Harpooned a Turtle
Marco:
Hi, John.
John:
It's like WWDC all over again.
John:
Although at least WWDC was over quickly because it's like, well, it's clear I didn't get tickets here.
John:
It's just clear these people don't know how to make websites that can withstand any kind of load.
John:
We have many devices working on it.
John:
Tina actually did get tickets for the, not the Thursday opening night, but the Friday one, but she accidentally bought 3D.
Casey:
And that's not acceptable because of motion sickness?
John:
No, it's not acceptable because 3D is terrible.
Casey:
Oh, I agree, but I wasn't sure.
Casey:
I figured Desperation would make it acceptable, but apparently not.
John:
I'm going to watch it.
John:
I mean, if it's all I can get, it's all I can get.
John:
But, well, that's just really...
John:
Many times I got to the stage where you're picking your seats to reserve.
John:
Many, many times I got to that step.
Casey:
Is the theater near you like an Alamo draft house in some fancy and highfalutin?
John:
No, none of these are fancy.
John:
They're all just whatever.
John:
I mean, the fanciest one is the one we actually have tickets for.
John:
It's reserved seating and it's the big reclining seats and everything like that.
John:
But 3D, come on.
John:
So I may be distracted during this episode as I occasionally reload the 5,000 tabs that I have pre-configured to exactly the page where you can buy tickets.
John:
All of which are just returning, you know, 503 gateway errors or just spinning forever.
John:
Because that's great.
Casey:
Well, I mean, I don't think it's a problem because I'm not at all distracted by the New York football giants that are currently acting like the Giants.
John:
No one cares about football, Casey.
John:
This is Star Wars.
Casey:
Meh.
John:
Football games happen every year.
John:
People get concussions.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
They have terrible brain injury that destroys their entire family.
Casey:
Also true.
John:
And it happens, what, 16 times every year.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
But to put things in perspective with regard to my priorities, Aaron and I were just having a very casual debate, which we didn't even conclude as to whether or not we would go see this movie in the theaters.
John:
You should stay away and let other people get the tickets.
Marco:
I love, John, that you're able to resist every Apple product on day one, every new release of anything.
Marco:
You're able to say, you know what?
Marco:
I'm going to let everybody else go try those things first and tell me what's wrong so I know whether to actually do it myself.
Marco:
But with this...
Marco:
You're going right in.
John:
It's Star Wars.
John:
And it's also a slightly smaller investment than a multi-thousand dollar Mac.
Casey:
I don't know, man.
Casey:
Your dreams and hopes and wants and desires, they're a pretty big investment that you're putting on this movie.
John:
The main investment that I'm protecting with this whole thing is the investment I have put into avoiding Star Wars-related spoilers.
John:
That is a serious investment that can be destroyed very easily when the rest of the world has seen the movie and you haven't.
Casey:
All right, so I'm sorry it wasn't completely successful, but hopefully it's successful enough.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure I will see it in 2D eventually.
John:
I just really don't like 3D.
Casey:
All right, so you want to do some follow-up?
Casey:
Chipworks has some thoughts on the 2A9s.
Casey:
I don't know if, John, you wanted to talk about this a little bit.
John:
Yeah, I put this in there and I was all excited.
John:
This is going to be a really detailed breakdown of what is different about the chips with little microscopic views.
John:
And there was a little bit of that, but there's two problems with it.
John:
One, a lot of it, the stuff in it is over my head because they're using lingo that they assume everybody knows and I don't know.
John:
Or I have a vague idea of what it means, but I don't understand the implications.
John:
Like, you know, one of the chips says weak NMOS.
John:
You know, I have vague memories of what that is, but I don't understand what the implications are.
John:
Anyway, I suppose I could look it up.
John:
And the other one is that there's a lot of information about all the other components that I don't care about.
John:
Who do they use for the display controller?
John:
What chip do they use for the power regulating thing or the battery thing?
John:
Or, you know, like all sorts of other stuff that I'm not interested in.
John:
But we'll put a link in the show notes because...
John:
uh chip works is the only place i know that is taking these things apart and like slicing the chips open and putting them under microscopes and stuff like that so
John:
No real news there, but for people who understand more about this than I do, maybe they can glean something from it.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
And speaking of the A9s, Consumer Reports weighed in about them.
John:
That's a more reasonable consumer-focused test.
John:
Consumer Reports has had a spotty history with technology and everything, really.
John:
Consumer Reports I always wonder about because the more I know about a topic...
John:
the more i think consumer reports selections are just don't make any sense and so that makes me suspect like maybe their dishwasher recommendations also don't make any sense i don't know anything about dishwash but every time i know something about it like their car reviews like the cars they pick they recommend for you to get i guess it's really they just have different criteria than i do like the way they pick cars is those are not the things that are important to them are not the same things that are important to me and that's true in a lot of things if you look at
John:
car and driver for example and they're always emphasizing like uh performance and handling and stuff like that and it's like maybe that's not what's important to you and you should read consumer reports anyway you hate performance well i don't but uh i have anyway um so their review hit uh their test of the batteries is more or less what i was looking for like they're trying to do real world testing i think their testing was pretty timid
John:
um it's similar to the battery testing i did when i was doing mavericks it's very like i would call it light usage maybe they're calling it medium usage they just loaded a bunch of web pages over and over again but they did do a bunch of fairly standard things i think probably in a way that is less stressful than someone actually using the phone they also monitored the temperature of both of the phones during this which i thought was a good idea because hey maybe one of them you know maybe one of them is hotter than the other
John:
um and they didn't find any appreciable differences so basically said one to two percent differences in their tests which they consider not an appreciable difference and like within the margin of error um so there you go the the the benchmark testing may have showed a 20 or 30 percent but the consumer reports attempt to simulate real world usage which they detail you should follow the link we'll put in the notes they detail what they did like oh we loaded a web page repeatedly for this amount of time or we ran this thing for this amount of time you can see what they did and see if that is representative of how you use your phone and then you'll know
John:
Well, the difference is.
John:
But anyway, Consumer Reports loves a good story about Apple phones being broken in some way.
John:
So if they are not jumping on this and saying that one of the A9s is much, much worse than the other, it's a pretty good bet that they're about the same.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And somebody wrote in with regard to fusion drives.
Casey:
Jopter Horse.
John:
You're not going to say that name?
John:
It's exciting.
John:
Nope.
John:
So this is about the Fusion Drive size.
John:
We complained they had dropped the Flash portion of the Fusion Drive in the new iMacs down to 24 gigs from 128 gigs.
John:
But apparently if you get the 2 or 3 gigabyte Fusion Drive, you do get the old 128 gigabytes of SSD.
Casey:
2 or 3 terabyte.
John:
Terabyte, yes.
John:
Only the 1 terabyte Fusion Drive option has the 24 gig one.
John:
So that's some good news on that front, I suppose.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And Toby wrote in and had an interesting point.
Casey:
They said, when I hear the merits of the Magic Trackpad discussed, it's usually in comparison to using a mouse.
Casey:
But I find it really comes into its own in combination with a mouse.
Casey:
And we've heard this from a few other people.
Casey:
I heard this from Mike Hurley a year ago now, I think at least.
Casey:
But I'd forgotten about it.
Casey:
I'm glad Toby said something.
Casey:
I have never run both a Magic trackpad and a mouse.
Casey:
I love my Magic mouse, even though it's ergonomically atrocious, but I love the functionality it provides for me.
Casey:
I was lamenting on Twitter, I don't know, yesterday or the day before, or maybe it was on here, actually, on this podcast.
Casey:
Somewhere I was lamenting that
Casey:
I think my mousing days may be over shortly because I think Force Touch will eventually catch on to the point that I'm going to be kind of grumbly about not having it on the Magic Mouse.
Casey:
And I've been thinking a lot about maybe I should just get one of these stupid Magic trackpads and just embrace the future in the same way that maybe my next car, I should just get a stupid dual-clutch gearbox and embrace the future.
Casey:
But neither is happening right now.
Marco:
The future is no gearbox.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
You're already getting smug.
Casey:
You're turning into one of those smug Tesla owners.
Casey:
You're not even an owner yet.
Yeah.
Casey:
uh this is gonna be a long year so when you first get that car it's not gonna be this year oh thank god all right at least i have a few a few more months to uh to raise my defenses and get get prepared for this awfulness anyway um i mean we can talk about mac bros some more if you want if that's better
Casey:
Oh, God, please stop.
Casey:
Although I was thinking earlier today, actually, how ridiculous it is.
Casey:
You two fawned over this stupid trash can for like 15 episodes of ATP.
Casey:
And John never bought one.
Casey:
And Marco, you kicked it to the curb within like six months.
Marco:
I suspect that my next computer will probably be a Mac Pro again.
Marco:
But, you know, because the difference now between like, like there was a good discussion about this with Serenity and John on this last week's episode of the talk show about how like the Mac Pro right now is kind of like the best of almost nothing except for multi-core performance and things that use that second GPU somehow, which is basically only OpenCL stuff that can even use it.
Marco:
um so there's like there's a small number of things that are better on it but the but there's a whole lot about it that the imac beats it at um including for you know for my purposes including the screen quality for one um the fact that there is no good way to get 5k or you know large retina on the mac pro and so you know if there's a new mac pro in i mean there's probably going to be one in like four or five months but
Casey:
um i don't i probably won't get that one but i would probably get the next one wait so you're saying if there's a mac pro that is released in the next year or so that supports retina you're not going to insta buy it i'm not planning on it i mean you know with me i can never really guarantee that as much as you guys this is what i sounded like when i was like oh no i'm totally not getting an apple watch isn't it
John:
or a bmw or an iphone or if they don't have a retina screen you're not going to get it exactly you're not going to you're not going to give up the retina screen so it doesn't matter if a mac pro is introduced all we should be watching for is uh is an external 5k screen release because they're not going to release screen unless something can drive it
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so I would like there, like before I really do an update, I would like for there, first of all, to be a good performance increase on the CPU side.
Marco:
I think whatever they update to next, I forget what core they're up to in the Xeon line.
Marco:
And I might even, you know, depending on if it comes soon, I'll probably skip it because I'm still very happy with my iMac.
Marco:
But I would like more parallel CPU power eventually because I really do max it out like crazy when doing stuff to my new photos on my new camera.
Marco:
um because they're just massive but that's the only time i really destroy the cpus uh so i can wait aren't you happy you asked i've been watching the football game for the last 10 minutes were you talking awesome so uh anyway while i'm talking and you're not listening let's do an ad read
Casey:
Wait, hold on, no, no, no, hold on.
Casey:
We never finished the talk about the trackpad.
Casey:
That's where all this started.
Casey:
That was Genesis.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
So, trackpads.
Casey:
Yeah, so I have nothing else to add about this, but somebody had some other notes in the show notes about it.
Casey:
It wasn't me.
Casey:
I'm assuming it was John, who was also not paying attention because he's trying to buy Star Wars tickets again.
John:
That's one of those days.
John:
No, I'm, you know, I thought you had it handled, but yeah.
John:
My question on this is, do any of you work this way?
John:
Have you worked this way, like mouse and trackpad at the same time?
Casey:
You know, I don't generally, however, because the only trackpad I have is physically in the computer, attached to the computer.
Casey:
But I did notice a couple times, and I think it was getting a definition of a word the other day.
Casey:
I was at work, and I'm on a client's site now, so I only have my onboard monitor.
Casey:
I'm not using my clamshell with two identical externals like I was at our office.
