Time Was…
Casey:
We should briefly discuss that it is earlier in the week.
Casey:
We have some interesting travel arrangements between the three of us coming up in the next couple of weeks.
Casey:
And so we're trying to get ahead of everything.
Casey:
Additionally, we should note that John is coming to us on assignment from an undisclosed location.
Casey:
So if he sounds a little bit peculiar, if you hear slightly more background noise than usual, that's not his fault.
Casey:
That's what being on assignment is all about.
Casey:
So please bear with us.
John:
not much of an assignment my internet went out of my house so i had to find make other arrangements but yeah this is my my fios box from i don't know how many years ago 10 years ago 12 it's really old and i think it's finally given up the ghost which is a shame and of course it does it now at the most inconvenient time and we have two podcasts during this week and i'm about to leave somewhere to go on vacation so what can you do
Casey:
Well, you know, things happen, but we appreciate you not only going on assignment like that, but also admitting to the fact that on assignment just means you have internet problems.
Casey:
I was trying to build you up and make it sound super exciting, and then you had to go and ruin it.
John:
Yeah, I've also got my little cup of water on the same level as my MacBook Air.
John:
I'm totally channeling you.
Casey:
You know, I hear that's a bad idea.
Casey:
I hear that's very dangerous.
John:
Again, limited options in my undisclosed location.
Casey:
Well, Godspeed.
Casey:
Oh.
Marco:
Oh my God, it would be so funny if you spilled it.
Marco:
I really don't want you to, but... Neither do I, but God, it would be funny.
John:
I'm going to be pretty careful, as you would imagine.
Casey:
Oh my goodness.
Casey:
All right, so we should start with some follow-up.
Casey:
The internet has written in to tell us about the Tesla model name scheme.
Casey:
Now, I didn't really... I knew this, and I think you guys did too, but none of us, or at least I didn't really want to bring it up because I didn't think it was relevant, and nobody was 100% sure at the time that we recorded...
Casey:
whether this was a clever, like, backronym or if this was a good theory or what.
Casey:
But the Internet has written in to tell us that the intention for the Tesla model names, which are S, X, 3, and Y, the original intention was for them to be S, X, E, and Y, which you jumble that around a little bit and that becomes S, E, X, Y, which is then the word sexy and ha ha ha, look at how clever Elon Musk is.
Casey:
So this is our just our way of acknowledging that, yes, we are aware of this.
Casey:
And in fact, we were aware of this.
Casey:
We just didn't really want to bring it up.
Casey:
And now we have been compelled to bring it up.
Marco:
That's actually not quite true.
Marco:
One of us did bring it up and I actually edited it out.
Marco:
I thought it sounded so juvenile and implausible.
Marco:
I'm like, that's probably not true.
Marco:
I don't want to have that in the show.
Marco:
So I just edited it out.
Marco:
So you actually did cover it.
Marco:
You got to read more articles about Elon Musk.
Marco:
Maybe I don't.
John:
I think I'm better off not reading more articles of Elon Musk.
John:
Yeah, I didn't go back and look at the master plan thing, but during the presentation for the Model 3, he said the master plan was three cars.
John:
So at best, best case, the original plan could have been for SEX.
John:
You know, with the four models now and the whole thing with the Y and I don't know.
John:
Anyway, it sounds silly.
John:
It is silly.
John:
And it doesn't work because it's called the three and there's no Y and the X came before the three.
John:
It's just a mess.
Casey:
Yeah, but everyone thought that we were not aware of this because whether or not we brought it up on the original version of the show wasn't on the released version like Marco just said, but we are aware.
Casey:
I whatever.
Casey:
I don't think this is as amusing as everyone else does.
Casey:
Like I don't want whatever.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter to me.
Casey:
But since we brought up the Tesla, any other thoughts on the Tesla from Marco?
Casey:
Same old stuff?
Casey:
Still love it?
Marco:
Still love it.
Marco:
Still awesome.
Marco:
I really am just enjoying it a ton.
Marco:
The thought of going back to a gas car now, or as underscore David Smith calls it, an exploding dinosaur car, it just seems like the past.
Marco:
It seems like a step back to think about it.
Marco:
And there's no gas car on the market that I'm interested in.
John:
And by the way, sorry, underscore, but I'm not going to give you credit for the exploding dinosaurs thing.
John:
He claimed in Slack the other day that he had coined that term, and I'm going to say no on that one.
John:
Have you found prior art?
John:
I don't know when he claims to have coined it, but I've heard it for a long, long, long time.
John:
Google searches for it go back pretty far.
John:
He could have coined it when he was 15.
John:
I don't know, but it's pretty old.
John:
I'm giving it to him.
Casey:
I hadn't heard that exact combination.
Casey:
I've heard dino juice in reference to regular traditional motor oil instead of synthetic.
Casey:
But I had not heard this particular combination.
Casey:
That being said, we will put this link in the show notes.
Casey:
This is underscore David Smith's a nerd's review of the Tesla Model S. And it was really great.
Casey:
I really, really enjoyed it.
Casey:
And it is exactly what it says on the tin.
Casey:
It's his review from the nerd's perspective.
Casey:
Now, Marco, have you been in the 3GT since you've owned the Tesla?
Yeah.
Marco:
Only to move it in and out of the garage when doing some driver rearrangement.
Marco:
So only very briefly, but it's fine.
Marco:
It's still a great car for what it is, but again, this is why Tesla is so interesting because really once you drive an all-electric car, it really does make all other gas cars feel like obsolete things from the past.
Marco:
It's hard to describe.
Marco:
It's just a feeling that you get.
Marco:
And it's just great.
Marco:
I do have a little bit more experience now with autopilot, with the automatic steering.
Marco:
I did a couple of highway drives the other day, and so I used it for a lot of them.
Marco:
I agree mostly with what Underscore says about it, which is that it really is more like an advanced cruise control.
Marco:
It's not the kind of thing where you want to stop paying attention or even can safely stop paying attention.
Marco:
And I would barely call it self-driving because basic things will throw it off.
Marco:
Like if you're driving in the highway lane and the lane you're in splits and part of it was like the continue on this road fork and the other part of it is like the get ready to exit off somewhere else or the highway splitting too.
Marco:
Whether it chooses to follow the right side of the split...
Marco:
if you're like if you should be staying left is kind of inconsistent and vague and there were a couple of times where it was steering me i thought a little too close to like walls on the side like barriers on the side and everything so i got a little freaked out a couple of times so basically i wouldn't necessarily say that this is like massively useful you can't stop paying attention you can't even take your hands off the wheel
Marco:
you're basically left loosely holding the steering wheel because it turns for you, you know, like by, by the car.
Marco:
So you're, you're basically left loosely gripping the steering wheel, still holding your hands up, at least one hand.
Marco:
And so it's kind of like, well, what's really the benefit of it?
Marco:
If you have to, if you have to do all that.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
Um, I'm, I'm a little torn on the value of autopilot and I, I can, I can now see firsthand the,
Marco:
just how incredibly complicated the idea of self-driving cars really is in practice.
Marco:
If this is like the current generation of what regular consumers can get today, we still have a lot of work to do.
Marco:
And it is very impressive compared to nothing, but it is really still in its very early days.
Marco:
And I would not expect fully autonomous self-driving cars in the next few years.
Marco:
I think we're further away on that than a lot of people might think, just because
Marco:
driving is so complicated and these are such hard AI problems and such hard technical problems to solve that and then after that it'll be such a hard human problem to solve that I think we're still a while off on that but I do think we're heading in that direction it's just a question of like you know how quickly and
Marco:
Yeah, maybe not so quickly.
John:
Yeah, actually, I agree with Marco on that.
John:
I want to talk a little bit about self-driving cars.
John:
I should have put that in the topic list because it's something I wanted to talk about for a while because of all the press with the Tesla stuff.
John:
But I just want to chime in briefly and say that I found a reference to exploding dinosaurs from 10 years ago.
John:
More than 10 years ago, so...
John:
where again underscore i just found a forum post quoting something this is a december 27 2005 someone's saying just remember that your car is propelled by exploding dinosaurs anyway it's a really old saying again underscore was alive in 2005 we did he never claimed when he coined it but i'm gonna say no anyway i'm gonna say yes i think he's in his 30s like us so you know pretty sure well like two of us you got to keep going backwards and google and keep finding it anyway 2005 is the earliest i found in the two seconds worth of googling i've done here
John:
um so with the self-driving car things you hear about it because of the tesla autopilot you hear about it because of all the other car makers that are showing their self-driving cars that's just today i saw a new story about the uh did you see this about the convoy of self-driving trucks that went across europe no i saw the headline but i didn't see anything else
John:
had like a human powered one on the front and then like two or three these are like big you know semi trucks two or three behind they were following along looks terrifying um i think the press and the public has and even car magazines have really jumped the gun on this one because uh it's clear we have a nice progression from cruise control to radar cruise control to things that will try to steer for you and so on and so forth but to make that final leap
John:
to actual self-driving cars with all the sci-fi pictures where you see someone reading a magazine while they're in the car.
John:
I think we are a ways away from that, especially since the most successful version of this, which I think is the Google self-driving cars that tool around their campus and have been driving hundreds of thousands of miles.
John:
That's the one that the press stories love to cite.
John:
However many thousands upon thousands of miles these Google self-driving cars have
John:
driven just you know and they've had like you know one accident or something it was a human's fault or whatever like the amazing driving record and the amazing technology like wow well if that's happening in the magic of silicon valley surely it will only be a couple of years before i'm able to go to work in a self-driving car
John:
Um, and it just comes down to the, you know, the difference between like the conditions and the way the, the things are done.
John:
So the Google self-driving cars, they mapped out every inch of those frigging roads.
John:
Um, and the cars know not just which, you know, where the roads are like a GPS style map, but I think they have like 3d terrain maps of every inch of the roads and they have, you know, a lack of weather and they have lines painted on the road and they have other things that, you know, it's, it's California for crying out loud.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The cars are always on vacation.
John:
Yeah, people don't live in those environments.
John:
And Google has not mapped 3D laser mapped every inch of pavement everywhere.
John:
And I know there are plenty of cars they can drive without there.
John:
Marco's got one now.
John:
It will stay in the lane as much as it can.
John:
If it can figure out where the lanes are and, you know, there's not snow covering the road and all these other factors.
John:
he can't read a magazine because it's not it doesn't hasn't gone that last the last little bit right and the last little bit is killer you can make increasingly sophisticated essentially smart cruise control um but to get over that hurdle where you don't have to pay attention anymore in the same way you don't have to pay attention when you take the train because you're not driving the train right um
John:
that is going to take a really, really long time.
John:
And I'm going to say probably not within our lifetimes on existing roads.
John:
Wow.
John:
Because, I mean, special roads, sure.
John:
Especially mapped roads, maybe.
John:
But when I mean existing roads, as in like...
John:
a road that a human could drive on right now that's not specially prepared, that hasn't been carefully mapped out, that doesn't have things embedded in the pavement, like all those things you can do.
John:
Like, you know, it's not saying you can't have this.
John:
I mean, they could do that to every single road in all of Manhattan.
John:
And then you just know that if you go to Manhattan, there's no more taxis.
John:
You just get there and you get a self-driving car because it's a grid and they can do whatever they want.
John:
And they can make it work, right?
John:
In limited circumstances, it can work.
John:
But in general, I think it's so far off because it's just so much harder problem than winning Jeopardy or playing Go or anything like that because the possible inputs are so incredibly varied.
John:
Humans have difficulty sometimes finding where the hell the road is.
John:
And we're pretty good at looking at the world and figuring out what the hell it is we're looking at.
John:
So...
John:
I think full self-driving cars and the way that people imagine it is really, really far off.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think it's that far off.
Marco:
I would say most likely within our lifetimes.
Marco:
But, you know, I think most people are thinking this is going to come in like two to five years.
Marco:
And I think it's probably more like 10 to 20.
John:
it's hard for me to say more than 20 i was saying our lifetimes like i think we'd be pretty darn old because you need you just need so much and it's not just the tech like even if the tech gets there in 25 30 years then you need all the legislation and then you need all the other like i think it'll be fine though like it will have arrived as far as people are concerned if it works in limited circumstance so if all of london has self-driving cars people like see you didn't think self-driving cars are going to come but they're totally there it's like sure they're
John:
all of london they're in manhattan they're they're in disney parks like they're they're wherever they are they're all over silicon valley but i mean like a car dropping on any road in the united states and it drives and is able to successfully get from point a to point b um and maybe you don't need to get all the way there but i think people envision a such a quick ramp from controlled circumstances laser mapped roads and then fast forward a couple years and any road
John:
Um, and I just don't see that happening just because like we, you know, I don't think we have the, uh, we don't have, we don't have the technology for that yet.
John:
I mean, just look at those DARPA challenges where they have those vehicles try to, they've come so far, but it's, it's kind of like AI where when I was a kid, it was like computers can answer simple questions now.
John:
And maybe they're about as smart as a cockroach.
John:
And if we extrapolate from current trends, by the time you're an adult, computers will be super geniuses and they're not.
John:
AI is really, really hard and we don't understand even how our own minds work.
