Meatspace Windows
not only do my kids not know how to use computers but they all because they don't know how to use computers they don't know how to fix things on computers like they don't even have they've never had to fix anything on a computer it's like how do you learn how to fix crap on computers like because when we were kids our parents didn't know anything so there was no one to ask
And you had to just figure it out yourself.
Yeah, we just kind of broke everything and figured out how to fix it.
That's basically how we figured this all out.
My son had a problem recently where he was like, Dad, the computer only types capital letters.
And so I came over and he was like in a Google document.
And he's like, look, capital letters.
And it's not caps lock because cap lock light on or off.
Either way, it just produces capital letters.
Right.
And he was that was it.
That was the extent of his debugging.
Like he knew cap locks existed.
And he had tried toggling it on and off, and it confirmed that in one position, the light is on and one position, the light is off.
But either way, capital letters come out.
But that was it.
He was out of ideas.
And that's not good.
What was it, like a stuck shift key?
So I tried another application, which is the first thing you try.
Is this just Google Docs or the browser?
Or is this everywhere?
So open text edit.
Sure enough, only capital letters in text edit, right?
So I'm like, the things you learn from a lifetime of debugging are things that could potentially solve this problem.
So log out.
right uh we go to log out uh or you know switch users the master troubleshooting step turn everything off turn everything back off uh and the login screen i want to log into my account and when you see the little password thing you see the little arrow that tells you that things cap locks is on you know yep that puts right and so basically it was like the computer thought caps lock was on all the time it wasn't you could look at the keyboard and it doesn't matter the light was on or off but the computer was totally convinced the cap locks were on or off so i unplugged the keyboard and plugged it back in and i fixed it and then my son said to me
So how could unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in fix it?
And I was like, if you've ever fixed anything on a computer, this fix is a surprising number of things.
Log out and back in, unplug and replug, reboot, turn everything off, wait 10 seconds, unplug it from the wall, wait 10 seconds.
All these things have reasons behind them.
But even if you don't know the reasons behind them...
eventually you learn by fixing things that sometimes you just have to do crap like that and the only way you learn that is by actually fixing problems in the real world without understanding why they fix you just like what can i do to make this problem go away and once it works for you once it's in your bag of tricks of like just you know the general idea of start the thing over again unplug it and plug it back in disconnected and reconnected
and my kids don't even have that they don't even have the basics they don't have any understanding of that because they never had to fix anything themselves like nightmares of like them leaving the house and living on their own as an adult and having a job and calling me and saying I can't get my TV show I can't watch my TV show it's not working like because you know like Netflix is broken or something
I feel like this might be kind of how like, like whenever anything breaks about our house, usually, you know, if it's not that critical that it gets fixed, you know, like there isn't water pouring all over everything and we're not like installing a fire hazard outlet in the wall.
But, you know, if...
But if there's, you know, like some like, you know, we have to like hang something that's kind of heavy duty on the wall somewhere or we have to like fix something that's made of wood, you know, usually those tasks just accumulate until my father-in-law comes to visit.
He will basically just go around to the first days here and just like fix everything around the house that we've been putting off forever.
Yeah.
And I feel like maybe the way that he thinks about it, or at least the way he should think about how we seem to be totally incapable of fixing these things ourself, might be the same way that you are thinking about, like, how can your son possibly not know how to troubleshoot these computer issues himself?
So I'm going to show up at his house when he's an adult and it's like, oh, thank God you're here.
We haven't been able to watch TV in six months.
Maybe.
We can't figure out why.
And I'm going to go up to his television, unplug it from the wall, plug it back in and go, there you go.
That very well might be how this generation plays out.
Oh, my word.
Maybe figured out myself in the spare time.
I don't feel like I have or just live with it forever.
I don't feel that incapable for home repair things.
My parents, my father does come and fix everything exactly like you were saying your father-in-law comes to do, Marco.
But it's not because I don't know how to fix it.
It's because I don't want to fix it.
I don't have time to fix it.
And he's going to do a better job, too, because he's fixed it more times than me.
But I do know what to do only because I spent an entire lifetime watching home improvement television shows.
LAUGHTER
Oh, I spent a lot of time watching, not as much as you, but I spent a lot of time watching those shows too.
So all I can do is be the annoying person of like, are you sure you want to do it that way?
I can be like that guy, which is the worst possible role to play.
Nobody likes that guy.
Yeah, because I know just enough to be able to criticize and make stupid comments about something, but not enough to actually do it right myself or to realize that the way they did it is actually correct, not my amateur view of what Holmes on Holmes would think is the right thing to do.
You've got to keep watching them, though.
I still have season passes for those shows.
I still watch them.
So then you're up to date on the latest technologies.
The latest mold generation technologies?
