Control + Money + Smallness
Marco:
You are always sick.
Marco:
Here's how I know that I'm going to be sick.
Marco:
Adam is in school, and it's the winter.
Marco:
Therefore, we are sick.
John:
How do you pronounce this person's name?
John:
You both know this person, right?
John:
Andreas Netzman.
John:
It was one of the many people who wrote in to tell us that apparently iMacs no longer have IR sensors since around 2012.
John:
So the people suggesting that perhaps my shiny new 5K iMac was getting woken from sleep by IR, apparently that's not happening because there is no sensor.
John:
So that's kind of good to know.
Marco:
In other words, this ancient history is that iMacs have not had IR sensors since four years after your Mac Pro was made that you're still using every day.
John:
still working just fine i'm wondering at this point i'm wondering if i can make it 10 years but i don't know i don't want to apple just make an external 5k display for crying out loud you'll make it we'll see because they're they're not going to make the computer you want ever and so you're just going to keep holding on
Marco:
Sure they will.
John:
I just need an external 5K display and a computer that can drive it.
John:
And they're not going to make the display with no computer that can drive it.
John:
And they're not going to make a computer that can drive it with no display.
John:
So it'll happen.
Marco:
The computer that drives it is going to not have the right kind of gaming card for you and configure it's going to be way too expensive.
John:
No, it's not going to be the right, right kind, but it will be acceptable.
John:
It will be way faster than everything else I have, including the one that's built into the iMac.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Did I tell you guys that I saw I'm working out of a client's office for the last month or so and will be for a while?
Casey:
You know, as working for a client goes, it's pretty good.
Casey:
But it's still kind of weird doing the staff org thing, which is not what I'm used to doing.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
Wait, wait, wait.
Marco:
The what?
Marco:
The staff org thing?
Marco:
What does that mean?
John:
John?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
Really?
John:
This is the consultant language you're speaking now.
John:
I never did consulting.
John:
Is this a Virginia thing?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
It's not a Virginia thing.
Casey:
It's a consulting thing.
Casey:
Staff augmentation.
John:
So generally speaking, the work I do... Oh, I would have got that if you had pronounced it like a New Yorker.
John:
I was like, staff aug?
John:
Is it like aug vorbis?
John:
Yeah, I thought OG.
John:
Yeah, but you're hanging out with Tiffanoff.
John:
You should know it was staff aug.
John:
It was Staff Org.
John:
You were doing Staff Org?
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So, Staff Org.
Casey:
My clock is ticking like this.
Marco:
You know, just as a random guess here, I'm guessing that nobody who has a New York accent thick enough to notice like that would ever say Staff Org.
Marco:
Like, just the phrase.
Marco:
Would never use that phrase.
Marco:
They'd say it.
Marco:
There's no overlap between the population who would say that phrase and people who would have that accent.
John:
No, people are... There are consultants on Long Island, too.
John:
I got no more use for this guy.
Casey:
So anyway, so I'm doing staff log.
Casey:
And basically what that means is rather than having a group of my coworkers that is working to build a project as a group, often in concert with the client, you know, we prefer to do it in concert with the client, but it's a group of us.
Casey:
This, by comparison, is basically I get kicked in the butt over to a client's office and said, come back in a few months when the client doesn't want to pay for your time anymore.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Um, I look around me and you know what I see all over this office?
Casey:
Cinema displays everywhere drives me insane.
Casey:
I want one so badly, even though I know there's much better displays to be had, but I've always just thought they were so pretty and, and beautiful.
Casey:
And they have like a quasi docking station and I want one so bad.
Casey:
And they're everywhere.
Casey:
Oh,
Casey:
Makes me sad, you guys.
Marco:
Just think, if you had one, you could plug in all of your FireWire 400 devices.
Casey:
I know, right?
Casey:
It would be delightful.
Casey:
No, I am jealous of it.
Casey:
I'd love to have the Ethernet hanging off there, my mic set up at home hanging off of there.
Casey:
A man can dream.
Casey:
But yeah, so here I am using my Dell with all of these cinema displays and MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs all around me.
John:
You feel like a real consultant then, right?
Marco:
If only you had two or three Mac laptops that you could bring one to your client side.
Casey:
Well, and that's what I do.
Casey:
I bring my work laptop so I can get work email and talk on work IM, etc., etc.
Casey:
But it's depressing.
It's sad.
Marco:
Well, it would be more depressing if you really were tied to the idea of listening to your headphones on your iPhone while you were working and charging it at the same time, which might not be possible next year.
Casey:
You're jumping ahead.
Casey:
You're jumping ahead.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have more follow-up, though.
Casey:
I derailed us, and then you tried to move the train forward.
Casey:
Let's get back on the tracks.
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
there's not not too much follow-up so derail is fine there um this is from sebastian kraus cruz lots of german names today uh was trying to tell us about a little bit of the history behind mdns responder and discovery d and all that stuff this story is told in a video that is in german so we're getting this translated for us so we'll put a link to the video in the show notes if you understand german you can watch it but anyway we're taking this person's word for it on the translation
John:
uh apparently the story is about vince surf uh the father of the internet you can read his wikipedia page if you want to learn all about him and darpa and tcpip and all that good stuff anyway he was at an ietf meeting internet engineering task force meeting and it was fed up that his printer wasn't working anymore so he called up tim cook which is a thing you can do when you're vince surf apparently and you're pissed off about your printer not working and tim cook then talked to stewart cheshire who's the guy who invented bonjour formerly known as rendezvous and a
John:
And told him to investigate.
John:
And eventually, they're the ones who supposedly came up with the idea of let's just take out a Discovery D input MDNS responder and see if that fixes the problem.
John:
So this is the possibly apocryphal story of one possible contributing factor to why did Apple...
John:
uh why did apple know what what did it take for apple to take action and actually fix this problem once and for all and this story i always find stories like this depressing if there's even any bit of truth to them is like well apple didn't care until vince surf uh called tim cook and that's how the message actually got to the top that there was a problem i really don't like to believe that those things are true but it does make for a funny story
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's plausible.
Marco:
Based on Apple's apparent reaction to, you know, all of a sudden there's a problem and Apple knows about it suddenly, but we've all known about it for years.
Marco:
It kind of does seem like whatever system is supposed to inform the high-ups...
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
big companies are all like that to some degree it's just that you know it's the uh the fantasy scenario that that you have as a child that follows many people into adulthood that it that like somewhere in the world there are the grown-up people who know what they're doing and like when you become an adult most people think you realize oh that's not actually the case now i'm an adult and i realize no one knows what they're doing right
John:
But we hold on to a little bit of that, especially for the things that we admire.
John:
Like, okay, my company doesn't know what it's doing.
John:
The higher-ups in my company have no clue, and my company is dysfunctional, but surely the richest company in the world, the most successful technology company in the world, got that way because they're better than my crappy company.
John:
So even though I understand that, yes, no one knows what they're doing, and there's no people somewhere who are like...
John:
in charge and actually understand things um surely apple is at least a little bit different but i mean apple is a big company just like any other big company and it's really difficult to organize a big company in a way that doesn't incentivize people in management layers below the top to hide bad news from the people about them because they get rated and judged by how well they're doing and in like it's it's it's in everyone's best interest to some degree to
John:
Not fully to not convey that losslessly up the management chain.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's why like the Sebastian wrote in is basically described this as a fix from the top down where you would hope that there's lots of other people talking to lots of other customers and stuff about problems and doing the leaf nodes of the org chart.
John:
doing all sorts of things involving customers gathering information so on and so forth but that information has to go up up up the chain and the more levels it has to go through the more likely it is to be toned down or reprioritized or whatever until by the time it gets to the top something that is a real problem for most end users that the leaf nodes know about by the time it gets to the top
John:
doesn't seem like that big of a deal so it has to come you know and the other thing is just human nature the people at the top maybe vint surf was not annoyed by discovery do you say he was annoyed by some other thing that just happened to annoy him that might have gotten fixed and that just would have been vint surf's problem so he would have bypassed the entire organization to get a thing that isn't a problem for most other people fixed and he would be happy and so in some respects the organization is working to try to prioritize things to tell tim cook what's really important in this case it just so happened that
John:
The top-down, you know, celebrity-based fixing also happened to hit on the thing that was a problem for a lot of other people.
John:
So, I don't know.
John:
Anyway, companies are messed up.
John:
Good talk.
John:
Well, you know, like, I mean, Casey, since Marco had a little bit of experience with big companies, I think Casey, having worked in or consulted for big companies, at the very least, have you seen some of this going on where the lower you get in the org chart, the more people really know what's going on?
Casey:
Oh, God, yes.
Casey:
And not at the company I'm consulting with now, but I think we talked about it on the show like two years ago.
Casey:
But there was a large firm in Richmond that I did some consulting for.
Casey:
And it was abundantly obvious to me that most of the organization was middle management.
Casey:
And most of the organization, really all these middle managers, really knew deep down that they were all redundant.
Casey:
And so every meeting you were in, everyone wanted to be included and everyone wanted to say something really, really interesting.
Casey:
So everyone around them knew, oh, Susie isn't expendable because Susie just said something smart.
Casey:
John or Bob.
Casey:
Sorry, Bob.
Casey:
He's expendable because he didn't really say anything this meeting.
Casey:
And it was just ridiculous because it was a billion middle managers and like seven actual grunts who actually got work done.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
John:
Yeah, the tipster in the chat room points out the story about John Mayer, the musician, famously emailing bugs in Logic directly to Steve Jobs.
John:
And then they got fixed.
John:
You get an email.
John:
The Logic team will get an email that says, fix this, Steve.
John:
And that's like the worst way to do this, by the way.
John:
Like to have a famous person...
John:
go to the very top of your organization and have the person at the top of your organization highly motivated to satisfy the famous person because sometimes the famous person will find a legit bug that everyone has experienced but a lot of time the famous person will just be annoyed by some minor issue and why do they get this special treatment like they may be
John:
you know reshaping the application in a bad way for most people just to satisfy john mayer so this is not a scalable system i'm not i'm not saying like the way it works now with the leaf nodes not message not getting up as bad and this is better um really you don't want either one of those things you want
John:
a an efficient organization that correctly communicates what's really happening to your customers and how they really feel about your product up the management chain without diluting it in a way to protect your the reputation of your group or whatever it is that you're doing as a manager to try to say well this wasn't our fault and this isn't that big of a problem and everything we made in this last release is going really well so give me a good rating and a big bonus this year
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity.
John:
And rather than a regular sponsor read, they asked John to review One Last Toaster.
John:
So remember when I said I found that toaster in my garage, I didn't realize I had the monstrosity with like the big griddle on top of it and all that other stuff.
John:
Since I didn't realize I had that toaster, at some point during the year, you could ask the question that we always ask is like, do you have a toaster for this week?
John:
And I'd be like, no, I don't have a toaster.
John:
And then they would rush one out to me and I would get a toaster.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so basically somewhere their count got off.
John:
So a toaster arrived for this week, but I already had toaster.
John:
So now I have two toasters for this week.
John:
And there's no sense in saving one of them because this is the last week.
John:
So this is going to be a double toaster review.
John:
Yes, this is exciting.
John:
Lucky, lucky you.
John:
The first toaster is the Americana Collection 3-in-1 Mini Breakfast Shop.
John:
Shop with two Ps and an E. This is model EBK-200BL.
