Selling Hot Dogs on a Stick
Marco:
I just, for the first time in a while, picked up my iPhone 5S.
Marco:
I headed out for overcast testing.
Marco:
Mistake.
Casey:
It's waffle time.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
See, but try accomplishing anything on it.
John:
You are like someone who we're trying not to mention, and whatever the last thing that you've done has the most impression on you.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
No, I mean, it's the kind of thing like I was doing some testing a few days ago and that's why I just picked it up now to move it out of the way so we can do this show and it just feels so good when I pick it up and I'm like, man, it looks so good.
Marco:
I wish phones could still look that good and would still feel like good in my hand.
Marco:
But then when I actually use it to do my tests, I'm just like, man, this is such a toy.
Marco:
This is so small.
Marco:
I've honestly been thinking like, okay, so my phone is continuing to not be able to make phone calls reliably.
Marco:
Since day one, both mine and Tiff's iPhone 7s have been...
Marco:
very frequently exhibiting the exact same problem of the microphone cuts out during phone calls so that the other person can't hear us for like 10 seconds or 15 seconds at a time often resulting in them saying hello hello hello until they hang up and we're screaming we're here we're here we're here and they just hang up after a while because you know usually it doesn't recover
Marco:
And it's, you know, you say you might think you're never on the phone.
Marco:
Oh, I never I never take phone calls.
Marco:
You know, I use apps on my phone all the time.
Marco:
You'd be surprised how many times a phone call becomes something important, even in a lifestyle like this.
Marco:
Simple things like when your credit card gets flagged for fraud and you have to call them and explain it.
Marco:
And they hang up on you in the middle because they say, I'm sorry.
Marco:
It seems like no one's here anymore.
Marco:
We have to hang up.
Marco:
Anyway, so I've been thinking about maybe trying a plus while I get this phone fixed.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I just keep waffling because like the camera on it is so good, even though it's not that great in low light.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Because I use my phone so much, and so often I wish the screen was bigger, but when I do have the Plus for like a week here or there, I'm just like, oh, this is so unwieldy in my hand.
Marco:
I hate holding it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, that's the current waffle, but it's not a very serious waffle yet.
Marco:
Maybe Mike will work on me for another couple of weeks, and we'll see, but probably not.
Marco:
I'll probably just wait until the next one.
Casey:
Can we not put this in the show?
Casey:
Because I don't want to hear Mike's lip after it's inevitably released, and then he starts celebrating on you waffling again.
Casey:
Also, I take issue with something you said a minute ago.
Casey:
The 5S unquestionably feels amazing in the hand.
Casey:
Oh, my God, it feels so good in the hand.
Casey:
But I actually stand by my earlier assessment that this iPhone 7 matte black that I have in my hands –
Casey:
While unquestionably slippier than the most slippy soap that you've ever held, it is aesthetically my favorite iPhone I've ever used, which is unfortunate because it is like holding a bar of soap.
Casey:
But God, I think this thing is beautiful.
Casey:
And that doesn't mean you have to agree, but this is my favorite phone of all the iPhones I've owned purely visually.
John:
On the phone size thing, the AirPods are giving me...
John:
a little bit of relief from the excessive size of the 6, which is the only size of iPhone I've ever had, but it's obviously bigger than the Plus.
John:
Or not the Plus, the iPod Touchers I used to use.
John:
Remember I said when I first got the AirPods that the clicker thing on my wired headphones was beating them in the kitchen?
John:
Well, the AirPods have made a comeback because they allow me to put my phone down someplace else and not have it in my pocket, which you wouldn't think would make a difference when I'm going around the kitchen and cooking.
John:
but when you're cooking in the kitchen, occasionally you have to bend down to get like a pot out of a low thing or whatever.
John:
And no matter which pocket I put my phone in, it's just big enough to be uncomfortable when I bend down that I feel like I'm either bending my phone or it's just, you know, I don't know.
John:
It's just nice not to have it there or, you know, it's just, anyway, I feel better when I put my phone down, you know, on a side table in the other room and then just walk around the kitchen with my AirPods.
John:
AirPods are back in the house now.
John:
um and it just goes to show that i would never trade down this for the smaller size no matter how good it feels in the hand because like marco said you you don't just hold the thing it's not it's not a worry stone that you just rub in your hand you actually look at it and touch the screen and for looking and touching the screen i want a bigger screen so i have one but i do like uh that the airpods are letting me keep my phone away from myself while listening to audio
Marco:
I'm so torn because whenever I am using it, I want a bigger screen.
Marco:
But whenever I'm holding it, I want a smaller phone.
Marco:
You're talking about the 5S?
Marco:
No, I'm talking about the middle one, the 4.7 inch size.
Marco:
I'm never happy with this size, but I'm also not happy with any of the other ones.
Marco:
So I picked the one in the middle that's kind of mediocre at everything.
Marco:
And I'm, I guess, least unhappy with it.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
This is why I'm hoping so much that the next industrial design of the phone puts a larger screen in smaller bodies.
Marco:
I would love so much to have the size screen that the Plus has, but in something that isn't quite as much bigger than the Plus.
Marco:
Any reduction in size would probably be enough to push me over the edge.
Marco:
Even if it's a small reduction, just like fine.
Marco:
And I'm not talking about thickness.
Marco:
As you know from ever listening to me complain about anything ever, I don't care that much about thickness.
Marco:
In the iPhone's case, it's more about the footprint, the dimensions, because that's what makes it awkward in the hand and awkward in my pocket.
Marco:
The thickness itself is not that important to me.
Marco:
So I'm really, really hoping the next one does something like that.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
They keep selling so many of these.
Marco:
I don't know if they're ever going to change it.
Marco:
Speaking of topical things.
Casey:
So I have a question.
Casey:
If the next iPhone, let's just assume it's called an iPhone 8.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's what I expect.
Casey:
Let's just assume for this conversation that the next iPhone is the iPhone 8.
Casey:
And let's assume for the sake of conversation that it is approximately the same size as an iPhone 7, physically speaking, but the screen, because of smaller bezels or John Bezels, however, is now roughly the size of a 7 Plus.
Casey:
I don't even care if that's possible physically, just for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
Is Mike right if we all get these iPhone 8s that are physically the size that we've always used, but the screen size is the size of a plus?
Casey:
Is Mike right?
John:
Yes or no?
John:
Is it like the TARDIS where it's bigger on the inside?
John:
The math doesn't work out on that.
John:
Just go with it.
John:
No, I mean, just go with it.
John:
It's like, what if, what if you could have a bus, but it was the size of a matchbox car, but it fit your whole family?
John:
Precisely.
John:
You get it, John.
Marco:
You get it.
Marco:
For reference, so I have all three phones that we're talking about right here on my desk.
Marco:
I've been doing this testing.
Marco:
And if you place the iPhone 7 on top of a Plus phone, you can still see the size of the Plus phone screen sticking out the left and right.
John:
I don't think Casey knows how big a Plus is.
John:
It's way bigger.
John:
Yeah, it's a lot bigger.
Yeah.
Marco:
So yeah, it's not possible to shove the massive screen into the mid-sized body.
Marco:
It is possible to put the massive screen into a phone that is less massive.
Marco:
It would still be a very large phone, but it would be possible.
Marco:
It would be more pleasant in the hand.
Marco:
It would be a little bit smaller.
Marco:
And honestly, I mean, none of the three of us have ever, to the best of my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, spent any time with one of these Android curved screen edge phones.
Marco:
But you can look at other phones on the market, and they have creative ways to shove large screens into at least narrower phones, and maybe also shorter, but narrower is usually the more important one.
Marco:
And I think I would agree with that in the hand.
Marco:
Narrower is kind of more important for whether you can reach things with your hand and how it fits, how you hold it.
Marco:
But man, just again, the very slightest...
John:
improvement in size of the big one i'm getting it you won't be swayed by what they're probably going to do which is keep the the the seven form factor but pulling the margins on that like so same same size screen as the seven but smaller surround so basically it's making it in your hand feel closer to the five size uh you'd still go for the big giant phone with its margins pulled in as opposed to the the middle phone with the margins pulled in
Marco:
So, you're probably right that, you know, that is probably the kind of thing they would do.
Marco:
Like, if they do one, they would probably do both with the same kind of treatment.
Marco:
So, the phone you just described, which is basically like the iPhone 8 minus, it would be really, really great feeling in my hand.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
I would have the same problems I have with the current 6, or 7, this design, which is that I just keep wanting more screen space and the biggest battery and the biggest camera.
Marco:
Although, honestly, truth be told, I have been totally fine with the battery on the 7.
Marco:
Yeah, agreed.
Marco:
And part of that's because I'm doing a lot of iOS development, so it's plugged in a lot during the day.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But overall, the battery life on the 7 is noticeably better than it was in the 6S for me in my real world use.
Marco:
It is a substantial difference.
Marco:
And it's to the point now where like Tiff and I, a few years ago, I ran a lightning cable between two segments of our couch so that we would just always be able to pull between two of the cushions.
Marco:
We would just be able to pull up a cable and plug our phone in called a charger couch.
Marco:
It's a great idea.
Marco:
and we recently had to replace the couch and i haven't even set up the new one yet with the charger cable because i realized like we never really use it anymore because tiff's phone always has the giant battery backpack on it and mine is always plugged in my computer all day and when i'm actually using it throughout you know their outside world like
Marco:
The battery is actually better enough in the 7, the regular size 7.
Marco:
So that is good for them.
Marco:
I'm really happy about that in practice.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why overall I am happier than I thought I would be with the 7.
Marco:
That being said, I still want the bigger screen and whatever the best camera is.
Marco:
Hopefully, in the next one, they can fit two image-stabilized cameras, and hopefully the zoomed-in one is both stabilized and not a meaningfully smaller aperture.
Marco:
So that would be nice, but...
Marco:
I still do want the best, best, best of all that stuff because I use my phone so heavily for so many things throughout the day.
John:
Sorry, Apple doesn't make best, best, best of anything anymore.
Marco:
I know, that's kind of the problem, right?
Marco:
Yeah, you got to decide what asterisks you're willing to tolerate.
Marco:
But anyway, so to answer your question, John, I should probably just go ahead and get the big one next time, assuming it is a little bit smaller.
Marco:
But the whole time I would have it, I would be waffling in the other direction.
Marco:
So you'll hear about it.
Marco:
Just wait about, what, about nine months, and you'll start hearing me waffle?
John:
I'm going to say this is like, you will buy the bigger one, you will receive it, you will use it for a week, and then you will keep it for testing purposes, but buy a smaller one and use it as your phone.
John:
Maybe.
Marco:
No, I just want my wonderful 7 that I'm unreasonably happy with in other ways, I just want it to be able to make phone calls.
Marco:
It's kind of important.
Yeah.
Marco:
is that do you think that's related to the intel do you have the intel chip instead of the qualcomm on the radio i do that's that's another thing so i do have both every um i think at&t sold phone i think i think all of them except in the u.s i think all of them except the verizon one have the intel one yeah that i never make phone calls from right exactly so that was also also one of my theories is
Marco:
If I send this in to get fixed and I buy a new phone in the meantime, I would buy a Verizon unlocked one.
Marco:
If I get the old one back, then sell it or something.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I just don't want to deal with it.
Marco:
This is why I haven't gotten it fixed yet.
Marco:
It hasn't been able to make phone calls reliably since day one.
Marco:
I need my phone all the time.
Marco:
There hasn't been a time where I've wanted to ship it back and be without it for probably at least a few days while Apple does whatever to it.
Marco:
Then it comes back and maybe isn't fixed.
Casey:
Mine has been completely fine, and Aaron's, to the best of my knowledge, have both been completely fine since we've gotten them.
Casey:
We're both on AT&T, both on iPhone 7s, and they've both been no problem at all.
Casey:
That's not to say that you're wrong or anything.
Casey:
Obviously, your experience is your experience, but it's not a systemic issue with all the Intel chips, it would seem.
John:
Yeah, that's why I was wondering if it was like an OS bug or something.
John:
By the way, speaking of like how often we use our phones, I have my phone right here and I can pull up how often I... Does all calls do sent and received or just sent?
John:
I'm in the recent calls section in the all tab.
John:
That's everything, right?
John:
I would think so.
John:
So this is 2017 phone calls for me.
John:
One on the 5th from my house.
John:
Spam call on the 12th.
John:
Spam call on the 18th.
John:
one on thursday spam call on thursday and then one today so that's everything in 20 one two three three spam calls and three legit calls in 2017 so far it's february don't use my phone a lot i have 52 calls in 2017 yeah so you're you're feeling the pain of a weird uh microphone a lot more than i am yes
John:
32 33 34 35 36 8 for screen yeah it's it's somewhere between 40 and 50 and and i'm using that no more robo thing too like i don't it's i mean it i'm using it and i like the fact that it has caught some but uh i don't like that if you still get through
Marco:
Yeah, so iPhone 7, overall thumbs up, but for God's sake, I want to make phone calls reliably.
Marco:
And Nomorobo, also thumbs up.
