Roasting Your Own Beans
John:
uh anything we need to talk you want to talk politics for a while oh my god john syracusa tell me about your 4k display or displays if you please yeah this is not really related to the mac pro and apple's getting out of display business and all that business but it's strangely connected so i've got that i've got a ps4 pro now and one of the features of the ps4 pro is that it
John:
theoretically supports 4k for games for games that are updated to support it and that actually do support it um and i figure since i i'm keeping my old ps4 and it had a gaming monitor with it as well i needed a new monitor for the new one because neither one of these is
John:
Getting hooked up to my TV for display burn-in reasons.
John:
So when I was going to get a new monitor, I figured I should get a 4K one.
John:
Because, hey, the PlayStation 4 Pro is supposed to be all 4K capable, so that's what I should do.
John:
So I shopped around for a 4K monitor that supported HDR, which is another feature of the PS4 Pro.
John:
Actually, maybe they back-ported that to the plain old PS4.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Anyway, apparently it's impossible to find.
John:
an hdr capable 4k computer monitor you can find tvs obviously but i wasn't looking for a tv and and also the size inflation of tvs that happened maybe three years ago four years ago where any decent tv is now like at least 55 inches i'm fearing the day that someday you won't be able to get one less than 65 inches like the minimum size for a decent tv has gone up you'll have to move yeah you can't buy yourself can i get a 27 inch 4k tv with hdr the answer is no
John:
No, you can't.
John:
You want a 55 inch?
John:
Got one of those for you.
John:
Anyway, no HDR, but I did want to get 4K.
John:
So I shopped around a little bit.
John:
I hate doing this because I don't, there's like a million different products in the non-Apple world.
John:
So much selection, it's overwhelming.
John:
I ended up getting a ViewSonic, great product names, XG2700 4K display, which is really nice.
John:
I especially like the stand it came with.
John:
It's like height adjustable.
John:
It was very sturdy.
John:
The monitor itself was a little chunky and a little bit gamery looking.
John:
It was black but with like a red stripe and these silly things.
Casey:
My word, this is not only expensive, but...
Casey:
You're whining about the LG display and the way that looks and this has frickin red trim on it Are you serious John Syracuse those are racing stripes that make you go faster?
John:
I mean, this is not my Mac obviously PlayStation 4 Have you seen what the PlayStation 4 itself looks like this is it?
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
This is truly terrible The LG ultra fine is it is not a pretty monitor I'm not trying to say it's pretty but it's positively understated compared to this atrocity and
John:
this is not that i mean if you look at it it's basically just in completely black around the display and all you can see when you're sitting in front of it is the two little red side things on the stand um and you can't even see the red stripe on the on the vertical thing because it gets covered up at the height i had the monitor anyway that's what i got oh and it was all right um all of these pc gaming monitors have they have like on screen you know
John:
There's adjustments on the device itself that had nothing to do with the thing that's connected to it.
John:
So on the device itself, you can adjust like brightness and contrast, but also a million other settings, some of which are strange through what you can imagine to be like the worst on screen controls, you know, you know, when they put like grainy sort of bit mapped.
John:
little menu thing and normally you have like a the view sonic has like a one and two button like the one brings up the menu the two goes into it and there's up and down arrows so bad it's a terrible interface it's it's kind of like going back in time to like when televisions first got on screen displays osd they call them on screen display uh which doesn't really make any sense that what it stands for on screen display anyway i believe that's right it doesn't make it on where else would the display be on off screen display
Marco:
this is real i'm still looking at this monitor i mean like i i should point out like i like many tastefully designed pc monitors i like view sonic and views i have owned multiple view sonic monitors they are really good usually i like red even red is one of my favorite colors for things to be in even though trump ruined red hats forever but i look at this monitor and i cannot even imagine buying this thing and having this on my desk
Casey:
I could not agree more.
John:
Just look at the monitor part of it.
John:
Not the stand, but just the monitor from the front.
John:
It is literally a matte black rectangle with the word USonic on the bottom.
John:
That's pretty much as plain as you can get.
Marco:
But you will see the stand, and if you're not seeing the red stripe on the back, your monitor's probably too low.
John:
Well, I mean, I guess you can see a little tiny bit of it, but you don't notice it.
John:
And the stand, among stands, you don't know how deep this thing goes.
John:
Go look at some of the stands of other PC and gaming monitors.
John:
Just do me a favor.
Marco:
Do me a favor.
Marco:
Get a VESA arm and have that hold this up instead.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I'm getting to that.
Marco:
I'm getting to the VESA arm, okay?
Marco:
We'll get there.
John:
Is it VESA?
John:
Not VESA?
John:
All these years.
John:
I'm going to say VESA, and it's definitely a move file, and you mispronounce everything, so...
Casey:
I don't understand how you besmirch the 5K monitor as an atrocity that you would never be able to use ever.
Casey:
And then you buy this piece of garbage.
John:
Do you think I would ever connect this to my Mac?
John:
what difference does it make oh it makes a difference i would never connect this to my mac it doesn't even get to be on the same desk as my mac i love that you have like lower standards for like the for like the pc and gaming equipment of course i do of course and not only of course i do i don't i don't disagree but you really have no choice like you have to have i have different standards anyway but you have no choice there is no like nice tasteful pc hardware for the most part
John:
Even things like the HP Spectre are really, you know, I see they're putting in an effort, but it's not to my taste.
John:
Anyway, let me continue my story here.
John:
So I got this thing, and the adjustments on it are very strange.
John:
I'm trying to get it sort of calibrated to something reasonable, but they have all sorts of settings, most of which...
John:
uh fly in the face of my television uh snob sensibilities because the television you want to adjust like you're trying there is a goal there is like you can get reference images and say it should look like this you know because television content is produced with the expectation that here is the color range of your display here is the the the brightness behavior all sorts of other things like that
John:
Whereas for a gaming monitor specifically, games are not produced with any sort of reference viewing environment, right?
John:
Because there is no real standard for that.
John:
Games are produced.
John:
I don't know how they decide, like, how dark should the textures be and, you know...
John:
What color range should we use?
John:
I, I really don't know what they use, but I can tell you that everybody's PC monitors are not calibrated like quote unquote correctly and are all over the map.
John:
And there is a setting that seems to be pervasive on all PC monitors, especially with the gaming, but they call black stabilization.
John:
Have you ever even heard of that?
John:
no what why why is black changing yeah so in games uh a lot of games are made where there'll be dark sections where you go like in a cave or something but if you're playing a game especially a competitive game you don't actually want to quote unquote faithfully reproduce the blacks because you won't be able to see anything
John:
It is an advantage for you instead to have the monitor so that it kind of... I'm assuming what it's doing is like squashing everything down.
John:
It's like, oh, I can see the subtle difference between 100% black and 99% black and 98% black in this cave.
John:
It's important for me to see that so I can...
John:
Pick out the edges of the cave wall and find where the enemies are or whatever.
John:
Like, have you ever seen anyone do, like, competitive first-person shooters in PC gaming?
John:
They're not trying to get visual fidelity as if it's a movie or a television show.
John:
What they're trying to do is, can I see everything clearly?
John:
So a lot of the monitors have settings that make the picture worse, like, by...
John:
reducing the dynamic range and making areas that would be black less black which looks looks bad it's like a bad black level on your tv and also all the settings that are involved like response time because that's the other big thing you a lot of gamers use tn panels which nobody uses anymore because they look terrible the viewing angles are terrible um but they have better response time
John:
i've never gone that far i couldn't get a tn display because that's like i mean it's like going back to the macbook air it's like no i mean you aren't an animal right so again i got an ips display which does it has a like a five times worse response time but even on these displays there's a way you can change the response time to be as good as it can be
John:
doing what I assume is sacrificing visual quality.
John:
I'm trying to strike the right balance between don't-look-terrible monitor, but also I do feel there's a benefit to not having everything be black when I'm doing one of the raids in Destiny.
John:
There are a lot of dark areas, and if I'm doing some jumping puzzle in the dark to try to do something, I do have it adjusted, quote-unquote, wrong, so the games play better.
John:
Anyway, I had a lot of trouble trying to get the ViewSonic set up that way, but the real problem was that
John:
for a while my playstation 4 pro did not show me a 4k output option it would just output 1080 i'm like well that's not what i want i need you to output 4k so i did a bunch of googling the playstation says uh you know count out 4k and it would say hdcp 2.2 not available
John:
I don't know if you guys are familiar with HDCP, but it's another one of those stupid things that makes your life worse for no good reason.
John:
And this monitor apparently predates HDCP 2.2.
John:
It only supports like, I forget what the earlier standard is, maybe 1.1 or 1.4.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I had a quote unquote HDMI 2.0 cable and everything was good, but it didn't work with it.
John:
And I did some Googling.
John:
You find people asking ViewSonic on Twitter, hey, does this monitor support HDCP 2.2?
John:
They say, sorry, no.
John:
So I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to return this thing and get a different monitor.
John:
now it turns out uh you can get it to games to display 4k on this it has a bunch of hdmi ports in the back and like so many televisions and monitors before uh only one of the ports is like the good one so once i move the cable to the good port the one and only good port which isn't labeled with anything that says hey this is the only one that does hdmi 2.0 hey this is the only one that does 4k but turns out there's only one that does it
John:
So I could display games in 4K on this, but I still wanted to get another monitor because this one still doesn't support HTTP 2.2, which probably isn't a factor for playing games, but it does mean that Netflix and other stuff like that that wants to display video content won't do it on 4K because this doesn't do the stupid...
John:
intellectual property copy protection dance just the right way for stupid reasons so i returned this one in grand marco fashion uh although this was just plain old my fault of like i didn't i didn't even think to look for hdcp 2.0 i'm like i just need a gaming monitor this is one of those it has hdmi input i should be good to go but and by the way i don't usually return things usually i sell them
John:
I thought about selling this because the stupid restocking fee on this was going to be a lot of money.
John:
I'm like, well, if I can sell it for more than the restocking fee, then... Oh, if there's a restocking fee, I'll return it for sure.
Marco:
It's just an issue of I don't want to... I feel bad returning things when I know someone else is going to be eating the cost.
Marco:
But if I'm definitely eating the cost, then I won't feel bad about that anymore.
John:
Yeah, I was just hoping if I sold it to someone else, like a brand new monitor that had like barely even touched the little plastic films were stolen.
John:
I think, you know, the peely plastic stuff that protects it.
John:
That was still on it.
John:
So this is brand new.
John:
But if I could have sold it for somebody for like maybe $80 less than I paid for it, then I still would have come out ahead.
John:
Anyway, so I returned that one and in its place, I got an LG 4K display.
John:
I don't have an LG 5K display.
John:
I now have an LG 4K display.
John:
Does it have that weird little head with the camera in it?
John:
It is not a 5 head.
John:
take a look at it um hey what model is it the ridiculous i just put the link in the show notes it is not a five head it is more tame looking um whoa there's no edge there is it's just it's just a it's very thin but it's you know so you notice this one is smaller overall it comes in a very small box as casey noted um the frame around it is very small
John:
The panel is probably the same panel that's in, like, every LG 27-inch 4K display that you can get right now because they sell a whole bunch of them with different letter suffixes on them.
John:
The little stand that it's on is where the ViewSonic kicks its butt because the ViewSonic stand was big, chunky, height-adjustable... And red.
John:
And stable, right?
John:
And this monitor, if you take your finger and put it under the corner and tap upwards, the monitor bobbles its little bobblehead like it's one of those little hula dolls that you put on a dashboard or one of those...
John:
bobblehead figures right it is the worst design stand it just connects with two screws that you screw in yourself to this little tiny uh you know thing in the back of it terrible stand it's ugly too i think that little semi-circular thing is ugly it takes up more room on your desk width wise than than that square thing that the view sonic had no there's no red stripe but it doesn't perform adequately the function of keeping the monitor still so if i bump my desk with my knee while i'm playing i gotta watch a stupid bobblehead bobble in front of me
John:
Now, it does have a VESA mount on the back.
John:
And so I said, all right, well, whatever.
John:
Who cares about that stand?
John:
It's got, you know, the 100 millimeter VESA mount on the back of the thing.
John:
All I have to do is find a sturdy VESA mount, get rid of that stupid foot, and use that.
John:
But I don't want an arm because I don't want to clamp it to my desk because I have glass on top of my desk and I don't want to clamp anything to it.
John:
My desk isn't that, you know, I just don't want an arm.
John:
There's too much stuff going on back there.
John:
I just want to stand.
John:
And every single Visa stand I could find was uglier than this foot.
