Can’t Innovate Anymore
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Hey guys, sorry for the shaky audio for the first five minutes of this.
We were recording onto a dying hard drive, and then five minutes later we fixed it.
So hang in there, and it gets better.
Special thanks to Mack Roar for letting us record in their awesome podcast studio here in sunny, windy San Francisco.
Yes.
I sound the same.
I don't think I sound any sexier.
Well, could you sound any sexier, John?
I mean, let's be honest.
I'm just going to leave that one out there.
So, stuff happened today.
Really, the keynote had an incredible mood and energy to it.
It started out first with Tim, and you could tell that his energy was up.
He was very positive.
He was almost aggressive towards competitors and just very lively, very energetic in general.
And you could tell all the presenters kind of went very quickly.
Pace was very fast.
It almost felt rushed at times.
Even before Tim came out, didn't you think it was weird that they started with that video?
I think they probably started with videos before, but that video opening made me think, because it wasn't about a specific product or anything like that.
It was about the philosophy of the company and little bouncing balls.
You assumed it was previewing kind of the aesthetic theme of iOS 7, which it turned out kind of sort of was.
And then the guys came out and raced cars, and you were like, what?
Yeah, we have to talk about that.
It seemed like, you know, when the car racing guys came out, I thought, okay, this is kind of early to be bringing out a third-party demo, but maybe this is some...
This is something cool.
Maybe they bought this company or they were integrating its technology somehow into iOS to provide some kind of cool AI stuff.
And then it just turned out to be this kind of weird demo.
It killed that energy that you were just talking about.
It did.
And it's kind of good that that was at the beginning, but it was like, oh, this big, big intro movie.
And then these car guys, you're like, and then it started going again.
And then after a while, you're like, you're thinking back, what was the deal with those guys with the car?
Not that the cars weren't cool, because it did look.
Tell me how that fit into the rest of the presentation.
Why was that there?
It was not part of the theme, because you were looking for maybe some AI, nope, no AI theme, no nothing like that, it was just, they were just there.
Very, very strange.
But other than that, I mean, I thought especially, really I think the star today was Craig Federighi.
I really think he, you know, everyone knew he had that shaky presentation a few years ago, and he's gotten better.
And he is just rock solid now.
And he had the best energy.
He had great banter, like when he went off script for a few words or a sentence here and there.
He was solid and awesome.
That's the secret to going off script.
No, maybe those were all scripted and he planned the jokes ahead of time.
But when you do it well, we're not supposed to know which parts you're ad-libbing, which parts you're... You see the weaker presenters like the guy earlier in an NDA session.
I'll tell you about the joke he did in the NDA session where he had a picture of his...
said it's not my boss like that one he had rehearsed right and you could tell that was pretty clear you could tell he had rehearsed the secret is making us not be able to tell uh and yeah with craig craig's presentation when his hand was shaking on the mouse and he was having trouble doing the gestures it was like two years ago or two years ago even that presentation probably wasn't that bad if you just watched him but the fact they gave you the close-up of his hand you realize oh god this guy is that nervous and for all we know he was that nervous this time too but we couldn't tell and so now it's like you can't even think back
Just shaking out of his mind.
Now it's hard to imagine that his hands – maybe they were shaking, but you could not tell.
He was just smooth sailing and just punching, punch, punch.
All the competitors just – Well, not only all the competitors, but they were punching themselves.
There were so many – Stop hitting yourself.
Yeah, right.
There were so many attacks or like backhanded attacks on skeuomorphic design and linen and leather.
Like what was the joke about –
We're all out of green felt.
Yeah, exactly.
We don't need the stitching to hold it to the screen anymore.
It's kind of like when Microsoft would slam, like, the previous version of Windows is crap.
This new version of Windows is great.
And usually you don't see Apple do the Steve Jobs thing.
We're like, here's iOS 6, and iOS 6 is great.
And we love iOS 6.
And then he tells you how great iOS 7 is.
But here they were kind of like, here's iOS 6 without saying so much.
And it was great.
And it had leather, and it had green felt, and it was gross.
And that's weird for Apple.
That is very weird.
Yeah.
It seemed like they were listening to everything that we were complaining about for all these years.
They were listening to sleep with us.
And, you know, in most ways.
At least the people on stage did.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Who knows?
I don't know if it was a good day to be Scott Forstall or not, but nobody knows that really.
Yeah.
I think it was really a very surprisingly bold energy from the presenters and from what they showed us.
You know, I think it's clear that, especially like with Tim, Tim was really on fire about against Android.
And I think this was, you know, Tim obviously is the kind of guy, like, he'll sit back and wait until he has something really great to say.
And, you know, he's patient.
You can tell he's patient.
and he will sit back and wait let the press rake them through the coals for six months about how they're not doing anything and then come out and just have a keynote like this which is just packed full of awesome stuff
Cool.
Are we back?
We are back.
All right.
What the hell are we just talking about?
All right.
Keep your eye on that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So what I was saying was that I found it very interesting that Tim Cook, you know, he's a Southern guy, which is not a bad thing at all.
He's very deliberate when he talks.
He's very slow when he talks and not in a bad way.
Just he wants to make sure he says what he wants to say.
And so today he and every other presenter that we saw seemed very rushed.
They were trying to get through things.
Not rushed.
I'm nervous.
Just rushed.
We have a lot to cover.
And I took a few notes with this barbaric pen and paper that I have.
And that was the first thing I wrote down was that, oh, man, Tim is in a hurry.
And if Tim is in a hurry, we must be in for one heck of a show.
And I feel like we got a heck of a show.
Part of it could have been timing.
Someone commented, I remember who was you, that they came in almost exactly at two hours.
And the other part of it is I think that it's like a Hollywood action movie where they're not trying to rush through the content so much as they don't want you to get bored ever.
Again, with the exception of the cars.
They didn't dwell on something for too long.
I think in a lot of Steve Jobs presentations, he would be enamored with some particular feature, whether it's how Windows minimized the dock or some feature of an application.
At a certain point, Steve is more fascinated with it than the rest of the audience is.
We're like, okay, Steve, we get it.
We know it's cool.
Go on to the next thing.
In this one, there was none of that.
They would show you a future.
You'd be wowed by it.
They'd move on to the next one, like just get moving.
And contrast this to the one last year where he had that interlude section with the video with the blind person navigating where he was – the video itself was kind of slowly paced, and he came on before it and talked with a lot of pauses and a lot of tempting of the hands and doing all that.
I don't remember if he did Steve Jobs.
It was very slow and deliberate where he wanted to have like a break.
Now it's like we don't have time for breaks.
We've got stuff to show.
We've got competitors to punch in the face.
We've got ourselves to punch in the face.
We need to just go, go, go.
Yeah, it was just nonstop.
With the exception of that weird car demo, the rest of it was just rock solid.
There was never a point where I was bored.
There was never a point.
I mean, it was just great.
Maybe Apple Retail was a little boring in the beginning because we're like, come on.
Oh, yeah, that doesn't count.
Everyone assumes that's boring.
The palate cleanser.
Yeah.
All right.
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All right, back to the show.
I think there was the OS X thing, which, John, I know we don't want to spend too much time on that, but what do you think of the name?
I don't think I like the name.
I thought the name was absolutely absurd.
I don't like that it's plural, and I understand that it's a place name, and I guess it's talking about the waves that are there, but I don't name whatever.
The name is the name.
I didn't like a lot of the cat names, too.
I can think of lots of other interesting California place names, but I assume they're not going to use any names that a non-Californian would recognize.
Like, I don't expect OS X Sacramento, you know what I mean?
Or Los Angeles or San Francisco or any of the cities that an East Coaster could name.
It's going to be places that we...
I can't think of the names, but I do really like the big Wave logo.
I like the little skinny X, even though none of those aesthetics seem to be reflected in the OS itself.