John:
And it's not easy to, you know, it's unlike all the other situations like games like chess and Go and Jeopardy.
John:
It's not a controlled situation.
John:
It's the real world.
John:
And our problem is...
John:
synthesizing sensor input and processing it and we don't even know how our own freaking brains do that we don't even have a good model to work off of so should we be working off our brain now should we be doing something different we're trying the best we can but i think it's a much harder problem than the news media thinks it is
Casey:
Do we know when the... And bear with me for a second here.
Casey:
Do we know when the Tesla superchargers started getting installed?
Casey:
That was like a couple of years ago, right?
Marco:
Maybe three or four years ago.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So one of the things that I've always thought about electric cars being completely not feasible is that how could they possibly create enough charging stations to make it feasible?
Casey:
And one company...
Casey:
as of the time we record, is claiming 613 supercharger stations.
Casey:
And I'm looking at this map, and it's all over the United States, and there's some in Europe and some in Asia as well.
Casey:
And there are 3,628 superchargers across those 613 stations.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
This is surely not the coverage that gas stations have, but it is a tremendous amount of coverage in the United States, which is not a small country.
Casey:
And so I think about that and I think, well, they really did kind of fix this problem.
Casey:
And then I think to myself, well, let's assume for a second that in order to get totally self-driving cars, you need to put...
Casey:
you know, sensors on the sides of each road and in between each lane or what have you.
Casey:
And admittedly, there are many gazillions of miles of roadway in the United States.
Casey:
But what if we just said, hey, on any federally recognized interstate, we're going to put the sensors necessary to get self-driving cars on there?
Casey:
If we can put a whole bunch of superchargers out there in the span of about four years since the Model S—
Casey:
We might be able to do this thing that I sitting here now that seems just completely implausible.
Casey:
But I thought that the superchargers or what is now the superchargers was implausible.
Casey:
And that seems to have worked all right.
Casey:
So you never really know.
John:
Well, I think you're overestimating the superchargers because, first of all, if you like the supercharger map looks impressive until you were to put it side by side with a map of gas stations.
John:
oh sure because it takes a certain amount of i mean in gas stations you fill up pretty quick like gas stations you're not there at the pump for very long right so do the math on you know if we converted all the cars to electric coming out is there enough superchargers to support the existing teslas maybe but charging the teslas takes so much longer that you would need more supercharger stations not fewer to support the number of
John:
cars if they were eventually to become all electric so i'm not saying it's you know it's an amazing feat and it's surely enough for long car trips for the number of people who have teslas right now right but it's so far from you know that and that's a fairly easy problem in the grand scheme is you just keep making more of these stations and you keep selling more of the cars and the cars fund the stations and you know it should all work out so i think it's totally feasible as would be putting things in the roads or doing what you need to do especially in limited scopes just new york city just london
John:
or you know regions of the country especially ones with not a lot of weather but then you look at how the united states government spends money and we can't even keep our bridges from falling into rivers we can't can't fill the potholes that are covering every street you know so in the past couple decades the u.s has not been really good about infrastructure spending so
John:
that is definitely technologically possible a lot of people in the chat room are trying to send me videos have you seen this video have you seen this video like things that look impressive in controlled circumstances uh don't necessarily translate to the the test of drop this car onto any road in the entire united states and it can drive you to anywhere else in the united states
John:
It's a very complicated problem.
Marco:
Well, the thing is, too, these are very infrastructure-heavy problems.
Marco:
If you start getting into fixing the roads or improving the roads to be more friendly towards self-driving, the reason why superchargers could get built and cover a big portion of the country in a useful way is because you don't have to put one in...
Marco:
under every square foot of road you can kind of cherry pick where they go and they serve wide areas whereas anything that involves modifying the roads themselves or just even as john said they just bring the roads up to standards of like basic maintenance and like painting lines on them yeah cars like the lines on the road we tend not to paint those so much in this country exactly
Marco:
So like basic things like that, it's easy.
Marco:
You wouldn't need to put advanced sensors and everything on the highways because the highways are easy for self-driving cars to navigate.
Marco:
I mean, my Tesla can do that, you know, already fairly well.
Marco:
Like the highway is the easy part.
Marco:
The hard part is all the other roads.
Marco:
And, you know, as John said, it's such a hard problem because the roads that cover our country and other countries, but I think ours in particular, especially near where me and John live in the Northeast where weather is severe, everything is ancient, and there's no budget to fix anything.
Marco:
It's just a really hard problem that, like...
Marco:
The roads that I encounter every day are filled with weird little edge cases and weird conditions and non-ideal conditions, unmaintained portions or vague things like, wait, am I supposed to be in that lane to go over there or not?
Marco:
It's hard even for humans to navigate.
Marco:
And so to make AI algorithms to navigate these things is just really hard.
Marco:
And I do think it is possible...
Marco:
And I do think that we are making progress in that area.
Marco:
And I do expect to see meaningful progress in that area within 10 to 20 years.
Marco:
But I really think it's not as close as a lot of people think, just because it is so hard.
Marco:
And that last mile of making sure we can go on 95% of the roads is a heck of a lot easier than making sure that you can self-drive on 100% of the roads.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and then parking lots think of parking for crying out loud how to find your way into the parking lots which way you go in and out like you know like there's little miniature road signs that aren't real road signs and the lines they paint in parking lots are almost meaningless and where do you go and you know it's not that they would suddenly kill people in parking lots they would be more like electric car gridlock as they all uh are paralyzed by indecision about what
John:
the hell they're supposed to do where they're supposed to go and thinking they arrived like because again what i'm thinking of is not the situation where the car can do the driving for you for a certain portion of time but the idea where you don't have to have a driver's license to get from place to place in a car you don't need a driver's license to get on the subway and get places right that's public transportation that's truly driverless as far as the passenger is concerned or a bus or whatever granted there's somebody driving those in most cases although not always in trains because you can make trains driverless a lot easier because they have tracks and everything but um it's it's
John:
To get the big win of saying we are a society where I just tap something on my phone and a magic personless vehicle comes and I get in and the vehicle doesn't care whether I have a license or have ever driven.
John:
That just seems so close to some people, like three to five years away, surely.
John:
And it just seems so incredibly far away to me.
John:
Because think of it, you can do the extrapolation thing like in the sci-fi movies where...
John:
they'll have a premise for a sci-fi movie that's for the purposes of the movie like this thing is possible but they never say well if it's possible to do this say making uh you know robots that look just like humans that fool humans if it's possible to do that what else must be possible given that technology like what does it mean to have that technology so self-driving cars
John:
If you're able to get a car that can drive anywhere as well as a pretty good human, what else must that mean in terms of the technology available?
John:
Would it be slavery to make that kind of intelligence drive a car if it truly is able to?
John:
Is there a way to do that without being conscious and intelligent as a human is?
Marco:
Okay, great.
John:
i'm just saying like it's anyway um don't don't hold your breath for that but uh you can have really awesome cruise control and can maybe take your hands off the wheel on the highway for a long time and maybe if you live in a major metropolitan area or silicon valley uh you won't have to have a license at all within city limits all perfectly possible
John:
But I would still bother to get your license because it will give you more freedom than the alternative.
Marco:
Until then, I can temporarily take my hands off the wheel for three seconds while on a straight highway to uncap a tightly capped drink.
Casey:
You know, you say that, but that is a pretty nice change.
Casey:
Yeah, I did.
Casey:
I've definitely done the squeeze.
Casey:
I've done the squeeze between your thighs and hope you don't spill approach numerous times.
Casey:
And given my history, I can tell you about how well that works out.
Casey:
Really quick to finish our follow-up, an anonymous AppleCare senior advisor wrote in to tell us that AppleCare uses TextExpander.
Casey:
That was the impression I got from this email.
Casey:
That's what you guys had gotten from it, right?
Marco:
It seemed like it was maybe not necessarily the official tool that they used, but that it was widely used.
John:
And so that comes up in terms of enterprise software, people using it in a big call center, so on and so forth.
John:
And the other point that this anonymous person brought up was that AppleCare prohibits the use of any third-party sync service that could contain confidential or internal or customer data.
John:
Now, I don't know if TextExpander sync service...
John:
that qualifies for it was obviously customer data wouldn't be in there but maybe internal data like maybe part of your little snippets are contain internal proprietary data or whatever so this this is the tricky bit with enterprise software that a lot of people brought up it's like oh texas banner ever wants to go enterprise
John:
one of their first hurdles is going to be that enterprise it people always want to have everything in house so i want to run my own sync server i'll buy a piece of hardware and i'll put a server on it but i don't want my company's data going to your server's text expander because i have no idea what's going on in your servers and for compliance reasons and so on and so forth it has to all be internal so text expander will you please sell me an internal text expander sync server that i will run um and text expander as far as i know has not gone that far down the enterprise rabbit hole but if they want to
John:
keep customers like AppleCare, and they're going to force everyone to use syncing because that's their premier feature for enterprises, they may end up having to do that.
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They are $20 a year.
Marco:
Gets you a fully functional email account.
Marco:
You'd remain with 10 gigs of storage.
Marco:
You can pay more $29 a year for the big mailbox, which is a full terabyte of storage.
Marco:
And if you want just email forwarding, that's just $5 a year.
Marco:
Check all this out today.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
You are the trolliest of all the trolls.
Casey:
By the way, we are getting some real-time follow-up from several different sources that says Apple does have a site license for Tax Expander.
Casey:
So it is at least partially blessed from what I'm told.
Casey:
In any case, Marco, why don't you tell us in your quest for more home automation or excuses to get more home automation sort of things, tell us about your surveillance camera.
Casey:
What are you surveilling exactly?
Casey:
Ducks.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Anything else you'd like to add?
Marco:
So last year we had a duck that was laying eggs and nesting in our backyard.
Marco:
And then the ducklings all hatched and they all got to the nearby Hudson River.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
to watch the duck and to check on the duck.
Marco:
And then if I can figure out a decent way to do it, to possibly live broadcast the duck.
Marco:
So this is kind of another part of my recent discovery that everything outside the Apple ecosystem costs nothing.
Marco:
And technology is amazing these days.
Marco:
There's just like tons of ridiculously capable, cheap hardware out there to do things that used to be really complicated or impossible.
Marco:
So the way I have this working, first of all, my Wi-Fi doesn't reach the backyard very well.
Marco:
So the first thing I did was I ordered another wireless access point from Ubiquiti.
Marco:
And I don't think I've talked about my Ubiquiti gear on the show yet.
Marco:
Have I?
Casey:
Not to my recollection.
Marco:
So a couple of, maybe a year and a half, two years ago now, something like that, my Apple Airport Extreme started becoming flaky.
Marco:
And this makes me sad.
Marco:
Airport Extremes used to be rock solid.
Marco:
They used to be like the best routers you can get.
Marco:
And these days, not only have they fallen behind on a lot of the features, and they were never amazing on the features, but they were at least, I think, more competitive in the past.
Marco:
But also, I've had only mixed success with their reliability in the last maybe five years or so.
John:
you're talking about the one that you gave me you're saying that's the one you had trouble with i think so great yep so i mean well you know so far i should say that but like my previous flat one lasted a really long time and i think what turned out to be wrong with it was the stupid power brick which really isn't the fault of the overall thing and it wasn't plugged into a surge strip so it's probably nobody's fault so i i've had very good luck with with the airports and the one that you gave me
John:
So, I mean, I haven't had it long enough to say one way or the other, but so far it's been just as solid as all the other ones.
John:
And I remember when you were talking about getting this ubiquity gear, I'm like, oh, Marco's found some way to spend more money on computer equipment than he previously had that worked.
John:
So, surprise there.
John:
It's actually less money.
John:
Well, yeah, maybe.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I'm interested in it kind of, but I think the reason I keep coming back to the airport ones is because of all the integrations that I have with them.
John:
And every time I look up how to do those integration with other things, it just seems ever so slightly more complicated, not much more complicated, like, oh, I have, you know, I want to hook my printer up to it to USB.
John:
uh this one doesn't have a usb port but you can buy a little dongle for five dollars that lets you do that and i'm sure that will work fine but if it doesn't you might have to try a different dongle and you know does how do i connect to it do i have to bring up some weird web ui or do i get to use the shiny apple airport uh whatever thing so i i'm still mostly open to the idea of uh
John:
sort of more reliable enterprise caliber uh router type equipment but i guess i need the apple stuff to be crappier first like i needed to really start to really start flaking out on me but so so far i think i've had like three of them in my life and they've all lasted just until they really need to be replaced anyway um and so far your tall one's doing pretty well too good enjoy it with its fan
Marco:
silent silent fan or i'm old enough now that i can't hear it i guess either way you win yeah so the thing with ubiquity gear is that first of all a huge warning there's a bit of a learning curve and there's some weird java-based software that you have to install when you first set up a wap a wireless access point
Marco:
not the router the router can all be done web-based but the router does not include a app these these are separate components like they originally long long ago used to always be so ubiquity stuff the components are all separate and uh there is a learning curve i would not recommend that you like you know tell your non-technical friends or relatives oh just go out and buy this ubiquity gear no do not do that but if you're listening to this show you could probably handle it you could probably figure it out and i i didn't have any trouble with it and i'm not
Marco:
you know i'm a computer nerd i'm a programmer but i'm not like a networking gear expert there's a lot of things that it can do that i just don't enable and don't do um the java software that manages the installation of the laps if you don't do a lot of crazy features you don't need to run that software continuously wait wait where are you running it do you run it on where does it where would it run continuously on one of your clients on the router on the access point i don't understand where it's running
Marco:
Any computer.