Marco:
Big supporter of that now.
Marco:
I tried a lot of the call blocking things.
Marco:
Nomorobo was the best.
Marco:
I think it's like two bucks a month, some kind of subscription price, but it's worth it.
John:
uh do it oh yeah well I would I would pay more if it worked better although I still have Haya on here which was the one I was using before which as you pointed out Marco like doesn't work and is annoying and is slightly evil uh because Haya lets you look up numbers so when one of them gets through and I don't answer it because why would I I want to know is this a spam caller and I can just you know go to Haya and paste in the number and it says oh you know nine out of ten people reported this is spam and I know you know
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I've had Nomorobo miss spam calls a couple of times in the last few days.
Marco:
But overall, it's been very solid.
Marco:
Because when I'm not running a blocker of some sort, I get roughly one a day, maybe.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Yeah, for the last couple of years, I've gotten almost one a day.
Marco:
Maybe it's more like four or five a week, so it's not quite one a day.
Marco:
But in that ballpark...
Marco:
And I had Haya block zero of them ever.
Marco:
I ran it for like two months.
Marco:
And then I've had No More Robo now for a couple of weeks.
Marco:
And I have gotten, I think, one or two in like two weeks or so.
John:
We'll put a link to Marco's article about this in the show notes because it's hard to understand the name of these things.
John:
We were saying Haya.
John:
hiya as in the word hi and then ya short for you for you h-i-y-a and then no mo robo is no more robo calls but it's n-o-m-o-r-o-b-o all one word yeah anyway we'll link to the blog post all this stuff is linked it just sounds like we're saying made up words but these are real apps welcome to the app naming it's like you know web 2.0 site naming where you had to like spell everything because it's oh well it's it's like flicker without the e and yeah i don't know who else would name sites like that
Casey:
Yeah, who would that be?
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Away.
Marco:
For $20 off your order, visit awaytravel.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP during checkout.
Marco:
They make incredibly smartly designed luggage for the modern age.
Marco:
So they have three sizes, the carry-on, the medium, or the large.
Marco:
They use high quality materials, but at a much lower price than most other brands by cutting out the middlemen and selling directly to you.
Marco:
These are all made with premium German polycarbonate, which is unrivaled in strength and impact resistance and very, very lightweight.
Marco:
The interior is very smart design.
Marco:
So it has a patent pending compression system.
Marco:
You can fit a lot in there.
Marco:
It also has helpful conveniences like 360 degree spinning wheels for you can maneuver it easily.
Marco:
And also they have a built in laundry bag for your dirty laundry.
Marco:
So as you're out somewhere, you travel, you get to, you know, you wear your clothes, you stuff them in this dirty laundry bag when you're done.
Marco:
You don't have to like make like the pile of dirty clothes in the hotel or whatever.
Marco:
That's gross.
Marco:
Use the built in bag.
Marco:
It's so convenient.
Marco:
And you might have heard about another cool feature they have.
Marco:
They have a built in battery in the carry on model.
Marco:
So you can charge your cell phone, your tablet, e-readers, anything powered by USB.
Marco:
A single charge of the away carry on will charge your phone five times.
Marco:
It's just so smart.
Marco:
Why doesn't everyone do this?
Marco:
They are truly designed for the modern age.
Marco:
They also, of course, back it up.
Marco:
They have a lifetime warranty.
Marco:
If anything breaks, they fix or replace it for life.
Marco:
And you can see for yourself with a hundred day trial, live with it.
Marco:
You can even travel with it.
Marco:
This is how you test a suitcase.
Marco:
You can buy it, travel with it for a hundred days.
Marco:
And if you decide at any point it's not for you, you can return it for a full refund with no questions asked.
Marco:
And of course, free shipping because they're just that great.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
This is so smartly designed, you should really see for yourself.
Marco:
And because there's free shipping and a free 100-day trial and free returns, there's no risk.
Marco:
Check it out today at awaytravel.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP during checkout to see really modern, intelligently designed luggage.
Marco:
Once again, awaytravel.com slash ATP, promo code ATP for $20 off.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Away for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so let's start with some follow-up, if you can claim starting this late.
Casey:
Most important piece of follow-up that I think we have, which is not in the list, which makes John oh so happy when I go off schedule like this.
Casey:
I have heard a lot of feedback about my shower habits, and I have heard one or two pieces of feedback that has disagreed with me and said I am a barbarian for showering at night.
Casey:
And overwhelming amounts of feedback, probably because we've been hiding in the shadows for all these years, ashamed at our peculiar ways.
Casey:
Dozens of us.
Casey:
Dozens.
Casey:
Dozens of us, I tell you.
Casey:
An overwhelming amount of feedback, including many people making that same reference, have said it is absolutely the only way to go.
Casey:
You must shower at night.
Casey:
It is disgusting to shower during the morning time.
Casey:
And many people wrote in to say, I should have kept notes, but I believe it was Japan.
Casey:
It's just culturally the way they do it is to shower at night.
John:
It was like every country outside of the United States.
John:
How I characterized the feedback was, well, first of all, still the vast majority of the entire United States is against Casey.
John:
And they didn't write in because they have a silent majority.
John:
that's probably true but basically every other person i wrote in and said in insert country that's not not the united states everybody either showers at night or showers twice a day nobody wrote in from other countries and said oh we all shower in the morning because maybe there's a solid majority too but lots of people from many different countries in europe south america asia everywhere they're all like oh we totally shower at night but united states nothing from them because we all know casey's crazy and so they just let him be
John:
there also were clear trends where uh hotter countries uh would more often do it and also it seemed more prevalent in asia than other places yeah and some people point out the farther you get from europe the more showers people take someone who lived in south america but yeah i don't know i'm although i didn't i didn't pick this up because i didn't think there was anything to follow up and i think we thought we covered all the bases but since casey insists on bringing it back up one point oh here we go
John:
One point that nobody brought up the last time is like what I think is the obvious reason, which, again, wasn't stated because we all know Casey's the outlier here, that people shower in the morning is gets back to the Dilbert comic strip with after you shower, you're the cleanest object in your house.
John:
Right.
John:
So after you shower, that's the cleanest you're going to get.
John:
You're just going to get sweatier during the day.
John:
If you shower in the morning.
John:
Your interactions with other people for your day, for your nine to five day, present you at the cleanest because you go from maximal cleanness, slowly degrading until five o'clock, right?
John:
Those are the best hours you give or the hours you're with, you know, you're at work and with other people.
John:
If you shower at night, you've got a good solid eight hours of sweating in your bed before you meet the first person the next day for work.
John:
So that's the obvious morning shower thing.
John:
And I'm assuming that's why everybody in America showers in the morning.
Casey:
You know, John, there's these magical devices.
Casey:
They're called air conditioners.
Casey:
And you can turn them on and it conditions the air.
John:
Because no one sweats at night if the room is the right temperature.
John:
Something like that.
John:
I have some bad news for you slash your wife as you age about night sweats.
Marco:
oh john i love having the old man on the show to keep us keep us in check um i love how like this week like everyone else is talking about apple earnings and we're talking about showers again we'll get there this is just follow up and casey added this i didn't have it in the notes casey wanted to bring it up he's digging his own grave
Casey:
John loves it when I just throw something in at the last second.
Casey:
It's his favorite.
Casey:
Also, I'm going to rearrange the show notes.
Casey:
Aspartame is the artificial sweetener in Diet Coke, not sucralose.
Casey:
I don't personally care.
Casey:
Whatever it is, it's freaking delicious.
John:
It was Marco who got it wrong when he was complaining about artificial sweeteners.
Marco:
i i knew exactly i i knew that already but it just it doesn't really like i didn't it doesn't really matter it's like the concept of an artificial sweetener i made some reference to like it causing cancer and of course so then we heard from everybody about how it does or doesn't cause cancer and which chemical does or doesn't and it doesn't but you were making a joke i i took it as a joke but other people took it seriously which is worth pointing i was making a joke yes that's not that's not a real thing don't be afraid you should be afraid perhaps of uh
John:
weight gain and some relation to diabetes from drinking diet soda because there's lots of studies in that like how could diet soda cause you to gain weight it's you know zero calories and how does it have anything to do with diabetes there's lots of studies around that that do indicate there might be something to be concerned about but cancer not so much
Marco:
I mean, in general, training yourself and your palate to not need all of your drinks to be sweetened is always a good thing.
Marco:
Because for purposes of calorie and sugar control, the stupidest thing you could possibly do is drink a lot of calories.
Marco:
It works so much against you.
Marco:
It is so incredibly bad for you.
Marco:
Anything that conditions you to still want all your drinks to be sweet probably works against you in that way, even if one of the things you drink has a zero-calorie sweetener.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
It still tastes delicious and I'm good with that.
Casey:
Remco Vandenbosch writes in to say, once iOS 10.3 comes out, do you think it will be worth restoring my iPhone from scratch to get more APFS benefits?
Casey:
And then he or she, they talk for a little while about the HFS to APFS conversion.
Casey:
You know, is that good?
Casey:
Is that bad?
Casey:
John, as our resident file system expert, what do you think?
John:
So what he's asking about, I think, is like if you leave all the data where it is and just write all the metadata to new places, maybe you have files that are fragmented and other stuff like that.
John:
I'm not even sure if, by the way, HFS Plus on iOS does the auto defragmenting stuff that they they added to HFS Plus years ago, like where it will find files below a certain size that are overly fragmented in its spare time, defragment them and stuff.
John:
Uh, but so basically asking like, would it be better, uh, ideally speaking to wipe your whole phone, reformat it as APFS and refill it with your data so that you'd have fewer fragmented files.
John:
And in theory, uh,
John:
um i think you could potentially get a nicer less fragmented layout uh but i don't think it would be anything that you would notice and i think it would actually even be hard to measure because flash is not a spinning disc and random access is faster on flash than it is on spinning discs and fragmentation even if they don't have the auto defragment stuff that's part of hves plus
John:
it's probably not that big of a concern um so i don't uh i think you would get some benefit that maybe if you took great pains to measure it and had a really thrashed phone and compared it with a fresh one you would see but it's definitely not worth people doing so just let it convert in place if and it'll be fine so that's that's my advice
John:
cool oh and there's also a question about uh whether apfs will be open source like uh hfs plus is kind of sorta um and what apple has said about that is they're going to uh document the what do they say the volume format
John:
Yeah, the volume specification.
John:
So they're going to put a document out for that.
John:
But that's not the source code, but that's just like telling you, hey, here's how the bits are on disk.
John:
And all they say is an open source implementation is not available at this time.
John:
Doesn't say anything about the future, but who knows.
Marco:
So basically somebody else could theoretically make a third party tool or driver to at least read APFS volumes and probably also write them.
Marco:
But you probably wouldn't want to rely on it.
Marco:
Kind of like the whole Mac on Windows and NTFS on Mac kind of things, right?
John:
yeah and like you can see the hfs plus code which was you know very helpful for all my os 10 reviews like it's all in the the darwin source repository uh but apfs i'm not sure there's a big benefit to them open sourcing it because it's not like unlike swift i don't think they want apfs take over the world instead i think they want it to be a custom tailored operating system just for their devices that they're free to change in any way they want and i bet they will
John:
uh and i don't know if anybody else has the exact needs that apple has like if you look at the features of apfs they are excluding the ones that are you know fancy new features all the other features like having like per file encryption keys and foregoing a lot of these zfs data integrity features and stuff are so tailored to apple specific needs because it needs that encryption stuff for what it already does on ios outside the file system now and
John:
And it can't have the heavyweight stuff because it has to run on a watch.
John:
And like, I don't know if anyone else has those exact needs.
John:
So it's not really a general purpose PC or server file system.
John:
It is a specific purpose Apple file system as its name awkwardly implies.
Marco:
We're sponsored this week by Audible with an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it.
Marco:
You can listen to audiobooks from virtually every genre, anytime, anywhere, on phones, tablets, computers, even most Kindles and iPods.
Marco:
Audio books are great for flights, long road trips, or even your daily commute.
Marco:
Because you might think, I don't have time to read books.
Marco:
Audio books seem really long.
Marco:
How am I going to do that?
Marco:
But you'd be surprised how many audio books you can read each year, even if you only listen to and from work every day, because all that time really adds up.
Marco:
And audiobooks bring books to life.
Marco:
Many of them are read by the authors themselves, which adds an extra dimension to the text.
Marco:
And you can take risks and try new authors and genres without regret because Audible offers their great listen guarantee.
Marco:
If you start an audiobook and you end up not liking it, you can trade it for another one for free.
Marco:
See and listen to all this for yourself.
Marco:
When you begin your free 30-day trial, you get your first audiobook for free, and there's no stress or obligation because you can cancel your membership at any time.
Marco:
So with audiobooks and spoken word audio products, you will find what you're looking for with Audible.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial today by signing up at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's audible.com slash ATP for a free 30-day trial.
Marco:
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Casey:
so just uh was it yesterday as we record uh apple announced their what is first quarter earnings if i get this right i believe that's right um so things are going well as it turns out we'll link to a uh a summary by jason snell at six colors and as long as you don't like the ipad
Casey:
Things are mostly okay.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't really have a lot to add on this.
