Screaming At Us From The Future
John:
that's one of the amazing things about uh the making of empire strikes back book the digital version has a bunch of audio clips of like people talking about stuff i'm like i'm glad somebody recorded these things because here they are having actual conversations about making this movie and then people have recollections like i talked to them about this guess what we've got audio too you know 15 minutes of audio about this one thing and it's great to hear even though the quality is terrible because it was the 80s that's true of many things in the 80s but not empire strikes back that was in the 80s and it was great
Marco:
Yeah, so are me and Casey.
Casey:
So young, so young.
Casey:
I feel like I have spoken to Marco and John both extremely recently and also not in weeks because we saw each other three days ago.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
And yet at the same time, we haven't had the opportunity to really and truly nerd out for a couple of weeks now.
John:
I like when we tried to talk about computer stuff.
John:
We were all together like everyone else did not want to hear it.
John:
It was there.
John:
We're just like rolling their eyes and trying to change a subject to anything else.
Casey:
They effectively said with body language, save it for the show.
Casey:
And also, happy birthday, John Syracuse.
Casey:
Hey.
Casey:
It's a little bit late at this point.
Casey:
It is four days ago now, but happy birthday.
Casey:
You are the answer to, what is the actual phrasing?
Casey:
The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
John:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we have any pre-show banter?
Casey:
We just want to go straight to follow up.
Casey:
I think that was the pre-show banter.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk about the naked robotic MacBook Pro, Mr. Syracuse.
John:
This is the bestest thing ever.
Yeah.
Casey:
It was said with not an ounce of sarcasm.
John:
I think it is.
John:
I think it is pretty neat.
John:
If someone had posted this as a joke a couple weeks ago, I think we all would have had a good laugh about it.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
The first time I saw this, I thought it was a joke.
Marco:
And I was like, it's not April 1st.
John:
I guess somebody just has bad joke timing.
John:
Yeah, but, you know, this is apparently a real thing.
John:
This is from OWC, our friends at OWC, Otherworld Computing.
John:
This is a product that you can't buy yet, right?
John:
They've just sort of announced it and more details to follow.
John:
You take your new slim 4 USB port MacBook Pro that we've talked about at length on this show, and you sit it on top of...
John:
an aluminum rectangle that's the exact size and shape as the the bottom of the macbook pro making your very slim 2016 2017 model macbook pro the thickness of a 2012 macbook pro and in the process it gives you a bunch of extra ports on the side you get usb type a ports you get ethernet you get an sd card slot you get another usb c as far as i can tell you don't get any additional battery
John:
it does it does claim also four terabytes of internal storage of some type and additional things to come like they haven't haven't revealed all the things it's going to do so right away i have some technical questions about this oh yes my first how does it work because i expected it to plug into the usbc ports on the side because you know you can do that like the thunderbolt slash usbc ports if you you can plug for example a thunderbolt 3 dock into there and
John:
On that dock, you can have an SD card port and USB ports and storage.
John:
And, you know, you can do all these.
John:
We know you can do it.
John:
But you have to plug into one of those ports.
John:
And the pictures they have show both sides of this thing with all four of the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the side of this MacBook Pro completely open.
John:
So that's mysterious.
Casey:
No, I don't think it's mysterious at all.
Casey:
I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I will bet you a gazillion dollars that if you're looking at the images of the two sides, so they're showing the right hand side of it, but it's on the left hand side of the image and then the left hand side on the right hand side of the image.
Casey:
So the right side of the dock where the SD card is, there's a USB-C port directly under one of the four onboard USB-C ports.
Casey:
It's hard to paint a word picture about this.
Casey:
But anyway, I bet you anything they're going to have one of those little stubby USB-C cables right there.
Casey:
It'll be like, you remember the daughter board video cards from PCs way back in the day where you would go like VGA from your 2D card?
Marco:
John doesn't remember.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
yeah you go from vga from your 2d card to your 3d card and then vga from your 3d card out to your monitor and they would have these little like stubby vga cables it was barbaric but so i'm gonna make an even older reference back in the mac days when they had scuzzy as their uh external connector for hard drives and such and you would buy hard drives that fit exactly underneath the classic mac shape so you'd stack them and they would be exactly the size of the the base of like a mac plus or a 512 or whatever uh
John:
and since you would stack them each one would be a different hard drive and you need to daisy chain them together in typical scuzzy passion one would have a terminator and then you go from one to the other they made c-shaped brackets that were not cables at all but were exact brackets you know a single manufacturer would sell them like jasmine or whatever and they would plug into the back and connect one drive to the one right above it exactly matching these gigantic 50 pin scuzzy connectors
John:
So not a cable at all, but a very stiff, brackety type thing.
John:
And I can imagine that as well, but they don't show it in the pictures.
John:
Correct.
John:
That is fair.
Marco:
Well, and also, these pictures should be taken with a huge grain of salt, because they have even stated these are renderings, these are not the final product.
Marco:
And in fact, when I first looked at this page, maybe an hour before that MacRumors article was posted...
Marco:
These exact pictures in this exact spot on the official OWCDigital.com slash DEC on that page, these exact pictures, the two sides were blank except for the one single USB-C import.
Marco:
Oh, and the card reader was there.
Marco:
But all the USB-A and the Ethernet port you see right there were not there like 12 hours ago.
Marco:
So clearly, this is a work in progress.
Marco:
I learned more from the Mac Rumors post about it than I did from their page.
Marco:
So clearly this is still in the very early phases.
Marco:
They said it will be available in 2017, but I don't think they got more specific than that, nor had they listed a price or anything.
Marco:
But I mean, it's basically, yeah, it's a docking station that happens to be the same shape as the MacBook Pro, so you can sit it on top of it.
Marco:
But when I first saw these pictures without seeing the MacRumors article, when I first saw the pictures and got almost no information,
Marco:
I assumed that what they were doing was basically offering a service where you could send your map to them and they would like unscrew the bottom of it and replace like and kind of, you know, semi permanently attach this thing.
Marco:
And if they were doing that, then they could maybe do something like give a bigger battery.
Marco:
Uh, and, and, you know, use internal, whatever kind of internal, um, connections that are present.
John:
If any, I honestly would be surprised if there are many, if any, uh, but yeah, I was thinking where, where were they connected internally, but you can do a bigger battery with it external too, because remember that USB-C port is also the charging port.
John:
So it works like this smart, the smartphone, uh, you know, iPhone case or whatever.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
But anyway, that isn't what this is, as far as we can tell from the very little information we have.
Marco:
But either way, so basically, it sounds like it almost certainly doesn't offer any additional battery power.
Marco:
And that's the only real reason I would see for wanting to have this tremendous additional bulk added permanently to your MacBook.
John:
Well, not yet.
John:
We don't know because they say more stuff is coming.
John:
And if you look at the stuff that's in there, obviously there has to be more because the stuff they have in there would not take up all that space.
John:
So I guess it could just be filled with air.
John:
But if you're going to put a battery, it's not like there's not room.
John:
They could put an optical drive.
Casey:
No, I actually thought the same thing, believe it or not.
Marco:
They could put a really good keyboard that you can't reach.
Marco:
No, so I, you know...
Marco:
We'll see when this thing actually provides a little more information and when it actually launches.
Marco:
But I don't think the market for this is going to be very big.
Marco:
I certainly won't use it.
Marco:
No way you can make me use that.
Marco:
Because the fact is that the MacBook Pro, as it is, is almost pretty good.
Marco:
And this pushes it so far in the other direction that it's like, okay, you've turned something that's almost pretty good but has mediocre battery life and a bad keyboard into something that is still having mediocre battery life and a bad keyboard that is just bigger and heavier to add what is really a very small handful of capabilities so far.
Marco:
I don't see why people would want this, honestly.
Marco:
But somebody might, I guess.
Casey:
Well, remember, Marco, that you cannot possibly do any kind of work on a MacBook Pro unless you have an SD card slot.
Casey:
So if you wanted to do any kind of work on a MacBook Pro, you must have this dock.
Casey:
Otherwise, it's impossible.
Marco:
And honestly, so in the massive span of time since we've last spoken on this podcast, we traveled upstate for parent Christmas stuff.
Marco:
and i i have my laptop there and there was one point in which i had i had brought some every year we're making christmas video and from from the previous christmas's photos and and time lapse tiff does all the work she gets all the credit anyway i i bring with me on my laptop copies of all the videos so that way when we get there after we've shown to everybody we can then give everybody their own copy on the thumb drives that don't go into your computer yeah so one of the film members has an ipad uh one has a laptop and one has a thumb drive
Marco:
so this is okay this is like you put the wolf on the boat and it's like it's this crazy thing it's like how do we put the wolf in with the chicken right it's like how do we get how do we get these files to these different things right i'm sitting there on the couch with my new macbook and first my father-in-law brings down the the lightning uh card reader adapter with an sd card on it that he uses in his ipad so can you put on here
Marco:
And I look at the lightning, and I look at the SD card, and I'm like, nope.
Marco:
And then I get handed this USB key, this USB thumb drive thing.
Marco:
No, I guess I got to get a dongle for that.
Marco:
I got to go upstairs, get the dongle.
Marco:
And it wasn't that I didn't own the dongle, and it wasn't that I didn't even have the dongle technically with me on the trip, but it was upstairs, and I was downstairs, and I was on a soft couch, and it was Christmas.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There's just going to be so many of these times with these new MacBook Pros where even if it's a minor inconvenience, it still makes you regret the limitations of this computer in use, in practice.
Marco:
I bet more often than Apple might have estimated by whatever data they were using to make this decision to omit all the useful stuff from this computer.
Marco:
And there are so many things about it that are nice.
Marco:
Like every year, we go to the same place, my in-law's place.
Marco:
And every year, I have to plug in my laptop.
Marco:
And every year, I had this weird layout where to reach the left side of where the charging port was, where MagSafe was...
Marco:
I have to kind of lean the laptop in a strange way overnight when it's charging.
Marco:
And this year, I could use the other side, which was really helpful.
Marco:
And there's going to be times like that where it's nice to have charging on either side.
Marco:
Like, that would be great, right?
Marco:
So, you know, it isn't all bad.
Marco:
And it was also really nice to have this thing be lighter as I was carrying it around the house and, you know, doing, you know,
Marco:
basic stuff like it was nice having it lighter so i appreciate those things and i appreciate some of the progress uh but boy not having not having the sd card reader and and at least one usba port has already bitten me like more than once in these like little tiny like you know razor blade cut ways like just ah i just it doesn't leave me with a good taste in my mouth about this laptop overall
John:
So I think this product, however it turns out to be in the market, reveals some interesting things.
John:
We've talked about it before, but this is like a concrete version of it.
John:
The first is this is an extreme case of the naked robotic core thing applied to the Mac, which we talked about before.
John:
The idea that if you just provide the core amount of functionality and let people add stuff on top of that that they might want.
John:
So with the iPhone, it's like we give you the skinniest little metal thing that you want.
John:
and if you want extra battery or you want more protection or you know you want a place to put your credit cards or you want a rubbery outside or whatever it is that you want to do to it everyone else can bring to it whatever they want you want it to be a different color a different texture or whatever you can put that on but by making the smallest thing possible we let the people who want a really small thing have a really small thing and people who want something different everyone can apply because if we made a choice and added the big battery the people who wanted the skinnier ones can have it and so on and so forth so this thing being the naked robotic macbook pro
John:
uh if you want a bunch of ports you can slap it on the end and all the past all the past times we've talked about this is like yeah but if you add it on the outside because you have to have you know phone motherboard battery case
John:
uh you know inner case battery outer case like the the extra layering requiring them both to be products in and of themselves the case is a product and the phone is a product and they have their own walls and the combination of all the walls is your total thickness it makes them bigger than if you said if you just took that amount of battery that's in this battery case and put it inside the phone it wouldn't be as thick so here we have a great example of that these ports that they're adding if apple had put these inside the macbook pro it would be thicker but
John:
But it would not be this thick.
John:
I mean, you can look at they have the Ethernet port is stacked up with the USB-C ports above it.