Marco:
So it's Java-based.
Marco:
There's a Mac version.
Marco:
So when I install it, I have it on my laptop because I don't want to put Java on my desktop.
Marco:
So I have it on my laptop where I put software that I don't necessarily trust, like crazy Chinese jailbreak apps and Java, which are categorized together.
Marco:
And so anyway, some people run it on like Linux cloud servers.
Marco:
You can like run it on a Linode server.
Marco:
It doesn't even have to be in your network necessarily.
Marco:
I haven't gotten that advanced with it, but it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
Anyway, so you set the stuff up.
Marco:
And once you set it up, you basically don't have to touch it.
Marco:
And also once you set it up, things like because of this duck camera setup thing, I wanted to expand my Wi-Fi coverage to more than one access point.
Marco:
and apple made this easy in the past too you know i recognize that but ubiquity makes it possibly even easier that you basically plug in the access point and you just add it to the network with like two clicks and then it's just part of the network and it brought and so any change you make to the wi-fi network to if you want to change the password or anything it propagates like it it's you just have to manage one network and it applies to all the access points that are on it really advanced features here um
Marco:
features that i am not even qualified to describe because as i said i'm not a pro network engineer so i i don't i don't know everything these things can do i don't appreciate everything these things can do but i do know that they compete apparently very well against high-end cisco routers and other like you know super high-end enterprise grade stuff but it's really surprisingly cheap so the a wi-fi access point is usually around 100 bucks depending on which one you get uh it's you know in that range and
Marco:
and the the router is you know just this dedicated little box it doesn't have wireless itself it's just a router the router that i get i have the uh the er light 3 the edge router light 3 and i think that's like 80 or 90 bucks so you're looking at total of about 200 bucks to get a router plus a decent access point and it is just awesome it is solid uh the gear so far i've had no problems i've never had to reboot it i have
Marco:
once or twice rebooted it because i thought it might be the cause of a problem and that but it just wasn't like i rebooted it and then it came back up and the problem is like oh that's right it was a fiost problem so like it's so i there has literally never been a problem that i have traced to this routing gear and there's never been a problem that rebooting fixed uh it's it's just rock solid
Marco:
And I know I'm not the only one because you look at the reviews of all the Ubiquiti gear, and it's all just stellar.
Marco:
People love this stuff.
Marco:
And the only complaint people have is LearningCurve and that Java software to set up the WAPs, and that's it.
Marco:
If you can get past those things, it is just awesome.
John:
How many Ethernet ports on the Edge router?
Marco:
It's not really made to be a built-in switch.
Marco:
If you ever set up a PFSense router or anything like that, I think it has three or four ports on it, maybe three, but they're all separate interfaces.
Marco:
So you can have two inbound connections, and you can bridge them, or you can load balance between them and stuff.
Marco:
You can configure it how you want, but for most cases, you're only going to want to use one in, one out.
Marco:
And then I have a separate little HP switch sitting next to it.
John:
yeah that's the other category of software that are hardware that we talked about usb hubs and how it's hard to find good ones or like drive enclosures or whatever my latest uh not a white whale or my latest uh thing to battle is uh network switches hp done i'm telling you hp switches are awesome do they make uh my big thing is heat and power supply noise believe it or not
Marco:
The one I have, I'll find the link and put it in the show notes.
Marco:
It's a little tiny eight port gigabit one.
Marco:
It is not like a full size one.
Marco:
I don't think there's any fan in it.
Marco:
I don't think there's room for one.
Marco:
The HP Pro Curve 1410-8G.
Marco:
Now that I've switched to all this stuff like maybe a year and a half, two years ago, and I've really just had zero problems with the network since then.
Marco:
And I really cannot recommend Ubiquity Gear enough if you are a geek enough to be willing to set that up.
Casey:
So you we somehow ended up on this in talking about the camera.
Casey:
So you said you had started looking into we had you had started looking into broadcasting the duck to the Internet and you decided to abandon that or at least temporarily abandon it.
Marco:
So I wanted to have some kind of live webcam kind of thing, IP camera kind of thing, looking at the duck nest area, both for potential future live broadcasting to nobody on the internet, and also just for me and Tiff to take out our phones and check, oh, is the duck outside?
Marco:
Because if the duck's outside, maybe we won't let the dog out yet.
Marco:
Or we just want to know, has the duck come last night?
Marco:
When was the duck here?
Marco:
Did any raccoons try to eat the duck?
Marco:
I set up this camera.
Marco:
You go on Amazon, you try to find an IP camera, and there's just a billion of them.
Marco:
It is really hard to figure out what makes a good IP camera.
Marco:
The one I got is a TriVision on Amazon.
Marco:
It was very highly rated.
Marco:
It's okay.
Marco:
The colors on it suck, but the resolution is decent.
Marco:
It has built-in Wi-Fi and built-in web server and all this crazy garbage like FTP server and SD card slot, and you can upload to a NAS if you want it to.
Marco:
It's just crazy.
Marco:
And it's, of course, outdoor capable.
Marco:
And what makes these things super easy is not only does it support Wi-Fi, which is one of the reasons I was trying to extend my Wi-Fi network by buying more Ubiquiti gear, which is how we got on that topic in the first place.
Casey:
Ah, yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
So one of the reasons I picked this camera was that it has Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Most of them only have power over Ethernet or even worse, just Ethernet and power separately.
Marco:
But this one has all of those things.
Marco:
You can do PoE.
Marco:
And power over Ethernet is also very awesome.
Marco:
You have Ethernet in and you have a little AC adapter.
Marco:
And then out, you have just Ethernet with power on the unused pins of it.
Marco:
It allows you to run just one cable to things that can take the power of your Ethernet, and then that can then supply power and data to them.
Marco:
So it's often used for IP cameras.
Marco:
It's also often used for wireless access points.
Marco:
And all of Ubiquiti's wireless access points do this, and they usually come with a little injector that you need.
Marco:
You can have a wireless access point somewhere in a ceiling or up on a wall or whatever, and you only run one cable.
Marco:
And that cable can be as long or short as an Ethernet cable needs to be and can be.
Marco:
So you can have a very long cable that you just run one thing to and you have power and data in that one cable.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
So that's what I did with the camera.
Marco:
I originally ran it over Wi-Fi.
Marco:
It was kind of cutting out and wasn't quite great because I didn't have the second access point yet.
Marco:
There was a shipping delay on it because everybody's buying these things all at once.
Marco:
So I ran power over Ethernet to it using a power line adapter kit to get outside in the first place.
Marco:
So this is all this massive pile of complex technology.
Marco:
Home power line networking running into a power over Ethernet injector
Marco:
That spans an Ethernet cable across my patio, then into a camera that is showing a picture of my duck live to my desktop and recording it when there's motion.
Marco:
All this stuff was like a total of a couple hundred dollars.
Marco:
And it does these amazing things of showing me live video of a duck in my backyard without a whole lot of wiring, without a whole lot of effort and in pretty impressive quality.
Casey:
Now, what are you using to do the motion detection and recording?
Marco:
That part is less pleasant.
Marco:
The area of surveillance-type software, like any kind of software that can display IP camera feeds and record them and possibly detect motion on them and save them in certain conditions, this is not a great area of software.
Marco:
There's very few choices.
Marco:
The choices that are out there seem...
Marco:
Not amazing.
Marco:
And I'm not going to name names in case someone listens who writes one.
Marco:
You can just assume I didn't find yours.
Marco:
They're not great.
Marco:
These are not great software packages.
Marco:
And then I briefly looked into what would I do if I wanted to stream this to the internet.
Marco:
And one way to do it is the camera itself has a built-in R something MP, whatever protocol is like the streaming protocol for this video.
Marco:
It has a built-in server for that, but A, I don't think it can really take a whole bunch of connections at once.
Marco:
And B, I don't really want to have everybody hitting my home IP directly.
Marco:
I'd rather relay it through a server somewhere, and then that provides both
Marco:
a level of indirection for the home ip as well as a capacity like to you know similar to how we when we broadcast the show live i'm bouncing this off of my web server my market web server because that way that is connected to this giant internet backbone that relays the audio to everybody in a way fat way higher capacity method than what i can do from my house
Marco:
The options to do that for video seem pretty slim and usually have enterprise pricing.
Marco:
Call us and if you need more than one live viewer at a time, you need to call us.
Marco:
Or, oh, that'll be $3,000, please.
Marco:
Or some crazy money to do these things.
Marco:
Many of them are like entire video platforms where if you want to translate from your R-whatever-MP video stream to a video feed online that people can just go to and see, oh, that'll use this crazy software package and cost thousands of dollars and call us for pricing.
Marco:
It's kind of a mess.
Marco:
I did find YouTube live streaming.
Marco:
It's kind of like Periscope in that you can do a live broadcast, but then it wants to save that as a video on your account.
Marco:
So it probably doesn't want the live broadcast to be a month long.
Marco:
That probably won't work.
Marco:
And then to get to YouTube is another pile of hacks where you have to use the open broadcasting... What's that server called?
Marco:
The OBS.
Marco:
Yeah, the open broadcasting server that all the gamers use.
Marco:
You have to use OBS...
Marco:
to window capture something that's viewing the ip camera like in a browser window or something and then rebroadcast to youtube live so this is like if i if i'm going to do this if i'm going to actually live broadcast this it's going to basically require like a computer dedicated to this task 24 7 or as long as it's live broadcasting and i just i don't want to do that i don't i don't have a lot of extra computers to dedicate to that and i just don't i don't know it doesn't seem worth it
Casey:
Now, did you look into, this has nothing to do with live broadcasting, but just for your own viewing, did you look into surveillance station on your Synology?
Marco:
I did, but the list of cameras that it takes did not include the one I got.
Marco:
And did not include any of the ones that seemed highly rated on Amazon right now.
Marco:
And also, my Synology, the only... I use almost none of the software on it.
Marco:
Because the only drive... The only volume I have formatted on the Synology in its own native format...
Marco:
is my Time Machine volume.
Marco:
Because the Synology Time Machine server is awesome.
Marco:
It's way more solid, in my experience, than any Apple Time Machine implementation.
Marco:
And I think there's some kind of open-source Time Machine thing that they built into that.
Marco:
But it is way more solid than a Direct Attacks disk has ever been for me, and way more solid than a Time Machine server running on a Mac Mini or a Time Machine external disk running on an Airport Extreme.
Marco:
Whatever package Synology uses for their Time Machine server...
Marco:
I never hit problems with like, oh, it ran out of space and I have to format the whole thing to actually make Time Machine resume.
Marco:
It never errors out.
Marco:
It just works.
Marco:
And I have disk quota set so that me and Tiff share one volume.
Marco:
I'm amazed it works as well as it does, given my experience with other Time Machine options.
Marco:
But it works great.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
My Synology is formatted such that the Time Machine volume on there is the only native one.
Marco:
All the rest of it is one giant iSCSI volume.
Marco:
So the Synology can't see it.
Marco:
It's just like, you know, dumb blocks to the Synology.
Marco:
So I don't really want to devote my Time Machine space to this, so I haven't done that yet.
Casey:
Well, I asked because my dad set up an IP camera with power over Ethernet at his house to point at his driveway and has an ancient iPad just sitting there streaming it in his office so he can see if people are coming up to the house.
Casey:
And he uses surveillance station on the iPad, the app for the iPad.
Casey:
He uses it on the Synology and really, really has had wonderful things to say about it.
Casey:
I've seen it, although I've not played with it.
Casey:
And it looks really solid to me.
Casey:
And it'll even send emails when it detects motion with a screen capture.
Casey:
It looks really, really good.
Casey:
If it doesn't work with your camera, then there's nothing you can really do about that.
Casey:
And obviously you've made different choices with regard to your volume setup.
Casey:
But if anyone else is listening and has a Synology, I've heard very, very good things about Surveillance Station.
Marco:
It also just kind of sounds creepy.
Marco:
You know, oh, I'm going to set up Surveillance Station in my house.
John:
Well, there's that.
John:
You don't respect the privacy of your ducks.
John:
No.
John:
Who knows what they could be doing there?
John:
You'd be filming them 24 hours a day.
Marco:
To be fair, it's only one duck and so far four potential future ducks.
John:
yeah i think the live broadcast now that you've talked all this up you're like well i can't wait to look at marco's duck cam and now it just sounds like there's not going to be a duck cam so i guess what people are going to have to settle for is like the highlights like when something eventful happens like the eggs hatch or something and if you catch that then you can pull that clip and then put that up on youtube and then say here the hit here's the uh the exciting part where the eggs hatch or the exciting part when the raccoon comes and eats some by the way hops doesn't bother the eggs
Marco:
hops is is a terrible hunter if you give him a treat and it falls between his legs or behind him he can't find it his brain is the size of a walnut give him a break he has little short shih tzu nodes so like he's you know he's not he doesn't have the greatest sense of smell does he look at you and say you did this to me selective breeding i used to be a wolf now look at me i'm a furry sausage he was never a wolf
Marco:
Whatever hops came from, he was not a wolf.