Yeah, it seems like they did dramatically change the iOS aesthetics, but the OS X aesthetics look pretty much the same.
With the exception of the Maps app and the iBooks app, which have weird iOS 7-looking icons, and now they look out of place on the metal dock next to all the other stuff.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, are you going to continue to do reviews?
Because everyone – as soon as this happened, anyone around us was asking, oh, are you still going to do it because they're not big cats anymore?
Oh, my goodness.
Is the world coming to an end?
Is this going to be the last one maybe?
What will the nerds do?
Are you going to do the next ten?
I don't know.
I was looking for an end to the cats as a place to put a cap on it.
But now that the end has come, I start thinking that –
I like having done all the big cats.
So now I feel like I can stop on a port and say, well, I did all the big cat releases, right?
And there is a little bit something about 10.10, even though this is technically the 10th release because we started from zero.
When 10.10 comes, I don't know.
Like...
I'll stop.
I have to stop eventually.
Right.
I don't know when that's going to be, but it's not going to be now.
I'm going to review this one because like the release date is what I wanted.
They said the fall.
I feel like I will have time to do it.
This does not look like it's a big release.
I think the review will be shorter.
This does look kind of like a Snow Leopard release because aside from them enhancing a couple of applications in interesting ways and enhancing notifications and little things like that.
A lot of the stuff they talked about was internal stuff.
And that's good.
I give that a thumbs up.
But it also means I don't think there's, you know, how many screenshots do you have of memory compression?
Probably not a lot, right?
Yes, but how much time will John Syracuse spend writing up all these little internal foibles and bits and so on?
It depends on how much information I can get about them because there's not going to be a session on their implementation of memory compression, right?
And so how do I extract information, super technical details about it, other than just simply explaining it to people who don't know what it is in a reasonable way?
That expands out somewhat, but I don't know how much detail I can get into because anything that's not a developer feature, they're not going to spend time at WWDC explaining.
The developer features I think they're going to explain are like how to make your app more memory efficient, more battery efficient, and the app nap things, like things that interact with your application.
They will probably spend a long time explaining how those things work, and I'll be able to expand on those.
But some of the stuff that was in the keynote, all I'm going to hear about it is what was in the keynote and what's in those PDFs.
They published a PDF of just technical details, but not really.
And that's the last I'll hear of those things, right?
And then just the proof will be in the pudding.
I'll use the thing and say...
Does it work like they say?
Is it better?
Whatever.
And you know at the last minute they're going to apply a new theme and make you change your screenshots.
That would be terrible.
So I should say that the three of us sat together in the keynote and I feel like there was a moment in which it was clear that they were about to announce the release date and I could feel all of the stress and anxiety and tension in the air from my friend John to my left because –
you were a little nervous, I'd say.
Yeah, it was like that last year and the year before, too.
But the difference was coming in, I think, both years coming in, I had thousands of words written already coming into WWDC because they had done, like, the super secret preview and the release development.
This was, like, total radio silence.
So that was kind of helpful in one respect because, like, look, they can't release it.
We haven't even seen it.
What are they going to do?
People have to have their apps work.
But on the other hand, it could have been this was a really slim release and they figured everyone's apps will still be compatible and it would be, you know, coming out in July 4th and then I would be screwed.
Yeah.
But no, as I said, fall.
I like fall.
I encourage them to take as much time as they need.
All right.
So do we want to cover the new hardware?
Yeah, let's do keynote order.
So next, I mean, MacBook Airs, I don't think there's that much to say.
I think what we really want to talk about is the new R2D2 Mac Pro trash can.
So, gentlemen, thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs in the middle.
What do we think?
Well, I said on the last show that even if they don't make a machine that suits my needs, if they feel like they're fulfilling the spirit of the macro by doing something that has just massive performance, even if it has to be some crazy-ass thing, you know, like I said, with PCI Express SSDs and some crazy arrangement, like...
they decided they could make something cooler or better by not having stuff inside it, fine.
Then at least it will be daring and interesting.
And I think this fulfills that criteria.
It is daring.
It is interesting.
They did crazy stuff with it.
And they did crazy stuff because they felt it was better.
And it seems like this machine is also focused on being...
much more powerful and capable than an iMac in some respects.
In other respects, people point out, look, it may be that you could spec out an iMac with more internal storage in this thing.
And that's kind of depressing.
Oh, that's almost definite.
But you will not be able to spec out an iMac with like more GPU strength in this thing because it's got those two gigantic, you know, whatever professional 3D GPUs in it.
And that's, they've made this machine for people who know what those GPUs are and who actually need them to do their work.
which, again, does not help me and does not fulfill my criteria for the Mac Pro, but it is totally a daring, new, interesting, bold design that they seem really committed to and excited about and had that cool video with the big booming bass and the Darth Vader look of the entire thing.
I give that all a thumbs up, but I am sad that they didn't make a machine that suits my needs.
It does not have internal drive bays.
The GPUs do not look well suited for gaming, or at least the drivers won't be, I suspect.
It's going to be stupidly expensive and not have a lot of internal storage.
And then, like, this is the most un-Apple-like thing.
And again, time has to tell because it's going to release in the fall.
Are they expecting everybody to buy third-party monitors, third-party 4K monitors, which they mentioned in the keynote, and third-party external Thunderbolt enclosures for drives?
Like, Apple's not even going to sell one of those.
You know, if Apple made one of those and it, like, matched the machine, people would buy it even if it was crazy expensive.
And now we're kind of thrown to the wolves.
Okay, well, here's this little trash can, and you go out and figure out what you want to connect to it.
Good luck.
I thought it was really wild.
And as someone who has no selfish interest in a Mac Pro, it seemed to me – and you touched on this, John – it seemed to me that they were fixing the problem of what do professional video and audio – basically media people need.
And 3D.
And 3D, exactly right.
You know, it's not for you guys who just want an extraordinarily beefy Mac.
It's not for Marco, who maybe just doesn't want to have cables all over the place.
It's for someone who is working at a studio, define studio however you please, and it's going to solve that problem, which I think it did fairly effectively.
Like the Pixar people, didn't they announce that they were going to have, if you want to see how the Mac Pro performs...
Yeah, in the tomorrow lunch session.
Yeah, come go to go, and Pixar's going to go and show how they can real-time render stuff with their, you know, because that's... I mean, it's not really going to give us that much information, honestly.
No, it's not, but they're going to show off what dual professional-quality GPUs can handle in there, and they're not gaming GPUs, and as far as I can tell, those are the only options.
Is those crazy... Like, that was always an option when you bought a Mac Pro.
What you could pick from the video cards was, like, you'd pick, you know...
the crappy stock video card, which sometimes didn't even have active cooling.
It just had like a passive heat sink from those days.
And then you'd pick, you know, maybe one or two cards that are bigger than that.
And then there was always the option was like add $3,000.
And it was like NVIDIA, whatever.
And you would never want that unless you're going to run Maya on it, right?
And nobody would want those.
And actually their gaming performance was not that great because the drivers for those things in gaming would not be, you know, but professional 3D people needed them.
And we would never pick that one.
But now it's like you get it whether you want it or not.
So I don't know.
I don't know if I'm going to end up buying this machine because I want to play games on it.
I don't want to have to buy a gaming PC.
And if it turns out that, like, the top of the top of the line Retina iMac or whatever has better gaming performance, I'm going to have to end up with an iMac instead of that thing.
God.
What will the world come to?
No, it's a nightmare.
I think – I mean the new machine, it's really interesting.
They did – they had this goal I think of making something bold and new and obviously the typical Apple modern values of making it smaller.
But they – in order to accomplish that –
What we have is a machine that has reduced choice and that does not cover many of the edge cases of needs that the previous Mac Pros covered.
And I have to wonder, like, you know, so they made this thing really small, but, you know, I didn't really need it to be small.
