The Escape Zone
Casey:
It is currently five past nine on Thursday night.
Casey:
The Apple event was earlier today.
Casey:
My beloved Virginia Tech Hokies are presently losing to the University of Pittsburgh.
Casey:
I am watching it out of the corner of my eye on my iPad on the Watch ESPN app, which is actually very nice.
Casey:
And I am trying desperately to pay attention to what you guys are saying rather than watch my beloved Hokies.
Casey:
And so if I accidentally let out a cheer, maybe given that we're losing 21-16, a not happy cheer that Marco may have to bleep.
Casey:
My apologies, but this is what I do for you listeners.
Marco:
It would be kind of incredible, though, to be perfectly well-timed.
Marco:
We're talking about this new touch bar, and Casey's like, f***.
Marco:
Come on, that would be kind of amazing.
Casey:
I wouldn't put it past me, so no promises.
Casey:
All right, so we do have an infinitesimally small bit of follow-up.
Casey:
Yes!
Casey:
All right, we're within 10 yards.
Casey:
That's a good deal.
Casey:
So we have an infinitesimally small amount of follow-up.
Marco:
All right, so for joke reference, this is a football team you're watching?
Casey:
Yes, this is a football team I'm watching.
Casey:
I have to know which sport to make terrible jokes about.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Oh, and isn't the World Series tonight as well, actually, come to think of it?
Casey:
One of the games, I mean?
Casey:
probably it isn't it like every night i mean is it like that's the thing like baseball baseball is like a ddos attack let's just like every night there's baseball like you can't get away from baseball there's constantly games everywhere every day that is amazing oh well done sir so we do have a bit of follow-up and for the first time in like two or three weeks it's not me john what have you been up to lately i did actually make it to an apple store to check out the phones that were there this is
John:
yes dedicated trip the only reason i went timely was to yeah to check out the phones we're gonna start right talking about the iphone yeah well it'll be quick it'll be here's a picture you took with one here's another picture you took with one uh-huh yeah i was gonna send them to tim but i decided not to um and i was hoping it would clarify he had plenty would clarify which one i wanted to get it didn't really help me that much because really yeah because
John:
i know i have a dilemma i think i've kind of decided what i'm going to do but you know yeah so the jet black one is grippier uh it would look better if people didn't touch it but people touch it so it looks gross it has little scratches on it like but we already covered all this ground um i think what i think what's going to end up happening is i'm going to experience the worst of all possible worlds because what i think i'm going to do is buy a jet black one and try using it without a case
John:
And then eventually decide that I can't handle it without a case because it looks too ugly and it's scratched too much.
John:
And then buy a case for it later after it's already damaged and scratched up and put a leather case on my scratched up Jet Black iPhone 7.
Marco:
At least it wouldn't be a lie.
Marco:
At least you wouldn't have this pristine phone under there that you think is totally unscratched, but there's actually one scratch on the side.
John:
i think i can keep it pretty well but like i the thing is i've never all my ipod touches i've had cases for and my one iphone i had a case for so i'm just going to give it a try without a case because this one is grippy enough that i feel like all right you know let's let's give it a try and can i handle the damage that is inevitably going to happen to this so i think i'm going to give it a try i almost bought one when i was there but then i remembered
John:
that I'm not supposed to buy one until I can renegotiate some Verizon thing in like 10 days or something.
John:
And they only had 256 gig models anyway, so I didn't get one.
John:
But I think that's what I'm going to do, get a jet black one, try it without a case, see how long I last.
John:
I predict that will not last long.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Now, are you planning to get AppleCare?
John:
Oh, yes.
John:
Yes, I always do.
Casey:
I bought myself this matte black iPhone 7, which I stand by a few weeks later is the prettiest iPhone I think I've ever owned.
Casey:
I really genuinely believe it's great looking.
Casey:
It is slicker than anything you can imagine, but it's really darn good looking.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Field goal.
Casey:
That's a good sign.
Casey:
Only down by two.
Casey:
So anyway, so I got this, excuse me, this Matt Black iPhone.
Marco:
This is all staying in the show, you know.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
The listeners will take this journey with me.
Casey:
So I got AppleCare.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
I got this AppleCare Plus for the very first time.
Casey:
I never got an AppleCare on anything before to the best of my recollection.
Casey:
And I feel okay about this.
Casey:
Meanwhile, later that same launch day, I order Erin an iPhone 7, no AppleCare+, because she always uses a case.
Casey:
We go to a football game this past weekend, and her phone falls out of her pocket because...
John:
why wouldn't it it's slick as a bar of soap and she didn't have her case on it yet ask me what happened to aaron's phone her three-week-old phone did you spill water on it no that would actually be kind of okay why did it not have a case on it yet how long does it take for the case installation process after after it is purchased this is like you have to bring it to the dealer to put the case on you just take out of the box and you put it in the case
Casey:
Well, the rust-proof coating on the undercarriage is really expensive and it takes a long time.
Casey:
Now, what ended up happening was we had gotten an Apple case, but even the silicone cases are ridiculously expensive.
Casey:
Just wait, just wait.
Casey:
The silicone cases are like $30 or $40.
Casey:
And so we had had one, but we were thinking, oh, maybe we can find something that's effectively the same on Amazon.
Casey:
It hadn't opened up the Apple one in case we could return it.
Casey:
So what ended up happening was in order to attempt to save the $40, I think it was, for the silicone case that we had already purchased,
Casey:
We ended up now having $130 worth of damage that has yet to be fixed.
John:
This is like when your UPS was sitting next to your computer during the thunderstorm, not plugged into it.
John:
Yes, exactly right.
John:
You have the case sitting at home in the box while you drop your phone.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's absolutely accurate.
Casey:
So get AppleCare is really the moral of the story here.
Casey:
Or put the darn phone in a case.
Casey:
And don't be like me.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
i'm all fired up i'm ready to go it's the mac day i'm so happy but yet asterisks but other for the most part i'm happy it's mac day we should start by talking about tv then we should this is to give an accurate simulation of the experience of watching this this presentation
Casey:
Well, you know that with John on the phone, we cannot skip anywhere.
Casey:
We're going to have to go chronologically.
Casey:
So let's start with the TV.
Casey:
Things have happened for the Apple TV.
Casey:
And in fact, things have happened for more than just the Apple TV.
Casey:
They've happened for iOS as well.
Casey:
The Mac, well, I mean, who cares about the Mac?
Casey:
It's just a Mac event.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But yeah, there's an Apple TV app or a TV app, I should say, for iOS.
Casey:
Not for the Mac, but for iOS and as well for the TV, of course.
Casey:
And it's all things to all people as long as you don't care about Netflix or Amazon.
John:
Yeah, it's weird, kind of weird that they did TV stuff in this thing, although we kind of knew that they were going to with, you know, just off our features, no hardware features.
John:
They haven't fixed the Apple TV remote or anything like that.
John:
But they did want to talk about their new, you know,
John:
Make the experience of actually watching TV on your Apple TV better, which is, hey, a good thing to do.
John:
Maybe don't spend so long on it in front of an event that's supposed to be about mix, but whatever.
John:
But I think it's worth talking about because this presentation kind of showed that Apple is still chipping away at Apple TV, making steady progress.
John:
But on the other hand, I think it also highlighted all the ways that they're behind.
John:
And I had a couple of thoughts in my head while watching this.
John:
One was that everything they were showing you, like...
John:
the unified interface tv convenient place to watch all your stuff easier than going to find like what app was i watching that thing in or whatever you know having a unified tv thing keeps track of what you're watching even if you're using another app to watch it trying to bring everything together like their goal of you know i forget what the words were i'll try to scrub to it in the video here but like a unified tv experience or whatever
John:
you can't or is it unified tv experience there you go you can't actually deliver on that until you hit some critical mass of content and it's debatable what that critical mass of content is but obviously we would agree that if you just had hbo it's never going to be unified interface or if you didn't have some of the major sports it wouldn't be unified interface but like i'm not quite sure what that is but i think apple apple tv does not yet have a critical mass of content
John:
and you may say that's based solely on netflix not participating in this that is enough at this point to say no because people want their next flicks they have exclusive content people like it if that's not part of this experience so much for unified it's already bifurcated and it's just going to splinter even more for things like local sports that you can't get so
John:
The goal of unified experience is fine, but as discussed many, many times in the past, if you're not going to do the omnivorous box thing, you can never present a unified interface unless you literally contain all the content someone wants to watch on TV.
John:
And I don't think they're close to that for most people.
John:
Because there's always going to be something that's not in Apple TV or not in the TV app in Apple TV for most people.
John:
A few people who only watch the things that are in there, fine.
John:
But if that's their goal, they need to work on the business side of this to figure out if we have these content providers...
John:
we could get, you know, we would cover 80% of the viewing public's needs or whatever.
John:
And I'm sure that changes from country to country and region to region, but I don't think they're close now.
John:
So that's depressing.
John:
But that has nothing to do with technology.
John:
It has to do entirely with business deals.
John:
And the next thing is the TV button.
John:
The icon on the remote for the TV button, it's kind of the home button.
John:
When you press it, you go back to the screen with all the little rectangles where all your different apps are.
John:
But that icon that's printed on the remote is also the little glyph that's on the TV app.
John:
And so in the demo they showed, if you go to the TV app, launch it, and there's a bunch of things you're watching, and you click on one of them, like Game of Thrones, and then you're chucked off into the HBO app where you're watching Game of Thrones, and then you hit the TV icon, it takes you back to the TV application, not back to the screen with a bunch of little rectangles.
John:
And it's kind of like...
John:
this button and this this thing go together and like it should have been there from the beginning but it could be retconned in but either way it kind of changes the fundamental experience i think for the better kind of in the same way that the apple watch experience was changed it's like look people don't want to go back to basically springboard on their apple tv all the time it's supposed to be a television watching device and if you're watching television the television watching should be the central thing like when you hit the tivo button it's
John:
you go back to well that's not a good example because it always takes you back to the stupid main tibo central whatever anyway um re-centering the center of gravity of the tell of apple tv on television i think is a good idea uh but then now all of a sudden the apple tv reframed in this way less as a like humongous ipad that you don't touch you know like it's just like a big ipad you know less like a oh springboard is the heart of everything right um
John:
springboard is not the heart of everything the tv app is the heart of apple tv because it's all about watching tv and sometimes you might want to play games or whatever but really you want to be using the tv app and reframed like that then again you see how far behind on there where are the user profiles how can i switch to like my kids thing where all their apps are going oh there's like up next or whatever yeah fine if you live alone and only one person ever watches tv shows at the same time that's great how do i switch to you know
John:
A different account with a different Apple ID or with the same Apple ID?
John:
All these things that Netflix has long since figured out.
John:
Because when you launch the Netflix app, you can pick who you want to be and you have your own queue of stuff and you have your own thing that you've watched last.
John:
And I'm not going to go up to it and find out the next thing that's up next for me is like, you know, some Disney Channel show that my daughter was watching that I don't want to watch, right?
John:
They're so far behind just the Netflix app, let alone...
John:
Other full television experience, you know, attempts to be a unified thing.
John:
So I'm glad Apple TV is making progress.
John:
I think they're moving in the right direction, but they're still behind and the remote sucks.
Casey:
Well, how do you really feel?
Casey:
You know, I was really excited to see the live sports stuff.
Casey:
And granted, as we've already discussed, I am not at all watching college football right now.
Casey:
But being able to just say to Siri, you know, put on the Virginia Tech game or what have you, that's really powerful and really awesome.
Casey:
When it works.
Casey:
When it works, which, I mean, well, I'm going on faith that it generally does.
Casey:
But that's really exciting.
Casey:
And that's, like you said, it's movements in the right direction.
Casey:
But I just have a hard time thinking that, for me, this is going to be much of an improvement.
Casey:
Because, generally speaking, when I'm using the Apple TV, which I do darn near daily, I'm using Plex, or I'm using Netflix, or occasionally I'm using the standard music app.
Casey:
It's very rare I am doing anything else.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Having to go, I guess how this would work is I would hit the TV, what was once the home button, to go to the TV app, and then I guess hit it again to go to Springboard?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It might take you back to the Springboard-y thing if you haven't first launched Apple TV.
John:
I have no idea how it will work.
John:
We saw a demo with two seconds worth of interaction.
John:
We'll find out when we get the OS update, I suppose.
Casey:
But anyway, if if going back to Springboard is via the Apple TV app or I'm sorry, the TV app always, that's actually going to be a disappointing change for me.
Casey:
But I hope I really, really hope that in the future, the Netflix and Amazon stuff gets squared away so that they can be included because Amazon is going to be important to me soon because of the grand tour.
Casey:
Like I said, Netflix is where we watch pretty much any TV that isn't on terrestrial television and plexus for movies and other things.
Casey:
So I feel like this is a step in the right direction, but it's not there yet.
Casey:
And man, I'm hopeful, though.
Casey:
I'm super hopeful, even though I don't expect anything to actually happen.
John:
and apple has a lot of work to do if it wants to get these things in like get netflix on board if this is the unified tv experience you need to have netflix in there get amazon to have a thing like integrate make sure the people who should be integrating do make sure plex is integrated like if you really want to be unified you have to reach out and it's really hard to get netflix on board when apple keeps making emotions about oh we're going to be our make our own content like they're doing that reality show and simco keeps talking about well you know we're looking into funding content to be like
John:
making your own content is directly competing with netflix and amazon who are also making their own content um and i i think it's easier to work with something like hbo which also makes its own content because hbo has no pretensions to make a digital platform for television watching like they're not selling little pucks that you connect to your tv they don't sell network services they're all about the content so that is a little bit more of a straightforward thing but anyway if this is their plan they they got a lot of work to do so
John:
while we're waiting for the new apple tv with a non-crappy remote to come out hopefully all of apple's little business people are scurrying around trying to get these deals to happen doing whatever it takes or just don't be a tv platform like if you're going to play in this game and try to provide a unified interface then provide unified interface i don't want to see you know 10 years from now three or four islands of content with their own apps and their own ecosystems totally separate from each other it's annoying
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else about the TV?
Casey:
I know, Marco, you are really excited to talk about it some more.
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
I care so much about television.
Casey:
You know, you say that, and I know to some degree you're being silly, but don't you watch all of your TV through the Apple TV?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I don't care about it whatsoever.
Marco:
To me, the Apple TV is something that I... I kind of treat the Apple TV the way a lot of our friends who love iPads so much treat the Mac.
Marco:
It's a thing that I use.
Marco:
I choose it as the best of a whole bunch of tools I don't care about.
Marco:
And I use it and I don't really think about it.
Marco:
I don't have a lot of passion for TV or TV-related things or TV-related boxes.
Marco:
The new Apple TV box is...
Marco:
Largely fine.
Marco:
It could be better in a lot of ways.
Marco:
I think it will always just be fine.
Marco:
The old one was always just fine.
Marco:
Also, the Apple TV as a product line has been around for quite some time, and it has always been fine.
Marco:
So I expect it to continue to be fine and for me to continue to use it on a regular basis, but really just never think about it at all, except when I'm using it and it doesn't work.
John:
i think you'll appreciate the up next thing because if you actually use that tv app it's an easier way to get back what was i doing before on the apple tv if it hasn't retained state on the thing to be able to just go to that except that the things that i that i watch most often are netflix and plex uh which i'm pretty sure will probably never be in it will not be in that yeah so
Marco:
i hear you you know it's the kind of thing like i don't i don't have cable so i don't have a cable login so i can't i don't use any apps that require cable login uh i do have hbo go now whichever one i have one of the hbo's now but i've actually been thank you i've actually been thinking about canceling it because we hardly ever watch anything there like we watch stuff in bursts and you can always just turn it off and turn it on again touchdown oh no never mind damn
Marco:
Regardless, I don't think I'm going to possibly ever see this TV app.
Marco:
Or if I do, it'll be something that gets in my way that I have to click the fake home button one more time out of to get to what I really want to watch.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on the Apple TV?
Casey:
Is your team losing yet?
Casey:
They are losing.
Casey:
I thought we had a touchdown, which would have put us somewhat comfortably in the lead, but I was mistaken.
Casey:
Riveting.
Casey:
You know, we forgot to mention something.
Casey:
Apple opened the keynote with a really lovely video on accessibility.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
I completely forgot to mention that.
Casey:
I thought that was really cool.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
They said that they're going to, or I guess, I think it's already there.
Casey:
I just haven't looked at it yet.
Casey:
They're going to have like a top level, so to speak, accessibility page on their website, which we should check out and we'll find it and put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But I thought that was a really great video.
Casey:
And in many ways, I think that's Apple at its best.
Casey:
And I just wanted to applaud them for it because I thought that was really good stuff.
Marco:
Apple has always been really good with accessibility stuff.
Marco:
Like, you know, they haven't been perfect, by all means.
Marco:
And anybody who uses these technologies will tell you the various times they haven't been perfect.
Marco:
But compared to what almost everyone else in the industry does, Apple's accessibility support is just world class.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
And what you get out of the box with Apple products for things like screen readers and click control, all sorts of various technologies.
Marco:
A lot of times, this kind of stuff is available on other platforms, but only if you buy additional software or have additional hardware even.
Marco:
What you get with Apple out of the box with all their products, accessibility-wise, is just ridiculously good compared to everything else in the market.
John:
I think the most important feature of these videos is, aside from making people think Apple is a nice company and doing all the PR effect, it's cynically like, oh, you go to these videos, show you such a nice company.
John:
Well, A, they are a nice company, and B, the other side effect of this is that it exposes people who don't use these features, people like me, don't use these features for the most part, to the fact that they exist and how they work.
John:
I had no idea that the camera on the iPhone will speak to you about who's in the frame and whether it finds a face and how big the face is.
John:
So a person who can't see, can I take pictures with the camera?
John:
Like when do regular people experience these features?
John:
I don't think most people go into accessibility and turn on accessibility features created for people who have a bad or no vision or can't hear or so on and so forth, just experiment with it.
John:
Right.
John:
Most people don't see these features at all.
John:
And so when you say accessibility, maybe people don't even know what you mean.
John:
You're like, well,
John:
Well, what do you mean?
John:
How can a blind person use an iPhone?