John:
Yeah, you're not going to have a good time there.
John:
They're terrible.
John:
Like, the metal ones look like giant metal horseshoes.
John:
The plastic ones look just as bad as this.
John:
so i'm just gonna i'm just you know not hitting my desk and being careful and by the way the on-screen controls this one are better than the view sonic but still pretty grim this one has a tiny little joystick under the middle that you move around it's like kind of like a five-way switch you know you get up down left right and press in but what boy what a terrible interface
John:
And because it's the bottom and you're wiggling a joystick that's like pointing down, but you're trying to move controls on the screen that are going, you know, in a different plane up down left and right.
John:
Anyway, I think this one looks a little bit better than the ViewSonic panel quality wise.
John:
uh or maybe it's just that i have had more time to tweak it because the adjustments are not so painful to use in the menu but it has all the same crap including a response time adjustment in which the value that you want is high it's like i don't want high response time but yet because of the way they name these features and probably the poor translation of the options i had to look up the manual and say which one do i want for the thing where the response time number is a lower number of milliseconds oh hi that makes sense why would you ever want it to be slower
John:
i think it decreases uh you know the uh the quality of the display it decreases the i don't know something i'm assuming the color quality or something like it's doing less processing on the display and probably you know it's it's trying to not put as much computation between the signal and the screen uh same thing with there's like a sharpness thing that'll apply a sharpness filter and especially when playing games in 1080 like destiny is still just 1080
John:
The sharpness filter does help make the text look better, but it adds processing overhead.
John:
So if you really want the best response time, I'm assuming that the best option is to turn the sharpness all the way down, which is what I've done.
John:
Anyway, I was able to adjust this to get it look a little bit better to my eyes than the ViewSonic.
John:
And now I'm just patiently waiting for 4K games to come out.
Casey:
So I do not have this exact same monitor.
Casey:
I was mistaken for a couple of different reasons.
Casey:
One, I'm pretty sure it's a different model.
Casey:
So you got the UD68-P.
Casey:
I got the UD58-B.
Casey:
And the the bezel on mine is considerably larger than the bezel on yours.
Casey:
Also, you chose poorly if this is ever going to get connected to a computer.
Casey:
If you're if you're ever going to connect it to a computer, 4K is not enough DPI for 27 inches.
Casey:
You should have gotten 5K.
John:
Yeah, I'm not.
John:
I'm never connecting this to a computer.
John:
What computer would I connect this to my gaming PC?
Casey:
Well, you could connect it to your piece of garbage Mac, in theory, and then actually have a Retina Mac.
Casey:
No, this also is never going to be connected to a Mac.
Marco:
I love that all of this trouble you're going through, I mean, this is all, like, this crazy stuff you're going through, and having this whole separate desk set up that, of course, this won't go near your Mac and everything, and having this PC monitor...
Marco:
all this and yet you won't build a gaming pc like you're basically doing you're putting in all the effort that it would take to have a game no way the playstation is way less effort than a gaming pc way less no i mean once you get into all this crazy monitor twiddling that you're doing i mean really like you might like why is there not a gaming pc on this second second tier desk that you have yeah
John:
gaming pc would not do there's no destiny for pc although destiny 2 may be coming for pc fans but anyway there's no destiny for pc there's no west guardian for pc there's no uncharted 4 for pc like i need to have this this is the thing that i need gaming pc does not replace this in any possible especially since the only thing i do with my consoles is play like a handful of games that are essentially console exclusives even on my nintendo consoles there's no
John:
gaming pc that's going to play the next zelda game right that's what i buy these things for so i would have to have a gaming pc in addition to this and there's no room for it and it's way more headache than this this is you know i didn't mind the 4k thing because i was excited to get a 4k monitor and to play games that resolution i do have a few games that have had updates that came out which really just makes things a little bit sharper because it's not like they redid all the textures for the most part
John:
I think Overwatch is 4K now.
John:
I haven't looked at that yet.
John:
Anyway, there's a bunch of games there.
John:
And I don't have the PlayStation VR yet, but I'm considering getting that.
John:
But no, I'm pretty happy with the setup.
John:
Oh, about the PS4 Pro.
John:
The only complaint I have about it, and I realize I should probably just complain to Sony and get this fixed.
John:
the one controller that the ps4 pro came with the left analog stick if you look at it like from the side is tilted in the neutral position ever so slightly and i'm not having any of that so i'm using my old i'm using my old dualshock uh
John:
Because they didn't change the controller or any.
John:
They just changed it like the buttons are now like ugly gray instead of black.
John:
And I think maybe the triggers might be a little bit better.
John:
But anyway, I'm going to complain to Sony and say, look, I took this thing out of the box.
John:
I never touched it.
John:
In the neutral position, all of these analog sticks should be straight up and down.
John:
This one is tilted to give me a new thing.
John:
And I'm sure Sony will be happy to do that for me.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sure.
Casey:
On the one side, John, I truly, genuinely admire how perceptive you are and how you can notice these little things.
John:
Oh, you would notice it.
John:
It's not like, oh, this is obscure.
John:
I'd only notice if I took it out of level or a plumb bob.
John:
You'd notice it with your eyeballs.
John:
It is not subtle.
Casey:
But with that said, I am so glad that I am at worst mildly critical and not hypercritical like you are.
Marco:
This whole conversation, I'm sitting here thinking, thank God this is one area I don't really care about.
Marco:
I don't care about gaming really at all.
Marco:
I'd like to, but I don't.
Marco:
I barely care about TVs.
Marco:
I barely care about TV adjustments and picture quality adjustments and everything.
Marco:
I certainly don't care about analog sticks being slightly tilted from neutral.
Marco:
I am just so happy.
Marco:
There are so many areas that I care way too much about.
Marco:
At least here's one that I don't.
John:
Yep.
John:
I'm not carving my own analog sticks out of plastic.
John:
That would be the equivalent of you roasting your own beans.
John:
roasting your beans is really not that hard and it's really good i know but i'm saying like it is one thing to be picky about the things that you buy but at a certain point you say there's nothing i can buy i must i must make it myself and that would be the equivalent of me carving my own controllers and like a controller assembly kit and like making my own analog sticks and like assembling different pieces
Marco:
You try to find good coffee on this half of the county.
Marco:
I guarantee you can't find it.
John:
There's no good controllers either, but I just accept what they sell me.
John:
I just want it to be like, you know, correct.
John:
When it comes out of the box, everything should be straight.
John:
If you could make your own perfect controller for $5 in 20 minutes, wouldn't you do it?
John:
And then I have to drink it and it's gone and I got to do it all over again.
John:
Hence the analogy is breaking down.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anyway, this monitor that you bought, John, is not HDR.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
No, it's not.
Casey:
Isn't that one of the... Because that's why you bought that god-awful red racing stripe to view Sonic, was to get... No, none of them are.
John:
No, you can't get... There are none for sale.
John:
There is no gaming monitor.
John:
Like I said, you can get a TV with HDR.
John:
You can get a 4K TV with HDR support for your PS4 Pro.
John:
But as far as I was able to determine, there is no monitor, computer monitor that you can buy, as in a thing that's 27 inches and not 55, that you put on a desk that has HDR support.
Right.
Marco:
This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.
Marco:
Start building your website today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Squarespace sites look amazing.
Marco:
They look professionally designed regardless of your skill level and you don't have to code.
Marco:
Although if you want to, you can jump in there and edit the code.
Marco:
You can do things like inject JavaScript or inject your own CSS, move around the blocks, customize your theme.
Marco:
But if you don't want to, you don't have to.
Marco:
You can drag and drop things if you want to.
Marco:
You can just change colors and stuff or you can change nothing.
Marco:
It's totally up to you with Squarespace with their intuitive, easy to use tools for building websites.
Marco:
It is such a huge difference from the way we used to build websites.
Marco:
It is so much easier today with Squarespace.
Marco:
You've got to check it out.
Marco:
If you're making a site for yourself or even better, if you're making a site for somebody else, if you do it on Squarespace, they support it.
Marco:
You don't have to be involved.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
So if you're making a website for somebody else, or if you just want to save time yourself, which is usually the right move, because you know what?
Marco:
These days, the worst use of your time is updating a website CMS.
Marco:
You need to outsource that to Squarespace, whether you're making the site for yourself or somebody else.
Marco:
Let them handle that so you can do your project.
Marco:
You can do, you can share your photos.
Marco:
You can make your store.
Marco:
You can make your portfolio.
Marco:
You can make a blog, a website for your business or anything else.
Marco:
you can do everything you need to do with Squarespace.
Marco:
So check that today.
Marco:
Go to squarespace.com, start a free trial.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up, which you probably will because it's amazing, use offer code ATP to get 10% off your purchase.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Can you guys see the difference between wide color and not?
Casey:
Because maybe I've just never really had a good example photo in like two screens next to each other.
Casey:
But briefly before I gave up my 6S when I had, but I did have my 7.
Casey:
I held the two of them side by side and damned if I could tell the difference.
Casey:
And I don't know if it's just that my eyes are crappy, which they unequivocally are, if I just don't appreciate it, which is possible, or is it just not that big a deal if you're not like a designer?
Casey:
Like Marco, for example, are you able to tell the difference when you just look at an arbitrary photo on a wide color display versus a not wide color display?
Yeah.
Marco:
Not yet.
Marco:
I suspect as wide-color displays become what I'm looking at every day.
Marco:
Because right now, I do most of my computing on a 2014 5K iMac, which does not have the high-color display.
Marco:
And so I now have it on my phone and on my iPad, but really I'm doing almost all of my...
John:
you know looking at things on my on my iMac but it's not it's not doesn't matter where you look at them it's the source material so Casey if you have something you look at if you look at the same picture that you took in a pre wide color world of course it's going to look the same because there's no wide color information in it you have to take the picture with a device capable of capturing that and then look at that same picture one on like your iPhone 7 that you took it on that took a wide color picture and then the other one on that
Casey:
I thought that's what I did.
Casey:
But truth be told, it was right when I first got the 7.
Casey:
I wouldn't have put it past me to accidentally have taken an old picture and said, oh, I don't see anything.
Casey:
And I've seen the sample images where there's a big red blob and there's an R hidden in there that you wouldn't see unless it's wide color and stuff like that.
Casey:
But nevertheless, on a regular picture, I've not noticed the difference.
Casey:
And as a corollary question...
Casey:
Is my two-year-old Micro Four Thirds, I presume that's not wide color.
Casey:
Is that fair to say?
Marco:
Most cameras have... Well, most cameras don't have this option.
Marco:
Middle and high-end cameras often will have an option to save the colors in Adobe RGB, maybe, instead of like sRGB.
Marco:
But as far... I haven't looked too much into this.
Marco:
As far as I know, I think that conversion happens after RAW anyway.
Marco:
So you might be able to fix this with just a different RAW conversion process.
John:
john do you know about this i was gonna say what you said like there are other color profiles that are not called p3 that nevertheless have a larger range than srgb yeah like adobe rgb is one of them yeah i don't know which what the little envelopes look like on all of them but uh and especially if you capture raw like yeah then that's all the information you're gonna get and if you can pull more stuff out of it i don't know but yeah i would like your best source for images with wide color is your iphone 7 because it's yeah you know it's it's all sure connected up end to end there
John:
um if you i'm sure you've looked at craig hockenberry's page where he has a bunch of sample images if you really can't tell the difference between the sample images because they're made to like emphasize the areas where humans can perceive the p3 color difference more that um those really emphasize and those are kind of like artificial um but i have seen some other pictures where it's like
John:
just a picture of like a park like grass and a tree and some sky uh and if you see them side by side like i do on my ipad pro and i go to that page like all right i mean it's not it doesn't jump out at you but if you look you're like you're like is this really the same picture it's like yes this is literally the same picture just one is srgb and then the other one is showing the full wide color and the
John:
it's it's almost like contrast is turned down on the other one like there's not like the greens don't look as green like in this you know in the grass type situation like oh that tree looks a little bit more pastel-y and washed out not not a lot but you have to see them side by side to see it i don't think i could pick one out alone but if you literally show me the same picture and wide and not wide you go oh the wide looks a little better that's about it
Casey:
Okay, so I'm not entirely crazy then, because I'm looking at this link on WebKit, and we'll put it in the show notes, and they have, and this is what I was thinking of, they have the WebKit logo, which is like this big red blob that in sRGB, you don't see the logo, and then if you go into P3...
Casey:
You can see the logo.
Casey:
Well, if you scroll down on that same page, they have a yellow flower.
