A Rich Toddler’s Toy
John:
I hate looking at text manipulation in JavaScript.
John:
It just makes me sad.
John:
Of course.
John:
We've got a for loop with an iterator.
John:
That's great.
John:
Nice language.
John:
For bar i equals zero, i less than words dot length, i plus plus.
John:
Seriously?
Casey:
That's every C-based language, John.
John:
No, wait, no, no, no, not necessarily.
John:
Even Objective-C has been iterating over collections without an explicit iterator for many, many years now.
John:
In fact, there's been like seven different versions of iterating over collections.
John:
Even PHP has that.
John:
It's just depressing.
John:
Every single JavaScript library implements their own each thing, you know, and all the ES6 and all the other, you know, maybe even the later versions of ES5 have stuff like this, but then you've got to go back down to just...
John:
The very bottom.
John:
JavaScript is the new PHP.
John:
I'm saying it.
John:
Don't forget to use triple equals.
John:
Avoid those coercions.
Casey:
We should probably do some follow-up.
Casey:
So Chris Adamson wrote in to tell us about Audiobus.
Casey:
Do you want to talk to us about that, John?
John:
Sure.
John:
I think it was Marco who misled us in the last program.
John:
Yep, that was me.
John:
About Audiobus being a network thing.
John:
Chris says, Audiobus never relied on network loopback for interprocess communication.
John:
there's a blog post by michael tyson who i think is one of the creators we'll put a link in the show notes uh and it explains that the earliest versions of autobus used midi sysx messages which allow for arbitrary buffers of data to be sent across the midi bus later he migrated to mock ports i know what those are uh which apple's midi messaging is built on top of so there's audio bus audio bus who's getting a uh bad rap on the last episode it is not as crazy as we made it sound and how about the inter-app audio framework
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so last episode, we were also talking about supported, better supported APIs rather than not that a random third party thing is bad necessarily, especially since it's building on top of existing facilities like the MIDI thing and mock ports, which are part of the kernel that's underneath the iOS and OS 10 and Apple TV OS and the watch OS and so on and so forth.
John:
um well there is uh added an ios 7 uh to the audio unit framework uh something called inter-app audio iaa that enables the ability to send midi commands and stream audio between apps on the same device and so if there are a bunch of applications that support this mechanism as i imagine there are after ios 7 things like you know virtual effects pedals you know for audio applications that you can send audio from one app to the other but of course as
John:
marco pointed out last time skype doesn't support these type of things probably is never going to support these type of things so there's still a place for an officially supported by the os way to route audio arbitrarily because all the audio is going through or the os or being the os is aware that it's happening and the routing capabilities are probably in there which is how tools like loopback and audio hijack work their magic and
John:
But the fact that they're using private APIs makes them a little bit dangerous to support over the long term.
John:
So it would be better if Apple, instead of forcing every single application developer on an entire system to write to a new API,
John:
Um, especially if those applications don't consider themselves audio apps, like most of these APIs are for people who are making music applications to work together.
John:
I think it would still be nice for the OS to expose the mechanisms that are so clearly there to control, uh, the audio routing, uh, at the OS level, rather than just to the individual app level, cooperating with each other through the US.
Casey:
So Marco, tell us about lightning-only headphones, as John Casey asked about.
Marco:
Yes, this is not confusing at all.
Marco:
So John Casey asked about something, John Casey, and I will be talking about it.
Marco:
So basically, he threw out an interesting idea regarding the future of the iPhone 7 not having a headphone jack, probably, and a future in which headphones are lightning-only headphones.
Marco:
um he said many headphones come with detachable and replaceable cables any chance apple might make a replacement cable not just an adapter dongle um so the idea there would be that apple sells you a just a straight replacement cable for your for your legacy headphones and so one end has lightning the other end has a little skinny thing that plugs into headphones at the top end instead of just being this clunky adapter on the bottom
Marco:
And, of course, in the middle, they could put a really good clicker, which would be great.
Marco:
So this is a great idea in theory.
Marco:
In practice, it would probably not work very well because the problem is the end of the cable at the headphone, at the earcups end of it, that end is not standard.
Marco:
Now, usually it is either another 3.5-inch jack, just like the end by the phone.
Marco:
Or it could be a smaller one, the two and a half inch version, or the two and a half millimeter.
Marco:
And then around it, you have a similar problem to the very, very first iPhone, where it had that big plastic surround, and you couldn't fit every kind of headphone plug into it.
Marco:
Sometimes the plug would be too wide, like the plastic around the plug would be too wide, and it just wouldn't fit around the housing around the port.
Marco:
That problem exists big time on headphones with replaceable cables where so often, I'd say most of the time, even a headphone that has a detachable cable usually can't use another cable made for a different headphone.
Marco:
Usually something about it doesn't fit or it doesn't click in right if there's some kind of locking mechanism or something like that.
Marco:
So in practice, the end of the headphone cable on the headphone, on the ear cup,
Marco:
is not standardized enough, even among the ones with removable cables, to make it possible for somebody to make a general-purpose aftermarket replacement that fits a lot of them.
Marco:
That being said, Apple could, of course, make one that works for all Beats, or at least the most... I mean, Beats doesn't have that many popular models.
Marco:
They could cover those and cover a large portion of the Apple headphone-using population.
Marco:
That is not saying it's likely they would do this.
Marco:
I think the most likely answer is they wouldn't address it at all.
Marco:
And the answer would just be, well, buy new headphones or use our adapter.
John:
Do all Beats have detachable cables?
Marco:
You know, I don't know enough about them to say if all do.
Marco:
I know many of them do.
Marco:
And generally speaking, detachable cables are something I always hope that headphones have.
Marco:
And I always ding them if they don't in the review because especially for desk headphones, it's not as necessary because you tend not to wear those out.
Marco:
Portable headphones, they're constantly being wrapped up and unwrapped and put in bags and taken out and everything.
Marco:
And so there's a lot of stress on the cables.
Marco:
And usually what makes headphones die, what makes headphones go bad or stop being usable is
Marco:
is usually one of two things.
Marco:
Usually either the wire frays near one of the ends, usually the phone end, but if it's a permanent cable, it can also fray at the place where it meets the ear cup.
Marco:
Or if they're beats, they literally break in half.
Marco:
Literally.
Marco:
Because if you have a plastic headband...
Marco:
When you put headphones on, the headband has to stretch out a little bit, so it's constantly being stretched and unstretched and stretched and unstretched.
Marco:
So the stress of that, if you have an all-plastic headband, very often results in the headband cracking right in the middle.
Marco:
That is usually how bad headphones break.
Marco:
Good headphones usually eventually break because the cables go bad somewhere along the way.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anyway, we have some super important follow up.
Casey:
The Internet, possibly the country or maybe even the world would like to know, John, what's going on with your destiny, HUD?
John:
We talked about when I had to move my PlayStation 4 off of my plasma television onto a separate gaming monitor because I was playing Destiny a lot, and I noticed that the HUD that is up on the screen while playing Destiny was burning into my plasma screen.
John:
So I had to evict the entire console from the television, which was kind of a shame because it looked way better on my TV than it does on this terrible little monitor that I'm using right now.
John:
But when I moved it away, I also set a calendar reminder for a year in the future to say, reminding me to check whether the Destiny HUD had finally worn off of my television.
John:
Because what I had heard from people who had the same model as me is that, yes, image retention is a problem.
John:
but in most cases it's not actually permanent it just takes forever to go away so i said fine i'll put a thing for a year some people say it took many months some people say it took multiple years so i figure i'll put a reminder for a year and it's not like i've forgotten about it i've been watching tv and i've been looking at it in fact i'm always looking at my television i was noticing that the you know the cartoon network logo that i've complained about in past shows was burning in um but anyway this is the year anniversary uh to the day i think probably to the day
John:
Um, so I took a look on my television in the various ways that you can do while you're putting solid colors behind it and a pure white screen and stuff like that.
John:
Um, and I can say that the, from a normal sitting distance, if I didn't know where the HUD was supposed to be, I wouldn't be able to see it.
John:
I think a normal person would not be able to see it.
John:
i can barely see only the super bar the big bar that fills with uh with color as your super gets charged up and turns yellow when it's fully charged i can barely kind of make out where that used to be no other part of the hud is visible and that even like i i got up really close to television like am i just imagining that it's there because i remember where it was i would love to see this so
John:
i it's it is almost entirely gone you can totally see the big c and a little bit of the n in cartoon network so that's a good you know thing to compare it to like i can see the cn um and cartoon network has been banned from this television as well now um but so i say that the the destiny hud experiment destiny's not coming back to my tv my ps4 is not coming back to tv although i might move it back for an individual game or two
John:
um but i wouldn't play destiny over there uh but anyway it has faded substantially so what looked like permanent image retention was not actually permanent it just took a really really long time to go away so i suppose i'll put another calendar reminder in for a year from now revisit for a second year to see if it's really really gone but at some point i just want to replace this tv with a fancy oled one so people need to start making better televisions
John:
the theme of every episode people need to start making better televisions they do john syracuse this is a bad time for tvs i'm trying to wait it out i i bought i felt like i bought it the right time i bought the peak of the previous generation of televisions and now just i've just endured this until we come on the other side
Marco:
Yeah, it does seem like you bought probably the best 1080p plasma that will ever exist and probably the best plasma that will ever exist.
Marco:
And now you just kind of have to wait for like when 4K gets non-stupid.
John:
Well, yeah, they got to work out all the HDR stuff and work out their standards there and get the OLED kinks worked out.
John:
Like, there was a fancier model than the one I got, but it had slightly lower brightness, and so I sacrificed, and it was also more money.
John:
And I was like, it's very similar, it's really too close to call, and I think the extra brightness will be what I wanted.
John:
But yeah, I bought pretty much at the right time, and I lucked out with the fan noise and everything, which I was afraid of.
John:
It turned out not to be an issue, especially compared to my previous television, but...
John:
right now like when i finally did read up on all the tvs at cds and everything and now it's like just a battle over the high dynamic range standards and you know the all those different standards and which channels are going to support what for broadcast and will netflix supported and
John:
what things the ultra HD Blu-rays are supporting and what television manufacturers are.
John:
And it's just, it's a big mess.
John:
I really want that to just be settled.
John:
And then, and then of course, OLEDs, you have to make, you have to make a few generations of OLEDs before they get that all worked out.
John:
So there's a long way to go here.
John:
I mean, a lot of the HDR standards are being supported by televisions that can't actually display the entire range of the HDR stuff yet.
John:
So yeah, two or three years probably.
Casey:
Now, just to prevent us from getting a crud load of email, would you mind reminding the listeners what TV you ended up buying?