John:
You got to see the screen, right?
John:
People just don't know, right?
John:
And these things, I think, show what Marco just said, how far these products go to be usable in situations that regular people don't consider because they don't have...
John:
if you don't if you don't have these limitations uh you don't know what thing what affordances are there to help you with them until you need them like it's as we all get old for example uh i'm sure most of us will be cranking up the tech size and all of a sudden we'll appreciate that feature that we never touched before like my parents use their iphone like six size device in like the big mode where i forget what it's called but like you've everything is bigger it's like zoom in it's a non-native res
John:
Uh, and that feature is meaningless to me now, but eventually as my vision gets worse, suddenly it'll be like, Oh, I'm glad that's there.
John:
These videos do a good job of highlighting to both users and developers that this stuff is actually there.
John:
Um, so that when they do eventually get older and start, uh, you know, that their sensory perception starts changing, they'll know to go and find those and they'll feel good about, you know, using a product line that, that offers these years and for developers, uh,
John:
It's reminding them it's not just about putting labels on your things.
John:
There's other, you know, go the extra mile, like see what we did with the camera app.
John:
If you have a camera app, you could do something like this too.
John:
Your application will be more accessible.
Casey:
All right, what else was spoken about pre-Mac stuff?
Casey:
There was nothing that pertinent, right?
Casey:
Didn't they talk about iPhones briefly?
Marco:
They talked about how well the Apple Watch is selling but not giving any numbers, I don't think.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, who cares?
Marco:
Let's talk about Macs.
Marco:
It's a Mac day.
John:
They talk about iOS penetration of iOS 10 versus the latest version of Android or whatever.
John:
let's let's let's be honest they were killing time i don't know why they were killing time they they didn't have like it's not as if it's one thing to have filler and the second thing to just make what should have been a much shorter presentation way too long but they did uh we forgot to mention something about the apple tv minecraft is on the apple tv is that and i'm i'm not trying to be snarky is that something we care about like is that a big deal or is or do you think no one will use that i don't know squat about minecraft
John:
i don't i don't think that's that i mean it it's it's a big deal in that minecraft is super popular and tons of people will buy it and play it uh but minecraft is available on like every platform in the universe so the fact that it's on apple tv now yeah you have parody good but you know all right so i guess i've run out of reasons to stall other than to say that tech is up 22 21 over pit uh let's talk about the mac
Casey:
Overall, I feel like this is okay.
Casey:
I think this is good.
Casey:
I certainly have been left... There are certain things that I'm disappointed by.
Casey:
But in the grand scheme of things, these new MacBook Pros look really darn good.
Casey:
Really, really good.
Casey:
I'm amped about the... What do they call it?
Casey:
The touch bar.
Casey:
I don't know if I'll like it, but...
Casey:
Tentatively, it looks good.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I'm excited to try it, even though I don't plan on buying one and I'm not going to get one from work for two years.
Casey:
But anyway, I'm excited to try it.
Casey:
I am sad, although completely unsurprised that they don't have like a Magic Keyboard update that included it.
Casey:
I understand that leaving that screen on would surely take a not insignificant amount of battery power.
Casey:
But I mean, the Magic Keyboard is rechargeable now.
Casey:
So who really cares if I have to charge it once?
John:
You connect it with a wire and then you wouldn't have that problem.
Casey:
I mean, I wouldn't want to be an animal, but I could.
Casey:
But no, I mean, I would love to see a Magic Keyboard that had this touch bar on it.
Casey:
I don't expect it'll happen, but it would be neat.
Casey:
And I say that in part because at home I use a desktop.
Casey:
I use an iMac.
Casey:
And certainly today there was no real talk about anything for the desktop.
Casey:
But I can't say I'm surprised by that either.
Casey:
I mean, what are they really going to do to the iMac?
Casey:
There's not really any new chips, are there?
Casey:
And outside of maybe a new fancy keyboard, wired or wireless, or maybe I guess you could put different ports on it.
Casey:
You could put USB-C ports on it.
Casey:
But that's not that remarkable to me.
Casey:
So, I'm not too surprised that there's not a lot of desktop activity.
Casey:
Nobody really thought the Mac Pro would be updated.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
I mean, come on.
John:
We were talking about this last week.
John:
Marco said exactly the same thing.
John:
Like, if we're going to update the iMac at all, it's just USB-C ports, and we didn't mention another fancy keyboard, but...
Marco:
Well, that's not entirely true.
Marco:
I believe the Kaby Lake CPUs are available roughly for the iMac.
Marco:
I'm not sure if they're in volume really yet, but technically new CPUs are basically available for the iMac now.
John:
I know, but none of us expected the iMac to come or the Mac Pro or the Mac Mini.
John:
You expected the iMac?
John:
Really?
Marco:
the iMac has been updated the last two falls like it it made sense like it is right on schedule for the iMac to be updated i'm guessing it's it probably is not far off like i mean i wouldn't expect it like next week but i'm guessing it's not going to be like another year until the next iMac update it's probably going to be a few months maybe i don't know you're more optimistic than i am i like like i said in the last show i think they should keep updating the iMac but i have dim hopes that they will i guess because i mean i
John:
I don't understand the reasoning behind the cadence of doing an iMac update so faithfully and then just dropping it, but I totally expected not to have any desktop Macs at this thing at all.
Marco:
Well, the thing is, doing an update when it's a fairly minor processor and motherboard chipset update is not that hard.
Marco:
It doesn't take that much engineering work for Apple, not any more engineering work than any other
Marco:
update is like and and it used to be not that long ago that every time there was a new chipset out for either the macbook the macbook pro the macbook air or the iMac it got updated like within a month of that new chip coming out uh so it's only been in these recent years where there's all been like apple skipping generations and intel having weird delays it's only been in those years that we started having these things where apple is kind of like
Marco:
deciding whether they want to bother updating things.
Marco:
I mean, it used to just be assumed, of course, they would update their main computers with the new chips that came out.
Marco:
And so the iMac line of chips has not had those problems that all the mobile ones have had with Intel.
Marco:
So the iMacs have actually been updated on a regular basis until right now.
Marco:
And it's a little questionable why it wasn't there now.
Marco:
And I guess the answer will not be apparent until whenever it is updated next.
Marco:
Then we'll figure out, like, you know, why did it not get updated now, I guess.
Marco:
But...
Casey:
Well, I think I have an answer, though, because if you look at Wikipedia, which is clearly the source of all human knowledge and never incorrect, the Kaby Lake Wikipedia entry says that it began shipping to manufacturers in OEMs in the second quarter of this year.
Casey:
Mobile chips have started shipping with more of Kaby Lake desktop chips to be released in the coming months or early next year.
Casey:
So what makes you think that they're available for the iMac right now?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Random people on Twitter told me I could be wrong.
John:
You want random people in the chat room are pointing out that if they are available, it's almost certainly not the ones with the fancy iris graphics that Apple always likes.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So that could be the reason that it could be as simple as that.
Marco:
Also, I think it's worth pointing out, like we heard from a lot of people because, like, you know, Intel officially, quote, launched KB Lake like a month or two ago or whatever it was.
Marco:
And we immediately heard from everybody on Twitter saying, how could Apple release Skylake laptops now and not Kaby Lake?
Marco:
And of course, the reason why is because when Intel announces a longship means nothing.
Marco:
It's like Intel is basically saying these chips will be available sometime, maybe in the future.
Marco:
And at the actual time that you can ship computers with the right ones for those computers might be, you know,
Marco:
2 to 12 months away from that time period.
Marco:
But anyway, Kaby Lake I don't think is a big deal.
Marco:
From everything that we've read about it, from what we know about it so far, it seems like it is not really something that you should be really waiting up for.
Marco:
Sky Lake was a big deal.
Marco:
Kaby Lake really isn't.
Casey:
I also have another important update for you.
Casey:
It's 29-21 Tech.
Casey:
The good guys are winning.
John:
Is this a basketball game you're watching?
John:
There's a lot of scoring going on here.
Casey:
Well, you know, football, sometimes it's a more offensive than defensive game.
Marco:
Are you voting for the Hooties?
Marco:
What are you doing?
Marco:
Hokies.
Marco:
H-O-K-I-E-S.
John:
It was like that ringer of an Auburn game they had where Auburn was up like 50-something.
John:
You get to do that when you're a CEO, I guess.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
OK, so no desktop.
Casey:
So no iMac updates.
Casey:
It's unclear whether or not Kaby Lake is available.
Casey:
Tipster is saying yes.
Casey:
I'm seeing no.
John:
I mean, it doesn't matter if it's available.
John:
There's lead times to getting it into computers.
John:
And Apple recently has not been that spry about like, as soon as the chips are ready, we're going to be ready to go.
John:
Like, that's kind of more of the old Apple.
John:
And this new one is like...
John:
Don't even wake me up until they're available in volume and the next generation is about to come out.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Then maybe we'll incorporate them into a computer of some kind.
Marco:
When Apple delays on things, and this is probably Intel delay here, but when Apple delays on things, what I'm saying is...
Marco:
we don't really have to make excuses for Apple anymore.
Marco:
They are the biggest corporation in the world most of the time.
Marco:
They have tons of resources that they can choose to devote to updating their computers to new components that come out for them.
Marco:
It isn't that hard.
Marco:
It doesn't take a lot of time or money relative to what they make from them and what they have as a company.
Marco:
So we don't need to excuse them.
Marco:
It is up to them to update things.
Marco:
And it is my opinion they should not be slackers about that or skip generation simply because they don't feel like it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So sadness about, well, maybe not sadness about the iMac.
Casey:
I think we can all agree that's reasonably expected.
Casey:
Sadness, but not surprised about the, what is that little Mac called?
Casey:
It doesn't come with any devices attached to it.
Casey:
It's not got a display.
Casey:
It's like a little one.
Casey:
It's like a tiny Mac.
Casey:
No, no, no, not the circular one.
Casey:
Not the circular one.
Casey:
It's like more of a rounded rack.
Casey:
It's a Mac.
Casey:
The old Mac Pro.
John:
The Apple TV you're thinking of.
Casey:
uh shoot i can't remember the name mac small mac small maybe no it's much smaller than that oh man it'll come to me the mac air the power power mac g4 cube yes that's it oh is that it okay yeah so no power mac g4 cube updates um no trash can updates thank god because oh my i wouldn't even pay attention to this this show anymore i'd just be watching my football game actually maybe they should have updated the mac pro isn't that what you're doing yeah
John:
Speaking of the Mac Pro, I was surprised at how many random angry people there were on Twitter about there being no Mac Pro update, which shows that there's this weird sort of Venn diagram between people who understand that the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in forever.
John:
But don't follow the stuff enough to know that there was no way in hell a new Mac Pro was coming out in this thing.
John:
So it's kind of weird that the anger has spread beyond the people who are ever actually going to buy one to just the general public being embarrassed for Apple for having this quote unquote pro computer that pretty soon the watch will be faster than.
Marco:
well because you know even if you're not about to buy a mac pro the fact that they have this high-end that the highest-end computer in their lineup that has been so neglected high-end air super air quotes yes but well it's still i mean if you do parallel stuff it's still the fastest it's fastest on no other benchmark but on that barely barely or you get like five ipads yes uh so probably not even that many uh but um
Marco:
the reason this matters is what you argue john and your your supercar halo car thing um that like it matters whether apple is treating its high end well if you are a mac user at all because if apple is neglecting significant portions of its user base uh for the mac lineup and you are a mac user or you are heavily invested in the mac as a platform that should be a warning sign for you that like that just set off warning bells to say like wait a minute
Marco:
Maybe the health of my platform or the future of my platform is not as healthy or guaranteed as I would like.
Marco:
Because if they're neglecting this whole big area of it, maybe there are worse things to come or maybe they aren't putting the right resources into it.
Marco:
So it is totally relevant whether you buy a Mac Pro or not, how Apple treats their Pro customers.
John:
Yeah, I'm just saying they crossed over the point now where it has moved beyond and now is affecting a broader base of people.
John:
It's kind of like as if they were still selling the original Dodge Viper, like the original, original Dodge Viper.
John:
It had not changed in any way.
John:
And it would be like, oh, that's a great halo car for Dodge or Chrysler.
John:
But eventually it becomes an embarrassment because the original Viper was a terrible car in so many ways.
John:
And it just can't compete with today's supercars.
John:
It would be like, oh, your halo car for Dodge can be beaten off the line by a Volkswagen GTI now.
John:
I mean, it's just be or even a lesser car.
John:
It stops being a halo car.
John:
when it loses in single-threaded performance to the two, you know, run-of-the-mill computers.
Casey:
So anyway, so no Mac Pro, not surprising.
Casey:
No Mac Mini, not surprising.
Casey:
No iMac, almost entirely not surprising.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That leaves us with the portable Macs.
Casey:
So the MacBook Pro, as I was talking about a few minutes ago, MacBook Pro is looking really good.
Casey:
Aesthetically, it's looking really good.
Casey:
I think what they've done is really cool.
Casey:
The touch bar looks great.
Casey:
And we can go through this line by line.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Man, it's to the point that between this external display, which actually we should talk about as well, that I have at work, the 4K display I have at work, and these new MacBook Pros, I'm starting to doubt my newfound love for my desktop iMac existence because I love this 5K iMac.
Casey:
I love it to death.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I just can't help but think to myself, well, you know, I could get one of these 4K or maybe the fancy 5K LG display.
Casey:
I could get one of these new MacBook Pros.
Casey:
Life could be pretty good that way.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
One of you guys is probably upset about this.
Casey:
So talk me out of spending money I don't have on a computer I don't need.
Marco:
i'm probably i'm probably the most upset but marco can go first and say what he likes so i will go back to your earlier point but which i will you know i'm probably not done talking about this point yet uh but basically the touch bar looks really cool i'm sure it's going to be a really big deal for people when they are working on their laptops and no doubt that is a lot of people a lot of the time however it is not on every laptop and
Marco:
Apple sells a lot of the MacBook Air class computers.
Marco:
And so for everyone who bought the MacBook Adorable slash MacBook One, or for everyone who buys the old or kind of still for sale but old MacBook Air, or the new...
Marco:
Whatever we're going to call the low-end configuration of the MacBook, names in the chat that I liked a lot so far are MacBook Escape or the FnBook.
Marco:
I think MacBook Escape is probably my favorite one.
Marco:
But, oh, the Air Pro and the FnPro were also very good.
Marco:
But MacBook Escape is really good.
Marco:
Anyway, so all those people, that's a lot of Mac buyers, not to mention all the desktop buyers.
Marco:
And granted, I know laptops are more popular than desktops, so I know the desktop buyers don't count for as much.
Marco:
all those people and the entire Mac user base that has a computer already before today does not have a touch bar.
Marco:
And even if you are one of the people who has one of the new MacBook Pros with the touch bar,
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that is when the touch bar can be used.
Marco:
It is going to be a really great convenience for the people who use it in that way, but I don't think it's going to radically take over the Mac experience yet and become like a must-have accessory until it is available across the entire lineup, laptops and desktops in some form.
Marco:
that might become more interesting than you know when when you can kind of assume that all modern macs have it but you can't assume that today as either a user or developer so i think it's going to take a while before that becomes a must-have thing it will be a convenience from day one and surely you know apple's apps having it built in is nice uh you know and and that's like that's a lot of apps that people use on the mac is our apple's built-in app so that's good
Marco:
But it's going to take a while.
Marco:
Like when the first Retina MacBooks came out in 2012, it took a long time for most of what you saw on screen to be Retina.
Marco:
It took a couple years at least for apps and websites and everything to update.
Marco:
For the Touch Bar, it's going to take a while before you can really get into using it with many of your apps and everything.
Marco:
So I would say for you, Casey, looking at these today and feeling bad you don't have one...
Marco:
It's the kind of thing where if you're buying a new laptop, if you were buying one anyway, then I think you should consider the touch bar as an important thing to have, you know, probably.
Marco:
And all this should be prefaced by saying that none of the three of us were at the event.
Marco:
None of the three of us have review units.
Marco:
So none of the three of us have ever touched these or handled these or seen these in real life.
Marco:
So all this could be out the window the first time that...
Marco:
The world kind of gets more experience with these and we know more about them and how they work in reality.
Marco:
But I would say probably that if you're buying today or if you recently bought something and you don't want to buy another thing, you don't really have to feel bad yet that you don't have this touch bar.
Marco:
Because it's going to be a while before apps can assume that a lot of people have it.
Marco:
And it's going to be a while before a lot of apps take advantage of it.
Marco:
And we still don't know...
Marco:
how much of a must-have thing it will be in practice until these things are out for a while and we can kind of look more objectively after.
Marco:
It's kind of after the cool has kind of rubbed off and we've either used them ourselves or we know people who have used them and we've gotten like some long-term opinions from ourselves or others about like how useful this actually is in practice.
Marco:
So for now, you don't need to feel bad.
John:
You should feel bad not because you don't have a touch bar, but because you don't have a MacBook Pro with, like, modern internals that's way faster than the one you have now.
John:
So that bad feeling remains.
Casey:
So question for both of you, and I'll start with Marco.
Casey:
Do you think that a keyboard with a touch bar will ever exist for a desktop Mac?
Casey:
Or do you think it will always, always, always be for laptops?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
If yes, if you think it will one day exist for desktop Mac, would Apple just completely go bananas and make it wired only?
Casey:
Or do you think it would be just basically a revision of the smart keyboard as it is today?
Marco:
I honestly don't know.
Marco:
I'm leaning towards no.
Marco:
And no one's going to like the reason why.
Marco:
But I'm leaning towards no.
John:
Oh, I know it.
John:
I know the reason.
Marco:
You probably do.
Marco:
We all know the reason.
Marco:
I'm leaning towards no because, you know, A, I think putting the touch bar as it exists today into something the size and price of the Magic Keyboard, I think, would be very challenging.
Marco:
And there's probably a lot of constraints there, many of which are self-imposed by Apple.
Marco:
But I basically don't like I don't see them wanting to make their keyboard bigger.
Marco:
I don't see the market having much tolerance for them making their keyboard more expensive.
Marco:
It's already pretty expensive.
