Aluminum-Colored Aluminum
Can we do the Accidental Car Podcast for a minute, please?
Sure.
Pretty please.
We had a big week last week.
It was a good week.
It was a huge week for everybody, for the show, for John Syracuse.
I mean, for everybody who matters, it was a big week.
Yeah, it was.
I had such a great time at WWDC, and I know I speak for both you guys in saying that.
And it was especially peculiar for me having kind of been that guy that hangs out with Marco and John for the last couple of years and now getting recognized occasionally.
It was the trippiest, most flattering and awesome thing.
I don't even know what to make of it.
I'm still like processing it all.
See, I told you that would happen.
When we started this podcast, I told Casey, look, just so you know, if you're on a podcast and people listen to it, next year at WWDC, everyone is going to know who you are.
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
People were coming up.
John and I, people have known who we were at WBDC for a few years, a little bit.
But Casey, oh my god, he was the star.
Everyone's like, oh my god, I love you on the show.
Everyone was so thrilled.
Nobody gave a crap about us.
Everyone was so thrilled to meet Casey Liss.
That is a very flattering, bold-faced lie.
You were there.
Well, everyone was excited, but I think it was like, oh, you're Casey.
Oh, you're Marco, and you're John.
But no, all kidding.
It was extremely flattering, and many thanks for everyone who had the chutzpah to say hi.
I know we talked about it a couple shows ago, but it was still extremely cool to meet all of these people that I perhaps wouldn't have had the opportunity to meet otherwise, because we would have both been just faces in the crowd.
Yeah.
Many thanks for all you guys and gals that said hi and had nice things to say, no less.
We only had a couple verbal complaints about Neutral, and I consider that a moral victory.
I was impressed that anybody actually listened to Neutral who came up to us at that conference.
That's true.
And we did have a few fans who really wanted us to bring it back.
Yeah, which was also weird.
And as a quick aside, I drove an M3 today.
Yeah, which generation was that?
E90.
Nice.
All right.
Yeah, it was really cool.
It was like my car plus 10-15%.
It was fun.
You know, we should do a podcast about cars sometime.
Yeah, maybe.
You think anyone would like that?
Hell no.
I don't think anyone will.
The pricing on the M3 is not your car plus 15%.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
Well, actually, I guess it's in the ballpark.
How much is an M3 these days?
I think a well-equipped one is something like 70 or 80, right?
I mean, I think it's like in the 70s, something like that.
I don't know.
I never priced one out.
I mean, my car plus 15% would have been... Oh, no, you're right.
My car plus 15% was not even near 70.
I'm dead wrong.
Anyway, all right, so we should probably talk about nerdy stuff that's not cars.
What did you guys think of WWDC?
Let's start with Mr. Syracuse.
Didn't we do a whole show about this last time?
Well, yeah, but a lot has happened since then.
Okay, fine.
We can ignore everything.
I have things in the notes.
Consult the notes.
The notes.
The notes.
Actually, I've been pulling a Marco and largely ignoring the notes, but I do have them up.
So with that in mind.
I don't even have Chrome open.
You don't have your Chrome jail open?
John, would you like to talk about any of the Mac Pro details we've learned?
Yeah, I got a little Mac Pro follow-up.
So we talked about it at length on the last show, and there are two things that I want to talk about since then.
The first one is about this article that I wrote a while ago called The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor.
And it was me arguing the point before we knew what the fate of the Mac Pro was, that Apple should continue to
Push the envelope in desktop computer performance for all the same reasons that car manufacturers make these ridiculous cars that nobody buys, that are not practical, and that cost way too much money.
And that lose money for the companies all because they want to push the limits of car technology and performance.
And in the end, deep, deep down, because the people who work at those companies love cars.
And that's why they want to make, you know, supercars or halo cars, as I called them.
And so when the new Mac Pro was announced last week,
I thought I had addressed this in last week's show, but apparently not clearly enough.
A lot of people were asking me, so is this a true Mac Pro successor?
Does this meet the criteria that you laid out in the case for a true Mac Pro successor, or are you still disappointed?
And the fact that on the last show I was saying how...
This doesn't quite look like it's the machine for me, so on and so forth.
People are like, oh, I don't see how this isn't a true Mac Pro successor, isn't it?
Well, so to be clear and spell it out, yes, this is definitely a true Mac Pro successor.
It completely fits the mold of, you know, the supercar type things.
It's ridiculous.
It's crazy.
It does not look like a normal computer.
We don't know the price yet.
but I assume it's going to be really expensive, certainly more expensive than the other things there.
It has compromises that most people wouldn't expect, like the dual GPUs that are going to be these big honking GPUs that maybe everybody doesn't need, but at the same time, it doesn't have any internal spinning disk storage, which is kind of like a supercar that has 900 horsepower, but a trunk that fits one little tiny bag in it.
I'm assuming Apple hopes that they sell way more Mac Pros than people sell their top-end supercars, but
This computer, despite or perhaps because of the fact that it doesn't satisfy all of the practical needs of various Pro users and stuff, definitely fits the bill.
So despite the fact that I was disappointed in it last week for various personal reasons, as I thought I expressed in the last show, I'm happy that Apple continues to...
innovate to use phil schiller's bird in this area and to continue to chase the high end and the second thing about the mac pro is that my opinion of it has softened a little bit for my own personal use since uh last week's episode and that since then i've learned or actually been reminded and i should have i don't know why i didn't think of this uh last week
that the gaming performance, the thing that's really been holding me back, like, oh, I'm going to spend all this money on this machine, and I'm going to have all these compromises with no internal storage and everything, and I'm going to get a machine that's not going to fulfill one of my main criteria, which is to be able to play PC, Mac games really, really well, because...
It's got these pro GPUs in them.
And to people who aren't familiar with the pro GPU market, or maybe people who are familiar, more familiar than I was, that sounds crazy.
It was like, well, if these are super high-end GPUs, isn't that great for gaming?
Aren't these going to be, you know, like they're, these are like $2,000 GPUs, and then shouldn't you have awesome gaming performance on this?
And if you look at like Windows benchmarks and stuff for...
these pro gpus that are used for like cad and 3d programs and they test windows games on them the gaming performance these gpus is terrible and you say how can i spend fifteen hundred dollars on a video card and get terrible gaming performance uh and the answer is the the drivers the drivers are made to run maya or autocad or whatever other programs and that's used for professional design and those programs demand
precision and repeatability and reliability, they don't demand all sorts of the performance tricks that gaming GPUs use.
So you'll see a GPU that costs three times as much as another one not perform as well on the game.
And on the PC side, on Windows,
When you buy one of those high-end GPUs, you get these special, you know, certified OpenGL drivers to be used with whatever software you bought, and it works.
And when you buy just like a gaming video card, even a super high-end gaming video card, you get a totally different driver.
And...
That one is optimized to make sure you get really high frame rates in Crysis 3 or whatever, because they tune the driver for that.
And a lot of that tuning has to do with cheating, where they can say, yeah, the OpenGL spec says we're supposed to do this and that in terms of line precision and anti-aliasing or occlusion or whatever.
But we found that in this game, we can detect when this game is running.
I don't know if they still do that, but in the old days, they would detect which specific game is running and perform some optimization that they knew wouldn't cause any noticeable graphical glitching in that game just to get more performance out of it.
And that's why I was disappointed.
Oh, pro GPUs, that means crappy game performance.
It's like the worst of both worlds, expensive video hardware and crappy game performance.
But on the Mac, that is not the case on the Mac.
Historically, Apple has shipped the use the same driver for the pro cards and the non pro cards.
And in the past, that's meant that Apple's game performance sucked equally across all the GPUs because they always optimized the drivers for correctness.