John:
and if you look at it it looks a lot like the crazy one from the last time the red thing where it's got it's like a toaster oven it's got a little tiny uh coffee pot drip coffee pot thing and on top of the toaster it's got a little thing that gets hot where you can in theory cook some eggs or something
John:
all right uh the last one remember i said that the coffee thing even though the picture you're picturing it like it's a regular drip coffee thing really it's like tiny and doll size this one my daughter actually said in the kitchen she walked up and said that looks like it's for a doll this thing is microscopic it is incredibly incredibly small obviously the coffee thing is tiny but then look at the toaster part i mean i guess you can look at the measurements and try to get an idea for it but here's the best way i can describe it to our audience the tray that slides inside the toaster is smaller than the magic trackpad too
John:
can you even fit one piece of bread on there you can fit one piece of bread on there if it's not too big so you can't do two wow yeah so this is very similar to the old one i didn't know there was such a market for these three-in-one things so similar like so the coffee thing looks like it's might even be using some of the same parts that one still does its job you can put water in there and heats it up pretty quickly it dips drips through the filter into the thing if you like drip coffee this is you know this is a drip coffee thing it doesn't take too long to boil the water
John:
uh it's got the same type of thing where the top dial decides what heating elements will be on and the bottom one is just a plain timer they don't even bother with little pictures of light medium and dark toast they're just like look it's just a timer just turn it good luck they don't give you any guidance there um and it's good thing they don't give you any guidance because trying to toast a piece of toast in there
John:
at around five minutes and 50 seconds i gave up not being able to see any real color on the top of the toast and i took it out and the bottom was overdone practically black in the middle like uneven and the top had no color on it at all and that's after almost six minutes so as a toaster it fails to toast even though you only put one piece of bread in there it fails to toast it there is no adjustable rack by the way so i was thinking maybe why is it burning on the bottom and not cooked on the top maybe i can move the rack up but the rack doesn't adjust
John:
the top thing instead of having a full-size griddle it has a little circular tin same problem as before it just doesn't it doesn't get hot enough or doesn't like i think the real problem is doesn't have enough thermal mass like it's it's just a thin piece of metal so that when you put the egg on it it just sucks all the heat out of the thing and the heating elements don't have enough to like keep up like i think basically the griddle acts as a heat sink for the heating elements dissipating their heat but not into the egg and
John:
so i was able to go and you can really only put one egg in there like it's practically the size of a poached egg thing all right so i was able to cook one fried egg and i have to say it did a better job than the previous one and at least that one egg i was able to cook it and it came out as like an actual egg like it cooked enough to to stay together and let me flip it over and everything so but really nobody should ever buy this or the other thing
John:
It's not good at anything that it does.
John:
Please just do not.
John:
It is adorable though.
John:
As it's been sitting in the kitchen, this one, even more than the red one, it looks, it looks adorable.
John:
It looks like doll furniture.
John:
It looks like you have an easy bake oven on your couch.
John:
It looks like one of your kids toys is in there, but, but it really works sort of.
Marco:
Well, yeah, it's a, it's a very degrees of work.
Marco:
I wish you could try the coffee.
John:
Well, it's just it's just a drip.
John:
It's like I got a filter in there comes with a filter.
John:
It makes the water hot.
John:
It runs it through the filter drips into the little thing like that.
John:
I don't see how the machine itself could affect the quality of the coffee coming out of it because it really is the most primitive thing you can imagine.
John:
It's all just plastic parts inside.
John:
There is nothing fancy.
John:
it is not i mean look at the price what is this this is like 35 yeah 35 so you've gotten what you're paying for there so i think the main market for this would be uh hollywood prop buyers who want to put something in the background of a scene scene in like a cute uh kitchen apartment in like manhattan or something
John:
Because it's cute.
Marco:
And I really do wonder.
Marco:
Obviously, there's a market for these because so many are for sale.
Marco:
But I just have to wonder who is buying them.
Marco:
Suckers.
Marco:
People who think, isn't that great?
John:
It's a great way to save counter space.
John:
I have three things all in one place.
John:
And again, the same problems.
John:
Who wants to cook on top of your toaster oven?
John:
Your toaster ovens are usually underneath their overhead cabinets above it.
John:
And then you're making hot steam going to the bottom of your cabinets.
John:
It's just not a good idea.
John:
Even if it worked, it wouldn't be a good idea.
John:
And it just does...
Marco:
like seriously can't even toast one slice of bread in six minutes forget it the best thing is this has a four-star average review on amazon with 240 reviews how it has to be paid for i don't know maybe they just don't know how these things are supposed to operate everything's smaller than expected but works as promised verified purchase the toaster oven was probably the biggest negative it is only wide enough to fit one slice of break
John:
That is true.
John:
And it won't toast it after six minutes.
Marco:
Fortunately, there is a top burner and a bottom burner so you can stack two pieces of bread on top of each other and flip them in the middle of cooking.
Casey:
Oh my god.
John:
No, you can't.
John:
Please.
John:
Why not just hold your bread over a match and just move it around?
Casey:
It's cool.
Casey:
I can actually take this with me when I'm on the road to set up in the hotels I stay in.
John:
the things like the drip coffee maker they have in hotels is better than this yeah like and those are terrible and that would be better than this yeah because at least it's like sturdy and doesn't fall apart because that you have to be in a hotel room and hold some more coffee oh man wow all right anyway the second one let's let's try to you know bring this back from the insanity of these multi-function device second one is just a legit toaster oven this is the kitchenaid 12 inch convection bake digital countertop oven model kc02
John:
uh put the url this one in the chat room for everybody oh this is a high priced one this is 187 dollars yeah this is a fancy toaster oven we're back to normal looking things the first thing you have to know about this is it's really big i know they all look the same size on amazon i have a pretty big toaster the breville 650 xl this is really big it's like the bigger breville
John:
It's so big that I think it really is beyond what is reasonable for most people's kitchens.
John:
If you have a really, really big house, this will be to scale.
John:
It's kind of like when you have a big room, you have to put a big sofa in it.
John:
For interior design, you have to scale the furniture to the room.
John:
Unfortunately, I like to scale the furniture to the people, but no matter how big you are, if you have a really small room and you put a gigantic puffy leather sofa in it, it will overwhelm the room.
John:
Similarly, if you have a cavernous room and you want to put this delicate little sofa in it,
John:
It won't quite look right.
John:
So anyway, this is a big toaster oven.
John:
So do not buy this unless you have a really big kitchen or you really want to dedicate that much space to it.
John:
It's tall, it's wide, it's deep, it's humongous.
John:
When I put this on my counter, since I have narrow New England ancient countertops,
John:
opening the door practically that's it there's no more counter space left like there's a toaster i can open the door and i don't remember if the door overhangs the edge of my counter but it's close this thing is huge um it's stainless steel just like in the picture that is actual stainless steel not plastic colored stainless steel very sturdy construction i think even the handle is stainless steel which occasionally the handle will be like plastic for like insulation and
John:
it feels rugged it feels you know it looks nice and glossy everything feels thick the the wire rack feels incredibly rugged thick gauge wire it's actually have this little metal strip on the front of it everything is very solid the door feels solid it opens and closes solidly it's got the little not little rubber stoppers big rubber stoppers on it the the spring tension is just right doesn't doesn't wobble doesn't creak three positions for the rack uh
John:
uh and they have little instructions for another thing about where they where the where the different positions are for there's five heating elements four of those thin resistive style ones plus one of the thicker quartz style ones on the top in the middle it has a huge thick cord like one of those like for a power tool like your you know you know uh makita drill or something like a big three-pronged cord with a very thick cable and the big connector
John:
And I don't know why these guys do this, because don't they know it has to go in the kitchen?
John:
Like, where do they think people are plugging in their toaster ovens?
John:
Like, you're going to put it on your counter, and then you're going to plug it in, and the plug is going to be just above your counter, right?
John:
The plug sticks out, like, three inches from the place where you plug it in, because it's a huge three-pronged connector, right?
John:
It's not... They need to make flush-mount plugs.
John:
You know how they, you know, those little adapters they sell for them?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
You have to make it.
John:
Like, even if the plug isn't right behind the toaster, because if it was, the toaster would be six inches away from the wall.
John:
Even if it's not at right side, who wants to see this big, thick, like, hard-to-manage...
John:
You know, maybe the cord has to be that thick for the power requirements, but make a flat mount plug, people.
John:
I don't know what the hell they're doing.
John:
Let's see.
John:
The controls on this one, if you look at it, are very similar to my Breville.
John:
I don't know who copied who.
John:
Obviously, I had my Breville first, so I'm thinking, oh, they copied the Breville's control.
John:
Who knows who copied this first?
John:
But anyway, there is an LCD on top, a backlit LCD on top, showing you temperatures, timers, countdowns, the same type of controls where you get to pick a temperature and like a, you know, a number of slices or whatever.
John:
the there's two knobs the first one is the function knob for all the different things you can do like you know toast bake and it has things for reheat and bagel that does like you know different temperatures during different phases like for example the bagel will do a lower temperature to toast it and then towards the end it'll do the top elements only really high but
John:
to toast the tops of the bagel assume it's assuming you have a bagel it's been sliced in half you know stuff like that lots of different functions in fact more functions than the breville for all sorts of different things this is also a convection oven by the way which is one of the reasons it's so freaking huge because they got to fit all the convection fans in there so there are function settings for convection type baking too where they'll try to bake a whole chicken and keep the air flowing and then crisp up the skin at the end and everything
John:
And then the knob below it is the control knob, which really is just kind of like the control knob in your BMWs or whatever, where you just press it to select and turn to go up and down selections in a menu.
John:
The knobs themselves, they are not as wobbly as they are on the Breville.
John:
They're still plastic, but they're not as wobbly.
John:
They don't have as much slop.
John:
They're not made to look like fake metal, which helps.
John:
they're nicer materials than the breville ones they're not like shiny plastic they're kind of like textured they're still a little bit gritty they're not the best feeling knobs but they're they're better than the breville ones so they're pretty good since the function knob on the bottom really should just be a disc because it's like turn left turn right to go through a series of options and press in it's weird that it has like a a flathead screwdriver type like indentation they want you to pinch it because there's it just spins around forever like there's no
John:
there's no markings or anything it's really just a jog dial basically and it's weird for a jog dial to have a part where you can grab it because then it's like when you're done with it where do you leave it do you leave it pointing up do you like anytime you turn it it might change a number on the screen so that's a little bit weird but i think it just did it for symmetry and then it's got a start button on the bottom it's got a little button for frozen things what is that other button for i can remember off the top of my head oh and the convection button to turn convection on and off
John:
so the knob feels good so so like i said higher quality than than my breville and they don't feel like they're shaking they're about to come off and they're not fake looking like supposed to look like metal but it's really plastic but i think the decision to make the jog dial look positional when it's not really it's a little bit off plus you have to press it as a button it's weird to press a button that's you know that's like a dial that you can pinch um
John:
toast time four minutes and 30 seconds for a piece of toast not great the bread bowl is a little bit faster but this thing's cavernous like you'd be lucky it doesn't take eight minutes uh and it did a pretty decent job of toasting the convection features i didn't have an opportunity to test because i didn't have anything that you would cook in convection but it has like a cookie setting and stuff so i think you could actually use this as a miniature oven you didn't have an entire chicken to put in there like it's depicted in one of these pictures that's a tiny
John:
chicken like this is not as tall as the super tall one was so there isn't that much you know i was still treated as a toaster oven not as a place you're like that remember the one that had the probe built in that you could that could probably fit a bigger chicken so to categorize this i would say this is most similar to the big breville which i've never tested by the way and so i assume it's okay because i have a small breville and people who have the big breville say it's good but it seems similar in terms of it feels sturdy it looks nice it does the job it's supposed to do it has enough heating elements to heat up that big interior
John:
uh and i guess if you want to use it as an oven it'll work fine too i think the best the things to recommend this the most are the things that i like most about my breville i like seeing immediately when i press the start button how long it thinks it's going to take because it'll you know as soon as you put the pieces of toast in there you say how many pieces of toast and what level of darkness which is a number that you can pick three four five six seven you just learn whatever darkness you like
John:
and then you press the start button and it will tell you it'll start counting down from four minutes and 20 seconds or whatever and then when you put it in the second round of bread if someone else wants toast it will start counting down from three minutes and 30 seconds because the thing has heated up right you know how long it's going to take you get to see a countdown it's easy to adjust because the
John:
they get they get around the whole problem of trying to do the darkness adjustment because it's a number on a screen and really you're just using a control to adjust the screen the screen really helps because then you can do countdowns and show words and numbers up there it's not like a full bitmap display it's a you know a bunch of seven segment things and a bunch of other things but it makes a big difference the little frozen button is surprisingly useful it's kind of like that little bit more button that some of the toasters have where
John:
You're like, I'm going to toast bread, but actually this bread is straight out of the freezer.
John:
So put it on the same toast setting you always want, but then hit the little snowflake button and it will just add a little bit more to get it defrosted before it goes into the toast cycle.
John:
So overall, if you want a really big toaster and considering I haven't tested the really big Breville, this is the best really big toaster I've ever tried.
John:
It is a solid quality product.
John:
It does all the jobs it's supposed to do.
