All You Need Is Five Nerds
Casey:
I'm already tired.
Casey:
I'm already cranky.
Casey:
It's gonna be a long show.
Marco:
If only there was like a mild beverage you could take that would help you be a little bit more awake and alert for a little while after you take it, that would really come in handy.
John:
Marco, drug pusher.
Marco:
I mean, of all the drugs that you can be mildly chemically addicted to, it is by far the most pleasant and least harmful.
Casey:
that's not true i'm sure there are less harmful drugs to be addicted to i mean deodorant maybe but like i wouldn't that's not really a chemical addiction how are you using deodorant he's huffing it that's what he's doing um no i uh i did have a glass of diet coke you're right so uh maybe that'll help a little bit because that's what you were talking about is caffeine and i get my caffeine from diet coke like any responsible human would do
Marco:
Right, surrounded by cancer sugar.
Casey:
Good luck with that.
Casey:
It's better than having to choke down coffee, am I right?
Casey:
So anyway, yeah, so I'm tired.
Marco:
Nothing in the world is worse in the food world right now than the gradual invasion of sucralose into everything.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Just use real sugar or don't sweeten it.
Marco:
Sucralose is the worst in the universe.
Marco:
You can always taste that horrible aftertaste.
Marco:
Ugh, this has sucralose in it.
Casey:
Well, so that's the thing is the horrible aftertaste that regular humans like yourself get from Diet Coke.
Casey:
I actually get that from regular Coke.
Casey:
Like the regular Coke lingers in my mouth for days.
Casey:
And Diet Coke is just...
John:
Just stop drinking soda.
Casey:
Problem solved.
Casey:
Soda's terrible.
Casey:
I drink Diet Coke.
Casey:
I have a can at lunch pretty much every day.
Casey:
Well, during the week, that is.
Casey:
And then I'll usually have like a glass after dinner.
Casey:
And that's it.
Casey:
Um...
Casey:
But I have not yet found any demonstrable proof in my own body.
Casey:
I'm not saying this is true for anyone else, but in my own body, I have not yet found demonstrable proof that caffeine negatively impacts my ability to sleep, especially after you two keep me up until midnight.
Casey:
But I can have a fair bit of Diet Coke in the evening right before going to sleep, and I'm fine.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
But the thing is, though, you are right that Diet Coke is bad.
Casey:
But coincidentally, I am also right that coffee is revolting.
Casey:
We're both right and we're both wrong.
Marco:
I think there's a large body of evidence to suggest that I'm right on this.
Casey:
No, coffee is disgusting.
Casey:
Oh, God, I would hate to be that person that has to have a cup of coffee in the morning in order to function.
Casey:
Screw that.
Casey:
You know what I do in order to function in the morning?
Casey:
I get out of bed.
Casey:
I don't even shower in the morning.
Casey:
I shower at night because P.S.
Casey:
showering in the morning is disgusting.
Casey:
You should be showering before you get in bed rather than sleeping on three weeks worth of filth.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
You're just piling on the unpopular opinions.
Marco:
Keep going.
Casey:
Well, no, it's not my fault that everyone's wrong.
John:
How often are you washing your sheets?
John:
Hang on a second.
John:
I'm doing some math.
John:
You may be slightly off on your sheet washing cycles.
Casey:
It is more often than once every three weeks.
Casey:
But seriously, I cannot fathom.
Casey:
I understand that I am the weirdo on this one, all snark aside.
Casey:
I am the weird one that almost everyone I know showers when they wake up.
Casey:
I'm trying to make two different points simultaneously.
Casey:
Number one, I currently, as it stands today, have no morning routine in order to get myself moving in the morning.
Casey:
The way I get myself moving in the morning is I open my eyes.
Casey:
I am ready to go after that.
Marco:
Uh, so, so I'm looking at a, at a little avatar view of my Skype client that does actually, it does actually reflect generally what you look like and your hair is really nicely done and it looks like you might have some product in there.
Marco:
So does that just, did you put that on at night somehow or?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
That's a fair criticism.
Casey:
That's an entirely different issue.
Casey:
What I meant to say, I have my morning routine.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
My point was just that I'm not one of those people that needs a coffee in order to be ready to handle the day.
Casey:
You can come at me right first thing in the morning with some sort of technical problem, and I'm okay with that.
Casey:
Now, the one thing I did not consider is I do need to consume something for breakfast.
Casey:
It can be damn near anything.
Casey:
I can have a Pop-Tart.
Casey:
I can have an Eggo.
Casey:
I typically make myself a fruit smoothie.
Casey:
I
Marco:
whatever you know i would hate to be the kind of person who couldn't function in the morning before i ate something i just get out of bed i'm ready i'm ready to solve problems i i often will start work and programming before i've had coffee that's a thing like i don't i often don't have coffee till like 10 or 11 o'clock oh see so see i'm okay with that it's the it's these people that typically work in an office that are like oh don't talk to me i haven't had my coffee like screw that come on you're an adult and
Marco:
that's just them being like a pain in the butt like you know like if they weren't complaining about the coffee they complain about something else i agree we agree no i will say though in in defense of your weird night showering habit uh having traveled with you a bunch it actually makes it really convenient to travel with you because you're i'm never waiting in the morning for you to get ready you're always ready like whenever i am because i am i'm a morning shower so of course i take longer i also sleep as long as i possibly can i'm never waiting for you ever when we travel
Casey:
I don't know if that's actually true.
Casey:
I would hope you don't ever wait for me in the morning.
Casey:
I'm sure there's some point in time where you're waiting on me.
Marco:
Well, when you're doing your hair.
Marco:
No, it actually... It would be... I don't think we've ever actually shared a hotel room, but if we ever had to, that would be very convenient also to have you be a night shower, because then we're not competing for the shower in the morning either.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
The whole point I was trying to make is, like I was saying, is twofold.
Casey:
One, I mean...
Casey:
I could handle a technical problem first thing in the morning.
Casey:
I'd prefer to have a breakfast first, but I don't have to.
Casey:
But number two, I can't get out of my head how gross it is for someone to take the day's filth and put it into their bed every night.
Casey:
Every night, today's filth.
Casey:
Monday's filth into the bed.
Casey:
Tuesday's filth.
Casey:
Let's add Tuesday onto Monday's filth.
Casey:
Wednesday's filth.
Casey:
Let's add Wednesday's filth onto Tuesday's filth onto Monday's filth.
Casey:
And let's just roll in it for eight hours.
Casey:
That sounds awesome.
Casey:
And again, I recognize before the entire internet writes me, which they're about to do anyway, I recognize that this is a weird thing and that I am the weird one here.
Casey:
But I cannot fathom how any human being that values hygiene can get into covers that they're getting in without showering first.
Casey:
That's disgusting.
Casey:
Oh, I don't get it.
Casey:
Now, this is where a couple... So there's a few things people say.
Marco:
How dirty are you getting in during the day?
Casey:
So...
Casey:
How dirty are you getting during the day?
Casey:
You sit in an air-conditioned office behind a chair, in a chair, behind a screen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
It's still some point.
Casey:
I can only speak for myself.
Casey:
But at some point during the day, I probably have at least a little shimmer on me of sweat, of dirt, of something.
Casey:
Because you don't have winter there.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
Number two.
Casey:
In the South.
Casey:
I'm choosing what battles to fight right now.
Casey:
Number two, this is where all sorts of people come out of the woodwork and say, well, don't you sweat at night?
Casey:
Sometimes.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
Casey:
Sometimes I do.
Casey:
But at least leave it as the night dirt that's in the bed.
Casey:
Why would you contribute the day dirt on top of the night dirt?
Casey:
That's barbaric, I tell you.
Casey:
It's insane.
John:
I think your threat model for dirtying sheets is wrong.
John:
that transfer happens from you to the sheets putting them in a state that you don't like i think that whole model is wrong because well maybe we don't want to get too much but are you sleeping naked because because wouldn't you like to know john i'm just saying like it seems like what you're modeling here is uh an idea of how uh
Marco:
how how things would transfer from one place to another making one thing that was clean dirty right but i don't know if that idea maps to the reality of you sleeping in beds it's an alternative reality john moving on my favorite my favorite thing about this conversation is all the new listeners we got last week thinking you know what what they're going to expect that this show is and then they tune in and hear this this week
John:
They're not going to tune in live.
John:
They'll just be the pre-recorded one, and this will not be heavily featured at the start of the program.
Casey:
Let's hope not.
Casey:
Let's hope not.
Casey:
So let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Consumer Reports has recommended the MacBook Pro, so turns out...
Casey:
That they have worked with Apple in order to fix Apple's bugs, which may or may not entirely be Apple's fault.
Casey:
Oh, I guess the bugs were.
Casey:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Point is, they have retested their MacBook Pros.
Casey:
One model got almost 19 hours on a charge.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear how that could be possible, but that's what they say.
John:
because that because that's how their tests work like it so i was saying before the absolute numbers don't really matter on tests like this because there's no way you're actually gonna right you know simulate any particular users all you want to know is we use the same test all the time is this better or worse than the same than like the previous mac or a different model you want some kind of consistency within the numbers but you know it's uh it's like story points in a sprint casey i don't know what you're talking about
John:
So for the Consumer Reports thing, the main reason I put it in here, one was just to follow up on like, hey, guess what?
John:
Like we said, they probably went last time, they retested it, everything's fine, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But thinking of it from the perspective of someone who used to write for a publication that did product reviews and used to do product reviews myself, as like an institution for doing reviews, as a publication, as a venue, as a place where people get information...
John:
This is not a good outcome because now anyone who reads Consumer Reports has to think Consumer Reports did or didn't recommend it.
John:
But is this the real story or do we have to wait two weeks for them to figure out what the real story was and then to tell us whether they should get it or not?
John:
Like their job is to tell us whether this laptop is worth buying or should be avoided.
John:
And I'm going to say, although some people may differ, that the product is
John:
with and without this bug like whether you have the beta version that fixes this bug fix or whether you don't have the beta version is not that different marco is using it presumably without this beta fix and it is it is a satisfactory product right with the beta fix maybe it'll be a little better stop
John:
Well, you talked about it the whole last time about how, you know, it's not as bad as you thought it would be.
John:
I know.
Marco:
No, just every week I waffle on whether I like the new one or whether I want to switch back to the old one.
Marco:
But it's not as if the battery life is fatally bad.
Marco:
The keyboard is so bad.
Marco:
Again, I've actually been doing my own tests, and the battery life is not good, but it's okay.
Marco:
And the old one was similar.
Marco:
The old one was also not good, but okay.
Marco:
But, God, the keyboard is so bad.
John:
They're saying they can't even recommend the product.
Casey:
Marco, remind me, have you tried the Magic Keyboard?
Casey:
We've been through this so many times, I honestly don't recall.
Marco:
No, because for desktops, I've got to use an ergonomic keyboard.
Marco:
I just use desktops too heavily, and I have minor RSI problems if I use regular keyboards.
Marco:
And so to avoid those and to avoid them becoming major RSI problems, I use ergonomic keyboards.
Casey:
No, totally.
Casey:
I was just curious.
Casey:
I didn't know if you had tried one for more than 10 seconds in a store because I find that I've talked long to anyone who will listen about how much I love the Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
And I have only used the new MacBook Pro keyboard for but a flash.
Casey:
And it was a while ago.
Casey:
So this is all on memory and it was a very brief...
Casey:
time that I used it but I feel like the frustrating thing for me about the new MacBook Pro keyboard was that it was like 80% of perfection because I'm not saying you agree I'm just saying to me because it was so similar to the Magic Keyboard but I think the throw was a little bit smaller and that difference was enough to just drive me batty and I'm sure I would get used to it over time
Casey:
But man, was it annoying because I feel like it was so close.
Casey:
You were right there.
Casey:
You almost had it.
Casey:
And they didn't quite get there.
Casey:
And the thing that's scary to me is that I suspect whenever a Magic Keyboard 2 happens, I bet you anything they're going to use that keyboard with the shorter throw.
Casey:
And I'm going to be Gruber in buying 1004 original Magic Keyboards to keep around until Kingdom Come because this is my favorite keyboard I've ever used.
Marco:
Well, first of all, I actually have done that myself.
Marco:
Microsoft upgraded the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard that I have used for a few years now as my main one.
Marco:
They, quote, upgraded that to the new Surface ergonomic keyboard.
Marco:
And I bought one, and I actually had to return it because the Surface ergonomic keyboard is Bluetooth instead of its own custom wireless thing.
Marco:
But it has special Bluetooth implementation details, I guess, that are incredibly incompatible with Macs.
Marco:
and i've never had a pc keyboard that was incompatible with a mac before the microsoft sculpt ergonomic is one of these or i mean the microsoft surface ergonomic excuse me um and and they're the two main problems if you're looking at this a lot of people ask me about this two main problems number one you can't remap option and command to be like on windows and alt properly the system panel that you do it in for every other pc keyboard is
Marco:
the change just doesn't apply.
Marco:
It doesn't work.
Marco:
Like you can change it there, but the keys still don't change their functions.
Marco:
And the second problem, which is even more fatal than that, is that it's Bluetooth implementation.
Marco:
Basically, it falls asleep after a while.
Marco:
And when you wake it up by pushing keys again, the first couple of keys you push don't get recognized.
