Edit, Crop, Aspect, Original
Casey:
what what's happening why like i don't uh matthew cox wrote in to tell us about uh serial numbers and logic boards we have actually gotten a considerable amount of feedback about this but i got so much feedback i guess john that you uh felt that matthew's feedback was uh perhaps the best summary so would you like to tell us about this
John:
Yeah, anytime we ask any question, the Apple geniuses or the ex-Apple geniuses all come out.
John:
And this was about serial numbers and motherboards and the serial number being etched into metal on various Apple computers.
John:
And what if you get parts replaced that the serial number is attached to?
John:
The only thing that the geniuses couldn't tell us is...
John:
facts from my past that i can't remember because i'm old i have this vague memory of getting some part swapped in the distant past that none of these guys know about because they probably weren't apple geniuses then because apple stores didn't exist then um or maybe i don't know anyway the idea was that i got a computer back and then they were like oh just so you know your serial number we will be different now because we've replaced the parts that determine that but anyway in this modern day and age in some as of now and some indeterminate time in the past that i can't remember back to
John:
uh, all of the motherboards that Apple sells are apparently able to be flashed with a serial number.
John:
So when they give you one, they just, you know, they put, they put your old serial number into it.
John:
So your serial number of your computer doesn't change, even if they replace the part that contains the serial number.
John:
Uh, I put Matthew Cox's thing in here because he had the interesting bit that each part is factory repair to reuse three times before being scrapped.
John:
So you're supposed to only flash three different serial numbers into there.
John:
Um, although in theory there's, you could bypass that if you wanted to.
John:
Um,
John:
and what else did he have in here uh about the stickers the idea is you're not supposed to be able to see the stickers sometimes there'll be a part that's replaced that has an etching on it and in those cases the technician is supposed to use permanent marker to note the serial number obviously this is not in a visible location you wouldn't see it uh but some people send us screenshots of the permanent marker thing like that they need to write the actual serial number on the part if it's not etched into it and so on the inside in some place that you won't see they just in their little scrawl handwriting right right in this serial number and
John:
but I wouldn't want to know that's on my computer.
John:
So if it is, don't tell me.
John:
How many of those do you think are in your monitor, your cinema display?
John:
I hope none because I, well, who knows?
John:
I don't even want to think about it.
John:
Anyway, the external case on my monitor is the same.
John:
I can tell because it's got all the scratches they put into it every time it gets repaired.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
it's not their fault like that's not they always ask in that survey like how is the external appearance of your thing it's like it's fine like a regular person won't notice it but it's literally impossible to handle things like this that are just like this perfect uh anodized aluminum finish
John:
things and like moving them around it's impossible to not get scratches on it so they do every time it goes in and out um small ones that mostly you can't see but anyway um and the final bit that i thought was interesting is that apple uh are i
John:
are starting to put serial numbers on other internal components.
John:
And he says this ensures that no three-way swaps are carried out for warranty scams and also that each part is reused three times.
John:
These parts usually have tiny QR codes on them, about half the size of a small fingernail, which require expensive barcode scanners to scan and which are declared during the repair process for tracking purposes.
John:
So not just like big things like your motherboard or whatever, but even the little tiny parts, little, little, tiny serial numbers and little, little tiny QR codes.
John:
to keep track of them all and to make sure that they're right and they say that the technicians like it because it's much easier just with the fancy barcode scanners to scan the tiny little qr codes than trying to read tiny little alphanumeric codes through a magnifying glass and copying them down because you know the zeros look like eights you know look like bees and all these other problems on these tiny things so i thought this was interesting that the uh
John:
The serial number proliferation and using all that with, you know, sort of modern techniques to track it to make sure that the parts are used three times and then trashed and stuff like that.
John:
So never fear your serial number will not change.
John:
Although part of the process a lot of people wrote in about was like...
John:
The technicians are really supposed to give you your new serial number because if you get it and they don't give it to you with your old serial number into it or with no serial number into it, lots of stuff won't work.
John:
Like iMessage will be all cranky if you don't have a serial number or any sort of thing that's derived from the serial number involving like authentication or, you know.
John:
Like your hard drive and all your data will all be the same, but the OS and the computer will be very angry if either they forgot to put a serial number on it, flash it into the motherboard that they replaced, or they put a different one into it.
John:
So I forget someone was telling us the techniques they use to make people remember it.
John:
But anyway, if everyone's doing their job right, you shouldn't have to worry about this issue at all.
John:
You'll just have to think maybe a little bit about someone's handwriting and permanent marker on the inside of your computer.
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
I just want to see your face if you open up your computer one day and see somebody's chicken scratch in there in Sharpie.
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
I only accept the etched-in signatures of the original Macintosh team, which I do have on the inside of a couple of my computers in the attic.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So tell us about long distance wireless charging, John.
John:
That was at the end of the last episode, I think, talking about you asked about Casey, like inductive charging.
John:
Like what if there's no lightning port?
John:
What if you just have to put your phone on like a pad or a mat or some other thing?
John:
This way the watch charges where you don't plug something into it, but you just rest it on something.
John:
And Marco was talking about how that's maybe not such a great idea because you got to have all these pads.
John:
And even the watch is annoying with its little pad that comes in it.
John:
And, you know,
John:
um and then i threw out like the idea of well what would be something that everyone could agree would be great is if you didn't have to put it on a pad or plug it into anything you just plug something into the wall in the room and then all the devices in the room get charged somehow it gets power wirelessly from that location specifically targeted to each device and your liver yeah and i just i just threw that out there as as a thing but uh apparently lots of companies are working on this tech we'll throw some links in the show notes um
John:
This is an Ars Technica article that links to a Bloomberg article that talks about companies doing stuff like this.
John:
Of course, there are competing standards, and they're saying the current ones are much slower than plugging into wires, you might imagine.
John:
And the other link we'll put in the show notes is to Artemis, that company with the P-cell technology that we talked about a while ago.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Is anything going on with them?
John:
The whole thing with them was like besides the thing that they were promoting, they had that little teaser at the end of their intro like, oh, and there are other applications that we're thinking about for this technology that we're not ready to discuss.
John:
And everybody who wrote about that story was like, we think probably what they're talking about is power delivery because their cool technology was like that they could...
John:
uh you know use use computers essentially to calculate the correct interference pattern to exactly target the devices that are that are in range so they would sort of manipulate all the big overlapping bouncing waveforms with like sort of a feedback loop until it would hone in on wherever your phone is uh and it would track it like you could be you know they had a thing like you can go in a car but once you go over 70 miles an hour it's not fast enough to keep up with where you are anything like that but for people just walking around holding their phones
John:
It would use interference as an advantage instead of a disadvantage, using the power of computers to figure out this complicated math to exactly target you.
John:
So what they're basically doing is taking electromagnetic radiation and concentrating it in a fairly small area.
John:
It's just Wi-Fi or cell signals.
John:
It's not radiation that's going to do anything harmful.
John:
But once you have that ability to basically say, I can take electromagnetic radiation and target it at a very small area that you can move wherever the hell you want.
John:
We'll keep up with wherever it is.
John:
then if you crank up the power you know like you know it's some form of delivering energy through the air to charge a battery you can't really crank it up ambiently because like then you know if you put all your devices in a microwave and it that that bombards it with lots of high energy electromagnetic radiation uh but it does it uniformly it doesn't like everything in the microwave is hitting that
John:
um you can't make an entire room a microwave oven not that you're saying i use microwave radiation but anyway you really need to target it because if you target it then you can crank up the power and everybody else in the room doesn't get a huge amount of uh power thrown into them just the spot where you're targeting it does you still have to stay within reasonable safe limits which is why i keep talking about cooking your internal organs and if they're off on where they aim it or whatever uh but the ability to target uh
John:
a small area is what gives you the ability to turn the power dial up even at all.
John:
Um, both practically speaking, because you, because you're concentrating in a smaller area.
John:
And also because if you start to get into the realm, depending on what wavelength and signals you're using, you start getting into the realm where they could actually, uh, affect the human body.
John:
At the very least, you're not just, you know, doing it to every single person standing in the room.
John:
You're just doing it maybe to the hand that's holding the phone or whatever.
John:
So, um,
John:
i imagine that the companies that are working on this tech are working on it at such low power that it's not does not pose a harm to humans and it's probably not as fancy as the p cell thing where it exactly targets with this constructive interference thing it is probably much you know simpler and lower power than that but for a situation the reason i was thinking about this even not just like oh you show up in the hotel room and you just plug this wall art and all your devices charge you
John:
even for at home because it like plugging in your phone before you go to sleep it's got eight hours to charge doesn't take eight hours to charge your phone takes way less than that so if i could just not have to worry about plugging in my phone if whenever my phone was just on my nightstand anywhere on my nightstand not on a special pad or like even just anywhere in my bedroom if i knew that if i put my phone anywhere in my bedroom and go to sleep when i wake up in the morning it'll be fully charged and i have to do nothing i would buy that thing like because you don't care how slow it charges you're gonna be asleep for many hours and it will
John:
you know it maybe wouldn't work for an ipad because sometimes it takes forever to charge but even just the very simple very low power version of this that didn't require me to remember to plug my phone in i'd buy that in a second so i hope uh these people working on this uh get it done sooner rather than later yeah just watch where you put your hand on your liver at night it'd be so low power though barely trickling and maybe it'll keep me warm in these cold these cold uh new england winters when it's uh 60 degrees here today or whatever
Casey:
So tell us about the shared iPad development guidelines, which I didn't even know was a thing until I saw this in the show notes.
John:
We talked about it last time.
John:
It was like the education iPads.
John:
Yeah, the multi-user account thing.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
I just didn't see the developer guidelines until tonight.
John:
Yeah, this is just a public URL.
John:
So if you want to go to it, you can see like the guidelines for like, say you're going to write an application that's going to be on one of these shared iPads in a classroom where you got 20 different students.
John:
They could all quote unquote log into your iPad at any time.
John:
um and it's it's all the same things that we thought just you know following up on this to put the url in there like the guidelines are like make sure you put all the data in the cloud this is this is for app developers if you're writing an app that you want to be well behaved put all your data in the cloud pull the data down when you need it every time someone does something to change the data shove it back up into the cloud uh all the little things that you're used to keeping locally like
John:
uh they say first launch or progress flags like how they launched this app before what screen were they on or whatever that stuff that you used to keep like in a little p list locally don't you got to put that in the cloud too otherwise every time someone logs in it'll be like they're first launching it over and over again um and use all the apis that apple's added over the past few years about marking your storage as purgeable
John:
uh by the os so i can come through and say i'm allowed to delete that uh because the app has told me that it is available elsewhere so if i delete it it's fine because again if you have 20 students they can't all fit their data on there as multiple students log in and new data gets pulled down from the cloud it's going to inevitably evict data from the like the person who used it five logins ago um and they talk about you know using the various apis for syncing stuff um but and so these guidelines are
John:
This is, you know, it's for shared iPad, which is their education thing.
John:
But these same guidelines are very similar to the guidelines they've given to people on iOS and even OS X. Again, with the marking your data as purgeable and doing everything with the cloud so that less state is kept on the local machine.
Marco:
Well, it's even closer to the Apple TV, where the Apple TV, from the start, they specifically say, you have no persistent storage, only iCloud.
John:
Yep.
John:
And then you can and your app can't even be that big.
John:
So half your app has to be pulled down on demand as well.
John:
So these are these are like as many people pointed out, like this is like slowly inch by inch creeping up onto the Chromebook model, which is, you know, of course, there's nothing on this computer.
John:
This computer is nothing.
John:
This computer is basically a local cache of some stuff that lives elsewhere.