John:
If you, as they say, if you have the space, I can recommend it.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
So if you have the means, you highly suggest picking one up?
John:
Yeah.
John:
No, it is a quality product.
Casey:
That's a reference.
John:
Since this is the last one.
John:
I know.
John:
I was making that reference.
John:
Since this is the last one of these we're doing, a lot of people have asked about the Sweet Homes toaster reviews.
John:
their number one pick was one of the toasters that i did review uh a while back it was the panasonic the really tall panasonic one that was really really fast um and people are asking what do you think of their reviews they do actual product reviews not joke ad product review things so go read their reviews they actually test them they put a million pieces of bread into all these things my criteria may be different than theirs but i'm not doing the kind of testing they're doing so please read their review if you really care about toasters um
John:
now that said having used the one they picked as a top pick the reason i don't like it is because i think the ui is weird and i think it's oddly shaped but it does toast things really fast and really efficiently and does a good job on them but for my purposes i want to be able to put four slices of bread in there or a whole tray full of english muffin pizzas or something and
John:
uh and they just won't fit in the toaster because it's just not big enough and so it doesn't fulfill any of the ui is just crazy with the membrane buttons and all the different functions the the breville interface and this interface are just way better but that matters less to them in their rating they're mostly saying what when the bread comes out how does it look and how does it taste uh and that toaster that panasonic toaster toast bread really fast and does a good job on it so i don't disagree or agree with their ratings i just know what i want out of my toasters and that's that's what i'm reviewing syracusa toast review
John:
this whole year we've had toaster reviews from cars against humanity this is the last one great this is their idea fantastic idea we all had a great time and uh yeah thanks a lot but please no more toasters i never did test the top pick the top expensive pick like sweet the sweet home has like here's our top pick and they always try to take budget into consideration and they always have like if you have a little bit more money this one's even better it's not better enough that we think it's worth it but it's a little bit better and i i have not tested that toaster whatever that toaster is i'm actually curious about it
John:
maybe if my thing ever dies i'll take it and by the way i didn't say but a couple of i guess a couple months ago at this point i did finally open up my breville and adjust the stupid springs and the door doesn't spring open nice or spring closed rather which was a real pain man i i could i literally could not figure out how to get this toaster apart without breaking it luckily i can get to the spring without actually fully disassembling it but i think i need one of those eye opener things from i fix it that like heats up some glue or something i don't know what the hell is holding this thing together but it is
John:
there are a lot of screws and it is very solidly constructed so i was just lucky i could get through it to the point where i could get to the spring and adjust the tension goodness i'm gonna miss these reviews you sure you don't want any more toasters no i just i think i have like three or four left to ship out of here and then no more no more please they're just too big we'll have to send you small objects to review yeah i'll review diamonds
Casey:
slightly included i see what you did there what are the five c's anyway four c's rather anyway all right so um we should probably talk about what went on this week um can we talk about the uh headphone jack business really quickly oh boy would i like to talk about this
Casey:
So there are rumors based on an interesting translation from some Japanese site.
Casey:
I don't think we even have the link in the show notes, do we?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, the source of this is pretty unreliable.
Marco:
I think based on the rumor and based on some things that we've looked at here and there and been told here and there, it sure seems like this rumor has no more credibility than any other random rumor that you find with poor sourcing on the Internet.
Marco:
So...
John:
the rumor itself has no credibility really but it is i think worth talking about would apple do this and and what would be the ramifications well the rumor may not like the specifics of the rumor like we think the iphone 7 which will be the next major iphone that apple makes is going to have this feature well you know whatever maybe it seems like that's the sourcing for that is not great but we do know for a fact
John:
that you can plug headphone compatible headphones into the lightning port on your existing iphones and they will work as headphones like that apple has already added headphone support to the lightning port for iphones and that you can buy i don't know who buys these things but you can we'll put a link in the show notes headphones right now today that have at the end of them instead of the the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack have a lightning port and plug them into your existing iphone and it will work fine and you have to think why would apple do that if at some point it wasn't at
John:
are we going to keep that headphone jack are we maybe are we going to have that all the time you know the things are getting thinner maybe we should start thinking about what we're going to do it doesn't mean they're going to make a phone without one ever even but they did do something that opens the door for this that's why people take these rumors vaguely seriously because and i think before the like the last iphone or maybe it was for the iphone 6 same rumors were out there because people were hearing about headphone support for uh the lighting port and lo and behold that actually exists and is a thing and is there right now so that's why i think this is worth entertaining because
John:
Apple would not both implement and ship something like that if it hadn't considered very seriously the idea of ditching the headphone port at some point in the future.
Marco:
I mean, so the idea of ditching the headphone port, first of all, you know, the rumor is that they would ditch the headphone port in order to make the iPhone a millimeter thinner.
Marco:
And this was covered pretty well this week's episode of the talk show with John Gruber and John Maltz.
Marco:
So I don't want to go too far into this because they literally gave an hour to it.
Marco:
It was pretty good.
Marco:
But the short version is that you don't need to ditch the headphone jack to get that extra millimeter today because the current generation of iPod Touches still has the headphone jack and is at least that much thinner.
Marco:
So you don't need to do that.
Marco:
Now, granted, you could and you could make other gains.
Marco:
We're getting to the point now where making the phone noticeably thinner will require dropping things that people tend to like in their phones, like the headphone port and like good cameras.
Marco:
So let's see what they do in that area.
Marco:
Maybe they can make different advances.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
But right now, thinness alone is probably not a good enough reason yet.
John:
I didn't listen to that episode, but they talk about the slimmed down 3.5 millimeter jack.
John:
they didn't i yeah it wasn't didn't apple like change the way it was built and make a special one or something like that there's a apple patent which again apple patents everything it's a apple insider link it's basically like a regular headphone jack but with the one side filed down to be flat i just put the link in the show notes
Marco:
And there is, by the way, there is also... So the headphone jack that most people think of is a 3.5mm jack.
Marco:
There's also a 2.5mm version that has existed forever also, just like all the other ones.
Marco:
So there is a smaller version of the standard headphone jack that is occasionally used on things.
Marco:
In fact, a lot of headphones, if the headphone that you're using has a detachable cable...
Marco:
there's a pretty decent chance that the end of the cable that plugs into the ear cup might have that size plug on it.
Marco:
A lot of them do.
Marco:
So those plugs exist.
Marco:
They could switch to that and gain a whole extra millimeter, which is a pretty big deal at this scale.
Marco:
Now, granted, again, they don't need to yet.
John:
Although for the 2.5 one, I think one of the reasons that they would want to stay away from that is...
John:
I know from having kids that it's possible to bend 3.5 millimeter one just from kids bumping it around.
John:
2.5 one would bend even easier.
John:
Maybe maybe adults don't do this, but it's getting kind of getting to the point where you don't want that one to be on the because I think I think the 2.5 millimeter is easier to bend than lightning.
John:
and i don't know if any maybe this is just me but anyone who has kids who use their ios devices like that they get to use all the time that are theirs go to all of them and take the kids headphones plug them into the jack and then rotate them and see if they actually are still straight on axis it seems like everyone that my kids touch very not massively bent but bent enough that you can see that seriously yeah just wait it'll happen
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, assume Apple does this.
Marco:
So assume they get rid of the headphone jack, and the only way you can use headphones with an iPhone is either over Bluetooth or through lightning.
Marco:
So what does that mean in practice?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I don't have a real job, but I've heard a lot of people who have real jobs listen to music on their phones for a big chunk of the workday through headphones at work.
Marco:
For whatever reason, they either can't or don't want to use music services on the work computer itself, so they plug into the phone and use a streaming service or their music library on their phone to listen to music at work.
Marco:
Most of the time, I would expect the phone to be plugged in during this process.
Marco:
If you do this, if you have it so that that jack has gone away, chances are Apple would probably ship a little dongle for between $20 and $40 that would basically be a lightning to 3.5 millimeter headphone adapter.
Marco:
And we've seen how they do these things.
Marco:
Chances are it would not have a lightning pass through to also charge the phone.
Marco:
Chances are this would be a one plug thing, one plug on each end, and that would be it.
Marco:
Similarly, lightning headphones would have the same problem where lightning headphones don't have a lightning pass through port to also simultaneously charge the phone while you're listening to the headphones.
John:
so chances are if they did this you could no longer listen to the phone while it was being charged unless you abandon wires completely and go to bluetooth well i mean a million third parties would sell adapters for it and by the way i see people listening to their phones at work and none of them have it plugged in so but maybe they just like it because but the screen is often it's just playing audio even if maybe it's playing like spotify and streaming stuff it's not that bad or maybe people just don't care um but yeah if apple didn't build it somebody would because it would be eminently buildable so i don't
John:
I don't think that would be a significant deterrent to doing this, and I don't think it would preclude people from charging their phone while they listen because they just make an adapter.
Casey:
Yeah, and also consider that the official Apple, I always get the name of this wrong, but the lightning AV connector, whatever it is that we talked about last episode.
Marco:
Yeah, your favorite thing in the world.
Casey:
Yeah, like my favorite thing in the world.
Casey:
This thing does have a lightning pass-through.
Casey:
I actually think you're right, Marco, that it's unlikely that that's the approach Apple would take for this, because I think it's far more likely that they would assume that listening would not be all day long and that you wouldn't need to charge as you listen.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But there is a precedent for them doing something with a lightning pass-through.
Casey:
And the whole reason there's a lightning pass-through on this cable is so that you can charge your phone while you're displaying whatever you have on the phone on a TV or whatever.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So that is one thing that would be inconvenient or problematic for people if they did this.
John:
Well, the main inconvenient thing, of course, is that you can't use your old headphones.
John:
Even if they ship an adapter, even if you don't need to charge, having to have an adapter is annoying.
John:
That is the main inconvenience is, but what about all my headphones?
John:
And I don't want to use an adapter, and it's just not elegant or nice or whatever.
John:
And so that was, you know, the last time we had this discussion when the rumors of lightning port headphone support were out there, same thing.
John:
It's like, well, I don't want to not have all my headphones and...
John:
you know that's what everybody says anytime a port gets you know i don't want to lose all my charging cables i don't want to not be able to use all my docks when they change from 30 pin but the headphone port as many people have pointed out on twitter and elsewhere is way older than the 30 pin connector and is not as terrible as the 30 pin connector like it's fairly solid port you can't put it in the wrong way it's pretty sturdy it's been around by i saw some estimates of being like
John:
80, 90 years, depending on how you measure.
John:
Maybe it was over 100.
John:
I forget.
Marco:
I mean, it has this minor problem of shorting itself out when you plug it in.
Marco:
But, you know, other than that, it's okay.
John:
Yeah, it's not the best in the world, but with all these things, the thing that came to mind to me is VGA ports.
John:
VGA ports, granted, weren't around since 1910.
John:
Fine.
John:
But they were around for a really long time, and they had limitations that were obvious, especially as we went from analog to digital video with DVI connections and HDMI and DisplayPort and stuff like that.
John:
But VGA was like the standard.
John:
You go into a conference room, they have VGA connectors.
John:
And what eventually did VGA connectors in was not all the things I just listed, which should have been obvious.
John:
Like, well, you can't keep doing VGA.
John:
You're going to constantly convert to analog.
John:
It's just terrible.
John:
And then the resolution limits.
John:
And like, we have all these digital standards.
John:
Why wouldn't you switch those?
John:
What did VGA in is eventually everybody's laptops are too damn small to fit a VGA port on the side.
John:
That's what did it in.
John:
It's just, I mean...