Marco:
So it's really a pain to use in practice.
Marco:
So it is effectively incompatible with the Mac.
Marco:
First time I've ever had a PC keyboard where that's been a problem.
Marco:
And so I had to return it.
Marco:
And also the ergonomics got worse and it got earlier.
Marco:
So there you go.
Marco:
The key switches feel a little bit better, but it is way too wide because it added the 10 key numpad area back on.
Marco:
and it's low and flat does not have a riser in front uh so the ergonomics are all worse and whatever the look they're going for it's like gray it's like the lining of cubicle walls like that kind of like gray carpety material you know like that's it's like they made a keyboard out of that uh so
Marco:
big miss on that and so so because the sculpt ergonomic keyboard that i like so much is now officially discontinued uh i i stockpiled three of them right now because you can still get them in most places for like around 60 70 bucks um so i stockpiled a few of them for myself and i figure like by the time i burn through three of these which should be probably five years or so six years or so uh then i should uh probably be able to find something else by then
Casey:
And is that one Bluetooth, the old one that you're stockpiling, or is that wired?
Marco:
No, it's its own custom RF dongle, like most Logitech mice.
Marco:
It has its own little thing.
Marco:
And it's not very good.
Marco:
The Sculpt wireless that I've been using for years now, the wireless thing is pretty flaky.
Marco:
That's usually the way these keyboards eventually die.
Marco:
The reason I replaced them is usually that the wireless thing just becomes too unreliable.
Marco:
And you can change batteries, and you can re-sync it, and you can move it around.
Marco:
Eventually, those things just don't help anymore.
Marco:
or it still starts failing.
Marco:
And when it's working properly, it never fails.
Marco:
It's solid.
Marco:
So whatever it is that kills these keyboards after maybe two years of use, that is what ultimately ends these for me and for a lot of other people.
Casey:
So what were we trying to talk about?
Casey:
The Consumer Reports thing?
Marco:
Consumer Reports.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
I mean, Consumer Reports is still going to keep doing the same BS they do all the time.
Marco:
They're going to keep doing it every time there's a new Apple product.
Marco:
They're going to get attention with some crazy headline.
Marco:
Oftentimes, it'll be about a real problem.
Marco:
Sometimes it won't be.
Marco:
But usually, when it is a real problem, they will be overblowing it.
Marco:
I think Marco's drinking beer tonight.
Marco:
Am I right or am I right?
Marco:
I've had literally like one inch of beer.
Marco:
It is still in the neck.
Marco:
And you're hammered.
Marco:
And it's a 4% beer.
John:
There's no amount that I'm saying here.
John:
You mentioned last time I said I could tell when you were drinking, and you said, oh, yeah, well, next time tell me.
John:
And so I just did.
John:
This is like the lightest beer I've ever seen, and I've drank almost none of it.
John:
I'm not attributing any kind of cause.
John:
I'm just saying.
Casey:
I'm just saying.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So also in this last week, I haven't had a chance to read this, so I'm going to defer to you, John, on this.
Casey:
But there's a blog post on the WebKit blog introducing Riptide WebKit's retreating wavefront concurrent garbage collector.
Casey:
That sounds fancy.
Casey:
So what's this all about, John?
John:
Well, on the last program where we talked to Chris Latner towards the end, we talked about Arc versus garbage collection.
John:
And Chris went through this whole big thing about the trade-offs and the different behaviors.
John:
And that might have been over a lot of people's heads because it was lots of jargon there.
John:
This is another one of WebKit often does these things.
John:
The WebKit developers post a thing that talks about some technical underpinnings of some feature of the browser.
John:
um or the engine usually and this one describes their new garbage collector for javascript kind of like uh the stuff that chris said you can't read this starting from zero and understand every part of it but they do go through and explain a lot of it and i think if you just google some stuff and find some links you can you know start understanding it um
John:
But I think it's a good example of a lot of the things that Chris alluded to, like the attributes of a garbage collector that are very similar to the attributes of Ark in that there's additional bookkeeping and stuff that has to be done in line as part of the normal operation.
John:
Because the slam against Ark is very frequently that...
John:
Well, you've got all these reference counts, you know, increments and decrements all over your code.
John:
You didn't write those things, but they get added anyway.
John:
And it's just like overhead.
John:
And so even if you don't understand all the weird nuances of this very, very long article, I think it is written in a very clear way.
John:
Whoever wrote this, I think, did a good job.
John:
You have to assume some foundational knowledge and maybe more things could be links because, you know, I'd love to make things links.
John:
Do you?
Casey:
I had no idea.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, but anyway, you can just, the word you don't understand, just, you know, type it into a Google search box or look at the Wikipedia page or something and you'll learn about it.
John:
Um, so I would encourage anybody whose interest was piqued by that discussion on last week's episode to read maybe over a couple nights, this very long, uh, post about, uh, WebKit's garbage collector, because I think it is really well done and you'll learn a lot and you will also, even if you don't learn that much, come to a,
John:
gut level understanding of exactly how much of a pain in a butt it is to make javascript go fast and how much time and effort and money is being put into doing that indeed and this was by philip pislow just fyi i miss the beach wavefront that's all it took riptide wavefront it's like ah summertime if you read the whole thing and understand a little bit of it the title will make sense by the end retreating wavefront concurrent garbage collector all those words mean something and are explained at length in the article
Casey:
Go figure.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
I remember you being vehemently opposed to the beach, and I was only mildly less opposed to it.
Casey:
Now the two of us are both converted.
John:
Who knew?
John:
Turns out I'm opposed to your pronunciation of that word.
John:
Which word?
John:
Just keep going.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So John had a big day yesterday, was it, I believe, when the 10.3 beta was released.
Casey:
And John, I have it on good authority that you did a little happy dance at your cubicle when you saw this news come out.
Casey:
Is that true?
Casey:
Please do not deny it.
John:
I did not do a happy dance.
John:
My happy dance was when they announced the existence of the file system.
John:
That was my happy dance.
John:
We had a bell.
John:
We had a happy dance.
John:
We had all sorts of things.
John:
That time has passed.
John:
I will say this, though.
John:
What you're talking about is the announcement slash leak or whatever, that iOS 10.3, the beta builds that developers can get now,
John:
will apparently convert your iOS device from HFS Plus to APFS upon upgrade.
John:
And that's mostly notable because, A, it is a partial fulfillment of the goal Apple set forth for itself at WWDC last year.
John:
They said...
John:
and you know we want to convert all of our platforms that means like ios and mac os and i guess watch os i mean basically all apple platforms to be on apfs in 2017 now 2017 is the entire year they didn't say which part of the year or whatever but here we are in january and there's already a beta of ios 10.3 that converts to apfs so it's not as if they're waiting until you know october or whatever when the successor to sierra comes out for uh for the mac or
John:
or whenever these things are going to be released, they seem to be ahead of the game, ahead of schedule.
John:
And I was worried last year that are they really going to be able to roll over their entire product line with a new file system that they just announced next year sometime?
John:
But they're apparently doing well.
John:
They seem confident.
John:
People who have upgraded, I think Marco is one, have not seen all their data disappear in a puff of smoke.
John:
So things are looking good so far, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
So my upgrade went totally fine.
Marco:
I didn't realize.
Marco:
So here I was, new version, new beta of iOS comes out.
Marco:
Of course, I installed on my main phone immediately.
Casey:
Like hour zero.
Casey:
Did you not learn from iOS 5?
Casey:
You and I did this together on iOS.
Casey:
It was a 5, 4.
Casey:
It was 5.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We learned together.
Marco:
Gruber still gives me crap about that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
But it should give you and me crap because we were both idiots.
Casey:
And here it is.
Casey:
Well, now, to your defense, this was a point release.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the point releases are usually completely harmless.
Marco:
They are almost never a problem for almost anybody.
Marco:
And so, you know, that's why I figured, like, let me do this.
Marco:
There's some new APIs I needed to test again.
Marco:
So let me try some stuff and make sure everything works and everything.
Marco:
So, okay.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Then after I installed it, like an hour later, I learned that, oh, I'm now using APFS.
Marco:
It was not even a thing.
Marco:
All I noticed was that the install took maybe 15 minutes longer than I thought it would.
Marco:
It was a little slow, but otherwise, my phone booted up.
Marco:
Everything's fine.
Marco:
Everything's totally fine.
Marco:
I've had zero issues so far.
Marco:
and then a couple hours later when chatting with john i learned that i'm using apfs before john funny how that is well it's not really true because like i said i used it on the sierra dev builds that doesn't like not in your main machine that doesn't count if it's not like it was on my main machine it was as main machine as it could be like i did everything that you could do with apfs on my main machine
Marco:
you can't boot off of it with mac os 10 no you cannot boot off of it but i was still using it well then you're not really yeah that doesn't count i'm using apfs in production on my main machine before john and that's it i think i'm done for the year it's on your phone your main machine come on thought you're a mac user the computer i use most often anyway um based on based on nothing but marco's uh firsthand experience of having upgraded
John:
and the vague wording in apple's release notes that have been tweeted out by various people um this is what we're talking about on past shows about in-place conversion uh and how the design of apfs makes that not as crazy as you might think it sounds like you might be thinking oh how is it going to do
John:
How is it going to upgrade my file system?
John:
Do I have to have, like, 50% of my storage free so it can write all the data to a new location and do this thing?
John:
Or is it going to, like, back it all up to the cloud or make me do an iTunes backup and restore it?
John:
How is it going to do this without destroying my data?
John:
And as we discussed last time, the strategy is that you leave all the data exactly where it is.
John:
You write a new set of metadata structure somewhere and the metadata is just like what tells you information about the data.
John:
Where is it?
John:
How much of it is there?
John:
Like the names of the files, the dates, all that crap.
John:
write that somewhere and that doesn't take up that much room like you need a little you need a a reasonable probably fixed size chunk of metadata more or less plus or minus extended attributes for each file uh and the bigger of the files you have the more efficient this is so if you have tons and tons of relatively large files like music or videos
John:
it's even it's an even bigger win so you don't probably need that much free space you need some free space for all ios upgrades you need some free space but you don't need that much they write all the metadata there pointing to the data exactly where it exists
John:
And then only at the very, very end, after writing all of the metadata, they do a very fast, very quick operation that says, and big swaperoonie, rewrite the headers and the volume to say, oh, actually, now this is an APFS volume, and the metadata is over here.
John:
And that little tiny critical section should only take, like, fractions of a second, right?
John:
That is the only time where you could potentially have a problem if it failed in the middle.
John:
But even then, they could use journaling and everything to defend against that.
John:
You don't have to worry about any more than you normally would, you know, somehow running out of battery during your upgrade.
John:
Or I don't even know what could happen because it's not like you can accidentally unplug a phone like they do want to be plugged in when they're being upgraded.
John:
But it's not like you're going to have a power cut unless there's some sort of hardware problem where you really drain your battery.
John:
so the moral of the story is yes upgrading in place is a real thing it should go fine and it is actually fairly safe assuming everything goes okay so I'm not afraid of doing this upgrade I'm not going to do the beta like I'm not in no hurry
John:
But when 10.3 comes out, I expect it to be fairly uneventful, barring any catastrophic bugs.
John:
Because once you're running APFS, then if there's a bug in APFS, then you're going to be sad, right?
John:
But the conversion process itself seems like it's okay.
Marco:
What are you more afraid of in practice, bugs in APFS or the regular behavior of HFS Plus?
John:
Yeah, that's the only thing that bothered me a little bit about the conversion when I was thinking about it more now that it's a real thing.
John:
Because the conversion is like what I would like it to do.
John:
is run essentially fsck or you know the repair thing to like to validate all the hfs plus metadata to make sure that it's not incorrect in various ways and all the ways that if you were to run disk utility on your disk right now it would find a bunch of crap wrong because hfs is weird and buggy and sometimes doesn't keep track of things the right way and it will find stuff that it can tell is wrong by exhaustively going over the data and metadata and comparing them and doing so on and so forth
John:
i would like it to do that before it dutifully writes the new metadata to a new location and based on your 15 minute time i'm not sure that it does i don't i don't know how long it would take to like to essentially fsck hfs plus on a 64 gig ios device maybe it's faster than i think because the discs are so much smaller than you know like a terabyte on a mac or whatever um
John:
So I'm not sure if it is doing that, but I would feel more comfortable if before it decided to make a copy, made sure the thing that it's copying is right.
John:
And this gets back to what you're saying.
John:
What are you afraid of, bugs in APFS or bugs in HFS Plus?
John:
I'm still probably more afraid of bugs in APFS because, bottom line, it takes a long time for a file system to really be bug-free.
John:
But at the moment of conversion, I am definitely more worried about
John:
My existing HFS Plus disks and all my iOS devices having the normal residue of problematic metadata that seems to accumulate in all HFS Plus volumes.
John:
I'm more worried about that at that point.
John:
After conversion, I have to say I have to give the nod to HFS Plus for, you know...
John:
For a brand new file system that has never been deployed on Apple devices, if something is going to go wrong, it's going to happen in that first big deployment.
John:
HMS Plus, for all of its little crappy bugs, I really don't expect any massive data-destroying things to suddenly pop up.
John:
HMS Plus is going to be what it is, and it has been for a long time, and it's not good.
