Capital F, Capital C
John:
I also like the idea of titles that make people not want to listen.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, first item of the most the most followed up item from last week was both was Marco's description and my reinforcement of the idea that if you lose the tiny little Apple remote in your couch cushions or it's just dark and it's somewhere on your couch or on the arm of your couch or on a coffee table and you go reaching for it and you feel around to try to find it and you accidentally swipe your fingers across touchpad while you're watching video that will move the playhead on the video.
John:
And many, many people are going to tell us that if you hit the menu button, it will just go back to where it was.
John:
When you move the playhead, it doesn't actually start playing again until you tell it to play, but then you're still kind of faced with the situation of, oh, well, how do I get the playhead back to where I want to put it?
John:
I don't think you even have to put it back, first of all, but second of all...
John:
If you accidentally do that, if you're reaching to the remote and you swipe your hands across touchpad and it's, you know, moves the playhead somewhere, just hit the menu button and it will go back to where it was.
John:
I think you can probably also just hit, well, maybe you can't hit play.
John:
Anyway, menu button, the largest followed up item.
John:
I didn't know that in my one hour of using it, but since then I have used it and it works.
John:
Have you used Plex yet?
John:
I haven't.
John:
I keep meaning to install that.
John:
I haven't installed it.
John:
And the thing that keeps me away from Plex, I went through this big, long, painful experience to install it on my PS4 and then was disappointed in the client.
John:
And the main thing that keeps me from installing it is my Plex server would be my Synology, but I use the DS video server instead, and the kids use the DS video server.
John:
Like, you can play video from it from my television and from 10 different places.
John:
And I think...
John:
I don't like to mess with that setup because I think like by enabling Plex, there's a potential that I could screw up my existing video thing or maybe it'll show up as two DLNA servers.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
It shows up as two DLNA servers because my dad uses DLNA and he has Plex running, I believe, hosted on the Synology of Memory Serves.
Casey:
And there are two separate DLNA servers for sure.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I'm always just afraid to touch what works, especially if it involves things that my kids are using.
John:
But I will eventually try.
John:
Really, you should get yours first and try it and tell me about it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
We'll figure that out.
Casey:
At some point, maybe.
Casey:
I'm sure I'm going to get one.
Casey:
It's just I haven't done it yet.
Casey:
Trying to hold out.
Casey:
Trying to wait for the holidays probably won't work.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
What did you kids say about the remote?
John:
This I thought was interesting because I've seen a lot of things about the Apple TV or about just technology in general where it's like we old people don't understand it and only the kids truly understand it.
John:
And I thought one of my kids' reaction to the new remote was interesting and
John:
They're used to having lots of different remotes because I don't have a universal remote.
John:
I have a bunch of different remotes.
John:
They have learned more or less to navigate my crazy television setup to get what they want on the television.
John:
They're not really that into it.
John:
They don't want to know how it works.
John:
They just want to know the minimum possible to get it to work.
John:
Anyway, I said, here's the new Apple TV.
John:
I showed it to them and we were watching some video and at some point they wanted to watch a video by themselves.
John:
And I said, I'll just use the new Apple TV.
John:
And they didn't know what the remote looked like because they're used to the TiVo remote.
John:
Anyway, I gave them the remote and showed it to them.
John:
And immediately, this is my daughter.
John:
She was super angry that this remote did not work like the other one.
John:
She was just trying to navigate the grid of items, you know, go up and to the left.
John:
And I was like, all right, go over to Netflix.
John:
Why she was watching Netflix in there, who knows?
John:
She knows how to do it from the TUO too.
John:
But anyway, just moving the sort of selection to the Netflix icon on the main screen using the touchpad was not immediately apparent how that worked, even though I kept showing her, swipe your thumb left or right or tap or whatever, and she got
John:
so angry she's like why can't it just be buttons i just want to go up and left and she was just so angry that it didn't work the way the other one did because she was competent with the other one she knows how to go again it was a tivo remote not the little apple thing she knows how to go up up left left and then hit the button in the middle to select and this tiny little remote was thwarting her it had taken away her skill and made her back into a novice and that is a phenomenon that we're all very familiar with
John:
in the adult world or the world of people who aren't in elementary school anyway, where they have a set of computer skills that have been built up over many years.
John:
And the, the introduction of anything new, even if the new thing is better, it's seen as a threat or as a bad thing because it puts them back into the role of novice.
John:
They know how to use the old system.
John:
They know how to use the,
John:
you know, a particular interface or a piece of hardware or a piece of software or whatever.
John:
And that expert, they start, that expertise starts to feel like they start to internalize that as like, I am a competent person.
John:
I know how to do this job.
John:
I can, whatever, whatever task I need to accomplish, I can accomplish it.
John:
And I use it in any tool you give them, even if the tool is actually better, once you learn it,
John:
Because it makes them feel like they can no longer do that task they could previously do, that tool is bad.
John:
And it was amazing to me to see that happen in an eight-year-old.
John:
We're not that different, you and I, the old people and the young people.
John:
Even an eight-year-old can be super angry that her hard-earned skills of using the directional pad and the select button on a T-board remote can be erased in a moment by new technology.
John:
Anyway, she's used to it now.
John:
It's fine.
Casey:
Just like that.
Casey:
All is right in the world.
John:
Yeah, I mean, you know, she's eight.
John:
It takes three seconds.
John:
You learn how to do it.
John:
It's like she was still angry about it for that day, but now she's over it.
Casey:
Oh, goodness gracious.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Any other follow-up or are we already done?
Casey:
If we are done, that is world record follow-up.
Casey:
I'm very proud of us.
John:
I think Marco has been doing more Apple TV gaming.
John:
Do you have anything more to add on it?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So basically what happened between last show and this show is that my family discovered that the Apple TV can in fact be a good gaming system.
Marco:
Because we discovered the game that everybody else discovered two years ago, Badland.
Marco:
This was especially good because none of us had actually played it on iOS.
Marco:
So it was all new to us.
Marco:
Badland is a fantastic game for the Apple TV.
Casey:
I don't think I've ever even heard of this.
Marco:
So it's kind of like the art style, almost of Limbo, but with color.
Marco:
And it's this kind of intricate, really fancied up version of the basic gameplay mechanic of Flappy Bird.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this is really minimizing its goodness.
Marco:
But it's like, so, you know, you are this bird and you, like, you push the button to go up and you let go of the button to fall.
Marco:
And, you know, it's just like this kind of inertia-based flying game.
Marco:
And you just fly through these side-scrolling levels.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of different obstacles and things that, you know, things you pick up to change the behavior of things.
Marco:
And you multiply and divide.
Marco:
It's crazy.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's just a really, really good game, and it is incredibly good even on the Siri remote.
Marco:
We tried it with the gamepad and with the Siri remote, and we actually find it's better with the Siri remote, and I can't explain why.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
Is it tap to click, or is it click to click?
Marco:
You have to actually click the button in.
Marco:
It doesn't just tap.
Marco:
But again, it doesn't make sense.
Marco:
I don't know why it's better, but for some reason, it just feels better.
Marco:
It feels right on the Siri remote.
John:
Well, doesn't it feel weird to hold a traditional console-style controller in two hands and the only thing you're doing with it is pressing one button with one thumb?
John:
Maybe.
John:
That might be it.
Marco:
So anyway, it really is a fantastic game.
Marco:
I highly recommend it for any Apple TV owner.
Marco:
It's accessible.
Marco:
Kids can play it.
Marco:
Adults can play it.
Marco:
Non-gamers can play it.
Marco:
It is really a very nice, well-done game.
Marco:
I think it's like $5.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
Just get it.
Marco:
It's really good.
Marco:
By far the best Apple TV gaming experience that we've had so far.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
This looks aesthetically, just reading the, or excuse me, not reading, but watching the little video on their website, this looks aesthetically a lot like World of Goo to me.
Casey:
Did either of you play that?
Marco:
Yeah, and honestly, I wouldn't expect World of Goo to work because of the lack of a pointer, but...
Marco:
But it is kind of in a similar art style, or maybe that was one of the influences on it.
Marco:
Certainly, it's a gorgeous artistic design game.
Marco:
And it's kind of funny.
Marco:
It's kind of sick.
Marco:
It's really good.
Marco:
Just get Badland.
Marco:
There aren't that many things you can do in the Apple TV that are really excellent right now because we're just waiting on a lot of software to get ported or written for it.
Marco:
This is one of those things.
Marco:
This highly recommended Badland.
John:
This is another one of those one-button-press games.
John:
Yes.
John:
Because, you know, again, designed for... I'm assuming this was designed for touch originally, but it lends itself well because you are forced to go forward.
John:
Like, there is no move forward thing.
John:
Like, going forward, isn't that, like, part of the gameplay itself in that...
John:
the screen moves on whether you're ready or not so if you have to backtrack or something to get around an obstacle and the screen is moving on tough luck right yeah exactly and so this is a type of a type of game that i think traditional gamers who are used to having more control over their environment might find off-putting but is ideal for the phone where you don't want to make someone try to use a virtual d-pad and now on the apple tv where we actually have a real d-ish pad or whatever like
Marco:
if you just want to use the remote hey we already have a game already tuned for single button press and now that button doesn't even block any of the screen so an ideal apple tv port yeah and it's and you know it's it's watchable by people like it's fun to watch someone playing it um they're like nothing about it needs to be on a personal device that's only in your hands you know it's it really is very much like a a
Marco:
tv friendly family friendly general audience kind of game it's just really good um highly recommend it i also tried provenance more this week so the provenance is that emulator so you can't actually get on the app store you it's one of those it's one of the relatively few apps i think um that is published with the intention of everybody it's open source and to install it you have to download the source code get register for an apple developer account get the
Marco:
Have Xcode build the game and connect your TV via USB to your computer and have Xcode install the game onto your Apple TV with provisioning profiles generated from your developer account.
Marco:
My goodness.
Marco:
It is definitely not something that you can just tell a non-developer to just go do this and expect them to figure it out.
Marco:
They might, but the chances are not great.
Marco:
So it is very much a cumbersome process.
Marco:
I know Flux, the F.lux, that, I believe, just came out with something similar for iPhones and iPads, where they had this open source version that they just say, here, you can sideload this with Xcode and a developer account if you want this on your device without jailbreaking, something like that.
Marco:
So it's a pretty cumbersome process.
Marco:
And then it's nerdy.
Marco:
Then you have to tell it to import your ROMs that you want to play in the emulator.
Marco:
And then it creates a web interface.
Marco:
And you have to go from your Mac and upload them.
Marco:
And so it's definitely a little bit cumbersome to get set up.
Marco:
But when it is set up, you have an emulator on your Apple TV, and it covers all the popular 8 and 16-bit systems.
Marco:
It doesn't have N64 or anything more advanced, but I think it stops at Super Nintendo and Genesis level.
Marco:
But it is really quite good.
Marco:
as you know i've i've played better emulators if you have a computer with a gamepad on your computer you can do a lot better because like provenance it it lacks a lot of customizable control that a lot of emulators have uh you can't for example customize the controls uh so if you don't like how they how they map the buttons onto the gamepad tough luck oh i guess you have the source code i guess you could change it but i i am a developer and i wouldn't bother doing that
Marco:
They also don't appear to have any of the really nice scaling modes.
Marco:
So like, you know, all these old games, they were made for much lower resolution screens.
Marco:
And if you run them on a modern emulator, you get all these like fancy like the 2X SAI and Super Eagle, like all these fancy scaling up modes to make the graphics look better on higher resolution, larger screens that we have these days.
Marco:
And so that is not present on this.
Marco:
So you're just looking at a pixel quadrupled version of the game or whatever, just scaled up in the dumbest way possible, scaled up to the big screen.
Marco:
So it doesn't look great, but it looks no worse than the original system did.
Marco:
So overall, it's fun.
Marco:
It's a fun way to get a whole bunch of games on an Apple TV if you have a gamepad.
Marco:
Don't even bother if you have the Siri remote.
Marco:
Just don't bother.
Marco:
But if you have a gamepad, check out Providence.
Marco:
Oh, if you have a gamepad and an Apple TV and you're a developer and you have a USB-C to USB cable.
Casey:
And you have a bunch of backups of your old video games.
Marco:
Yes, and if you have legally obtained backups from... I don't even know what hardware that would be to create those.
Marco:
If you have all of those, which are really small, it's funny.