Casey:
So anyway, so I had my keyboard open and, you know, obviously the trackpad's right there.
Casey:
And I was trying to get a definition of a word and I force touched in order to get the definition rather than like right clicking and going to define or what have you.
Casey:
And it took me aback because I didn't even really think twice about it.
Casey:
I just reached for the trackpad and did it with my left hand.
Casey:
And I was like, wait a second, that was weird.
Casey:
And it was kind of nice, but I don't know.
Casey:
I can't fathom getting an external magic trackpad.
John:
in addition to a magic mouse in no small part because they are damned expensive it is really stunningly expensive 130 i believe why is everyone saying that's super expensive though i've seen a lot of complaints about the magic trap being we didn't mention in the last show but i've seen a lot of people saying 130 to the trackpad that seems outrageous now obviously it's more than my like 19 plastic logitech mouse from 1995 that i've been using forever
John:
uh but i wouldn't flinch at spending a hundred dollars on a really good mouse so why is it that this is a big deal at 100 is it because uh you'd see it as just a flat thing that doesn't move and it seems like how am i paying 130 for a flat thing that doesn't move i mean it
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
It's because of what you just said, because I'm used to paying like $20 for a mouse.
Casey:
My Magic Mouse that I bought way back when was probably, what, $60, I think it was, something like $70, the original Magic Mouse.
Casey:
And I thought that was silly expensive.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think it just seems like a lot of damn money, $130 for a mouse, for a freaking mouse.
Marco:
Well, for a trackpad, but still.
Marco:
So, you know, the fact is high-end mice have always cost in the $100 range.
Marco:
Right, like the one, the Logitech MX Master.
Marco:
That's $100, isn't it?
Casey:
I don't recall, but I do remember vividly looking at it when Mike had said that it does a lot of the stuff that I do with swipes on the Magic Mouse and thinking to myself, man, I really would love something that doesn't look like a piece of sushi.
Casey:
And I looked at it, and I was going to buy it, and then I saw whatever the price was, apparently between $70 and $100, depending on where you buy it.
Casey:
And I remember looking at it and thinking, that's way too much damn money for a mouse.
Casey:
No way.
John:
Boom.
John:
But why is it so much?
John:
I don't understand why people think that's a lot of money.
John:
The Razer gaming mice are probably similarly priced.
John:
This brings me a good point to pull this thing that's been in the post-show section for God knows how long.
John:
The Xbox Elite controller, which you should all follow the link to right now.
John:
You guys see it up on the top for some reason in the post-show thing.
John:
this uh this makes a lot of sense to me this is an xbox controller i believe it's 150 dollars wow it more or less looks like the regular xbox controller but they put more money into it it's sturdier it's more customizable it has higher quality materials it has better tolerances uh i'm sure it feels better to use it's also got some extra weird triggers on the bottom so you can use different uh button pressing arrangements uh
John:
It's like a premium controller.
John:
For a controller, like a mouse and like a keyboard, is something that when you're using the thing, your hands are on almost all the time.
John:
And for a controller, pretty much all the time.
John:
And they try to make them as sturdy as they can make them and keep them as cheap as possible to...
John:
bundle them in with the game consoles and then they're usually like maybe 40 bucks to 60 bucks to buy another one which is kind of expensive but these things do have bluetooth they do have a lot of buttons sometimes they have lights and on them and microphones and all sorts of other stuff and i'm willing to buy a fancier version of basically every controller that i have by all means double the price of the controller and put 25 more value of parts into it so obviously your margins go up for the expensive controller and
John:
But I'm getting 25% better.
John:
Take that money and put it towards.
John:
Because it's got the same buttons as everything else.
John:
This one has the extra things on the bottom.
John:
But put it towards making the buttons sturdier.
John:
Or feel better.
John:
Or improving the materials.
John:
Or making them not wear out as much.
John:
Or not using hardier bushings.
John:
Or things that rub together.
John:
Whatever they're going to do to it.
John:
make it more expensive and i think that is an incredibly smart purchase the same reason you should buy a really good expensive chair uh the best one you can find keyboard mouse all the stuff if you're going to sit in it all day and touch it all day with your hands that's where you should spend your money so uh now the magic trackpad isn't quite the same thing because really like it doesn't do anything it just sits there right um so maybe 130 is too much for that because people feel like it is not
John:
that much better than the old magic trackpad in that again it's just a little surface it's a little bit bigger has slightly nicer materials it supports force touch whatever but at the bottom line all people see is like a flat slab that lays in the ground that you put your finger on but
John:
It doesn't seem that crazy to me.
John:
Now, maybe it's overpriced in that there's no lower price model.
John:
In the case of the Xbox Elite controller or fancy keyboards or fancy chairs, you can get less expensive ones that are still pretty good.
John:
Whereas the Apple external desktop trackpad is not $130 for people who want a trackpad but really don't want to spend $130 on one because they're on a budget.
John:
That's where I can see the criticism.
John:
But this specific product saying this isn't worth $130 because Apple's margins must be crazy doesn't really bother me that much.
Casey:
It's not that it's not worth $130.
Casey:
It's just... I feel like whatever my barrier for a mouse or mouse-like device is, this is on the other side of that barrier.
Casey:
And what you just said makes...
Casey:
perfect sense to me i'm touching this constantly this is how i'm this is how i'm making my living is by using a mouse and a keyboard and sitting on a chair and so on all of that makes perfect sense you're absolutely right but i don't know just i look at these prices and as soon as i get much past like 60 70 i just feel like it's just too damn much the rent is just too damn high
Marco:
But how often do you buy new input devices?
Marco:
People can justify spending $100 for an extra few gigs of memory on their iPhone with barely even thinking about it often.
Marco:
But then...
Marco:
an input device that you probably buy once every five years at most?
Marco:
How often do people buy these things new by themselves?
Marco:
I think it's pretty rare.
Marco:
This is a high-end premium device.
Marco:
This is not a mass-market device.
Marco:
Most people are not buying desktops to begin with.
Marco:
Those who are buying desktops are generally going to be using whatever comes with it, and by default it comes with the mouse.
Marco:
And those who are going to be willing to pay extra for...
Marco:
you know this premium trackpad thing like that's that's kind of an upscale premium thing in that in that market um i don't think it's a high volume product i don't think apple probably makes or sells a whole ton of them i'm honestly surprised they updated it at all as i mentioned like last show i'm surprised that the desktop input devices got any attention from apple given how relatively unimportant they are in apple's overall market but
Marco:
uh i don't think it's that that ridiculous i mean it's a premium mechanical keyboard is going to cost you between one and two hundred dollars usually uh i don't think it's that crazy to to have this trackpad from apple which is a premium brand now it's a fashion brand uh i don't think it's that ridiculous to have this coming from them doing things that no other trackpad can do um at least on a mac uh possibly anywhere offering that for 130 that somebody's gonna buy once every five years that that doesn't seem crazy to me at all
Casey:
So a couple of thoughts about this.
Casey:
First of all, I don't know when I bought this magic mouse, but I can assure you it was shortly after it was initially released.
Casey:
And it's the same damn one I've been using for like easily five years.
Casey:
So, so there's that.
Casey:
But secondly, you're, you're both trying to use logic to fight with my emotions and, and,
Casey:
And you're right.
Casey:
I mean, you're absolutely right.
Casey:
Everything you both said, absolutely right.
Casey:
But all I can tell you is, I look at these price tags, I'm like, holy God, that's just, it's too much money, damn it.
Casey:
And it's just because it's what I feel.
Casey:
You know, it's the same reason that I look at a piece of software on the App Store, and if it's, you know, north of five bucks, I think, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
Is this something I really want?
Casey:
And I shouldn't think that way.
Casey:
Oh, please.
Casey:
Please don't get into this.
Casey:
No, I know.
Casey:
I'm not saying that because I'm proud of this.
Casey:
I'm not saying that because I think it's the right approach.
Casey:
I'm just saying that's how I feel.
Casey:
And then I remind myself, oh, my God, this is like $6 or $7, and it's going to give me plenty of enjoyment for a long time.
Casey:
Like when TweetBot whatever came out, and it was, what, $5 for TweetBot 2?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
$4 and, yes, $5.
Casey:
Yeah, so for a split second, I was like, wow, that's, I mean, not that I wouldn't do it, but I was like, Jesus, no, it's not, you idiot.
Casey:
You use that app constantly every single day.
Casey:
What are you doing even thinking that $5 is too much money?
Casey:
But that's logic talking to the emotional side of my brain, which initially was like, wow, $5 for an app, really?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I'm wrong.
Casey:
I'm not arguing that I'm right.
Casey:
I'm not saying I'm right.
Casey:
I'm wrong.
Casey:
But it's that gut reaction.
Casey:
And when I see $130 or anything north of $80 for a pointing device, I'm just like, wow, that's a lot of money.
John:
So on the other side of this, the other reason this is in here, like I said, is setting aside the price of the trackpad is the concept of people who...
John:
either have become accustomed to or were brought up in the age of trackpads and mice and keyboards adopting a computer use a desktop computer usage pattern that involves them all so in the same way that my sort of i i grew up with a mouse my way of using computers was alien to the people who were you know teenagers or adults when i was first getting my mac
John:
their their way of using computers was the keyboard you sit in front of the keyboard and that's how you use a computer keyboard keyboard there is nothing else i was always from you know from day one of you know of the mac mouse and keyboard uh sometimes just the mouse sometimes just the keyboard but very often both at once command clicking to clean up icons in the desktop shift clicking option clicking
John:
You know, the whole nine yards, clicking, typing, clicking, typing, switching back and forth between them, doing them both simultaneously, using shortcut keys and graphics programs while you're drawing with the mouse and switching tools with the keyboard.
John:
All those things are second nature to me because that's how I was brought up.
John:
Now that we have trackpads, especially on the desktop, I can imagine there being people who get into a groove of one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard or trackpad where you're mousing around.
John:
And, you know, this Toby wrote in to say this is the two things that he uses a trackpad for while also using the mouse is swiping between between spaces and swiping between launchpad pages.
John:
Why bother?
John:
Why don't you just click on the little things to take you to the next launchpad?
John:
It's just it's faster and more natural to do it the other way.
John:
And what is your other hand doing anyway?
John:
It's sort of it's not like being ambidextrous.
John:
It's just like accepting that there are a bunch of places that you can give input to your computer and not saying, well, I can only be using one of those at once.
John:
Or I can only be using two of those at once because one of them didn't exist when I was growing up.
John:
uh you know and i feel like if i it almost makes me want to take down my magic trackpad because i have one too like i said i got it for os 10 reviews so i could do all the gestures to try to find a place for it to see if i get integrated into my life maybe you know can't teach an old dog new tricks maybe it's too late for me but i like the idea of younger or more flexible people using all forms of input simultaneously uh without being constrained by like well because computers because desktop computers didn't used to have a trackpad therefore there's no place for a trackpad in my computing life so i'm
John:
Not that I'm going to run out and buy one of these trackpads, but I am kind of fascinated by that idea, and I may try bringing my thing down from the shelf and trying to find a place for it on my keyboard tray here.
Marco:
I love that both of you always get up my butt about how I buy everything that Apple makes and I'm always buying everything.
Marco:
Meanwhile, I'm the only one here not even tempted a little bit by the trackpad because I just know I wouldn't use it.
John:
Well, we'll see what actually happens.
John:
There's the talking about it and there's the buying.
John:
And the buying is you just bought a new iMac and you bought a Mac Pro and you bought a new iPhone.
John:
And so you're ahead on the actual buying.