Casey:
I've been really busy, so I haven't dug into this deeply.
Casey:
Marco, any thoughts on this?
Marco:
I mean, I think it's probably best that we leave most of the discussion of this to other podcasts with people who do this kind of business-y type of reporting more often.
Marco:
But for the most part, it is useful to just see general trends of how things are going for Apple, even if we aren't directly investing in it ourselves or care about the stock price.
Marco:
I used to have Apple stock a couple years ago, at least, if not more.
Marco:
um but i i have since stopped buying and selling any individual stocks and i sold off all the ones i had and now i just invest through like mutual funds and things like that that might have it but i'm not directly investing so that's a disclosure there and honestly i think just friend to friend here this is not investment advice whatever whatever however i think investing in individual stocks with a substantial portion of your money is is a fool's game
Marco:
Anyway, I think looking at it as general trends for Apple and as Apple watchers and Apple fans, it is useful to see like these kind of numbers are what Tim Cook is graded on by the board and by investors.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Optimizing for these numbers is a large part of Cook's goals.
Marco:
Whether he has other goals for product quality and new initiatives and things like that, that's all vague and unknowable as to the balance there.
Marco:
However, we do know for sure that it is very important that Tim Cook keeps these numbers looking healthy for the board and for investors.
Marco:
And that does drive product decisions on some level.
Marco:
Again, whether it's a high priority in his mind, we can't know.
Marco:
That's up to him.
Marco:
But it is useful to pay attention to what's going on here, to see trends in what's working for Apple and what's not working for Apple and where they need growth.
Marco:
And that can help inform our predictions and our opinions and our interpretations of what Apple does.
Marco:
So, you know, in these earnings, the iPhone's doing great.
Marco:
It seems like it has kind of recovered from the weird boost and then slight dip that it had with the seemingly like related to the massive success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Marco:
It seems like it's kind of back on a regular track now of...
Marco:
Steady growth.
Marco:
So that's good for the iPhone.
Marco:
The iPhone seems like it's fine.
Marco:
So that's good for it.
Marco:
The Mac division is probably the least interesting.
Marco:
It's up a little bit, but it's within the normal realm.
Marco:
So Mac seems like steady, healthy, not setting the wrong on fire.
Marco:
And that's to be expected after a year of having very few Mac releases.
Marco:
Then in this quarter is when the new MacBook Pros became available.
Marco:
So that helped boost those for sure.
Marco:
You can see that in the graphs and things like average selling price and everything.
Marco:
Because the average selling price for the Mac took a big hike upwards.
Marco:
That's not a coincidence in the quarter in which they release a whole bunch of more expensive laptops that were significantly more expensive than what they replaced.
Marco:
That is probably one of the reasons why to make that boost up a little bit.
Marco:
services are doing really well their services revenue is up by a good amount that's interesting because like that it seems like that is that is a major part of their of their future growth that they're going to want to boost up so that might include things like you know maybe we're not going to see a whole bunch of cheaper iCloud storage this coming fall or summer or whatever else
Marco:
Maybe we are going to see more ways that we can give Apple money every month, more services, more premium tiers, things like that.
Marco:
This plays into things like what Apple Music is doing and their possible video efforts that they're hinting at or saying very little about, things like that.
Marco:
So expect to see Apple, because services is a line that's going up and is now a decent number, expect to see Apple...
Marco:
putting more into services and trying to make more from us from services.
Marco:
Tim Cook is really good at this.
Marco:
He's really good at taking an existing market that's doing pretty well and turning the screws so that they make more from each person.
Marco:
That's why the iPhones now have two sizes and one of them costs $100 more than the other one and all the base storage just sucked for so long because Tim Cook is really good at pushing those average selling prices up, up, up to try to make more money from each new person.
Marco:
That's why things like iPad cases are so much more expensive than they were in the other two parts and all this stuff.
Marco:
You have the $100 battery backpack for the iPhone now and all these different things.
Marco:
This is why.
Marco:
This is not an accident.
Marco:
And this is definitely why the new MacBook Pros cost so much more than the old ones.
Marco:
Anyway, so expect to see tightening of the screws and boosts in the services area.
Marco:
So we're probably going to see, again, more ways we can spend money on Apple every month coming this fall or summer, whatever else.
Marco:
And then the other thing is the iPad, and the iPad is down again, and not by a small amount either.
Marco:
It's still going significantly down.
Marco:
It's kind of hard to explain.
Marco:
Everyone has their own theories.
Marco:
Everyone has, you know, some people say Apple is not telling the right story, whatever that means.
Marco:
I honestly don't really get that argument, to be fair.
Marco:
Some people say that iPads just last so long and therefore people don't replace them very often.
Marco:
Some people think that the iPad is a flop in some way and that nobody likes tablets anymore.
Marco:
I think the truth is probably a combination of all of these things.
Marco:
And I guess we're probably going to talk more about that for the rest of the show.
Marco:
So I will move on from that for now.
Marco:
And then the watch is kind of buried somewhere and other.
Marco:
And we don't have any numbers about the watch, except Tim Cook says it was the best quarter ever for the watch.
Marco:
So good.
Marco:
On a Bezos chart, that is now the highest bar on an axis that has no label.
Marco:
So good for the Apple watch.
Marco:
um their their quote other revenue that the apple watch is buried in didn't take a huge jump so i i don't it doesn't seem like it's making it's moving the needle much on revenue for the for the company but oh well we are an analyst maybe i'm missing something there but you know it's probably doing fine what do you guys think
John:
So the services thing, I saw some doom and gloom about like, oh, look, their services are growing.
John:
Therefore, Apple's not going to lower prices on iCloud storage.
John:
I don't make that connection at all.
John:
Like services is all about getting more people to pay Apple on a recurring basis for something, anything.
John:
One way to do that is to lower the price, because if you can lower the price by half, but get more than double the number of people to sign up for it, then it works out.
John:
And there's a lot of things buried in services.
John:
It's not just, you know, when you say services, a lot of people think you just mean iCloud or like the app store is in there, which is one of the reasons everything is going up.
John:
And
John:
apple music which is has been backfilling for the itunes music store downloads that sort of disappeared many years ago and now they're you know apple's finally getting to streaming and the idea that apple has all these customers surely there's some way apple can monetize them by making them pay some small amount for each one of these little things uh
John:
and trying to it's kind of like the original video content they're doing by attaching the original video content to apple music they're basically just trying to get more people to sign up for apple music why because i think once they get you on the apple music thing you're just used to having all the music available to you you'll just keep paying this month after month and i think to entice more people to like you know how many people pay for iCloud storage whatever the percentage is now if it's not
John:
really, really high, like in the 90%, Apple must be thinking, we can get more people to pay for iCloud storage.
John:
Let me look at what the numbers are.
John:
Actually, we've been overcharging by a ridiculous amount, as everybody knows, when compared to other cloud vendors.
John:
Why don't we just bump that or lower the price or both, and then we'll get more people on board.
John:
And by the way, let's attach some original video content to iCloud storage.
John:
And the things they're willing to do to get to entice people to sign up for in Roderick on the line parlance, another eel,
John:
are boundless and seemingly don't have to be that well related because the idea of offering exclusive like essentially television video content to get people to sign up for apple music doesn't make any sense except that hey if there's something you want and the only way to get it is to do this you'll do it like it's the whole reason people sign up for amazon prime so they can watch man in the high castle what does man in the high castle have to do with getting free shipping from amazon.com for rolls of toilet paper nothing but you'll do what it takes to get the
John:
content right and this is this is a weird deal but people have shown that it works if you give them something they want they will sign up for something they don't want just to get the thing they want how i did it i signed up for youtube red just so i could or i signed up for google play music just so i could get youtube red on a family plan i don't use google play music i don't it's sitting on my phone but i never actually launch it it's just so i don't have to see ads on youtube it's uh a tried and true technique which is not ideal from a consumer's perspective but people love recurring revenue
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I'm slightly surprised.
Casey:
Well, I guess I'll stick with it.
Casey:
I'm slightly surprised that things are going overall as well as they are.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, on this show, we've talked a lot about how we feel like things are going.
Casey:
Not the way they once were.
Casey:
And I think the three of us have varying degrees of how dire everything may be.
Casey:
But I mean, this was their best quarter ever.
Casey:
I mean, I'm looking at the very first chart on Jason Snell's post and.
Casey:
The most recent quarter was $78.4 billion, and the nearest one was the prior holiday quarter, or first quarter, I guess, which is over the holidays, which was $75.9 billion.
Casey:
So, I mean, that's, what, $2.5 billion difference, something like that?
Casey:
I mean, that's a big difference, and things are...
John:
But percentage-wise, look at the slopes on this graph.
John:
Apple's growth is still slowed, especially if you look at the year-over-year change in revenue.
John:
The reason this is a big deal is because they're coming out of three consecutive negative year-over-year revenue growth quarters.
John:
It's like, hey, we're back in the black.
John:
We're back positive.
John:
We made more money in this quarter this year than we did last year.
John:
But you can kind of see if you look at those, if you look like especially the big holiday quarters, 46, 54, 57, the slope of that line versus 74, 75, 78, right?
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
Growth is still slowing at Apple, right?
John:
And that's something they have to deal with.
John:
But, I mean, I think this is in line with everything that we said on the show.
John:
We've just been disproportionately focused on our dissatisfaction with the Mac.
John:
But when we all were asked to pick what is your favorite Apple product this year, didn't we all pick the iPhone 7?
Yeah.
John:
i think so although now i would say airpods but at the time when like when maybe you did say airpods i don't know but i think marco and i at the very least of the iphone iphone 7 is a great phone and it doesn't surprise me that it sold well you know headphone jack whatever it is it is a it is a good phone it is a tried and true thing it's it's their third attempt at the same form factor it has better battery life they they
John:
you know they worked out all these shoes they could possibly work out the the weird home button and the waterproofing and the whole like everything comes it is a good phone and i've always said that they've you know they're doing very well in the phone space and because if you look at the giant pac-man chart and you see the little the pac-man shaped wedge that is the iphone eating the rest of apple's products if the phone does well apple does well and that totally dwarfs any whatever ipad some sort of problems there that's lost in the noise and
John:
service revenue keeps going up um and the mac continues doing what it does and the little hike in the graph like oh mac asp is going up because they cranked up the price of their macs it's like it's the old mac but for the past few years it's been like produce pent-up demand by not releasing any new computers and then whatever the hell you release people will buy and if what you release is 500 bucks more than it used to be your asps will go up so it's not i don't think that's a healthy situation but that's what happened
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like Marco said, I don't know how much more analysis we should really be doing on this.
Casey:
But I'm sad about the iPad.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
I don't know if we've talked about this on the show.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
But I've been flirting with the idea of getting a MacBook Adorable whenever the presumably pending refresh happens.
Casey:
Although with the way Apple is these days, I guess I should never assume a refresh is coming.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I really love my iPad mini.
Casey:
And I have the most modern one, which was brand new or nearly brand new.
Casey:
Not this past Christmas, but the Christmas prior.
Casey:
I really love my iPad mini.
Casey:
I really like that form factor.
Casey:
I know a lot of people don't.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
But I can't help personally, but feel like anytime I want to do anything but look at Twitter, and I don't want to get into the consumption versus creation debate, but anytime I want to do anything other than glance at Twitter or RSS or something like that, I feel like I'm fighting the device.
Casey:
I feel like I'm fighting iOS.
Casey:
And so I've really been debating, you know, maybe a MacBook Adorable would be a better...
Casey:
fix for this problem because it would also be very portable not as portable but very portable um and it would do everything a mac could do maybe not as fast as other macs but that's why i have a 5k that i'm speaking on right now um and it would it would probably be a really good compromise and somebody tweeted i think earlier today and i don't recall who it was but
Casey:
Or somebody had said earlier today, anyway, that, you know, if you think about it, the Macs are getting more and more and more portable.
Casey:
And the iPads aren't that different than they were a few years ago.
Casey:
The software is a lot better.
Casey:
Multitasking is a lot better.
Casey:
Even my iPad mini can do the multitasking.
Casey:
But I feel like the change in portability of the most portable Macs is dramatically better as compared to the change in ability of iOS on an iPad.
Casey:
And so that's led me to wonder...
Casey:
you know, maybe I should just get a MacBook adorable as a super portable travel machine because that might fit my needs even better.
Casey:
And so I use this all.
Casey:
And the reason I bring this up is because it's a case study of why maybe the iPad isn't doing that great.
Casey:
And as Marco alluded to, there's probably a billion other reasons, but any immediate, any immediate thoughts on that before we get too far down the rabbit hole?
John:
I don't think a Mac could replace my iPad usage for me.
John:
And I think that's probably true of most people that the
John:
Maybe you're using an iPad because no Mac was portable enough, but for people who are using iPads for iPad-type purposes, there is no Mac.
John:
Even if there was a Mac exactly the same size and weight as my iPad, I still wouldn't use it because I don't want to use a trackpad.