John:
Like because they can't they can't add, you know, they can't violate the integrity of the case.
John:
So you've got the entire flat side thickness of the case.
John:
And then what they have left to put their ports on is anything they can put below that.
John:
They can't combine them.
John:
So this does show.
John:
the you know a very graphic illustration of the highlight of the naked robotic core strategy is that if you do add stuff it will always necessarily be bigger than if it was built in and the second thing i think is that i don't know if this was just someone making an estimation or if they say it in the copy as a real thing but i believe that they're saying this makes your 2016 2017
John:
macbook pro the same thickness as the 2012 model but we all look at this and it looks like that that comic illustration of the uh the the powerbook g5 do you remember that oh yeah photoshop it looks like it's just comically thick like it's like the size of a dictionary or a phone book i don't know if kids know what those are it's a really thick book uh
John:
it looks it looks huge and yet this was the thickness of a product that apple sold not too long ago 2012 macbook pro that people still haven't like and often they say i'm sticking with my 2012 macbook pro because it's got all the ports i want or whatever this i think illustrates what i always talked about you know in that uh hypercritical post a long ago about people complaining that the imac was getting too skinny when they took away the optical drive it made it super skinny it's like who the hell needs a super skinny imac what's the point um and i i transferred over the iphone to say look
John:
You have to go thinner year after year, because even though from year to year, the sacrifice doesn't make that much of a difference.
John:
You think, oh, what?
John:
So it's a few millimeters thicker.
John:
Multiply that by year after year after year, and you will find yourself far from where you started.
John:
So in 2012, them shaving no millimeter off 2013 and another millimeter off in 2014.
John:
It seems like, what's the point?
John:
You're just making my thing thinner in a way that I can't even detect and I'm not getting any gains from it.
John:
But like you said, Marco, you appreciate the lightness.
John:
Even just compared to your previous model, which wasn't that old.
John:
Imagine what it would be like if you upgraded from a 2012 model to this.
John:
And here we have a rewind button to go back to what it was like in 2012.
John:
And now you can't go back.
John:
Now you say, no, that's too far.
John:
I can't go back that far.
John:
I don't care how many ports you have.
John:
It is too big and it is too heavy.
John:
Now that I know what's possible...
John:
i i can't go back to that again so there is something to be said for apple's relentless pursuit of thinness i still don't think they've hit any sort of inflection point like my uh the thing i always go back to is the uh the the credit card size phone that just flutters to the ground and you don't have to worry about it cracking because no one worries about dropping their credit card on the ground and cracking it because it's so freaking thin we haven't we haven't got there yet we're not even close but
John:
this illustration and our general disgust with it, this product, and our disgust with how thick it is, really hammers home that this thinness thing, even though we complain about it, the upsides aren't just academic.
John:
Like, once you become accustomed to it being that thin, we want it to be that thin and also maybe have an SD card slot, which, by the way, they could totally do because there's plenty of room.
John:
Or add two millimeters back.
John:
Like, you know, we're willing to bargain a millimeter too, but none of us want to add...
John:
you know, half an inch to this thing because we just can't go back to that.
Marco:
By the way, I can't let this go without pointing out that this ancient thick 2012 MacBook Pro that they're comparing this to was sold in the form of the 101 until like two months ago.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Had an optical drive.
Marco:
Plenty of room in there.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, but I mean, you're right.
Marco:
I love the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro.
Marco:
The 15-inch Retina, it's so, so nice.
Marco:
It's such an overall awesome machine.
Marco:
But now that I've had this new one for one month, the old one, which I still have in my closet because I haven't sold it yet,
Marco:
I look at it and I pick it up every so often and it feels ancient.
Marco:
And it feels like a big, heavy, awkward lunch tray.
Marco:
Even though a month ago, I was like, this is fine.
Marco:
This doesn't need to get any smaller.
Marco:
It really is all about what you're accustomed to.
Marco:
And as soon as you get accustomed to this new one, even though the difference in weight and in thickness is not tremendous, it is a savings that is noticeable.
Marco:
And as soon as you start noticing it, it's really hard to ever go back and to have it feel normal.
Marco:
I mean, heck, even the keyboard.
Marco:
I hate the keyboard on the new one.
Marco:
But when I use the keyboard on the old one, I'm like, this is kind of mushy.
Marco:
Like, I'm ruined.
Marco:
I'm completely ruined.
Marco:
I still hate the new one, keyboard-wise.
Marco:
But it's like... And honestly...
Marco:
I think I would hate the new keyboard a lot less if they would give me back the gaps above the left and right arrow keys.
Marco:
That has bitten me more than any other thing about this keyboard.
Marco:
The key switches, I still don't like, but I've gotten used to.
Marco:
Escape, I have mapped to Caps Lock, and it was a very easy transition.
Marco:
the shaping of those arrow keys and not having the little gaps above left and right the way they have been for years, that keeps messing me up so much because I can no longer orient myself on the arrow keys by feel reliably.
Marco:
And this, as it turns out, this is something I need quite frequently in use.
Marco:
I didn't realize it until I used one of these things for a while.
Marco:
But wow, that is a big change.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Yeah, when you go back to the old one, it's like, wow, I don't want... Even though it is in so many ways better, you use the, quote, mushy keyboard, and you see the relatively tiny little quaint little trackpad on there, and you're like, wow, this is like using a PowerBook by comparison.
Marco:
The new thing really does feel so much newer and more modern, even though in these fairly large ways, it is definitely worse.
John:
This is one of the dangers of using iOS or growing up with iOS.
John:
When I watch my son, he's mostly the one who has to do school assignments like these Google Docs, and he writes school papers and stuff in it, which is a pretty good system in terms of letting teachers and peers comment on and see their work.
John:
Anyway, because he's a child of iOS and a child of the post-PC age,
John:
Watching him try to use a word processor on a Mac just makes me want to tear my hair out because all of his cursor movement he does with the mouse.
John:
And I'm like, see these keys on the keyboard with the arrows on them?
John:
I swear to you, they will move the insertion point one character easier than you finding where the mouse is.
John:
steering your because he's not good with the mouse either steering your cursor over moving it over two guys like just use them you don't even say like option or command arrows just plain use the arrow key like it is so much faster and forward delete and just like these amazing technologies that like watching him try to do text editing because all he's ever used to is the terrible text editing on ios where you have to hold your stupid finger down you get that magnifying glass that also makes me want to tear my hair out um even after i show him the arrow keys it's not like he's like thanks dad that's a revelation i'm so much more efficient he's like no i'll go back to the mouse
John:
Yeah.
John:
So painful.
John:
Kids these days, someday they'll learn about arrow keys.
Marco:
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Oh,
Casey:
On pros leaving the Mac, apparently somebody has done a little bit of polling and research about whether or not designers would ever consider, motion designers specifically, whatever that means, would you ever consider switching to a PC?
Casey:
Yes, 42%, maybe 40%, no, 18%.
John:
I threw this in there just to reinforce the idea I said last show that professional users whose job is to do motion graphics, they're not Mac users.
John:
They're motion graphic designers, right?
John:
This is what they do.
John:
I think this means motion and video, basically video effects or transitions during the news or whatever.
John:
I think that's what this means.
John:
This is what this website is about.
John:
It's called
John:
school of motion.com so it's entirely a professional website for people who do this for a living it's not about max it's not about computers not about what tool you used to do for a living it's like i want to do this for a living and then they talk about the tools that they use so they want to get the job done they don't necessarily care about any particular and so the the survey was would you consider switching to pc so it shows that in general the bent of the site it's like oh we mostly use max to do this and we talk about programs that are available on the mac to do it
John:
um like motion i think it's still for sale um anyway would you consider switching to pc 82 are either yes or maybe only 18 say no because the bottom line is it's like well if that's the way i have to go to do motion graphics uh i will do it because you know they're not going to change their profession because the computer they like doesn't let them do what they do they're going to change platform so
John:
And again, like I said on the last show, it doesn't mean that every company that tries to make that transition will be successful.
John:
It's very disruptive to have to buy all new hardware and learn new programs and buy new licenses and deal with file formats and legacy data and all that other stuff.
John:
But in general, if a company doesn't serve a professional market like that, the market will switch very quickly because the market is not sentimental.
John:
Individual people may be sentimental.
John:
Even whole companies can be sentimental.
John:
But the market in terms of I need a bunch of people to do job X for me with computers is not sentimental.
John:
And if you don't do the job, someone else will.
John:
And whatever tool gets a job done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the next item in the list scares me deeply.
Casey:
Me too.
Casey:
It says Casey and Marco's homework.
Casey:
And I think I can speak for Marco in saying, well, maybe that I don't remember.
Casey:
That might be just me.
Casey:
But I can speak for Marco in saying, I didn't do my homework.
Casey:
So what was I supposed to have been doing?
Casey:
That could always speak for me, Casey.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
That part I was confident.
Casey:
It was the remembering part I wasn't as sure about.
Casey:
I also don't remember what the homework was.
John:
I felt bad because I was listening back to the show.
John:
Well, so people were tweeting at us like, I can't wait to hear Casey and Marco and their homework.
John:
And by that point, I had forgotten what I had assigned to you for homework.
John:
But I remember doing it, but I did it mostly as a joke because we know that you guys don't do any homework.
John:
So when I was listening back to the show, as I do, I was reminded of what the homework was.
John:
But listeners, maybe they're new listeners, they somehow thought that you were going to actually do this homework.
John:
A, remember what the homework was.
John:
And B, come to the show ready to have.
John:
The homework was... It's very optimistic.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The homework was the idea of...
John:
trying to figure out how you would distinguish between a situation where the world is moving on from PCs and we are just being left behind because we're dinosaurs, or a situation where Apple is foolishly abandoning the Mac market, even though the concept of a PC-style computer has many, many years to go and Apple is making a mistake.
John:
And the idea from the perspective of someone who loves a Mac, those can both look the same from the inside.
John:
What might you look for?
John:
What might you look for from the inside to try to distinguish those two situations?
John:
Is there something... Because they feel the same and they look the same, but is there some kind of...
John:
thing you could look at to say okay well if it if it was the case that we were being left behind as dinosaurs we would see this but if it turns out that apple is actually making a mistake we would see that instead is there anything we can look for to let us know which those two things are and couldn't think of anything on the show and so i signed it as homework and you two probably forgot about it but i don't suppose you have any new interesting thoughts on it now
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
I mean, I don't really care what the difference there is.
Marco:
I want what I want, and if Apple is not going to provide it, I'm going to yell about it.
John:
Yeah, no, I mean, that's true.
John:
I'm not saying you don't have to yell.
John:
I'm just saying, like, I think it's interesting, too, because I am interested in whether it's the most difficult to be objective about something that, you know, you care deeply about.
John:
But...
John:
it makes you kind of an enemy of progress if you know you know if the whatever the the buggy whip salesman or whatever it's like you know or as casey was saying uh the stick shift thing where if you know are you are you using your influence to actually stop the future from coming or are you right and that's not actually the future and really apple's just doing something dumb and i think it makes a difference because i don't want to to use
John:
all my power and influence and arguing skills to try to hold back progress right so i would like to know if i am you know not that i'm not going to be upset about it but i would like to know if i am actually the enemy of progress here by clinging to the idea of the personal computer right
John:
And so I'm interested in being able to determine what the situation is.
John:
Now, I feel like I'm not particularly strongly on either side of this.
John:
So I don't think this is for me personally a situation and maybe Marco doesn't care.
John:
But I think it is.
John:
I think it's a thing worth considering for not just for, you know, silly neglecting the Mac things, but for all things of this type, especially as we get older.
John:
Very often what you really don't want is for things to be different than you're used to.
John:
And it's very easy to decide that your desire to not have things change trumps everything else.
John:
And that's not... I believe in progress and I constantly want to make sure that I am not...
John:
slowly shifting to the opposite side of progress because when you see that from the outside and you see somebody who is an obvious enemy of progress and doesn't realize it, it's a pitiable situation and I never want to be in that situation.