John:
Long ago.
John:
His ancestors.
John:
Furry sausage.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
Marco:
We are sponsored tonight by Blue Apron.
Marco:
Go to blueapron.com slash ATP to get your first two meals for free.
Marco:
You need to know how to cook.
Marco:
And not only should you know your way around your kitchen, but cooking at home means eating healthier and saving money instead of ordering expensive, unhealthy takeout every night.
Marco:
Where do you start?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So this week we have things like fish piccata with fresh pasta and pink lemon and teriyaki steak with peanut dipping sauce, jasmine rice, and baby bok choy.
Marco:
Blue Apron's recipes are between 500 and 700 calories per portion, so they're delicious and good for you.
Marco:
Right now, you can get your first two meals for free at blueapron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's blueapron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And I'd like to say personally, we've been Blue Apron customers for many months before they sponsored our show.
Marco:
I think we've been with them for about a year now.
Marco:
And we are still with them.
Marco:
And we don't get it for free.
Marco:
We pay for it because our account started before the sponsorship.
Marco:
We pay for it.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
And we're going to keep doing it because not only is it great to not have to decide what to cook every night for the family, but it also really is making us better cooks.
Marco:
We have them three nights a week.
Marco:
And for the other nights of the week now, I'm a way better cook than I was before we started.
Marco:
Way better.
Marco:
And I have techniques I've never done before.
Marco:
I'm more comfortable cooking ingredients and cuisines that I was never comfortable with before.
Marco:
So we've really had a good time with Blue Apron.
John:
Let's have Blue Apron tonight, too.
John:
We did get a free trial as part of the sponsorship, but then the free trial ended.
John:
And I kept paying for it.
John:
Now I'm just a regular customer.
John:
yep same here my the most exciting thing for me still is there's a different meal every like i haven't i guess they repeat after a year because marco's been in it for more of the year and they start to repeat but i i have had zero repeats like it's it's a different meal every single time which for someone who's old and tired like i am like you eventually get a repertoire of meals that you like or that your family likes or whatever and just the excitement to have a different thing every single time uh which sometimes we've made repeats by the way you get to keep the recipe card sometimes i'll have one that i like
John:
and we will make that on our own just by the ingredients ourselves so we've like manually done repeats but just to know that it's you know it's always something different and we're not particularly adventurous either so this kind of forces us to be slightly adventurous we still didn't you know you get to pick what your preferences are so we still didn't pick any weird stuff that we know we're not going to like but anyway uh it hasn't worn off and it's it's nice to uh to be surprised every week about what's going to come so check it out blueapron.com slash atp blue apron a better way to cook
Casey:
All right, so it was last week that Apple turned 40, if I have my chronology right, whenever it may have been, Apple turned 40.
Casey:
And John, you had some thoughts about this.
Casey:
Would you like to share?
John:
Yeah, we missed it by two weeks, I think.
John:
But yeah, Apple, I think April 1st, it was founded because they're just a bunch of jokesters, those two Steve's.
John:
And a lot of people did Apple at 40 stories talking about their history of Apple or whatever.
John:
And it's such a big topic.
John:
I didn't really know how to address it, especially with you two Mackie come lately or whatever you want to call you.
John:
came on board later but i i think it's worth 40 is a nice round number i think it's worth at least reflecting on the the first 40 years of apple and any kind of sort of like when you when you look at it what stands out in your memory as important whether you were involved in apple or not and if all your memories are only from like 2004 on that's fine but i figured it's worth taking this time to look back and think about uh
John:
you know what what important things apple has done it's kind of like when there's a grim way to put it but like when you like a celebrity or something dies and they have their obituary like the first couple sentences of the obituary uh you know kind of have the highlights and so apple's not dead and we're not trying to write an obituary for it but we can look back on the first 40 years and say what were the most important things that happened there to you personally not just like we're not going to say like well you know it's important for the history of computing x y and z but to you personally what do you think was uh
John:
What weighs heavily in your mind when you think of the first 40 years of Apple?
Casey:
You know, my experience with Apple was probably very similar to many people my age in that I experienced it, Max, and I guess the Apple II at school.
Casey:
And that was it until much later in my life.
Casey:
And so my earliest memories of Apple were playing Oregon Trail like so many kids my age did.
Casey:
I also vividly remember when I was in, I believe, middle school, I was already showing an affinity and a love for computers.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I ended up being kind of a volunteer peon for the computer lab administrator.
Casey:
And they were running some flavor of Mac.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John and Stephen Hackett.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you what kind of Mac it was.
Casey:
But they were running Macs.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I remember vividly being able to help out, and I think I had some super secret administrative password that they trusted with a middle schooler for some stupid reason.
Casey:
And I couldn't really do much with it, but I thought I was so cool because of it.
Casey:
And the thing that sticks out in my mind, even to this day, like 20 years later...
Casey:
Is we all had to like buy a floppy disk or one of the three and a half inch disks.
Casey:
So it wasn't even floppy.
Casey:
But anyway, we ought to buy a floppy disk and we would store all of our school documents on it because that was more than enough room for years worth of school documents.
Casey:
And I remember someone had shown me or somehow I figured out how to set the icon for the disk.
Casey:
So when you put the disk into the Mac and any Mac, it would like instead of being a regular gray icon or whatever it was by default, mine would be like really bright blue or something like that.
Casey:
Or maybe it was an entirely different icon altogether.
Marco:
Blue disk stud.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so I remember figuring out how to do that.
Casey:
And oh, my God, I thought I was hot stuff because my disk, when it was on the desktop, looked different than everyone else's.
Casey:
aren't i a badass and i just remember that so vividly and i have some other memories but but they're more of like modern era so marco let me give you and then john as well a chance to kind of cover the the the let's call it the pre-2000s era well before you move on uh what does your hard disk icon look like right now on your mac
Casey:
Oh, it's not on my desktop in the one in finders, whatever the default is.
John:
What happened?
John:
You were there.
John:
You were a blue disk stud.
John:
And the same feature has lived on through the various versions of the Mac operating system to today where you can do it.
John:
probably in an even easier way than you did back then depending on how far actually it was probably the same way because you're not that old i think it was about the same way it was like a get info and then you just drag you just copy and paste right oh yeah maybe that's what it was it used to be more difficult they added the copy and paste feature and a later version of the mac covering either way um i'm excited that you did that like that that's definitely a mac user kind of thing to do like that you want your thing to look nice and you can do it and as you noted it's not as if
Casey:
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it looked nice.
Casey:
I'm sure it was god-awful hideous, but it was mine.
John:
And as you noted, it's not as if that was just a change on your computer.
John:
If you brought that disk to any Mac, they would honor it.
John:
You should be doing that today.
John:
All of my hard drives have been named fancifully and have had custom icons.
John:
I did the same thing for most of my folders back in the day, although now that the Finder is my enemy, that doesn't work so well.
John:
But the disks, I still battle in this way.
Casey:
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Marco:
I also rock the standard disk, and it also isn't on my desktop.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, Marco, what was your, like, let's say, up until high school experience with the Mac experience?
Marco:
It actually wasn't the Mac.
Marco:
It was the Apple II.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
Marco:
And this might sound more impressive than it was because my first experience with the Apple II was around 1990, maybe.
Marco:
So it was already, what, 12 years old or something by then, right?
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
So my experience was I went to a very poor and not very scientifically advanced elementary school and
Marco:
So the computers they had, they did have computers.
Marco:
They had one computer lab that had maybe, I don't know, 15 computers in it.
Marco:
And they were all old donated Apple IIs.
Marco:
By the time I was in maybe fifth, sixth grade.
Marco:
So what is that?
Marco:
Like if I was born in 82, when is that?
Marco:
Like 91, 92, something like that?
Marco:
yeah roughly and i just played games on them like did you say oregon trail i'm not going to try to say my version of how to pronounce that state name because i know i'm going to get it wrong also but i it's pronounced worcester yeah worcester trail it's it's either oregon or oregon is the only two ways i've ever heard it i'm gonna use either of those anyway so oh god
Marco:
So I played that, you know, another, you know, math munchers and, you know, other like, you know, games that were supposed to be educational that weren't really and had fun with that.
Marco:
In seventh grade, my friend and I, he was a Mac nerd at the time.
Marco:
And he this was in like 1995 or something.
Marco:
He had a laptop.
Marco:
in class all the time as a seventh grader.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
So there was some kind of arrangement he had with the school, with his parents in the school, that he was allowed to have a laptop for a learning disability of some kind.
Marco:
I don't know the details.
Marco:
Anyway, he had his laptop, and we would program on that, and then I kind of learned basic, and then there was this Apple II in the back of the room, and his laptop would just goof around, because it was some kind of, whatever Mac laptop would have been somewhat current in 1995.
Marco:
It was gray.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
we would play on that and he had real basic on there we'd play a real basic on that and then in the back of the room there's ancient apple 2 that no one else in the class knew what to do with except me and him so we would you know we would do like stupid things like we would like make write a four loop to play a sound and just leave you know like or like you know like of course like infinite loops and you know try to show little graphics on there and stuff and just kind of mess around with it and then
Marco:
it really be after that i i kind of didn't use apple computers for a long time because i never had one uh for that whole time and it wasn't until after college that i got one and that whole time apple computers were seen as like kind of a tragedy if you had one because it was like oh we're you know all of us were over here like playing our awesome pc games and everything and then oh
Marco:
that guy oh he he just has he has a mac and it was kind of like oh he he can't play any good games and we kind of feel bad for him because he has the mac that's your that's your memory of apple that it was a tragedy if you had one and that you played with the apple too
Marco:
Yeah, before I got my own in 2004, yes.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I guess it makes more sense than Casey's story where he saw the Macs and the cool disc icons, and yet you didn't really, they didn't make enough of an impression on you for you to, I mean, I guess you had your IBM father that was really going to prevent you from ever getting into Macs.
Casey:
Yes and no.
Casey:
It wasn't.
Casey:
I don't think he ever would have necessarily actively prevented it, but there were always ThinkPads just hanging out around the house.
Casey:
And I had a laptop or a desktop since I can remember.
Casey:
Now, granted, they were all typically very old and out of date, but they were mine and I didn't share them with anyone.
Casey:
And so I grew up on predominantly ThinkPads and nothing about the Mac ever really called to me.
Casey:
Like I respected that little bit of customization.
Casey:
I thought that was cool.
Casey:
I remember vaguely trying to like skin Windows XP to look like a Mac from time to time.
Casey:
Like I would get this kick.
Casey:
I would get on this kick to try to fake like the Apple menu at the top of the screen and some of the icons to make them look like a Mac just because I thought it looked good.
Casey:
And inevitably, I would always regret that because it just was a total utter hack.
Casey:
But no, it wasn't until far later, which we can get to when we get to the 2000s or to the noughts, that I really started thinking about the Mac again.
John:
you two are two people i probably would not have been able to convince that the mac was the amazing thing that uh that it was because you were just so content with your weird worlds of vcs now so the early early apple for me like i mean i did i used apple twos and stuff like that apple twos were not that exciting for me they didn't seem
John:
Having come up on Commodores and stuff like that, the Apple II just seemed like a natural progression there, and it was fine, but did not make much of an impression on me, especially probably because most of the Apple IIs we had at school were like monochrome display.
John:
It just, you know...
John:
character mode uh programs maybe a couple of games if you could even call them that eventually there was like 2gs and stuff by the time 2gs was in play in the schools i the mac had already come but no so the the big thing about the mac for me that people who miss this era don't
John:
understand is that it was the computer that made the statement that graphical interface the gui was the way that we should use computers it wasn't the first gui but it was so far and away the best one ever sold in a computer that regular people could buy or ever sold to anyone really uh and it's it's big statement was hey guys stop typing at command prompts do this instead and
John:
And the entirety of the computer world said, no, we don't want that.
John:
That's not a real computer.
John:
That's stupid.
John:
You can't do anything with it.
John:
It looks ugly.
John:
It's pointless.
John:
You need to have a command prompt.
John:
I don't know what the hell you're doing over there, Apple.
John:
And even though this was a short period of time, historically speaking, for the transition for the whole world to figure it out,
John:
When we were in the middle of it, it seemed like the battle of the century with the people on the good light side, the Mac users, not being able to understand how anyone could argue against this.
John:
It wasn't as if they were arguing Windows is better or some other GUI is better.
John:
Their argument was the GUI is dumb.
John:
that you should not use a gui it's a waste of computing resources it makes the computer less powerful it will never catch on it is a pointless diversion it's a fad uh and you should feel bad about using that computer and stop distracting me and you have to get your own magazines and i'm never going to hook up a mouse to my computer and all that other stuff uh and
John:
To grow up in that environment, kind of like if you grew up in the sort of the Sega Nintendo console wars, it was just such a huge dividing line.