John:
I never bought the last trackpad.
John:
That's been around for years.
John:
Well, the only reason I bought it was I bought it used on eBay.
John:
The only reason I bought it was I had to for OS X reviews because I did the trackpad on my ancient non-unibody Mac does not do the gestures.
John:
Remember when they introduced the gestures and everything?
John:
I couldn't actually do them.
John:
I didn't have any.
John:
I didn't have review hardware from Apple and I didn't have anything else.
John:
So I had to eBay a magic trackpad.
John:
I can't believe you bought a trackpad used.
Casey:
Yeah, I can't get over that either.
Casey:
I thought the exact same thing.
John:
It was in very good condition.
John:
It did not smell like smoke.
John:
But did you like?
John:
And I cleaned it after I got it.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't even want to think about the cleaning procedure you put that poor trackpad through.
John:
Man's assumption, right?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
It's a miracle that that thing worked after you surely dismantled it in order to clean the insides that you would never have ever touched.
John:
Is it man's assumption or man's conjecture?
John:
Now I'm feeling doubtful.
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Neither one of you knows because you're useless.
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Casey:
Do you want to talk more about this new iMac?
John:
Well, I put this last thing in here because it was supposed to be for last week.
John:
Maybe it's follow-up, but I don't know.
John:
It's more of the same topic.
John:
I just, and a lot of other people pointed this out, but I thought it was worth having them one more time in the 5400 RPM drive.
John:
So Apple put up a website at apple.com slash iMac slash then hyphen and hyphen now.
John:
It says, hey, let's compare the original iMac, that iconic computer from yesteryear, with the new one just to see how far we've come.
John:
And they go like, oh, 62,000 times faster graphics, 14 million more pixels, 1,000 times more RAM, 750 times more storage, 366 times more processing power.
John:
But I'm pretty sure the hard drive in the original iMac was also 5,400 RPM.
John:
So I would like the last number that scrolls by on this little web page to be 1x more speed on the spindle.
John:
And a couple of people pointed me to, I think it was like other world computing articles and saying...
John:
Oh, it's not.
John:
Even though the RPM is the same, the storage density is so massively increased that the bandwidth is higher.
John:
I agree with that.
John:
Like I said last show, if you come from a spinning disk and you get another spinning disk computer, this spinning disk will be faster than your old spinning disk just as hard drive technology gets better, right?
John:
Setting aside the storage density, which is going to give you higher throughput for how many megabytes a second can you pull off the disk, I'm sure the seek times are potentially better as well.
John:
Or lots of things about a modern hard drive are better than the big clunker that was in the original iMac.
John:
But the reason I put this in there is because this is the meta argument about the 16 gigabytes of memory in the iPhone and how much RAM Apple used to put in the computers.
John:
It's not so much the absolute number that kind of galls the technology enthusiast so much.
John:
It's like whatever numbers you come up with, whatever numbers you pick, whatever you feel the line of products with a set of parameters in them.
John:
The only thing I'm looking for is over time, make that number go up.
John:
And that's kind of what this whole website is about.
John:
Look how these numbers have gone up.
John:
And on the long term, yeah, it does go up.
John:
Look how much better we've done since like 1998.
John:
Good job, guys.
John:
1998, 2015, you made great advancements, right?
John:
But one, two, three years in a row with the same bottom storage tier on your phones is too much because it feels like where's the progress?
John:
Why are you holding steady at the three year ago levels?
John:
Has really nothing changed since three years?
John:
Is everything else exactly the same?
John:
Or are we making bigger pictures?
John:
Are we making bigger videos?
John:
Are the application sizes increasing?
John:
All these things that change, can we not get more storage for the same price?
John:
We want to see progress.
John:
And really, this is the most grating thing for me about Apple because I'm so gung-ho and like, oh, progress, progress, is that...
John:
whatever numbers you pick please just let me see progress in them and doesn't have to be every single month every single six months and even maybe i'll give you pass in every single year if the previous year you were above the you know you you seem to be generous but if time passes and a stat doesn't change that's bad and that's why the 5400 rpm hard drive is like seriously i i remember purposely trying to avoid 5400 rpm hard drives on laptops i bought well before the unit the unibody error right because it's like oh you want to get the fast harder i'd get the 7200 rpm one right
John:
it feels like going back in time it's like our you know we should be making meaningful progress and we are everywhere else everywhere else is ssd wow what amazing progress great spread that across your entire line except for these thinkers at the bottom which by the way i think no one sent this theory in but it occurred to me after the show last week that the only reason for the bottom of the line retina imac is to get people in the door you know kind of like the cars that you advertise in the paper just to get them into the dealership
John:
but you never actually saw anyone that car it's like oh and retina starts at 1500 but not really because you should never buy the 1500 one you're always going to buy you always have to get the option for whatever you know the option that actually gives you a transmission or whatever option they have that you know oh if you want seats then then you have to pay the you know to get get the convenience package for 800 dollars
John:
um so that could be another potential reason they're trying to hit a price point to get people into the retina line like once they start considering well this is a non-retina but look at this screen isn't it nice and you can get into this one for only 1500 bucks but no one should go out the door with the 1500 model so let me start uh selling you some options that's another possibility i don't know if that's the case but anyway uh i just thought the then and now site was like apple highlighting the worst feature of its new line of retina imax unintentionally
John:
Awesome.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
I actually, in my deep thoughts that I had earlier today, apparently I had a lot of time to think earlier today.
Casey:
I was thinking again about, you know, whenever it is I upgrade my personal machine, what should I get?
Casey:
And we talked about this over a couple episodes a few episodes back.
Casey:
And I was thinking again, you know, maybe the right answer is an iMac.
Casey:
And maybe the right answer is I just get a 5K iMac.
Casey:
And the thing that made me stop.
Casey:
I can sell you mine.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
At least you're honest.
Casey:
Now we're getting to real talk.
Casey:
Wait till the next Mac Pro comes out.
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Casey:
That's the most real of real talk.
Casey:
Anyway, it occurred to me that the problem I have with an iMac is that I oftentimes work from home, as we talked about, and when I do work from home, I want to be able to plug in to an external monitor.
Casey:
I am one of those people who works much better with two monitors, or at least more than just the 15-inch monitor I have built into the computer.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't really care that there isn't a target display mode or whatever it's called.
Casey:
But in this case, it would have made the conversation with myself a little bit different if I knew I could plug my Mac into that screen.
Casey:
Even if I couldn't get retina resolutions, even if it was just scaled or something, that would make it a much more compelling option.
Casey:
Because otherwise, I'm never really going to be able to plug into an external monitor or I'm going to have...
Casey:
a second monitor sitting next to this 27-inch behemoth on my desk, which I really don't want.
Casey:
And so I don't know what to do.
Casey:
And I know that we talked about this before, and I didn't know what to do then, and I still don't know what to do now.
Casey:
But the fact that I was really thinking about, well, how could I make an iMac work was weird for me in the same way I was thinking about when I
Casey:
maybe I should try to make a trackpad work for me.
Casey:
That was another weird thought for me because I've never been interested in desktop Macs or computers of any sort since college.
Casey:
I've never been interested in trackpads.
Casey:
I use them because I have to, not because I want to.
Casey:
TrackPoint for life.
Casey:
So I've been having a bit of an identity crisis with regard to my computing preferences over the last 24 hours.
John:
Have you considered the iPad Pro?
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
Why?
John:
I don't know, you're considering, you seem to be open to all options.
Casey:
No, let's not get crazy.
John:
I'm standing in for Vitici saying, you know, iPad, it's really big, you can split the screen now.
Casey:
Yeah, no, let's not talk crazy talk.
Casey:
Although I did briefly consider an iPad Air 2, as opposed to my beloved Mini whenever I upgrade that, and that was also an odd thought.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Just weird times in my noggin these days, gentlemen.
Casey:
Weird times.
Casey:
You guys are so much worse than me.
Casey:
It's not worse.
Casey:
It's different.
Casey:
You just buy everything and get rid of it instantly, including businesses.
Marco:
At least I'm consistent.
Casey:
But yes, at least you are consistent.
Casey:
Both of us, actually, although perhaps me more vocally, hem and haw for three years and then eventually get something that we should have bought three years prior.
John:
I know what I'm waiting for on the computer.
John:
And like I said, I'm probably going to get one of these iMacs.
John:
uh it'll be my wife's computer not mine i'm just waiting to see like i'm basically waiting to decide which gpu i should get is it worth it to get the big one is the big one much hotter than the other one is it a waste to get the big one because it gets thermal throttle all the time so you might as well get the cheapest smallest coolest one because the gaming form is going to be crap either way like i just want to see benchmarks and numbers and noise stuff and wait for everyone else to get the lemons off the assembly line and then i'll buy one
Marco:
I mean, for whatever it's worth, like, you know, the... I mean, I haven't used the new one yet, but I imagine... I mean, I know it's the same thermal design as the old one.
Marco:
I mean, maybe the actual thermal load might be different, but in general, gaming on a 5K iMac works fine, but is loud.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Like, the fan is loud when gaming.
John:
Yeah, I don't think anything could be louder than my 13-inch MacBook Air that my kids play Minecraft on the session.
John:
I mean, I don't know how much noise the little tiny 13-inch Air can make, but...
John:
like it is at max speed and max volume and it's not that loud because the air is such a tiny machine but it sounds like it's being hurt the whole time it's amazing this machine hasn't died like they just sit in front of minecraft for hours and just sounds like a tiny little hairdryer behind there going all the time no it is not that bad at all but it is you know it's it's exactly the same thing with their like asymmetrical blades on the 15 retina it's like it it sounds more pleasant of a tone but it's it's still just as loud basically
John:
no anyway like i feel bad for them because you know there's the 27 inch non-retina but still 27 inch monitor attached to that little 13 inch air and they play minecraft full screen at native res and they get like 12 frames a second i just they don't know what they're missing i think but boy i look at it and i'm like
John:
you know i don't know how they tolerate it i guess it's what they're used to like well i guess this is what minecraft is like on a computer like it's faster on their ipads a little like the ipad 2 runs minecraft pocket edition at a higher frame rate much higher frame rate than this macbook air runs on this 27 inch screen goodness all right so uh what else we have going on we have something called marco's pet topic
John:
Hey, you skipped a bunch of things.
John:
I'm still not done with peripherals on the iMac.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
It's like follow-up that's not follow-up.
Casey:
Okay, carry on.
John:
It's a topic.
John:
Yeah, there's things we didn't mention last time.
John:
We didn't mention last time that the keyboard and trackpad work if they're plugged in, even if you have Bluetooth off.
John:
So in theory, you could buy this keyboard and trackpad and connect them to a computer that does not have Bluetooth.
John:
Because even though they are Bluetooth peripherals and they charge through a lightning port that connects to USB at the other end,
John:
Theoretically, you could buy a computer with either broken Bluetooth and no Bluetooth at all and still plug these things in and use them.
John:
And since the trackpad and the keyboard don't move, you don't have to worry about fraying the ends of the lightning cable by wiggling it back and forth.
John:
And that brings up the other topic that's not in here.
John:
There's theories about why the charging port is on the bottom of the mouse, which we talked about last time.
John:
And, you know, I was willing to say aesthetics explains it 100 percent.
John:
But other people have theories like, well, if you put the plug like where you would expect the cable to connect, aside from it being ugly, it would encourage people to keep it plugged in all the time.