Marco:
I loaded up every game I wanted from Genesis, Super Nintendo, and NES, and even Sega Master System.
Marco:
These games are like a few hundred kilobytes each.
Marco:
I played through Sonic 1.
Marco:
By the way, Sonic 1 is a hard game.
Yeah.
Marco:
I used to be a lot better at Sonic than I am now.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
When it turns out we don't play games for like a decade, it really impacts your ability to play them.
Marco:
I almost got a game over in Labyrinth Zone.
Marco:
That's how bad it was.
Marco:
I died in Marble Hill Zone.
Marco:
I mean, this is how bad I've gotten.
Marco:
So I played through that, and it's like a few hundred kilobytes.
Marco:
So it's a great way, if you are this geeky, to set this kind of thing up.
Marco:
It is a really cool thing to do, for a little while at least.
Marco:
That being said, overall, I am... So now that I've had good game experiences on the Apple TV, I am more optimistic for its future, but it's going to depend a lot on how many people actually buy these game controllers and then how many developers can afford to make games for it.
Marco:
Certainly, there's going to be games like Badland where you don't need the game controller, and that's good, but it's so limited because, you know, you see that if you don't have one of these yet...
Marco:
You look at that remote and you might think, oh, games can use six buttons or whatever.
Marco:
No, games can use basically, I think, two buttons.
Marco:
The D-pad simulator or, you know, they have the trackpad and the play pause button.
Marco:
And I think that's it.
Marco:
I think everything else is off limits to games because everything else has a meaning into the system that you aren't allowed to override.
Marco:
And of course, there's the accelerometer stuff.
Marco:
So, you know, you could kind of do like Wii game kind of stuff.
Marco:
Some of it, not even all of it, because some of it requires more buttons and more precision and everything.
Marco:
But you could do some of the kind of stuff we saw on the Wii, but it is pretty limited.
Marco:
So I do hope we see more good games.
Marco:
I'm sure we will.
Marco:
And there's probably even more out now that I haven't tried yet.
Marco:
But I do think it's going to be, I do think it has the potential to be a really fun gaming platform.
Marco:
And I just hope it pans out.
John:
Yeah, I was struck again by the stories this weekend about video game sales.
John:
Like, thinking of the Apple TV and iPhone gaming and everything else as kind of like gaming for the masses, where it's like, yeah, I'm not that into games, but if you have a fun game to play, I'll check it out.
John:
The Apple TV, you buy it for other reasons.
John:
If it plays games, it's cool.
John:
But, you know, I think the general impression of people who are not in the video game industry is
John:
is that most people play phone games you know you got a phone everyone's got a smartphone you can play games on it do you know anyone who has a smartphone who hasn't had at least one game that they've played briefly like had a week where they were addicted to insert name of your favorite game here whatever that may be even there's just some random zynga thing or or flappy bird you mentioned before the idea that for the mass market
John:
they're there you know what we used to call casual games like but there's so many more of those people right and then there are the hardcore people who the weirdos who have actual game consoles and stuff like that but when you look at it from the number side of it it is flipped around um you know there was this call of duty black ops 3 came out and sold like 550 million dollars and uh you know on the first weekend and it's on track to earn a billion dollars
John:
It's almost as if, like, if you took it in the movie sense where people said, people have the impression, well, most people go to see these small independent movies because they're just movie casuals.
John:
And only the real hardcore people go to see Jurassic World, right?
John:
But no, no one has that impression.
John:
Everyone says, well, movies?
John:
Well, Jurassic World, that's a smash hit.
John:
Like, that's for the masses.
John:
That's for the mainstream, right?
John:
Gaming is so weird in that the thing that everyone thinks is kind of like a dying industry of these...
John:
you know hardcore gamers there's only a couple of you know tens or hundreds of millions of those as opposed to the billion people who play cell phone games and yet that's where all the money is though these you know that call of duty black ops is making more money than probably the entire top 10 in the ios uh you know gaming charts and that's just one game on this supposed platform that is dying pcs and uh and consoles so i don't know how we're going to square that circle like
John:
i don't think we can extrapolate and say well consoles are going away and pc is going away and pretty soon the mass market will take over and everyone just plays uh badlands on their apple tv and plays flappy bird and you know candy crush and that is the gaming industry
John:
When the money people are like, give me this year's Call of Duty any day because it is a money-making machine on the scale of a blockbuster movie.
John:
And as far as the money people are concerned, that's the mass market of gaming.
John:
So, I don't know.
John:
It's hard for me to get a handle on this because as a gamer, I do see these other sort of...
John:
not lesser games, but smaller games as the thing that's weird.
John:
And I see Call of Duty as exactly the same as Jurassic World.
John:
The only thing that doesn't fit with that is the popular notion that console games and PC games are somehow going away to be wiped away by lesser devices like the smartphone and iPad games that kids play and Apple TV games and whatever.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's like the size of a dorm fridge.
Marco:
It just comes to your house in a box, and you open it up, and it sucks all the air out of the room and inflates itself, and there you have a mattress.
Marco:
I mean, you're not going to get back in the box, but it's pretty amazing.
Marco:
And they know that buying a mattress online sounds a little bit crazy.
Marco:
So they are willing to let you try it for 100 nights, risk-free, free delivery, free painless returns.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And we've heard from people on both sides.
Marco:
We've heard from people who have them, who love them.
Marco:
We heard from a couple people who returned them because it didn't work out for them.
Marco:
And they were raving about how great the return process even was.
Marco:
Like, that tells you how nice it is that even somebody who decided not to keep it wanted to email us to tell us how great they were to deal with, how great the return process was.
Marco:
This just sounds like a fantastic company to deal with from everyone we've talked to who's dealt with them.
Marco:
So this is completely risk-free, free shipping, painless returns, made-in-American mattresses, and the prices for all this, you would think, this sounds like a premium thing, and it is quality-wise, but not price-wise.
Marco:
Mattresses, usually for a good mattress, you're paying between $1,000 and $2,000.
Marco:
If it's a larger size, like a queen or a king, you're paying almost $2,000 for that, for anything really good.
Marco:
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Marco:
Under $1,000 for a high-quality king-size mattress is unheard of.
Marco:
I've never seen a good mattress that was under $1,000 in that size.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can even get $50 off by going to casper.com slash ATP.
Marco:
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Marco:
Terms and conditions do apply for that.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Casper for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So as we record big day today, biggest of all, though, for our friend Federico Vatici, his dreams have come true.
Casey:
Today is iPad Pro Day.
Casey:
I did not have the time to go and take a look at the store to see if they had any in stock.
Casey:
I did not preorder one.
Casey:
I have no experience with this whatsoever, but one of us does.
Marco:
So I actually went... TIFF wanted an iPad Pro.
Marco:
And so we decided, like any Apple products, if you're going to get it at all, get it when it's out because the price is not going to change between now... Well, actually, never mind.
Marco:
The way Apple is these days, this will be for sale for the next five years.
Marco:
And it will drop by $100 next year.
Marco:
But anyway, so we decided, you know, Tiff was interested in larger screen iPad.
Marco:
So this morning, woke up, ordered it for in-store pickup because I was surprised.
Marco:
You know, they said it would be available for online ordering today in stores later this week.
Marco:
And they surprised everyone, including the stores, based on the employees I talked to, by having it available in stores today.
Marco:
That was great.
Marco:
So I went and ordered it like still in bed in the morning with the Apple Store app for the iPhone, which is the best way to order things.
Marco:
Unfortunately, the pencil was already backordered at eight in the morning, already backordered three to four weeks.
Marco:
And the stores I asked around and it sounds like most stores actually got zero pencils to sell today.
Marco:
Like it's not like they sold out.
Marco:
They actually just didn't get any.
Marco:
So what makes you think the pencil is backordered as opposed to nobody has been able to order it?
Marco:
the people in my store said that they think the big stores in Manhattan might have gotten a small number.
Marco:
And I heard some people from maybe some stores in Europe that are really high profile that they got a couple.
Marco:
So it does seem like they are coming to some stores.
Marco:
They came to some stores today and the early orders this morning had... Some people said they got a one to two week delay window rather than my quoted three to four weeks.
Marco:
So they are coming, but...
Marco:
I can't help but feel like Apple keeps botching the releases of these things, you know, like in the same way that, that the watch launch was totally botched.
Marco:
I mean, the watch launch was a disaster where, yeah, it officially launched on this day, but you couldn't actually get one for like months and,
Marco:
And if you wanted certain ones, you waited even longer for things like the modern buckle or leather loop or the black link that were very backordered, delayed.
Marco:
And now with the iPad Pro, it's nice that it's available today.
Marco:
That was a nice surprise that we were able to pick one up today.
Marco:
But two of its main selling features, the smart keyboard, is that what it's called, smart keyboard?
Casey:
I believe that's right.
Marco:
The keyboard from Apple and the pencil were both totally unavailable for most people who try to buy it today.
Marco:
And who knows how long it'll be.
Marco:
It does kind of put a damper on it.
Marco:
Like Tiff was really excited about the pencil.
Marco:
And so was I, honestly, to try the pencil.
Marco:
And it does put a damper on it to be like, okay, now we finally get this device that, by the way, was announced two months ago.
Marco:
It's not like this was announced last week and we've been really impatient.
Marco:
This was announced two months ago.
Marco:
And it just barely shipped, apparently.
Marco:
And they couldn't even get the store stocked with the really critical accessories.
Marco:
Like, that just seems like a botched launch to me.
Marco:
And this, like...
Marco:
the operations guy is running the company how does like how does this happen i don't know i'm probably being too uh too critical of this but it really does put a damper on it uh when you go to the store all happy to get this new device that you can do this cool new thing with and then it says oh you can't get your pencil for another month you know that's that's a bummer for you but what does that mean in terms of things that apple cares about does it mean fewer sales
Marco:
I did see a number of people today.
Marco:
I tweeted early in the morning, like, you know, this, this is, this kind of sucks.
Marco:
And I did see a number of people responding saying that they were going to go pick up an iPad pro today, but since they can't get a pencil, they're just going to wait until they can.
Marco:
So they're just delaying the sales, you know, like they're still going to sell those probably, but they, they will just be delayed.
Marco:
But I have to imagine, first of all, Apple really wants a big opening weekend.
Marco:
You know, they want to be able to brag.
Marco:
They sold X million iPads in a weekend.
Marco:
If, if they do, you know,
Marco:
So it's going to hurt them in that way.
Marco:
But also, there is going to be a certain degree of like right now there's inertia.
Marco:
It's day one and people are really excited about it and they want to get it.
Marco:
Maybe some people who were on the fence about whether they wanted to get it, maybe they now won't get it because maybe as this inertia dies down over the next three to four weeks before they can get the accessories that they want, maybe in that time they'll actually decide, you know what, maybe I don't really need this anymore.
Marco:
It's probably not going to be a massive portion of their sales, but I do think it will hurt them in some way.
John:
Also, how does that balance with the other side of which I think happened with the watch?
John:
There are positive aspects of things not being available.
John:
There is the perceived scarcity that essentially, you know, that this product is playing hard to get and it makes you want it even more because you can't get it.
John:
there is for the people who weren't even that interested in it there is the the the meta story about people i don't want to watch but people who do want watches are not able to find them it's the cabbage patch doll phenomenon like it becomes like a frenzy like wow this must be really popular because people really want it and it's sold out everywhere and that creates a positive buzz about it and then finally as like you know someone finally got a modern buckle right as as these
John:
products trickle out when they are ready to ship or whatever you get repeat stories i know we already covered the apple watch seven times but here's the first person to have the darth vader link bracelet here's the first person to have the modern buckle so on and so forth not that i'm saying apple is doing it on purpose like that it's artificial scarcity it totally seems like this is just as soon as they're able to manufacture them in volume they ship them
John:
Um, but I would say, but against the idea of someone being disappointed that they can't get what they want and then just saying, well, nevermind and not coming back, balance that against the positive effects of the perceived, uh, desirability and value and the repeat press on the sort of the trickle of stuff coming out.
John:
So yeah.
John:
I have to think I think it's bad for it not to launch all at once, mostly just because it reflects poorly on the company and might give someone a bad impression about Apple.
John:
But I think overall, I don't think it's actually hurting their sales as long as I mean, obviously, as long as by the by the time the holidays come, as long as everybody who wants to get an iPad Pro with a pencil for the holidays can get one.
John:
They may cut that close because that's where you could actually get hurt in sales because things are seasonal like that.