Marco:
Well, you know, I think it's somewhat useful to look around and to see like, all right, I have these like opinions on how the types of work that I do, the types of problems that I need to solve, how these things should or need to be done.
Marco:
Obviously, one of the biggest things you could say is, well, look around at other people who have similar problems.
Marco:
Are they insisting on the same requirements?
Marco:
Are they doing things that way?
Marco:
Or did they move to something else a long time ago and you didn't?
Marco:
And they are now getting along just fine without doing the same kinds of things that you want to do, but in the new, quote, progress way.
Marco:
Obviously, it's hard to make this apply to everything.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Looking around, it's hard for people to have a lot of good data on what a lot of people are doing because mostly it's just anecdotal.
Marco:
Well, I look around and I see the other people in my office are doing this or my parents are doing this or my kids are doing this or whatever.
Marco:
You have a few friends you can look at, but most people have a pretty small sample group they can draw from for that kind of analysis.
Marco:
But I think sometimes that's enough.
Marco:
I think if you can look around and you can see, am I the last person doing this this way?
Marco:
then that's probably a sign that you are on the wrong side of things.
Marco:
But if what you are defending is still done by what seems like the majority of people who do that kind of thing, then you might still be wrong.
Marco:
You might be at the very beginning of a wave and just everyone else hasn't realized it yet either.
Marco:
but chances are you're probably at least a little bit right.
Marco:
Chances are that you're probably on the right side of that, at least for now.
Marco:
It might be something that's really forward-looking that everyone's missing, but that doesn't happen very often.
Marco:
Everyone thinks it happens a lot, but it doesn't happen very often in reality.
Casey:
I was actually having an interesting conversation with a friend of mine earlier tonight about whether or not...
Casey:
Well, he said to me something I thought was very interesting.
Casey:
And he said, desktop OSs are a solved problem.
Casey:
And I think he was being a little bit, I don't know if dramatic is the right word, but he was kind of playing up his point of view a little bit, right, to make a point.
Casey:
But he was saying, you know, desktop OSs are a solved problem.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And at first I was like, what?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
God, no.
Casey:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
But as I thought about it, I still disagree with him.
Casey:
And again, I think he was just making the point to kind of play devil's advocate.
Casey:
But I understand where he's coming from in that...
Casey:
If you look at what do we want from a desktop OS?
Casey:
And he asked me that, actually, and what I said to him was, I just want it not to be ignored, man.
Casey:
Like, I just want progress.
Casey:
But if you look at it, there's been progress.
Casey:
Like, Siri doesn't really do anything for me on the desktop, but that's progress.
Casey:
That's a big deal.
Casey:
And that's just a single data point, but it's an example of things that are happening.
Casey:
everyone has been uh moaning lately about how messages hasn't been touched on sierra that's just not right like the the rich previews or however you phrase it where for example you paste a link to a tweet and you see the tweet in the in the messages window like granted i wish i had sticker support in in sierra like i totally do i don't know that i would use it that often but i just wish i had the support for it right and
Casey:
But even something as arguably silly as rich previews and messages makes a world of difference, and that's progress.
Casey:
And so to me, I think just not even necessarily bringing iOS into macOS, but just having that continued incremental improvement, that's all I really want from a desktop OS right now.
Casey:
And to that end, my friend was kind of right that...
Casey:
In a large way, it's kind of a solved problem.
Casey:
Now, in the next breath, I'll tell you, well, is it really a solved problem?
Casey:
Look at the touch bar.
Casey:
That's this brand new paradigm that just came out.
Casey:
We don't really know what we're doing with that.
Casey:
So obviously, this is a very shaky argument.
Casey:
But when you compare that to iOS, where there's plenty of work left to be done, certainly iOS is...
Casey:
in many ways, the more interesting platform.
Casey:
Now, I'm not necessarily saying interesting to me.
Casey:
I'm not saying interesting to everyone, because personally, I still like the Mac.
Casey:
I still prefer the Mac.
Casey:
We went over this either last episode or the episode before.
Casey:
But there's a lot more progress to be made.
Casey:
And I look at people like Ben Brooks, I look at Vatici, and I look at Mike Hurley, and I see them doing everything in their jobs or nearly everything on iOS devices and
Casey:
And I come to kind of what John was saying a minute ago.
Casey:
Am I the one that's telling everyone to get off my lawn?
Casey:
Like, am I the one that's really holding on to the past?
Casey:
And I'm not saying that it is the case, but I am definitely wondering.
Casey:
And to more directly answer John's question, how do we know which one of these it is?
Casey:
I'm not sure, but right now I can tell you that it seems to me like there are some pretty direct ways to accomplish things on the Mac.
Casey:
And I can't think of a great example off the top of my head, but you can accomplish a lot of things on the Mac directly where in iOS you need to like daisy chain seven different apps to make the same operation happen.
Yeah.
Casey:
And that doesn't mean that iOS is wrong.
Casey:
But to me, as long as that's still the case, as long as you still have to write a custom workflow to get something to happen in the workflow app, which, by the way, is truly mind-boggling amazing.
Casey:
But as long as that's how you get things done, like that is the official way to get things done on iOS...
Casey:
I don't think that the Mac is dead quite yet.
Casey:
And I'm not even talking about writing code or anything like that.
Casey:
I'm just talking about general things that professionals do.
Casey:
And you can define professionals as professional podcasters, as professional project managers, as CMOs, whatever Ben Brooks' title is.
Casey:
I don't even remember anymore.
Casey:
But if they're jumping through hoops in order to get their work done, even if they don't necessarily feel like it's jumping through hoops, it's still daisy chaining a bunch of different steps together.
Casey:
As long as that's still a thing, I don't think the Mac is dead.
Casey:
But when that stops being a thing or it becomes even easier to kind of daisy chain all these things and you're not writing custom workflows because apps are supporting it, then I start to wonder, maybe I'm the old man here after all.
Marco:
Well, this is why I think it's important to really make these observational comparisons, which I guess are called observations, on people who do the same kind of work that you do.
Marco:
People you mentioned are podcasters and writers, and the podcasters all still use Macs to podcast with.
Marco:
Not all podcasters, but the ones you mentioned.
Marco:
And a writer can get away with using iOS only or primarily a lot more easily than a programmer can today.
Marco:
And so I think once people... You and I, the three of us, are all programmers.
Marco:
Once a whole bunch of programmers dump their PCs and Macs and do all of their work on iOS...
Marco:
then I think we have to start looking, okay, there's a thing here.
Marco:
We should consider this.
Marco:
We should pay attention to this.
Marco:
And maybe we are wrong at that point.
Marco:
But until that happens, which might never come, again, I want to be very careful here in how I phrase this.
Marco:
You said the Mac isn't dead until this happens.
Marco:
And a lot of people, you phrase these things in a way that presents them as an inevitable future.
Marco:
But I do want to be clear here that when I talk about this, I'm not necessarily considering this an inevitable future.
Marco:
The future... I mean, obviously, OSs eventually do die and fall out of favor and fall out of use and maintenance.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I am still not yet convinced that the PC-style operating system is destined to be sidelined and killed in favor of the mobile-style operating system within the foreseeable future.
Marco:
Eventually, on an infinite timescale, it might happen, but...
Marco:
I don't see this as the obvious foretold future that is certain to happen.
Marco:
But anyway, I think you really have to just look at people who do the kind of work you do.
Marco:
And most of the people who are talking about going iOS only or iOS being the inevitable future...
Marco:
Most of these people are writers and analysts and executives.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
And there's a lot of people who that will be fine for.
Marco:
But if you start talking to people who do different kinds of things with their computers, including things that we all that all three of us do.
Marco:
then you start very quickly to hit limits of like, oh, well, you kind of can't do that on iOS yet.
Marco:
Or that's really difficult and clunky to do on iOS.
Marco:
I don't think you can look at a bunch of people who professionally write as their main job and say like, well, they're all using an iPad, so therefore I should be using an iPad.
Marco:
You should be more concerned if people who do the kinds of things you do, like programming, if they switch.
Marco:
And that's when you should pay attention.
Yeah.
Casey:
I largely agree with you, but I don't think it's fair to classify Federico Mike and Ben Brooks all as simply writers.
Casey:
I mean, I think they're doing... I didn't say simply.
Marco:
That's important.
Marco:
It's a job that is very amenable to iOS primary or iOS only work.
Marco:
And there are a lot of jobs, which is the case.
Marco:
But there's a lot where it isn't also.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess my point is that I don't want to paint the image because I can hear Mike Hurley and Federico screaming at us from the future.
Casey:
It's not that all they do is write.
Casey:
They're doing sometimes relatively intense spreadsheet work.
Casey:
I mean, look at the quarterly earnings reports that Federico farts out in the span of like four seconds because of all the workflows.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
he's he's built and and you know mike and and and steven hackett are you know billing or invoicing um advertisers and doing all sorts of like traditional businessy things uh so i don't i i agree with you that that it is mostly writer like things on the surface but there's a lot more to it when you start digging in but that doesn't negate your point that the these people with the exception perhaps of federico actually these people are not developers they're not writing code well except federico on the
Marco:
I mean, Federico's an outlier in a lot of ways.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
But yeah, it's not the sort of thing that the three of us do, but I don't want to discount it in summary as legitimate work that is more than just writing prose on a piece of paper.
Casey:
That's all.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
No, and I never said legitimate or simple.
Marco:
I'm not saying these.
Marco:
I'm not characterizing it this way.
Marco:
It's just different software needs and different things you need from your computing devices and different levels of flexibility and access to things like files and inter-program communication and the integration of lots of things within the same data set like what you need with programming.
Marco:
There are certain strengths and weaknesses to both OS styles, but again, I think
Marco:
When people who do the kinds of things you do are switching in mass, that's when to pay attention.
Marco:
Before that happens and unless that happens, I don't think you need to be worried too much that you are the dinosaur holding back progress.
Marco:
Also, it's quite impressive that John thinks that we can hold back progress.
John:
Well, no, I'm just saying like, what are you spending your time doing?
John:
Cause like I said, if you see somebody yelling against it, even if they, if they don't actually do anything, it is not, it seems like they're, they're wasting their time and it's a sad situation where they don't realize that the world is passing them by.
John:
Um, one more item on this, uh, that I think about is sort of the second level version of checking yourself, which is more focused on Apple, the company and less focused on, uh,
John:
whether what the future of computing is and that is the question of whether it's important for apple to be in the personal computer market so even if you seed everything that marco said they're like okay well people doing these types of jobs still need pc or whatever is it the best thing for the company called apple to
John:
does it need to be in the pc market and that's what we talk about like oh well they need you know the max and developer ios what if they have a development environment on ipads well it's not the same blah blah could you develop ios applications on bcs like that's the next question is even if you stipulate pcs aren't going away anytime soon should apple continue to sell pcs is the mac uh only hanging around for old time's sake and
John:
tradition and affection but but it would be better for the company to allow all the people who develop for ios to do so on a platform that someone else maintains and uh really in us arguing for apple to stay in the market really we're just trying to like you know i mean we've made the argument a million times so like every every other alternative is worse so we would be sad but from the perspective of apple the company they may say yes every we agree every alternative is worse than the mac but
John:
the Mac is no longer worth the money for us to invest in.
John:
And rather than letting it limp along with us, never updating our stuff and you being all mad about it.
John:
Why don't we just get out of that business the same way we get out of printers and wifi hubs and whatever the hell else they're not in.
John:
And won't that be refreshing?
John:
We can finally concentrate.
John:
on the thing we do best which is the iphone with some ancillary ios type things and blah blah blah blah i i think you know obviously i disagree with that or whatever but that's that's i still keep it in mind as the second the second possibility the first being that you know that you know we're on the wrong side of history and the second is we're on the right side of history but just because we love apple and just because it's the best that it would actually be better for the company apple to get out of this business so we could concentrate on the other stuff which
John:
again i i don't buy but i still i still entertain that as a thought experiment that i that i revisit to make sure that it's not the case because that can sneak up on you too where you're like you feel so strongly that you're right that like look everybody who's editing video is doing it on a big powerful personal computer personal computers can't go away i'm a video editor i need to edit video i look at all the other people who are adding video and no one's doing it on an ipad clearly the pc is a thing and then to make the leap therefore apple needs to make a new mac pro does apple need to make a mac pro or do you just need to switch to windows and be sad
John:
Like, you know, because again, pros will use whatever they have to use to get the job done.