John:
I want to touch a screen.
John:
I don't want to deal with a keyboard.
John:
I want an iPad for when I do iPad stuff, which is browsing the web or...
John:
uh reading twitter or watching video i want an ipad right so there's no substitute for uh the mac for that uh the ipad sales stuff like i you know that we shouldn't just rattle off the reasons that we've talked about and all the other things um i think marco talked about them in his post about uh the ipad one of the most compelling ones aside from ipads lasting forever and
John:
If people just use the iPads to watch video, you don't have to spend $800 to watch video on a little square that's a screen.
John:
That's a loser market.
John:
Apple can't stake out the high end of square screens that play video because there is no high end of it.
John:
That is doomed to a low end thing.
John:
All you need is some...
John:
basic wi-fi functionality a reasonable cpu with some video decoding hardware and the ability to run the amazon prime and netflix apps right there they're amazon tablets for that they're android tablets that you do not need an ipad to watch netflix i promise you right and so if that's what you're doing with your ipad i think people like tablets for that purpose uh but you don't need an ipad for that um
John:
and the other thrust of uh what was the title of your article marco the future of computing oh yeah so we've gone over this on the show before and i must remind marco once again because apparently i wasn't there to remind him before he wrote this post but every time we discuss that i i take great pains to emphasize the idea that the ipad as a specific product as made by apple as exists now may not necessarily be the product that that sweeps across the market and becomes the most important thing but
John:
When I specifically talk about the future of a computer with capital F, capital C, what I'm talking about is post-PC computing, which means computing without as many of the concerns that have necessarily come with PCs, which includes dealing with Windows menus, pointers, file systems, like all that stuff.
John:
And as compared to iOS, which swept all that stuff off the table and abstracted and hid so much of it, that is the future of computing because people can't handle PCs in general and dealing with file systems and their files and Windows.
John:
It's too much.
John:
The iOS or smartphone or whatever interface where they take away almost all of that complexity and massively simplify it and protect you from yourself, that is the future of computing.
John:
The question is, okay, how does that manifest?
John:
Does it manifest by macOS slowly removing all that functionality?
John:
Does it manifest by Windows becoming this mutant hybrid thing?
John:
Does it manifest by Android taking over the world?
John:
Or does it manifest by Apple introducing the iPad?
John:
It's incumbent upon each one of those products to figure out how they get there.
John:
But...
John:
you know you it's not it's like saying well the mac isn't successful so let's all go back to dos nope that's not the answer at all like you know you can see what the future is because we've all lived our entire lives of seeing how badly humans are at dealing with pcs with all the stuff they come with and then ios showed us a way to get a computing platform with
John:
almost all that stuff gone and now we're just figuring out yeah but what about like the stuff you can't do and the ipad thus far has been doing as marco points out not a great job of showing you how you're going to get that same stuff done without the complications but it's very clear that without the complications it is so much more accessible because everybody has smartphones and nobody deals with any of that weird pc crap on their smartphones like everything is just so much simpler and easier and easy to use which is why smartphones have raced across the entire world and a tablet is just basically
John:
bigger smartphone in terms of how hard it is to use at this point that has to change if you ever want uh the capital f capital c future computing to actually marginalize the pc to push it down to the specific realms where it will have to remain right but it's uh that hasn't happened yet microsoft's trying to do it with server studio
John:
Apple's sort of trying to do it with the iPad Pro, but half-heartedly?
John:
Is Android doing anything in this space?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, maybe you can count Chromebooks as an attempt to get away from some of the dangers of PCs, but I don't think they're doing a very good job.
John:
But anyway, that's the future of computing we all believe in, and what we...
John:
what apple should be what we should be grading an apple on is like you're blowing it you are not achieving that you you want to have your cake but you don't want to eat oh it's a terrible analogy anyway they want to say here look it's the uh it's the ipad and it's simple like your phone it's like yes it is and you use it to replace your pc it's like well
John:
can we right and you know it's apple has to show us how to do that because there are things we need to do and we need to be able to do them and they need to be pleasant just like uh web browsing previously we were not able to do web browsing on our phones or it was incredibly unpleasant and apple said no actually you can do web browsing on a tablet on the phone and i think we would all agree that browsing the web on a tablet is super pleasant
John:
in many many ways nicer than doing it on a pc if only because you can be sitting on the couch and leaning back and you're using your finger and it's like more like flipping through a magazine web browsing you've nailed it ipad but as marco would point out a million other things like whether it be from editing a podcast or using photoshop or dealing with uh complicated products that span lots of different applications and share data you know of the typical p site pc type stuff
John:
uh it hasn't yet been demonstrated that we're able to do all those things in the same way so everyone else is a contender the mac is a still contender for the future of computing provided apple was willing to remove all the functionality that we know and love about the mac which i hope they never do uh but that that's one way you could try to get there
John:
uh you could try to get there like microsoft by by weirdly morphing your desktop os into a hybrid os that does both things at once uh and you know who knows how we get there but ios is such a stake in the ground to say it's obvious that in the future no one wants to deal with the crap that we deal with on macs and pcs today like that is not the future of computing we have to leave that behind um
John:
But so far, the iPad has not been a compelling argument for that.
John:
And there was one other graph that's not in Jason Snell's page that we're looking at here on sixcolors.com, which we'll put in the show notes that has tons and tons of pretty graphs.
John:
One page that I think maybe Horace tweeted or something.
John:
It's showing graphs of days of the week, like average days of the week usage time for, what was it, for smartphones and PCs.
John:
and the smartphone line is like this little lumpy thing that goes along right you don't see any particularly large trends there and the pc thing goes monday through friday huge dip saturday and sunday and back up for monday through friday huge dip saturday and sunday which is showing that people don't use pcs on the weekends right and what are they not on the weekends they're not at work so maybe they're using pcs at work or maybe they only considers pc is a work-like thing but the phones they use all the time i feel like
John:
If the iPad curve was shown, it would look more like the phone curve and less like the PC curve.
John:
Because people aren't, for the most part, doing work on their iPad.
John:
The iPad curve would just be like, I use it the same amount pretty much every day.
John:
It wouldn't be like, the weekend's here, I'm not going to be on my iPad because I use my iPad for work.
John:
you'll know that the ipad or any other pc replacement device or post pc device is finally useful for all the same things pcs are when it starts to get the same curve because everyone's got to do some work and a lot of people do work involving some kind of task with computing and if they're still doing that on personal computer type devices i mean it could be a lagging indicator so maybe we have to wait a few more years but
John:
Right now, think of the number of people you know who every day go to work and just use a tablet of any kind as opposed to a PC.
John:
I know way more PC users.
John:
Maybe it's because all my friends are old, but we'll keep an eye on that.
Marco:
I mean, I think what we're seeing – I think the right way to interpret the iPad and the future of computing and everything else –
Marco:
is probably something between the crazy blog post I made and the argument that John is making and the argument that Jason Snell made on Upgrade this week.
Marco:
The future of computing is not going to be just one of these types of things.
Marco:
It's not going to be just tablets, and it's not going to be just computers.
Marco:
My argument is not that the iPad is failing as a thing or that it's going away or that it's useless to everybody.
Marco:
My argument is simply that when people say this is the future of computing, what they usually mean by that is going to replace the PC-style computer.
Marco:
Again, I mean PCs and Macs in that.
Marco:
I basically mean, for the most part, I mean laptops and other desktops and things that run Windows or Mac OS or Linux even, like PC-style OSs.
Marco:
And I think the most likely outcome here is that the tablets of all sorts are not going to replace PCs.
Marco:
They are going to do what they've been doing, which is add to them, augment them.
Marco:
There are going to be some people who only primarily like tablets, and there's going to be some people that only primarily like PCs.
Marco:
They're not going to actually replace each other in either direction.
John:
Well, the only way that'll happen, I don't think you can do that.
John:
I don't think you can have them not replace them unless PCs essentially adopt all the attributes that I was just discussing of iOS-style computing.
John:
In other words, PCs would have to abandon all the weird-ass crap that regular people don't like and can't handle about PCs.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because they can't stay in their current state with all the legacy stuff that PCOSes have to deal with.
John:
It's an untenable situation because people can't use them and people can use phones.
John:
And so something is going to marginalize current-style PCs, whether it's the PCs themselves changing, because it totally could be.
John:
You could take any of those PC-style operating systems you listed and slowly...
John:
basically iosify them while leaving enough of the functionality still there you know for showing through so you can get more stuff done than you can on an ipad for example but you just can't leave it there it's again it's like going back to dos like saying well uh i can't do everything on this mac that i can do on on my pc with dos therefore it's a dead end and people just you keep using dos forever they won't like the capabilities of the gui will eventually expand to do enough of the things you know so i like i
John:
I don't think there is any situation where the PC as it exists today, with all of its legacy concerns, does not become marginalized in the future.
John:
It's just a question of what will marginalize it.
John:
Like, not disappear, but marginalize, like in the same way that, you know, people using the command line.
John:
Still tons of people using the command line today.
John:
I use it every day, but it's marginalized.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure that your premises are sound here.
Marco:
So premise number one is that you said people can't figure out how to use PCs, but they can use their phones.
Marco:
Do we actually know that?
Marco:
Is that actually a thing?
Marco:
Like, are PCs really as hard as we think they are to use, and then are phones as easy as we think they are to use?
Marco:
Or is that gap actually smaller than what we might think?
John:
Oh, it's big.
John:
Go find someone who has a PC, whether at work or at home even, and just look at it.
John:
That's all I ask.
John:
Just look at it.
John:
Watch them use it and see what's on it and see what state it's in and ask them to use it to do something.
John:
And yes, people have trouble with phones too.
John:
It's a relative thing.
John:
But one is so much easier than the other.
John:
One is not infinitely easy and one is not infinitely hard.
John:
And yes, you can learn to use anything.
John:
But...
John:
You have to get rid of those things that people don't like to be concerned about.
John:
It's the reason people love the phone so much.
John:
They took away so many things that they have to worry about.
John:
Maybe less so on Android.
Casey:
I don't know about this at all, John.
Marco:
I think the biggest reason is that it's always in your pocket and it has these awesome cameras and sensors and always data connections.
Marco:
There's a lot about phones to love that don't have to do with the usability paradigm of their software.
John:
But people can do things with their phones that PCs could also do, but they never did with the PCs because it was too much of a pain.
John:
Even just down to installing software.
John:
So easy on phones, hard enough on personal computers, and so fraught on personal computers because of the lack of the app store and viruses and all sorts of stuff like that, that people didn't attempt it.
John:
or accidentally attempted it by accidentally clicking on things and install browser toolbars and crap like that.
John:
All the crap that the PC world makes it so people, even if they were equally easy to use, it would say, well, this feels safer.
John:
Suddenly, I'm installing software.
John:
Oh, there's a cool new app.
John:
I'm going to try it.
John:
No one, regular people were not discussing cool new apps for their PCs.
John:
Only nerds were.
John:
That alone is such a huge... I think you're describing Android, but...
John:
maybe less so on android but even android i feel like the disposability of phone is like well if my phone is hosed i'll like you know the fact that it normalized backups and a thing that nobody essentially nobody did to their personal computers but because of cloud backups with phone stuff built in more people have a shot at having some kind of backup of something somewhere on their phones whereas pcs it was like forget it no backups might as well not exist as far as the non-nerd world is concerned
Marco:
Well, and so I think there's this continuum here.
Marco:
Like you mentioned, command line all the way up to GUI and phone.
Marco:
When you're in the more command line side of it, the more difficult side of it, getting productivity and power user type tasks done is...
Marco:
Possibly easier than on the easy devices, but casual use is harder.
Marco:
And then on the devices like phones and iPads, getting productivity and power use type things done is actually harder to figure out, but casual use is easier.
Marco:
Somewhere in the middle there is the PC style OS.
Marco:
PC style OSs are, you know, they kind of try to be everything.
Marco:
I think we are generally much better at using them for productivity type things and power user type things.
Marco:
And that's partially because most productivity and power user people have grown up with computers to some degree or have a certain number of years using them.
Marco:
So there's already a lot of
Marco:
people you know what people are used to people already trained on how to use computers for the most part but also part of that is just the design of them is you know with with like these kind of file centric paradigms of the desktops and everything and all this drag and drop multiple windows kind of stuff it's just a lot easier to do a lot of tasks a lot of like productivity and power user type tasks on a pc style os
Marco:
That's not to say that iPads and stuff can't get some of those features, but also you can't say that PCs can't get some of the better ease of use and security features that iPads and phones have.
John:
That's all I'm saying.
John:
If you do do that to the PC-style operating system...
John:
you know if you start hiding the file system on pc style operating systems like it's the same argument it's just like it's the question of venue where where is that going to happen it's going to happen because people don't like the old way and they like the new way better uh do they i'm pretty sure that sales curve is showing you something else
John:
Yes.
John:
They're proving it by what they want to buy.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
With the complexity of tasks, it's about marginalizing the users.
John:
It's about chasing them farther into the corner.