John:
If they miss the holidays, obviously they've really messed up.
John:
But as long as they make the holidays with a reasonable amount of time, I think people not getting their pencils for a couple of weeks is not that big a deal.
John:
The main thing I'm annoyed about as a lazy person who stays at home all the time.
John:
is i seem to remember in the old days that apple would if not favor uh online orders then at the very least sort of give them equal footing where now with the apple tv i experience this myself i ordered an apple tv and before my apple tv arrived to me they were already showing up in stores so rather than you know
John:
like and so now i bet if you were to order a pencil now you would get it sometime within the delivery window but then this weekend if you go into a big apple store you might be able to pick one up if you just happen to go in the morning and so it's they're definitely uh favoring retail it seems over a mail order
Marco:
Yeah, and that's, again, like the Apple TV, it was not a big botch, but I heard a ton of stories like that from people who ordered online, and then they had weird shipping issues, they didn't ship on time, and then, yeah, the stores got them first.
John:
Well, that makes sense, though.
John:
I'm saying this is what they do and it annoys me because I stay at home, but...
John:
people who order online who are those people they have it's better to put them in the stores because most people are just like wandering through the mall and they see the apple store and they wander and they have no idea when a product launch or anything about it's only us who like order the second it's available online because we just want to we want to do the action that we think is going to give us the product as soon as possible because we're tiny little children at heart right and so it's like oh it's available for order i'm gonna stay up at 3am and order order order
John:
No one else is like that.
John:
No one knows when these things are.
John:
They just like they go into the Apple store and they say, well, there's a new iPhone.
John:
The new iPhone's out.
John:
Oh, they're not out.
John:
OK, well, I'll check back next weekend.
John:
Oh, they are out.
John:
Oh, here's the new Apple TV.
John:
They don't know or care when things launch.
John:
So it's much better to have them available in the store for sort of not impulse purchases.
John:
But hey, let me wander into the Apple store and see what's available as opposed to trying to cater to people who stay up till 3am to order a phone.
Marco:
yeah i don't know that just the whole thing it just it just puts a damper on you know like it's not that it doesn't ruin things it's not going to kill all their sales but it just puts a damper on on the enthusiasm it's like oh this is great except oh no bad news you know it's puts the damper on your enthusiasm the rest of the world doesn't even know the ipad pro exists yet they'll know when the ads start running on tv and when they wander even when the ads run on tv i think people are perfectly acceptable accepting of seeing an ad on tv for a cool apple thing
John:
Then wandering into the Apple store and saying, is that thing I saw an ad for on TV yet?
John:
And having the Apple store say, no, we don't have those yet.
John:
And they'll be like, oh, all right.
John:
And they'll come back the next weekend.
John:
That's how I feel like the vast, vast majorities of Apple sales operate.
John:
Tiff just wants a pen, I understand.
Marco:
All that being said, I was able to try the Pencil and Smart Keyboard in the store because they had a demo one that some of the staff were playing with out on the floor.
Marco:
And so I went up and I got to play with it too.
Marco:
They wouldn't sell it to me.
Marco:
I asked.
Marco:
I offered, but they were not allowed to sell it to me.
John:
$1 million for one night with your iPad Pro.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
That's a reference.
John:
I know it's a reference.
John:
Yay, we saw a movie together.
John:
Yay.
Casey:
I've actually never seen the movie, but I know what you're referring.
Casey:
It isn't that good.
Marco:
Please email John.
Marco:
So I will say, having now played with the pencil and keyboard, very briefly.
Marco:
I mean, I had about five minutes with the pencil and about two minutes with the keyboard.
Marco:
I will say the keyboard is not as bad as I expected.
Marco:
I expected it to be terrible because I heard it had similar key switches to the MacBook One and possibly even worse key feel than the MacBook One.
Marco:
I think it's probably about the same, maybe a little bit better even.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It didn't feel as horrible to me than the MacBook One, but it was very close.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
It's an iPad keyboard.
Marco:
It's going to be a compromise in a lot of different ways.
Marco:
So that's fine.
Marco:
I know there is a Logitech one.
Marco:
The Apple stores are even selling it.
Marco:
They had that in stock.
Marco:
They were out of stock of every other iPad accessory, including the smart cover and the smart case, which are now two separate.
Marco:
Now the smart case is only the back part.
Marco:
Oh, that's weird.
Marco:
And so if you want both the back and the front covered, you have to buy both parts for a total of like $150.
Marco:
Yikes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So that's annoying.
Marco:
Like, it's almost as expensive as just buying the keyboard, which covers both.
Marco:
So you might as well just buy the keyboard at that point.
Marco:
uh anyway the keyboard was very securely attached um it only really holds the iPad in one angle though as far as I could tell I wasn't sure if you could if you could adjust it at all um it seemed like it was fixed to this one particular angle that it would hold it at you could shove the pencil behind it because there's no place else to put that pencil so just pull pull the iPad forward put put the pencil in there push it back it'll be fine
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is going to be the kind of product where there's a huge opportunity here for third parties to make way better cases and keyboards than Apple did.
Marco:
Because you're going to want a place to put the pencil, and there isn't one anywhere on the iPad, anywhere in any of Apple's cases.
Marco:
You know, it's similar to how the iPad 1 just kind of... They had that terrible...
Marco:
gray like wraparound case and the ipad one was just clearly not designed with the case in mind at all and they just kind of threw one on that's how the pencil feels today which is like here's this this awesome thing that almost everyone is well not almost everyone but a lot of people are going to want for this ipad and the ipad was seemingly designed with no regard to how this thing would actually be kept on or near or in the ipad as dan morin pointed out today it goes behind your ear yeah
Marco:
right well it's too heavy for that first of all i think is it so it it is heavy um it's not like uncomfortably heavy it doesn't feel like a lightweight pencil or or or a plastic stylus it feels dense and it not too heavy but almost too heavy your ears can take it i have faith in them
Marco:
But it really does feel incredibly good to use that pencil.
Marco:
I would say the keyboard, if I were really into this thing myself, which I'm probably not going to be, but if I was really into this thing myself, I would probably skip the keyboard.
Marco:
But I would definitely get a pencil because I'm not an artist of any kind.
Marco:
I have no illustrative abilities at all.
Marco:
I hardly ever handwrite anything.
Marco:
This made me want to handwrite things and draw diagrams and become some kind of artist, even though I probably won't ever be.
Marco:
The pencil is great.
Marco:
And combining it with palm rejection, other touch input, everything, I could not, in my five minutes of using it, I never encountered an error in...
Marco:
Thinking that a touch was the pencil or rejecting the palm properly, it was flawless.
Marco:
And they were using the Adobe... Oh, God.
Marco:
It's like an Adobe Sketch something.
John:
Adobe Sketch is the app.
Marco:
That.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's what we were using to draw with.
Marco:
And it worked very well.
Marco:
There is a little bit of lag still, but it is the best stylus slash pen tablet thing for a computer.
Marco:
By far the best I've ever seen.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
Way better than the Wacom tablets that I've seen.
Marco:
Way better than any previous iPad or iPhone stylus that I've tried.
Marco:
Just a completely different experience.
Marco:
Far better.
Marco:
I was able to rest my palm on it flat on the table and just write, just handwrite.
Marco:
Like Gruber mentioned in his review, which is very good.
Marco:
He mentioned that he tested by drawing his signature and that when you draw your signature on most touch devices or pen terminals in stores, it always looks horrible, crazy, nothing like your real signature.
Marco:
And he said on the iPad Pro, it looked like his real handwritten signature.
Marco:
In my very brief testing here, I tried handwriting things, like just handwriting a few sentences, and it looked just like my handwriting on paper.
Marco:
It is incredibly good.
Marco:
I wish I had a reason to use it.
John:
And right now, I don't think I do.
John:
So it's time for you to go look at the show notes, Marco, if you haven't already.
John:
Because there are two videos related to this topic in the show notes.
John:
These were from tweets.
John:
One is from Steve Streza saying he was not impressed with the pencil latency.
John:
So I think it's an animated GIF because...
John:
twitter is stupid but anyway take a look at that tweet and look at his video i don't i can't tell what app he's using there but the lag on the thing that he's doing is just horrendous that is really rough actually all right now scroll down and here's matt panzerino saying really because when i was using it it was awesome and then look at his video also of an ipad pro presumably with a different app and look at the lag there it looks like a different app
John:
yeah it might be although they later in the discussion they're like i was using adobe sketch and then uh and panzer says oh i was using adobe sketch too i don't know if it's in this picture and anyway i i think what i think what this shows is that from application to application there can be a big difference in latency and response to this in other words the hardware is capable but depending on how the application is programmed you
John:
you could get the latency you see.
John:
Because I don't think these are broken iPads.
John:
I think you could get the latency you see in the first video, which is really, really bad.
John:
Or with the same exact hardware, you can get the latency you see in the second video, which is really, really good.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's going to depend entirely on good coding.
Marco:
Like, you know, at some point, the hardware is going to be the limiting factor.
Marco:
But yeah, I mean, my experience matches Panzerino's video there of it just being, you know, it does, you can feel that there is some latency, but it is really small.
John:
uh and it's perfectly fine for handwriting i think and when i saw the first video i'm like oh well maybe that's slow because it's trying to do like a brush type thing where it's like pressure sensitive and there's like bristles you can see it's trying to be like a brushed ink thing where the leading edge is has things but then look at panzerino's video and he's doing like translucent smeared ink looking like he's not just doing solid black lines either and whatever application he's using it seems to be doing even fancier effects
John:
um and this is yet another opportunity to link that microsoft video showing the different latency things uh if you watch i always go back to that microsoft video to calibrate my eyeballs to hard numbers because they tell you they have like the thing with adjustable latency here's one millisecond here's 10 here's 100 to my eyes the good uh video of the ipad pro here is still not down to one millisecond but it's much better than 100 milliseconds so it's somewhere in that range um
John:
um and the idea that the application can affect what the latency is like shows that this is really just the dawning of the mass market perhaps i'm sure apple hopes it is but perhaps the dawning of the mass market era of pen computing and so people say well that that started with windows for pen or whatever or the grid pad or that started with the surface or whatever really it remains to be seen if this will actually popularize the pen to any significant degree or
John:
But in all cases, I think pen input is not yet at the level, has not crossed the threshold that the mouse did when the Mac was introduced because there were mouse type input devices before and after the Mac.
John:
But one of the things that the Mac...
John:
uh has been excellent at from day one is when you move the mouse the cursor on the screen moves there's no stuttering there's no lag it's a seemingly direct connection and that was very important at the dawning of the mac to making a mac feel like a mac it's one of the reasons that like you know windows
John:
always felt weird and different until they got their cursor stuff nailed down a couple of years later and on the mac there was nothing you can do in a program to make that mouse cursor screw up like it's not like well if you program your application badly the mouse cursor won't be responsive not drawing with the mouse because yeah you could screw that up because you know on the original mac if you tried to draw with a fancy brush tool it would be all lagging gross and everything i'm talking about
John:
the mouse itself like just moving the cursor around that stayed solid right there's nothing you could do an application to screw that up other short of crashing or grinding a disc or something terrible like it even even that they tended to even when the disc was grinding it the mouse would still move smoothly all of us have experienced a crash where the entire computer is frozen but the mouse cursor still works that's an important part of the sort of physical interface to computers with the mouse is the reliability of you move the mouse or you swipe on the trackpad
John:
and the cursor moves it's also by the way why it's so incredibly disconcerting when your mouse cursor freezes we've all had it happen many times many more times in the bad old days of classic mac os it almost feels like the world is broken for a second where you move your mouse and the cursor doesn't move you're like oh no this is not right something it's like you've been knocked off kilter or something it's a it violates this constraint of the world that you believed in that when i move the mouse that the cursor moves well
John:
for pen computing or any kind of pen input to really become as sort of second nature and boring as mouse input is nowadays we have to eventually get past uh the the idea that the responsiveness uh will be different and it's different with a pen because pen's not a pointing device pen is a drawing device so where i was giving the mouse a pass before and say oh well of course if you wiggle the mouse really fast and super paint with the
John:
spray can thing it would be all laggy and gross and that's fine um that's because the mouse isn't primarily a drawing thing it's for moving things around and clicking and pointing but the pen it's not a pointing device there is no cursor on the screen is entirely about drawing so i want all pen input to be you know like the second video or better and it's clear that we're not quite there yet um which is kind of a shame but this is early days at least as far as apple is concerned with uh pen input although the newton sitting on my desk right now might uh might disagree but
John:
That had pretty bad latency too.
