Cat, Modifier Cat
John:
All your data is out there, and you have no idea if any of it's valid.
John:
You're just propagating single-bit errors into all of your backups ad infinitum.
John:
You don't worry about that?
John:
You don't think about that, how terrible it is?
Casey:
I choose not to worry about that.
John:
Wow.
John:
Blame me when your wedding pictures are corrupted and there's a giant pink pixel where your face should be.
Casey:
Oh, please.
Casey:
Well, firstly, a pink pixel where my face should be would probably be an improvement.
Casey:
But secondly, I have like 35 backups of that, including the original DVDs.
John:
Yeah, they're all corrupted because once they go bad in the original disc, you're just corrupting your backups.
John:
You're just propagating the corruption because you have no idea it's there.
Casey:
I have the original DVDs.
John:
The original DVDs, those will keep, yep.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
John:
Little burnt spots on ink under plastic.
John:
That'll last forever.
Yeah.
Marco:
And it's organic dye, so it decomposes.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I hate you so much.
Casey:
So what are we talking about today?
Casey:
Well, this is turning into the Accidental Marco podcast because you've gone and sold stuff again.
Casey:
I'm waiting to be told that I've been replaced or sold or, I don't know, somebody else is my daddy now.
Casey:
So a big week.
Marco:
Yeah, a little bit.
Marco:
At least this is the last one.
Marco:
I'm out of stuff to sell now.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
Well, you just got to make new things to sell.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I saw so many jokes about how your next app has already been sold and nobody even knows what it is yet.
Marco:
Yeah, that's pretty good because I don't know what it is yet.
Marco:
That's pretty good.
Marco:
Actually, at this point, I do know what it is, but we'll see.
Marco:
If you just pay attention to what sessions I go to during WVDC, you'll probably be able to guess it pretty easily, but it doesn't really matter.
Okay.
Marco:
I'm really excited to finally have... Basically, I mentioned at some point before the magazine sale was public, and I should mention too, Glenn and I were arranging this almost a month ago.
Marco:
And it just so happened that... We did arrange it after the Instapaper thing, but it was before the Tumblr thing.
Marco:
And as the Tumblr thing was going on, Glenn and I were emailing each other going, man, this is going to be hilarious when we announce this.
Marco:
And everyone's going to think I'm just selling everything I own.
Marco:
But yeah, the main reasons I wanted to sell the magazine were what I wrote in the blog post, which is basically I had created a job for myself that was a lot less of what I wanted to do than I expected.
Marco:
It was a lot of just administrative stuff and process stuff and overhead and almost no development.
Casey:
You know, I kind of wish that I failed as spectacularly as you do in creating these lucrative-appearing businesses that you just have to be burdened with unloading.
Casey:
It's a tough life you live, Marco.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
I mean, no, it's... The other main reason that I wanted to sell it is...
Marco:
that because it was taking up my time, and it's a mental burden as well, having these things.
Marco:
Everything that you do occupies some kind of space in your mind and in your present state of mind.
Marco:
I'm probably abusing these terms.
Marco:
I'm definitely not a Buddhist or anyone who would be trained properly in being able to describe these things.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But I don't like having things on my plate that I'm not really into.
Marco:
And obviously, there's some stuff that you've got to do.
Marco:
You've just got to do it.
Marco:
You've got to do your taxes.
Marco:
You've got to clean your house.
Marco:
There's stuff you've got to do.
Marco:
But something like making your own business, you have control over that.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
One of the reasons why I wanted to sell Instapaper was because it was weighing on me mentally that I didn't want to put in the effort into it that it really deserved, and a lot of it I couldn't put in the effort that it really deserved.
Marco:
With the magazine, it was more like, I can keep doing this indefinitely because it wasn't taking up much of my time, but why keep a business around that I'm barely putting anything into?
Marco:
And what I learned also, like coding... You know the answer to that question, though, right?
Marco:
Well, because it makes money, right?
Marco:
Is that the answer?
John:
Yes, that's the usual answer.
John:
I keep a business around that makes money that I barely put anything into.
John:
Yeah, that's the answer.
Marco:
But the reality is, like, you know, you can ask people who buy a restaurant, you know, thinking, oh, this will generate money forever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Maybe, but you're going to be involved whether you like it or not.
Marco:
It's going to need you.
Marco:
The idea of a business that just generates passive money and you never have to touch it, those do exist, but not really in the software world.
Marco:
They really don't exist.
Marco:
You can neglect something for a while, and it can work for a little while, but it doesn't really exist in the sense that you're still going to have to maintain that.
Marco:
You're still going to be responsible for that.
Marco:
You can't just let it sit there and stagnate forever.
Marco:
Eventually, things are going to dwindle down.
Marco:
People are going to see that you haven't done much to it in a while, and they're going to move on.
Marco:
Or something's going to break.
Marco:
With the TextMate 1 problem, something might break at any point.
John:
you know cause problems so well there's no reason you couldn't have done what exactly what glenn is doing though which is like you know so he's taking the reins now and he's not a developer right well not not this kind of developer so he is just really bringing people on to take over development with the ios to app to you know do all sorts of ancillary things while he you know sort of wrangles them so it seems to me that it's like
John:
If your heart was in it, if this is what you really wanted to be, was like run a publication and grow a publication, you would be doing it.
John:
And it has less to do with whether the thing is making lots of money or a little bit of money or how long it's going to make money because you're perfectly capable of doing the things that Glenn is doing with it, basically delegating to other people to do all the stuff, delegating the development and everything.
John:
It's just that that seems like not something you want to do.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
And I could delegate the development to somebody else, but the development was the part I liked the most.
Marco:
But there just wasn't that much that I wanted to do with it.
Marco:
I loved building the app.
Marco:
I loved all the little design tricks and everything, and I loved doing all that.
Marco:
But then once the app is done, I'm like, well, you know, it's in maintenance mode, basically.
Marco:
And there's certainly features you can add.
Marco:
There's some good stuff Glam wants to do to it.
Marco:
But it was all stuff that I really didn't care that much about.
Marco:
I wasn't that motivated to do.
Marco:
And ultimately, it wasn't...
Marco:
You're right that if I wanted to keep doing this, I could have.
Marco:
Of course I could have.
Marco:
My theory is that... Well, I know, just the way I feel, I know that...
Marco:
I'm just not that into doing the management and the business stuff.
Marco:
I do that stuff because I have to, not because I really love it.
Marco:
My role in the magazine had become pretty much all business stuff and overhead and none of the stuff I wanted to do very often.
Marco:
What I also learned, I was talking to our friend underscore David Smith recently, I don't know, a couple hours ago.
Marco:
David Smith has lots of apps.
Marco:
He has a portfolio of many apps.
Marco:
He does a lot of things.
Marco:
I don't think I can really do that.
Marco:
When I started working on the magazine alongside Instapaper, I started learning some of these difficulties in my motivation or my personality or whatever it is.
Marco:
I'm not very good at working on multiple apps at the same time of the same type.
Marco:
I can do a web app and a native app.
Marco:
Those are different enough.
Marco:
I can do an app, a podcast, and a blog because those are very different things.
Marco:
They serve different parts of my brain and my satisfaction in what I do and what I make.
Marco:
But I really don't think I'm very good at having multiple apps that all need attention.
Marco:
When I had the nursing clock app, that was nothing.
Marco:
I crapped it out in a couple of days and it didn't require any maintenance and it made something like $30 over the course of its life.
Marco:
It didn't require any maintenance.
Marco:
That's a whole other story.
Marco:
To have two apps going at the same time
Marco:
that both need a good amount of attention ongoing, I can't do that.
Marco:
I really don't work well that way.
Marco:
I want to start this new thing I'm doing.
Marco:
It's an iOS app.
Marco:
I wanted to start a new thing.
Marco:
And I know I could have kept doing the magazine, but I was so not that into it already because of what my job had become that I created for myself.
Marco:
I was so not that into it already that I wanted a clean plate.
Marco:
I wanted to have nothing else competing for my attention in the app space.
Marco:
Also, I mentioned last episode or recently, I don't know when.
Marco:
I don't want to talk this whole episode, by the way.
Marco:
But I mentioned last episode or something like that that I work in bursts of productivity.
Marco:
Running a publication doesn't really allow you to do that because there's a publication schedule.
Marco:
So every two weeks, even though it wasn't a lot of work for me, you know, Glenn was doing almost all of it already, but every two weeks I had to do XYZ.
Marco:
And doing a podcast, that's a little bit different in that it's easier and it's more of me being creative and having this creative output.
Marco:
Publishing an issue with a magazine does not involve creativity on my part by very much.
Marco:
I picked a few photos and picked the cover image, and that's about it.
Marco:
And then I had to pay checks to everybody and do the server push and stuff like that.
Marco:
And it just wasn't...
Marco:
It wasn't that interesting.
Marco:
So having to do that every two weeks felt like a restriction on me.
Marco:
Whereas... Oh, and you can't really take a week off.
Marco:
At least this show, if we really wanted to, we could take a week off.
Marco:
Not that any of us are likely to do that.
Marco:
But if we really wanted to, we could take a week off.
Marco:
With a publication, you can't.
Marco:
So it locked me into this fixed schedule, but I don't really work very well that way.
Marco:
So that was another reason.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
The main reason I wanted to sell it was because I wanted to clear my plate and be able to put myself into my next project fully.
Casey:
And that makes complete sense, and not to psychoanalyze you at all, but it seems to me that we're seeing a trend, and certainly I've known you for a really darn long time, so I feel like I'm somewhat qualified to speak about this.
Casey:
It seems like I'm seeing a trend that anything that's compulsory, you tend to not like.
Casey:
And in the case of the magazine, once you – You don't say it.
Marco:
It transcends like first grade.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So that's exactly my point.
Casey:
I mean you've talked a lot about how you don't really like homework.
Casey:
You've talked about how you don't really love paying taxes, which granted who does.
Casey:
I love paying taxes.
Marco:
I don't like dealing with it.
Casey:
Well, you know what I mean.
Casey:
So, and also, it seems like part of the reason that you got turned off by the magazine to build on what you were saying before is because you had to be productive at certain times.
Casey:
It's not that you hated necessarily doing the work, at least that's...
Casey:
It sounds to me anyway that it's not necessarily that you hated doing the work as much as you had to do it at a certain time, and that's really tough.