You know, like Mac Pro customers weren't really complaining that often that things were big.
I mean, when you'd have to move them, it kind of sucked to have the handles cut into your hands because they weighed like 60 pounds.
But, you know, for the most part, it wasn't that big of an issue.
You know, and you're right, you know, like, you know, now everyone's going to get these GPUs.
So everyone's going to have to pay for these GPUs.
Now, standalone workstation class GPUs used to be about $1,000 or $1,200 each has options.
Now we have two of them, and that's the only option.
So who knows what we're going to be paying for this machine.
There's no more internal drive bays.
There's internal PCI Express SSDs that look like there's room for two modules.
They look like they're probably custom modules.
And so we probably won't be able to easily upgrade them, at least not for a while.
And Apple's going to charge a bazillion dollars for them.
Exactly.
Like they always do.
exactly because it looks like the one the demo unit they have with the lid off upstairs um there there's a there's a spot for a second slot on the motherboard but the connector isn't even soldered on there so it's like this was an option when they screened the board but they didn't even put the connector on there if it wasn't configured with that and you know who knows how it will ship but it's it's looking like it might be like you have to buy it with two cards if you want that much storage and
And because of the kind of module they're using that's going to limit the amount of storage, I'm guessing the maximum might be 1 terabyte or 960 gigs when it ships if it's two 480 modules.
Maybe they'll be able to crank it up and get two 768s and have it be 1.5 terabytes.
Either way, it's going to cost a fortune for that storage.
Yeah.
And there's no hard drive options.
There's no two and a half inch bay.
And there's no PCI slots, which is going to anger video people because they're going to have to buy new capture hardware and all the PCI hardware that people used to use.
The thing is they emphasize like, oh, and it's so quiet and we got this fan and everything.
You have to hook up external drives to it.
And Apple doesn't make a super quiet, black, sleek X Thunderbolt.
So now I have to take this beautiful... Let's say this thing is beautiful and quiet and sleek and I sit it on my desk.
Now I have to just...
you know, buy some random third-party Thunderbolt drive enclosure that's going to have its own fans and its own stupid noise?
Well, so much for the quietness.
Like, it's not like you can, how long is the maximum Thunderbolt cable?
It's not like I can put them in a closet.
It's not, you know, I guess I could have, like, a SAN or something.
I think network drives are going to become more popular.
It's not, it doesn't provide the, even for people who want to do, like, video editing stuff, I don't, are they going to value the quietness and size?
Because it's immediately compromised by the way they have to use it, unless they're all using SANs for everything, I don't know.
Well, actually, I think a big production has what they usually do.
Well, then why have six Thunderbolt ports on the back of it?
Right.
I guess for six monitors, maybe?
Yeah, I bet monitors are actually a big reason why.
And also, one big problem with video is that there's no longer a dual socket model.
This appears to be single socket only.
They are going to use the Xeon E5 with the Ivy Bridge EP coming out this fall.
It is going to match out at 12 cores, but that's only because Intel's making a 12-core E5 this fall.
If they were continuing with their old way of doing things, you could have gotten 24 cores.
I mean, they moved to single socket, which allowed them to make the whole thing much smaller, much lower power needs, much lower thermal needs.
But video editors are going to really, I think, not react well to this machine for both the lack of card slots and for the only single socket option.
Those are the people who are buying Mac Pros, like all the really high-profit dual-socket models that start at like $5,000 today.
They're the ones who buy all those high-profit machines, and they're the ones who – like the iMac will not work for them, and it will never work for them because they actually need as much GPU performance as they can get to do their jobs well and to be economical.
I think it's like a bet on the future of like they assume more and more stuff is going to be moving to the GPU.
Yeah.
And they're counting on people to rewrite their applications, to use more OpenCL and to farm stuff off, because it's going to have so much more performance on those GPUs than it will have on that one CPU.
And it's just a question of tapping it.
Because if you think about it, very little you can do with that Mac Pro is going to tap those two GPUs, except for running a huge number of monitors and running like Maya or something that takes advantage of them or something that always use WorkState.
And everything else is just those GPUs just sleeping there.
Right.
Like, if I get one of these things, it's going to be such a waste of those GPUs because it's going to be showing text editors most of the time and Xcode.
Right.
And the thing is, like, we're always – you know, you always want – we want everything, right?
So it's a desktop class machine that's not a Mac Mini, so thumbs up there.
And it's not an iMac.
It doesn't have an integrated screen, so thumbs up there.
And a lot of it we loved.
We loved the Xeons, the ECC RAM.
And it would make your text editing better because you're pulling stuff off of really presumably a super fast PCI Express attached SSD.
And so things will open really fast.
Like it's got all those good qualities and then two grand worth of GPU that you don't want that you can't get rid of.
Right.
And so and we don't know, you know, the pricing of this is going to be very interesting because we don't know how much we're going to be charged for those GPUs.
It's not going to be the same cost as putting two big NVIDIA cards in there.
It's not going to be four grand worth of GPUs.
The question is how much can they shave off by soldering these things to the boards, having only one Xeon.
And by having this be the only option for every Mac Pro buyer, they have to have some volume advantage.
Maybe they got a nice deal from AMD on the GPUs.
I mean, who knows?
But that's a big question mark, I think, is the pricing and how much we're paying for those GPUs.
And it looks like they're not upgradable.
They have some kind of weird custom way to attach to the main CPU motherboard, but it doesn't look like this is going to be upgradable in any way except RAM and maybe those disk modules.
Everything in it is weird and custom.
Even the RAM seems to fold out on these little gills on the side of the thing.
was like a little that little plastic latch opens up and then the ram modules flap like it's totally weird and custom it looks kind of like i mean someone posted a picture of the 20th anniversary mac subwoofer like but the 20th anniversary mac was also similarly custom and as are all the macs like if you look at all the airs or the macbook pros nothing inside them is standard everything is made specifically for that model to fit exactly and that's true of the mac mini and the only computer left that it wasn't true of was the mac probes it's like oh that video card that's in there
That wasn't made, like, custom.
I mean, it was in terms of, like, manufacturing.
But it's a regular standard PCI Express card, right?
And you could take that card out, and it will physically fit inside a PC.
It probably won't work because, you know, you'd have to flash the thing.
But, like, it's made to a standard that was not made by Apple.
Nothing in this thing is a standard thing except, like, maybe the CPU.
The dims.
The dims are about it.
Everything else is some crazy board.
There's no standard SATA connector.
There's no 2.5-inch bays, 3.5-inch.
There's no optical drive bays.
There's nothing about it that's standard.
And so now it fits with the rest of Apple's product line because this is their vision of how to build computers.
Well, nothing on the inside is standard, but there's, what, four Thunderbolt ports?
Six.
Six Thunderbolt ports.
There's like four or six USB ports.
So I think the interesting thing about it is that there's nothing that's inside that's standard with the exception of the RAM, but almost every connection to the outside world is standard.
Yeah, no more ADC port or any other weird exotic things.
In fact, very few ports at all.
I wonder if those audio ports are the fake little optical ports.
Because the back of my Mac Pro has actual dedicated optical ports in addition to the – Yeah, you have like little SPDIF ports.
Yeah, right.
And like all that stuff, like I wonder how much they've sacrificed there.
And I wonder how much people – the other thing about it is the power supply.
We're debating whether – is the power supply internal or is there a brick?
It does appear to have a regular, you know, the three-pronged NEMA or NEMA, whatever it is, the plug, the standard plug.
It does appear to have the same, roughly the same type.
So it's almost certainly internal.