John:
Nothing is ever canonically on this computer.
Marco:
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Casey:
So earlier today, Walt Mossberg discovered the functional high ground.
Marco:
See, this year, I don't have to say anything this year.
Marco:
Everyone's doing it for me.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
You just planted the seed.
Casey:
You incepted the tech press.
Casey:
That's not the past tense of inception.
Casey:
Anyway, it's the point.
Marco:
That sounds gross.
Marco:
I'm sorry, tech press.
Casey:
Whoops.
Casey:
So anyway, so Walt wrote on The Verge an article about how he really feels like Apple software quality has gone downhill lately.
Casey:
And so there are a couple of quotes I wanted to pull out and read really quickly.
Casey:
And this is Walt Mossberg again.
Casey:
He doesn't know what the name of the Mac operating system is.
John:
That's fine, Walt.
John:
We know.
Casey:
It's almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products while pursues big new dreams like smartwatches and cars.
Casey:
Fast forward a little bit.
Casey:
But the exceptions are increasing and I hold Apple to its own higher often proclaimed standard based on all these, quote, it just works, quote, claims of the oft repeated contention by Mr. Jobs and his successor, Tim Cook, that Apple is in business to make, quote, great products.
Casey:
Apple's advantage is that it designs and builds software together.
Casey:
So if the software isn't excellent, it does the superlative hardware a disservice.
Casey:
It was a pretty stern lashing that I thought that Walt gave.
Casey:
And he seems to, from what I've read of Walt Mossberg, he seems to generally like Apple stuff quite a bit.
Casey:
And he said in this article, you know, I still think the iPhone is the best smartphone.
Casey:
I still love their hardware.
Casey:
But man, this software is...
Casey:
It's getting a little crummy these days.
Casey:
And it's fascinating to me to see someone at The Verge, which clearly has a readership that surpasses Marco.org, you know, someone there saying, you know what, guys, things are looking a little rough these days.
Casey:
And I don't know if you guys have anything you'd like to add about this, but I mean, at what point, and I feel like I've asked this question to you guys a thousand times, at what point does Apple recognize this and start to fix it?
John:
Yeah, this article, like so many, like so many articles that Walt Mossberg and those people used to writing, like it's necessarily has to be like, it's almost as if he's writing for a newspaper column inches that he can't, he's not going to go on for just pages and pages as some people are known to do.
John:
um he's gonna get in and out quickly uh but it also means that he can't really support his contention particularly well like it's just kind of like look if you already agree with me then you will enjoy my complaining session and i'll cite a few small examples but there's no there's no like systematic support for the thesis no attempt to explain why it's just like you know what sometimes things don't work for me and i'm cranky about it and immediately jump to i think this is part of an overall trend but by being just one more pebble
John:
in this little mountain or whatever it doesn't really matter what he says in this article all that matters is that there's an article on this topic uh yet another article on this topic uh gruber wrote about it too a lot of people have been reacting to it because he's walt marsberg dalrymple too yeah because he's walt marsberg and because the verge is a big site or whatever um
John:
in the media sometimes there are these fads where people get on a kick of like you know complaining about a particular thing or harping on a particular topic so there's there's that to look for it as well and that like once once a sort of a narrative gets out there every publication wants to have a piece either about that topic supporting it or you know surrounding and it comes and goes so we know how that works but
John:
Uh, as Gruber points out at this point, you know, Marco wrote his thing a long time ago and he like, was it like last year or something?
John:
Yeah.
John:
13 months ago.
John:
And, and he wasn't the first one to complain about Apple software quality and he won't be the last, but the fact is that like we've had these flare ups, but it's not as if it just goes away and people go, Oh, a year later, no one will even be talking about Apple software quality.
John:
Like I would feel like it's multiple years at this point.
John:
Uh,
John:
And that you could say that, you know, part of the media narrative and the sort of feeding on itself that they're getting more strident and urgent.
John:
But even ignoring that, just saying like they're not going away, that this story seems to now be evergreen, that you could write the story, you know, every few months you could write the same story.
John:
And as Gruber points out, he sees a lot of people reading the Walt Mossberg thing and agreeing.
John:
He doesn't see a lot of people disagreeing.
John:
and in some respects like you can you can say that makes sense too because of course everyone's got complaints about their computers it's like you know complaining about work or traffic like everyone's like oh yeah no those are all bad things right that may be true um but especially for something like apple if it was a if it was a non-story you would have all the people who fill the traditional role of calling bs on people's complaining about stuff that apple does like apple is you know like anytime someone uh
John:
slams Apple for a reason that seems ridiculous or unfair or holding Apple to different standards than other companies or whatever.
John:
There's plenty of press to fight back against that.
John:
But I just don't see it for these type of stories where people are like, you know what, that's not fair.
John:
Apple stuff is actually really... Because everybody is like...
John:
apple's not living up to its own thing that's what mossberg said that gruber said a lot of people said that like it's apple's own standards that we're holding them to it's not as if we're demanding that they be different than other companies because just for the hell of it their whole their whole value proposition is we are better than the other guys uh we make the hardware and software together we make the best products in the world um and so the fact that this can still be a story like
John:
i think that's the the story that's the story not the individual articles or the details of them or what people are cranky about or what anecdote each person puts in their thing but the fact that you can just keep writing these stories um and i feel like you couldn't have written them for example maybe like in a time you think of a time when apple uh where people would have said no that's not true i have a windows 95 computer it's been nothing but problems
John:
but i got this new mac with iLife and i am able to do all these amazing things and it is just so much better and nicer and so much more understandable and i couldn't make heads or tails on my other computer so if you're saying that apple doesn't know how to write software you're crazy because i think their software is great yeah all software has problems sometimes there are bugs you know that's what you would have gotten if you had done this during one of the more you know one of the the times in history when apple software was more unimpeachably good
John:
but i think over the past i don't know i'm gonna say five years or so not that it's like they're going downhill or it's like they're sliding off into oblivion but there's been enough of an annoyance for enough people that you can write these stories and people go yeah that seems about right like maybe your individual problems aren't a big deal maybe i haven't had your individual problem maybe you're overblowing it for the sake of like getting you know views and being dramatic or whatever but the general theme uh that
John:
that apple software qualities doesn't seem to live up to the standards it sets for itself people i think people broadly agree with that and and as casey points out like maybe apple doesn't broadly agree with that um but like at this point you know is the the bit that gruber had at the end that like the fact that we're still talking about it a year later and that the consensus reaction is one of agreement suggests that apple probably does have a software problem and they definitely have a perception problem like whether their problem is real or not i think even apple has to admit
John:
Even Apple, if you disagree as a company that all these articles are overblown and you have your own metrics that show your software quality is better than ever and blah, blah, blah.
John:
You definitely have a perception problem because I feel like all of us out here are just reading these articles and going, yeah, yeah, that's pretty much the case.
John:
It's kind of a shame.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, when I first read Walt Mossberg's article today, I was honestly a little bit disappointed in that it wasn't better backed up because I think the examples he chose were not... For the most part, they were not widespread.
Marco:
It seemed like they were all kind of weird things that happened just to him.
Marco:
However, when I thought about it more and I started seeing everyone else's articles, the reality is like...
Marco:
Everybody has their own set of weird Apple bugs and stuff that happened to them.
John:
And don't forget Walsh Mossberg has this special concierge treatment where if he has any weird problem, weird things that happen to him, Apple people parachute out of the sky and help him debug his problems.
John:
that does not happen for regular you go to the apple store and buy a device and you have something that you can't figure out no one from apple calls you and has like the guy who wrote the software walk you through debugging procedures right only walt mossberg gets that which is totally skews his perception and he has written in the past about hey i had some problems with this device but apple helped me out and blah blah i'm like it's great that you're telling us this but geez like don't you realize that's not going to happen for anybody else they're just going to be stranded right and so it's
John:
like oh it's just yeah so anyway this that's why i tried to like underplay this particular article was just like uh you know old man yells at cloud like my software doesn't work sometimes and it's annoying it but it's like i said it's just one more little pebble one more little pebble in a giant pile that everyone just chucks their own little pet problems onto
Marco:
Yeah, and the reality is, you know, some of this, you can look back at any part of Apple's history, and you can say, well, there were always problems.
Marco:
Like, some people think, oh, everything was better in Snow Leopard, but no, it wasn't.
Marco:
Like, you know, there were always problems with every release, and there's always been bugs and shortcomings with all their stuff.
Marco:
You know, anytime you can point back in history, it was never perfect.
Marco:
But I do think my thesis from last year that blew up so badly that, yeah, it's never been perfect, but the list of asterisks just keeps getting longer and longer and longer.
Marco:
I think that has only continued.
Marco:
Now, I'm not personally having as many problems now as I did a year ago because the whole Discovery D fiasco caused a lot of problems for me.
Marco:
uh but even that even the same thing happened back then a lot of people said well i don't have that problem but i have all these other problems you know and so like everyone has different problems and i think the reason why everyone has enough problems to to be agreeing with these things uh the reason why i think this this is not just a perception of of an overall quality decline this is a real overall quality decline um
Marco:
The world we live in now has so many devices, so many services, everything is constantly changing, everything's in flux, that it is harder now than it's ever been to maintain high quality.
Marco:
And Apple's simply not doing it.
Marco:
They aren't maintaining a high quality.
Marco:
And it seems pretty clear that they can't.
Marco:
It isn't that they're evil or stupid.
Marco:
It just seems like they can't maintain high quality.
Marco:
Actions speak louder than words.
Marco:
I love the quote they gave Walt Mossberg.
Marco:
In response to my inquiries about this, Apple said, We have dedicated software teams across multiple platforms.
Marco:
The effort is as strong there as it has ever been.
John:
That's probably true, but you get an E for effort.
Marco:
That doesn't really... Yeah, see, this is a pet peeve of mine.
Marco:
It drives me nuts whenever I hear somebody like Tim Cook excuse something by saying, the team's working really hard on that.
Marco:
Because you know what?
Marco:
I don't care how hard the team is working.
Marco:
That is your problem.
Marco:
That is the team's problem.
Marco:
That is not my problem.
Marco:
That is how you talk to yourself and your team internally.
Marco:
That is not how you talk to the public, because the public doesn't give a crap how hard the team is working.
Marco:
The public cares about results.
John:
sometimes they care that like it seems like you as an apple don't care about this and sometimes part of the damage control is saying no no we really do care like as if he can speak for the whole company but like i believe they really do care like this uh gruber cited his interview with phil schiller where he talked about these issues again a whole year ago so this is not like you know this keeps coming around around and i think a lot of things in that that interview like all we have there's only insight i have into like what the hell is actually going on apple but the image i have in my head of what's going on is explained by the the venues that i think they're doing badly in
John:
One, which I talked about at length, is the whole cloud services thing, which they've always been weak at, and that more and more things are cloud service-based.
John:
And so if they're bad at cloud services, the badness spreads more.
John:
So let's set that aside for a second.
John:
The other thing that the thread that both Gruber and Walt Mossberg are talking about in this round, and not so much what you were talking about last year, is not really like...
John:
the os or like something wrong with the software in in the the sense that that uh like it bugs and stuff like that just like application design like your application uh they don't seem to be as good as they used to be they're not as simple they're not as understandable they do weird things gruber's thing was that like photos told him that five photos couldn't be uploaded but he couldn't figure out how to tell which five photos um
John:
um like application design decisions and the reason i think this gets back to the phil schill in our interview the reason i think apple probably is less inclined to agree with this is that they the metrics they've chosen to seems to me the metrics they've chosen to put on their software efforts is one they don't have a lot of good metrics on how well things interact with the cloud because obviously it works in test and it works when we connect to our test server and it works when blah blah blah but then if it doesn't work for people out in the field oh well internet uh demons we don't know what's going on right um
John:
But it seems to me that Apple has really concentrated, and I hear this from Apple engineers, on if there's a crasher.