John:
Oh, I don't remember the name for it.
John:
It's Panasonic VT60.
John:
Excellent.
John:
The ZT60 was the fancy, the slightly fancier one.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
Now, do you want to tell us about pirate eye patches?
Casey:
Because we got a surprising amount of feedback about pirate eye patches.
Casey:
Never in my life did I think we would be getting this serious about pirate eye patches on the Accidental Tech podcast.
Casey:
But here we are.
John:
I opened the door on the pirate eye patch, so I might as well finish closing in here.
John:
So the first thing to point out, which is not something we discussed last time, is...
John:
uh not whether or not the things we said about pirate eye patches helping you see in the dark were actual you know it was actually true does it actually help you see in the dark because we did link to the myth busters episode about that but the larger issue of did lots of pirates have eye patches uh and the consensus on that seems to be probably not like there's no evidence of that the only reason we think that is because you know hollywood
John:
and various movies and stories and famous pirates and blackbeard and all that other business or whatever but historical records of pirates like were there a lot of one-eyed pirates were all the pirates wearing eye patches so they could see better under decks there's no evidence for that so that is basically probably completely apocryphal you know and not really uh based on anything but the other part that we were talking about is does that actually help you see under decks and this i think is a great example of
John:
what i would call testing versus explaining uh some somebody sent us a link to this other podcast that had uh it was i forget what it's called but it's uh like a q a type podcast where they ask questions they had an expert on to answer and the question was like hey if you put an eye patch over your eye would that help you see better because one eye will be adjusted to the dark or whatever and the person on this show uh
John:
said their answer contained all correct information but didn't really lead to the correct conclusion and the idea was that if you keep one eye under an eye patch um and the other eye out of it it's not as if the eye under the eye patch the pupil is going to dilate massively and the eye that's out of the eye patch the pupil is not going to because in general uh if one of your pupils is way bigger than the other you probably just got hit in the head really hard and you should see a doctor like they they tend to be the same size figure what's called a consensual response or whatever like
John:
that your pupils are basically, you've heard it on all the television shows, you know, equal and reactive when they do the little night light thing in your eyes to make sure that a, your eyes respond to light by, you know, your pupils getting smaller and be that they're equal.
John:
If one of them stays open, they want you to go to the doctor really quickly.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
And so they said, therefore, the whole idea of pirate eye patch is silly because it's not as if the one under the eye patch is going to have a really dilated pupil just waiting for you to go under decks and flip up the eye patch.
John:
Right now, what the Mythbusters did instead was rather than trying to think of a theory of why it wouldn't work, they said, well, this is easy enough to test.
John:
Why don't we just make a dark place and put an eye patch in someone's eye and give them some silly task?
John:
Like, see how fast I forget they were doing the episode, but.
John:
See how fast they can accomplish a bunch of tasks in this really dark room.
John:
And they tried it without the eyepatch, and the eyepatch just crushed the non-eyepatch one.
John:
It was an extremely efficient way to see better in the dark.
John:
And so how do you square this circle?
John:
Where the explaining thing went wrong is the idea that...
John:
The size of your pupil is the only thing that determines how well you see in the dark.
John:
That is one aspect of it.
John:
Your pupil opens up to let more light in.
John:
But the other aspect of it is how sensitive the little things in the back of your eye are.
John:
And someone sent us a link to a thing about astronomy, red lights and astronomy, and why you want to use red lights when you're looking up at the stars.
John:
And that contains another theory of what helps you see in the dark, and it's the sensitivity of the rods at the back of your eye that help you see in the dark.
John:
From this article, during daylight hours, your rods are overexposed and so they're less efficient.
John:
As light gets dimmer, a chemical change allows them to become even more sensitive and your eyes become dark adapted.
John:
It only takes brief exposure to bright light for the rods to overexpose.
John:
Once that happens, you have a half an hour or more to regain dark sensitivity.
John:
So you really want it to be under the eye patch, not to change the size of your pupil, but to get the rods in that eye, which are not consensual with the rods in the other eye, unlike your iris dilation, to get them to be more sensitive to light.
John:
And it's important because if you expose them just for a short period of time, it's going to take like half an hour for them to get back to that super dark sensitive way because it's a chemical change in the eye and not just a physical change and, you know, essentially adjusting the aperture of your eyeball.
John:
It's ISO versus aperture, basically.
John:
yeah so so there you go uh everything you ever wanted to know about pirate app probably not because people are still going to want to know why the hell do we think pirates have eye patches i forget which particular pop culture thing caused us to think that but regardless of whether or not they had eye patches if they did they could use them just like they did in myth busters and it would help them see in the dark better fair enough and do you want to talk about how this relates to programming
John:
well i don't know how like the testing versus explaining i guess like one of my pet peeves as an old cranky programmer is if you hear whether it's going on between you and another programmer or you hear two other programmers sitting near you talking to each other about uh it's usually some silly corner of the language thing because people love talking about language but even could be an api or whatever well if you do this it does that and well uh you know if you
John:
If you call it in this way, that will happen, and this thing doesn't have blah, blah, blah, and they'll just go back and forth for what seems like a really long time, especially if they're sitting near you and talking and you're trying to get work done.
John:
45 seconds.
John:
Trying to come up with explaining to each other, no, actually the language works this way.
John:
Oh, you're not accounting for this, blah, blah, blah.
John:
where there's no reason to have this discussion because in 20 seconds of typing you can find the answer definitively like you don't have to speculate about what this language feature likes or is that a syntax error or how would you do the expression is this is the correct way to do references or whatever don't speculate don't debate it for 10 minutes just type it in there's your answer
John:
And then you can talk about why that's the answer or whatever, but you don't have to do Google search.
John:
You don't have to do anything.
John:
Like, especially if you're in a language with a REPL, just find out.
John:
So it's testing versus explaining.
John:
Explaining and theorizing and thought experiments are a good idea.
John:
But when it's really, really easy or, you know, simple or very readily available to test it,
John:
just testing is faster and better and will lead you wrong in its own type of ways if you do your testing badly but sometimes things are just very simple so the eyepatch thing is like we have a theory we think eyepatches help you see better in the dark is that true so easy to test you could spend all day talking to you know
John:
And doctors and neurologists and theorizing about it, and they'll probably get the right answer.
John:
But if you get off on the wrong track and think about, oh, dilation, that's not, you know, that's not going to help you there.
John:
It's just so much easier to test it.
John:
So I don't think Ms.
John:
Buzzard knows or cares why it works.
John:
They just tested it.
John:
And assuming their test is reasonably sound, they come to a useful conclusion in much less time.
Marco:
Before we do, the last bit of incredibly, incredibly exciting follow-up.
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Harry's.
Marco:
Go to Harry's.com and use promo code ATP to save $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
Harry's offers high-quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of the big razor brands.
Marco:
It was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg.
Marco:
They make their own blades from their own factory, an old blade factory in Germany that they actually bought.
Marco:
These are high-quality, high-performing German blades crafted by shaving experts, giving you a better shave that respects your face and your wallet.
Marco:
Harry's offers factory-direct pricing at a fraction of the big brand prices.
Marco:
They're about half the price of what you're used to paying for big brand razor blades in the supermarket.
Marco:
Now, the starter set is an amazing deal.
Marco:
For $15, you get a razor, moisturizing shave cream or gel, and three razor blade cartridges.
Marco:
When you need more blades, they're just $2 each or less.
Marco:
So an 8-pack is just $15.
Marco:
A 16-pack is just $25.
Marco:
16 blades for $25 is roughly half the price of what you would pay for the big brand that you're probably thinking of that sells the expensive razor blades in the store.
Marco:
And I would say these are very comparable to those quality and performance-wise.
Marco:
Half the price.
Marco:
So with Harry's, you get comfort, closeness, and convenience at the ridiculously low price of under $2 per blade.
Marco:
It's also very tastefully designed.
Marco:
You get these nice, you know, heavy, weighty handles.
Marco:
Kind of like a modern Mad Men kind of aesthetic.
Marco:
Really nice aesthetic.
Marco:
High quality stuff.
Marco:
Feels good.
Marco:
Looks good.
Marco:
Comes in great packaging.
Marco:
The website's nice and easy to use.
Marco:
And the shave quality is very good.
Marco:
With Harry's, you get all of this.
Marco:
All at half the price of the big brands.
Marco:
Get started today with a set that includes a handle, three blades, and shaving cream for just $15, including free shipping right to your door.
Marco:
Harrys.com.
Marco:
Use promo code ATP to save $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Harrys.
Marco:
Now, the incredibly interesting follow-up that we've been holding off on this whole time.
Casey:
Yes, this is riveting.
Casey:
And really important.
Casey:
Actually, I joke because it is kind of silly, but I was really interested to know where the crap is the serial code or serial number on a Visa mount iMac.
Marco:
We discovered last week that the serial number for a regular iMac with the big foot is on the bottom of the foot.
Marco:
And so the question was, if you get one with the Visa mount, that custom monitor mount in the back, that doesn't have the foot, doesn't come with the foot, where would they put the serial number?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so we figured, you know, probably would be somewhere on the mount or what have you, because where else would it be?
Casey:
And sure enough, James McCain has written in and included a picture.
Casey:
This is professional level follow up right here.
Casey:
Included a picture of exactly where the serial number is on his Visa mount iMac.
Casey:
And so it turns out it is if you flip the entire machine upside down, it's kind of printed in there right by the fan.
Casey:
Is that the exhaust or intake in the back?
Marco:
That is exhaust.
Marco:
The intake is the big ridge in the bottom.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So anyway, so that's where it is, as it turns out.
Casey:
I was waiting for Jason Snell to let us know, but apparently he's not caught up on the show.
Casey:
I'm very upset at him.
Casey:
But James McCain has saved the day.
Casey:
So thank you, James.
John:
I remember back in the day, speaking of serial numbers, that if you got certain repairs done to, say, your laptop Mac, the serial number would change because they gave you a full motherboard swap or whatever.
John:
uh and if that's still the case you especially that's why i was asking if this was a sticker or etched onto the thing you could end up uh i mean you could end up with if they replace the guts of your iMac with a machine that has a different serial number than the one that is actually etched into the metal on the device which could be very confusing to all involved if you're not aware of that i think i remember we actually had a repair done like that maybe to a white iBook maybe like my mom's white iBook or something we had
John:
some repair and they said just so you know your serial number will be changing but even though you have the same external case uh anyway i don't know if that's still an issue but it always struck me as weird that they would attach the serial number to uh to the physical device but it's really connected to the innards of the device so you could end up in these uh scenarios where things are wrong i think they can also like
John:
I don't know.