John:
And in the same way that I imagined for people who are not computer nerds, it's sports teams might be a dividing line.
John:
If you grew up in like Mets versus Yankees or whatever your sports rivalry is, it's just imprinted in your DNA as a super important thing.
John:
And eventually it transitioned to, okay, fine.
John:
So GUIs are a reasonable idea, but now Windows is better than the Mac or whatever.
John:
And that became, you know, the Mac versus PC thing, which was another form of tragedy.
John:
But my original abiding memory of the Mac is essentially trying to convince other computer nerdy people, kids and adults, that the GUI itself was a good idea.
John:
And that, you know, just try convincing someone like no one has that argument anymore because no one ever argues against it because it seems ridiculous.
John:
I thought it was ridiculous then too.
John:
And yet people had arguments against it and you could not convince them because all they knew was the command line.
John:
And they had what they thought were really solid arguments about like how much more efficient it is to memorize the commands in WordStar than it is to like bring your mouse up to a menu.
John:
And it's like, you're not getting it.
John:
It's not a micro level thing.
John:
A macro level thing as in this helps people use computers.
John:
Like the idea that every computer was going to work this way inevitably and there's nothing you could do about it.
John:
And they were like, every computer, are you kidding me?
John:
yeah so that is my sort of my core memory in the uh the inside out parlance of earliest core memory of apple was this gooey and i would say to this day the the sort of cohesiveness of the original mac gooey the only thing it has been matched by i think are probably appliance like devices and ios and
John:
Because there's never been another personal computing operating system, including macOS 10, that has so fully committed to the graphical user interface to providing sort of a coherent, consistent world of the computer.
John:
in which it wasn't an abstraction or a shell on top of something that as far as the user was concerned there was nothing underneath um there was no way to get underneath there was no terminal there was no there was no command line there was no there were no file system paths visible anywhere in the user interface you know if you asked a mac user what the path separator was on
John:
Their operating system, first of all, they don't know what a path separator is.
John:
If you were to explain it to them, they would have no idea that the colon was used internally because you just never, ever saw it.
John:
Same thing with the files and folders and icons.
John:
The idea that files and folders are represented, you know, this little picture represents your file and this little picture represents a directory.
John:
None of those things represented anything.
John:
They were the thing.
John:
There was no indirection.
John:
It was just so...
John:
so incredibly consistent in the same way that if you were to ask someone like where is the you know the instagram app like oh this little icon represents the instagram no no that is the instagram app when i delete that instagram app is gone and when it's there the instagram i have the instagram app like that is so solid and there is no command line on ios and there is no way you can see file paths on ios unless they're exposed and i guess urls kind of came and screwed that up for everybody but
John:
Anyway, that was an important point in computing history, and that was the most important point in my computing history as it relates to Apple or any other company.
John:
It's just sad that you guys missed it, I guess.
Casey:
My journey in computers began with trying to get stuff to work in DOS.
Casey:
And I believe it was PC-DOS.
Casey:
It was IBM's version of DOS, even when MS-DOS was a thing.
Casey:
And I was annoying my dad constantly asking, you know, how do I do this?
Casey:
How do I do that?
Casey:
How do I do this?
Casey:
How do I do that?
Casey:
And he just got exasperated and said, well, just read the manual.
Casey:
And even though I was like eight years old, he said it kind of sarcastically, and I took him at his word, and I read the manual.
Casey:
And so I remember trying Windows 3.1 and just thinking this is a piece of crap, and I don't know why anyone would use this.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
I want to go back to DOS.
Casey:
And then when Windows 95 came around, it was like, oh, yeah, this thing all those Mac users were all excited about.
Casey:
Now I get it.
Casey:
Now this ain't so bad.
Casey:
And look, we have a recycle bin instead of a trash because we're better than they are.
Casey:
But it wasn't until Windows 95 that I really understood what the point of it was.
Casey:
Well, that's not entirely true.
Casey:
I was an OS2 warp user for a while, and then I understood the GUI.
Casey:
But anyway, it wasn't really much of a thing as early as it was for Mac users.
Casey:
And I never really got that involved in the debate because I didn't really know any Mac users at the time.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Any other thoughts on the pre-2000s?
Casey:
And then let's cover the 2000s.
John:
I think you're going to jump right from the pre-2000s.
John:
Like there's some, like almost of my Apple history is in the pre-2000s.
John:
I just gave you my earliest one because you guys were going for your earliest runs and I was going to be older.
John:
Man, there's just so much stuff before the 2000s.
John:
That's like... Don't let me rush you, old man.
Casey:
No, no, no.
John:
Don't let me rush you.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
I'm really... Even though you guys turned this into let me reminisce about one of my earliest memory of Apple is, I was trying to think of like...
John:
uh when i think back on apple like the sort of milestones and so the the mac gui the mac itself that computer that gui that is the first big gigantic tentpole when i think back of the first 40 years in apple such an important thing and probably people feel like i'm giving the apple too short shrift because that's so important in the history of apple as a company but again i'm not going with like what was important to the company or whatever i'm going like when i look back on the first 40 years of apple the first big tentpole i see is that mac and i feel like that that tentpole is
John:
there's a through line from that tentpole all the way through to the iphone whereas i don't think there's a very solid through line from the apple 2 with expansion cards and a command line and all and you know and really like there's very little about the apple 2 like the apple 2 was steve wozniak's machine the mac was jobs's machine right and jobs is the through line through the all the history of apple and for for better or for worse the apple 2 um
John:
was kind of an aberration of that entire line in that it was like the company didn't become Steve Wozniak's company.
John:
It became Steve Jobs' company.
John:
He left, he came back, he brought it back in line, but even when he was gone, the people who were there in his stead making computers, they were much more Jobs-like than Woz-like, although I'm sure Jobs found them unsatisfying as well.
John:
So that's the first big tenfold I see.
John:
And then you could say, and then fast forward, and it's just like iPod, iPhone, right?
John:
I don't really see that.
John:
I see a lot of significant advancements in the middle there, sort of like the heart of the Snow White design era of Macs, where they were all kind of platinum colored, I guess, and had slats in them and had a little rainbow logo on them.
John:
um and no one else was paying attention to them and marco felt bad for anyone who had one uh but he shouldn't have felt bad because there were some amazing computers that none of his friends were going to have because they were like ten thousand dollars in the 80s like you know 1989 actual ten thousand dollars for a computer like
John:
nobody like regular people did not have these computers which is part of the reasons I lusted after like they even look like Ferraris with the side slats on them and everything like you don't know anyone who owns a Ferrari just look at pictures of my magazines that was like what the Mac 2 FX was like to me I'm actually never going to meet anyone who has actually even touched one of these computers but I know it's out there and it exists and boy is it amazing and I would kill to have that computer but it cost it maybe it wasn't $10,000 I think it was like $8,000 in 1988-89 might as well have been $10,000 there was no way in hell I was ever going to get one
John:
um and there was no equivalent for that to me in any other line of computers forget about the gui and everything like that like that this was like a ferrari in that it wasn't like a muscle car which you could say oh i could i could buy a beefed up pc and build it myself and it will you know have better specs than that mac 2 fx if you're lucky right
John:
that might have been possible but that's not a ferrari you can't build a ferrari yourself in your garage out of spare parts you can't buy like a stock mustang and replace the engine and do custom suspension like i've got my own ferrari you do not you do not have your own ferrari um the the high-end max were like ferraris and they were technical marvels they were ridiculously expensive and they were beautifully designed and like they were products right you know
John:
The whole thing that we love about Apple products today, that was something they had back then as well.
John:
They came with beautiful manuals, their accessories, their keyboards, their mice, the monitors they came with.
John:
They had Trinitron displays when no one else was bothering with those things, and the case was beautifully matched to the computer and the power cords and just like...
John:
everything about them they're just they were just magical um i do have a two fx now by the way i finally got one uh i think it cost me five dollars so depreciation it's boy it's tough but uh i i just i just needed to own one i don't have quite have my ferrari yet but maybe someday i will but anyway i guess that's like the second tent pole is that
John:
That whole error of Macs when everybody else thought Macs sucked because the operating system was still great.
John:
Windows had not caught up because they never really understood what was truly magical about the Mac, like the fact that there were no file paths, that there was no command line.
John:
There was no any files and bat files and IRQs and anything like that or drivers or any of that crap.
John:
You had your own series of hacks, though.
John:
But all of them involved the abstraction.
John:
We would drag things in and out of the system folder.
John:
like physically you know pull this out of the system folder put it into the system folder put it in control panels folder put in the control panels disabled folder but take it out of the extensions folder and reboot like it was all done on top of that abstraction like there was no there was no command line like there was there was no underneath like you know obviously you can get into the debugger and start poking in memory addresses and stuff but
John:
The abstraction was so total, eventually to the detriment of the Mac, obviously.
John:
I love Mac OS X. I love Unix, right?
John:
But it was just such a different age of computing.
John:
And age, I think, needs to come back eventually and has sort of come back in iOS.
John:
Because iOS takes away all that stuff from the user's perspective.
John:
It's still there under the covers, much more visible even from the developer's perspective than it was in the Mac.
Yeah.
John:
from the user's perspective, iOS has continued to remove.
John:
So I truly feel like iOS is the natural successor to the original Mac operating system, much more so than macOS 10 is, despite the fact that, of course, being a modern Unix, that I love macOS 10.
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Casey:
All right, so I will start with my next memory, and I don't remember where this is in the chronology, so if I'm skipping to the end of the 2000s, well, I don't think I am, but... No, actually, I do remember.
Casey:
It was roughly 2005...
Casey:
I had heard about iPods.
Casey:
I had seen them.
Casey:
I had perhaps used one from time to time.
Casey:
And I never really was that into them.
Casey:
I had a Diamond Rio way back when, I think before an iPod was a thing.
Casey:
But then the iPod Nano came out.
Casey:
And holy crap, did I want one something awful.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I eventually got one.
Casey:
I think Aaron got it for me.
Casey:
This was right after we started dating.
Casey:
But I eventually got an iPod Nano, which I still have, or I think that's what it was, whatever the one it was that had the screen and a click wheel, but it was super, super thin.
Casey:
And I just wanted one so hard.
Casey:
And that was the first time I was really interested in an Apple product that
Casey:
That I can remember.
Casey:
And that was, I think, the beginning of the end for me when it came or the beginning of the beginning, actually, I should say, when it came to Apple stuff was looking at that iPod Nano and just thinking, holy crap, I must have that.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that was, I think the iPod now got a lot of people into Apple, honestly.
Marco:
I mean, you know, the iPod as a whole obviously got a lot of people in, but that first Nano and then the continuation of the Nano line, I think, really played a large part in it because it was so compelling.
Marco:
You know, the full-size iPods were always a lot more expensive, and, you know, they were amazing for the time, but I just feel like the Mini first and the Nano just took it to another level.
John:
yeah i agree the magic of flash storage i mean that was not the flash wasn't on other people's radar but i if you were an apple fan at that time as well like the progression from that you know the whole ipod line was made possible by that tiny little whatever it was like inch and a quarter or one inch or whatever it was those tiny little hard drives which are such a ridiculous hack it's like doll furniture for your computer right you know a little but it works it's a real working hard drive right
John:
jumping from that to no moving parts and much smaller made the shocking you know the steve jobs famous intro but he had it in that little in like the little change pocket in your pants that no one knows what that pocket does he pulled it out of that pocket and it was it was such a leap and especially for something that involves miniaturization it's so weird to have a popular product line
John:
that really hinges on miniaturization to have become popular before flash memory was ubiquitous, which allowed that big jump because you would think it would be impossible to even popularize a music player when they're all the size of a deck of cards.
John:
That card isn't big, but...
John:
It's kind of ridiculous when you think about it.
John:
And so unlike cell phones and so many other things, or smartphones anyway, that were born in the era of flash storage, we're never going to get another leap like that until we get to some, you know, whatever the next technological breakthrough is that allows...
John:
if within one phone generation it had the same drop in volume as from the mini to the nano we would our jaws would be on the floor like it would it would almost be the credit card iphone you know what i mean it would go like well we haven't just made it like half as thin and half as narrow but like it would you know someone should do the math on what the volume difference was between the mini and the nano but it was just viscerally when you hold it in your hand it was just shocking you're like
John:
how could this be possible this is a magic candy bar that does everything that the mini did but it's so much smaller and it looks like the future and scratches like crazy because the plastic was really soft oops but anyway uh they fixed that minor details minor details
Marco:
So I got into Apple stuff really in the 2000s, in the early 2000s, because I was leaving college in 2004, and I was about to start a new job, and I was ready for a new computer, and I was ready for my first laptop.
Marco:
At the time, looking around the PC laptop area, I had always ventured into the Apple room at Micro Center here and there to just look around.
Marco:
As OS X got off the ground and started getting a little bit of attention and started getting good in the early 2000s, I would occasionally look in there and I just kept thinking, man, OS X looks really nice and these Apple laptops are really nice.
Marco:
This is the area of the PowerBook G4.