John:
Not good by a long stretch, but
John:
presumably like i can't remember the last time a uh oh i can't remember last time hfs plus was even updated but all the updates that they've done to it none of them have caused any sort of catastrophic problems that abfs plus abfs oh god i cannot say these names um
Marco:
yeah anyway um i'm i'm gonna upgrade everything i'm just gonna go for it i have a lot of backups you should have a lot of backups too uh let's just all dive in and see how it goes well that's part of like you know on one hand it is awfully bold for apple to deploy their brand new file system on their most popular device like you know it's to make it part an automatic not even like an updating but an automatic part of seemingly all ios 10.3 installed well you know we'll see if it ships that way but it looks like that's the plan uh
Marco:
then that means all of the iPhones are going to get this, and they're all going to be converted when they reboot, and that's it, right?
Marco:
And that's a pretty bold move.
Marco:
On the other hand, iOS is, you know, even though it has a much larger install base, in many ways it's lower risk because the nature of phones is that they're these kind of closed systems.
Marco:
You have, like, very limited numbers of configurations.
Marco:
You don't have, like, weirdo, like on a Mac, you have all these different, like, you know,
Marco:
different disks and partition schemes and all sorts of apps that could be trying to mess with them or things like that on ios it's all very much it's all very controlled and there's fewer combinations of things fewer configurations and also the nature of phones is that people lose break and replace them often and so they're designed in in software and in services to have everything in the cloud and have everything backed up most of the time and i mean that isn't in practice always the case but
Marco:
That's the case way more often on phones than it is on Macs.
Marco:
So if something does go catastrophically wrong for some percentage of users on the phone, it is probably less destructive than if it happened on macOS.
John:
Yeah, I mostly agree with that.
John:
Well, I mean, the other obvious reason why they would do iOS first is because it's more important, and that's where their effort goes, and the Mac will be having a thought.
John:
Like, oh, yeah, I'm also looking for it.
John:
But yeah, phones are so much more of a controlled system.
John:
And also all of the weird crap about APFS, which is mostly good, you know, like the space sharing stuff and, you know, all the things that make it behave differently.
John:
differently than you might expect are not visible at all in ios because ios doesn't have the problem of 10 different ways that you can see free space and and users looking at it like the already the way you see free space in ios is already an illusion you go to the you know the preferences in general and usage and all that stuff like those numbers have only a vague connection to space on disk because they're totally hiding whole classes of things that don't count towards your space and they're trying to sum up space and attribute it to applications like it's already an illusion so
John:
there's no weirdness there whereas on the mac if you do you know if you use the power of the file system and if disk utility is actually updated to use it people can make arrangements that start to make far less sense where you can have a single apfs container with three volumes on it and then how do you throw the free space on them and trying to figure out when you make an instant copy does that count as space being taken up now you have two one gigabyte files where before you had one but the free space didn't change even though you don't have any shared volumes on the containers and
John:
all that goes away on uh on ios and also ios is case sensitive so that gets rid of all of whatever you're going to deal with for you know case folding stuff i did file one radar against apfs back in the early days about the whole character encoding handling uh and the fact that you can have two files with uh apparently the same name on the mac on apfs but you can't do that on hfs plus because hfs plus does this
John:
uh, normalization stuff to try to make them all the same, do a weird normalization.
John:
But anyway, uh, I don't know the state of that radar.
John:
I don't think it's the state of that radar has changed.
John:
Maybe it was closed as a dupe.
John:
I don't even remember.
John:
It went into the black hole.
John:
I haven't heard anything about it.
John:
Uh, but for max, most, the vast, vast, vast majority, which have case insensitive file systems.
John:
they're going to have to make decisions about that and i don't know what decisions they made so um if the mac gets the ability to boot from apfs before the octoberish release of whatever follows mac os sierra i will be surprised but on the other hand it's january and they're already doing ios maybe it will come to the mac earlier but coming to the mac is obviously the the change that i find uh more interesting because i'm into the mac and because you can actually see the file system and i think it is actually the more difficult one than doing ios
Casey:
that's interesting never thought of it that way uh any other thoughts about ios 10.3 that that are general and aren't spelled out in the rest of our document oh i don't know marco are you using it what is it like anything exciting in there uh no i mean like as a user i i don't even really notice anything honestly
Casey:
That's a good sign.
Casey:
Sounds like it's stable.
Marco:
I mean, I've had zero problems, like nothing that you typically associate with a beta one of a major point release or a major release like iOS 11.
Marco:
It's nothing like a beta one of that level.
Marco:
If I didn't know academically that I was running a beta, I would not realize I was running a beta.
Casey:
That sounds like a pretty clear win to me so far anyway.
John:
Oh, the other thing on file system being in 10.3, like the fact that this is a point release and Mark was saying, well, you don't really notice that much of a difference.
John:
APFS tech wise has capabilities that could be leveraged in iOS 11 or whatever the next major version is.
John:
To provide headlining style features.
John:
So, for example, snapshots, the ability to preserve the state of the entire file system in a consistent state could be used.
John:
I don't know if Apple will do this.
John:
You know, it's a political issue more than anything to roll your phone back to an ungood state.
John:
in a reliable way it's something that you can't really do now all you have to do is restore from backup or restore from the cloud and we know how annoying that is to do but imagine if before the the ios 11.1 to 11.2 upgrade it would just routinely snapshot everything beforehand and if you didn't like the upgrade at any point you could switch back to the state it was like the day before or whatever oh there's no chance of that i know well but tech but tech wise that is that is possible
Marco:
right and i think what's more likely to be used is maybe a recovery thing where like if an upgrade fails for some some for some reason then there'd be some mechanism to to have it kind of automatically roll itself back you know like that's that's more likely i think than i don't like the new icons i'm gonna go back like apple does not enable that really at all i mean or you could do it on a like uh
John:
uh i don't know they could do it at any level they wanted they could do it per application level to go back to an old version of an application they could do time machine type of features inside applications to find old versions of you know you could you could already do this stuff in various ways above the level of the file system but the fact that you get this sort of for free out of the file system and it's very efficient
John:
And fast and presumably have APIs.
John:
Those are the type of things that, yeah, you've got APFS now, but you don't have probably almost any of the features that could be built on it.
John:
Those are major OS features.
John:
They could be for few, maybe not even 11, maybe iOS 12 or whatever.
John:
Same thing with on the Mac.
John:
if and when we can boot from apfs yeah that's all well and good but there are many years presumably of features that are built in this like who knows if time machine will even be updated to support apfs in the next version of mac os maybe we'll have to wait for the version after that it's not it's non-trivial to take advantage of all these features and you know i'm in no hurry it's like step one get the file system with these features and make it solid step two three four and five then slowly roll out the features that
John:
consumers won't care that it's enabled by the new file system.
John:
They only care about the features, but many things will be enabled by these features.
John:
So I look forward to them even though, oh, 10.3, ho-hum, new file system, what was the big deal?
John:
The big deal should come later.
Marco:
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Casey:
We have finally gotten our wish.
Casey:
And by our, I mean mostly Marco.
Casey:
And you can respond to App Store reviews now, which is really exciting.
Casey:
I think developers have been talking about this for forever and a day.
Casey:
I saw a link fly by to Chalk's blog.
Casey:
I don't have it handy.
Casey:
I'll see if I can dig it up for the show notes.
Casey:
But I think it was like 2009 or something like that.
Casey:
saying, oh, we should really be able to respond to reviews in the App Store.
Casey:
Android has been able to do this for a long time.
Casey:
And now it's finally a thing.
Casey:
And that's something to be excited about.
Casey:
And it seems pretty clear to me that Phil Schiller is making moves.
Casey:
So Marco, how do you feel?
Marco:
It's kind of amazing as an iOS... And I said some of this when Phil first started doing things like last spring and summer.
Marco:
But it's just kind of amazing as an iOS developer to have things changing in the App Store and getting better at all.
Marco:
Because the App Store is, what, eight years old, eight and a half, something like that?
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
And during that time, during the first seven years of it...
Marco:
Almost nothing changed.
Marco:
Almost nothing improved.
Marco:
There were a few minor things here and exceedingly minor things.
Marco:
Something's even got worse.
Marco:
And so to have it being worked on and to have positive changes or any changes is a new feeling for iOS developers.
Marco:
And
Marco:
overall since phil has taken over i think the changes have been overall quite good uh very few things have been like a major miss or majorly harmful uh even search ads where they were very controversial and i think that's with good reason you know i i now spend more on search ads than i do on my servers and i don't love that oh i didn't know that
Marco:
Yeah, I was... It's accounting time with taxes and everything.
Marco:
So I've been looking back and, you know, doing all the... Adding up everything.
Marco:
And I now spend a good amount of money on search ads every week.
Marco:
And I have all these graphs.
Marco:
I mean, this is a diversion.
Marco:
This is not the main topic tonight, I guess.
Marco:
It could be if you wanted to.
Marco:
But anyway, you know, basically...
Marco:
I'm now paying for a certain part of my user base.
Marco:
And it isn't that big of a portion of my user base.
Marco:
The overall search ad traffic has been lower than I expected.
Marco:
And I don't think it's because I'm losing auctions.
Marco:
I think it's because I'm not being shown or there just aren't that many searches for the things I'm bidding on.
Marco:
But the search ad system is possibly a net improvement.
Marco:
But it's something.
Marco:
It's something big.
Marco:
And these are customers that now I'm getting.
Marco:
And the way I have things split out and being measured, it is apparent to me that most of the customers I'm getting via search ads are not coming from people who are looking for Overcast.
Marco:
they were coming from people who were looking for like podcast or some things like that like you know more generic terms competitor names things like that uh because i have my overcast bids i have on a separate campaign uh so i can tell like am i spending a lot of money just to get people i was gonna get anyway which you know i don't want that number to be very high um although i don't really want anybody else outbidding me either but you know
Marco:
If that number was very high, then I'm just paying for people who tapped result number one instead of result number two in the search, and that's no good.
Marco:
But that number isn't very high.
Marco:
That's not a massive percentage of what I'm spending.
Marco:
Most of what I'm spending is on generic search terms.
Marco:
So the system is kind of working as designed.
Marco:
I don't love that I'm taking a portion of what Apple's giving me every month and just giving it right back to them.
Marco:
It's like they're already they're already taking 30 percent.
Marco:
Like, you know, at least that I don't I don't see.
Marco:
It doesn't feel good to be paying them back all this money.
Marco:
But yeah.
Marco:
But overall, the search ads have been okay.
Marco:
As I said, they're not bringing in a large percentage of new users.
Marco:
Off the top of my head, I actually don't know the number, but off the top of my head, I think it's probably like 10% or less of new users are coming through search ads.
Marco:
But it's in that ballpark, at least.
Marco:
But
Marco:
these are people i wouldn't have gotten otherwise uh pretty clearly like from you could tell from the search terms and from how when i go to the store how i rank on those search terms because app store search is terrible uh so like you know you search for podcasts and like you know five of the first ten apps are like alarm clock apps it's like it's stuff that's totally unrelated it's literally like it's the search is still just as awful as it's always been
Marco:
But to have search ads there, I am getting customers I wouldn't have gotten before.
Marco:
So that's overall positive, even though I'm paying for them.
Marco:
And I'm paying a little more than I would like, but it's still within the realm of reasonable, I think.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
That aside, it is really nice going back to the original question.
Marco:
It is really nice to have changes happening in the app store that most of which are good.
Marco:
And I'm also using subscriptions now.
Marco:
I'm using the night purchase subscriptions.
Marco:
Next September, I'm going to start getting my 85% people renewing.
Marco:
That's going to be a great day because I'm going to just get a raise for no reason.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
So, you know, everybody let your subscriptions renew, please.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But otherwise, yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, so for this specific change of responding to reviews, and I guess maybe we'll get later to the app review prompting mechanism change.
Marco:
I don't know if we're going to talk about that on this show.
Marco:
If not, we talked about it on this week's Under the Radar.
Marco:
Plug, plug.
Marco:
So responding to reviews.
Marco:
So let me begin by asking you guys, as App Store users...
Marco:
Do you read a lot of the reviews?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So basically, if developers start responding to reviews, will you really see that?
John:
I do read reviews for apps that I have no idea about the whole domain.
John:
I was looking for an application recently for laying out where furniture is in rooms, so I need something that can do walls and doors and windows with correct-to-scale measurements and have couches and end tables to see how furniture is going to fit in a room without doing it yourself by cutting out little pieces of paper, which is fun, but I figured that an iPad app would be better.
John:
And I have no idea about that.
John:
uh area and as you noted search is terrible so i do what i think are reasonable searches and it shows a million hits half of which are scams or pieces of garbage and the ratings don't tell you that much i have to actually look at the reviews to see you know like a two and a half star thing could be 50 people cranky that it's five dollars and then 150 people who think it's actually a reasonably good app you have and the only way to tell that is to look at the reviews so i will scroll through them and see you know
John:
because you can't tell people rate things low for reasons unrelated to the functionality of the app i'm willing to pay 299 i don't care that 90 of your reviews are from people who can't believe you'd wanted to charge 299 for this like i just want to know does it do the job um so i do read them and and weep i suppose
Marco:
So my theory, my impression of this so far, basically, is the effectiveness and the value in developers being able to respond to reviews is highly dependent on implementation details of how this is actually done for both the reviewer, the developer, and people reading their reviews.