Casey:
And if you click, this is like what you were saying, John, if you click between the sRGB only and the P3, unequivocally, I can tell that the P3 is much more vivid and looks more real.
Casey:
But if I were to look at either of these images, like you said, John, without the other side by side, unlike, say, a retina screen versus a non-retina screen, where it's just unbelievably obvious, with these, I don't think I would notice the difference unless they're side by side.
Marco:
That's how I am with most of these, too.
Marco:
The example things, if I look at it on my iPad Pro, which is currently my biggest P3 screen, these pictures look great, sure.
Marco:
The big orangey sunsets, yeah, they do look a little more saturated in those orangey-reddish tones.
Marco:
But you can look at a non-retina screen or a non-retina image or asset on a web page on a retina screen, and you can tell that difference immediately.
Marco:
The very first thing you see that is non-retina, after you're accustomed to retina, you notice that immediately.
Marco:
Whereas if I am scrolling through a web page and I see a picture of an orangey sunset that is not P3 after I'm used to P3, I don't think I will notice because it could just look like it wasn't as saturated of a picture as it could have been.
Marco:
And so it's not...
Marco:
It's a way smaller advance for everyday casual observing and for most people.
Marco:
It's nice to have.
Marco:
I'm glad they're doing it.
Marco:
And it's especially nice if you actually shoot a lot of pictures of orangey sunsets and things.
Marco:
But in general use, it's the kind of thing you can very easily forget that you even have.
Casey:
Okay, that was my experience as well.
Casey:
And I was curious, because I feel like maybe it's just because I follow people like Hockenberry and Mark Edwards, and you know, they're really revved up about it.
Casey:
But to me, I was like, man, I barely see the difference.
Casey:
And I'm glad to hear that that's not necessarily unusual.
John:
So two more things on the monitors.
John:
First, Casey, when you get back to work, you should tap the underside of one of the corners of your monitor and see if you've got a bobblehead, too, because I think you have the same.
Casey:
Oh, I definitely do.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, what a bad job.
John:
Like, the stand has one simple function.
John:
Just put the monitor up off the desk, off the ground, and keep it still, and it fails to that thing.
John:
The other thing is the one thing, even though it's LG monitors...
John:
you know there's not much to it like it is it's just black everywhere it's not matte it's not shiny doesn't have much of a frame around it it's not a five head the part on the bottom is the biggest part so like it's proportion the lg logo is small and subtle but if you go to that amazon page for my thing and do the little zoomy thing you can you know zoom in and see the lg logo right
John:
move over to the right from the lg logo what do you see there lurking in the corner because this is a pc product it's just got to be ugly in some stupid way what do you see there this stupid energy star and it's small it's not a big energy star badge and it's black and white like it's not colored and weird but it's like the whole front of this thing has nothing on it i will accept the lg logo it is small and tasteful and centered
John:
why the hell is an energy source there and so i'm like i'm just gonna peel that sticker off but it's one of those stickers where i'm gonna have to think on it for a while because it is clearly not one of those ones that comes off easy you know the ones that are like made to come off like the metal one it's not metal it's not plastic like here's here's the math i have to do like
John:
I know I could get it off but after I get it off what's left underneath the square where it used to be will that look worse than the sticker because the sticker for all it's ugliness looks like a sticker right it's the energy star logo if I peel it off and there's a bunch of like sticky crap or I damage the plastic underneath it because it's all just cheap plastic
John:
this is not an aluminum apple display or anything right if i damage it somehow or get sticky stuff in there that i can't somehow can't get off with you know careful application of skin so soft on it which by the way that's a secret for all you out there if you get sticky crap from stickers on them one of the many things that will remove it i know there are many products but the one of the ones that i've used for years is avon skin so soft which i think was supposed to be a thing that softens your skin the only thing i've ever used it for is to take off sticker scum and it's got a pleasant odor oh my god
John:
why i i love the extent to which we will avoid talking about the microsoft surface studio no we'll get there we'll get there anyway uh energy star sticker uh it's you know it's just got to be ugly in some way and like i said i don't like that that semicircular horseshoe stand i don't know who thought that was nice but it's not
Casey:
So that Energy Star sticker that on your monitors on the bottom right, I have what appeared to be an identical one.
Casey:
But if you look at the stand and you know how it's kind of tilted at a sort of not a 45 degree angle, but like a 30 degree angle, maybe.
Casey:
Well, mine was all the way on the left on that stand.
Casey:
And I let it sit for a week or two before I even noticed it.
Casey:
And then I was like, oh, this is crap.
Casey:
And you know what I did?
Casey:
I immediately ripped it off because I don't worry about things like you do.
Casey:
and there was no residue or if there was residue i like rubbed at it with my thumb for a second you don't know if there's residue you probably just that i don't even see it in the amazon picture of your monitor i don't see the energy star sticker anywhere on it uh you're right i don't see it either but it was there for sure yeah so anyway i might make a run at that sticker eventually
Casey:
Just rip it off, John.
Casey:
It's like a Band-Aid.
Casey:
Just rip it off.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Speaking of Windows stuff, we got a series of tweets from Jordan, who is nerdyophage on Twitter.
Casey:
And he tweeted five things.
Casey:
I'll read them in series.
Casey:
He says, I spent a week with a MacBook Pro escape after two solid decades of Windows use.
Casey:
I was of the opinion that Marco's unabashed dislike...
Casey:
of the OS, of Windows, was equal parts adoptive culture slash fanboyism slash showmanship.
Casey:
I stand corrected and a little bit humbled.
Casey:
The Windows path from neophyte to power user is shaped by registry edits, decoder rings, and secret knocks, which is arduous.
Casey:
Mac OS, by comparison, feels inviting, friendly, and intuitive, like a late-night conversation at a dinner party with good friends.
Casey:
So TLDR, this is still Jordan, Mac OS, holy crap, I get it.
Casey:
Transition cost will be very high, but seriously considering it.
Casey:
And this echoes my experience in 2008 of switching from Windows to OS X at the time.
Casey:
There were two weeks where I doubted my life and thought I'd made a terrible, awful, horrible choice, and then I'd never look back.
Casey:
I'm not saying that Jordan's experience is true for everyone, because now we're going to have all the Windows apologists writing in telling us how Windows is good and we're a bunch of jerks and blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
Do they still really listen to us?
Casey:
uh some do because we still get emails um i'm not saying that this is true for everyone i'm not saying windows isn't better in some way or another but what i am saying is that we are not the only we are not the only ones that seem to think that there's a better way so just thought i'd share those series of tweets from jordan so thank you jordan for writing us
Casey:
We had an interesting conversation in Slack, Marco, and I'd like to air a grievance.
Casey:
Let's back up to circa January, maybe December.
Casey:
So almost a year ago now.
Casey:
And the two of you, but my recollection was that it was mostly Marco.
Casey:
We're saying, you know what, Casey?
Casey:
You should never put personal crap on your work laptop.
Casey:
You should really have a nice, powerful machine for home use.
Casey:
You probably shouldn't be ignoring Aaron and using your laptop while you're sitting next door on the couch.
Casey:
You know what you need?
Casey:
You need an iMac.
Casey:
I've tried the laptop dance, Casey.
Casey:
It's no good.
Casey:
It's no good, man.
Casey:
Get the iMac.
Casey:
Think about that 27-inch beautiful 5K display with wide color, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
I'm telling you it's the way to go.
Marco:
I have some nitpicks with your summary already, but go ahead.
Casey:
But then fast forward to, I don't know, a few days ago when Marco is talking in Slack, that private place that we really shouldn't bring up publicly.
Casey:
But here I am because I'm annoyed.
Casey:
Marco is talking in Slack and saying, hmm, you know what?
Casey:
Maybe I'll get a new MacBook Pro and a 5K display and I'll be back to a one machine man again.
Casey:
And I won't even have to have a stupid desktop anymore.
Marco:
That's not... Okay.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So here's what I said.
Marco:
So basically, looking at performance of everything and figuring a potential and maybe even likely future that does not include the Mac Pro existing and also includes standalone 5K Retina displays that can plug into laptops that have...
Marco:
Not matching, but maybe 90% of the performance of iMacs or 80% of the performance of iMacs.
Marco:
I always say the reason I buy the 15-inch laptops is because when I'm traveling, I either need almost nothing, in which case it doesn't matter what I have.
Marco:
And the laptop's mainly there to type emails faster or to browse Twitter.
Marco:
Or I'm doing serious work, whether it's Xcode or Lightroom photo raw importing and stuff and editing.
Marco:
Either way, usually when I use a laptop during travel, I want a lot of screen space and I want a lot of horsepower.
Marco:
I also now have an iMac as my main computer.
Marco:
And looking at the specs of these computers these days, comparing the new MacBook Pros with LG 5K display, assuming it's good, which we don't actually know yet, but we'll assume it's good because it probably is.
Marco:
Comparing that against the iMac, basically I am maintaining and upgrading and paying for
Marco:
two different computers with overall fairly similar hardware and fairly similar performance.
Marco:
And so I thought, you know what I probably should do, but won't, and I bolded won't, but...
Marco:
I said what I probably should do is stop having two similarly specced Macs that I pay for and maintain and everything, or just have a top-of-the-line 15-inch MacBook Pro that I use, like many people do, in clamshell mode on my desk most of the time.
Marco:
But then when I travel, I can just take that with me and have all the power of this maxed-out computer with me.
Marco:
That is what I should do.
Marco:
It is not what I'm doing.
Marco:
And maybe in the future I will do that.
Marco:
You know me.
Marco:
I always change everything up because I'm never happy.
Marco:
So maybe in the future I will do that.
Marco:
I think I really want to wait and see what happens with the Mac Pro next year first.
Marco:
If it turns out the Mac Pro is really dead and that the best we can ever hope for on desktops is iMac hardware that's 10 or 20% faster than the MacBook Pros of the day, then that might make a lot of sense actually for me.
John:
You won't be able to handle the fan noise, I guarantee it.
John:
Can you just think of that?
Marco:
But the iMac also has fan noise.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
But not as loud as a 15-inch.
Marco:
No way.
Marco:
Well, so again, I want to see the new 15-inches first.
Marco:
I want to have some experience with them, hopefully, to see how are these machines.
Marco:
They really did reduce the fan noise noticeably when they moved from the old crappy symmetrical fan blades to the Retina MacBook Pro in 2012.
Marco:
When Johnny first talked about the asymmetric fan blade, they showed the waveform.
John:
Yeah, it's not louder, but the...
John:
Like the annoyingness of it.
John:
The asymmetrical really helped with the annoyingness.
John:
It turned more into a white noise thing, but I think it's still not a contest.
John:
I'm annoyed that I can hear the iMac at all.
John:
I'm annoyed at what I hear when I hear a laptop going with the... I haven't heard the new ones, obviously, but the asymmetrical fan ones, they still... I don't like the sound of a white noise generating machine.
Marco:
Yeah, neither do I. And I don't like, but see, when my iMac fan spin up, I consider that like something that I either need to put headphones on right now and stop hearing this, or I need to find the process that is using all my CPU power and just kill it.
Marco:
Because I really do not like hearing fan noise while I work.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
So, you know, a Mac Pro is silent under load in most rooms.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons I love it.
Marco:
And that's one of the things I will greatly miss if it is truly dead forever.
Marco:
Which, you know, again, I think it's looking increasingly likely.
Marco:
We'll see what happens next year.
Marco:
But anyway, so all I was saying was...
Marco:
It doesn't make a lot of sense for me to maintain two different four-core, mid-range to high-end machines from Apple when I occasionally need one on the road, but most of the time it's at my desk.
Marco:
It would make more sense to consolidate that into one computer.
Marco:
And maybe even pull an iMac slash CGP Grey and have...
Marco:
two laptops.
Marco:
Maybe I have that crazy one and also a very small one like either an Escape or a MacBook One for the travel needs during which I don't need a lot of power and I just want to have the smallest thing possible and that would hardly ever get upgraded.
Marco:
But
Marco:
That is a world that I probably should go to, but currently I am not going to that world because currently I'm still waiting out the potential Mac Pro of the future.
Marco:
So I will see.
Marco:
ATB Tister is pointing out in the chat room that I should not forget that six core chips will be coming to the iMac consumer core i7 line, presumably in the near future.
Marco:
A 6-core iMac would be awesome.
Marco:
I would really prefer more.
Marco:
If I'm going to upgrade from 4, I want a big upgrade.
Marco:
I want to go to 8 or 12 even, or even more if I can get it.
Marco:
So it'd be nice to have even more, but we'll see.
Marco:
Again, this all depends on...