John:
If something that crashes the application, that needs to get fixed.
John:
And I think Apple software over the past few years has crashed way less than it has in the past.
John:
I can't even remember the last time I had an Apple...
John:
you know application on either ios on the mac like a crash at all let alone a repeatable crash like every time i do this the whole app crashes like i really think they have really reduced crashes but you think that's great isn't that great that they reduce crashers right um but maybe concentrating on that has taken their eye off of the other balls which is one application design which i want to talk about a little bit more later i have this item in the show notes about photos right
John:
About how you make the application.
John:
And two, cloud services, which doesn't show up as a crasher.
John:
It just shows up as data that doesn't sync.
John:
And as cloud infects every single application we have, that becomes maddening.
John:
So, Margot, when you were talking about the functional high ground with stuff like the naming service, just plain doesn't work.
John:
And that's not really a crasher either.
John:
Even if the daemon was crashing behind the scenes, you wouldn't see it.
John:
But it's just stuff doesn't work.
John:
But I really feel like...
John:
Apple's OS and their applications have way fewer crashers than they did back in like, and I keep going back to like the leopard days and stuff like that, but things would crash all the time.
John:
And it's like, Oh, you know, and, or even the classic Mac away is going back farther, like that.
John:
They've made such progress there that they must feel really good about themselves internally and their metrics must be all looking up, but they don't realize that the crap discipline doesn't work to perform the desired function, either because the app is designed wrong or because it's trying to connect to some cloud service and doing the wrong thing.
John:
And people just have no recourse other than to stare at their screen and hope their note will appear.
Marco:
It was very clear to me last year.
Marco:
I kept hearing from people here and there, secondhand.
Marco:
I kept hearing that internally, Apple was caught by surprise that that article was getting traction because they thought everything was fine.
Marco:
Because by their metrics, everything was better than it's ever been.
Marco:
And that's great if your metrics cover everything, but nobody's metrics cover everything.
Marco:
That's impossible.
Marco:
And so in reality, you've optimized for the metrics.
Marco:
And I see Apple doing this a lot recently.
Marco:
I don't know if that's a Tim thing or if that started before Tim was in charge.
Marco:
But it seems like Apple's really heavily into data-driven decision-making now.
Marco:
And I think there are so many flaws with that.
Marco:
And number one starts with, like, what is the data you're basing these decisions on?
Marco:
And is that telling the whole story?
Marco:
Is it accurate?
Marco:
Is it being gamed?
Marco:
Things like that, as these problems are very challenging in any kind of organization that tries to measure anything.
Marco:
And I think we're just seeing the ways that falls down.
Marco:
And one of the ways that falls down is like, if they're measuring quality by number of crashes, well, there's a lot of bugs that don't cause crashes.
Marco:
And it doesn't seem like we're reducing those.
Marco:
And in fact, we seem to be increasing them.
Marco:
And as you mentioned with services, like...
Marco:
So many of the bugs that I see now, now that Discovery is fixed as far as I know, most of the bugs I see now are interactions with Apple's services in some way.
Marco:
Whether it's the Apple TV trying to play media from iTunes and failing for God knows why, or showing a bunch of weird password dialogues on the phone for store purchases or anything, weird stuff like that.
Marco:
It seems like it's the interaction with the services that is falling down so badly.
Marco:
And we will definitely talk about design flaws because that's a separate category.
Marco:
But the actual failures and bugs so often are service-related that people are actually hitting here that I don't think Apple is measuring the right things.
Marco:
If they don't think there's a problem, then their metrics are a problem.
John:
and like the seat of the pants thing like the way that we would imagine in the fantasy scenarios like how does apple have such great quality well it's because steve jobs uses the products and if anything goes wrong for him he comes back and yells at people and they fix it right that's the silly fairy tale of how quality was maintained back in the steve jobs days but the reason that fairy tale works for us is because we can picture in our mind like it's the thing everyone asks ourselves like don't these guys at apple actually use their products again i'll go back to contact syncing which is
John:
You would think the simplest possible thing, very small, very bounded data set, not complicated data.
John:
It's basically all text, right?
John:
And you just want to have the same contact.
John:
You want to enter contact on your phone and have it show up on your Mac.
John:
You want to enter contact on your Mac and have it show up on your phone.
John:
You just want them to be in sync with each other.
John:
Like, and maybe you have an iPad in it, but it just seems like it should be a problem that is so incredibly boring and licked that it just works every time.
John:
And yet, pretty much once every 1.5 years, my wife comes to me and says...
John:
i entered some contact here and it's not showing up there and then i have to do a bunch of rain dances to make that work and i'm like seriously i'm doing this again this is happening again it's contact syncing you're like and you think doesn't tim cook have contacts in his phone doesn't he like when he's on his phone enter someone's contact information and then come back and go on his ipad at work and be pissed that that contact information isn't there like
John:
that's not a crasher but that should show up as hey contacts doesn't work to for the job that it's supposed to do and then of course he has no recourse because you just sit there and you stare at it like maybe the contact will show up eventually should i try signing out of icloud and deleting all my local data off the device what what should i just you know first you got to do all all the stuff of like backing up all your content like i've done this so many times i know all the steps of
John:
there's no way in hell a regular person is going to do all these things and you just you just sit there and you stare at it and that stuff like that with services what how do you put a metric on that the only metric is steve jobs tried to enter a contact and got mad and came and yelled to people like i don't know how you like a cloud services company need to measure that and they need to get good at measuring that but apple doesn't seem to like it when problems like that happen for a for a problem domain that i think should have been solved like decades ago and
John:
It makes me lose faith in everything.
John:
I can't get contacts right.
John:
Forget about the complicated stuff.
John:
They should just spend the next five years saying contacts will always work.
John:
I'm not even talking about little things, complicated scenarios, simultaneous use.
John:
I'm just saying you enter it on your phone, you come back five hours later, you look on your Mac, and it's not there, and you don't know why, and you wait two days, and it still doesn't show up, and you're just scratching your head, and that makes me want to just scream.
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, it's funny because my contact sync, to my knowledge, has always worked perfectly.
Casey:
I never run into the iMessage problems that so many people run into.
Casey:
However, earlier today, I was trying to airplay something to our brand new Apple TV.
Casey:
and i cannot think of a device in the house that isn't on the latest and greatest version of ios or um or os 10 and i go to airplay to my apple tv and i see family room space paren for paren oh no it's back no the house has been infected clearly the only option is to burn it down and start anew um well did the airplay work though that is the real question it did well then consider yourself lucky
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's I feel like what you guys have said is my experience as well.
Casey:
Like it used to be that I would have almost no glitches or random errors or issues.
Casey:
I mean, it would happen from time to time, but very rarely.
Casey:
And I feel like and I don't have a list in front of me or anything like that.
Casey:
And maybe I'm just allowing myself to be influenced by what the press is saying.
Casey:
But I really, really do feel like I'm seeing a lot more small issues these days and sometimes big issues like the iMac, the first iMac.
Casey:
I'm just seeing these issues from time to time that I never used to see before.
Casey:
And, you know, Aaron and my parents are coming to me and saying, oh, this isn't working right.
Casey:
What can I do?
Casey:
And my answer has been a very sad shrug a lot more often lately than it ever was in the past.
John:
yeah because because what can you do like that's that's the thing with these with these sync issues and to bring up another one that i heard recently on a podcast i think it was the talk show i don't remember someone was talking about like oh i just used the apple bundled notes app which has improved tremendously in capability you know like you can do all the drawings in the notes app and you can do like rich text and pictures and all this stuff and it doesn't use imap as a storage back end it's like a modern full-fledged notes application so i'm using it so much more i practically
John:
i practically use it as they were saying i practically use it as a like as a replacement for like paste bot or like those copy and paste things where you will essentially copy something on your phone you want to be able to see to paste it on your mac so they'll just enter it in notes and then you know put down their phone half a second later launch notes on their mac and the note they just put on their phone is on their mac and they're all amazed at how fast it syncs
John:
and that's a success story that's the way it should be for all these things because hey it's not a lot of data i just pasted like a url for instance in notes on my phone and then i'm going to open notes on my mac and that url will be sitting there well i also have a notes document in the apple official notes application which i do use that is just a bunch of urls that i frequently tweet at people because they'll ask like hey where is casey's blog post on all the toasters you reviewed or something and i don't want to have to find the url again so i go to the notes thing and i added that url note
John:
uh i don't remember a couple weeks ago i edited it um and then several days later i went to my mac and you know someone asked a question about something i was going to tweet a reply with the url and i opened notes on my mac and the urls note wasn't there
John:
And so I picked up my phone on my desk where I had added the note like several days earlier.
John:
And I looked at it on my phone.
John:
There's a URL note there.
John:
I'm like, did I add it to the local only one?
John:
Because they know there's the cloud and local ones.
John:
Nope, it's in the cloud one.
John:
And I put the phone down.
John:
Then I look back at the notes application on the Mac.
John:
And then I went to the iCloud system preferences.
John:
Yeah, notes is checked.
John:
You know, it's syncing or whatever.
John:
uh and then i quit notes and i forgot about it the next day i came back again uh launched notes to get a url the url note wasn't there there's no like refresh button to click there's nothing to be done except for i could have signed out to icloud or unchecked and rechecked the notes thing or whatever but i'm like
John:
what does a regular person do in this scenario and i thought about something like dropbox where when i launch dropbox on my mac a bunch of little spinners run a bunch of little badges appear on icons and at a certain point it's synced like i know when i launch it it syncs everything in my dropbox when the little badge is gone from the the dropbox icon on your bar i have some faith based on years of experience that dropbox is satisfied that it has successfully synced everything to my computer
John:
Were I to quit Dropbox and relaunch it, I know that on launch it would say, I better make sure everything in the Dropbox is up to date, and then we'll show a little spinner, and then it will go away.
John:
And yet with Notes on my Mac, when I launch it, if the note I expect to be there isn't there, like Casey said, I shrug my shoulders.
John:
And so I just quit it.
John:
I quit Notes, and then I came back a couple days later, and I launched it, and my URL note was there.
John:
That's not a success.
John:
There's no crashes.
John:
Apple's metrics must look great on that, right?
John:
But...
John:
what what's happening why like i don't know it's maddening because it's like and especially for something you hear other people you know saying great things about like when it works you're just like this is awesome because you're excited the same way that people i want it to be boring like dropbox where maybe it's not the most efficient and fanciest thing in the world but over years of use you know and dropbox has its weird corners where it saves your conflicted copy with this weird parenthetical name and it can get confused in complicated scenarios
John:
All I want is the easy scenarios to be so boring that I never think about them.
John:
I don't launch Dropbox with trepidation, wondering if the data that I expect to be there will be there.
John:
Even when I run out of my quota or whatever, it puts a little red badge icon, and all I have to do is free up a little bit of space, and it notices that I freed up space, and it resyncs things like...
John:
it should just be boring right it shouldn't be this mysterious roll of the dice uh and then when it does work you have no idea why it started working because literally i didn't even try to debug this i didn't try to change it so i think i went like a week a week and a half with that that one note that i added on my phone not appearing on my mac and eventually it appeared and i have no idea why and so that's why like you know like casey one of my relatives asked me questions i'm like
John:
i'll take it to the apple genius like i don't want to do the rain dance for them there's no obvious solution they're not doing anything wrong as users it's just it's just a constant source of frustration for things that should be boring at this point and i i give apple a total pass at the edge of the envelope where they're pushing the envelope doing complicated things i give them a pass on things like siri that's really hard to do natural language like just you know
John:
Make easy things easy, make hard things possible to throw out more, you know, Pearl catchphrases, right?