Marco:
And I don't really see them wanting to have multiple models of keyboard that they sell.
Marco:
I mean, they can barely sell peripherals at all anymore.
Marco:
So I don't see that happening.
Marco:
But ultimately, the biggest reason why I don't honestly see this happening, even if they get over the technical stuff, is that I just don't think Apple gives a damn about desktops anymore.
Marco:
And that's not to say they're never going to make one again.
Marco:
But I just think the focus... I mean, look, you can barely get Tim Cook to pretend to care about the Mac.
Marco:
at all all macs you know there's a reason why tim didn't say a lot today about the mac you know that was delegated to phil and craig because they i'm pretty sure care deeply about the mac like they seem like they're really like mac champions inside the company at the very high level
Marco:
But Tim, I don't think Tim cares.
Marco:
I don't think he even hides that very well.
Marco:
I don't think he even honestly tries.
Marco:
I don't think Tim cares.
Marco:
And so as long as the company is led by Tim, I don't see the Macs making substantial advances.
Marco:
What I see instead is what we see today, which is they're going to keep doing what they can do to move things along occasionally to be thinner, lighter, better, faster.
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
But I don't see a time under Tim Cook's rule, which is probably going to be long, I don't see a time of this happening here where...
Marco:
Tim is going to decide that the Mac really needs a lot of effort put into it and it needs major resources and major prioritization.
Marco:
I just don't see that happening.
Marco:
So I don't think they're going to put in the lots of work that it would take and possible profit cannibalization of other products to meaningfully enable this on desktops.
Marco:
I just don't see it happening.
Marco:
I wish it would, but I just don't.
Casey:
Let's assume for just one moment that you're right, that Tim either doesn't care about the Mac, or let's even go so far as to say he freaking hates the Mac.
Marco:
I'm not saying he hates it.
Marco:
What I'm saying is, he's obviously not a Mac person.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure he has said on the record multiple times that he does his work on iPads anyway.
Marco:
So I don't think he uses Macs very often, if at all.
Marco:
And I think he is very much profit-focused, and he looks at where Apple can make the most profit and diverts resources there.
Marco:
And things that make still good profit but just less are kind of out of his field of vision, I think, most of the time.
Marco:
So basically, I just don't think Tim gives a lot of thought to the Mac, and I don't think it's a priority for him.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's assume that's true.
Casey:
And in any degree of aggressiveness, he hates the Mac or maybe he just doesn't really care.
Casey:
Maybe it's just another line item, like you said.
Casey:
Let's assume any one of those is true.
Casey:
He's a pretty smart man from everything we can tell.
Casey:
Don't you think he would trust in his lieutenants and those who do care for the Macs?
Casey:
I don't view Tim as the thing standing in the way of the Mac being this perfect device that you're excited to buy a new one every six months or what have you.
Casey:
I really don't think Tim's the problem here.
Casey:
I think it's just that Apple is doing what they think is best.
Casey:
And like I think you had said, Marco, I mean…
Casey:
Laptops are the Macs that everyone buys.
Casey:
We're weird buying desktops and super weird for you two buying cheese graters and trash cans.
Casey:
So I don't think Tim is the problem.
Casey:
I think it's just that this is where the users are.
Casey:
So why not cater to the 90%?
John:
Well, it's debatable whether there's even a problem.
John:
I mean, the job of the CEO is to be forward looking.
John:
It's like, is this a product line that's in ascension or in decline?
John:
And clearly desktop PCs and laptop PCs in that whole market are in decline compared to smartphones and possibly even tablets.
John:
And so he's trying to be forward looking.
Marco:
But not for Apple.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
They're not in decline for Apple.
Marco:
They're in decline for everyone else.
Marco:
But until Apple stopped updating them for three years, they weren't in decline for Apple.
Marco:
Apple has this entire market that it could keep taking share from.
Marco:
It's a big market.
John:
It was declined relative to the rest of their business because the rest of the business was growing much faster.
John:
At this point, service revenue is more than Mac revenue, right?
John:
Because service revenue is growing.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It just passed Mac revenue, right?
John:
So if you are looking where the next big...
John:
you know where is the next uh big product that's going to go on a big growth trajectory going to come from it's not the pc it's not the mac that's what apple currently thinks and so again it's debatable whether long term this is an incorrect choice i think we're in the painful period now where it's like well look are you going to do max or you're not going to do max apple's like oh no we're going to do max but they're doing them not with the gusto meaning not with the investment that they used to do them and to get back to casey's question
John:
uh you know do i think they're going to do a keyboard with uh with a touch bar on it the apple that was still investing heavily in the mac where the mac was like super important and central even even as the iphone was growing and the ipod and all these other businesses were obviously where the big growth was back you know not too many years ago apple was still heavily investing in the mac because those growing ones started off small and the ipod one did a hump and went back down right and so it was like well the mac
John:
you know we got to keep investing in the mac because the ipod looks great and it's this big business for us but actually we can see it's on the way back down oh the iphone's looking great and it's on its way back up but if you were to look at those line graphs the mac was still in the mix certain point the phone just took off and now every single graph is like
John:
here's the iphone company and then there's some lines down there near the horizontal axis and those lines are like service revenue macintosh like just crap like that and once that happens like it's hard to it's hard to justify like is it the right thing for the for the ceo to do to continue to invest uh that much proportionally in the mac as you used to and it's clear that they're not right and so the old apple not i'm saying like good old days but the old apple with the old apple mix of products and revenue and profits
John:
right that apple would have had touch bar keyboards in this presentation today like guaranteed because like marco said what the hell is the point of this thing even people who have laptops when they sit them at their desk you know you're not like laptops are bad ergonomically to sit in front of all day the keyboard should not be touching the display like it's like that because it's a portable device and you you know when you use it portably that's what you got to go with but if you're sitting at a desk
John:
your laptop is off to the side, you have a second monitor, or your laptop is up on a stand, but then you can't use that keyboard and you're using a big keyboard.
John:
Like...
John:
the touch bar can't be part of the quote-unquote mac experience if the only place it exists is on a keyboard attached to a laptop period so the old apple would have had it because the old apple was investing in the mac much more for comprehensible reasons not like out of spite or meanness or whatever now if you would have this discussion with tim cook and and try to convince him that it is important to continue to invest in the mac you can't say it's because the mac is going to be proportionally a larger percentage of apple's profit and revenue in the future because it probably isn't but you could make the argument that
John:
Even though it looks small, and the argument I think we've made, even though it looks small and it's not going to come out of nowhere and become a big thing, it is, as many people have pointed out on Twitter and said it with various metaphors or whatever, the foundation of so many other things that Apple does.
John:
You've got the halo car factor for having the highest performance computing device.
John:
You've got the fact that the development for the platform that's most important to your company is done on Macs, right?
John:
You've got the historical loyalty and fan base.
John:
You've got the Alpha Geeks creatives type angle, which we can talk about when we talk about the Microsoft Studio.
John:
There are lots of reasons not having to do...
John:
with how much they sell or how much their profit is, that the Mac is really important.
John:
And I could make that argument pretty strongly to Tim Cook, and I bet people are trying to make that argument, but that argument relies on a lot of assumptions, or you have to be convinced that if this and this and this, therefore this.
John:
You can't back it up by saying, look, I don't even need to convince you of like...
John:
human psychology or customer loyalty or other things like that i can just show you the the lines on a graph with dollar signs attached to them and you can be convinced you have to go to a more touchy-feely argument to convince tim cook to invest more in the mac than they are currently investing and i'm hope i'm hoping the people who are making that argument
John:
inside apple are winning and that what we're just seeing here is you know a course correction that they haven't quite corrected all the way and a couple of the intel delays mess things up and they'll be resurgent in the next year when they inevitably reduce uh produce these sky like uh mac pros someday maybe possibly is it inevitable
John:
oh i don't know i i backtracked from the inevitable saying the potential mac pro that we might you know it they could still turn this around and sort of get back on an even keel but the the lack of a touch bar external keyboard is a perfect example of how apple is just not investing as much in the mac as they used to and it's i think it is is an argument to be had of whether that is
John:
smart or not smart but as fans of max as all of us on this podcast are friends of max it is painful to see the product that used to be so important to the company being so much less important now i i i don't know if i would go that far at all just because they're not updating desktop max with the speed or efficacy that you two approve of doesn't mean they don't care about the mac or any mac these the laptops weren't updated forever either
Casey:
Well, yeah, but I think a lot of that was, obviously none of us know, but if I were to wager a guess, that was relying on Intel to give them a decent reason to make an update, or perhaps, let's assume that wasn't the issue, maybe they were just trying to get this pretty darn fancy touch bar tech and the fancy Touch ID tech, which apparently is basically a mini Apple Watch within the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
That can't have been easy.
Casey:
So I don't think it's fair to characterize Apple as not caring about the Mac or caring that much less about the Mac.
John:
It's not about caring.
John:
It's investment.
John:
It's not care.
John:
It's not personify the company.
John:
It's like, how much money and resources do you put into this?
John:
It's investment.
John:
It's not like Mac's feelings are hurt or whatever.
John:
It's a choice of resource allocation, right?
John:
And that's the argument that you're making towards this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I feel like the perfect example is even if we buy everything you're saying about the touch bar and being difficult or whatever, it's apparently ready to announce now they could have announced keyboards right alongside it.
John:
But if they felt that was an important part of the Mac experience.
John:
And speaking of the touch bar, the next topic I want to move to is specifically about touch bar.
John:
But we can get done gnashing our teeth over the Mac investment.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, but that's the thing is I really don't, I mean, I guess there's no way that I'm going to convince you that you're wrong.
Casey:
And there's certainly no way you're going to convince me that I'm wrong.
Casey:
But I just, for the record, there's one of the three of us that thinks that there are investments happening to the Macs.
Casey:
I am, as it sits right now, I feel like I'm more desktop Mac guy than a portable Mac guy.
Casey:
But I am really excited about the MacBook Pros.
Casey:
And that is what most Mac users use.
Casey:
Almost everyone uses MacBook Pros.
Casey:
Or perhaps the Airs, which at this point are near as makes no difference to the Pros.
Casey:
I mean, the Pro is effectively an Air.
Casey:
I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a lack of investment.
Casey:
I don't think it's fair of the three of us to say, oh, putting a mini Apple Watch next to a mini Retina display on a box that's physically smaller, that has better battery life...
Casey:
That is quicker.
Casey:
Like, these are all worthwhile investments.
Casey:
And I don't think it's fair that a bunch of nerds are getting butthurt about the fact that this isn't the thing that they wanted Apple to invest in.
John:
No, that's not what this is about at all.
John:
Like, even if we ignore all of, like, what we think Apple's philosophy is and how they choose to invest because we don't know where their money goes because we don't have that love of granularity, ignore all that and just treat Apple as a black box and look at the products they release and when they release them.
John:
The release cadence of Macs has...
John:
They release them less often, which means that the existing ones that you can buy are worse relative to other things.
John:
And they also keep selling the old ones for much longer.
John:
That is inarguably a fact.
John:
And you could say that's not because they're not investing as much.
John:
In fact, they're investing even more, but that dictates that they have to have bigger gaps between products.
John:
That is probably the only argument you can make because like, oh, it actually costs so much more money to do the touch bar than the other things they did with the Macs.
John:
But I don't really buy that either.
John:
Like the MacBook Pros that were out there on the market,
John:
were behind the 15 inch macbook pro was an embarrassing product to sell as like this used to be the best like in the presentation like the best macbook pro now he made it even better they used to be able to do that pitch because when they replaced them the old one was still pretty good the old one's piece of crap what the hell was it uh ivy bridge or haswell whatever the hell it had it was haswell
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
We can argue about what the cause of that was, but on the outside, we can see that's the case.
John:
That 15-inch MacBook Pro was not a pro product, was not worth the price they were buying for it.
John:
It wasn't Mac Pro levels of bad, but it was bad.
John:
And this is their flagship product.
John:
And so, of course, when they make a new one, it's thinner, faster, better.
John:
Yeah, that's great.
John:
It's thinner, faster, better.
John:
We totally agree with all that.
John:
Of course, when they compare it to the old models, it's like, oh, come on.
John:
Look how much faster it is than our old MacBook Pro.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because your old MacBook Pro sucked.
John:
That's why it's so much better.
John:
we know like and again i'm i know this is sounding negative i'm going to get even more negative in a little bit these are these are good machines right but i'm what i'm arguing against casey is i'm trying to convince you that regardless of what we think about these machines which i think they're pretty darn good and we'll talk about that eventually i promise um
John:
I don't think you can say that Apple is putting the same amount of resources into the Mac as they used to because the proof is in the products that they release and when they release them.
John:
And we can argue about what the causes are and stuff like that, but I don't think there's an argument to be had that they're doing the same as they used to.
Casey:
It's not fair to say that they're putting the same amount of investment in as they used to.
Casey:
I concur.
Casey:
But what I'm hearing, which maybe is a misinterpretation on my part, is what I'm hearing is, oh, they're ignoring the Mac.
Casey:
The Mac is on life support.
Casey:
Nobody cares about the Mac.
Casey:
Tim Cook hates the Mac.
Casey:
Like, I don't see that.
John:
You said all those things, not us.
That's true.
Casey:
I mean, I just, I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like you're crapping all over the you collective you and not just you two.
Casey:
I mean, I saw a lot of just grumbling going on today on Twitter.
Casey:
Like, I feel like everyone's just getting grumpy about, oh, touchdown tech.
Casey:
Everyone's getting grumpy about the Mac.
Casey:
And now I'm back.
Casey:
I'm back.
Casey:
I'm back.
Casey:
Wait, text the one that you like, right?
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
The 2Ds or whatever.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
That's exactly right, yeah.
Casey:
So everyone's getting so upset about, oh, they're not investing enough in the Mac.
Casey:
And I just, personally, I don't see it that way at all.
Casey:
I agree, John, that certainly there was a dark period.
Casey:
Perhaps I shouldn't be sweeping the dark period under the rug as quickly or as emphatically as I am right now.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
To me, this is a clear sign that the Mac matters.
Casey:
And I mean, this has got to have been like this touch bar, which I really need to shut up so we can move on to that.
Casey:
The touch bar has got to be an unbelievably cool piece of technology and touch ID as well.
Casey:
And that's got to have been hard to create.
Casey:
And again, Touch ID apparently is being controlled by a mini watch OS.
Casey:
And I can't imagine getting an ARM chip that's controlling the Touch ID to cooperate and behave nicely with the Intel chip that's controlling the rest of the Mac.
Casey:
That can't have been terribly easy.
Casey:
That must have been difficult to do.
Casey:
Can they not have a little bit of time to do that?
John:
They can if they just release other Macs in between.
Marco:
Yeah, and here's the thing.
Marco:
By the way, Casey, it's worth pointing out here.
Marco:
There's this kind of distortion here that I see a lot in corporate culture, especially in Tim Cook's Apple, that it is indeed a lot of work what they did.
Marco:
The team worked really hard on this.
Marco:
They did.
Marco:
And they should be commended in some kind of prize ceremony for how hard they worked on a technical level.
Marco:
That's very impressive.
Marco:
However, that doesn't either A, absolve them of the rest of the neglect of the Mac line and the neglect of this line in the meantime.
Marco:
That was clearly bad management of the lineup and of whatever the supply chain, whatever led to these long spans where these things haven't updated.
Marco:
And whatever is leading to the Mac Pro and Mac Mini and iMac...
Marco:
Still not being updated.
Marco:
So it doesn't absolve that.
Marco:
And also, you don't get automatic reward just for trying something difficult, just for trying something complicated and new.
Marco:
It might well be that the touch bar might end up being awesome.
Marco:
We might look back on this time and say, man, we can't believe we ever lived without this.
Marco:
This was such a revolution.
Marco:
First of all, we don't know that yet.
Marco:
It might and it might not.
Marco:
And it doesn't absolve them of the other problems.
Marco:
There are some downsides to these new releases, which we'll get to, but one of the biggest ones that people are upset about is that these cost a lot more than they used to.
Marco:
And that's not insignificant.
Marco:
uh and you know and things were taken away uh so you know it certainly like there's going to be people who are upset because in certain ways they got worse for them and it doesn't matter like if you if you were buying these things if you were buying like macbook airs in bulk and you had to have them hit a certain price point and now you can't do that anymore uh then the fact because they're still selling them well but you know basically like like
Marco:
Everyone has, whenever Apple releases something new, these days especially, but this is not that new, there's always pluses and minuses, right?
Marco:
There's like, you know, you move mostly steps forward, but usually a couple steps back or sideways.
Marco:
And in this release, there is a lot of cool new stuff.
Marco:
They did get seemingly really impressively thin and light.
Marco:
um they it seems i the battery is still a question mark but if but their reported specs are still reasonable um so i assume the battery life won't be terrible i assume it'll be pretty good um so if they're able to achieve this thin and lightness with those battery gains then that's great so that like that's great improvement right
Marco:
The touch bar is mostly great.
Marco:
It is probably going to be bad to lose escape keys for a lot of people.
Marco:
I think the idea that only nerds use the escape key, I think, is wrong.
Casey:
But it's still there.
Casey:
It's just not... Oh, my God.
Marco:
We'll get there.
Marco:
We'll get there.
Marco:
And I think also a lot of people were simply asking Apple, can you please put modern guts inside your laptops and make them faster and everything?
Marco:
And Apple delivered this thing that they weren't asking for and then raised the prices.
Marco:
Even if you are impressed by the touch bar, and I think for the most part, it probably will end up being a good thing.
Marco:
the reason why so many people are mad like people have good reasons to be upset with it with this update because not every product that that needs an update got one and the update to these products that did get updated came with additional costs and and a couple of new downsides like what if you actually used the sd card slot or the hdmi port or things like there are a lot of things were removed too so you have ports that were removed and
Marco:
You have a higher price and you lost some keys that you might have preferred to be hardware.
Marco:
So basically, even though it made advances, that doesn't make it invalid or unreasonable for people to complain about the ways in which it got worse for them.
Casey:
No, it doesn't.