John:
This is another thing for geniuses.
John:
I think they used to be able to change the serial number of your motherboard by like flashing it back to the old value.
John:
But I don't know if that's a thing that they did.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So a friend of the show, Stephen Hackett in the chat is saying, crap, I lost it.
Casey:
Oh, they have to re-serialize the boards.
Casey:
And usually that comes with a sticker you put over the etch serial number.
Casey:
Also, the tipster in the chat is saying when the serial is changed for laptops, they will often swap the bottom cover with one that has no serial.
Yeah.
John:
I'd like to give you a sticker.
John:
Oh, the indignities.
John:
Yeah, we fixed your Mac.
John:
But by the way, here's a sticker to put over the beautiful laser etched in serial number that's there.
John:
No thanks.
Marco:
Yeah, I would.
Marco:
I mean, the good thing is that they're, I mean, on laptops, it's a problem.
Marco:
On the desktops, at least they're like hidden away in places that you'd never see it.
Marco:
But if it's on your laptop, like now with the modern ones, that's on the outside on the bottom.
Marco:
Like you would totally see that.
John:
Well, that's why I'm saying giving a bottom thing that has no serial numbers.
John:
Then you can be like Steve Jobs with no license plates on his car.
John:
Yeah, totally off the grid.
John:
Untracked by Apple's serial number readers.
Marco:
Untraceable except every other aspect of my computer life.
Marco:
Untraceable except by all the software on the computer.
Casey:
I just love how deeply offended you guys are about the thought of having a sticker on your computer.
Marco:
well look either you're a sticker person or you're not if you're not the idea of any sticker on there is like is horrible that's the whole reason we buy max is we wouldn't have intel inside nvidia powered all these like you know powered by invention by asus like all this stupid stuff they put on their computers uh and on the pc world and here we don't have that um if you are a sticker person you probably want better stickers than stupid apple cereal number one
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So moving out of follow-up, Apple earnings were as we record last night.
Casey:
It turns out they made a lot of money.
Casey:
Go figure.
Casey:
But there's a couple of things that I think are interesting.
Casey:
First of all, their guidance for iPhone sales is down a bit.
Casey:
So they haven't said, if I understood things correctly, they haven't said that they've sold less iPhones already, but they are expecting to sell less iPhones in the next quarter.
Casey:
Is that accurate?
Marco:
that's compared to compared to the year ago quarter right right because last year there were a number of reasons and like you know last year they there were some overflow from the holiday quarter that was very strong like some of those happen in the next in in you know the next quarter and so we're not going to have that this year and then also last year there was tons of pent-up demand for the bigger screen phones and this year that has been alleviated and then there's currency fluctuations and economy fluctuations and everything else i don't know do we care does it matter
John:
Well, I mean, I don't think we care about the details in the way that the people on the financial call do.
John:
Like, tell us exactly why this quarter will be weaker than – but, like, I'm looking at Jason Snell's six-color post with all the pretty graphs and everything.
John:
If you just look at the, you know, the four-quarter moving average graphs and try to get a shape of the lines of the various products and how they're doing, it's still kind of hard to help because a lot of it is revenue instead of units in these graphs.
John:
But –
John:
you can get a kind of idea of where the company is at with its various product lines are you guys looking at this page like look at uh apple revenue four quarter moving average showing the total and the iphone ipad and the mac right so you get a picture of the company here the total line shows you that the company is still going you know from the lower left to the upper right more or less
John:
If you're going to draw a trend line.
John:
Growth.
John:
Right.
John:
Good.
John:
And then where does that growth come from?
John:
You see this iPhone line that is going up, but it's starting to get a little hump at the top of it.
John:
Not, you know, it's not going hockey stick upwards.
John:
Now it's starting to go more like, you know, ski mogul.
John:
uh mump i don't know whatever you want to call it it's a mound right the the slope is decreasing right along the bottom you have the mac which always on these graphs looks like just a flat line because the fluctuations the mac is so low below the iphone the fluctuations are barely visible and then you've got the ipad which like starts off around the same as the mac makes a tentative bid to go to the higher parts of the chart and then says nah never mind and actually dips below the mac in the most recent uh year
John:
yeah this was not a good report for the ipad no yeah so look at the look at the ipad one look at ipad units four quarter moving average that now it looks like it's like uh you know it's it's a it's a hump it's an upside down you it starts at the bottom goes up to the top and starts going down again and now we're getting like an actual proper hump i think there's a better one later on if you ever see like the ipod graph to have you ever seen a graph with the ipod on it too the ipod just looks like it comes out of nowhere makes this big lump and goes back down to basically zero
John:
it makes a nice mound in the graph like here i am in the ipod oh never mind it had a good run yeah that's over the course of many many years but like that i wish i could find that graph the things that strike striking out looking at the ipod is like that the ipod is like its hump is even smaller than the ipad's hump or similar size to the ipad's hump we thought the ipod was this whole big world changing apple is the ipod company kind of thing it is nothing compared to the iphone the problem with all these graphs is as soon as you put the iphone on the graph it totally blows the y-axis and you can't read anything anymore because
John:
The iPhone is so ridiculously huge, makes so much money, sells so many units that everything else starts to kind of even out.
John:
But anyway, the one thing I put in the show notes about this is I think the iPad is the real story that I'm interested in, at least, in these earnings results.
Marco:
Also, one thing before we move on to the iPad is, obviously, the iPhone is the company.
Marco:
The iPhone is the most important thing in the company by numbers and by many other metrics.
Marco:
By a long shot, it's not even close.
Marco:
Like it says down here on this chart, the iPhone made 68% of the revenue in the entire company.
Marco:
The average selling price of the iPhone is incredibly important to the company's financial outlook.
Marco:
And this is why when I make predictions or when I try to explain things that use the iPhone average selling price as a justification for why Apple did or might do something...
Marco:
this kind of shows you why that might override decisions from Apple about things like what's actually best for the customer or what actually might be the best product.
Marco:
Because everything's in balance with Apple, with any company.
Marco:
Everything's in balance.
Marco:
No company is like pure good or pure evil.
Marco:
Everything's always these contending factors that are trying to reach equilibrium, but there's always this contention between them.
Marco:
I don't know if contending is a word, but it is now.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
So with Apple, they're always kind of fighting between what they can make, what's possible to make, what they can ship on time, what's profitable, and what's best for the customer.
Marco:
In the case of the iPhone average selling price, I think they are definitely willing to do moves that will raise the average selling price by a substantial amount, even if it's kind of crappy for the customer.
Marco:
And I think you can look at the 16 gig base size of the phones as one of the biggest examples of this.
Marco:
There is almost no other justification for that.
Marco:
You can look at almost every other reason people gave for that back when we all discussed it two years ago or whatever.
Marco:
And you can rule almost all of them out by other supporting reasons.
Marco:
Like people say, well, oh, we buy all these phones in our company and no one ever uses more than 16 gigs.
Marco:
Well, you could also say a lot of phones don't use the ear pods that are in the box, but they still include them.
Marco:
Or your company doesn't use necessarily 3D Touch, but that thing's in every phone, too.
Marco:
So you can look at any part of it, and you can say a lot of people don't use this.
Marco:
That's not necessarily a reason why the 16-gig thing has to be there and be sucking and be problematic for so many people.
Marco:
Anyway, so Apple is willing and possibly...
Marco:
I wouldn't say forced to, but there's strong pressure for Apple to keep that iPhone ASP up and growing.
Marco:
And so for them to do things that will increase the average selling price by even a little bit, it matters enough, and there's huge motivation for them to do it.
Marco:
And so you look at something like the headphone jack thing, and we're all saying, Apple always includes headphones in the box.
Marco:
What if this fall, the iPhone 7 comes out with no headphone jack, and they don't include headphones in the box?
Marco:
Then, a huge portion of iPhone buyers are going to go spend $30 more when they buy that phone.
Marco:
That's going to be an attachment sale that counts towards the average selling price, I think, of the phone itself.
Marco:
Anyway, however they count for that, they're going to make a lot more money if they do that.
Marco:
You can look at this cynically, and you can say Apple will do this for sure because it'll make them more money, and it sucks for us.
Marco:
Or you can look at it the opposite way, and you can say Apple always wants to do what's best for customers.
Marco:
They would never do that for that reason.
Marco:
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle there.
Marco:
So we have to consider that when we look at what Apple does with the product line, especially in regards to the iPhone, and how that impacts their profitability, even if it kind of sucks for us.
Marco:
And all this financial stuff that comes out every quarter...
John:
is a perfect reason why they have very strong reasons to to have some contention there i don't feel like they're so wed to average selling price because they've in the past they've done things that have hurt their average selling price on their products to you know like the ipad mini is a great example but margins i feel like a lot of their those decisions are just as easily explained if not better explained by margins because like the 16 gig thing the average selling price argument is this is going to push people up to the bigger model because they don't feel like they can fit in 16.
John:
But it also just resulted in more people buying 16s.
John:
You don't quite know because Apple doesn't break it down like that for us.
John:
Right.
John:
But surely one thing it does is increase margins because it's like 64 already had good margins.
John:
And by keeping the lower one in 16, you know, like and keeping the price is basically the same.
John:
That 16 gigs that they've been including on their phone for years and years, it just got to be getting cheaper for them.
John:
And yet the phone price hasn't been dropping year over year over year.
John:
So their margins go up.
John:
And I think they are really sensitive to their margins.
John:
Their margins of, I think it's like 40% or something across the board on all of their stuff.
John:
So even if they have to drop the average selling price by selling the iPad mini, I bet they're very sensitive about what are the margins on the iPad mini?
John:
How can we bring that down by putting crappier stuff in it?
John:
You know, that's kind of always what they're looking for.
John:
Can we sell you something with last year's technology in it in some aspect because it saves us money?