John:
And the more like an appliance, this is what I was talking about when Marco was talking about like getting the Surface Studio, the more you use a computer like an appliance to get your job done as a professional, the less tied you are effectively, if not emotionally, to the particular platform you're using.
John:
So if you're just going to be in Lightroom all day and the Surface Studio is the best, you know, dedicated Lightroom appliance, you go into the office, sit down in front of it, all you do is Lightroom, Lightroom, Lightroom all day long.
John:
Maybe that is better than any solution Apple has to offer.
John:
And maybe Apple staying in that business is just some sentimental thing that you care about.
John:
But realistically speaking, we would all be much happier if Apple got out of it and stopped making that line of computers entirely.
John:
And you just sat down in front of your server studio and gave that business to Microsoft, some company that's actually interested in pursuing it.
Marco:
Yeah, well, as soon as Apple starts being managed by the numbers that way, they're going to find themselves, I think, in a very boring and slowly declining place, whether the numbers suggest so or not.
Marco:
That is a very, very fast way to become Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.
Marco:
That's...
Marco:
There was this wonderful Steve Jobs video that floated around Reddit a couple weeks ago about how it takes five years to realize when the bit flips and you start making computers just to make money and not to make better computers or something like that.
Marco:
I'm probably butchering it.
John:
um he also said he would milk the mac for all it's worth and move on to the next big thing and guess what the mac is it's not like an analogy he was talking about specifically the mac the mac we're talking about now milk it for all it's worth move on the next thing it's clear he thought the next thing was the iphone and the ipad and it's pretty clear the next thing is the iphone and ipad but we're still making mac so in some ways it would be like pursuing your passion not continuing to make the mac just because you've always made it if the company itself is enthusiastic about ios devices only um
John:
than continuing to make Macs in a disappointing way.
John:
You know, it's not as if like, oh, well, you're just going to go... If you're going to go by the numbers, you say, oh, I should go where the big business is.
John:
But maybe the passion is just not in it anymore for the Macs.
John:
Maybe they see it as a declining business that they're not interested in.
John:
And isn't it better for all of us to divorce this dysfunctional relationship, stop making the Mac, force everybody to go to Windows, or whatever, which will force more money into that market that will hopefully motivate Microsoft to make the Surface Studio better,
Marco:
you know i'm again i'm not recommending any of this it's just these are all thought experiments and all things that i revisit i revisit and mostly reject but if you never revisit them you'll they'll sneak up on you well but here's the problem with this thinking so you start running the company by the numbers and you think well it'll be fine well you know we'll we'll let the mac languish or we'll kill it because it's not you know it's not where we want to go or whatever whatever the reason doesn't matter
John:
But it's not by the numbers as they're not passionate about it.
John:
It's the past and they're passionate about the future.
John:
So they're running it by their passion.
John:
They're not being a slave to the past.
John:
They're saying what we're interested in is, I don't know, maybe they're interested in AR or whatever, but maybe they're not interested in the Mac anymore.
John:
So I would say it's the opposite of running it by the number.
John:
Because the numbers would tell you why throw away a $22 billion business, right?
John:
That's free money.
John:
Why are you throwing that away?
John:
He said, we're throwing it away so we can concentrate more fully on the thing that we really believe is the future, which is the opposite of Steve Ballmer.
John:
Steve Ballmer would keep the Mac going forever and just do exactly what the customers wanted forever and ever as the rest of the world moves on.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
I feel like that's more of the Steve Ballmer way.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
Apple would definitely not keep selling the same products forever.
John:
No, I mean, in terms of trying to do what that market wants exactly.
John:
They would be giving us Big Macs with lots of ports and constantly revising them and making them satisfied in the way that IBM mainframe customers are satisfied.
John:
IBM will continue to make mainframes for its mainframe customers and give them exactly what they want, all the while the whole rest of the world is moving on from mainframes.
John:
But they don't know.
John:
They're like, it's fine.
John:
They keep making us better and better mainframes.
John:
And we love mainframes.
John:
And they wake up one day and the entire world has moved on.
John:
And they're like, wait, there's only like 10 of us left.
John:
But we were so happy for all these years.
John:
And we were happy to give IBM all this money.
John:
And they kept making these awesome mainframes for us.
John:
And the world has moved on past you, right?
John:
So I feel like that's more of a balmer thing.
John:
Fair.
Marco:
But everything you're saying about the Mac, what happens when they apply that exact same logic to the iPhone?
John:
well they can i mean if they're no longer passionate about the iphone and they think the next big thing is something else you know then they should like it's it's exactly the same thing as steve the steve jobs saying like milk the mac for all it's worth move on to the next big thing eventually it's milk the iphone for all it's worth move on to the next big thing because if you don't
John:
someone else will like someone else will eat your lunch if you don't eat you know cannibalizing your business apple is the one who cannibalized its own ipod sales apple didn't cannibalize ipod sales the sales curve for ipods would look like the same big hump with spikes on it for the holidays it would look exactly the same but someone else would have replaced it whether it's samsung or microsoft or whoever whoever would have won that war if apple didn't cannibalize the ipod someone else would so it's not like apple
John:
bank the company on the ipod and said it's going to be ipod forever and remember when people were saying the ipod is going to dwarf the mac and now apple is just an ipod company and the apple store was the ipod store right apple is the one who cannibalized the ipod it turns out the ipod arc was obviously shorter than we think the iphone arc is going to be the iphone arc could last our whole lives for all we know
John:
right or longer um but that's that's the challenge you know the innovators dilemma and all that other crap that's the challenge of business uh and the mac in all these graphs is this aberration that never goes up and never goes down but just keeps on trucking and i think they're you know i'm again i'm not i'm playing devil's advocate i'm just saying like these here these are things that are worth thinking about i don't find them convincing if i had to make the argument i would say apple needs to continue making the mac and should do much better job at it because the time has not come because i i mostly uh i'm on the same page as marco like
John:
Other people who are doing these tasks are not currently using anything that's not like a PC.
John:
They're using PCs to do them.
John:
Like, they're not using Surface tablets.
John:
They're not using, at this point, they're still not using the Surface Studio.
John:
They're using PCs, whether they're Windows PCs...
John:
or Unix workstations running Maya or Macs.
John:
They're just not using iPads to do these jobs, right?
John:
And that's, I think that is, you know, Marco didn't do his homework, but he came up with a pretty reasonable last minute scribbling while the teacher's coming around and collecting the papers.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's how i got through school yeah i think that is a thing to look for um and you have to be careful because if you're just looking at the people who are like hanging out in the same circles as you then it's all like sort of self-selecting it's like well all my friends still use pcs but maybe every kid graduating school is doing you know like for example digital video like if every kid graduating film school is shooting digital video and editing digital video and you're like well all my friends are still shooting on film so film's never gonna die you're you're being blind you're missing it right
John:
But I think in this case, for the jobs that we're talking about, certainly programming, because I think we have a good view on that, not just for iOS and Mac programming, but just in all realms, that serious programming is still done in PC-style devices.
John:
Video editing, for the most part, is still done in PC-style devices, but you got to watch the kids.
John:
Watch the kids coming into film school.
John:
Are they editing their film school project on an iPad or on a Surface Studio or on anything like that?
John:
uh you know that's that's sort of like the leading indicator and that's the thing to watch for i i think right now the answer is that pc style computers are still the thing to do my big fear is that apple decides that it's not worth them being in the business i don't i don't particularly have a fear fear that in the near future the pc style of computing is going to go away i have a fear that the apple
John:
personal computer meaning the mac is going to go away because apple doesn't care about or neglects it to the point and that's the worst case scenario where you still have to use a pc but you no longer get to choose the mac because it's you know it's no longer any good for you that's when i switched to linux
Casey:
Got to help us all.
Casey:
Quick side note about that, though, John.
Casey:
I had some co-workers at the last gig that did use Surface tablets to do their work, like to write code, to do their work, to do – that was their computer.
Casey:
There were only a couple of them, and I think by and large they kind of regretted their decision.
Casey:
But in that sense, it is happening.
Casey:
That is a thing that happens from time to time.
John:
i keep putting the surface into but i'm thinking more of like using the touch interface to the surface device even more of the surface studio where you're where you are touching the screen that in many respects the surface books and all that stuff they're just a convertible laptop like it's muddled by the fact that that windows is this unified platform but yeah i have people at work who do programming stuff on surfaces too but it's just a laptop at that point it's like a weird laptop with a bendy hinge and
John:
And it's running Windows, and they're running terminal stuff, and they have a keyboard, and they have a trackpad pointing device, and yeah, they also have a pen, and yeah, it can kind of be a tablet, but essentially they're using a laptop.
John:
They have Windows with title bars and scroll bars.
John:
It's confusing because of the way Microsoft has done its unified OS strategy, but I would still totally classify those...
John:
as pc style because it's it is very distinct from the ios style even when i see my daughter she's got like a keyboard logitech keyboard thing for her ipad even when she does you know form of laptop with her you know that's wonder twins for you you guys missed that show anyway um but she makes a little laptop out of her ipad and her keyboard
John:
There's no... It's still not a laptop.
John:
Yes, it looks like one.
John:
Yes, there's a kind of a vertical-ish screen and a horizontal-ish keyboard, but there's no pointer on her screen.
John:
She's not using a trackpad.
John:
There are no windows.
John:
There are no scroll bars and scroll thumbs.
John:
There's no menu bar along the top of... It is not a PC computing experience.
John:
She's not, you know, like...
John:
it's yeah we we live in a strange time we live in a strange transitional time but uh some things defy categorization but i think the salient points like what makes it a pc and what makes it a pc style computing environment are pretty clear for me obviously it's all about windows because uh what the hell imagine if the 28 inch uh surface studio uh
John:
did not have windows like everything was full screen or split screen like it does on the ipad we would say this is the biggest waste of a 28 inch screen in the world unless you're only ever in one app doing lightroom all the time then fine but for a general purpose computing device getting back to marco's idea that you can do more than one thing at a time uh a general purpose computing device that can only show apps in full screen on a 20 inch display is just a very wrong-headed idea and i would say that's not pc computing that's more like ios
Marco:
Here's a question.
Marco:
In what product is Apple really stepping on the gas and really firing on all cylinders?
Casey:
AirPods.
Casey:
I know it's not a valid answer in this context, but I cannot stop talking about how much I love my AirPods.
John:
I would say the iPhone.
John:
I mean, I think the last show I recently listened to it, so it's fresh in my mind, and Marco said, like, oh, the new iPhone 7, like, internally the changes aren't that big.
John:
Like, look at the graphs, man.
John:
Like, every part of this, every part of this that can be better computing-wise and capacity-wise...
John:
is better by leaps and bounds, by, like, 90s-era PC leaps and bounds.
John:
Like, it's not... The CPU is not just a little bit faster.
John:
The GPU is not just a little bit faster.
John:
The flash capacity is, like, the max is... You know, isn't it double?
John:
Like, you can only get 128 last year, now you can get 256s.
John:
It's fantastically better internal.
John:
You know, the only thing that's not...
John:
you know better about it by like oh they're not standing again it's like oh the case is the same shape and even there they did you know they changed the surface in such a way that marco's you know was saying is his favorite product of last year because it made such a difference in in day-to-day use um so i i still think iphone is is you know pedal to the metal and airpods are part of that are part of their weird headphone thing which by the way has bitten me i don't have a usbc laptop but i've been bitten by the headphones thing like five times recently
John:
where I thought I had everything I needed and was going to plug a headphone in and realized, even on the plane coming back, I brought the adapter for me to use my noise-canceling headphones, but then my daughter wanted to use some headphones, too, and plug it in.
John:
It's like, oh, well, I only have one adapter.