John:
you can i know you can still find it on your dells i know they like they make laptops that are like exactly the thickness of a vga port i think i even saw where the tops and bottoms of the vga port were basically there was no like plastic above and below them they were just you know what i mean like it was there was no like thing to shove the vga port into it was just like there was like a notch cut out and the vga port was there so when you plugged in something the plug would be thicker than the thing anyway
John:
that's what eventually did in vga port certainly on the mac and on a lot of other slim laptops that are out there because if you want to have really slim laptop the vga port is just too darn big so that future is lurking out there probably in you know in the possibly distant future but who knows
John:
for smartphones because eventually we'll be able to get smartphones thin enough that the port will be thicker than the thing now we were already there with with high quality cameras as marco pointed out before that the phone is already thicker than the camera and we just make the camera poke out so who's to say you couldn't have a credit card thin iphone 15 years from now
John:
and hanging off the edge of it a 3.5 inch thing you know what i mean like it would be this big lump this big silly lump thing but it wouldn't detract too much from the thinness of the phone it would still be in a situation where then if you drop your phone it would flutter harmlessly to the ground and you would pick it up and the fact the fact that it has a silly headphone port poking out of it wouldn't bother anybody i'm not sure the headphone port
John:
is raised to the level where we're willing to say you know what even when our our phone is the thickness of a credit card i will be perfectly fine with there being a 3.5 inch headphone jack on there of course at that point lightning will also be too thick in thinking about this i think we can all agree i don't want to make this infinite timescale argument but this may literally be one you finally said it i know well you guys keep using the phrase but this may be an actual application of it because it's like look that port is going to go away eventually
John:
it just is right yeah the question is is this the year that it goes away in terms of timing say you were like the grand poobah of like when ports go away across the industry which apple kind of is because once they make a move everyone yells at them and says they're stupid for doing it and then does the same thing five years later or two years later or one year later uh see also floppy drives and uh getting rid of legacy ports although pcs have been much slower about that
John:
is this the year to do it would you do it this year which with the iphone 7 i mean would you decide that this is the year to do it or would you wait until you have to do it for some thickness reason because i agree with marco that they don't have to do it for a thickness reason but would you do it anyway to sort of say we want to get the pain over with now or would you wait until everything goes usbc and you finally give up on lightning in six years uh i don't know
Marco:
You can look at this, and to me, there's so many downsides to doing this.
Marco:
First of all, I think this would cause a substantial loss of goodwill.
Marco:
This would be a big deal.
Marco:
Look at how many people complained for so long and got so mad about the switch to Lightning at all.
Marco:
To have them also basically make everyone's headphones obsolete or make them worse by having them requiring some dongle to be plugged in.
Marco:
This would be a really, really big problem for their goodwill and customer satisfaction and for the press's impression of the phone and what everyday people, what all people end up thinking about it and thinking about them.
John:
How many iPhone buyers do you think use headphones other than the ones that come with the iPhone?
Marco:
I mean, you can look at Beats as a pretty big example of that.
Marco:
It's a pretty big number.
Marco:
I mean, I think that the market for aftermarket headphones is pretty healthy right now.
Marco:
I very rarely see people using the earbuds anymore.
John:
see i'm i'm trying to think of what i see people using and i mostly see people using the earbuds you're right that the big headphones the next the next thing i would say is if they're not using earbuds what are they using i would say they're using something like beats whether they're real beats or beats ripoffs or just large big big headphones like that but i don't know um
John:
There are upsides to this for people who sell headphones, obviously, right?
John:
Because even the people who sell earbuds suddenly get to increase their margins because previously they were selling, oh, hey, you broke or lost the things that came with your Apple earbuds.
John:
You like earbuds.
John:
You like that they're small.
John:
You don't want big beat-sized things, but you lost or broke them, and you want a replacement, and you don't want to pay for Apple's.
John:
Buy ours, which are $3 cheaper than Apple's,
John:
But our margins are huge because these earbuds are pieces of crap and they have a lightning port on them.
John:
So these are made for iPhone, iPhone compatible ear pods or whatever.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
This is a way for Apple to not only sell a very large number of high volume dongles and accessories to adapt old headphones, but it's also a way now for Apple to, through the MFI program, to take a royalty on every headphone sold.
Marco:
Like that's...
Marco:
Of course, I mean, look, you can look at this as the various benefits that this might bring.
Marco:
You can look at it as the various downsides it might bring, and I'll address Bluetooth separately because Bluetooth is a whole different story.
Marco:
But if you're still staying wired, I hate to be cynical about this, but I think a realistic way to think about this is...
Marco:
Would today's Apple, really today's Apple, not the Apple that we want to exist, but the actual Apple that does exist today, would today's Apple make an already very thin device, even thinner, at the expense of usefulness in the real world,
Marco:
and in a way that would increase the average selling price of their best-selling product by designing it to basically require high-margin accessories at the expense of customer satisfaction and goodwill?
Marco:
Yes, of course they would.
Marco:
They do this all the time now.
John:
But it depends on how much customer satisfaction and goodwill.
John:
That's why, if I keep thinking about this, if I was going to run a meeting on this at Apple...
John:
The first thing I would say is before we even discuss this headphone things, we have to decide if we're ever going to go USB-C.
John:
Are we going to stick with Lightning?
John:
If we're going to stick for Lightning, is Lightning on a 10-year plan?
John:
Or is it not?
John:
Because Lightning and USB-C are really similar to the point where Lightning was important for Apple to have because they had it for years before USB-C came out, right?
John:
But the USB-C is here now.
John:
So how many more years do we give lightning or are we committed to lightning?
John:
Is it really on a 10-year plan and we're not even going to consider an alternative until 10 years are up?
John:
Because you have to have that discussion first because it's not just that we're saying get rid of the headphone port.
John:
It's get rid of the headphone port and the place where you plug it in is this lightning port.
John:
And you really don't want to do a thing where we had lightning for a while.
John:
Then we got rid of the headphone port and all the headphones had to be lightning.
John:
And then a couple years after that, we got rid of lightning and all the headphones had to be USB-C or some crap like that.
John:
That is really bad in the long timeline for customer satisfaction.
John:
I think you can only absorb a certain number of these.
John:
We're getting rid of the floppy drive type of revolutions.
John:
You can't stack them that close together.
John:
So I think you really have to plan this thing out.
John:
And I think you should plan it because, like I said, it's going to go away eventually.
John:
Eventually, the phone's going to get so thin that you're going to have to make really difficult choices about bulges and crap like that.
John:
and if anyone's going to get rid of it on their phones it's probably going to be apple because that's their thing they always like you know they're they're more willing to get rid of it even even today's apple that sells millions and millions of these iphones they are the ones who are going to be more willing to get rid of this you just have to put it on the plan and i right now if if the the plan is not to keep lightning for a long long time now is not the time to get rid of the 3.5 inch port
John:
If they do get rid of it, it's not like they're going to make an announcement and say, yeah, we're getting rid of the headphone short.
John:
And by the way, our current plan is to keep lightning around for at least five or six more years.
John:
So don't even think about USB-C.
John:
It's not going to happen.
John:
Your investment in lightning headphones will last you several years, many years.
John:
Don't feel too bad about it.
John:
but they're not going to say that so it'll be sort of an unknown um if i had to put money on it right now i would say i would bet against not strongly against like you know 51 49 percentage wise but i would bet against the iphone 7 dropping the headphone part because i don't see a reason for it and i don't feel like now is the time because i really think that they will reconsider lightning sooner rather than later so i think they can hold out
John:
until they reconsider lightning in a couple of years and then they can get rid of the port because then they actually will probably need it thickness wise but uh but i do think that they should do it before they definitely before they really need to the first phone they do it on won't be because they just couldn't do it any other way it'll be because they were just they were they wanted to set things up they wanted to take the hit when they were going to take the hit set things up and then and then by the time they really really need it it's already kind of like lightning like
John:
did they have to go to the lightning for the first phone that had it or could they have wedged a 30 pin on it they could have fit a 30 pin on there it would have fit technically it would have been maybe awkward or whatever but it could have fit but they didn't wait until they absolutely desperately needed lighting and they did lightning when it looked very small on the end of the phone and now the phones are slowly shrinking down around it and i think that's what they'll do with the uh headphone replacement
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Marco:
And I also I think, you know, this is absolutely the kind of thing Apple would do.
Marco:
All the downsides be damned.
Marco:
They would definitely do it because, yeah, it it makes things thinner, even though we don't need them to be.
Marco:
But it makes things thinner and it makes them more money.
Marco:
So they would absolutely do it.
Marco:
But I don't think they're going to do it this year.
Marco:
I don't think they need to yet.
Marco:
And I don't think it makes sense.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think it's going to happen either, but personally, I wouldn't be that bothered by it.
Casey:
I almost never use Bluetooth headphones with my phone, but I might be the only person on the planet that isn't particularly bothered by Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
I use Bluetooth headphones at work all day, every day, and they're connected to my Mac, not my phone.
Casey:
They are very cheap headphones.
Casey:
I think they were $25 new when I bought them literally four years ago.
Casey:
The battery lasts at least a day, if not a couple of days.
Casey:
The latency, yeah, if I hit pause, it doesn't pause instantly, but there's no latency when I watch videos.
Casey:
I don't feel any of the qualms that so many people seem to feel when they use Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
So if that means if Bluetooth is our future, Bluetooth only is our future or some silly dongle, I don't think that's such a terrible future.
Casey:
I think that Apple will get eviscerated in their customers that, but I don't think it's such a terrible future.
Casey:
We've been, as Mac users, which is different, but as Mac users, laptop users, we've had stupid display dongles forever.
Casey:
I'm very overjoyed that this new MacBook Pro that I have has an HDMI port.
Casey:
But generally speaking, we've had to use silly dongles all the time.
Casey:
If you're one who uses most iPhone battery packs...
Casey:
most of the ones that I've ever seen, there's something in the way of the headphone port.
Casey:
So if your headphone jack is any bigger than the headphone port, like the ones that I've bought always include a one or two inch little extension so you can clear the battery case and then plug in your headphone to the little extension.
Casey:
Like none of these things are that terribly new.
Casey:
And again, I just...
Casey:
If Bluetooth is our future, I don't think that's such a bad thing.
Casey:
Sorry, Marco.
Marco:
Well, it's not Bluetooth.
Marco:
It's it's kind of like the move to the watch.
Marco:
It's like here is something else that is more expensive than what it might have replaced based on a lot of software and flaky standards.
Marco:
So it's a little bit unreliable.
Marco:
There's some lag involved in common actions.
Marco:
And it's one more thing that needs to be charged and put on an upgrade cycle.
Marco:
And I think we have so many of these things in the world.
Marco:
And I say this as a user of the phone and the watch and Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
Most of the time when I'm using my phone for audio playback, most of the time I'm using Bluetooth headphones because most of the time I'm listening to podcasts on my little Sennheiser PX210BT, which are amazing headphones, although they're not made anymore, but the MM400X is basically the same thing.
Marco:
I love those headphones for podcasts, but they're flaky.
Marco:
They need to be charged.
Marco:
It is kind of annoying.
Marco:
So, in many ways, this is a step forward, but like Force Touch, it's a step forward that's also kind of a step sideways and that's kind of worse in some ways and more complicated.
Casey:
You know, what if Apple released a Bluetooth set of headphones that...
Casey:
charges via lightning similar to the apple pencil and charges really really fast via lightning would that make it easier on all of us i was going to say regular people but it would make it easier on me too you know would that make it easier on all of us if you could get a couple of hours worth of listening off of a five minute charge
Marco:
I mean, the charging is one downside of many.
Marco:
It's the unreliability, the extra battery power that the phone needs to send the signal, which then makes the phone's battery life worse.
Marco:
There's a lot of little downsides to Bluetooth.
Marco:
And the reason I use it is because it is really convenient when I'm walking around.
Marco:
And these headphones sound like complete garbage.
Marco:
And most Bluetooth headphones I have heard sound either mediocre to bad or
Marco:
And I don't think, you know, a lot of people say, oh, well, Bluetooth is a bad sounding protocol.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
But most of the sound problem people have with Bluetooth headphones are because the headphones themselves are mediocre.
Marco:
Like the drivers are mediocre.
Marco:
The whole design of the headphones is mediocre.
Marco:
They just sound bad because usually you can plug them in with a cable and you can hear the sound just as bad over a cable.
Marco:
But, you know, the world of Bluetooth is not all bad.
Marco:
And I think ultimately enough people are going to be using Bluetooth headphones often enough over time that when they do finally kill the 3.5 inch jack, which I don't think is happening this year, but when they finally do it, a big portion of people won't be affected at all because they will already have moved on to Bluetooth.
Marco:
But we are not there yet.
Marco:
And it isn't all good.