Casey:
So a couple thoughts on this.
Casey:
First of all, to double down on what you were saying about the world being completely wrong when your mouse freezes, imagine how weird it is when not only is the mouse frozen, but your mouse button doesn't exist anymore because it's a software fake button.
Casey:
That has happened to me a handful of times on this MacBook Pro that I have for work, and it is weird.
John:
So you just press and the little vibrate-y thing doesn't vibrate underneath it?
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
So it's like pushing on a plate of glass.
Casey:
Nothing happens.
Casey:
And that's when everything is broken.
Casey:
On the plus side, you have a physical indicator that everything's broken.
Casey:
But on the downside, this thing that you forget is all software suddenly stops working, and it's very weird.
Casey:
And the other thing I wanted to throw out is, I believe it was after the iPad Pro was announced, I'd remembered seeing something about advanced multi-touch or something like that.
Casey:
And I went back and watched the WWDC session on it, and we'll link it in the show notes.
Casey:
It's session 233, I believe.
Casey:
And it was really, really interesting.
Casey:
And they talked in the session, I don't remember who gave it, a lot about...
Casey:
these infinitesimally small windows of time with which you have to process touch input and how they coalesce it and this and that and the other thing.
Casey:
And I watched it like a month or two ago, so I'm a little fuzzy on it now, but it was really, really interesting.
Casey:
And if you have the time, it's worth watching.
Casey:
And I bring this up because...
Casey:
It very well could be, you know, if both these videos are using the same Adobe app or whatever it is, if it's the same app, then this is irrelevant.
Casey:
But if it is different apps, it would not surprise me at all if there are very different performance characteristics between two different apps.
Casey:
Because the way they handle it can change very, very dramatically depending on whether or not they're good developers, whether or not they're using new APIs, etc.
John:
Fraser Spears says that, just to confirm that, he's used the iPad Pro as well.
John:
Latency seems very app-dependent.
John:
He says the latency is undetectable in Notes, meaning the Apple Notes application, I assume, but very laggy in paper by 53.
John:
I don't know which apps are used in this video, but I'm totally willing to believe that it's entirely app-dependent.
John:
And that what we're not seeing is like a bad or buggy hardware or something.
John:
It's just, you know, it's just software.
John:
Like Casey said, if you're not pulling, you know, processing the events in a particular way or using whatever the fast path is for doing input.
John:
And like I said, this Panzerino video, that's like...
John:
something that looks like a magic marker where it's like smeary and thicker towards the edges something that looks like grease paint something that looks like watercolors so it's not like it only works if you're drawing a solid black line but if you're doing anything fancy it's slow so i really have no idea why the slow one is slow and why the fast one is fast other than you know just maybe using the wrong apis or something
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, anyway, regardless, we at least know that when properly handled by the software side, the pen, the pencil can be really great.
Marco:
And in a few apps already, it already is.
Marco:
And that, I mean, really, like using this blew my mind, like how good it is.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
I just, again, I wish I had a reason to handwrite things.
Marco:
I've never even, I've never been like a notebook at my desk kind of person.
Marco:
Like a lot of people will sketch things out on paper notebooks.
Marco:
I've never even done that.
Marco:
I never took notes in school.
Marco:
But, man, I do wish that I had a reason to use it because it really is awesome.
John:
You just need to do a video Pictionary.
John:
Someone who needs to make a Pictionary application for iPad Pro people so you can do Pictionary with people across the country.
John:
Like, draw something, basically?
John:
You didn't get to see their face, you know?
John:
Right, right, right.
John:
iPad Pro, you could put up on an easel.
Marco:
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Marco:
So, iPad Pro software-wise.
Marco:
I got TIFF's iPad Pro, wasn't able to get anything else for it, so we have no case, no cover, no pencil, no keyboard, but we're probably not going to get the keyboard anyway.
Marco:
Brought it home.
Marco:
So far, I would say, based on my quick experience with it, it is really a mixed bag.
Marco:
Most of the reviews seem to back up what I've experienced so far.
Marco:
First of all, it is huge.
Marco:
And because it is so huge...
Marco:
Certain aspects of things that you could do well on iPads before are actually worse, in my opinion.
Marco:
I think it was definitely worse for reading, unless you're reading things like comic books or magazines where you need as much space as possible.
Marco:
But just for reading regular column articles or iBooks, it looks kind of ridiculous on it, to be honest.
Marco:
Because iBooks does not seem to offer margin control.
Marco:
You've got to crank the phone.
John:
size up though like that's that's what it lets you do it lets you have keep the sane number of words per line but make the text way bigger so it's easier to see
John:
Yeah, but then you're just holding it back further.
Marco:
No, it's for people who have... Your eyes will go eventually, young man, and you will appreciate it.
Marco:
No, absolutely.
Marco:
I mean, if you actually need a bigger size just to make it legible in general for vision accessibility reasons, that's a different story.
Marco:
But if you have vision within kind of the normal range and you don't need it to be really huge, I would say in general that the other iPads are better reading devices for that reason.
John:
um this is obviously better for video well for for reading though what if you want to have twitter along the side while you read that's a terrible idea why would you want people do that like i'd do it or if you just want to have twitter and slack and in the same thing split each one gets a reasonable size column like you're you're still thinking as if the screen is one thing that the application can fill and apple hasn't done much to dissuade you from that notion but they have at least cut the screen in half or thirds or whatever so i think you have to in considering software which
John:
Granted, I'm sure you get it.
John:
This has not been updated very well for the iPad Pro and sometimes looks ridiculous.
John:
At the very least, you can say, all right, well, it may not be a good reading experience for this thing, but that's only because I'm letting it have the whole screen.
John:
Why don't I divide the screen up and let something else have that thing?
John:
And now I have two good reading experiences at the same time.
Marco:
yeah i mean that's that's kind of the idea but like one of the things that made ipads and and e-readers so good for reading books compared to computers is that you could only do that one thing on the screen you could fill up the screen with one reading app and you like if you try nobody reads books on their computers for the most part because you have these giant screens that are filled with all these all these little windows all these all these distractions and it's not a very good reading environment for that you think that's why people not read books on their computers
John:
I think that's one of the reasons.
John:
I think the main reason is that it's uncomfortable to sit at a desk staring at a screen that's in front of you.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Similarly, it's uncomfortable to hold this iPad up for a long time because it is... It is not light or small.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So, you know, different reviewers have agreed and disagreed on this point that I've seen so far.
Marco:
Some of them say it's okay.
Marco:
Some of them say it's heavy.
Marco:
You know, Tiff's initial impression, my initial impression so far is that it's pretty heavy to hold up for more than a minute or two.
Marco:
Like you want to have it on some kind of, you know, propped up case or desk or stand or something, you know, not just holding it up in bed for a long time or anything like that.
Marco:
So, for a lot of things, like if you've ever done anything on an iPad and the smallness of the iPad screen has been a limiting factor for you, then this will be an improvement.
Marco:
That's not true for everything.
John:
Andy Anako had a good picture, though.
John:
Speaking of that, recently he tweeted a picture of, I think his tweet was, the text was, living the dream.
John:
And what he had was his iPad Pro.
John:
showing a comic book and next to it a physical comic book which you could see you could take that physical comic book and basically place it on the screen and it was pretty much exactly the same size as the screen so if you're a comics reader and you're tired of looking at comics either shrunken or cropped you can't get two page side by side but at least now you can get one full size real life comic book page at a one-to-one ratio uh on your ipad pro
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And, you know, for people who like people who like markup PDFs, this would be great for them because it's like, you know, you want you want that to be like kind of life size or close to it at least.
Marco:
And the 10 inch I've had was almost but not quite the right size to do that.
Marco:
So, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
Like there are there are things that are going to be better on this for sure.
Marco:
And there's probably gonna be a lot of those things.
Marco:
But what all I'm saying is that not everything is better on it.
Marco:
And it's important, if you're thinking about one of these devices, it's important to know that going in.
Marco:
Just because certain things, there is such a thing as too big of a screen for certain things.
Marco:
And you might hit that.
Marco:
But as you alluded to earlier, John, one of the bigger challenges up front here is that iOS, while it's nice to have things like the split view and the slide over and everything, these features are...
Marco:
pretty basic so far.
Marco:
Especially things like the slide over the app launching experience there.
Marco:
If you're having to scroll through this giant long list of these apps that are capable of doing this.
Marco:
This interface... I don't know who designed this interface because it should have been obvious to anybody that as soon as you have more than a handful of apps that support this feature, this does not work very well.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
There are affordances for the big screen and things that take advantage of the big screen in iOS.
Marco:
But the iPad has always kind of been the second-class citizen of iOS.
Marco:
It has always gotten oftentimes delayed hardware capabilities or less good hardware in certain ways.
Marco:
Like the cameras are never as good as the iPhone cameras.
Marco:
It got Touch ID late.
Marco:
The new one, even the iPad Pro, as the reviews have noted, doesn't have the Touch ID sensor from the 6S, the good new one.
Marco:
It has the slower old one from the iPhone 5S and 6.
Marco:
And that seems crazy.
Marco:
This is like a new flagship iOS device.
Marco:
that there there is a substantially better touch id sensor that launched two months ago and the ipad pro doesn't have it and you know 3d touch it doesn't have either that that might be because they couldn't get to work on the big screen that's that's a little more understandable i think because like you can see the challenges involved there i think the touch id sensor makes sense too though because why
John:
volumes because how many like i i'm not i don't think there is an entire world of vendors making this touch id sensor i think there's a limited number of people who even can make it maybe like patent encumbered or whatever who has the ability to manufacture who has the expertise and the iphone is just so damn high volume that it's going to get every single one of those things so they can manufacture for the foreseeable future that i don't know if that's true but that is a plausible explanation as to why
John:
why you wouldn't you know what the iphone would absorb everything because it has to because it is the most important product and if there's any part that is in limited supply iphone gets it and don't even don't even worry about the ipad just give them the old sensor it doesn't even matter the iphone is what matters because if you had to think of a part on the iphone that is supply constrained the touch id sensor especially the brand new one is one of the one of the top ones that i would pick
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think it's equally likely that this was just an area where somebody decided, you know what?
Marco:
People aren't unlocking their iPad via Touch ID as often as they do it on their phone, so it's not that important.
Marco:
We can save a dollar.
Marco:
It feels more like that.
John:
Is it cheaper?
John:
Is the new one actually more expensive, though?
John:
It might even just be the same.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It seems more like...
John:
iPhone gets all the good stuff, all the best stuff first.
John:
It is the oldest favorite child.
John:
If anything is in short supply, iPhone gets the stuff first.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So regardless of the reason of that, on the software side, unfortunately, that's also true.
Marco:
And you see things like, even back forever ago, when the iPad launched with iOS 3.2,
Marco:
Then iOS 4 with multitasking came out for the iPhone.
Marco:
And it wasn't until four months later, or maybe even six months later, in like 4.3 was when they unified it, where they brought all those features to the iPad.
Marco:
Look at when iOS 7 launched.
Marco:
And then in the early betas, they wouldn't even give you the iPad beta because it was so unfinished, they wouldn't even give you the developer betas at first.
Marco:
And then later on in the iOS 7 developer process, they eventually released the iPad version of it.
Marco:
And I would say the iPad version has always and still lags behind the iPhone version ever since the iOS 7 redesign.
Marco:
There are certain things about it that just seem half-assed.
Marco:
You know, things like Control Center, things like that, that swipe over, AppPicker API or UI.
Marco:
Notifications have always been kind of weird on it.
Marco:
There's still, like, I think as Gruber pointed out in his review, there's still, like, no calculator or weather apps.
Marco:
Like, it just seems like in so many ways...
Marco:
The iPad is trying to be this higher-end device, and in many ways it's achieving that.
Marco:
But on the software side, it's being held back by these limitations.
Marco:
And they did make great strides with the split view and with the slide over in iOS 8.
Marco:
That does help a lot, but in general, it just seems like it's not getting a lot of attention in its software.
Marco:
Here we are, flagship product.
Marco:
This is obviously very important to Apple to get the iPad sales boosted again, get them going again, keep the iPad alive, keep it going.