John:
Like, you always think you have everything you need, but here, just use it.
John:
Oh, never mind.
John:
or gone on a car trip and you know before yeah and we're gonna plug in my wife's old car she just had aux in with like a headphone port and i brought my ipod with me or my phone with me and we can listen to like the podcast that i'm in the middle of and we get in the car and start driving away and i grab the little aux cord from the center console and pick it up and go no there's no place i can plug that into my phone and of course i'm not carrying the adapter around with me um so yeah the struggle is real as they say
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Final bit of follow up.
Casey:
Speaking of cars.
Casey:
So we're almost done.
Casey:
Well, this is one of those episodes where follow up isn't exactly follow up, which is probably most episodes.
Casey:
Anyway, Samu Balsamid, who is a co-host of the wheel bearings podcast, which if you ever wanted neutral, but with people who actually knew what they were talking about, you should look up wheel bearings.
Casey:
It's pretty good.
Casey:
Anyway, he writes in to say, the 2016-2017 model year Accords do indeed support both CarPlay and Android Auto, as do most new Hondas.
Casey:
The only Hondas that are still waiting for Android Auto and CarPlay update are the Fit and the HR-V.
Casey:
I'm not sure what that is.
Casey:
I know the CR-V, but not the HR-V.
John:
You don't know what the HR-V is?
John:
Be glad.
John:
It's terrible.
Yeah.
Casey:
Anyway, the 2018 Odyssey is debuting in a couple of weeks at the Detroit Auto Show.
Casey:
So that makes me think that Tina's car does indeed have CarPlay.
Casey:
Does it not?
John:
So here's the question.
John:
I've never used CarPlay.
John:
I've seen pictures of it online.
John:
And I think I've even seen, like, screenshots of, like, Marco's CarPlay stuff.
John:
And I've seen Marco's disembodied CarPlay testing watchables thing, right?
Yeah.
John:
But I don't know how CarPlay works.
John:
Do I have to download an app onto my phone called CarPlay?
John:
No.
John:
So you think if I just plug a phone into my wife's car with a wire, because we don't have the wireless version, that something will happen on the screen to indicate you are in CarPlay now?
John:
uh apparently if you just uh plug it in there'll be one of those alerts like a computer where it says do you trust this car or something like that and then magic happens now i've not witnessed this myself this is just real-time follow-up but uh that's what i'm being told do i trust this car yeah last time tina was saying there was only on certain trim levels bottom line is this is like the schrodinger's cat of carplay support until i actually try it her car both has carplay support and doesn't have carplay support but seriously i didn't i it had not occurred to me to think like
John:
do i have to download an app and once i download the app do i do a thing or is it just plugging it in and i think basically we've never actually plugged any of our iphones into her car because it's all been bluetooth so it could be that that's totally right as soon as i plug it in oh john how do you not know this already i don't be the first thing i tried i've driven that car uh onto and off of the driveway like twice that's how far i've driven that car
Casey:
Why don't you just go outside right now and give it a shot?
Casey:
I'm kind of not kidding.
Casey:
I'm really not kidding.
Casey:
It won't take too long.
Casey:
It'll take just a minute.
John:
All right.
John:
I'll be back.
John:
Hang on.
Casey:
So literally, as I'm saying this, Tina is sending me a text saying that it is not a thing.
Casey:
Hold on.
Marco:
I'm looking up the HR-V.
Marco:
It looks basically like the Honda X1.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Standard on Accord EX, EXL, and Touring trim.
Marco:
But I think she doesn't have the EX, so I think it's optional for her trim.
Marco:
Is it just not there, or was it optional?
Marco:
That's what we don't know.
Casey:
That I don't know.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Honda USA...
Casey:
I hate that whenever you go to, like, Honda or Audi or whatever, it's the corporate.
Casey:
This is the most American thing I think I've ever said.
Casey:
But why does it not go directly to America?
Marco:
It's just like in the country list drop-downs.
Marco:
Why are we not the first sign listed?
Marco:
Like, I know alphabetically we're not.
Casey:
This is barbaric.
Marco:
Do I really have to scroll through?
Marco:
How likely is it that I'm actually from, like, you know, any of these other places?
Marco:
Like, just put the U.S.
Marco:
on top for all the stupid, arrogant Americans and put everything else below it.
Casey:
I am fully behind this.
Casey:
uh tina's saying there was no option it's uh she she does not have an ex it's sports special it was not an option there's basically no options period anyway well i guess john went outside in the cold in the winter for no reason oh well i'm sure he won't be mad i'm now getting yelled at by tina that nobody wants to believe her i did believe you tina we just wanted to send john outside with that too this is basically every conversation i've had with aaron ever
Casey:
Aaron tells me this is not a thing or this is a thing.
Casey:
No, you've got to be wrong.
Casey:
Oh, it turns out you're right.
Casey:
It's every conversation I've ever had with Aaron.
Marco:
Yeah, I believe we have words for this.
Marco:
One of the more charitable ones would probably be mansplaining.
John:
Oh, the magic of technology.
John:
hi john here's what happened so i go to the car and i i get all my stuff and my cables and everything and i i plug you know get the car turned on i plug the thing in i wait to see something pop up on my phone screen nothing ever pops up wait a couple seconds and i hear you two talking
John:
about what i'm doing right now like talking about going to the car configurator the the honda website and stuff like that because tina's phone popped on right so tina my wife is listening to the phone upstairs on bluetooth and the car is paired with her phone and so it start for a second i'm like what in the world is going on that is so amazing
John:
ah the magic of bluetooth anyway uh my result of the short experiment was that plugging in the phone does nothing i was not prompted to do anything i couldn't find anything in any of the menus that mentioned carplay or anything about carplay i could connect my phone by bluetooth but that's not how carplay works it's not a bluetooth audio thing so uh inconclusive results but at the very least merely plugging my phone in did nothing
Marco:
While you were gone, I'm pretty sure we found out that your wife was right the whole time and you didn't even need to go outside.
John:
See, that's... Thanks, Sam.
John:
Guy on the car podcast who knows something, supposedly.
John:
Your wife knows better.
Casey:
I'm sure we'll get some feedback on this one.
Marco:
Amazingly, sometimes we don't know what we're talking about.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
And this is why we used to do a car show, kids.
Marco:
People love when you don't know what you're talking about and you do a car podcast.
Marco:
People really like that.
John:
I reject this characterization.
John:
I know a lot about cars.
John:
I know a lot about what I was talking about.
John:
You two keep saying that about yourselves, but I reject that.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
This episode is turning to be quite good.
Casey:
I love how we just have no structure this week.
Marco:
We did follow-up.
John:
All those items were a legit follow-up.
John:
One of them was even homework.
John:
They went long.
John:
Sometimes follow-up goes long, but that tends to happen after lots of stuff builds up if we haven't recorded for a while.
John:
the problem the problematic part we have here is as we transition to topics go look what's lurking there let's look at the notes the very first item who put that in there who is that it's gonna be casey did you put that in there yes i don't think i want to talk about that right it's just like it's the same thing we've been talking about for the past month on the show i don't feel like is that like i read parts of that article it's gone but it's done before yeah you deleted it but um oh god here we go is there anything in that article that is not something that we've already talked about that's my only question
Casey:
Probably not.
Casey:
So the article in question, hopefully we'll cut this from the show, but the article in question is Chuck Von Rosbatch.
Casey:
I probably pronounced that wrong.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
But anyway, his Apple 2016 year in review, which TLDR, some things suck, some things don't.
Casey:
It's a great post.
John:
It is good.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's good.
John:
It's totally good.
John:
You know, he's expressing in a much more succinct way his position on the same issues that we have talked about.
Casey:
Yeah, succinct is not necessarily the word I would use.
John:
Well, it's more succinct than like hours and hours of audio.
John:
But like, you know, we're both, we're all Mac fans.
John:
And we're all kind of experiencing some dissatisfaction with the treatment of the Mac.
John:
And we've talked about it at length.
John:
And this was his take on it.
John:
And it was good.
John:
And it was articulate.
John:
And it was an expression of his opinion and his desires and his hopes and dreams.
John:
And it was a good post.
John:
But for the purposes of discussion on the show, I'm wondering if it is bringing any new angle that we haven't already given our opinions on umpteen times.
Casey:
Yeah, and since we'll be asked about it... God, who was it that wrote this?
Casey:
Hold on one second.
Casey:
Chris Adamson?
Casey:
Yes, Chris Adamson's post.
Marco:
Also very good, although I honestly... I don't know if the Mac Pro was the best choice there, but we're seeing now from a lot of people saying similar things.
Marco:
This is not a coincidence.
Marco:
This is not an accident.
Marco:
This is not a trend or people being wrong.
Marco:
This is legitimately...
Marco:
Apple is causing concern in many of its customers and many of its best, biggest fans and longest time customers.
Marco:
And so I think if I can summarize in a very quick way, or at least try to put a cap on this for now, 2017 is going to be a very important year for Apple to prove a lot of big things to the market and to its customers.
Marco:
Right now, there's a lot of things where the...
Marco:
The answer from Apple so far is either silence or just wait.
Marco:
Wait till we see what we have next or something like that.
Marco:
2017, a lot of this stuff is coming due.
Marco:
If 2017 passes through the whole year and there isn't a major new iPhone design and there isn't some answer to the Mac Pro and there isn't maybe better quarterly earnings...
Marco:
These are some pretty big things.
Marco:
There have been bad signs on these fronts for the last year or so, but everyone's, oh, next year or soon, or this is going to be out soon, or this is going to be fixed soon, or the next iPhone is going to be great, or those quarterly earnings were an anomaly.
Marco:
All those promises are going to be due this year.
Marco:
And a year from now, when we're presumably still having this podcast and still doing follow-up, we will see, were all of our concerns unfounded?
Marco:
How well are all these complaints going to age?
Marco:
Are we all wrong?
Marco:
Is Apple about to release over the course of the next year?
Marco:
Amazing things that are going to blow our minds and we're going to feel good about the Mac again and we're going to feel good about Apple's prospects again and we're going to feel good about the iPhone design again, all this stuff.
Marco:
And their numbers are going to go up and everyone on the market is going to be happy.
Marco:
Is that really going to happen this year?
Marco:
It might.
Marco:
We don't know yet.
Marco:
We'll find out.
Marco:
And I really hope things go better because...
Marco:
Frankly, if they don't, I'm going to have to find other stuff to talk about because I'm tired of being sad all the time about all the stuff I love.
John:
Wargrove in the chat room had a good turn of phrase, which I'm going to slightly improve.
John:
2017, year of macOS on the desktop.
John:
Nice.
John:
Pretty good, huh?
John:
Nice.
John:
Ooh.
John:
Yikes.
John:
I know Marco wanted to put a capper on this, but unfortunately the next item in the topic list is the one tiny sliver of new angle on this, yes, very old entire topic that happened to occur to me and that I tweeted earlier.
John:
Earlier today, it was in response to Michael size.
John:
He's had a series of articles on this, on this whole same thing, like so many other Mac bloggers and he's an old time Mac user and he's feeling all the same things.
John:
Uh, and one of his posts was on finding an alternative to what he calls Mac OS 10.
John:
Uh, but he's, he's not, he's not on board with their naming, I guess.
John:
Um, and he links to, uh, Wesley Moore's, uh, post about this, about, you know, trying to find, I'm looking into a different Linux distributions and stuff like people are looking for alternatives for, for Mac OS 10.
John:
They're, they're,
John:
not looking for an escape patch but like at the very least trying to see what else is out there like before i was happy using the mac and i wasn't really looking at alternatives but now i'm starting to consider like hey what else is out there how's windows doing you know is linux any good let me try a few different distributions stuff like that uh and then gruber also talked about anyway so uh this michael slide post uh what i tweeted i used the little quote tweet feature which i actually i'm starting to like because it gives me room to actually write something
John:
um while also including their tweet welcome to like two years ago john i know i mean my client has supported it the ios version of twitter it's great it's totally up to date but i i'm still my habits are based on the old ways talk about like not knowing when to move on no i use it but like my normal twitter way would be to like i write a tweet and then paste the last 20 characters be the shortened url right but by by quoting you get some characters back anyway
John:
What I tweeted was the last time Mac users were seriously passing around articles like this, articles like the one about finding alternatives, was during the transition from macOS to macOS 10.