John:
yeah bluetooth keeps evolving too the different versions of the standard so you think eventually by the time you know in many more years it will still be bluetooth but probably bluetooth and name only and we'll maybe use different signaling and uh you know different frequencies and different uh you know compression strategies or whatever like that it will and hopefully the stacks that do it will be more reliable that will it will have evolved to the point where it passes that threshold of flakiness
John:
you know because i think bluetooth has been getting better certainly in terms of power consumption bluetooth has been getting better so it doesn't drain your battery as much when you got the you know bluetooth 4.0 whatever things this all these ones that take less energy energy from your phone and i assume take a little bit less energy for your headphones or maybe they're just passive receivers but anyway what i always think about is bluetooth earbuds because i hate having cords i hate cords getting tangled up and stuff you know it would just be much more convenient if i could stick my phone in my pocket and what i want is earbuds because i don't you know i'm listening to podcasts i don't care
John:
if i could put little earbuds in my ears and then i would probably lose them so they have to be magnetic and maybe they could be magnetic and stick to the back of the phone and inductively charge when i'm not using them like that that is the the wireless future but i think apple will ditch the headphone port before wireless standards are as good as we would all like them to be like i guess what is that threshold is it like wi-fi wi-fi is wi-fi i guess wi-fi is above the the threshold of flakiness wi-fi is way more reliable than bluetooth
John:
it's still kind of flaky with some people though or maybe just you know i don't know what what some obviously there's signal strength where you're in some weird corner of your house and you have lead in your walls and you know tough luck right but for places where you get good signal but you are losing wi-fi that i don't i don't hear many stories about it certainly doesn't happen on max or when it does like it's a big deal in the apple community like oh the new version of os 10 screws up wi-fi like we demand it to be reliable it's like if i can get a signal and i have enough bars on my little display i want that connection to stay up and if it doesn't
John:
something is terribly wrong and apple needs to have a class action lawsuit against it right meanwhile if somebody screwed up bluetooth you wouldn't even notice right it's all bluetooth again i mean like i said in my in my crappy car when i get in i just have to wait to see first of all if i don't have the source set to bluetooth like if the source is set to something else bluetooth doesn't even appear in the list of sources for a while so i have to listen to am or fm or ipod or something else while i wait i can't turn the system off because that will not you know
John:
initiate the process of getting bluetooth set up so i have to wait until bluetooth appears as a source and then select it which is annoying that's just your car and if bluetooth is already selected say bluetooth i haven't changed the selection i get in the car i start the engine it's a long time before i hear anything coming out of there i have to wait and wait i don't know what it's doing is it booting up is it trying to find my phone
John:
usually it finds it maybe 99 of the time it finds it after five or six seconds sometimes it doesn't find it and i have to go to like you know connect to audio device and and it's already it shows itself already being connected but going through that thing in the menu makes it connect anyway like i said yeah bluetooth was you know bluetooth is way too flaky now and if it was messed up in some way i would never notice
Casey:
You say that, but what do you use?
Casey:
Well, I can't ask you this.
Casey:
Most people, however, probably use a Bluetooth keyboard and or Bluetooth pointing device for any sort of Mac that lives on a desk for any amount of time.
Casey:
Yes, I know there's a crud load of Mac laptops.
Casey:
I know that most people probably use the onboard pointing device and keyboard.
Casey:
But for those that have, you know, an iMac, those are almost certainly going to be Bluetooth.
Casey:
So if they really hosed up the Bluetooth stack on OS X, I think we'd know it.
Casey:
I think we'd know it pretty quick.
John:
what i've had that's been the most reliable like the most frequent wireless accessory that we use in our house that i found to be more reliable than bluetooth stuff like say the magic trackpad which i have now and my non-magic trackpad which i also have and my old bluetooth keyboard which i have which i use with my with my ipad which granted is not os 10 anyway uh is the little logitech thing with the crazy little usb plug uh you know rf dongle thing it's not bluetooth it's whatever logitech silly proprietary thing is that silly proprietary thing
John:
the batteries last forever and it always works and there are no drivers to install.
John:
And so I always think, Bluetooth, why can't you be like the stupid Logitech dongle?
John:
Like, what is it that they're doing?
John:
Is it shorter range?
John:
Is it just because it's non-standard?
John:
Whatever the hell they're doing, you do that because it always works.
John:
It never doesn't work.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's very frustrating i mean i understand there's probably technical issues involved in bluetooth is more sophisticated protocol and they can do stuff like audio and it's not just you know sending mouse positions but logitech i bet when they were doing their products on it's like oh bluetooth is the next big thing you should really get on bluetooth and i'm sure logitech does make bluetooth mice but whoever said you know what no we're gonna stick with these stupid dongles they were kind of right because those things always work
Casey:
I hate those stupid dongles with all my being.
Casey:
Here again, I don't mind Bluetooth.
Casey:
If Apple does kill the headphone jack in the next iPhone or in a iPhone, do they include some sort of dongly adaptery thing in the box or do they include some sort of like Bluetooth earbuds sort of thing?
Casey:
I think they would include some sort of Bluetooth earbuds sort of thing.
Casey:
But what do you think, Marco?
Marco:
I would say neither.
Marco:
You really think so?
Marco:
He's the pessimist.
Marco:
Look, this is today's Apple.
Marco:
Let's be realistic here.
Marco:
This is away from them to make another 40 bucks on every sale.
Marco:
There is no way that gets included in the box.
Marco:
No way.
John:
I say there's no way they include Bluetooth headphones because that is an upsell.
John:
That is an optional accessory.
John:
So you're not getting Bluetooth headphones in the box, at least for the first version.
John:
Eventually, when wireless becomes so pervasive that no one has the concept of plugging in a mouse or a keyboard or something, eventually there may be.
John:
But for the first version, no.
John:
but i think they would include the adapter for the same reason that they felt bad and included the magsafe one to two adapter in boxes for a million products for a really long time i think they would include the uh 3.5 inch adapter because what they for that first one that was a long time ago i know but for that first one i feel like they they're gonna want to do something to stem the tide of angry people who whose headphones don't work anymore so i think and and because that adapter would probably be super cheap and passive that they would put it in the box
John:
no find out we'll probably all live long enough to find out this this one is not an infinite time scale i would not bet heavily on my thing that they're going to include the adapter because marco's right not putting the adapter would totally be an apple thing to do but it's just such an easy thing to do to really help with the initial impact of the initial anger over breaking people's headphones and
John:
that it's so small and so cheap, like the little MagSafe 1-2.
John:
It's the same situation.
John:
Like, oh, we're breaking people's things.
John:
In fact, I bet the MagSafe 1-2 adapter was more expensive to manufacture than the Lightning to 3.5 would be.
Marco:
I mean, so the more likely thing... So part of the rumor on this rumor site was that it would... The translation was kind of weird, saying, like, it would be a special new Lightning port that would allow pass-through of audio.
Marco:
Because the thing is, you can't just take the digital Lightning signal...
Marco:
And have a passive adapter that just moves pins around and wires that and suddenly becomes an amplified analog signal for headphones.
Marco:
So the report seemed to suggest that what it would do would be that if you plugged in these special new things into the special new port that would be on these new devices...
Marco:
That it would still be using the DAC and amp in the phone, but that it would be able to route those over the lightning port, only on this new phone.
Marco:
That would then allow a relatively passive device to be the headphone side of that.
John:
Yeah, you can't have an adapter if you don't do that.
John:
Well, you could.
John:
Unless you have a chip in the adapter, like the stupid H.264 output thing with the processor in it.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I think that's the alternative here.
Marco:
The alternative would be that the adapter would actually have a little USB DAC amp thing right in there, which is totally possible and plausible.
John:
But they would not do that.
John:
I mean, just think of the Lightning...
John:
connectors where there's a chip in the thing like there's only so small you can make anything that involves a chip so then you got this big stiff thing poking out of the bottom of your phone it is not good like that is just that is just not going to happen i don't think they will ever ship a product that's like that right so it is also the you know the third option here which is way more sensible and likely than them shipping adapters in the box the way more likely explanation here is that they would just
Marco:
They would wire the port in that way so that lightning audio headphones made in this way would work only on the port on the new devices that's made for this.
Marco:
So it wouldn't work on your old phones, but they don't care.
Marco:
And they would just give a version of the ear pods that they ship now that just has a lightning plug on the end.
Marco:
And they would include that in the box.
John:
well of course that's like that's what they ship the phone with of course but i think it would also come with the adapter for your old headphones like if you have a pair of beats that has a 3.5 you're going to get the thing it's going to come with plain old passive ear pods with a lightning connector in the end yes of course they're not going to be bluetooth and then it'll also come i think with a little tiny passive adapter and see that's the part i don't i don't think they would do that these days no that's they would charge at least 20 bucks for that well
John:
remember we were talking about the uh the usb3 speeds on the ipad pro do you remember that yeah yeah and they one of the things that was like showing the internals of what the port looks like on the ifixit teardown or something that had like two extra contacts for the lightning port and people were speculating that it was those two extra contacts to get the usb3 speeds because usb3 connector has more uh contacts than the
John:
that's why i've talked about that uh that blog that linked to saying you don't need uh even though the usb3 thing has all those extra parts you don't need them on lightning because usb3 has dedicated ports for send receive at usb2 speeds and lightning wouldn't need that because it can repurpose the pins because it's like a dynamic port or whatever so then what are the two extra contacts for maybe they're for passive audio stuff or something like that like the idea that you can get that you can find a way to without changing the physical sort of
John:
shape and size of the lightning port find a way to make that passive adapter that you can just plug in 3.5 millimeter headphone jack into without a chip or any sort of DAC in there it's still just completely analog coming out that's something that could be done but but again i don't know even if that's everything i'm like really do you want to do this now
John:
or do you want to i don't i don't know what the solution is the long term to make it thinner because now i'm thinking about usbc usbc is not going to add pins for analog audio anytime so maybe that's like the advantage of lightning and the reason lightning will stick around for a long time because apple can do stuff like this without consulting anybody else and without worrying about
Marco:
no i i wouldn't i wouldn't assume that lightning is going away in favor of usbc on on the devices that currently have lightning anytime soon in fact as we see apple keeps adding lightning to more devices you know the apple could have made things like the smart trackpad and keyboard and everything they could have made those charge over usbc and they didn't they made them charge over lightning like all like all those all those all the peripherals the the new input devices well it's
John:
My new iMac doesn't have a USB-C port on the back of it.
John:
So they're dragging their feet a little bit on USB-C.
John:
But yeah.
Marco:
Well, they could have given you a cable.
Marco:
But I think the reason here is Apple is perfectly fine to support USB-C to interface with peripherals from the rest of the world.
Marco:
But when it comes to their own devices and their own devices, like the end of the plug they support, I think they're very happy to support Lightning because it is theirs.
Marco:
And so not only does it have more abilities than USB-C that might be useful to Apple, but again, they're making licensing money on each one of those things and they're controlling the standard and everything.
Marco:
I mean, that's everything Apple wants.
Marco:
It's control plus money plus smallness.
Marco:
I mean, that's Apple right there.
Marco:
That is everything they want.
Marco:
So they are not going to abandon Lightning anytime soon.
Marco:
I think they would skip USB-C entirely for things like iPhones because it's not really any smaller than Lightning, is it?
Marco:
I mean, or not meaningfully so.
Marco:
I'm guessing that the phone has Lightning longer than USB-C would be the thing it would move to.
John:
I'm still hoping that my next tube-shaped Mac Pro will have along the back of it a ton of little ports that look like USB-C, but a really Thunderbolt 3.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
And I think, honestly, I would love that.
Marco:
And I think that's most likely the case.
Marco:
Although, unfortunately, that pushes us next June, I think.
Marco:
I am nothing if not patient.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So big, actual, confirmed, legitimate news happened.
Casey:
We were told at WWDC that Swift would be open source by the end of the year.
Casey:
And with not too much time to spare, Swift has been open sourced.
Casey:
I am genuinely impressed.
Casey:
And the thing that impressed me most, which I didn't realize at first, was that the entire commit history, as far as we can tell, was pushed to GitHub.
Casey:
It wasn't just the initial commit dance, which is what most people do.
Casey:
It's probably what I would have done if I was Apple.
Casey:
But you can actually see the evolution of Swift over time, which is crazy to me.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here, but I feel like John, after your Copeland 2010 bit, let's start with you.
John:
Well, so the first thing I think is worth explaining is what the hell does it mean to open source Swift?
John:
How do you open source a programming language?
John:
Isn't a programming language just like you read a book and it tells you how the language works?
John:
Like, what are they open sourcing?
John:
And of course, they're not, you know, it doesn't make much sense to open source language.