John:
and use it like that and then that would inevitably fray the lightning cable which is not meant to be yanked around like that or the connector would start wiggling or whatever so by putting it on the bottom you're sure that it is impossible to use it when it is plugged in and then therefore no one will use it when it's plugged in that makes some sense i still think aesthetics is the is you know occam's razor it is the obvious solution it is the easiest solution it explains that entirely yeah i guarantee you that was the reason it was not because of the cable fraying questions no not at all the reason was it looks better
John:
Or the idea that people would accidentally use it.
John:
Like, they understand they're buying a wireless mouse.
John:
Once they realize it can work with that, someone would probably use a plug-in.
John:
I don't doubt that because people will do all sorts of things.
John:
But in general, I don't think it's like because people would be confused or anything like that.
John:
Like I said last week...
John:
Doing it for aesthetic reasons makes so much sense, except for the fact that when you charge it, it is almost impossible to make it aesthetically pleasing while charging.
John:
And charging is a very infrequent occurrence, but it's always going to look like you've harpooned a turtle.
John:
And it's in the throes of death or already dead when you charge it.
John:
It just doesn't look good.
John:
It's not a good look.
John:
There is no way...
John:
you know johnny ives elegant desk with everything cleared off of it and his minimalist setup with his beautiful apple peripherals that look like a piece of sushi and then he's got to charge his mouse and it's just there's just no way to make that look good maybe maybe it's like you know uh hanging a lantern on it and uh movie script parlance like we have this thing that's a problem let's us point let's let's say yes this seriously is a problem there is no way to make this look good when charging guess what your mouse is dead it was harpooned by a lightning cable yeah
Marco:
Well, this leads in very well to my pet topic, if you want to go right into that.
Casey:
Yes, but before we do, you should tell us about something that's awesome.
Marco:
Well, John still has to tell us about Apple's mouse click sounds concerns.
John:
Isn't that part of your thing, though?
John:
Yeah, so this was a link to... Who did this one?
John:
I've got to look at it.
John:
It was Stephen Levy, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
He got access to Apple's input...
John:
uh peripherals lab basically where they work up the mouse and keyboards and everything you're talking with the engineers and they're all serious about everything like we really sweat the details and they told him a big story about how the click sound of the new mouse wasn't quite right and they had to figure out why it didn't sound right and adjust the little feet that touched the bottom and they were they you know they angled the feet differently to make the the resonance of the click sound better until they got the click just right and it talks about sweating the details um
John:
um and a lot of people point out like that's all well and good i love that you sweat the details on how a nice the mouse click sounds but a you may be missing the forest for the trees and that a lot of people would say that the shape is not particularly ergonomic for the class of people who want to rest their entire hand on the mouse but i still say that's a categorical like how you grip the mouse thing
John:
And B, you're really concentrating on that, but everyone's okay with the speared turtle charging thing.
John:
Like, they really sweat the details, except for this detail, because they say, you know what?
John:
I don't care what it looks like when it's charging.
John:
Have it look as ugly and stupid and awkward as you want.
John:
That is detail we are not sweating.
John:
It's just fine.
John:
Just forget it, right?
John:
So the detail they're sweating, obviously, and it makes kind of sense.
John:
You click the mouse all the time.
John:
You want it to be satisfying and feel good.
John:
You charge the mouse very infrequently.
John:
It's okay for that to just be a total disaster, I guess.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so tell us about this pet topic of yours.
Marco:
So I was kind of inspired by this iMac stuff, which I'm saying, being concerned about the detail of how it looks when it's not plugged in, and then the ridiculousness of how the mouse looks when it is plugged in, and how you can't use it while charging and everything.
Marco:
And then, so we got an email from Florian Kunlens, and he said, for me, the new magic peripherals discussion left me the impression that Apple's laser focus might be a bit too focused.
Marco:
They care about the sound of the mouse, but not the weird charging port position, or at least not enough to change it.
Marco:
Meanwhile, it would make a lot of sense being able to use the mouse wired only like the other two new peripherals.
Marco:
Similar with the iMac and the 5400 RPM hard drive, why give it the super screen, but not a good drive?
Marco:
Same with the iPhone and 16 gig and so on.
Marco:
And so for me, I think this is a bigger discussion that I've alluded to for a while, but I think it's worth diving into here because these all are relevant.
Marco:
We all like to think that Apple always does things that are best for usability.
Marco:
And the fact is, that is not true now.
Marco:
And that really has never been true.
Marco:
Usability has always kind of been balanced between appearance and profitability, for lack of a better word.
Marco:
It's kind of this tight balance that Apple has had to walk.
Marco:
If usefulness and usability and good engineering-wise things being awesome, if those were the top priorities, regardless of how it would look or how profitable it would be,
Marco:
Apple stuff would be more like the PC market.
Marco:
We have that in the market.
Marco:
We see what that is like, and it's a very low-profit business.
Marco:
It's very badly differentiated or minimally differentiated, and it's not that great.
Marco:
And also, people like us who kind of care about how things look a little bit, we like to think that we are objective because we're geeks, and we like to think, oh, it doesn't matter how it looks.
Marco:
I'll just get the one that functions best.
Marco:
Wait, who thinks that?
Marco:
Who thinks that?
Marco:
None of us do.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So, good.
Marco:
So, you know, in many cases, people really do care what it looks like.
Marco:
So, you know, looks are important.
Marco:
Anyway, I can look at almost any Apple product and I can point out ways in which appearance...
Marco:
or you know the overall visual appeal just appearance has trumped usefulness or real world use like like you know john pointing out that that the mouse like when you when you charge it like that it looks ridiculous when you have to charge it like on its back or on its side diagonally like whatever it is it looks ridiculous right
Marco:
In reality, Apple worked so hard to make the iPhone look super thin and be super small and look great, but almost every iPhone I see in the wild is in some kind of crappy case because the iPhone is, you know, either it's a case for durability, which is most of the time, or for better grip because the phones themselves aren't durable enough and don't offer good enough grip.
Marco:
Or it's a case that's a battery case because the phones don't offer good enough battery life for people.
Marco:
So it's like there's always these trade-offs that Apple makes for good looks.
Marco:
Similar thing with the iPhone 6 design.
Marco:
Why is the sleep-wake button directly across from the volume-up button, which makes it very hard to hit just one of them?
Marco:
uh without hitting the other one accidentally uh the reason most likely is because it looks better it is visually symmetrical on that level um and so it looks better than offsetting those buttons at all or by having them by having the sleep wake button be like in the middle or still on top or whatever you know it looked better that way that might not be the only reason it's there but it's probably the biggest reason it's there i don't think i don't think looks is the reason for the sleep wake button at all
John:
I think looks is the reason that the tops are aligned exactly, but I don't think there's any place you could put that that is better than opposite the volume buttons, unfortunately, because top is too high, and once you slide either the volume buttons or the power button down, they become much more awkward to reach.
Marco:
well then so even if it was like centered between the two rather than align with the top one you think that would help yeah i do actually i think it i mean it still wouldn't be ideal but i think it would be easier to hit just one of them if they weren't exactly aligned maybe maybe anyway that would still be aesthetically aligned because it would be exactly centered between the two volume buttons
Marco:
yeah but i'm sure somebody said i'm sure somebody was like no it looks better like this and that's why anyway so your other arguments are stronger well i think your arguments got weaker as you went on as in weaker is defined by whether i agree with you or not sure okay but you know let's let's go you know and there's even with the new stuff like the ipad pro i i called out and many people did um one of the big problems with the ipad pro that people are going to have in practice is that there's nowhere on it to put the pencil
Marco:
If you have a pencil, there is nowhere on the iPad, even if you buy the big keyboard case, there's no slot for the pencil.
Marco:
And part of that is because it's super thin.
Marco:
It's just not thick enough to have a slot.
Marco:
The pencil, by the way, which as CGP Grey pointed out on Cortex, the pencil which is perfectly round and can roll away...
John:
Because that looks better.
John:
Did you see the person who, I forget who it was, posted a picture of the, you know, the Surface, the stylus for the Surface 4?
John:
It's shaped like a pencil, and the Apple Pencil is shaped like a pen.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Anyway, so, like, you know, there's issues with that, you know, where, you know, at least make, you know, for the keyboard case, at least make a hole, because you know there's going to be
Marco:
a million third-party ipad cases they're going to have pen holes in them because that's what people actually need if they're going to if they're going to have the ipad pencil but you know it it'd be great if apple made them and because apple's cases are generally pretty nice so anyway they should attach it with a chain like at the banks like one of those little little little metal chains just so no one walks away with it and you can have the metal thing just clunking around as you try to write that'd be great right
Marco:
uh obviously you know the new macbook one um that has a lot of these trade-offs uh for thinness uh because it looks nicer and you know i've as i've ranted many times before i think the keyboard and the trackpad both suffer from that um from this trade-off just to make it look thinner but again the macbook like how many people go buy macbooks because they are like they they they kind of inspire lust like when you when you touch one when you see one it's like my god that's amazing so it does work um
Marco:
the iMac is a curious case of this um because like the iMac and the Mac Pro you could you know you could look at all these things um the the iMac is really really thin and if they if they would be willing to make it thicker even just the thickness it used to be you'd be able to do a lot of things that would be very nice you could for instance the 21 inch model could use three and a half inch hard drives again uh which would make them faster and cheaper and larger um
Marco:
you know you could if it was thicker you could have a kind of more robust cooling solution so that you could have the fans that don't spin as as fast under high load so like what the like the mac pro has that one giant fan which is awesome because you can stress out a mac pro like crazy and you will not hear it no matter what it's doing you will not hear it the imac is much more designed like a laptop and because it's so super thin it kind of has to be um so the imac is i think it's one
Marco:
one main fan in the middle or something like that but anyway it's like they it has to spin really fast under under very heavy cpu and gpu loads and it's very loud as a result and if they'd be willing to make the enclosure thicker they could have larger slower fans in there that could have the same degree of cooling um but they don't because it looks better when it's thin from the side which like i have i'm looking at this 5k iMac on my desk
Marco:
If it was three inches thicker, I would never notice because I would never see it because I'm looking at it head on and it's against a wall.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
John:
But when it's on the reception desk at a fancy office, people do see the back.
Marco:
Yeah, but even then, they really care.
Marco:
But yeah, that's why they do it.
Marco:
And it looks nice in their press shots and they like saying how thin it is, even though it's only that thin on the edge, but oh well.
Marco:
Oh, and also with the iMac, one of my biggest complaints about the iMac is that the stand is too low.
Marco:
If you actually want to have an ergonomically correct setup with an iMac or an Apple Cinema display, you have to like put it on a book or something.
Marco:
You have to lift it up by about three inches.
Marco:
What is yours on?
Marco:
Mine is on a, I believe it's called the Elevation Stand.
John:
I thought you had it on top of one of your weird expensive German amplifiers.
Marco:
I used to because those are also the exact right height.
Marco:
But now I move those to the left and right because they're holding speakers up.
Marco:
Anyway, so I have an Elevation Stand from Elevation Lab, which is pretty perfect.
John:
Yeah, all of Apple's monitors and I'm always been too low.
John:
I might have mine on a stand to my stand that is even high enough.
John:
I have like a clear piece of Lexan that's kind of curved in a U shape.
John:
Right.
John:
I wish I wish it could be higher still.
John:
I kind of bought it thinking, well, I'm surely going to replace this 23 inch monitor as soon as they come up with a big 27 inch one or whatever.
John:
And I just never bought one, so now it's just been too low for a long time.
John:
But yeah, you're right.
