Digital Schmear
Marco:
Anyway, I don't know how you're going to edit the beginning of this show.
Marco:
Good luck.
Marco:
I'm just going to delete everything before right now.
Marco:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
What am I going to pull out of that?
Marco:
The Cooley Cozy Cozy discussion was wonderful.
Marco:
I don't want to have a whole show about butts and beer warmers.
Oh, come on.
Marco:
Or Ohio.
Marco:
Sorry, Ohio.
Marco:
It just doesn't make the cut.
Marco:
Just let it be known.
Marco:
Marco's the party pooper.
Marco:
So, John, would you like to tell us about Apple TV catching up on gaming consoles in power?
John:
Sure.
John:
We don't have much follow-up on Apple TV.
John:
It's finally tailing off now.
John:
But one conversation I saw floating around these past few weeks, I forget what prompted it.
John:
Otherwise, I would have put the link in here.
John:
uh maybe it was just people talking about uh gaming and apple tv in general and some people like you know the the apple tv with an a8 it's catching up to some gaming consoles in power um and like it's more powerful than a ps3 and maybe it's not as powerful as ps4 now but the ps4 isn't going to change anytime soon like the ps5 is not imminent so if apple keeps revising the apple tv at some point the apple tv could be more powerful than all current generation gaming consoles
John:
uh and i think that's crazy talk because there it's it starts with a kernel of truth yes that the apple tv the a8 is way faster than the old one and i'd even go so i haven't looked into this deeply but just from looking at the games you could say yeah sure ps3 power maybe a little bit more probably um that's a safe bet because ps3 is a really old console and again i agree that it's not ps4 power or xbox one power
John:
But then they extrapolate and say, but, you know, this is the A8.
John:
What if next year is the A9 and then the A10?
John:
And, you know, even if it's just a year or two behind the top end phone, the idea is that iOS devices keep getting faster and game consoles have, you know, five to seven year lifespan, sometimes even longer.
John:
so if there is no ps5 on the horizon perhaps just before the ps5 arrives the apple tv will be more powerful a more powerful gaming system and the reason i think that's bunk is not necessarily because apple couldn't make hardware that is faster than the ps4 because they inevitably will although not perhaps in the time frame before the ps5 comes but just because
John:
The Apple TV isn't the iPhone.
John:
It doesn't get revised every year.
John:
And even the iPhone, even the highest end iOS device they make, the gigantic iPad Pro that we will talk about later, has only 4 gigs of RAM and the PS4 has 8 gigs of RAM.
John:
And you would think, well, RAM doesn't matter.
John:
The CPU and the GPU will be just as fast.
John:
But when it comes to making games, things like RAM and things like hard disk space and stuff like that makes a difference.
John:
um you know the the ps4 i think it's a 500 gig hard drive now and eight gigs of ram when do you think it's going to be that the apple tv has eight gigs of ram eventually it will right but will it have eight gigs of ram before the ps5 is out i find that hard to believe given how frequently apple updates the apple tv and and even just given i don't even think the iphone will have eight gigs of ram by the time the ps5 comes out at the current rate of ram uh boost so
John:
uh and that stuff makes a difference for games with like large open world games with high resolution textures and all that other stuff so anyone's thinking that the apple tv will eventually be more powerful than the ps4 it will but by that time the ps6 will probably be out there's also a pretty big difference in thermals between between these kind of systems you know the
Marco:
As we see from modern CPU and GPU limitations and designs and progress and everything, we're mainly limited by how much heat we will allow the chips to output or how much heat we can deal with them outputting.
Marco:
And that pretty much puts a limit on performance that we can get out of them at any given moment or in any given year, like in whatever we can do that year.
Marco:
That is generally what we're fighting against.
Marco:
And for things that are AC connected, you don't really need to worry too much about current draw, which is related, but you can max out the current draw as much as you want when you're plugged into a wall outlet, but you still, in a little tiny box that's $100 next to your TV, or $150 next to your TV, with no fan in this little tiny enclosure that's not even made of metal, it's going to be pretty hard to get mega heat output out of that.
Marco:
Meanwhile, you look at a game console and they had these big, hot chips with these big, loud, annoying fans, especially in their first generation before they do any kind of process shrink.
Marco:
So when the PS5 comes out, they're going to be able to put in some giant, big, hot chip with a big, loud fan on it.
Marco:
And the Apple TV will still need to be this cheap, fanless box running year or two old iPhone guts.
John:
yeah and they're and they're offset from each other because like could you imagine when the ps3 first came out if you said someday there'll be a little black puck with no fans in it that's more powerful than the ps3 you'd like get out of here but here we are but look at the the time span gap it's huge gap between the ps3 and now so like the fanless thing is always going to lag behind the thing with fans by at least a generation and and not like processing power as much as just capacity for large
John:
Having all that RAM is important for putting the big console games on there for the big textures and all that other stuff.
John:
If you don't have that RAM, if you have to... The PS3 didn't have a lot of RAM, so you had to wedge a lot of crap in there.
John:
That's part of the reason that the Apple TV can match it these days is because...
John:
the ps3 was very strange architecture and relatively ram star but the ps4 is not ram starved uh it's got tons of ram and it's got tons of hard drive space which is not as fast as an ssd but when you're you know pre-loading levels and stuff it's fast enough to stream levels also so anyway
John:
um i don't i'm definitely not looking for the apple tv to catch up and pass the ps4 unless i guess there is no ps5 and then you just wait around until we can get a ps4 and a little puck thing but i really think at this point there probably will be a ps5 because the ps4 is doing pretty well for sony all things considered
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Any other follow-up?
Marco:
On an infinite time scale, the rate we're going, we are going to not have follow-up at all.
Marco:
I don't even know what to make of this.
John:
What a shame that would be.
John:
I mean, you could technically put a lot of the iPad Pro stuff in there, but it's not really because we're just going to talk more about the iPad Pro later.
John:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Any follow-out you'd like to do, John?
John:
I don't know what that is.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
What's awesome these days before we dig in?
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
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Marco:
So the Mac App Store had some issues in the last week.
Marco:
It was a pretty big disaster, and I didn't really know what was going on.
Marco:
I've been really busy, and so I have been following Twitter as religiously as I usually do.
Marco:
And I saw that there were some issues, and I didn't think a lot of it because everything seemed to be working on my computer.
Marco:
And then all of a sudden I went to run 1Password and I was told I couldn't.
Marco:
And suddenly this thing I wasn't paying attention to became a lot more real.
Marco:
So, John, why don't you tell us what happened?
John:
Well, so the stuff they run from the Mac App Store is DRM encumbered, let's say, to some degree.
John:
There are receipts that the Mac App Store puts in the application.
John:
Apple's advice for figuring out on the launch of your application whether your app is valid is to check those receipts.
John:
They have some code samples showing you how to do that.
John:
But you can really do it any way you want.
John:
Some developers use OpenSSL library that they bundle into their application.
John:
OpenSSL is an open source thing to check their certificates.
John:
And there are a couple of problems related to this.
John:
As with most disasters, it's not just one thing goes wrong.
John:
Multiples.
John:
One of the things that went wrong is that Apple updated their certificate.
John:
uh for this receipt to use a better encryption of a stronger encryption they had been using previously and it just so happens that the open ssl library that a lot of applications use to validate their receipts can't handle this new uh encryption level right so that's one class of things that went wrong the second class of things that went wrong is the mac app store certificate expired and apple replaced it with a new one that's why they had the occasion i think to replace this with the new one that had the stronger encryption
John:
uh and there's a bug in the mac app store where even if a new certificate is issued after the old one has expired there's some caching issue i guess it's locally on the macs that makes it not take the new uh the new certificate even though the old one uh you know had expired and so what people were getting was they would try to launch an application and not just one application but some in some cases if they have the caching problem pretty much every application they'd got from the mac app store um
John:
You would end up getting these dialog boxes that say this application is damaged.
John:
Please throw it in the trash.
John:
Basically, the system telling you that it couldn't validate the authenticity of this application.
John:
This is kind of the system working as designed.
John:
And like if some malware infected all your applications and like turn them into Trotian horses and stuff.
John:
You would want to know, hey, don't you know, don't run this application.
John:
It's messed up.
John:
But the same dialogue appears if the validation machinery says, you know, like in this case, the certificate had expired.
John:
And even though Apple had issued a new one, even though your application might have been able to use that new one to validate that everything was going on.
John:
the local operating system was telling it uh no you're trying to use a certificate that expired like three days ago so you're out of luck so apple fixed this by downgrading their encryption to the old version that fixed all the applications that had the old version of ssl um and i don't know what they did to fix these expiring certificate other than to tell people like to reboot and stuff i'm not entirely sure what they what they did
Marco:
Yeah, they said they're preparing a software update for OS X to prevent the caching issue in the future.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not going to help people who had this problem last week.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this was a disaster on so many levels.
Marco:
It's kind of an embarrassment.
Marco:
I mean, so the official statement they gave, which came pretty late, honestly.
John:
Six days later, they made an official statement, and it wasn't even... Was it a public statement?
John:
I think they emailed developers this thing, right?
Marco:
Well, they emailed something to developers, and they also gave a PR statement to sites like iMore, which we'll link to in the show notes.
Marco:
Apple does a lot of things this way.
Marco:
They don't put...
Marco:
bad news or reactions to things on their own site, they'll send the same PR statement to known friendly Apple sites and have them all basically report it and apologize on Apple's behalf for them so that Apple doesn't have to soil their site with any kind of negative PR.
Marco:
So the statement they gave was, I think it was a lot of BS and some truth.
Marco:
There was a planned event and most users experienced no issues.
Marco:
However, some users experienced some issues during this change.
Marco:
Now, because of the nature of this problem, I think most users, that is complete BS.
Marco:
The idea that most users experience no issues and only some people had only some problems.
Marco:
No.
John:
So is there any way that Apple could know the actual answer to that?
John:
Because Apple's not tracking, I'm assuming, how often we launch applications and stuff.
John:
So I don't think anyone really knows the scope of this problem.
Marco:
You know, I don't know, honestly.
Marco:
So the fact is, you know, this PR statement is trying to minimize the issue.
John:
But if you don't know, and Apple doesn't know, everyone is just guessing based on stories they've heard, right?
Marco:
I guess that's true.
Marco:
I mean, I suppose they could know, like, how many people hit the certificate server, right?
John:
I mean...