Casey:
And the other thing I'll say, and then you can refute everything I just told you if you want because I'm trying to put words in your mouth.
Casey:
The other thing I'll say is it's like the same reason you don't have the 1M anymore.
Casey:
You've got your fancy, nice car.
Casey:
You don't want to have to choose between two equally fancy, nice cars.
Casey:
It's so ridiculously good.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
And you're going to get me started, and we don't want to do that because nobody listens to me.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
You don't want to have to choose between two nice things any more than you want to have to choose between two crummy things or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And whether or not other people will understand what the burden was, the fact of the matter is you felt it was a burden, and you felt that you had to work on it rather than desired to.
Casey:
And so that's the point at which
Casey:
At least to me, it seems that's the point at which you sold Instapaper when you felt like you had to work on it.
Casey:
It's the point in which you sold the magazines when you felt like you had to work on it and when you didn't want to work on it anymore.
Casey:
I mean, from an outsider's point of view, that's what I'm seeing.
Marco:
Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
Marco:
I'm not a very complicated personality.
Marco:
There's not a lot of layers here.
Marco:
It's pretty much what you see is what you get.
Marco:
I don't make any effort to hide all that stuff, and you nailed it.
Marco:
That's me.
Casey:
I mean, that's pretty fair.
Casey:
John, any observations on that before we totally sidestep?
John:
No, I don't think so.
John:
I think Marco is doing what we would all do if we could.
John:
Not do the things you don't want to do, do the things you do want to do, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you want to share anything about this forthcoming app?
Casey:
And I did not figure out in advance whether or not I should ask that question.
Marco:
No, not yet.
Marco:
I will in time.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm still debating in my head, because debating out loud is boring, I'm still debating in my head whether to pre-announce anything about the app before it's ready, whether to put up a splash page and do all that bullshit.
Marco:
Oops, I've got to bleep that.
Marco:
Or...
Marco:
Or all the stuff people do.
Marco:
Just hype up their app, have a queue.
Marco:
I'm not going to do that.
Marco:
But put up a splash page and tease it.
Marco:
It's like, coming soon.
Marco:
I don't know if I want to do that or if I want to just say what the app will be and then collect feedback at the expense of having competitors then copy me and stuff.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I'm going to decide all those things over the next few months.
Marco:
But what I have decided is that I'm not going to make any major decisions about the app's feature set or design or layout or navigational structure until after WBDC.
Marco:
Because I want to see what iOS 7 introduces.
Marco:
I want to see what's different and what's coming up.
Marco:
And then I will decide fully...
Marco:
here's the kind of you know feature set this will have here's the business model like you know if they introduce something like upgrade pricing or trials that might influence my decision on the business model so i don't want to make any decisions yet on all those big things but and then i'll see you know maybe throughout the summer maybe i'll tease it maybe i will just announce it outright and it won't be available yet or maybe i'll just shut up about it until it's ready i don't know yet
Casey:
Well, did you see what Justin Williams is doing with whatever he's building?
Marco:
You know, I didn't have a chance to look at that yet.
Marco:
The passbook thing?
Casey:
Yeah, I forget what he's calling it.
Casey:
Man, this is an accidental podcast.
Casey:
Pit Pass.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
It's a car reference, Casey.
Marco:
We should know this.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm disappointed myself.
Casey:
But the premise, in case you're not familiar, is you get this passbook item into passbook.
Casey:
And I guess what he's doing is he's going to update it with little bits and blurbs about the forthcoming app as he decides to release it.
Casey:
And whether or not you believe in pre-releasing things...
Casey:
And pre-announcing things, I think it's a very clever and different take on something that we've seen ad nauseum our entire lives.
Casey:
So I didn't know, Marco, if you had any thoughts on that.
Casey:
I guess if you haven't really looked into it.
Marco:
I haven't had a chance to look at it.
Marco:
But it looks like the point of it is to do things – it looks like a combination of being able to tease apps that are upcoming and also like the iOS version of a newsletter.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, you know, traditional software developers, especially indies who have, like, sold on the Mac and stuff, they have, for a long time, had, like, mailing lists they maintain, and then, you know, like, Rogue Amoeba has talked about this before, our friends over there, where, like,
Marco:
They hardly ever mail anything out to people, but when they make a brand new product or a major update, then they will.
Marco:
And that's always a significant source of upgrade revenue and of customers coming back and buying new stuff.
Marco:
And people actually like that.
Marco:
And on iOS, there's no good way to do it.
Marco:
You aren't allowed to do it with push notifications.
Marco:
Other people do, but you aren't allowed to technically.
Marco:
And you don't want to annoy people.
Marco:
And you also don't usually have access to things like their email address.
Marco:
So this is an interesting idea if it's going to address some of that beyond just the promoting upcoming app thing.
Marco:
But I guess that's all I have to say because I don't know much about it yet.
Casey:
John, did you have any thoughts?
John:
Marco was saying he wasn't sure whether he wanted to tease this thing ahead of time.
John:
It seems pretty clear to me that you don't want to tease it ahead of time, but are only considering it because it may be a good way to build...
Marco:
you know good buzz for your application right here's the thing i've always thought building buzz before you could actually get it is kind of a waste because i know when like i i i forget where i was i was talking to somebody about this sorry to whoever that was hopefully it wasn't you guys um that there's this movie um for it's a documentary about sign painters people used to paint signs by hand before like vinyl signs and everything came out
Marco:
And they keep promoting this thing everywhere.
Marco:
And I see it everywhere.
Marco:
And it's a little documentary.
Marco:
It's been at film festivals and stuff.
Marco:
But I can't get it.
Marco:
I can't buy it.
Marco:
I can't rent it.
Marco:
I can't view it online.
Marco:
No matter what I do, I won't be able to get it for months.
Marco:
And so they're getting all this publicity out there, and I'm interested.
Marco:
I'm responding.
Marco:
I'm saying, I want to see this movie.
Marco:
I will pay a few bucks right now to see this movie if you can get it to me.
Marco:
But it's not out.
Marco:
And that drives me crazy as a customer.
Marco:
Because what's probably going to happen is it's going to come out in six months, and I won't care anymore, and I will have forgotten by then.
Marco:
So I hate pre-hyping things because...
Marco:
you get people interested.
Marco:
I mean, this is one of the reasons why the Apple strategy works so well.
Marco:
Apple says nothing until the thing's available, and then it's like, all right, here's this awesome new thing.
Marco:
You want this, right?
Marco:
You can buy it today or this Friday.
Marco:
You can respond immediately.
Marco:
The hype does something for you.
Marco:
When this product's not even available yet and not going to be available for months...
Marco:
What can you really do with that?
Marco:
What can you really do with all that hype?
Marco:
To me, I think it's kind of arrogant to expect people to remember all that crap in two or three months.
John:
Well, you would – I mean, I assume you wouldn't – like, there's – it's a spectrum here.
John:
You wouldn't tease it way, way, way ahead of time.
John:
But perhaps, like, basically, first, you don't put anything up until the thing is basically done.
John:
And all you're doing is delaying it so you can build this hype.
John:
So maybe if it's only, like, one week or two weeks lead time when you are actually finished, basically, and you're just, like, this is the ramp up to sale.
John:
Like, I wouldn't say, like, do like they do with the movies and tease it the summer before it comes out with –
John:
you know, some obscure image to get people excited about what the movie is.
John:
And then, you know, but it's what I was getting at before is that if marketing was not a factor at all, and human beings weren't buying this application, you were just making it for your own edification, you would release it when it's done and not say anything about it ahead of time.
John:
I mean, you won't even say what it is at this point.
John:
So it seems like your inclination is, why would I ever tell anyone anything until it's done, and then I would give it to you, and here it is.
John:
But the only reason you're considering it is because maybe that attitude is a little bit too close to this.
John:
Maybe there's something that's a happy medium where three days before I have a countdown clock, or a week ahead of time I put an image, or something like that.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
You have to look at it as, for me, what's in it for me, really?
Marco:
What is my benefit from...
Marco:
pre-announcing and pre-teasing something and because you know and it's hard honestly i would love to share stuff with people i would love to share information with people i've been burned a lot in the past by being ripped off and i'm still very sensitive to that you know i'm trying to i'm trying to reduce my sensitivity to that over time but i still am very sensitive to it and so the last thing i want to do is announce what i'm going to do and then get ripped off before i even do it
John:
Everything's a remix, Marco.
Casey:
Well, the one thing I would say, and then maybe we can do a quick sponsor.
Casey:
The one thing I would say is that in my personal opinion, you've just preannounced everything you should need to preannounce or need is probably a poor choice of words, but everything you might want to preannounce.
Casey:
We know that you're working on an iOS app.
Casey:
We know that it's going to be something different.
Casey:
And I don't think we really need to know any more than that.
Casey:
And I think I echo what you were saying earlier, that it's almost disrespectful to say more than that.
Casey:
I mean, people know you've cleaned your plate of all your obligations.
Casey:
presumably you found something that's no longer compulsory, but actually interesting to work on.
Casey:
And so everyone knows that you're not going to sit on your island with your yachts and helicopters and your M5 and drive in circles.
Casey:
So that's all I think anyone wants to know, is that we're going to get something else in the world thanks to you.
Marco:
I can tell you that it will contain a UI web view, and it is not a watch.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
So who do we like?
Marco:
This week, we have two brand new sponsors.
Marco:
I'll tell you about the first one right now.
Marco:
The first one is from RAM Object Software.
Marco:
It's called Oxygen for Coco.
Marco:
And it's a new programming language.
Marco:
And it's for Coco and the Objective-C runtime.
Marco:
So I want to explain this properly.
Marco:
So give me some leeway here.
Marco:
Basically, so they say, especially they even address this comment to John, it is not a bridge and it is not an abstraction layer.
Marco:
It is a true language for the platform, and it replaces Objective-C within the tool stack.
Marco:
So it gives you full and direct access to all the Cocoa classes and APIs.
Marco:
All the objects you interact with in the code are the real Objective-C objects.
Marco:
You're calling methods on a real UI button, you're implementing a real UI table view controller subclass, etc.
Marco:
And it compiles down to regular Objective-C runtime objects and native code.
Marco:
So the resulting executable is all but indistinguishable from one created with Objective-C in Xcode.
Marco:
And if you debug the app or if you run it in instruments, it looks like it's written in Objective-C, so all those things just work.
Marco:
So the language is based on Object Pascal.