Marco:
what the hardware brings over the next year or two, and whether Apple even makes computers that use these chips that are coming out.
Marco:
We don't even know that.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Time will tell.
Marco:
But right now, I am not going all laptop.
Marco:
But all I was saying that if I were more sensible, it would probably be a better allocation of resources to just do that, which is probably the reason why so many people do exactly that.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I just wanted to grumble at you publicly for a moment.
Casey:
So I feel much better now.
Casey:
Thanks, everyone.
Marco:
We're sponsored tonight by Betterment.
Marco:
Go to betterment.com slash ATP for investing made better.
Marco:
Betterment is the largest automated investing service out there that's independent, managing more than $5.5 billion for over 180,000 customers as of this past September.
Marco:
Betterment has changed the investing industry by making investing easier and at a lower cost than traditional financial advising services.
Marco:
Betterment manages your investments with the same strategies that financial advisors use with clients who have millions of dollars.
Marco:
And you've probably heard about them in the press, such as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch.
Marco:
The financial services industry has embraced technology and innovation through the creation of automated investing platforms like Betterment, meaning that you keep more of your money with fees that are a fraction of what you pay for traditional financial services.
Marco:
Excess cash that's generated is automatically reinvested.
Marco:
So every dollar you invest is put to work.
Marco:
Your portfolio is also automatically rebalanced as necessary.
Marco:
Now, investing involves risk.
Marco:
But right now, you can get up to six months of no fees by going to Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Betterment.
Marco:
Investing made better.
Casey:
Apple has released a new Mac book and things.
Casey:
There's a new design book, and half of me thinks I really don't see a problem with it.
Casey:
And half of me thinks, my word, have they lost all sense of reality?
Casey:
And I haven't decided which one's which.
Casey:
Did anybody see this coming?
Casey:
I didn't, for sure.
John:
I think it's a totally reasonable and to-be-expected thing for them to do.
John:
In fact, I'm surprised they don't do more of it.
John:
I mean, they sell shirts with their things on them.
John:
They sell all sorts of merchandise that has Apple stuff on it.
John:
They love having giant posters of all their...
Marco:
proud of their design and this particular thing as sort of a capper to johnny ives career at apple like it makes total sense i don't i don't think it's all that weird there are a few things that are different about i mean first of all like the the t-shirts and mugs and everything you can only buy at their company store or at their conference uh so it like you can't just go into any apple store or go online and order an apple t-shirt like you like that's kind of like a limited thing they keep only to like their store i'm assuming this will be limited too like how long do you think they'll sell this i'm gonna be selling it for five years unless i
John:
Maybe Tim Cook says, you know what?
John:
We can keep selling the same design, but for 10 years.
Marco:
We'll never have to lower the price.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
But the other stuff is more like... It's like a gift shop at a museum.
Marco:
It's like I went to Apple to either WBDC or to their campus.
Marco:
And so I got this expensive t-shirt because I went there.
Marco:
And that's a little bit more justifiable if you have a problem with this.
Marco:
By the way, I don't necessarily have a problem with this.
Marco:
I'm still... I'm mostly indifferent on it.
Marco:
I mostly don't care that it exists.
Marco:
I do think it shows a few...
Marco:
things worth worth considering you know things like possible giant retirement uh overall though it seems poorly timed at a time when apple is being criticized for neglecting a lot of their product line and their new release is being criticized for being an especially poor value for the money
Marco:
and they and they appear to have cut dongle prices in an effort to show maybe that they're not just trying to get a whole bunch of extra money from from accessory sales so it is kind of an unfortunate time even if you ignore the election which i i don't think you should but even if you ignore that this is kind of a weird time for apple to release an incredibly self-congratulatory highfalutin two to three hundred dollar book about themselves it's just it's a little bit poorly timed i think
Marco:
But even if you don't agree with that, if you set that aside, I think it's mostly fine.
Marco:
I do think it is one of many signs pointing to Johnny Ives probably not that far off departure or retirement from Apple.
Marco:
Or maybe he'll just ascend further into the clouds of bizarre titles that mean he doesn't actually do any day-to-day work.
Marco:
But that might be the same thing.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I'm not sure if I want one or not.
Marco:
I might be one of the ideal customers for it.
Marco:
I buy stupid expensive things all the time.
Marco:
And I like Apple stuff usually a lot.
Marco:
As I was looking, though, at some of the pages that they have on their sample site and everything, they just kind of make me sad because they show, like, on their store, the samples show the Mac Mini case and, like, the big cutting wheel.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
I don't know the terms for these various manufacturing tools.
Marco:
Like, some giant spiky wheel that presumably carves out part of the inside of the Mac Mini case.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, that's really nice that you care so much about the Mac Mini that you'll take this picture of the machine that makes its case.
Marco:
uh what about the product that's been pretty neglected pretty badly or it shows like it showed like a picture of the um of the bottom assembly with the lid popping off of the previous generation non-retina macbook pros like i might even be the 101 exactly um and it shows the macbook pro bottom lid taken off and you have the removable battery and you have the removable upgradable hard drive and it's like oh yeah i remember when laptops were upgradable
Marco:
And easily repaired.
Marco:
I think this book would mostly just make me sad, honestly, about either computers that Apple has neglected and that I am sad about, like the Mac Pro, which I assume is in there.
Marco:
or features of computers that are no longer present, that have been cut through the march of, quote, progress over the years, some of which is real progress, some of which is just cutting things.
Marco:
So I don't know how I feel about this for myself, but if other people want to have this book and enjoy it, that's fine, really.
Marco:
Again, I do think the release is poorly timed, but other than that, I don't really have a problem with it.
Casey:
I think I mostly agree, but I already have a copy.
Casey:
It's just called Iconic.
Yeah.
John:
I have Iconic somewhere, I think, too.
John:
I have the old Apple design book from the 90s.
John:
It's called the... Let me check the title.
Marco:
While you're checking, there is one nitpick I do want to not forget about, though.
Marco:
And that is... So Steve Jobs' name is all over this book.
Marco:
His name is all over the press release.
Marco:
They very prominently dedicate it to him and everything.
Marco:
I think enough people have said that I don't need to say too much about that.
Marco:
It's questionable whether Jobs would have actually approved this project and used it.
Marco:
I will say that a lot of people keep saying that this project was started eight years ago and therefore that was back when Jobs was alive and therefore he must have implicitly approved it.
Marco:
And that's not entirely clear.
Marco:
When Johnny Ive gave an interview to W something wallpaper, whatever it was, I forget, I'm sorry.
Marco:
It mentioned that they started collecting the products to photograph eight years ago.
Marco:
That doesn't mean they started photographing for this specific project that was approved by Jobs eight years ago.
Marco:
So I do want to make that clear, that we don't know that Jobs knew this at all.
Marco:
And I think... I can't imagine that he would have appreciated it.
Marco:
But it's always risky for tech people like us to say, well, Steve Jobs wouldn't have done this or wouldn't have liked this, because you don't really know.
Marco:
The guy changed his mind a lot, and he's not here anymore to refute it.
Marco:
So it's not a great thing to rest on.
Marco:
But I do think...
John:
plastering his name all over it is maybe not so great just dedicated it to him it's not like they're trying to like you know build on his his image to make to sell this book like the book sells itself on its merits is dedicated to him it's in the memory of their friend i think that's fine and if we can say one thing about this book it is that steve jobs would like to have it in his house
John:
Whether or not he thinks it's the product Apple should sell, I guarantee you he would love to have this book.
John:
He would sit there on his couch with his bare feet and leaf through it and look at the great work that he's done.
John:
Whether he thinks it's things Apple should be selling is a whole other story.
John:
Whether he thinks Apple should have a museum of all their old stuff is a whole other story.
John:
But...
John:
He so clearly took pride in all the products that are in this thing that he himself, just personally, would surely love to have the best possible photographs on the best possible paper made in Germany with, you know, special gilding around the edges and...
Marco:
he would love this book this seemed like a really cool thing to make for your employees you know or or to maybe sell for a limited time at your campus store but to sell it as like a whole product i think that kind of raises the bar and raises the um the level of criticism a bit uh a little bit unnecessarily maybe but you know because like i think it would be a lot cooler um
Marco:
if this was a thing for all the employees that they just all got for free which by the way are they even getting it for free probably not it's charging two or three hundred dollars for it but imagine if they gave this to all the employees and the handful of apple collectors who really want it would have to like go find it on ebay or something like that it would be so much cooler if you had one if that was the case i don't know it just seems like that might have been a better way to go here
Casey:
Yeah, I tend to agree.
Casey:
So I just reached out to the bookcase behind me and grabbed my copy of Iconic.
Casey:
And I started paging through it.
Casey:
And I landed on page 130 of Iconic.
Casey:
And it has a quote, which I will read to you.
Casey:
If you never change anything, then what you can really engineer is kind of incremental.
Casey:
But when you're willing to change things, then you kind of open up a whole new world of design.
Casey:
This is Big Bob Mansfield at the launch of the 2012 MacBook Pro, and the accompanying picture is a MacBook Pro that has MagSafe, Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt, two USB ports, an SD card slot, a line-in, and a headphone jack.
Casey:
I just thought that was kind of funny.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So, when you're willing to change things and you open up a whole new world of design, like fewer ports.
John:
So the book next to me is called Apple Design, all one word, capital A, capital D, colon, The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group.
John:
And it's an older book, so it's got the stuff from before you guys were Mac users.
John:
It's like mostly the era.
John:
Well, Iconic spans the whole range.
John:
But anyway, it's definitely earlier than the stuff that's in this book.
John:
And I could say I would like to own this book, too.
John:
i would totally like telling this book but i wouldn't like doing it 300 worth at this point um because and here's here's the thing like it's not that 300 for a really super high quality photo book is that big a deal it's just that for me personally with you know having just bought a monitor and a playstation 4 pro and all sorts of other stuff um
John:
I would spend $300 in this if it was like the making of the Star Wars books that I bought, which, by the way, weren't $300.
John:
Like basically if it was lots more words.
John:
Not that I don't like the pictures.
John:
I do.
John:
I want the pictures.
John:
But if it was the pictures, but also page upon page upon page of the designers, including Johnny himself, telling the story of how they came up with these designs in as much detail as they can possibly remember.
John:
Again, like the making of the Star Wars books, which are not first-person accounts, but it's like someone researched and talked to all the people involved.
John:
and tried to lay out here's how each of the three original trilogy star wars movies was made from conception through to production and design talking to all the people involved and getting quotes from them and putting it all together that's what i would like to read and my impression is this book is either entirely or at least mostly pictures and not so much about apple's going to tell you you know how the sausage is made um i mean i'm sure there's lots of pictures of prototypes and you know like things with the tool that marco talked about or whatever but it's not really like
John:
tell us how did you come up with this because i would love to read that but that is not this and what i'm saying is basically if those if those words were in this book i would pay 300 for it in a second but just the photos i i have a longing to own this book but cannot bring myself to part with 300 for it quite yet maybe maybe i'll break down depends on how long they sell this maybe i'll succumb to it at some point because i really do want this book i mean i have tons of books like this but boy 300 that's tough and no i don't want the small one because come on
Marco:
That's another thing.
John:
Why are there two sizes?
John:
That's such a Tim Cook thing.
Marco:
Just make it one.
John:
They should have called the big one the plus.
John:
Some people want a larger book.
John:
The big one is huge, though.
John:
The big one, I'm thinking about it.
John:
If I had that in my house, how the hell would I even fit it on my shelves?
John:
I don't think I even have any shelves.
John:
The making of Star Wars books are a little bit too big for my shelves, too.
John:
But if it's photos, come on.
John:
You've got to get the big one.
Casey:
Yeah, I just got to say, this iconic book, I hadn't paged through it in a long time.
Casey:
Man, is this a nice book.
Casey:
It really honestly is.
Casey:
And it's cheap now.
Casey:
It's like 50 bucks on Amazon right now.
Casey:
It's definitely worth it.
Marco:
I wonder if I can get the business rep discount on the book.
John:
15% off your $300 book.
John:
So my Apple design book is right next to The Art of Kiki's Delivery Service, The Complete Works of Larry Elmore.
John:
What else do I have?
John:
Hyrule Historia, Legend of Zelda book, all of which are about the same size, big kind of glossy photo book things, but none of which cost $300.
Marco:
No, I mean, people who know more about art books... And as you said, John, I don't think it's outrageously priced for what it is.
Marco:
But it certainly doesn't contribute... Or it certainly doesn't help the recent or possibly the forever reputation of Apple for this elitist company making expensive things only for rich people.