John:
So people who use the command line and who do sophisticated things for their computers will still need PCs.
John:
But all those people who just do email, word processing, calendaring, web browsing...
John:
They don't need PCs now.
John:
They have them because basically it's the only way to get Outlook and to be able to see PDFs and to do all the other stuff.
John:
But increasingly, if your company uses Google Docs and Slack and so on, there's no reason those people need a full-fledged PC.
John:
Not because they're not doing command line stuff, but they're not even doing anything complicated enough to require them to use the non-command line stuff.
John:
portions of a gui like they don't have multiple files that they're assembling into a large uh you know uh project they're not doing uh you know development is also kind of a command line thing but it it's a matter of slowly making the people who need pcs a smaller and smaller subset of people in the same way the people who need command lines have become a smaller and smaller subset of people it stops at some point it's not as if i mean if the command line is marginalized in the command line has really stalled out because so many people do software development or do
John:
stuff involving, you know, servers and so on where the command line is important and is not going away anytime soon.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not like you chased command lines away until there's only three people in the world using it, but it shrinks way down from where it was the DOS thing.
John:
Like to do your regular business stuff, you don't need a command line.
John:
You can get that all done with a GUI, which was an argument at one point.
John:
It's like, well, if I want to get real work done, I need DOS.
John:
But if I want to do this one silly thing, like draw a silly digital painting, maybe I can use a GUI.
John:
Eventually, you can do everything from GUI.
John:
You can do your fancy business spreadsheets.
John:
You can write your word processing things.
John:
Email hadn't been invented, but you could do that too.
John:
You can do all that stuff from the GUI.
John:
It's just a question of marginalizing that stuff.
John:
And if that stuff gets marginalized by like old style PC operating system and new style one that hides all that crap or modes within one, or it's like, it really depends on the particular company that ends up figuring this out, whether it be Apple with its whole different OS iPad approach or Microsoft with its hybrid approach or Android with its phone OS everywhere, Chrome OS, whatever hybrid S thing, or even just with the web stuff.
John:
Like, can you get everything done with the web browser and use a Chromebook for regular people?
John:
So you have nothing locally and it's just, everything is on the web.
John:
Yeah.
John:
maybe you can do that in that case you definitely don't know to need a pc style operating system to do that you just need something that can run all the web apps and that's not so farfetched especially if like there's a slack client stuff like that um so i you know i i don't i wouldn't focus on one single product i wouldn't even focus on what we call pcs because it's possible for them to be the future of computing as well just have to look for where where and how the people who really do continue to need a gui end up getting you know
John:
where where do they get chased what corner do they get chased into and they'll be hanging out there with the command line people because the command line people are not going anywhere and very often they're the same people and soon eventually they'll be joined by the people who need to use like full pc operating systems then everyone else will be uh trying to book rooms and outlook futilely uh on their on their future of computing devices because that's what they do all day is is send people emails and mess with calendars and waste time in slack
Marco:
So I don't disagree with much of what you said.
Marco:
I think we're kind of arguing two different points here.
Marco:
Basically, my theory is that the PC-style operating system and the iPad-style operating system...
Marco:
have this kind of common ground between the two that they're both kind of aiming for or should be aiming for to solve their problems.
Marco:
But I'm not sure that either product can get to the other one's common ground.
Marco:
If they actually meet in the middle successfully, I'm not sure that would be a good product for either of them.
John:
But I do think... They're not going to meet in the middle from the same company because the same company would be foolish to make their two products meet in the middle.
John:
Like...
John:
But they could be like the iPad meets Windows 10 in the middle, you know what I mean?
John:
Windows 10 goes tablet-y and the iPad goes PC, but the Mac would still be hanging out there in full-fledged PC area.
Marco:
However, I do think, though, that we are judging this for the most part from what Apple's doing.
Marco:
Because Microsoft does crazy things.
Marco:
They're kind of on drugs.
Marco:
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Marco:
Who knows what they're doing over there?
Marco:
Sometimes they're pretty cool.
Marco:
Microsoft is showing that...
Marco:
there is still a lot that can maybe be done in PC-style OSs.
Marco:
And also, there is a possibility of making more productivity-focused tablets.
Marco:
Like, Microsoft is doing a bunch of stuff in that area.
Marco:
And it's all wacky.
Marco:
And some of it is cool.
Marco:
Most of it is weird.
Marco:
And sometimes it works.
Marco:
Sometimes it doesn't.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
But they actually are moving.
Marco:
And they're actually seeing some progress there and some success with their Surface stuff and various Windows 10 stuff and everything else.
Marco:
Like, we make fun of it, but it actually is starting to actually succeed.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
We are looking at Apple for this because we know Apple, if they put their mind to it, would do a better job at both sides of this.
Marco:
However, I think it's very clear from recent years that Apple's not really stepping on the gas too hard on either side of this.
Marco:
They're devoting their resources elsewhere.
Marco:
They're focusing on things like the iPhone and services and the watch and maybe occasionally the TV and pouring God knows how much effort into this car thing.
Marco:
They're not really stepping on the gas on trying to improve Mac OS, which seems like it's almost in maintenance mode.
Marco:
And iPad OS slash iOS seem like in these productivity style or power user style ways...
Marco:
It jumps forward like every two years in some interesting way, like they add multitasking or split screen or extensions or whatever else.
Marco:
But then that kind of just sits there for a while.
Marco:
They're not really driving quickly towards either of these goals.
Marco:
And it's kind of unclear as to whether they even intend to.
Marco:
So I think it's kind of a bad example.
Marco:
Like we are trying to argue whether these things are possible or whether convergence is possible or which one of these is like, quote, the right or the inevitable or the future approach.
Marco:
But we're basing that on only what Apple's doing here.
Marco:
And I think that's kind of blinding us to what might be possible.
Marco:
Because if a company had these platforms that really cared a lot about these particular things enough to prioritize them higher than what Apple does...
Marco:
I think we might see more answers more quickly.
Marco:
And I think we might see ideas tried that we wouldn't have considered.
Marco:
And Microsoft is almost doing that.
Marco:
Again, they're doing a lot of crazy stuff.
Marco:
They're just not doing it very well most of the time because they're not that great at it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
We are seeing like it is possible if you invest heavily in these areas and you really step on the gas in these areas, it is possible to both have interesting tablets that could be easy to use and also run productivity software pretty well.
Marco:
And it's also possible to do interesting new things with desktops to bring them closer to the tablet world in ways that make the tablet world good.
Marco:
I think it's only a matter of, for Apple specifically, do they care enough about macOS to make major changes to the OS and to the way it works?
Marco:
And we just saw the touch bar and everything, and that's cool.
Marco:
That's not a major change to the interaction model or the application model of the OS.
Marco:
That's a hardware feature that sells new hardware and has some software integration, and it's really cool the way it integrates with the hardware and everything, but that's not fundamentally changing macOS in any meaningful way.
Marco:
Today.
Marco:
Well, okay, fair.
John:
It's additive.
John:
It's purely additive.
John:
It's not taking away any complexity from the Mac, put it that way.
John:
Any of the weird stuff on the Mac, like the touch bar doesn't alter that at all.
John:
It's just an additive cool thing, right?
John:
But it does not allow you to avoid or otherwise hide or make moot any of the complexity involved in all the things that iOS does better than the Mac.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
And then on the other side, iOS on the phone, the phone is making great strides, of course, because that's where Apple focuses a lot, because that's good.
Marco:
They should.
Marco:
That's where all the action is.
Marco:
That makes sense.
Marco:
But on the iPad, we've seen the same pattern from them over and over again, which is they give the iPad a little bit of attention,
Marco:
And then they kind of just let it sit for a year or two.
Marco:
And then they give it a little bit more attention and let it sit for a year or two.
Marco:
But ultimately, the iPad always is playing second fiddle to the iPhone.
Marco:
And that's true of both Apple's attention and also just the design of the OS.
Marco:
In so many ways, the iPad is just a blown-up iPhone.
Marco:
And it seems like that's mostly okay with everybody.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
There are a lot of advantages to doing it that way.
Marco:
But if you keep doing it that way, I don't see how it ever replaces more PCs meaningfully than what it's replacing now.
John:
You just go to the screen thing, which is the thing I always bring up.
John:
People don't use PCs with 12-inch screens on their desk if they can help it.
John:
Maybe in laptops, but even then, if they want to work all day, they'd hook it up to a bigger screen.
John:
There's a reason for that.
John:
A bigger screen lets you see more stuff.
John:
It makes you more productive.
John:
Maybe you don't remember.
John:
Back in the 80s, all the studies about...
John:
how uh productivity worker productivity increases when you have bigger crt on your desk and like employees would use that as an excuse to demand a massive 21 inch crt which actually they were massive they're really huge and heavy and people don't understand exactly how big those things were um but yeah i mean like how both the ipad and on the mac
John:
One of the things that I always attribute to the fictional person of Apple Computer, which is not a person but a collection of people, but, you know, it's sort of turning it into a person.
John:
Like, Apple is hoping that people don't have to do such complicated things.
John:
Can't you do all of your stuff with the iPad apps that we give you?
John:
Look how simple they are.
John:
You just need these simple functions...
John:
You just need to be able to crop your images in this way.
John:
No, you don't need to be able to crop with fixed proportions, but also in landscape and portrait.
John:
You only need to do that on Mac.
John:
On the iPhone, do you really need to do that?
John:
When you edit video, do you really need that fine control of how the audio comes in?
John:
Or can you just drag the slider and we'll pick the curve for you?
John:
Like...
John:
do you really need that much all right how about how about the the precision editor is that precise enough couldn't can't you get your work done just with these simple because it's so much easier with the simple because we don't have dialogues with all these numbers in them we don't have all these palettes that you have to rearrange and there's so many palettes you can't even have them all on the screen at the same time you have to pick which ones you want that's just too much look how much simpler is this guys right can't you get your work done and people say
John:
sometimes but other times no um and apple really doesn't want to give you either like for the mac it's like can't you get your work done with one cpu most of the time yeah but maybe i want if i had two of them and they both had 12 cores i could cut this portion of my work down in half and it would make me more productive but
John:
but can't you get isn't this okay if you just buy this one and it's like that it's like wishful thinking that the massive simplification that is so good for everybody doesn't that fit they seem to be thinking that it'll fit more people into it than it does and as marco's always with like people are just getting shaved off the top and
John:
you know it apple has shown that they're essentially a captive audience when you come up with the new laptops and they're 500 more expensive and they don't have all the ports and features that you may have wanted you're going to buy them anyway what choice do you have what are you going to do you know vote for a third party candidate go ahead throw your vote away i finally get the reference
John:
Yay!
John:
So yeah, that I feel like is where Apple is dropping the ball.
John:
They have been too optimistic, too hopeful that every new thing they make, whether it's like the new version of iMovie where they had to keep the old one around, or that really old kerfuffle from many, many years ago,
John:
you know all the way up to the hopes that the ios versions of their apps like the ios versions of photo editing and so on and so forth would would be enough for anybody so much so that we can even just port them to the mac and there'd be enough for everybody there too like that is probably a good strategy for trying to simplify this for most people but it is slowly like torturing the people who really do have demanding needs and
John:
Apple doesn't want to complexify the software, and Apple doesn't seem to want to make it so that other people can make similarly complicated software, if only because they refuse to make an iPad with a bigger screen, because you can't fit all of Lightroom's palettes in there.
John:
Marco was playing with Lightroom on a 28-inch Surface Studio.
John:
That gives you enough room for all of Lightroom's crazy palettes.
John:
oh do you really need all those controls in lightroom can't you get away with just the controls that are in like an okay ios app no you actually can't it is for a certain section of the market you can't and if apple doesn't care about them they are seeding that entire market both on the pc and on the mac to other people now to bring microsoft into it the thing about microsoft they're kind of in the apple position and i kind of feel bad for them but kind of not because you know history um
John:
Where even if Microsoft has the right product and even if their product is awesome, sometimes you're just not in the right market position or you have the wrong reputation.
John:
Like forces independent of the quality of your product can cause your thing to fail.
John:
Look at Apple in the 90s.
John:
The best operating system, the best GUI, but it was too late.
John:
Like Microsoft had already won.
John:
Wait, hang on.
Marco:
You're saying OS, like classic OS was the best operating system in the 90s?
John:
yeah i'll give you the 80s and maybe the first part of the 90s first few years maybe but like yeah well what until windows 2000 when it was 2000 was like 99 yeah 99 yeah see trust me maybe i mean certainly i'm gooey and then like on the tech things you know it's it's borderline but anyway certainly back when it was like uh the macintosh versus dos and like windows 1.0 and stuff but anyway not to rehash that
John:
Sometimes you don't win with the best product, right?
John:
And so even if Microsoft gets it right or gets it righter than Apple, we are at the whim of the companies that exist and their entrenched legacies and their customer bases and where they make their...
John:
It's not a perfect system where once someone comes up with the right answer, it will just, you know, we are stuck with the companies that we have or the new companies that will have to grow to replace them.
John:
And that is a ugly, messy, slow process.