John:
Easy things are not easy a lot of the time.
John:
Even when hard things are possible, there seems to be no connection between them.
Casey:
Yeah, my favorite persistent bug that was around for a long time and then resolved itself and has now come back rearing its ugly head, crippling my ability to respond quickly and easily with emoji, is the keyboard text replacement that's built into the system that's all synced via iCloud as far as I'm aware.
Casey:
So this is in, if you're on the Mac...
Casey:
System preferences, keyboard, and then the text tab.
Casey:
I use these to quickly type emoji that I use constantly.
Casey:
And when I got the new iMac, none of them synced.
Casey:
There's still, as far as I can tell, syncing between my iOS devices.
Casey:
They used to sync between my iOS devices and my Mac.
Casey:
But now they're not syncing with my Mac and I have no course of action to diagnose.
Casey:
I have no way to figure it out.
Casey:
There's nothing I can do to fix this.
Casey:
Just hope.
John:
All you've got are the rain dances because you know what the rain dances are.
John:
You know, sign out of iCloud, disable that syncing, delete and recreate your account.
John:
Like all these things you're trying to basically kick the thing into gear to say...
John:
go do that thing that you think you need to do where you synchronize data because you have the sneaking suspicion that it thinks it's synchronized, but you know it's not because you can't see your emoji shortcuts, but it thinks it's done.
John:
It thinks there's nothing to do.
Casey:
Yep, that's exactly right.
Marco:
Well, and also, like, the rain dances that, you know, like, you know, John, you said, like, you know, you said you send people to the genius, like,
Marco:
The geniuses can't do anything really.
John:
No, but I want them to walk through.
John:
Yeah, I want them to walk through the steps.
John:
I don't want to be the one walking through that thing.
Marco:
And those steps are horrible.
Marco:
If anything involves either restoring your phone or even signing in and out of iCloud, with modern computers and modern devices, if you've bought into Apple's ecosystem, if you use photos, if you use music,
Marco:
Signing out of iCloud is an incredibly destructive action.
Marco:
You should never, ever, ever have to do that unless you're like selling a computer.
Marco:
Then sign out of iCloud and format the whole thing.
Marco:
Signing out of an iCloud on a modern Mac, if you have stuff in photos and music and everything, and if you're using all the sync and everything, that is risky.
Marco:
It is complicated.
Marco:
It is time consuming.
Marco:
It can possibly waste a ton of bandwidth.
Marco:
You might lose data if you don't do it right.
Marco:
And it won't necessarily work.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And although the sad part is, unfortunately, how often it does actually solve the problem.
John:
Although when it does solve it, I always feel like things.
John:
So I'll see you guys here in a month when it doesn't work again.
John:
Because it's not like you've actually solved the problem.
John:
You've just restarted the counter on when things will go awry.
Marco:
And so to me, if anybody at Apple is considering it a success when you can solve a problem by signing out and signing back in, no, that is not a success.
Marco:
That is like you saved your butt on that particular instance of that bug by putting people through a really, really invasive process.
Marco:
But that should not be standard operating procedure.
Marco:
You should not have...
Marco:
people not only having to do this, having to sign out of iCloud and delete all the crap and then re-sign back in and re-download all the crap, or have to restore your phone, which is even worse than all that.
Marco:
You shouldn't have people doing this on a routine basis to solve seemingly random and somewhat frequent problems because A, that's really destructive now, and B, once people get into that habit, it's like quitting all the apps in the app switcher.
Marco:
Once people get into that habit,
Marco:
Years from now, people are going to still be doing this, thinking it's going to solve all their problems.
Marco:
That's going to be what annoying power users tell their relatives.
Marco:
Oh, you just got to restore your phone.
Marco:
Oh, you just got to sign out of my cloud and sign back in.
Marco:
That causes damage for years to come in people's superstitions way beyond the time when you've stopped needing these horrible solutions.
Marco:
So it really is a long-term damage being done here in so many ways with the quality issues and with the remedies and everything.
Marco:
I just get the feeling, and I hope I'm wrong, I hope this is just Apple putting on a good face because they don't really share a lot, but I just get the feeling that Apple is either oblivious or in denial to these problems, and also that they're defensive.
Marco:
What I hear from Apple people, they're usually very defensive about how well they're doing, and they think they're doing a lot better than I think they're doing.
Marco:
Maybe I'm just the least lucky person in the world, but it sounds like everybody has these stories about random stuff that just doesn't work right for them or has failed for them or has done bad things.
Marco:
This is a big problem.
Marco:
And I won't hedge my bets and say, well, either it's real or there's a perception problem.
Marco:
No, no, it's a real problem.
Marco:
This is way too big and widespread to be just a perception problem.
Marco:
You know, I heard earlier, I write a blog post, I forget, I'm sorry, I forget where it was, but somebody was saying like, you know, modern Microsoft stuff is no better for them.
Marco:
It's a huge mess for them too.
Marco:
Or like, you can look at other makers, you can look at Microsoft, you can look at Google, you know, you can say, oh, well, everybody has problems.
Marco:
That is also not a defense.
Marco:
Like, yeah, everybody has problems.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Everybody else makes crappy PCs.
Marco:
It doesn't mean the Mac can be crappy.
Marco:
You know, like, that's not how Apple works.
Marco:
That's not why any of us use Apple stuff.
Marco:
So, you know, like, that's not good enough.
John:
And there are examples of things that are better.
John:
Like, it's not like you're saying, oh, nobody is better.
John:
That's not true.
John:
I just named one, Dropbox.
John:
Dropbox is better at syncing files.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
You know, so, like, it seems like Apple...
Marco:
From what they project to the outside world, again, whether this reflects their internal thinking or not, I don't know.
Marco:
But what they project to the outside world is everything's fine, we're working really hard on it, and everything's fine.
Marco:
That is what we hear from Apple.
Marco:
And the reality is that everything's not fine.
Marco:
And I really, really hope that they see that because all I hear from them usually is defensiveness.
Marco:
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John:
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John:
i gotta tell you this is a hell of a pillow we'll probably talk about it in some future ad read um but i'm i'm thinking of ordering a second one just so when this one wears out if casper like doesn't make this pillow anymore i'll have a backup you gotta have a backup pillow i you have to i've done this i've made the mistake before with my stupid slippers that i'm wearing now i didn't buy two pair and these wore out now i can't get them again
Casey:
You know, two is one and one is none.
John:
Exactly.
John:
So, yeah, maybe I should buy three.
Marco:
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Marco:
I have a closet with two pairs of shoes in it that are replacements for the pair of shoes I wear every day because in case Doc Martin stopped making them.
Casey:
You know, you joke, but the Skechers shoes that Matt Alexander loves to make fun of me for, they are not making them anymore probably because Matt called in a favor so I wouldn't wear them anymore.
Casey:
And I had one backup pair, but now I'm out of backup pairs and I don't know what I'm going to do.
Casey:
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Marco:
Clothing's the worst.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
You guys alluded to app design, and you had some thoughts about that.
Casey:
Some.
Casey:
Let me prime the pump a little bit and ask, what the crap is the point in photos?
Casey:
Because I added all of my pictures to photos, which I hadn't used in at least a couple of years, if not more than that.
Casey:
And outside of much easier access to shared photo streams, which actually I should point out very quickly, work flawlessly for me and I have zero complaints about them.
Casey:
What is photos really doing for me?
Casey:
Like there doesn't appear to be a way to look at pictures by location.
Casey:
There's the faces thing, which I never really trust.
Casey:
I've got photo stream access.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
And I can see all my selfies that I take all the time, I guess.
Casey:
So what is the point in photos?
Casey:
What is it doing for you that makes it worthwhile?
Casey:
And then you can perhaps spring from that to why is photos a piece of crap?
John:
I think photos is a great starting point because I can answer your questions at the same time talking about the app design issues because they're both related to photos.
John:
I guess I'll talk about my specific photo complaints in a future thing.
John:
But just addressing your concerns, like, what am I supposed to be using photos for?
John:
This is an app design philosophy that really is kind of separate from the, like...
John:
Do things work?
John:
Is my data syncing, you know, measuring crash or metrics instead of something else?
John:
But it's kind of related.
John:
And a lot of the time people are complaining about Apple software quality.
John:
Sometimes they're complaining about things don't work.
John:
Sometimes they're complaining about cloud stuff.
John:
But sometimes they're complaining like even when everything is working exactly as it's supposed to be, as it appears to be for you in photos.
John:
People still don't feel the applications are as useful or as interesting or as fun or like they're not giving them enough value.
John:
And I trace a lot of that back to the design philosophy that started many years ago on the Mac specifically.
John:
I mean, I guess you could talk about an iOS a little bit, but on the Mac, I really feel it where.
John:
Someone somewhere, I'm not going to say it was Johnny Ive, but it is in keeping with his hardware ethos, but who knows, decided that complexity is the enemy in software design.
John:
And that's basically true.
John:
Like a lot of Apple's great software designs have been like, you know, let's simplify this application.
John:
Let's, you know, Steve Jobs whole thing.
John:
Can I just have one window that like I just drag a thing onto and it makes me a DVD?
John:
Like I just want one window.
John:
I don't want a million buttons.
John:
I don't want a million pallets and toolbars and all the other stuff.
John:
um and you remember like those old pictures of like microsoft word uh what version was it on on the pc was it uh office 95 the one where like you can if you put every uh toolbar and word out on a 640 before 80 screen you had like one line of text left where you where you could type stuff in like that was you know and apple's reacting against that to simplify right um
John:
uh but it really kicked into high gear i think maybe around uh lion or something where they took applications but even back when it's just iPhoto they took iPhoto which had been you know they've been iterating on it they've been making new versions of iPhoto they've been adding features and and doing all sorts of stuff and then someone said you know we got too much crap on iPhoto there's too many toolbar buttons there's too many like you
John:
you know options the whole customized toolbar thing and then we have buttons in the bottom and then we have a sidebar and then there's regions in the sidebar and groups and subgroups and then we have a floating panel for keywords and it's just there's too much stuff we need to clear all this crap out of iPhoto again this is before photos and so they they went through and they like said like this big top bar in photos get rid of pretty much all those buttons the bottom bar get rid of the bottom bar entirely the sidebar what can we remove from there floating palettes how many of those can we get rid of
John:
What things do we not need in the menu commands options for showing the keywords underneath photos?
John:
Nobody uses that except for Syracuse to get rid of that feature and never bring it back.
John:
Just removing, removing and simplifying.
John:
And that instinct of simplifying, I think, is admirable and the correct one.
John:
But, you know, as whatever that I forget, it was that designer whose name I can't remember is like everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
John:
they i think they've crossed that line and what it has led to like you know going through iPhoto and then going to photos photos is even more like remove everything don't have any buttons or or widgets or things like have just like the minimum number of things you can possibly see on the screen as if as if visual clutter is the number one enemy visual clutter isn't enemy and conceptual clutter and complexity those are enemies but
John:
At a certain point, you have someone like Casey who's like, I launched photos, and it looks like an unadorned window with a bunch of my photos in it.
John:
And I'm like, what does this do for me?
John:
What can I do?
John:
Like, the silly field they used to have that had, like, the star ratings in iPhoto, you would look at that, and if you're familiar with iTunes, you were like, oh, what does this do?