Casey:
But I feel like what I'm hearing, and it's not just from you guys, but you're the only two on the phone, and so that's why I'm busting your butts so hard, is what I feel like I'm hearing is, well, what we really wanted was a new processor, maybe more RAM, maybe more hard drive space, and then don't touch anything else for the love of God.
John:
No, no, no, no.
John:
I mean, I don't think anyone said, like, I think Marco talked around it before, but basically,
John:
i said it last week if you're going if you're gonna have this line of products and i think uh uh who was it who had their web page that listed all of the uh steven hackett the listed all of the the laptops sort of in in order of the lines if you're gonna have all these laptops from like under a thousand all the way up to like big bucks for the big one right and they do have a pretty good spread of prices right
John:
If you decide you're going to do that and you're going to sell one of them with a non-retina display with old guts and old ports and you're going to sell some of them with the fancy new ports and the new guts and the whole deal, the way to do it is not to leave ancient computers around and just be like, well, this one's never going to get USB-C because it's not worth updating.
John:
We're just going to keep selling the MacBook Air forever and ever and ever.
John:
We'll update the guts every once in a while, but it's never going to be an overhaul.
John:
The way with more investment...
John:
which i'm not going to say again i don't like to say like the old apple the old way because it makes like say in the olden days like just a question of how much investment the old way with more investment is fine you're going to sell this line of computers from a thousand bucks to four thousand all of them get some minimum set of new features rolled out together like it's a rising tide lifts all boats if you're going to keep selling same thing with the 101 macbook which i think is gone now or is it still alive it is finally gone
John:
Anyway, like I said last week, if you're going to sell a super cheap laptop with really low specs with an optical drive, you also have to occasionally update that one.
John:
You can't just say we're going to keep selling the old computer unmodified for a long, long time.
John:
You should move the line up together, which means you have a gradation of features like the touch bar isn't going to be on all of them.
John:
I understand it's expensive, right?
John:
And same thing with all the other features and all the different things you bring out.
John:
They're not all going to have the P3 screen, right?
John:
But...
John:
The fact that Retina still hasn't trickled down to the lowest end model because they want to keep selling the old model, like the really, really old crappy one, mostly unmodified with only minor tweaks, that does not speak well to the investment in the product line.
John:
It's better to keep selling the cheaper computer, but continue to update them all together in some cadence.
John:
They get away with it on the phones because they only do like, you know, last year's phone and then it kind of trails off at the end.
John:
But even there, I think it's a problem.
John:
That's where the strategy came from.
John:
But with the Macs, like how many years has essentially that same quote unquote same MacBook Air with different guts been sold?
John:
I mean, even made the point now, which I look at the 13 inch MacBook Pro is now it's now more of an error than an error.
John:
Isn't that amazing?
John:
And yet we'll still sell that error because the new MacBook Pro is five hundred dollars more expensive.
John:
It would be better to have a cheaper, better MacBook Air.
John:
I mean, even if they want to keep it non retina.
John:
make the screen better than it is it's a crappy screen like i'm just trying to say like i'm trying to give them an out i'm not saying like every product has to be awesome but you have to bring the products up together you can't have this these two classes of like here are the good computers and here are the ones we've been selling for years that are pieces of crap and there's these weird that's not the case though what they're saying is here's the brand new good computers that quite frankly aren't cheap
Casey:
And as one of you just said, they're less cheap now than they used to be.
Casey:
And then if you want something that's more affordable, guess what?
Casey:
It's probably going to be a little older on the inside.
Casey:
It's like the difference.
John:
But it should be newer than it is because it's like.
John:
the pricing doesn't make sense it's like the mac pro we understand the mac pro is an expensive computer but if you don't update the internals for three years it becomes embarrassing now the macbook airs internals have been updated more than the mac pros we have to give them that but it's still basically the same form factor and the internals are pretty old and slowish compared to everything else like i mean like this to me like this this is my fundamental just friction that i have with the tim cook way of running apple
Marco:
You know what would take real courage?
Marco:
They talk about courage in the head-to-head stupid headphone jack.
Marco:
What would take real courage would be to take a temporary margin hit to make all of your products great.
John:
As someone in the chat room was pointing out, it's hard to... I'm trying to give the MacBook Air more credit than it probably deserves in terms of the specs and the money because, again, they have updated more than the Mac Pro, which is a low bar.
John:
But...
John:
if you if you look at the pc internals you can get for the similar price and again granted the macbook air is a better computer has nicer you know industrial design so on and so forth it's just it's just not keeping up with the rest of the line and the line just feels like have and have nots it's like you know the the ipad air and the ipad pros like we this this gap exists everywhere and it is it
John:
It's a gap that reflects a level of desired investment because it's so much easier to keep selling the old models or even just bumping the internals of the old models without fundamentally changing.
John:
Like, oh, well, we can bump the internals a little bit, but if we change to USB-C, that's like a whole new thing and it requires more investment and all that other stuff.
Yeah.
John:
And I don't want to put value judgments on it and like moral things and be like, Tim Cook doesn't care.
John:
He's being mean to us.
John:
I think it's just investment.
John:
And again, I think the investment is justified by all of the tangible attributes of the Mac line as compared to everything else.
John:
Mostly the reason you hear me upset anyway is because I like the Mac.
John:
right and i from i can argue for why you should do this not just because i like the mac but because here's why it's actually important for apple as a company like i can make that argument too but personally speaking it's because i like this product that's now getting less investment and that's why i find it frustrating and it didn't help it didn't help that they said that hello again on the invitation but as i said last week i was overhyped
Casey:
So you're taking one admittedly quite long data point, which is not updating the MacBook Pros effectively for like two or three years.
Casey:
Full stop.
Casey:
That was BS.
Casey:
That was terrible.
Casey:
Shouldn't have happened.
Casey:
But you're taking that one data point as a line with a huge downward slope that says, yeah, we don't care about the Mac.
John:
Well, you've got the Mac Pro 2, you've got the Mac Mini, which has always been like that, and we just excuse because it's always been like that, right?
John:
Even the iMac has gone through droughts.
John:
It's just it's on a good cycle now, right?
John:
Even if you just want to pick things like peripherals and stuff, not making a new extended keyboard when they made the new key switches, stuff like that, that's harder to make an argument for it than everything else.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, I want to get off of this because I think we're mostly just arguing, the two of us arguing with you, and I think the larger... This doesn't matter to most people.
John:
The biggest outcry on Twitter was from people who expect desktop Macs to come, which is... Just because we didn't expect them to come or definitely didn't expect them all to be updated or anything...
John:
doesn't mean it's not kind of like doesn't mean we're not tired of waiting for them as well right and i what you saw were people who like desktop max complaining there weren't people don't like desktop max don't care who cares they don't even know desktop max exists as far as they're concerned max are laptops and they think the macbook errors are fine and so on and so forth but
John:
we're you know computer enthusiasts and mac fans and desktop mac fans and so of course we're upset about it it's separate argument of whether just because we're upset that the products we like aren't getting updated does that mean that apple should update them more often um but that explains the upsetness and i think the upsetness is not for for the most part for people who are thinking clearly the same as saying apple should do what i want right because that's what you're getting at before um
John:
we would like it if apple did something different but uh you know you should just allow us to be upset that apple is not doing what we want and then we can have a separate discussion about whether apple should do this thing that we want whether it's good for apple or good for computing or whatever and that i think i can turn that into a vague segue into what i wanted to get into which is the touch bar this is where marco will put an ad or something
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
So many years ago, one of my early, maybe my first, but one of my early articles for Macworld Magazine, the back page article, was about this fairly fanciful idea.
John:
Again, I have this history to the back page of Macworld and MacUser Magazine that made me
John:
think of writing something that i probably wouldn't even write in a blog post today but i did in a print article back then about the idea of a mac laptop that you could use as a mac but then you could somehow fold it over on itself kind of like all those convertible like a lot of convertible pc laptops are like this remember when they were making a lot of i bet they're still making them but the month you could fold it over and it turns into a tablet basically and when you turn it into a tablet
John:
however you want to do it twisting the screen and going down or folding it all the way backwards when it's in tablet mode it's basically an ipad and when it's in mac mode it's a mac and it was like well you know you've already got ios running on intel in the simulator and the you know the conversion would be kind of a neat thing we've seen lots of pc makers do it apple could do a good job on the hinge mechanism and make it very you know interesting and and sturdy and and good to use in all these different scenarios and wouldn't that be an interesting kind of computer because
John:
That would deal with the dichotomy that was then a hot topic and still kind of a hot topic between iOS and the Mac OS and all this other stuff.
John:
And, you know, obviously nothing came of that.
John:
Windows continues to sell those convertibles.
John:
Windows has converted its OS to be one unified OS for both touch interface and everything else.
John:
And again, we might talk about that later on a different show.
John:
But setting that aside now, the idea that you could run both iOS and what was then OS X or Mac OS X at that time on the same computer because iOS also runs on Intel.
John:
What we have today with these things, as you pointed out, Casey, is...
John:
a Mac that runs macOS on its Intel processor.
John:
And then off to the side, this little T1 processor that is presumably ARM and presumably runs something like iOS.
John:
I mean, again, the core OS of both OS X and both macOS and iOS is Darwin anyway.
John:
But anyway, presumably that little chip is running NOS that's running the touch bar and doing all this stuff.
John:
Here we have a Mac that is essentially...
John:
running two os's on two different screens the only difference is the tablet mode is just this little skinny strip that goes along the top of the thing and then the mac part gets the big thing at the top and you look at this and i joked i was teasing marco about this a couple of shows ago just you wait until the entire keyboard is one big screen for the people who don't mind typing on glass like look at the evolution of the keyboards on these macs going from
John:
big honking giant keys that are like on the Apple extended to keyboard or the Mac portable, like big giant mechanical key switch, but chunk, but chunk, but chunk.
John:
And they just got squished and squished.
John:
And the plungers became butterfly hinges, became dome switches.
John:
They've just, the keys have just been descending into the thing, becoming like,
John:
comically thinner and smaller like like they've been rolling over by a steamroller year after year and now all of a sudden one of the quote-unquote keys is a big flat screen that looks like the keys they did a really good job by the way of like pattern matching them like so it's the same kind of matte finish on both the screen and the keys so it looks like it's a big key um
John:
anyway and now all of a sudden one of them turns into a screen and it's run by this little processor has an os and like someone did an animated gif that i retweeted it was like next year the number keys are a screen next year the top row of the qwerty keyboard is key next year the next row of keys next year the next row is the keys then eventually the whole bottom of the things is the keys then eventually the top screen goes away and you just have an ipad
John:
right like they're slowly slowly making the nintendo ds dual screen thing you know by by converting the keyboard and i'm not saying this is the inevitable direction they're going to go but it's hard to look at that touchpad or the touch bar and if this touch bar has any legs at all as a thing that people might want to do not to see this as like a weird transitional fossil and i don't again i don't want to totally get into the microsoft surface studio thing but like i
John:
this weird transition possibly weird transitional fossil held up against this the surface studio where the whole freaking thing is one giant touch display oh and by the way there's a keyboard when you need it one of those looks like they skipped to the end of this evolution again this may be a dead end in evolution maybe they're wrong about this is the you know the future of computing or whatever maybe they're wrong about the os maybe they're wrong about so many other things
John:
but for one of the first times in recent memory apple looks to be making a more cautious bet than than microsoft at least in this particular scenario and that's not necessarily bad because i think the cautious bet like the odds i think the odds of the touch bar being interesting and useful are higher than the odds of the surface studio being a runaway smash hit that saves microsoft right or whatever uh because like it's safer i think it has a higher chance of success but i i
John:
I look at that touch bar, and it's hard not to start thinking about, you're putting screens where the keyboard... Why is the touchpad, the trackpad, not entirely a screen?
John:
The keyboard's not a screen, but is, as Marco would say, getting progressively worse as a keyboard, but as other people might say, getting progressively less keyboardy, because people don't care about keyboards anymore, and why not just make the whole thing a screen?
John:
And then when you do that, why do you have two screens?
John:
Why not just make one screen, and you've just reinvented the iPad again, but with a different OS, but now, you know...
John:
so i think this is all this this seems like it's all eventually going to come to a head and i think we'll look back at this and be able to see the progression but right now the progression that we can see from the past is the keys are getting flatter the things are getting thinner uh and now the limitations of keys have gotten to the point where they're bringing some screens down into that area and i'm not quite sure where this will end but
John:
Apple looks like the more iterative, let's say.
John:
I don't want to say cautious or careful because this is an interesting move, but it's definitely more iterative than sort of leapfroggy than we're used to, I think.
Casey:
I don't think that's a bad thing.
Casey:
I think it's... I don't want to really turn this into a Surface Studio discussion, but it is a fascinating... I don't know if case study is the right way of looking at it, but it's fascinating to see Microsoft just tripling down on this hybrid OS idea, which to me seems utterly preposterous.
Casey:
And I actually have installed Windows 10 on my work laptop because I've been doing a little C Sharp API work.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, I was expecting Windows 10 to be really good because everyone I know that has run it has said, oh, it's great.
Casey:
It's a lot better.
Casey:
They fixed a lot of the problems.
Casey:
It's really good.
Casey:
And I could go on for hours about how awful I found Windows 10 to be.
Casey:
And in no small part, because high DPI support is a joke at best and nonexistent at worst.
Casey:
But that being said, all of a sudden with the Surface Studio, I sort of understand what Microsoft is going for with this hybrid world where touch and non-touch OSs are one and the same.
Casey:
I think that that is the Surface Studio is kind of the ultimate realization that it's to some degree kind of a naked robotic whore of Microsoft strategy that let's make a machine with this huge what is it's a 27 inch monitor I believe something like that it doesn't matter a huge monitor 28 inch I think okay and I believe it's taller right because it's a different aspect ratio than what we have it's three by two yeah which I would love honestly
Casey:
So let's make this very large, you know, kind of contrary device where it's not widescreen like everything else on the market is.
Casey:
And let's make it touch sensitive everywhere.
Casey:
And that is kind of the ultimate realization of Microsoft's Microsoft strategy.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Although I would give almost anything not to run Windows, I can understand why this would be appealing.
Casey:
I don't think I would ever want to have a computer that is a drafting table, so to speak, but I can see how it would be really, really cool.
Casey:
Similarly, I think this touch bar is kind of the ultimate realization of what Apple thinks is the best idea for a quote-unquote hybrid world, which is not as much that the screen is a touchscreen, but more, hey, we'll give you a little separate touchscreen that you can interact with and you can do cool stuff with.
Casey:
And by the way, it's more than just buttons.
Casey:
Like when we had seen the preview or the renderings for this...
Casey:
I don't recall, anyway, having seen that there was going to be anything on here, really, but a bunch of just programmable buttons, if you will.
Casey:
And there's all sorts of cool stuff that they show on this.
Casey:
They show timelines in Final Cut Pro, or maybe it was a different app.
Casey:
They showed kind of a CoverFlow version of all the pictures that are in a folder when you're looking in Finder.
Casey:
There's some really trick, cool stuff.
Marco:
CoverFlow will never die.
Casey:
Was it Cover 5?
John:
I forgot.
John:
We always knew it was... Well, the rumors were all an OLED screen, so we kind of knew that there was going to be other stuff up there.
John:
But to go back to what you said earlier, Casey, I think the key phrase that I don't think is apt here is ultimate realization, because this is not the ultimate realization of anything.
John:
This is an iterative improvement, and I think it's good, and I think it's going to be really cool, but...
John:
it's almost as if the more cool this is the more we will realize that limiting it to just a little strip is bad and that you know like why is the whole trackpad not a screen why is the whole bottom of the laptop not a screen why is the whole keyboard not a screen and this is the point we'll say well the whole keyboard's not a screen because typing on glass is terrible and then millions of millennials say no we love it it's great uh you know and then it's like and then once you do that it's like well then why is there a bottom screen and a top screen why is it all one screen and then you just
John:
like it really feels it's not the ultimate realization or anything the ultimate realization if this idea turns out to be good of this computing idea not this laptop idea but this computing idea uh using like the value system that is most in line with probably mine and marco's is the server studio which is just make the whole freaking thing a big giant gorgeous touch screen but also give me a physical keyboard for when i want to type because i'm old and i like to type on physical keyboards
John:
and when i'm not typing i don't have to deal with that and there's no like separate region of the keyboard that's also a screen and i can use seven seven hands and ten fingers and five elbows all at the same time with a little dial and like just you know that is the ultimate realization of idea is it a good idea does it work well is the os good are there other intangibles that are stopping them again i think we do have to talk about the surface studio at some point but
John:
The touch bar is not the ultimate realization of any idea.
John:
It is the next good iterative step along the lines of the idea that Apple is pursuing.
John:
And I think it looks really cool and really awesome with some minor caveats, but it feels...
John:
It feels like just one more step and it kind of, it's transitional enough that it makes me feel not uncomfortable, but like anticipatory.
John:
Like I, like I'm, I'm waiting to see what's next.
John:
It's tantalizing in the, like, where does this all go?
John:
Where does this lead?
John:
Because clearly this is not going to be the end.
John:
This is clearly on its way to something.
John:
And, and,
John:
Uh, you know, it's like, it's like a glimpse of the future that is not yet here.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, the keyboard's getting flatter.
John:
We shoved a screen on it, but it's still kind of, if you squinted this thing, it's still kind of the shape of the old computer.
John:
And certainly the shape of Mac OS is still as separate from iOS as it ever was.
John:
And we don't I don't know where it's going, but this is like I feel like this is the first step off of the path that the Mac has been going on to an acknowledgement that there can be that not that they're, you know, merging the OS's or whatever, but just trying trying to reconcile this world where we want to touch stuff.
John:
and have touchscreen things with the world of the mac where we're not touching things right and how do we bring them together and this is honestly this is the first mac with a touchscreen right no other mac has had a screen that you touch they've had touch pads and they've had all the other hybrid things hey we want a touchscreen mac you got one oh by the way the screen is really thin and that just makes me think like where is this going where what is the future of this like surely this is not a holding pattern that we stay in for another 15 years with a little strip on the on the
John:
screen there this has to lead to something and i'm excited to see where that goes but this this machine makes me like hunger to see what's next yeah quick aside about the surface studio from everything i can tell it's using the exact same processors as the iMac and it isn't out for another two months
John:
Yeah, no, that's not a super, like, that machine, it's a separate topic.