Marco:
But there's a good reason that their tagline is, it's not your daddy's Pascal.
Marco:
I don't know, my daddy didn't have Pascal.
Marco:
Maybe yours did.
Marco:
Because it goes well beyond what most people associate with Pascal, but it maintains all the readability and consistency that makes Pascal a great language.
Marco:
So it has many advanced features that they say blows Objective-C out of the water.
Marco:
Things like future types, class contracts, and many elements that make it just more convenient and straightforward to use an Objective-C.
Marco:
For instance, you can use plus to concatenate two NS strings, and it will automatically box from an integer to an NS number if you call a method on it.
Marco:
You know, stuff like that.
Marco:
And the other cool thing about this is that this Oxygen language is also available for the .NET platform and for Java and Android.
Marco:
So if you are writing applications for multiple platforms or, say, a server backend, you can do it all in the same language.
Marco:
Oxygen has been around on .NET for about eight years, and it's the most widely used non-Microsoft language on the platform.
Marco:
So, you know, what they say is, you know, it's not, it isn't to encourage the right ones run everywhere kind of crappy cross-platform apps, but it's designed to let you create platforms or create apps for each platform natively, but you can use the same language in all places.
Marco:
So, you know, you learn it once and you know it.
Marco:
Anyway, you can find out more at remobjects.com.
Marco:
That's R-E-M-objects.com slash oxygen.
Marco:
But it's oxygen spelled with an E on the end.
Marco:
So it looks like oxygen, but it's pronounced oxygen.
Marco:
So O-X-Y-G-E-N-E.
Marco:
Or you can go to oxygenlanguage.com spelled the same way.
Marco:
Listeners of this show can get 20% off any of the product with coupon code ATP13.
Marco:
Once again, that's remobjects.com slash oxygen with an E on the end.
Marco:
And use coupon code ATP13 for 20% off.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Oxygen for Coco from RamObject Software.
Marco:
I was pronouncing this Oxygen in my head the entire time we were setting up the sponsorship until they gave me the text.
Marco:
And they specifically gave me the pronunciation guide that it is pronounced Oxygen.
John:
Yeah, people have been sending me the links, and I was going to the site and reading the site and also pronouncing it the wrong way into my head.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's pronounced Oxygen, but spelled Oxygen.
Marco:
All right.
John:
The top thing on their site should have been just the pronunciation guide.
John:
Is there anyone behind this that we would know?
John:
Because I always wonder where these companies come from, because what they're doing is not something you're like, oh, I just think I'll do this thing where you write in one language and deploy on all these different platforms.
Marco:
Yeah, it is a small job.
John:
Right, and yet, like, you know,
John:
They seem like, where do these people come from?
John:
They must have been toiling on this in obscurity for years.
Marco:
Well, they said they've been on Microsoft platforms for eight years.
Marco:
So I think that's probably where they came from, is they started out there and then they migrated the language.
John:
They were just off our radar, I guess.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And now they've branched out into iOS.
John:
That makes some sense, because I'm like, how in the world do you ever accomplish that in any reasonable time frame?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
And more importantly, you look at this and you're like, why can't Apple do stuff like this?
Marco:
But they're not.
Marco:
They can.
Marco:
They just aren't.
Casey:
Well, they don't care about anyone but themselves.
Casey:
And they themselves.
Marco:
Let's have a whole podcast about paying taxes.
Marco:
That sounds like fun.
Marco:
Oh, that sounds super fun.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
And sort of kind of speaking of paying taxes, the other thing I wanted to at least briefly talk about is Tim Cook at All Things D, which was what, last night, I believe, at the time of recording, which is Tuesday night.
Casey:
So there were a couple of interesting things that came of this.
Casey:
To be honest, this conversation may be fairly short, but one of the things that I thought was really awesome was the way he talked about how Apple views their job.
John:
Tim said...
John:
some settings on these phones so that you're deep into the bowels of the thing, choosing this and that and the other and the other.
John:
I don't think that's what most customers want.
John:
Do some want it?
John:
Yes, of course.
John:
But is that...
John:
a mainstream customer one.
John:
I don't think so.
Casey:
I thought that was about as good a way as any that I've ever heard somebody sum up the way Apple approaches products.
Casey:
And I know when I talk to a lot of my developer friends, particularly the local ones that work, say, in .NET or other languages,
Casey:
They all get very angry about the fact that they don't have a lot of control over iOS devices, and that's why a lot of them use Android devices.
Casey:
And I keep coming back to, you know, five, ten years ago, maybe ten years ago, I would have much preferred an Android device because I could fiddle with it and tweak it and turn it into something honestly kind of awful.
Casey:
But now I just want stuff to work and I want Apple to make those choices for me.
Casey:
And again, I thought this was just an unbelievably good and short way of summing it up.
Casey:
I don't know what you guys thought about it.
John:
I always get nervous when I hear Tim Cook saying product related things.
John:
Not that I think he shouldn't like, I mean, he's the CEO.
John:
He says, you know, he speaks for the company.
John:
That's fine and everything.
John:
But
John:
I guess my picture of him in my head is not – that's not his strength.
John:
I would much rather see him – when he starts talking about a similar thing, like why they don't have a large line of phones and all the different things about international business and manufacturing, I'm confident that he's an expert in those areas.
John:
But in these other areas, I feel like he is doing what a lot of other normal CEOs do, which is relaying the result of discussions with the –
John:
lower level experts in the company who are the tier below him or the tier below them you know i don't i don't know like it does sound right like oh you know apple is it sounds like a summary to me of previous discussions and i don't if you left it to tim cook what things would be allowed to be in settings and what things wouldn't be i feel like you would make bad decisions
John:
In one direction or another.
John:
He would have very few settings, but they would be the wrong settings, or he would have no settings, and that's untenable.
John:
Just ask Marco.
John:
Or he would have too many settings.
John:
The whole settings thing, this could be a whole separate topic, but...
John:
it's it you know the reason we talk about is because it's not easy you can't just give a rule like oh you should have no settings or or you should have as few settings as possible you have to have just the exact right settings and you have to know and it's kind of like a gut feeling or whatever what are the right settings to have what is important what isn't because we all know that you know that the settings in an application can make or break it right it doesn't mean you have to have a lot of them but
John:
If you don't know what you're doing, yeah, then you end up with a lot of them.
John:
And it's like, well, at least everyone who needs to change something can change the thing they want to change.
John:
And that's pretty terrible, right?
John:
But by the same token, if you put in the wrong settings, there's only three settings and they're the wrong ones, it's like, man, this app would be perfect if I could only do X. And it doesn't have to be a frivolous thing.
John:
It could be something, you know, important like...
John:
It totally breaks the way I work with this application because it doesn't, you know, I can't change this particular behavior and it drives me insane.
John:
And then the application is no good for you.
John:
And everyone's got one of those and you can't include everybody.
John:
So like that's the art of it, figuring out for the most people, these are the top five most important things that should be settings because neither decision is clearly the right thing to do.
John:
And that's what I'm going to go with.
John:
And that is sort of an art more than anything else.
John:
So when I hear like a manager-y type person giving a pat answer, like, oh, they pay us to make decisions for them.
John:
And I know some people want settings, but most people don't.
John:
And people applaud that.
John:
I'm like, that's like a platitude.
John:
It's not, you know, if I know that's backed by the good taste to know which ones to set, then that's fine.
John:
But if I just hear it in isolation, I'm like, well, you know, I'm not impressed by that statement.
John:
Maybe I'm being mean to Tim Cook.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Well, no, I don't think you're being mean to Tim Cook, but what I think is hard is to realize, or at least hard for me anyway, is to realize that Tim may not be the man that knows that, unlike Steve, but he's smart enough to find the person, man or woman, that can make that call and empower them to do so.
Casey:
And I think giving Johnny Ive and Craig Federici a little bit more control
John:
is evidence of that that that i think tim knows that he's not that guy but he will empower the guy or girl that is that guy or girl did that make any sense at all yeah like he's he's got it it's unfair to him because he only one guy can be on that stage and it's got to be him so he has to speak for the whole company right i mean we're like you said we're just kind of spoiled by steve jobs where he could speak about that particular topic like it was the reverse with steve jobs when steve jobs would talk about like supply chains and inventory and
John:
Then you could tell he was not talking about something that he was deeply knowledgeable about, but he was merely channeling Tim Cook.
John:
And it's weird to see that reverse now.
John:
You know, when Tim is talking about financial stuff and supply chains, that's like him talking.
John:
And the other times it's him representing the rest of the company.
Marco:
Well, I think, first of all, I think it's worth pointing out that Steve did make tons of bad decisions.
Marco:
And he did often rely on the people below him arguing with him until he relented.
Marco:
And sometimes he didn't relent and ship bad decisions to the public and then had to go back on those.
Marco:
So, you know, there's that.
Marco:
Anyway, I think, Sean, I think you're being a little bit mean to Tim Cook here.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
You look at this guy talk, and I think I'm about halfway through the video.
Marco:
I read the live stream last night as it was happening, but the live stream really does not capture it very well.
Marco:
First of all, the live streams generally paraphrase.
Marco:
They don't usually say the exact words because they usually can't keep up.
Marco:
And so it helps to watch the video to really get an idea of what he said, exactly what he said and how he said it.
Marco:
And you look at this guy speak, and he is a rock.
Marco:
I mean, he is rock stable, rock solid.
Marco:
He was the same with Congress.
Marco:
Like, you can't make this guy flinch.
Marco:
And I think if he was mainly just repeating things he was told or things he had been taught by the lower-down people about the product philosophies and stuff, I don't think he would be quite as solid when talking about them.
Marco:
And I think you'd see him doing a lot more misstatements or kind of awkward, clumsy handling of the statements.
Marco:
But he doesn't do that.
Marco:
He's rock-solid.
Marco:
And so I think...
Marco:
I think he really has internalized everything he needs to internalize to be the CEO of a product-focused company like this.
Marco:
I really think that he has a lot more of his sensibilities than you give him credit for here.
John:
Well, what I'm looking for is basically like, you know, I don't think he doubts any that he's shaky on any of the principles.
John:
But when it comes down to it, as I said, the tricky part about this is not this.
John:
Unlike a lot of the economic stuff is not a science.
John:
It's more of an art.
John:
And he's not the one with that gut feeling that is going to drive the company.
John:
As you said, you know, Steve Jobs has got was wrong plenty of times, too.