John:
It's got these little empty white stars, and as you click on them, you can click on one, two, or three, and you would see the contents of the window get filtered.
John:
Like, oh, when I click this thing up, it's like a dedicated field for quickly filtering by star rating, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's maybe like a UI too far, but at least you could very quickly say, oh, that's the way I can do things.
John:
And then you would lead from there to the little menu that would pop up from the bottom bar that would let you do more sophisticated filtering on the view so you could view by location and stuff like that.
John:
All of these things that used to have toolbar buttons.
John:
that have either been removed entirely from the application or hidden away under some other little button or menu item.
John:
It's like, what do you think we want to do with the application?
John:
Do we just want to go there and see our pictures and scroll through them?
John:
Then maybe Photos is a good application.
John:
But if the application is capable of doing anything else, say I want to organize my photos.
John:
I want to sort through them into piles and make little albums.
John:
Maybe I'm going to make a calendar at Snapfish and I want to find all the good photos of the kids for the past year grouped by season.
John:
And I want to sort of like...
John:
you know or I want to edit my photos are all the editing tools hidden behind a sidebar in a mode that like are not visible or whatever
John:
And it's all the more galling when I do it on a gigantic 5K iMac, huge 27-inch screen with these massive toolbars going along the top and bottom and these sidebars, and there's nothing in them.
John:
There's no buttons.
John:
Everything is buried.
John:
Everything is buried under seven clicks that I have to get to.
John:
It's like, what are you saving the space for?
John:
That empty space in the toolbar is making Casey not understand what the hell this app is even good for and making me, that I know what the app is good for, have to click seven times to get to the features I wanted.
John:
Like, it should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
John:
Like, people want to feel like the application is there to help them do things.
John:
Not wipe the entire slate clean and like, oh, everything should, it should be like, whatever, deferring to your content.
John:
Like, your content should be the star.
John:
But people want to do stuff with their content.
John:
let them have buttons easily accessible to do the most common operations and yeah maybe the old way of like oh we'll give you a customized toolbar with a million toolbar buttons and you can decide what you need use most often and you've got to design your own application basically by direct like maybe that's the wrong answer too but they've gone way too far on the mac specifically made applications that just make a mockery of the massive screen that i have and it makes people feel like makes people feel like the applications are yes less useful and i feel like they are less useful either because people won't discover the things they can do because they're too hidden
John:
um or they they'll know the things they can do and get frustrated like i am having to click through 17 different buttons every time they do an operation they do all the time i want to crop i want to you know straighten i want to adjust some white levels and i don't want to click a million times like i do that over and over and over again every time i do it i have to reveal these layers of ui that are hidden underneath the you know the magic cloth of don't clutter my ui that's not clutter that's what i want to use the application for i need you know so they need to strike that balance and they're they're not currently doing it and
John:
that's why i think a lot of people use apple's applications and just feel like something is missing like the the excitement of like using the original i life suite of like wow look at all these things i can do and yeah it's pretty complicated i've never done it before but like there's like three or four or five buttons and once i learn what they do it's like you do this you do this and you do this and you drag it over there and you get a thing and you get a movie and you and you can play music and you can burn a cd like the old versions of these applications had way more visual clutter on them
John:
but people could use them to figure out what is this app good for and then how do i use it to do that thing right and at some point the solution to everything was don't show people butts anymore don't show people panes don't show people windows hide everything under as few things as possible um and that's the solution i feel like that is that is sort of uh
John:
Part of the dissatisfaction, like getting back to Gruber's complaint was like he was in photos and the little tiny text was like the only freaking thing in the entire gigantic bottom bar.
John:
My 27 inch monitor was like a little text message that tells you like you have X number of items in your library accounting for Y number of megabytes.
John:
And he had a little message that said like...
John:
failed to upload five items and his his reasonable question was uh what five items what what you know so so what did he do in that there's nothing there he clicked on the text the completely featureless text like like ios 7 and on has taught him there's a slim chance that if you click on that text like just plain text not even like embossed really just like plain text maybe if i click on the text it will tell me nope
John:
Like, five items failed to upload.
John:
And it's just sitting there staring at you, like, taunting you, like, five items failed to upload.
John:
And you're looking around, and you're looking around the bar, and I guess you just start going to the menu bar and go, like, tell me what items failed to upload?
John:
Show a log window?
John:
Like, no, no chance it's going to be a log window.
John:
What, are you crazy?
John:
Yeah.
John:
there's just no you know nothing that can tell him how he's supposed to fix his problem eventually he googles for it which is a bad sign because if someone using your application apple and it's telling you something and their recourses eventually go to google and he found like a support discussion they said oh if you make a smart folder and you make the smart folder filter on items that have failed to upload no user is going to figure that out and then it will show you the reason the things that failed to upload and you'll have to divine the reasons they failed to upload on your own which he eventually did and solved this problem but like
John:
all in the name of minimalism it's like i don't want anything on that bottom bar except for text should the text be clickable no it should there be if something goes wrong what should we do no dialogues don't pop dialogues up in people's faces don't have a status bar don't have an activity window don't put all those confusing things and most of those instincts are right but their solutions their solutions are wrong it's making an application that is less useful more frustrating to use uh but i guess i guess it doesn't crash right
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I use the Photos app.
Marco:
Casey, honestly, I like it a lot.
Marco:
However, the reason I like it a lot is because I don't do any editing in it.
Marco:
Because doing any of the editing drives me nuts, just like what John was saying.
Casey:
So what are you doing with it?
Casey:
Because maybe I'm just having a dumb moment, but I don't see anything that this does for me other than maybe making a gazillion albums and doing a whole lot of manual management that I have zero interest in.
Marco:
So what it does for me, and who knows what it does for everyone else, what it does for me is a few things.
Marco:
First of all, it is one unified place where I can have all of my photos synced to be visible not only from my main computer where I'm like working on them and storing the full res versions, but also to be synced onto my phone.
Marco:
my iPad if I ever take it out of the drawer, and my laptop when I take it on vacation.
Marco:
And so I have access to all my photos everywhere.
Marco:
And I know there are other solutions that can do this as well.
Marco:
However, I like this one because it's built into everything and syncs really fast most of the time.
Marco:
So just having all your photos available everywhere, at least for basic viewing, I love that.
Marco:
That's number one.
Marco:
Number two is it's another backup.
Marco:
It's kind of a safety because I do the iCloud photo library thing, of course.
Marco:
So I
Marco:
It's kind of another backup for just my photos that in case everything else goes wrong, maybe someday I'll need that.
Marco:
We also do the sharing thing.
Marco:
Between our family and friends, we do often do shared photo albums.
Marco:
If we go on a trip or something or we have friends over or we go visit some relatives, we'll make a shared photo album for that and we'll send everyone the link afterwards.
Marco:
And so for all these things, it does work fairly well.
John:
the share photo album thing the the ui for how you invite people on the mac is horrible but but it does overall that the functionality does work don't you love that little pop down thing from the toolbar this tiny constrained window that you can't resize that it is deadly like there are so many clicks you can do you can do clicks in that window that the entire contents disappear and since there's no like save button you're like did it just auto save my deletion of every person from this shared photo i've done that like three times accidentally to my entire family and said i have to invite you all again
John:
click on the thing in the email if you use gmail you can't click on your ios device forward it to your mail address that's an apple mail like all these byzantine instructions and and that ui that frustrates me so much that little tiny ui like you've got this huge screen here and i'm only inviting like 15 people in my family to this thing you've got this huge screen and yet i'm forced to to edit it in a buggy
John:
view like a capsule view you know like in mail where it shows like everything in little capsules or whatever a buggy capsule view that periodically erases everything with no sort of save functionality you just need to hide the thing and assume that it is auto save or something the worst it's the worst so there's a lot of ui problems in photos um and and i i agree john like you know like i i agree that
Marco:
overall it does seem like apple's apple in in a similar way that if you wanted to make a criticism of their hardware designs my criticism for their hardware designs recently has basically been like basically everything just getting like make it as thin as possible and it seems like they don't have a lot of other ideas um and that isn't always true but that is kind of the overall like if you had to pick one dysfunction that they have that seems to be the most common one
Marco:
um in this in that same way in the software design the the main way the software design fails or fails most often is that they oversimplify something to the point where they are favoring the way it looks and so it can make great screenshots or can make great ads or great presentations or something but when you actually have to use it
Marco:
The way it looks is getting in the way.
Marco:
The way it looks is making them make decisions that make it harder to use or more confusing.
John:
There's actually a metric-based support for that, too, because a lot of what they're doing is removing features.
John:
Like, they're not just hiding them, but they're flat-out removing them.
John:
For example, your options of how to sort the main view in photos are drastically reduced from iPhoto, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
fewer features means fewer possibilities for testing means fewer bugs right so there is actually a metric based motivation for this is do we need to have all those features how many people do show keywords under their photos what if they have too many keywords and it busts our layout when we use this new you know ios collection ios ported collection view you can't have an unlimited number like
John:
i'm just you know harping on my pet features but like the fewer features you have the less stuff that can go wrong in your application the fewer crashers you have the fewer scenarios you have to test like this is a metric that is appealing internally to apple if your goal is let's write more bug-free software make your software simpler it benefits the user a certain point because like most people don't care about that and you should simplify it and if they want a more powerful one they should get the pro feature whatever and it also benefits apple and that they are
John:
They're making more reliable software by removing features, but they just go too damn far, and they get to the point where Casey's like, so this is just a generic window frame with my photos in them?
John:
What the hell is that?
John:
What do I get?
Marco:
What is this?
Marco:
And the Photos app is... Everything is so buried in... This is what I refer to.
Marco:
I referred to it before as the junk drawer philosophy of design, where you still...
Marco:
you still have complex products you still have complex functionality having one app that stores every photo you've ever taken on any of your devices and cameras and that can do all these edits and all this sharing and all this management i think you can still order books from it right maybe like all all the features that like that are still part of this that they haven't killed
Marco:
That is a complex set of features.
Marco:
And so there is going to be some minimum level of just required complexity in any app that encompasses all of those features.
Marco:
And it seems like what Apple considers great design is, as you said, basically just delete everything.
Marco:
Great design is to have an app with no buttons anywhere until you enter modes.
Marco:
That is bad design.
Marco:
That is great visual design for marketing screenshots.
Marco:
It is horrible design for actual use.
Marco:
And Apple has... This was not like a post-Steve Jobs thing or a Johnny Ive in power thing.
Marco:
This started earlier.
Marco:
This started way before that.
Marco:
This started with Steve and earlier.
Marco:
Apple has, for a long time now, been a little bit out of whack in prioritizing visual appeal a little bit too much over usability.
Marco:
And you can see this going all the way back when they get rid of the visible scroll bars in Windows and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's so many examples of this in OS X and in iOS.
Marco:
And, of course, iOS 7, I think, went really far in that direction and probably a little bit too far in that direction.
Marco:
But the way to manage complexity in the interface...
Marco:
is not to just hide it all behind drawers and modes.
Marco:
Like, there are better ways to design apps.
Marco:
And sometimes it will make for a screenshot that has a few objects in it that aren't your content.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
that's software this is like that's what this is useful for if that makes it useful like right now i have a photos app where editing it looks so pretty that i never do it because you have to enter like three different modes to the to get through the controls that i want to use every time like even rotating a photo oh i took this with my phone held in a weird way and i want to rotate it 90 degrees
John:
it's like four clicks tap the crop icon right because you want to rotate that sounds like crop right and then on the crop thing there's a rotate thing uh and you know just keep tapping until it's rotate the right direction and don't and enjoy the animations between each one of those mode switches oh yeah like it's it's it just seems like all of their design now is way too heavily focused on visual and marketing appeal
Marco:
It seems like not only have they not cared about making it harder to use in favor of that, but it seems like they don't even know how anymore to make it easy to use.