Criticizing and making snarky comments, whatever it is you said.
Isn't that pretty much our show in a nutshell?
Just criticizing from afar, not really knowing what we're talking about?
But I like to think that we at least... I think we know more about what we criticize on this show than I know about home repairs.
Yes, I would say that's definitely the case.
Because at the very least, all of us do a lot of things related to the things we're talking about.
Whereas despite me watching home improvement shows for my entire life, I've never built a house, not even once.
All right.
So we should start, as always, with some follow-up.
And somebody, I think John, phrased this section as pouring cold water on Apple USB-C notions.
And so we talked last episode about whether or not the forthcoming iPhone, we'll call it for the purposes of this conversation, the iPhone 8.
whether the phone itself will have a USB-C port on it.
And there was a Wall Street Journal report that seemed ambiguously to say yes.
And then Ming-Chi Kuo has come out and said, well, we believe all three new iPhones launching in the second half of 2017 will support fast charging by the adoption of Type-C power delivery technology while still retaining the Lightning port.
So probably sticking with Lightning Port, which I think I'm in support of, but having listened to most of the shows that are like ours that cover this sort of thing, I feel like I'm the only one, which makes me wonder if I'm just the old man of the crowd all of a sudden.
I was hoping this was a reaction to the Wall Street Journal story, which was weird and ambiguous and had everyone talk about USBC.
And then Ming-Chi Kuo just says, no, no, no, no, no.
Here, I know how to speak in sentences that have meaning that is clear to the reader.
Every single new iPhone coming this year will have a lightning port on the bottom.
Boom, done.
And so...
I'm hoping it is just simply a clarification.
I'm hoping what it's not is like a competing rumor of, you know, without any particular foundation.
But it certainly seemed like that ambiguous story was out there.
There was a lot of chatter.
And then this thing came and just shut everybody up and said, it's the boring thing.
Never mind.
Yeah, I mean, at some point, I think Ming-Chi Quo needs to evolve into just the Dalrymple.
Just nope.
Yep.
No, but I think, you know, as we said last show, we all thought this was fairly unlikely to be the case, that they would replace the lightning port with the USB-C port.
I do think it is still worth considering as a thought experiment.
I do think that if they were to actually get drunk and do this...
I would actually welcome that change.
I think it would be temporary pain, but long-term, it would be great.
And Apple usually errs on that side of that kind of decision.
Ultimately, though, I still think it's very unlikely, with one little exception.
That we keep hearing from people about the EU regulations, about phones all having the same connector.
And for the last few years, ever since the introduction of Lightning, basically the EU said all phones have to have what used to be micro USB.
I have not honestly been following this very closely.
But what I keep hearing from people is that that regulation is getting more strict now.
and that Apple will no longer be able to get away with just shipping an adapter that converts Lightning to micro-USB, or in this case, I assume it's USB-C.
So there's something going on there where the EU is putting pressure on Apple, and I don't know if they're going to be able to negotiate their way out of it again, but there might be something there.
You know, like...
There might be a strong reason for Apple to say, okay, you know what, in addition to all of the other reasons we have to get rid of Lightning and switch to USB-C these days, it would also probably cause less friction with the EU and any other kind of similar regulatory body around the world that might get in the way.
I wouldn't expect in the next three and a half to seven years that the U.S.
would really care that much about reducing waste in a regulation.
But I imagine other countries that actually have functioning governments probably all have similar goals.
Yeah, that would be cool.
Yeah, that would be awesome, right?
They probably all have similar goals of reducing electronic waste and standardizing on things that really matter and stuff like that.
And so I think Apple's going to keep getting pressure from large markets.
I mean, if China did it, game over, right?
Imagine if China said, okay, to sell a phone in China after 2017, it has to have USB-C on the bottom.
Lightning would be gone the next day.
They can make two different models, one for that market.
They've made different models with different things inside them before.
China could do something like that, but my understanding of the EU thing is not like Apple can't sell it.
I think it's more like a guideline or agreement.
I'm sure there's some kind of carrot and stick thing where if you follow along with the agreement voluntarily, you get some boon or whatever.
I'm not convinced that it's the type of thing where if Apple...
Yeah.
And they have done that in the past for other things.
But it seems like there's arguments on both sides of whether they should do this or not.
And so if there's a big thing, a big external factor that tips them one way or the other, they would probably go that way.
And so if there's a major world market of buying phones that demands in a pretty strong way or absolutely requires that they have a standard port on the bottom instead of their proprietary port...
That would probably be enough to sway the argument one way or the other if there were no massive downsides that we aren't thinking of.
If there's some kind of major engineering challenge of doing it, but on a brand new phone that they have designed separately from the iPhone 7 and 6, God, I hope, assuming we finally get a new design, then they could totally do it.