John:
But.
John:
For the most part, in the big sweeping decisions, like, we should make a teal computer, we should make a music player, and it should be like this, and we should get into phones, and it's not going to ship until it's good enough for me.
John:
In the big things, his gut was what drove these things.
John:
So it's one thing to say...
John:
You know, this abstract philosophy of we'll make decisions for you and choose what needs to be in the application and what doesn't.
John:
And it's another thing to know that that is also the guy whose gut is going to guide big sweeping things like what is macOS 10 going to look like?
John:
The fact that it was all crazy and blue and shiny or whatever, right?
John:
Was that the right thing to do, the wrong thing to do?
John:
I mean, your gut can be wrong about these things, and he's not the guy with that, right?
John:
That's true.
John:
Even though he understands the principles.
John:
Like I said, I think it's basically the reverse of Jobs, because whenever Jobs talked about the economic stuff, he was a smart guy, he knew all the principles, but when it came down to it to decide which supplier should do what, and how much of the flash memory should we pre-buy, and is this a good deal, or are we going to be saddled with tons of LCDs that we don't need, or should we wait for this?
John:
He wasn't the guy to make that call, but he just understood all the underlying concepts.
John:
And it's probably true that Tim Cook is much, like you said, much more solid when talking about topics that he's not the super-duper expert in than Jobs was, because when Jobs did talk about economics, he sounded more like he was somebody merely parroting things that he learned from other people, even though he also probably understood them.
John:
But I think the thing that is in Tim Cook's favor during this entire thing, and especially, I think, back to last year's WWDC, which I probably came across in the keynote, but it
John:
I mean, we were there, we saw him as a speck on the stage or whatever, but you can kind of feel it in the room.
John:
That Tim Cook has the same enthusiasm and passion, and he's not faking it that Steve Jobs had for these things.
John:
I think about the time when he was on stage talking about the blind guy using the iPad to walk around the woods and everything.
John:
Unless he's an Academy Award-winning actor, he was not faking the fact that that...
John:
that that made him feel like what he's doing with his career in life is meaningful, right?
John:
More so than all the stuff they ask about market share and different models of phones or whatever.
John:
He is really, you know, touched by the idea that things he's making are changing the world in a touchy-feely Apple, you know, goofy kind of way.
John:
And that, I think, is his best asset as CEO.
John:
Well, okay, second best.
John:
Second to his, you know, expertise in the job that he had before he was CEO.
John:
is the fact that he really is enthusiastic about this stuff and he's not he's not a bean counter and he's not just out there to sort of steer a ship and or like he's not just a manager for a manager's sake right why he left compact or wherever he was before you know why why john scully left pepsi you know you don't sell sugar water you want to come with steve and change the world
Marco:
And with Tim, too, I think we've really seen, over the last year especially, we've really seen him just develop this incredible image of just not only being an absolute rock about everything, and this is definitely a guy you'd want running your company, but you can also tell that, A, he's not an idiot on any level.
Marco:
To use the Steve Jobs word, he's not a bozo at all.
Marco:
You can tell this guy is sharp and knows exactly what he's doing.
Marco:
But he's also – and he's very deliberate in what he does.
Marco:
It doesn't feel like he's throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Marco:
It seems like he's really being very deliberate about everything he does.
Marco:
But also, he projects a very nice personality when he speaks publicly.
Marco:
He seems –
Marco:
He seems extremely polite, well-spoken, personable, but still firm and strong.
Marco:
And so I think he has the perfect image of what you'd want a CEO of an important company to have.
Casey:
And he's extremely deliberate in the way he speaks as well.
Casey:
Something I wish I could be better about is taking a moment to think about what you were going to say, especially in like a one-on-one conversation.
Casey:
This podcast is a little bit different, but if you're in a serious conversation, say, you know, remember that I do consulting for a living.
Casey:
So say I'm at a client and they ask me a question, my natural inclination is to fire off an answer immediately.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And one thing that I respect deeply about Tim is that he will sit there and allow a silence so he can collect his thoughts and make sure that his answer is a great one, not just a good one, not just an acceptable one, but a great one.
John:
That was a big Steve Jobs-ism.
John:
Steve Jobs would just let that pause.
John:
And at a certain point when Steve Jobs did it, you wondered, is he pausing together his thoughts or is now this is kind of a head game?
John:
where he's pausing like he's already knows what he's gonna say but he's just like a little longer like in that was that wwc 1998 or whatever thing where he was doing q a and the guy the guy asked him the obnoxious question about uh i forget what the obnoxious question i was like it was clear that you don't know what you're doing or it was angry about open doc or something or whatever and he just the pause after that i should time it in the video it's like so long where he's waiting for the response there
John:
If I could think of a couple more mean things to say about Tim Cook.
John:
It's not mean, it's just like we're all comparing to Steve Jobs, right?
John:
And with any kind of powerful person speaking publicly, you basically get two choices.
John:
You get the guy who really truly believes what he's saying and is earnest about it, and the guy who says exactly the right thing...
John:
But give some kind of hint that he also knows that it's BS.
John:
And a good example is we didn't get to talk about this, the congressional thing where Tim Cook is out there explaining Apple's business and everything.
John:
And Tim Cook did nothing wrong.
John:
Like, he did exactly what you're supposed to do.
John:
And I can't decide.
John:
Actually, I can't decide.
John:
For me, I think it's worse to be the guy who really believes that everything you're telling Congress is the 100% straight, honest truth.
John:
like you know the fact that he'd never mentioned why they have these things overseas and how it's a tax avoidance scheme and stuff like that like everything he said was true it was just sort of an error of omission and i feel more comfortable like if steve jobs was doing it he he would make it clear that everyone knows this is bs because everyone watching knows it's bs congress knows it's bs tim cook we all know it's like kind of a it's theater right uh
John:
But sometimes I think that for a second or two, I think that Tim Cook really believes what he's saying.
John:
I'm like, wait a second.
John:
He knows what's really, you know, he's no dummy.
John:
We're all in on this or whatever.
John:
But he's so earnest.
John:
And you're like, oh, my God, maybe he really believes that.
John:
Maybe, you know, I'm like, no, come on.
John:
He doesn't really.
John:
And to me, that's worse.
John:
I would rather have, like...
John:
the guy who's in on the sort of shared delusion that we're all, you know, the suspension of disbelief for this theater type thing, then the true believer type thing.
John:
Because the second Tim Cook really believes that everything he omitted in discussing that Apple's various tax shelters doesn't exist, then we know, you know, we're in trouble.
John:
I mean, that's just testament to how incredibly earnest and honest, like for a second, he can make me believe that he really believes it.
John:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Before we exit the Tim Cook All Things D topic, I do want to point out also that a lot of people have said, oh, he hasn't really said anything here.
Marco:
He didn't say anything new or he didn't learn anything.
Marco:
And I think that's all crap.
Marco:
I think he said quite a lot.
Marco:
And he said it in the Apple way and in the Tim Cook way.
Marco:
But I think he said quite a lot of interesting things.
John:
That's Kremlinology.
John:
I mean, we're all... Like, if you go back... I would watch the Steve Jobs one, and you're all just looking to see... Like, he's never going to say, say it.
John:
So there's reporters who have no idea about, you know, just generic reporters who, like, go through it and go, oh, it doesn't seem like he said anything.
John:
But for people who are following every single, you know...
John:
every single fart that comes out of apple when you ask him you know uh what do you think about big screens and i guess you guys are making one or whatever and the first thing out of his mouth is as well we're not making one yet i mean like that's the answer like that he just that's him that is that is the most the biggest answer you're ever going to get out of anything like even steve jobs was never that open on even on his wildest days right yeah
John:
And what he's saying is perfectly clear.
John:
We're not making one yet.
John:
We're not ruling it out for the future or whatever.
John:
He doesn't say that if they don't have a larger screen phone in the planning stages already.
John:
And little things like that that were dropped everywhere about, you know, timelining the television, timelining anything that's wearable.
John:
It reminds me of...
John:
steve jobs way like i don't remember when i was way before the iphone like five years or something before that when they were talking when people were asking apple about pdas that was the big thing to do it's like is apple gonna make a pda like they tried to buy palm or handspring or something and been rebuffed and not that they ever announced that it was all secret you know rumors and stuff and people kept asking about pdas and a certain point you know the
John:
Apple would give answers and no comments or whatever.
John:
But at a certain point, Steve Jobs said to some reporter, we really believe that phones are where the future of this business is going to be.
John:
Boom!
John:
Apple's making a phone.
John:
Like, that's all you needed.
John:
And that's why for years, my friends and I were like, you know, when is the iPhone coming?
John:
And we would just call it the iPhone because it was the iMac and the iPad.
John:
When is the iPhone coming?
John:
And then we started to lose faith.
John:
We're like, maybe they're never going to make a phone.
John:
It's been such a long time.
John:
But, like, back then, like...
John:
When you make a statement like that to a reporter, you might as well just come out and say exactly what you're doing.
John:
I guess reporters can't report on it because it would be, you know, he didn't really say that.
John:
But for people reading the tea leaves, it's all out there in the open in his answers.
Marco:
I would say specifically, he seemed to confirm, in his Tim Cook and in the Apple way, he seemed to confirm that they are working on some kind of watch-like device that includes multiple types of sensors and serves multiple functions.
Marco:
Didn't you get that impression from what he said?
Marco:
Yeah, he said wearable.
John:
Oh, yeah, that wearable stuff.
John:
I think there might be something to that.
John:
It's a really interesting area.
Marco:
But it has to do multiple things.
Marco:
It can't just do one thing, and it has to have multiple sensors.
Marco:
I'm thinking he's looking to replace that Nike fuel band on his wrist.
John:
He's, like, describing his product obliquely at that point.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, I think that was a very clear – not even a hint.
Marco:
That was, like, beating you over the head.
Marco:
We are doing something like a watch that's going to have multiple sensors.
John:
Yeah, that combined with, like, the entering new product categories for the earning call.
John:
Right.
Marco:
And possibly as soon as this fall, it seems.
John:
The people freak out about it like we did with the phone thing.
John:
The phone didn't come out for like five years or whatever it was.
John:
It was some insane amount of steam, like forever, right?
John:
It doesn't mean that the watch is coming out next week.
John:
Like, that's the problem with the echo chamber of the news is like, oh, you know, a watch is coming.
John:
It's going to come out any second, right?