Marco:
And also, just how many people actually do go through and read reviews.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
I think iOS developers have a pretty good idea that having star ratings matters.
Marco:
Having a high average matters, and it looks better if you have a high number of them because it says, you know, usually in parentheses next to the star average, it'll tell you how many ratings there were.
Marco:
And so when people are choosing an app or deciding whether to download or buy an app, I think a lot of people do look at those star ratings and that matters.
Marco:
But the actual written reviews...
Marco:
We don't really know.
Marco:
I kind of have a hunch that they don't matter that much, that not a large percentage of people do go through and really read them or read a decent number of them.
Marco:
And so if that's the case, then whether developers can respond to them doesn't matter that much.
Marco:
And if you look, you know, this is one of those things that the Android people are going crazy today because Android has had this for years, maybe even since day one.
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
From what we hear from Android people, it's mostly a non-issue.
Marco:
It's like, yeah, some people do it.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
It isn't that big of a deal, right?
Marco:
So we don't know how this will play out on iOS.
Marco:
It isn't the same market, but there's certainly some overlap.
Marco:
And if I'm right that not a lot of people read a lot of the reviews, they mostly just look at the ratings,
Marco:
then whether you as a developer respond to them is really completely up to you.
Marco:
And it's kind of an optional support channel if you want it to be.
Marco:
That being said, App Store reviews, like your customers consider that a support channel whether you do or not.
Marco:
And that's not going to suddenly start now that developers can leave responses.
Marco:
That's always been the case.
Marco:
You've always had people treating the review system as a support channel and using it to, you know, grind axes or to ask weird questions or to withhold stars as hostages until you add their favorite features.
Marco:
Like, that has always been the case.
Marco:
It's not going to change that for developers.
Marco:
The perception that people expect you to respond has always been there.
Marco:
So people who are upset now that this is an additional support channel they now have to manage, Newsflash, it always has been one.
Marco:
We just haven't been able to manage it.
Marco:
So now we will have a way to do it.
Marco:
implementation wise there's a huge open question of how are these shown are they shown in a way that many people will see them one of my big questions about it is if i respond to a review is the person who wrote it notified of that response uh is it sent to them in some way through you know through like an email by apple or something because if not then the value i think for me responding is even lower because a large part of the value if somebody writes something
Marco:
that is either really a support request or is indicating they're having some kind of problem you could help with or the misunderstanding the app in some way, like they're saying it doesn't have a feature, but it really does have that feature.
Marco:
If they aren't notified of my response, that has a lot less value than to respond.
Marco:
So the implementation details, it rests a lot on this.
Marco:
How are they shown in the interface?
Marco:
How do developers respond?
Marco:
How hard is it to respond?
Marco:
Do we have to go through some weird iTunes Connect tool?
Marco:
Is there going to be a third-party app that makes it easy?
Marco:
How are we going to deal with the different storefronts in different parts of the world?
Marco:
How are we going to deal with different languages?
Marco:
There are lots of big question marks on the implementation details of this that will decide how effective it is or isn't and whether it's worth developers responding or not.
Marco:
And of course, there's going to be the people like Twitter and Facebook who just respond to every single thing with, please email support and we'll try to help you out, like fake template response.
Marco:
But overall...
Marco:
It's probably going to be either completely forgettable and it's going to be a total non-event and not a lot of people are going to respond and it'll be fine and nobody will care.
Marco:
Or it'll be a positive thing.
Marco:
The only downside is I'm going to start reading my reviews.
John:
It'll be positive for developers.
John:
It's situational.
John:
This is a developer-pleasing feature more than a customer-pleasing one, it seems to me.
John:
As you noted, customers may or may not care, especially if they're not notified.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But
John:
if you happen to be a specific developer who has a specific app that has a very popular lots of people clicked on helpful blah blah blah like the top review is a scathing review filled with mistaken information as in like you said
John:
i expect this thing to have feature x and it doesn't it's garbage and it totally has feature x this person just hasn't found it and you would love to be able to tell them actually click on the blah and there's a thing and you know like but you can't respond and you don't know the person's email and there's no way you can communicate that and your poor app sits there with this everyone you know it everyone who loads up your app is going to see that as like the most helpful review and it is just the worst and
John:
most developers aren't in this situation but for the one that is this feature is like the best thing ever because you know they don't care how it affects the whole app store they don't care if it you know if it even gets them any more conversions they just you know it's like the principle i just can't stand this one mistaken review being sitting there sitting there at the top right and i guess i could just release a new version and erase it which is a whole other
John:
A whole other thing about how reviews and ratings are going to last across releases, which, by the way, is not part of this.
John:
Apple has said they're aware of that problem.
John:
They don't have anything to announce at this time, but we should be looking forward to something happening there.
John:
But in the meantime, it just feels so good, I can imagine, as a developer, to be able to finally respond.
John:
I think even if they're not notified, it just lets you feel better to be like, well, that person will never know because they're long gone.
John:
But anyone else who stumbles across these reviews, at least I've set the record straight.
John:
Whether or not you really set it straight, whether you actually dug yourself in deeper by being passive-aggressive in your response and people think of your app worse, it's just human nature to feel better about this.
John:
And practically speaking, I think you have to give developers that channel.
John:
It's up to them to...
John:
do something useful with the channel they could not use it at all or they could you know be self-destructive and do bad things with it and argue with their customers even though you only have one reply i guess they get into edit wars as the question and the answer re-edit themselves over and over again um but not having that channel along at all for like seven or eight years has just felt terrible and so i think this is
John:
It's a really important feature to have.
John:
The importance is far out of proportion from the effect that it will have on anybody's business, probably.
John:
You had a system for commenting.
John:
You had everything in place.
John:
We're not asking you to expose their emails, which is another bone of contention of who owns the customers.
John:
Apple still owns them, right?
John:
But just give developers some way to respond.
John:
And it took so long and it's finally here.
John:
So I think there's no way this can't be a net positive for the App Store as a concept, even if it's not a net positive for any particular person's sales.
John:
It will be a net positive for a developer's state of mind.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
Well, I'm looking forward to seeing how this shakes out.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm also curious to hear what you think of it, Marco, after it's been a little while and seeing if you hate reading reviews or not.
Casey:
Well, what do you think of it?
Marco:
You're an iOS developer.
Marco:
What do you think?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's a little weird for my situation because it's a company.
Casey:
It's not just me.
Casey:
And seeing the feedback come through our email is interesting and enlightening.
Casey:
It does tell me that a lot of the problems we expect to see, because we know that they're problems, a lot of people cite them as problems.
Casey:
But there are certainly times where people are like, I don't understand how to do blah stuff.
Casey:
Why can't I do blah?
Casey:
And in that situation, it would be super convenient to be able to... And these are all emails, so obviously we can reply.
Casey:
But hypothetically, if these are reviews, it would be super convenient to be able to say, oh, if you need to do that thing, you just tap here and then tap there and then problem solved.
Casey:
And by the way, it sounds like we need to make this better in the future.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
In that sense, I mean, I'm positive about it.
Casey:
I don't suspect that it's going to be my personal job to be trolling the reviews.
Casey:
Well, not trolling, I guess, but weeding through the reviews.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Yeah, right?
Casey:
Weeding through the reviews to respond when necessary.
Casey:
But I agree with both of you.
Casey:
I think this is a net positive, and I'm curious to see what happens in it.
Casey:
And I'm also very curious to see...
Casey:
If after a while, like a few people start – people or companies, for that matter – start replying to reviews and we see how that goes, and that either convinces the rest of us to dive in headfirst or if it convinces – someone in the chat said trawling.
Casey:
That is the word I was looking for.
Casey:
T-R-A-W-L-I-N-G.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Anyway, so yeah, so does Marco start replying to reviews, and he has a terrible experience with it, and so underscore says, oh, I'm never touching that.
Casey:
Or does Marco start replying to reviews, and it's a great experience, and suddenly underscore's like, heck yeah, I want in on that, and then...
Casey:
Suddenly my employer's like, heck, yeah, we want in on that.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, I'm curious to see what the not literal beta testers, but kind of effective beta testers show us about the experience, if it's garbage or if it's great.
John:
It really depends on their personality, though.
John:
We all know people who probably shouldn't respond to comments like you can make it worse for yourself, you know, because you you have a free text box.
John:
And if you get there like in the wrong mood or you're angry, like if you end up like yelling at your customers, it's not a net win for you.
John:
But I don't think someone like David Smith is going to see someone yelling at their customers and say, oh, I better stay away from reviews because he won't yell at us.
John:
customers like customer support and dealing with you know customer support issues is a skill and you can have more or less of it depending on where your skill set lies and it is not a thing that you should just assume that you're able to do just because you wrote the application um so i you know the channel has to be there but for you know it's giving people even though they only have one reply that is more than enough rope for a lot of people to hang themselves so now now there's another skill set that these uh
John:
uh small shops or independent developers who have to be able to do a million things guess what here's one more thing that you have to add to your skill set or find some way to outsource and honestly and i said this on under the radar too uh again talk listen under the radar this week if you're into this topic because we went into more of it uh but
Marco:
This is a huge opportunity in the tools space for some service or app to make it easy for developers to receive new reviews and reply to them and track which ones they have either replied to or decided not to reply to.
Marco:
Across all the different stores, maybe with built-in translate functionality of some sort with a decent API.
Marco:
That's a thing.
Marco:
Please somebody make that and you can sell that to a lot of iOS developers for an ongoing recurring subscription fee.
John:
Using Apple's convenient open REST API.
John:
All these things you're describing, it may just be because I just did a podcast about this, but all I can think of is how much better that game I play that you guys make fun of all the time, Destiny,
John:
does with this exact thing destiny uh the game has an extensive api that is completely open to anybody who wants to use it that will they can give you all the information about all your characters and all your stats and let you do things with it and there are you know
John:
browser plugins websites ios applications everything you could possibly imagine for messing with your stuff in destiny why because it's an open api they said here's an api to all of our stuff and a simple you know authentication scheme where you just authenticate and then it's just and the number of things that people have made it's just like the thing you just described would there be a hundred of those the next day if this was destiny that we were talking about uh i don't know what the situation is for apple's
John:
interface to reviews but if it's not as good as destiny the game maybe they should hire some people from bungie because this is like making a decent api that anybody can use is like a simple rest based api that speaks json it's it's not that hard like individual people
John:
you know make these little chrome plugins or web pages that do amazing things and they do it all for free and they do it in their spare time and any one of them you would love to have something that's that good for what you just described for dealing with uh reviews in the ios app store but if apple keeps it all proprietary and it's behind some weird thing then it's going to be much harder to make and there will be fewer of them and it will be sad
Marco:
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Casey:
Moving on, I hear rumor on the streets that Marco is actually going to, in the new version of Overcast, and don't tell him I squealed, he's actually going to change the icon for Overcast to be the show art of the actively playing podcast.
Casey:
Since I've spilled the beans, Marco, why don't you tell us more about this?
Yeah.
Marco:
So one of the features that has been added in iOS 10.3 beta is this mechanism for seemingly setting alternate app icons in code.
Marco:
The implementation of this is a little questionable.
Marco:
Steve Trout and Smith did some digging, and apparently, I believe the API doesn't actually work yet, but apparently there is evidence in the frameworks and stuff that it prompts you to confirm it.
Marco:
like it prompts the user to confirm any change of icon before it actually applies it and so the question is what is this for and it is not for developers like me to do things like for instance like i would love to have to change the icon uh based on you know whether whether it's night or day and i could have like a dark mode at night and if i and then i could add automatic dark mode switching and everything and
Marco:
and that's just not going to be practical if if that's what it is um there was a tweet from the fantastical people uh that they would love to have because you know it's an alternative calendar app and just like the apple calendar app they'd love to change their icon to be the day number every day uh just like what apple's app does so it always shows the right date and it's not going to do that either it just prompts you every morning yeah right
John:
send you a push notification time to update your icon come here and say okay you can kind of understand why they do it that way though because it is a security concern because if applications could programmatically change their icon you could totally be be phished by an application that suddenly changes this icon to look like some some trusted application and you don't notice that you're not on the page you thought you were on and you tap the icon and it puts up like a phishing screen looks just like the you know what i mean like
John:
it is dangerous to, to allow applications to arbitrarily change their icon without a prompt.
John:
So I totally understand that prompt, but you're right.
John:
That eliminates all sorts of use cases.
John:
And especially with the phishing stuff, this is kind of like so many other app store things.
John:
Fantastic.
John:
How should be able to change its icon to be the date, right?
John:
It should be able to do that.
Uh,
John:
And it's like, well, but if we let them do that, then everyone can... It's like... There should be some earnable level of trust within the system.
John:
Just like there was on Stack Overflow or whatever.
John:
And Fantastical should have earned some level of trust by this point.
John:
I don't know how this mechanism is going to work.
John:
It's very difficult to do these types of systems.
John:
Just ask the people who run Stack Overflow.
John:
It is a hard problem to solve.
John:
But...
John:
Throwing up your hands and saying, well, oh, well, Fantastical can't show the data on their icon.
John:
That's not the right solution either.
John:
So I'm glad whoever this feature is made for is getting the features that they asked for.
John:
And I can think of reasonable uses of it in that context.