John:
They can estimate, I'm assuming they can estimate it from like support load because you can do some math and say, if we get X number of support calls for this issue, that means why people really have this issue.
John:
You know, just based on historically speaking, how many people will go to the phones or go to email about a particular issue.
John:
You can kind of back of the envelope, figure out based on previous problems that you did have better metrics on.
John:
Right.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, what we're using is like...
John:
do you know somebody who had this problem with their computer?
John:
Like, I mean, you know, I didn't, I actually didn't encounter this problem on any of my computers, but then again, I tend to avoid buying applications in the Mac app store, but I do have some, for example, Slack I brought on the Mac app store and I use it every day and I had no problem with it.
John:
Is it because I'm always running it?
John:
And if you're like, if you're running it and the certificate expires, I think there's no problem.
John:
It's only if you quit it and launch it, but I'm pretty sure I did quit it and launch it during that window and haven't restarted.
John:
So anyway, I had zero problems.
John:
Casey had a problem.
John:
Some people had tons of problems.
John:
I had many problems.
John:
Like stories where they show the dialogue boxes, like 500 dialogue boxes popping up on a screen saying they can't watch things.
John:
Anyway, the bottom line is that this was a problem that could have potentially affected every single user who has ever purchased anything from the Mac App Store.
John:
And it probably affected a lot of them because...
John:
who well you know i maybe i just got lucky but like conceptually speaking this is you don't need a weird set of circumstances to trigger this problem i don't think you just need to have purchased things from the mac app store uh to and to have your system cache the old certificate and then to launch them after the new one has been issued
John:
tips during the chat pointed out something pretty relevant here um slack probably does not do receipt validation on launch because it's a free app they probably don't care so the only apps that were doing receipt validation uh would would have had this problem yeah i'm trying to think of the mac app store apps i have i guess i have apple's apps like you know the the you know pages and and all that stuff from the iwork suite and i tend not to buy in the mac app store and that's the the second factor in this which is
John:
Things like this, especially for people who have no idea why the heck this happened, make them feel worse about the Mac App Store.
John:
And people who have any clue about the details of the Mac App Store, this will actually make them avoid it more than they did in the past.
John:
I'm avoiding it for a variety of reasons.
John:
mostly because they're, you know, the applications I use, even when they were in the Mac app store, like BB edit, I never bought the Mac app store version because it was crippled by sandboxing because of Apple's rules.
John:
So if I have a choice between buying the crippled sandbox version and the non crippled version, and I know the non crippled version gives more money to the developer.
John:
i'll buy the non-crippled version every time so that's what i've always done if there's any choice the ones i buy in the mac app store it's always been like that's convenient you know i don't care that much about it it's not a big deal or it's free like slack or whatever you know it's more convenient than going to direct download it like i would like to have the experience where i could just go to one place and see all my apps and auto update them and all that stuff like i like those features the mac app store
John:
But for apps that really count, I'm definitely buying them outside.
John:
But for people who are more towards the Mac app store where they're like, you know what?
John:
The convenience is more important to me than, than like giving more money to the developer.
John:
And the applications I use don't suffer from any sandboxing issues.
John:
And I really love auto update and all this other stuff.
John:
Um,
John:
never mind the most mac apps before the mac app store are already using sparkle or something like that anyway anyway for people who uh know about these details this is going to make them think twice because they're like before the trade-off was worth it to me i will buy from the mac app store because the convenience is worth it to me for for the potential downsides but now they're weighing that convenience versus like you know this a day when all your apps won't launch and you've got to figure out what the heck the problem is and so
John:
This is not good, both short-term and long-term, for the Mac App Store, which was already not a particularly beloved institution as far as developers and tech-savvy users are concerned.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
I mean, there are so many reasons already why you might want to be hesitant about buying from the Mac App Store and why developers might want to be hesitant to be in the Mac App Store.
Marco:
And to add one more thing to the pile, it's just a really bad time for that.
Marco:
And it just seems like...
Marco:
You know, there was a good post by... Is it Michael Psy?
Marco:
MJ Psy?
Marco:
I think that's right.
Marco:
He made a good post, we'll link to it in the show notes, called Nobody Minding the Store or something like that.
Marco:
Do I have that right?
Marco:
Basically, like, you know, collecting all these quotes and everything and pointing out just like...
Marco:
The Mac App Store is just so neglected, and it has been since its introduction.
Marco:
You know, the iOS App Store has its own set of problems, but the Mac App Store is so much worse in almost every way.
Marco:
The fact that it has a bug, you know, a certificate validation bug, I mean, that's like one of many problems with it.
Marco:
That's only the most recent problem with it.
Marco:
The application itself, the Mac App Store application is a disaster.
Marco:
The sandboxing issues have pushed out tons of good apps.
Marco:
Mac App Store developers, I really feel sorry for them.
Marco:
And if I were launching a Mac app, I'm not sure I would put it there.
Marco:
If you would have asked me a year ago if I was launching a Mac app to put it in the App Store, I'd say, yeah, probably.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with myself distributing it.
Marco:
So yeah, I'll put it in the App Store.
Marco:
But today...
Marco:
I don't think I would.
Marco:
It just seems like it's not worth all of the downsides and costs.
John:
It really depends.
John:
If I was developing a Mac app, I would say it really depends on what kind of app it is.
John:
Because if it's a small app or if it's a free app or if it's an app that you think will never be impacted by sandboxing...
John:
And you just don't want to deal with, you know, incorporating Sparkle and putting up your own endpoint for that and making sure it's up for the updates and doing payment processing yourself and all that other stuff that you would have to do if you did the direct sales route.
John:
Because say you don't have an existing channel for direct sales to software because you're not an established software company or whatever.
John:
It is definitely convenient to use the Mac App Store.
John:
But if your app, you know, if I was doing an app that that wasn't true for even one of those things, like could my app potentially be impacted by sandboxing?
John:
Don't, you know, don't go to the Mac App Store.
John:
Do I already have a way to accept money from people?
John:
I don't need the Mac App Store for that.
John:
Do I already know how to incorporate self-auto update and have a robust framework for doing that and already have a website that I have to keep up until I can put an endpoint on it for updates?
John:
then, yeah, just, you know, there's no point if you feel like those things don't apply.
John:
That's, you know, I'm not actually a Mac developer, so I don't know.
John:
But part of, yeah, part of this whole recent round of Mac App Store stuff in the tech nerd circles was developers...
John:
Sort of reiterating, see guys, this is why I'm not in the Mac App Store and users like the MJ side thing, writing up all the list of, you know, all the great Mac apps that are not in the Mac App Store, like the Mac App Store, even though many people think of it as the only and best and single place to get Mac software.
John:
a lot of the mac software that the mac users really love a lot of the best mac software is just not on the mac app store and obviously that's not true on ios because it's pretty much all the software on ios is on the app store so yeah apple's always been in an uncomfortable position with the mac app store because there is an alternative and we all want there to be an alternative but that means the mac app store actually has to compete kind of in the same way that the itunes music store had to compete against piracy the mac app store has to compete against
John:
direct sales and applications that can be more powerful and do more powerful things.
John:
And currently, it's losing that competition.
Marco:
And even as a user, everything about the Mac App Store from a user perspective has gotten worse over time.
Marco:
First, when they started adding sandboxing, that not only pushed out a lot of apps that made us, oh, well, now we have to exchange our license and go download the direct version and everything.
Marco:
So that was a pain for people who bought in early to the App Store.
Marco:
And then when sandboxing came in, now, like, I hate sandboxed apps because they're a pain from the user side to use.
Marco:
Like, I have a couple apps.
Marco:
Like, one of them is called Space Gremlin.
Marco:
It helps, like, find where all your disk space is.
Marco:
And, you know, it has to read your whole hard drive.
Marco:
And the convoluted hoops that apps like this have to do, it's like, okay, click this button, choose the root folder, and then every time you've got to redo it, and oh, now it can't look at files, it's just... It's such a pain.
Marco:
And from a user perspective, just like sandboxing is... Like, I don't...
Marco:
I understand the security benefits of it, but if it's a very rarely used opt-in system, those are pretty limited.
Marco:
And I don't think it's worth it from the user perspective.
Marco:
I really don't.
Marco:
The way it's implemented now, in its incredibly half-baked and seemingly completely neglected way...
Marco:
I don't want it as a user.
Marco:
It's just one more thing.
Marco:
And then you add something like this receipt validation bug that made all my apps just break all of a sudden.
Marco:
That's a big problem.
Marco:
What reason do I have as a user to buy more apps from the Mac App Store after all the problems and things getting worse?
Marco:
I don't see a good reason anymore.
John:
Well, you've still got the convenience reason, like the one place you can go for the updates and it's easy to buy things there.
John:
I wish the Mac App Store should also make it easier to uninstall, but they don't really.
John:
But beyond that, like all the pros are still there, but the cons just keep stacking up and the cons don't go away.
John:
And the sandboxing thing really like the main problem with that, aside from all the bugs and all the other things that the poor Mac developers have to complain about how, you know, iOS gets better tools for
John:
crash reports and debugging and uh betas and test flight and all that other stuff anyway um aside from all that mac app store sandboxing like ios is sandboxing and everyone gets along with it because the entire system the entire operating system the entire way of using the phone has from the beginning uh
John:
been built around the idea of sandboxing which is you know problems for data sharing and silly like uh url schemes to get around all these things like so that has its own problems but it fits with the system on the mac sandboxing flies in the face of the entire history of the platform and if you put sandboxing in that environment it it doesn't fit like if your app happens to fit into a little nice sandbox thing you're fine but there's whole classes of applications good useful applications that don't fit within sandboxing
John:
And it's almost like Apple saying, we really wish that you didn't have to have apps like this on your Mac.
John:
We really wish the Mac was like iOS.
John:
And so they say, maybe if we make all the Mac apps be sandbox, then the Mac will be just like the iPhone, but it's not.
John:
And so like the app that Marco just mentioned, you know.
John:
showing where all your disk space is um could they have like in system preferences a disk space usage thing that did the same thing that was part of the operating system like settings is on on ios they could but they don't and mac users do have to manage their story storage and on a mac because of the way it is it's difficult to tell where all that space is going because you have a lot of files and a lot of folders and all the other stuff that
John:
again it's not user visible in ios so there is a place for applications that do this type of thing same thing for like disk duplicating things like super duper and stuff that's a thing you don't have to do with phones because they've always had like well they have the cloud backup now or you back them up to itunes which just pushes the problem onto your mac or whatever you're going to do
John:
For the Mac, we need a way to back it up, and doing disk clones is a useful thing to do.