They would say, okay, let's do exactly what the OpenGL specs does and correctness first and we'll worry about speed later and we'll try to tweak it and so on and so forth.
But over the past several releases, I think starting in 10.7, Apple has really tuned their video drivers to actually get decent performance out of games by working with companies like Valve and stuff to sort of do all those cheaty little things that you can do to make game performance better.
But at the same time, those same drivers were also driving their high-end cards.
So it's my expectation that when I get this new Mac Pro, which I think I am going to get now, it's going to use the exact same drivers as a Mac Pro that had a high-end Radeon, like a previous-generation Mac Pro.
It's not going to be a special, slow, dumb, high-precision driver just for these things.
It's going to use the exact same driver as a gaming video card would use.
And that means it should have pretty darn good gaming performance, at least as good as, you know...
as it would have had a Mac gaming card.
Now, it doesn't quite help me that much, unless Apple also does drivers for boot camp.
So if I reboot into Windows, I don't want to be forced to use the Windows slow drivers for this Pro GPU or whatever.
But just having decent Mac gaming performance on the thing makes me feel a lot better.
So I think I'm definitely getting one of these machines now.
Now, I have to ask, for your priorities as high performance but also significant gaming, now that we know what the compromises are for the next Mac Pro, at least we know most of them, I think, why not a high-end iMac?
The video cards on those things are, I mean, they're not desktop cards.
Some of them might be, don't they use laptop GPUs?
I think they're actually pretty good these days.
I mean, it's not going to be like the equivalent of like a $400 desktop card, but I think they're pretty good.
They're not powerful and they're not replaceable.
So I couldn't even upgrade them.
Not that the GPUs are in the Mac pro replaceable, but if I'm going to buy a machine, I always buy it with the, with the very fastest GPU that's in it so that I can use it for five years or whatever.
And at the end of those five years, it'll still be good.
Like I bought what the highest end non pro video card that I could get with my current Mac pro.
And to this day, I can still play modern games on it at the full resolution of my screen with the settings on normal or even up on high.
So I just want to get mileage out of the card, you know?
And that would be the 8800GT?
Yeah, I mean, think of a game that came out recently.
I'm the wrong person to ask.
But I'm surprised that, because the 8800GT is now, like, what, five years old?
I'm surprised, given the pace of video card innovation, I'm surprised that you can still do that with a five-year-old card.
I mean, I can't play the very latest games, but I'm not playing the very latest games.
So when Portal 2 came out, I could play it just fine.
Full frame rate, full resolution, anti-aliasing, everything.
And that was only a couple years ago.
I think the most recent game I played was Walking Dead, which is not a graphically intensive game, but it ran fine.
Diablo 3, when that came out, ran fine.
I mean, this is all going to be impaired by what I hope will be my retina screen on my Mac Pro, right?
So then that video card maybe won't last quite as long because...
I don't know.
I don't know how many games will take advantage of their retina resolution going forward.
But that's what I want.
Especially in a machine where it's not replaceable, I want to get the most mileage out of it.
So I wouldn't want to buy something that's, you know, okay performance.
Like, it's obvious anything I buy is going to be faster than the Mate 800 GT, right?
But I wouldn't want to buy an iMac with a sort of mediocre desktop GPU with not too much VRAM in it.
That would probably last me three or four years, and then, you know, I would have to...
not play PC games anymore or think about upgrading it sooner than I wanted, especially since if I bought an iMac, the screen will probably last me five years easy because I would probably hold out for a retina iMac, right?
And I would be like, oh, I don't want to get rid of the screen.
The only thing that's wrong with this machine is that stupid GPU that I can't replace, you know?
So better to get a machine where everything is maxed out to a ridiculous degree and then the whole machine will age sort of together.
So I had a thought about the displays, and a lot of the scuttlebutt at WWDC was, geez, they didn't release a Retina display for the Mac Pro.
I mean, they made some hand-wavy talk of, oh, this supports 4K screens, three of them, in fact, if I'm not mistaken.
But they never announced an actual Apple display.
And one of the things that occurred to me when the three of us were at dinner one night was if the Mac Pro is this black, I believe it's aluminum, anodized aluminum, whatever it is, it's black.
So if they release a retina display, if Apple releases a retina display, is that also going to be black?
And is this the first time that we have not aluminum colored aluminum or aluminum devices from Apple that are computers, I should say, in a long time?
That aren't just iPods.
Right, right.
The displays are already black, though, like the part you can see when you're sitting in front of one.
I guess the foot is silver, but they've already changed the surface of the things to be black, like the frame around the display.
And it goes edge to edge now, right?
Well, not on my high-res MacBook Pros.
I mean, your point is still absolutely fair.
The external monitors, like the external ones.
They changed the external monitors to be black when they're facing you with the exception of the foot.
And I think that still matches with the black...
computer you know i don't think it's i don't think that clashes i think that's they're neutral tones right so why no displays then
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, maybe they haven't decided what they can do, haven't decided pricing.
Well, my theory is – and I forget whether I said this last week or not – that it's interesting that Haswell is out for laptops.
But they only mentioned the MacBook Airs, and they only updated the Airs.
So my theory is sometime later this year, in quotes –
probably alongside the Mac Pro launch, they will potentially also launch new Retina MacBook Pros with Haswell, with Thunderbolt 2.
And alongside those, they will launch Retina displays.
And only then the new Mac Pro and the new Haswell Retina MacBook Pros will be able to drive them.
Do you know if that's a possibility Haswell's GPU and chipset?
Does it support Thunderbolt 2?
Yeah.
Thunderbolt 2, from what I know, which I think the best person to ask for this would be Anand Lallshimpy, and I'm sorry for the pronunciation if I got that wrong, which I probably got at least some part of it wrong.
I believe that the Thunderbolt 2 chip or chipset or whatever it is that does it is separate from the main motherboard chipset and then can be installed or integrated into any modern Intel board, I think.
Yeah, chat room says it does.
I suppose that's, I would have to know the dates on that.
I vaguely remember the code names of those two different chipsets.
I think I only remember the, not the current one, but the next next one, which is like Falcon Ridge or something.
But anyway, that could be why.
I believe Falcon Ridge is Thunderbolt 2.
I think that's the next, next one.
The next one is something else, Ridge.
Anyway, that is a reasonable reason why those things could have been delayed, that they're going to run Thunderbolt 2.
Right, because it's weird that they didn't get any mention at all.
Yeah, and those chips are ready, like the CPUs anyway.
I mean, the other explanation is maybe that Intel can't deliver those CPUs in volume yet.
That's possible.
That's certainly a more boring explanation for it.
for the delay but the macbook air doesn't use the same thing the macbook air uses the ultra low power value correct this big honking package thing which is totally different and apparently there's enough of those to say hey the macbook airs are shipping today right and it's not like usually i would expect those would be like the better binned parts because those are the ones that can run at super low voltages right i mean like you would think if they can deliver those they can probably deliver the big ones yeah you would think so i think the uh
What do you call it?
The Thunderbolt 2 chipset thing could be the delay.
Or it could be they just have excess inventory of the Retina MacBook Pros they want to get rid of or something.
I don't know.
Or they're just holding it back until they can launch the Mac Pro, which is at least Q3.
Because the Mac Pro's CPUs aren't out yet.
And so if they can do a big Pro launch where they satisfy all the Pros at once with a Mac Pro, new Retina MacBook Pros, and a Retina display...
that would be a nice little event.
And maybe they coincide it with a minor update to Final Cut 10 or something like that.
Something like that.
It would make sense to combine those timers and to coalesce those timers into one thing.
That whole Mac Pro announcement was just really weird.
I mean, it was acknowledged to be weird in the keynote where they're like,
we normally don't do this.