Marco:
And so I was seeing these Apple laptops look so good at the same time I was in the market for a laptop.
Marco:
The PC laptops at the time were just, you know, not doing anything for me.
Marco:
And I wanted something really good.
Marco:
And because I was curious about this platform, I was like, you know what, this seems like the right time.
Marco:
I think I'm going to try it because I really just want that, you know, the basic 15-inch PowerBook G4 that the current MacBook Pro doesn't still look that different from...
Marco:
I just wanted that so badly.
Marco:
Once I finished college, I scraped together the graduation money I'd gotten from here and there and various savings here and there and spent something like $2,400 on PowerBook G4.
Marco:
At first, I got into it slowly.
Marco:
I first started using it on my clay.
Marco:
Let me figure out how this works.
Marco:
Transfer over some of the things I do onto this.
Marco:
And then over the next, I don't know, year or two, around 2005 or so, over that next year or two, I just stopped wanting to use my Windows PCs.
Marco:
Because OS X was just so much better in so many ways.
Marco:
And in most of those ways, I think it still is better.
Marco:
Just design considerations, the way things work, the technical advancements of things, the respect it shows for users and their time and their attention, and just the overall quality of good third-party software on the platform.
Marco:
It was just so much better than Windows.
Marco:
And in my opinion, again, still is.
Marco:
It got to the point where when I was at work one day, I worked at a company that was developing search web apps, like search-based enterprise web apps.
Marco:
So all I had to do was write code in C. It didn't really matter what platform I used to write that code in.
Marco:
I needed a terminal window that can run VIM on Linux servers that we were logging into to do development on.
Marco:
and a web browser and an email client.
Marco:
That's all I needed.
Marco:
So all those things I could get on the Mac.
Marco:
In fact, the terminal looks actually easier on the Mac.
Marco:
I was using stupid Sigwin setups at work, and that sucked.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So one day at work, it was when Windows XP Service Pack 2 came out.
Marco:
So this was somewhere around 2005.
Marco:
I remember this very specifically.
Marco:
Service Pack 2 introduced a feature if there was an update to be installed from Windows Update, which there always was.
Marco:
It would show boxes saying, hey, this update is ready to go.
Marco:
You want to reboot now or later?
Marco:
And if you didn't click reboot later, after a certain amount of time, maybe a couple hours or whatever, it would just reboot for you.
Marco:
And it would force close everything.
Marco:
All windows you had open, it would just force close them all and forcefully reboot the computer if you didn't respond to this box in a certain number of hours.
Marco:
So one day I had a ton of terminal windows open, tons of stuff open on my computer.
Marco:
And I went home for the night because it was my work computer.
Marco:
And I came back the next morning and I had forcefully rebooted the computer.
Marco:
And I was so mad that I just unplugged the monitor, plugged it into my Mac that I was bringing with me every day anyway to run iTunes and stuff.
Marco:
plugged into my mac took the keyboard in my house plugged them into my mac and just turned off my work computer and just never used that windows work computer again after a small amount of time i did the same thing at home i had this gaming pc i built at home basically only to play half-life 2 and um i eventually just stopped wanting to use that for anything too
Marco:
And so I just started using my Mac full time because I didn't want to use Windows anymore.
Marco:
It had annoyed me for so many years with its mediocrity.
Marco:
I had some good times on Windows, but those times were over.
Marco:
And it was very, very clear from 2005-ish forward that those times were completely over.
Casey:
You know, I had a very similar journey into the Mac.
Casey:
So I think it was in school maybe or shortly after I graduated, I started running Ubuntu on my ThinkPad.
Casey:
And that was what I was using full time at home.
Casey:
I was on Windows at work and Ubuntu at home.
Casey:
And that was working pretty well for the most part.
Casey:
This was fairly early in Ubuntu's history.
Casey:
And I was doing a distro upgrade from like Gutsy Given to Hardy Heron or something like that.
Casey:
I forget exactly when it was, but I was doing an upgrade and I think it was like X Windows just completely crapped the bed and I couldn't get my ThinkPad to work anymore without like reinstalling everything.
Casey:
And I didn't want to go back to Windows because I had left Windows on purpose.
Casey:
And even though, you know, Linux on the desktop was and remains a disaster, it was less of a disaster than Windows.
Casey:
But now in a similar way to what you had experienced on Windows, Marco, where it just kind of rebooted on you and didn't tell you or didn't give you the chance not to.
Casey:
Well, I tried to do this upgrade and it just failed miserably.
Casey:
And meanwhile, I had you, among others, Marco, whispering in my ear, figuratively speaking, you should get a Mac.
Casey:
You should get a Mac.
Casey:
You should get a Mac.
Casey:
You should get a Mac.
Casey:
And I vividly remember it was the WWDC keynote.
Casey:
I believe it was 2008.
Casey:
I'm almost sure of that.
Casey:
It was WWDC 2008.
Casey:
I listened to it or followed along, I guess, to make sure they didn't introduce new Macs.
Casey:
And then that evening, I went to the Apple store and bought myself my first Mac, which was a polycarbonate MacBook or Polybook, as I like to call it.
Casey:
And that was in 2008.
Casey:
And I haven't bought a PC since.
Marco:
And you started at Intel.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
The same way that John can't stand how late I started, I look at your start that way, even though the difference between when John started and when I started was like 20 years, and between when I started and when you started was like two years.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, that really is accurate.
Casey:
But I can understand why you would feel like it was a lifetime difference.
Casey:
I mean, I think I was on Leopard...
Casey:
I think I was after Tiger when I bought my machine.
Marco:
Yeah, mine started on whatever 10.3 was called.
John:
I keep forgetting that you guys never read any of my OS X reviews in real time as they were released.
John:
If you were to ever look at them, it would only be looking backwards.
Marco:
What you said about Windows feeling wrong for you, I think what crystallized it for me was...
Marco:
The overall feeling from using Windows at the time, which I don't know, the last version of Windows I used extensively was Windows XP.
Marco:
So I, which granted many people are still using, but I don't know how it's been since then in anything more than just occasional uses here and there.
Marco:
But the impression I got from Windows up to that point was just that this was Microsoft's computer and I was along for the ride.
Yeah.
Marco:
Literally.
Marco:
So, like, the computer would just, like, you know, Windows is like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
We're going to reboot now.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And just go, oh, wait, wait, I was doing something.
Marco:
No, we're going to reboot now.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
And then you boot back up and it's like, hey, you want to take a tour?
Marco:
No, I want to do my work.
Marco:
Like, it just always felt like Windows treats the computer like it's theirs and that they are putting on a little show for you and they're going to do what they're going to do without regard to any respect for you and what you're doing and the work you need to do.
Marco:
Whereas Mac's,
Marco:
And they still hold this advantage, although not as much, but they still do hold this advantage.
Marco:
The Mac respected you as the user.
Marco:
Things got out of your way.
Marco:
For instance, on Windows, it was a common occurrence for some background application to put up a box that would steal the focus from the foreground application.
Marco:
And so you'd be just typing, all of a sudden you'd be in a different app.
Marco:
Like, wait, what the hell happened?
Marco:
And it was just something showed a system modal box and took over the focus.
Marco:
And on Max, that wasn't impossible, but it happened just way less often.
Marco:
And just in general, Max gave you the impression and the design that really...
Marco:
left you in control of your computer and respected your time and your attention it wouldn't just like drag you along into different things oh hey we gotta go do this new thing now hey you wanna get spammed by this new offer that we have this new cool feature here's more balloons to pop up from the system tray to tell you all about things and if you click on the balloon they don't go away they pop up new windows so you gotta figure out where to click on them to make them go away which might not exist it was just the difference in overall attitude towards the user
Marco:
and the experience of being a user of both these platforms at the time, the difference could not have been more striking.
Marco:
And I do still think that that difference exists today.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's wider or narrower, but it's still there as far as I know.
Marco:
And I think OS X, soon to be renamed MacOS, still has the advantage there by a significant margin.
Marco:
And that's why I still use it.
Marco:
And this is why I am such a fan of the Mac.
Marco:
I know it's less cool these days to be a fan of the Mac because not only does everybody have them, but now the future of computing is not the Mac according to everybody.
Marco:
I just don't buy that because I'm such a huge fan of the Mac.
Marco:
I love the Mac so much.
Marco:
I still love it to this day.
Marco:
And this is all one of the reasons why I am so critical when things with the Mac don't go well.
Marco:
If I start seeing things slipping or things getting worse, this is why I'm critical because everything I do for work, for hobbies, for entertainment, almost everything I do involves using a computer.
Marco:
And I do not want that computer to be anything else but a Mac.
Marco:
I've tried Windows.
Marco:
I fortunately never ran Linux on the desktop, on my main desktop.
Marco:
I use it here and there at work and school sometimes, but I never ran it on my main computer because I'm not crazy.
Marco:
Please email Casey.
Marco:
But everyone, please, I know that Windows is going to have this new Linux subsystem.
Marco:
We will talk about it if it ever becomes relevant to us.
Marco:
I think it's still a little early.
Marco:
But I know Windows is adding this.
Marco:
Please, please don't email us about this.
Marco:
We know.
Marco:
Thank you very much.
Marco:
We will talk about it when the time comes.
Marco:
But I do not want to switch back to Windows.
Marco:
And I think if Mac OS X ever got so bad that I couldn't use it anymore, I would switch to Linux.
Marco:
Because I really did run fleeing from Windows.
Marco:
And as much as Microsoft has done things in recent years that are interesting to people like us, we always say, oh, this is interesting.
Marco:
Windows 8, this new thing was interesting.
Marco:
And Windows 10, these new things are doing, they're interesting.
Marco:
And the new Linux subsystem, that's interesting.
Marco:
These are all interesting when you're not using them.
Marco:
And they're interesting because we are at a distance.
Marco:
And people who use them every day, they're probably a lot less interesting.
Marco:
And from what I hear from people, the reviews from all these things are so mixed.
Marco:
And there's so many gotchas and trade-offs and negatives associated with them that it sounds to me like Windows is roughly the same that it's always been.
Marco:
Where my entire time using Windows, I had a love-hate relationship with it.
Marco:
It was always...
Marco:
fine, I put up with it.
Marco:
I tolerated it.
Marco:
But it had all these annoyances and shortcomings.
Marco:
And it sounds like that's still what it is.
Marco:
You know, just the things have shifted around a little bit.
Marco:
There's different annoyances.
Marco:
Some of them have been fixed.
Marco:
Some have been added.
Marco:
Sounds like Windows, from what everyone uses it, tells me it sounds like it's still about the same.
Marco:
Just, you know, things are different but the same.
Marco:
But the Mac, I really feel protective of because it is my entire computing life.
Marco:
And I don't, I neither want that to change, nor do I want the Mac to get worse.
Marco:
I only want the Mac to get better.
Marco:
And that is why every time I say anything negative about Apple on the show, we hear criticism for it.
Marco:
People complain to us all the time that we're too negative towards Apple or that we criticize Apple too much or they're tired of hearing it, blah, blah, blah, especially focused towards me.
Marco:
But this is why I do it because I love this platform so much.
Marco:
I depend on this platform so much.
Marco:
And nothing else out there is good enough for me.
John:
You know, you mentioned when you were talking about the computer, like, respecting the user and, you know, not feeling like you were using someone else's computer and, like, Microsoft was in control of the computer and you just happened to be there and it would tolerate you in some period of time.
John:
It's, once again, reminded of how sad, well...
John:
It's partly your age, but also partly both of you were alive and using computers during the age when the Mac was even more like this.
John:
The first thing that popped into my mind when you gave your original example of the computer not respecting what you were doing or whatever is like...
John:
old man voice time was when you could name your files whatever you wanted i mean you guys never you lived through it but you didn't live through it as a user the era when i mean there was still files and folders right but you could name files whatever you wanted and most of the computing world has never lived on a system where that's true uh
John:
that that the file the file name was you just type stuff there right sentences spaces punctuation no colons it would just substitute a hyphen most people didn't notice that one but you could put slashes you if you wanted to put dates whatever you wanted except for this one special character yeah yeah well that's the whole thing they wouldn't it wouldn't beep at you it would just silently turn into a hyphen and and you know but mostly what i remember putting dates like you do you know month day year and the you know typically u.s date type thing with slashes and stuff anyway
John:
Most of the time, you're just typing words there.
John:
But the whole point is that the file name was entirely the user's domain.
John:
You could name your hard drives whatever you wanted.
John:
You could name your files whatever you wanted.
John:
And I did.
John:
I named my hard drives whatever I wanted to call them.
John:
I named my files and folders.
John:
in sentences with capital letters in each word and spaces between them and punctuation and that was a freedom that essentially we had for this brief moment in time that is mostly gone now um in any system that forces us to deal with files at all i mean i guess the freedom in ios is like oh you don't have files at all now you're free or don't you feel better um
John:
But that got taken away because it was one of the things that didn't carry over from classic Mac to Mac OS X. It's one of the things that has never existed in Windows or Linux or anything like that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, you guys missed it.
John:
It was great.
John:
It was glorious.
John:
And I don't know if I'll ever live to see it again.