Marco:
so you have this flagship product it launches right before the holidays peak time first of all yeah no accessories available right problem number one but then second of all hardly any apps are updated for it so so already you have this weird experience where like when you launch most ipad apps they come up in the blurry blown up way and it just looks terrible i
Marco:
It looks ridiculous.
Marco:
That's a problem.
Marco:
And just going through Tiff's initial setup here at home, we've seen a lot of those apps.
Marco:
Almost every app she uses has not been updated.
Marco:
And that includes both games and browsing apps and magazines and shopping apps.
Marco:
There's so many apps that have just not been updated.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
But even just iOS, like, it's his first impression when she saw the Springboard home screen.
Marco:
She was looking at how many icons you get across the top.
Marco:
And, like, the number of app icons has stayed the same in, like, how many you get per row and column in Springboard hasn't changed.
Marco:
Even though the screen size got almost twice as big.
Marco:
So everything's just this giant spread out...
Marco:
weird arrangement and she she immediately started looking for a setting to change it because she assumed of course there has to be a setting of course this would not be the only way you would ship this thing nope there's no setting to change it that is the only way it's shipped like it's it just seems like there is just not enough resources at apple being devoted to making ios better specifically for the ipad
Marco:
it's hard enough for developers to justify putting a lot of work into iPad apps a lot of the times.
Marco:
And that's going to be another problem this has because now, for the first time I think in a while, now with SplitView coming a few months ago and now with the iPad Pro having a whole new screen size, not to mention if you want to take advantage of things like the pen and keyboard in significant ways, app developers need to catch up.
Marco:
They need to do a lot of work
Marco:
to get their iPad apps to be really great now, to keep them current, to keep them running well on the newest hardware, to keep them taking advantage of the newest hardware.
Marco:
The iPhone does this to us every year in some way, but the iPhone has a lot more people using it, and therefore it's a lot easier to make money on the iPhone for a lot of kinds of apps.
Marco:
But the iPad, because it's a smaller platform by install base, it's always been a little bit harder for a lot of people to justify doing work on it, doing work on iPad apps.
Marco:
And the problems in Apple's software ecosystem of app pricing, sustainability, over competition, everything, all of those problems are magnified on the iPad side because the install base isn't as big.
Marco:
So you can't just make it up in volume.
Marco:
It's harder to make it on the iPad side.
Marco:
There's less competition, I think, which helps, but it's just harder.
Marco:
Look at how many iPad apps have just been totally abandoned and just are getting no meaningful updates because their developers just can't afford to work on them.
Marco:
I think this is ultimately going to be what decides whether the iPad Pro succeeds or fails is will developers, including Apple with iOS, will developers be able to justify investing a lot of resources into making really great software for the iPad Pro?
Marco:
because if they it's it's kind of a chicken and egg problem if they don't then the ipad pro it will probably will probably not do substantially better than the other ipads have done and it's not like they're bombing you know everyone always says oh well it's a bigger business than mcdonald's or whatever you know they're doing okay but it seems like the point of this product was to really juice the ipad line and really give it a substantial boost and unless the software comes i don't think that's going to happen
Marco:
I also don't see what in the software ecosystem will meaningfully change that will suddenly make this a great platform that is worth developers, both large and small, spending a lot of time creating and maintaining professional quality apps for this platform.
John:
It seems like Apple's been coasting on the, not coasting, but like benefiting from the inevitability of the iPad that they apparently feel that I've always felt, even from like the original iPad launch.
John:
Remember when the iPad was coming out, it was like Apple's tablet.
John:
We didn't know what the name of it was going to be.
John:
One of the topics of discussion around that time, although we didn't have a lot of podcasts to talk about it on, was...
John:
What is the home screen going to look like on an Apple tablet?
John:
And the reason that was a discussion because the second thing anyone would say in that conversation is they can't just do what they do on the phone and have just a grid of icons because the screen is massive.
John:
So what are they going to do?
John:
It was fun to think about what is the sort of the home experience, the root level, the bottom level, the thing you see when you turn the thing on.
John:
What does that look like when you have a tablet-sized device?
John:
And Apple's answer was it looks like a phone.
John:
We spread stuff out a little bit more.
John:
And as the iPad changed sizes, when it got smaller, the icons were there.
John:
Now it's gotten bigger.
John:
The icons just spread out.
John:
There's a couple aspects of that.
John:
One is...
John:
uh if they actually did put things in at the same density they are on a phone uh that would be an object of ridicule people like that big ipad you can't tell where anything is because a million icons on the home screen um so they can obviously not do them that just you know that just goes to show that like the density that works well on a tiny thing in your hand you can't use that same density when the thing is the size of a
John:
actual notebook piece of paper uh but surely looking at the ipad pro you could like you can fit a few more in there can't you like this is just huge white space between them but all gets back to the same root problem which is trying to figure out which apple has been trying to do and mostly failing for many many years now
John:
how to take this computing device that apple and i at least think is the future of computing uh it's obvious as anything else um but that it has to grow up and it has to start taking on more of the capabilities of desktop computers and it has to do that at the same time as it doesn't take on all of their crap the whole reason we see it as the future of computing and inevitability
John:
is that there's some things you won't be able to do on a phone, which we don't have to call inevitable sort of here.
John:
Boom, done, right?
John:
Some things you can't do on a phone that's too darn small, and PCs are still too hard to use, including Macs.
John:
So here's this thing that's in between.
John:
It takes all the good stuff from your phone that everyone knows how to use and is comfortable with, gets rid of all the legacy corrupt, but how can you make it have more capabilities?
John:
And designing the home screen with the iPad was one of the first times that Apple was faced with that thing.
John:
Hmm.
John:
All right.
John:
What do you see when you turn on the iPad?
John:
We have this big screen.
John:
Can we do something different in this realm?
John:
And that realm is like the place where people go to launch their apps or to rearrange things or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
And they punted on it.
John:
They said, well, I don't know, we didn't really have any good ideas right now.
John:
So let's just make it a grid of icons.
John:
And they just continued to kick that down the road, all the while knowing that surely there's something more they can do.
John:
But it's like, but you don't want to make it into what are you gonna have a finder on the iPad?
John:
No, no, we don't want that crap.
John:
The whole reason people like the iPad is that it's simple, right?
John:
So it has to be straightforward.
John:
And like, all right, yeah, we're fine with that.
John:
But now we're getting to the point in the iPad's evolution.
John:
It's like, but we have to make it more capable.
John:
So bigger, good.
John:
Yes, thumbs up.
John:
I've always been a big fan of the iPad Pro.
John:
You have to make it bigger because there's more stuff you can do.
John:
And then what can we do with that real estate?
John:
That's a harder problem.
John:
I've got this extra real estate.
John:
Apple's like, well, we could split the screen and make it like a divider that you can kind of like...
John:
That's better, better than nothing, but it still shows that they haven't figured out how to add capability without adding complexity.
John:
The beauty of the thing we all know, the Windows pointer mouse, you know, WIMP interface pioneered by the Mac or popularized by the Mac is
John:
is that evolved over time with a vocabulary that we're all familiar with.
John:
Like, you know, it's easy for us to think like, oh, Macs aren't that hard or PCs aren't that hard.
John:
Everyone knows how to use Windows and menu bars.
John:
And like this vocabulary for dealing with Windows that, you know, that they have widgets on them that you can resize them from various edges.
John:
You can move them around.
John:
tabs or another vocabulary that was added and we all understand how tabs work but that's us everyone else this is and same thing with the file system file system and folders and and you know navigating the hierarchy a very simple consistent vocabulary for people who are into computers for everyone else it might as well be you know inscrutable and just like some people just never fully grasp it so that's why
John:
We know that like the smartphone and the iPad are inevitably the future because history has shown over, you know, decades that just people, not enough people grok computers the way we grok them.
John:
This interface is, you know, it's much better than what came before.
John:
The command line, even a small number of people grok.
John:
The GUI with the mouses and the scroll bars, a larger group of people grok, but everybody gets the smartphone, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And, but there are those of us who use computers to do our job.
John:
So they have to figure out a way to make these things more capable without making them more complicated.
John:
And that is a really difficult job.
John:
And that's on Apple, like individual developers, they can make their applications to use the old parlance, iPad pro savvy, and they need to all do all that stuff or whatever, but it's kind of on Apple to show how this can really be the future of computing.
John:
And so far they've been timid about it because it's safe to say, well,
John:
We'll just do what we did on the phone and bigger because people already understand it and it works fine.
John:
But you're not gaining any new capabilities then.
John:
Even though they said, well, when you rotate mail sideways, you get a new sidebar.
John:
Or even on the 6S Plus, like they did a couple of different layouts and whatever.
John:
This is so massively huge.
John:
You can't just say, all right, well, now all our apps will have a little bit different layout.
John:
Because sometimes you don't even have anything to go over there.
John:
Inevitably, you have to get to some solution that gives us what we do with Windows.
John:
But in a simpler way.
John:
And the splitter is their first crack at that.
John:
And I haven't used it, so I don't know how successful it is.
John:
But boy, I just feel like they have a long way to go in this area.
John:
And most of the complaints surrounding software on the iPad Pro, I don't think it dooms the tablet as a platform.
John:
It just goes to show that...
John:
This is a hard problem and it's easy to take for granted the breakthroughs and conventions that came with the Mac and with the original GUI that had so much time to evolve.
John:
Remember we had two arrows on both ends of the scroll bars and we had proportional scroll thumbs and then we got rid of the scroll bars entirely.
John:
Even just something as simple as moving windows around and scrolling.
John:
there's a lot of cracks at that like what we have now is not what was first there and we tried all sorts of different things to try to find something that had that was better proportional scroll thumbs were a pretty big revolution apple didn't invent those obviously and they were really late adopting them um but that was a significant enhancement over the original scroll thumb and the original max scroll bars were significant enhancement over the weird ones on the xerox systems that you had to like middle click or whatever to scroll um
John:
Um, so I don't expect, uh, anyone to nail this in the first try, but the, the iteration time has definitely slowed down.
John:
I think mostly because the smartphone and its interface became so iconic that Apple was like, well, worst case, it's just, it's like a phone, but on a bigger screen, everybody understands that and it'll be fine, but we won't make significant progress towards the future of computing capital F capital C, uh, that Tim Cook and I and several other people believe must come someday.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, a lot of these problems, people assume to be problems, like, you know, like my old, you know, launch an app without a setting screen design problem, where, you know, you assume, oh, well, computers are too hard to use.
Marco:
So the way to make them easier to use is to get rid of all these files and windows and everything, get rid of all these things people are confused about.
Marco:
But if you look at it only in that way, that's kind of a naive, 22-year-old smart person way to look at things.
Marco:
Like, well, this is all stupid.
Marco:
We'll just get rid of it.
Marco:
And then you do, and you realize, oh, now we have a lot of problems to solve.
Marco:
And the solutions that you build up end up being oftentimes more complex or worse or at least no better than what was already there because what was already there was actually there for good reasons.
Marco:
And so a lot of these problems, I think, you know, have to be backtracked in some way.
Marco:
For example, iCloud Drive, perfect example of this, where you have, okay, well, there's no more files.
Marco:
Each app just has its own content in the app.
Marco:
And then, oh, now we have a sync engine, and well, it'll just sync.
Marco:
There's documents still in the app.
Marco:
And then, oh, it turns out having a folder that just syncs everywhere, like Dropbox, is really useful.
Marco:
And makes a lot of things way easier than all these apps having their own little sandbox silos.
Marco:
And also those little sandbox silos bring lots of other limitations and challenges to the platform.
Marco:
And oh, by the way, all this contributes very heavily to why a lot of people can't get their work done on iOS.
John:
Don't you feel like it's tempting to slide back to the old solutions?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think that was, you know, Sync is a great example where it's like the new stuff is supposed to work but doesn't.
John:
And Dropbox used the old paradigm plus reliability to say, look, you guys haven't figured it out.
John:
I know this is an old paradigm that is confusing, but it's reliable.
John:
And at least, at the very least, the people who understand files and folders understand Dropbox.
John:
And the other people, they'll muddle along because we'll be reliable enough.
John:
But it's so easy to go back to that.