John:
And so it's really hard to tell if Microsoft actually has the right answer.
John:
Like, for example, if Apple had done what Microsoft's doing with its OS strategy, they would probably be farther along because Apple has been in a stronger position because of a little thing called the iPhone.
John:
And they could have made a lot of headway there, whereas Microsoft was coming way from behind.
John:
having really gotten you know really missed the boat on the mobile thing and having all sorts of problems with their traditional sources of revenue switching around and trying to change into a services company like so it's it's really hard to tell if they've got the right answer either but i love that microsoft has the luxury of having a completely failed smartphone effort so they have no legacy in smartphones to worry about
John:
Well, but it's tough.
John:
Now that iOS and Android have sort of run the table, what room is there for Tizen or whatever the hell that thing is called or Windows Phone?
John:
And it's tough.
John:
Again, even if Microsoft had the best smartphone operating system, technically, aesthetically, user-friendliness or whatever, it's so hard to go up against entrenched interests.
John:
But again, we always talk about Apple because we know more about it.
John:
And I feel like Apple's mistake is actually one of...
John:
naive optimism or wishful thinking and they and they keep plugging away at like they plugged away at you don't need access to the file system for how many years before they did icloud drive like that's all just wasted time like if they if they were going to come up with a better answer that's fine if you can't come up with a better answer not really good to wait six years or whatever the hell it was before before icloud drive comes out
John:
Because by that point, everybody's already using Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever the heck they're using.
John:
And, you know, iCloud Drive, because it's entrenched and it's from the platform vendor, it's going to do okay.
John:
Same thing with Apple Music streaming.
John:
Like, there is an advantage to being the platform owner, but that's not a strong move to take away the file system and all the functionality it provides while hiding the complexity and then not come up with a suitable replacement and then just bail a couple of years later and say, okay, here's Dropbox.
Yeah.
Marco:
This is always the struggle of the iPad and iOS in general also, but I think more for the iPad, that in order to enable these power uses, you have to give a little on the simplicity.
Marco:
And there's always the question of whether you're actually just slowly re-implementing the Mac poorly, like the whole Lisp joke.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
I don't think that the industry has shown yet that anybody has a really good idea of how to balance those things between power usability and multitasking and file access and things like that and simplicity of tablet use.
Marco:
I think almost everybody just kind of punts the answer to that question of, oh, well, Apple will figure it out.
Marco:
They're smart.
Marco:
Or some answer like that that's really not an answer.
Marco:
And it's like...
Marco:
usually Apple doesn't figure things out that we can't figure out a solution to ourselves.
Marco:
Because usually Apple is made up for the same kind of people as outside of Apple.
Marco:
And if we can't figure out whether a solution to a problem can even exist, they usually can't either.
Marco:
They usually just punt and say, well, yep, this is a problem.
Marco:
Deal with it.
Marco:
And we do.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
Like when the iPad was first being rumored,
Marco:
we were all like, well, what are they going to do for text input?
Marco:
Because on-screen keyboards are pretty limited, but you can't have a physical keyboard on a tablet.
Marco:
That doesn't work either.
Marco:
What are they going to do?
Marco:
And they pumped it.
Marco:
They said, all right, well, here's an on-screen keyboard.
Marco:
It's limited, but deal with it, and we'll sell you this external one.
Marco:
That was really bizarre.
Marco:
And yeah, like...
Marco:
Sometimes these are just kind of unsolvable design problems that you just have to pick one or the other and neither are great.
Marco:
And I think the balance between the file system access and windowing and multitasking and everything like that and the simplicity of what iOS offers today...
Marco:
I just don't think there is a good balance between those two.
Marco:
There might be ways to do it better than what the Mac and what Windows do.
Marco:
But I still think that if you add that power, you are going to ruin the simplicity.
Marco:
You're going to add complexity.
Marco:
It is just going to be one of those design punts.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I'm not sure that this is necessarily avoidable, but I do think it might be an unsolvable problem because tablets have been around for a while now, and we still haven't figured out a solution to this problem.
Casey:
You know, I keep coming back to, as I'm listening to you guys...
Casey:
I think about what Chris Lattner had said a couple episodes ago.
Casey:
God, it's cool that we can say that.
Casey:
Anyway, what he had said about Swift having, and I forget the term he used, maybe one of you remembers, but like progressive disclosure.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
You knew where I was going with this.
Casey:
I think by and large, Marco, I actually agree with you in that I personally don't see a way to square the circle.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
In order to make an iPad more usable for more people in a professional capacity, I think you would have to take away a lot of the things that make the iPad so great today.
Casey:
But progressive disclosure is a thing that's already happening.
Casey:
Like, if you don't do a swipe from the right side of the screen toward the center of the screen, would you ever really know about multitasking?
Casey:
If you don't hit that little...
John:
I know about it when I accidentally do it playing a game all the time.
John:
And that's fair.
Casey:
But you know what I'm driving at.
Casey:
You know what I'm driving at.
John:
I think that's actually relevant.
John:
It sounds like a side thing.
John:
Like, oh, you accidentally do a gesture, so what?
John:
That's one of the things that is more troublesome on touch devices and less on PCs, where progressive disclosure is easier on a desktop operating system because you're less likely to accidentally trigger something because...
John:
the input is more precise right and there's more mechanisms right you have an entire keyboard and then you have all the hot keys and you have a pointing device and two buttons on you can have like alternate clicks and modifier keys and they're not afraid to put put preferences in like hey if you want to disable dashboard and disable all hot corners you can ios has you know disabled multitasking gestures and stuff but some things you just can't turn off on ios because they're always there like actually control center i think you can there's a preference for that too but um
John:
Yeah, that type of thing of like, how do you do progressive disclosure well on a device where you've already used up like every possible Morse code click combination on the home button and 50 million gestures and there's no keyboard.
John:
Like they're kind of already painted themselves into a corner in their ability, in their eagerness to gild the lily of iOS touch interface.
John:
It's not leaving a lot of room for them to wedge in the more complicated stuff in a nice progressive disclosure way.
Casey:
Yeah, and I agree with you.
Casey:
I just can't help but wonder, is there something that I'm not seeing today that would lend itself to having the iPad feel like a more... I'm going to use the word professional, but I can't think of a better word for it, but a more professional device.
Casey:
And I think about...
Casey:
If you had told me during the iOS six or seven days, oh, you know, there's going to come a time that you can have this floating window that plays video that you can shimmy around the screen and enlarge and shrink and swipe off to the side to kind of hide it for a minute.
Casey:
I would have thought you were bonkers.
Casey:
And I would have wondered, you know, how do you activate that?
Casey:
How do you make it go away?
Casey:
What do you do with this thing?
Casey:
And as it turns out, picture-in-picture on the iPad is awesome.
Casey:
And similarly, multitasking is pretty awesome.
Casey:
It's pretty crappy switching between apps in the little multitasking app switcher.
Casey:
But by and large, it's pretty awesome.
Casey:
And I don't know that I would have seen a way to do that prior to having actually seen the way it was implemented.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I do agree with the both of you, but I can't help but wonder what is it that we are not thinking of that would make something in the spirit of progressive disclosure possible?
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I have no specifics, but it makes me wonder what's coming.
Casey:
What's coming in June?
John:
Maybe you're not thinking of it, but I totally am thinking of it.
John:
That's what I was getting at with Apple being wishful in hoping that the simple applications and the limited form factors and interface venues that they have provided on the iPad and increasingly on the Mac will be sufficient for everybody's needs.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that you know you used to draw on your ipad this big stubby artificial finger thing and like it took so long for them to get through their skulls like people want to draw on these things they're buying these terrible devices to do it for god to make a pencil and they did finally right there are so many obvious things they can do they can make a much bigger form factor if you want to see you know microsoft's already gone and done a whole product that you can rip off ideas from or get inspired from
John:
You can do more things with multitasking than simply splitting the screen.
John:
You can do more things with hotkeys and with the little floating windows like there's tons of obvious things they can do.
John:
And, you know, the thing that Marco was talking about, something I talk about, you know, in my the first OS 10 reviews that I did just after iOS came out.
John:
I think it was maybe the very first one after it was clear there was some crossover between them.
John:
It was like, is it easier to make the Mac more like iOS or to or to make iOS more like the Mac?
John:
Like, is it easier to simplify Mac OS or bring those capabilities of the Mac to iOS?
John:
And I think it said then, I think now it is much easier to add the capabilities of the Mac.
John:
to ios without messing it up than it is to do the reverse because as soon as you start trying to make the mac to be like ios you totally destroy its usefulness for the people who want to use it for like the current use cases and there's no replacement for that if on the other hand you take ios which is a cleaner slate and was much cleaner back then than it is now but a cleaner slate and
John:
try to let people do the more complicated stuff with, like Casey said, progressive disclosures, it is a much easier thing to do.
John:
And you get a chance to do it in a different way over there.
John:
And while you're doing that, you're not screwing up professionals who presumably can still use your Macs.
John:
And if you're doing a good job on iOS, you're also not screwing up people who never use that functionality.
John:
And arguably, that's what Apple has been doing by making the iPad Pro, by making the 12 point whatever inch iPad, by making the pencil, by adding multitasking.
John:
But boy, did it take them a long time.
John:
And they're still stubborn about,
John:
you know about going all the way like i i don't know what i don't know what they're holding out for i don't know what they're waiting for i don't know maybe they're waiting for people to die and habits to change but i agree with marco in that like the use cases aren't going to change people would like to do them with less complications but if they can't do less complications they just want to do them period like they'll they you know they have to do them because it is part of their job and if you don't give them a simpler way to do it
John:
they will limp along with the more complicated way until and unless somebody could be Microsoft could be anybody else gives them a way to literally do the same really complicated jobs with less, less concerns with, you know, less fighting with the machine.
John:
And Apple still seems like, like, like Marco said, like,
John:
Give them a little bit.
John:
Does this move the needle?
John:
Is the iPad really a pro device now because we made a slightly bigger one and gave you a pencil?
John:
It helps.
John:
It doesn't hurt, right?
John:
But Microsoft Surface Studio is like, what are you even doing?
John:
You know, what is the meme?
John:
You're like a little baby in the 28-inch Microsoft Surface Studio.
John:
That's how Apple should feel.
John:
But the impression I get from the personification of Apple is they still really wish people didn't have to do such complicated things with computers.
Marco:
It's like they're almost put out by people's actual needs.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh.
Marco:
For $35 off your first week, visit HelloFresh.com and enter code ATP when you subscribe.
Marco:
Whether you're a busy professional couple, a large family that runs at a breakneck pace, or someone who simply wants to start cooking more, HelloFresh makes it easier, tastier, and healthier than ever to enjoy the experience of cooking new recipes and eating together at home.
Marco:
From creating the recipes and planning the meals to grocery shopping and even delivering all the pre-measured ingredients, HelloFresh delivers right to your door so you can skip the trip.
Marco:
HelloFresh currently offers customers a classic box or veggie box and will soon be launching a family box.
Marco:
You can order three, four, or five different meals per week, depending on how often you want to cook, designed for either two or four people.
Marco:
And new recipes are created every week.
Marco:
HelloFresh is the meal kit delivery service that makes cooking fun, easy, and convenient.
Marco:
Every week, they give you delicious recipes with step-by-step instructions designed to take around 30 minutes for everyone from novices to seasoned home cooks short on time.
Marco:
HelloFresh sources the freshest ingredients measured to exact quantities needed, so there's no food waste.
Marco:
And they employ a full-time registered dietician on staff who reviews each recipe to ensure it's nutritionally balanced.
Marco:
All of this delivered to your doorstep in a special insulated box with free shipping.
Marco:
I've tried HelloFresh and it is exactly what they say.
Marco:
It's convenient.
Marco:
It's tasty.
Marco:
It's really fast and easy to make these recipes.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
Go to HelloFresh.com and enter offer code ATP when you subscribe.
Marco:
Once again, HelloFresh.com and use code ATP and you will get $35 off your first week of deliveries.
Marco:
HelloFresh.com, code ATP for $35 off your first week.
Marco:
Thank you very much to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show.
HelloFresh.
Marco:
I think you are right that it is easier to advance the iPad probably than to lock down or dumb down the Mac.
Marco:
And that is, you know, your argument about like, you know, leaving Mac people behind, you know, how bad that would be versus bringing along iPad people.
Marco:
That makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
I still think it's going to be hard.
Marco:
We still don't really know if the iPad can do these things well.
Marco:
And we still don't see massive efforts from Apple in the software department.
Marco:
We see interesting efforts in the hardware department.
Marco:
I mentioned in past shows, the iPad Pro 9.7 is amazing.
Marco:
And the 12.9 is also amazing for people who like even bigger ones.
Marco:
But the 9.7 being the kind of average mainstream iPad...
Marco:
It is amazing hardware.
Marco:
The hardware is better than ever, as is usually the case.
Marco:
But the hardware is better than ever.
Marco:
They're doing fine on the hardware.
Marco:
But the software is harder to do because it's a more significant and trickier design challenge.