John:
when will i have when will someone rediscover that i guess maybe they only rediscover it in the context where files are no longer a thing i don't know that's the jury's still out on that we've talked about it so much about how ios does this wonderful thing of hiding the file system from people and yet the file system is such a flexible way files and folders to solve so many problems that you either have to end up recreating and
John:
the file system in the form of a new abstraction that isn't actually directly backed by the file system but just gives the people to a you know like springboard is a great example folders you know they call them folders just for historical reasons if you were to plop someone down in 2007 or whenever they added folders to springboard not 2007 i guess and say why do they call those folders they don't look anything like folders and they don't really behave anything like that's all you got to explain desktop metaphor files folders anyway um
John:
yeah you're recreating something like that but it's not quite the same thing it doesn't have the same flexibility of being able to name things and save them somewhere and organize them and pull them back up um so it could be that no one ever has occasion to use that but if it turns out that that type of arrangement really is the best way we come up with for people to arbitrarily arrange stuff on their computing device uh maybe it'll come back again but
John:
Boy, it was great, and I still think about it every time I see a hidden file name extension comes out and scares me or an incorrect file name extension causes a file to have the wrong icon or causes it to launch in the wrong application.
John:
Boy, what a mess.
Casey:
So does it annoy you, John, all kidding aside, that Marco and I, especially me, are so new to the platform?
Casey:
Does that frustrate you because we don't have that?
Casey:
We didn't go through the crappy time like you did?
John:
no it's mostly i i tried the thing that bothers me the most is the time when you guys were alive and using computers but weren't using max because all the all the things that all the things that you like about max were true and perhaps like i said perhaps even more true then and yet you weren't like it's like wasted time like you could have been using max but you weren't for a bunch of silly reasons right
Casey:
It's fair.
Casey:
It's fair.
Casey:
Although, I don't know.
Casey:
If you had put 10 or 12-year-old me in front of a Mac at home, like not at school, because I enjoyed using them at school.
Casey:
I mean, it was a neat little diversion.
Casey:
But if you had put me in front of one of those at home, I don't think I would have appreciated it like even an equivalently aged you was.
Casey:
I don't want to do the math in my head, but...
Casey:
However old you were when the Mac was new was young, as far as I remember, as far as I'm aware.
Casey:
And so you appreciated, even at a younger age, you appreciated much better than I think I would have if I were in your shoes.
John:
No.
John:
I think you would.
John:
I think you both had and have the sensibilities to appreciate it.
John:
I mean, speaking more realistically, my experience has been whenever I had someone over my house who was
John:
hardcore pc user like a friend or whatever who was totally into pcs and thought max were junk i could blow their mind with the things i did with my computer even my computer was black and white the fact that the pixels were so freaking micros it was the retina screen of the day they had never seen a computer screen with pixels this small or this sharp like i would blow their mind with black and white games
John:
you know, games on the Mac, what are you talking about?
John:
How could you blow their mind with the game?
John:
They're playing Doom, right?
John:
The pixels are the size of boulders, right?
John:
I would blow their mind by having multiple screens and arranging them with like the displays control panel.
John:
Like there were so many things I could do that would just make their heads explode and their jaws would drop.
John:
It was just so much farther ahead of anything we had ever seen.
John:
Did that mean they were going to go home and buy a Mac?
John:
No, because the Macs were a bajillion dollars.
John:
There's no avoiding this.
John:
Like they were just so much more expensive.
John:
And it's kind of like,
John:
you know computers themselves were so much more expensive back then it's not like you had each kid had their own computer like the family had one computer and it was like a car you know it wasn't like you just bought a new one every year or something this was before the upgrade cycle and the internet and all this other stuff so realistically speaking no matter how amazed somebody was by my mac
John:
They're not going to go home and say, hey, mom, can we buy a $3,000 in 1980s money computer?
John:
They were like, what are you talking about?
John:
It was, you know, so really I'm speaking of a position of massive privilege having had the original, you know, Macintosh, the 128K Macintosh and a series of Macs.
John:
Like you just couldn't afford them because that was one thing that was true back in the, you know, the slam against the Macs.
John:
They're more expensive.
John:
My God, were they more expensive.
John:
Everything about them.
John:
But the keyboard was $200 for crying out loud.
John:
Again, the 1980s money.
John:
right good wow fantastic it was an awesome keyboard though ask gruber i think he's still using it um and so realistically speaking that's one of the reasons but and that was also one of the reasons that you couldn't convince people because i would they would come over and i would blow them away with my amazing macintosh
John:
but they had to go back home and retrench on the pc because there's no way they could get a mac like there was it was never going to happen right i mean they would have had to turn around and try to convince their parents to get a mac and they would not be successful because their parents wouldn't be as impressed by whatever thing that i showed them
John:
um so it was it was an uphill battle um and but i i believe both of you would have also been impressed by the things i mean even even when i got my color one 24-bit color it's not 24-bit color on no one again all my pc using friends had never even seen a screen with 16.8 million colors
John:
they had no idea like they were you know vga 256 they were just amazed and then you go 640 by 480 it's like you don't even know what you're talking about guys let me show you you know like a trend trend screen high-res trend trend screen with 24-bit color attached to my uh mac se 30 arranged with a black and white i would drag a window half on the black and white screen half on the color screen and move it around just their little brains would explode uh
John:
And, you know, and that computer setup was like six thousand dollars.
John:
Right.
John:
So those are the days, man.
John:
But I mean, there are explicable reasons, but I feel like you two would have appreciated what you were seeing because you appreciate.
John:
I mean, you appreciate nice things like that that look nice.
John:
You appreciate the Apple aesthetic, like all the sort of things that make a Ferrari different than a muscle car.
John:
I believe you both could have appreciated then because you do appreciate it now.
John:
It's the same reason, Casey, you made your disk icon look different.
John:
That is a Mac user thing to do, right?
John:
PC users had drive letters.
Casey:
See, I don't know.
Casey:
I think it was just me wanting to be cooler than my peers.
Casey:
I appreciate everything you just said.
Casey:
Well, the Mac was cooler, though.
Casey:
Was it?
Casey:
I mean... Yeah, no, it was.
Casey:
Well, but to you, because you appreciated these things, whereas to Marco and I, and I'm putting words in Marco's mouth, I think we would have been like, you know, that is really cool that you have all these colors.
Casey:
And yeah, that does look nice.
Casey:
But remind me again why I can't play Doom or whatever, you know, the game of the week was.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I don't think I would have cared.
John:
Games was the thing that you could pull out of the PC.
John:
But, like, you know, it seemed like it was old hat.
John:
Like, Doom was everywhere.
John:
Doom was not a differentiator.
John:
Everybody had Doom.
John:
Like...
John:
you could you could play doom on on any old computer it wasn't technically impressive after the first you know thing and then same thing with like you know the the playstation and once the 3d game console started coming out a lot of the gaming shifted to that like pc gaming you know there was a there was always going to be something that the pc was going to do better and you know the mac never came close in gaming so that was just it was just a complete write-off but that's why i said it was amazing that i could impress my friends with mac games because
John:
What in the world could you impress them with?
John:
Like they had every game in the world, right?
John:
Didn't they have every game in the world?
John:
What could a Mac possibly do with games?
John:
And I would show them games that didn't even exist on the PC.
John:
So that's like opening their eyes up to a whole world of quirky games and be high res games.
John:
Like there are certain genres of games.
John:
That's why Syndicate was so amazing.
John:
Syndicate was 640 by 40.
John:
You could actually see the little people on your PC.
John:
It was like one of the only PC games, like when I was playing Syndicate with my friends and their PCs, I'm like, see, the reason you like this game is the reason why people care anything about the Mac games because the Mac has no games and most of the games are terrible.
John:
But the ones that it has are all beautiful and high res and have nice colors and are interesting or whatever.
John:
Anyway, no, I definitely think the Mac was cooler in the same way that Steve Jobs was cooler than Bill Gates.
John:
Like that's basically the human embodiment of why Apple and the Mac was cooler.
Yeah.
Marco:
First of all, I think there might be the age gap here showing that.
Marco:
I think, John, you're talking about the difference between Macs and PCs for gaming and stuff, I think, at an earlier time span than what was mostly relevant to me and Casey.
Marco:
For us, we were comparing Macs in 1994 to
Marco:
through 1999 like that like that era like comparing those macs to the penny m1 the 486 and and you know svga graphics cards yeah no that's that's you're comparing the apple going down the toilet drain like apple going out of business like the pre-steve job 1997 is like the low point of apples
John:
So if you're if you're any of the mid to late 90s, yeah, that was the worst Apple would ever be.
John:
That's why I'm saying that it was a shame that you had missed out on Apple for all those years when you could have been using it when you just wasn't even on your radar.
John:
Right.
John:
Because Apple was not as bad then, especially in comparison.
Marco:
So I mean, computer, I got my first computer in 1994.
Marco:
Like so it was by the time I got a computer, Apple was already on the decline.
Marco:
At that point, you say me and Casey, we appreciate good things.
Marco:
I don't know about Casey, but when I was in middle school and high school, I didn't appreciate nice things.
Marco:
I just wanted to play games.
Marco:
That's what every middle schooler and high schooler wants to do with their computers, play games.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I, you know, I can, yeah, I can type a paper on it.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Let me finish that so I can go back to playing Doom.
Marco:
Like that, it was, and by the way, every other game, because at the time, like, yes, you could play games on Macs, but not most of them, and usually not when they were new on PCs.
John:
I think you could play Doom on the Mac in the 90s, actually.
John:
A terrible, terrible Mac version of Doom.
John:
Boy, that was grim.
John:
yeah but see and like gaming on the mac was always a second class citizen compared to gaming on the on the pc like in the 90s so and honestly still today but uh less less so today you guys don't know how good you have it today i think it may be worse today it was like back even in the 90s if i had showed you a black and white version of dark castle you would have been impressed because there was nothing like that on the pc because there was it was a mac only game uh and
John:
it just looked and played so much differently than anything you would have seen on the pc you would have still said that doom was better because doom was better but it was interesting and and impressive and novel in in a way that made the mac that differentiated the mac because there was no way the mac was going to meet by saying uh whatever popular game you like in your pc we have that on the mac
John:
because what was the point even if it exactly duplicated it it's like well but i already had that the only way the mac could could be meaningful in any way was to have something different and that's how you would impress a jaded diehard pc user you can't impress them by showing them doom and quake they already have those games like even if they ran perfectly so what they already have that it has to be something different
John:
um and that's what mac gaming had again they're not going to say okay well now i need to get a mac but plenty of pc using friends would be like i would never give up my pc for a mac but can we go over to your house and play that weird mac game that we were playing it would happen all the time well and that was the thing too like you know back then computers were as you said they're so expensive
Marco:
So not only did – most people didn't even have one.
Marco:
So to have one at all was a luxury.
Marco:
And also, you wouldn't have been exposed to many of them during that time.
Marco:
The total number of computers that I played on during my entire childhood was probably – including at friends' houses – was probably less than 10.
Marco:
So you weren't exposed to many computers.
Marco:
If you had one, you were very lucky.
Marco:
And the upgrade cycle was pretty long, especially when you're a kid.
Marco:
Like three years or five years feels like forever when you're a kid.
Marco:
That could be like a third of your childhood, at least the part you remember.
Marco:
So whatever you got, the sense of what is now called fanboyism, the sense of trying to defend your purchase, trying to never let the thought into your head that something else is out there that's better than what you got,
Marco:
PC people had no chance of appreciating anything the Mac had that was better because they were PC people already and they couldn't just like buy a Mac next month.
Marco:
Like, no, you were stuck with that PC you got for all of middle school, you know, or more.
Marco:
So like whatever you had, like you had to be happy with that.
John:
And they probably couldn't buy a Mac next year either because they were so expensive.
John:
When it came time to replace your PC, there's no way you were going to replace it with a computer that costs literally twice as much or three times as much.
John:
But again, the things you appreciate, the type of person who would see just the hardware on a Mac, like what the case looks like, how it's designed and how it doesn't look like, you know,
John:
the ibm pc xt case or like the gateway or all like it was aesthetically a difference in both the hardware and the software that you would appreciate as sort of like a nicer thing it's kind of like if you got into your friend's mercedes like we never had fancy cars but i had friends who had mercedes and their parents would come and pick me up and i would sit in them i'd be like wow like this is a different this is a different kind of car everything in this car is nicer the door handles the seats the dashboard the headliner the little carpet that's under my feet everything about it is just
John:
nicer and cleaner and like and the mac did that with the little pixels on the screen that everything was like classy and tasteful and nicely drawn again if you like that particular style the mac appeals to you and i feel like both of you do like that particular style because apple style today when both its hardware and its software is not that different from that and so again it doesn't mean that you would run out and buy one but then you would see it and go
John:
this is a nice this is a nice thing here this ridiculously expensive computer i can kind of see where the six thousand dollars went someone paid some designer to make this case to look nice so it looks good from all sorts of angles and everything kind of matches and it's really nice and everything i see on the screen is nice too like except the keyboard sucks yeah some people some people can't appreciate it because all they would see is like the lack of a command line or you know if they're a unix nerd like the lack of uh
John:
you know emacs or vim or whatever like it depends on what you see but because the fact that you two are mac users today i feel confident that you would have that attraction could have been fostered in younger versions of yourself and so you did so your first apple experiences weren't like when apple what is the lowest point it would ever be in the history of the company and it had the worst products it would ever have in the history of the company probably not a good entry point uh for you to get into apple
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I agree with Marco that I think in that era, I don't know that I had the eye for it.