John:
But it kind of annoys me that the API is finally being made public, but in a way that so many use cases can't use it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, again, as you said, it is a tricky problem.
Marco:
There's lots of potential abuses for this.
Marco:
So it does make sense why they would strictly control it.
Marco:
But honestly, I'm kind of surprised it needs to be there at all.
Marco:
I honestly am very surprised it needs to be there at all.
Marco:
And if it needs to be there at all, I think it should...
Marco:
It should be there in a way that's more useful.
Marco:
So for instance, maybe to avoid possible security issues, maybe the icon has to be part of your app's bundle so you can't generate it dynamically.
Marco:
And then maybe AppReview checks all of them just to make sure that you don't have the messages or Apple Pay icon in there.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
That's a way they could do it for everybody, and that would make it a lot more useful.
Marco:
And then if it has to just ship 31 icons and have the app just call them without a prompt, like that's totally reasonable.
John:
Well, even with those things, because your applications aren't Swift, they can make an API like that.
John:
But once you can get pointers to things, you can fill in the image data programmatically from an obfuscated giant data array that you hide.
John:
No, you can't.
Marco:
If it was a set image named call and you had to pass it only a name of something in your bundle, there's no way to abuse that then.
John:
People are very sneaky.
John:
I mean, this...
John:
what was the thing we saw recently with that, uh, that piece of malware in the app store doing some weird things and calling some weird APIs with like some selector swizzling, like bottom line is it's really difficult to both human and automatically determine whether an application is safe.
John:
It's kind of the halting problem.
John:
So it doesn't mean that they shouldn't do it because it's impossible to do with a hundred percent accuracy.
John:
Like you're right.
John:
They, they would get, there was just covered the 99% case, but I think also, and even perhaps more reliably, uh,
John:
reputation uh of developers earnable through some kind of system to show that you are trustworthy and are not trying to scam people and even that has problems because like what if you're not trying to scam them but someone broke into your server and messed with your application like there's always going to be problems um but at this point in the life cycle of of the app store
John:
particularly for things like calendars where the utility of it is significant like i do look at the calendar icon to see what the date is on my phone frequently um that they have to find a way to make that be there and whether it's the scheme that you were describing marco where it's just a very uh limited api or it is a trust-based system which would have many other uses by the way not just for this api could have uses for review times and for how deep of a review you do and stuff like that
John:
This is another one of those things that should be there by now.
Casey:
I mean, no matter what, the fact that there's an API, even though it's super restricted right now, I mean, that's Apple style, right?
Casey:
I mean, look at the Siri.
Casey:
What do they call them?
Casey:
The different groups of functionality.
Casey:
There's a term for it.
Casey:
I can't think of it off the top of my head.
Casey:
But, you know, you can only use Siri in certain contexts.
Casey:
Well, maybe this is one of those things and maybe they'll open it up in the future.
Casey:
I mean, I'm not terribly confident about that, but it could be.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
But yeah, however this came to be, whatever this is about, I mean, I guess, cool, maybe?
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I suspect, just like Marco was saying, this is going to amount to a whole lot of nothing for most people.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Moving on, Steve Troughton-Smith, who is, I guess at this point, an honorary member of the show since he's given us most of the topics for tonight just by tweeting all this stuff.
Casey:
Uh, he has also found a floating detached keyboard.
Casey:
Now this is different than the thing.
Casey:
I don't even know if it's still a thing, but then the thing that at least used to be the case where you could slide the keyboard up the screen on an iPad and it would split in two.
Casey:
So there would be like a half on either side of the screen.
Casey:
And I think the intention there was so you could touch type with your thumbs while gripping the screen.
Casey:
This is not the same thing as that because that's split in two.
Casey:
This is an entire iPhone-shaped and sized keyboard that you can use single-handedly on a 9.7-inch iPad, which seems really peculiar and stupid to me at first.
Casey:
And then I got thinking about it, and I was like...
Casey:
You know, that actually might make some amount of sense.
Casey:
This might be kind of cool.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Like, when?
Casey:
Because if there's a situation where I'm holding an iPad one-handed, which admittedly, I can't imagine that would be terribly often, but...
Casey:
If I or maybe if I had the iPad propped and I wanted to use only one hand to type, having all those keys right next to each other, I could see that being kind of cool.
Casey:
I mean, it's all hypothetical, right?
Casey:
Because I haven't tried this myself, but it might be neat.
Casey:
I'm not writing this off immediately as garbage.
Casey:
It might also be garbage.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It sounds like you don't you're not too impressed, Marco.
Marco:
We would have to see how Apple tells the story of this feature.
Marco:
What is the intent of it?
Marco:
If it gets released.
Marco:
That's a big if.
Marco:
But if it gets released, I would be very curious to know what Apple thinks of this feature, what they expect it to be used for.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
As he's showing it in these screenshots, I can't think of a good use for this.
Marco:
I think it would be very, very hard to type on an actual iPad hardware.
Marco:
No matter where you put it on the screen, I think it would be very, very hard to type on.
Marco:
The whole reason that that keyboard works is because you are holding a device that is roughly the size of your hand and using one or two thumbs on it.
Marco:
The way you hold an iPad is totally different.
Marco:
The way your fingers reach things on the iPad is totally different.
Marco:
I don't see how this would work, honestly.
Marco:
But at this point, iOS is so big.
Marco:
There's so much there that they can add features like this that only two people ever want to use.
Marco:
Or the app icon changing API that they added that...
Marco:
How many apps are you ever going to be able to use that in a constructive way?
Marco:
Zero?
Marco:
Five?
Marco:
There's lots of APIs now, like various extension points that exist that are almost never used by anybody, but one type of app uses it, and that's enough.
Marco:
As you mentioned, the SiriKit stuff.
Marco:
Being able to order certain things through Siri or query certain things through Siri, where that's really only ever going to be used by...
Marco:
zero to one apps that are on somebody's phone uh but it's worth it to have it because those might be enough people to matter with ios being so big so something like this like you know i i would argue on the ipad they should probably be spending their time doing more important things that affect more people on the ipad that could have a bigger return but you know someone's going to use it and so i guess if it wasn't too much work it's probably fine but i i hesitate to see or i i struggle to see the use of this myself
John:
I think there was a tweet saying that this code has been in there since the beginning of iOS 10.
John:
It's not a 10.3 feature.
John:
And again, to be clear to everybody, this is not something that's in a 10.3 beta.
John:
This is a hidden thing.
John:
The code is there for it, but it's not exposed.
John:
It's just going through headers and finding things to call.
John:
The most important thing to me, looking at this potential feature that may or may not ever ship or be revealed in any way...
John:
is that it is, I guess, the second, maybe I'm missing some things, iteration of bringing essentially Windows to iOS.
John:
It is a floating square on the screen.
John:
that is not you know it's not the screen divided in half or in thirds or slide a panel that slides up from the side or whatever it is its own independent floating square that presumably you can put wherever you want uh that's called a window doesn't have title bar on it it's not a window in the mac sense but it's definitely a window picture in picture also a window you can kind of move that thing around on the screen without not completely freeform same thing with our little friend the assistive touch button nub thing that you can put anywhere on the screen
John:
It's like iOS was first, everything fills the screen.
John:
And then second, the screen starts getting subdivided into pieces for multitasking and thirds and halves and stuff like that.
John:
And then finally, a bunch of little guys come and plop up on top on this one big floating layer on top of everything.
John:
Keyboards, picture in picture, such stuff like...
John:
It is a step in the direction away from the absolute extreme simplicity that iOS was born in and towards a tiny toe dip into the world of the Mac where you can have more than one thing on the screen at the same time in an arrangement of your choosing and you can move stuff around depending on what you want to see.
John:
And this tiny little keyboard, this weird little iPhone floating keyboard, whatever thing...
John:
um is interesting to me not just because it's a window but also because it reinforces the idea and i feel this even on my ipad that sometimes when that keyboard slides up it's taking a larger portion of the screen than you think is appropriate for a keyboard at this time like oh man my big ipad screen now a huge portion of it is taken up with this big honking keyboard
John:
If a particular task, you don't need like that whole bottom third of the screen to be taken up with a keyboard just to have a little floating thing that you can put anywhere.
John:
Maybe you don't want it covering the bottom.
John:
Maybe you want it covering the left or the top or the side, or maybe you want it near your thumb or whatever.
John:
The same reason people like the assistive touch button, even though they're chasing that little puck around the screen, moving it out of the way so it doesn't obscure stuff.
John:
apparently people get used to that and like that's just part of me using my phone is occasionally i have to move the little thing out of the way uh but it's still preferable well here i think you're trading a very large keyboard take up you know not just obscuring large portion of the screen but often the app have to change their view hierarchy and view structure to accommodate for the very large keyboard when it comes up to say no application you don't have to change your layout at all let the user deal with that the user will be the janitor and old steve java's parlance
John:
And they'll just move the little tiny keyboard around where they want to move it.
John:
Now, like both of you said, having not used this, it does not immediately appear to me to be any sort of win.
John:
And I kind of agree with the fact of it not being exposed right now.
John:
And I would like to have to see what kind of story they explain this.
John:
But like the split keyboard that I think Casey mentioned before, where you take the existing iOS keyboard and split it.
John:
And I'm pretty sure that feature still exists because I've used it recently or recently-ish, like in the last year.
John:
um they announced that feature they showed it people ood and odd and i think most people who don't use it just forgot about it but if it's still there it doesn't do anybody harm if you don't ever use it and you don't ever accidentally trigger it it's fine um so this could be that category of things but i want to encourage apple to continue to explore this radical idea we call windows with a lowercase w
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
It's fascinating to me that Apple is shipping this code dark.
Casey:
Not surprising, necessarily, but just interesting.
Casey:
But what's really super interesting is that Steve Trouten-Smith is finding all this stuff.
Casey:
Like, just the stuff that he can dig up is tremendous.
Casey:
And I...
Casey:
I don't even know where to begin to do some of the stuff that he's able to do, and I'm deeply impressed by it.
Casey:
And I love that he's sharing it with the world, even to the point of making a sample project that's on GitHub, and we have a link to it in the show notes, or a link to a tweet of his anyway, to exercise the icon thing.
Casey:
Like, just such cool stuff.
Casey:
And man, I wish I was smart like him.
Casey:
But anyway, yeah, we'll see what happens with this floating keyboard thing.
Casey:
I do think that your point about the...
Casey:
So windowing is interesting, John, especially because if I recall correctly, you can actually resize the picture in picture window if you like pinch it.
Casey:
I think there are some limits, but I think you can enlarge and shrink it.
Casey:
And I've also noticed that you can kind of flick it off to the side.
Casey:
So there's just like a little like handle or like nubbin that pokes out off the side of the screen.
Casey:
So if you wanted to like shimmy it off to the side just for a moment to look at something and then bring it back, you can do that.
Casey:
So there is some amount of window management that's going on in iOS today.
Casey:
And it seems like more and more is coming, which is really, really interesting.
John:
And picture in picture, like it shows Apple's willingness to ship features on iOS in which it's up to you to deal with that little window.
John:
Like the whole point is you don't have to have the app in the front.
John:
You can go do other things and we won't even mess with your multitasking.
John:
We won't even take up one of the multitasking slots or whatever.
John:
It's just this little window and maybe it's blocking stuff.
John:
It's up to you to move it out of the way.
John:
If it's covering something you don't want, move it to a different place.
John:
If you just want to get rid of it, like...
John:
It is pushing that management task, deciding that you know where, like, oh, I don't care that it covers this part of the screen.
John:
And if it's covering something annoying, you move it.
John:
And in practice, I found with picture-in-picture, it's usually not that hard to find someplace on the screen where you can put it where it's not bothering you.
John:
And you know where that is because you know the apps that you're using.
John:
That's, you know, that's the curse and the power of Windows, as we all know on, you know, typical personal computers is...
John:
you can put them wherever you want and you can arrange it in a way that makes sense to you and it's so much more limited in ios like you have very few of these little things and the where you can put them and how big they can be and how you manipulate them is incredibly limited but i think you know coming from a world where the entire phone was one application all the time that incredible simplicity and moving to a world with you know ipad pro you know large type devices with a pen and all this other stuff you have to start giving people the ability to do this otherwise you're not
John:
leveraging the power of the larger screen and the multitasking and all that other stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I love picture-in-picture on my iPad, and I love it so much, even on macOS, that I found, I don't remember who introduced this to me, but, and forgive me if I've mentioned this on the show before, but there's a Safari extension called Pied Piper, but it's Pied P-I-P-E-R, get it?
Casey:
Anyway, it's a Safari extension that'll allow you to easily do picture-in-picture on, like, YouTube, and I think Vimeo and a couple of other places, and Plex, for the Plex Web front-end.
Casey:
Yes, I am aware that you can do some like right-click, right-click again dance on YouTube in order to get it to support picture-in-picture.
Casey:
But this just puts a little button right on the video that lets you kick it over to a picture-in-picture.
Casey:
And I find that super convenient, particularly because although I don't believe in having a gazillion Safari tabs like you do, John, I do believe in having about 11 billion spaces or virtual desktops.
Casey:
And so having picture in picture can let this hover across several different spaces, which is really nice.
Casey:
So I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Casey:
Anything else on iOS 10.3?