It's like, yeah, you normally don't do this.
Like when you say we, this product is really off in the distance, but we know that people are going to freak out if we don't say anything about it.
You know, it's almost as if like last year at WWDC, they said, I know you're all waiting for Mac pro announcement.
And here's these ones that aren't really that new, but trust us next year we'll have a good one.
Like, I mean, they kind of did that by having a public statement or not a public statement, an email response from Tim Cook saying, Oh yeah, I know next year we'll have something nice, but like pre-announcing products.
It's just, it's crazy.
And I guess they did it for damage control because if they didn't, we all would have come out.
And that's why none of us expected a Mac Pro announcement.
We were even joking about it because, like, we knew it couldn't possibly be ready because we knew what kind of CPUs it would have to use, and those weren't ready.
And sure enough, those aren't ready.
But Apple said, you know what?
Screw it.
We're going to show it to you anyway.
Here it is.
You can't buy it for a while.
We won't even tell you if we have monitors for it.
We won't tell you anything about pricing, but it's here.
It's shaped like a garbage can.
It's coming.
Yeah.
I think a good point, too, QRS in the chat room said Aperture 4 may be something to consider here.
The new Mac Pro has this pretty lopsided design where it has only one CPU socket, so it can get a good amount of CPU power in there, but then it has this insane amount of GPU power.
That seems, from the wording they've used and what's on their side, it seems as though the dual GPU setup is not optional.
It looks like all the Mac Pros will come with the same GPU setup.
And if that's the case, and obviously that's going to have potential cost implications, but...
That is a really lopsided power balance of, you know, you get some CPU power, but what you really want to buy this thing for is the GPUs.
And what's interesting, you know, I've seen a few places report that only one of the GPUs is going to be used to drive the displays, and that the other one is going to be used exclusively for, like, OpenCL-type computations, but...
And so it's interesting that you're going to have this ridiculous amount of power that today only a few apps really make any good use of, right?
I mean, I don't think it's very widely supported yet.
And so maybe Apple's Pro apps are going to be substantially shifted over to put a lot of work into OpenCL, maybe more than they already are.
And I think they're already doing some.
Yeah.
Aperture already uses the GPUs like crazy.
It's not so much that one GPU is dedicated to OpenCL, it's that only one GPU is connected up to the Thunderbolt ports.
So they're both available for OpenCL.
When you write an OpenCL program, you'll see both of those GPUs as available as whatever the...
I think what they call them, like, you know, computing resources.
You see one CPU and two GPUs.
So you can use both of them.
It's just that only one of them is connected.
Only one of them has place where you can plug in a display.
So the other one is never going to drive a display.
But even when one is driving a display, you could run OpenCL stuff on both of them.
Right, okay.
And then what's interesting about that is that now you'll have this Mac Pro that, for other reasons, it probably is going to be a pretty bad deal.
It's probably not going to be a great value for its CPU performance.
It's not going to be a great value for its RAM ceiling.
There's all these different things.
I expect this thing to cost $3,000 or $4,000 base.
And...
But if pro users are using these certain software packages that make really great use of OpenCL, then this machine is going to blow away the entire rest of the Mac lineup so much.
Well, think about what those people would have to pay before.
During the lunchtime demo where the guy from Pixar at WDC was up there demoing that program and saying how great it was, right?
if he wanted to get the equivalent GPU power in another machine, like even just the current Mac Pro, it would probably cost him the price of a new Mac Pro just to buy the video cards because they're so ridiculous, like $3,500 for the video card.
And that's another thing on the Mac Pro.
I was thinking about pricing.
I think I tweeted this at Dr. Wave this week where when we both came out of the – Marco and I came out of the keynote –
We've all said like $2,999 was our guess for the base price for the thing.
But now I think I've changed that, and I think they could hit $2,500 for the lowest, lowest end.
And I think the way they could do that is the AMD Fire Pro GPU line comes in a lot of different sizes.
And if they if Apple decides to offer anything other than the super duper high end one, they could reduce the price a lot because I think everything else in there is relatively cheap.
Like there's not as many moving parts as just one Intel CPU that cuts like 500 bucks off the price right there, which is nice.
Apple's going to have crazy margins on their stupid PCI Express SSD thing, I'm sure, whatever.
The RAM middling.
And if they can get, you know, the quote-unquote crappy Fire Pro GPUs in there with much, much less VRAM instead of the maximum.
I think I read together the maximum.
I believe they're 6 gigs each.
Yeah, six gigs each.
I thought it was six gigs combined.
So six gigs of VRAM each.
And again, gaming video cards at this point have two gigabytes of VRAM, like the most expensive gaming cards you can get.
These things have six gigs each.
And you know it's not going to ship with a base RAM of the whole machine of 12 gigs.
The video cards are going to have more RAM than the main machine.
I think the base might be 16 gigs.
But anyway, if they cheap out on the GPUs, they could have an entry-level model that no one wants to buy, including me, for $2,500.
So it sounds like both of you guys are in for one, though?
Marco's going to buy one for every room in the house double as a waistband.
I think I'll probably buy one, but I'm not... The big two questions about what the price is going to be and whether there will be retina displays.
If this ends up being one of the only machines that can drive a retina display and maybe the only one that can do it really well when those eventually come out, then I'll buy one no question because I really want a desktop-sized retina display.
And surely the only one that's going to be able to play games on the red display.
I know how important that is to you.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't care about that at all.
I would feel kind of like an idiot buying this computer that has these two ridiculous high power GPUs and using them most of the time to display like text mate and a web browser.
Or Xcode.
That's usually what I'm doing.
Someone asked on Twitter today, won't text editor developers and the people who write Xcode now change their applications to take advantage of those dual GPUs?
Yeah, how?
I'm having trouble thinking of a way that you can use that kind of GPU power in your text editor unless all the text was made 3D and flying through some kind of world as you typed it.
So we're getting the matrix text editor.
Right.
minority report yeah right all right so is that all on the uh mac pro i guess for now i mean we really don't know much about it yet that's the big that's the big thing like until we know pricing and options and and you know possibly retina question uh i think it's going to be hard to make any other really great statements about it just because we don't have it yet and there's so much we still don't know
All right.
There's another piece of follow-up that I think mostly John wanted to talk about that maybe we can do a sponsor.
So, John, tell me about the new Xbox that just came out today.
Yeah, this is the obvious joke.
You know, sometimes you wonder, like...
If these stories happen because there's a perfect name for it, they just couldn't resist.
So the show note and the million headlines is Xbox 180, which is the obvious headline for the story that Microsoft has reversed its decision on all of the DRM, digital rights management, used game, always online things about the Xbox One that everyone hated.
uh and so to recap things that people hated were the xbox had to check in with microsoft servers every 24 hours you were locked out of it people hated that people who were like especially the military or people who are going to be away from an internet connection for a long time even just people who didn't like the idea of having to check in uh
The fact that you couldn't sell game discs to people because the game disc was just a convenient way for you to get the bits onto your computer and all the rights to the game had to do with the DRM.
And so if you bought a game in a store and you got the disc, selling that disc to your friend was pointless because if they put that disc into their machine, it would do nothing for them because it would say, oh, you don't own this game because you don't have the rights to it according to our servers.
And game companies were allowed to not allow their games to be resold even in digital form.
And so all these things pissed off gamers.
And at E3, Sony hammered them in their presentations.
You know, Sony's presentation was all about, look at how much better we are than Microsoft.
And Sony was getting, like, standing ovations for standard features of game consoles for the past, you know, two decades, right?
Like, oh, my God, it's amazing.
I can buy a disc in the store and then sell it to my friend.
Woo!
You know, anyway.
Yeah.
So Microsoft was really getting hammered.
I saw one online poll.