Marco:
And it takes a lot of investment to massively move software around.
Marco:
And there's two more issues I want to mention here that are, I think, big problems for the iPad.
Marco:
One is the application ecosystem.
Marco:
Apps that are used by professionals or content creation or even just a lot of productivity apps are just really, really mature and stable and usually much more financially healthy on the Mac.
Marco:
And when these applications have tried to move to iPad, they've had pretty mixed success.
Marco:
Some of them work.
Marco:
Many of them don't.
Marco:
Many of them work UI-wise to some degree with a lot of work, but then fail business-wise.
Marco:
They don't sell enough.
Marco:
They don't bring in enough money.
Marco:
And so the companies aren't interested in investing in them further or can't afford to bring over more of their apps or whatever else.
Marco:
That's a huge problem with the app store and with customer expectations for pricing for these things.
Marco:
And that significantly hurts the iPad.
Marco:
And there is no end in sight to that.
Marco:
really uh like there's there's been a couple of things apple has tried to maybe help move needle on that a little bit like oh now you can do subscriptions and that's cool but it doesn't seem like that's really helping a lot well they could totally tie up the entire market for pro users who routinely spend their day using a 12.5 inch screen
John:
like those people like great i can now switch my work to the ipad and get it all nobody does that nobody sits at a desk doing any complicated app on a 12.5 inch screen like the screen size alone i feel like is a disqualification even if you could get lightroom like exactly lightroom exactly how it is like it's you know os 10 on your ipad would you choose to use it on a 12.5 inch screen when you could use it on a 5k i'm like nobody would
John:
it doesn't i i disagree i just unless you have to be portable obviously like the whole use case is portability like oh i have to use it on the go or whatever like yeah so portability is a thing but i'm but portability is is only a concern for people who are not currently sitting in a dark room at a desk plugging away at their computers working at pixar or working on photoshop all day or you know like or even if you're just doing big cad drawings or just assembling a big presentation like
John:
Some people need to be on the go and portability is important, yada, yada, yada.
John:
But everything Margo's talking about, all these applications with like strong financial foundations and, you know, they charge a lot of money and people routinely upgrade and stuff.
John:
Like, I feel like the only company that is straddling that line is maybe Microsoft with its office applications, which I have a feeling is still subsidized by the other businesses.
John:
And Omni, which is still selling expensive Mac apps and still making partner apps that also work on iOS for when you want to do the same stuff, but portably.
John:
But almost everybody else is like, how are you going to get that guy off the desk when you're only offering them a 12.5-inch screen?
John:
There's so many remaining hardware barriers to success in this area that Apple, just like Marco said, he doesn't see an end in sight because he's like, I don't see Apple coming out with a 28-inch iPad.
John:
It doesn't even make any sense.
John:
It's not an iPad anymore.
John:
You're right.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's something else.
John:
But you're never going to get those people off their desks if you force them to use a portable form factor all the time.
Marco:
And there's also a lot to be said for using the same application from a 12 inch laptop all the way up to a 30 inch display on a desktop.
Marco:
Like you can use the same app.
Marco:
You can write one app for the PC operating system.
Marco:
You can have it show up for all those screen sizes and you can have people both portably and at their desks using this one app.
Marco:
So it's easier to develop that app.
Marco:
It's easier to sell it.
Marco:
People who buy only have to buy one copy of it.
Marco:
Like that's a huge advantage.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But I think you guys are overemphasizing your own needs and not considering the needs of other kinds of users.
Casey:
And there is a distinct advantage to being a single machine person.
Casey:
And that machine could be a 13-inch iPad.
Casey:
There is a distinct advantage to never having to rearrange your windows every time you plug in an external.
Casey:
There's a distinct advantage to having a simpler experience that
Casey:
Just because CAD doesn't work on a 12-inch screen, which I bet it could, but it certainly wouldn't be as easy as a 40-inch screen.
Casey:
Just because CAD doesn't doesn't mean everything doesn't.
Casey:
And I think a lot of people value having one machine that they can carry anywhere.
Casey:
I mean, look at me.
Casey:
I, generally speaking, for most of my life, have had a single laptop that was my everything computer.
Casey:
And yes, there were compromises for sure.
Casey:
But I preferred having one machine that always had all of my stuff.
Casey:
Always.
Casey:
Because that was better to me.
Casey:
And that was a trade-off I was willing to make.
Casey:
And just because a CAD operator...
Casey:
or designer or what have you, doesn't necessarily want to make that trade, that doesn't mean that everyone doesn't want to make that trade.
Casey:
And I mean, look at all the people that have MacBook Airs that may or may not plug them into external monitors all the time.
Casey:
Like, those are small displays.
Casey:
They aren't even a retina.
Marco:
They may or may not be dry.
Casey:
They may or may not be dry, too.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
Keep your liquids away from your computers, kids.
Casey:
Anyway, so...
Casey:
So I'm not trying to say that you're wrong, John or Marco, but I think that there is a spectrum here that you're not really giving credit.
John:
Marco's context was specifically about pro applications that are expensive, that have a foundation on the Mac, that sell to people who use them for work.
John:
And those are the people who you can't pry away from their desks with a 12.5-inch screen.
John:
right obviously there's tons of people again like i said are just doing you know they're just messing around with outlook and sending emails and doing web browsing and writing stuff up and talking with other people in chat applications like by all means like and then it's just a question of whether you want a laptop or a hardware keyboard ultra stuff like that and even even within the realm of your single machine being an ipad with a two terabyte flash drive in it you can sit down on your desk and connect it up to a massive 28 inch touchscreen and have like
John:
server studio when you're sitting and when you pick it up on an ipad that gets back to what marco was saying the ability to sell one app that scales to different screen sizes like you can if you buy lightroom on a pc and you have a 5k i mac or a 5k external screen assuming your wi-fi router isn't nearby and you connect it to your laptop right but but again that is an experience that the ipad does not offer at all
John:
You've got a 12.5-inch screen, and that's what you're stuck with, whether you're at a desk or not.
John:
You can't sell one version of your application that you can use on all those different screens.
John:
No matter how you want to do it, whether you want to do single machine, multiple machine, or whatever, the iPad does not address that at all for hardware reasons.
John:
And that's all we're saying.
John:
Specifically talking about those high-end people, you will never dislodge them until the AR, VR realm comes and things are being projected onto their retinas or something, and then we don't care how big screens are, and this is all...
John:
But for now, anyway, the hardware limitations of the iPad and the software and the application ecosystems that Apple has chosen for itself are necessarily limiting that.
John:
Microsoft has made different choices, but they have so many other challenges that are unrelated to the quality or potential of their products.
John:
So...
John:
we're still just sitting here patiently waiting for apple to make its next progression of the ipad uh but it just seems like apple needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into into the future and in the meantime they've been chopping out the legs from underneath the mac and hoping people can get all their work done in even simpler situations on the mac and if they can't have fun dealing with third-party monitor
Marco:
Well, and then the other problem, so I mentioned the applications issue, which is what got us on this big tangent.
Marco:
But the other problem, Casey, is what we were just talking about.
Marco:
It is really nice to have one machine for lots of reasons.
Marco:
Lots of people have one machine for price concerns alone.
Marco:
That's a huge concern because a decent specced iPad is not cheap.
Marco:
Like if you buy an iPad that's any good, you're lucky to be out of there for less than 600 bucks.
Marco:
And that's without any accessories.
Marco:
If you actually want like a keyboard or a cover or anything, it's so easy to spend like eight, nine hundred dollars on
Marco:
and just to get what you consider like a mid-range iPad with, you know, a couple of accessories that kind of are required to make it very useful to you.
Marco:
A lot of people just cannot justify $500 to $1,000 on this in-between device when they already have a phone, which covers most of their ultra-mobile and ultra-simple needs, and they already might have a computer or a laptop.
Marco:
And so people who want only one device...
Marco:
That one device so often – I'm not even going to say most of the time.
Marco:
I'm not even going to say sometimes.
Marco:
But that one device often can't be an iPad because that one – I mean assuming the phone is always going to be there because that doesn't even count.
Marco:
I'm talking one device between iPad or computer.
Marco:
So often that can't be an iPad because of things like we were just complaining about hardware limitations of just they just don't make it in this size.
Marco:
You can't plug in an external screen or whatever else.
Marco:
There are so many limitations with iPads that if you need to do something outside of what is considered and optimized for by Apple, you hit a brick wall and you just can't.
Marco:
It's just like, well, the answer to that is you just can't do that.
Marco:
or you hit what appears to be a brick wall, and there might be some kind of power user app to work around that, but you might not know that as a typical iPad user, or you might not have that app, or you might not want to spend the money for that app or whatever else.
Marco:
So there are so many hard brick walls that you hit when trying to do any kind of edge case thing or even some pretty common things on iPads and iOS.
Marco:
And if your one device is a computer...
Marco:
It might be less fun or harder or more complicated to use, but there are far fewer of those brick walls.
Marco:
The computer is partly from legacy, partly from architecture, partly from hardware ecosystem.
Marco:
The computer is the everything device.
Marco:
It can do so, so much, especially when combined with a phone, because then the phone covers your ultramobile, your camera, and then the computer covers everything else.
Marco:
For so many people, if they can only have, or if they only want, or they can only justify paying for one device besides their phone, the idea that it would be a tablet is not high on their list because...
Marco:
they need to do something or they want to do something or they prefer the way something is done that can only be done on a computer.
Marco:
And that trying to do it on iOS is either impossible or really it just fights you the whole time.
Marco:
And that's what you were saying earlier about wanting to maybe get a small laptop instead of your Retina Pad Mini.
Marco:
Sorry, Stephen, again.
Marco:
There are these walls that you hit trying to do things with iOS that...
Marco:
While many people can do great work on iOS and love doing it, I think they are a minority.
Marco:
Everyone can always point to power users like Vatici who use the iPad for everything.
Marco:
And you can point to everyone has a relative or a friend who's a novice at using computers and the iPad is their only computer.
Marco:
But there's a lot of people in between.
Marco:
And for so many of those people in between, a PC-style operating system and PC-style hardware is the only way they can get their needs solved in one device.
Marco:
Today.
Marco:
Well, that's true.
Marco:
And again, this could change in the future.
Marco:
But I think changing that would require so many changes and expansions to both iOS and iPad hardware that
Marco:
that just seem very unlikely that Apple would ever do.
Marco:
And that's why I think it's fairly unlikely that we're going to get to that point.
Marco:
I think it's much more likely that we're going to keep going where we are for a while, which is Apple's strategy is basically we're going to keep selling you these devices that are kind of in this big Venn diagram where all the circles overlap like a third of the way with other circles.
Marco:
And we just want to, you know, Apple's a hardware company.
Marco:
They want to sell you more hardware.
Marco:
So Apple is perfectly fine to have the strategy be,
Marco:
oh for you you like parts of this device and parts of this device you should buy both you know like that's i have a feeling that's going to be their strategy for a long time but as long as it is their strategy the ipad is never going to replace the mac and at least it shouldn't if there's a future for any kind of mainstream mainstream and power computing on apple devices the ipad better not replace the mac unless it has significant changes
Marco:
But again, it just seems very unlikely that the Apple that we know today would do the kind of changes to both iPadOS and hardware that would enable it to fully replace the Mac.
Casey:
It must be tough.
Casey:
And imagine how stinky it is to have to worry about charging your computer every day.
Casey:
And God, imagine how crummy it would be to have to carry a brick that you need to charge it that's big and heavy.
Casey:
Imagine...
Casey:
For me, I can just charge wherever I have a USB port.
Casey:
And imagine how crummy it would be if anytime I wanted to get on the internet, I had to have Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Okay, yes, I have a phone in my pocket, but I can just flip on my little cellular switch and suddenly I have Wi-Fi in the device I'm using.
Casey:
Imagine how crummy it would be to not be able to tear your keyboard off the device because you just really don't need it and you know you're not going to need it for a while.
Casey:
Imagine how crummy it would be
Casey:
to feel like you can't always bring your one device everywhere you're going because it's this big computer.
Casey:
And yeah, okay, they're smaller than they used to be, and they're certainly more portable than they used to be.
Casey:
But man, it would stink if I felt like I had to have this big laptop bag.
Casey:
How barbaric is that?
Marco:
What kind of pants are you putting an iPad into out of curiosity?
Casey:
Actually, I can't fit a mini in several of my jackets.
Casey:
Not my pants, but my jackets.
John:
Underscore has got laptops in every pocket of all the clothes you wear every day.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
But, I mean, imagine how boring it would be to have to use a Mac every day when you can just touch and swipe your way through getting work done.
Casey:
I'm being silly, and I started the show by saying I don't really know if there's a place in my life for an iPad anymore.
Casey:
But I absolutely understand how it would be possible to prefer an iPad for all the reasons I don't like it.
Casey:
And I think that the three of us are too preoccupied with our own needs and our own desires and our own wants.
Casey:
And I think there are plenty of people that would prefer an iPad Pro, be that a 10-inch or a 12-inch or a 9.7 or what have you, that would prefer for all those things.