John:
whether it's like putting the the cruddy your camera and the ipod touch that's not subsidized and they have to they have to maintain their margins or you know whatever they put in their low-end phones or even on their highest end phones we'll keep the prices more or less the same but we'll give you 16 gigs for years and years because every year that gives us a little bit more on the margins and like you said marco any anything to do whether it's average selling price or margins multiplied by the number of phones they sell is a tremendous amount of money and you know that's a lot of what this call was about was like uh
John:
foreign exchange rates and you know various other quote-unquote headwinds uh these fluctuations and how the dollar is valued against the other currencies in the world has uh you know it seems like it's not that big a deal it's not like we're in some financial meltdown where the dollar is like worthless or worth 10 times more than all the currencies in the world right but even minute movement in in the foreign exchange rates multiplied by apple's revenue equals these tremendous numbers so a lot of the
John:
on twitter that like the amount of money apple lost due to currency fluctuations is larger than the amount of money facebook made the entire year or something like that like just the numbers are so mind-bogglingly huge that any like the fluctuations in the chart look like nothing you're like well you know it's a few pixels lower or whatever but like those pixels are billions and billions and billions of dollars
John:
so it's it's it's mind-boggling to even consider this and that's why i'm so glad i'm not in the financial world because trying to judge apple as a from a financial perspective is just so so weird because of the way the things they value seem so out of whack with the things that like a regular person would value about a company oh they're making a lot of money they're profitable they have a lot of money in the bank boy that must be a good stock they're like no where's the growth
Marco:
When stuff like this happens, I am so happy that I no longer buy or sell individual stocks.
Marco:
I have mutual funds that include some of these things, I'm sure.
Marco:
But I don't manage that myself and I don't buy and sell stock anymore.
Marco:
I'm so glad because I would think of things the way you were.
Marco:
I would think of things like Apple's doing great.
Marco:
They have great prospects.
Marco:
They're making a lot of money.
Marco:
Why did their stock just take a dive?
Marco:
And it would frustrate me like crazy.
Marco:
And of course...
John:
that isn't how the market works at all like the market everyone says the market is stupid and doesn't understand apple no the market is doing its own thing it's not stupid there's a there's a lot to be said about it's bad but it's not stupid there's some stupid like usually the stupid manifests in the other way where companies are overvalued for like because because that anyway it's just another form of gambling buy low sell high how do i know what's low well low is something that's going to be high later
John:
And so a bunch of people will get together and say, look at that company.
John:
That's going to be super high later.
John:
And bid it up and have astronomical valuation based on the potential.
John:
This could be really high later.
John:
Boy, if everybody decides to buy this person's thing, this will be great.
John:
But it's basically speculation.
John:
What do you think is going to be high next year?
John:
Is it going to be Apple?
John:
Is Apple going to go up by 50% by next year?
John:
Or is this little company you never heard of?
John:
You can buy the stock for pennies.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's yeah it's not it's kind of a sucker's bet not really because you can in theory have some knowledge that will help you do better witness people like warren buffett and everything i'm pretty sure are not cheating um they're just a little bit better at playing this particular game of poker than other people um so there is a it's not a lock there is a skill-based aspect but for the most part like
John:
i don't get too mad about the way apple is treated by the market because i have to think like i mean this is what everyone's been thinking for years and years you're like well there's nowhere for them to go but down they're at the top if you had thought that five years ago and five years before that and five years you just put them in wrong wrong wrong wrong and that's what all the analysts always point out it's like every time someone says that apple's at the top and they can only go down you just wait five years then you make fun of those people right but at some point they'll be right because if not apple will have all the money in the world and we will literally have no money because apple will have it all
John:
and it's just like morris law you can't you can't keep doubling forever because eventually you will have all the monies
Marco:
Our next sponsor this week is Squarespace.
Marco:
Start building your website today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Squarespace built it beautiful.
Marco:
Now look, I've built many websites using Squarespace now, and I've built many websites using other means.
Marco:
And Squarespace is by far the easiest way to do it.
Marco:
And it is by far the least ongoing hassle and the easiest way to get a lot of advanced functionality up quickly.
Marco:
Start any website you make today at Squarespace.
Marco:
If you have to make something, try it there first.
Marco:
and see how much you can get done in an hour.
Marco:
And you will be shocked how far you get, how much functionality it has, and how little work you had to do to get there.
Marco:
If you're building an website for other people, it's even better.
Marco:
If someone's asking you to build a site for them, if you do it on Squarespace, not only can you hand it off to them and say, here, now you do it.
Marco:
You help yourself.
Marco:
Not only that, but if they need more help, if they need support, if they need any kind of hosting thing or any kind of technical support, they ask Squarespace, not you.
Marco:
You don't support it.
Marco:
Squarespace does.
Marco:
If that's not a reason to do it, I can't help you.
Marco:
If you're making a website for somebody and you want to support it yourself every time something has to be changed or something breaks or they need help...
Marco:
But more power to you.
Marco:
That is not me, though.
Marco:
For me, I tell people to build their sites on Squarespace.
Marco:
They can usually do it themselves right from the start.
Marco:
They just need a slight push for me to say, here, try this.
Marco:
So that's what I advise all of you.
Marco:
Try making a site on Squarespace next time you have to make a website.
Marco:
Give it an hour.
Marco:
See how far you get.
Marco:
And I bet you will stick with it and just leave it there because then you're done and you can move on to do anything else with your life.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
Squarespace.com to start your free trial site.
Marco:
There's no credit card required to do a free trial with Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace.com, start a free trial and make a site.
Marco:
If you like it, please make sure to use the offer code ATP when you sign up to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, that's code ATP at sign up to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Squarespace, build it beautiful.
Casey:
What I found interesting about this is that the iPads are down and down fairly big, which in and of itself, I know we have already covered that.
Casey:
But having just gotten a new iPad and now being able to unlock, if you will, all the multitasking features in iOS 9...
Casey:
I've fallen in love with my iPad again.
Casey:
And I know that a lot of our friends, even in ones like Mike Hurley, who were kind of aggressively anti-iPad very recently, are now falling in love with their iPad Pros.
Casey:
So what gives?
Casey:
Am I weird in that I really love my iPad mini?
Casey:
And is Mike weird in that he really loves his iPad Pro?
Casey:
What is going on that apparently a lot of people have fallen out of love with the iPad?
John:
I'm going to answer the easy questions first.
John:
Yes, you're both weird.
John:
But that's not here nor there.
John:
That is a separate thing entirely.
John:
I was thinking about this, and I think now that we have a nice shape to this graph, and now that we can clearly see that enough time has passed where we could be like, it's not replacement cycle.
John:
It's not some other thing.
John:
It's just basically like this is starting to take the shape of the other type of devices.
John:
And although I still am totally signed up with the idea of the interface that we all know and love in our phones,
John:
being eventually being the thing that supplants what we currently know as the pc um whether or not the ipad does it i'm not sure but what the way i'm conceptualizing the ipad now which i think kind of explains like your casey your attitude towards it and mike's and everything is that currently for now the ipad is a specific product not like the tablet in general but the ipad is a specific product i see as two filling two main roles um
John:
First, it is a rich toddler's toy.
John:
And I'm lumping myself in that.
John:
My kids have iPads.
John:
They are the kids of rich people.
John:
In general, most of the people I know who live in a similar place that I do have suburban lives, professional jobs.
John:
they have ipads they give to their kids sometimes they're handing down ipads or whatever but just like i see a lot of ipads that are used by kids right so it is and i say toddlers because once the kids get older they want a phone right yep um and and that's that's obviously you know that's everything and the other thing the ipad is uh is to use steve jobs parlance it's a truck
John:
Uh, the iPad is the truck of the world of, you know, iOS and touch devices or whatever.
John:
Most people don't need a truck.
John:
Most people get away with the car, which is called their phone that does everything they could possibly need.
John:
But some people, the weird people need a truck, not just the iPad pros, the truck, but the entire iPad line is now revealing itself as a truck because everyone else is saying, you know what?
John:
The phone is fine.
John:
The phone is all I need.
John:
Phone does everything I want.
John:
Um, and then in the other realm that you could say, if it's not a rich toddler's toy, what about the non rich toddlers?
John:
i think tablets still have a role for you know for for everybody for little kids in particular because it's a great it's like a you know a great little child's toy but they just buy cheap android tablets they can watch youtube i think like if i replace my kids ipads with like 99 android tablets just played youtube they would be mostly satisfied
John:
like that's mostly what they do with it is used to watch youtube it doesn't take too much to run youtube so in in the current the current life of the ipad product line they seem like you know a a product that is has a much much narrower appeal than the phone and that's what they're really competing with is is the phone not the laptop at this point or whatever so in in that light
John:
i think it's a good move for apple to have finally gotten off its butt and done the ipad pro which by the way doesn't factor at all into these results and i wouldn't expect them to move i mean it factors some but like the ipad pro came at the tail end of the results that we're looking at right here but it's not that's not a mainstream product right it's never you know so anyway if the ipad is going to be a truck make a better truck for crying out loud right you know i mean that's i mean like you know in the in the original analogy the pc or the you know like the the the computer was the truck and
Marco:
And the, you know, iOS devices were the cars.
Marco:
And I think like, I think the PC still is the truck.
Marco:
And the iPad is like the, maybe the El Camino or like the, whatever, what's that Subaru half truck thing?
Casey:
Oh God, I know exactly what you're thinking about.
Casey:
I can't, I can't place it.
Marco:
The Baja, that's it.
Marco:
It's like, it's not even, it's neither a great car nor a great truck.
Marco:
It's, it's kind of in the middle there.
Marco:
do there's maybe there's a reason why the el camino is not made anymore and the subaru baja is not is not the most popular car uh it has nobody looked at the subaru baja and said this is the future of cars you know the same way like everyone looks at the ipad and says this is the future of computing but it is but it is like it totally is like yeah no it totally is i mean we we have it borne out when we when they say that they mean like like a
John:
A thing that is not a PC because it's totally not a PC, right?
John:
That you interact with mostly by touching.
John:
And it is the future of computing because that's what everybody does.
John:
But it's also that they do it on their phone.
John:
It's like, oh, well, is the tablet a separate thing for the phone?
John:
Or is it just the same exact thing as the phone at a bigger size?
John:
And it is.
John:
But it's like, why would you need that bigger size?
John:
Well, most people don't.
John:
Most people, especially with their big honking phones, most people, that's all they're ever going to need.
John:
Like the PC is still this separate, separate thing.
John:
But if you just set aside the PC entirely and just look at the computers that most people use for their personal computers are their smartphones at this point.
John:
And why would you ever need one that's bigger than your big phone?
John:
Well, that's kind of like the truck of the phone world.
John:
Like, if you pretend PCs don't exist, which basically, as far as my kids are concerned, they might as well not exist.
John:
Like, so many kids, like, your parents have a computer, but why would you?
John:
Like, I'm waiting to see if my kids will ever ask to have their own computer.
John:
They asked to have their own iOS devices and phones without any prompting very, very early.
John:
None of them even said, hey, I'd like to have my own computer.
John:
Yeah.
John:
the computer is something that your parents use so it's it's categorically different so that's why i'm refocusing and saying now forget about that crap that your parents use that you don't understand that's in some other room it has this thing attached to it with a with or without a wire um and think about your world of computing which is a bunch of these screens most of them are like i just want a phone i can talk to my friends i can i can watch youtube videos i can listen to music
John:
I'm good to go, right?