Maybe it was Amazon or some other site.
It was like, hey, guys, who's thinking about getting one of the next generation consoles?
And it was just PS4 versus Xbox One because, you know, no one cares about the Wii U. And normally those polls, like on the dawn of a console generation launch, are always like 50-50 each because all the fanboys from both of the consoles go there and they all fill the ballot box and it's like, you know...
Pretty much a dead heat.
And this was like over 90% for the PS4 and like the rest for the Xbox One.
So it looked like a blowout.
And that's just, you know, one random poll.
Could have just been a bunch of Sony fans.
Who knows?
But like you never – I've never seen that in all the console launches that I've been through.
So things were looking bad for Microsoft.
And what they did was kind of gutsy but also kind of –
lame and weird or whatever was just reversed everything it said never never mind it's exactly like the xbox 360 you go to the store you buy discs and that's it you can sell the disc it works exactly like the 360 and they also eliminated all the good features of the xbox one where you know everyone in your family could play the game for free even if they didn't live with you like up to 10 people in your family could play the game so if you bought it then like your brother at college automatically got the game for free he didn't have to buy it again you didn't have to ship him a disc um
And pure digital downloads now, it's just like the 360 where you can do a digital download, but if you buy a physical disc, the disc has to be in the drive while you're playing the game, which sucks and is stupid because why does the disc need to be there?
Oh, it's because they just completely reversed everything, they said.
I don't even know how they can do this at this late stage.
It seems like all the deals involved with publishers and all the software involved, they're completely reversing course.
And most people are happy about it.
They got rid of the always online thing.
They said...
You have to be online when you set up your Xbox One, but after that, you can just be completely offline, and as long as the game you're using doesn't need internet connectivity to run, then you're fine.
So this is kind of a mixed bag.
It's good in that they reversed their stupid decisions.
It's bad in that they got rid of all the things that might have been cool, and I think it's bad long-term because, as I think I said when we originally talked about the Xbox One, everything they were doing...
It was done badly, but in broad strokes, the idea that you don't own a physical disc, instead you own rights to something online, that's good for all the convenience reasons.
They just need to get the particulars of it right.
Once that's the case, you don't use that to then give the publishers more power and forbid people from reselling games and everything.
Instead, you should say, okay, now it's even easier for you to sell a game to your friend.
sell it through our online thing you don't have to you know bring the disc over to their house and you don't have to do any of those stuff and you're you're it's not tied to your account or whatever you should be able to sell games sell use games resell them and let microsoft take a little cut you know we're not i think apple has shown that people are not opposed to the idea that sort of the uh the middleman gets some small cut by from providing the convenience of buying and selling uh goods online um
So it's kind of a shame that we've kind of hit the reset button because Microsoft's policies were so boneheaded.
But the overall idea that spinning plastic disks are stupid and should really just be an accelerated way to download things for you and really the entire marketplace should be online.
I mean, Apple's proven the entire marketplace being aligned for everything, for their desktop operating systems, for the desktop software, for the handheld software.
That model works.
People like it.
It's great.
And Apple's taken 30%.
I mean, Microsoft could take like 5% of used game sales and gamers would still love them.
for the convenience of being able to one-click sell their game to their friend and get, you know, $10 back or whatever.
So that's the story.
I'm kind of sad about it.
I was never going to buy an Xbox One anyway.
It's just kind of sad to see Microsoft backpedal like that, when really what they could have done is just fixed everything and kept the good and just got rid of the bad.
So, thumbs up on this?
I mean, it sounds like you are not pleased with this, but you are pleased with where it ended?
It's better than what they had before.
What they had before was just a terrible policy that everyone hated.
They just threw out the baby with the bathwater.
I like them trying to make progress.
They just went a little bit off in the wrong direction.
And their correction was history eraser button.
This never happened.
This thing just behaves like the Xbox 360.
Never mind, guys.
Marco, you want to talk to us about Squarespace?
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Yeah, and I mean, our site is run on Squarespace and neutrals, and we've never had not one hiccup.
That's great.
Wait, does that work, never had not one?
You know what I meant.
I'm getting more and more southern with each passing day.
It's not terrible, it's just different.
Well, you have to offset us.
Yeah, well, that's true.
So I want to talk about iOS 7 a little bit, and we have a couple of things in our accidental show notes.
And I want to go off the rails a little bit, and I want to actually go back to ATP Episode 1.
Okay.
And the reason I want to do that is because ATP episode one, before it was really a podcast at all, was the three of us talking about an iPhone plus.
And we were talking about how one could extrapolate and theorize what size it would be, whether or not it would exist, etc.
And one of the things that's been bugging me in a good way about what we saw during the keynote was that gestures are a big deal in iOS 7.
And specifically, there's a gesture to go back a screen in iOS 7.
And there's been a lot of talk about gestures in iOS 7.
And the thing that struck me about the gesture to go back a screen is if it's very easy kind of system-wide to go back one level...
it may not be so terrible to have a back button that, at least for right-handed people, is too far away.
So in other words, if you look at the iPhone 5, for most normal-sized people, the back button, and normal-sized right-handed people, the back button is way up and to the left and is a little bit of a stretch to reach.
Well, what if you didn't have to reach that anymore?
Then could the phone, would that be enough to make it not annoying to have a bigger phone?
Does that make sense?
Well, first of all, I think that you – it sounds like you're saying that right-handed people have to hold their phone in their right hand.
That's true.
And obviously – well, that was the assumption, but you're already making a great point.
What?
You do that?
I hold my phone in my right hand.
Yeah, I hold my phone in my right hand.
That's crazy talk.
I mean, I don't have a phone, but you know what I mean.
I hold my iPod Touch in my right hand.
I mean, I do it lefty too, but... You guys are nuts.
Well, think about the slide to open.
How do you do that with your left hand?
That's weird.
With my left thumb.
That is weird.
No, it works much better when you're pulling your thumb towards than when you're extending your thumb out.
Agreed.
You guys are nuts.
Well, I think what's interesting also, and I don't know...
I think I can safely say without violating the NDA, I don't think anyone's going to complain if I say that auto layout has been heavily encouraged.
And so you look at a few things.
you look at that they're really pushing you to use auto layout.
And the new design of iOS 7 even, and the designs they're kind of encouraging by example in the apps of things like stripping away ornamentation and big heavy textures and everything else, the designs are probably pretty stretchable.
and more so than they used to be you know where it used to have it used to be back before the iphone 5 that you could design like the old um the old tap bots apps before tweetbot when it was like like convert bot and stuff like that where you could basically design a 320 by 480 screen and that was it that was your whole app you you can just design this one big bitmap because you only had one screen size to deal with
It's like web development with tables when you slice up everything into images and make everything about tables.
And iOS 7 is responsive design.
Exactly, yeah.
iOS 7 is the visual style they're going for.
First, the iPhone 5 told everyone, oh, crap.
If your app is not just a scrolling view with bars on top and bottom, this is going to be non-trivial to do.
But...
Now, I think the encouragement to use auto layout, plus this back gesture, plus the whole style of iOS 7 being so flexible, I think, more easily and breaking fewer things visually, I think that all is, if not pointing to different iPhone screen sizes, I think it would at least pave the way to make that a lot easier to do if they chose to.
And reading the tea leaves a little bit,
It would not surprise me at all if they did a new iPhone this fall.
And maybe they do more than one.
But we talked before, I think they need a bigger screened iPhone.
Because whatever Tim Cook says about the displays, whatever people who are big Apple fans say about phone sizes, the fact is the market is demanding them significantly.
And...
Apple is losing a lot of the high-end market, which is the profitable market.
They're losing a lot of that high-end market by not having a larger screen phone.
I saw a monstrous phone today.