John:
And the disk cloning software needs to read the entire disk, of course, and sandboxing makes it a pain.
John:
It can be done, but it's a big, super pain.
John:
So you can't make the Mac as safe as iOS by merely just saying applications have to be sandboxed.
John:
All you can do is say some applications will be sandboxed, and it's good for them.
John:
It is a benefit to the user to have applications that...
John:
can't get outside of their little pen and that if they somehow get exploited or broken or there's a bug in them or whatever they can do less damage but that other class of applications is never going to go away so long as the mac still is like it is so long as the mac is still you know an old style pc operating system um so i don't see what they can do about the tension other than to you know
John:
make a tiered system and say sandbox if you can it will give you a special label in the app store for your sandbox and a label if you're not but instead they're just stubbornly saying everything has to be sandbox and if you can't work in the sandbox we don't want your kind of application on our platform and at least the tech savvy users are saying you may not want that kind of application on the platform but i want that application because it does useful things for me and so
John:
Either you make it no longer useful, like you will never need to clone a disk again because all your data is magically backed up using quantum entanglement or something.
John:
Right.
John:
Or you make it like iOS and, you know, with no local backup option, everything is a cloud backup.
John:
Or you got to give me some way to do all these things that I need to do.
John:
Or even just something as simple as BBEdit where the text editor wants to be able to have like a file browser.
John:
without throwing a stupid open save dialog box in your face to you know the power box thing to let you convince the system that you're allowed to access these files like you know a programmer style text editor where you browse the whole file system is a useful thing to have because the mac is a system that lets you have files and folders and expose the whole file system and you can't bb edit is not useful if you confine it to like a sandbox like environment all you're doing is pushing that annoyance onto the user who has to do silly things in the ui to convince the
John:
the system that, yes, please let BBEdit edit these text files no matter where they are.
Marco:
You know, John, a minute ago you said, wouldn't it be nice if Apple had included something like SpaceGremlin or my preferred app, DaisyDisc.
Marco:
Have you not seen about this Mac and then the storage tab, which is super useful and is telling me that of the three quarters of a terabyte I have full, about half of it is other?
John:
The usage in iOS is not very granular, but it's granular on the level that iOS works because it tells you like per apps because you don't have direct access to managing the storage.
John:
It's like all you can do about it is delete an app and all its data goes with it.
John:
Maybe some apps you can go into the app and like delete videos or whatever, you know.
John:
But the granularity of the information provided by the settings thing in iOS matches the granularity of of the way you use iOS more or less.
John:
The granularity of the Mac for good or for ill is files and folders.
John:
So, you know, letting it tell you how much is music, how much is video and how much is a giant yellow bar full of other, which I always wonder how it comes up with that.
John:
a is not even as useful as ios and b just is not it's not the way the mac works i need to know like i use it all the time especially back and before i upgraded my wife's computer she had 256 gig ssd and i would need to like hunt down you know some episode of my little pony that i didn't know had auto downloaded by itunes to dig it out of the itunes folder and delete the damn thing you know and you can do that sometimes from within itunes but you know even just
John:
the the sad discovery that many people make that the the virtual memory sleep image can push you over your your disk space limit uh right because when you get a machine with a lot of ram and a small ssd you start really asking hard questions like do i really need the uh you know the hibernate functionality or can i just disable that and just use old style sleep and just really hope that it doesn't run out of battery while it's asleep
Marco:
Yeah, it's really ugly.
Marco:
And I don't know, when I saw that 1Password, which just so happened to be the first thing that reared its ugly head, when I saw that that was broken or, well, not broken, but I saw that it had been broken by the Mac App Store, I realized what was happening very quickly.
Marco:
But that was only because I had seen some passing references to it on Twitter or RSS or what have you.
Marco:
If I remember right, the dialogue, though, said something like, oh, this is all broke.
Marco:
Go redownload it.
Marco:
And so it doesn't even it says this application is damaged and you should move it to the trash.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so the solution is redownload this from the Mac App Store.
Marco:
The process of doing that is so like they couldn't have made it more obtuse and and manual if they tried.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's the thing is that, you know, I kind of know what I'm doing when it comes to using a computer.
Marco:
I can't imagine someone who doesn't follow this stuff.
Marco:
I mean, it's not that hard to go to the applications folder and drag it to the trash and then go back to the Mac App Store.
Marco:
But that dialogue, to your point, Marco, didn't really make it clear what the correct order of operations or correct task list was to fix this issue.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it's just – it was – like one of you said, it was just a disaster from top to bottom.
Marco:
It was a disaster all the way down.
Marco:
And it's a little frustrating that the most Apple did was say, yeah, well, you know, screwed up, but we'll fix it.
Marco:
Don't worry.
John:
Yeah, the thing is they have all the – that dialog box, they have all the information on the system to fix that in one button press.
John:
If the system thinks that the application and damage should be thrown in the trash –
John:
there could be one button that says would you like me to redownload this because i know exactly which damn application it is and i know that you purchased it and i can put it in the trash and i can redownload it for you because i know everything about like there's the gimme's like that the same thing with uninstall like if the uninstall process really is drag it to the trash why is there not a big hunk and uninstall button in the uh the mac app store app so anyway a lot of it is neglect of just like things they could do and they don't do uh speaking of neglect uh
John:
Our tipster in the chat room insists loudly and has been since this time this happened that this bug about the certificate caching has already been reported.
John:
There's already a radar for it and it's been around since OS 10 10.6.
Marco:
That's uncomfortable.
John:
and has not been fixed again it's tips for information so take with a grain of salt whether it's true or not but it's it's the you know it feels bad when your platform is not getting attention and at various times apple has ignored the mac and then so said that like you know we really care about the mac we're paying a lot of attention to it and done lots of important significant things to the mac but there's still areas particularly around the mac app store especially as it compares to the regular app store that just feels uh neglected
Marco:
How many people do you think are actually tasked with working on this kind of thing at Apple right now?
Marco:
Apple's teams are always a lot smaller than you think they are, and Apple also has this very frequent habit that, from what I hear, is worse than ever.
Marco:
where engineers get pulled off of things all the time to go work on some new project that needs more engineering resources that is a newer thing or more important to the current direction of the company or current business goals.
Marco:
So people get moved around all the time, and there's usually either nobody left working on boring stuff like the Mac App Store or a surprisingly small staff.
Marco:
It might be a handful of people doing some of this stuff.
Marco:
Some things have one person working on them.
Marco:
It's so...
Marco:
A bug like that, it's not that the Mac App Store staff is so big that they're working on other stuff.
Marco:
It's more likely that almost no one's working on this.
Marco:
And Apple keeps having problems like this where the boring old stuff either gets ignored forever and bugs like this sit around for years, or it gets these drive-by updates.
Marco:
like it's like somebody comes in rewrites the whole thing like discovery d is a perfect example of this um from what we hear the lcap usb stack might be something like this uh certainly we're hearing that the lcap disk utility uh is probably something like this uh where it's you know you get kind of this drive-by update where somebody is finally allowed to work on it and told to like you know revamp it or clean it up or rewrite it or something
Marco:
And you get like one pass at it, and what comes out is like 75% functional, and then that person is gone and sent to go work on something else.
Marco:
And this is not the recipe for quality at all.
Marco:
It's the complete opposite of what you should be doing, and it is not even an efficient way to run an engineering organization.
John:
They should get some of the 100 developers at Instagram who don't have time to make an iPad app.
John:
Before Twitter cut its staff, which is sad for all the people who lost their jobs.
John:
But they had and still do have a very large number of people.
John:
I mean, to some degree, I can kind of explain it with Twitter and Instagram to say, look, they've got a server side component.
John:
So when everyone throws out big developer numbers for these companies.
John:
They envision all these people working on the iOS app when surely perhaps the majority of them are working on back end stuff.
John:
But the number of developers in these large VC funded companies that they hire lots of really smart people to work on one or two flagship mobile applications.
John:
And then you compare them to the like one or two person independent shops writing competing third party applications.
John:
And you're like, how, how is Twitter have like literally 100 iOS developers making their, their iOS Twitter client and Twitterific has two people.
John:
And you look at the two applications and you think they're peers, like they seem about the same.
John:
Right.
John:
One of them is made by the company that makes the thing.
John:
And the other one is made by two guys.
John:
And so, like, you know, just the mythical man month at a certain point, adding more people doesn't help.
John:
And then, you know, this, you know, committee syndrome and people are, you know, you can't actually make any change, which is why Twitter, to its credit, has been saying that they're trying to, you know, become more efficient or whatever.
John:
But Apple seems to have the opposite problem where, like Marco said, every story we hear is, you know, there's actually one guy who's responsible for these three applications.
John:
And within a given release, he does two minor updates to each one, fix some bugs.
John:
And that's about it.
John:
You know, crashers first and everything else if there's time.
John:
And there's got to be something in the middle there where you have a reasonable number of people empowered to make good decisions to not just make a product, but to continue to make it better year after year after year, like the hardware team surely have.
John:
I mean, it's not like they took the iPhone 4S and just said every year we'll just make minor tweaks to it because we don't have time to do anything except for to fix the broken home button.
John:
right no they make a whole new phone and they go you know the hardware gets better and better and better the software depending on what it is can spend years without really moving and so yeah the mac the mac does have a lot of applications and some of them don't really change much year after year uh even when we feel like they should like maybe it's okay that the terminal application doesn't change too radically from year to year but the mac app store that everyone agrees has all these problems um should really be getting more attention
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:
Okay, so the long national nightmare is over.
Marco:
You have acquired an Apple Pencil.
Marco:
I have, yes.
Marco:
We have the iPad Pro, and we have the front smart cover only, because I couldn't bring myself to spend $140 to cover the back as well.
Marco:
Ugh.
Marco:
But I could bring myself to spend $100 buying a pencil.
Marco:
So we now have iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil.
Marco:
And I love using the Apple Pencil.
Marco:
However, I am not much of an artist.
Marco:
I wish I had more reasons to use it.
Marco:
Fortunately, my wife is an artist and does use it.
Marco:
And she's had a lot of experience with it.
Marco:
So please welcome on the show, our return guest, Tiffany Arment.
Marco:
Thank you.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I'm not an artist.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yes, you are.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I'm a dabbler.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
She's the artist formerly known as Tiff.
Exactly.