John:
But what they're open sourcing is a bunch of the things they use to implement the language.
John:
So LLVM and Clang and those compilers are already open source.
John:
But the Swift compiler and the Swift standard library and associated things written in Swift, that's what's being open source.
John:
So...
John:
there's a website swift.org that you can go to which is sort of the gateway for all this stuff today i was kind of sad to see that their site was hosed that swift.org was like really really slow it wasn't down you didn't get errors but you just try to load anything on swift.org and it would take forever to get back to you so that's
John:
kind of embarrassing i think the snarky comment i made it was like maybe if this swift open source project gets some kind of wealthy corporate backer they can afford better hosting seriously this is the this is like the richest technology company in the world uh and swift.org was slow today it makes me sad anyway uh i will yell more about apple and their network stuff in a future show i'm sure really um yeah we keep pushing it down the notes with the other news but it is there and it's getting worse and it's simmering so i will complain about it at some point um
John:
But Swift.org, if you go look at the source code, will lead you to GitHub, which is the first exciting thing that you would see about this like GitHub.
John:
Really?
John:
Apple's not hosting it on their, you know, opensource.apple.com website where they host all the Darwin source.
John:
And that's exactly what Casey was talking about in the old days.
John:
You know, Apple has open source components and like or even WebKit.
John:
But going back further.
John:
Darwin, the core OS that's underneath OS X and iOS, has been open source from the beginning.
John:
And what would usually happen is Apple would come to some, you know, conference WWDC or in the old days Mac world and announce a new version of the OS.
John:
uh and then developers would develop for it and then they would ship that version of the os to customers and then you would wait days weeks or months and then the open source version of the underlying projects like oh here's the darwin release for mac os 10 10.4 that would only be released as one big blob
John:
well after the os was already out sometimes it would be the gap wouldn't be that small but the bottom line is you would get what casey was saying it's like a big dump like okay you can go to this open source site and see the source code and it just sits there until the next time apple comes along and goes plop here's 10.4 plop here's 10.5 and they would do the point releases too
John:
But it's not like they're showing you, here's the entire commit history of all the components of Darwin over their entire development.
John:
You just get these dumps.
John:
And it wasn't, as I say, developed in the open, right?
John:
So certainly, as they're working, you know, 10.5 is plopped down on the site.
John:
Someone somewhere in Apple is working on 10.6.
John:
You don't get to see that work to the open source components.
John:
You're not going to see any part of 10.6 until 10.6 is out.
John:
And then they show here, by the way, here's the open source parts of 10.6 plop, right?
John:
webkit was a little bit different in that you could see what was going on because you know it wasn't strictly an apple project and it was developed kind of out in the open but they would do the same thing where they would be like internally apple is working on its next revision of safari with a new version of webkit but they're not doing that work out in the open at some point they're going to plop down a big commit
John:
uh to the latest version of webkit and that's been getting better with webkit but swift is even more towards the actual model that people do with open source projects in terms of here's the whole history of the entire project from the beginning all the committers have accounts on github so you can see all you know the names attached to them and like literally the whole you can go back to 2010 and see the first commit and just you know go through the history of the entire swift programming language and see who did what and look at the commit history and who did who would contribute the most code when
John:
the fun thing is you can go to a chart and github and see like little graphs and stuff and what you can basically see is either the hire date or the disclosure date of everyone working on swift because in the beginning it's just you know uh latner is doing everything because he's the only one who knows anything about it right and then at a certain point a second person comes on then a third person then a fourth person and if it's not their hire date you know the time before is probably when they didn't know the project existed and they were disclosed on it and it's like oh now they see you know so it's like revealing the history of the thing and
John:
they're continuing to work on it in the open so much so that there's a roadmap on the site to say hey we're going to do swift 2.2 and we're going to do swift 3.0 and here's what's planned for it and here are the proposals and here are the check-ins that are leading up to it so this is totally normal from the perspective of any regular open source project like i don't know apache or python or whatever but it is extremely novel in terms of core technologies in apple to be actually real live developed with a public bug tracker where you're seeing future development happening in real time
John:
They're doing things that are not yet released in any Apple product, and you're seeing them do them, and you can file bugs against them and stuff, and you can see all the source code.
John:
It is for long-suffering Apple technology enthusiasts a breath of fresh air.
Casey:
It's really surprising.
Casey:
And in the last couple of weeks, Apple as a whole has been getting a lot of flack about the Mac App Store and potentially their plans for iPhone hardware.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys have heard anything about this headphone thing or not.
Casey:
But this is really impressive, and this is very un-Apple-like.
Casey:
And it was funny because earlier today I was listening to Material, which is a podcast on Relay, about Google stuff.
Casey:
And they had their, you know, Google's VP of design, whose name I will butcher if I try to pronounce.
Marco:
Matthias Duarte?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
They had him on their podcast.
Casey:
And granted, Schiller did go on the talk show, but you don't typically hear these sorts of things happening with Apple.
Casey:
And this is a very open way of doing open source, which is just really impressive.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, you've been quiet so far.
Casey:
What do you think?
Marco:
I'm really happy to see this.
Marco:
I mean, as much as I do complain about things that Apple doesn't do well and does that are hostile to either customers or developers, in reality, this is a really big move.
Marco:
This is a good move.
Marco:
And this is way more open about this stuff than I expected, for sure.
Marco:
Way more open than they really probably needed to be.
Marco:
And there's a number of things about this that I assume we're going to get to, where when they first announced that Swift would be open-sourced, and I thought, and we talked about it back then, and I said basically that I was reserving any kind of enthusiasm about this because...
Marco:
I thought it was going to be more like how John was saying, more like they've done open source in the past, where it's just kind of like these dumps, and those aren't that useful for the most part.
Marco:
And I also was concerned about, I would absolutely love to only master one new language now to cover both my app development and my web development.
Marco:
Because I don't like web development that much.
Marco:
I'm not that into it.
Marco:
I do web development as just a means to an end to make the apps that I want to make.
Marco:
And I've been doing it in PHP for all these years.
Marco:
And I just now started dipping my toe a little bit in Go.
Marco:
But I'm not writing whole apps in Go.
Marco:
I'm just making a few components in Go that the big PHP app uses.
Marco:
And I like Go a decent amount, but I don't think I like it enough to build a whole new web app in it or to port the whole app I have to it.
Marco:
I don't plan to do that.
Marco:
And Swift is not my perfect ideal language, but it's pretty good.
Marco:
It looks pretty good.
Marco:
And I know I'm going to have to learn it if I want to keep being an Apple platform developer for 10 years from now.
Marco:
I'm going to have to learn Swift, and I'm going to do it at some point.
Marco:
And so it would be nice if I could just learn Swift and have that also work on the web for my future web needs.
Marco:
And then I can finally stop using PHP and use Swift everywhere and really get a nice deep mastering of this one language and be able to share code between them, be able to share my own utility libraries, etc.
Marco:
Share application level code, maybe some of the data layer stuff.
Marco:
I would love that.
Marco:
That didn't look like it was going to happen before because I was assuming that the open sourcing of Swift would be similar to the old way of just dumping things.
Marco:
And they didn't say anything about open sourcing foundation or any of the APIs.
Marco:
And so we all, myself included, just assumed that the only part that would be open source would be the core of the language with the handful of built-in types it has.
Marco:
There would be effectively no libraries.
Marco:
And that wouldn't be very useful.
Marco:
Multiple people would have stepped in to try to make their own standard libraries and try to get themselves established as the standard library.
Marco:
And it would have been a mess, just like JavaScript frameworks.
Marco:
It would have been a total mess.
Marco:
But what has actually happened, they're outlining a plan to actually convert Foundation to Swift and open source it and include it in this package.
Marco:
And I'm sure not every API is going to be available in this open source way.
Marco:
But what this does is this gives people a way to actually build, say, a web app backend that runs in Swift on a Linux server and also runs on iOS where they could actually share a meaningful amount of underlying code and libraries.
Marco:
And that is really cool.
Marco:
That I was not expecting at all.
Marco:
And I'm really happy to see that because now that makes this interesting.
Marco:
That makes this beyond just like an academic curiosity of,
Marco:
Oh, maybe I could toy around and get, you know, Darwin running on my Linux server.
Marco:
No, this is like actually potentially useful in the real world.
Marco:
And no offense to Darwin.
Marco:
Well, you know, like we knew that they were going to do Linux, though, because they announced that at WWDC, right?
Marco:
We knew they would do Linux, but we didn't know that there would be any libraries beyond the built-in Swift types.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, so when they said they were going to do Linux, like that was the other, you know, in between the slides when they said they were going to open source in the slide when they put the word Linux on the screen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
what i was thinking what was a reasonable fear was like um no matter what you do with open sourcing that's well and good but they're going to open source basically swift so you can run it on on max right on os 10 right because there are os os ties little things i was like oh well great if you have a mac you can do it but it's going to be useless on the server because nobody uses mac servers so it's a shame that even though swift will be open source it's going to be up to the community to figure out how the hell to get it to work on linux and then two slides later it's like oh linux apple's doing that part
John:
Why would Apple do that part?
John:
Well, Apple has servers too, right?
John:
And they're probably not running OS X at this point.
John:
God, I hope they're not.
John:
They have server-side stuff.
John:
And why would Apple waste its time doing a Linux port?
John:
And believe me, they would not do it out of the goodness of their heart to say, see, it's really portable.
John:
Look, we did a Linux port, right?
John:
They're doing it for themselves.
John:
And they...
John:
eventually basically have the same needs as marco which is like well it's great that we can run swift on the server but if we want to share any significant amount of code between our client and our server it would be great to at least have foundation like you know what i mean that would be nice um i suppose they could just bring the objective c runtime to to linux as well i mean if it's not already there um but what they chose to do instead which is i think is the most exciting thing like i knew they'd have something like this to be able to run in links because why the hell else would apple be the apple wants to use it for the same thing marco wants to use it for only on a much larger scale right
John:
uh but what they did instead was took the hard road which is like we're not gonna use the objective c runtime on linux and let you use swift on linux with foundation on linux with you know core foundation in c and foundation and objective c and like they could have done that and it would have worked fine instead they are they have not done this yet but they are undertaking the effort to port foundation to swift and they're doing it you know you can look at the source repository and see like all the empty implementations were like not yet implemented but the you know the function is there
John:
this is one of the projects they're doing and i don't know what kind of schedule it's on i think maybe they were saying by like 3.0 they would have the whole thing ported or whatever um so it's still going to be core foundation straight c underneath the covers that was already portable for the most port or core foundation light or whatever had been open source
John:
And then on top of that, they're going to go from that point, Swift all the way up.
John:
So anything that used to be in foundation was Objective-C, they're re-implementing in Swift.
John:
I'm still a little bit confused about how they're going to do Swift string versus NS string.
John:
And by the way, this is the other exciting thing about this.
John:
um they're finally dropping the ns prefix from all the foundation stuff they're taking this opportunity this re-implementation in swift to drop all the ns's which for people who don't know it always it always cracks me up i was googling this earlier to see when the ns was added because i believe it was added at some point in the history of next but ns stands for next step and so all these new mac developers who have no idea what the hell next is probably like programming this for months and going through tutorials and whatever going
John:
why the hell are all the apis being with ns doesn't make any sense i can't figure out what that means next step um but it's silly for it to be there and now it's the perfect opportunity to remove it so then how the hell do you distinguish between swift dot string and formerly ns string which i guess would just become string i mean you can understand because for namespacing like they would they'll be distinguishable but and i know they're like you know
John:
uh bridge to each other like zero cost bridge you know array and ns array and behind the scenes and all that stuff but it's potentially confusing so like am i using pure swift with swift strings or am i using swift with foundation in swift with swift used to be ns strings but are actually strings anyway i'm sure they'll work it out but the bottom line is they're clearly not taking the easy road here they're
John:
You're not going to say they're leaving the Objective-C runtime behind, because obviously they're not, because they've got a bazillion lines of Objective-C code, and that will be maintained and enhanced for the future, obviously.
John:
But the foundation, literally, the foundation of their programming language stack is going to be written in Swift.
John:
It's C, core foundation, and then it's going to be Swift, foundation, and then the Swift standard library and all the Swift stuff on top of it.
John:
So this is very exciting, and...