Marco:
This doesn't really help that image at all.
Marco:
This really...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Again, this is not a big deal.
Marco:
I don't feel that strongly about this book either way.
Marco:
I might even buy one.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I do think it was a little poorly timed for image's sake, I think.
John:
And see, the weird thing about this book is I like the idea that Apple itself is the one doing it because as great as Iconic is in the Apple design books or whatever, Apple presumably... I mean, you would think they would have access to all this stuff, but apparently they didn't and had to go out and buy it or whatever.
John:
But either way, like...
John:
they apple's really good at taking pictures of its products they have the most experience of anybody in the entire world taking pictures of apple products because that's what they do and they do it really really well and because they're all obsessive detailed people about like the printing and the color and the paper i bet it's a really nice book right but the one thing that apple can bring to this book above and beyond those two things that i just mentioned is
John:
that nobody else can is that they have the best access to the people who were involved in making these some of those people may be gone although supposedly there's very little turnover in johnny ives little design group there that's the value they can bring this is the whole angle you're getting at mark was like apple's making a book about how great they are that's right they're making a book about themselves and saying we are awesome or just look at all these cool things that we made which i guess is okay but if you want to blunt that it's like
John:
don't just make it look at these awesome things that we made bring the value that only you have tell us the stories people who worked on these products tell us about how you made them because no one else can tell us how they made them other people can take pictures of them other people can make a big glossy photo book other people could probably find the right kind of paper and do the cool printing and do all the things but nobody but you guys can
John:
tell us the story of how these products were made and they're not doing that so they're like saying how great they are but like i don't want to tell you too much about it just look at this stuff we're pretty great huh don't never mind how it was made and that's that definitely shades more into the that makes it less forgivable as an act of you know self-congratulations because if you are describing how you did it you're not just congratulating yourself even if the whole book is like we had these hard problems and we solved them because we were super smart you're you're passing on your knowledge you're telling the rest of the world
John:
learn from our lessons which you can still do with a lot of ego and you know back padding but i think that would offset the look how great we are angle of it and um and like you said and like how many people said like and like we talked about with the actual the the new macbook pros the past several shows it's not so much the thing itself it's the context into which it's introduced and so like margo said the timing is bad and at this point
John:
almost anything you introduced into the context of a certain set of grumpy apple fans is going to be looked upon with a you know a very critical eye and people are generally in a bad mood for reasons that are some of which may be outside apple's control whatever like if they've been if they've been building doors for eight years fine whatever release it like holiday season it's a good gift idea for the apple nerd in your life you know like
Marco:
i i don't fault them i don't think it's that big a deal i just wish it wasn't 300 because i really want this book i you know and one thing like i think you nailed it about like you know part of this i think that rubs people the wrong way is the fact that there is there are you know no words or as you said like you know like they have access to the people they could have added a human a more human touch and
Marco:
and it seems like they i mean we haven't read the book yet but from the few sample pages we've seen it really does seem like they didn't you know there's no words in it um and i think if i had to summarize i i guess the the main disappointment i have with apple recently which i think a lot of people feel but might not have put into words is that it seems to just lack humanity recently and
Marco:
This might be a Steve to Tim thing.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I haven't given a ton of thought to this yet.
Marco:
It's hard to put it into words.
Marco:
But Steve, even though we knew he could be cold and ruthless to people when he had to be, his public persona, which really did reflect upon the whole company to the public...
Marco:
was really quite warm and human.
Marco:
And with the transition to Tim Cook's Apple and Johnny Ives' Apple, which is really what this is these days, the public image that we get, even though most of the same people are still there, but the public image that is shown to us, what gets out, is a lot more cold.
Marco:
and the humanity has been stripped out of it.
Marco:
And I think part of what bugged people about things like removing the startup chime on the new MacBook Pros and removing the light-up logo on the back is that's a little bit more of this humanity that's just being pulled out of the products, and we don't see warmth and humanity as much as we used to anymore.
Marco:
A promo video showing what people are doing with their products is different.
Marco:
Do you think it's humanity?
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
I do think it's humanity.
John:
I think we don't... You don't think whimsy is a better word?
John:
Because it's a stronger case for whimsy.
John:
Because humanity, I think of like... Tim Cook is much more into the human aspects or social aspects of both the products and the company than Steve Jobs ever was.
John:
And Tim Cook, in the Tim Cook era, he's the one who's constantly starting presentations with videos about accessibility and people who are being, you know, the human story of being empowered by Apple products.
John:
I would call that human too.
John:
But whimsical is, you know, where, like, it is...
John:
dorky maybe you know whimsy is just like the little happy mac and and the chime and the little poof animation and stuff silly things like that seem to not be uh to johnny ives taste because he's he's not into the poof right he's not into the the happy mac the smile and the chime he's into the the iphone that doesn't even have a logo that you can see when you look at it right
John:
um and tim cook is deferring to johnny ive in that way so i think you're right to refer to it as the tim cook slash johnny ive apple so there is definitely less sense of whimsy uh and whimsy can be seen as warmth and his design aesthetic can be thought of as cold but i think tim cook's apple and tim cook in specific specifically are all about humanity and
John:
Just not about dorkiness and whimsy.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
Again, I'm not saying that the company – because the same people are mostly there, especially at the upper levels.
Marco:
Not a lot has changed there.
Marco:
We know that they do good.
Marco:
These are good people, and they do good things for the world.
John:
but you it doesn't come across the the amount of warmth and and you know and maybe humanity might not be exactly right word i do think whimsy's part of it but i don't think whimsy covers all of what i'm what of what i'm missing well what about the ads like when they show a lot of their recent ads have been all about showing people using the product like remember the one with like the kid with his nose buried in his phone during the holidays uh the christmas thing and at the end he's made the video of them making the stuff like
John:
Or just like the people who are like with your watch, you get up and it's early in the morning, it's still dark out, you lace up your sneakers, you put on your watch, you go out running, or you're running through the rain with your now water resistant phone.
John:
Like their ads, even more than they used to be, have been less about glorifying the objects as these beautiful totems of technology as like, look how smooth and sleek it is, which they still do in like the presentations to us.
John:
But on television, it's all about the people.
John:
It's all about...
John:
i am a runner i like to take photographs i'm on a family vacation and you know buy this device and your kid will be uh it will look like a sulky teenager really he will be a loving wonderful creative child which is false advertising but anyway um he'll just sulk and won't actually make a video for you um he's just texting his friends all the time uh like the ad seems to be focusing on again the humanity of
John:
uh like that it's not about the products it's about the people and what the products enable the people to do so again that's you know apple chooses what kind of ads it makes like the advertising company makes them but apple can give them the direction um and it is less like than you know in the steve jobs era you had a series of commercials that were all about showing you the card the hardware like the lifesavers iMacs flying across the screen look they're shiny and colored and look at the when the iMac se came out it's all sleek and graphitey like
John:
Those were more obsessed with the objects because that was all about like, hey, hardware can be fashion and look at these things.
John:
And I think it started to shift with the iPod where it was like, yeah, there's silhouettes dancing and you can see the iPod with the white cord, but it's all about people dancing in music.
John:
And at this point, they're selling phones by showing you people jogging.
John:
Right.
John:
So it is so far from I think it is definitely a very human approach.
John:
But again, I would say that the product designs themselves and what things the company decides to do definitely seem less whimsical and less dorky.
John:
And I can see that as being more cold and less warm.
Marco:
You're right, the ads are fine, but they're ads.
Marco:
They're commercials.
Marco:
I'm referring to mostly the products and then some also of the presentations by the actual humans on stage at the events.
Marco:
Again, it's hard to not make this about Steve because Steve was really good at
Marco:
at really being personable up there on stage.
Marco:
And whether it was rehearsed or fake or real or whatever, I don't know.
Marco:
It didn't matter.
Marco:
It really did come across as genuine and real and warm.
Marco:
And that's what I miss both on stage.
Marco:
I don't care about the videos.
Marco:
The use of more and more videos actually, to me, feels colder.
Marco:
It feels more artificial.
Marco:
But that's beside the point for now.
Marco:
All I'm saying is I miss this level of warmth that we used to get from them in these presentations.
Marco:
And then I think the whimsy in the product is part of that.
Marco:
That showed in the products.
Marco:
And it seems like modern Apple is all about really editing that out as part of a march towards, quote, simplifying or, quote, progress.
Marco:
But we're losing a lot of that.
Marco:
And we don't seem to be gaining it in many areas anymore.
Marco:
It seems like the company just moved on past that.
Marco:
And it's just now it's just a lot more like cold and almost robotic.
Marco:
So this book coming out with all pictures of Johnny Ives robotic tools in stark white backgrounds with no words.
Marco:
I think is kind of like a culmination of that cold process.
Marco:
And that's kind of what rubs me the wrong way about the book and about Apple today, if I had to summarize it down.
Marco:
Again, I'm sorry if I'm not expressing this well.
Marco:
This is really still a very squishy thought in my head, but I'm trying to put into words a complex feeling that I've been feeling over a while.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I just miss that warmth that we used to get, whether it was real or not, from both Steve and the products, that I think we're really missing a lot of that recently.
John:
So if you were to get this book, and if it was chronological, which I'm not sure that it is, but if it is chronological, you could flip through it and watch the whimsy slowly drain out of the products as you start with Tangerine iMacs and all these brightly colored things like the toilet seat iBooks and all these things that just look...
John:
so exciting and dr susie and slowly but surely everything turns silver and glass and uniform and not shiny and not matte and just in betweeny and you know just it smooths out um which i you know i like both those aesthetics that's why i think like this book is this book highlights some of apple's best work in terms of industrial design because it does include
John:
all the way from you know the the the vibrancy of the original imax and even like the the one with the big neck and all the other stuff all the way up to the modern era of everything being sleek and clean those are both great aesthetics but chronologically speaking you know you can see the trend i could just read the book backwards and make myself feel really happy he could benjamin button it um you know i
Casey:
I think I agree with you, Marco.
Casey:
I just can't shake this feeling that Apple is reluctantly moving closer and closer to being the IBM that they fought so hard against when you and I were like really little.
John:
Let's not go crazy here.
Casey:
Well, no, I don't think they're there.
Casey:
But if you look at the IBM of the early to mid 80s, probably even late 80s, it was not boring, but certainly it did not have whimsy.
Casey:
And I would not say that Apple's products today are boring by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
But I agree that they've lost some of that.
Casey:
And I actually think humanity is a good word for it, if a bit overblown.
Casey:
But I can't come up with a better one.
Casey:
And I think I like humanity more than whimsy.
Casey:
But anyway, it just doesn't feel as...
Casey:
Happy-go-lucky as it used to.
Casey:
And I think part of that is no longer being the underdog and is now being king of the hill, which maybe that's our perception.
Casey:
Maybe it's that because we perceive them as king of the hill, we perceive them as boring and they're anything but.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think that's the case.
Casey:
And I agree with you.
Casey:
And it's funny because on the one side, I love the look of the new MacBook Pro, at least in photographs.
Casey:
I haven't seen one in person yet.
Casey:
But in photographs, it looks phenomenal.
Casey:
I love it.
Casey:
I think it looks really great.
Casey:
And I think that's in part because, you know, a very black aesthetic appeals to me.
Casey:
But yet I miss the fun of all these different colored iMacs.
Casey:
The computers that I saw running around campus when I was in school in the early 2000s, they just looked fun.
Casey:
And I wouldn't say a new MacBook Pro looks fun.
Casey:
It looks really damn good.
Casey:
It looks more aesthetically good, I'd say, than perhaps any other computer.
Casey:
laptop on the market today.
Casey:
And in fact, I've said before, and I'll say again, this iPhone 7 I'm holding in my hands right now, this matte black iPhone 7, I think is the best looking iPhone I've seen yet.
Casey:
However, I wouldn't say it looks fun despite it looking really good.
Casey:
And I miss that kind of fun aspect.
Marco:
Yeah, and I'm not saying the products are bad.
Marco:
The products are, in many ways, better than ever now.
Marco:
By most measures, most of the products are better than ever.
Marco:
They're still good products.
Marco:
In many ways, they're still great products.
Marco:
But again, it's this feeling that I'm missing that we used to have here.
Marco:
And maybe I'm just old and jaded and boring.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe I'm just mad about the Mac Pro still.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it just feels like I'm missing this feeling.
Casey:
I'm not, well, I am old and jaded, but I'm not jaded about the Mac Pro specifically.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
And I'm not jaded about the MacBook Pro specifically.
Casey:
And I do largely agree with you that it just, it's not as fun as it once was.