John:
Nintendo Switch, also, sorry if you're here to invent Nintendo Switch, probably not this week.
John:
Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Surface Studio, they're on the list.
John:
We will talk about them.
John:
All right, so now, you said nice things about the touchpad, a few minor...
John:
annoying things about the touchpad well now one fun thing about it um the the customized thing pure apple feature love that you can drag the little thing off the screen onto the onto the touch bar that's awesome right that's like another one of those magical type of things and they did when you're in editing mode where you want to edit the buttons to customize it it's good that that's a feature because customizing is great
John:
and they go into shaky mode you know like an ios where when you you know when you're editing your your springboard icons that's that's kind of like a a ui idiom that apple has coined and then now they use across their product line to great effect when when these things are in the mode where they're being edited have them wiggle so it's clear that you're in like editing mode and all the rules are different that's very clever very good bit of ui that they've been smart to spread everywhere but the tricky bit on the little strip the touch bar screen is
John:
is that they're using edge to edge every single pixel of that thing to show the buttons because it's such a skinny screen.
John:
Like they're going all the way up from the top edge.
John:
There's no margins they're leaving on it.
John:
So they can't have the icons shake back and forth as if they're rotating like the springboard icons do.
John:
I thought they did.
John:
No, because they would be clipped on the top and bottom and it would break the illusion that they're keys when you saw them clipped by the screen edges.
John:
So instead they shake but only left and right.
John:
oh is that right okay so they're in there and they're wiggling and you don't know like something a little bit off of it but they're basically like jostling up against each other like a bunch of like you know peas in a pod or whatever but they can't wiggle up and down because the clipping which i thought was a really clever way to solve that problem because the problem is like we want to use every pixel of this thing but when we make them shake the other way they clip top and bottom and it destroys the illusion so just make them shake side to side i thought that was super clever and adorable and they look cute when they do that and that's a great feature
Marco:
And it's the same trick they use on the watch display, too.
Marco:
Because, like, on the watch... And this is one of the things you could do with OLED.
Marco:
Like, one of the reasons OLED's so great is that, like, black on OLED looks really black.
Marco:
And so you can more easily conceal the edges of the actual screen, the actual pixels of the screen, with the black margin around it.
Marco:
So on the watch...
Marco:
Interface elements go right up to the edge.
Marco:
They tell you specifically in the interface guidelines, you should design your screens that way.
Marco:
Don't leave any margin around your interface.
Marco:
Go right to the edges.
Marco:
And then on the watch's physical hardware, they just leave enough of a margin around the screen to make that look right.
Marco:
And so they're doing the same thing on the touch bar here, which is one of the many parallels it has to the watch.
Marco:
because it appears to run a variant of watch os and it's running on on what appears to be a variant of the watches s1 chip it's totally different there's a t there instead of an s totally different right right and the w1 is different yes anyway um so yeah it's a similar move there it's it's a genius move like you know just we don't need the screen to be any bigger than this because the buttons are going to be that big so just make it look like the screen has a healthy margin and don't waste any pixels and power on anything that's not you know necessary
John:
so margins giveth and margins taketh away let us now discuss the escape button by the way all the people like i didn't want to respond to all this on twitter for the past week because it seemed tiring but now i'm going to do it in the podcast uh the the point that we made either on the show last week or on twitter about the escape key was all about the fact of it being a physical key none of us on this show were saying that there was not going to be a little gray square with the letters esc in it in the upper left corner of that little screen
John:
well almost the upper left corner yes yes i'm getting to that we all knew it was i all knew it would be there it's just we were asking for a key because in our line of work it is a key that we hit more often than probably the average person and it's nice to be able to reach up and feel for it and so on so that was it it was not about like people were saying when they showed the key look there's an escape key you got your escape it's like it's not a key it's just a picture on a screen and we knew that was going to be there anyway it's an escape zone yes as for margins the the escape zone
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because that first centimeter or so of the touch bar is, as far as I'm able to determine, completely inert.
John:
I know it doesn't have a screen underneath it.
John:
I'm pretty sure it also doesn't have touch sensors underneath it, although I see those things aren't necessarily connected.
John:
They could have put touch sensors under there, but no screen.
John:
Anyway, no screen is under there, so they can't physically draw the escape button against the left edge of the touch bar.
John:
and i'm pretty sure you can't touch there which makes it kind of a shame because if you're feeling for something to like reach out to the corner to find the thing it's the one part you can feel for on a completely smooth like touch bar screen is you can feel for the top edges and the sides so i would love to be able to reach up to that corner and hit the escape zone on the screen yes but it looks like i will have to hit the zone slightly over to the right from the escape zone and i'm
John:
i'm not particularly happy about that because it's like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because you have it's like the one button i care about that's being replaced by a virtual button the one i hit the most often at least it's in the corner and i'll be able to feel for it but now i can't feel for it by the way i'm probably getting one of these at work which is why i'm more invested in this at this point um and as i snarkily tweeted earlier can we all guess why the screen doesn't go all the way to the edge on the left side why doesn't the screen extend underneath that little bit
Marco:
so on the opposite side is the touch id sensor that's the same width as the margin on the left side interesting exactly the same width or is it just close i i think it's exactly the same i haven't i haven't verified that though yes i think it is i think you're right it is exactly the same with who do i know who likes margins to be exactly the same width on the right and left sides of things that they design
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, maybe it might be the same person who put the camera shutter slash volume up button directly opposite of the turn off the screen and go to sleep button on the iPhone.
John:
Offsetting those wouldn't have helped that much.
John:
But anyway, again, if you squint through this laptop, you see this is still a 15-inch laptop with a tiny keyboard crammed in there.
John:
And I know you want to have room for the speakers.
John:
And I know so on and so forth.
John:
All I'm saying is that keyboard could be bigger on the 15-inch model, but they want to be uniform.
John:
Same thing with the inverted T. You could have full-size arrow keys if you didn't want to have a perfect rectangle.
John:
johnny ive and the apple designers like symmetry i like symmetry i like things to be uniform and centered and everything but everyone has their limits and this is the touch id being in the gap on the right i know it has to be there that's fine what i would have chosen if i was designing this is that the screen would go all the way to the edge on the left side even though it's not symmetrical that's the choice i would have made apple made a different choice
John:
all they have opened the door for is the ability to sell lefties model of this where the touch id is on the left do you want a lefty or a righty 15 inch macbook pro oh i want touch id on the left anyway it's mostly silly i think it will probably be fine but it is another maddening case of uh some people would say it's it's form over function i think that's it's a little far i think i'll probably still be able to find that escape key
John:
uh the arrow keys bother me more than this but boy i i am i am on a slightly different page than apple's designers when it comes to symmetry and ergonomics well and also like you will probably be able to find it but you will probably have to look more often
Marco:
And we don't know yet, in practice, how often this will be a problem with all the buttons on the touch bar.
Marco:
But I would say, for the most part, I think most people who use Macs, like on Windows, Windows assigns all sorts of frequent shortcuts to the F keys.
Marco:
Is the only way to close Windows still Alt F4?
Marco:
Windows people might use those more often.
Marco:
Mac people, for the most part, you're not very heavily using almost anything in that function row, except the escape key, where many people... And we, as geeks, we often minimize or diminish or underestimate everyone else who's not a computer geek and their ability to use our computers that we think are ours.
Marco:
Even there, I slipped into... Anyway, sorry about that.
Marco:
Other people who are not geeks...
Marco:
many of them know that the escape key often performs a cancel shortcut to lots of things in the os full screen things dialogues i mean like there's so many things in using a computer where the escape key is a useful shortcut for literally escape like cancel or escape what i'm doing right and normal people in quotes
Marco:
many of them know that this is not like a thing that only people who use vim use like a lot of people know this so this is this is not just like a thing that annoys geeks like the loss of a of a hardware escape key that you can hit without looking
Marco:
Because we've all been taught to type without looking at the keyboard.
Marco:
And the more you use keyboards, the more you kind of just get into the habit of not looking at them.
Marco:
The lack of the hardware escape key is actually going to inconvenience a lot of people.
Marco:
It is not just nerds.
Marco:
Now, it might be worth it.
Marco:
The whole rest of the benefits of this thing might end up being worth it in the end.
Marco:
But I don't like when people minimize this as just a nerd thing because it really isn't.
John:
I think more nerds don't look at the keyboards than regular people, but I, you know, I, I know a lot of people, if I gave this computer to would be annoyed by the fact that escape is not a button, but even if they're looking at the keyboard the whole time, but that's, I, I, I'm willing to say that the benefit totally outweighs it because the features that are available on this thing are just fantastically better than a row of keys.
John:
And I'm all on bar with, on board with that.
John:
It's just, like I said, like the one, the one button that you can feel for if touch ID is in the right, the left corner is the easiest place on that thing to find.
John:
And if the touch region extended all the way to the left, it's,
John:
that would be that would make it almost as easy to hit because it's not like you're typing the escape key every once in a while you're hitting it if you're a normal person you're not it's not like the e key where you're constantly typing it so the fact that it's not a button wouldn't be like oh it feels weird when it's not a button it would be fine if it was over to left more by the way the second most frequently used button in that top row for me on my apple extended keyboard at work can anyone guess what it is play pause volume no it's the eject button and i don't hit it on purpose i hit it accidentally when i try to hit backspace
John:
And the CD tray of a Mac Pro comes sticking out like a giant tongue.
John:
And why do I accidentally hit the eject button when I'm hitting backspace?
John:
Well, I'm not a great typist, but why do I accidentally hit the button?
John:
Because the top row of keys is jammed right up against the number row in the backspace keys.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because there's just not enough room on my giant expansive desk to put an extra five millimeters between those two rows of keys.
John:
Even Microsoft has lost the technology of separate sets of keys.
John:
Remember the original Microsoft ergonomic keyboard?
John:
It had the two halves of the keys, and then it had a space, and then it had the function keys, and then it had a space, and it had the inverted T, then it had a space, and it had the numpad.
John:
Look at the one that they just introduced recently.
John:
Yeah, and then your mouse was in New Jersey.
John:
I know, but I'm just saying, like, you can solve that problem by getting rid of the numeric keypad or whatever.
John:
I'm not asking for seven inches of space between these regions, right?
John:
But if you look at the new Microsoft ergonomic keyboard...
John:
They copied Apple down to the half-sized function keys that are jammed up against the numbers.
John:
It's like vertical.
John:
And they have a huge wrist rest on this thing.
John:
It's like a seven-inch wrist rest.
John:
And yet they couldn't spare five millimeters to put a space between the top row function keys.
John:
And they couldn't make the top row function keys full size.
John:
Yeah.
John:
do you think we have room on our desk or do you not think we have room on our desk because this keyboard is huge but all your keys are jammed together and the numeric keypads jammed against it and home end and page up page down are jammed together like i don't know who's designing these things or what they think is going on but like spaces between different sets of keys are a feature being able to feel for the top edge of the backspace key is a feature i hate hitting that freaking eject button and seeing my cd tray eject and i can hit it without even looking to push it back in once i hear the mechanism start going because there's a delay like oh i did it again i hit the thing to the
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I don't understand what you just said.
Casey:
You said something about a tray in a what now?
John:
I know.
John:
It's hard to understand.
John:
It's this cup holder, Casey.
Casey:
Oh, the cup holder.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I miss having one of those.
Casey:
Man, that's a long time ago.
John:
And I would say, again, on a laptop, could you fit a keyboard on the 15-inch MacBook Pro that has a space between the number keys and the little strip thing?
John:
Maybe you would want to in this new scenario because it's like a screen and you want it to be able to reach a folder.
John:
But anyway, for traditional keyboards...
John:
I think the space is important.
John:
I think having half-sized keys up there is dumb.
John:
I think, you know, the little strip thing is not the full height of the keys.
John:
Why not make that little strip be taller than it is?
John:
Maybe it's just the right height for the proportions they wanted for the features, but a lot of the times they show, like in the Photoshop demo, they were showing the history of the images, but the images were either...
John:
they were either cropped or squished because if you throw them if you show them proportionally they'll be really small so you want to show more of it but you only have width to expand in like why isn't the touch bar the height of a full height key right that's enough is it just because the keys that it's replacing were half height like maybe it's a cost concern maybe it's a power concern i'm not entirely sure but lots of decisions flow out of this that i don't quite understand but as far as keys go
John:
I liked it better when I had full-size keys with different regions separated from each other, especially on a gigantic, expansive desktop keyboard.
Marco:
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Marco:
If I had to summarize the releases today, I am on the good side.
Marco:
Overall, this was good.
Marco:
As I said earlier, this does not come with... It isn't all roses.
Marco:
There are some bitter pills to swallow here.
Marco:
But overall, this was good.
Marco:
And I'm really happy that they are still doing things like the Touch Bar, even though...
Marco:
I will probably not use one for quite some time, primarily because I get all my work done on the desktop.
Marco:
And as I mentioned earlier, I don't expect this to come to desktops anytime soon, if ever.
Marco:
And so this particular thing will probably not impact me day to day for a while, if ever.
Marco:
But they did make their laptops better, faster, newer designs, thinner, lighter.
Marco:
Overall, this was a really good day for Mac laptops.
Marco:
It was just not a day for Mac desktops or for anybody who cares about money, which is a lot of people.
John:
I had some lighter things on the touch bar before I move on from that topic.
John:
Sure.
John:
These are all credited to people on Twitter.
John:
So I was talking about the, you know, when I was doing my cranky tweets about the symmetrical space on the sides of the touch bar, like asking, you know, can anyone guess why that space is like I posted a picture from the Apple human interface guidelines that emphasizes the fact that the margins are identical on both sides of it as a hint to the people who aren't listeners to the show.
John:
And Dave Lehman had a good answer as to why the escape key is not up against the left margin.
John:
That's the space taken up by the headphone jack.
John:
Oh!
John:
You couldn't fit the headphone jack, but we had to fit it in, and the headphone jack is right under there.
John:
And then I also tweeted that we should start the countdown to Touch Bar Games, because it's the Mac, and we don't have to send things to the Mac App Store, and this thing does have an API...
John:
you can make a touch bar game i'm sure uh of some fashion how responsive it can be i don't know because i don't it's not like you're you know i think it is out of remove with a separate t1 chip over there but it would be fun to try to hack that to do something cool and here are the best entries for potential touch bar games richard gale suggested punch the monkey which is a joke that only people on the internet in the 90s will get because that was a banner ad with the monkey and he moved mostly horizontally because there wasn't much room for him to go so punch the monkey is the right thing and benjamin glukin wins the idea for
John:
uh touch bar game which he calls really boring snake snake by the way for all over younger people is a game that was popular on cell phones back when the only games they could play was having any i can't explain snake if you don't get the joke trust me it's very funny it was called nibble in q basic back in the day
Marco:
mm-hmm i remember really boring snake he should copyright it capital r capital b capital s tm that's a game that you can make marco honestly the the gaming things might be i saw james thompson of p calc fame uh talking earlier about the he was just starting to use the stk awesome news that there there appears to be a simulator uh for building apps for it so you don't need to have the hardware yet
Marco:
um but it also appears that you only have access to it when your app is active so if you were to make a a touch bar game you might have to always have a window on screen that the user keeps active for your game to keep showing up in the touch bar yeah i know well again it's the mac we'll see what kind of hacks people can do to it but like and you mentioned before that the addressable market for touch bar things is going to be small um and i think that would be more of a problem if the touch bar wasn't so damn cool
John:
oh yeah and and it probably seems like and it's also seems like it's easy to do something down there it's just so cool and it's in the simulator and i expect to see a lot of applications doing possibly inadvisable things with the touch bar but it's just to have another place on you know to have the place next to the keyboard that's configurable that you can do stuff in and
John:
It will be exciting for developers to just try something, especially if it's fairly straightforward to implement.
John:
It seems like the classes they have for this type of stuff, the NS scrubber and all the other stuff in the whole API seems pretty well thought out and well designed.
John:
It won't be that hard to get something up there, even if it's just a bunch of buttons and stuff.
John:
And the Apple apps are really showing the way with like, we're not just putting a bunch of configurable buttons like Casey was saying before, like, oh, just a bunch of buttons that change based on the context.
John:
they've got you know i mean it's obviously lots of horizontal stuff but timelines thumbnails lots of interfaces it seemed pretty responsive in that you could do things on this little tiny ios control computer that would cause changes on the big mac computer a couple inches away in a fairly responsive fashion making it so you can do things without taking your hands off the keyboard or you know doing things two hands at once with one on the touch part one on the trackpad
Marco:
i found that demonstration pretty compelling and i think even though such a small number of people relative to the rest of the mac user base are going to have this developers will add this feature because it's cool i i love the idea of this like amazing like high-end dual core supercomputer sitting there mostly idle as you play a game on this little 30 pixel tall strip uh
John:
the whole screen's like they're lit up the whole computer's on doing nothing while you sit there playing the game on this little watch processor's little skinny screen it could be an inversion of like the like the top part will be just like the the status display that shows your inventory and the whole game will take place on the bottom uh lots of infinite runner runners are potentially good again i don't know how much control you have in there but because it is
John:
a little computer doing that i wonder if you can somehow get code onto it for it to run i'm not sure what the whole deal is it seems to be communicating add or remove from the rest of the mac system but there is code running there to run the display and if you can get your code onto the t1 or onto whatever the t1 does and get it run to run from there that will be where you're you're fun at the very least you should probably be able to do pong or something right or or really boring snake
John:
And the other thing for the touch bar is there's already Apple human interface guidelines for it.
John:
I briefly looked at them and I remember reading it and I'm like, oh, this all seems sensible and good ideas.
John:
But one of the items made me think that Apple had actually done a demo that was counter to it.
John:
Let me just see if I can find it now about like...
John:
Well, that's not new.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Apple doesn't always follow the HIG.
Marco:
And the HIG is not a Bible that has to be followed to the letter.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
The one that was confusing me, they're within the bounds of things.
John:
Avoid mirroring the touch bar interactions on the main screen.