No.
John:
The timelines in these things are huge.
John:
You just read the tea leaves to see, all right, is this something that Apple's even looking at?
John:
Because if you would ask them if Apple was thinking of making a car, his answer would have not been, the car airspace is really interesting.
John:
I think a car made by Apple could be really interesting, and it would have to use multiple sensors.
John:
No, he would say, no, we're not interested.
John:
It's a different answer, right?
John:
All it does is tell you that...
John:
Something that you wear that you purchase from Apple that's not a clip on iPod Shuffle is potentially in the future of this company and tells you nothing about the timeline other than it's probably not a decade from now.
Marco:
But even on the timeline, I think he was pretty clear that we're going to see a new category from Apple this fall or early next year.
John:
Yeah, that could have been the TV had he not put the kibosh on that in his answers at the conference, right?
John:
Because the earnings call was like new category, and everyone's like, okay, is the new category TV, which was rumored for a really long time, or is the new category something that you wear, which has also been rumored?
John:
And then fast forward to the conference, he gets asked both questions, gives very different answers, and you're like, all right, I guess it's the thing you wear.
Casey:
Was it him that said that nobody wears watches anymore?
John:
Yeah, but what was interesting, he said, the live streams kind of transcribed this quickly, but what he actually said was like... For something to work here, you first have to convince people it's so incredible that they want to wear it, because you two guys are wearing watches.
John:
If we had a room full of 10 to 20-year-olds,
John:
And we said, everybody stand up that has a watch on.
John:
I'm not sure anybody would stand up.
John:
I don't see it.
Marco:
10 to 20-year-old.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, okay, so the guy deals with data.
Marco:
That sounded a lot like they did a survey.
Marco:
It sounded like that was data that they had looked up already.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that Steve would wing from his gut.
Marco:
Tim, I don't think, would.
Marco:
He was talking as though they were already looking into this.
Marco:
The comments about multiple sensors and about glasses sucking, I really think he was pretty clearly telling us there's going to be something here.
John:
Apple under Steve Jobs did do lots of market research.
John:
Jobs liked to downplay it, and he would say they didn't do focus groups for the other design, which is true.
John:
But the best example I can think of that is, speaking of nobody wears watches anymore, is when people were asking about, is Apple going to do some – this is pre-iPad.
John:
Is Apple going to do some sort of reading device or whatever?
John:
And he said, nobody reads anymore.
John:
And then he threw out, like, a couple of statistics.
John:
The only way he would know those statistics off the top of his head is from Apple's on-market research that they had done in the planning stages for making the iPad, which was so clearly in development then.
John:
It's like...
John:
By quoting a statistic that is supposed to be shooting down the argument of the person and saying, oh, you should make this thing.
John:
Oh, nobody reads anymore.
John:
People say that surveys show that people from this age group, I forget what statistic you threw out, but you don't know that statistic off the top of your head if you had not investigated it.
John:
So it's the same type of thing.
John:
Yeah, they they did do market research.
John:
They continue to do market research to see, you know, to decide what kind of product they're going to make.
John:
I don't know if Tim does more of it than Steve.
John:
I know Steve definitely want to downplay the idea that they that, you know, it's anything other than springing from their creativity.
John:
But yeah, they're a big company.
John:
Of course, they do market research.
John:
So I'm sure they know exactly how many people of what ages wear watches or would be willing to wear something and so on.
Casey:
Well, right, and to that end, when he says, you know, if you have a room full, was it 10, 20-year-olds, or 10 to 20-year-olds?
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
I'll have to rewind it.
Marco:
I think it was 10 to 20-year-olds.
Casey:
10 to 20-year-olds.
Casey:
To be honest, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
The point I'm driving at is, when he says, oh, nobody in the 10 to 20-year-old range, or whatever the statistic was, wears a watch, is that like a Barney Stinson challenge accepted moment, or...
Casey:
Is that him saying, no, really, nobody wants a watch and there's nothing we can do to stop it?
Marco:
Well, what he was saying, the theme of what he was saying was basically that if you're going to convince people to wear a watch, it has to be really, really good.
Marco:
And implying that what's on the market now in the field of smartwatches is not good enough to convince people to wear a watch who weren't already and who weren't nerds like people who are buying Google S. And...
Marco:
And so it sounded like what he was saying was a combination of Google Glass is a total flop and nobody will wear it, and we think there's something to be had in the watch area, but nothing else out there is good enough yet, which is typical Apple stuff to say before they enter a market.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
That's exactly my point, is they're saying, well, right now it all sucks, but, you know, the underlying, you know, under your breath comment is, oh, but we'll show you.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
It's like men's hats, you know, whatever.
John:
The 40s were all, you know, you look at those old movies, all the men on the street in New York City were all wearing hats.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
And then eventually that fell out of favor and then nobody wears a hat to work, you know, like it.
John:
And in fact, it would be rude to wear a hat to work if you're going to like a baseball hat or something.
John:
Right.
John:
So, you know, men's dress hats and I guess women's dress hats to some degree fell out of fashion.
John:
So if you had asked, you know.
John:
60 years ago how many men wore a hat today on their way to work all their hands ago well i think watches are like that in part because you know i think actually it started with pagers remember when people just started looking at the pagers to see what time it was right once you had some other way to tell what time it was other than a watch watches change from this practical thing that you had to wear so you got places on time into merely like jewelry like a fashion accessory and people still do wear watches but
John:
Even the people who do, I wonder if they still pick up their phone to tell what time it is, right?
John:
So, like him saying, you know, oh, people don't wear watches just because, like, the function of a watch is a timekeeper that goes on your wrist.
John:
We don't need that anymore because that functionality has been subsumed in these other smart devices.
John:
But...
John:
If we can make something that you can put on your wrist that suddenly does have value to you beyond just telling you what time it was, then maybe that would be a good thing.
John:
So he's saying there's all those wrists out there that don't have watches on because watches are not worth putting on your wrist.
John:
Those wrists are just waiting there.
John:
And it doesn't have to be wrists.
John:
Who knows where these things are going to be attached to your body.
John:
But something that you wear, probably, yes, probably on your wrist.
John:
That's what he's saying with that answer is all those wrists out there are just crying out for something really cool from Apple to stick on them.
Casey:
do either one of you guys wear a watch no you know i didn't i did until i'd say a couple years ago and i've always enjoyed them and i've always told myself that if i ever hit it big and sell everything that i own ahem
Casey:
that I would get myself a stupidly expensive watch.
Casey:
And by that, I mean like several hundred dollars as opposed to 20.
Casey:
But I keep telling myself I want to buy myself a watch and I haven't worn one in a few years and I'm too cheap to buy one.
Marco:
There was this guy in the old Tumblr office.
Marco:
I don't want to say who he was in case it would cause any problems, but there was this guy who shared the office and he had a watch dealer come in like twice a year to show him like these like new fancy like really like $10,000 watches and
Marco:
And it was this kind of short, thick guy with a nondescript briefcase would come in, open up the briefcase, and show off 30 gram worth of watches right there.
Marco:
It's like this whole cult of watch people.
John:
It's like camera people, but even more so, because cameras have more of a function.
John:
Once they tell time, beyond that, everything else is basically just fashion.
John:
And although I was just on...
John:
podcast with guy and renee and i don't remember if this part of it was after the recording had ended or if they'll stick it in so you can forgive me for repeating it but we were talking about the watch thing and what i said to them was that this is such a dangerous area for apple or any other company because once you put something on your body in a way that counts as wearing you enter this whole other realm of crazy illogical nonsensical uh
John:
ego-entangled decision-making.
John:
Because, you know, the iPod shuffle, you clip onto your clothes.
John:
And most people would say you are not wearing an iPod shuffle.
John:
It's like, oh, it's just my iPod, but it attaches to my clothing for convenient carrying.
John:
But once you have something that, oh, I'm wearing this, then, you know, forget it.
John:
It's like,
John:
Many people will take an electronic device, carry it in their pocket, or even clip it to their clothes.
John:
But the thing that people are willing to wear that is acknowledged as a wearing thing is totally dictated by things that Apple really doesn't have any control over.
John:
And I'm sure Apple is up to the challenge, but what a challenge that is.
John:
Give me something that I will want to wear.
John:
Because then it becomes a fashion statement, an expression of self.
John:
Much more so than even carrying a laptop or a phone.
John:
Even those things do, you know, you carry a part of your image with that thing.
John:
I feel like wearing is like the next level.
John:
Because basically, if you make this thing ugly...
John:
you know, in the opinion of some buyer, they're going to be like, this is the most awesome device ever.
John:
I think it's awesome, but I'm not going to wear.
John:
And like, that's part of the Google last thing is because that's wearing.
John:
Once you put that thing on your head, that counts as wearing something.
John:
And if it looks awkward or geeky and gives you a weird image, no matter how awesome it is, you're just going to be like, you know, I mean, it's hard for me to relate because everything I own is unfashionable and ugly and it makes me look stupid.
John:
But, but other people have lots of their self image tied up into looking good.
John:
And you have to sort of,
John:
But I guess it's like not step on those landmines to get a product into their hands that they're willing to wear.
John:
Lots of nerds are willing.
John:
I mean, look at the people willing to wear glass.
John:
Some people just have no barrier.
John:
Like, sure, I'll put anything on if it has some practical value.
John:
You should get Google Glass, John.
John:
Or futuristic.
John:
Even I have my limits.
Yeah.
John:
But yeah, and that is such a dangerous part about wearable tech.
John:
And I don't know how Apple in particular is going to navigate that because they're not going to make 700 models of this.
John:
Samsung is going to make 700 models of the ripoff product, right?
John:
And you'll be able to find one that works for you.
John:
It's the same thing with the phone cases, right?
John:
Even though you don't wear a phone, people buy the phone, but then there's a bazillion cases.
John:
And some of the cases you find hideous, but other people love rhinestone encrusted things or wooden cases or things that look like they're made of Legos or brushed metal.
John:
Like that's how people are able to even come to terms with the things they carry a lot of the time.
John:
If you can't do something similar to something that you wear, Apple's going to be in trouble because no matter how neutral and tasteful they make it, some person's going to say, I wouldn't wear that.
John:
I won't wear that.
Casey:
Yes, but you're also not considering that I think Apple, at the moment anyway, is more than not very trendy.
Casey:
And so it's trendy and kind of cool now to have a silver laptop with a piece of fruit shining on the lid.