John:
And maybe I'll go into my parents' room to type the papers or whatever.
John:
But sometimes they might want something bigger to do more truck-like things.
John:
And I'm not entirely sure that this upcoming generation is going to occur to them immediately to say, oh, now I need a PC.
John:
Rather, they might say...
John:
uh i have weird needs so i want one of those big fancy ipads now the the subaru is the baja i thought it was the brat but anyway they're they're both true the brat is the very old one which is actually what i was thinking of and the baja is the newer one it was actually called the brat yes maybe i had it written on the side of it it was great um wow the little like a c-pillar equivalent on the pickup truck hybrid thing can't imagine why they changed it yeah um
John:
But like the reason that I think is apt is because we all recognize that the iPad is not a great truck.
John:
And the iPad Pro is a step in the right direction to say, give us an even bigger screen, give us a stylus, make more room for the multitasking stuff that you've added.
John:
Right.
John:
It's a baby step in the right direction to really being like, if you're going to go truck, go all the way.
John:
um but even if they succeed in that endeavor even if they say oh now the ipad is the truck of the new family of computing devices because this entire family collectively is the future of computing and some people need to do fancy stuff like say run xcode on their ipad or whatever the hell they're going to be doing 10 years from now right um does that suddenly mean that this ipad sales curve that we see making a big hump and going down hill is going to reverse no because most people don't need trucks like nothing nothing can save the truck from being the truck nothing can save
John:
the computer that most people don't need nothing is ever going to make the mac pro like sell like the iphone nothing is ever going to hockey stick any of these things up and so for now for the ipad product specifically just used hockey stick as a verb that's right i did it's it's a well-established uh verb on the show oh my god yeah
John:
Nothing is going to change the inherent nature of of that.
John:
And even even the PC is like, well, what if iPads replace all the PCs?
John:
Go look at the PC trend lines.
John:
Those aren't great either.
John:
The only thing that is going that has been going upward like a hockey stick has been the phone.
John:
And even the phone is leveling off a little bit at a certain point.
John:
And the reason the phone is leveling off, I feel like not with Apple specifically, but eventually with everybody.
John:
eventually there's only a certain number of phones you can sell in the world once every single human every single human alive babies adults everybody has a smartphone then you're just fighting over how many you know then you're just fighting of who gets to sell them right so you can have 100 market share i sell a phone to every single human alive on the planet but you're never going to get more than that right so eventually all these curves have to level off and smartphone really is the type of product that can have that kind of penetration so uh
John:
When I look at the iPad curve and I see it going down and I see the phone leveling off, the phone is like, well, Apple, you got to compete with the other phones that are out there to make sure you maintain your market share.
John:
And the iPad, I just feel like it has slowly growing into its destiny as the truck of the new world of computing.
John:
But I just I just think it should be a better truck.
Marco:
I agree with some of what you've just said, but I see a better future for the PC than I think you do and than a lot of people do.
Marco:
And again, I think you're right.
Marco:
It's not going to really go up from where it has been.
Marco:
I think it's going to go down a little bit and then just kind of level off at some point where the PC really is the general utility computing device.
Marco:
And that is incredibly powerful.
Marco:
And there are so many things that, you know, we can all call them edge cases.
Marco:
We can say like, you know, like you look at so much of what iOS devices can't do.
Marco:
And so many of them seem like, well, almost no one needs that.
Marco:
And that's true.
Marco:
But almost everyone needs one of those things.
Marco:
And it's kind of like the world of people who need computing tasks or abilities that the iOS devices and that worldview of computing can't address is a pretty big group of people.
Marco:
So I think the computer will always be relevant in the same way like Microsoft has always been relevant.
Marco:
They used to be dominant and the only game in town.
Marco:
And now Microsoft is this kind of like mostly ignored, boring company that no one talks about, but that still has a great business and still, you know, very useful to a lot of people.
Marco:
No one really talks about Microsoft, but their stuff is still very, very popular.
Marco:
It's financially seemingly okay, and a lot of people rely on their stuff to get their work done.
Marco:
And I think that the PC in general, whether it's Windows or Mac, I don't make that distinction right now,
Marco:
The PC in general is so general purpose.
Marco:
It is so capable.
Marco:
It is so unbounded by so many of the restrictions that modern mobile devices have, both physical and software restrictions.
Marco:
There is always going to be a market for a more customizable, more open architecture, more hardware diversity kind of platform because there's always going to be edge cases.
Marco:
And as these mobile devices get smaller, simpler, more locked down, fewer ports, everybody, come on.
Marco:
All the stuff that we celebrate as consumers as like, oh, wow, this is great.
Marco:
It's getting thinner and lighter and everything's even more locked down than it was before.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Marco:
All of that is very powerful in certain ways.
Marco:
And if you're making something that's going to sell as many units as possible to as many people in the world as possible, that is a good way to do it.
Marco:
And that's going to keep working.
Marco:
I always say, never bet against a smartphone.
Marco:
It's very powerful.
Marco:
but i don't think that has to come at the expense of the entire pc business it will come at the expense of some of the pc business but again i don't think like not a lot of people are saying you know what i don't even need a computer anymore i'm just going to use my phone for everything some people say that with the ipad and so the ipad is certainly more of a threat than the phone is but
Marco:
But I think it's much more likely that the people who are still using PCs today, even when good tablets are available, I don't see a whole ton of them making that jump if they haven't already.
John:
No, but those people all die.
John:
I guess that's the way it works.
John:
Those people all die.
John:
And the people who are formerly using PCs, what we're waiting for, maybe not the iPad specifically, but tablets in general, the idea that something without the...
John:
the paradigms and the complexities that we currently associate with personal computers that tablets can eventually replace them and that maybe eventually the things that we think of as tablets now will eventually be called pcs to distinguish them from the phones but they won't because they won't be running windows they're running os 10 they won't have they won't have like discs that you mount and volumes and expose file systems and all the things that we associate with
John:
personal computing now like that's why i'm talking it's important to differentiate between the ipad as a product which apple may never get their act together on right and the tablet as a whole the idea that a future computing device should be more appliance like and probably also mobile because again with the morris law stuff like having lots of headroom to put powerful heat hungry things in there is fine but at a certain point
John:
you can't like at a certain point we need another technological breakthrough to increase compute um and if we can't do that then you just basically say well the fastest cpu in the entire world fits in a battery-powered device and we haven't figured out how to make it faster because we haven't figured out how to do quantum computers or optical computing or anything yet so in the meantime
John:
enjoy your quote unquote pc which is basically a big honking tablet because that's what two generations of children know how to use and they have no idea what the hell you're doing with that freaking mouse they just want to touch the screen right so whether apple is the one that does that or somebody else long term after we're all dead um i think the the total market for people who need to do computing besides using the appliances in their home and their phone
John:
it will probably be about the similar size of the quote-unquote pc market today but i would expect tablets to slowly cannibalize that well maybe the whole line on the graph stays about the same while above it floats all the other mass market devices but that's that's where the tablets are battling down there with the pcs who is going to who is going to to get these people who need more than a phone to do their job who who is going to serve them and right now it's
John:
the Mac versus Windows computers versus a whole panoply of tablets versus Surface versus Chromebooks versus, you know, all these things that are like PCs and post-PCs battling it, and I just have to give the edge to the ones with less legacy crap that are more understandable for people to use, even if right now they're just not powerful enough, as we talked about the last show, to actually replace those.
John:
I think we'll all be gone by the time it happens, but I just look at my kids and my kids' kids.
John:
Having a television is going to be... I can't even think of a good analogy, but it's just...
John:
It's going to seem like having like a plow in your backyard to till the fields.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's going to seem weird.
Casey:
Well, you know, I agree with you, John, more than I do Marco, that I think that the PC as we know it, again, like Marco said, Mac or PC, the personal computer as we know it is not terribly long for this world for almost everyone.
Casey:
And I agree, John, that the future is going to be touch, the futures or something after touch.
John:
Or VR, right?
Casey:
Or VR.
Casey:
Well, I think the future is not this beautiful new iMac that I just bought myself.
Casey:
But where I'm having trouble is why then is the iPad so sharply down?
Casey:
Like, I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
It's not powerful enough.
Casey:
It's not doing enough right now.
Casey:
But geez, if the iPad really is the future's truck, don't you think it would at least maintain or not have such a stark downward slope?
John:
Yeah, because I think they misfired on the iPad.
John:
I think they thought things were further along than they were.
John:
And so there was the initial burst of like, hey, this is the future.
John:
Everyone's going to love it.
John:
And then everyone realized, you know what?
John:
I can do all the same stuff on my phone, especially when the phones got bigger and more powerful.
John:
Then it was like, oh, well, never mind.
John:
Just give those ones to the kids.
John:
It's like a burst of enthusiasm followed by the realization that it does not provide enough additional value.
John:
And so that's why I feel like it's tapering off.
Marco:
Well, I think there's a number of factors here.
Marco:
First of all, I think that the value of a tablet in general, if you use it for productivity tasks, then the iPad is very competitive.
Marco:
But I think what most people use tablets for is entertainment.
Marco:
And I'm not saying you can't do work on an iPad, but I think the market bears that out, that a lot of people use their tablets primarily for entertainment purposes.
Marco:
And if you're doing that, there's a lot less reason to get specifically an iPad over any other tablet out there.
Marco:
And there's tablets that cost nothing.
Marco:
Tablets are cheaper than gas.
John:
If you can play Flappy Bird and you can watch YouTube videos that cover... If you can play a couple of really simple games and watch YouTube, as far as my kids are concerned...
John:
It would be like indistinguishable from an iPad because they are not using any of the iPad-iness of the iPad.
John:
They are just literally watching YouTube forever and then playing a couple games.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So that's problem number one the iPad has is that like in phones, I think what people tend to use phones for, kids are a different story.
Marco:
And I do want to separately address that.
Marco:
You know, John, you...
Marco:
You and many other people make predictions about the future of PCs being dead because their kids don't ever want to use a PC.
Marco:
But a lot of people are making that assumption based on kids who are, I think, too young to make that determination.
Marco:
Because if you think about the kind of things that an iPad is really good at and the kind of things a computer is really good at that an iPad isn't very good at...
Marco:
The overlap between what most kids used to use computers for, which is a lot of entertainment stuff and some very light browsing and light work, that kind of stuff you can do on an iPad much better.
Marco:
But that's not to say, what if your kid starts wanting to be productive in multitasking kind of ways?