Casey:
And again, maybe is that just by virtue of them being no longer the underdog?
Casey:
So, you know, it's fun to root for the underdog.
Casey:
It's not fun to root for the King of the Hill.
Casey:
So maybe it's misplaced.
Casey:
Maybe the problem is us.
Casey:
But I agree with you, nevertheless.
Yeah.
John:
I think the design trend that I just described from the more whimsical computers that varied more widely in shape and color and texture and everything about them to the current design is a natural consequence of the advance of the technology.
John:
Because as we acquire the technology to make the products that we have now, that in the case of iDevices are essentially rectangles that are screens that get increasingly thinner.
John:
And for the case of laptops...
John:
a screen rectangle and then a rectangle with a keyboard and an increasingly large trackpad, your options for industrial design, uh, start to be in conflict with the advances that you're, you know, reaping the benefits of actually being able to make it smaller.
John:
Like if you look at the size of the, the plastic that surrounds the screen on, on the toilet seat IMAX,
John:
It is vast.
John:
Right.
John:
And that allows you to make this cool looking, strange, oblong kind of purse like design and everything that gives you the room to make those big scoops and colors and contrast.
John:
But there is no there's no more room for that in a world where it's basically a screen with the margins slowly shrinking around it or like the laptops, you know, getting thinner and thinner and smaller and tighter and tighter.
John:
and you know why fight that the correct direction is aesthetically speaking to say embrace that and embrace an aesthetic that can work with increasingly svelte devices um and that is yet another reason to add to the list of why the mac pro would be great because the mac pro does not have a screen on it you do have the freedom to make it they can make it shaped like a soccer ball it can be shaped like a spiral apparently it could be shaped like a garbage can it could be shaped like a cheese grater
John:
it actually gives them the most options in terms of industrial design because they are no longer constrained by the fact that you have to carry it and that making it smaller and thinner and lighter is such a benefit in the long run that they can't afford to put a giant plastic handle on it and a huge three inch border around the entire screen because that's ridiculous like no one wants that anymore it's it looks old and it is old and it's bad but when it sits on your desk or under your desk a lot more options open up and so it's just another reason that it would be a shame if they totally gave up that form factor or if they said
John:
even in that form factor you want it to be as small and and minimal as possible and so that's how you get the current mac mini and the apple tv which are just the most you know it's and it's not appropriate i think for those things to be well maybe the apple tv because that should be boring because you don't even see it but the mac mini you
John:
can have a little bit more fun with that maybe put some vents and strakes on it make it look like a ferrari i don't know uh but there's no reason for it to be as boring as it is but there are reasons for the phone to be as boring as it is and for laptops to be not as boring but like for them to look like they do i think there are very good reasons for them to do that i think if they if they had tried to keep the old aesthetic while going along with the marcher technology that allows you to make them thinner and lighter
John:
it would be a bad tension between those two things you can't make a modern laptop that looks like the toilet seat ibook you just can't it would it would it's not the right design approach back then it was now it's not now you could take the current ones and make them in candy apple red with the same form factor making like polished glossy candy apple red and that would be fun but
John:
it's still you know like color and texture is basically all they have left to play with because shape wise it's not like they're going to be adding fins and strakes uh you know tail fins on the next ipad pro or whatever
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
Like, why couldn't we have all the colors of the 5C on the 7?
Casey:
You know, because those were fun, I thought.
Casey:
And I think they appealed to a lot of people that perhaps weren't as, you know, technically minded in terms of stats and like having to have the latest and greatest.
Casey:
I still see 5Cs floating around from time to time.
Casey:
So why not have that color range?
Casey:
on the top of the line phone?
Casey:
Well, because it's not proper?
Casey:
I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
I do kind of miss that.
Casey:
Even though on the one side, I wouldn't ever pick any of those.
Casey:
I guess this is my halo car.
Casey:
I don't really see the need for a Mac Pro, and I'm not trying to open up that conversation again.
Casey:
But to me, I don't see the need for a Mac Pro.
Casey:
But I would notice an array of colors on the iPhone 7 and be pleased that they exist, even though there was no freaking way I would choose anything but matte black or maybe jet black.
John:
i guess back to naked robotic core again it's like you in real life you see phones that are all sorts of colors that's just not the color of the phone it's the color of people's cases i see phone cases a huge range of colors textures sizes features ones that you can put your credit card into ones that have a place for a stylist to go into like there's a huge things with mirrors on the back of them they just think clamshell ones ones with the covers you know just huge range but that's apple's not doing any of that they're just giving you the naked robotic core
Marco:
This episode is sponsored by Audible.com with an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial at audible.com.
Marco:
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it.
Marco:
You can listen to audiobooks from virtually every genre, anytime, anywhere.
Marco:
You can play Audible's audiobooks on every device you have.
Marco:
Phones, tablets, computers, even iPods if you still have an iPod.
Marco:
Audiobooks are great for flights, long road trips, or even your daily commute.
Marco:
You may think you don't have time to read books, but you'd be surprised how many audiobooks you can hear each year, even when listening to and from work every day.
Marco:
Audiobooks bring books to life.
Marco:
Many of them are read by the authors themselves, adding an extra dimension to the text.
Marco:
And you can take risks and try new authors and genres without regret with Audible, because they offer the great listening guarantee.
Marco:
If you start an audiobook and don't like it, you can exchange it for another one for free.
Marco:
See and listen for yourself today.
Marco:
When you begin your 30-day free trial, you get your first audiobook for free, and there's no stress or obligation.
Marco:
You can cancel your membership at any time.
Marco:
So with audiobooks and spoken word audio products, you will find what you're looking for with audible.com.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial by signing up today at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We've been putting off for a long time talking about this Microsoft Surface Studio, and I think that we should probably talk about the Nintendo Switch.
Casey:
We don't actually have to do that, but I couldn't resist.
John:
We should do the Surface Studio first.
John:
In fact, it's been so long since the Surface Studio event, whatever the heck that was, that I think we need the chief summarizer-in-chief to remind everyone what the hell the Microsoft Surface Studio is.
Casey:
What if the chief summarizer in chief doesn't remember anymore?
Casey:
No, I can wing it.
Casey:
So this was, I don't recall exactly what it was, but it was a few weeks ago that Microsoft had some sort of product demo where they debuted the Surface Studio, which at first appeared to be an iMac.
Casey:
In many ways, it just seemed like an iMac.
Casey:
An iMac, well, I guess I should say an iMac and a Mac Mini, right?
Casey:
Because it's the screen of an iMac.
Casey:
It appeared.
Casey:
It's 28 inches.
Casey:
And the computer bits are in a base that looks very much like a Mac Mini.
Casey:
It's all black and aluminum, or at least aluminum colored.
Casey:
And it all looks very snazzy.
Casey:
And I don't mean that sarcastically.
Casey:
It really honestly does look good.
Casey:
And at first, it was like, OK, great.
Casey:
You're doing an iMac.
Casey:
Woo-woo.
Casey:
But then they mentioned that, oh, this is a touchscreen, a 28-inch touchscreen.
Casey:
And suddenly people start to go, hmm, okay, tell me more.
Casey:
And then the real party trick happened, which was Microsoft explained why there are two arms going from the Mac Mini to the iMac.
Casey:
And those arms allow you, from what they showed, allow you to very effortlessly turn this iMac into kind of an easel.
Casey:
So it's at a very, very shallow angle, such that you could use it as though it's a writing surface.
Casey:
And it has with it their equivalent of an Apple Pencil.
Casey:
And even more importantly...
Casey:
it has, or maybe not more importantly, but differently, it also has a Surface dial.
Casey:
And so what this is, is a little puck sort of thing.
Casey:
It's actually not dissimilar from the puck mouse that everyone hated, but much taller.
Casey:
And you can sit that on your desk and you can spin it in order to, I don't know, change volume or get different, you know...
Casey:
tools as you're using the pen but where it gets even cooler still and you have to understand that this hinge that they have genuinely is really neat it looks really really clever but what's cooler still about the surface style this puck is that you can drop this thing right on the display and the display recognizes that it's there and where it is and allows you to treat that as another control surface so
Casey:
In the way that the naked robotic core is the most pure realization of what somebody would want for a computing device, of what Apple would want for an iPhone.
Casey:
I think, not that this is a naked robotic core, but I feel like this is the most pure realization of what Microsoft hopes for, for this world that to me is a little bizarro, where you have a touch-based or touch-permitted, if nothing else, desktop OS.
John:
So Microsoft's strategy for many years now with its Windows thing, especially as the Windows phone stuff has been fading, has been to have a single OS for all their platforms.
John:
And because that single OS has part of its family tree is...
John:
phones and tablet type devices that of course it supports touch which is why you can do touch in windows with you know windows 8 that started uh and they're up to windows 10 now and so they've been changing windows to be an interface that you can use with a mouse and a keyboard you can use with a pen you can use with your fingers and they've been doing this for a long time
John:
and to varying results i know some people have the microsoft surface their tablet product that is basically like you can use it like a pc with a keyboard attached to it because it's got a hinge thing you can use it kind of like a tablet if you're using it like a laptop you can also just poke your finger at the screen which i'm sure we've all seen this many people just expect to be able to do that especially younger people or anyone even who just uses a touch device for a long time they'll switch from an environment where they're using a tablet or a phone to a laptop and instinctively touch the screen i know i used to do it with kindles before the touchscreen kindles
John:
because I spent so much time with iPads, I would touch the screen to try to do something on a Kindle.
John:
And of course nothing would happen because they were totally inert.
John:
Like there was no, this is before the touch sensitive ones.
John:
It is natural to get into that habit.
John:
And Microsoft has built an entire interface strategy around the idea that all forms of input are welcome, that it should be supported.
John:
And they've been changing, they've been changing windows to not require a perfectly precise mouse pointer or even a stylus to do things, to try to make bigger, chunkier controls and gestures and stuff like that.
John:
And this Surface Studio is the biggest this has gotten because previously it was like, you know, you get tablets and you got these convertible laptop-y things that are like a tablet with a keyboard.
John:
And yeah, of course, you can touch the screen and they have the pen input and all that stuff.
John:
But this is like 28 inches is like...
John:
This is not a big tablet.
John:
This is a full-size, bigger than most people have, because most people do not have 28-inch screens on their PCs, full-size personal computer running Windows.
John:
It doesn't pretend to be a tablet.
John:
You can't take it off and carry it like a tablet.
John:
It's not a big phone.
John:
It is a personal computer that has all the normal input modes you would want, including a pen, but then also accepts not just touch, but stop thinking of it as like I'm touching the screen, but more like,
John:
removing indirection because the mouse and the keyboard are indirect input devices and they're they're wonderful input devices and they're very precise and especially the mouse i feel like is the least indirect of indirect input devices because
John:
If you've used a mouse for any appreciable amount of time, the indirection disappears very quickly.
John:
You don't feel like you're driving the mouse versus like, say you had a joystick.
John:
If you had a joystick, you would feel like you're driving the mouse cursor around the screen like it's a little car to get the things you want.
John:
But if you have a mouse, you just basically feel like you're grabbing things on the screen.
John:
And yes, it is indirect.
John:
You're not touching it.
John:
It is not as direct as touching the screen as anyone who uses an iPad or an iPhone knows.
John:
Not that kind of direct.
John:
But it is like really good video game controls in that
John:
very quickly it disappears and you stop thinking about the control and just start thinking about the task but the ultimate direct input is like literal direct input as in you see something on the screen you manipulate it on the screen with your hands and your fingers or your pen like the same way you would
John:
In the pre-computer age, if you're doing something that involves putting marks on a piece of paper or shuffling things around, put marks on the piece of paper or shuffle things around.
John:
Like, do it.
John:
Don't move something that moves another thing on a screen that represents the things you're moving around.
John:
Just get right on that screen.
John:
And this thing tilting down to like a drafting table type, you know, angle, saying like, if you're not doing text input, you're not writing a program, but instead you're doing anything having to do with visual arts or anything like that,
John:
Turn it down.
John:
Set aside your keyboard and your mouse for now.
John:
And just get right on there on that screen.
John:
It's a huge screen.
John:
Just get right on there.
John:
You got a pen.
John:
You got your fingers.
John:
You got the little dialy thing.
John:
I can imagine them adding more types of tools to that.
John:
That to me is...