And I don't see any obvious downsides as we talked about last week.
Anyway,
I still don't think it's likely.
I still think the most likely scenario is what Ming-Shu Kuo said where, yeah, this rumor from the Wall Street Journal that was horribly written got the facts wrong and it's actually just USB-C on the charger end.
That's the way more likely explanation here.
But I still do think it would be better to go USB-C on both ends or at least the phone end.
And there might be better reasons for them to do that.
We don't know.
So the hardware mind virus worked on me because I was getting all excited about USB-C phones until I read this cold water story.
I'm like, oh, never mind.
But really what happened related to this is my Nintendo Switch did arrive, which maybe we'll talk about later.
And I got a Pro Controller with it.
And this is the first device, besides my Apple TV, which I never plug any USB-C things into, that I had occasion to...
see and mess with usbc uh connectors with when i got my pro controller i had to plug it in to charge it and there's a little usbc connector inside the little switch dock or whatever and so i'm holding here the uh the pro controller charging cable uh and when i took this out of the box and plugged it in my immediate thought was oh no way is apple gonna ever use this thing it's huge
like i know it's not that much bigger than lightning it is barely bigger than lightning but just seeing it in real life i'm like can you imagine apple putting this thing on their phone no no way in hell like obviously this is just my gut reaction like i'm not using my brain at that point but my my visceral reaction to this connection was how massive it was compared to lightning i was like if i was inside apple i would like recoil in horror at the start of the conversation of like remind me again while we're doing lightning again it would take look at this look at this giant
We can't have this on our phones.
It's ridiculous.
What's next?
VGA ports?
Oh, God.
It really isn't that much bigger.
I know.
I know.
It cracked me up that that was my reaction.
It is not that much bigger.
I have a lighting port right next to it.
I'm holding it up next to it.
It is bare millimeters.
But the fact that it's...
wider and also thicker it just makes it seem so much more massive and it doesn't help that like i have one of the good old lightning connectors here that in front of me with the very small plastic part that's barely bigger than the metal part like it looks so small and dainty it's almost like lightning can go inside a usbc port
Well, it almost can because of the gender flip between the connector and the wire.
And actually, I suspect... I don't know if that's for sure.
I haven't looked that deeply into it.
But I suspect the design of USB-C probably permits for there to be less clearance around the port opening.
I bet you can shrink the device thickness...
closer around the port size with usbc than you could around lightning because lightning has to have all the pins and everything on the inside as opposed to usbc which has just like you know the flat conductors on the inside so i would imagine there might be something there with usbc also they have tons of room they got rid of the headphone jack and this other speaker on the bottom is fake so they have tons of room
I mean, thickness-wise, obviously, width, they're not at a loss for.
But anyway, it's not that big of a deal, and I still think it would be cool for them to go USB-C, but this rumor seems to say they're not, and so we're back to the default universe of Apple where it's lighting for a while longer yet.
What I do wish for, at least, since we're probably not going to get our USB-C on both ends cable, does anybody make...
the usbc equivalent of these wonderful anchor like five port usb chargers like all i've seen out there are chargers that have one usbc port i have not seen any that have like five like i would love to standardize on just one cable type and just like it might like i i'm traveling uh soon and i'm packing my travel bag and i have to have all these different cable types because it's like well i need every combination of something on one end and something else on the other end
everything between usb a usb c lightning micro usb like i have all these stupid cable types and these 50 different chargers come on i mean anyway so i hope i hope there's i hope the usb c ecosystem blooms soon because when it does uh that will be even more reason for apple to please for the love of god change the iphone to use usb c speaking of vga you better hope usb a usb type a connector doesn't turn out to be the vga port of our
you know hang out forever you remember like remember how long vj held on we had so many other standards that like and it was just like you could not get rid of vj it just stayed it stayed stubbornly on the side of pc laptops it's stubbornly on projectors long after multiple better smaller standards existed i'm really hoping that usba hasn't like
gained enough momentum that it will not be dislodged by usbc for like an extra you know five to ten years just because that will be sad you know it's certain sometimes transitions are easier like the second time through and in this case like the transition from dot connector to lightning was very painful but a lot of people took that opportunity to not just go to lightning for their devices or needs but to just go directly to wireless to airplay and bluetooth and things like that um
with the with the vga in conference room projector situation i wonder like how many conference rooms actually just went from vga to dvi or lightning and how many just switched to other solutions like air playing to an apple tv or something like that spoken for someone doesn't spend a lot of time in corporate america yeah uh no they don't use airplay yeah
Well, so AirPlay is not the answer, but I got to tell you, so my office is all in on the Google ecosystem, which at first glance for an Apple-centric show like ours might sound terrible, but truth be told, it actually works out really well.