Casey:
And Vatici is an example of this.
Casey:
And yes, I acknowledge that he is like way on the other side of the spectrum.
Casey:
But I don't think a lot of his desires are that unusual.
Casey:
To have an LTE-equipped device, to have only one device to have to manage, again, like you, Marco, I agree that the phone is just a given.
Casey:
To have something where the software is always the software he has, it always looks the same, regardless of what, you know, it's because the device is always the same size.
Casey:
It's...
Casey:
I feel like there's so many advantages to living an iPad-only life that are disadvantages to me.
Casey:
They're disadvantages to you two, but they are advantages to some people.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
And I think we're all—all three of us are discounting—
Casey:
that there's plenty of real work that can be done.
Casey:
Maybe not CAD, maybe not development, maybe video editing, maybe not, maybe podcast editing, maybe not.
Casey:
But there's a lot of real work that can be done on an iPad today.
Casey:
And all the rumblings I've heard is that things are going to get a lot more interesting in the next few months.
Casey:
So imagine what will be possible tomorrow.
John:
I don't think any of us are discounting that at all.
John:
I think you haven't been listening to us.
John:
We've been talking specifically about the high end.
John:
We totally concede that the vast majority... We're only talking about the high end.
John:
That's all we're talking about.
Casey:
Yeah, but my point is that your high end... When you say high end, it...
Casey:
And it implies – I'm trying to think of how to describe this.
Casey:
I feel like you feel like the high end is the Empire State Building, and to me the high end is the Mighty Black Stomp.
Casey:
And that there are people that can – this analogy is falling apart already.
Casey:
But I think that you guys are treating this mythical high end as this unattainable thing.
John:
It's not a myth.
Casey:
It's a real thing.
Casey:
Okay, you're treating this high-end as this thing that could never be accomplished by a single touch device.
Casey:
I don't think that's the case.
John:
No, I'm not treating that at all.
John:
I'm saying the opposite.
John:
I'm saying the iPad could totally do all this stuff.
John:
Apple has been reluctant to extend it to do so.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, because the hardware power is there.
Marco:
The will of people to want to carry an iPad and do these things on it is there.
Marco:
It's really just a very strong problem of...
John:
the ipad os really not being uh advanced enough and and being too high friction for the way a lot of people want to work and and the way a lot of people and the way some people need to work and the and the app store and upgrades and you know and the hardware flexibility and like and again like the apple has been making steps in that direction remember they weren't making any steps in that direction for a long time and that was frustrating because it was like it was static but they they have been making moves and as marco characterized it
John:
they're sporadic moves and they move a little bit each time and they hang out in between.
John:
Uh, and if they move faster, it would be more dramatic, but you know, I don't really, if they have to choose whether to put the resources behind the next iPhone or the next iPad, like the iPhone is where you have to do it.
Casey:
It's not a choice.
John:
Right.
John:
So, you know, so who knows, maybe they will accelerate or whatever, but like I am heartened by any kind of progress because it's as if they, uh, you know, they came out with a Mac pro that was a weird trash can and they waited a year.
John:
and then they let you have two cpus and one gpu and they waited a year and then they upgraded the gpu to be not really old and they waited a year that's not great this sounds amazing what we got it's better than what we got so on the on the ipad where it's like oh finally let us have multitasking and then wait a year oh here's a pencil too and then wait a year like this is good this is you know but it's not as good as it could be but it's better than you know the high end of the mac where they're like nope that's not a thing anymore just buy what we sell
John:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
HelloFresh, Audible, and Away.
Casey:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Casey:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Casey:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
So today, Scoop Gurman has written a post saying that Apple, well, let me just read the headline.
Casey:
Apple is said to work on Mac chip that would lessen Intel role.
Casey:
And I think that actually has changed.
Casey:
I think it was a different headline earlier.
John:
But in any case, read the slug for the original headline.
John:
apple developing new mac chip in test of intel independence which is certainly a little more aggressive which is not true and an inaccurate headline so that's why they changed it but they never change the slugs because people make terrible cms's that don't let you change a slug or if they do let you know it never changes them like do they think people don't see urls i know safari hides them by default but come on people
Casey:
Anyway, so there's a delightful autoplay video that's going on here, which is the most frustrating thing in the entire world.
Casey:
But anyway, the article in short seems to say, hey, there's this T1 chip that was done to power the touch bar.
Casey:
That's ARM-based.
Casey:
What if for like PowerNap, for example, there's this new chip that apparently has been codenamed T310 because that matters.
Casey:
But anyway, this mythical T310 chip could handle PowerNap and wake up and do those sorts of things and then go back to sleep.
Casey:
And because ARM just sips power, that would be flawless and perfect.
Casey:
So that's the way forward is we can slowly encroach on Intel's territory by making an ARM chip that's used when convenient and
Casey:
And then use the Intel chip for all the other time.
Casey:
So it's an interesting premise.
Casey:
It's certainly not something that I had really considered, but I like the idea of it.
Casey:
I don't know if I really buy that it would be flexible enough, short of like virtualization, which would be a terrible idea and ruin most of the power savings.
Casey:
That it would be flexible enough to just do anything on this mythical ARM processor.
Casey:
But maybe via the extension framework, and I saw somebody else talking about this earlier, via extensions maybe could have an extension that's compiled for ARM and the rest of the app is compiled for Intel.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But it's certainly a fascinating idea.
Casey:
And every sign that I can see, all of the tea leaves are pointing to Apple at least exploring getting rid of Intel and using their own chips, even if it's not anytime soon.
Casey:
So, John, what do you think?
John:
it's a weird story because like the chip that powers the touch bar like it's it's sense it only makes sense that there will be a successor to that chip that powers the touch bar on the next generation things and maybe it'll be a little better in a bunch of ways like sure granted and whatever that chip's code name is fine and we already know it's a little arm cpu and running some little mini thing of ios uh and you could use it to do smart things when the intel cpu is asleep right and
John:
Where this story gets fuzzy is like, all right, so the power nap stuff?
John:
Like, first of all, I'm not sure that stuff your computer does when it's essentially asleep and you're not using it is a really big source of power draw.
John:
Like...
John:
like idle power people don't even list this anymore in laptop reviews how long can i leave this laptop asleep before the battery drains like that's not that's not a very common use case like oh i need to be able to leave it at my house for a week in sleep mode and come back and have it have 100 battery well it's not going to happen nobody even tests that uh and it's not a common use case no it does happen it's like now it's like a month because what they do is after i think like eight hours or whatever of idle time and i believe you can tweak that time out with some kind of
John:
you know nv ram command um it goes into full hibernate mode like hibernate to disk so even in full hibernate battery strain that's why you don't bring your tesla to fire island because you're you're afraid but that's why i'm pretty sure that the the idle time has been about a month since like the 2012 retina macbook pro right but i'm saying that's not a use case they care about so putting a lot of investment into making that use case even better like now it's two months like who cares that's not a selling point it's not a big thing you know and the second the idea that
John:
that this thing would be able to do the stuff that happens during power nap power nap like the computer is basically asleep but it wakes up the real live cpu periodically to do stuff in a lower clock lower power type way doesn't turn on the screen and doesn't even turn on the fan in the cases of modern computers with fans i think right
John:
But it's still running the real software in a limited capacity.
John:
And it has to be running something that has the ability to do IO to the disk or, you know, to the SSD, essentially, because you can't receive your email or do time machine backups if you can't do IO to the disk.
John:
I have a hard time believing that there would be an ARM CPU in there that could not wake up the Intel CPU at all, which is still the main CPU to the system, but wake up and somehow run code for your mail application to fetch mail and do I.O.
John:
to your disk while the Intel CPU is asleep?
John:
even if you were compiling extensions with arm uh binaries and shipping them off to the little arm cpu to run and like and that that little cpu is going to have access to io and it's it's such a weird situation it's like what what are you even optimizing for so it makes me look at the story and think there's totally a successor to this t1 it is better and more capable and will do more things like perhaps listening for hasten on my mac so i can finally use siri in a sane way
John:
But will it do everything?
John:
Will it do all that PowerNap stuff and let third-party applications run arbitrary code in the background without waking the Intel CPU?
John:
I mean, it could.
John:
I'm not saying this is technically impossible, but it seems like that is not a use case that Apple would be investing money in.
John:
Whereas I think they would invest money in
John:
you know making siri better or have it only listen always listening for stuff or have it be able to do more sophisticated things having to do with the management of the system but once it starts shading into actual applications running code whether they be first party or third party without waking up the intel cpu it just doesn't seem like it's worth the the hardware os and software investment to make that work because the benefit is not something that you would sell and not things that people would notice
Marco:
Yeah, I think this is yet another case where a rumor article that has good sourcing gets probably the gist of the facts correct, but the story wrong.
Marco:
It seems like this is not like Apple trying to reduce their dependence on Intel as a chip supplier.
Marco:
It seems much more likely that it's like, well, we are putting this chip in these machines for the touch bar anyway.
Marco:
So we have this whole little embedded ARM computer in these machines that uses almost no power.
Marco:
We're including this hardware anyway.
Marco:
So can we have it do anything else?
Marco:
Can we have it be more useful than what it's doing now while the computer is not needing it for anything else?
Marco:
Because it's convenient.
Marco:
We have all this great stuff in here.
Marco:
Let's figure out if it can help us out any other way.
Marco:
I think it's probably going to... The facts here are plausible.
Marco:
It is probably truly there to do very low-power tasks.
Marco:
What those low-power tasks include is another story.
Marco:
And I don't think this is at all indicative that Apple is slowly going to cut Intel out and make ARM Macs.
Marco:
They might be doing that in the future.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But I don't think this is related to that.
Marco:
It seems like a totally separate project or task here because it seems like what they're doing here is more effectively utilizing the resources they already have in these computers and are already building in any way.
Marco:
And it would be such a technical challenge and such a hurdle and so much complexity to...
Marco:
to have this chip meaningfully take over lots of what the Intel CPU is doing, any kind of major application-level thing.
Marco:
I think you mentioned that it would be probably an extension, and that would be an ARM extension, if it's accessible to third parties at all.
Marco:
Or even just the way Apple's apps implement it.
Marco:
It is probably like, you know, a little extension kind of thing that is native ARM code that can run here.
Marco:
And John, I share your concern about like, well, does this have access to the disk somehow?
Marco:
Like, how does that work?
Marco:
How does the, you know, how does it interact with...
John:
All the buses and Wi-Fi and network operations.
John:
It's like a dual CPU system with two different CPU instruction sets, which, again, you could do it.
John:
This is all technically possible, but that's a hell of an investment, and I just don't see the benefit.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So that's why I think it's more likely that this is a real story, but that the tasks it's going to do are going to be very, very limited.
Marco:
And it's not a big deal.
Marco:
It doesn't mean anything about Apple's relationship with Intel or the future of possible ARM MacBooks.
Marco:
That is all totally separate discussions.
Marco:
And it seems much more likely that this is mostly a non-issue, something that they might mention in a keynote for two seconds that we would immediately forget about.
John:
It could be a headlining feature if they use it right.
John:
So one example is you could do a Windows 10 style face recognition thing, not to let you in because that's terrible because people just print out a picture of your face and get access to your computer.
John:
But even just something as simple as, hey, it's always listening for you.
John:
And there is proximity detectors to see when you're close by.
John:
And when you sit down in front of your sleeping computer, it does face recognition with the camera to realize who you are to bring you your login prompt.
John:
Like, even if it was on a different user, so you don't have to, like, pick the user or do the thing, like, that would be a good use of a fairly capable, low-power CPU that has access to some things, has access to the camera, has access to its own proximity detectors, has access to Touch ID and the secure enclave and can do stuff with the touch bar.
John:
It doesn't involve, oh, hey, I'm taking over PowerNap.
John:
Not to mention, like, PowerNap, the reason it works, and it works even better now, is because you can make these Intel CPUs run at a super underclocked rate, turning off most of the cores.
John:
Like, they're pretty efficient.
John:
Like, a Skylake in super-duper low power mode with half of the chip disabled.
John:
It's actually pretty good.
John:
Most of the power is going to be from your Wi-Fi radio trying to do your time machine backup and all your SSD access.
John:
The CPU is not the problem there.
John:
So if you're going to let power not happen at all, you're not worried, oh, I can't have this Intel CPU running at 600 megahertz with one core enabled.
John:
doing my thing it's because the ssd and the wi-fi are going to overwhelm that anyway but but anyway back to the little arm chip if the feature i just described like face recognition proximity detection touch id blah blah that's that's a keynote keynote demoable feature right there and yeah it's not a big deal technically speaking and they already had the hardware there it's an easy win it's a cool thing it's something that microsoft has sort of already done and apple can pretend they don't know that and just pretend they invented it and we'll all oh and ah
John:
And just like we like sitting down to use Touch ID to unlock our computers, we like sitting down in a shared environment and having it know that it's us and wake from sleep and show us our password prompt even if someone else was logged in.
Marco:
Is that it?
Marco:
I think so.
John:
Ship it.