I'm assuming it was a Samsung, and it was in the hands of a young child, and it just – it made it look even bigger.
It was like comically – I guess it had to be one of those note things, but it was ridiculous.
It looked like an iPad mini.
Yeah, there's a bunch of things in iOS 7 that lend itself to this.
Even like the lock screen with the gesture for swiping where you don't have to swipe in that one particular region, you can swipe anywhere.
The icons in the home screen are bigger.
So, I mean, anything they make bigger, you're like, oh, well, this will look more normal on a larger size.
Even in the navigation bar, the...
The text that's in the buttons that would say the word back, you know, for the back button, that text is larger because the buttons don't have borders around them.
And, like, anything that they make larger, you think, okay, well, when this is on a larger phone, it will fit in better there.
They're not going to complete extremes because they do have the adjustable text sizing.
Did they show that in the keynote?
I hope so, unless I'm... I just broke an NDA.
I thought they did.
But whatever.
The adjustable text sizing...
doesn't actually alter the size of things like navigation elements because that would force people to use auto layout.
You really use auto layout.
The bar metrics are all, I think, permanent.
Right, but like I said, the button text is bigger.
So they're trying to strike a balance.
They don't want everything to be bigger because then it would look wrong on the smaller phone.
They don't want everything to scale because that will make app development a nightmare.
But, you know, auto layout combined with larger icons combined with bigger text on the navigation, but with the same nav bar sizes and all that stuff.
It's like, I mean, as we were discussing in the first episode of ATP, we don't expect a humongously bigger phone, just a little bit bigger and bigger in two dimensions.
And so I think iOS 7 is perfectly suited for an ever so slightly bigger iPhone that both has a slightly higher resolution and also like a lower dot per inch.
Because then you could, you know, those two factors combined.
Those two relatively small factors combined give you a phone that is bigger than the iPhone 5, but it's not comically large.
Right.
And before, when we were talking about this, whenever that was, like five months ago or whatever that was, I had my theory about, well, they can keep the same resolution and just make everything a little bit bigger and everyone would be fine with that.
Now, I'm not so sure that's the case.
Now, I think you're right that they could just increase the resolution a little bit and just make the panel...
What is it now?
Four inches diagonal?
Give us maybe a five inch one.
Even four and a half inch would look substantially larger.
I think they could do that and even just scale the resolution up proportionally if they really want to.
I think now they're obviously preparing for non-fixed resolution iPhones.
If that makes sense.
Or rather, you know, for multiple sizes of iPhones.
I think the pieces are in place now that, you know, the tea leaves are starting to line up to say, this is probably where they're heading.
And it still doesn't quite address the Andy Anaku issue that I think we discussed in that third episode, which is that the reason he loves Android's phone with larger screens is not just that it's larger, which I think is at least half of it.
But there's another part of it is that Android phones, when running on larger screen or Android software running on larger screen phones, put up more UI and a miniature version of what iPad version of apps do.
Because once you have the iPad version, oh, I've got all this space.
I can have a totally different UI.
Well, a slightly bigger phone, if it's bigger enough...
Maybe you have room for a toolbar before you didn't.
Maybe you have room for one more toolbar button.
There are things that you can do to actually give you an application that doesn't just give you more viewable area for your content, which is great and everything.
It doesn't just have larger text sizes and larger buttons, but also says, oh, there's just room for a little bit more information.
And maybe a feature that didn't fit on the phone can fit there.
I don't know if Apple's phone will be bigger enough to even give you one more toolbar icons worth of space or one more toolbar word in the new world of iOS 7 where they like to use words sometimes instead of icons.
But it's possible.
It's possible that applications like you've got optimized for iPad, right?
So it's a completely different application, basically, even though under the covers it might be very similar.
But the UI can be very different.
And then you have your iPhone 5 size version of it.
And then you have your iPhone 6 Plus or whatever.
where you get one more toolbar icon, or you didn't have a toolbar before and now you do, or you have another little row of things on the right side or something like that.
I would really be interested in seeing that, but that's the last piece of the puzzle.
I don't think that's necessary.
I think simply making a larger screen is plenty, bigger resolution, larger everything.
People will still love that.
But if it's possible to optimize your app for it, the apps that do that to provide a little bit more UI and features, I think that will be the icing on the cake.
Yeah, we'll see what happens.
I just thought it was interesting that all the signs are pointing more towards yes.
And that gesture, I don't know why, but for me, it really made me think, you know what, this iPhone Plus or whatever they're going to call it, that really could be a thing.
The other thing that's been noodling at me all week since I left the keynote was their talk about iOS version adoption.
And the general gist of it is that, oh, everyone upgrades to the latest version of iOS immediately.
And, you know, of course, immediately is defined as a few weeks or whatever the case may be.
But people upgrade to the latest version of iOS very quickly.
And that's generally true, especially on point releases.
But what occurred to me was I remember reading David Smith's iOS version stats and seeing that adoption of iOS 6 was not that quick at all because everyone was freaking out about Apple Maps.
Well, I think that's actually not supported by the data.
Oh, yeah?
That's a very, very common theory.
So basically the theory was, okay, everyone's holding back because they don't want iOS 6 Maps, etc.
And then the theory was that once Google Maps app comes out...
then you should see a big bump in 6 adoption.
And you didn't.
There was almost no change in the rate of adoption when the Google Maps app came out for iOS.
And so it looks like that probably was not the reason.
I mean, for me, I think the biggest reason why iOS 6 adoption... I think it climbed at a relatively normal rate.
And then it just kind of peaked at like 92 or whatever percent that it is now.
And if you look...
iOS 4 adoption has shrunk proportionally, as you'd expect.
iOS 5 adoption has kind of hit a wall.
And my theory there is all about the iPad 1.
Granted, Apple has sold a lot more devices that run everything else than the iPad 1.
But there still are a lot of iPad 1s in use.
Because the iPad 1 was sold until, what, two and a half years ago?
It wasn't that long ago that it was still sold.
And people were buying this $500-plus computer-type device.
And it's not on a contract.
It's not subsidized.
So they expect that to last more than two years.
Yeah.
So there are still a lot of iPad 1s in use that can't run iOS 6.
And I don't know how much of the percentage of people still on 5 that represents.
Probably not even the majority of it.
But I bet that's like a big solid chunk in there that just is not going away anytime soon.
And you know what?
You're probably right.
I just know whether or not it was data-backed or not.
Maybe I made that up.
But certainly anecdotally, I know a lot of my mildly nerdy friends had said, oh, I can't get that new Apple Maps thing.
It's terrible.
I won't have it.
And either way, I mean, I was just trying to build up to the question, not argument, of...
What do we think about iOS 7 adoption?
Do we think it'll be quick?
Do we think it'll be really, really slow by comparison to other versions of iOS?
My inclination is I feel like it will be kind of in the middle, which is, of course, the worst hedging ever.
But I really think it'll be less quick than a lot of the less remarkable major releases.
But I think a lot of people are going to really like it.
And I think it'll be all right.
But I'm curious to hear what you guys think.
I think it'll probably be driven, like a lot of these things are, they're driven and aided by the fact that Apple continues to sell more and more phones.
Now, granted, the growth rate has leveled off a little bit, but assuming iOS 7 launches with a new phone...
And the new phone is going to come with iOS 7, and people will very quickly stop buying the old one.
And so you get this immediate boost from just like all the iPhone 5S or 6 or whatever the heck it is, especially if it's an iPhone 6.
If they don't do a 5S and it's actually a different form factor, and if it's like a bigger one or something, that will give iOS 7 a huge boost out of the gate and skew the statistics.