John:
it's exciting not only that they're saying they're doing this this isn't done yet this is the type of thing like in the old apple would not even announce that they're doing this until the next wwdc they're telling you that they're doing it even though it's not done you can see how far they've gotten and like i said they tell you what there's going to be in swift 2.2 they tell you're going to be on swift 3.0 they have a system whereby you can propose things to be in swift 3.1 or 4.0 and your proposal could get accepted and incorporated and you could submit patches and everything it's actual open source development
Marco:
Yeah, it's really cool.
Marco:
And this makes me interested in learning the language, you know, at some point soon.
Marco:
I'm still not going to jump on it like today or next week.
John:
Yeah, don't spend too much time learning the plus plus and minus minus operator.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And one thing that I probably will wait for is that they mention that they are not – so they talk about the goals for the big 3.0 release that will be in late 2016, which is a year from now.
Marco:
But they say that they're not going to address concurrency primitives or concurrency built-ins in language until after 3.0.
Marco:
I think I do want to wait to really master the language until the concurrency story is worked out because that's pretty important.
Marco:
You'll always have an excuse to wait.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
I'm saying to really master it.
Marco:
I didn't say to start learning it or to start using it.
Marco:
But I do want to see how that shakes out because that's kind of important in the modern environment.
Marco:
I mean, that's, you know.
John:
Well, that's why Go is going to be better for your server side things because Go is already like you're using those features in Go and they're really handy.
John:
And I mean, I guess like what they're saying is for now, this is a library thing.
John:
Use lib dispatch.
John:
right which is not terrible you're already kind of familiar with it from using it in your existing apps is lib dispatch available uh i mean it's because it's open source itself right yeah i mean like but basically they're i forget what they're the exact text of the thing was they're saying for now before we address this in the language libraries are the answer so use p threads use lib dispatch use whatever the hell you want to use it's a library problem not a language problem but go go decided that it's important enough to be part of the language and it makes stuff easier so
John:
It's going to be when you mentioned like, oh, you know, like writing a server side web framework equivalent to your PHP one or even equivalent to the simple servers you're doing and go.
John:
There's a lot of library work that if Apple has done it, we're not seeing it yet.
John:
And so it's up to the community to actually do that part of it, I think.
Casey:
yeah uh so and under the radar number two you and underscore talked about basically we'll get there when we get there and now it sounds like you're kind of rethinking that um what makes it being open source make it so much more appealing to you because you're not you're not about to be contributing you know pull requests or anything like that so why not at all so why does it being open source suddenly change your opinion
Marco:
Well, because now mastering Swift now has more value to me because now there's a chance that I can use it on the server side as well.
Marco:
And there's now a roadmap in site where that is looking likely and plausible and potentially very good.
Marco:
So that's the big reason.
Marco:
Now, it isn't just...
Marco:
oh, just learn how to do everything I've already been doing on the same platform with no possible other impact besides just the language's built-in benefits, which I don't care that strongly about yet.
Marco:
Now it's also, I need to learn a better website language.
Marco:
I really do.
Marco:
I am constantly hitting PHP's limits, and I'm constantly running into problems with it.
Marco:
uh whenever i do new development and it's not that i you know it's not that you know php is constantly crashing or anything but it seems like it's on shaky ground that you know i've expressed before that i i just don't i don't need to convince people why why i don't like php uh that that i i don't really believe that that his leadership is taking it in good directions not like it ever has but you know it's it's finally starting to affect me but
Marco:
Anyway, so I want to get off PHP sooner rather than later, but I also don't think Go is the answer necessarily.
Marco:
It's good enough for now, but I'm still looking for a better overall web language to switch to, and I don't think Go is going to end up being it.
Marco:
For this to potentially step into that role, then this gives me a really big reason to learn Swift.
Marco:
Not to mention the code sharing benefits.
Marco:
If I can have the model layers shared between, say, Overcast and its web component.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
There's a lot of benefits to having that kind of code sharing potential.
Marco:
Even simple things.
Marco:
Right now...
Marco:
The main reason why the Overcast web interface does not have playlists is because I don't want to have to port the code that the playlists use to order themselves, which is a very complicated piece of Objective-C code.
Marco:
I don't want to port that to PHP because it's going to be a massive amount of work to get it right, and it's going to be buggy, and it's just not worth it.
Marco:
There's opportunities like that where like, oh, if I could just do the same thing on both sides, that would be a much more easily solved problem.
Marco:
So, you know, I'm looking forward to a future where I can just master one.
Marco:
Because that's my style.
Marco:
My style is not to learn 60 different languages and to have a shallow proficiency in each of them.
Marco:
My style is to really master one thing and use it forever.
Marco:
Use it until everyone's making fun of me for using it and then finally switch.
Marco:
So that's what got me here.
Marco:
And I think I would love for Swift to be the next language to do that with.
Marco:
And this now shows me that that has a good chance of being possible.
John:
Plus, you can make your own web framework in Swift because there won't be one.
John:
Well, there probably will be one pretty soon.
John:
Well, there are already a couple, but...
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
But like now based on the new foundation and based on all the new stuff, like that wasn't part of Apple's open source stuff is like, and by the way, here's what we're using for our server side Swift, because Apple is surely using server side Swift and how they're incorporating it.
John:
I'm not sure, but there is no equivalent to, you know, whatever your favorite web or even even equivalent.
John:
I don't think there's even an equivalent to the simple server port listening stuff that's in the go standard libraries, is there?
John:
no absolutely not no i mean is is the sia is the networking stuff you've imported yet well yeah but just the network but you want some of the you need something like coroutines or an event driven loop or you need something to handle you know processing more than one request at once you know what i mean anyway um yeah so there's there's an opportunity for people who want to do something potentially uh you know dramatic and uh something that has a big footprint and a big effect the first person to make a really good web framework uh
John:
in server side swift will have the attention of everybody who's in the same situation as marco which is i've got an ios app and i would love to be able to share the faceless components between the server and the client i don't want to have to think about all the crap about running a server listening on a port dispatching based on urls and stuff i want
John:
a fairly simple but reliable fast framework to do that for me if someone makes one i will use it because you just want to plug in your model code you don't want to deal with like request routing and parsing http headers and crap like that you know yeah ideally that's that should all be handled by any modern framework like i there's no there's no reason for web programmers to be doing that stuff manually anymore
John:
Yep.
John:
I mean, and like PHP, the standard library handles it and go has standard library functions for things like that.
John:
But Swift, that's the gap in Swift functionality.
John:
A couple more points that we'll probably continue this topic in future shows, but we don't want to drag this one out too long.
John:
But in the topic of.
John:
uh apple being more open craig federighi who i forget what he's like the head of all software at apple i don't know what his title is he is making the rounds to the websites as i saw him uh interviewed at ars technica i think he talked to uh i don't know so maybe the next web or a bunch of other websites i read reviews where craig federighi talked to a bunch of websites about the swift open source project when has that happened that is definitely a new apple thing like that they send out one of their guys to make the rounds of the relatively speaking you know
John:
dinky little websites like you know you'd see steve jobs go on cnn or something uh and talk to the wall street journal and the new york times but that's it but now craig federighi is talking to the i guess the second tier websites yeah yeah the tech press yeah because cnn doesn't want to hear about open source swift basically but but no this is this is great yeah i i think this is a great i mean you know he's going and he's saying the same things to every different website or whatever but but it is
John:
i don't know it just makes me feel better than like yeah see what you can do apple just like regular pr in some ways apple was was i always looked on them as interesting and special because they didn't do regular pr like every other company anything they do that they think is even remotely important they're like a proud little child see what i made see look see look at this put it on
John:
the refrigerator right and apple would just be like we say nothing we talk to you this number of times a year everything else we do maybe there's a press release on our site but we're not going to talk to you just reblog our press release like or don't we don't care like whatever but now they're actually saying hey we've got craig fitterie here do you want to talk to him he wants to talk to you about open source swift hey like to the tech websites and so that's just weird and
John:
god i think that the websites don't even know how to handle it like a lot of these websites are not accustomed to interviewing an executive and then writing an article based on that interview uh with apple executives because it's like so do i just transcribe exactly what they said even though their sentence doesn't quite make sense or do i clean it up a little bit but then will they be afraid i'm misquoting them and like so some of them is just
John:
It seems like awkward.
John:
It's like, oh, I didn't I didn't think you'd actually show up.
John:
Is this really you?
John:
I guess like let's talk about Swift for five minutes and then I'll write something about this is totally weird.
John:
So it definitely it definitely feels weird.
John:
I mean, it would be weirder if it was, you know, Chris Latner talking to everybody, but.
John:
uh craig fitterie can make sense he's the head of the whole software department and he's going to tell you why apple is open starting swift and why it's a good idea so i'll put a link to the ars article but you can see a bunch of other things around and this is definitely a uh glasnost i guess is the appropriate cold war uh metaphor for this so i i thought that was exciting um and i and hope to see more of that like you don't do it every time every single thing you do but open starting swift is significant and a lot to send out an emissary essentially
Marco:
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Marco:
and really this is this is something that has been ridiculous for most of shaving history because they were just so expensive and now they're not so harry's is really making dreams come true with this um so i really do like them a lot they are great value great quality and their their design is really classy the handles look really great they're nice and weighted nice and heavy handles classy designs you don't look like you're into some kind of transformers commercial or anything it looks great
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Marco:
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John:
we only have one more thing to add about swift for this show we're going to talk more about open source swift in the next show i'm sure because we just put a big dividing line in the notes about it uh but the one thing we forgot to mention is what license is this what open source license is it uh and it is the apache 2.0 license with a special exception to not require you to open source stuff that you build into like a single library or something that happens to start to pull in some of the swift like runtime and
John:
that it's saying that you don't have to open source that one it's okay that if you you know bind with the swift standard library or whatever it doesn't mean that you have to suddenly open source your whole application so it's a very permissive license it's not gpl because apple's commercial company and they would never do gpl because it is intentionally viral and apple doesn't like the virality of that particular of the constraints and forced by the gpl uh so i think for the most part no one is surprised by the license and for the most part the expected people are happy about it and the
John:
There is a fun this is actually for the next week.
John:
I think we can mention it briefly.
John:
This is a thing with a lot of open source projects where where you put the source code isn't necessarily the same place where you want people to file bugs.
John:
So GitHub, like many places that you can put source code for, also has what they call an issue tracker, which is basically a bug tracker.
John:
But Apple, of course, has its own bug tracker called Radar.
John:
And Swift does not use the issue tracker on GitHub.
John:
It has its own website.
John:
It's like bugs.swift.org.
John:
And I think that's where they want you to file the bugs unless they want you to file a Radar.
John:
It's a little bit confusing.
John:
I guess you'd start at Swift.org and eventually you'd be led to the right place.
John:
But the bottom line is on GitHub...
John:
You can't, I think, add issues, but you can issue pull requests.
John:
So someone immediately made a pull request to change the license to like GPL or something.
John:
And then a million people trolled the thread with animated GIFs and stuff.
John:
So we'll put that link in the show notes as well.
John:
So you can enjoy looking at the first trolling pull request on GitHub for Swift.
John:
And of course, it has to do with the license, which as far as I'm concerned, I don't care about.
John:
I think they picked the right license for their purpose, and it's fine.
John:
But other people do care about it.
John:
And so there you have it.
Casey:
All right, any other thoughts before next week?
Casey:
We're just going to hold for then?
John:
Yeah, we're going to hold more.
John:
There's more to talk about, and we'll probably go on more in-depth in the same topics for next week.
John:
And hopefully by next week we'll know more about this.
Marco:
Yeah, because this week, as we record this, we only have something like four hours of knowledge of this so far.
Marco:
So, yeah, we'll see what happens.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Overall, good week.
Marco:
We still have our headphone jack, and Swift had a lot of good stuff, so I'm happy.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harry's, Warby Parker, and Cards Against Humanity, and we will see you next week, or hear you next week, or speak to you.
Marco:
You ruined my phrase.
John:
Just keep saying it the same way you've always been saying it.
John:
It works fine.
John:
You will hear us next week.
John:
No, don't say that.
John:
That's terrible.
John:
What?
John:
Just say, and we will see you next week.
John:
You had a thing.
John:
It's a thing.
John:
People need repetition of familiar phrases and beats in the story structure that is our podcast to feel at home.