John:
But they mean, the example they give, if the user taps a button on the touch bar and is presented with listed options, don't also present those same options on the main screen.
John:
What they demoed was, for example, in photos, when you're messing with the exposure slider,
John:
They, rather than just you messing with the exposure slider on the touch bar and seeing the exposure change on the full screen image, when you go into edit mode, the photos app also goes into edit mode.
John:
And when you drag the exposure slider, the exposure slider is visible on the main screen as well.
John:
And it drags in, you know, the same time as you were dragging your thing.
John:
Now, that's arguably not the same as presenting a list of options in both places, but it is kind of mirroring the controls.
John:
It's like, look, am I changing the exposure in the sidebar of photos or am I changing the exposure on the touch bar?
John:
It's kind of weird to have it in both places.
John:
Like, the advantage should be, as they showed in a couple other demos,
John:
if i'm using touch bar that means those controls don't have to be on the screen like that's the whole point of the touch bar i have them down here so more of the screen can be used to show me the content but maybe just because photos hasn't been updated to do that and the only way to be in edit mode is to have that view visible i don't know but um anyway well we'll put this link in you can and you can check it out it's short it's one page and it's an interesting insight into how apple expects the touch bar to be used by developers
John:
all right anything else uh worth talking about next we haven't even talked about the max ram 16 gigs mac ram on a four thousand dollar notebook yeah that's unfortunate just you gotta say no on that one like 16 gigs uh uh you know standard on the 15 inch fine i can almost kind of forgive eight gigs on the 13s maybe maybe not but the 13 pro is increasingly less pro we haven't even talked about that but uh 16 gigs max on on the big one not not a good choice not a good choice at all
John:
especially since it's such a powerful machine compared to the previous one like to have the same max ram on but if you're going to run any vms those are going to eat up your memory and if you're going to be doing all these fancy things that you can do on this this new computer with high res images and video 16 gigs of ram max is not great
Marco:
Well, I mean, look, let's be honest here.
Marco:
I see people on Twitter and stuff complaining, like, how could a pro machine not have this or have this or whatever else?
Marco:
Apple's use of the word pro is primarily about size and price target.
Marco:
It does not have to do with whether professionals, whatever that means, however you define that, are able to use this computer for what they need or whether it's designed for them or not.
Marco:
Pro means it's the big expensive one, period.
Marco:
So the fact that pros often need more than 16 gigs of RAM does not seem to enter Apple's thoughts about whether to make that option available or not here.
John:
I think it entered into their thoughts.
John:
They just would need more battery to do it probably.
John:
And that's where the sticking point was, I'm assuming.
Marco:
I mean, RAM does use battery power and not a small amount of it.
Marco:
But compared to everything else in there, I mean, the 15 inch has a 45 watt CPU next to a 35 watt GPU.
Marco:
And by the way, one of the things that makes me sad about the new 15 inch
Marco:
is that I was always a fan of buying the low-end 15-inch configuration that only had the Intel-integrated GPU.
Marco:
That option has been available now for quite some time, I think, since around 2010 or so, where it used to be... First, it was just always discrete.
Marco:
And then, eventually, they had these dual GPU models around 2008, 2009, or something like that, where they would have this one... They had the high-powered discrete GPU, and they would also have the Intel-integrated GPU...
Marco:
and then it would switch between them based on whether anything was running that needed the more power of the big one.
Marco:
And this switching, not only does having two GPUs and having a high-powered one there in the first place, not only does that raise the power requirement when that GPU is active, and it raises the ceiling of how high the power consumption can get if it's under load, but also there were often bugs switching between those two GPUs.
Marco:
That's not an easy task, and the Mac switching between them would often have weird issues.
Marco:
Wait, like what?
Marco:
visual glitches both gpu staying active and using too much power occasionally even blue screens also the other problem is that having another big hot chip on the logic board will actually significantly raises the failure rates and many people and there i think there have even been class actions against this and extended service programs and everything where often a 15-inch macbook pro
Marco:
will have a big problem with the GPU failing after a certain amount of time because there's just the additional heat and stress and the board and everything.
Marco:
There were big problems with NVIDIA back in the day.
Marco:
And these problems, I don't know if there's any recent ones, but it's basically there's enough of a downside to having the discrete GPU in the 15-inch, both in battery, in heat, in possible bugs, and in possible failures down the road, that I've always favored the option because I'm neither a gamer...
Marco:
nor do i use external monitors uh with my 15 inches like i just use it as itself when i do use it um i've always been a fan of of buying the intel only gpu version and for whatever reason that version that that option is gone now now you can only buy it with the amd one and somebody on twitter told me earlier i don't know if this is true or not somebody said that the
Marco:
the newest version of the intel integrated gpu that would be in this is actually slower than the previous one so that that might be the reason apple might have a legitimate reason for getting rid of that option um but well what about what about the fact that it can drive two 5k displays i don't suspect i was going to mention that like there's there there's some big advantages to this and then you lose the pronest i think marco would still want it because like i don't need to drive two 5k displays but i think
John:
All these reasons, the one that is common to all of them, both the memory and the GPU is uniformity.
John:
If you just have one model, it always comes with 16 gigs.
John:
It always comes with the GPU.
John:
That's another cost savings.
John:
That's another resource and investment thing.
John:
How many different SKUs do you want to have?
John:
How many different varieties do you want to have?
John:
The RAM is soldered to the board.
John:
If we have one with more RAM, it's more of a pain.
John:
Like, do you want to have one with and without discrete GPU?
John:
Just do the one with discrete GPU because the one without, you know, the integrated one is crappy and you can't drive the monitors.
John:
And then how do you have,
John:
four thunderbolt free ports and everything you know so there's a lot of reasons i can think of for for both of these choices but i have more faith than marco than in the discrete gpu simply because this one is 14 nanometers which has got to help with the heat and everything and i'm hoping that they have mostly worked out the kinks of the gpu switching if they could do it power wise it might be easier just to always use the discrete one that would probably be slaughter your battery but
John:
that would be good from a bug perspective i know a lot of people use what was that thing called marco the little menu bar thing it was a graphics card status by cody krieger yep that's right yeah there was a utility where you could say where you could make it use one gpu or the other and one possible solution to bugs was like look plug in your laptop and just make it only use the discrete gpu uh and then you don't have to worry about it
Marco:
Well, but even that was controversial because even that one, it could force the discrete GPU to be on, but it couldn't force the discrete GPU to be off.
Marco:
Because under certain models, it would tell that utility that it was integrated only, but it would still run the discrete one anyway.
Marco:
Basically, you could never count on it to only use the integrated one.
Marco:
You could, as you said, you could count on it to always use discrete, but then you're losing a lot of battery life and making more heat to get that.
Marco:
Because, you know, the GPUs are very complicated.
Marco:
You know, a GPU in a laptop these days, like a good one, is almost or equally or even more complicated and heat demanding and battery demanding than a CPU.
Marco:
So, you know, like that said, that's a 35 watt GPU in there next to a 45 watt CPU.
Marco:
That's a lot of extra power there.
Marco:
So if you don't need it and, you know, like, again, the definition of pro, there are lots of types of pro work that don't need GPU power.
Marco:
I have never really needed much GPU power in what I do.
Marco:
I'm a pro.
Marco:
Tiff doesn't need it.
Marco:
She's a pro.
Marco:
John, I bet you don't need it except for games.
Marco:
But on your work computer, I bet you don't have it.
Marco:
Or rather, you don't need graphics card power.
Marco:
Casey, do you need a good graphics card on your work computer?
Marco:
Or your home one for that matter?
Casey:
No, but I think you're giving a pretty narrow definition of pro.
Casey:
Pro to you is someone who does the sorts of things that you or your family do.
Casey:
And there's a lot of other flavors of pro that might necessitate that GPU.
Casey:
And since I have the floor, I will say that the only time I ever had problems with my two 2011 MacBook Pros, each of which...
Casey:
had discrete cpu gpus the only time i ever had any sort of glitches or issues was when i was running graphics card status when i was just using os 10 or you know mac os now out of the box i never had an issue except i could not agree with you more marco that battery life just was slaughtered when the discrete gpu was on completely agree there but in terms of like glitches and stuff like that i never had any of those problems as soon as i stopped talking about uh graphics card status or since i stopped rolling graphics card status
John:
I would always buy, if I had a choice and they had it, I would always buy the one with a discrete GPU anyway.
John:
Well, you're a gamer.
John:
Even with all the bugs.
John:
Not just because of the games, just because it's like, look, if you're buying the Pro, it's going to be the biggest, the hottest, you know, and like I said, I have faith...
John:
i like the fact that we're not in the bad old days where the gpus used to be done on a worse process in the cpu this gpu is 14 nanometers it is on actually it is actually the current architecture that amd is uh has out right now i think it's the current one polaris instead of being like three or four generations behind like the embarrassing it's not it's not the super fast as some people are asking me is this like a gaming laptop no it is not like this is not this is not the best gpu you can get in a laptop
John:
by a long stretch of the imagination but compared to what we had before like that's why they could put up those slides look it's a hundred percent faster it's like yeah because those ones were ancient and this one is contemporary middle of the road you know probably not as clocked as high not the best of the best you know but i like gpus i would always buy the one with the big hot gpu my laptop's gonna be plugged in at work all the time anyway
John:
uh but it's it's good for it would be nice you know again options how many skews do you have how many options do you have marker would like one that has a big screen but doesn't have discrete gpu they don't make that product i think mostly because of uniformity we make one of these computers we make one of those we make one of those but they did until today i know actually i'm pretty sure they still sell it yeah you might be you might be able to still buy the old one because why would they stop selling it
Marco:
Yeah, but I mean, basically, so besides that, though, I mean, the 15, ultimately, the 15 looks like an incredible update.
Marco:
I am a little concerned about real-world battery use here.
Marco:
I'm very, very interested to see the reviews come out and to see people's experiences with these things as they come out because one of the problems that I've had recently with a lot of the, as I mentioned before, a lot of the gains we've made in battery life recently in probably the last five years at least
Marco:
has really been in reducing the idle power levels of these chips and of computers.
Marco:
It's basically reducing the amount of power that computers use when you're using them very lightly for things like email and web browsing.
Marco:
But as soon as you do anything that really strains them, like many pro types of applications,
Marco:
or running chrome then the battery life drops tremendously like like you might get 10 hours if you're doing light web browsing but four hours if you're actually pushing it a little hard or two hours if you're pushing it to the max uh and so like there's huge differences in in like battery life under under light loads and battery life under moderate to heavy loads and
Marco:
With this, I fear that we're going more in that direction just because, you know, just looking at the specs, I mean, you have these big hot chips in there.
Marco:
The one that doesn't go in this direction that I'm very, very interested in is the new MacBook Escape because that one I think we need to talk about.
Marco:
So the MacBook Escape, the new 13-inch low-end one with the real F and keys, is the one that I have pre-ordered or ordered, I guess, that it's going to arrive next week.
Marco:
The reason why...
Marco:
is because as far as I can tell, so here's the weird thing about this computer.
Marco:
Apple quotes all three of these new MacBook Pros.
Marco:
The MacBook Escape, the new 13 with the touch bar, and the new 15 with the touch bar.
Marco:
They quote all three of them as having 10-hour battery life.
Marco:
And if you look at what hardware is in them, this doesn't quite make sense.
Marco:
Now, the 15, of course, the 15 has a bigger battery.
Marco:
That makes sense, though.
Marco:
It has much more power-hungry components in it, but it has a bigger battery.
Marco:
So you can kind of see that the 13 with touch bar and the 15 with touch bar having very different components but very different battery sizes can be made to have the same battery life.
Marco:
but the macbook escape has effectively the macbook air guts in it it has the macbook air processor which uses half the power of the 13 inch it has you know no no discrete gpu so basically compared to the other 13 inch with the touch bar it has a processor that uses half the power at max load it doesn't have the touch bar and whatever power it takes to drive the touch bar and
Marco:
And it has 10% larger battery capacity.
Marco:
And it's quoted at the same battery life.
Marco:
That makes no sense to me.
Marco:
My best guess here is that the 13-inch MacBook Escape gets substantially better battery life than the 13-inch MacBook with Touch Bar.
Marco:
But Apple probably didn't want to trumpet that, that the low-end one gets the best battery life in the whole lineup of these new things, because that might discourage people from buying the new Touch Bar.
John:
And by the way, on the 13-inch model, I'm kind of surprised that Apple emphasized this.
John:
They're saying, look, it's smaller than the Air and has less volume in the Air and all the other things.
John:
This is kind of the amazing futuristic computer, either one, either the 13-inch one, the Escape or the regular one with the touch bar, that I always wanted the Air to be, and they finally made it.
John:
Because I've always been cranky about the wedge shape.
John:
It's like, why are you saving that space?
John:
Why are you scalloping your batteries like they're potatoes?
John:
just make it the same thickness from end to end you can fit more battery in and they did it they finally did it this is a mac that is not thinner at one end or the other for aesthetic reasons which means they can fit more battery into it which means it probably gets really good battery life for the powerful internals it's got two ports instead of one they're thunderbolt 3 right they're thunderbolt 3 on that right i'm not
John:
not remembering that that's right thunderbolt 3 like this is a hell of a laptop and it makes me you know it's it's bad for it's bad for most people that it's 500 more expensive but i feel like it justifies that price by actually having modern technology in it and being being the same thickness all the way across and having better battery life and like
John:
i i don't think i would have gotten the escape one because i think the touch bar is too compelling it's like look if you're gonna buy one it's like the iphone if you're gonna buy one you're gonna get black you might as well get jet black because that's the new thing yeah uh but marco's making a bet on the battery life the specs seem to bear out your theory that it will have better battery life
Marco:
uh but don't you want to play with a touch bar what are you gonna do with this well see here's here's exactly the thing i if you are the kind of person you listener if you use your laptop as your primary computer get the touch bar because you're right that is the new thing that might be the future you know apple will will wedge it into the future whether it will be or not so that will become the future um
Marco:
it's going to be great it's going to be awesome and that'll be a new cool thing to use and play with and to probably improve your productivity at least sometimes if not all the time so if your your laptop is your primary computer get the touch bar but that's it's not my primary computer my primary computer is my iMac and hopefully next year another Mac Pro I get all my work done almost all the time at a desktop and
Marco:
So I'm not really going to get into the touch bar lifestyle.
Marco:
It's never going to be a thing that really gets itself into my workflow until I can use it on a desktop.
Marco:
And as I mentioned, that might be never.
Marco:
So right now, what I do want out of a laptop is I would like one that is small and light.
Marco:
And by the way, just to put into perspective how small and light these new laptops are, the new 13-inch MacBook Escape and the new 13-inch MacBook are both
Marco:
as uh as light as the 13 inch macbook air always has been the 15 inch is four pounds now that is substantially lighter than the 13 inch plastic macbooks were
Marco:
Those were, I think, either 5.0 or 5.5.
Marco:
I looked it up before the show and I forgot.
Marco:
There might have even been 4.5.
Marco:
But regardless, the new 15-inch is lighter than the plastic MacBook was.
Marco:
And that was the small and light computer of its day.
Marco:
And that day was not that long ago.
Marco:
So that's impressive.
Marco:
So the reason to not get a 15-inch, if you're weighing the pros and cons here, the reason to get a 15-inch or not should not have to do with the weight by itself.
Marco:
Footprint might matter to you.
Marco:
Cost, of course, is a thing.
Marco:
Although the cost difference once they're specced up is actually not that big.
Marco:
It's kind of embarrassingly so not that big.
Marco:
But cost is one thing.
Marco:
Footprint is one thing.
Marco:
But it's only four pounds.
Marco:
The 13-inch MacBook Air is three pounds.
Marco:
And so that's really awesome.
Marco:
That's a really lightweight computer for what you're getting for that price.
Marco:
But anyway, I'm trying out the MacBook Escape because for me, it is not my primary computer.
Marco:
I want something small and light.
Marco:
That's why I originally bought the MacBook One back when it came out and ended up returning because I hated it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I think this will probably solve the problems I had with the MacBook One.
Marco:
This will probably be the best computer for me to have in the small and light role.
Marco:
And in my current needs, I think that will fit me best.
Marco:
And because I'm not using it that often and for all of my work, whether it has a touch bar or not for me is not that relevant.
Marco:
But again, for you, listener, if you're getting one to be your primary computer, you should probably get the touch bar one.
John:
because it'll be cool is this the first one they did the giant escape key with or did they do it on the macbook one as well i forget i forget that might have been was that on the 13 inch air before that yeah like the reason they did it by the way what we're talking about is the the escape key on the macbook escape is really wide it's like wider than you would expect a normal key to be and i looked at it briefly like why is that so wide uh just just specifically on this computer because i looked at the old 13 inch uh macbook pro and in the old ones the space between the function row keys and escape
John:
There was more space between them horizontally than there was between, like, the letter keys, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so they were more spread out, and by spreading them all out, then you end up with, like, uniform, normal-width keys all along the top.
John:
They were still a little bit wider than you would have.
John:
Anyway, now the keys are all closer together.
John:
Which means that if you kept the same number of keys in the top row, you'd have this empty space.
John:
And so they just made the escape key really wide, which is fine with me.
John:
In fact, it was kind of funny.
John:
Speaking of these keyboards that I hate so much, not because of the key presses, which we'll talk about in a moment, but because of the key placement.
John:
They spent so long denigrating the function key and being like, you know, who uses function keys?
John:
It's better, like, which I totally sold them.
John:
Like, yes, it is much better.
John:
This is like the iPhone argument writ small.
John:
Like, it's better instead of having fixed hardware keys, we'll have software keys and you can do much more cool things.
John:
Like, good, thumbs up, right?