Marco:
I assure you, you're a much better artist than I. And I know John has dabbled in the past as well, so I won't speak for him on that one.
Marco:
But certainly better than me.
Marco:
And I think it's safe to say better than Marco.
Marco:
So you're as near as we got for now anyway.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I don't know.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Marco's drawings are pretty amazing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Like his stick figures are totally killer.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
XKCD caliber.
Marco:
Yeah, I was going to say, give him Randall Monroe a run for his money.
Marco:
Not that good.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You made that awesome little decaf sign with that sad coffee mug.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
That was super funny.
Marco:
I can occasionally make one decent drawing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I love his drawings.
John:
I think we have to get rid of the idea that you have to pass some skill threshold to have a reason to use any sort of artistic implement.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I agree.
John:
No matter what it is that you're doing, there's not...
John:
Like, nothing bad will happen to you if you quote-unquote can't draw and you start doodling with a stylus.
John:
Like, we all doodle, like, in the margins there are notebooks and everything.
John:
Just, if it's fun to do and you find it relaxing and meditative, like, I'm sure someone that they haven't already will make the adult coloring book application for the iPad Pro and Tiff will get it and she will love it.
John:
And, like, there's no...
John:
There's no like you don't have to.
John:
I know Marco's looking for like something useful.
John:
He wants to feel like he's doing something useful or productive.
John:
But if it's just relaxing and fun to do, you can try it.
John:
And if you actually have any interest, you can get better at it by practicing and learning about it.
John:
Like it's just like any other skill.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Exactly.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
For the longest time, I didn't even start doing anything because I was afraid to be bad.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And everyone's bad at first.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So it was kind of a stupid fear.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But that's what kept me from even trying to draw anything ever.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And so recently, I decided, you know, I'm like 32 years old, I'm tired of being afraid of being bad at something that I don't even know how to do.
Marco:
So anyway, more on this, by the way, listen to this week's back to work, which is basically entirely on that topic.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Is it really?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
All right.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
All right.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So we're talking about some pencils that I've already broken.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I was about to say, you took the words right out of my mouth.
Marco:
So how long did the pencil last from the time you had opened the cover of the box to its actually initial breakage?
Marco:
Probably about five seconds.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Literally, like I opened the box and I was looking at the little card because this it comes with this card that also has inserts in it, which is on top of the pencil.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So I opened that up.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And first I was pulling out what the card was, the box flipped over the pencil fell out of the box, it fell onto our floor and it the cap popped off this little silver ring popped off of the cap and there were pieces everywhere.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So but it turned out that it was functional.
Marco:
It's just the body of it was broken.
Marco:
Is that fair to say?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Well, the little tiny cap has this little tiny silver ring that goes inside of it and it seems to be held on by nothing but like a dot of glue.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So it just probably fell the worst way possible because it's not very tight in the case and in the box when it comes.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So it just kind of flipped out and then that little tiny ring popped off and Marco has since super glued it back on and but I don't know.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It still feels funny to me.
Marco:
The whole pencil, even with the ring in place, the cap does not really fit tightly.
Marco:
In so many ways, this pencil was not designed for practicality, which is a shame because it feels really good in use.
Marco:
It works incredibly well, which we'll get to.
Marco:
you know like i expressed um concern earlier even when they when they first announced it that like there was there's nowhere to put it for one thing like there's no way to attach it to or put it into any kind of cover for the ipad that exists so far which is so frustrating because where else are you going to use this pencil nowhere nowhere else is this pencil going to be used anywhere besides with this mac with the ipad pro so why not attach it you crazy people
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the cap, so if you want to charge this thing, you know, we also expressed concern when they first showed this off two months ago or whatever.
Marco:
We also expressed concern that when you put it in the end and you put it in the lightning port, that is just asking to be broken off.
Marco:
Like, that is so precarious and looks weird, first of all, but just so ridiculous.
Marco:
And it seems like...
Marco:
possibly last minute they added this like theme this uh double female lightning adapter that's in the box so you can you can use it to reverse the orientation or to reverse the gender of the lightning plug on it so that you can charge it from a lightning cable which is way more sane and i understand why they did it the way they did where you can charge it from epic is that way like if you only have the ipad and the pencil with you and you need a quick charge you can get one quickly just from the ipad so that i
Marco:
it's nice to have that ability i guess but that also shouldn't be the primary way to charge it and so i guess maybe they recognize that last second and it isn't so then the problem is when you're charging it if you plug it in like you know overnight sometime if you're charging it where do you put the cap you can magnetically attach the cap to the the one of the smart car you know the smart carvers have magnets in them you can stick the little cap onto the it's kind of uh wobbly it's
Marco:
It really is designed to be in Johnny Ives' white world.
Marco:
And it... And, like, it doesn't... It doesn't seem like... If it rolls around in the white world, he won't find it.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So, you don't have to worry about it rolling off the desk because it is weighted, so it won't roll off the desk.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It seems like it just made at every opportunity to break or get lost.
Marco:
Even when it's in the iPad to charge, its lightning connector is extra long, and it fits fairly loosely in it.
Marco:
Everything about it is loose and just waiting to either break or get lost.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Well, the cap already almost went into the vacuum and the air conditioner vent in our house about two hours after I broke it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So, I mean, I'm doing really great right now with this pencil.
Marco:
So what I'm hearing is since they're so plentiful, you should just jump on down to the local Apple store and get a couple of backups because nobody's looking for them.
John:
Buy a dozen and keep them in a big jar.
John:
So you lose one pencil, whatever, just get another one.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
They should come in a box like crayons.
Marco:
I mean, they're cheap.
Marco:
They're plentiful.
Marco:
No, no problems.
Marco:
No, they're going to sell so many of these things because people, you know, if you if you actually use it regularly, I would guess you have to buy a new one probably once a year or so.
Marco:
So, you know, at least maybe even more depending on how careless you are with your things or, you know, if you lose things a lot because it really is like you couldn't have designed it to be to be less practical for like forgetfulness or clumsiness, if that makes sense.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
First of all, I'm not that clumsy or I never lose things.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I know where everything is in the house down to like the little tiniest piece of anything.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I know where it is and losing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I can't believe how like comedy of errors happened yesterday when we got a hold of this pencil.
Marco:
Yeah, so I had pre-ordered one online that has a ship date of mid-December, and I wanted it sooner, so I kept going into the stores until they had it, and then I was able to get it there.
Marco:
But I'm not going to cancel that pre-order for the one I ordered, because I think we need a spare.
Marco:
It's going to be good to just have it in the house.
John:
Plus, you can find out if you can draw on the screen with two pencils at once.
John:
That's true.
John:
Wow.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So now that you have a slightly damaged but otherwise functional pencil, what is it like to use?
Marco:
And if you wouldn't mind, can you set the stage as to, can you self-describe what you would normally do that's artistic with a pen or pencil?
Marco:
Are you drawing your own Rembrandts or are you just drawing stick figures?
Marco:
I presume it's somewhere in between.
Yeah.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Well, I'm not very good at like sketching, which I think the pencil, I feel like it really excels at if I'm, you know, I actually developed a new signature.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
If anyone has seen it on Twitter recently, which is what I decided to do first with my pencil is the most important thing, develop your signature for your iPad art.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, I've been writing checks from you all day.
Yeah.
Marco:
it's like naming your band in high school before you've actually like practiced once or gotten together.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I'm totally naming my art band.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So I got my art band name.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So that was actually really fun to do on the pencil.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And it, from what I've tested three programs now, and what I found is it's really dependent on the program and your level of skill with using these types of programs on how great the pencil feels.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I do a lot of watercolor in real life, not digitally.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And so yeah,
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Trying to replicate that in a lot of programs is a little bit iffy, obviously, because you're dealing with ink flowing and pigment and water and dilution and transparency.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So that's a little tricky.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But the pencil actually makes it really fun to play with on the iPad.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And with some medium, like trying to...
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
replicate a medium that's more solid uh the pencil really really excels and it feels extremely fluid it doesn't detect your hand at all which is really amazing and well slow down when you say it doesn't detect your hand you mean if your hand is on there it's not also drawing it's smart enough to throw away the hand portion yeah fair to say
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, it will detect a fingertip if you accidentally move a fingertip around.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But with most of these programs, there's, you know, like a race and back.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So it's not like you're ruining anything.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But when the palm detection is really like you can rest your hand on the iPad Pro and draw and it doesn't it doesn't detect it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It doesn't smear anything.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It doesn't, you know, digitally smear.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I don't know.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Shmear.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So something else.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I don't know.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I'm from Long Island.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So yeah.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You should know this.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I do know what it means.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So, yeah, so I think it's really, really enjoyable.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And so far, I've done a number of sketches with it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And I keep wanting to do more.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I almost fell asleep with it last night, like cradled next to me, which is intimate.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But yeah, I'm really enjoying it.
Marco:
So of the apps that you've used with it, what would you say is your favorite?
Marco:
And corollary to that, is that the best app for the pencil?
Marco:
Or do you just like the experience with that app the most?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Well, Marco put two new ones on today.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And before that, I was using Adobe Sketch.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Is that what I was using?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And then today you put on what did you put on?
Marco:
I put on Procreate and... Oh, geez.
Marco:
There's this Japanese name that I forgot of another very popular SketchUp.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Is that the Nico Sketch one?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
We'll put it in the show notes.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Anyway.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So I was just recently just drawing with those just before the show.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And they have more of a learning curve, I think, because they're really involved for artists that know what they're doing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
The Adobe Sketch one was pretty...
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It was easy to master right away being a newbie, using the pencil, newbie to art.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You felt like you were accomplishing a real work, you know, like you're not just a little sketch that you're just going to delete and it doesn't matter.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You really felt like you could do it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
The other ones, they have so many changes and buttons and flows and this and that.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And the interface is a little bit trickier to navigate if you don't know what you're doing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I feel like that those other programs are the programs that you would move on to after you kind of mastered how to manipulate the pencil with the different art mediums that are available in a lot of these programs.
Marco:
And the name I was forgetting before was Taya Sui Sketches.
Marco:
I actually went to the Apple store this past weekend and spent maybe a minute and a half, two minutes using the pencil.
Marco:
I did ask one of the employees if they had any in stock, and they basically laughed to my face.
Marco:
I mean, they were much nicer about it than that, but that was the message, was, yeah, no.
Marco:
But I did play with it briefly.
Marco:
I only used the Notes app.
Marco:
And I mean, again, I'm no artist, but I thought it was cool.