John:
All their stands are too low, which, I mean, the solution that other monitor makers do, like Dell or NEC or Asus or whatever, they make adjustable height stands, like especially in the fancier models.
John:
And adjustable height stands just all look gross and don't feel good to use.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And Apple wouldn't do that because...
John:
making an adjustable height making a very good adjustable height stand would be really expensive and making a cruddy one makes them feel bad about their products so they don't so it's a single contiguous piece of bent aluminum with a little hole for the cables to come out of and that's it and even then like you know obviously in all of their photos of it there's no cables plugged into any of their products you
Marco:
because cables are ugly but again like in the reality of somebody using these these apple products is usually uglier and clunkier than the way they're presented and because it looks gross and i don't really i can't really blame them for that but i do wish they that their designs would consider it more and i think it seems like over time the reason i bring all this up the reason why i want to talk about this tonight is that it does seem like over time the balance between what is like what is the best overall product versus what looks the best versus what's most profitable
Marco:
I feel like the best overall product side of that triangle has been losing a little too much recently.
Marco:
That in seeking out higher average selling prices, more upsells, more profit, and also I think, I don't know how the internal politics work, but it does seem like the most powerful person in the company is Johnny Ive from the outside.
Marco:
That's how it looks to me.
Marco:
It seems like he can do basically whatever he wants and that anything he says just goes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because Steve was so involved in product and design.
Marco:
I'm guessing Steve and Johnny had a really nice balance going that Tim and Johnny just can't have because Tim is not the same kind of person.
Marco:
He's not really in that role as much.
Marco:
And so I think now Johnny has so much power and it's going less checked.
Marco:
possibly even unchecked and so what we're seeing now is like we're seeing like the the johnny and tim sides get really strong of like you know if you think about tim as like the profitability side right uh you know he that is apple is nailing the profitability johnny is making these beautiful looking objects uh but it seems like that that advocate for keeping the product in check was steve
Marco:
And that role is now just kind of, you know, it's falling to other people, but none of them are as – maybe it's power, maybe it's just, you know, high ranking, whatever it is.
Marco:
None of them are exerting as much influence, it seems, over the product line the way Steve did and could.
Marco:
versus johnny and tim who are like if you think about johnny as wanting the beautiful things and tim is wanting the profitability which those are probably oversimplifications but those are clearly like kind of where their strengths have a lot in the past if you look at that it does seem like there's this there's this kind of vacuum where steve used to be in keeping the product stuff in better balance with those two factors
John:
i don't know i would put steve in the camp that's just as extreme in terms of wanting to remove everything and it seemed to me because every time you talked every time you saw an interview with steve jobs it always seemed like what he really wanted was to get rid of all this crap like what he really wanted essentially was the ipad right can we just get rid of all this crap i don't want any ports i don't want any expansion slots i just want it to be like a beautiful single piece obelisk that has no features on it whatsoever but it's a computing device like
John:
I mean, he's the guy who made the Power Mac G4 Cube for crying out loud.
John:
Like he wanted to get rid of it all, hide it, get rid of it all.
John:
And yet even in the cube, did he make the cube with no firewire ports, with no connections for a keyboard, with everything wireless?
John:
No, because he couldn't.
John:
He couldn't do that yet.
John:
And so I definitely feel like if he was still around, not that it matters, but anyway, he would be on the side of get rid of everything.
John:
And in that vein, like the idea of getting rid of everything,
John:
the little triangle that you sketched out between i figured it was like profitability does it look nice and is it a good overall product or whatever yeah basically there is there is a little bit of overlap there because when i when i look at the the products they're making these days aside from thinking that steve jobs would be totally gung-ho and removing every single port and every single feature and just making them have nothing and just removing all choice because it's just you shouldn't need that crap and it's annoying
John:
There is something to be said for whether intentionally or accidentally, and I think it is mostly intentionally, doing stuff like removing the number of possible moving parts, reducing the number of joints, fewer parts, fewer joints, fewer moving things, fewer ports, fewer holes, simpler, smaller, less stuff.
John:
That does actually make a better product.
John:
And aggressively pursuing that can get you, you know, it's not like a smooth gradient of like, well, it was, you know, more ports are good, but fewer ports is fewer things to break.
John:
Apple seems to always be looking for the next kind of discontinuity or step jump where it's like, well, if we remove, you know, it could be argued that the, you know, the iPhone or the iPad like that.
John:
If we remove everything about computers, we give you a little handheld computer that we call a smartphone and remove everything about it.
John:
No finder, no file system, no installing your own apps, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like,
John:
They're looking for that in hardware design, too.
John:
Now, are they successful?
John:
Do they make products that actually the people appreciate?
John:
Oh, it's great.
John:
It only has one port.
John:
See how that's better than two?
John:
Because one is fewer than two and it's less things to break and it's simpler and blah, blah, blah.
John:
I think they blow it a lot.
John:
But it seems to me what they're going for all the time is.
John:
to try to to try to make it simpler and that instinct is mostly a good instinct it's just like what you're putting in the axis of like is this a better product it's it's judging it by the criteria of like kind of is it useful for me in the same way that the previous mac was used for me only faster and nicer looking or whatever and they're always trying to say but we want to go beyond that we want we want you to not need any ports we won't need you know if they could make
John:
mice and keyboards that you didn't plug in ever they would like tiny little atomic power plants like they would seal them up and just say like you never plug these in they're wireless forever if they could put wireless power to the imac so it looks like it did in their product shots they would like they do they want to remove everything that makes this thing a computer they wish if you could give like johnny i have a magic wand and say you can make a computer that's anything you want assuming he didn't immediately go into images projected on the back of your retina by nanomachines he would just make a beautiful floating screen that floats in mid-air and has no edges right
John:
uh and input devices that are invisible that either are mind controlled or controlled by your hands not touching anything and there would be nothing like they all want to get rid of the computer and just make it it's you and the screen that's all there is maybe they'd make something like vr or whatever and so i see in this thing that you're attributing to aesthetics as in i want to look like a beautiful sculpture or nickel and diming as in
John:
Now, the GPU and the iMac could support two external screens, as people in the chat room are saying, but that would mean more ports, and more ports means supporting those ports and making sure we have the buses to go through them.
John:
It's more expensive to do that, and I've got to drill my holes in the case or whatever.
John:
Them just trying to say, we just want to, you know...
John:
johnny ive and his white world boil it down to its essence what is it just you and the screen you shouldn't need more than one screen just you and this beautiful screen that's just wrapping around your whole head and it's all you can see and you put your hand on the sushi and you touch a little keyboard that has no edges and nothing is plugged in and there are no wires and that's the world you know
John:
I see them striving for that, and I kind of applaud them striving for that, and I don't attribute it all to just Johnny Ives' disconnect from like, well, I don't want people to actually use these things.
John:
I just want them to be sculpture.
John:
I feel like he does want them to be useful things.
John:
He just has the same sort of allergy that I always sense in Steve Jobs to the...
John:
to the the greebles in uh in ilm parlance or special effects industry parts of computers the little doodads and doohickeys and ports and flanges and switches i mean it's a lot of rotation lock has gone from the stupid ipad because like can we get rid of that switch if we can get rid of it because i want there to be nothing i just want it to be a screen like that's why everyone thinks the home button is going away there's like one of the few remaining moving parts in the thing so i i totally get your point i just i'm i'm myself internally conflicted about a
John:
applauding their aspirations while at the same time saying you missed the mark with this particular feature or product or whatever.
John:
And we may differ on what those are.
John:
So I get where you're coming from, but I sympathize.
Marco:
Well, but most of what you just said, I agree with.
Marco:
It's just really an issue of the balance and whether they have the right balance now or not.
Marco:
I totally agree that...
Marco:
Generally, the track they're on, the direction they're going is generally good.
Marco:
And I generally think, obviously, the world thinks so, too.
Marco:
It's working for them.
Marco:
Who am I to say that this massively successful company is doing something wrong?
Marco:
But the reality is that in the real world, there are things that are not ideal with the way some of this stuff works.
Marco:
And I do think, again...
Marco:
I think they're on the right track overall, but there are little course corrections that are necessary that are not happening now.
Marco:
It does seem like it's kind of out of whack with the priorities, and that might get magnified over time.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, when I read that Johnny Ive was moving into the clouds to be his new position, I was happy.
Marco:
Everyone else was like, oh, no, we're going to lose Johnny.
Marco:
I was like, let him ascend into the heavens to whatever he wants to do, because I would love to get new blood under him, get new people up there, get new ideas here.
John:
I mean, there's a whole team.
John:
That's the whole thing about Johnny, though.
John:
He's not coming up with all these designs.
John:
The most you can say is that he's giving yes, no, no, yes to 17 designs that are presented to him.
John:
And so in that way, he has an influence over the company.
John:
But other people are designing these products.
John:
And maybe he gives them notes.
John:
Maybe he says, I'm thinking like an egg.
John:
But with no rounded parts go like I don't know what he says to people to inspire them.
John:
But he's not there with a pencil drawing every single product.
John:
I don't know which products he even has a handed.
John:
But you're right.
John:
Like in the same way Steve Jobs wasn't drawing anything.
John:
He was just saying sitting back and say, I'm thinking like leather, like on my Learjet.
John:
And then iOS 6 would come and he would go, no, yes, yes, no, no, yes.
John:
look at this other sample no no yes like johnny i've is more involved in steve job than just saying no and yes but like we're using him as a standard just for the people who get the idea that i was designing we're using him and his philosophy as a standard so new blood i feel like with him ascending that maybe that he is delegating more of the uh what makes the cut and what doesn't and maybe also delegating the the direction like what i always think about is uh you guys never read the johnny i book it's a good one leander canning one it's pretty good um
John:
talking about the early iMac designs and how they're like well we can go a lot of ways with this phone thing it's probably going to be some kind of rectangle rounded and we have a couple different designs and one of the ones that came up really early on was essentially the iPhone 4 design you know you know the one we all know it's like it looks like an ice cream sandwich with the
John:
the you know the metal thing and then the glass thing on the front and back that was like one of the very first designs they were thinking of for the iphone they just couldn't make it happen for the iphone one it was just like well that's great and all you know that was that was one of their ideas in the mix and it was like manufacturability problems and how big it had to be and the timeline that they had and so they basically had to say even though we like that design the best what about this design what about this line but the iphone one design they came up with was like the fourth compromise down of like
John:
well none of us really like this design like if you look think of the original iphone you can tell john abd was probably upset about many aspects of it right but it's the best they could do with the time and materials and skills they had at the time but eventually by the time the iphone 4 came around he didn't give up he's like i remember that ice cream sandwich one and it was pretty awesome and we're gonna make that phone and they did eventually make it um that's that's kind of the you know the compromises that are necessary in industrial design and
John:
i see in a lot of the products they're making now like the ones that look like transitional fossils where it's like well we're not quite at the point where you can get rid of all these things but they have a design that almost tries to get rid of them but leaves this little weird vestige uh and in that way you can kind of see the previous iteration now that the new keyboard is out look at the old uh
John:
tiny bluetooth keyboard and you're like what is all that crap around the edge and why is that big barrel thing over there i don't understand it like it seems unnecessary and that's what they're trying to do with their advance maybe they had this idea like the first time they drew we're gonna make a bluetooth aluminum keyboard go go go they drew and i said yeah we can't do that because we need a place to put batteries and we you know we it needs to be bigger and we're comfortable how about this i don't know if that's true i'm just making this up like but the whole idea that
John:
uh that they uh what i'm fighting against is the idea that anyone inside apple is particularly pleased with any product they produce because i think every product they put out there is potentially a design that they really wanted to make that they either couldn't or didn't make that's still sitting in the back of their own mind and gnawing at them that's what drives them forward to make the next one so uh maybe what i'm saying is maybe a lot of people inside apple are just as disappointed in like the lumpy back of the iMac as we are and just that like they you know that's
John:
design is compromising i have to say what can we ship and what's what's the how what's the best we can make it look even the 20th anniversary mac do you guys remember that the big vertical thing you don't remember it's before your time anyway oh is this the one that hackett's obsessed with yeah it's it's weird looking anyway that one it was at johnny i've designed i'm gonna make this beautiful 20th anniversary mac and use one of these new fancy lcd screens they can have leather and wood and all this stuff like that
John:
uh but then they said it had to have like ports or i forget what the thing was it had to have some expandability he's like and he had to put this big giant backpack on the thing like he had to take they take his design that he liked and add like two inches like this big lump on the back of it so you can see if you google for you can see the 20th anniversary mac both with and without the lump i forget if it was expansion chassis or expansion guards or something like that that was mandated to him from from above
John:
The Johnny Ive of today will not let that be mandated to him from above.