John:
function keys are not they're right function keys are not used frequently more often people are hitting the quote unquote function keys to change their brightness and their monitor volume or the speaker volume and to pause stuff like that's what they're used for all in total agreement then why does the effing key get this place of pride on the portable keyboards right
John:
if it is so infrequently used why are you hogging the good spot on the keyboard with the effing key if people aren't going to you know and i say this obviously as someone who sits spends more time than the average person average mac user hitting a the control key because it comes up a lot in in programming and unix e crap um
John:
i would like that to be the control key down the corner and i know everyone's saying right now if they're listening you know you can remap keys if you haven't remapped cap locks to to control like it's a solaris machine from the 90s what are you doing with your life everyone knows the proper place for control is where the cap locks is and uh in a sierra update recently the os now lets you remap the escape key to something else so if you're real upset about not being able to to have a real key for the escape key you can remap it to whatever you want
John:
there are solutions here but i what i'm saying is i'm even more on board than apple seems to be about the dinosaur nature of the function key like i i don't use them i need to be able to type them sometimes that's fine uh but i don't use them so much that i would be happy to get rid of the f and key as well or at least move it to a less easily accessible place because the corners that's a great place on the keyboard to have the corners right uh and i don't think the f and key deserves that place anymore
Casey:
Well, I think the reason it's there is because that's your gateway to getting the legacy behavior from the touch bar.
Casey:
Because Federici mentioned on stage that, oh, if you need one of those old keys, just mash down on the function key, and then the touch bar becomes the prior, the effing keys, if you will.
John:
But nobody uses those, as they were emphasizing.
John:
Like, who uses function keys?
John:
We all use them for the other functions.
John:
If you need them back, yeah, you can get them back.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But, like, I don't think getting them back is such a common operation that deserves the lower left corner.
John:
well i mean like you know yeah people don't use like f7 a lot but they do use pause you know but i guess those will always be there anyway pause like i see what you're saying just get like to get i mean you have the control strip though even in the context sensitive right you can still get those things like it's it's a weird i mean the main thing that i saw a lot of people tweeting about which is also true is if you happen to be a person who goes from either desktop to laptop or goes from dock to laptop with with like an earn out keyboard or something like
John:
It's weird to have two sets of habits where on basically every keyboard that's not a laptop keyboard, lower left is control.
John:
Again, if you haven't remapped it and so on and so forth.
John:
But when you go on laptops, you have to remember, oh, lower left and over a bit is control.
John:
You know, like different habits for different environments.
John:
They do so much for the uniformity of the keyboards.
John:
and they blow that uniformity on a key that is commonly used by people in my profession obviously not by regular people i understand this is a this is a minor concern not of concern to most normal people who hit don't hit the control key or the effing key ever i understand this is minor but uh but like i was saying keep keep going like put the effing key someplace else that's even less free or make it a weird key combination or something because
John:
Regular people can get at that stuff using the control strip, expanding it as needed, and everyone else can find wherever the hell they move the effing key to.
Marco:
Well, and I do want to nitpick one thing, though.
Marco:
You keep saying, I've seen a lot of people say this.
Marco:
Well, that sounds Trumpian.
Marco:
I've seen this idea spread around a lot, which is like, they didn't design this for me, or for us, or for you.
Marco:
And this is designed this way, not for your needs, but for everyone else's needs.
Marco:
Well, again, if you start sanding off groups of users, you're like, well, this kind of sucks for me, but this wasn't designed for me.
Marco:
That's huge chunks of customers.
Marco:
And if you keep doing that, everything they change or remove or make worse about something is going to affect some group of customers.
Marco:
And eventually, that adds up.
Marco:
Like, eventually, if you do that too much, like, it's like a design fallacy to design for, like, quote, the average or the normal or the mainstream, because everyone has something that's out of the mainstream that they do with their computer or their devices.
Marco:
And so the more that Apple focuses in and sands off the edges and makes things harder or worse for, quote, non-mainstream uses...
John:
they're they're losing potential customers that are making things worse for their existing customers every time they do that this adds up this is not insignificant yeah speaking of that though getting back to the pros uh we didn't talk about this but i'm happy that there are four thunderbolt three ports on the big pro like i mean obviously six would be better if you're a port maniac but four like you can't argue with that like
John:
Every one of those ports has amazing capabilities, which they emphasize.
John:
Every one of those can do all sorts of things.
John:
And as Casey pointed out, you can drive two 5K displays off your laptop, which is phenomenal.
John:
5K displays, by the way, that appear not to have GPUs in them from what I've been able to determine.
John:
The magic that they're doing is like...
John:
As we've discussed in the past, like, don't you need DisplayPort 1.3 to do this?
John:
And these are only DisplayPort 1.2?
John:
Yes, but they're doing multi-streaming.
John:
So it is like you are connecting two cables, but it's my understanding at this point is that they are taking two DisplayPort 1.2 streams using this multi-streaming thing or whatever over the Thunderbolt 3 things, which is why you're able to drive even a single 5K display off these laptops.
John:
The fact that you can drive two off of it is amazing.
John:
And then you still have two ports left over, both of which you could connect these giant Hydra hub to.
John:
Phil emphasized this.
John:
One of them is going to have a power cable in it.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
So you got one left.
John:
But still, you can hook a lot of stuff up to this laptop.
John:
And that feels pro.
John:
And this is the future that we were all promised.
John:
uniform same kind of very tiny amazingly capable port we're kind of like finally there after so many years of like usb and firewire and thunderbolt and mini display port and vga and and dvi and adc and just to to be able to finally seeing like the the goal posts the end goal of like
John:
Just a bunch of little tiny uniform boards, each of which does phenomenal stuff, even if it comes at the cost of MagSafe, which we all love so dearly.
John:
Even if it comes at the cost of having some dongles or whatever.
John:
I want to live in the future where the only port on all of my computers is this tiny little thing that does everything.
John:
And I would like there to be a lot of them.
John:
And four, I think, is a reasonable number for a 15-inch computer.
John:
Five or six would be even better, especially since one is used for power.
John:
But I'm willing to go with it, and I mostly give that a thumbs up.
John:
And two on the 13-inch, it's nice they didn't hold the line there and say, well, it's a 13-inch.
John:
It only has one.
John:
Having two, three would be better than two.
John:
There, I think they're a little bit one under.
John:
But what I'm saying is I love Thunderbolt 3.
Marco:
I love this future that we've arrived at.
Marco:
Doesn't the 13-inch with Touch Bar, I think, has four?
Marco:
Because it's only the MacBook Escape has two.
Marco:
And I think that's mostly because of the MacBook Air chipset not having enough, probably not enough PCI Express lanes to have more than that, if I had to take a guess.
John:
all right if that's the case then that's reasonable also i believe the display that lg display will power the mac over yeah yeah it's like it's a very apple like solution to a non-existent apple i i'm trying to figure out if the monitor if the monitor has a gpu in or not because as we know we've seen these rumors on various sites and our own itp tipster has been insisting that there exists somehow this 5k external apple display
John:
And in this presentation, Apple's like, if you want to use a cool 5K display, buy this one from LG that probably uses the same panel as the iMac.
John:
And it's awesome.
John:
And try it.
John:
And Apple has done this in the past many times.
John:
When it doesn't have a product for sale, it will direct you to a third-party one.
John:
This has been taken a sign by many people that this means Apple definitely doesn't have a 5K display.
John:
I don't know whether they do.
John:
I really want Apple to have one, even if it's the exact same panel.
John:
Not because this LG display is bad.
John:
This is exactly what I want.
John:
I just don't want it to be ugly like that one is.
John:
I know it's stupid and I'm picky and I want it to match and be nice, but like for crying out loud, the LG display has a bigger margin on the top of the display than the bottom.
John:
What kind of maniac?
John:
It's a five head.
John:
The thing is a five head.
John:
It's just, it's no, it's anyway, I'm sure it's a lovely display LG.
John:
I just want Apple to make one.
John:
If they never do, I will buy something like this LG display.
John:
And I think the way it works with the laptops is amazing.
John:
And like, you know, applause all around.
Marco:
i mean i have always used a third-party external display with my macs until i got this imac uh this is i've never bought an apple display for my tiff had one but i never bought one for myself before this imac i always had like dells and hps and before that like any always third-party displays and this new lg1 is uglier than every monitor i have ever owned
John:
It's not that bad in the grand scheme of, like, PC displays.
John:
No, it really is.
John:
But know what makes it ugly?
John:
It's not ugly, but it doesn't match the Apple aesthetic.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
With, like, the glass and the aluminum and the sort of tastefulness of the stand.
John:
I mean, it's fine.
John:
It's not hideous.
John:
There are hideous PC monitors.
John:
We've all seen them, like, where they just do the wrong thing with the foot and make the margins all weird.
John:
Even this Asus display that I have my PlayStation attached to has, like, this shiny...
John:
surround on it that i find weird and it's kind of creaky and the the power button is on the bottom when you hit it the whole display tilts and it's just it doesn't feel as nice and this is totally like touchy-feely aesthetic stuff like i'm not even talking about the screen right because again lg makes all the panels anyway like they make they make the panel for the iMac they make the panel for this like that's not what i'm talking about i'm just a picky person um and i also think apple should be in the business of making displays because
John:
it's a it's a selling point to say first of all why shouldn't apple make that money they can add margin sell it for an extra hundred bucks like whatever we'll buy it the suckers will buy it and it's like nice cool thing look that thing they touted you can connect one thunderbolt cable to your laptop and it charges it and it also drives it it's like that's amazing that should be like that should be in an apple family like product family photo like look at this awesome setup you could have you could have this portable computer when you sit down at work you have this amazing screen or even two of them that's phenomenal and i feel like apple is
John:
not emphasizing that arrangement as much because it's like well we don't even make the display we'll mention it and it's nice and we probably have some deal with lg and we work with them uh but it's not going to be in all our product family shots maybe it'll be in one of them um and so i feel like apple is leaving money on the table i continue to hold out hope that they will introduce a 5k display maybe i'm a fool obviously if the mac pro is ever revised and there's still no 5k display well i'm just glad there'll be something for me to buy
Marco:
yeah i mean if i would give the chances of this of apple's 5k display actually coming out now like i you know i believe tipster and everyone else that this thing exists inside of apple and that it was possibly even finished uh but whether it ships is always a different story and i would give the likelihood of this shipping now since it didn't ship at this event and since apple pushed the lg one so hard i would say it's 50 50 at best now yeah it's looking it's looking grim
Marco:
If it does ship, it'll probably ship maybe next summer when the Mac Pro is presumably updated.
Marco:
If that even happens, even that is a big if.
Casey:
So are you two pleased?
Casey:
I'm not prodding you on purpose anyway.
Casey:
Are you pleased with this event?
Casey:
Because I feel like I've heard both of you flip flop between this was wonderful and oh, my God, I hate everything.
Casey:
That's an exaggeration.
Casey:
But I mean, are you happy with what Apple did today or are you completely left wanting?
John:
Marco ordered a computer, so he's got to be happy in some respects.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like, I'm happy in the sense that, like, I mean, for years, I've been saying, man, wouldn't it be great if they put the Air CPU inside a computer with a nice large battery and with a retina screen and everything?
Marco:
And that's exactly what they did.
Marco:
And that's kind of why I put my money where my mouth is and actually ordering this computer, because I think it's going to be amazing for my actual preferences right now.
Marco:
however uh the rest of the event you know it's a mixed bag they and you know they we didn't even talk about the keyboard they they according to most of the reviewers it seems like this keyboard feels very similar to the macbook one keyboard and that is not good yeah i was gonna say earlier you said you ordered this one because it solved all the problems but isn't one of the reasons that you hated the macbook one was the terrible keyboard and now you just ordered a computer with with the slightly improved version of the same keyboard
Marco:
Yes, and I'm going to have to see if that works for me.
Marco:
I hope it does.
Marco:
It might not.
Casey:
Do we know when these new ones are going to be in stores?
Casey:
Are they today?
Marco:
The MacBook Escape is going to be available, I think, tomorrow or early next week.
Marco:
It's in the next few days for the MacBook Escape.
Marco:
And then the MacBook with touch bars.
Marco:
I don't think there is a clear in-store date on those, but I think it's going to be probably two or three weeks at least.
Marco:
to be clear i'm not talking about to purchase i'm talking about to take it for a test drive in terms of the keyboard yeah no i'm guessing that you're not going to see any before two weeks from now my understanding uh i don't think anybody i don't think even the reviewers have the touch bar ones yet so that i mean it's clear they're not ready yet i mean maybe maybe they're hanging out with the airpods in a warehouse somewhere but uh they're they're they're clearly not out for for showing outside of that press room today yet
John:
i mean the press got to play with them they just might not have gotten to take one home so they were there like people who could use them you can see videos online of people playing with them that's that's where i got to see like how how really cool this and we spent so long not seeing matte monitors you know and so to see a tiny matte display where they where they match the finish to the key caps it looks it looks super cool it looks like a future world thing it also makes you wish that all the keys were tiny screens and then the whole keyboard is a screen but we already talked about that
Marco:
Yeah, so it's probably going to be great.
Marco:
But overall, though, the event, I think, is good for most of the things it introduced.
Marco:
But there are a bunch of asterisks because some things did get worse or more expensive.
Marco:
And it was an incomplete update to the Mac line because there's a lot of things that still didn't get updated that desperately need them.
Marco:
And we were expecting that, of course.
Marco:
But that does color our feelings on it because what we've seen basically is that Apple might be out of the woods on the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
But we don't know if they're out of the woods yet and everything else.
Casey:
Well, I mean, I don't think the iMac is really in a bad spot.
Casey:
Now, the other ones I will concede.
Casey:
But I think the laptops look good now.
Casey:
I don't think the iMacs are bad.
Casey:
I think once the Kaby Lake or whatever it's called comes out, I think then we'll see the update there.
Casey:
The Mini and the Pro obviously are total dumpster fire.
Casey:
But, I mean, the main desktop line and the main laptop line are both looking good.
Casey:
And that's not a bad place to be.
Casey:
John, what did you think of the event?
John:
So I think all the computers they introduced are pretty good.
John:
Like you always have your little complaints, like half the time it's like the storage on the iPhones or whatever.
John:
On this one, it's the max RAM on the thing and the escape, you know, but overall these are really good machines.
John:
These, I think the, the important,
John:
point to take away from this is it is now safe to recommend people to buy macbook pros again whereas for a long time it wasn't and now i think we all feel totally safe because all these are winners all these are good computers they have modern-ish internals even if it's not kb lake or whatever the models that could possibly have it right they have something cool and new and interesting which is the touch bar in some models their retina their p3 like that the thunderbolt the capabilities for external displays like
John:
these are these are good laptops uh and you mentioned we're like oh they're probably out of the woods on the macbook pros it's difficult to say on those type of things because it's like yes and now finally finally they're they're they're recommendable models they are max to be proud of they're max that apple can be proud of selling that the people are people who buy them are going to have good experiences even if like oh i miss magsafe and i wish i had an sd card slot or whatever like these are good laptops but just like the mac pro
John:
you're not really out of the woods with one data point.
John:
You have to show that it's not going to be another year and a half, and we're not going to have to wait for three more generations of Intel CPUs for the 15-inch to get upgraded to the new architecture, right?
John:
That's what you have to show.
John:
To restore faith, you really have to show consistency.
John:
So good, we have ended the drought.
John:
but it's like we don't you know don't trust that this is going to be an ongoing concern until you show me all right update them to kb lake you know update them to whatever lake is after that i forget what the hell the intel like are you gonna update this regularly now because that's what we want as mac fans and enthusiasts and buyers of like really expensive machines with high margins right but
John:
We want to show, we want to see that Apple cares about our concerns.
John:
So good.
John:
You did that for these ones, but I'm still kind of like cautiously looking at it.
John:
And a lot of the event for the things that we knew weren't going to be there, we're still grumpy about not being there.
John:
You mentioned all those things like the ones they introduced.
John:
That's not the problem.
John:
Those are cool machines.
John:
It's the ones they didn't introduce, even though we knew we weren't going to introduce them.
John:
We can still be cranky about it.
John:
And the ones that they're still selling on modified, because I feel like Apple's laptop line is
John:
is now still filled with some machines that seem kind of creaky and old not that they're bad machines not like the mac pro you know like the 13 inch non-retina air it's not a bad machine but i feel like it is a increasingly worse value proposition
John:
as other things get better same thing with the imac 5k mac i think is a great computer but suddenly it looks slightly worse when i see the 15 inch pro which has a cool touch bar and has the thunderbolt 3 things and i look at the 5k mac i'm like you look slightly less amazing to me now which is as it should be every time you make a new computer your older ones that you haven't updated in a while look a little bit worse but now it's filled with the fear of like and will they update the imac to have thunderbolt 3 ports in the back
John:
And will they update the iMac to have Kaby Lake and a better GPU?
John:
Like, there's this fear involved in everything.
John:
It's like, we don't just trust, like, yeah, well, you know, the iMac was updated before, and now the MacBook Pros are at the head of the pack.
John:
The old way was like, yep, the MacBook Pros are the kings now, but soon the iMac will get its update, and then it will leap ahead, and we'll just go on, you know, leapfrogging each other.
John:
And, you know, sometimes it's cool when they all update at the same time when we get excited, but otherwise we just expect this cadence.
John:
And now, with this...
John:
really long delay between things every it's almost as if by introducing the new cool macbook pros it has made us feel worse about the rest of their line that wasn't updated than we did before so it is a mixed bag and i have to say honestly that finally to cap this off the the surface studio event really did affect how this felt to me right which is a rare thing that happens at a microsoft event
John:
and a microsoft product colors how i view apple's things but but it just did and we'll save this for a future show to dwell more on the the surface studio products whose name i can't remember and keep messing up when i try to say that did color how i look at this uh and that has good and bad aspects but it means that i i don't have the same unbridled for all these reasons i don't have the same unbridled enthusiasm from the new products as i used to
John:
Even though I think they're really cool.
John:
And like I said, even though I'm actually going to be getting one of these at work, which I am kind of excited about.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Audible.com, Squarespace, and MacPaw.
John:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't lose.
Casey:
i really do want to go to the store and uh and try out one of these keyboards because it's funny i i don't have the unbridled hatred of the macbook one keyboard that marco seems to but i i definitely agree that it is it it leaves me wanting
Casey:
But as I've said numerous times, I freaking love the Magic Keyboard, which is not that far away from the MacBook One keyboard.
Casey:
So I'm curious once I try these new machines, will I find them to be more MacBook One or more Magic Keyboard?