John:
And as I tweeted to someone else who had replied, someone replied, oh, I can't wait for the million replies that are going to say, and now it's the transition from macOS to iOS.
John:
Which, yes, there were many of those replies.
John:
But, you know, my commentary on the follow-up to this was analysis intentionally omitted.
John:
a because it's twitter and you don't have room to do that and b i like to just let this tweet lie because it is like a raw shock test you know the last time i saw articles about this was the transition of mac os to mac os 10 half the people are going to see that and say yeah and weren't those dummies wrong because mac os 10 was awesome and all the people clinging to mac os were a bunch of chumps and the other half of the people are going to say yeah that's around the last time the mac almost died and we came through it by the skin of our teeth
John:
by you know struggling mightily to get this next based os uh up into ship shape so that it's satisfying to mac users and then yet another group of people are going to say yes but a lot of people actually did leave the mac then it's just that they were replaced by unix nerds and it all evened out or actually was a net win and so many different views on how the the os the mac os 10 transition went you know i'm i'm fairly intimately familiar
John:
You're with a Mac OS 10 transition, so I know what I think about it.
John:
But so many different people had different ideas of what it was like.
John:
You guys didn't experience this.
John:
You didn't experience the incredible turmoil.
John:
I'm going to say much worse than the current turmoil.
John:
Much, much, much worse of...
John:
a a die practically a dying company certainly a dying os like this this is you know the in your parlance the windows 95 you know no memory protection uh no preemptive multitasking like trying to get from that world into a modern os while trying to preserve something anything that was good about the mac it totally felt like apple as a company could be dying which is not a thing that we are currently worried about right now at all right and
John:
and certainly that the mac could be dying along with the company because even if they survive what what is what comes out the other side of this thing will not be a mac it'll be some stupid unix thing with a terminal that won't be a mac at all and everything is terrible um in the end you know i think we successfully navigated that transition but all of the participants all the players were there
John:
there wasn't that much podcasting going on but I can tell you that there were many many people who are from the old school Mac world complaining just like we've been complaining on this podcast through every channel available to them again Twitter didn't exist either but like
John:
use net lots of arguing on use net i remember arguing with some some person named guy english which totally sounds like a made-up name on use net about the merits of classic mac os versus next i don't know who that guy was um on you know on the the nascent web and on our blogs and in person and in mac user groups and the pages of magazines and letters to editors about how the mac was going um
John:
And the reason I referenced that is not because I think we're in the same situation again.
John:
I think that was a way more dire situation, which gives me some comfort because it's like I came through that and we're nowhere near as bad as that is.
John:
But just to say that no one was seriously circulating, check out these alternatives to Mac OS X in the circles among diehard Mac users.
John:
Obviously, there's always articles about like, hey, if you're thinking of using this, look at this alternative, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But within...
John:
Our sort of blogging and tweeting circles of all these people who have been using Macs for years and love it.
John:
I hadn't seen an article like this in ages, let alone a series of them.
John:
To find one, I have to go back to the last time our little community was in turmoil.
John:
And that was when people were like, oh, if they're going to do this to the Mac, I might as well use Windows or I might as well try Linux.
John:
Or I'm going to leave the Mac and go to, you know, there was, you know, no one said they're going to leave the Mac and go to Palm OS because that wasn't, you know.
John:
Anyway, it gives me some historical perspective, but it also highlights the fact that even though the current situation is not as bad as it was then, it is at least of the same type that these kinds of articles are...
John:
are in circulation and are of interest to everybody even if you don't feel that way even if you just want to read it so you can sneer at the people who are you know claiming that the sky is falling or whatever the fact is the articles are being passed around and people are reading them people are thinking about it and that hasn't happened in in a long time how long ago was the macro standardization 2001 ish so we had a good 15 years of peace uh and now now we're gonna have a little bit of if not war then maybe at
Wow.
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John:
since clearly the mac is doomed and the future is not even ios its voice uh tell us about your google home my google home yeah so i i got a google home as a gift my wife slash gift for the family uh it's complicated by the fact that our photos are you know i signed up for google photos using my one terabyte of google can we back up for a second
Marco:
I heard from your wife that you got this Google Home as a gift... I'm getting to that.
Marco:
...as a gift to her and then paired it to your phone.
John:
I'm about to.
John:
It's not paired to the phone.
John:
I'm about to explain this.
John:
Did it say Homer on it?
John:
It's obviously for the whole family because it just sits in a room.
John:
It's not like one of us has it on their desk or something, right?
John:
But one of the things that it can do for you is you can ask it to display your photos on your TV.
John:
So show me pictures of whoever...
John:
on my chromecast and it will do that i don't have chromecast yet but i plan to get one they're like 30 bucks or whatever it's not a big deal and i do have hdmi ports available on the side of my tv so i'm going to do that um but all of our google photos are associated with my google account not hers even though she has the iphone the photo library
John:
on her 5k iMac under her account so she owns that but i mean and this is actually a feature i like the fact that we can do this i had one terabyte of google storage that i use for other things and so when it came time to to look into google photos i said i can run the google photos thing on your account on your 5k iMac but use it to upload all of your photos from the family photo library up to my google account storage because i'm the one with one terabyte of storage and so i
John:
I have all the Google photos, and you can only associate the Google Home with one Google account.
John:
It was the first thing I searched by Googling, because I saw how you could set up, like, okay, now how do I add another account?
John:
Because you know in all the Google web properties, you can be signed into mobile accounts and switch among them.
John:
I thought, surely that's a thing, but I immediately found out that Google Home currently is limited to being connected to one Google account.
John:
So it is connected to my Google account, and the reason it's connected to my Google account is because...
John:
i'm the one with all the photos and that's one of the one of the few things that this thing can do for me so that's that's limitation number one uh about this limitation number two is i mean it's it's a big number two we'll link in the show notes this article dan morin wrote about uh these devices because he's been an avid uh i look forward to the summary of this like on like the book jacket like john syracusa calls google home dot dot dot a big number two
John:
yeah well you know the number two thing is that basically like amazon echo has a big lead and it does way more stuff right it just does especially in terms of home automation those other things like it's been out longer it has more integrations um
John:
And so if you're looking for something you can take out of the box and hook up a bunch of 50 different things to and make your own actions, this is not that thing.
John:
Someone asked me on Twitter, if you had to do it over again, would you still buy the Google Home?
John:
And I'm like, how do you even know I have a Google Home?
John:
And what do you talk about doing it over again?
John:
I just got the Google Home.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But the reason I got it, and I think we talked about this before when I said I was interested to get it, the reason I got it is because I believe in the promise.
John:
I believe in the promise of Google Home as a product.
John:
The actuality of Google Home as a product is that it's nicer looking than the Echo.
John:
In some ways, it's better in terms of, you know, I think maybe the speaker is a little bit better and it's smaller.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh you know it's it's a little bit more polished i think uh but i'm totally buying it because i believe that google will eventually be better at all the things that i care about which is understanding what i'm saying and find me finding me useful information and answers and i do use google calendar we all use google calendar i use google from my email we have all our photos on google in theory this has access to more of our stuff than the amazon echo would
John:
And I subscribe to Google Play because I subscribe to Google Play family thing to get YouTube read or whatever.
John:
So I can say things like, you know, I hate OK Google, but that's what it is instead of Alexa.
John:
I wish you could make that configure.
John:
But I could say, OK, Google, play some Christmas music.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It plays Christmas music because it has access to, you know, their streaming music service.
John:
Whereas if you ask Amazon Echo to do the same thing.
John:
you can set something up to do it or you can try to get it to play audio on another bluetooth connected device and it'll play the audio that's on that device or whatever but anyway um so far mostly the children have been asking it to say things in foreign languages uh and do unit conversions i did use it to set timers um but it is really limited like the one of the very first things i asked it to do was uh remind me in two hours to check on the roast this was like on christmas day right um
John:
And it said, I can't set up a reminder for you.
John:
Sorry about that.
John:
Something like I'm like, you can't set up reminders like you don't need to do.
John:
This doesn't need to be a network integration.
John:
Just do it right.
John:
It can do timers.
John:
Set a timer for two hours for the roast.
John:
OK, I've set a timer for two hours for the roast.
John:
Right.
John:
But remind me in two hours.
John:
It knows that I want a reminder, but I guess it classifies them in the same way that Apple classifies reminders versus timers.
John:
And it has no way to create a reminder.
John:
in the world of google yet right so again i google this and sit on a million people saying yes it can't set reminders yet maybe it will be able to in the future so
John:
I really hope that they get cranking on the integrations and the functionality.
John:
I am very impressed with its ability to understand my children's poor diction as they yell over each other to try to get it to do things, right?
John:
I'm impressed with its ability to understand me talking from other rooms and mumbling and how responsive it is to asking you to set timers.
John:
It takes me longer to figure out when I can start talking to Siri than it does to complete the action.
John:
on the Google Home, right?
John:
Because that is an internal frustration to have the fanciest, fastest iPhone, and half the time I'm like, is it okay for me to talk?
John:
Do I have to wait for the boop-boop?
John:
And then, like, I start talking, then it goes boop-boop, and then it does not understand me, and I can't reset it, and I have to start all over, and it's just...
John:
I just want to get a little talking to the air.
John:
And you mentioned, Casey, before, Siri and the Mac.
John:
This is, I think, one of the things that both the Amazon Echo and the Google Home do so much better than Siri and the Mac.
John:
If Siri and the Mac really wants to be worth a damn, it should be like those two devices where I can just say...
John:
Okay, Mac, what's the weather like tomorrow?
John:
No preamble, no pressing a key, no making sure the Mac is ready before I talk.
John:
Just freaking say it.
John:
Because if this little tiny $100 cylinder can do it, this huge multi-thousand dollar computer should be able to do that too.
John:
Let alone the fact that there's no Hey Siri.
John:
It's like, oh, you can hook up this Alps group to make it so it recognizes when you say Hey.
John:
No.
John:
like if the cylinders can do it a mac a mac has to be able to do it too because as as marco well knows that is the killer feature to be able to just rattle it off in the air with no setup and no preamble and no making sure everybody is ready and it just friggin does it and that's awesome right i mean that that i think the most important feature of all these cylinders is really good microphones that can understand you from far away with background noise and incredible responsiveness and
John:
and iphones don't have that and macs don't have that and it's a damn shame so anyway google home it shows promise for the things that it can do it's very responsive i intentionally bought it because i believe in the promise of google doing this type of stuff really well and the things that it does do it does do really well you can phrase your i mean like google search you can phrase your unit conversions or questions about the weather or follow-up questions in a fairly natural way and it pretty much nails it um
John:
It just needs more features, so I'm patiently waiting for them to appear.
Marco:
Yeah, I got to say, I mean, I have yet to see the Google Home.
Marco:
But having had now quite a bit of experience with the Amazon Echo, these like home cylinders with voice stuff that connect to simple things like timers and weather and music services and home automation...
Marco:
This is a real deal.
Marco:
This category is really great.
Marco:
It's really fun.
Marco:
And there is this pretty significant land grab going on right now, mostly being won by Amazon.
Marco:
I am honestly kind of concerned that Apple is not playing in this space yet.
Marco:
And we've heard rumblings that they're working on.
Marco:
I really hope they get here soon because this is the time they get into this business.
Marco:
So over Christmas, we got my in-laws an Echo.
Marco:
It was kind of funny.
Marco:
For the last five or six Christmases, we've gotten people various Apple things, like Apple TVs here and there, and occasionally iPads for big gifts sometimes.
Marco:
This year, nobody got anything by Apple.
Marco:
This year, Apple had nothing to do with our holiday fun this year.
Marco:
They were just... We were all using iPhones, basically.
Marco:
But there was no new stuff from Apple this year for us.