Marco:
I thought the tilting the pencil on its side to like shade was kind of neat.
Marco:
But I don't know why.
Marco:
But the thing that just blew my freaking mind was when I got the Notes app out and I put on the on-screen ruler.
Marco:
Have you played with this, Tiff?
Marco:
No, I haven't.
Marco:
So in the Notes app, you can bring up an on-screen ruler and...
Marco:
And it behaves like you have a ruler on the page.
Marco:
It's not perfect because there's no physical barrier to keep you from, you know, flinging the pencil across your iPad.
Marco:
But it does a really darn good mimic of what a ruler is like.
Marco:
And it's so stupid.
Marco:
And I don't know why I found that so impressive.
Marco:
But I just thought it was really, really, really cool.
Marco:
So you mean like it keeps the line straight?
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So you can draw up against the ruler and have a perfectly straight line.
Marco:
And you can spin the ruler around.
Marco:
And as you spin it, I believe it shows what angle it's at.
Marco:
And it was just very, very neat.
Marco:
Again, I don't know why I personally would ever need to do that, but I just thought it was so well implemented and so well done.
John:
I also went to the store recently and got to play with the pencil.
John:
The first thing I was struck by was in the Apple store, the pencil is not attached with anything.
John:
Like it's not attached with the little bankers, you know, little metal beaded chain thing.
John:
It is just loose in a little cradle thingy.
John:
So I have to imagine those things are walking out the door like crazy at Apple.
John:
um especially when they were rare but anyway i did get to try it um although the first thing that confused me was i couldn't figure out why it wasn't working because it was paired with the one like they have the pencil in the middle of two ipad pros and it was paired with the other one so i just plugged it into my thing and repaired it which is nice that feature that repairing feature uh is cool and comes in handy i didn't have to go to the stupid bluetooth thing to pair it
John:
um using it i i've experienced all the same things we talked about in past shows varies widely by apps some of them are slow some of them are fast the notes app was the fastest one that i tried because they had a bunch of different apps installed on it uh it was fun it was interesting that the notes app uh the pencil tool that's supposed to look like a pencil they keep showing like oh you can tilt to do shading and stuff like that that is the one part of the notice app that felt the least like real media to me and my my bias is that i
John:
I have habits in my hands and my mind and my body from using real pencils and stuff for many, many years when I was a kid.
John:
And every time I use anything that involves drawing on a tablet or on a screen or whatever...
John:
It's almost as if it was farther away from the real thing, I would feel more comfortable because then I wouldn't be trying to use the motions and gestures that I'm used to from the real physical world of art media.
John:
But the pencil is close enough to real media that I expect it to work more like a pencil.
John:
And the tilt shading thing just does not work anything like an actual pencil.
John:
And so I was continually frustrated by the fact that I had to stop myself from doing what I would do with an actual pencil and start doing what this pencil demands.
John:
In particular, I found that a lot of the lines that I draw, I draw with the pencil tilted at such an angle that the accelerometers in the pencil think I want to do shading.
John:
But in reality, with a real physical pencil on paper, I'm still just using the tip.
John:
and i found that very frustrating and it made me have to change how i was doing everything to be more directly into the uh into the screen to make sure it does a thin line if i could disable the shading thing or change like the ratio of like don't even start shading thing until i'm super tilted over uh yeah that that really bothered me a lot but that's just i think that is more of a barrier of like people who are good at using computers to draw and
John:
It is actually, I think, a different enough skill from people who are good at using, you know, pencils or pen or paints or any other media like the media really the thing that you're using, the medium really does change how you use things.
John:
So if I got one of these and I was actually using it to draw, I think I would have to I would have a learning curve.
John:
to learn how to use this tool to draw in the same way that you learn how to use and like oil pastels versus oil paints versus acrylics or anything like that but bottom line is i feel like this could this could could be used to very easily be used by someone uh to do their work as an artist uh because it is so close to in terms of uh responsiveness uh you know
John:
a real pencil it's so much closer than all the things i've used in the past and from what i've heard from actual artists even the people who are using the top of the line current generation tablet type things that it's it's pretty good it's either better than or at the very least at least as good as the existing uh tablet technology so good job for apple on its first try all right it's first try not counting the newton once again poor newton on my desk here feels bad when i say this first try not counting the newton of doing really good uh pen uh input for artists
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And also the pencil feels really nice.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It doesn't cramp your hand while you're using it, which is great.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It is very comfortable.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And before when I was using the iPad Pro, I felt the weight of the iPad Pro all the time without the pencil.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So I was sitting with it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
We were watching movies.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I tried to read with it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Some people think that that's awesome.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
The reading experience is really great.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I found it
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
awful on the iPad Pro.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It is way too big.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But when I was sketching with the pencil, the weight just kind of disappeared and I kind of didn't notice it and it felt so natural and great to have this really big screen.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So my experience with the iPad Pro itself without the pencil was a disaster and I kind of wasn't sure I even wanted it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
to keep it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And I didn't, I played with it for a few hours and then I kind of left it on the table.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You know, I didn't, I wasn't interested in using it any further than that because it felt just too heavy, too big, too much stuff going on or too little stuff with the home screen icons.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And, but as soon as I got the pencil, I, it has been in my lap every free moment that I could possibly find.
John:
Do you not subscribe to any magazines like digital or otherwise like big magazines that like, you know, I don't know if you
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
i was subscribed to martha stewart's magazine actually but she filled it all up with ads like her real magazine and now it's horrible to read and the ads move on the digital one so that was worthless so i ditched that so no i don't subscribe to it i've tried to read some reading some digital magazines my ipad is really slow so i tend to prefer the paper ones uh my wife reads some magazines on her ipad
John:
she used to i think she used to read them on her mini too but now she's got a full-size one and i can imagine the the best application inside like comic books and stuff like that for a big gigantic ipad would be magazines with big uh big illustrations or photos like a photography magazine a nature magazine a fashion magazine or you know even a car magazine like yeah i could see those being amazing but i mean when i read romance novels i really don't want that very large and visible to everyone in the world yeah
John:
I mean, the way you can think about it for the iPad Pro for reading is if you could imagine yourself comfortably reading a paper book of that size, then the iPad Pro is great for it.
John:
So the magazines, the paper magazines are as big as the iPad Pro, especially the very large ones like Edge Magazine before they shrunk it and made it crappy.
John:
But anyway...
John:
or you know i don't know how big vogue is these days but like there are magazines that are very large and you can say sure i can do that but novels are paperback size usually even hardcovers are not as big as the ipad pro in most cases right most of the paperbacks i have on my shelf even the biggest ones i have up here are more or less ipad air 2 size not ipad pro size so it is a little oversized but as i said last week the whole idea is maybe not for reading novels or anything
John:
you can have other stuff on a screen at the same time.
John:
So you can bounce back and forth between Twitter and flipping through the latest issue of, you know, car and driver or whatever.
Marco:
And that's kind of like a general theme that we've found so far with the iPad Pro is like, it's really good for certain things, but it doesn't overlap completely with what the smaller iPads are really good at.
Marco:
Like, you would think that what the iPad Pro would be great at would be like a strict superset.
Marco:
where it would include everything that the small ones are good at, plus also some new stuff.
Marco:
And I don't think that's actually the case.
Marco:
And that's okay.
Marco:
In the same way that a 17-inch MacBook Pro, may it rest in peace, is not great at everything you want a laptop to be for.
Marco:
If you want to be using it on a plane, or if you want to be carrying it around all the time, a 17-inch MacBook Pro is not that great for that.
Marco:
that doesn't mean that the entire MacBook Pro line has to be small, thin, and light.
Marco:
So I think now we're reaching that point with the iPad lineup that it has substantial differentiation between the models now, and that's okay.
Marco:
You can't just be sure that if you like one of the iPads, you can't be sure that the next one up will be better in every way for you.
Marco:
So Tiff, if you were to go to your parents' house for a few days, would you bring it with you?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
That's a really good question.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Probably not because I don't have time to sit and sketch or draw or paint anything.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So I never brought my painting supplies there, even though I have travel ones.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So probably not, but I would bring my regular size iPad because sometimes I do like to read when I'm there, like in during naps or evening or I don't know.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But so, so no, I probably wouldn't because it's really big too.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And the internet connection is not so great.
Marco:
That's a different issue.
Marco:
I'm assuming since you wouldn't bring it to mom and dad's that you probably wouldn't bring it on like a trip or something like that.
Marco:
Like, let's say, you know, Tesla does European delivery, which I understand makes no sense.
Marco:
And you guys and maybe all of us go again.
Marco:
Would you bring this?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
on that sort of a trip no i wouldn't i wouldn't because i'm not a digital artist i'm just now learning and getting interested in trying to do it because it is just like john was saying it's very different holding a stylus to a screen and trying to get it to mimic paint moving or a brush with bristles that that are dynamic and move and swirl
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
translating that, if that's what you want to do is you want to paint something, satisfying that doesn't happen on the iPad.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But if you want to do something, create a digital piece of art, which I find is just like another medium until, you know, you have paint, you have pencil, you have digital art, like it's just another way to do it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And it's another set of skills that you need to learn and develop.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So if I got into that, then yeah, I would see myself carrying this with me to accomplish that task if I wanted to create a digital journal of a trip I was going on.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But as of right now, no, because I'm just not enough.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I'm not skilled enough, but I can definitely see a place for it for other people.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But for me, it's just too big.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Speaking of digital journals like that, that is a thing that Apple should aspire to make the iPad Pro into a good tool for, like in terms of people.
John:
Some people do this and some people don't like to like while you're on the trip.
John:
So you're going on a trip to Europe while you're there, like at the end of each day that you take the photos off your camera.
John:
put them right into your ipad pro with the usb port that we'll talk about in a little bit maybe um use the various applications available on the ipad pro to compose either a cool looking web page or a slideshow or a movie or something that you can share with everybody else and at the end of each day you would send out to your family or whoever is interested here's how our you know second day in italy was right or just even just to be working on it so that by the time you come home from the trip you have everything sort of assembled together into
John:
Whatever form that you decide you want to share your trip with, whether it's a series of pictures or a slideshow or a movie or a web page with a bunch of pictures and blog posts, all the type of things that we all know that we can do with computers and websites.
John:
I think the existing image of the iPad in most people's mind and in the reality for most people other than maybe Vitici is that the best...