And I was thinking of it from audio perspective, like, because the Power Mac G5 had terrible, like, you'd get this electronic noise inside of the thing that would show up on your audio.
uh and i i still get it sometimes like you know because the analog audio about i was thinking well if i use optical audio out maybe that would be isolated like it was just a big box of electrical noise and this one you would presume would solve those problems well also it would be it would be a significant uh heat issue if they had a brick they would have to have a fan in it because that you know these the the highest tdp for this for the series of zeons they're using for the 12 cores is like 130 watts for the cpu alone
Yeah, I wonder about the whole thing in terms of power, because those GPUs are not cool.
Like, each one of those would require, like, a big active cooler on each of those cards, plus gigantic fan on the CPU.
I guess they get away with not having hard drives in there probably saves a lot on heat.
The thermal design does look really nice, and I do like, for noise reasons, I do like how the fan appears to be the only moving part.
But, you know, it is... I think my two big questions on it, which I guess we'll learn closer to launch...
My two big questions are entry price and Retina displays.
Yeah.
Because all that GPU power, you know, maybe the reason why they beefed up the GPUs like crazy for everyone who buys this thing.
Maybe the reason why is that they expect to actually ship a Retina desktop display sometime during the lifetime of when people are going to own this thing.
And whether it's at launch, that's, you know, pushing it, I think.
But...
Maybe next year they release a retina desktop display that you can plug into this.
Do you think they've decided that the users they're targeting with this already have displays or don't want Apple displays anyway?
That seems crazy to me.
Maybe someone in the industry knows, oh, we never buy the Apple displays.
We always have our specially calibrated whatever display.
But that...
It seems like leaving money on the table.
If you're going to sell someone on this really expensive computer and they can at least have an option for like, oh, and pick the Apple super expensive 4K display, even if it's not better than third party, because you're going to make money on it.
And if you make it nice and it matches the display, people will buy it, I guess, right?
Maybe we'll see at the launch event.
Maybe they have a new display for people to buy.
Maybe they don't.
I don't know.
And the hard drives annoy me because it's like, you're going to buy this Mac Pro for a bazillion grand and now you do not have, you can't do a time machine backup.
Because, oh, you got to buy Thunderbolt disk for that.
Now you're just like an iMac user.
Oh, you need a stupid external desk.
Goodness, no.
Yeah, Time Machine is one of the reasons why I so appreciate all my internal drive bays.
Because it's like I don't – I hate the – as Katie said, I hate the clutter of a desk covered in hard drive enclosures and all those extra cables and power bricks that come with them.
Yeah.
turn their hard drives on because they're not bus powered.
Right.
And all that crap.
I hate all that stuff.
And, you know, these days we are seeing a lot of moves towards network storage, things and like time capsules.
I'm sure they want you to buy that instead.
You know, like there's all the, they don't, historically they have not worked nearly as well as local disks for Time Machine.
Even just FireWire attached disks, internal SATA has been the most reliable way to do Time Machine or SuperDuper or anything.
And it's quieter and it runs cooler.
Disk's been down when they're not in use.
There's no extra power.
It's just, you know.
Yeah, so I think this will be interesting.
I think I'm probably going to end up buying one just because I really want that CPU power, and that will help me a lot.
But it is a little disappointing that the compromises that they made that don't necessarily seem like they're achieving goals that any of us are really asking for.
Yeah, well, it's Apple's goal.
Go ahead, Casey.
Yeah, and so that's the thing is that it seems to me like Apple took their vision of what
excuse me, what a media person would want, what a studio would want.
And they said, oh, they're going to want an enormous amount of graphic power and a pretty fast CPU, and that's all they should need.
When, as you guys were talking about, in reality, that might not really match up with what a studio would actually want to buy.
So it's as though Apple invented this phantom persona that they wanted to build this thing for,
But it's certainly not you guys who want a gazillion internal drives and the ability to add and remove things easily.
And it may not even be for the studios because they're going to want their own video cards.
They're going to want more internal storage, et cetera, et cetera.
I think they had to have been in touch with –
One would think.
They didn't have a video.
Sometimes they have a video of the people who they built this thing for.
Sometimes they do it with software or whatever.
Like, oh, this new version of whatever is amazing.
This new version of Aperture changes the way I... And they show all the photographers who presumably they had some kind of early feedback with.
They must have had not a phantom persona, but like a real...
Maybe Pixar.
Maybe Pixar.
Maybe that's why they're doing the lunch session.
Oh, Pixar loves these.
Now they can run Maya really well and it doesn't take up a lot of room.
I think there is a phantom customer, but I wonder why that's decided to focus on.
This machine, though, it seems like the philosophy that it adheres to is the one that Apple has for all of its hardware.
Custom parts, as small and as quiet as possible, as simple as possible, no standard anything.
We are not a PC manufacturer.
We don't make a box that you can slap a bunch of stuff into.
Because slowly, all of Apple's computers stopped being that until there was almost nothing in them that was, like, standard or standard opening or card slots or whatever.
And even, like, the hard drives, like, we can replace those with our own, not really custom, but sort of custom little, you know, instead of 2.5-inch SATA drives, we can use these little, what is it, the mSATA connector or whatever?
Yeah, like the sticks.
But it's not – it's, like –
I think Anantek, he was analyzing, trying to figure out what it was, and he said there was this M2, it was MicroSata 2.
I think that it didn't appear to be that, and it looks like it's just a custom connector, custom modules, custom everything.
So that's how they decide, that's how you make computers from now on.
Right.
In the same way that the MacBook Air is made, it was the precursor.
Now all their computers are like that all the way down to the Mac Pro, which is just a philosophy that I don't think they consulted on other people.
Hey, you guys, do you think we should make the battery sealed in on all our laptops?
Do you think we should get rid of 2.5 inch SSDs and replace them with this little stick thing?
Like they just decided this is the way computers should be built.
This is the way Apple computers are going to be built.
And then also, oh, by the way, what would you guys like?
Okay, we'll build you one of those using our philosophy of all custom parts and crazy stuff like that.
Right, and certainly I think this is going to bring Apple more profit because now we can still probably put in third-party RAM, but now we can't put in third-party drives anymore.
That machine will just reject third-party RAM.
You'll try to put it in, but it will spit it out the side and grind it up in the central fan, and it will come out in chunks.
I'm sorry.
I only accept Apple-approved RAM.
Mac Pro Shredder.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's talk about our second sponsor and then we'll move on to iOS 7.
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iOS 7 gives you many new reasons where you might want to send push notifications to your application.
It does, actually, yeah.
That's a perfect segue, John.
That's very true.
So what do we think about iOS 7?
I got to tell you, I haven't – so Marco put it on his not normal phone and his old 4S.
And we've all played with it for, I don't know, maybe between all of us, some total of five minutes.
And so we haven't had a chance to really process and think about it.
Since I'm talking, I'll start with my own thoughts.
My first thought is I don't know what to think.
I feel like I need to chew on it a little while because –
It is bold.
It is absolutely bold.
And the other thing I will say is the first thought that I had and I think all of us had the moment we saw the home screen is, holy crap, those icons have got to go.
They're just rough.
Actually, the first thought I had when I saw this, when they finally revealed what it looks like, and even in that little demo video with the dots that was in the beginning, is –
So we complain about giving credit to like, oh, you're not the first person to make something with a touchscreen.
But we give credit to Apple because they made the first one that didn't suck or whatever.
Or, you know, Apple kind of with making a phone that's all a screen.
Like, oh, Nokia had a phone that was all a screen beforehand.
Like, those earlier ones don't count.
It's like whoever sort of –
I mean, right or wrong, like whoever popularized it, whoever was famous enough and did the thing, they get the credit because no one knew about it when it was just on the Nokia phone.
But then when Apple did it, you know, touchscreen phones everywhere or the GUI or any of these other things.
And in this case, I really feel like this visual style, which is the first thing that hits you in the face with this, seeing the home screen, seeing all the other stuff.
Credit to this visual style, planting the flag in this, goes to Microsoft with Metro.