Marco:
Granted, I know the AirPods are a big deal for a lot of people.
Marco:
But that wasn't... Anyway, that wasn't for our holiday season.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
All the fun was playing with the Echo and all the home automation.
Marco:
I got a handful of the Belkin WeMo outlets and everything that you could switch with them.
Marco:
This stuff, this is where all the action is happening right now in cool, fun, new technology.
Marco:
And yeah, it isn't like...
Marco:
a massive business there's not a lot of profit to be made here i mean amazon's already selling the echo for under 200 bucks and the dots are like 40 bucks and what's the google home like 150 or something i got it on sale is one of the reasons i bought i got it for like 110 or 120
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So like, you know, this is it's obviously going to be like a low margin business for, you know, probably forever.
Marco:
And that's that's going to be difficult for Apple because I can't see Apple coming in at, you know, under 250 probably, you know, I mean, look, the Apple TV is, you know, in a similar boat where like all the competitors are really cheap and Apple TV is still very expensive for, you know, compared to them.
Marco:
So anyway, I worry about Apple in this business because it's so cool.
Marco:
It's so much fun.
Marco:
These devices are really, really awesome.
Marco:
But in order to be good, they require two things Apple's not very good at, service consistency and integrations with a whole bunch of other stuff.
Marco:
I don't say that as a joke.
Marco:
Siri, for all of its benefits and faults, one thing it really isn't.
Marco:
Even people who love Siri, I think they would usually agree.
Marco:
One thing it really isn't is consistent.
Marco:
And the Echo is so incredibly rock solid.
Marco:
So anyway, between Google and Amazon...
Marco:
I really haven't read a single review of the Google Home that makes me think anybody should buy it over the Echo.
Marco:
Honestly, all the reviews seem to say, yeah, it's kind of the same thing, but worse.
Marco:
What am I missing here?
John:
I feel like it is better at all the same things that Google is good at.
John:
You can type things into a Google search box in lots of different ways, and it more or less figures out what you mean.
John:
In the same way that...
John:
You know, the difference between we know when Google does that thing where it puts like it's like here are a bunch of search results and here are a bunch of ads.
John:
But by the way, I'm pretty sure I know what you're getting at.
John:
And here's a box at the top that shows like exactly what you're interested, like the score of a game or like the answer to the trivia question you were asking or whatever before it even gets to the search results.
John:
That type of stuff is more or less exposed in a spoken way.
John:
Uh, as opposed to like, you know, like what was it when Dan Martin and his review was talking about doing the language translation, uh, the echo or Alexa rather can do that as well, but it displays the results on your, on your phone in the iOS app.
John:
It doesn't speak them back to you.
John:
Um, so it's, it's like, it's basically all the things that Google is good at.
John:
If you're interested in controlling stuff in your home, uh,
John:
Echo has way more integrations.
John:
If you're interested in buying things, forget it.
John:
That's Amazon's bread and butter.
John:
You want to buy things by talking, Amazon's got you covered.
John:
I don't even know if you can do that at all on Google.
John:
Tell you what, by the way, that sounds like a stupid thing until you do it.
Marco:
I'm sure you love it.
Marco:
Once you've given in to the Amazon way of life and you start ordering everything from Amazon, you can do things like, say, name of thing, reorder a fridge filter.
Marco:
And it will go through your order history and it will query it for the fridge filter and it'll say, do you want me to add this thing?
Marco:
It'll read out the name and it'll say, here's how much it costs and it has four star reviews or whatever else.
Marco:
And it'll say, do you want to buy it now?
Marco:
And you can add it to your cart and just do it later.
Marco:
You can add it to your shopping list or you can just have it say yes and place the order right then.
Marco:
You can...
Marco:
literally get rid of your like i ran out of this thing or i need another one of these things you can eliminate those problems like without ever touching a computer like oh my fridge filter needs to be replaced all right get a new fridge filter two days later it just shows up it's kind of amazing i also before we got this thought that was a ridiculous concept but once you do it like once and you kind of break the uh like the break the seal almost like you break hearts like once you do it once you're just like oh my god this is kind of awesome why have i not been doing this
John:
And I think we're kind of in an Apple Google situation, like the early days of the iPhone, where it was like, oh, we have this nice sort of symbiosis where Apple is going to do this awesome hardware in the OS and Google will do the cloud services like the maps and stuff.
John:
And it's a marriage made in heaven.
John:
And then they split.
John:
It seems like they're already split because there are things that Amazon does better.
John:
But there are also things that Google does better.
John:
Like basically any kind of search or intelligence or figuring out what you mean.
John:
amazon can do all those things mostly because they have integrations with google or google-like services but they don't do them themselves whereas buying things amazon is totally like it's all integrated with your amazon account it knows your order history you can do all that stuff like that it it's too you would you would want a home automation thing that can do all of these things right and the same way of like i don't know amazon probably has this because they have every service under the sun but
John:
Google has all my photos.
John:
Amazon doesn't have any of my photos.
John:
I can't ask the Echo to show photos of my son on the television, you know, show photos of my son from 2015 on my Chromecast.
John:
I can't ask Amazon to do that.
John:
I mean, I could maybe make a little skill or a program or a little app in there, a little thing to make it do.
John:
But like.
John:
but google's got my stuff and in the same way apple if they ever come up with one apple's got a lot of my stuff too they've got also got my photos and you know they have my reminders because i use reminders on my phone and they have my i messages but they don't have my calendar because google has that and so you know in some respects the best would be a cylinder that you talk to that doesn't have a horse in that race but integrates with all of them sort of the cylinder equivalent of the omnivorous box but of course that doesn't exist so instead we're we have to choose silos for
John:
the apple salad has nothing except for a sort of cranky siri that you can't really talk to and by the way if they ever did make a cylinder can you imagine if they made it respond to uh ahoy telephone which i'm not going to say every device in your home would go off and then maybe the cylinder would bloop later like they should just give these things different names or whatever
Marco:
It actually is not an easy problem to solve.
Marco:
When the Amazon set of products first came out, if you had more than one, which they're so cheap, and you kind of always want one nearby, so I think a lot of people have or will have more than one.
Marco:
uh which again puts a problem on apple's um strategy of probably a nicer more expensive one uh anyway so when you have more than one like if both of them are within earshot when you say the trigger word you know originally they would just kind of both operate independently eventually in a software update which by the way i never even had to know about like they just update themselves and don't even tell you they just update it's amazing
Marco:
But in software update, eventually they added a thing where like you can give them both the same trigger word.
Marco:
And now like whichever one like heard you best will handle the command.
Marco:
And so, and, and, you know, there, I, I believe they're also wanting to work on things like multi-room audio, similar to what Sonos does.
Marco:
I think Google home talked about something like that.
Marco:
Either they're doing it or they're going to do it.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
this is actually it's going to ramp up quickly into a category where like the minimum bar to entry is actually you know non-trivial that's why i kind of like for apple's sake if they're going to play in this business at all i hope they get here soon because there's a lot to do and the competitors are going to keep raising that bar and apple's just going to be playing catch up if they really don't don't get here very very soon
John:
i feel like amazon even though they are the leader now is at quite a disadvantage because both google and apple have more of people's stuff than amazon the only thing amazon has for most people is their purchase history and their purchases which is great for amazon because if they're trying to find your way for you order things by talking and make money that's fine
John:
but most people uh don't have all their family photos on there most people don't have big video collections up on amazon most people don't have their calendars on amazon or their you know reminders or their shopping list which even though it has these features like in other words to to win like you said this you have to have it's an ecosystem play and apple has its ecosystem and google has its and you can argue about whose is better or whatever but amazon's is the least full featured of all of them like uh
John:
and google you know you have to actually integrate with them for you to win doesn't doesn't help that google like oh google has a calendar if i can't do anything with the calendar which you can you can ask it about your day and stuff like that um or google has maps data and traffic data like you need the integrations but it's easier to make those integrations if if google actually gives a damn about this product because that's google's other weaknesses historically they've been like oh we'll try this but maybe we're not that interested whatever right but it's easier for google to do those integrations and
John:
And then it is for Amazon to get people to use Amazon for email, Amazon for calendars, Amazon for photo storage.
John:
Like, even if they offer these services, even if they make all these services, they make world-class versions of these services to match both Apple and Google's services, then you have to get people to switch to them.
John:
So there is a big disadvantage for them to ever be in the ballpark if this becomes an ecosystem-wide play.
John:
there i guess their ace in the hole is like we don't have to have that ecosystem we will just we will try to be as omnivorous as possible and give you a way give people a way to make those integrations so hey buy the amazon echo if you have your reminders on apple we can integrate with them if you have your calendar on google we can integrate with them like that's their that's their out but it's certainly easier for apple and google to integrate with their own stuff um it's just you know they're playing catch up and like in that article uh the link in the show notes that reviewing them
John:
It's like Google, Amazon integrates with all of these.
John:
Amazon integrates with all these home automation devices, and Google just integrates with these three.
John:
But every single other one that was listed has announced support for Google Home, right?
John:
So it's not like Google is behind, but it's not like they're like Apple where they do a single sign-on thing and they wait six months and say the same three pathetic companies are the only ones we got for single sign-on.
John:
Oops.
John:
Like everybody has announced for Google Home.
John:
That doesn't mean anything.
John:
A lot of people announce for HomeKit too.
John:
I know, but it's a question of whether Google follows through on that.
John:
and google actually released a product they announced a product and they released it and it works which is way more than apple has done so apple is clearly in last place and i have some faith that google home will have a more illustrious career and life than did all the other like google tv uh and weird stuff like and just think about the chromecast which seemed like this little turdy thing that had no future but tons of people have chromecasts and love them
John:
And even though it's a very small, simple thing, now you get Chromecast and Google Home.
John:
Now you have two pieces, and they kind of fit together.
John:
And that Chromecast that was already valuable suddenly becomes more valuable because you have Google Home.
John:
This is like ecosystem 101.
John:
So I do have some faith that Google understands that they can be an RR player here while Apple snoozes and while Amazon takes all of Marco's money every time he speaks.
Yeah.
John:
$14 at a time for a fridge filter.
John:
And the option, by the way, the Dan Morin option is these things are like a hundred and something bucks.
John:
There's no reason you can't have both of them.
John:
They don't take up that much room.
John:
Dan Morin's got two of them in his house.
John:
I think he's got like three of them in his house.
John:
There's no reason you can't have all of them and say, Alexa, buy me toilet paper and Google translate this phrase for me or Google what's on my calendar today, right?
John:
It's confusing to talking to multiple assistants, but it's not that bad.
John:
It's not like you're making a $3,000 investment in a computing platform.
John:
You're just buying a little cylinder and plugging it into the wall somewhere.
John:
So I'm actually considering that as well to get both of them because they don't conflict.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
How much the ecosystem matters to which one succeeds or fails or which ones succeed or fail, I think also depends on what people want these cylinders to do.
Marco:
What is the role this is playing for you?
Marco:
And your thing about...
Marco:
You asked the Google thing to show you pictures from your Google photo stream of something on your TV.
Marco:
I would never do that.
Marco:
You are doing that.
Marco:
And so, you know, like, obviously, like people are gonna have different needs for this kind of thing.
Marco:
But, you know, I think certain roles are going to come out ahead.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
One of the things, there was a rumor that came out a couple of weeks ago about how maybe the next Echo might be like a tablet kind of thing that's really made to be a kitchen appliance, really, because they've found that so many people put the Echo in their kitchens.
Marco:
And it turns out people really like using it
Marco:
in the kitchen while cooking.
Marco:
So it'd be nice to maybe have something like a screen showing your timers, because timers are a really popular thing, as opposed to just some kind of audio thing we have now, or a screen to show a recipe that you're cooking or whatever else.
Marco:
So Amazon is finding their uses in the kitchen.
Marco:
Google might find their users in the living room.
Marco:
Each one could find their own audience.
Marco:
Or it might turn out that the things that Google is optimizing for, people actually just want to use their phones to do those things.
Marco:
And no one's really going to want their cylinders to do that.