Casey:
And I could swear that I had read stories years ago that people would connect iPod earbuds or iPhone earbuds to non-Apple devices just so they also had the white crap dangling in their ears.
John:
Yeah, no, they would do that.
John:
But that's what I'm saying.
John:
I think there is a part of personal expression embodied in…
John:
fashionable electronic devices that you carry and this is like the next level because you're not just carrying this you're wearing it like it's so crazy like think about shoes you know how crazy people are about the shoes they're willing and not willing to wear how many times you see somebody else's shoes and you think man i would never wear those shoes but they the person wearing those loves those shoes they paid 300 bucks for them right it's such an incredible range and people will reject products that are perfectly good in every possible way because they'll just say i can't wear that i won't wear that
John:
And yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how Apple navigates this because these are extremely dangerous waters.
Casey:
They are.
Casey:
But if you think about Apple's normal devices, they're extremely simple and tasteful and generally speaking, look good.
Casey:
Surely not to everyone.
Casey:
But generally speaking, there's not a lot to them.
Casey:
They're not very flashy and they just look good.
Casey:
And so I actually I do agree with you.
Casey:
And I think that this is a whole new territory they're not used to.
Casey:
But I also think that they'll probably navigate these waters pretty darn well.
John:
Well, if they do the naked robotic core thing again, I mean, like I said, it's worked for them with the phone.
John:
Because like you said, oh, they make something tasteful.
John:
It's very unadorned, very subdued or whatever.
John:
But some people want it to be pink and rhinestone encrusted.
John:
So there better be a way for me to take a pink rhinestones and shove them all over the Apple iWatch.
John:
Otherwise, I'm not wearing that thing because it looks just so boring and ugly.
John:
It looks like a techno bobble and mine needs to have rhinestones because I'm fabulous, right?
Casey:
John, I cannot wait to see you with your pink rhinestone encrusted watch.
Casey:
I am extremely excited for it.
John:
Yeah, it'll go great with my Motorola clamshell phone.
John:
Now with color screen.
Marco:
This is what happens when you get three nerds talking about fashion.
Casey:
Yeah, it never ends well.
Marco:
This is fantastic.
Marco:
Goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should do our next sponsor.
Casey:
I was just about to ask.
Marco:
This is a good time.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Our next sponsor, they need no introduction.
Marco:
But the sad thing is that won't apply to all of you because there are still people out there who have not bought this yet.
Marco:
It's Solver.
Marco:
and i don't know if it's pronounced silver i say solver in my head but i also said oxygen in my head so my head's not always right i guess um it's silver so it's s-o-u-l-v-e-r and what this is this is an app for the mac iphone and ipad and they told me to just wing it because they knew that i'm a massive fan of this so they didn't even give me a script um
Marco:
Solver is basically a hybrid between a calculator, a notepad, and a spreadsheet.
Marco:
If you can kind of think of that.
Marco:
If you just search my site for Solver, you'll see I've posted about it like 10 times over the years.
Marco:
Basically, if I'm working, I have this app open.
Marco:
I have it open now, even for a podcast.
Marco:
I always have it open.
Marco:
What I suggest you do, download this app.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure there's a trial.
Marco:
They didn't even tell me.
Marco:
I should probably go look that up.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure, yes, there is a trial.
Marco:
Download the app.
Marco:
Give it a shot.
Marco:
What you want to do is...
Marco:
Once you install this app, even just the trial, just hide Calculator.
Marco:
If you have it in your doc, take it out of your doc.
Marco:
Never launch Calculator again.
Marco:
I suggest trying it on the Mac first.
Marco:
In my opinion, that's where I use it the most.
Marco:
That's where it's best.
Marco:
Try it out instead of Calculator.
Marco:
Anytime you would try to figure out some little computation, type it into a scratch silver document instead.
Marco:
And once you start using it for like a day, you will instantly realize, oh my god, why have I been using stupid calculator apps besides this all these years?
Marco:
Why have I taken so long to find this app?
Marco:
It's basically a scratch pad for numbers.
Marco:
So I started using this, I don't know, 2005 or something like that?
Marco:
They've been around forever.
Marco:
I started using it forever ago.
Marco:
And ever since I started using it, I hardly ever use spreadsheets anymore.
Marco:
And I never use Calculator anymore.
Marco:
And it's for programmers, for people who are just doing simple calculations.
Marco:
Basically, if you're the kind of person who has ever launched the calculator app on your computer, you can probably use this and you can probably benefit from it.
Marco:
So it's called Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R.
Marco:
It's $20 in the Mac App Store or directly from their site.
Marco:
They also have some volume license discounts.
Marco:
You can get, for instance, a four-computer household pack for only $25.
Marco:
You can get volume licenses.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing like if I was running a business with employees, which I guess I won't do because I apparently hate doing that, but if I was running a business with employees, I would buy one of these for every employee and just have it just hide calculator on the computers through some kind of like group IT policy and put this on there instead.
Marco:
Really, it's that good.
Marco:
So they also have for iOS.
Marco:
Now, I use it for iOS, although I will say I use it for Mac more.
Marco:
But on iOS, it's really great.
Marco:
First of all, on the iPad, there is no built-in calculator from Apple.
Marco:
So you need to install something if you ever need a calculator.
Marco:
Might as well install this.
Marco:
It's awesome for lots of different things.
Marco:
It does formulas.
Marco:
You can use variables.
Marco:
You can use simple logic.
Marco:
You can use labels.
Marco:
I mean, it's really an extremely...
Marco:
high-functioning application for doing any kind of number scratchpad work.
Marco:
It's just so good.
Marco:
Anything that you would otherwise use a simple spreadsheet for, like, oh, let me figure out what my S3 costs are going to be this month for my bandwidth.
Marco:
Just use Solver.
Marco:
It's just so perfect for this.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
It's $5 for iPad.
Marco:
It's $3 for iPhone.
Marco:
I even use it, I know this is going on long, but I even use it as a scoreboard when I'm playing games in real life.
Marco:
If you're playing 500 Rummy with people, playing any kind of table game, you need some way to keep score between rounds.
Marco:
I type things into Solver.
Marco:
Every person will have a line labeled with their initials or their name, and then I'll just do score plus.
Marco:
And every single time there's a round, I'll add another one to their name.
Marco:
You can always see, leave it out, you can always see what everyone's total is and what each round was before that.
Marco:
There are just so many uses for this app.
Marco:
I use it constantly.
Marco:
Go get Solver.
Marco:
Please, for the love of all that is good, go get Solver.
Marco:
It is that good.
Marco:
You need this app.
Marco:
It's by Aqualia.
Marco:
I'm not even going to try to spell it.
Marco:
I'll put it in the show notes.
Marco:
It's aqualia.com slash Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R, or find it in the Mac App Store or the iOS App Store.
Marco:
Thanks to Solver for sponsoring.
Casey:
So not to pile on at all, but Solver, whatever it's called, is one of the few apps that triple dipped.
Casey:
In other words, I had to pay on all three platforms, and I didn't feel bad about it because it really is that good.
Casey:
And the other thing that I wanted to point out is that you know how a lot of people, ourselves included, have complained and moaned about how when you're building a calculator app for a computer, you don't really – and actually, Marco, you wrote a post about this, I think –
Casey:
You don't want to be encumbered by what's physical.
Casey:
And solver, solver, whatever, is a great midway between a spreadsheet and a calculator.
Casey:
And they were able to do that because they chucked out all the cruft and old stuff from the physical world and just made something that's really great in the computing world.
Casey:
Now that I think of it, I just totally stole a blog post, didn't I?
Marco:
Yeah, that's entirely my blog post.
Marco:
But yeah, I believe I called it overdoing the interface metaphor.
Marco:
This was back before most geomorphism debates, but the idea was if you make a computer calculator, you don't want to bring over a big grid of buttons that you have to click on and then a single line display.
Marco:
That's stupid.
Marco:
Computers can do so much more than that if you just let them.
Marco:
Solver is...
Marco:
It's a calculator app that was clearly designed for computers and not designed to try to mimic what old calculators used to be.
Marco:
It was designed for what computers can actually do and do well.
Marco:
It's a document-based app on the Mac and
Marco:
I don't know if the iOS versions are document-based.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure they are.
Marco:
Because what that means is on the Mac, you get all of the line and mountain line auto-save and version support, and it uses iCloud to sync everything, and it actually works.
Marco:
I've tried it between my laptop and my computer.
Marco:
It's great.
Yeah.
Marco:
Really, it's just a fantastic app.
Marco:
The guys even told me, you can probably sell it better than we can.
Marco:
I've basically devoted every chance I get over the last few years to talk about this app, I've devoted to trying to convince the world, please, for the love of God, just use this app.
Marco:
Trust me, it is that good.
Marco:
Even when the Mac App Store came out,
Marco:
I bought it, even though I already owned it.
Marco:
I bought it at the Mac App Store just to A, give them more money, and B, have a quick way to install it after any reinstall or any other computer that I owned.
Marco:
It really is that good.
John:
I can't believe it took you guys that long for the skewer to come up.
John:
I would have led with that.
John:
Basically, the calculator is to skeuomorphism, as this is to the opposite of that.
John:
I'm also a big fan, although I pronounce it as solver, because I like that better.
John:
The other thing I'll add is the reason I use this app all the time, and I actually use the dashboard widget of another skeuomorphic calculator occasionally, but I also have solver open all the time, although I just could it before launching it.
John:
uh skype because i want to free up some memory to make sure skype is it feels good uh is that this thing also does the stuff that you might find yourself typing into google for and i use it to do math in a lazy way like i write uh 27 is the percentage of 359 write that into solver and it gives you the answer you could do that math yourself we all know basic algebra you can do division multiplication and figure it out
John:
But, you know, did I do the division wrong or did I put the wrong thing in the right place or whatever?
John:
You can do 5,300 bytes squared in kilobytes and it will do the conversions for you.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
There's unit conversions.
John:
There's stock price lookups.
John:
The feature I like about it the best is that thing where you can write in a single English sentence that expresses what you want to know and it will just give you the answer of it.
John:
And I find it faster to go to Solver than to go to a Google search box and type these things in.
Marco:
Right, because it's a native app.
Marco:
It's all right there.
Marco:
It's all running already, and it's just a text box.
Marco:
It's great.
John:
And I think it is the one app where I find autosave the most satisfying.