They were not the first person to come up with this style.
They were responding to, like, the things in the air about the design community, but they put that flag in the ground.
And I remember talking about it on Hypercritical where we were talking about, after I just watched that Windows Metro video for Windows 8 for, like, an hour and a half, and I looked back on my iOS device, and it looked old and creaky and clunky.
And so...
This does not look exactly like Metro.
It isn't a ripoff of Metro, but Microsoft is the one who planted the flag of this is the new visual style.
And if you stare at this long enough, even if you hate it and think it's ugly, when you look back at your other thing, your other thing looks crappy.
And I think iOS 7 is following that trend in terms of Microsoft planted the flag and Apple followed.
And it will probably, ugly icons aside, will probably have the same effect where if you stare at it for a long period of time as you're developing your app, when you go back to your iOS 6 and you look at it, you're going to be like...
Ugh.
It's going to be like pinstripes.
No matter how much you hate the ugliness of iOS 7, I think that effect is going to be there.
And that is startling to me.
And as Gruber said in his posts, this is a polarizing thing.
But I feel like there's going to be a ratcheting effect where we won't be able to go back.
I think it's – I would even say it looks almost like it's been heavily influenced by both Windows Phone and Android in a lot of its graphical treatments and styles.
Like I think the new toolbar icons in Safari –
They look very Android-y in their design and their style.
They're all thin, abstract lines.
It really does look like Android.
You're right, the rest of the system looks a lot like Windows.
Not at the point where you'd confuse them, but you could tell this is obviously a very heavy influence.
In the same way that you can say Android does not look like iOS, but you're going to say...
Face it, Android is the way it is because iOS came along and made an OS where you only interact with it.
Because if you look at Android before iOS and after, and no one's going to say, oh, Android rip off the look and feel of iOS, because it doesn't.
It looks totally different.
But you're going to say Android looks the way it does because iOS exists.
And I'm going to say, like, both iOS 7 and Android...
share the influence, I think, at this point of Windows 8 Metro, which may not have been a successful product, but was the first highest profile, boldest iteration of that design philosophy, which, again, I don't think Microsoft necessarily invented, but it doesn't matter, just like Apple didn't invent the GUI or the touchscreen phone.
It really is remarkable to point out that Microsoft has set a new design trend.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm hesitant to say set, but they are the standard bearer for it.
They were there first.
They planted it, and they were the big company that put it out there.
And it's like other people would say when they saw Winder and Metro, oh, that looks exactly like what I've been doing.
Hundreds of little people probably all said that, but they aren't Microsoft.
And that's just how the business works.
And it's...
Yeah, it's startling not just that it was Microsoft, but that Apple is now reacting to it, you know, with the Redmond Start Your Photocop.
Not that I'm saying they shouldn't react to it because fashion and design trends, like, that's how it works.
But this is one that Apple is not the standard bearer for.
They're just not.
No, and the thing that I thought was most surprising was during Tim's part of the keynote early on, I think it was his beloved customer sat, which I hate that.
But when he was talking about customer satisfaction numbers and the way he was talking about Android –
It felt like he knew that Android had a lot of users, but he just didn't believe in his heart that they were an actual competitor.
And the way he was talking, even though it was very briefly, the way he talked about Microsoft was that they were the ones that Apple should be worried about.
I mean, this is all based on my interpretation –
It's not like he came out and said it, but I got this feeling that Microsoft was the actual competitor and it was just hammered home by the way iOS 7 looks because it is not a rip of Metro, but it's absolutely – you're right.
It's a very heavily influenced by Metro.
That's the direction everyone is going in.
Right.
And Apple was not out there first to saying, come on, everybody follow me.
And it's weird because usually the person who's out there first with the design direction of like, hey, everybody, let's make touchscreen phones is also the leader in the market.
And Microsoft is not the leader in the smartphone market or really anything else, you know, like these days.
But they they were definitely the leader in that vision.
And it's.
i mean i wonder this is like alt history stuff say forestall is not there and doesn't force there's no forestall rise to power does johnny ive beat windows metro to the punch with with a software interface that looks like this and the only reason he didn't was because the combination of forestall and jobs were so they loved so much leather and 3d effects and thick things and texture and like the story of steve jobs uh someone showed their app to steve jobs in the elevator and
At Apple, some Apple employee showed it to him, and Steve looked at it a few seconds and said, this background needs more texture.
He gave it back to him.
Remember that story?
Yep.
Like, Vegas, those guys just love texture.
And maybe that was a diversion.
I think it was a fruitful diversion.
I like the look of the old OS, but I got to say, it starts looks pinstripe-y.
Like even in the demo when they said, here's how you can test your app to make sure the metrics still work in iOS 6 or 7.
They switched it back to 6 mode and everyone went, ooh.
Yeah, it looked really old.
And this is not an audience that's like gaga for iOS 7.
Like we're not all, oh, iOS 7 looks gorgeous.
We're saying iOS 7 looks weird, but it's the contrast.
It's like being dipped into hot water and then cold water.
You're like, oh, I didn't like either one, but this feels cold now.
I think what's worth pointing out, though, is that while iOS 7 does appear...
By looking at one static screen, it does appear very Metro-y in a lot of ways.
Where they really departed from both what Android and what Windows are doing is in the depth.
It was very important that nobody from Apple said flat at any point.
The word flat was never used to describe this design because it's not textured and not using gradients very much, but...
You know, very much like like Lauren Britter's letterpress, there is a depth to the interface and they use depth very clearly and they use shadows and they use translucency, which I'm a little iffy on.
It looks a little bit Windows Vista.
But, you know, they use they make heavy use of layering and then the parallax stuff and the transitions are all different.
It is very much like iOS before 7 had all these textures and gradients and everything, but the way things would move, like the way view controllers would push onto the stack.
It was flat planes.
Yeah, you were just moving around flat planes together.
And there wasn't a big separation.
If you imagine them as a bunch of cards on the desk, the cards were all touching each other.
Exactly.
Like they would slide past each other and in front of and behind, but there was never like, oh, this card is a centimeter floating above the
Exactly.
And that's how Windows Metro feels.
They do a little bit with the text, you know, like the text being kind of partially off screen.
You scroll it in.
They do a little bit with that, but for the most part, it still feels like you're moving around flat panes.
And iOS 7, I mean, we haven't had time to play with it much yet, but the way it looks in the videos and stuff, it looks like it has this great sense of depth and layers to it that you don't really see in the other OSes.
They're trying to sell that, but that is a – I mean, this is – we'll talk about iOS 7 overall.
That is a difficult transition to go from everyone who's got their apps that look like the way they do now and Apple says, here's a new direction.
And when they show their own apps, like, sure, they can make a mail match that and they can make a Safari match that or whatever.
But if you look at Safari compared to the old version of Safari and if you were to say, okay, well, that's how much Safari had to change to match into the aesthetic and functional and conceptual model –
Now take your app and how it looks.
You have to change as much as Safari change.
And that's a lot.
That's not a little.
It's not like, oh, just make your toolbar work.
Because Safari is just wildly different in terms of how the toolbars work and how it's practically a new app in terms of the UI.
Like none of the UI is shared.
Like the web rendering is shared and improved.
But that's a lot of work to be able to fit into this new world.
So it might be kind of like Apple's apps fit into this new world.
And then you launch someone else's app.
And it looks a little different, but the conceptual sort of physics model of how it works is the same.
You're sliding things in and out.
And, I mean, I guess you have the new animations on, like, the sheets that come up and stuff like that.
But you're not going to be getting any, like, I guess the picker has its little, I don't know.
It might be weird to use this on day one and see all the built-in apps looking this way and all of the third-party apps looking like iOS 6 with a fresh coat of paint.
Right.
And the thing – there were two things that struck me about it.
The first was – the way I would describe iOS 6 is how would you make something look 3D when you only have two dimensions to play with?