Casey:
And to Marco's point earlier, everyone that's reviewing them is saying, well, it's more MacBook One than Magic.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I'm curious.
Casey:
I'm curious to try it.
Marco:
It was interesting, too, in the Johnny Ive explanation video, that they really hammered on the fact that this was the second generation butterfly key switch.
Marco:
They really made it very clear, this is not the same keyboard, this is an improved keyboard.
Marco:
Which I thought was kind of a tacit acknowledgement of, yeah, that first one wasn't very good, or was at least controversial.
Marco:
So they really want us to know that this is new and improved.
Marco:
We'll see if it actually is.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I've been thinking about this theoretical product.
John:
The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems in my mind.
John:
Because you mentioned you really like the new Magic Keyboard, and I don't like the fact that it's all squished up there, but the key presses I might like.
John:
I don't even know if I actually tried one.
John:
Anyway, touch bar.
John:
A touch bar on a Magic Keyboard, like a Magic Keyboard plug-in or otherwise, or with a battery.
John:
Just start to think about that product and how absurd it is.
John:
It is basically...
John:
and an old ipad with a really skinny screen and a physical keyboard welded to it like it's like i want a thing that i touch down here that has a screen but mostly it's a keyboard but it's also a screen with a little computer running it and it's like that how does that tension resolve itself between these two things and the keys by the way are getting thinner and smaller and traveling less and less it's just so weird anyway i would like one of those i would if they
John:
of course i would want the extended one an apple extended keyboard aluminum apple extended keyboard with full size you know full size touch bar separated from the number things like i'm willing to give up all this desk space all this precious desk space that apparently they think i'm filling my desk with coffee cups or something and i don't have five millimeters to spare that would be a cool product but man would that be a man would that be a weird product because it's like it's it's like an ipad with a tiny screen with a keyboard attached what the hell is that
John:
i don't even know it's definitely but i i like i said it is definitely a transitional fossil it is is not the end evolution of anything so out of curiosity do you use your your 10 key numeric keys that often mostly to enter rsa token values but yeah i do use it for that
John:
and and if you want oh rsa oh rsa um every time i every time i use it to two-factor into a production machine that number is burned so you know i open up another tab or another window immediately gotta wait for a new number
John:
and type in a new one delightful it is and i do use that i would sacrifice it though if you're asking like i would i would chop off that thing i i want i want home i want home and end and page up and page down and arrows i will not give them up but i would sacrifice the numpad if i could well any apple keyboard i've ever seen you either give up the home and page up etc with the 10 keys i know
Casey:
I mean, that's I mean, teach their own.
Casey:
I would I guess in a perfect world, I wouldn't mind having them.
Casey:
But I absolutely would prefer a wireless keyboard, except maybe with the mini iPad on it.
Casey:
But I prefer a wireless keyboard.
Casey:
And I can certainly live without all of those keys personally.
Casey:
But that's just me.
John:
I would plug it in.
John:
I still use wired everything.
John:
And, like, it's a desktop.
Casey:
Like, I can find a place to... Oh, you still have that barbaric mouse, don't you?
Casey:
I can find... Yeah.
Casey:
Wait, you use a wired mouse?
Casey:
Yeah, remember he uses that, like, $10 piece of junk.
John:
I do.
John:
I have a mouse problem.
John:
I've had a mouse problem for a long time.
John:
And it's not the wire.
John:
It's the fact that I can't find a mouse made in this decade that I like.
John:
And so I keep using this ancient... I have one at home and one at work, this ancient mouse.
John:
That is not a good mouse.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, and one of them died and I had to buy one new on eBay.
John:
And now like, I really need to find a mouse that I like.
John:
Um, and I don't have anything against wireless, although I would find the battery charging and I would probably be fine with it.
John:
Um, although I still, I don't know, like for gaming and everything, I was looking at some, uh, aftermarket PlayStation four controllers and they were wired.
John:
I was like, you know what?
John:
I'm on board with that.
John:
I like the psychological advantage of not, not having to think about the wifi signaling process, adding latency to my, uh,
John:
uh crappy game reflexes i need all the help i can get just connect it with the wire i'm sitting in front of the thing anyway like anyway um for mouse and keyboard both the wires are routed in such a way that the fact that they're wired does not enter into uh
John:
you know my mind i don't see them they don't bother me they're all managed well it's fine we talked about your ridiculous mice in episode 132 they're not ridiculous they're fine they're just really really really old and and you know i don't know i just it's difficult with mice because what do you do buy and return them buy and return them and just like go to a store and hold a bunch of them in your hand try to guess which ones you like i tried that i'd bought a bunch of new ones and i was i was wrong that i i gave them all like several weeks i was like no i
John:
go back to the old one i i still say it's because of the stupid uh original mac mouse that i learned that i learned to mouse on and now i just keep looking for other mice with straight vertical sides without buttons all over them i mean the magic mouse is pretty good
Casey:
No, the Magic Mouse.
Casey:
I am a diehard Magic Mouse user, and it's terrible.
Casey:
It's way too flat.
Casey:
Way, way, way too flat.
John:
It's not terrible if you like a mouse.
John:
You just hold it differently.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you're the type of person who rests your hand on a mouse, like if you learned, maybe you've learned like the iMac generation with the stupid puck, which kind of made you like, because you couldn't grab the sides, but I'm a side grabber.
John:
I hold the mouse.
Marco:
No, I'm the same way.
John:
I hold the mouse on the side.
Marco:
I got my thumb and my ring finger hold the mouse, and so my hand floats very far above it.
Casey:
Same here, but the nice thing is a lot of modern mice that are not the magic mouse are super bulbous.
Casey:
So I'm looking at the way I'm holding my magic mouse right now, and there's a mile of air between the top of the mouse and my palm.
Casey:
But on a lot of the modern mice, that will be taken up by the mouse.
Casey:
So you can just flop your hand right on it, and it's in that same shape.
Casey:
But you don't have to actually worry about holding your hand up.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I really miss that about the Magic Mouse.
Casey:
But in every other way, I think this thing is darn near perfect.
Casey:
So that's why I've put up with it since it was released.
John:
What about the right click and having to not have your left finger down?
John:
Doesn't that drive you mad?
John:
No.
Marco:
Honestly, I've been using Apple's mice now for probably a good six or seven years now.
Marco:
That took me about a half a day to get used to doing it correctly, and I literally never have a misclick, where I mean to right-click.
Marco:
That never happens.
John:
I don't think I'd have a misclick, but because I'm so sensitive to the RSI issues, anything that requires me to sort of basically hold my muscles and tendons in static contraction for a brief period of time, like having anything poised over anything without allowing it to rest on it,
John:
that I'm very sensitive to those type of moves.
John:
So even just the briefness of like remembering to lift while I press down on the other one, it's not that I would accidentally ever trigger the other behavior.
John:
It's just that it is a ever so slightly more muscle stress inducing move than my, my current thing.
John:
And I, and I,
John:
I'm not even saying how I use my current mouse is good, RSI-wise.
John:
It's just the way I happen to do it.
John:
But that definitely... Anything that requires you to hover or hold over or lift when you didn't have to lift before as opposed to being a more relaxed thing is difficult.
John:
Even if it's just a matter of changing my habits to try to relax and do the same move, I found that difficult to do.
John:
And I'm looking at how I mouse.
John:
I realize what I also do, which is the reason a lot of the much more ergonomic, strictly speaking, gaming mice and everything that let you put your whole hand on it, they're kind of shaped like if you grabbed a big...
John:
blob of clay and squeezed you know like where you have your whole hand on top of the thing very large mice uh the reason those don't agree with me is that very often i rest my my palm on the mouse pad and i'm only moving the mouse with my thumb and my ring finger but my palm is stationary for fine motion you ever do that isn't that terrible
John:
i don't it's not really that good i it probably doesn't seem that it's good but it has the advantage that i'm not holding my arm and wrist up poised over the thing which you know it i don't know i'm just saying what i do i'm looking down at what my hand does i do find movements sometimes without moving my hand i'm only moving my fingers and you can't do that if the mouse is so large that it expects your entire hand to be on it because then how could your how could like the the the
John:
ball of your palm or whatever be resting on the mouse but not all the time like obviously when i'm mousing way across the screen i'm not doing that but my palm actually is fairly close to the mouse pad a lot of the time and when i'm not moving it goes back into rest like on the mouse pad instead of on the mouse it's yeah i think i'm the same way as you obviously i'm not looking at how what what you're describing but the way you describe it it sounds like the exact same way i mouse
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that's not a good fit for the shape of the Apple mouse.
John:
The Apple mouse is much better if you're resting your hand on it, kind of like you're petting a cute little white fuzzy mouse.
John:
You know, it's down there.
Casey:
I'm surprised, Marco, that for someone who really, really has to have an ergonomic keyboard that you can handle having such a woefully non-ergonomic mouse.
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, what it is mostly, I mean, mousing for whatever reason has not seemed to cause me problems.
Marco:
Whereas having to type on a non-ergonomic keyboard, like one that doesn't have the split and the angle, that caused me problems quickly.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
One of the reasons I don't use a laptop full time is because I kind of can't.
Marco:
I can use it for like, you know, short periods, temporary things like trips and stuff and on planes, but after a while it hurts.
Marco:
And whereas regular ones don't.
Marco:
Mice have just always, for whatever reason, I've always been fine using pretty much any mouse.
Marco:
And what keeps me on the Magic Mouse, people who don't like the Magic Mouse dislike it so much that they are shocked when they hear somebody like a computer nerd like us uses one of these things.
Marco:
And the main reason I use it is once you get used to having inertial scrolling, it is really hard not to have it.
John:
and it's totally fine it's great i would like those features too like i i envy those features the magic mouse not enough for me to start using it because it's too low and i hit the right click but i would like to use that i like whenever i'm using a magic mouse i appreciate that feature of it and i wish it was on a mouse with a shape that i liked
Marco:
Keep holding out, John.
Marco:
Someday.
Marco:
Oh, I don't have any hope with that.
Marco:
It'll be the same event in which they unveil your gaming PC that will cost nothing.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
I don't know if I mentioned this on the show proper.
John:
Maybe I just alluded to it a few times, but it's worth putting in here for the faithful people who listen this far into the show.
John:
Did the show live up to the hello again hype that an old school Mac user like me received from that invitation?
John:
No, no, it did not.
John:
Not even close.
John:
These are not on par with the original Mac.
John:
These are not on par with the iMac.
John:
These are not on par with the iPhone that had hello in the commercial.
John:
Hello again was inappropriate if your goal was not to overhype old fogies like me.
John:
You know, you realize during the World Series that that's the one time a year that the fewest number of baseball teams are playing when there are any playing at all.
John:
Because it's just two teams.
John:
I didn't know that.
John:
I mean, you do, logically speaking, know that when the championship is going on, all the teams that are no longer in the championship aren't playing anymore, right?
Marco:
so wait so i know they play like five or seven games right it's the same two teams for all those games oh my god do they just like play till somebody wins three of them or something it's the world series like if there's going to be think of it this way there's a sports that has a bunch of teams at one point one team has to be the winner you do that by process of elimination yeah but i i just assumed that there were like you know maybe four or five teams that made it into the final group of games and then they played the world series yeah i i assumed it was like a small handful of teams not just two oh
John:
I don't know what part of the United States you grew up on where they allowed you to get to adult age with knowing so little about baseball.
John:
It seems like a failure of the national pastime.
Marco:
No, you know why?
Marco:
I grew up in Columbus, Ohio.
Marco:
Columbus does not have a pro team.
Marco:
It's all about Ohio State, and I don't think they do baseball.
Marco:
Oh, they do baseball.
Marco:
well okay but nobody cares about it so it's a sorry Columbus people so it's a big town for college football and basically not like every other sport is kind of minimized in Ohio because in Columbus specifically because Ohio State football is such a big deal so there's really no room in people's like energy and my basketball a little bit but there's really no room there for like culturally for anyone to really care that strongly about pro baseball anyway the World Series is two teams
John:
There's two leagues, the National League and the American League.
John:
The number one team from the National League plays the number one team from the American League.
John:
If you are the number one team in the National and the American League, that's called winning the pennant, and then those two teams go to the World Series.
Marco:
Wait, so winning the World Series is not winning a pennant?
Marco:
What do they win at the end of the World Series?
Marco:
Winning the pennant is when you...
John:
there's three bases you hit the ball you're like it's just geez like do they win a flag at the end of the world series like what happens like what are they the trophy is terrible the world series trophy but uh but anyway no there's just two teams so what i'm saying is during the regular season at any given day many teams are playing they're all playing each other to see whose win-loss record is going to be better to get into the playoffs and blah blah blah but during the world series you're down to two teams that's it that's wait are the playoffs different
John:
can we just stop this is this is i honestly don't know anyway the point is there's actually less baseball on than normal although i don't follow baseball either for all i know the world series is over is the world series over casey might know no it's not last i heard it was either tied up or two to one and is which game number in the seven is this oh it's two to one you can figure it out
Marco:
What?
Marco:
If it's two games to one, they've played three games.
Marco:
Oh, I thought that was the score of tonight's game that was still going because baseball takes forever.
Marco:
I figured that was the score of the game that's happening right now.
Marco:
Is there a game happening right now?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I thought there was, but I'm not sure.
Marco:
He's too busy watching the Toadies.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
Like Blammer in the chat.
Marco:
I fell asleep and just woke up to an exasperated Syracuse explaining baseball.
John:
Welcome to our world.
John:
like if i'm explaining baseball something has gone terribly wrong well he doesn't know whether the world series is over yet this is everything is relative you have to like take your entire scale and skew it way over to one end and then you're into the atp zone for sports uh it is not today they are playing game three on friday so it is tied one to one they are playing game three tomorrow
Marco:
So they've each won one game, and they just play until somebody wins four of them, I guess?
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So that's why they don't always play all seven games.
Casey:
Correct.
Marco:
Okay.
Casey:
You okay?
Casey:
Do you need an aspirin?
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I'm good, because I will see none of these games.
Marco:
I will know mostly not what happens in them, except at the end, I know that it's meaningful, because it hasn't happened in a very long time, that I guess the Cubs are in it.
Marco:
They're one of the two teams.
Marco:
So I know that's significant.
Marco:
Do you know about the goat curse?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
See all these things that you can know about baseball that are fun sounding?
Casey:
The goat curse is so ridiculous.
Casey:
This doesn't sound fun to me.
Casey:
It's not.
John:
Here's the fun part of it.
John:
The origin of the goat curse is from a time when you can bring your goat to the baseball game with you, apparently.
John:
Yikes.
John:
Like, go to the park, go into the stands, go find your seat, but bring your goat.
John:
It was the 40s, right?
John:
It was a very long time ago, right?
John:
Yeah, it was a very long time ago.
Marco:
But surely you can appreciate the idea of bringing your goat to the baseball game.
Marco:
And who are they?
Marco:
What's the other team that's in the series?
Marco:
Cleveland.
Marco:
oh who cares about them as as someone pointed out in a tweet it's serif or sans serif because their logos are both c's but one has serifs that was pretty magnificent i don't remember who that was so i mean it's got to be a little bit hard to be the cleveland whatever's in this series because like basically nobody wants them to win like everybody wants the cubs win because it would be so amazing right people in cleveland want them to win do they really but like wouldn't wouldn't even yes they really do
Marco:
But wouldn't even they be really happy to see the Cubs win it?
Marco:
I don't think you understand how sports works, how sports fandom works.
John:
Wouldn't they be happy for the other team that hadn't won in a long time?
John:
No.
They want them to die.
Casey:
Plus, Cleveland already won the NBA championship, and so if they were to win the MLB championship, that would be a huge big deal as well.
Casey:
So that is all the justification a Cleveland fan needs to be all about Cleveland and screw the Cubs.
Marco:
Do people cross sports a lot like that?
Marco:
Do they really care that things happen across different sports in the same city?
Marco:
Is that a thing?
Casey:
Do you care if Apple releases great iPhones and Macs?
Casey:
I mean, they're two different things from the same company.
Casey:
It's a very weak analogy, but it's still the same thing.
John:
It's about fandom and about being proud of where you live for completely illogical reasons.
John:
Yeah.
John:
reasons that are explicable in terms of uh tribalism but don't make any sense anyway whatever yes people love it they love it red sox win patriots win they love it can we please make accidental sports podcast where you just you just explain a sport to me every week i already have the title of our sports contest would clearly be the blind leading the blind that would be our sports podcast you're like sports how do they work
John:
Although I could explain, I feel like I am a fairly big expert in tennis.
John:
So at least there's one sport that I understand very, very thoroughly.
John:
But even that, I don't actually, even that I don't understand all the particulars of the intricacies of the different kinds of like the mechanisms of the league.
John:
I just understand the game itself.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
We should do an F1 podcast.
Casey:
Oh, that would be good.
John:
Oh, geez.
John:
You know, McLaren's more of a technology company.
Yeah.
John:
Actually, they're more of a carbon fiber manufacturer.
John:
Actually, McLaren's more of a food service company, if you think about it, really.
John:
Oh, I can't believe we're still going.
John:
I guess we're not now, but... I was surprisingly fired up after this thing, too.
John:
I don't know why.
John:
I'm all worked up.
John:
You should go watch some sport.
John:
No, I don't do that singular crap.
Casey:
yeah that's bullshit total get my maths mixed up with my sport i feel like sport should be pronounced like with a silent t like spore yeah why don't you uh yeah watch your sport while you do some maths that's just no stop that's why it's that's why their english is a rough draft so oh i forgot to ask did your uh flippies or whatever lose what happened hokies won
Marco:
Oh, okay, and that's the one you were voting for, right?
Marco:
That's correct.
Marco:
Yeah, cool.
Marco:
Congratulations for something.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
Actually, it's a good season.
Casey:
We're bowl qualified now.
Casey:
Wait, aren't there like 10 bowls?
Casey:
Which bowl?
Casey:
There's like 100 bowls, but you have to have six wins.
John:
There's enough bowls to go around.
John:
It's like trophies for little kids today.
John:
Everyone gets a trophy and everyone gets a bowl.
John:
Not everyone gets to play in them, though, but almost everyone.
John:
Enough so everyone feels good about themselves.