John:
way to synthesize all those different things photos video text web stuff uh you know emailing people compiling all that information um the best way to do that is still on a mac and i see no reason that the ipad pro can't be as good or better at almost all those things especially with the stylus input if you wanted to annotate pictures like can you imagine arranging pictures and a lot like an application that lets you sort of
John:
build a vacation album where you could hand write underneath the things little captions wouldn't that be a lot more personal if you assume you have legible handwriting then typing in captions for things and you know being able to touch things and drag things around as if they were actually photos in a real scrapbook and stuff the iPad Pro would be perfect for that but that that's only promise at this point I'm sure there are applications that do this but like bringing it all together touch stylus photography importing multiple applications working on a single thing and then sharing it out to everybody
John:
I don't think we're there yet, but I totally think we could be.
John:
And the iPad Pro would be the perfect device for that.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, there's no doubt that the iPad Pro will make that experience way better for anyone who really likes doing that and is already kind of doing that on a laptop.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So I feel like the people who are committed to doing that kind of thing, that work on the go, vacation journaling or scrapbooking and sending it out to family, it's going to open up
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
to a lot more people with the iPad because it becomes way more accessible.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But it's, again, it's another, it's a thing you have to be into doing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I feel, you know, for me in the end of, you know, in the evening and stuff, when I'm on vacation and I'm doing stuff, I kind of just want to like read Twitter, put my one photo on Instagram and move on, you know, like committing to all of that work while on vacation, I think takes a certain type of person.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And that's the person that's going to really grab hold of this kind of device and run with it.
John:
Well, the best kind of technology actually changes habits a little bit.
John:
So a lot of us were not the type of people who made family movies of anything.
John:
But when iMovie came out and it made it simple and fun to make a quick little movie, even if it didn't turn.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Don't tell me how about iMovie.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It is not simple and it is not fun.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
every christmas is like iMovie stress hell in this household i make a christmas movie every year with a stop motion video of us unwrapping gifts and stuff and it is hell every time and i'm also very upset that there aren't any new themes ever ever ever ever yeah yeah my point is that that those applications the iLife applications made people who would never even considered doing that try it at least once a whole bunch of people tried it and were more or less successful at some percentage ratio 50 or whatever
John:
People who did not suddenly become people who make videos for every occasion in their life, but they did it maybe once, maybe twice, right?
John:
Because the application suddenly made it possible.
John:
It wasn't like, well, I can't make a video of my family.
John:
All I can do is shoot the video and record it to my little, you know, VHS or mini DV or whatever.
John:
And then we can all watch it from start to end and it's interminable, but I'm never going to edit this video because I'm not a video editor.
John:
And the early days of the iLife suite made it so that regular people who are never considered themselves video editors suddenly had a tool in their house that they could use to edit a little video.
John:
And they tried it and found it was really difficult and you make crappy videos, but they did it once or twice.
John:
And I feel like the iPad Pro, with stylus input and everything, could take people who would never in a million years go through all the work to do it on a laptop and know how to synthesize all that stuff and make it.
John:
And if there's one or two good applications in the iPad Pro with stylus support, maybe someone who isn't one of those people who makes albums at the end of every vacation day brings their iPad Pro with them and tries it once and sends out a nice thing.
John:
Like, that's all I'm talking about.
John:
It's small stakes, but...
John:
technology can sort of like lower the barrier to entry to the point where people who are never going to be serious about it still will like dabble for a second or two and find out, yeah, this still isn't for me, but hey, I made this cool thing out of it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I mean, that's the way exactly I feel now about the digital art before I never even considered ever, ever, ever trying to do anything digital.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And because this thing kind of appeared and Marco buys everything, so things appear.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So it all of a sudden piqued my interest into trying this medium that I've never would have tried before because I'm not going to go out and purchase a tablet and purchase, you know, this.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And even though I do have a tablet, we have one of those because we have everything.
Marco:
But we've had a Wacom tablet sitting in the closet for about five years.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Well, I tried it for photo editing.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It was awful for me.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And I'm not going to go out and get a program and learn it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But with this, it just feels so accessible and attainable to learn how to do at least a base level of this kind of thing.
Marco:
So iPad Pro Ultimate at-home iPad?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yes, at-home iPad.
Marco:
I would even say also, I said a little bit of this last week too, but my further time playing with it just reinforces this.
Marco:
I think it's the kind of thing where if you were already using an iPad for productivity kind of work, then this will probably be even better for you.
Marco:
If you were already doing email and documents and spreadsheets and stuff like that on an iPad before, then this will probably be an improvement.
Marco:
But it is kind of like a laptop in that way.
Marco:
If it has replaced your laptop, or if it has almost replaced your laptop already before you had an iPad Pro, then yeah, this is probably the device for you.
Marco:
Or if you have some of these nice creative uses, if you plan to use the pencil, if you could make use of such a thing...
Marco:
This is also going to be amazing for you.
Marco:
If you are currently using an iPad with a keyboard and you want a better, larger keyboard, this will probably be amazing for you as well.
Marco:
Although we don't have the keyboard, so we can't really say how good they are.
Marco:
Many people have covered that already.
Marco:
But if you're using your iPad primarily for content consumption...
Marco:
Or if you're like me and you can't quite figure out when to use your iPad for the most part, then it's more of a mixed bag.
Marco:
It's not a guarantee that this will be better for you.
Marco:
And it isn't a guarantee that you would be happy with it if you got it.
Marco:
So that is still up in the air.
Marco:
But I will say that for the things it is good at, like that pen input, it is so good that for me, as a longtime iPad skeptic and just kind of not having much use for my iPads...
Marco:
I want a reason to use it.
Marco:
I actually am motivated to try to use it and to try to get into it because using the pencil is just so damn fun.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I want to ask that to Casey, because if you're the guy here who says he does not do art stuff, right?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Am I correct?
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You said John does a little bit.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I know Marco does a little bit.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
He's a liar.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And, you know, I do.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But for you, does this intrigue you to start possibly playing around and seeing if you want to learn how to draw and to start that learning on the iPad?
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, I've only played with the pencil, like I said, for like a minute or two.
Marco:
It was not very much at all.
Marco:
And I thought it was neat, but it struck me as the sort of thing that I would think this is really neat for a week or two and that I'd probably never look at it again.
Marco:
Now, who knows?
Marco:
Maybe in that week or two, I would get bit by the art bug, if you will, and then I would never put it down.
Marco:
But my guess is I would think, ooh, shiny, ooh, neat for a week, maybe two, and then I would just never look back.
Marco:
I wish I could do it someone in the chat asked about Tiff how about photography work and I think this is worth touching on briefly would you use it for photography if so why if not why not
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I guess right now, not because the way I edit my photos, it's very, very heavy in Photoshop.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And I feel like just the power and the hardware that's needed to run the Photoshop that I like to run when I edit my photos is just not there on the iPad.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I could see it if it ended up
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
If they ended up translating that onto the iPad with the touch interface, it might be interesting to do.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But I don't know, the precision of some of the Photoshop actions that I do really probably would not translate that great.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And for me, I have to edit photos if anyone else is out there who is a photographer or edits photos.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
You know that if you use a different screen for editing your photos, not a screen that you have calibrated with a printer that you use or that you're used to working with, you can move photos from one device to another and the colors will be all wrong that you have worked correctly.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
on.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So you could sit and you could work on a picture for, you know, 20 minutes if you're dibble-dabbling it all over the place and putting filters on and taking them off like I do, like an insane person because I'm crazy.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But if you do that, you would have it on one device and you put it on another and then all of a sudden it's not what you wanted it to be, which that frustration exists when I give photos to clients and they don't have the right color, but I've found a way to fix that anyway.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But it just, it's not,
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Right now, it's not accessible on the level that I'm playing with here.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And I think that a lot of other people feel that too.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But if you're just doing, you know, you're moving some sliders around, which the majority of our family photos, that's all that it needs, then it is pretty accessible.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
But I don't like having my photos in two places.
John:
We actually have something in the show notes about that.
John:
There was this thing in Macworld about the display quality, the color accuracy of the iPad Pro versus the Surface Pro 4 and other things.
John:
And iPad Pro didn't come out that well in this test.
John:
There's no bad screens here.
John:
These are all good screens, but the Surface Pro 4 edged it out.
John:
I forget what the company is that does this, that tests all the displays.
Marco:
DisplayMate, I believe?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Historically, Apple has been weird with the displays because...
John:
it's you know they always say all their displays this is the most beautiful display you've ever put in a blah blah blah like they always say they're great they don't tend to differentiate but whenever anyone does any actual testing with the color meter some models of device have super accurate displays and some have not so accurate ones and it doesn't follow any particular lines like i think they were saying like the best screen apple had ever put on was like on one of the minis or something yeah the most recent ipad mini the mini 4
John:
yeah so they're all pretty good but you know but there there's enough variance that what tip is saying is surely it's not just like that you know even screens that are all equally good they can be different from each other if they're not calibrated but then some cases it's just like this screen can't display the same range of colors that that screen can so no amount of calibration is ever going to make them look the same same
Marco:
It's also interesting that they have the nice DCI-P3 10-bit screens on the new iMacs, but that didn't make it into the iPad Pro.
Marco:
I wonder, and as far as I know, I don't think iOS even supports 10-bit colors.
Marco:
That's probably one of the reasons why.
Marco:
But it'd be interesting to see if and when that gets added to iOS, because that could really help as well.
John:
Yeah, it's not the iMac Pro, but it's got the good screen.
John:
But the iPad Pro, not so much.
John:
I mean, obviously, there's different constraints for a handheld device.
John:
Like, who knows what the requirements are.
John:
You know, that extra little bit of color accuracy and the 10-bit range and everything, maybe that's just not feasible at all in a handheld battery-powered device yet.
Marco:
The extra gamut would be nice, though.
Marco:
But anyway.
Marco:
All right, any other questions for Tiff on iPad Pro?
Marco:
Just in general, sounds like thumbs up.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I really like it.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
And I think that I'm going to develop liking it even more because as I get better at the, you know, doing the digital art thing that I think, um, I think it's going to become more and more useful as a, another tool of hobby.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
I think, you know, it's not my profession at all.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So it's, it's very much a hobby tool, but it's, it's a pretty darn fun one.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Awesome.
Marco:
Well, thanks for coming on and sharing with us.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Yeah.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
Thanks for having me guys.
Marco:
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Marco:
All right, so there's more about the iPad Pro, I believe, or no?
John:
Well, we can talk about the USB thing, but that can stay until next week if we get more info about it.