John:
Because before autosave, I didn't like the fact that it had the little modified dot, and I would quit, and it would ask me to save.
John:
And I was like, just save everything all the time, and now it does.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's fantastic, really.
Marco:
I mean, it's hard to describe how good it is in just one ad spot, which is why this is taking us so long.
Marco:
But believe me, you got to try this app.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
And the people who develop it seem like really nice guys.
Marco:
I've talked to them a lot over email in the last five years or so.
Marco:
And you just want to support this.
Marco:
And they're always putting out updates to fix any little problems that come up.
Marco:
Although, honestly, I've rarely ever seen a problem.
Marco:
I mean, it's just so good.
Marco:
It's one of those apps that, it's like your text editor of choice.
Marco:
It's one of those apps that you can look at whatever you spend on this and say, this has helped me make so much more money than whatever it costs.
Marco:
This is so worth the minimal price I paid for it once years ago because it's that important to what I do.
Casey:
All right, so let's just continue to talk about this fantastic app the rest of the show.
Casey:
In terms of timely topics, the only one I've got left is WWDC, but I haven't had a proper think about what predictions I want to be wrong about.
Casey:
So is there anything that you two wanted to bring up?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, because that's coming up.
Casey:
Yeah, we've only got... Next week should be our predictions show.
Casey:
But I didn't want to do that today, but can if we have to.
Casey:
And I'll be even more wrong if we do it today.
John:
Yeah, I don't know if I'm ready.
John:
It's much better to do the prediction show right before WRC, because then we have the highest chance of being right.
John:
Right.
John:
You want to cheat and wait for all of the...
Marco:
Well, honestly, do you think anything's going to change between this week and next week with predictions?
John:
No, but our knowledge of it, yeah, but there'll be something.
John:
All the obvious things that are in the invitation is like, oh, I bet they'll show the new version of iOS and Mac OS X. That's great.
John:
But we want to know what else.
John:
Is there anything else?
John:
Or what are the features?
John:
Did we get a leaked iOS 7 screenshot somewhere, some blurry image?
Marco:
Haswell notebooks.
John:
Yeah, is that now, or is it going to be announced, or is it going to just have a little new badge after we walk out of the thing like the Mac Pros did, because it's not important enough?
John:
But those details will be clearer by next week, I think.
Marco:
I bet Haswell MacBook Pro updates would at least warrant an eight-slide Phil Schiller mention.
John:
Yeah, no, I mean, like, they spent a lot of time on the new retinas last year, and granted that was like, oh, it's the first retina, you know, Mac, but certainly it's worth something.
John:
Some slides showing how much faster and lower power they are and all that good stuff.
John:
Right, here's an update to our notebook line.
John:
And Lord knows they're not going to be showing us new Mac Bros.
John:
We want some hardware that can be in a clear acrylic tube outside and walk out of their room, you know?
John:
They should just put an old Mac Pro in there and see how many people gather around it.
Casey:
You know what they should do?
Casey:
They should take an old Mac Pro and slap a new sticker on the side.
Casey:
I hear that works.
Marco:
I think what we're going to see is mostly the focus is going to be on iOS 7, but I'm actually really curious to see what we learn about Mac OS 10.9.
John:
Yeah, because if they keep with their pattern of cat modifier cat, then this comes up as cat again, right?
John:
Four releases is a cycle, cat modifier cat.
John:
And so either they're done with cats or we've got to have a new cat.
John:
I have been since last year or for a long time.
John:
I have to give a name for the thing I put in my notes file.
John:
uh i've and mine is called lynx l y n x not that i think that's what the cat name is going to be but when i ask my brain well brain you have to type in something else to be your placeholder for 10.9 and i don't want to write 10.9 i wrote in lynx because i can't i can't even think of another it was like ocelot and all sorts of bs things either cat names are done which i'm perfectly fine with good can the cat names i'm all for it uh or my brain says lynx so but i have no idea what they're going to call it i've heard nothing well what's the modifier going to be then
John:
I don't know.
John:
Mountain Lynx.
John:
Makeup.
John:
Graphical Lynx.
John:
Snow Lynx.
John:
Graphical Lynx.
John:
This is another reason that Lynx won't be the name, right?
John:
But I'm happy to be done with cats.
Marco:
Well, do you think there's going to be a 10.10?
Marco:
Because maybe there won't be a modifier cat for this next one.
Marco:
Maybe they will change the naming convention to not have 10.10.
John:
I think they'll do.
John:
Well, I think...
John:
To go to something where you're like, oh, this is not 10, it's like this one goes to 11.
John:
If you want to do some sort of thing like that, you can't just do that as a marketing push.
John:
There has to be something to go along with that, and I don't see any kind of change that's that radical in the 10.10 time frame.
John:
Like, 10.10 should be the modifier cat release of whatever the hell they have cooked up for this thing.
John:
But who knows?
John:
I mean, four releases is definitely a pattern, but they break the pattern whatever the hell they feel like it.
John:
So, yeah, I mean, obviously, for obvious reasons, I'm very interested in what's going on there, and I'm less interested in what's going on in iOS.
John:
And I'm sure iOS will be by far the more dominant focus in the news.
John:
And I'm not expecting anything or shattering out of 10.9.
John:
But the question is, all right, well, then what the hell is it?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm really curious to just see what, besides the name, of course, which is very interesting, but what will 10.9 be for the marketing, first of all?
Marco:
What will they market about the features of it?
Marco:
And then will there be anything interesting for developers?
Marco:
Will there be...
Marco:
substantial improvements to the core in any in any significant way like you know what what is there to do and it's only been a year since mountain lion so you know now they're on the shorter cycle so it's not going to be like it's not going to be a massive rewrite of anything well there's plenty to do but it's the the most interesting question is given how much attention apple wants to focus on os 10
John:
They can't do everything.
John:
What things do they prioritize?
John:
Because that will sort of give you an idea of what they feel is important.
John:
Do they just do things that they would have had to do anyway because their changes to the core OS to benefit most OSs?
John:
With Lion Mountain Lion, they almost entirely focused on things that...
John:
bring together the mental space of the Mac and iOS in terms of making the applications look a certain way, having them have iCloud integration, like trying to make it so, hey, you've used your iPhone or your iPad.
John:
This Mac is not all that different.
John:
Take a look.
John:
Look at the Contacts app.
John:
See how it's kind of the same?
John:
Stuff like that.
John:
And the autosave, hey, you don't have to save things on iOS.
John:
And to varying degrees of success, but that was where they were putting their energy.
John:
And they weren't, for example, putting it into a new file system or, you know...
John:
Making the OS faster, improving the virtual memory system, changing out the kernel to have better, like, all sorts of nitty-gritty things that would be totally interesting to someone like me.
John:
But Apple's saying, well, we're not getting any bang for the buck out of that.
John:
Like, don't spend all your time working on that.
John:
Instead, spend your time in this other area.
John:
So...
John:
They did that with Lion, and they sort of repented a little bit with Mountain Lion to say where they had overreached and sort of shore things up and put a third panel into the stupid book metaphor app.
John:
Like, well, a book can have three parts, right?
John:
But then one of them has to be half of it, and the other one has to be 25% and 25%.
John:
Ugh.
John:
anyway uh do they keep doing that or do they concentrate in a new area this time and like fusion drive would have been an obvious thing but like they already they already released that like fusion drive missed mountain lion i feel like they wanted to get it into that but they're like all right well fine screw it fusion drive it's that's not tied to another release it just appears suddenly with some new iMacs and stuff
Marco:
Well, and that was also a good way to sell hardware.
Marco:
Like the way Siri was tied to the 4S, that was a good way to say, even though you can create it now on the command line, nobody really knows that.
Marco:
There's no interface in disk utility, and no one's doing it really except super nerds.
Marco:
For the most part, if you want the combination of very high speed and very high capacity, you must buy a new iMac or Mac Mini.
John:
Well, I give them a pass on that because unlike the Siri thing, anything having to do with low-level disk drive crap is really sensitive to the specific mechanism and drivers and everything involved there to the point where I really believe that basically it's not that it won't work.
John:
It's just that they didn't QA it in any configuration.
John:
They only had time and they only QA'd it in these specific configurations.
John:
And it probably will work perfectly fine in tons of other configurations, but, like, whatever your SSD either does or doesn't support the trim command or has some other feature or ends up running into some pathological case that they never tested for or whatever.
John:
So I don't blame them for being super conservative with the supported hardware there.
John:
But, like, they didn't hold it for the next OS release because they had this hardware they wanted to ship.
John:
It just didn't make the OS that they wanted it to make, like, in that WWDC session.
John:
they hinted that there was this thing that they would like to talk about but can't, and that was Fusion Drive, right?
John:
Like, it just missed the release.
John:
Like, it didn't get on the boat for that one, and so they put it out mid-release.
John:
But Fusion Drive would be an awesome 10.9 feature.
John:
If they had announced that at WWDC, we'd be like, wow, this is great.
John:
10.9's got some really cool features.
John:
You see, like, Fusion Drive, but now that's kind of spoiled by it already being out there.
John:
I mean, I'm sure they'll have sessions on it, and their support for it will be expanded and blah, blah, blah, but...
John:
That kind of takes some of the wind out of its sail, and my eternal new file system thing, like, probably not this year either.
John:
Who knows?
Casey:
Well, and actually, that just got me thinking.
Casey:
There are still a fair amount of Macs that have platter drives, right?
Casey:
Because we just mentioned the Fusion drive, which is half platter.
Casey:
Well, maybe more than half platter and also an SSD.
Casey:
But most of the lower-end MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the non-retina ones anyway, they all still have platter drives by default, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So the reason I bring this up is I wonder if, and I'm looking mostly to John for your two cents on this, I wonder if the Mac line switches, well, if it can, let's assume it can, and if it switches to all flash hard drives,
Casey:
would that lead to easier choices in either creating or picking a new file system?
Casey:
Whereas right now, they've kind of got a leg in two very different worlds where you have to support both the comparatively old and slow platters as well as this brand new, well, reasonably new, I should say, Flash system.
Casey:
So if everything was Flash and...
Casey:
That's all we needed to worry about.
Casey:
Would that be easier?
Casey:
And a corollary to that would be, would iOS jump to a different file system before the OS X does because everything on iOS is Flash?
John:
It's not going to jump to all Flash.
John:
So like they're stuck with spinning drives for the foreseeable future.