Marco:
It seems like whatever talent exists at Apple that was able to make things easy to use is no longer in power or is no longer there or something.
Marco:
It just seems like that group is gone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that is fundamentally what frustrates me so much because they have the ability to make such great stuff.
Marco:
They have so many smart people who work there.
Marco:
They've done it before.
Marco:
They used to be so much better at prioritizing usability.
Marco:
And again, it was never perfect.
Marco:
There were always examples of them prioritizing looks over usability.
Marco:
But I think they're worse in that way.
Marco:
I think they're worse now than ever.
Marco:
in in in a way that looks are taking too much precedent over usability and and i do think that lies right at johnny's feet because i think that that the the rate at which that has accelerated coincides exactly with johnny i've being made head of all software design not exactly because it was did he get changed i really think 10.7 is where it started to happen on the mac because that's where i really saw it like where applications that they've been year over year and always tend to come bundled like contacts and address book or whatever uh
John:
that they just got features just ripped out of them and i think that was before johnny ive came over like again the simplicity motive like it's it's positive like in general that's usually the right move a lot of the guidelines that apple talks about in their ui guidelines are telling you to simplify only you know but like you just have to know like you can go too far it is it is really possible to go too far both with removing features which again is very attractive to everybody involved and with hiding features and it's just it's like i was just had a brief glimpse when you're talking marco about the uh
John:
the possible apple car ui which i'm sure will be much smarter about the car ui than this but like the equivalent of my iphone of frustration is if the apple car came out and every time you wanted to indicate a turn you would press on a touchpad to the turn indication function and then and then you'd press on the touchpad which direction you want the indicator to go and then it would reset it would reset to the main menu each time
John:
and you're like you know what apple one of the controls that you use a lot when you're driving a car is a turn signal it should not be two button presses away on the touch screen that you have to glance at and so what you know to get it you said what you use photos for what i use it for casey is basically what marco said it's you know i do icloud backup and my photos are everywhere and so on and so forth this is actually my wife's photo library because she's got the big library and they don't understand how families work separate issue um but also i do all of my editing there i don't do any fancy editing but pretty much all the time i am
John:
like cropping rotating adjusting the lighting before i throw it into a shared library i and i also go through and i do my favorite so basically like the photos go in there i have to like manually import the ones from my phone anyway and then i go through them all and i favorite the ones i think are good and at that point i might also adjust them and then if i'm doing something with i'm like oh i want to throw these into a shared stream or we want to make a calendar or i want to you know
John:
do something with the photos i do the editing there and every time i always want to crop i probably want to rotate isn't really bad at holding cameras perpendicular to uh uh the you know parallel to the horizon or whatever i'm really i'm crappy at that anyway
John:
i always want to do those things and all of them are like nine clicks away and it's like what is one click away in this application nothing is can i quickly filter the images based on writing nope that's not one click away can i do like a quick smart like nothing is one click away everything is like two three clicks away and cropping cropping is the worst i just want to kill the person who made this feature edit edit crop aspect original edit crop aspect original edit crop aspect original edit crop aspect original how many i
John:
can you just remember that i always want original as the default even if you're gonna make me click 700 times to get to the fact that it doesn't even remember the aspect that i want and then you get to drag and they change the way dragon works in photos and it's a little bit weird but oh it's like what what do you think and i ask the same question case what do you think people use this app for there are features there why is every single one of them buried surely there's one it's like the controller where all the buttons are the same size surely there is one or two features that you think are the most commonly used
John:
make them super obvious and overcast is a big honking freaking play button because most people play audio that marco had put the play button under three menus that you had to go through and students straight across now had to play this podcast go to options go to playback and hit the play button no it's like a gigantic play button in the middle of the screen you can't miss it it's it's oh so frustrating
Casey:
So let's assume for a second, because I spend almost no time editing and no time categorizing my photos, which is true.
Casey:
So let's assume for a second I want to go to a photo from when Marco and Tiff and Aaron and I were in Germany.
Casey:
How the hell do I do that?
Casey:
I guess I search like, but if I know the date, I just have to fart around with the scroll bar until I know the until I land on the right date.
Casey:
Like, it's just it's insane to me that there's no like jump to date or anything like that.
John:
In the iPhoto world, I would go to the lower left and right next to that little rating thing.
John:
There would be a little pop up that you click into a pop up a calendar widget and you could just click on a date and it would immediately filter it would immediately filter the main pain view to that date.
John:
Because, like you said, that's a common thing.
John:
How do I quickly go to a date?
John:
There should be a always visible button that you can click that pops up a calendar thing that lets you pick a date from it.
John:
Like, if that's a common task, and I think it is a common task, and you've got literally two feet of gray...
John:
to put buttons in put something there like and it wasn't even that much this was like a centimeter worth of space it was like a little field that you can click in for the rating and like a little like a gear menu or a pop-up thing like it was it was even a little bit too hidden back then but it's like what are you saving all the space for like what do you get in the end of the person with the most unused gray pixels wins
John:
This is what I'm saying.
Marco:
This is bad design.
Marco:
It's not just that this looks prettier or this is clunkier to use.
Marco:
Design is not about how it looks.
Marco:
It's about how it works.
Marco:
There's a reason why Steve Jobs said that and everyone always quotes him on it.
Marco:
modern day apple i think has forgotten that or or has deprioritized that too much now it is all about how it looks and we hope it kind of works well and there is no better example of this in my opinion than a lot of the ui on the apple tv and we have to also include apple music in a lot of this as well now hold on before before we go there which we should do a sponsor break first that's gonna be long too well
Casey:
Not only should we do that, but I would also like to compliment photos because as John was talking and I was lamenting, how do I go to our trip?
Casey:
I did a search for Nürburgring.
Casey:
I did not type the umlaut on the first U. And sure enough, it came up.
Casey:
So kudos to photos.
Casey:
I still would prefer to have an easy way, even if it's just a keystroke, to jump to a specific date.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I was able to type out Nürburgring, and because all of these were taken with an iPhone and they're all geotagged and blah, blah, blah, it did find, if not all of the pictures, then darn near all the pictures almost immediately.
Casey:
So points for photos on that one.
John:
that's why they can convince themselves that it's okay to remove all this stuff they say well regular people don't want to deal with all these buttons it would be better if there was just a search field that everyone can use they would just do the right thing but we know that apple still lags behind google in general in the hey here's a box where you can write random text and we'll figure out what you mean google does that amazingly well apple does it less well but is getting better at it but the bottom line is sometimes like if you're doing that quickly that's fine but say you were going to you know pick three pictures to make fractures of from the nürburgring thing you want to make sure
John:
that you are seeing all the pictures you have from the Nürburgring.
John:
So merely the search wouldn't be good because you're like, oh, maybe some of them came from someone else's camera and they weren't geotagged.
John:
You'd know date-wise when you were there.
John:
So you would inevitably eventually say, you know what, I just really want to see all the photos from date X to date Y. And so you would be forced to figure out how to do that in the UI.
John:
And it's great that the search box is there for quick things like that, but the next level down of like, I just want to do a specific date search...
John:
the job of good software is to make that task simple enough that people can figuring it out people can figure it out like that they they can figure out without making like a smart album and using some ui to set boolean expressions and stuff there should be a simple friendly ui that regular people can figure out like an obvious way they would say that they would just learn through the language of using the application if i want to see things by date range here's this calendar widget it pops up i can pick a start date and an end date and it filters the windows
John:
and that's very modal and it means i can't do anything else in the main view or whatever but it's simple enough that people can use it but and it's the thing you're asking to do is just one step more complicated than let me just type random search and hope the application figures out what i want to do but still i think is within the realm of functionality that an application like photo should do it's not you know aperture or light room or it's not like a pro level application but regular consumers have to do these kind of tasks too
John:
And the job of the application is to make them able to do them, not to say regular consumers will never figure out how to click on a calendar widget.
John:
I just have to let them figure out that they can type in a text box.
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Get them out of Instagram.
Marco:
Get them out of Facebook.
Marco:
Get them onto something that actually lasts more than a week, not just in your feed that will get buried next week.
Marco:
These make great gifts.
Marco:
They're great for you.
Marco:
They're great for around the house.
Marco:
Preserve some of those memories.
Marco:
Get your photos printed.
Marco:
And if you're going to get them printed, Fracture's a great way to do it.
Marco:
Once again, check it out at FractureMe.com.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring us once again.
Casey:
So Apple Music and the Apple TV.
Casey:
Oh, boy.
Marco:
You know, the Apple TV makes me so sad.
Marco:
It really does.
Marco:
I mean, to me, the Apple TV, it kind of exemplifies all the problems I've been talking about tonight.
Casey:
See, really?
Casey:
Because I like most things with the new Apple TV.
John:
The remote, I would say, is in keeping with what we've been talking about tonight.
John:
But I have to admit that the fact that that has the Plex app on it and that I've been using it more and that most of the other apps that I do play video when I hit the button is really giving me a more positive attitude towards the Apple TV lately.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree that the remote is a little rough.
John:
A little remote is a mess.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I still think that the up, down, left, right buttons work better for me than the silly mini touchpad.
Casey:
But all in all, I really do like my Apple TV.
Casey:
So Marco laid on us.
Casey:
What's wrong with the Apple TV?
Marco:
So we should just briefly go over the remote, just for the sake of completeness.
Marco:
Obviously, we've talked about it before, but I think this remote is like the hockey puck mouse.
Marco:
It is something that was designed only for visual appeal and such at the expense of usability and just basic ergonomics.
Marco:
The remote is...
Marco:
It's a design disaster.
Marco:
That's what it is.
Marco:
I am not going to say it's nicely designed because it looks nice because it is not nicely designed.
Marco:
I will say it looks kind of nice, but that does not mean it's well designed.
Marco:
And the fact that that came out of a design division at Apple, they should look at that and feel sorry they put that out there and make a better one for the next generation because that is not good design.
Marco:
If so many people...
Marco:
have trouble with this.
Marco:
It isn't just me.
Marco:
It isn't just you guys.
Marco:
I don't know a single person who has an Apple TV who has not had some kind of problem with that remote design, whether it's picking it up upside down and accidentally inputting things into the touchpad, not knowing which way is up in the dark, not knowing which button is which, which button is where, what the buttons actually do, which one is kind of the home button.
Marco:
That is a massive design failure.
Marco:
And that is the primary input method for this device.
Marco:
So that's not a small deal.
Marco:
This is a big deal.
Casey:
You know, let's assume for a second that the touchpad was okay, which it isn't, but let's go with it.
Casey:
What on God's green earth made them use menu for back, because that's basically what it does is go back, and the TV for home?
Casey:
Why not use the little rounded rect that's been on all these iOS devices up until Touch ID became a thing?
Casey:
Why not use the rounded rect for the TV button?
John:
well ran a rack doesn't make sense because the icons aren't little rounded things like they are on the phone you know like that's that's the mnemonic for that and menu i give them a pass on menu because on every tv connected remote like menu basically means back like they're i think they're they're going in line with the terminology for menu they're going in line with the terminology uh precedent set by every other av remote for the past 20 decades or whatever
John:
it is kind of bad though that most of the time when you hit menu what you see is not a menu i know but that's but that's true that's true on every tv remote like menu always means back yeah since when does apple pay attention to the consumer electronics industry standards for design i feel like that's what they're doing the the tv one the home one is is i mean really it should have just been a house but apple doesn't like to do that right because at least that would make some sense but that would that would be again falling in line with the television thing
John:
The problem is what they made looks like a television set and not an application.