John:
If someone says, oh, but by the way, after you've already designed the thing, it actually has to have three more ports, drill some more holes.
John:
He's going to go, no.
John:
And that, I think, is better because I think the compromise on the 20th anniversary Mac makes that machine worse than if he just said, I'm making it the way I want to make it.
John:
And if it doesn't have whatever the feature that was the backpack added.
John:
oh well tough luck that's what it's got and then you can just sort of accept it and say this is the computer and it looks the way i want it to look and it's got the features that i want and if you don't like it no one will buy it like the power mac g5 g4 cube and we'll go back and we'll reconsider we'll go back to our rooms and think about what we've done and try again and try to make a computer people will buy
Casey:
I don't know how I feel about this because on the one side, I agree with you guys.
Casey:
And I think that there are a lot of compromises.
Casey:
I would love to have a phone that I would never even have to think twice about lasting all day.
Casey:
I would love to have a phone that when I...
Casey:
go to a football game and I know I'm going to be using my phone a fair bit and I'm going to be searching for signal for three and a half hours, I don't need to bother putting it in a battery case.
Casey:
Yes, I am aware that the Plus Club exists, but I am a human with human-sized hands, so I want a human-sized phone.
Casey:
Um, I would love to have a phone that's a little thicker with a little more battery, but I'm looking at my phone now and it is a freaking beautiful device.
Casey:
It really truly is.
Casey:
And with this Apple leather case on, it is perhaps less beautiful than it could possibly be, but it's still freaking beautiful.
Casey:
And I charge my phone every night and only have to worry about battery life when I know I'm going to be using it hard all day long.
Casey:
Otherwise I never have to worry about it.
Casey:
Is that really so bad?
Casey:
Could it be better?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
But is that really so bad?
Casey:
I was thinking earlier today in my continued deep thoughts that I really do love this new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro that work got me.
Casey:
It's beautiful.
Casey:
It's thinner, noticeably thinner.
Casey:
I like that it's thinner.
Casey:
I like that it doesn't have an onboard optical drive.
Casey:
I kind of wish it had an onboard Ethernet port, but I can fix that very easily.
Casey:
What year is this?
Casey:
Well, I'm just saying.
Casey:
I know, I know.
John:
He needs low latency for when he plays Quick 3 Arena.
John:
He doesn't really want to wait for the Wi-Fi latency.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
No, actually, all kidding aside, I needed to get... Well, I already had one, but I would have needed to get a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter for work because the company where I am working does not give...
Casey:
access to the restricted areas of their network except by hardline so with my mac i need to get on an ethernet connection in order to get to the servers that i need in order to develop the things i need to develop so would i have liked to have had an onboard ethernet port hell yeah but
Casey:
Would I have chosen that over just bringing the dongle and having a device that's perfect or nearly perfect in every other measurable way?
Casey:
I'd probably take the dongle.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
It's a very tough thing.
Casey:
And this is what makes engineering so beautiful, is that you get to make these tough engineering decisions as to what's more important.
Casey:
And I agree with you, especially, John, that I think every engineering decision that Apple makes, I would expect that they have a...
Casey:
serious amount of regret about every single one but they're doing the best that they possibly can and and i think that's the case with all of their devices and do they have room to do it better sure better for me absolutely but better for everyone i don't know that's what you're always looking for at least what i'm always looking for on the apple computer is the time when it all comes together when there were no major design compromises that had to be made
John:
Like it wasn't like we wish we could have made it this thin or this size or had this battery life or this performance of this feature.
John:
But we didn't have enough room or it was too expensive or the parts weren't ready in time or the material we were going to use didn't work out or whatever.
John:
And it's just an all around good computer that's like ahead of its time, that lasts for a long time, that is sturdy, that is nice looking, that the looks don't go out of date.
John:
Like it's the same thing with cars for that matter.
John:
of 911 aside when there's the one model when there's the one model that's like that was the one to get that's where it all came together briefly even if it all came together like oh the 65 version of that is you know the the height of the pre-fuel injection error like just the beautiful specimen where it all comes together and those are those computers are rare like the mac world did those big like best mac everything's and the se 30 kept coming up
John:
A, because I picked it and it's the correct answer, and B, because a lot of other people felt the same way about it.
John:
Obviously, modern Macs are so much better, but for that time, it was the perfection of that form.
John:
They had perfected that form factor.
John:
The innards of it were the best innards they could possibly be.
John:
Everything about it was better than all previous computers of that size.
John:
it lasted a long time you could expand it in ways that you didn't expect it was sturdy it was beautiful like it was just that was that was a peak and i think you can pick out other models that are like that the 5k imac could be like that maybe you could quibble over the thunderbolt compromise and say well it's like in between the thunderbolt 3 error and the usbc error so it was a little bit weird so maybe it doesn't qualify but i don't know i'm sure we can pick out ones like how about the 2008 mac pro
John:
a pretty damn good like in kind of in the middle of the run of the of the cheese graters you know post intel you know after all the g5 stuff or whatever but before they started to get kind of long in the tooth and that's a great computer that was that was a high point um when we're looking at any other type of device we have to say
John:
uh like for the iphone line what are the high points in the iphone line i i would definitely pick uh for industrial design anyway the four but maybe i'm wrong about that because i'm not looking at like the broken home buttons and the crappy antenna when you grab the edges of it and stuff but like industrial design wise ignoring the other parts of the thing so maybe that's not the one like i don't you know i don't know what would you guys i'd say that i'd say the high points were the 3gs and the 5s
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
I mean, like, everyone's got their own things, but it depends on what criteria you're choosing from.
John:
And the thing is, for the designers, do they care so much?
John:
Like, oh, the stupid engineer screwed up the home bottom.
John:
That's not my fault.
John:
The part that I did, my design, like, I like that sandwich phone.
John:
Or I really liked, you know, like you said, the three... Well, no one likes the three...
John:
GS, I think, inside Apple's industrial design because it just had this big plastic bubble on the back of it.
Marco:
But anyway... Right.
Marco:
But for the time, it was insanely fast, great innards, huge upgrade from the past one.
Marco:
It was also very practical.
Marco:
It had great gripability on that case.
Marco:
It was durable.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Long term, you could see... I don't think it really had any major hardware flaws.
Marco:
Whereas the 4 had the antenna issue.
Marco:
It had the bad proximity sensor.
Marco:
And then the 4S had those dying home buttons.
Marco:
And the 5 had the flaky finish.
Marco:
And the 5 also, I believe, had a home button issue.
Marco:
I mean, a sleep-wake button issue.
Marco:
Whereas the 5S, I think, actually really was pretty rock solid.
Marco:
I don't think anybody really had consistent hardware problems with the 5S.
Marco:
And I would say the design there was a high point.
John:
that's that's like that's that's your priorities i would i would imagine that there's not anyone on apple's industrial design team who would pick the 3gs as their design high point no definitely not because just just isolating just isolating that part of it and so you're like i don't care that much about the design it was nice and it looked nice and it was grippable but the point is that it was that it felt good it was fat like all the things that you listed are the product attributes that you are you know you give a ranking of like which ones do you prioritize um
John:
And that's why maybe the design people would prioritize the materials and physical appearance and be like, well, I had no control over the stuff they put inside the phone.
John:
So if they screwed that part up, it's not my fault.
John:
And I feel like the pinnacle was whatever their favorite design is.
John:
And the flaking finish, even you could even see someone would be like, well, flaking finish.
John:
That's not really my problem.
John:
They should.
John:
They probably wouldn't say examples.
John:
Industrial designers know this is their problem, too, but they say it looked perfect when it was new.
John:
Just don't touch it.
John:
You know, don't even look at it.
John:
It can't be played.
John:
I can't do the accent, but.
John:
mike is seeing that movie now i'm finally listening to mike at the movies and i realize all these movies now mike is seeing them in case he's not
Casey:
Like which one?
John:
Well, this was Spinal Tap.
John:
You didn't see that one with it.
Casey:
Nope, definitely not.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, Marco, I've given up.
John:
Yeah, you know I haven't seen anything.
John:
Anyway, the point is we should all be kings of our own companies with the resources of Apple and then we can make exactly the products we want until we find out that we can't get what we want either because the materials aren't available or the chips cost too much or Intel's not ready or whatever.
Marco:
Our last sponsor this week is Fracture.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com.
Marco:
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Marco:
These prints look awesome.
Marco:
I have so many of them around my office now.
Marco:
Our friends are all getting them.
Marco:
They are so nice.
Marco:
So here it is.
Marco:
You get your photos printed on a slab of glass.
Marco:
And it's a nice thin slab of glass.
Marco:
So it's very, you know, not only would Johnny Ive like it a lot because it's so thin.
Marco:
But it also works really well.
Marco:
It satisfies both of those sides because it is very, very lightweight.
Marco:
You don't have to be all stressed out the way I would be about hanging on the wall and having to put in some giant draw ball anchor and hope it doesn't fall out or tear a hole in your wall or whatever else.
Marco:
They're incredibly practical, and they look great.
Marco:
Now, Fracture prints make great gifts also.
Marco:
Now, going through this holiday season...
Marco:
I highly recommend, first of all, in general, I highly recommend fractures as gifts.
Marco:
I have done that myself many times.
Marco:
I'm doing more of them this holiday season.
Marco:
However, fracture prints are all handmade and checked by real people in Gainesville, Florida.
Marco:
in the holiday season they often get really backed up with orders because there are just so many people who have figured out thank you everyone uh who have figured out to use fracture for holiday gifts that sometimes they can't like if you wait until mid-december say to order a holiday order you might not be able to get it in time because they're going to be so backed up by then so they want to ask you please if you're going to be ordering for the holidays place your orders now
Marco:
Because it's already, as we record this, it's mid to late October already.
Marco:
It's, you know, November is coming very soon, and then December comes right after that, in case you've forgotten.
Marco:
I frequently forget, and it surprises me.
Marco:
But trust me, you want to get these orders in now, because Fracture...
Marco:
Many people have figured out how good this is, and they're all right.
Marco:
Many people have figured this out.
Marco:
Please place your holiday orders now for fracture prints.
Marco:
Vivid color prints of your photos directly on glass.
Marco:
They make great gifts.
Marco:
They're great to hang up around your house, around your office.
Marco:
I use mine to have my app icons printed whenever I make a new app.
Marco:
I print out the icon.