Marco:
Things that you can do on the iPad, but it's easier or better on a computer.
Marco:
Or if they develop a hobby of, you know what, I want to try programming.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that's hard to do on an ipad again not impossible but hard and some kinds aren't possible so far but you know there there are things that like as kids get older if they want to type a type of paper for school or whatever like you yes you can do it on an ipad but in many ways it's easier on a computer and you haven't met any kids who prefer using the keyboard on on a screen than a physical one have you met those kids yet because they exist yeah no i know they exist but they're terrifying what i'm saying is
Marco:
I don't think we can make the call to say kids these days aren't going to ever use computers because I think kids these days are too young to know that they're ever going to use computers and for us to know that.
John:
Well, it takes multiple generations.
John:
Let's see what you're saying.
John:
It takes multiple generations for it to turn over.
John:
Like I said, we're all going to be dead.
John:
Maybe our kids will be dead because it's the same way that you still do things that your parents do just because your parents did them.
John:
It takes a while to turn over.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh the options available like you said the options available to them let like my kids are all in a house with plenty of macs and plenty of ios devices and the only reason they ever touch the macs is to play minecraft on a bigger screen and maybe that's a valid use case it's like well see they like they like the big screen but if i had my playstation attached to the television they'd probably play it there with the controller i don't know anyway um as as we can see from the ipad curve i think the current crop of tablets ipad and all is included
John:
are not yet up to the task of doing things with the kids so when the kids have to type papers they do end up using it or like using chromebooks in school or something like that and the microsoft services another take on this is like hey we're both things at one we're the old computer and the new computer at the same time that definitely seems like a transitional fossil to me
John:
um but what i'm looking at long term is like we're not there yet but that seems the direction things are going and it only takes a couple of generations of people dying before all these concerns that we have when someone listens to this podcast like uh 100 years from now it will seem ridiculous that we're even debating this in the same way they would seem ridiculous if some if you were listening to people debate about whether uh you know people will actually be able to use a computer with a mouse to do real work i mean i was alive for that debate
John:
and it was fierce, and people were like, you could have done the same thing.
John:
It's like, well, my kid's been born into a world with mice, and they're going to only use mice.
John:
Like, well, when they get a job, they'll have to use a computer without a mouse to do actual work because the only computers that have mice are toy computers.
John:
That's just the way things go.
John:
So maybe it's a pointless thing to even talk about because if we're all dead, do we really care that much?
John:
But I think it's interesting in light of this iPad graph because it's like,
John:
It's the future that we think is coming, but the graph shows that it's not here yet.
John:
And what the graph may also show is that Apple may not be the company to to nail it because this was their shot.
John:
And either they were too early or they just they just fumbled the ball and didn't.
John:
uh you know didn't hit the mark with their first attempt at this type of product and you know as we keep saying we're basically you know totally uh outplayed by their star product the iphone which everyone has basically voted with their wallets and their feet to say this is what we want right now ipads you know convince us later maybe
Marco:
Right, because at the same time that the iPad has been going along and improving every generation, the iPhone has gotten better and bigger, and the Mac has gotten smaller and lighter.
Marco:
And so it really is being squeezed on both ends.
Marco:
If you're willing to carry something now, especially with the MacBook One, only a little bit bigger than an iPad, then if you need keyboard and touch input and a PC-style OS, the MacBook One is going to be better for you than an iPad, even an iPad Pro, at that kind of task.
Marco:
On the small end, if you need a portable entertainment and consumption and communication kind of device, an iPhone is now able to take a lot of that.
Marco:
And especially with the 6 Plus line, it's taking even more of it potentially because that has the benefit of it's always in your pocket.
Marco:
It's always with you.
Marco:
And you probably paid less for it up front than you would have for an iPad and all these different benefits.
Marco:
So it's being squeezed on both sides.
Marco:
Then it's being squeezed from the low end because all these cheaper tablets that also can play YouTube and play some games and browse the web, all those cheaper tablets are coming and eating the whole bottom end of it.
Marco:
So it's being attacked on so many fronts.
Marco:
And the good thing is two of those fronts are owned by Apple.
Marco:
And so it's being cannibalized by other parts of Apple, so it's not necessarily a horrible thing for Apple.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
I don't see a way out of this for the iPad anytime soon.
Marco:
Maybe long term.
Marco:
Maybe you're right.
Marco:
You might be right long term.
Marco:
I'll give you that.
Marco:
But in the near term, the things that tend to improve quickly, relatively, in computing is the basic hardware specs.
Marco:
The speed, the quality of the screen and stuff like that.
Marco:
That stuff improves in the short term.
Marco:
The biggest challenges to the iPad, I think, are pretty deeply rooted software architecture and software limitations and input, both of which are not solved so quickly and easily.
Marco:
You talk about how iOS could get better for productivity use, and it's things like rethink multitasking and files.
Marco:
Those are big things.
Marco:
Those take years to possibly develop or to realize that you need to rethink if you do.
Marco:
That's a very slow-moving thing.
Marco:
And then input is oftentimes not solvable.
Marco:
Like there just isn't a way to make like a nine inch laptop with a keyboard that humans can use comfortably.
Marco:
You know, like there's like there's like there's limitations like that where you're just fighting physics and, you know, the physical world and you just can't win those fights a lot of times.
Marco:
And tablets certainly are challenging in regards to how to how to fix input, how to make input that is that is good for both casual lean back on the couch use and also productivity use.
Marco:
And that is a very hard problem.
John:
it might not be possible to solve and it's the kind of thing where progress is made very slowly if at all now you're talking about cannibalization and that's another that's a the other takeaway of this thing is like when you look at these little lines like you look at that ipod hump that's like here comes the ipod and then it arcs over and then you look at the mac like i forget i tried to find this graph because i think someone tweeted and i can't find it but it was like a graph over many many years not just like the last five or ten years but like from the 90s
John:
all the way up to the current time and you look at the products and it's like little fireworks like the ipod launches up into the sky not too high then it's the ground again right and the ipad launches up into the sky and is arcing over to starting to be on its way down again you look at the phone and the iphone goes like into the stratosphere but then eventually starts leveling off right and so you can't see the other side of that things are the only line on the entire graph
John:
that is basically has any kind of you know uphill slope for the entire length of it is the mac and it's like way down at the bottom kind of blending with with the x-axis you can barely see it but you can see it is a little bit higher it does go up over your view a tiny little bit and it's insignificant or whatever but
John:
um it's interesting that that trend line because because it started off as like the loser in the pc market so it never had a lot of markets never had a high height to come down from and it has been steadily gaining um you know it has been gaining market share while windows loses it or whatever so it does have a good graph uh you know an uphill climb even though it's insignificant but when you look at all those other things what what apple is hoping for when you mentioned is all right so apple makes products that make these little arcs right every product has a lifetime the iphone arc doesn't seem like it's even half over or maybe it's exactly half over right
John:
If you would extend that graph out, however optimistic and pessimistic you want to be about the iPhone arc, you draw that.
John:
What you need is another lump.
John:
You need another big arch in that thing.
John:
So what is the new product that is going to come?
John:
Like the watch isn't even visible because it's too new, so who knows what that's going to be like.
John:
But Apple's whole thing is...
John:
what is the next big thing what is the next line that's going to be on our graph maybe the line will never go up as high as the phone or whatever maybe it will maybe there's some vr thing out there maybe it's the car if you want to do revenue because a lot of people have cars and they cost a lot more than a mac or a phone so the asps are really good on cars
John:
Um, but the margins are much lower, you know, so I don't know what it is, but like, that's, that's one of the reasons that investors are cranky about Apple because they look at all these lines and they see all these little arcs and they're like, all right, well, I think we've played this out and we feel pessimistically that the iPhone is at its peak and now it's going to go down.
John:
So where is the next arc Apple?
John:
and right now there is no convincing answer and it's apple's job to come up with that like and i agree with you the ipad pro is not going to turn the ipad thing around because even if professionals love the ipad pro there's not a lot of them right so you have to either let the ipad arc follow its course down to the baseline and then start again with another tablet-ish product or you need to
John:
somehow transform the mac into a tablet-ish product i don't know how you do that like just you know semantically how you could ever get there that's why i still feel like the ipad must rise again in a new form at some point in the future or if not then maybe apple loses that and someone else does it right maybe you know who knows what what ends up winning in this but i i just feel confident that the pc is the past and we are the last the last great pc generation uh is already alive of people i mean
Marco:
Well, it also, you know, a lot of people like in our walk of life here, and by that I mean geeks like us, a lot of geeks just deny the role of fashion and trends in things.
Marco:
And, you know, we try to make everything more logical.
Marco:
We try to justify things and we don't understand fashions.
Marco:
or fads really what if tablets have been a fad i know this is crazy i know this sounds like the the champion of the computer trying to optimistically say that oh tablets are just a fad and computers are going to come back you know so i i know this sounds crazy and i'm not even saying i'm not even saying i believe this but i think it's worth thinking about but you're not you're not saying computers are going to come back though you're just saying tablets are fads two separate things right
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So I think it's worth considering, though, what if the entire idea of tablets had their peak already?
Marco:
And that, you know, in the future, like the kind of casual, the future of computing was already here earlier than that.
Marco:
It's the mobile phone.
Marco:
It's the smartphone.
Marco:
And, and that, you know, what if that is really the future?
Marco:
And the tablets were just kind of this thing that for a brief time, the whole world was kind of like in love with it kind of infatuated with, but it was actually just a fad.
Marco:
And now we're kind of realizing, eh, you know what, I think I'd rather just have a good phone and then maybe a good laptop also.
John:
all right i've considered it and i reject it that's fair but but i think a lot of people are not considering that as a possibility but i think i think the data actually like if you look at this ipad sales graph that looks exactly like what's going on but that but that's just the ipad that's why i keep differentiating like there's the ipad which may be apple blew it on and then there's the concept of a screen about the size of a piece of paper or bigger that you hold in your hands and i would even include in tablets a screen that's much bigger than a piece of paper like the ipad pro that you hold in your hand right
John:
or even a bigger thing that sits on your desk i would say is basically a big piece of glass that you touch that uh extends down to the portable range but as i've always said i can imagine a desktop replacement that is like more like a drafting table um and just the utility of essentially having a magic piece of paper that can show anything that's piece of paper size
John:
Like, once that becomes like 99 cents, like the computing part of that is so, you know, again, as the price of compute drops to zero, of course people are going to want to have that because people want to hold things in their hand and read them and look at them and watch a video.
John:
And maybe that won't be an iPad anymore.
John:
Maybe it'll be something that comes in your cereal box that you unroll and it's like...