But I have to think that the adoption will probably be about the same as it was for 6 –
uh if only because like that thing where they push the updates at you i mean i know ios 7 is gonna have automatic updates and same for mavericks and everything again i think these are in the keynote uh that will drive adoption going forward even more but even just the current model where they're like hey there's a new version of ios do you want to upgrade and people hit a button and then it does it
that's what's driving all this adoption it's like the you know that jeff atwood post from i guess it's years ago at this point of the infinite version google chrome is the best one of the pioneers in this where you don't do anything you don't have to make any choices you use it and if you don't if you don't know anything about it if you use it and quit that program and relaunch it it is updating itself unbeknownst to you like they'll put a little colored arrow or whatever in the toolbar and if you notice that you can go oh i can update google chrome now or whatever like it used to be more intrusive now it's just like look we're going to update your google chrome
There's nothing you can do about it.
I mean, maybe there is some way to stop it.
But the defaults are you're going to get updated.
What version of Google Chrome you're using?
Who knows?
The latest.
And that is the idea that you don't have versions of software that you get comfortable with, like where you buy a 2002 car.
Sorry about the cars again.
And you're like, oh, I'm happy with this car.
If you went out in your driveway and it was replaced with a 2003 model, you'd be like, but I like the 2002 one.
I like the way the shifter worked, and the seat fabric was nicer, and the radio controls were better.
You just get used to what you have.
Software in the past has been like that, where you get Photoshop version 3.0, and you're like, oh, wow, layers, this is awesome, and this program is great.
And then 4.0 comes out, and you're like, oh, that's weird.
Actually, I should have done 2.5 to 3, because you could say maybe you like channel operations and not layers.
But anyway, you get used to a piece of software, and...
and you say okay well this is the software and it continues to work and i like it um why would i ever want it to change and if it changed underneath you're like whoa what's this the menus change and the keyboard shortcuts change and they change all sorts of things about this program what happened to my old program i want that one back uh because you think of software as this one thing that you get like a physical thing like a car whereas with chrome
You know, you can't you've shown that people can be trained not to think of software that way.
If you use Chrome, the program that you're using now is not like the one you were using several years ago.
And you didn't do anything about that.
You could have just never touched any button, never said yes to any updates.
It just updates itself.
And you come in like, oh, Chrome is different today.
And for the most part, it's different.
It's faster.
It's better.
It's more stable, has more features.
But also, it changes stuff.
Like, oh, the menus are different, and the preferences are different.
On the Mac version, things kept moving into browser tabs and out of, like, real UI as they tried to make everything web-based, and that kind of annoyed me.
But I think that's the future of software.
that's what's driving this adoption more than people saying oh ios is six i want i want to get it it's because every single ios device that can upgrade to ios six showed a prompt that says do you want to upgrade to ios six and it showed it again and like i don't know how persistent it is but and people eventually hit the button android has eight bazillion ancient versions because those phones can't even run like you know it's up to the carriers to upgrade them and like ah screw it we're not doing anything if all those phones had little prompts they'd all be running the latest version of android too but they can't and they don't have those prompts so they're not
Also, one of the biggest things, like you touched on earlier, one of the biggest things driving iOS adoption is that all new iOS devices are always sold with the latest OS.
And because the sales of iOS devices tend to still be growing quarter by quarter or year by year...
Every year, there's way more iOS devices added into the pool of actively used devices, and everything added past an OS's release date has the newest OS.
Whereas Android, you still have phones that are sold today that are running not the current version of the OS, and sometimes they're running versions that are like six months or a year or even more old.
So as long as sales of iOS devices stay strong and you remain not able to downgrade them, I think we're always going to see very, very strong version adoption.
Apple had some stat that I can't remember.
It was something like the number of iOS devices sold in the past year is more than the number of iOS devices sold in all of history before that or something like that.
They've claimed that a lot because in many years that is the case.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, the growth, growth has leveled off a little bit, so maybe they won't be able to claim that next year, but that gives their, that combined with the fact that they can upgrade.
And like you said, that all the new versions, all the new hardware comes with the newest version that drives adoption.
And so they use it as a point, like our adoption is great because people, because users really love our latest version of the OS.
And I don't really think it's the case.
Not that it matters, but like iOS seven will freak people out, but they're going to upgrade it anyway, because the buttons are going to come on the screen and they're going to press it and they can't downgrade.
And when their contract expires, it's going to come on their new iPhone.
So guess what?
90% adoption.
All right.
I have more to say on that.
But first, let me break for a minute to talk about our second sponsor for today.
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I'm sad I can't go to that this year.
I tried to get finagle work into paying for me to go, but no luck.
Oh, well, maybe next time.
So, back to iOS 7 for a minute.
So, you know, WBDC happened.
We did our show, and we all gave our opinion of it.
Then I went home, and I showed my wife the beta on my iPhone 4S.
And her immediate reaction was, ew, this looks really cheap.
Looking at the home screen, looking at those often terrible icons, she really was very turned off by the appearance of the home screen.
And I think it was mostly because of the crappy icons.
And her initial experience was, I don't really want to keep using this.
I don't really want to play with this.
This is kind of gross, and I'm a little scared of where they're going here.
And, you know, she played with it for another couple of minutes at my urging.
And then, you know, later on that evening, she's using her regular iPhone with iOS 6 on it.
And she's like, you know what?
This looks old.
And she's like, you know, I actually...
I want the new one, and I want a white iPhone now.
That may be the worst part of iOS 7, is it encourages people to buy white iOS devices.
I couldn't agree more.
First of all, actually, I have a white iPad mini, because the new style... So I have a black iPhone 5, but ultimately, I think the black aluminum is not aging well.
The edges get the scratches, and you can start seeing the color underneath.
I don't know.
I'm not crazy about the way the black ones look in practice.
But anyway, I think this is going to probably reflect a lot of people's opinion of iOS 7, because when you first see it, you're kind of like, huh, that home screen's kind of ugly looking.
But then, you know, once the whole OS sinks in, and once you start to use it, you start to realize, okay, well, some of those home screen decisions are pretty bad, but overall...
this really does look very modern, and it starts to really show you how dated the old iOS appearance has become.
So did Tiff get deeper than just looking at the home screen?
Did she actually play with a few apps?
Yeah, I opened up Calendar and Mail and stuff like that.
I didn't have any third-party apps really installed on it, but I opened up built-in stuff, and she was poking around with that a little bit.
It was not a very long interaction.
I will give you that.
But just having seen that,
And only having seen that for a few minutes, she was then able to recognize, oh crap, my old iPhone looks – or my current iPhone looks old by comparison.
And so she wanted the new one just because it really is new and fresh and modern.
And I think – I really think that's going to be a very common reaction.
Well, and I know Tiff pretty well, and she doesn't strike me as the ooh, shiny kind of person, but is that going to be the reaction from your average Joe or Susie, that it's just new and shiny, or do you think it's deeper than that?
I happen to think it's deeper than that, but I'm a nerd, and so that's not unexpected.
Yeah.
I think it's going to be shocking to people who aren't paying attention.
They're going to be like, well, whoa, this doesn't look like my iOS.
But at that point, they will have no choice.
And they will use it for a week and get used to it.
And three or four things will continue to annoy them, just like three or four things annoyed them about the old one.
But they'll get used to it.
It's going to be a differentiator.
That's the most important feature of this change from the...
The regular person's perspective is that it is unmistakably different than the previous one.
And as I said in the past podcast, Apple needed to make a change.
This is a change.
That is an essential feature of this that customers can identify at a glance that is different.
because that's what iOS needs at this point.
It needs a clean break with the past and something new.
And as long as it's not completely unusable or just seen as horrendously ugly, it'll be fine.
I mean, think about Windows 8, which I think has some horrendously ugly parts of it, but that's not what annoyed people.