Marco:
I have this nice little trophy row up top.
Marco:
So check it out at FractureMe.com and use code ATP15 for 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Once again, FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Use code ATP15 for 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Big thanks to Fracture for supporting us for so long.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Marco:
Recommended.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What is Facebook battery?
Marco:
All right, so actually, I think Vitici's been one of the leading investigators on this, right?
Casey:
Oh, you're talking about the ridiculous battery usage?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Ah, gotcha.
Marco:
So everyone's, I mean, I think people have known for a while that the Facebook app is incredibly battery inefficient, but nobody really had a great idea of why or how that was that way.
Marco:
And a few things changed in iOS 9.
Marco:
One of the biggest things that changed is that the iOS 9 battery shaming menu or screen and settings, it now will tell you how many hours things were on screen and how many hours they were in the background.
Marco:
It'll also tell you what they were doing in the background.
Marco:
So it'll say things like audio or network or whatever.
Marco:
So it'll tell you what it was doing, background refresh, what it was doing in the background.
Marco:
People have been noticing that the Facebook app is somehow being woken up really for very long times for background usage, even when these people are not using the app.
Marco:
So like they'll have like, you know, like one guy had the app was open for two minutes, was in the background for like seven hours or something like that and used up a ton of his battery.
Marco:
You know, some crazy difference like that.
Marco:
And more importantly, what people are finding, even if they disable background app refresh, it was still finding ways to run in the background and in some cases use even more battery, often by doing really, really sleazy tricks.
Marco:
So do you remember...
Marco:
Back forever ago, in like, I don't know, 2009, 2010, something like that, forever ago, before you could do much in the background of iOS, one of the things you could do was if you were, one of the very first backgrounding modes in iOS 4, whenever that came out, one of the very first things you could do was you could play audio.
Marco:
So if you're an audio player, like if you were a podcast app, or if you're a streaming music service, that was one of the things that you could run indefinitely if you're playing audio.
Marco:
And so one of the very first things that somebody – I forget who it was.
Marco:
Was it TapBots that made – was it PasteBot that did this?
Marco:
They played Silence the whole time.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So they submitted an app that through this clever hack, you could run indefinitely if you were playing audio.
Marco:
And so they figured out that if you just played silence, like if you're evoking the audio buffer, but you're just sending it all silence in the buffer, your app can run indefinitely.
Marco:
And so they were using this to do clipboard history management and clipboard sharing between computers and everything.
Marco:
And Apple very quickly figured out what they were doing and banned them from doing this.
Marco:
Facebook is now doing that same trick in 2015, and Apple's permitting it.
Marco:
so we'll see what happens oh is that is that what it's come down to i didn't realize we figured it out yeah so people have done have done some investigation and facebook is using background audio to play silence to stay running as long as possible and among other tricks and so and i can explain at least one thing so first of all
Marco:
I've had so many people report bugs to me in Overcast that sound really weird about not playing in the background after they've launched Facebook or something.
Marco:
And now I'm suspecting this might be related to Facebook's stupid activity.
Marco:
But also, people have wondered, if I block you with background refresh...
Marco:
If I disable background refresh for your app, and I've, quote, forced quit your app by removing it from the multitasking switcher, how do you still run in the background?
Marco:
And I can answer this question.
Marco:
Back when Newsstand was unveiled, one of the cool new things Newsstand apps could do was called a content-available push notification.
Marco:
Now, normally, if you run a web service and you want to send something to all the iPhone people that are using your app, you could send notifications.
Marco:
But previously to that, notifications had to be visible on screen.
Marco:
You couldn't just send an app like an empty notification to have it just start running and download new stuff.
Marco:
You couldn't do that before.
Marco:
You could send it an alert.
Marco:
And it would show the box and the text, and the user could then say, OK, enter the app, and then it would launch.
Marco:
But all that was user-controlled, and so you couldn't be doing it behind the user's back.
Marco:
And you had to have the user interacting with it to actually get launched again in the background.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the way they initially, so first it was just a newsstand.
Marco:
And then I think it was iOS 7 that made content available push notifications available to all apps.
Marco:
You could be waking up your app all the time.
Marco:
And so initially, Apple would throttle these things.
Marco:
And they would be like, you know, it would only allow it to wake up the app once a day or only when it was plugged in or something.
Marco:
And over time, those restrictions have gotten loosened.
Marco:
And in 8, you could wake up your app pretty frequently if you really wanted to with content available.
Marco:
It was pretty reliable.
Marco:
You could usually wake your app up.
Marco:
But if the user quit you out of the multitasking switcher, so if they force quit your app, you wouldn't get those anymore.
Marco:
And in iOS 9, they changed that.
Marco:
In iOS 9...
Marco:
Even if background refresh is off, because background refresh is a separate thing.
Marco:
Background refresh is the system of periodically waking up the app to do something, and the user can control that.
Marco:
However, there is no system control for whether to allow an app to receive content available silent push notifications.
Marco:
And I think I haven't tested this with the Facebook app because I don't have it installed because I'm not insane.
Marco:
Sorry, Facebook people.
Marco:
I don't use Facebook enough to use their app, but I recognize that it's very popular.
Marco:
Different viewpoints.
Marco:
Anyway, so I don't know.
Marco:
I would like I'm curious to know if Facebook people can test this who are experiencing these battery problems because people are saying I disabled background refresh, but it's still doing all the stuff in the background.
Marco:
try disabling all notifications because so anyway in eight if you force quit it those content available silent pushes would not come through in nine they still come through so in nine even if you have quote force quit my app if i send content available from my server to your phone and you've enabled notifications my app will wake up in the background and i can start doing something i can start a background download i can start playing silent audio forever you know like facebook does um
Marco:
So I'm curious if disabling notifications entirely is the fix.
John:
You mean disabling them entirely on the entire phone or just for the Facebook app?
Marco:
Just for the app.
Marco:
But like, you know, because there's like in each app, there's the notifications area.
Marco:
And then there's this big matchup switch up top, allowed notifications.
Marco:
And there's the more granular stuff, show notification center, badge the app icon, what shape should they be?
Marco:
But if you turn that off for Facebook...
Marco:
I wonder if then it won't get these notifications.
Marco:
But anyway, so that's what they're doing, it seems.
Marco:
And they issued some kind of weird response, just like the Volkswagen thing.
Marco:
Well, it must have been some bug or rogue engineer, some BS.
Marco:
But the reality is this is a disgusting company and they do lots of unethical things.
Marco:
And this is just one thing.
Marco:
They're doing it because they can't.
Marco:
This is not the kind of thing that you program accidentally.
Marco:
They're doing it because they can.
Marco:
And what's Apple going to do?
Marco:
Reject the Facebook app?
Marco:
This is kind of... They can't really do that much for it.
Marco:
And I think it's unfortunate.
Marco:
But that's just the power dynamic.
Marco:
This is also from the talk show.
Marco:
The Facebook app is most likely the most popular third-party app on iOS by a long shot.
Marco:
My guess is it's number one.
Marco:
YouTube is number two.
Marco:
But you can't exactly tell Facebook...
Marco:
you can't do this anymore you know like how much power do they have i mean i kind of wish they would exert that power a little bit more here but um they might not really be able to but i don't know either way this is if you are a facebook user you should not be surprised by this you should be mad but you should not be surprised and this is just what facebook does and it's and it's you know it's disgusting
Casey:
Yeah, I don't really have anything to add about this.
Casey:
I don't use the regular Facebook app because around the time the Facebook Messenger became a thing, they eventually took the ability to send and receive messages out of the standard Facebook app.
Casey:
But they would still send you a push notification.
Casey:
They still had the entry point to the messages section in the app.
Casey:
So it was like a tab or something like that.
Casey:
But you would get there and they would say, oh, no, we've moved this to a new app.
Casey:
You have to go get that other app.
Casey:
Oh, it's so sad.
Casey:
This is stinky.
Casey:
But I refused to go get that other app because I almost never send or receive Facebook messages.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Eventually, I got sick of this and I got sick of the Facebook app.
Casey:
And so I downloaded Facebook Paper, one of the 85 things named Paper that is in our little world.
Casey:
And that allows you to send and receive messages.
Casey:
And so that's what I use if I'm using anything with Facebook on my phone.
Casey:
And it's fine.
Casey:
I mean, it's pretty, but otherwise unremarkable.
Casey:
And that was basically it for me.
Casey:
However, Aaron does use the normal Facebook app.
Casey:
And the other day, I noticed when I was looking at battery usage that it looked really high, but I didn't think much of it because I didn't know if perhaps she had been using Facebook all day or something.
Casey:
And then it was just a day or two later that all this kerfuffle started about battery usage, and I really wish I had paid closer attention to it.
Casey:
But I have been intending to keep closer track of...
Casey:
the the app's usage and i did turn off like background updates and all the things that you guys described and i suspect and i think that's exactly what you said marco that it's still getting used a lot for seemingly no reason and that's just gross like just because you can doesn't mean you should kids and yet when you're a company as big and powerful as facebook when you likely have the most popular third-party app on the platform
Casey:
You can get away with this.
Casey:
And it's also it's kind of too bad that that Apple allows it that, you know, they should have reacted in some way, shape or form publicly in the sense that maybe they should have pulled the app or not not like disabled it on existing devices.
Casey:
But maybe you can't download it from the app store or or something.
Casey:
And maybe I don't know, maybe I'm being ridiculous, but I feel like it's just it's stinky that the big, powerful people get away with things that the little guys can't.
John:
My question is, what benefit does Facebook think this provides them?
John:
Just ignore everything else about this.
John:
Let's assume Facebook does this on purpose because they want it.
John:
Why do they want this?
John:
Wouldn't you think it would be bad?
John:
What does their app need to do all the time?
John:
Gather data.
Yeah.
John:
seriously about what about like where they're getting location data from the phone i'm just wondering like because they might be i don't think there's that much like if you if the facebook app just said i don't know what the interval is but like wake me up every 15 minutes to get updates or five is it the immediacy of being able like i'm always running so as soon as something happens to facebook people know right away instead of having to wait for a background refresh interval or something like that because facebook must also know the downside which is that
John:
uh people you're going to run people's batteries down more and i don't know if they just assume well they'll find a charger somewhere because they're not going to go without their facebook updates or they'll use their phone less like you would think if you had an app what you'd be trying to get maybe information maybe right casey the thing is like we don't want your engagement or interaction with the app we just want your information i don't know i'm just trying to understand from their perspective how it makes sense to try to have your app you'd be running all the time
Casey:
So to put things in perspective, just today I was at the dentist's office and the dentist's nurse, we were talking, waiting for the dentist to come in.
Casey:
And I don't remember how we got on the subject, but she said to me, oh, yeah, the other day I went to that place.
Casey:
I believe she said she was talking about Facebook.
Casey:
I might be getting this confused with Google.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I went to this place on Facebook where it'll show you all the stuff it knows about you and all the places you've been, and it was super creepy because it knew everywhere I had been.
Casey:
And so, granted, this is one data point, completely anecdotally, from a person who just 10 minutes before told me she was completely inept when it comes to computers, but...
Casey:
And this conversation happened completely naturally.
Casey:
I didn't prompt it.
Casey:
I didn't interrogate her.
Casey:
She said to me, oh, yeah, it's so creepy what they know.
Casey:
That's so weird.
Casey:
So I suspect it is just data gathering.
Casey:
And maybe there's non-nefarious purposes as well.
Casey:
Like when you start the app, you want it to be totally refreshed, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But I think mostly it's for data gathering.