John:
briefly mentioned the reviewing interface thing that marco said he talked about it under the radar but uh that was a uh an issue we've talked about on past atps i think uh with applications asking you to rate them uh obnoxiously more often than you would like and we were discussing you know oh maybe you could report them that they're doing that or applications shouldn't be doing that but then how do you enforce the guidelines apple's solution to this seems to be
John:
Make an official API for asking that and put limits on the official API.
John:
And eventually, some point in the future, force everyone to use the API.
John:
So I endorse this plan.
John:
This sounds like a good plan.
John:
I look forward to them rolling it out.
John:
I like that they're doing it reasonably cautiously, not just one day saying, hey, guess what?
John:
If your app asks for reviews in any way except the official API, you will get rejected.
John:
They're not doing that.
John:
um but the api is it the limits are are sane it's like three times per year you can ask and with a global switch that says i never want to be asked to rate an application i'm going to use that global switch because i do never want to be asked many applications that i use and like frequently ask me to rate them and have obnoxious choices at the bottom of the dialogue boxes none of which my brainstem you know my brainstem doesn't know which one to pick so i have to read words and be like it's like
John:
maybe later no like oh i just go away box i don't want to see you so i i uh endorse this api i wish it would come sooner in fact i wish they would uh you know make it even more draconian now and the nice thing is
John:
Everything I heard about this is like, yes, these are reasonable choices.
John:
Like what about the applications like Marco's that never prompt you, but just have a little section in the preferences that say, hey, if you want to rate it, are they okay?
John:
Answer, yes, you're totally allowed to do that because that's not a thing that pops up in your face.
John:
If you're scrolling through the settings and you see the thing, those applications don't have to be removed from the store or change the thing.
John:
And if Marco wants to make it, so when you tap that thing, it pops up an inline thing to review the app.
John:
Can he use that new API?
John:
Yes, he can.
John:
See, it's not that hard.
John:
We're so used to every API that Apple, every sort of App Store rule or API they introduce, there being a bunch of obvious problems that we all whine about, right?
John:
No obvious problems in this one.
John:
There may be non-obvious problems, but it is just a great feeling to get an announcement at the App Store and go, they made, for all the big choices,
Marco:
they made reasonable ones yay yeah i mean this like again we we did spend about a half of under the radar this week talking about this so i have to re-put that in the show notes plug plug however this is one of this is like quintessential good apple this is like seeing a problem that is that causes a poor user experience uh but that that for some reason that that exists for a good reason so like these app review these rate my app dialogues exist for a good reason because they work and
Marco:
And because, as we mentioned earlier, star ratings in the app store tend to matter.
Marco:
And so when you can have a way for most apps to get a lot more star ratings, that will definitely increase their downloads and sales in a way that most people don't love, but most of them also just don't care that much about it.
Marco:
That's going to happen.
Marco:
That's going to be inevitable.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So Apple has addressed the need for them with this API.
Marco:
They're saying, okay, we understand that you need to prompt users or that you think you need, there needs to be a way to prompt users to review your app.
Marco:
However, they take control away from the developer of whether that's allowed to happen or not.
Marco:
The developer still says when it should happen, but they don't know whether it will succeed or not.
Marco:
And then combined with the policy change that will be coming down the road at some unspecified time that says you won't be allowed to ask for reviews any other way, that combination will be awesome.
Marco:
The only problem I see with this, which, again, we talked about this on Under the Radar.
Marco:
Please listen to that also.
Marco:
The only problem I see with this is enforcement, because I think it's going to be similar to the rules that they have against spam push notifications or push notifications that are used for, quote, marketing or promotional purposes.
Marco:
I think every single app that uses push notifications, with very, very few exceptions, including the App Store app, has been used for promotional purposes.
Marco:
Apps abuse this all the time.
Marco:
Apple themselves abuse this sometimes.
Marco:
And games are the worst.
Marco:
Big content apps are the worst.
Marco:
Big company apps are the worst.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
tons of apps spam notify people for things like hey bombs are now on sale for a limited time come check out the newest content like crap like that that is explicitly prohibited in the app review rules but that has never been enforced in any kind of scale because it's kind of hard to enforce that when you're reviewing apps for like three minutes at a time
Marco:
As long as you don't see the problem come up during those three minutes during app review, it's going to be really hard to enforce.
Marco:
Unless, as we discussed a couple times way back, maybe they could add some kind of report a problem button.
Marco:
But is Apple really going to clutter up their UI of every notification or something like that or every app icon or every app in the store with a report violation button?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
And so the problem that this review policy and review change will have is if they can't really consistently enforce that you aren't allowed to do it the old way anymore, then all the big apps that are data-driven like Twitter and stuff, they're just going to keep doing it the old way.
Marco:
And it's only going to hurt the good people who are trying to do things the right way.
John:
I think you only need a small number of people reporting.
John:
This is not a type of thing where you need everybody to even know the reporting interface exists.
John:
All you need is five nerds.
John:
Five nerds to know how to report it, right?
John:
Because all you need to do is alert Apple.
John:
Oh, hey.
John:
Maybe check this app out.
John:
Maybe it's doing this thing.
John:
And unlike push notifications, it's not like this is a data driven thing where like the avenue is there and the avenue is legal.
John:
It's just the content that's bad.
John:
This is the place where the avenue is not allowed.
John:
You are not allowed to pop up a dialog box that says anything about ratings and leads people to ratings.
John:
like without using the official api right so you don't have to be like oh you're allowed to use push notifications just the things that you push in those notifications shouldn't be ads you're like oh no totally we'll never push ads right that's not a reviewable thing whereas popping up a dialogue i mean obviously you can be sneaky and say oh the content of the dialogue is pulled from the web and you'll never know what it is right you know people can work around it but
John:
if you just let this go out into the wild and nerds know where the box is that tells them the application is a problem then that will you know and then they sort them by volume and they just say every week go through the ones that people are complaining about and see if it's yes it's true look i've you know i spent more than three minutes with this application and guess what it does prompt you for ratings and bring the ban hammer right it's you know it's like like all these enforcement problems like
John:
Just because you can't do it 100% doesn't mean you shouldn't try at all.
John:
And they need to get better about this in general, some kind of feedback mechanism for it.
John:
And honestly, I think applications will be motivated to use it.
John:
Because the API, another good thing this API does, is it improves the application.
John:
You don't have to send people elsewhere to write a review anymore.
John:
They can stay in your app.
John:
Developers have wanted that for a long time.
John:
And now you get it.
John:
So there is incentive.
John:
There's a carrot as well as a stick for everybody to use this API.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I was happy with this announcement.
Marco:
And honestly, like, I hate rate this app dialogue boxes.
Marco:
But the implementation of this is so good that I think I would leave it on.
Marco:
And I think I would be totally okay with apps I use on a regular basis showing this easy little box like once.
Marco:
And then I can just say, yeah, okay, four stars, five stars, whatever.
Marco:
Done.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
I never leave ratings for anything because I don't want to go through the hassle and I never think about it.
Marco:
I should because usually only people with access to grind leave ratings.
Marco:
So if you like things, you should leave ratings for them.
Marco:
But I almost never do.
Marco:
I have very few reviews on my account because I just don't think about it.
Marco:
This makes it a lot easier to do it.
Marco:
So as a customer and as somebody who wants to support good apps, I actually would leave this on.
Marco:
It is a really nice implementation.
John:
Speaking of reviews, you've reminded me slash shamed me into the same type of thing.
John:
I was thinking, when do I leave star reviews, and why don't I?
John:
And you've got both reasons.
John:
I almost never do, and I don't, because who wants to leave the application they're in to go do something?
John:
But if it was in the dialogue and I could just hit the number of stars, I would do that, and I should.
John:
And thinking of that, obviously I don't have any app in the store to think about reviews for, but I do have podcasts in the iTunes store, and those get reviews, and I'm not going to say...
John:
They are a tire fire because they're not.
John:
They're good reviews.
John:
We have good reviews for this podcast and for other podcasts that I'm on.
John:
But as shows age, what I have found is new reviews come in more slowly and the reviews become increasingly negative because eventually everyone who had anything nice to say about the show has already said what they have to say, which is fine.
John:
How many reviews can you leave for a show?
John:
But if in the middle of this podcast...
John:
a you know a magic auditory dialogue box could pop up and people could auditorily uh you know or with mental powers press like this is the analogy is falling apart anyway if it was really easy to rate podcasts i think more people would rate it and i think it would make the ratings nicer um but it's not easy to rate podcasts and therefore nobody does it and i have to say i don't rate the podcast i listen to either um and so the only people who are motivated to rate uh podcasts are
John:
when the show newly launches and people are enthusiastic and then later when people are angry and so now all we have left are the angry people rating the podcast which is fine like i don't i don't even know how reviews or podcast stars have any effect on our audience at all either but i mean it's also possible that you might be using a podcast app whose creator is very vehemently against the idea of podcast reviews and would never implement such a feature
John:
Do other podcast things have it?
Marco:
Well, not a lot of other podcasts have their own directories.
Marco:
Those that do, I don't know of any that have any kind of review system.
Marco:
But that's probably for good reason, because your view systems for podcasts are a terrible idea.
Marco:
But there's no API to do iTunes reviews, basically to give a star rating to...
Marco:
No, I really doubt it.
Marco:
I mean, you might be able to hack it through some kind of undocumented weird thing, but I really doubt it.
Marco:
That would be a massive potential for abuse.
Marco:
So I don't think they would want to expose that any real way.
Marco:
You can read reviews through an API that's, I think, also undocumented.
Marco:
I don't do that either.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
I don't want to...
Marco:
Show the content of reviews, the ratings from reviews.
Marco:
I think in the context of podcasts and podcast search and podcast discovery, the star rating system is incredibly dysfunctional.
Marco:
And therefore, I just do not want it.
Marco:
And I don't want Overcast to show any part of it ever.
Marco:
I have my own recommendation system, which is a simple thumbs up.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
It's a Boolean.
Marco:
You like this.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
There's no dislike.
Marco:
There's no stars.
Marco:
There's no commentary.
Marco:
There's many problems with those systems.
Marco:
Simple, thumbs up, easy.
John:
yeah the recommendation system and overcast works really well like there was uh chris latner uh cheated on us and went on another podcast to talk about stuff and i was like oh i want to hear that podcast too so i launched overcast and i went to the screen where you like i was going to like search for the show name or whatever but i didn't have to because it was already at like the very top of the like most recommended thing it was right there like the icon i mean i recognized it because the icon i had seen on twitter i'm like oh that must be it boop boop done
Casey:
didn't even need to type anything into a search box and that's just from people going thumbs up hey this was a good episode of the show that's all it takes like i don't really care what the star rating is for that podcast on a final note for tonight uh there's been a lot of mathematics that's been done there's been a lot of math done math british listeners maths casey it's math no it's math
Marco:
They don't know what that means.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Did you know it's pronounced hover?
Casey:
Anyway, so a friend of the show, Dan Provost, who is one half of Studio Neat, has done some math.
Casey:
He's crunched some numbers.
Casey:
And he has concluded that there probably should, or at least could, be a 10.5-inch iPad.
Casey:
And I'm going to try to summarize this as quickly as possible.
Casey:
If you look back to the original big iPad Pro announcement...
Casey:
What Schiller had said was, hey, if you take two full-size iPads vertically in portrait but put them adjacent with each other, that screen real estate of the two of them combined is the size, real estate-wise, resolution-wise, of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Casey:
So Dan said, well, what happens if you did the same thing, but with iPad minis?
Casey:
So you have two iPad minis standing in portrait mode next to each other, adjacent to each other.
Casey:
How big would the resultant iPad need to be?
Casey:
So cue some math, a little Pythagorean theorem.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
The answer is right around ten and a half inches, which works out.
Casey:
I shouldn't say it works out, which is interesting because we've been starting to hear a little bit of rumbling about, oh, there might be a ten and a half inch iPad someday, somehow in the future.
Casey:
But nobody really understood it until Dan started to do this math.
Casey:
So this sounds really darn plausible to me.
Casey:
uh what i'm not sure of and i've heard a lot of people pontificating about it is do they keep a 9.7 inch ipad around if i were to wager a guess i'd say they do but only in the dustbin the the old devices bin cheaply as apple is off to do uh what do you think knowing tim who that means i'm gonna be here for like 10 years well there's that uh so so marco how do you how do you read all this what do you think
Marco:
I think it sounds very plausible.
Marco:
If you look at the 12.9-inch iPad Pro users, the people who like that are real power users of the iPad.
Marco:
They really like having multitasking, especially, because the more you multitask, the more you really want resolution.
Marco:
If they ever do Windows like John wants, that would be even more important, as we know, from using PCs forever.
Marco:
So, you know...
Marco:
The demand for it, I think, is almost certainly there because lots of people who are real iPad power users want that extra resolution for multitasking.
Marco:
But for whatever reason, either it's carry size or hand size or whatever else, the 12.9 is a little too big.
Marco:
It's a pretty big iPad.
Marco:
Have you spent any time with one, Casey, the 12.9?
Casey:
Not really.
Casey:
There's a couple people at work that have them, so I see them.
Casey:
And even though I see them from time to time, like maybe once a week, every time I see one, I think to myself, my word, that is a tremendous iPad.
Marco:
It really is large.
Marco:
It is comically large.