And you would have – and I don't know the design-y terms to describe it, but that's kind of how it felt was let's take something that's flat and let's pretend that it's not.
Put shading on it.
Right.
And iOS 7 is – obviously the screen is still flat, but iOS 7 is now we are putting some actual depth into the interface, and it's not a fake anymore.
It's real.
And what are we going to do about that?
And so that, I think, to me was the most striking difference.
And then in terms of what you were saying about the apps, the funny thing about it is as time went on with iOS 6 or iOS Visual Interface Gen 1 –
everyone got more and more away from standard UI kit elements.
And so, for example, my little app that I have in the App Store, it looks extraordinarily dated now because I never really bothered with appearance proxies or anything like that.
I never did custom UI elements.
And so now, at this very moment, or at least up until today, it looked very old.
But I downloaded the new Xcode and ran it in...
Excuse me, the new Xcode.
And it actually looked just fine.
So the advantage of staying with standard UIKit elements is I blended reasonably well right off the bat.
And I'm not saying that that's going to be true for everyone.
It's just it's funny to me that all these people who went really wild with really, really custom user interfaces because they kind of had to in order to stand out.
Now we're going to kind of have to pay the price in certain cases.
Some developers could smell where the wind was blowing, like our friend underscore David Smith, whose weather app, who I can't remember the name of.
Check the weather.
He brought up a control and he was testing it on iOS 7.
And I said, oh, is that the new like OS player control?
Actually, this wasn't the weather app.
It was some other app that he makes.
He has too many of them.
And he said, no, that's... I believe it was Feed Wrangler.
Yeah.
And he said, that's a UI that I drew.
And I'm like, well, that looks like iOS 7 already.
And Twitterific is another great example of another app that sort of... And the weather app itself, or the Yahoo weather app for that matter.
They...
They reacted to the same—I mean, Microsoft, because Microsoft came out with Metro, like that same—the direction the wind is blowing is that way.
So if you did a custom UI and you did it in this theme, your app will not necessarily look out of place, at least in a static screenshot, in iOS 7.
And those people have got to be like, wow, this is great.
I don't have that much work to do.
Whereas the guys with super-duper 3D-rounded custom buttons that are trying to look like the OS buttons in iOS 6 but not really—
they have a lot of work to do because you cannot put one of those buttons on a screen, on an iOS 7 screen.
It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Yeah, that's why there's really going to be, I mean, this I think by far is going to be the iOS release that has developers needing to do the most work.
And, you know, you're right that I think there's going to be the two extremes of developers who use UIKit controls mostly unmodified will be pretty much fine with almost no changes.
And people who make their entire interface custom, they're going to be fine, too.
Especially if the look they chose matches iOS 7.
Correct.
If they've made it entirely custom and everything has grass growing on it, well, then they're kind of screwed.
Like, I worry a little bit about TweetBot.
Like, that style...
that might not fit in well with iOS's new style.
The whole style of those richly colored and gradiented apps that have all custom stuff.
But that is kind of custom, too.
What if you just left it like that?
And then you go out of this OS and then you're into Tweetbot.
Like, doesn't your app become even more distinctive?
Yeah, it might.
I guess we'll have to see.
The other choice is redesign your whole freaking app.
Every single button in control.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Like, Twitterific is a good example of, like, how they lucked out big time.
I mean, you know, they saw where the style was going also.
But it was very clear, like, Twitterific, when it came out, looked totally radical.
And now it's looking like, oh, that's going to fit in very well.
Yeah.
But I think it's the developers who are in the middle who are going to have probably the most work to do, which I've always been in this camp, especially with Instapaper.
With the magazine, I did a lot of custom stuff.
But with Instapaper, I was always in the camp of use UIKit stuff and then modify it slightly or modify it to do things that it can't do.
So you fake this shape or you fake this pixel.
If that's been your approach, I think there's going to be a lot of work.
What are the iPad version of Instapaper?
That looks like it had weird custom stuff on the side, doesn't it?
The iPad version will actually be okay because the iPad version was almost entirely custom.
I think Instapaper for iPhone is going to have some issues.
But fortunately, it's not my problem anymore.
Tip to Guy English if you're listening.
No, I think – and the magazine should be fine too.
But I think what you're really going to have to consider and what we're going to see, this is going to be an uncomfortable transition this fall when this comes out for developers, for users because so much is different.
I think apps that use mostly the old stuff, even if you can get them to not look broken, they will start feeling old and dated.
One of the biggest changes is the way that view controllers have this new depth and they kind of push over.
They've almost adopted the basement interface metaphor as the way those things move and are spatially arranged.
They've kind of adopted that for view controllers now, for the navigation pushes and stuff.
I think if your app uses the old style stuff where you have full screen view controller and then you're going to push down to another level and everything slides off screen and new thing slides on.
If you're doing that a lot, I think it's going to start to feel old.
Even if it looks okay, it's going to feel like an antiquated design.
And there's so much new stuff with parallax, with physics, and just new styles, new paradigms.
So much new stuff that I feel like...
You're going to have to significantly rethink your app in a lot of cases to make it feel modern and at home in iOS 7.
And I'd be shocked if anybody could really pull it off very well without dropping support for iOS 6 and before.
Yeah, I think the biggest visual trend, aside from all the stuff that's obvious, like looking at the pictures, is this was a big trend back in the earlier iOS days, and developers of their own accord have been abandoning it.
But back in the old days, every single freaking app had a top bar and a toolbar thing on the bottom.
I forget what the names of those are, right?
And now they're like...
And people started to give them up.
First, they gave up the bottom one and tried to do everything with the top one.
And then they tried to like have the top one so you could hide it.
And Apple's apps in iOS 7, it's like everything is full screen.
Your controls, if they're there at all, have to be minimal and maybe make them disappear when people aren't using them.
It's just like your app fills the entire screen from top to bottom, including even the status bar, which is now like translucent.
And your app is drawing underneath that.
I mean, it's not so much you can do because the status bar is going to have stuff in it.
It's not like you can draw there.
But that is a totally different philosophy.
And it's kind of weird that the screen got taller and they said, also ditch those stupid bars on top and the bottom.
You just get everything out of there.
Even more room for the content.
And that's part of the thing that looks old about it is when you see, like, it's like a hat and, like, a belt.
It's got a utility belt on the bottom, and it's got, like, this headband or hat on the top.
And then it makes the already small window.
And through those two things, you can see your app hiding behind it, and those are, like, the button controls.
And now it's, like, maybe some wispy words in a small font at the top and maybe, you know, nothing on the bottom.
And then everything disappears when you scroll, and if you tap it, the words come back, and you can tap them.
That is, like, you will have to change your application.
And that's why, like you said, you can't just say, okay, well, I'll just do conditionals and say if you're on iOS 6, draw crazy-ass toolbars.
But if you're not, you're making two apps at that point.
Right.
You can't change your entire interface or, like, fundamental parts of its navigation for just iOS 7 and keep all of it.
I mean, that's just ridiculous.
But I don't know.
And I think...
This is obviously the beginning of a new paradigm in a lot of ways, and I don't think Apple got everything right.
We said earlier that I think the icons are pretty rough.
One of my friends described the icons as they look like somebody's first Illustrator project.
and that i think is pretty apt um i i'm shocked at how bad they are honestly the thing is that they're bold they're not because i can imagine icon designs that fit exactly with this aesthetic that do not look as ugly like desaturate the colors like they could think of the super desaturated like os 10 things when they took all the color out of the sidebar icons or whatever you
You could do a super desaturated, subtle version where all this is just beautiful, simple, flat line art.
I'm saying flat to mean like they have not shaded stuff to make it look like it's puffy.
Like everything is, you know what I mean?
Like it's supposed to be like ink drawing printed on paper.