John:
I was saying in a past episode of some podcast about what the next, assuming there are some Mac Pros or Mac Pro-like machines or something, whatever, you know what I'm talking about.
John:
I thought that those will be Fusion Drive and you won't have a choice.
John:
Like, you won't be able to get it not as Fusion Drive.
John:
You won't be able to get it pure SSD because that storage is too small.
John:
And you won't be able to get it without an SSD.
John:
Like, you're getting Fusion Drive, period.
John:
Because that is their medium-term solution for...
John:
make it faster, but also let people store their gigantic libraries of stuff.
John:
And that's why they made it.
John:
Having the, you know, flash versus spinning disk, what that split is going to force them to do if they ever get off their butts is use some form of native storage on the flash.
John:
Like there are lots of other systems out there that do this type of thing.
John:
Like you don't,
John:
you don't file systems are designed for spinning things with have particular behaviors of like access time and sequential access is faster than random and seeks really kill you.
John:
And like the whole file system is laid out in such a way to minimize those things are hopefully laid out in a way to minimize.
John:
And all those things are either the opposite or just completely moot on SSD is because their performance characteristics are different.
John:
Like random access versus sequential access becomes less meaningful when you just got a bunch of chips that you're addressing, but they have their own particular quirks or whatever.
John:
So yeah,
John:
a file system layer on top of that is almost like i mean there are lots of file systems tailored to to flash or whatever but apple's the kind of company who could use just you know raw access to the nand i mean particularly on ios devices like why not like everything is everything is already there you still have to provide the same interface to the application so maybe that's a complication for them but if they want to extract the maximum performance with the lowest overhead from flash
John:
You don't need to go with the file system, not only just the file system that was designed for spinning disks, but you don't need what we think of as formally as a file system.
John:
Now, you just need to continue to provide the same interface, you know, the same driver interface to the higher levels of the OS.
John:
So it looks like HOS because it always has to look like HOS plus because all the API is expected to look like that.
John:
But under the covers, it doesn't have to be right.
John:
So I think that they probably won't even do that.
John:
But.
John:
The reasons I think they need a new file system have little to do with spinning disk versus flash.
John:
It just has to do with the fact that HFS is really old and crappy in all the ways that I've listed in my various articles complaining about this.
John:
And if they come up with a new one, I don't think it will matter that it's not 100% tailored to SSDs.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
And they'll put it on the spinning disks, and they'll probably also put it on the SSDs, and they'll use core storage to make Fusion Drive out of them, and hopefully we'll be happy.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We'll find that.
John:
We'll find that, yeah.
John:
The world you're thinking of is like, oh, wouldn't it be great?
John:
We don't have to worry about spinning this anymore.
John:
We just use Flash, but it's just not here.
John:
I mean, only Marco can get the big, and even that one can't hold his, well, it probably was your iPhoto library, like 260 gigs or something.
Marco:
Yeah, it actually does hold almost everything I have.
John:
Yeah, but that's not an average person's thing.
John:
I fill a terabyte drive easily.
John:
My next computer cannot have a terabyte drive as its main drive because that won't be big enough.
John:
I'm not using that much stuff.
John:
People still can't afford terabyte SSDs, and they won't be able to next year either, or probably the next year after that either.
John:
So for a long time, we're going to, and spinning drives keep getting bigger too.
John:
And Fusion Drive, by all accounts, is amazing in terms of how it makes it feel like it really is just an SSD, but you still get all that storage.
John:
Because people's usage patterns really are, you know, you do just hit a small set of files over and over again.
Marco:
Well, that's why I wonder if, you know, like with Fusion Drive, I believe the ones that ship in Amex, they're only 128 gigs, right?
Marco:
On the SSD portion?
Yeah.
Marco:
It is big.
Marco:
And the point is it uses a 4GB write buffer and then the rest of it is roughly 120GB worth of frequently accessed files or frequently accessed block storage.
Marco:
And
Marco:
But if you think about it, there's really not that much reason why they couldn't also build that into a lot of the laptops except cost.
Marco:
The problem is the retinas are already high-priced items and are already all flash.
Marco:
So the retinas, they won't fit in.
John:
Spinning is not coming back to the laptops.
Marco:
Well, but they could get a little bit more life and a nice performance boost if they would build in a little tiny 128 gig module into the non-retina laptops that still exist.
Marco:
The Air wouldn't need them.
Marco:
So actually, I guess I'm talking myself out of this because the Air is already all flashed.
Marco:
The Retina is already all flashed.
John:
Spinning is not coming back.
Marco:
And the other ones are all too cheap.
Marco:
They can't afford the margin.
Marco:
All right, never mind.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's just basically, it's just the, I mean, the whole desktop line is going to, like, you got the iMac that's, like, why would you even buy a big hunk of thing on disk if it doesn't come with, like, a terabyte of storage?
John:
Because, like, what's the point when I just get an Air and hook it up to a Thunderbolt display or whatever?
John:
And there's the Mini, which still has spinning, but also has the option to SSD, and those spinnings will probably go away, too.
John:
Like, it's really just the Mac Pro, because, like...
John:
you know it's got the big bays and you can put the big drives in there you can and for people who have huge amounts of data ssds just are still way too expensive for that and the spinning just keep getting bigger and cheaper and it's like but you're leaving money on the table if you don't have a solution to let people take advantage of that cheap storage and they do apple has a solution it's there waiting for them so they're they're going to use it it's medium term it's not it's not going to go away today it's not going to go away tomorrow it will go away once uh you know
John:
once SSDs get big enough and cheap enough to serve as the one and only complete main drive for a normal person.
John:
As long as I guess the size of the pictures we're taking with our cameras don't scale at the same rate that SSD storage scales.
Marco:
Right, oops.
Marco:
All right, with that, let's wrap it up.
Marco:
Sounds good.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Solver by Aqualia Software.
Marco:
Go to Aqualia.com slash Solver.
Marco:
We'll link to that in the show notes.
Marco:
And Oxygen for Coco from RamObject Software.
Marco:
It's spelled Oxygen, though, with an E on the end.
Marco:
You'll see.
Marco:
Go to RamObjects.com slash Oxygen with an E on the end and use coupon code ATP13 for 20% off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot, guys.
All right.
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 would let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-Y-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Marco:
Accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Tech.
John:
Podcast.
John:
So long.
John:
Said on the show, it's a good title.
John:
Cat, comma, modifier cat.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
And also, I should add that when you said graphical links, I was being myself.
Casey:
I think you're the only person who got that.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
Do you guys have links installed still?
Marco:
Does it come?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Let me see.
John:
No, it doesn't, because I always build it and install it, and I'm pissed when it doesn't come.
John:
Yeah, I definitely do not.
John:
Like, you build it yourself, and it doesn't come with SSL support, and it annoys me.
John:
Oh, and that's the other thing.
John:
Wget now is cranky about SSL certificates, and you have to pass the, like, no certificate check option.
Marco:
Well, that doesn't come built anymore, either.
John:
I know.
John:
It's one of the things.
John:
It's like Solver.
John:
Like, when you get a new Mac, I install Quicksilver, Solver, like, all the apps that need, BBEdit, and I also go and install Wget and Lynx.
John:
Because I'm old.
Ha, ha, ha.
John:
No, but seriously, who likes curl?
John:
You have to pass the capital O option to do the one thing that's the common case.
John:
The curl's default is just spew it into standard out?
John:
Talk about an app with terrible defaults.
John:
That's why I installed wget.
John:
I should just alias wget to curl minus capital O, but... Ugh.
John:
Yeah, we have a show about text editors where, like, everyone is, like, stuck with, you know, like, Marco's stuck with TextMate because it's just what he got used to, right?
John:
And you can, like, never leave it, so he'll be, like, 70 years old still using TextMate 2 and everyone else is, you know, using their... It'll still be an alpha?
John:
Neural, yeah, the neural interfaces or whatever.
John:
Well, it's the same thing with, like, Unix shells where, like, I know so many people, myself included, where whatever Unix shell they, like, learned when they first learned Unix, they'd never leave it and they'd just carry it around with them forever.
John:
I live in fear of the day that, like, Microsoft's not going to come with TCSH, which is my...
Marco:
login shell because that's what the login shell was at bu in 1993 it's one of those things like it's like once you learn one it's not there's not really enough benefit to learn any other ones to make it worth the learning curve like you just you know the one you use keeps working yeah you just carry your dot files they all have very similar abilities you know so you know it's not like there's like a massive reason to switch well unless you use bash which sucks but you know
John:
I think of changing to, like, ZSH or one of the, like, the super fancy modern, like, the equivalent of hipster shells.
John:
Not really, because hipsters didn't exist when, you know, ZSH was made.
John:
But, like, they do have lots of really amazing features.
John:
But then I just think about the amount of time I would have to spend to recreate my preferred key bindings and environment and all that other stuff.
John:
And I say, you know what?
John:
Just keep going with TCH.
John:
But, like, for the past, what?
John:
seven eight years maybe 10 years at work i've been i'm always the only guy who doesn't use bash because like all the people who grew up in the linux generation like bash was the default and they all just use bash and so people don't they see my shell prompt and it's not a bash shell prompt and you know they just say just type export whatever equals and i type something different like that's not going to work what are you doing what is this what are you typing into it yeah there's more that must be hard for you
John:
it is because like my entire office like for all for test plans or for putting instructions up or whatever i have to translate everything everything into bash ease because i can't because for the people who don't really know unix you know i can't just tell them what to do i have to type out the exact commands and then i have to like start a little bash cell in one of my windows so i can just make sure i'm not making typos and stuff like that so it's like i'm speaking a foreign language in the midst of all these other people
Casey:
You know, you could just convert to Bash.
Casey:
No.
John:
Why would I ever do that?
John:
It's terrible.
John:
The only reason to use Bash is if you were doing shell programming, because no one should ever do any shell programming in CSH or TCSH.
John:
But why would I ever do shell programming?
John:
We already went over that at the beginning of the show.
Casey:
Is it bad?
Casey:
I probably shouldn't say this one.
Casey:
We're still live.
Casey:
But is it bad that I'm almost enjoying this part of the show more than the actual show?
Marco:
Oh, this is all going in.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I hope so.
Casey:
Oh, this is fantastic.
John:
I think this would have been a good topic for an actual show instead of just me yelling about things.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
It's much better you just yelling about things.
Casey:
That's the best part.