Marco:
Yeah, especially because you're coming from the Mini, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And you know, too, the Mini shows us that you can take the regular 9.7, quote, regular iPad 9.7 resolution, you can shrink it down a little bit to iPhone density,
Marco:
and as long as you have decent eyesight it works right and so there is a market for that for people who don't mind a little bit everything being a little bit smaller who are maybe younger or power users are really precise with their fingers or whatever else they would rather have a smaller carry size and still have higher resolution uh so
Marco:
there is a market for that going from 9.7 resolution into the iPad mini size.
Marco:
So therefore, it follows.
Marco:
There's probably also a market for people who want the 12.9 resolution in a more like 9.7 size.
Marco:
So I think this makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
Whether it'll do or not is another story, it's plausible.
Marco:
Certainly, we've heard minor rumblings.
Marco:
And I think big picture, before John gets in and tells me why I'm wrong about all this, I think big picture, if you look at...
Marco:
The way Apple devotes resources in recent years, they find a product line that is in great need of attention, and they spend a year really whipping it into shape, and then they move on to the next thing that needs a lot of attention.
Marco:
The Apple TV a couple years ago was that thing.
Marco:
The Apple TV was in terrible shape.
Marco:
There was lots of increasing competition.
Marco:
They wanted to get it onto an app model.
Marco:
And so they gave some effort to it.
Marco:
They gave it a big boost.
Marco:
And then they just left it alone.
Marco:
There's been almost nothing changed in the new Apple TV since its release a year and a half ago, whenever that was.
Marco:
Last year, they put that amount of attention on the Apple Watch because the Apple Watch was basically on fire when it came out.
Marco:
It had so many problems.
Marco:
And so, watchOS 3 got lots of attention.
Marco:
I expect that the Apple Watch is not going to see tons of major changes this year.
Marco:
I think last year was its time to shine.
Marco:
It got a bunch of good improvements in watchOS 3.
Marco:
And now we're probably in for a quiet period.
Marco:
And now I expect this year to be another year of iPad improvements where I expect there to be decent investment into the iPad this year to try to turn around its sales curve, to try to really boost it, try to get it moving as another growth engine again.
Marco:
And I also expect that this year, I hope, that there is a larger-than-usual effort put into the iPhone.
Marco:
I think it's the iPhone's turn in this model.
Marco:
And the iPhone is a lot more important than the iPad.
Marco:
So I expect the iPhone to get things that are a little more resource-intensive.
Marco:
And the iPad to get things that will satisfy people, like kind of like holdover updates.
Marco:
So, you know, longstanding customer requests.
Marco:
Like if we ever get the rumored fix of the multitasking switcher to have like a much better app launching icon thing than the weirdo card thing they have now.
Marco:
Like that's probably going to happen this year if it's going to happen at all.
Marco:
Because this is the year for like iPad improvements that people really want that will get people really excited about the iPad again.
Marco:
And that will keep the power users going.
John:
um and then probably major effort on the iphone hardware wise i hope here's the thing about the ipad form factor and where the product is in its life it's one of the easiest products for apple to fiddle with because at ipad size it's
John:
with the internals you have a lot of leeway um you have so much leeway that they don't even have to use all the space for battery anymore right it can be pretty darn thin they have room for giant speakers the actual system on a chip and all the other things is so small compared to the size of the device
John:
you can from from year to year make different decisions about how big is it how big is the you know the the surround for the entire screen does it have a home button on the screen that tech ever comes from the iphone like you can play with all sorts of sizes and by the way every time you change the size or any other dimension you can sell more accessories and cases and stuff and everybody loves that um so tech wise and investment wise it's such an easy thing to do to say um
John:
We can take the iPad Pro 9.7, which is one of the best iPads ever made, and change a whole bunch of things about it dimensionally to try to make a different compromise on the product with very little investment.
John:
Because what does it really take to change the size of the screen by less than an inch?
John:
What would it take to update the Mac Pro?
John:
Right, right.
John:
Oh, here we go.
John:
No, but this is the easiest thing ever because you're not under space constraints.
John:
It's just a matter of finding a new supplier, and they do that routinely anyway, even if they keep the screen the same size to find new suppliers for things.
John:
You can tweak this product, and I think the iPad is in a good place now.
John:
I think the iPad Pro is...
John:
you know one of the best ipads apple has ever made perhaps the best and it is one of the few products that i recommend apple products i recommend to people these days with no reservations i want to get an ipad i like the nine points up should i get the ipad yes just get it it is it is there's nothing wrong with it like it is great maybe you could have more ramp but who cares like it's so good there's so few compromises and
John:
you know and the few things that i think about that they could change these rumors like i said for satisfying type of things that you can do to make people happy would i like an apple pencil 2 that connects to the smart connector hell yes and charges from it i hate the little plug-in thing on the end on the end to charge like you rarely have to do that like the battery lasts a long time but there's room for improvement with small changes to form factor and fit and finish and they'll get to sell new cases and new pencils and new you know new third party stuff to go like
John:
Such an easy win.
John:
And I don't know if that counts as, like you said, Marco, putting lots more investment at the iPad and giving it more attention.
John:
What I think it counts as is satisfying customers of the iPad with actually a fairly minimal investment.
John:
Just doing like the basic stuff of saying, well, we made a couple iPads.
John:
We've learned some things.
John:
Let's change it.
John:
Let's shift it around.
John:
you know they don't know which sizes they talked about in the original ipad this is the size that we picked when you just got to pick one size fine but as the product line diversifies i don't care how many sizes of ipad there are as long as they're not changing by three millimeters three or four sizes is fine with me and if you want to fade one out and bring another one in these are not radical shifts i mean aside from the thing that we always talk about of like i would like a 28 inch ipad you know that the microsoft surface studio that's a whole different product right whatever but within the realm of ipads that you battery-powered ipads that you hold in your hands
John:
I'm perfectly happy to see them mess with the dimensions of this product and the sort of the ergonomics and how it works with the case and the pencil and all that stuff.
John:
And I can't imagine that that type of change is a break the bank type of thing.
John:
So by all means, Apple, continue to make the already good iPad better with minimal investment.
John:
And with the money that you save, you have a line of desktop computers that I would love to see updated.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Casey:
And I think that does it.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Indochino, Betterment, and Casper.
Marco:
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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they did it in me.
Casey:
So a friend of the show, Brianna Wu, has decided that she really hasn't had enough grief in her life.
Casey:
And so she thought, you know what?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so one of the platforms she's running on, among other things, is like the whole kerfuffle from, I guess it was early last year, middle of last year, about Tim Cook and the iPhone FBI stuff.
Casey:
I think that that's worth mentioning.
Casey:
It's something that's relevant potentially to a lot of our listeners, even if you don't happen to live in Massachusetts.
Casey:
So John is our representative Massachusetts.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
What do you call yourself?
John:
That's it.
John:
You just wanted to say Masshole, didn't you?
Casey:
I really did.
Casey:
I really, really did.
Casey:
But I tried not to.
John:
You got it right.
Casey:
It's Massachusetts.
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that's not right.
Casey:
Got it in one.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not it at all.
Casey:
Anyway, so what are your thoughts on this, John?
John:
Yeah, so she's running in Massachusetts.
John:
She's running against another Democrat because, surprise, Massachusetts, well, maybe it's a surprise.
John:
We've had problems with the Republicans here before.
John:
But anyway, she is running against another Democrat who is insufficiently
John:
aligned with democratic principles and is not prioritizing the things that she would like to see prioritized and one of those issues one of the issues that is relevant to a tech podcast is the idea that you know this is true of most politicians regardless of party they don't know much about tech stuff
John:
And they're easily influenced by companies with a lot of money who will persuade them to vote in ways that are aligned with the interests of those companies.
John:
And because they don't know much about the tech stuff, like, well, I don't know, I guess this is the right thing to do.
John:
Like, they don't even know, right?
John:
But if someone who is involved in the tech world has a chance to...
John:
take stands on and make an important part of the platform issues that we care about so for example the iphone fbi stuff like it i think if you just asked a regular person should the fbi be able to get into a terrorist phone like they all say yes of course totally right but to understand the bigger issue right the bigger issue of like oh don't just
John:
don't just answer based on your fear of terrorism but think about the bigger issue of data privacy and the consequences and what it would lead to if if you know all information was accessible with and encryption was outlawed and all these other things are all things that tech people i feel like have a better grasp on than regular people to make that a platform of a congressional run um a it's novel to have someone who is actually informed about tech and who's making those issues
John:
uh you know front and center like this is a differentiating factor my opponent doesn't know about any of this stuff and doesn't care and is going to always vote the wrong way on these issues because they're just going to be aligned with the cable companies or whoever donates to their campaign right again regardless of party this is not a partisan issue like tech is terrible in the political world um uh but to make it a differentiating factor but my question is
John:
Do people care enough about this issue for it to be a good idea, politically speaking?
John:
Maybe the reason that no politicians bring it up is that it's like, yeah, so what?
John:
You are on the right side as far as nerds are concerned, but are there enough nerds to make this...
John:
something that helps you get elected or is this an issue that you never see in campaign ads for a very good reason and that very good reason being uh nerds are few and don't vote or don't believe you or don't care and i don't know the answer to that question i like the idea of you know who doesn't like the idea of their pet issues becoming the platform of some politicians are going to say i know you care about you know net neutrality and uh digital privacy and whatever and no one ever talks about them but i'm going to talk about them like yes i like that person but
John:
If there's like seven of us out there who care about these things, this is not going to help her get elected.
John:
So I'm of two minds in this.
John:
I'm happy to be catered to by a candidate who believes the same things I do about these relatively esoteric features, but especially in the current climate, which I'm not going to go into too much, where there are so many issues that I think we all agree are so much more important than this.
John:
Is this a distraction?
John:
Or even in the best of cases, do people really care enough about...
John:
digital privacy and other tech issues to vote based on them.
Casey:
Yeah, and to be clear, that's not like the only item on her platform by any stretch of the imagination.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
I mean, the ad we'll have a link to in the show notes is not even about that.
John:
Like, it's not about that at all.
John:
Like, women's issue is a much larger platform, and that's an easier sell because, yes, I think that is a winner.
John:
You know, women's issues is... I mean, just look at the women's march and, like...
John:
plenty of women will vote based on women's issue but specifically as relates to a tech podcast uh you know her her mentioning at all that this is an issue and part of her platform i think is is rare and novel so i'm not i'm not excluding any other things that are much more important on our platform i'm just saying this issue specifically does anyone care enough about it or will it always be dwarfed by the much more important issues including women's issues
Casey:
I think it's it's it's one note in in in the music.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It it's one it's one thing that that certainly I care about.
Casey:
And I think that to you guys care about that when a represent an elective representative of mine here in Virginia.
Casey:
votes against what I consider to be common sense nerd topics, for example, of voting against net neutrality.
Casey:
I noticed that.
Casey:
And that's enough to make me strongly consider the way I vote the next time I vote.
Casey:
So yeah, I think this can absolutely sway people.
Casey:
I think you're right also that there are far more important things to worry about.
Casey:
But this is also something that I am worried about.
John:
I always feel the same way when I see my representatives, which in general I'm fairly well aligned with because in the state that I happen to live in.
John:
But again, they just vote the wrong way, in my opinion, on so many issues related to tech.
John:
And it's like you just have to swallow that and be like, look.
John:
the alternative the alternative is so much worse and so much more important to things but on the other hand it just it just hurts to constantly have to swallow that so i'm like i said i'm excited by someone who i agree with on all the big issues and also these one section of small issues right and that that definitely it's so rare especially for tech things because everybody can no one's going to find a politician that agrees with everyone that doesn't exist you always have you know you
John:
Even if we didn't have this horrible two-party system, you're never going to find someone to represent you who, like, I agree with every single thing they say.
John:
You've got to have a hierarchy and you've got to prioritize and so on and so forth.
John:
But I think tech is not as obscure as... It should be more prominent than it is.
John:
Let's put it that way.
John:
Because the importance of tech in all of our lives has increased so much over the past several decades that now it actually is up there with the other issues...
John:
you know it should be discussed it should it shouldn't be like oh that's completely esoteric who cares about the internet because the internet is extremely powerful and extremely important and its power and importance is not diminishing over time um so maybe it's a generational thing and maybe we have to wait for a couple of generations to turn over before we really get into a world where people accept and understand the importance and power of networks and the internet um
John:
And hopefully we don't make too many bad decisions before then and screw it all up, you know.
John:
But it should be talked about more than it is.
John:
And it's a shame that even today, like even in the framing that I gave this, it is still viewed as a thing that only nerds care about and can understand.
John:
But it affects everybody's life.
John:
It doesn't matter whether you're a nerd or whether you're into tech or whether you're listening to this podcast.
John:
These issues do affect your life.
John:
It is basically impossible to live in the United States and not be affected by...
John:
You know, the technology law and telecommunication law and all those things.
John:
You are affected by it, whether you understand, you know, why your cable bill is going up or, you know, where you're able to get information from or not.
John:
Things could be much worse than they are.
John:
I think the net neutrality thing, we've sort of held the line on it for a long time, but it's a fragile wall that could crumble at any moment.
John:
And I really hope...
John:
More people in Congress and running for Congress bring this issue along, like you said, another note in the symphony.
John:
It deserves to be at least mentioned.
John:
That's not going to say that.