John:
There's no and you can say, oh, that's not a tablet.
John:
It is, though.
John:
It's like basically a screen that you hold in your hand that is way bigger than a phone.
John:
And that is absolutely not going to die.
John:
Whether Apple has any role at all in that product line remains to be seen, which is why I say the iPad is an open question.
John:
But there's a reason everyone was all gaga.
John:
Like the fad part that I think you're sensing about tablets was like, oh, this is like the science fiction books I read.
John:
This is like those movies I saw.
John:
It's like the future.
John:
Like how many movies had?
John:
Oh, you just hold this magic even before, you know, flat screens existed when everything was all CRTs.
John:
every science fiction story you know back hundreds of years like oh i just hold something that looks like a piece of paper but i can show any image anywhere and i can see anywhere in the world and i can watch moving pictures on it that idea is never going away because it has an amazing utility for people like us who have eyeballs in the front of our head and hands that we can hold things up with like it's you know unless vr retinal imaging or any sort of like interior mind type thing happens or strapped to your eyes thing until that comes and wipes all this away
John:
Having something big that you hold in your hand that is a screen, that idea will never die because it has such an amazing utility.
John:
It just could be that Apple is not the company that either brings that to us, benefits from it, or like it gets it right.
John:
Because if you just play out current trends, eventually, what will it take to have something to give your toddler to watch whatever the equivalent of YouTube is, right?
John:
Maybe that'll be $1.99 in a drugstore that's a rolled up piece of plastic.
John:
that the kid can just do anything they want to and when it gets destroyed you just throw it away right because seriously the the electronics the cost of the electronics and everything to sort of get internet access and play video and stuff that's going to in our lifetimes be so incredibly trivial it'll be nothing
Casey:
You know, I was going to ask you, John, what would make the iPad, you know, cross that hump and be the thing, or any tablet.
Casey:
And I think you just covered it in a lot of ways.
Casey:
But I was thinking, you know, when I got my first iPad mini, this is two years ago now, the iPad mini with Retina display, I had given Aaron my iPad 3, so the first full-size iPad with a Retina display.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I'd given it to her and I'd set it up with her iCloud account and iMessage account and some of the apps I thought she would use a lot.
Casey:
And I gave it to her.
Casey:
And I think in those two years, she has used that iPad five or ten times.
Casey:
Because it always ends up that she's either... Well, she starts with her phone almost always.
Casey:
Everything she does is on her phone.
Casey:
And then if for some reason something she's working on is easier or just better suited for the truck, for her Mac, then she'll go to her MacBook Air and do that thing there.
Casey:
But generally speaking...
Casey:
For Erin, it's her phone and the iPad isn't even a thought.
Casey:
In fact, most of the last two years, the battery has been dead because neither of us ever touches it.
Casey:
And granted, this is only one data point.
Casey:
That doesn't exactly make a line by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
But it certainly bears what Apple's results are seeing, which is that the iPhone is going crazy.
Casey:
The Mac isn't doing bad and the iPad is just not even there.
Marco:
Well, I mean, like, but, you know, by, to be fair, by, like, unit sales, the iPad and the Mac are kind of neck and neck right now.
Marco:
But the trend line is very clear that the iPad is on its way down while the Mac is still on its way up.
John:
Barely on its way up.
John:
Kieran Healy in the chat tried to give a...
John:
a bunch of charts but it's not the one i was thinking one it showed all the lines together all different colors and you just saw the only one that was like steadily climbing uphill like a snail over the course of decades was the mac and it was just like hugging the bottom of the graph totally insignificant volumes compared to the other firecracker products but it's like we're still here we're still clawing our way up like
John:
you know that's that's both sad and heartening at the same time but uh yeah i when i think about the car and there were some rumors about the car this this week everything i think like is that the next thing that's going to i try to imagine what a car line would look like on this draft like imagine they do as well as tesla and they sell you know some piddling amount of really expensive cars to people with a lot of money and the self-driving stuff doesn't work yet because it's not ready like
John:
but cars are really expensive and so the revenues will be high but the margins will necessarily be lower and it's like what does that line look like does does the car line look like the ipod line does it look certainly doesn't look like the iphone line does it look like the mac line where it claws its way up or do they just can the car and it's a bad idea and they should really concentrate on something else like and then the lines we can't even think of though vr is the current
John:
Question mark in the world of like, is this a thing people are going to want to do?
John:
Because at this point, the number of people who have done VR stuff is just a bunch of gaming enthusiasts.
John:
And that will be the case for a long time.
John:
I don't know what the next big thing I remember several years ago when we were talking on the show, like maybe the watch is the next big thing.
Marco:
maybe it is but if it is it's definitely got a slower ramp up it's as far as we can tell well you know like at this point it's it's still early right but the watch is the next ipod in the sense that not in the sense of the ipod like it was gone now but in the sense that like it's an accessory it's something that serves a narrow range of roles very well but that not everybody needs a device to serve that narrow range of roles and also that is not going to replace your phone
John:
Yeah, or maybe just wearables in general.
John:
It's very difficult to think of something that is ever going to be like the next iPhone because the great thing about a phone is that literally every adult in the world probably could conceivably use one, right?
John:
And that's a big market.
John:
How many products can you say that about?
John:
maybe cars not really because most people don't have cars in the world they have bicycles and motorcycles if they're lucky you know whatever like you're just trying to think of something that that everybody could find some utility for for some values of everybody and it's very difficult to think of that a watch is one like well sure something you hold on your wrist that tells you the time that seems like a broadly useful thing you could sell a lot of but
John:
You can't sell them for that much money, and I don't know if you're ever going to be able to sell everybody in the world $691, which I think was their ASP and iPhone $691 watch to everyone in the world.
John:
No.
John:
So maybe they'll just get the high end of the watch market just like they have the high end of the phone market?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm...
John:
I don't know what the next thing for Apple is, but when I look at these graphs, if I was to continue the x-axis and go from 2016 and extend that out for another 50 years and let me just continue drawing the lines of all their current product lines...
John:
i see like how optimistic can you be with the iphone line like if you continue to draw the iphone line you know what it looks like it's a big thing goes up up up and the slope starts to level off how do you draw that line do you just draw a straight line out into the future and say well smartphones will continue for the next 50 years pretty much as is or do you make it go up more or do you make it slowly go down like the rest of the things i don't know
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by Fracture.
Marco:
Fracture prints photos in vivid color directly on glass.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com and use code ATP10 to get 10% off.
Marco:
Now, Fracture prints look amazing.
Marco:
They are these nice little squares or rectangles, or big if you want to go big.
Marco:
Go big or go home.
Marco:
These nice little or big squares or rectangles.
Marco:
They offer a lot of options.
Marco:
And these prints look great.
Marco:
They're modern.
Marco:
They're clean.
Marco:
They go edge to edge.
Marco:
They don't need a frame or anything.
Marco:
They are their own self-contained thing.
Marco:
They replace the need for a frame.
Marco:
It just looks like a nice modern photo presentation.
Marco:
You can hang it on a wall or you can stand it up on a desk.
Marco:
They make fantastic gifts, and we have them all around the house.
Marco:
We've given many of them as gifts as well.
Marco:
People love these things.
Marco:
They always compliment them.
Marco:
We always hear about people, how much people love them, and you can do everything, of course, online, so it's great.
Marco:
If you need a last-minute gift for somebody, do it all online, have it sent to them, and you're all set.
Marco:
uh it's a perfect way to celebrate holidays fun whatever else you know valentine's day is coming up you could do it for that i really recommend checking out fracture for these beautiful photo prints in vivid color directly on glass and they're all assembled by by hand by their small team in gainesville florida so there's quality checking and everything and this is a very very nice human you know small company here that you're dealing with so good people over there
Marco:
You can get 10% off with code ATP10.
Marco:
Just go to FractureMe.com to check it out.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Fracture.
Marco:
Once again, code ATP10 to get 10% off.
Marco:
Thanks to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, Marco.
Casey:
Is the iPhone 7 going to be waterproof?
Casey:
We're running a bit long, so let's keep it to just that question.
Casey:
Is it going to be waterproof?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
I mean, why are we talking about this now?
Marco:
I mean, I think the answer is probably... It'll probably be very close.
Marco:
You know, just like the iPhone 6S is very water resistant.
Marco:
It is not waterproof.
Marco:
But if it happens to get wet by most people's estimations and some little tests here and there, it seems to fare better than the other ones.
John:
It gives the water a stern talking to.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It has extra seals.
Marco:
It has these extra little seals all over all the things on the board and everything.
Marco:
It is certainly water-resistant to some degree.
Marco:
It's unadvertised this way, but that is how they seem to do it.
Marco:
If they drop the headphone jack, that might be a reason to make waterproofness a headlining feature because that might help tame some of the anger that will result from losing the headphone jack from customers.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
so i think it's it's possible i i think the 6s and the watch both show that apple is and the watch i think is an is a more interesting example of this because the watch has openings it has a speaker it has a microphone as as the crown too
Marco:
oh yeah right yeah and and actually in traditional watches the crown is usually the hardest part to waterproof it's it's opening with a moving part in it and everything anyway so you know you have they they clearly have the ability to make things that are very water resistant possibly waterproof the only question i think is how waterproof will it be and whether they will advertise this as as a feature or whether it will just be quietly water resistant the way the success is yes that was the question
Marco:
so what's your answer i i would say probably to which one of those like the advertising or the the fact that it will actually be i would say it is very likely that it will be that it will be more water resistant than the 6s which is already pretty good so i say the the chances of it getting getting more water resistant are very good the chance of them advertising that i would give it maybe like a 60 chance
Marco:
they probably will advertise it but not necessarily but i do think if they do actually delete the headphone jack then that would be that would make it more likely that they would advertise that as a feature because that would help justify that decision yeah i think i mostly agree like the reason i put this in there is because like uh
John:
electronic devices don't become more water resistant by accident so in the past phones that have been that apple seems to have been taking making more of an effort to seal them up again totally not advertised as you probably shouldn't you know put your phone in water many people kill their phones by putting them in water right but some part of the engineering process for these phones is even if it's not about water maybe it's just about dust or whatever like they are making an effort to seal these phones up tighter
John:
um i don't see any reason that effort trend would diminish especially since many of their competitors do try to advertise their phones as waterproof and apple knows better than anybody how many people drop their phones in the toilet and come into the store and are sad about it and all the whole water resistance for their warranties like
John:
They have this info.
John:
They are trying to make their phones more water resistant.
John:
So I think the only question is, do they start advertising that like have they crossed the threshold at which they can start advertising?