John:
So if anything, you would imagine that would be the power button.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, really, the problem with the home button is the placement.
Marco:
You know, like I know Rene Ritchie did this like little mock up.
Marco:
We'll have to find a link again.
Marco:
But like.
Marco:
if you if you put the home button centered below the other buttons like in a place where a home button on ios devices it makes a lot more sense all the different shortcuts like you know you can double double tap it and go to a multitasking switcher and kill unresponsive apps most people will never know that they will never find that if it was where a home button is in ios they might get that they the chances would be higher it's still not great but it's but it's not a touchscreen like they just need to start over with remote like again they had
John:
realize that it's like a device that sits on couches that gets wedged between couch cushions that held that's held by entire hands that that uh you know i mean i don't want to harp on the tivo remote but like they just need to start over with that but the worst thing about you mentioned the hockey puck mouse i think it's worse than the hockey puck mouse because the using the hockey puck mouse could be frustrating when like you'd push the mouse up and the the cursor would go up on an angle and you realize you don't have it aligned and you do some little finger feel to feel where the court isn't or feel the little dent that they put in later versions or whatever
John:
but I never felt sort of like timid using the hockey puck mouse.
John:
I never felt like I need to approach it gingerly.
John:
That's something wrong.
John:
We'll go wrong.
John:
And yet this stupid remote, I have to place it gingerly to make sure it's not on a surface where it will slide down to a crack because it's so frigging small and skinny, right?
John:
I need to, when I pick it up, I need to pick it up carefully and,
John:
Both because I want to make sure I got the orientation right, which I have done a million times the wrong way.
John:
I have not succumbed to putting a rubber band on it, but I'm getting really close.
John:
And because I have to be careful not to touch the touch sensitive top half of the thing because it will take my touch input and do something with it.
John:
It's always on.
John:
It's always hot.
John:
Even if the thing it does is non-destructive, merely by bringing up the progress bar at the bottom, I don't want to accidentally bring the progress bar up if I'm just moving the thing out of the way to make room for a snack or something.
John:
I don't want to suddenly put a giant bar in the middle of the show that a bunch of people are watching.
John:
Even if it goes away on its own, I don't have to do anything.
John:
It's non-destructive, but it's annoying.
John:
And so I feel like I'm playing a game of Operation, which is an old board game, kids.
John:
You can find the old ad for it on YouTube.
John:
Every time I use this thing.
John:
I don't feel that way when I touch any of my other remotes.
John:
And, you know, my favorite one, TiVo remote, like, everything's fine about it.
John:
In fact, the only thing that TiVo remote I could daint for is that when it became... When I got a TiVo remote with Bluetooth support, now I can't blindly mash it as long as I know it's not pointing at the TV.
John:
Because now, if you mash a Bluetooth remote, it doesn't matter if it's pointing at the TV, which is a great feature and I love it, but it does make me have to be slightly more careful not to just pick it up like a barbarian and just squish the whole thing.
John:
But...
John:
I feel like I'm walking on... I don't know what the expression is.
John:
Eggshells?
John:
There you go.
John:
That's it.
John:
That's what I'm walking on.
John:
Eggshells when I'm trying to use that stupid little remote.
Marco:
Right, because it's always waiting for you to accidentally touch this area that is not a button that actually does things.
Marco:
That is unlike every other remote that has ever existed, and there's a reason for that.
Marco:
So anyway, I don't want to beat too much on the remote, because I think that we could take a whole episode on that, and most people have probably agreed that, yeah, it's not good.
Marco:
But just the entire Apple TV interface...
Marco:
There are parts of it that work fine, but the main content browsing interfaces, which is kind of a big thing that you do a lot on this thing, like we buy Top Chef.
Marco:
We have bought every season of Top Chef from iTunes since season five.
Marco:
We're currently on season, I believe, 13.
Marco:
When a new episode comes out every week,
Marco:
We go to the top and we click on the Top Chef because it's new.
Marco:
And it loads, after a very long wait time, the Top Chef section of the iTunes store.
Marco:
And in the bottom half of the screen, there is a horizontally scrolling line of episodes.
Marco:
This includes every episode from every season we've bought.
Marco:
So from season 5 through season 13, every single episode is in that list.
Marco:
Somewhere along the way, Apple forgot that we had watched seasons 5 through like 10.
Marco:
So those are all marked as unwatched for some reason.
Marco:
So every time we open this up, it opens up to the first unwatched episode in the list, which is the very first episode in the list of season 5.
Marco:
Delightful.
Marco:
We're in season 13.
Marco:
Now, there is no entry here that says, you know,
Marco:
switch a different season or anything no the way you have to switch is by scrolling to the right through i don't know 70 episodes or something scrolling scrolling scrolling paging through this giant long horizontally scrolling list of episodes and which are squares you know the this massive line of episodes from season five all the way scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll all the way till you get to the end of season 13 where we actually are and then hit play on that
Marco:
I don't know if there's any way for me to mark six seasons of a show as played without actually opening up every single one of them, seeking to the end, letting it stop.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
And of course, we hope the episode's actually there when we look, even though iTunes says it was there.
Marco:
And if you click more on iTunes, it'll be there.
Marco:
But that problem is just on the old Apple TV, too.
John:
Just mark them all as viewed in the web interface or in the Mac version of this app.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, sure.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Marco:
Those exist, right?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, of course.
Marco:
I'm sure desktop iTunes will work perfectly.
Marco:
So, you know, every part of this interaction is a failure in some way.
Marco:
So, A, why were those marked as unplayed?
Marco:
We watched them all.
Marco:
We bought them all years ago.
Marco:
So, A, something went wrong on the service end at some point.
Marco:
Of course, it's Apple's services.
Marco:
It's iTunes.
Marco:
It's the iTunes store.
Marco:
Of course, something went wrong.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
Problem number two, why is this every single season in one giant list?
Marco:
Was this designed in a way where they ever tested it loading a show that had more than one season?
Marco:
I honestly am asking this question.
Marco:
Did any of the designers at any point test this interface with a show that had, you know, seven seasons, 10 seasons?
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
there are many shows like this even if it had one season that's too much to scroll horizontally yes the idea the idea that horizontal scroll no one wants to scroll horizontally we learned yes horizontal scrolling is always wrong like the old apple tv put this in hierarchical vertically scrolling lists so every season had its own entry perfect right because usually like changing seasons is kind of a big navigational step you don't like accidentally cross over between seasons very often like you do that intentionally so like that can be its own state its own stage in the tree
Marco:
uh you know so a there's the failure of like why were these episodes all marked as unplayed b why are they all on the same list c when i play one in season 13 and then we come back a week later when there's a new episode in season 13 right after the one that we just played why does it start again at season five
Marco:
every part of this is a failure and the reason why this is designed this way is either a incompetence that they didn't even test whether this would work with a show that had more than one season or b that it was more important for them to have this big glamorous like pretty looking screen that has this big promo art in the background and it doesn't have the clutter or the ugliness of actual text that describes what you're looking at or a vertical list that's easy to navigate
Marco:
So either way, this is a massive failure.
Marco:
And I'm just picking on one screen here, but it's a pretty common screen you see on the Apple TV.
Marco:
And this just, to me, represents so much of the pattern of design failure that we keep seeing out of Apple recently.
Marco:
And Apple Music is very similar.
Marco:
And I honestly have not spent a ton of time with Apple Music because it is so bad.
Marco:
And for me, it not only is badly designed, for me, it actually doesn't work.
Marco:
Whatever their local CDN node is that serves me, very often a song will just end prematurely and just go to the next song.
Marco:
And I assume that's some kind of streaming failure.
Marco:
But I don't know why it sucks.
Marco:
That's infuriating, honestly, because I would like to use Apple Music.
Marco:
And I'm still paying for it.
Marco:
I keep forgetting to go cancel it.
Marco:
And I keep thinking, oh, maybe it'll work better.
Marco:
I would love to discover new music.
Marco:
But Apple Music just sucks so bad I can't do it.
Marco:
It literally just doesn't work well for me.
Marco:
But also just the design of that and the design of the new iOS Music app that followed from that.
Marco:
um it is so much in this in the same design failure pattern of we're gonna make it look like i don't know a magazine like we're gonna make it look like this like fancy rich content experience but in fact it's really hard to both use and to figure out what the heck is going on where you are what's going to happen when the song ends it is so hard to figure out anything the
Marco:
This is not good design.
Marco:
This is not how you design software.
Marco:
And it is not only bad ideologically, it's bad in actual use.
Marco:
It's one thing if you say, well, you should really always have white space around X for good practices.
Marco:
This goes beyond good practices.
Marco:
It is actually dysfunctional.
John:
you know if they had only looked at plex which gets this whole season thing right i know you're tired of hearing plex plex doesn't quite get it right either because oh please all right so plex is trying to present me with like the next episode in the series that i want to watch but i never trusted it to pick the right one so to make sure i have to go it i have to go early back out and then i have to pick all instead of just the browse i have to pick all so i can see the thing and then i click into it and then i see the seasons listed then i have to click into the season and then i see the episodes in a horizontally scrolling list and then i scroll over to the episode that i want
Casey:
When you're looking at an episode on the Apple TV, you're looking at an episode and there's like three or four buttons on there on that screen.
Casey:
And one of them is go to season.
John:
I'm saying like starting from the top, I launched the Plex app.
John:
It brings me to thing.
John:
It says discover, which I never want to see.
John:
And then all, and I have to go to, because if I do want to discover, like in the upper left, it has a thing, but it shows like the icon of the show that I want to watch.
John:
But if I click it, I'm not sure it's going to resume me at the right.
John:
So maybe I should just trust it.
John:
Like, I think like Netflix does a better job where, uh,
John:
it very quickly presents me to the thing that says you watch this, you watch this, you watch this, you're in the middle of this, or the next one is this.
John:
Where with Plex, that stuff's buried in Plex, still does horizontal scrolling for the episodes within a season.
John:
At least it's a hierarchy there.
John:
But anyway, like, yeah, everything about Apple TV being designed like a magazine and not like a thing that people use and that horrible remote, that's all bad.
John:
But the final note, I guess, to cap this thing off is sort of the meta discussion we've had many times about...
John:
negativity towards apple and uh you know complaining about things and stuff like that and the fact that the show isn't called hypercritical even though it's got one of the people from that show on it um two aspects of this one is uh although we're complaining about a lot of things here i at the end of last year i listed photos as one of my favorite things that apple had done that year and that's still true because the main functionality that photos provides having my photos everywhere and having them backed up to the cloud and stuff like that one of that was so long and it actually does that job so far for me
John:
um if it doesn't do it i have no recourse because i don't know how to make it do what it's supposed to do but so far it's been good for me so i still give that a thumbs up and like i said about the apple tv which has all sorts of problems in the end if video plays when i press a button that is a big step up from the previous one which would just show me spinners and strange error messages
John:
and numbers inside parentheses and make me sign into my iTunes account and stuff.
John:
So progress, good progress there.
John:
But the broader thing, I think, on the negativity is I don't think anyone who is listening to this and is, you know, complaining can say, you know, listen to the complaining and not liking it can say that this is just us at this point.
John:
Like, I feel like this is a broader thing.
John:
Now, you can still believe that it's a broader narrative about a drop in quality that is not founded, that it is somehow like
John:
feeding on itself and that is a manufactured thing of the media and of people all talking to each other and like that again that is an aspect of the media and we are a small part of that um but so much time has passed and so many people with so much experience and so much diverse backgrounds like it's not all the people saying this aren't like all jilted lovers who idealized some point in the past where apple was great some of these people are people who are recently switched to the mac some people have been mac users forever some people are not mac users at all they're just looking in from the outside like
John:
It's so diverse, and there's so many different opinions about this, and all of them are kind of concentrating on it.