Marco:
And so Google might be making a bad bet on that.
Marco:
And maybe people really want just a kitchen cylinder that plays music out of these things most of the time.
Marco:
Maybe Amazon will win there.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I don't think it's a safe assumption to say that the ecosystems that each of these companies have now are a sure thing to guarantee the success in this new area.
Marco:
Because, Pete, we might find with this new area that people will use it differently than what we initially expect.
John:
Yeah, like I was saying, it's a question of whether it's easier to add integrations or whether it's easier to add those ecosystems.
John:
Because having ownership of people's calendars and their messages and their purchases, those are things like purchases, for example.
John:
There's no way Apple and Google can get that.
John:
They can't like, oh, we're going to start a competing retail business, so we'll have a list of people's purchases too.
John:
Nope, you won't.
John:
And in the same way, Amazon can't say, we're going to start an email service, and it's going to be as big as Gmail.
John:
Nope, it won't.
John:
And we're going to have a calendaring service, and it'll be as integrated into the iPhone as Apple's calendar or with Android as Google's.
John:
You won't.
John:
So the lines are kind of drawn along there.
John:
And those things are not esoteric, like photos, calendar, email address, messages, purchases.
John:
Those are fundamental.
John:
Those are fundamentally owned.
John:
It's kind of like they have those squares on the Monopoly board, right?
John:
And they're not going away.
John:
It's just a question of how they're going to be divvied up between them.
John:
And the extras about the integrations, like with the Chromecast, the example I gave of putting photos on my TV, this is the thing I do now, but I do it the long, annoying manual way.
John:
which is always annoying i use apple tv to do it i pull up the photo library half the thumbnails don't show up it's a terrible experience but like it's a thing i want to do and relatives are over let's look at pictures i have them usually sorted into albums or smart albums or something like that let me see the picture of my wife's trip uh mediterranean cruise i have all those set up i already have the album apple tv because i use my photos and apple things has that stuff and i just want to see them
John:
And I have to use that terrible remote and use a bunch of applications to, you know, make sure her computer is on and awake and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Whereas if I could use a little Chromecast that I don't have to think about in a little cylinder, I don't have to think about and just sit down and say, show Mediterranean cruise photos.
John:
And it knows from the GPS tags what the heck I'm talking about because it's Google and it's really smart.
John:
And I didn't even have to make an album.
John:
That's a better experience.
John:
But you can only do that if you know where to get the photos from.
John:
And most people are not going to be sort of the self-hackers of like, well, my photos are on a, you know, a FreeNAS thing in the basement and I wrote a Linux server that pulls the thing.
John:
Like, no one's going to do that.
John:
Like, you can with the Amazon Echo.
John:
You can do those integrations.
John:
And in the beginning, that's kind of... It's impressive to create these Rube Goldberg machines.
John:
But I still feel like...
John:
especially in the silo world that we're in, ownership of data dictates what kind of things you can use it for.
John:
Like I said, in the same way that you cannot tell Google's thing to order you new fridge things, Amazon owns that.
John:
There's nothing Google can really do about that.
John:
Amazon's not going to be keen on letting Google integrate with its purchases in that way.
John:
So if that's one of the things that you want to do, and I think it is a useful thing to do, the only choice you have is the Amazon.
John:
And that's why I think we may be trapped...
John:
not trapped, but like faded to be talking to multiple semi-intelligent assistants, referring to them by name in the same way that we go to multiple websites to do things like go to Amazon when I'm shopping, but I go to, you know, Gmail when I want to do my mail, I say, order me a fridge filters.
John:
And I say, Google, uh, do I have any appointments tomorrow afternoon?
John:
Because Google has my calendar and Alexa has my purchases.
John:
And again, uh,
John:
If these little cylinders, like, they're cheap now, they're only going to get cheaper if they're mostly network-based stuff combined with really good microphones and a tiny little low-power CPU that's always listening and stuff.
John:
I think that is, aside from any sort of global cooperation between these giant companies, which...
John:
is not going to happen uh talking to different things in our house seems to me the most likely outcome of all this so i i think i think we're all doomed to have multiple uh increasingly non-cylindrical cylinders like eventually there'll just be a bunch of tiny little things that are dotted all over our house and having multiple ones then won't be a big deal
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Squarespace.
Casey:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
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.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
We all saw each other earlier this week, actually.
Casey:
And, Marco, this was your first probably multi-hundred-mile trip in the Tesla.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
That is right.
Marco:
It's the longest trip I've taken yet and the first trip that required a supercharger in the middle.
Marco:
So, how'd it go?
Marco:
Before I bought the Tesla...
Marco:
The prediction I had was that this is going to be a car that's really nice and everyday use to never have to go to a gas station.
Marco:
And it's just going to be a bit of a pain in the butt when I go on long car trips.
Marco:
I'm going to have these like, you know, forced half hour supercharger breaks every like three to four hours.
Marco:
And it's going to be a pain and everything else.
Marco:
But I figure like that'll be like I will tolerate that inconvenience for the awesomeness of the car in all other circumstances.
Marco:
So this is the first trip where you actually had to realize what it was like to to rely on the supercharger network for your range.
Marco:
Because every other I've gone to superchargers like twice in the past, but it was kind of optional.
Marco:
Like one time I was because it was just pouring rain and I was like, oh, I just need to break anyway.
Marco:
I'm passing one.
Marco:
So let me just take a break here.
Marco:
I'll go to a coffee shop or whatever.
Marco:
Any other time, it was more, again, like, you know, similar, like not really necessary.
Marco:
I just stopped for a few minutes.
Marco:
Anyway, this was the first time where I had to really stop for like 30 minutes.
Marco:
I, you know, we pull up, we find them.
Marco:
It was the Delaware rest stop on 95 that, you know, everybody goes to.
Marco:
And there was like 12 spots and half of them were open.
Marco:
So that was fine.
Marco:
You know, pull up, plug in.
Marco:
And we went in, we all went to the bathroom, and we all got a quick little lunch from the crappy food places they have in this wonderful Delaware rest stop.
Marco:
The food's the worst, but it's fine.
Marco:
Just don't go to the Baja Fresh because you think, oh, a Baja Fresh, that should be good because real Baja Fresh stores are good.
Marco:
But this is a Baja Fresh Express.
Marco:
And what that means is that it's a terrible, terrible pile of garbage that has the Baja Fresh sign above it.
Marco:
But that is not a real Baja Fresh.
Marco:
You never, ever get that.
Marco:
So we had lunch and everything.
Marco:
And before I knew it, we were just doing a basic rest stop.
Marco:
Before I knew it, my car was at like 98%.
Marco:
And I was trying to rush out of there so I didn't hit 100 and start getting charged 40 cents a minute for sitting there taking up a spot unnecessarily.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Now, what were you at when you pulled in?
Casey:
Just ballpark?
Marco:
Oh, I forget.
Marco:
Somewhere around, like, 30 or something.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
It was amazing.
Marco:
Like, you know, charge up.
Marco:
And, like, so, like, we were stopping anyway.
Marco:
And, you know, like, if we were, like, one of those, like, hardcore long-distance drivers that, like...
Marco:
The total time it takes you to get where you're going is very important to you, and you don't like to stop at all, then this is not the car for you.
Marco:
But if you stop anyway, just for basic comfort and to take a break, it's quite something else.
Marco:
On the way home, I had an even cooler experience.
Marco:
I was a little bit sick, and I was really tired.
Marco:
I could really, really just use a brake from driving.
Marco:
I was unreasonably tired just because I was sick.
Marco:
Anyway, Tiff and Adam went into Starbucks to get some coffee and to give Adam a sandwich.
Marco:
I sat in the car, left the heat on, and left the heated seat on, and just took a nap.
Marco:
I leaned the seat back.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
I took like a 20-minute nap.
Marco:
So here I was.
Marco:
I'm like, this is kind of amazing.
Marco:
So my car is filling up with the fuel it needs for free while I sit in a heated, nicely heated car with a nicely heated seat in the winter and take a nap.
Marco:
Actually, I think this is the best car for long road trip comfort I've ever seen.
Marco:
Again, I thought this was going to be some kind of big hassle on long trips, but it's only a hassle if you want to get there in the smallest amount of time possible.
Marco:
But if you are more leisurely, like we always have been, and you like to stop for lunch or stop and take a break every so often, if that's your style of driving...
Marco:
This is the best.
Marco:
It is so much the best because it allows you to not only fill up for free and it forces you to take these breaks at certain intervals, but the process of filling up for free is way nicer than stopping at a gas station.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
So actually, I really quite enjoyed it.
Marco:
And it was wonderful.
Marco:
And I look forward to future long trips where I have to use them.
Casey:
That's awesome.
John:
That's somewhat surprising, but super cool.
John:
Sounds like Tiff's new car is going to have even fewer miles on it than her old one.
John:
Truth.
John:
That'll be our beach house car.
John:
That's the next bit of electric car anxiety that you have to get over just by doing it because you're like, oh, it'll be sitting there and it'll be discharging and it shouldn't let it sit there for a week.
John:
I bet that's not a problem either.
John:
You got to try it.
Marco:
well i remember i did i did the experiment like i left my car unplugged here when we went there to kind of try that and it ended up i think it loses like one or two percent a day so it isn't that big of a deal but uh but no the bigger problem is i don't want to fill my trunk with sand oh geez look are you gonna use your car or is it just a piece it's just a piece of art that you look at
Marco:
there are two things that are not allowed in my trunk sand and glitter you can vacuum the sand up i promise you yeah yeah you know what i was told that about the glitter in my trunk when we had a no glitter heavy uh yeah exactly yeah so but sand you can no do you have it you have a trunk liner i didn't i don't think i've ever seen your trunk what does that mean it's covered in carpet i don't know
John:
that's a no right so you can usually buy you can usually buy like a little rubber uh thing that goes in there so you can it you know if it's mostly for like if like some groceries bang together and spill and get sticky stuff or whatever they basically you don't ruin the carpet in your car but also if it gets filled with sand you can take that whole rubber thing out turn it upside down dump all the sand back good and put it in but even if you do it right on the carpet
John:
I promise you, you can vacuum sand out of carpeting in a car.
John:
It will be fine.
John:
And finally, sand in your car is a badge of honor if you are a beach person, which I know that you are not, but we're converting you, right?
Marco:
I am a beach town person.
Marco:
I like the beach town.
Marco:
I like the beach environment.
Marco:
I like the beach mindset even, but I still do not like sand.
Marco:
Sand is a problem.
Marco:
We'll get you there.
Marco:
I don't see how glitter can be such the scourge of humanity that it is.
Marco:
Glitter ruined my 328.
Marco:
When I had that car, that Christmas, we brought my car upstate and it was a year where the wrapping paper that was in use that year contained glitter and the ribbon all contained glitter.
Marco:
And so my entire car filled with glitter.
Marco:
it never like i could not get it all out of that car i eventually had to turn the car in for the end of the lease it was still there i turned in a glittery trunk i was not actually fined for that uh but they should have fined me for that even i would have fined me for that you need to nip that in the bud like i'm familiar with this phenomenon wrapping paper with glitter on the outside of it just say no that cannot enter your house if someone else brings you a present with that on it you have to like isolate it like it's radioactive
John:
uh but by all means when you're wrapping your own presents do not choose that paper with glitter on it that is a terrible mistake that should just never be allowed to happen setting aside cars forget about cars you're just just in your own home they cannot that cannot be allowed to exist oh no it was well that that caused a rule to be enacted that no more glitter in my car ever and no glitter in any part of the house i care about which is basically the office and my car so
Marco:
But sand is not like that, I promise you.
Marco:
But sand is just dull glitter.
Marco:
No, it is not.
Marco:
It's very small rocks.
Marco:
How does that not work the same way?
Marco:
And what else floats in water?
Marco:
That's probably a reference that I'm not getting.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
I can tell when you use your reference voice.
Marco:
Yeah, you do have a reference voice.
John:
Everybody else will get that.
John:
I could have tried to do the accent.
John:
Oh, my goodness.