Just don't use like bright pink and bright purple and like don't use such saturated colors.
And it would still fit with the aesthetics theme because the aesthetics theme is like, oh, the buttons don't have borders around them.
They're just words.
And the words have a color to let you know that they're active.
Like, that theme is not in itself ugly and is nice, but the icons are just like, I'm pink and purple, and I got a yellow pointy thing on my spinning dial, and I'm Safari, and Newsstand, look at me, I got Fisher-Price books on my, and God, Game Center.
Like, they got rid of the stupid green felt, but now it's like just giant blobs of Jell-O.
It feels like a Barney show or just like a preschool show.
I found the felt and the parlor game thing insulting.
I find this insulting too.
They still do not understand how gamers would like to see themselves or how they identify.
And again, maybe they don't care because they're not making something for gamers.
But it's not attractive.
And going back a sec, just to finish that thought, I think they are starting this whole new paradigm.
And they didn't get everything right.
I think a lot of this stuff, a lot of things now are more gesture-based and therefore are harder to discover.
A lot of things that are buttons or are things that cause things to happen don't look like buttons anymore.
And it's like there's all these changes that...
Some of them I think we can agree.
John Gruber wrote a pretty good post last night about how the training wheels are no longer necessary.
People know how to work touchscreen devices now, and you don't need everything to look like a button and things like that.
I think that's true, but I think Apple might have gone a little bit too far in the other direction.
I think time will tell whether they have to course correct a little bit or not.
But ultimately, I think whatever Apple and developers do with this this year, we're going to have to revise significantly next year.
But once we see this thing in action, once the whole world is using this new paradigm and these new standards, then we can start making changes and seeing how it works in real use.
Yeah.
I think it's going to be a really uncomfortable transition period while we all figure this out.
I think it's exciting.
I think, you know, I think Apple has a lot of revision they need to do with the styling of it, but I think it's exciting overall.
Like, I like the animations.
I like...
Basically, to clarify what I like, I hate the icons and I hate some of the text and layout decisions they've made, but I love the 3D stuff.
I love the depth.
I love the animations.
That stuff, that all rocks for me.
The best example of the training wheels thing, I think, is the lock screen because everyone knows how to slide to unlock.
Right now.
And it still says slide to unlock and it still has an animation that goes from last slide, but it no longer looks like a little inset plastic thing that you drag along a little track cut into the top of your phone.
They no longer need that.
But I think on the other hand, one of the things that like that we all know, you know, the little.
What is it, the rectangle icon with the arrow leaping out of it to the right?
The share.
The share thing.
Or the fact that the gear menu is setting.
Nerds know what those things are.
But I've seen plenty of regular people using iOS devices, and they don't know how to, like, share a photo.
Despite the fact that seven apps that they've used have shown in all seven that they'll square with the arrow leaping out of it is probably, like, how you share something.
The word share is more...
more of an affordance for them than that stupid little icon.
Again, despite the fact that icon is used everywhere, you think you would pick up the pattern.
Like, oh, when I want to share something from the app, I hit that little rectangle.
Now that it actually says share and the fact that it's blue everywhere shows you can tap it, I think that actually is...
a trade off in the other direction and they made an emphasis of that like we're using words instead of icons because sometimes icons can be inscrutable and even though nerds pick up the patterns really quickly regular people don't so it's interesting that they're like not hand holding you on it because once you learn swiped open no one forgets that it's like that's it you know it you do it a bazillion times it's burned into your memory it only happens in one place the context is clear
Maybe people aren't learning gear is settings or share is that little rectangle thing and it's better to have the words on them.
So I think they're trying to react to a population that is learning how to use smartphones but at the same time recognizing the things that people are failing to accomplish with smartphones because of these stupid inscrutable little icons.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And to go back to what you were saying, Marco, about the animations, the animation to go between like an app and the home screen, it's hard to describe, but I love it.
I think it's really well done.
I think it looks great.
The new multitasking setup, I feel like something's just a little off about it.
Perhaps that the little screenshot of whatever app you're looking at needs to be a little bigger or something.
It doesn't feel right.
It doesn't feel like I think even Palm West felt better, which is a very similar metaphor for me.
Yeah, and I'm not sure what specifically doesn't feel right.
I am totally thumbs up on the premise of it.
I think it's a lot better than what we've got with the little multitasking tray in iOS 6.
But it didn't feel right, but I'm totally behind the principle of it.
And just those little affordances, just that animation to the home screen and the multitasking gesture, the multitasking view –
That alone makes me clamor for putting this on my carry phone, which I'm not going to do because I did that with iOS 5 and I hated myself for it.
Yeah, by the way, we've seen a few of our friends have put this on their carry phones.
And we've seen the reboot.
I would not recommend installing the iOS 7 beta on your carry phone.
I didn't do it, thank God, but it looks like it's pretty unstable and not ready at all.
Put it on the night phone only.
Yeah.
I think it's interesting, too, that the iPad beta is not out yet and that they didn't show anything on iPads yet.
Yeah, they flashed up a static screen shot, I think.
It was probably fake.
I mean, ever since the iPad has existed since 2010 and since iOS 3.2, it's always had a crazy mix of just blown-up iPhone UI and
and its own custom stuff.
And generally, iPad apps that used stock UI kit stuff looked way worse than iPhone apps that used stock UI kit stuff.
And I wonder if they're going to take this opportunity, well, if they're either going to take this opportunity to make the iPad version more distinct from the iPhone version, or if they went into this design trying to make just one design that looked better on both, rather than have a phone design that just blows up kind of to iPad.
Yeah.
But it seems weird going back to Safari.
Do you want an iPad screen for the controls of Safari just to disappear as soon as you start scrolling?
Because space is not as much of a premium.
You have that extra space.
So is the solution, oh, well, on an iPad, the toolbar doesn't do that shrinking thing?
Or is that an opportunity to find out something better you can do with it?
I don't know.
I think that's why the iPad always feels like the red-headed stepchild.
It's like, it kind of gets a phone UI stretch or a custom thing or whatever.
Maybe now it doesn't.
Sometimes I don't feel like, shouldn't they decide to do something like make the standard UI on the iPad tailored to the iPad and...
Make it so you could make an app with all standard UI on an iPad that both looks different from the iPhone version and is better in ways to take advantage of the larger screen.
Yeah, I guess we'll have to see what happens when they show us the iPad version because we haven't seen any of it.
And, again, we're all assuming it's, like, time pressure.
Like, you know, we have to have these things ready for the keynote.
What can we do?
Oh, how about we just take all resources off the iPad version until after the keynote?
Fine.
Like, that's, you know, that's a way to meet the deadline, and it's fine.
Like, whatever.
It's not due until fall.
But if you have an iPad app, now you're just kind of, like, twiddling your thumbs going, all right, well, I'm going to have to do something.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of other things iOS 7 related to talk about.
But in terms of the visual stuff, are we saying yes, no, or maybe?
I think I'm saying – to back you guys up, I like it-ish.
I think it's jarring.
But what John said especially earlier where you look at your current iOS 6 device and you go, oh.
And so I think there's going to need to be some tweaks.
But certainly it's looking a lot more modern.
It's looking a lot more fresh.
And so I think I'm behind the changes, but I definitely want to put it on a device and play with it for a while.
It was time for a change.
That's the bottom line.
Whatever it is, it was time for a change, and this is a change.
I mean, people have already complained.
They're like, oh, I think Jeff Atwood said, oh, I've seen the future, and it's just more icons on a background.
Yeah.
Shockingly, Jeff Atwood didn't like something that Apple did.
They didn't change that part of it, but the design language of the OS and even the fundamental features like multitasking and stuff, this is a change.
A change was due, and I really do feel like we won't be able to look back at the old stuff.
Maybe it won't look pinstripes awful, although I think that blue they used for the top bar will look pinstripes awful.