John:
It's not the end of the world.
John:
The company's not doomed.
John:
We still like it better than everybody else for the most part.
John:
Like, it's just, it's a trend.
John:
It's a thing.
John:
Even if you want to just, you know, like Marco wasn't willing to backpedal this far, but if you're going to say, maybe it's just a perception, right?
John:
But whatever it is, there's something there, and we are not manufacturing that thing, and we are not, like...
John:
uh i feel like we're not blowing it out of proportion i feel like we all have a proportional idea of like in the grand scheme of things we're all still using these products we all still like them they all are better than their predecessors in important ways but we're seeing things fall down in ways that we had historically expected apple to do better at and we can see obvious problems that apple seems like they don't and that it persists and it goes on and on and you know like we talked about not having crashers is great like i really do feel that over many years that some
John:
their software has gotten more reliable it's not like you can only have one of the others like we're saying come bring back the crashers and put a million toolbar buttons in our applications and stuff right it's like we're looking you know we're we we want them to keep that good stuff but bring back some of the old uh skills that they had like like margo said whoever was designing those other applications that are not there and they're not in charge they uh they need to be because um you know like
John:
think it's a regression it's small regression but it's a it's a trend and it's happening and i think we are not the source of that trend and i think none of us are saying anything as dire as the uh emails we get from people who just can't hear can't bear to hear us say anything bad about apple like
John:
i don't when the sky is not falling we don't hate apple apple is not a bad company apple is not doomed um but this is i feel like this is a thing like i you know i feel like this is a thing and this is not a thing that we have manufactured marco didn't make this happen by writing a blog post last year like that didn't start with him it's not going to end with him and it is ongoing from people who have no idea who any of us are
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
And, you know, looking at the devices that I've bought over the last year or so, I love the crap out of my iPad Mini 4.
Casey:
I mean, I can't off the top of my head think of any complaints I have about it.
Casey:
This 27-inch iMac that I had no business buying because I don't do desktop computers.
Casey:
That's not my thing.
Casey:
I freaking love this computer.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
After, you know, I got my second one because the first one didn't work.
Casey:
But that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But I really like my 6S.
Casey:
I can't think of any particular complaints I have about that.
Casey:
I mean, I would like things to be a little different in a couple of departments, but I don't have any actual complaints.
Casey:
And I actually really like my new Apple TV.
Casey:
I was wishy-washy on getting it, and it ended up being a holiday gift.
Casey:
But now that it's here, I use that thing constantly.
Casey:
And it was getting to the point that I almost never used our old Apple TV.
John:
Yeah, I'm using my Apple TV way more than I use the old one as well.
John:
Like that's the real proof.
John:
Like as annoying as that remote is, the old Apple TV was getting almost no use.
John:
And now this one gets a ton more.
Marco:
The reason why the Apple TV's problems drive me crazy is that we use the Apple TV every day.
Marco:
I could go on a much longer rant about how much worse I think both the Amazon Fire TV and the Roku whatever that I got a year ago or whatever.
Marco:
Both of those are now sitting collecting dust because I hated them both even more.
Marco:
But the fact is, as you said, this drives us nuts because we do use this stuff.
Marco:
And in some cases, we don't want the alternatives because they're worse for us in some way or they don't solve our needs or whatever.
Marco:
The reason why this stuff matters... What am I going to do?
Marco:
If macOS takes another dive towards bad reliability and stuff, what am I going to do?
Marco:
Switch to Windows?
Marco:
That's worse.
Marco:
That's way worse.
Marco:
So I...
Marco:
the reason why we care so much about this and we harp about this is because we don't want to go to the alternatives or the alternatives are actually worse.
Marco:
And so this is all we have.
Marco:
Like, if Apple starts getting mediocre and crappy, well, almost everyone else in the industry is mediocre and crappy.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's not like we are holding on to dear life because we want Apple specifically to be great.
Marco:
It's that we want somebody to be great.
Marco:
And the rest of the industry keeps showing over and over again for decades that they can mostly just manage mediocre.
Marco:
That's about as good as they can do most of the time.
John:
And the places where things are better, like just to go back to example, you mentioned Dropbox before, like I haven't used Apple, anything produced by Apple for email in ages because Gmail just just always works for me.
John:
I guess the type of things just use it year after year after year after year on different computers and different browsers, different versions of Gmail.
John:
They've changed their UI, blah, blah.
John:
It just does my email.
John:
it just does it never doesn't work it just works like gmail like and so i just never look back and dropbox like i'm still using that and like dropbox has problems we're gonna get email from people like oh dropbox deleted all my stuff and didn't save my old versions like everything has problems but over the many many many years that we use these products like that's why you know apple's been cut out of those i've chosen the better competitors product it can be done like i
John:
gmail for email dropbox for for doing my file syncing i you know both those things could be better in certain ways but they have to get the basics right and so you know like we're i don't think we're blindly tied to apple but by the same token i think marco is choosing to use the apple tv over those other boxes because he tried all those other boxes and just because apple is the best one doesn't mean they're not making what we view as like silly mistakes that should have been clear to them from all the time that they've been holding this thing waiting for their streaming deals or whatever that there were problems with this product
John:
That should have been obvious to them and they shipped it anyway.
John:
Design problems with it.
John:
If not, in this case, reliability problems or whatever.
John:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Audible.com, Casper, 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.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause 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.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't.
Casey:
We didn't really talk about the hardware side of it.
John:
That's a big angle on Gruber's thing was like, oh, everyone agrees their hardware is doing better.
John:
I know Marco has been upset about their hardware a little bit more.
Marco:
than than for other people but well but honestly the hardware is really good like they i i i harp on on two main problems number one that i wish battery life was longer and number two that even though we seem to have more entries in the product line than ever i think we actually have less choice we we have more options that have that have among them less diversity if that makes sense like
Marco:
like every laptop apple sells is a thin and light like they don't have any big honking laptops that have like three-day battery life like that just doesn't exist every phone they sell is a thin and light you know like it like every laptop they sell now except for the the 101 doesn't have user replaceable disk or or memory in most of them either like it there's like stuff like that like there's no no computer they sell no desktop they sell anymore has internal disk bays that are actually accessible you know like
John:
I think you may be living a little bit in the past with a lot of those requests.
John:
But I understand where you're coming from.
Marco:
Some of those, yes.
Marco:
But if you look at the roles that were served by the old Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yes, I got the Mac Pro in this episode.
Marco:
If you look at the roles that were served by that, that could handle a lot of edge cases.
Marco:
If you really want a Mac that has X, Y, or Z hardware capability, the Mac Pro is oftentimes the answer to that.
Marco:
And the new Mac Pro they replaced it with.
Marco:
knocks out the vast majority of those it's like it just removes them from possibility so you know similar with laptops like if you wanted like a laptop with four terabytes of storage you could do that before and now you can't like there's there's a pretty big list of things that used to be possible or configurable with at with mac hardware that is no longer possible in the current lineup uh or or like it's only possible like in the 101 the the non-retina 13x or whatever like there's a lot there's a pretty long list of those things
Marco:
And that in the list of like things we used to be able to do or get or configure that we can't do now seems to be getting longer over time.
Marco:
And not all those things are just outdated old technology.
Marco:
Some of those things are actually, wow, it would still be nice if I could do that or I need to do that and now I can't.
Marco:
So that's my main criticism of Apple hardware is that we are actually getting less real choice than ever.
John:
i think it's kind of a luxury to be able to complain about things at that level though because what we're not saying is that in general especially with the mobile hardware year after year the hardware hardware gets better in measurable ways that are meaningful to people the cpus get faster and you feel that speed the cameras get better and you see the results of that right they add features
John:
um they change you know change the size of those make a bigger screen add features like the stylus like that the products are just you know the hardware is progressing and then we can have quibbles about the directions like it's basically what you're coming to is like how do you design your product line what products do you choose to feel what direction do you want the overall product line to go in but in general the individual products
John:
Like, I think about my iPhone 6.
John:
I love this phone.
John:
It's great.
John:
I'm jealous of the 6S because it's a little bit faster and has better cameras off.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, the hardware is still doing what we expect it to do.
John:
It's not as... The equivalent in the hardware realm, in the software realm, would it be as if when the 6S comes out after the 6, like...
John:
that a whole bunch of things that used to be able to do on the six are are buried under a bunch of different screens and they remove they have done it with removing the mute switch but they remove like all the buttons from the entire thing and it's harder to get to the camera and like say there was like a cover that you had to slide down from the camera every time you wanted to take a picture because they wanted the outside surface to be like why did
John:
you put a cover over the camera you know like that's the type of crap we're talking about in the software world so i feel like in the hardware world we have the luxury of saying yeah yeah yeah apple's doing the basic stuff like general design uh reliability um the things look nice they feel nice that they seem to be more cognizant of the aspects of it having to do with being held in the hand even if things are slippery they try to make it less slippery in the next generation their cases are kind of grippy they take a shake that might have been slippery and they get put a case on it and it improves it and they learn from that
John:
cpu is getting faster it's like being back in the 90s and the desktop is they're still going through that whole chain of things they add more memory eventually you know maybe they'll go past 16 gigs like in general we just take for granted all the standard apple is doing good hardware stuff and that i think is why
John:
when people talk about they're like apple hardware is doing great in the software there's more of a problem like that i think that that is also a general perception that is not just us that like that if you had to rate apple like when jason snell did that big survey and again maybe he's all echo chamber and he's just serving a bunch of like uh tech reporters but like you know tech you can't you know it's not as if you can discount the opinion of all tech reporters so they're too inside or like so should we just ask people who don't know about the tech industry i guess anyway we did that big survey and you look at the little bar charts of how is apple doing with like you know grades from like a to f or whatever
John:
hardware they got a way higher grade than they got software like just broadly speaking whatever you think about they're just doing better with the hardware than software and that the quibbles you get to have about hardware are so much more uh you know specific and minor than like the basic stuff we're talking about on the software like you know
John:
going to a television show and wanting to watch the next episode a television show that you've purchased in the apple ecosystem or that's like a common task and making that task frustrating is is like it's just falling down on the basics right and that's you know so again the overall trends i think it's like it's not us being negative nellies there is an actual thing out there about that whether it's a real thing or not it is out there
John:
And I think everyone can agree, even no matter how much you love Apple, if you had to say they're doing better on hardware or software lately, probably have complaints about both.
John:
But you have to say they're doing better on hardware because the software, the unforced errors they're making on software are just so inexplicable and such a regression.
John:
Whereas at the very least, even if they make a slight mistake on hardware and making like the six slippery.
John:
When they make the 6s, they try to make it less slippery, right?
John:
We give them a pass.
John:
Like, you're making progress.
John:
They'll be, you know, you fold it.
John:
But, like, they're making it better.
John:
And is the 6s faster?
John:
Yes, it is.
John:
And does it have a better camera?
John:
Yes, it does.
John:
And does it have, you know, cool 3D touch and the haptic engine?
John:
It's like, it's cooler.
John:
It's better.
John:
I wish I had one instead of my 6s.
John:
But I don't wish I had the version of iPhoto that removed all the toolbar buttons.
John:
I wish I had the previous one because I like those buttons.
John:
Photos is great because it brings these great features with cloud syncing, but all the other stuff I do with it was better in old versions of iPhoto.
Marco:
At least you weren't an Aperture user.