John:
Because obviously they know like they're not going to advertise until they can be very sure like they are with the watch, like to spec it out and say, here's how we think it will perform and blah, blah.
John:
Right.
John:
By the way, even the watch, they barely advertise that it's water resistant.
John:
But there's expectations with the watch.
John:
Like, they under-promise and over-deliver the watch, because it's like, you totally shouldn't put this in the water, but realistically speaking, it's like, I mean, Craig Hockenberry's swimming in the ocean with his, like, every single week for God knows how long.
John:
Like, when he tells us that his watch has been killed by the water, then we'll maybe know what the limits are.
John:
But seriously, like, it's basically...
John:
you know waterproof enough but they don't say like you're right they don't say much about it because like they have the specs and it's like it's like watch specs you can go and you can see what the little numbers are and they have all these standards or whatever um but the phone they don't say anything about that like do not bring your phone near water in any way right and so at some point they'll be able to say something about the phone with respect to water um so i i think that is coming i just don't know if it's the iphone 7 or 8 or 9 or whatever and if i had to put a percentage on it for the 7 i would say
John:
The reason I put it in is I so want this to be an advertised feature of the iPhone 7, but I just feel like that even if they ditch the headphone port, they need one more generation to really go full waterproof.
John:
But I hope I'm wrong.
John:
So I'm going to put it at slightly under 50%, but I hope I'm wrong.
Casey:
So even if they ditch the headphone port, there's still a lightning port, right?
Casey:
Unless we go full inductive.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like, there's always going to be openings.
John:
I don't think the headphone... That's what Marco said.
John:
Like, it's not so much that getting the headphone suddenly makes it possible to be waterproof.
John:
It's that it's a nice thing to be able to say when telling people that you took away their headphone port.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, because, you know, there are ways to waterproof certain ports, and the design of the port can make it easier or harder.
Marco:
I'm sure Lightning was probably designed with that in mind, with it in mind to have future devices be more water-resistant
Marco:
it all that being said one thing that I find promising about this is that one of my common criticisms of Apple design especially recently that I think seems to be getting worse honestly it seems like the newer products that come out often times
Marco:
seem to ignore what customers actually need, like the problems that we face in the real world and what we actually want out of our devices, and instead give us things that we weren't really asking for, even though they might be nice, but just things we weren't really asking for, like increased thinness and lightness is one of the most common things.
Marco:
So you get things like the MacBook 1 with its really controversial keyboard.
Marco:
I'll be nice to it tonight.
Marco:
Well, a really controversial keyboard that was made in the name of thinness.
Marco:
It's like, well, we didn't need it to be that thin necessarily.
Marco:
Things like the iPhone.
Marco:
The best example that I can give on the phone is battery life, where so many people would love for their phone to get better battery life.
Marco:
And most people don't say, I wish my phone was thinner.
Marco:
In general, I see this happening at Apple, and I'm a little saddened by some of this.
Marco:
However, if you look at what else people really want out of their iPhones, very high on the list is resistance to damage.
Marco:
And the two kinds of damage that happen most to phones is water damage and dropping damage.
Marco:
And so if they can make it more durable and more resistant to shattering or scratching or cracking of the glass surfaces...
Marco:
and if they can make it more water resistant that will seriously benefit a large number of customers that is very promising in that apple is clearly trying not only to make things super thin so johnny i've can be proud of them because it seems like they don't really know what else to do with the physical designs but they can also at least solve real customer problems things that were really big that really affect a lot of people so that i think is great
Marco:
And if they're doing stuff like this, if they're improving waterproofness and shockproofness at all, those will pay off big time and an actual customer benefit.
John:
So, Casey, what's your answer?
Casey:
I think that if the headphone port goes, absolutely.
Casey:
I think it might even be so far as, hey, we made it waterproof, but oops, we had to make the headphone port go away.
Casey:
It's just the way it had to be.
Casey:
I think it's probably going to be – I don't know if it will be advertised as full-on waterproof, but I do think we will hear something advertised about significantly increased water protection, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, or water resistance, I guess.
Casey:
I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around how this would work while still having a lightning port.
Casey:
And I can't help but wonder, could we do not only inductive charging, but inductive data?
John:
I believe that's called Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Well, touche.
Casey:
Fair point.
John:
yeah but like i don't think you'd i think they're gonna still have a lighting port and i think lighting port probably because it's their own port and they can do whatever the hell they want with it and it has always been kind of like a non-traditional sort of software controlled port where it's not as if you're making a spec for the whole world to build and you tell them what the pin outs are and you have no control of what's at the other end of those pins because they're all like hardwired pins for different voltage levels or whatever like it is entirely up with apple so i feel like the lighting port is the least of their concerns like probably the trickiest parts are like
John:
uh the baffles around the speakers and microphones and stuff because i mean they've done it on the watch already but to do that and still have a reasonably high quality speaker and microphone assembly which they seem to be concentrating on in recent ios devices uh it all seems within their own possibility that's why i think like in the past the past few years of devices they've been slowly but surely gaining expertise in how to do this all the while not telling anyone any about it at all the only reason we're finding out about it is because people on youtube are dropping their phones into water and then filming it and seeing what happens
John:
at least they finally stopped blending them i think i think that that phase is probably over yeah did you hear all the things like the best the best uh waterproof electronics things they just use distilled water or something without any like free ions or whatever so they can't conduct electricity you can put basically any electronics in that or so the theory goes um whereas if you use tap water or something with minerals or impurities or whatever that it'll short out your phone
John:
uh-huh yeah do not put your phone in water it's the lesson like even when if they make this water resistant one don't make it i think marco was now we're trying to keep this just a waterproof but like uh smart to bring up the the dropping thing because apple is kind of stuck on that one until some kind of materials um
John:
change because they pick glass for a reason and they try to keep making tougher glass the glass that is that's more resistant to breaking and bending like the super gorilla whatever glass and trying sap like but the bottom line is if they just put plastic on it would be super durable but it would be terrible like you think johnny ive can't handle things now with the camera protruding although i don't entirely agree with that but uh forget it they do
John:
they want glass because it is it feels nice it feels expensive it doesn't get all scratched up and gross like all of the great qualities of glass that we love the reason why glass is the right choice for the phone the one thing it has against it is it does tend to shatter if you drop it onto asphalt just the right way um so i don't know how they get out of that bind because if if the whole if the goal was make it so i can take this phone and throw it on the ground like i'm spiking a football and it survives make the whole thing out of fisher price plastic
John:
like it's not as if there's a hard drive disc head to crash inside there it's extremely durable oh except for the fact that it would feel terrible if we made it out of fisher price plastic and it would get scratched up and it would look gross and it would be a worse product so at least waterproof is something they can do with with dropping not quite sure what they can do there and instead we all just cover our phones in cases that look like big fisher price plastic
John:
well some people do i mean my case is not saving my phone uh did i tell you that my wife dropped her her big uh plus no it's like that was a while ago it was like a week after she got it and it just like slipped out of her pocket or whatever from basically waist height onto the cement sidewalk completely shattered oh that's why you get apple care plus yeah well in her defense the plus is really easy to drop
John:
yeah well it was her first like she's getting used it was in the silicone case but that didn't save it but yeah no and shattered we all see shattered runs all the time i just i feel like there's no way out of that other than to keep leaning on your glass manufacturers to make it stronger and better but the you know until we get transparent aluminum i guess from the star trek movie wow would that be worth something to you
Casey:
And we're done.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot for our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Harry's, Squarespace, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
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, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't.
Casey:
Why do we still have a lightning port?
Casey:
Why not go inductive charging and just say the hell with it to having a port at all?
John:
My friend has one of those things.
John:
I forget what it's called, like the key charger or something, QI or whatever.
John:
He uses it with his iOS devices.
John:
It's a case that you basically put on your phone and it plugs into your lightning port and then it's a very thin case because all it really has to do is have a big like
John:
sort of inductive contact thing and you just put it on he likes it you just put it on these little stands and it charges it i would assume slightly slower um than the other things but yeah why why do they not have that
John:
i don't know i'm not entirely sure it is a clean win you're like isn't that better in all ways than than a wire uh setting aside performance entirely i is it better i don't think it's better in all ways than a wire because the charging thing takes up more room yeah because like imagine imagine like if you're traveling with your phone you go to plug it in like in a hotel or something look at what it is with the watch today and imagine imagine like the watch but bigger basically like
Marco:
Bringing the watch with you is kind of a pain in the butt because of that big cable and it doesn't really stick very well to it.
Marco:
When you're traveling somewhere, that kind of sucks.
Marco:
Whereas the phone, you plug in this thing and you can swing the phone around like a rope from the cord.
Marco:
and it it holds it i mean you shouldn't but you probably can and it will probably hold like it it's accords are just really really practical in the real world even though they are totally unsexy and they they they offend the sensibilities of geeks like us who are like why can't everything be wireless but the reality is like in practice they are just really good really simple really cheap and
Marco:
And they suffer from very few of the downsides of inductive charging.
Marco:
Like I know speed is actually a big issue.
Marco:
How much current you can get through an inductive charger at once safely in that kind of situation.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that the cord still wins at a pretty big margin.
Marco:
And looking forward to the future, it would be ideal if our phones charged even faster.
Marco:
Especially if the batteries keep getting smaller.
Marco:
It would be ideal if they could charge faster, which means more current, which means the cable will still win.
John:
Supercapacitors.
John:
That's all you need.
John:
We haven't talked about that.
John:
Supercapacitors.
John:
That's the current 5-10 year technology that's going to make our phones charge in 15 seconds.
Marco:
Well, you still need to get all that current across, though.
John:
But you were mostly addressing inductive, but I think the other thing out there is the whole...
John:
Try not to cook the people in the room by carefully directing microwaves to exactly where your phone is sitting.
John:
And in that case, you would go to the hotel, you would have all your devices with you, and all you do is plug one wall art into the wall and it would charge every device in the room at the same time.
John:
Hopefully not cooking your insides when it does it.
John:
Yeah, and you'd be sleeping five inches away from one of them.
John:
Well, you know, technically you can do that, kind of, sort of.
John:
I don't know if that would be legal, but I'm trying to think of things that would be a clean win, because I think we would all agree that if that could work and not...
John:
cook people uh you know using whatever technology you want to make up about some future technology that would be a win because it's better than plugging things in you don't have to have a bunch of pads with you it does all of them at once and it's just it's fire and forget like the same way that wi-fi is like oh now you know for most people i don't have to wire my whole house up i just put this one thing in the corner of my house and then internet is everywhere uh if you put this one thing in the corner of my house and charging is everywhere that would be cool i would buy that if it didn't cook me