I think it almost already does at that point.
And we have plenty of chances to refine this because...
They've refined the current iOS look that's changed drastically from 1.0, but it was clearly an evolution of a single beast.
And this is the first iteration of whatever this thing is.
So six more versions from this.
This thing could look very different, but still be a direct descendant of iOS 7.
So I'm excited to see a new stage in evolution, even if this is kind of the awkward half-form embryonic version of it.
Yeah, I like the foundation they've laid out here.
And I like...
the direction they're heading.
I don't like a lot of the individual little choices they've made here, but that's going to change over time.
That's going to be refined, and we'll see.
And we should also, before we run too much out of time, we should really talk a little bit about the technical changes with...
I think the two big things going into it that were on most people's wish lists were – at least most geeks' wish lists were better multitasking and better inter-app communication support or at least some kind of like contract or intents-like system.
And we got one of those and we didn't get the other one.
And I think that's probably worth talking about.
So we didn't get –
The the Android like intense or the Windows like contract systems where an app can say, I know how to share photos who can take a photo or, you know, I want to share a URL or I can open URL.
So whenever anyone else has a URL to share, show my app is something they can send it to, you know, things like that.
We didn't get anything like that as far as we know.
Or changing the default apps, leveraging a system like that.
Correct.
Right, yeah, being able to say, I'm going to use Chrome as my default browser or whatever.
Yeah, we didn't get that either.
So that's a big thing, a huge feature or a huge category of features that we just simply did not get.
But we did get substantially improved multitasking.
That is going to be major for, not for all apps.
A lot of apps have worked just fine in the current method of multitasking.
But having those periodic background wake-ups and being able to wake up on push notifications for all apps, not just news stand-ups once a day.
Now it's for all apps, and you can set the polling intervals, and it'll try to poll when the phone's woken up, when the person checks the time or whatever.
That's really cool, and that's going to make things like news apps and Twitter apps and social.
Podcast clients.
Yeah, so many things.
It's going to make just awesome.
It will make your phone feel faster.
Exactly.
Because when you launch an app, the stuff will already be there.
And it won't be a launch app, watch a spinner, watch a spinner, watch a spinner, wait for everything to load, load the new updates.
Hopefully they'll be there.
And presumably, I hope Apple has done that also with their own apps, with things like iCloud updates.
I've always hated how you launch Calendar or whatever and all your stuff pops in a few seconds later.
If you're lucky.
Right, yeah, because it wasn't, even though you edited these things three hours ago on your desktop, the app never checked.
It never had a chance to run.
Exactly.
And even Apple stuff was bad about that before.
So maybe I hope they've taken this opportunity to fix their own stuff in that way, too.
I mean, it looks like this is a pretty solid feature update.
They have a lot of text and font improvements, too.
I mean, it looks like a pretty great update for APIs and for developers.
Yeah.
And what I liked about the multitasking stuff is that, I mean, we couldn't talk about the particulars even if we knew them, but we don't know them anyhow.
But it seemed like one of the things I was really worried about was if they took the Android approach of every app can install a daemon that can live and run forever.
And obviously that's not Apple style.
But we weren't entirely sure if they were going to just be marginally less restrictive.
And there's an argument that that's what they did.
But it's certainly less restrictive enough that it should make a really notable positive difference.
And yet also restrictive enough that I don't think our batteries will last half as long.
Yeah, the key feature is apps that you don't use eventually fade away.
And that is the thing that kills your stupid phone.
If it's a free-for-all and you download some stupid app and you forget about it and then you don't understand why your battery is dying and you blame it on the app you downloaded today, but it really was the app you downloaded three days ago that keeps running in the background and doing something like...
those apps will just no longer be given a chance to run in the background by ios because it will say look the guy doesn't the user does not run you you never get a chance to run in the background i wonder if it will actually turn off your push notifications that would be interesting but like yeah because people could work around that like i'm trying to think of if you are malicious and you are annoying thing and you just want to load your ads or something could you make an app that constantly receives push notifications and constantly wipes up and drains your battery
I guess we'll see.
That kind of gets back to the OS X Mavericks feature where you can rate applications by how much energy they're using.
They still have not brought that to iOS.
Your process viewer where you find Android has that, here's what used your battery power, but on OS X they feel okay about it.
Maybe they'll bring it to iOS soon.
Maybe it'll be in the shipping version.
Who knows?
Yeah, I think overall, though, this is a solid update, and the OS X update looks pretty good, too.
I'm very happy with what they announced.
We didn't get everything we wanted, but we got a lot of it.
It was not boring.
Not boring at all.
Definitely not.
No, not boring.
Okay.
And I mean, I really think that they came out swinging.
I know we've said that a few times now, but the air in the room, whether or not it came across in the video, was that Apple was fired up.
They were – I don't know if angry is the right word, but they were ready to fight back.
They've been sitting around working on things quietly.
Yeah.
And now they're ready to say to the world, hey, screw you.
We never left.
It's not that we're back.
We never even left.
We didn't even mention iRadio.
We're just like, and we got one of those too, by the way.
We just bolted on a complete Pandora clone.
Right.
For less money.
Yeah.
Built into everything.
Yeah.
That looks like it's going to be awesome.
Between Marco and I, we counted probably five or 10 or 15 different
apps or companies that had some serious thinking to do after the keynote.
I mean, it was impressive.
And you know what's great about this?
Just overall, this is going to make everyone start talking about Apple a lot more than they have been.
Apple has lost so much of the attention and the interest of the press and of reviewers and of nerds because everyone else has been doing all these crazy things and Apple's been kind of resting on its laurels, apparently, to the public.
But now they come out with all this crazy new stuff and now they're back in the discussion and
And we have a lot of work to do and we have a lot to see.
And I'm very excited about that.
It would be great if it was a one-two punch and the next iPhone was the iPhone 6 with a new physical design.
I'm not predicting that, but boy, that would be impressive.
What if they come out with a bigger screen version this fall?
Yeah, I mean, they're setting up because that's usually their big thing these days is like, oh, a new iPhone is out.
There was no new iPhone here, but they did all this stuff and they didn't even do the new iPhones.
Like the new iPhone...
We all just assume it's going to be the five form factor, but imagine a device that matches up with iOS 7, right?
Yeah.
And that's kind of the idea they're going for.
I mean, they talked briefly but sternly about collaboration being a really important part of iOS 7.
And that the design of the device should inform the design of the software.
And so you make a very good point that it very well could happen.
And I think the thing that made me laugh the most was when Schiller – it was Schiller, right, that was doing the Mac Pro bit.
And he said – what was his quote –
Can't innovate anymore, my ass.
Yeah, and then they put the camera on Steve Wozniak in the audience, and I think he might have written an article once that said, or been in an interview once that said Apple isn't innovating anymore.
I don't want to throw Woz under the bus.
We should Google that beforehand, and I think that's why they put the camera on him as soon as he said, can't innovate anymore, my ass.
And whatever you think of that Mac Pro, and maybe people think, oh, it's not innovating, that is not a regular computer.
That is not like we made a box and put CPUs in it and RAM and stuff.
Yeah, and regardless of whether we're going to complain about its lack of hard drives or slots, that is innovative, that's for sure.
All right, I think we should wrap it up.
We still have so much more to talk about for these things, but I guess we'll have more to talk about next week once we are packed full of stuff that we can't talk about from the NDA.
Exactly.
But this is great.
I'm really looking forward to all this stuff.
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Sounds good.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G-Marco-R-M-E-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-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-
I don't have a sign off.
Hey.
I'm vlogging out in the hallway.
Nice.
I'm going to open the door so you don't die any more than you've already done.
Do you want to say hi in an after dark something?
Hi, everybody.
All right.
Oh, actually, that mic's off.
That one's off, yeah.
That's right.
You're welcome, Marco.
All right.