John:
The bottom line is that the iPad Pro is definitely the device where you want to have a speedy way to shove stuff into it, and Apple has said that you're going to be able to do that with USB 3.0 speeds.
John:
is there really a lot of motion behind tethered over the cable transfer of files to ios devices these days i imagine it's all i imagine it's all cameras right like if you could connect your camera directly up to your well i guess you could do it wirelessly if you wanted but uh if you could connect your camera or some other card reader or thing directly to your ipad then you could go on the road with just the ipad and the camera and do some useful photography work
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
And I might use it for that.
Marco:
I mean, there are some trips where I bring my laptop now, like if I'm going to a conference, I bring my laptop, but I really don't usually need it for any kind of laptop-y function that I can't serve just as well by my phone or an iPad.
Marco:
um so you know i could see the value in having that um they've they've had ever since the first ipad they've sold the camera connection kit which uh has either been able to be an sd card reader or a usb port which you can use to plug in all sorts of crazy stuff you don't even think about but a surprising amount of driverless usb peripherals work on ipads with the camera connection kit
Marco:
And some even work on iPhones.
Marco:
But anyway, so I could see that being possible.
Marco:
But because the camera connection kit is a fairly rarely sold accessory, as far as I know, they've never seemed to put a whole lot of effort into the process and the capabilities of importing photos off a camera card into the Photos app on iPads.
Marco:
uh so i don't know how how well it would work in practice i have one so i guess i could try it maybe i'll report that next week on how it works um i also wouldn't expect it to do very well on my 42 megapixel raw files but we'll see about that well that's why usb3 speeds like because that's the big thing lightning port was previously not at those those speeds and it's kind of a pain if you have gigantic files and
John:
uh now with the ipad pro this port is is capable i don't know if the adapters are out yet or if they're not yet but anyway will be capable of usb3 uh speeds and so that'll really help i mean generally when it comes to like processing raw photos on something like an ipad the card is the limit
Marco:
No, I think the processing power of the device is the limit.
Marco:
Because when you're processing raw files, you have to do the reading and the JPEG conversion on device.
Marco:
It isn't already done for you.
Marco:
And the cameras all have these really specialized image processors to do it in a highly parallel, optimized way.
Marco:
the computers are doing it generally on the CPU entirely or maybe with some light GPU help.
Marco:
And it's a pretty slow process to do large raw imports.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that would be much more useful for JPEG shooters or even the raw plus JPEG weirdos like I was briefly.
Marco:
But for people shooting raw who want to do a couple of quick imports to show somebody or preview or post it to a social network,
John:
i it probably won't be useful for that but i i'd love to try and be proven wrong so maybe i'll try it i'll let you know well i mean if i mean there's there's two things there's the file transfer and then there's the raw conversion even just for display purposes so if you can make the part where it just copies the raw data directly off of the card and onto the ipad faster then it gives you more time to spend with your slower cpu doing the raw conversion for display
John:
anyway even it's not just for photography the idea the lighting this was an open question this is why i have this link in there back when the lighting port was made it's like lightning how fast will it go why did they not use usb why did they not change it to usbc is it even possible to do usb3 speeds over lightning oh no you can't because it doesn't have enough pins because the usb3 connector has more pins than the contacts that are on the lightning connector and this uh link in the show notes was from someone who did a lot of uh uh you know investigation into the
John:
uh it was this rainer brockerhoff's blog and he has come back to talk about the lack of pins and the decision that he uh came down to is that you don't need all the pins of a real usb thing because they have dedicated pins for the usb2 speeds and lightning doesn't have to do that because it can multiplex and i could say look if i'm not doing usb2 speeds use those two pins for something else um
John:
but we'll see i think people who are doing teardowns on the ipad pro said they found two new what looked like two new connectors inside there so maybe the adapters will have extra contacts i don't know how it'll work we'll have to wait till these adapters are introduced and if they're already out i just haven't seen them yet so there's some follow-up for next week all right thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week squarespace mail route and automatic and we'll see you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
NEW_SPEAKER_SPEAKER_01:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Marco:
I do very much want to talk Disney, but I think we're better off tonight talking about the iMac.
John:
Yeah, no, that's totally a different after show.
John:
All right.
John:
um so iMac this is not my computer to be clear this is not replacing my Mac Pro my good old 2008 Mac Pro is still here I'm speaking into it right now this is a replacement for my wife's 2011-ish uh MacBook Air which was uh getting long in the tooth and our photos couldn't fit in anymore so we had an external SSD but it was only Firewall 800 and that was part of the reason I thought photos might have been slow and anyway got a big fancy new iMac after hearing uh Marco report good things about his
John:
uh 27 inch retina iMac and this is the newer fancier model with the even nicer screen um and she had always said that she just wanted an iMac at home anyway uh even as she continually took the MacBook Air out of the room when I podcasted so she could still use her computer without being here but anyway she can still do that because we still have the MacBook Air it's just moved over to the other desk but she's using the iMac and liking it
John:
few things for me to report uh i never really spent any time with marcos i saw it but and the ones in the stores i've seen them but i haven't really spent any a lot of time with them um for mine i decided to not max out the ram uh i didn't do too much research into this but i just saw in the in the store configurator it said 16 gigs for like two dims and 32 gigs for four so i picked 16 figuring
John:
can't i just buy two more dims and uh and up it to 32 later if that's not true don't tell me until four years from now when i find out um i just don't want to know but i assume it's true but anyway 16 gigs should probably be fine um i got the biggest fastest gpu because whatever like i was convinced by that youtube video fingers crossed that this will actually not be a silly thing to do my kids can now play kids have finally now seen minecraft at non-disgusting frame rates and
John:
And I think I'm more impressed than they are, but I think at the same time they're never going to choose to play it on the MacBook Air ever again.
John:
I don't blame them.
John:
And I got the big terabyte SSD because I really want to fit everything on this thing instead of on my external drive, which I still have, but it's in an enclosure that takes FireWire 800.
John:
So I also had to, by the way, buy a Lightning Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter so I could connect my chain of FireWire 800 drives and enclosures and everything.
John:
which is fine i also have a usb3 hard drive that i can finally connect to an actual usb3 port um and that was one of the first things i noticed about this was i have a bus powered uh one terabyte like 2.5 inch uh usb3 drive i've had for a while and i decided i'm going to use this i was i'll use this as the clone drive for this you know one of my super duper clones um
John:
And I kept finding that when the Mac would go to sleep and wake back up, it would say, you know, this disc was not ejected properly, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like it was unmounting itself somewhere along the line.
John:
And that usually means that like it's being underpowered by the bus and it's just, you know, not able to maintain the connection.
John:
But then it comes back.
John:
I don't understand that because it's not connected to a hub.
John:
it's directly connected to the computer and i haven't ever had that problem at any other computers i've connected this to but then again i haven't had it connected to other computers for really long periods of time so i don't know if i have a broken drive if the ports in the back of the us of the new imac can't supply enough power for this thing uh whatever it is that kind of annoyed me but i'm willing to chalk that up to the flakiness of external peripherals and right now i'll i only connect it when i want to do a clone which is a reasonable solution i suppose although i have a whole other drive at the end of the firewire 100 chain to do a clone to
Marco:
If you want, I have an enclosure that I bought like three of them now.
Marco:
It's something like $12.
Marco:
It's a USB 3 single disc 2.5 inch enclosure.
Marco:
And it's, I had, one of them would do that exact same thing when it was on a really flaky USB hub that I used to have.
Marco:
But so far, this enclosure, two of them that I bought have been perfect.
Marco:
And for $12, it's been just as good as like the expensive ones I've gotten from like OWC and stuff in the past.
John:
Yeah, that's why I had direct connected.
John:
I never considered connected to a hub because I knew that wouldn't work.
John:
But even direct connected to the iMac, it was flaky.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Anyway, that's a peripheral issue.
John:
The main thing I noticed about this iMac off the bat is that the fan in all states is slightly noisier than I thought it would be.
John:
Of course.
John:
Really?
John:
Even in the most idle, like nothing is happening on the computer.
John:
I downloaded the utilities.
John:
It shows me the fan RPM, like the lowest possible RPM.
John:
I can still hear it more than I could hear the fan on the MacBook Air for two reasons.
John:
One, the MacBook Air was like back a little bit farther, like it was kind of behind the monitor and to the left.
John:
And two, when the MacBook Air fan is like doing nothing, it is really quiet.
John:
Now, the flip side of that is that you do anything to the MacBook Air, the fan goes up to super, you know, as fast as it can possibly go and sounds like a terrible, angry hairdryer, right?
John:
So on the iMac, you can do way more before the fan starts spinning up.
John:
So overall, it's probably a benefit.
John:
But every time I sit in front of the computer, I keep thinking, did I leave one of the hard drives on?
John:
Because I have so many freaking hard drives connected to this thing for all my different backups.
John:
And I don't leave them on all the time.
John:
Like, I actually unmount them and turn them off.