John:
It deserves to be at least mentioned, along with the other headline issues that are much more important, that people's lives depend on in a very real and immediate way.
John:
Tech issues should also be brought along for the ride at this point.
Marco:
So moving on to anything that's not politics.
Marco:
So, Casey, it seems like you might be thinking more seriously than I expected about possibly getting a Tesla.
Casey:
That is not true.
Casey:
Stop with that ridiculousness.
Marco:
So let me just give a brief statement on the matter of you possibly getting a Tesla.
Marco:
So cars are a big part of your identity.
Marco:
Oh, boy, he's going right...
Marco:
So this is how this is going to go.
Marco:
Okay, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Seriously.
Marco:
So when we went to Cars and Coffee a few weeks ago, I made the remark that now that I'm a Tesla person, now that I look at all the other cars out there and all their decked out engines and big mufflers and all this horsepower and everything else,
Marco:
And I feel kind of the way I feel now when I see cool, overclocked PC hardware with all the blue LEDs in it and everything else.
Marco:
It's like that is something that was a part of my life.
Marco:
It was a huge part of my life for a long time.
Marco:
But what I've moved to now...
Marco:
All that is irrelevant to me now, and so I look at that now, and I look at cool PC hardware, or even just fast PCs, good graphics cards, awesome CPUs, dual CPU systems that used to be members of the Mac family and now aren't.
Marco:
All of these high-end PC hardware things that I used to love so much...
Marco:
I'm no longer interested because I see them and I'm like, okay, that's cool.
Marco:
I respect the kind of horsepower your PC has.
Marco:
But because I'm no longer interested in Windows PCs, I have a hard time really getting into it as much.
Marco:
And it kind of feels like it's the past in my life.
Marco:
So at this car event, I kind of felt that way, looking at all these cars, thinking like, now that I have experienced the joy and sheer disruption of driving an electric car, that really does make all...
Marco:
Gas-powered cars feel like the past and feel old and clunky by comparison.
Marco:
Even really good ones, it makes them feel old and clunky by comparison.
Marco:
I had a hard time appreciating much of the cool car world because of that.
Marco:
Because now I've kind of shifted in what I live in and what I like and what's important to me.
Marco:
So for you to consider a Tesla, I have a feeling that you were going to have a very hard time in your mind reconciling that with this core part of what you've made your identity of, like, you love cars.
Marco:
You've loved cars your whole life.
Marco:
And you love, like, the engine parts of cars.
Marco:
You love, like, the mufflers and the noise and the cylinders.
Marco:
Like, you love all that stuff.
Marco:
And so I wonder, like...
Marco:
If maybe you should be considering a Tesla more seriously than you are, but maybe you're not letting yourself consider it because you don't want to put at risk that part of your identity changing.
Casey:
uh so i think i'm trying to think of a brief answer the answer to this quasi question because i think we could do a uh a like 50 minute deep dive into my psyche and in what what motivates me and what doesn't but i understand where you're coming from um i think the first of all the primary reason i'm not really considering a tesla is it's just so much money it's just so much money um
Casey:
I'd said to you privately that, you know, if you look at what a reasonably well-equipped Model S costs if one were to buy one, and not to say that's the right answer, but that's what I think of because I've only ever bought cars.
Casey:
I've never leased.
Casey:
So you look at the price tag of a reasonably equipped Model S, and it's hovering around $100,000.
Casey:
I understand you can get cheaper ones, but built the way I would want it, it would probably be around $100,000.
Casey:
That's almost three times what I paid for my current car, which is a BMW 3 Series.
Casey:
That's not an unreasonable car.
Casey:
That's a pretty nice car.
Marco:
Well, to be fair, you are comparing used to new, though.
Marco:
That is true.
Marco:
So compare used to used if you're going to make a price comparison.
Casey:
Well, I'm going to have to go the other direction because I don't have the faintest idea what a Tesla is used.
Casey:
But I can tell you that my car, when it was new, was $55,000, something like that.
Casey:
Which, to be clear, is ridiculous.
Casey:
Like, my car is very nice.
Casey:
It is not a $55,000 car.
Casey:
That's why I bought it used.
Casey:
But in any case, so you're looking at two of my car for one Tesla.
Casey:
And that in and of itself makes all of my pipe dreams moot because there's I don't think that there's any way I could justify spending that kind of money or the equivalent thereof in a lease.
Casey:
I just I don't think I could do it.
Casey:
Now, this is where everyone will say, well, perfect.
Casey:
The Model 3 is just the right car for you.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
So I'm skeptical it'll be as quick as I'd like it to be.
Casey:
And this is where everyone says, well, what do you really need to go fast for?
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
But that's what I like.
Casey:
And I like what I like.
Marco:
No, there's nothing wrong with wanting to go fast.
Marco:
And believe me, with a Tesla, there is ample speed.
Marco:
Even their slow models are fast.
Casey:
Oh, the Model S, I agree.
Casey:
I'm less confident in the 3.
Casey:
It very well could be, very, very well could be I'll end up wrong.
Casey:
In which case, I think I'll give the Model 3 a real look.
Casey:
I didn't put a deposit down or anything like that because I think it'll still be like two to three years before one of those is even available for those who put a deposit down.
Casey:
I forget what the official timeline is, but we'll see.
Casey:
But so let's assume for the sake of conversation that I'm willing to spend $100,000 or the equivalent thereof in the lease payment.
Casey:
I think you're largely onto something in that it would be a tough bridge to cross because I have for my entire life, since I can remember, I have treated cars and car culture to some degree as such a critical part of my life.
Casey:
And I
Casey:
I think that comes from there was always an old car in our garage.
Casey:
My dad worked for IBM for something like 30 years.
Casey:
But there was a brief window of time before he started working for IBM where he was a professional mechanic for Buick.
Casey:
And he had always tinkered with cars since he was a kid.
Casey:
Now, the difference between dad and I is that he has actual practical knowledge and all of my knowledge, well, what little I have is all theoretical.
Casey:
And if you doubt me on that, I have a podcast to recommend to you.
Casey:
But in any case, but all kidding aside, I've grown up with cars around me all my life.
Casey:
And I think you tend to emulate your parents.
Casey:
And my dad has always been obsessed with cars.
Casey:
And so because of that, I think I've always been obsessed with cars.
Casey:
And even if I were to get a Tesla sitting here now, not knowing any better, I think I would probably want like a stupid dino juice powered, not weekend car, but like weekend car.
Casey:
One that has three pedals, maybe a convertible that I've ever owned one really.
Casey:
But that sounds like it could be fun.
Casey:
You know, like an S2000 or something like that.
Casey:
Just to have to remind me what driving used to feel like before it was all automated and before some of the soul was taken out of it.
Casey:
And I don't mean that to be insulting.
Casey:
I just feel like it's a very different animal with the Tesla.
Casey:
But I tell you what, you know, when we were out that morning on New Year's Eve,
Casey:
I drove us from cars and coffee to where we had breakfast.
Casey:
And every time I gave that Tesla, this was underscores Tesla, every time I gave that Tesla a little bit of my right foot, it just put a humongous smile on my face because it is just frigging intoxicating, having infinite torque from no RPM.
Casey:
It's unbelievably intoxicating.
Casey:
And so to that end, I wonder if I had a Model S,
Casey:
if I would get over it a lot quicker than I expect.
Marco:
I sure did.
Marco:
I mean, like, I'm telling you, like, like when I, going from the M5 to the Model S, I really was afraid that I would really miss like the sporty, you know, V8-ness of the M5 and shifting, shifting the gears and everything.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
i really didn't like i i thought that would i was very worried about that and i it it was a complete non-issue as soon as i started driving the models i'm like oh my god this is so good um now that being said if you theoretically were to do your like little gas car for fun weekend reminding yourself that you exist
Marco:
If only there was someone else in your household who was looking for a new full-size sedan.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So what, you're saying Aaron gets a Tesla?
Marco:
I mean, Aaron can make her own car decision, of course, but maybe Aaron could get a Model S because that's the size and...
Marco:
class of car that i believe she wants the space from uh and then you for like you know when you go to work you know you could leave leave the model s at home for you know because aaron's with declan during the work day right so you know there'd be the car seat in that one and then you ride your little s2000 which is probably not that expensive today because they're not that new uh you ride your s2000 to work or a miata or something and
Marco:
And you have your fun little rocket engine car with a stick with three pedals.
Marco:
And that's you remind yourself that you like Carr's car.
Marco:
And then you have the Model S as the other car in your family that Aaron drives most of the time and that you slowly fall in love with.
Casey:
You know, it's funny you mention that for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
First of all, I've barked up this tree with Erin and she has told me on no uncertain terms that there's no way she would be spending that kind of money on a Model S. Now, it's kind of funny because her money is my money and my money is her money.
Casey:
It's all really our money.
Casey:
But be that as it may.
Marco:
Well, it's a joint decision, obviously.
Yeah.
Casey:
right but uh but yeah she said no way she doesn't she has no interest in it not because she doesn't think it's nice i mean she's driven uh underscores car once or twice as well and i think she really liked it but she just does not feel like it's the right value for money because i don't think it is value for well so as as an automobile alone i don't think it's a very good price performer as a glimpse of the future yeah not that bad but how much money you put into your car for all these repairs
Casey:
Don't even talk to me about that.
Casey:
It's a very sore subject and it's too soon.
John:
Can I give you my plan for all this disposable income?
John:
For the price of Casey's used BMW, you can get a his and hers Honda Accord, which I highly recommend, and then take the $100,000 that you were going to spend on the Tesla and buy a used Ferrari.
John:
Done and done.
John:
oh talk about maintenance cost yeah right it's your fund you have two very large cars that both of which can carry all of your stuff and all of your children and then when casey wants to feel connected to you know the living breathing heart inside him i don't think your heart breathes um you know what i mean yeah he would have a ferrari
John:
and i'm gonna say going to the cars and coffee thing i did not having despite having driven and been driven in teslas which i think are great and you know and i i would recommend anybody who wants to buy one whatever i still love all those cars i still want a ferrari um and i think in 20 or 30 years i'll eventually want an electric ferrari but right now i want i want a gas one uh that's what i want please send me that now
John:
If I had $100,000, there is no way I would be looking.
John:
If I had $100,000 that I was forced to spend on a car, I would be looking at Ferraris.
John:
Because it would be like, can I get a used Ferrari for $100,000 this season?
John:
I think I can.
John:
Can you afford to maintain a $100,000 Ferrari?
John:
When it stops working, I'll just look at it and enjoy it.
John:
Like it's a piece of art.
John:
Like that guy, you know, that guy who put the old Ferrari like inside his house.
Casey:
Remember that guy?
Casey:
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
John:
Right.
John:
I can relate to that guy.
John:
I probably wouldn't do that, but I can relate to that guy because even when it's not moving, looking at it would make me happy.
John:
And the Tesla, when it's not moving, looking at it, it's a fine looking car.
John:
Like, don't get me wrong.
John:
It's not an ugly car.
John:
but it does not make me happy in the way that looking at Ferrari does.
John:
So I still, I would still spend that kind of disposable income on a completely frivolous and unpractical car.
John:
Not even pretend like, cause I don't want a practical car for a hundred grand.
John:
I want a car that no one should ever own.
John:
And that's a Ferrari.
Casey:
Well, do you remember, it was a few years ago, I'll put a link in the show notes, Doug DeMuro, who at the time was with Jalopnik, I'm not sure if he still is, he bought a Ferrari, he bought it, this article was written in December of 14.
Casey:
He said he had it for a little under a year and put 5,000 miles on it.
Casey:
He spent about $13,000 between depreciation, maintenance, everything else.
Casey:
So it's $13,000 a year.
John:
So it's like about the same amount as your BMW then, right?
John:
Oh, that cuts deep.
John:
That cuts deep.
John:
Did the engine explode at any point on his Ferrari or no?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
It's been a while since I've read this article, but my engine didn't exactly explode.
John:
It would have exploded.
Casey:
No, it just had a relatively catastrophic failure.
John:
If it starts to eat itself and make small pieces of metal, that's bad.
Casey:
No, it didn't start to eat itself, you big jerk.
Casey:
It's just the Vanos system kind of forgot how to work.
Casey:
No big deal.
Casey:
And then the water pump kind of forgot how to work.
Casey:
No big deal.
John:
Pretty sure my car has neither of those, for the record.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It has some kind of water pump, probably for the cooling of the batteries.
John:
That's true.
John:
There are far fewer things that can go wrong with an electric car.
John:
I'm totally on board with the electric car.
John:
I will get an electric car as soon as they come down to my price, which could be a while at this rate.
John:
But...
John:
But yeah, I can relate to Casey both A and not.
John:
In the absence of money falling on my head, it's hard for me to justify, as is apparent by my car purchases, spending that much money on a car, period.
John:
And if I had that kind of money and I was forced to spend it on a car, I would be thinking way more frivolous than...
John:
than a tesla which which is which is like it sounds extravagant but the tesla is is an eminently practical car it is not a frivolous car it will not cost you 13 grand in repair bills you do not need to hire a special italian to do your repairs for you there's nothing in the car to go wrong for the most part except for the infotainment system that can't find podcast art like and the door handles yeah and the door handles it is a pretty darn boring car for that amount of money no one should buy the model x though it's gross