John:
Don't mess with it.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
i don't ask much of icloud i don't i use dropbox i don't really use icloud drive i know a lot of people do but i was like you know what icloud drive is probably okay but dropbox works for me i should just keep using it um but in other aspects i want to trust icloud like when the new notes came out and it changed the back end from imap to icloud syncing i was glad and i started using it and for the most part it's been working
John:
and so my daughter has been writing she writes stories a lot and she started wanting to write one by typing instead of by writing on a notepad she does both but she also wanted to have one that she was typing and i wanted to set her up say okay here you go you can type something and i figured this is a perfect opportunity to use pages she's got the latest version of pages she's also got it on her ipad with the latest version of us the latest version of pages she just wants to type a story it's just words on a page um not very demanding
John:
And it would be nice if she could do it in both places, right?
John:
You know, Pages is integrated with iCloud and you make a document and she could type it on the computer.
John:
And then if she's in her room with the iPad, she could continue typing it on the iPad.
John:
Seemed like the ideal opportunity.
John:
And I'm not going to do page layout.
John:
I'm not doing anything fancy here.
John:
could have maybe used text edit but i said why don't i use pages as an out of integration and vaguely i was thinking of like that i work website i forget if it's even gone or whatever but anyway so i set her up on the mac to use pages and she's typing along and typing along and then i realized she hadn't ever saved and then i showed her about saving which is sad the first time you have to show your kids about saving kids who are brought up in the ios era like saving what are you even talking about like it's such an alien concept doesn't make any sense and like this is the thing you have to do why do you have to just anyway i
John:
go through the whole thing um and i said and you know she doesn't i didn't go into the open save dialog box i'm just like look i'll bring it to the right place i'm suffice it to say this is the thing you have to do by hitting command s or selecting this command every once in a while but to initially start i will give the thing a name and i will put it in icloud drive right that's one you know i picked icloud drive from the option she saves and she's typing along
John:
that works fine for like a day or two and then at some point i said you know like i think she needed to get kicked off the computer kicked out of the room or something like well you can continue writing this on your ipad uh and she's not surprised about or impressed by the way she's like all right fine uh and then i loaded pages up on her ipad
John:
and i tried to open the document that she had just been editing on the mac uh and it wouldn't open and so i'm like what is this complaint like she's like the document is being modified or something i'm like is it complaining because i still have it open on the mac that's messed up but fine whatever i'll close it on the mac and open it on the ipad
John:
And eventually it opened on the iPad and she started typing stuff.
John:
And of course, there's no, you know, like saving action going on there.
John:
And then she was done with that and quitted and it was gone.
John:
And then eventually she came back to the Mac and said, I want to continue my writing now.
John:
And we went to open pages and open the document and it gave some dialogue boxes like this document can't be opened right now.
John:
I think it said also because it's being modified.
John:
Who knows what the hell the Master Watch bottom line was.
John:
You couldn't open it.
John:
Double clicking it didn't work.
John:
Opening it from the application didn't work.
John:
Then I tried to open on the iPad.
John:
Also wouldn't open on the iPad.
John:
And I'm like, I'm not asking the world of you.
John:
This is Apple hardware, Apple software, latest version, latest version of application, latest version of the OS.
John:
i just want to edit the same document in two different places and now i can't open it anywhere and my daughter is upset justifiably so because previously everything was fine i was writing on my mac and because dad wanted us to say even though we're kicking you out of the room you can write it on your ipad now i can't open it anywhere and maybe it's gone
John:
And so I have to fix this problem by figuring out what the hell the deal is.
John:
Like I tried everything you can imagine.
John:
Eventually I tried copying the document out of the iCloud thing and like opening it and pulling out the text and copying it, pasting it to a new text document.
John:
And I said, all right, well, so much for iCloud drive, screw this.
John:
I'm putting it in Dropbox.
John:
So iCloud drive was cut out of the equation.
John:
I put the thing in Dropbox.
John:
Now I'm terrified to even try to open it on the iPad because that may end up posing the thing again.
John:
Um,
John:
um but i thought i was in the clear i'm like i saved it in dropbox she doesn't know where it's safe so now it's saving job i said i told her can't use it on the ipad anymore because that doesn't work that crap doesn't work and i had to move it out of icloud drive for this is just a total failure of the most simple thing you can possibly do a single person editing a single document in icloud drive on you know everything perfect and just just abject total failure like not even it didn't work or didn't sync or whatever just you could it got we got to the point where you couldn't open the document at all
John:
Then she decided to write a new story.
John:
And so I showed her how to make a new document.
John:
And she was typing for a while.
John:
And I came in.
John:
And once again, she had not saved for 20 minutes.
John:
And I said, oh, you have to save that, right?
John:
And I went to save.
John:
And I'm saving in Dropbox now instead of saving in iCloud Drive.
John:
So I hit save.
John:
It asked me for a file name because it had never been given a name before.
John:
I type in a name for it.
John:
Hit the save button.
John:
And it says, untitled could not be read.
John:
Boop, pops me back.
John:
didn't save i try to save again i try save as you know uh saving it in a different location not in dropbox on a regular disc says untitled could not reread boop sends me back to the document i'm like are you serious now i've made a new document i can't even save it to the local file system
John:
This is just the brokenest thing I've ever seen in my life.
John:
Like, seriously, you know, VI, Emacs, I just want to make a damn text document and save it to the local disk.
John:
I don't know what was wrong.
John:
At this point, I don't even care.
John:
Like, I feel like just burning pages to the ground and just never looking at it again.
John:
I don't know what the problem is.
John:
Like, is it because the new document was automatically made in iCloud?
John:
And by the way, the ghost of the old document that was in iCloud is still there.
John:
It's like this half package thing that I can't delete because error negative 37 in the finder or some crap like that.
John:
So maybe I've just entirely hosed her iCloud drive.
John:
And because when you make a new document, it auto saves it to iCloud.
John:
The very fact of me trying to save it to local disk has to read the document from iCloud.
John:
But iCloud drive won't let you read it because it thinks it's in use.
John:
Utterly horrifying.
John:
complete failure of the most simple thing you could possibly do with pages which is make a text document and i just it just boggled my mind and i just thought like what would regular people do like they would never try pages again i probably will never try pages again unfortunately now she kind of knows how to use pages and knows how to like change the font and stuff so i'm afraid to switch her out of that into like text edit but i'm like maybe i should send her to microsoft word at least i know it'll freaking be able to save documents
John:
and or google docs for crying out loud i know google docs will work we use it all the time all of us edit this document and at no time are we all not able to open this document at no time are we not able to save it like apple what what is going on i don't i don't even want to think and and still as i sit here right now in her icloud drive is the ghost of some ancient pages file packaging that i literally cannot delete from the finder
John:
I don't know.
John:
It is one of the most depressing experiences I've had with Apple server-side software in years.
John:
It's saying a lot.
John:
Seriously, though, like I can't.
John:
Can you think of something?
John:
Obviously, data loss would be worse.
John:
The only thing I can think of to be worse is like data loss.
John:
And it would have led to data loss if someone wasn't there who didn't realize that you can, you know, select all copy and paste into a new thing and, you know, find your way out of it.
John:
But for a brief period of time, I could not open up her original pages document anywhere.
John:
Couldn't open it on any Mac.
John:
Couldn't open it on any iOS device.
John:
Every time you tried to open it, it would give you an error.
John:
And it was the only copy of the file that we had.
Marco:
you've learned a lesson that I'm slowly learning over the last couple of months, which is that I think for maximum happiness, it is best to keep a little bit more distance from Apple's stuff than what we've been keeping.
Marco:
And for me, I'm rethinking my use of photos, I'm rethinking my use of any kind of iCloud backend stuff, rethinking whether I even want to keep wearing the Apple Watch.
Marco:
There's a lot of things where like,
Marco:
Apple right now, they're so big.
Marco:
They're doing so much stuff.
Marco:
They're spread so thin.
Marco:
So much of Apple's stuff is in this 1.0 or beta state recently with no end in sight.
Marco:
And it seems like the direction the company is going...
Marco:
is towards being even more spread thin and having even more 1.0 half-finished products.
Marco:
It's important for people like us who care about our computing life happiness, our stability, our data integrity...
Marco:
uh i i think it's important for us to start realizing like you know going all in an apple is not best for our happiness anymore and it's best to kind of keep some distance and you know maybe have a mac and an iphone but you know not every ipad plus the apple tv plus every phone every year plus the apple watch plus being all using all the new services apple music and photo photo library cloud and all sorts of like you know maybe not having everything
John:
I think for me, mostly what I've already known this and I've mostly been doing this is stick to the products that are really important to Apple.
John:
Photos is way more important than pages to Apple.
John:
And it shows, I feel like, right?
John:
And things like iCloud Drive, where there's already an alternative that I've been using that works for me, like Dropbox, right?
John:
don't switch to iCloud Drive just because it's Apple's thing because you already have Dropbox and it already does that like it's the same you know I use Gmail pretty much no matter what Apple does with Apple's mail application and iCloud mail I will never switch from Gmail unless Gmail starts being unsatisfactory to me right so that's the whole thing is like just because Apple makes a version of a thing that you already have and like don't switch to it because you think the Apple thing is going to be better right right
John:
only switch when you were dissatisfied with the thing that you have so i'm not dissatisfied with dropbox so i mean the reason i did it for my daughter is i'm giving her a difference like i'm i'm thinking a different standard for her i'm like she has nothing now so maybe if she just starts off uh as an iCloud person
John:
right from day one and puts all her stuff on iCloud drive maybe it'll work out fine for i already have you know investment in Dropbox my stuff in Dropbox my habits formed on Dropbox but Dropbox is a third-party company it could get acquired by somebody could go out of business for my kids i feel like if you just start straight up Apple and you just have you know one account and everything's on your Apple ID or whatever won't that be simpler for you it's less for me to explain like it's bad enough that my mother still insists on having two email addresses the pain it caused me is just tremendous tremendous amount of pain
John:
One is for spam, I guess you were wondering.
John:
And honestly, I've kind of done that with my kids, too, because I don't trust... Because I'm so distrustful of Apple Mail, I gave them both Gmail accounts as well.
John:
So they have... And that is, you know...
John:
it could be confusing to them if that was if they revealed the confusion but i just hid the apple mail app on their ios devices so they just see the gmail icon is how they get their mail you know what i mean um but for this that i made a different choice than it would have for myself basically because i would never have done this i don't use icloud drive but for them i decided to do it and it was a mistake so i really need to trust my instincts more on if it's really really important to apple it has a much higher chance than if it's like well we'll update it sometimes
Marco:
I think maybe a healthy way to look at this would be in the last 10 years or so, we keep going more and more towards integration and an increasingly smaller number of companies that each increasingly offer a larger number of services and products that people are expected to kind of go all in on one company for.
Marco:
So you're all in the Apple ecosystem or you're all in the Google ecosystem or whatever.
Marco:
And I think what maybe a better way to look at this is kind of like the danger of a monoculture and that if you're all in on anything, that it makes you vulnerable to problems.
Marco:
And maybe the healthier thing to do is to maintain diversity in the things that you use and the things you rely on.
Marco:
So, you know, I'm all in on Apple stuff in a lot of ways, but I don't use iCloud Drive because that feels like a little too much in a way that Apple is not very good at usually.
Marco:
So...
John:
and i and they don't host my email i use fast mail for that with mail right in front of it so i you know that's again like i wouldn't i wouldn't trust icloud mail uh even though a lot of people do and it works fine i'm surprised you didn't tell me your usual speech which like really and this is true i just have been lax in doing it the right thing to do for my kids is not to give them gmail accounts or apple accounts the right thing to do is giving them accounts in a domain that i own even if behind the scenes that like forwards through gmail or whatever so i'm kind of doing them a disservice by not doing that but
John:
then again they're not going to care what the hell i do then they're going to become adults and pick their own place to host their email i just hope it won't be hotmail hotmail will never die i can't i can't get my sister a hotmail i tried i really tried i she has a gmail account her hotmail all goes to it she can email from hotmail through it just i couldn't i couldn't do it she keeps going back
John:
Syracuse are talking about toasters.
John:
More exciting than a roller coaster.
John:
Will it fit on its countertop?
John:
I hope the reviews never stop.
John:
How many pieces of toast can it fit?
John:
What's the build quality of it?
John:
Do the buttons make it?
John:
We'll be right back.