People weren't annoyed that Windows 8 was ugly.
They were annoyed they couldn't find anything and nothing worked and stuff like that.
So as long as Apple gets the functionality part of it right, and I think they're on the right track there, the...
The individual decisions about aesthetics are not as important as the fact that it is just immediately identifiable as a different thing.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And the fact is, it still does work roughly the same way.
There are a few little tweaks here and there, and there's slightly more updated or more modern things like the back gesture, more updated navigation structure and stuff like that.
But it all still works pretty much the same way.
And for people who have never seen the multitasking bar in iOS 6, they will continue to not see it in iOS 7, and they won't notice that it's any different.
So, like, you know, we look at every single thing that's different because we know every nook and cranny of iOS, right?
But, like, I even wonder about – I mean, it kind of explains why Apple put that little upward-facing arrow to say, hey, guys, Control Center is down here, and it's a convenient way for you to change stuff.
But that's another one of those features –
well maybe it's like notification center where the first time most people activate notification center it's probably an accident they're like what's this thing i was in this app and this little thing peeked down from the top for a second and then i went back to using it what is that it's like and i did another app and this thing is up there like eventually people will discover this thing down there but unlike probably notification center once people discover control center they'd be like oh fast way to turn wi-fi on and off like things that people can understand you know or change the volume or whatever uh
I'm hoping that that will be a feature that people will latch on to.
Again, for the people who don't know that you can open the multitasking tray and go to the left, and there's stuff over there that's useful, right?
Right, right, right.
Control Center is the much larger, nicer version of that.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
So I got my mother-in-law for this past Christmas.
She has this nice radio, this nice little radio thing in their living room, and she's been using the iPad, and she was getting it to Pandora.
So I got her an Airport Express so that she could then airplay the Pandora to the little radio in the living room.
And...
Having to describe to a relatively non-technical person all the steps involved in turning on – because, of course, Pandora on the iPad doesn't have an AirPlay button because their apps are extraordinarily mediocre.
But trying to explain to a regular person how to go to the multitasking tray, swipe over, find the AirPlay button, tap that, tap the room.
Now it's swipe up, tap AirPlay.
There's like three fewer steps than there were before, and it's way more clear.
And there's going to be so many interactions like that that are just so much easier with that.
Yeah, and the other thing I wanted to note was if you look at Apple's iOS 7 page, there's the big image of a white iPhone 5 with the home screen.
There's a couple paragraphs of text, and then there's, what is this, 3, 6, 9, 12 images of all the familiar apps.
Well, they're not images, actually.
I think they're little videos.
But they're all the familiar apps that...
They're showing, and the headline is, see iOS 7 in action.
So it's clear that they're trying to, shop isn't the right word, but familiarize people with what's coming.
So whenever the time comes that iOS 7 is out, then it won't be so jarring.
And I think Apple's a little nervous about it, and I think they should be, but I think all in all, it won't be bad.
Anyway, do we want to talk about Nevin Mergen's thing?
I do, I do.
Sure.
Because I put it in the notes, that's why.
You're preparing a little too much, John.
It's one sentence and a link, and it's not even a sentence.
Getting a little nervous.
It's not long.
All right, so Nevin's post is another in a long series of people with design backgrounds and not commenting on iOS 7 about what they like, what they don't like, and trying to divine the philosophy behind it and reconcile what Apple has said with the reality of the OS and all that stuff.
And Nevin's post was very focused, and it's clear that he has sort of chewed on this design in his head for a long time and has finally decided that...
Some of it just looks wrong to him.
And he focused on the icons showing, I think he showed the App Store icon, the little circle, and the A conforms to the grid that Johnny Ive and his team has fully laid out for iOS icons to make them all look the same, where they have concentric circles and boxes.
And they made a point of showing how, even though all the home screen icons look different, they all sort of touch on important points in this grid and conform to it in the right way.
And he was saying...
Uh, but the grid is wrong.
Look at that circle in the app store.
If I was designing this, it would be smaller and it should be smaller because it looks wrong when it's bigger.
Uh, and I read that post and I thought there was a couple of really obvious already designed type replies to it.
Uh, and I'm, I found one of them.
I was glad to see someone tackle a lot of it.
This is from Ari Warner.
Uh, we'll have these links in the show notes.
This is up on Medium, a site which I don't really like the URLs from because you can't read them.
But anyway, he responded to Nevin's post explaining how wrong this is not really applicable in cases of design because, you know, you need to talk about it in context and whether it fills the role.
It's not a piece of art.
It's not just supposed to be pleasing to the eye.
It has a functional aspect and so on and so forth.
And so both those notes will be in links will be in the show notes.
But.
My main reaction to Nevin's thing was – and I think people – I'm not going to call myself an artist, but I did do a lot of art-related things early in my life and still sort of have that bent, believe it or not, as a programmer.
And one of the things I always found myself doing when I was doing visual artwork and even visual design stuff is trying to prevent myself from giving in to the feeling that Nevin has, which is when you make something –
and you and you're sort of artistically inclined you can look at it and see that it's not quite right and if you're have a little bit more experience and a little bit more skill you can see that it's not quite right and know what's wrong with it and fix it so that's what he did with the app store i kind of said this doesn't look right to me uh and actually i can go further than that i know why it doesn't look right it's because the the space around the circle is not quite right if i change a circle to this size now it's more pleasing to me and it's sort of like
An intuitive sense that you have.
That's the word that Nevin used.
He made another tweet about intuition being a data-driven process running on a machine with thousands of years of evolution behind it or something to that effect.
But you look at it and you just feel that's wrong.
And so what you can do if you're making a piece of art is just keep changing it until you feel happy with it.
Oh, that doesn't look quite right.
Oh, that doesn't look... And if you know what it is about it that's wrong, you can keep moving it more and more towards that idea until you look away and you're like, now that's it.
That looks beautiful, right?
And some people just don't have that.
They can look at one logo and another logo, like, oh, they're about the same.
Another person, one logo with a circle that's 5% bigger can look totally wrong.
And the other one is like, oh, that's the one, right?
But if you give in to that feeling when you're making something, if every single aspect of it, you...
just use the use your intuition to say okay that's not right i'm gonna make it better that's not right to make it better what you end up doing is sort of painting the entire design with a sort of sameness where especially like in web design uh but even just when you're doing you know drawing a picture or something then you step away from you're like oh now i have made this entire thing pleasing to to the eye in all aspects and it looks bland and boring and so one of the first
impulses i can remember having when i was taking art lessons as a kid is that sometimes when you're drawing something or designing something you take some aspect of it and you intentionally make it look quote unquote wrong not not wrong in the sense of ugly or anything but you you you push the limit of you say this would look perfect and right and nice and beautiful and you know be like the golden ratio and it would look like a beautiful woman and it would look like nature and it would look like a fractal and it would just be so pleasing to the eye
But I want to push it slightly more along one axis because it creates a kind of visual and emotional tension.
You can't do that with all aspects because then you just make something that's ugly, right?
But if you take one aspect of it and you press it a little bit, sometimes with a purpose, but sometimes just because it's like, you know what?
This will be more interesting if I make this one aspect of it not conform to this ideal of beauty that I have in my head.
And you're knowingly doing that.
And I'm not sure that's what iOS 7 is doing.
But when I look at it, I think...
There are parts of this design that's unsettling, or some would say ugly.
Colors are usually easier to be ugly, but the circles, yes, I saw them and they look too big to me as well.
But I thought, look, they know that these circles seem too big.
Perhaps it's for readability.
The icon needs to be readable instead of...
Just visually pleasing, because if you made it smaller, it wouldn't look quite as nice.
But it also could be that a design where everything is made to conform to that beautiful ideal is more boring and lacks character.