Casey:
But who knows?
Casey:
You know, you can never really tell.
Casey:
One thing, though, that I feel like you might have missed out on, at least my perception of how ordering a Mac worked back in the day, is I remember fretting with my father for days.
Casey:
days sometimes weeks trying to figure out the exact right build to make of our gateway 2000 computer and then eventually our dell computers and in many ways that's not a good thing that we had that much choice that there were that many options that we had to figure this all out oftentimes you had to call somebody because the internet was either not a thing or brand new and
Casey:
And you would eventually place the order over the phone and you would have to quadruple check it to make sure they got it right.
Casey:
And you'd have to get catalogs and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But so much of that was so intense.
Casey:
And for me, it was such a bonding moment with my dad that we had to figure out the exact right computer that both of us could agree on.
Casey:
And we had so many choices arrayed in front of us and so many different decisions we had to make.
Casey:
And although I'm so glad today that I don't have to do those sorts of things, that I have maybe two or three options within the kind of computer I want, I'm thankful for that time because it was...
Casey:
really really awesome at that moment and such an exciting time to be into pcs was when you had so many options could customize so much but i don't know maybe for you john you would have just found that deplorable well then when you were done you got a pc at the end so it's kind of exactly i know i remember because i would go to the you guys probably went to these things too maybe they're a little before your time you go to like
John:
computer fairs or like flea market type things where people would sell all the components to build your pc that's how i built the first pc i built right and you know that's that was i guess it was kind of like maybe before comp usa and the superstores came
John:
like this is where you would go to build your pc it was just people people have cases and drives and motherboards and just all the different components and it was just around around the 386 486 eras i remember these being big before like by the time the pentium was around i feel like the superstores had started to come on and you would go there you just go to fries or something and get your pieces but these were more sort of low rent people setting up tables buying parts from the far east and just selling them to you no i bought a pentium too in one of those
John:
you could yeah you could go there if you knew what you were looking for you could go there and build yourself a pc at all sorts of parts and again that was you know one of the big rallying cries was like i can build this amazing computer that can run quake and this that and the other thing and look how cheaply i could do it and of course what you would end up with this is terrible mongrel that looks like it was made assembled from pizzas that you bought at a computer fair which is exactly what it was oh come on it wasn't it was just in the same nlight 7237 that everybody else had
John:
Well, there was lots of different popular cases.
John:
I remember I was still going to the computer players when full height towers were a thing.
John:
Did you ever get a full height?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Actually, the first one I built was indeed a full height tower because I wanted all those drive bays.
John:
I mean, you could live in there.
John:
Like you can make a little house like hops can live in there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't really remember.
John:
how huge is computers i think the only time i had excitement about the phenomena is i would go there with my friends and watch them assemble their crap pcs with the parts they bought the only part that i was excited about was i was excited to help them build their pc because i will say i want to go over their house and play pc games on it right um but also uh it later a little bit later i guess this was in the superstore when the dawning of the linux age minix before that and linux
John:
that was exciting because all right everyone knows you can build a pc but you can build a unix computer from these same pieces that was a novel concept because before that the only way you got a unix computer was like in a university and like you know sun would sell it to you for even more than a mac or whatever now it's like
John:
these same parts of the same flea market i can make a computer and run linux on it and so now i'm not building a crappy pc i'm running a linux server that's going to connect to the internet and it's going to be amazing oh goodness any other thoughts uh marco let's start with you on apple's 40th congrats
Marco:
I guess.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
They're such a big company now.
Marco:
They've come so far.
Marco:
It's kind of like the history of GE.
Marco:
They're so big that it's kind of hard to sum it up and to see what's going to happen next.
Marco:
I hope that they continue to be Apple, to continue to be Apple-y, to not lose their personality, and I hope there's a very strong future for the Mac, because almost everything we've talked about so far tonight in this celebration of their history was not just the history of Apple, but the history of specifically the Mac, and
Marco:
And now Apple does a lot more things.
Marco:
And I really hope the Mac doesn't get lost or neglected because it is so great.
Marco:
And while there is obviously tons of room for people to be doing their computing on iOS and other things, I do still think that these devices are not killing the Mac and they're not replacing the Mac.
Marco:
They're just a new thing.
Marco:
It's another thing that you could do
Marco:
In addition to or instead of if you want to.
Marco:
But the Mac itself I think is the core of all this stuff.
Marco:
It's the home base.
Marco:
It is the hub as they used to sell it by.
Marco:
And I really hope the Mac has a bright future.
Marco:
And I think it will.
Marco:
And I look forward to what that includes.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
You're right in saying that we haven't really talked about iOS much.
Casey:
And I think that's because I associate so much of like older Apple with the Mac because naturally these things weren't existent.
Casey:
But, you know, I have stories about the iPad.
Casey:
I have stories about the iPhone.
Casey:
But man, I really like using this as an opportunity to think about the Mac.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, final thoughts?
John:
Yeah, we didn't really get to the other pillars.
John:
I mean, they're kind of obvious.
John:
Maybe they're too close to home.
John:
But maybe I put in the notes, maybe I'll talk about the iMac a little bit next week.
John:
But then obviously after that, you know, you mentioned the iPod.
John:
And then, of course, you got the iPhone where in the obituary of Apple, if it was to die today at the young age of 40.
John:
iphone is line one right i mean it is such a so much a larger much more successful revolution of the same kind as the mac in that what apple said is here's the way the phones are going to work and this time the world was much faster to go oh yeah you're totally right that's it that's that's that's what we're going to do then you see all the pictures of like phones before and after the iphone
John:
Again, Apple's not first with a touchscreen phone, not even first with a mostly screen touchscreen phone, but such a huge revolution.
John:
So I feel like it's the Mac, maybe the iPod, and then the iPhone.
John:
For 40 years of computing, most companies don't even get one hit on the caliber.
John:
Not hit, not even just like popular product, but one sort of revolution where it is a dividing line between
John:
What did computers look like before they had GUIs, and what did they look like after, and what was responsible for that transition?
John:
What did phones look like before the iPhone, and what did they look like after?
John:
And iPod, what did digital musical players act like before and after, maybe sort of popularized digital musical player, but again...
John:
Most companies don't even have a single one of those.
John:
The biggest companies in the world might have one.
John:
Apple has two, which is phenomenal, two, maybe 2.5.
John:
And that's what I think defines Apple.
John:
It's first 40 years that it proved that it's the company.
John:
I mean, you could even put the Apple II in there.
John:
The line they used to put in there, press the bottom of the press releases.
John:
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And yeah, the Apple II was important, but you could say that if the Apple II didn't happen, then maybe the IBM PC might have and were they really that different.
John:
But the Mac really made something happen that I don't think... If the Mac didn't exist, we would have had to wait much longer for the first big Google computer.
John:
And the same thing with the smartphone.
John:
If the iPhone didn't exist, we probably would have eventually gotten to a similar place, but it would have taken way longer.
John:
Just look at what Android looked like in the days before the iPhone and what looked like after.
John:
So Apple is defined as this company that...
John:
has done this miraculous thing multiple times and therefore takes this magical place in our minds and our memories that it is not just a bunch of people who are in the right place at the right time and got lucky once that they somehow have figured out a way a system for you know a system for greatness and then same way it's similar to pixar or whatever if that system was steve jobs i guess we'll find out in 30 years when we say you know what it wasn't really a system for greatness it was really just this one amazing guy but i feel like
John:
There's been enough things that have happened and enough promise has been shown that it's not out of the question for Apple to have another iPhone-like product revolution somewhere in our lifetimes.
John:
Unlike self-driving cars, I'm pretty confident that is a feasible thing that could happen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh but if not if apple goes out of business today i'd still say you you would stand it up as one of the great companies ever to be on the face of the earth in all terms you could possibly measure financial success customer satisfaction which tim loves customer set and just an impact on the world like if you were to you know they ever do one of those montages of the you know the years that apple has existed um
John:
a lot of things that Apple did would appear in that montage, not because it would be glorifying Apple, but because they changed the way all of us live and work.
John:
And that's a hell of a thing.
Marco:
Thanks so much for our three sponsors this week, Hover, Blue Apron, and Betterment.
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:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
What is this ongoing iCloud Drive pages text edit failure?
Casey:
Is that something quick that we can just use as an after show?
John:
Yeah, that's a quickie because it's just complaining.
John:
I talked about this before.
Marco:
Do you really want to follow up that with complaining about Apple failures?
John:
that's fair point yeah it's just it's just a minor like update on this thing remember i talked about before like doing stuff in pages and it wouldn't let me save it's not me it's my it's my daughter she wants to write things yeah you had some kind of like it was some kind of like sync conflict right yeah and i just i she just wants to write plain text more or less or styled text and
John:
I don't know why I keep encouraging her to do this.
John:
Pages is in the doc.
John:
I say, oh, just launch Pages and do that.
John:
And it wasn't even like I was trying to have her edit on her iPad anymore.
John:
I gave up on that.
John:
But just a Mac.
John:
Just a single Mac.
John:
Opened a document and she typed stuff.
John:
She likes to write things.
John:
So she's got a bunch of writing programs.
John:
She typed a bunch of stuff.
John:
um and it was time for dinner to get off the computer or something else you'd save before you go and she couldn't save you command s and it gave some error and i'm like really it's a new untitled document created on a single computer with no syncing involved whatsoever and i can't save
John:
And at that point, I'm like, all right, just go and do your thing.
John:
Daddy will take care of this.
John:
I couldn't take care of it.
John:
I couldn't save this document.
John:
This is an untitled document.
John:
I could not save it.
John:
I had to copy and paste the text out of it, put it into text edit, and save it somewhere else.
John:
And I don't know what the moral of this story is, but it's slowly teaching me an important lesson.
John:
I feel like Marco unplugging his PC and connecting up the Mac.
John:
Just never use anything that touches iCloud or Pages.
John:
I don't know what it's teaching you.
John:
It's teaching me to be sad.
John:
And it's...
John:
It's making me unsuccessful at showing my daughter anything about computers.
John:
New document, type words, hit save.
John:
Complete, utter failure.
John:
She just has to leave the room.
John:
And when she comes back, I have to say, don't use that program anymore.
John:
Don't ask daddy why.
John:
It's too sad for words.
John:
And I had her use Microsoft Word.
John:
That's what I did.
John:
Because you know what?
John:
When you make a new document on Microsoft Word and you type words in it and you save, it saves the document.
John:
Pretty much every time, I'm pretty sure.
John:
Saves, document, local disk.
John:
Anyway, that's it.
Marco:
It's one of the problems with like, you know, as we've gotten so much more advanced in the technology, it's also gotten so much more complicated that the basics often don't work as reliably as they used to.
John:
Because it's not as basic.
John:
You think it's basic.
John:
You think, oh, I'm just saving a document to the local disk.
John:
But somehow, like, I mean, if I want to put on my computer hat for a second, I'm pretty sure what happened is a lot of documents, even text edit, when you make a new document, since it's like autosave enabled, it will make the new document in your iCloud drive, like by default, or maybe if that's the last place you saved or whatever.
John:
So unbeknownst to you, you think you're typing in a document that has not yet been saved, but it has been saved.
John:
It's been saved in iCloud drive.
John:
you know and like i said text that has been doing that since like the very first cloud enabled version you just open it up you take a new document and you don't know but it's just it's put in icloud drive and something is wrong with her specific icloud drive connected to her apple id so again i don't even think this is a systemic problem or a bug i think like something server side in her icloud drive is hosed and like it poisons anything you put there
John:
And at that point, like, the new document that she created was already essentially sort of autosave created in her iCloud drive.
John:
And trying to save it and give it a name gave some weird error like can't open untitled.
John:
Like, it was trying to sort of...
John:
i don't know may open the document and then resave it under a new name but it was already icloud like drive infected so if i had open pages and made a new document such that it auto saved to her desktop i think everything would have been five but it was too late i had i had a single window it's called untiled one or whatever it was called and it had the words in it
John:
and there was no action i could take other than copying and pasting the content out of that window to get that thing saved into a file on disk like literally nothing this is a single computer no syncing involved and so i can kind of understand how it didn't work but like you said marguerite's like oh the basics shouldn't work it's not basic an icloud a cloud connected drive synced by a background demon running on the thing with the you know document ubiquity and all these that's not basic at all it's far from it looks basic but it's not it's not it's just it's fiendishly complicated if it works fine but if it doesn't
John:
Regular people can't be expected to understand that.
John:
All they know is I hit save and it gave me an error dialog box and put me back into a window that was still unsaved and window called untitled.
John:
You know what you should have done?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Use VI or Emacs?
John:
Is that the answer?
John:
You should have drove it over to Craig's house.
God.