John:
apple doesn't like to do that that's why the ipad pro doesn't come with a bunch of windows with widgets that you slide around on the screen right they totally could it could you know they could make like a touch an os 10 designed for touch where all the window widgets are gigantic or whatever but you have actual windows apple doesn't want to do that uh to its credit to its detriment or demerit or whatever word you want to insert there they don't seem to have quite an idea what to do going forward and they've been really cautious about like
John:
poking their way towards the edges of like i mean when microsoft has been much more daring in thinking the old paradigms are cruddy uh we want to try something new and they went hog wild with the whole metro stuff i don't think that was successful either but they certainly you know came went forward much more boldly than apple apple has just been like it's we'll just use the smartphone stuff everyone likes that
John:
All the compromises we made to a small screen, we will port to the big screen and don't complain that it can't do anything more than a phone.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, at this point, I would say the main thing that holds iOS back from more pro adoption is the OS.
Marco:
It's not that the screens weren't big enough.
Marco:
Those things help.
Marco:
And things like the iPad Pro and the Pencil and finally a decent keyboard, those things will all help.
Marco:
And they will all bring in certain portions of the workforce and population that couldn't have done it before or didn't want to do it before.
Marco:
But fundamentally, the main reason why so many people say, I can't get my work done on an iPad, or it would be very clunky for me to get my work done on an iPad.
Marco:
Fundamentally, that comes down to iOS and the structure of iOS, how things like files and documents and sandboxing and apps, how those things are and multitasking, like how these all work together, how the things they can do, the things they can't do.
Marco:
That is ultimately what it comes down to for a lot of people.
Marco:
And
Marco:
That is really hard to change meaningfully without, as you said, without just basically making it a Mac, without redoing all these old complexities.
Marco:
Now Apple is trying to figure out which of those old complexities were actually not necessary and which are necessary to have a productive kind of pro work machine.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
everything is inverted and the document is king and there's no real applications and anyway they didn't point is they have applications so we're faced that basically the high level problem we're faced with is how do i do more than one thing at one time even before these things start sharing with each other just simply how do i go you know to a web browser to my text editor to my email to my photo editor you know
John:
do i do more than what windows solves that problem not capital w windows for microsoft but like windows is the solution that people came up with that there's going to be application content it's in these little rectangles that we can change the size of when we change the size too small scroll bars are there to move around they have a thing that you can drag them on they have little buttons that you can close and minimize and mac like we that's that was the old solution to that old solution if i've seen anybody use computers and
John:
windows are not something that most people deal with well and it has simply not gotten better you can't blame it all it's because old people didn't grow up with computers there are many many people who grew up with computers who cannot manage windows i as we all know am an expert at managing windows because i grew up with it and because i have an aptitude for it but and it makes me keenly aware that pretty much everyone else i see has no idea what to do with windows
John:
Even young kids at work, like kids just out of college, I see how they use computers and they have these massive screens and they have like maybe two windows on them.
John:
That's why people love tiling window managers and things like Windows 10 where you jam the window against the side of the screen and it fills the half.
John:
Managing windows is...
John:
it's it is not easy to do to have a bunch of windows all shuffling around it's like having 17 papers on your desk all overlapping with each other and trying to manage it right that is it's not like that people are going to get better at that so i'm not saying it's a bankrupt paradigm it's way better than people managing the mental state required to deal with a command line right big advancement over that but
John:
You can't go back to it, but we still have the root problem of what if I want to do a bunch of stuff at once?
John:
So how do you let me do a bunch of stuff at once without asking me to manage Windows?
John:
And so far, we don't have a good answer to that.
John:
The iOS multitasking switcher, splitting the screen.
John:
None of those things like we recognize all those things are better than nothing.
John:
but still not as capable as windows even to people who aren't good at managing windows and don't like to have a lot of windows if you're at all used to windows you're like i wish i could just have windows on this thing but then you realize it doesn't work with the finger or whatever so that's just one root problem how do i how do i give something that's the equivalent of windows like i don't want to say it that way but how do i let people use this computing device to do more than one thing at the same time and and move between those tasks in a nice way so set that aside we don't have a good solution that the other one you were talking about marco
John:
How do I deal with the data?
John:
How do I take some piece of data?
John:
How do I synthesize like pictures from here, text from there, a link from here?
John:
How do I move stuff between applications, keep track of where things are, save things, have, you know, like, and the old solution to that was files and folders in a file system.
John:
You had images, you had text documents, you know, and that was the old paradigm.
John:
And as we all know,
John:
People aren't good at the old paradigm files and folders.
John:
People make a big giant mess.
John:
They can't keep track of where they are.
John:
Lots of people can deal with it, but lots of people just can't.
John:
And again, we've had computers long enough not to say like, oh, we just got to wait for the old people to die.
John:
Young people will know how to deal with files and folders.
John:
Nope.
John:
We ran that experiment.
John:
Human beings are not changing that fast files and folders.
John:
A lot of people can use it, but a lot of people can't.
John:
It's much easier when there's no saving.
John:
You open the notes app, you type a bunch of notes in with your thumbs on your iPhone, and you close the notes app.
John:
No one is begging for a save button on the notes application.
John:
I've said this a million times.
John:
And it just goes to show that those are complexities that we don't need.
John:
But when you want to do something that would traditionally be done with files and folders in a file system, what is the solution for that?
John:
So Apple should really probably have teams of 50 really smart people
John:
multiple ones of them working on all these problems because right now they're either not solving them at all or making the the most timid move in the direction of solving them and then just kind of being like i don't know like it's a little bit more complicated than the iphone but it's not as good as a mac what do you guys think of that and it's just not the same as the bold vision of the mac of saying the command line is crap forget about it what we're doing has nothing to do with the command line here are you know
John:
We've seen the future and there's GUIs and we're going to this is the direction we're going to take.
John:
And it's way better than everything came before it.
John:
And so far, we haven't had that moment for the post, you know, the post WIMP world.
Casey:
So two questions for you, John.
Casey:
First of all, on an infinite timescale, would we get good at using Windows?
John:
I don't think so, because I don't think there's any evolutionary pressure.
John:
There's nothing about being good at windows that makes your genes more likely to be passed on.
John:
So in the absence of that pressure, I don't see how the genetic makeup of humans would change over any period of time to become better at managing multiple traditional windows.
John:
And the second reason, of course, is that
John:
we will come up with different interfaces that are better than Windows and simpler and better suited to us.
John:
So there's nothing holding Windows steady of saying, I demand that Windows, as they currently exist, stay there for the next three billion years to wait and see if human evolution will make us better at handling them.
Casey:
You took that question way too seriously.
Casey:
I gave you the answer.
Casey:
But I appreciate it.
Marco:
And we expected nothing less.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
The other question I had, and I am being serious now, is,
Casey:
You seem really disappointed with the multitasking paradigm in iOS.
Casey:
And I have this iPad mini, the first one with the retina display, and it doesn't support – God, I always get the terminology wrong.
Casey:
So it does do slide over.
Casey:
It doesn't do split view.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure I got that right.
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
and so i've only had limited experience with the multitasking on on an ipad but i feel like i really like it i will say that the multitasking switcher when you're switching between apps in the slide over or what have you is stupid like i agree with you there that's dumb but the general premise behind it i don't think it's so bad i'm not saying there couldn't be better but i mean i i think it's a pretty solid first step do you not think that
John:
i don't know like it's easy to see that it's not as capable as multiple windows right because two like that's better than one but not as good as three and what if you've got four and so on and so forth 60 yeah and it doesn't help you with the it doesn't help you yet with the you know sharing from one thing to the other dragging and dropping across that line and
John:
or somehow because things are visually next to each other all the things same things we do in the desktop like drag and drop is again not saying drag and drop is what they should bring over because it's the old thing that worked but they need something that fills the same role as drag and drop in that like you know i have something over here i'm going to drag it over there and i'm going to chuck it into this thing and now this image i dragged out of photos onto the desktop i dragged from the desktop into photos that's not a particular efficient move but it's using a vocabulary that we understand to do that
John:
The reason I'm mostly disappointed in it as disappointed, like it's better than nothing, but it's so clearly still less capable than than a desktop computer.
John:
But I feel like almost as hard to explain to people who aren't familiar.
John:
I just tried to show my daughter today.
John:
For whatever reason, she decided to use the laptop to write something instead of writing it on a piece of paper.
John:
I don't think she writes on her iPod.
John:
But anyway, she decided to use the laptop.
John:
And she asked me how to make the window cover the whole screen.
John:
Because that's where she used it.
John:
She's grown up on iOS.
John:
So I showed her the full screen thing.
John:
She's in full screen mode.
John:
And then she wanted to look something up in Safari.
John:
And I wanted to show her, you can actually see the text editor in Safari at the same time.
John:
But then I realized to show her that I have to show all you have to do again.
John:
All you have to do is arrange the windows, arrange the windows.
John:
She doesn't know how windows move.
John:
She doesn't know windows can be resized.
John:
I resized a window and she asked me how I did it.
John:
How did you change the size of the window?
John:
Like it's something, you know, like,
John:
So trying to show someone how to use Windows, obviously very complicated.
John:
Trying to show her how to use split view on the iPad would result in almost the same conversations.
John:
Like it's already too complicated, I feel like.
John:
That people aren't going to figure it out on their own.
John:
And I think it suffers in comparison to Windows in that it doesn't really give you a...
John:
a sort of functional vocabulary that you can apply repeatedly because once you figure out how a window works you still may not be good at arranging windows because just knowing how to a window works is like i know how to form all the letters it's not the same as knowing how to write you know what i mean or knowing how to hit one piano key is not the same as knowing how to play a piano
John:
but you know that any key on the keyboard if you hit it with your finger will make a noise you figured out the vocab the functional vocabulary the basic functional vocabulary of a piano once you figure out how windows work you can drag them by the title bar you can resize them you can close them you can move them around you learn the parameters can i move it all off the screen no no i can't can i get the title bar up underneath the menu bar not unless there's like a bug in the os which happens sometimes um
John:
Is it really that much easier?
John:
Don't think about the split view as like, oh, it's pretty cool.
John:
I kind of like it because you know how to use desktop computers.
John:
Think about it as if you had to show somebody who had only ever used a smartphone how to use split view with their eyes glazed over and they would be like, I don't get it.
John:
And then secondarily, could they transfer those skills?
John:
Like if you say you show them how to use split view and they figure it out.
John:
could they are those skills useful for anything else so they're gonna say now i can split view any two applications or would you have to show them again okay well this is how you do a split view but what if you want to like when you come back to it will the same two things be in the split view or what if you want to put something different in the split view what if you want to have multiple like i think it's already too complicated and still less capable now
John:
i'm not entirely sure about that but i'm that that's my sense of it so far is that it's not like it's on its way to being as good as the mac i think it's it's not not as capable as the mac and not really easier to explain than windows so i feel like it's a bad solution at this point
Marco:
I've been talking about it before.
Marco:
There seems to be a certain baseline level of required complexity.
Marco:
And that's not to say that for things like multitasking, that we have Windows or SlideOver or everything's full screen.
Marco:
That's not to say that these things cannot be improved upon.
Marco:
But I do think there is a certain ceiling that we cannot surpass of how simple can we make this?
Marco:
Because the fundamental fact is these are advanced concepts.
Marco:
They're going to have some inherent level of minimum complexity.
Marco:
Oh, oh, we're going to have multiple things that are separate, that are running on this screen at once.
Marco:
And there's going to be some way to divide the screen space between them.
Marco:
And you're going to have to be able to pick out which ones to open somehow.
Marco:
Figure out if you want to open them one at a time or if you want to add multiple ones to the screen in some way.
Marco:
Then figure out how to switch between them, how to close certain ones or all of them.
Marco:
There's going to be some baseline level of complexity to this, no matter how it's designed, no matter what system it is.
Marco:
There's going to, therefore, be some kind of basic learning curve, no matter how easy to make it.
Marco:
So, again, this isn't to say that we can't improve the systems we have now.
Marco:
But I think people are assuming that there is some endgame here that we should be going for where anybody can just pick it up and all of a sudden it's perfect.
Marco:
And we're never going to reach that.
John:
I think you're mistaking intuitiveness in the old parlance for just a better UI.
John:
Because you could say all the same things back before the GUI existed.
John:
Like there's some inheriting complexity in a, in a time sharing system where multiple programs are running at the same time.
John:
And we're never going to make that easier because this, you know, like, and then the GUI came along and it's like, oh, well, I guess if you totally rethink things, then I guess you can make it massively easier for a huge number of people still too complicated for all people.