And I'm willing to believe that some aspects of iOS 7's design were done with that in mind.
That a design that is beautiful in all aspects and perfectly conforms to our ideal of beauty is boring.
And I like it to push the envelope in some aspect, because that's more interesting.
Oh, the alternative there is that maybe Johnny Ive isn't that good at graphical design, which is a lot less interesting.
He didn't drill his icons himself.
That's true.
There are more boring explanations.
They made them bigger, so they're more readable, and they're going to refine them.
And the colors are harder to go by, but it's the same kind of thing in colors.
Sometimes, especially if you've done art for a really long time,
it's like you get burned out on just everything being beautiful and perfect.
And like, sometimes you make something intentionally on selling.
And I think there's a tension in that kind of design that tickles the, the brain nether regions of artists who look at it and they find that nicer.
And that's what you end up with something that's polarizing and regular people probably don't care, except maybe about the colors, which will probably people will probably interpret as ugly.
But I think these icons and everything else about it will be refined over time, but I hope they don't,
I hope they don't do a lot of the revisions that you see, like, oh, I've redesigned iOS 7.
See how it's better this way?
And there's just this sameness to them of, like, just making everything boring and beautiful in conventional ways or, like, desaturating the colors and making it all, like, you know, beautiful and low contrast and pale and grayscale and lots of other designery tendencies that, if applied en masse to an entire OS, make the whole thing boring.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think it's too early to say whether they're just bad at this right now or whether this is intentionally along one side.
I think time will tell.
I'm certainly interested to see what the fallout is from all the complaining about the icons.
Are they going to do a Microsoft Xbox 180, or are they just going to plow forward and see what happens?
Convert them back.
Microsoft's design of Windows 8 was kind of, we have this bold direction, but in terms of shapes, I guess, if not in terms of colors, try to make things reasonable.
There are no equivalents of those icons with the two big circles in Windows 8 that I've seen.
right they they fit things inside the boxes with you know correct spacing and margins and nothing is uncomfortably uh too big or too small within the borders where you know whereas some of those icons like like the grid itself i mean that that that outer circle is just too darn close to the edges of that round rack right and it's it's uncomfortably close for people with design sensibilities and surely everyone inside apple who has any design sensibilities knows what what nevin put in there uh that that that doesn't that isn't the most
pleasing visual arrangement.
But I can think of lots of reasons why they would intentionally do that.
So we'll see.
Is that it?
I believe so.
Good deal.
All right.
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors for this week, Squarespace and An Event Apart.
And I guess we'll see you next week.
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.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because 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-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-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
For the live listeners, we should specify that the second show this week will be an early recording.
I know you kind of implied this, but it's an early recording because John's traveling next week.
Right, so we're recording next week's episode this Friday, so in two days from now.
Hopefully Apple will not buy Nintendo on Monday.
What the hell made you think of that?
I'm thinking of a story that it would kill me not to be able to talk about in a timely manner, and then you'd publish the show for next week, and it would not be about Apple buying Nintendo.
People are like, what the hell is this?
Well, Marco, has your Tumblr money come in?
Why don't you just buy Nintendo yourself?
It hasn't yet.
And then you can sell it.
Yeah, there you go.
I've gotten good at that.
Yeah, right.
Do you guys see this Mac Pro benchmark that was leaked like an hour, like 15 minutes after we stopped talking about the Mac Pro?
Oh, awesome.
I clicked on it, but we had moved on by then.
I didn't get to read it, but...
show me the number that's what i i was so annoyed about yeah here they're doing it again don't compare the new mac pro to the old mac pro we all agree the old mac pro sucks we want to compare it to like well there's a few things that are interesting about this benchmark first of all uh it is the first time we've seen as far as i know it's the first time we've seen any benchmarks of the xeon e5 v2 series
Right?
I haven't been keeping up.
It's possible.
I think this is the first time that a particular Xeon E5 model has even been leaked.
So now, if this is correct, now we know there will be a model called the E5-2697.
It'll be 2.7 gigahertz, and it'll have 12 cores.
As far as I know, that's all new information.
But beyond that, you know, I think the performance here is really impressive.
It's obviously very impressive to get a Geekbench overall score of almost 24,000 out of one socket.
Isn't that testing, like, less than one-third of the transistors in this thing, though?
Well, there were multi-core tests and stuff.
Oh.
No, but I mean like the GPUs.
Most of the computer power in that device is in the GPUs.
I don't know how much Geekbench is stressing those.
This is more of a CPU benchmark.
I don't think it does any GPU.
Or maybe it has a different mode for it.
I don't know.
But yeah, this doesn't mention GPUs at all.
So I'm guessing it's only a CPU benchmark.
So it's kind of like weird.
It's like, you know, I've come up with a good car analogy.
It's like...
Benchmarking the gas mileage of the Veyron.
It's an interesting benchmark, but maybe not what that car is designed to do.
And so this machine comes with, like, it's basically a bunch of GPUs, RAM, and SSD, and, oh, by the way, a CPU attached to the thing to run it all in terms of, like, transistor count.
And, like, as Marco pointed out, perhaps in terms of RAM count as well.
I mean, the sad part is they've been able to pull off this really great score that with one socket blows away the previous 12 core by something like 10% or 15% that did it with two sockets.
But imagine if they made a two-socket version of this.
Then you could have, like, a 45,000 Geekbench score.
Well, can you find software that uses 24 cores?
That's pretty difficult to find.
Video encoding software.
Yeah.
What about your magical script that you wrote way back when?
I remember seeing that fly by during your Tumblr days when you were trying to, like, encode something.
Parallelize?
Yeah, it's a script that you just... I mean, and there's, like... I think there's, like, now an argument for XArgs or something that does roughly the same thing.
But, um...
Make minus J, you know, 25.
You know, what annoys me when I edit this show is that MP3 encoding is not well parallelizable.
Because there's like this bit reservoir or something.
I don't know.
There's some reason I was looking into it.
Why the lame encoder is just single-threaded.
Why it's lame.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But because, you know, any compression scheme, the data depends on the data that comes both before it and after it.
So it's not easy to break it up into chunks because the chunks, you know, are related to each other.
And the video encoders are...
so insanely cpu intensive that i would imagine they were designed from the very beginning to be more parallel friendly but they have the same thing like video codecs have the thing where like the current frame depends on the past frame and the future frame and so like obviously these are parallelizable but there's blocks there's like the b frame or something and then there's there's like a block and you can like you can pass one block to a different thread and
Yeah, like, it's parallelizable, but it's not as simple as something like, you know, just chop the data up into pieces, have those pieces process independently, reassemble the results, which would be, like, strict linear parallelization.
Right, exactly.
But, yeah, I don't know.
I think...
what concerns me about this this 12 core is that let me see i wonder i wonder if we can get let me pull up a comparison between the um like the single threaded tests of this versus my current 3.33 gigahertz two generations old xeon um this might be slower in some in certain things because i just have that raw clock speed advantage who knows anyway i'll do that after the show but this is very interesting or clock speed
This is very interesting, though, that this tells us quite a lot of new information.
I think most people are like, oh, good, the new Mac Pro is faster.
But if you look, this announces details about the Xeon.
It confirms certain percentage improvements over the previous Xeons.
So this is very interesting to see.
So on a wildly unrelated note, Sam the Geek in the chat was asking how you and Marco, you and I met.
And then I said it's a long and mostly uninteresting story.
And then Simon Kelly said, and John Syracuse will tear apart why the friendship is not really that great.
Which I thought was pretty awesome.
I don't feel like we should tell the story because I think I'd rather watch all our friends in the chat just invent answers.
It's probably more interesting than the real story.
Oh, it's so much more interesting than the real story.