John:
and you know how like a hard drive that's on and spinning makes some noise a mechanical hard drive i keep thinking that i left one of the drives on but no it's just a stupid fan of this thing anyway it's not my computer it's fine uh it's probably still quieter than my 2008 mac pro although maybe not because my mac pro is on the ground and i don't really hear it but anyway that that is my one mild disappointment everything else about it is great screen looks great i don't even mind the weird thin edge i think it looks actually kind of cool because i do see it from the edge sometimes um
John:
uh for a while i kept thinking that the hinge was loose because it kept being tilted down but that's just my wife she keeps tilting it down then i use the computer and i tilt it up and she uses and she tilts it down so we're kind of we're kind of fighting over what the correct position is for the screen but we're obviously at different heights there um photos is faster it is much faster than it was when i was on my firepower 800 drive it is still slow and it's still weird and buggy when i when i brought the library over
John:
you know i had to copy it off my external drive that took forever and photos was really weird about it like i copied every single file over and photos was like i have 65 000 files to import i'm like no you don't they're all there and so i had to wait for like three days for it to convince itself that it had all the files oh and then at some point it was like you don't have enough disk space i'm like hell i don't have enough disk space i hope you know the
John:
i have plenty of this space i'm not even like a quarter filled on this terabyte drive so photos is weird and does weird things and scares me sometimes but in the end i just let it stew for a long time it was fine i still haven't removed my most recent backup of my old photos library so if this thing is lying to me i still have everything as of like you know when i got the new iMac but uh that was a little bit freaky um
John:
uh and boy copying the photo library in the finder that took so long and was so terrifying because there there are so many files involved with that and the finder gives you a little bit of information first of all the finder spends like a long time like maybe it was an hour maybe it was more than an hour preparing to copy yeah
John:
it's not going to copy it's preparing to copy it's got to count all the files and i don't know what it's doing and maybe it's pre-flighting to make sure the space is available it's like i should have just used the cp command just start copying things what do you like should use our sync for crying out loud you know because apple has flags and all these things they can
John:
make it copy all the metadata but i'm like no i have no idea what apple's doing with the photo library let me use the finder to do it it eventually did work remember i'm copying from ssd to ssd here so it's you know it's fire it's firewire 800 to internal ssd it's not as if i'm waiting for a spinning disk to send the heads all over the place seeking all over anyway that was terrifying and it eventually did work um
John:
so yeah uh so far so good oh no the final thing i didn't even put this in here i spent like three days fighting with this damn computer i felt like i was going back in time to os 10 time machine and spotlight were just not happy time machine seemed happy in the beginning because it's like oh you know i i named my computer the same as it was before i did migration assistant it's like
John:
i told it to use this disk for time machine it's like do you want me to inherit the backups from the previous thing and i did because like basically that was you know i i copied the whole hard drive over there yes please inherit the backup so i don't lose all my previous versions and so it starts backing up to this thing and i told it to do that and i noticed that like
John:
spotlight and time machine were just not ever finishing what they're supposed to be doing spotlight was always you know seemingly indexing and the console was filling up with tons of like md worker errors and stuff like that and time machine would never actually complete a backup ever ever ever after several days of this i spent a long time staring at the console and googling for things and finding all these weird obscure errors and people were like oh just nuke your spotlight uh store and you know i did all the things you can imagine doing with md util like
John:
totally removing the thing disabling spotlight trying to let spotlight go first trying to let time machine go first i don't know what their problem was but they were totally wedged and neither one of them spotlight indexing were not complete and time machine were not complete and that was very frustrating because i really can't basically sign off on the computer as ready for use until time machine is running i don't really care that much about spotlight so i spent many days fighting with that and googling
John:
and eventually got the thing to go through what the hell was i don't even remember what the problem was is one of those things where it's not like there was no aha moment i you know if if you like google for all these error messages you find a million hits on apple's discussion boards of people with the same problem sometimes they're benign sometimes people say oh this totally fixed it for me nothing i found helped me fix it eventually i just had to go to the old school kind of debugging where i'm using like lsof and stuff to figure out who the hell has these files open and
John:
And are they files that I can either delete or recopy?
John:
One of the solutions involved me deleting my old user account that I had in that machine because Spotlight isn't just indexing the files of the logged in user.
John:
It's indexing the files owned by all the different users at the same time.
John:
And some of the console errors you're seeing are not actually from the account you're logged into.
John:
And like one of the solutions is like, oh, make sure you log into every account, update the iCloud stuff.
John:
And I did that.
John:
It didn't help.
John:
Like, boy, it was one of those debugging problems where every solution you find, you get excited that this is going to be the thing to fix it.
John:
And it doesn't.
John:
but i did them all but anyway i deleted my account from there which took with it a lot of files that apparently of the various spotlight uh metadata demon import things like md worker and mds were choking on badly and that let it progress and eventually spotlight indexed and when spotlight index time machine worked uh and i just made me think that like there's no way in hell that anybody could have successfully fixed this if they didn't have the uh
John:
if they weren't the type of person who's willing to spend literally three days just googling and cursing and googling and cursing um nice and part of it is probably because like you know this is i've used migration assistant and it's like an old account that maybe like had a bunch of weird crufty things in it from a long time ago but
John:
uh you know people are gonna say yeah see you should have just done a clean install this is the first time migration assistant has steered me wrong um and really i just blame either spotlight or time machine or both for just not being more robust fine there are files in the file system that are weird that you can't import that are causing md worker to crash just just move on just you know power through it like then don't index those but if and i don't even understand why spotlight and time machines seem to wedge each other in this way because time machines should work without spotlight and vice versa but
John:
Apparently they did.
John:
So that was a bad sort of first couple of days experience, but eventually we did get into a steady state and now I have my umpteen backup.
John:
So I had to finally expand my backups on my Synology, which by the way was nice and easy because I just got to add, you know, they don't have, it's not like Drobo where you can just add another drive to the thing, but I just converted from raid one to raid five.
John:
And so from two discs to three, and so got more space and that all worked out.
Yeah.
Marco:
So for the fan noise thing, going back to that for a second, because my iMac is almost inaudible.
Marco:
And TIFF's the same.
Marco:
It's almost inaudible when it's not doing that much.
Marco:
And really, under any load except a sustained heavy load.
Marco:
If I open up Handbrake...
Marco:
or if TIFF has a game running, then you will hear the fans.
Marco:
But at every other time, I don't hear the fans at all.
Marco:
So I'm curious.
Marco:
Now, of course, if you had something like iStatMenus installed... I did.
John:
I installed the thing to see the RPM.
John:
It was like at 1,200 RPM, I can hear it.
Marco:
okay that's because that's i was gonna say mine is idling at 1200 and it's not loud like it's not a loud fan it's just not inaudible you know what i mean i'm surprised i mean you know in a room that that includes a mac pro because one thing we noticed like tiff and i went from two mac pros to two iMacs
Marco:
And when you would turn off the iMac or the Mac Pro, leaving the iMac behind, it was clear as day.
Marco:
Like when we had one and one for like a day or two, the difference was clear as day.
Marco:
Like that the Mac Pro was so, which we always thought was quiet, relatively speaking, but it so easily would mask the noise of the iMac.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, well, my Mac Pro is asleep most of the time.
John:
The closest thing to the iMac is the PS4, but that's also asleep unless someone's playing it.
John:
But really, I can only hear the iMac when I'm sitting in front of it, but that's when it annoys me.
John:
Like, what is that sound?
John:
Oh, it's the stupid iMac.
John:
Again, not loud at all, but I just feel like it should... Like, the MacBook Air was literally inaudible when the computer was idle.
John:
And if you could hear it at all, then it was like crash plan was grinding into the background or doing something like that.
John:
And this is close to an audible, but not.
John:
And so it's not that big of a deal, but it would be nice if it just like they just need to put an even bigger lower RPM fan in there.
John:
It's not like you don't have room.
John:
Plenty of space to spread out.
John:
Big, lazy fan blades turning it like, you know, 100 RPM.
John:
Go for it.
John:
nope you can't have it because you just said that you like the thin edge because you see it from the side sometimes that's what that's why we can't have nice things john that's why we can't have big quiet fans even with the thin edge there's enough room for like a frisbee in there it's not like it doesn't get thin this is a big honking screen oh yeah and speaking of that so like her computer was always the one that we had not sleeping because it was plugged into ac all the time and i always wanted to have one computer that's awake all the time the synology took over a lot of that role but her computer was always awake um
John:
uh and with the imac it was weird to see an os 10 i don't know if this is a new development because i haven't had imacs for a while like with a built-in screen computer there's not separate settings for display sleep and computer sleep there's one setting that says do you want me to prevent the computer from going to sleep when the display sleeps and there's one slider that says when should the display go to sleep i would like to say display go to sleep 10 minutes computer go to sleep one hour like you used to back in the olden days and how i can on my mac or my mac pro rather
John:
uh but you can't all you got is the check box and um i need to just look into the plist settings and just change this the way i want it um you can also you can set a hot corner to do immediate display sleep yeah yeah and and then you just have to dial to i know it's just like i'm used to the sliders the way they used to be and i've also noticed some spooky behavior where occasionally like you leave the computer no one's touching it no one's doing anything
John:
Uh, and the display will go off and whether it's sleeping or not, you'll come back a little bit later and the display will be on.
John:
And I've been sitting in the room when it's happened.
John:
I've been like playing destiny.
John:
I look over and the screen turns.
John:
I'm like, why are you turning on?
John:
And you know, wake for network access is off.
John:
No weird USB hubs are attached.
John:
The console doesn't say anything about what the thing is.
John:
It's like, did you wake up or did the screen?
John:
And sometimes the screen just won't go, you know, the interval will go by 15 minutes will go by and the screen won't go off.
John:
So I've got my eye on it on sleep issues.
John:
Like I don't, I don't care because it's basically on all the time anyway, but I don't know what's going on over there.
Marco:
for whatever it's worth i i know the issue you're talking about i've seen that in the past on other computers um but i have never seen that on either of our imacs um so it i don't think it's a it's an issue with the imac i think it's an issue with probably some you know maybe it's that weird usb uh device that you know maybe it's maybe it's a flaky enclosure the plug is that thing is unplugged now so that's not a factor anymore um
John:
Maybe it's the FireWire?
John:
No, the FireWire stuff's powered off.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I gotta figure out how to make this thing happen.
John:
I haven't seen it happen too much.
John:
It just happened once or twice.
John:
And I think one morning my wife came down and said, why was the computer screen on?
John:
So maybe it was on all night.
John:
Anyway, it's behaving now.
John:
It's full of windows.
John:
We'll see if it just...
John:
That's her computer.
Marco:
It can't sleep.
Marco:
It's like when you eat a bunch of chili and go to bed when you're like 35.
Marco:
Your computer has so many windows it just can't go to sleep.
John:
It's not my computer.
John:
It's her computer.
John:
It doesn't have that many things on it.
John:
It's only 50.
John:
She uses some windows.
John:
There's one other thing with the iMac that I can't remember.
John:
Oh, this is when it came time to order this.
John:
And I was going through the order configuration thing.
John:
I asked my wife if she wanted which mouse she wanted or if she wanted to try the magic trackpad.
John:
And to my surprise, she said she wanted to try the magic trackpad because she already had a mouse that she liked.
John:
um and we got the extended keyboard which is still in the box because she likes that keyboard and she's just using her old one so we have an extra now but anyway she picked the magic trackpad and not for me still like as magic as it may be i still use the mouse i'm i'm just not going to be a trackpad person um
John:
so far it remains to be seen if she will make the transition she's been trying it and messing around with it but i think if i look over there now i think the mouse is still next to the keyboard so i think she like pulls the the magic tripod down and uses it and i don't know i could tell when she uses it because i do that talk talk talk of the of the magic tripod that sounds different than the mouse but anyway there's one in the house now um and she was curious enough to try it but i don't know if it'll stick