John:
but so much better you know like you really there is no i don't think there's any limitation um and you know the end game obviously would be like you know some crazy neural interface where you just think stuff and it magically happens or or or the end game is all the extinction of human life and the computers take over anyway um there's definitely an end game you may not like it um
John:
But for things like interfaces, I think that kind of thinking that is just like there's a certain amount of complexity and there's no way we're going to make it simple is just absolutely the wrong way to look at this.
John:
Because having lived through the GUI revolution and having seen how – that's why the original GUI and the Mac was so brilliant.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it did find a way lots of people tried to find ways to do it and then the mac finally did find a way through the use of metaphor and through what i vote i maintain is one of the best interfaces ever the uh the spatial finder giving people an interface that played to the strengths of their of of the knowledge that they have from living in the actual world and let them use those skills to manage this this the virtual world of the computer
John:
in a way that wasn't possible before and it made them much more capable it didn't just make the capabilities easier it made them it added new capabilities and what we need is the next one of those revolutions arguably the smartphone was the next one of those revolutions just happened to be in a constrained environment where the thing has to fit in your hand and you carry it around with you which let us avoid a lot of the more difficult problems it was a very difficult problem in itself like that was the second revolution the smartphone right
John:
making computing making people be able to do something with computers people who couldn't even use computers or making you not even think of it as a computer but in the larger realm we still have these other computers which that have changed into this incredibly capable general purpose thing we have that we still think is too complicated so that is the next frontier um so i don't i'm not as fatalistic as you are about like yeah there is some inherent complexity uh and people aren't going to change but i really truly believe there absolutely is a way
John:
to leverage what humans are good at, to let them do all the things they do with desktop computers in an easier way.
Casey:
To go back a step, it is absolutely insane to me, John, that you would take Windows as the introduction to multiple things happening at the same time.
Casey:
To me, the iPad multitasking interface is so much easier to understand and makes so much more sense
Casey:
Yeah, it's a little bit weirder in that there's not a lot of visual cues as to what to do.
Casey:
But in every other measurable way, I feel like it is so much easier.
Casey:
And for your daughter to be confused by Windows, that's not terribly surprising to me.
Casey:
But I think if you had done the reverse and started her on the iPad and then said to her, all right, well, this is kind of like the iPad, but you can have more than just two.
Casey:
And you don't have to do some weird gesture to slide them around.
Casey:
You just have to grab it and move it.
Casey:
I feel like that would have made a lot more sense to her.
Casey:
To me, I think you're looking at the iPad interface as a dumbing down of windowing.
Casey:
Whereas I see, even though this obviously is chronologically the reverse, I feel like windowing is an extension of the more simple iPad interface.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it's a much easier paradigm to understand.
Casey:
And yes, it's not discoverable.
Casey:
But once you've discovered it, it is so simple to use.
Casey:
And it seems like it would be a lot of the problems that people have with windowing systems.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
I don't think they would have them with the iPad.
Casey:
This is all guessing.
Casey:
I have no evidence.
Casey:
I've never asked my parents, hey, how do you have two apps open at the same time on the iPad?
Casey:
This is all supposition, but it just seems so much more logical to me than the far more inscrutable task of managing Windows.
John:
I think you're getting hung up again on the learnability and intuitiveness.
John:
It doesn't really matter how confused they are at first.
John:
What matters is after you've shown them how to do it, does this translate into sort of a new paradigm?
John:
Does it give them skills and vocabulary that they can then use to manage complexity in their life?
John:
Like not the computer complexity, but the complexity of whatever thing it is that they're using the computer to do.
John:
You want to, you know, there's always going to be some...
John:
you know again that's the the saying from the old gooey days the only thing that's actually intuitive is the nipple everything else is learned and so intuitiveness is totally a red herring right all you want is something that most people can learn in a reasonable amount of time
John:
And that after they learn it, it gives them a tool set because it defines a sort of understandable world that lets them use those skills to solve problems.
John:
So you can totally see how the GUI, the Mac GUI in particular, gave people that vocabulary.
John:
All applications work the same.
John:
The menu bar is always at the top.
John:
All the windows work the same.
John:
Scroll bars work the same.
John:
The mouse works the same.
John:
There's a simple vocabulary for same click, double clip, and then adding the right click and everything like that.
John:
that was a tool set i don't think the split view thing it's a vocabulary that works in that way because it doesn't create i don't think there is an easily sort of there's no there's no user model there's no mental model that people can latch on to for that mostly because it's kind of not really an analog in the physical world but because they're like well what because the paradigm for ios thus far has been the thing is the app the app is the thing and that is totally a thing a paradigm
John:
that people can hang on to you want to go back to the place where all the other things are you hit the home button and then when the thing goes it is the device that's a simple one but that is a very solid paradigm that is what is powered the the smartphone revolution you know that this this incredibly good iphone user interface paradigm split view i think does not fit with the old paradigm and doesn't give the user a vocabulary or a mental model that they can they can then parlay into uh
John:
Now I can I can solve any problem because I know how split views work.
John:
They're just more like a weird feature that's been added on top of the old system.
John:
Like, again, it doesn't have to do with learnability or having to explain it.
John:
It's just that it just seems like it is not of a piece with the rest of the interface.
John:
It is a tacked on kind of thing that I don't think represents a new interface paradigm.
John:
And therefore, they haven't actually solved the problem.
Casey:
See, and I think that where we fundamentally disagree is, to me, the only thing that you should be able to accomplish by understanding and grokking split view on the iPad is being able to put two arbitrary apps next to each other.
Casey:
That is it.
Casey:
I don't care if that lets you leap into new worlds and go out into the great unknown and apply this knowledge.
Casey:
All I care about is, can your daughter have Safari and Notes next to each other?
Casey:
And then later on, can she have YouTube and TweetBot next to each other?
John:
but she has to understand why they're no longer next to each other or why something else is next to something else or how long they're expected to be next to each other like you know what i mean there's there's so many questions surrounding that in terms of like what what is the paradigm what is the user model what is the mental model how does this work just because you can i know how if i'm using this application i can make another appear if there's no actual understanding or there really is no solid paradigm underneath it then every time you use some other application you're faced with i'm
John:
Why is the thing not next to it now?
John:
Well, I'll just go through that same motion I knew before to put the thing next to it.
John:
Why is this next to that now?
John:
Well, I know how to get rid of the thing next to it.
John:
And it becomes it's like you're fighting with the computer instead of it helping you.
John:
You're not using it as a tool to help you solve a problem.
John:
It's just like every time you know, this is capability.
John:
But when it doesn't work the way you expect it to work because you have a different model of like the persistence or the or how the interaction between the different applications is when they're not that way, you can stab at the screen a few times to make it be that way.
John:
but it's not it's not as like it's not as straightforward as the the windows model which again people aren't good at but at least is an understandable model you make the windows the sizes you want that you put them to where you want on at face value like that's you know it's enough rope to hang yourself because if you don't know what size they should be aware you should put them an old steve jobs thing you have to be the janitor you have to put things where you want them we don't want you to have to be the janitor well
John:
whether you're the janitor or not everyone can understand the model of windows it's just that the model doesn't help them manage their complexity if they're not good at managing windows which is why windows are generally a failure but i just don't feel like the split view gives any kind of understandable model it gives a little bit more capability not as much as multiple windows but does not give you a new model for managing complexity going forward
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I still disagree with you, but I don't know.
Casey:
Either of us could be right on this.
John:
The way we'll find out is as you see people using iPads that are increasingly capable of split view, see how many people you see using split view or using it confidently.
Casey:
Well, see, I think that's two very different discussions, right?
Casey:
Using split view, as I said, it's not terribly discoverable.
Casey:
So that's one thing.
Casey:
Now, using it confidently, that's where I think that is what will differentiate which one of us is right.
Casey:
Because if somebody stumbles upon it and is like, oh, God, what has happened, and then is obviously trying to switch what app is there, what have you, and it's not working, okay, then you're absolutely right.
Casey:
It's completely inscrutable.
Casey:
If someone has discovered split view and without too much effort is now using it confidently, then I think that indicates that I'm right and that it really is useful and it really is a paradigm that they've learned to help them get work done.
John:
It may still be useful, but we all agree that it is less capable than multiple windows, if only because it's only two things, right?
John:
So the confidence I'm saying is if you see someone using it, you see someone doing their work in a cafe, in the same way you'd see them using a Mac.
John:
Now, whether they're using full screen and they're swiping between, which by the way, I've seen a lot of the younger people who I work with
John:
They're very confident in that because they're the smartphone generation, I guess.
John:
Like, they do full screen everything on their Mac laptops.
John:
They do do the multi-finger swipe between the applications, which I see is incredibly inefficient.
John:
But what they're basically doing is turning the Mac into a paradigm that they understand because Windows are too difficult to manage.
John:
But for split view, you'd want to see somebody...
John:
like doing uh like doing their task using split views to help make their task more efficient not just one split view that they keep permanently and their whole thing is like i need to have slack and twitter next to each other forever and ever and ever and amen i wish i could tell the os to never launch them separately and to launch them as a single application that i would say is a super degenerate case of using split view but just to say that they're they're arbitrarily putting applications next to each other as is appropriate for the task they're doing and
John:
If it's too difficult to rearrange to put this thing next to that thing and that next to this thing, then people won't do it.
John:
And they'll be like, well, it's too, it's too onerous to constantly in the same way that people find it too onerous to constantly rearrange windows.
John:
It's too onerous to constantly rearrange split views for whatever reason.
John:
So therefore I'm just going to have one split view and everything else is non-split view.
John:
And I would say that's not a confident use of things.
John:
And anyway, even if they're using split views like that, even if they're using them to always put the two most convenient applications next to each other they need at any moment in time, and they have no problem doing it, and it's second nature, and they don't have to think about it, and it's very intuitive, that's still only two things at once.
John:
And so it's still worse than Windows.
Casey:
Yeah, but it's worse by your metric of how many thousands of things can I get distracted by at once?
John:
No, it's worse because we know people need to do more than one thing at once.
John:
Windows are a failure because people can't use them to do more than – some people can't use them.
John:
I keep saying people.
John:
We're trying to talk in aggregates here.
John:
Obviously, all of us can use Windows to do more than two things at once.
John:
We do it all the time.
John:
But most people, when they deal with computers –
John:
are not successful at that, which means Windows is successful for the people who are good at using computers in the old way of like, he knows computers, but worse for everybody else.
John:
Smartphones, I would say pretty much 100% of the population is successful at both using and installing applications.
John:
pretty much i think we've solved that there not that it can't continue to improve but we've hit the the mainstream and that oh you are you good at using smartphones do you know smartphones very few people say that unless they mean like developing for it or hacking them or something like that everybody knows how to launch the facebook app everyone knows how to send text messages like we have crossed the the effectively 100 barrier there we are not even come close to crossing that at the can i use a general purpose computing device to do arbitrary things and so we're still struggling to
John:
get larger adoption than we have with the world of PCs and Macs.
Marco:
I think I agree with you that the smartphone full screen everything model is pretty close to ideally usable for a lot of people.
Marco:
But I think the windowing model is doing a lot better in practice than you're giving it credit for.
Marco:
I think a lot more people than you seem to be suggesting have figured it out well enough to get stuff done.
Marco:
And maybe not ideally.
Marco:
I'm sure you look at everyone's Windows setups and it makes you cringe.
Marco:
But you would look at my setup and it would make you cringe.
Marco:
But I think people figure it out.
Marco:
They've been figuring it out for decades.
Marco:
Most people who use a computer on a regular basis are able to figure out windowing enough to do what they want to do.
John:
Well, you can get by with anything.
John:
I mean, you can figure out like the upsides is that if you muddle through, right?
John:
But what we see, we all know the things that are bad about Windows.
John:
Like the reason people use the desktop so much and the desktop is filled with icons and that they feel non-confident navigating the file system.
John:
My desktop is filled with icons.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
It's basically... It's the reason everybody found smartphones to be such a breath of fresh air.
John:
It's because all that crap that they have been sort of muddling through on their PCs at work or whatever is not there on the smartphone.
John:
There are no files and folders.
John:
There's no save button.
John:
There's no desktop.
John:
It was just...
John:
it got rid of all that stuff and so even though they could you know manage with pcs that's why i'm calling the pc interface not like a failure in the sense of like it was terrible and nobody could use it but like to understand how much better it is compare it to people's reactions to smartphones like smartphones aren't even considered computers like it is is
John:
it is a discontinuity they have transcended the idea of a general purpose computer so you're right that people do get by zooming all their windows to full screen and playing mind sweeper and clicking around on their web browser and the web is another paradigm like a little miniature paradigm of like clicking on underlined words and stuff that was another simple enough one that i think was more successful um but like it's it's not like the pc or mac is a dead end but we've clearly pushed the limit of how many people are going to feel comfortable using that interface it
John:
not to its force, but just even in a merely competent way.