Marco:
It's probably all of these things.
Marco:
If they do any kind of continuous location or periodic location monitoring, I'm sure it's for that.
Marco:
If they're doing any kind of analytics of what kind of phone you have, whatever it is, there are things they can measure.
Marco:
I'm guessing it's
Marco:
probably a little bit about location and it is almost certainly what john said it's almost certainly about engagement it is about you know they i'm sure that it that having your app running in the background being able to get data immediately from your server being able to to start downloading things like to start caching things to start preloading things um that things that you're going to be looking at i'm sure it's for all those reasons and i'm sure the the overall reason is you know data gathering is probably part of it and the other thing is just
Marco:
Because if they can increase the amount of time, if they're basically always running or running as much as they possibly can, then they can get you notifications faster.
Marco:
They can get you data faster.
Marco:
They can get you new stuff downloading faster.
Marco:
And it's all about reducing the friction so that not only can they bother you as often as possible to come back to the app, but also that when you are there, there's no delay in loading anything.
Marco:
Because they've measured that both people like that and also it increases our numbers.
Marco:
It makes us X per year of more engagement and more growth hacking or whatever.
Marco:
That's why there's plenty of reasons why they want to do this.
Marco:
Those are the two big ones.
John:
Yeah, it makes me wonder if there was a setting in the app that said, should we try to run in the background even when every setting you're telling us is like basically...
John:
to let the users choose which behavior they want because that would be an interesting choice because you know if they didn't do this when you launch the facebook app less stuff would be loaded presumably i'm assuming that they're taking like you said taking advantage of that which user experience would people prefer would they prefer that when you launch the facebook app it's like up to date and most of the stuff is loaded would you prefer that as soon as your friend posts something you know about it immediately
John:
like would people trade the battery hit for that immediacy most people will think about oh facebook app is using my battery too much if they're techie enough to know that oh facebook is using our battery i wish it didn't do you really wish it didn't if we took away all of the things that it's doing during that battery time because then you'd be like oh the facebook app is so slow every time i launch it's got to load a bunch of stuff like i'm wondering what trade-off people would make because like i said
John:
As the app maker, if you're sucking everyone's battery down, do you think you're going to lose engagement because they're going to say, well, it's lunchtime, and normally I would keep looking at Facebook, but my battery is too low, so I'm not going to.
John:
No, they'll just find a charger, I guess, or they'll use a battery pack or something like that.
John:
I wonder if they've determined that...
John:
This is the trade off that people would choose anyway.
John:
So let's just aggressively be in the background.
John:
And, you know, and the other part of it, like speculating is just the game of chicken with Apple is like you both said, what are you going to do?
John:
Pull the Facebook app.
John:
Good luck with that.
John:
That will hurt your iPhone sales numbers more than pretty much any other app pulling that you could possibly do.
John:
I was getting an iPhone, but it doesn't have Facebook, so forget it.
John:
Right.
John:
So that is a negotiation between those two powerhouses to say Apple to say, please don't run your thing in the background so much.
John:
Facebook to say, I dare you to pull our app.
John:
I don't know how that's working out.
John:
Maybe they just don't even know.
John:
I mean, because Apple has been, like you said, Marco, changing.
Marco:
the rules for the various push notifications and updates and all the other stuff and they surely they know the consequences of those with respect to the facebook app so yeah i'm i'm sure i'm sure that apple has been in touch with facebook over this by now uh you know because it's very possible apple just didn't know about it i find that a little hard to believe because it's just so widespread but it's very possible that like
Marco:
this was brought to their attention or at least the right people's attention within Apple at the same time that we all learn about it.
Marco:
So I'm sure that somebody at Apple contacted somebody at Facebook to talk about this.
Marco:
And we'll see how it shakes out.
Marco:
I'm not surprised to see this because Facebook's entire iOS app, they have this culture, similar to Google has this too, this culture of extreme engineering arrogance to the point where
Marco:
they don't feel like they need to respect the platform they're running on.
Marco:
They feel like they know better and they're above it.
Marco:
And so the attitude at Facebook that permitted this to happen, I guarantee you this was not a bug.
Marco:
I guarantee you this was somebody saying, screw Apple's limitations.
Marco:
This is how we get around them and we deserve it because we know what's best for us and for our users, period.
Marco:
And Apple's not involved in this discussion.
Marco:
It's this culture of arrogance that is very, very common at Facebook and Google's engineering departments for sure.
Marco:
And you see it a lot in the way their app is this massive, bloated mess of a million different custom-written things to custom-implement things from the system.
Marco:
I mean, this massive, massive app, and they're rewriting their own Xcode because they break Xcode the way they use it, and all this crazy stuff that they do out of this arrogance.
Marco:
So if they think they're above the rules, that fits right into all that.
Marco:
It's not a surprise at all.
Marco:
And also, I would argue that...
Marco:
that this is actually kind of like a hole, almost a security hole.
Marco:
It's like a battery hole on Apple's side, which is, why do none of these switches that used to work or that seem like they should work, like, why, if you turn off background refresh on an app, should content available notifications still come through?
Marco:
Because, like...
Marco:
I know in the old world of iOS 8, when if you'd force quit an app, they wouldn't come through anymore.
Marco:
That caused definitely some support emails with Overcast because that's how I do my updates.
Marco:
And the notification I show on screen is a local notification.
Marco:
So it would cause problems in that people wouldn't expect that to work that way.
Marco:
They wouldn't expect that they force quit the app, that it wouldn't get new data anymore, ever.
Marco:
So it made sense to change that behavior from 8 to 9.
Marco:
But I definitely think that there should either be a separate switch, which is probably less good, or they should just roll this into the background refresh switch, which is if somebody has disabled background refresh for an app, it should not also still get content available notifications.
Casey:
Do you feel like where you've commented on Google and Facebook's engineering arrogance, given our conversation earlier, do you feel like Apple's arrogance lies in industrial design?
Casey:
I think it's more than just that, but perhaps their largest bit of arrogance is
Marco:
Apple has no shortage of their own arrogance, believe me.
Marco:
I mean, that's one of the reasons why the people who love all these companies love them, because each of them has their own breed of arrogance in different areas, and they all think they know best for the whole stack top to bottom.
Marco:
And that's what makes Apple ship what it ships as its Windows software.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
you know it gives a lot of windows people a really terrible impression of apple um like you know itunes and quick time for windows back in the day like that oh boy um you know so you know this applies to all of them uh but generally the results of of one company being a little too pushy in some area uh usually it hurts the customers um on the other platforms and this is one of those instances where like
Marco:
Facebook clearly thinks they're above the law with app store rules and iOS system restrictions.
Marco:
And as a result, they really are hurting their users.
Marco:
And it's not good.
Marco:
But I don't think they care.
Marco:
They're benefiting themselves.
Marco:
And that's all Facebook ever does.
Marco:
And that's Facebook.
Casey:
Well, that's all any company ever does.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think that's exclusive to Facebook or Google.
Casey:
I mean, I think Apple in many ways does the same thing.
Marco:
they they generally do but i i think speaking of you know striking balances i think apple strikes a way better balance uh in that regard uh with you know quality and respect for their users uh than than facebook or google and i think i think facebook is worse than google i mean i'd say i put google right in the middle there i'd say facebook is horrible google is in the middle and apple's decent most of the time anyway thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week squarespace automatic and fracture and we will see you next week
John:
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.
John:
It's accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
Tech Podcast So Long
John:
I like Perl 6.
John:
I think it's a really interesting language.
John:
But my interest in it is proportional to the quality of the implementation.
John:
So I don't just want to be able to write Perl 6 in something that executes.
John:
I need it to be reasonably fast and stable and better than some other language I'm using at implementing real-world applications.
John:
Because as much as I enjoy the language and what it looks like...
John:
I'm not going to build anything with it for realsy reels until it like all, all the benefits of the language is supposed to have, like, Oh, look at all these contracts that are, you know, that are ripe for actual concurrency and look at the ability to pin down types that could let us use more efficient types internally to have higher performance.
John:
Well, unless I actually have the higher performance, unless I,
John:
It actually does the concurrency that is inherent in the semantics of the language.
John:
I'm much less interested in it.
John:
So I'm glad that they're deciding to put a pin in 6.0.0 and have it come out 15 years later or whatever.
John:
But I'm mostly interested in it when I can use it to build actual real things because...
John:
like it's not like i'm being super demanding about it i'm still i really love the language i think other language designers should study it and take the ideas from it or whatever but i'm never going to learn what it's good for and what it's not good for until i can implement something in it and i'm never going to implement something in it if the
John:
performance and reliability is worse than every other possible language i could choose now i'm not saying the performance reliability are going to be terrible i know it's improved i know there's multiple back ends because the jvm one might be faster because you're piggybacking all the the jvm work that's been done over the past decades or whatever it's just that i need to see that i need to see hey you know like marco's like hey i built this thing and go and it was super fast um and really reliable and
John:
And by the way, I got to learn Go, and it was neat.
John:
I need to see someone else say, hey, I built this thing in Perl 6, and it was super fast and really reliable, and if I had built it in Perl 5, it would have been worse, and if I had built it in Python, it would have been worse, and if I had built it in Go, it would have been worse in this way or whatever.
John:
That's what I'm looking for.
John:
That's just me personally.
John:
Your mileage may vary, so I encourage everyone to take up Perl6.org, especially the people who have no idea what Perl 6 is, because people who don't have any idea what it is, I think they just think it's like PHP with different dollar signs and stuff, and then nothing could be further from the truth.
John:
Yeah.
John:
pearl six is strange in ways if swift didn't exist it would be more weird because i think swift has given everyone a kick in the pants of like what the hell's going on with this language like what are they trying to do there it's like c with structs but like it's got this weird stuff like it's object oriented but they're also it's got this functional stuff mixed in like what the hell like swift is like pearl six like a tiny fragment of pearl six like pearl six exploded and a little tiny star came out of it and it dumped in some other things but pearl six has got all the crazy and
John:
And all the crazy in the best sense, like crazy like a fox.
John:
So I encourage everyone who is interested in anything having to do with languages, check out the Perl 6 website.
John:
Wade through the documentation until your eyes roll back in your head and you think these people must be on something.
John:
They probably are.
John:
Lots of good ideas in language still.
Marco:
So I have two questions.
Marco:
First of all, on an infinite timescale, do you think you will use Perl 6?
Yeah.
John:
yeah if it's kind of one of those things like you know is there something magical about them putting out a 6.0.0 that's going to make the implementation much better much faster I don't know about that but I assume people will keep working on it because it's interesting I assume at least a small group of people will have enough motivation to keep plugging away I'm not entirely confident that they will ever get to the point where I end up using it to make a real project because it is conceivable that for my entire life it could be like a weird research project
John:
That is interesting to the people who toy around with it, but it never becomes sort of a thing large applications are written with.
John:
So I don't know there.
John:
I'm not going to say it definitely will because it could on infinite time fail.
John:
It could just peter out and like people stop working on it.
John:
It becomes just a historical curiosity from which people take ideas going forward, which will be fine.
John:
Like it's a lot of.
John:
you know perl 5 for that matter most of its benefit i think has not been the part where it played the prime role in making dynamic web applications during the web 1.0 era but the fact that so many other people used perl or looked at it and took those ideas forward into their own languages yes including swift question number two which do you think is likely to happen first you adopt perl 6 or you replace your mac pro
John:
Oh, I'm replacing my Mac Pro way before I had that Pro 6 or anything.
John:
Definitely.