John:
the culmination of their strategy of allowing all forms of input by saying here's a form of input not only do we accept all forms input it's like oh you can't decide you should concentrate on one it's kind of weird to type and then use a mouse but also touch the screen make your mind am i clicking the button with the mouse cursor i'm touching it with my finger am i drawing with a pen what am i doing there are many tasks and
John:
in which directly interacting with a gigantic screen is the best interface the task where you put aside all those other tools and say i just want to get right to it and obviously they you know they're showing like art and stuff like that it's the most obvious one and this is their first crack at this so maybe it's not as good as it could be people have said that there's too much parallax because your pen is too far away from like where the pixels are
John:
And that there's lag in some of the applications.
John:
But I really feel like this is almost inevitably the future of digital art, whether Microsoft is going to be the future of digital art.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But like we've gone through the whole thing of using, you know, using mice to using, you know, tablets that are an indirect input device to, you know, the Wacom Cintiq, which is like a tablet that's also a screen.
John:
It's like, just keep going because people love all those tools and they get used to those tools.
John:
But direct input, if you can raise a generation with the expectation that you do your artwork on a giant 28-inch monitor by directly manipulating it, that's going to win in the end, whether it's Microsoft or somebody else.
John:
And Microsoft getting there first is, it's nice to see, even if this is a product that is not great, and it should be worrying to Apple because...
John:
Apple doesn't have anything to compete with this like at all.
John:
And I don't think Apple can say we really believe that the future of doing digital art is using a Cintiq because Apple doesn't make those either.
John:
We really believe the future of art is using a mouse or doing everything on, you know, they have iPads.
John:
All right, so where's your 28-inch iPad that you need to plug into the wall?
John:
Like, whatever Apple's going to do, I'm not saying they have to make Mac's touchscreen or anything, but if they care at all, which maybe they don't, about the creative arts that involve drawing things, even things from, like, I can imagine CAD or architectural drawings, not just fine arts and illustration and stuff like that.
John:
they need to be doing something about this.
John:
And I was so excited when they came up with the iPad Probe.
John:
It was like, yeah, that's what I was talking about.
John:
You need a really big iPad.
John:
And if you go back to listen to all those shows from years and years ago, I think at some point I did talk about the whole drafting table thing.
John:
I think we talked about it on this very podcast, but also on Hypercritical.
John:
this is it microsoft made it before apple did apple did make their ipad bigger but they took a long time to do it and they didn't make it bigger bigger uh and the idea of an ipad that you can't take off your desk i remember being laughed at perhaps on this show perhaps other ones like well what the hell's the point of an ipad if you can't move it anywhere this this is the point this is the thing so i am super proud of microsoft uh for making this i hope they keep at it
John:
I hope they don't say, well, not a lot of people bought these because I guarantee you not a lot of people are going to buy this because it's really expensive and it's like the first generation product.
John:
And truth be told, most people don't do fine arts on their computer, right?
John:
But I think this is the right idea for that class of problems.
John:
And...
John:
if apple cares about that class of problems if apple cares about keeping those creatives and i think they totally think they should because they are another branch of sort of the founding bedrock of apple's products like creative professionals they need to start putting the air pump into those ipads and cranking up pronto because if they don't someone else is going to get there first
Casey:
Do you have any idea how much I wanted Reebok pumps as a kid?
Casey:
My goodness.
Casey:
I wanted those so bad.
Casey:
You know, I don't know.
Casey:
I really admire this, like you said, John.
Casey:
I also think that this solves a class of problems that I just don't have, which, I mean, you kind of said as well.
Casey:
But I have a Slack team that I'm in that's a handful of people that are either current or former employees of my last employer, the consulting gig.
Casey:
And we were actually I feel like we have very cyclical conversations.
Casey:
And one of them is, oh, our touchscreen device is stupid or not.
Casey:
And since most of these people are Windows developers, most of them have touchscreen Windows laptops and all of them swear, oh, my God, Casey, you have no idea.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
And that very well could be the case.
Casey:
Maybe it is that good.
Casey:
But having used a handful of touchscreen laptops, admittedly, very, very briefly, I have yet to really have it click.
Casey:
I've yet to say, oh, oh, yeah, this does make sense.
Casey:
And maybe given given a fair shot, maybe it would.
Casey:
But I don't feel like I want a touchscreen computer to begin with.
Casey:
And now you're saying, well, why wouldn't you?
Casey:
Why not have a touchscreen iMac?
John:
if i was an artist heck yes but as me meh no thanks it's a cool thing to look at but you don't want a touchscreen laptop like when you phrase it that way like no no no who wants who wants a touchscreen i'm just saying people find themselves compelled to touch a screen but no like those things the surface i would say is not a touchscreen laptop it is a tablet with a keyboard apple makes one of those already it's called the ipad
John:
it that's not the ipad is not a touchscreen laptop it is a tablet that comes with a keyboard and you say like what's the difference well they're both they're both basically the same in use like it's they're open at the same angle there's a keyboard horizontally and a screen kind of vertically and yes you can touch the screen but you use them in such different ways like oh well when i'm just using it with my hands it's just an ipad but then when i'm typing i use the keyboard like
John:
I don't know what you want to call that, but phrasing it as a laptop or the keyboard sounds like, oh, I don't want to be poking my finger.
John:
It's not comfortable, as Apple's pointed out a million times, to poke at a vertical screen.
John:
It's better to use the indirect input devices.
John:
But I think it's looking at it the wrong way.
John:
It's taking the old thing and saying, I'm taking the old thing and modifying it by adding a touch screen.
John:
when we take the new thing which is a tablet and modify it by adding back a keyboard everyone's okay with it and it's basically the same result and this thing the surface studio i think is it's like this is not a touchscreen laptop this is also not a touchscreen imac because imac doesn't lay down on the table for you like there's no way the hell you want a touchscreen imac you can't draw on it on an imac the thing doesn't only tilts like 15 degrees and most of them are you know it's close to straight up and down the whole time that is not the surface studio
John:
the key feature of the server studio that says when you want to do the thing like just like an ipad when you just want to use it like an ipad you don't need the keyboard and the server studio is like when you want to do stuff doesn't involve text input at all like you're drawing a picture and doing architectural drawings or like manipulating lines or things in space or whatever and you don't have to use the keyboard lay the whole thing down i think like in the pictures they have like laying down on top of the keyboard like you don't even have to see the keyboard it's not there anymore it's like it's the same way the keyboard goes away
John:
when you use your ipad like i'm not using the keyboard part of my ipad now i'm just using the ipad part of it and that's in a portable context this is the just simply the desktop equivalent of that so i'm not sure what you want to call it and it is weird that apple's most likely response to this would have to be an ios device and not a mac which is strange because as we've talked about in the past apple's thus far their inability to really get pro level applications to flourish on ios devices whereas they're still kind of doing okay on the mac
John:
That's Apple's challenge to solve.
John:
I'm just saying, writ large, the future of computing, direct manipulation for tasks that require it on a big, gigantic, awesome screen, the only way that's not going to happen is if VR and AR advance to the point where this approach never has its day in the sun.
John:
Because AR and VR, if they get good enough, make having a big, giant thing that lights up in front of you archaic.
John:
But I feel like there will be a time...
John:
before ar and vr get good where it will be the time of the gigantic touch screens that lay down in front of you um and when i'm super old and i'm you know doing computing stuff that doesn't involve typing i would like to have a big gigantic gorgeous screen lay down in front of me so that i can do stuff on it and also have a keyboard for when i do text input and also have speech recognition also have a bunch of things like pens and stuff i could do on it
John:
I'm ready for the Microsoft Surface Studio with 20 years in advancement, probably also not made by Microsoft.
Marco:
One thing you mentioned briefly earlier, John, is if they stick with this.
Marco:
And that's because Microsoft...
Marco:
They throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall.
Marco:
They change strategies often, and they change desktop initiatives often.
Marco:
This product line, like many other things Microsoft has tried in recent years, might not be good enough for them.
Marco:
It might not sell well enough, or it might not get enough software support.
Marco:
It won't sell well enough.
John:
But don't you see this as the trend?
John:
They've spent all these years making a single OS that accepts all these kinds of input.
John:
That's not like a fluke.
John:
That's what they've been doing.
John:
And that's what gives them the option to do things like this.
John:
I feel like this, like I said, this is the culmination of years and years and years of work.
John:
You can't make this on day one.
John:
You have to do all the work.
John:
to make the unified windows that does all the kinds of input to change the windows you are to even be usable with touch to make the device that has a pen that you know that looks like a laptop with a touch screen you have to do years and years of that before you can make this thing so i feel like it's not a fluke um sticking with it merely means maybe they will retreat from making their own pcs like maybe they will retreat back to the surface or retreat back to a tablet or phone size things
John:
or get out of that business entirely and just do microsoft azure and then license windows to clone makers we don't know but i don't i i don't think like they're going to say oh actually touching the screen is not a big deal because they've just spent so long coming to this point like that i feel like they worked hard to be able to produce a machine like this and this one won't sell well enough to be significant but i think i really think they will take a second and a third crack of it and
John:
when i think of the best microsoft i think of oh that's pains me to say this i think of the company that made the xbox which was a gigantic uh you know ugly piece of crap but they stuck with it and every new xbox they've made has been better than the previous one hey that first xbox was a really good system but
Marco:
Xbox is huge, LOL.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
No, I think just because they've built in all this capability for things like touch and pen input, if you would have looked at the TV market five years ago, you would have thought that 3D TVs were just what everybody wanted and they were taking off like crazy.
Marco:
Nobody ever thought that.
Marco:
Obviously, the future of TV was going to be 3D.
Marco:
Because if you looked at every TV, every high-end to even mid-range TV you could buy in a store, they were all 3D-supported TVs.
Marco:
But in practice, the reason that feature was being put there was because a stagnant industry was trying to add more hardware things to make people upgrade because they weren't upgrading their TVs fast enough.
Marco:
So Microsoft and putting in all this crazy capability and stuff into the service line, all these different input methods and everything else, it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's using them or that this will be how people will use their Microsoft computers in the future.
Marco:
It might turn out that way.
Marco:
But just because the capability is there, just because Microsoft is building all this support into everything, is building this hardware...
Marco:
That doesn't mean that PC users are going to meaningfully adopt this.
Marco:
Again, they might, but that's not a foregone conclusion.
John:
No, it's not PC users that are buying this.
John:
It is creative professionals specifically, which is a tiny market, and out of those people, they're not going to buy it because...
John:
This is like you trying to enter a market that another company owns, or there's already a set way to do things, and you have a totally different way to do it.
John:
Some people are going to try it, but professionals are the least likely to change their ways.
John:
Even if they're already using a Microsoft Windows PC running Photoshop,
John:
with a tablet whether it's a Cintiq or just a plain old tablet even those people aren't going to buy the Surface Studio except for on a Lark or to be curious about it because they're set in their ways using their Microsoft Windows PC running Adobe Photoshop with a tablet and they've been doing that their whole career and that's what they like and maybe they're curious about this but it's not a big deal but the thing about the future is this is if they stick with it and keep selling this even though they're not making money on it because not enough people buy it
John:
but eventually i think the market will come around to it because people who start out new might be interested in it and try it out and they never got used to using uh you know a non-lightup tablet or the people who use cintiqs might view this as a better cintiq until they try it and realize actually the cintiq is a little bit better because it's got all these buttons on it they're used to and so on and so forth like it's going to be a long road and the the other x factor is that people don't like windows or marco doesn't like it anyway
John:
Some people don't like Windows, believe it or not.
John:
And so those people who don't like Windows are going to be like, well, this looks great and all, but I don't like Windows, so I'm not going to do that.
John:
All the professionals who are using Macs, for example, I use Photoshop on a Mac with the Wacom tablet or whatever.
John:
uh even just talking to um seeing the tweets from uh dr wave on on twitter like isn't this perfect for pixar it's like well actually at pixar people who have these giant tablets to draw on to do their 3d work they're on like articulated arms and so it's a non-starter for this thing to just be on a simple hinge that goes on a desk like this is just one product and that it doesn't it's not as flexible as the products they're already using and they already have a system that works and so this may be novel and interesting but it's not it doesn't work for pixar right
John:
But this is, this is early days.
John:
This is a single product from a single company with lots of caveats that are associated with it.
John:
Uh, so I'm not, I'm not going to say that this is going to make Microsoft the king of the creative professionals, but they do have a headstart on people.
John:
And if they keep iterating on this product and this idea and this concept for years and years and years, and keep going with this whole OS strategy with touch and maybe make windows a little bit nicer in the process, um,
John:
And no one else does anything because who else is there?
John:
It's not like Linux is going to take over the creative professional market, right?
John:
It's them and Apple basically at this point.