John:
I think there are people who use a computer every day for multiple decades who still have no idea where the hell anything is in their disk and can't navigate the file system and are terrified by an open save dialog box and just desperately want everything to be either in that one place they know how to get to or on the desktop or something.
John:
And that shows that interface is not succeeding because that's not the way it's supposed to work.
John:
Whereas people are using smartphones essentially the way they're supposed to work
John:
under the sort of very simplified ios paradigm of a big grid of icons that you swipe between and you launch and they fill the screen like they're not using the phones in the degenerate case they're using the phones the way they were designed whereas the macs and windows i think people are muddling through not everybody not the people that we know um but like the the entire mass of humanity like taking everybody as a whole
Marco:
Yeah, I could see that.
Marco:
I think I'm mostly with you on that.
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Casey:
So any other thoughts about this new iPad Pro?
John:
We're going to talk about hardware, but I think we should save it for next week.
John:
I think there's a lot to talk about on the iPad Pro hardware, but that'll keep.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth giving us more time to use it first.
Marco:
I would say my very, very early impression as an overview of it is whether you should buy one, whether I want one.
Marco:
For me, the question is no.
Marco:
Tiff, I think, will probably keep this, although even she's a little bit unsure right now because it is so big and the software is so not taking advantage of it yet.
Marco:
These things will change over time.
Marco:
I mean, the bigness won't.
Marco:
But over time, software will take more advantage of it.
Marco:
I would say if you're not in a huge hurry, getting next year's is probably going to be a bigger improvement than most single-year improvements would be for these things, simply because not only will the hardware probably be a little bit better, maybe it'll add some cool stuff like force touch and better touch ID, but the bigger thing is...
Marco:
I think we need a year for both Apple and third-party developers to write good software for this thing because it isn't there yet.
Marco:
There's some right now, but it's going to be a while, and it's going to be a while before everybody can actually afford to take advantage of it.
Marco:
So the only exception I would make to that would be if you are already a heavy iPad user, somebody like Federico Faticci, if you already are able to do a ton of your work or all of your work on an iPad...
Marco:
and you already are doing things like using third-party keyboards with it and doing multitasking, and you need more screen space, if you already are using styluses to do artistic work or note-taking or annotations.
Marco:
So if you are already an iPad Power user,
Marco:
then, by all means, consider this now.
Marco:
But if things about the iPad have prevented you from getting into it as a serious productivity device for your work, I don't think this will change that.
Marco:
At least not yet.
Marco:
And maybe down the road it will once the software gets there, but I don't think it's going to be there for a little while.
John:
And hopefully by next year, they'll have the iPad Air-sized device with a pen.
John:
That would be something.
Marco:
Yeah, and that could change everything.
Marco:
I mean, right now, if you want this awesome pencil input, you have to get the giant iPad.
Marco:
And so, like, for me, if I were to ever get into pencil stuff, I would much rather have the iPad Air-sized one.
John:
You start doing art snacks with Tiff.
Marco:
but you don't need an ipad they send you actual like paintbrushes and stuff i know but the equivalent of like just having a small task that someone else sends you to do to draw something for the day you know i'd rather just play pictionary yeah no actually i actually i have kind of a fun idea for a game that i might want to do but it would require the pencil and it would also require me to develop a game so i think this is unlikely but
Marco:
that's that's the only thing i could really see doing on it and that's probably not going to happen combination of flight control and worms go sounds kind of fun actually no but uh you you actually found two games that i've played to me i was like you would draw the paths that the the projectiles take and the other person can set up barriers and you have to quickly draw between them the game writes itself
Marco:
wow thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week casper lynda.com and mail route and we will see you next week the game probably already exists too oh i'm sure there's like 10 of them at least
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
So, in other news, I got my car back a couple hours ago.
Casey:
Is it still white?
Casey:
It's still white.
Casey:
The fender is repaired.
Casey:
All is right in the world once again.
John:
I saw that picture of your car thing, and people were tweeting like, oh, if that happened to John's car, it would have burned to the ground.
John:
People don't understand how...
John:
much damage to my car i am both willing to tolerate and i'm forced to tolerate i have so many things on my car that are worse than that thing that you just spent a thousand dollars to get repaired and the reason i don't get them to repair is because i know it will cost an unseemly amount of money and i say you know what i'm just gonna live with that giant white paint streak that was added to my car by someone who parked next to me the second week i got it
John:
I'm just going to live with the huge gouge in my bumper from the person who re-entered me because my deductible won't cover it.
John:
It's like just that's why I think about getting a nice car.
John:
I would just never be able to drive it like just the world.
John:
The world that I drive around in is just filled with too many hazards.
John:
I mean, hell, my brand new car.
John:
I dented the rim of my fancy alloy wheels like in the first month that I got it from hitting a pothole.
John:
I had to get a new wheel for 650 bucks.
John:
so i couldn't believe that you is the thing that only people in the south or people who live in the desert do like oh i have a tiny ding to my car my perfect car that is preserved as if it's in a museum because we have no weather to speak of and no humidity or you have the humidity again and just i don't know how can you be spending a thousand dollars to repair a quarter size nick to your fender because it was down to the metal and for me it was a hundred bucks who cares it was the size of a quarter
Casey:
No, it was really obvious if you had seen it.
Casey:
I know that picture was not that impressive, but I assure you it was obvious.
John:
$1,000.
Casey:
It's $900 of Allstate's money and $100 of my money.
Casey:
Who cares?
John:
Your deductible is only $100?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's pretty good.
John:
That's a fancy insurance.
John:
Yeah, I would have done it for that.
Casey:
I'm sure I probably am paying too much for said insurance, but nevertheless.
Casey:
No, the problem that you have, John, is that you drive in an area that doesn't believe in roads that make sense, roads that function, or drivers that know how to drive.
Casey:
They're not called manholes because they're good at driving.
John:
I agree.
John:
The roads are my enemy.
John:
Other cars are my enemy.
John:
And I swear, more damage has been done to my car while parked than anything else.
John:
Because the parking garage at work has the spots, you know, when they paint the lines on the spots, they look like they're made for like motorcycles because they can fit more spots in the parking garage that way.
John:
And the court is not a big car.
John:
It's a full-size car, but it's not humongous.
John:
And I swear, every time I park, I am making decisions about how many inches on either side I have to.
John:
You have to judge because you want, like, you have to think most people are driving are single drivers.
John:
So they're not going to open their passenger door.
John:
So I want to get closer.
John:
But what if the guy backs in?
John:
Then I got to figure out if he's a backstabler.
John:
backing if it's a casey person then his driver's side is on my side so i have to like figure out where in in between the lines i want to be just perfectly and then looking at the type of car if i'm parking between two cars how likely is this person to be one of those people who doesn't even look and just swings their car door open and jams it into mine anyway everyone has their things they want to be perfect and i i admit i kind of did it with my mirror that was my fault where i clipped the mirror coming out of my garage which is also sized for a motorcycle or a horse carriage or something
John:
I got that repaired, but that wasn't $1,000.
John:
And that damage was way more noticeable than your little neck.
John:
But all this is to say that you obviously care very deeply about the particulars of how your car looks.
John:
And I would like to care very deeply about how my car looks, but I just cannot bear the amount of money it would take to do that.
John:
And time, frankly, to keep bringing the car in to get fixed and everything.
Casey:
Yeah, well, one of them was the mechanical issue, which was a week, and then this was three days for the body issue.
Casey:
However, I'm not the only one who is ogling white cars today.
Casey:
Am I, Marco?
Marco:
I drove a white car.
Marco:
I wouldn't say I was ogling.
Marco:
Is it ogling?
Marco:
Ogling?
Marco:
However you pronounce that, I wouldn't say I was doing that to it.
Marco:
It just so happened that the test drivable model was white.
Marco:
Just like all of your cars just happen to be white when they fall into your lap and you buy them.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I totally understand what you're going with here.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
Anyway, so the whole family went for this test drive, though.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Anyway, yeah.
Marco:
So ever since I test drove the P85D last February, I think it was, I was very impressed by it.
Marco:
But I also, at the time, I said that the P85D is so fast...
Marco:
I actually found it unpleasant.
Marco:
I was like, I would probably never do this from a stop.
Marco:
Flooring it like that, it hits you in the face so hard with inertia that I didn't really want to do that.
Marco:
And I am, since then, I've been thinking more about it, doing more research.
Marco:
I am almost certainly going to get a Tesla next.
Marco:
I mean, I'm basically ready to place the order because my lease is up in late March and there's like a two-month lead time on them, so I have to decide pretty soon what I'm doing.
Marco:
Today, I went up to test drive to, first of all, see a bunch of colors and stuff in person, and also to test drive the non-P version.
Marco:
This was a 90D, so it's just like the 85, but with a little bit more battery, so slightly heavier, probably, but no speed difference, really.
Marco:
So, overall, I think I'm going to get that one.
Marco:
I think I'm going to get the... Really?
Marco:
Yeah, in Tesla's line, it's not the slow one.
Marco:
It's like the middle one, and none of them are really slow.
Marco:
I mean, the slowest one, I think, is roughly the speed of your car, Casey, right?
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe you're right.
Marco:
Yeah, so none of them would be called slow by anybody, really.
Marco:
But it's all relative.
Marco:
So the middle one, I would say, in general, the 90D is not as fast as the M5 at the M5's peak power.
Marco:
So the M5, when you get that massive kick in the butt of turbocharged torque, it is stronger feeling and faster feeling than the 90D.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But the 90D, it's available right from zero.
Marco:
And the M5, if you floor the M5 from a stop, you'll just spin the wheels.
Marco:
It doesn't have any traction, and it's only rear-wheel drive.
Marco:
The 90D is all-wheel drive with a really, really good all-wheel drive system.
Marco:
And you have all that power right from the start, and it actually can put it down.
Marco:
It actually can use it.
Marco:
Overall, I would say it didn't feel like I was really missing anything in the middle version.
Marco:
other than that extra big kick from from like really flooring it is that ugly or wheels no all the wheel options are all the same now i am torn on which wheels to get uh and i'm sure you have opinions uh i don't think they have any great wheel options yeah i agree i think all the wheels are middle of the road too ugly
Marco:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Marco:
The base ones that John said in this picture, they kind of look like the M5's winter wheels.
Marco:
It's a very similar design.
Marco:
In person, it just kind of looks cheap.
Marco:
They don't look like premium quality wheels.
Marco:
None of them do, really, but I think the base model looks the least good of all of them.
Marco:
uh the the 19 inch silver cyclone is kind of the halfway point between everything now the bigger ones do look substantially larger and more aggressive in person and so the question is like you know how aggressive and sporty do you want your car to look also i'm not quite sure i can pull off thin 21 inch wheels on new york roads which are only marginally better than john's roads yeah you're gonna dent you're gonna dent the rims
John:
You should test drive the 21s, because a lot of car makers are doing this now, offering you obscenely large wheels because they look cool and everything, but they just turn the wheels into rubber bands, and you can't drive on railroads with that.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So I think I'm probably going to go with the 19 Silver Cyclone.
Marco:
So yeah, that's probably what I'm going to do.
Marco:
The red looks really awesome in person.
Marco:
The black doesn't look as bad as I thought, so I'm kind of torn between those two, leaning towards red.
Marco:
Otherwise, I'm pretty much sold.
Marco:
I think I'm almost certainly going to do it.
Marco:
What does Tiff say about the color?
Marco:
We never hear what her color choices are.
Marco:
If she were buying a car for herself... BTO, I know.
Marco:
Yeah, the blue is a very nice blue.
Marco:
I just don't care for blue cars for myself.
Marco:
tiff tiff really is is being very supportive of me getting the red um because of all your midlife crises a red car is like good this is a good go with that one yeah exactly you know like like the the black is fine um if i if i want to be subtle to be mostly subtle or to maximize the subtlety of this car uh the black would be the right approach uh to that but i've been getting black cars for so long i think i'm ready for something for something different unlike casey who always gets white
John:
So should we start reading the manual for you now?
John:
Yes.
John:
Yes.
John:
Casey will just download PDF.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I'll send it to you as soon as I find it.