John:
And if Apple doesn't move, it gives Microsoft time to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail over and over again.
John:
And eventually they'll get pretty decent and they'll basically win by default if Apple never makes an iPad bigger than 12.5 inches and never makes a Mac like this.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Audible, and Squarespace.
Casey:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
Do you want to talk about Sal Segoin?
Marco:
I'm sorry if that's not how you pronounce it.
Marco:
I haven't had time to research.
Marco:
This news broke a couple hours before we started recording that Sal Segoin, he was apparently the product manager, the head of macOS automation technologies.
Marco:
So that would include things like AppleScript, Apple Events, Automator.
Marco:
And apparently, he has been let go of Apple.
Marco:
His position has been eliminated.
Marco:
So basically, it sure seems like Apple is no longer going to have a head of automation of apps on macOS.
Marco:
And a lot of longtime Mac users are taking this news to be possibly a pretty bad sign.
Marco:
Do we want to talk about this?
Marco:
I mean, we haven't really had time to look into it much.
John:
i i looked into it and i and i know sal from uh by reputation and by all the wwc sessions i've seen with him and i've met him in person a couple times although i'm sure he doesn't remember me but uh yeah i'm pretty sure i have too he looks very familiar yeah he's one of those people you recognize um
John:
there are a couple aspects of it one is that sal is just a very nice gregarious charismatic smart person he's got charisma you see him and especially if you're a nerd and you're like attracted to smart people right who are interesting and dynamic and have have opinions and can express them well um that's sal so people who are longtime apple fans and who have you know
John:
known him professionally or by reputation or by his products or presentations are sad to see somebody that everybody liked, uh, not be at the company anymore.
John:
Right.
John:
That's so that that's an, you know, unquestionable aspect of this entire thing.
John:
Cause if he was a jerk that everybody hated, this would not be as big a story.
John:
Right.
John:
And then the other part is what you just said about automation.
John:
and automation on the mac which people just shorten to say like oh sal he's that apple script guy that's a reasonable summary of him if you want to go there but there's much more to it than that you can read all the stuff on his uh his website they'll put a link in the show notes it's not just apple script is also shell scripting and apple events that apple scripting is based on you can do it all sorts of different languages and
John:
There's the tooling involved with that.
John:
Even as recently as like last year or the year before that, they finally added like library slash framework support for AppleScript.
John:
So you could write AppleScript libraries and use them.
John:
Like AppleScript was kind of stuck in amber for a long time, not really getting any better, but not really getting any worse, but was still an essential part of so many professionals workflows.
John:
Like they would use AppleScript to automate the things that they did.
John:
And it was important to them for their professional applications they were using to have AppleScript support to be able to do this.
John:
Automator in the OS X age was this other thing like let regular people design sets of actions without having to be programmers.
John:
So Automator would let you string together, do this, then do that, then do that, without having to learn a language, even a language as simple as AppleScript.
John:
And his position being eliminated... I don't know enough about the internal rearranging, but it could just be that...
John:
The division is merged with some other division.
John:
There was another person that Apple likes better who's heading that division, so he's out and that person is in.
John:
But it could also be that, and this would totally fit with Apple's recent moves, as in neglecting the Mac Pro and having difficulty making Pro apps and canning Aperture and all that other stuff, that they see...
John:
using a user is creating automations in anything, even approaching a programmer like environment, whether it be hypercard, uh, rest in peace or automator or writing Apple scripts and scales.
John:
That is not the future of computing.
John:
It's too complicated.
John:
Regular people don't want to do it.
John:
The professionals who want to do it are really causing more problems for themselves than they're solving.
John:
And really they should just allow us to define the workflows by hard coding them into our applications or just buy another application does what they want and stop trying to program it or whatever.
John:
Therefore,
John:
having an automation division and a product manager of automation that's not the future of the company that's not the future of the mac we don't need that anymore it's a waste of time and resources and it's holding back our other approaches that's like the doomsday scenario the most pessimistic scenario is that automation is being de-emphasized in the same way that writing batch scripts would be de-emphasized or or you know having to write programs yourself would be de-emphasized right um and in some it makes some sense like
John:
the march of progress has been de-emphasizing the need for people who use computers to do stuff like that it used to be that you had to enter your programs by typing them from the back of a magazine in basic and that's how you got your program to run right and no one does that anymore now we have the app store right um and a lot of the things that we used to use automation for hopefully are mooted by the fact that programs are just better or the internet does it better or even something as simple as like uh what is the thing for uh ios
John:
Workflows?
John:
Yeah, workflow.
John:
Right.
John:
It's a third-party opportunity.
John:
Workflow is just fine.
John:
Apple doesn't need to do it.
John:
We just need to provide the capabilities.
John:
And Apple Events itself, you can't argue with the fact that Apple Events is pretty damn old and creaky.
John:
It could be that it's all being replaced by some bold new vision of automation for the modern age in the same way that AppleScript replaced everything that came before it.
John:
But as with all things in Apple, we don't know.
John:
It's a big black hole.
John:
We have no idea what they're planning.
John:
We just have fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
John:
And once again, this is all in the context of Apple fans being grumpy for a bunch of related reasons.
John:
So it can feel bad, but...
John:
I'm not entirely ready to go all doom and gloom on this just because it could just be that it's time to turn on a new page because Sal and all the tech that he was working on and especially the foundational tech like Apple events has never really felt like it has fit into the OS 10 world.
John:
So best case scenario, they're rethinking this all and saying, what does automation mean?
John:
you know from here going forward does it mean apple events or is there a better overall system for automating things on the computers in worst case tim cook says automating things is stupid we don't need to do that anymore people should just tap their meaty little fingers on screens and not worry about it
Casey:
Yeah, I never really wrote much AppleScript.
Casey:
I did real early on when I'd first gotten my Mac to do, I don't know, like some silly basic things.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it was for, but it was like maybe setting a default printer or something like that.
Casey:
And this was like in 2008-ish.
Casey:
And I personally have never really gone back and had a need to write more.
Casey:
Now, I know there's tons of people who write it a lot and use it heavily.
Casey:
But for me, this is not something I'm terribly worried about and not something that I use terribly often.
Casey:
But it also does make me a little bit sad.
Casey:
If this is a canary in a coal mine, in the coal mine for automation in Mac OS...
Casey:
It would bum me out if that went away, but I wouldn't say it would necessarily affect my day-to-day either.
Marco:
I mean, it's more about, like, it's a very, very powerful set of features.
Marco:
You know, AppleScript, the language is kind of, you know, that's just the implementation detail of it.
Marco:
But the system on which it's based that exposes Apple events and control of applications, automation of other applications...
Marco:
you know, through this entire API that can be any language you need it to be.
Marco:
And there's many things that expose it as different languages, like I think JSTalk makes it JavaScript, and I think there's a few other things like that.
Marco:
You know, it's more this...
Marco:
That feature set, while it is used by probably a very tiny percentage of Mac users, the amount of power it gives is so great that... Really, macOS... One of the things I love so much about macOS...
Marco:
is that it is just so incredibly powerful.
Marco:
I mean that deeply.
Marco:
It is incredibly powerful if you know how to use its power.
Marco:
It is, in every sense of the word, a true workstation OS.
Marco:
As I said in my Mac Pro post, OS X is awesome.
Marco:
And to remove or to let rot or to deprecate a major area of power from it, I can see why people are worried about that.
Marco:
And, John, you know, I agree.
Marco:
It does seem like things are moving away from that direction in consumer software design.
Marco:
Mostly by Apple's doing, by the way.
Marco:
It's not like the whole industry doing this.
Marco:
Mostly Apple doing this.
Marco:
But it was in many ways theirs to lose.
Marco:
They really had amazing automation features that were fairly accessible to people.
Marco:
Programmers will always find ways to automate things.
Marco:
The most extreme power users will always find ways to automate things.
Marco:
But one of the things that made this area of OS X so powerful is that it was really quite accessible to lots of people.
Marco:
A whole lot of people who are not programmers were able to use things like Automator to automate really...
Marco:
time-consuming tasks that then freed them up to have the computer do what computers are supposed to do.
Marco:
The kind of power that usually you have to be a programmer to have, many people were given this power by this system and this infrastructure.
Marco:
So the loss of it, I think, is certainly cause for concern if you...
Marco:
Love the Mac operating system as much as I do for this power that it's always had.
Marco:
And as I said, I'll be fine because I'm a programmer.
Marco:
I can use Bash and script something up or actually write an app to do things if I need to automate them, which I do all the time.
Marco:
I hardly ever use these technologies because I usually just write shell scripts and stuff instead.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
A lot of people use these, I think.
Marco:
And even, again, percentage-wise, I'm sure it's very small.
Marco:
But that still could be thousands of people who rely on this to save them hours of time a week or to do something that would just be impractical to do otherwise.
Marco:
So, yeah, I feel the worry on this.
Marco:
That being said, there's a lot about this that we still don't know.
Marco:
All we know is that this guy, his job was cut, apparently.
Marco:
We don't know why.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
Maybe they're just reorganizing the department of whatever it's in.
Marco:
I don't know how this is organized inside.
Marco:
Maybe it's just a reorg.
Marco:
Maybe it's weird cost-cutting measures that maybe they might come back to later.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe it was just a personal conflict.
John:
Maybe there's a new team doing basically like maybe all of a sudden there's overlap because, you know, we have this automation system, but maybe the Swift people are like, oh, I totally want you to be able to script your applications with Swift and we have this project and then maybe that project wins.
John:
And so this will be the legacy version of automation and then the Swift one will come.
John:
Another one I was thinking about in terms of how do you get people who can't program to be able to do simple automation stuff.
John:
I always feel like the people who are good at using Automator and AppleScript
John:
are either basically programmers already and they don't know it, or could be programmers within 15 minutes.
John:
Because to use, even though Automator is way easier than coding,
John:
the people who use it as part of their job, they eventually can't avoid basically becoming programmers.
John:
They don't know they're programmers.
John:
They think they just click buttons, but they're learning conditionals, loops, logic, input-output.
John:
They're just learning what programmers would consider to be an awful programming language, which is just clicking a bunch of buttons around, which is like, let me just write the code.
John:
See also Excel wizards.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
But another way you could do that is...
John:
How do you get non-programmers to be able to make their computer to do busy work that programmers know how to make them do?
John:
Another way to do it would be to have a conversation with the computer and describe what you want to have the computer to do it.
John:
So a much, much, much, much, much, much, much more advanced Siri.
John:
you could say um serial let's have a discussion uh i want you to take all the when when photos arrive in this folder i want you to take all of them and rename them yeah rename them with the date and uh and you know
John:
tag them with this label and put them into this folder or something you could do with hazel or with automator resize them all to be this size or whatever blah blah blah and siri would go back and forth do you mean like this giving you a preview what you're going to say okay if i was to do it this is what i would do does this look like what you wanted like all it would be doing behind the scenes is using the automation machinery that's already there and all the automation you're able to do for like images easy because they have so many tools for like resizing images or or you know changing the exif data or renaming files like that's all easy to do
John:
All you need to do is figure out a way to express to the computer what you want.
John:
And if you can have a conversation with even a pretty stupid Siri that is nevertheless hundreds of times smarter than it is now to go back and forth, eventually Siri could figure out essentially here's the automated action you would have built.
John:
Only we built it together by having a conversation.
John:
That is certainly a much more advanced, much brighter and I think attainable future of letting normal people automate stuff.
John:
So for all we know, maybe the future automation is all wrapped up in the Siri team and they have grand plans to do
John:
that uh i wish them luck because so far they haven't really shown me anything but it could be done um and so maybe you know like like you said we don't know what's going on apple it could just be a rear or it could just be a merging type thing um but i i have i have hope that even if apple has decided that every single technology that sal lists on his website is the past of automation um
John:
But I have some hope that Apple believes that there is something else that is the future of automation.
John:
Because like you said, Marco, people want to use their computers to do complicated things.
John:
But if they're not programmers and don't want to become programmers, we have to find a way to let them do that, like a gentler slope.
John:
to get them to be able to do that because they will be happier with their computers and will find them more indispensable even if they could perform something as simple as uh you know when i get an email like this extract the image attachment put in this folder rename it this way uh and then send me a text message about it or do whatever like
John:
when you show normal people that they can make something like that work they think it is the greatest thing in the world because they're you know they're basically like you know someone said in the chat room it's like the gateway drug to programming only they never actually go through the gate they just stay outside of it and go this is great my computer does what i want um which which i think is great so i i think there's still need for non-programmers to be able to automate things in their computer uh but i'm willing to believe that there is a better way