And so in most conference rooms, there's a Chromebox, and I don't know enough about Chromeboxes to know if there's something special about them.
Like I've seen the physical cardboard boxes that the Chromebox comes in, and I think it says like
Chromebox for meetings or something like that on it.
The specific wordage doesn't matter.
But what ends up happening is there's a TV in each of these conference rooms.
There's a Chromebox hooked up to the TV.
And the Chromebox shows that room's schedule for the day.
And you just select oftentimes the currently active button and
Yeah.
You just hop on the Hangout on your laptop and it will it will thus implicitly go to the TV in the conference room.
And it will also be presented to anyone that happens to be remote as well.
It works out surprisingly well.
And yes, there's hiccups and coughs and whatnot from time to time, but it's really solid.
I was very surprised how much I've I've really gotten to like Hangouts in this regard.
When your other choice is WebEx, anything looks good.
Yeah, that's true, too.
Amen, brother.
Before we get on the topic of conference rooms, I remember going through this several years back at work when we were going through a corporate, I don't know, disturbance, upsetness about conference rooms.
tech like everyone was cranky about it especially the tech people and we tried all those things we had a google box we tried google hangouts um and i you know air playing to apple tvs came up because if you look at how much money all the equipment we had that we were installing this conference was costing it's like an apple tv is nothing compared to that and this is yet another market that apple could have done well in with either a dedicated product like a chromecast or just by making the apple tv better but
it was basically a non-starter uh partially because you know no airplay on on pcs and everything but we had a lot of macs and i don't think that would have stopped it mainly because it was so much of a pain to get apple tvs onto the corporate network you could do it but you needed a special weird utility and it wasn't simple and no one wanted to go through with that so now instead of being able to bring your mac into the room and airplay to the projector you plug into one of the 800 cables that's poking out of this giant hydro one of which yes is still vga but
Who knows what they're going to do if and when my work ever buys the new laptops that have the USB-C connectors because most of the time the Mac users plug into HDMI these days.
Yeah, I have to imagine, too, like HDMI because, you know, VGA was analog and then we finally got DVI and then HDMI, which is basically DVI with bonus stuff attached to it.
I feel like it's easier to adapt to the new digital standards these days.
And HDMI is also pretty well supported now.
I mean, I don't think it's as big, like as universal as VGA was at its peak, but I think it's getting there.
And it's going to be fairly trivial for almost any new port standard to adapt to HDMI for the foreseeable future because it's just going to be in such high demand.
Every new device that has video app capability will have some way to translate that to HDMI for a long time.
So I think that it's mostly a moot point these days.
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Eric Peterman writes in, part of the USB-C spec is two-way power.
Devices choose what charges what based on the order of plugging them in.
So a Mac could charge the Switch.
That's a terrible way to do it.
It really is.
This is with regard to the rumor, or maybe I guess it wasn't a rumor, but somebody had plugged a Switch into one of the new MacBook Pros.
And they said, oh, this is weird.
The Switch is charging the MacBook Pro rather than what you would expect, which is the reverse.
And this is what Eric's talking about.
So I had heard separately from a not reliable source that that was actually a firmware issue with the Switch.
But this indicates that it's all about who plugs into what when, which is kind of bananas.
the fact that it wouldn't be deterministic like that it would like imagine imagine like in real life you know anybody using these devices who isn't intricately familiar with the usbc spec you know oh i accidentally plugged this in backwards and depleted the device that i was trying to charge plug your phone into your laptop and it drains your phone into your laptop yeah
Why would you design a spec that way?
Who knows?
I haven't looked this up and said, but I think it is actually a reasonable way for things to work in the absence of anything else dictating.
And I would imagine if you plug a phone into an Apple, you know, an iPhone into an Apple laptop, they have already, they already have a system through some resistor values, some other crap to ensure that it never goes in the opposite direction.
But if you have two devices that are basically from their perspective, but I don't know, I'm making up terminology of like two host devices, like the laptop and the switch.
Mm-hmm.
That's as reasonable way as any.
If they both expect to be the thing charging, but they're plugged into each other, there has to be some kind of negotiation as a plug water.
Sounds fine.
But I would hope that for the common case where it's like one really big one and one really small one, like I would hope that the phone doesn't have the power to charge anything.
I mean, I suppose it does.
It powers like audio peripherals, but it's not charging them, right?
No, barely.
Yeah.
All right.
Daniel Klein writes in USB-C versus lightning, isn't the middle part of USB-C a lot more breakable than the solid lightning connector?
uh and he continues more important than springs i'm not entirely sure what he's referring to there like the little springy bits uh you know so this is my concern about uh usbc uh before seeing them and even when you see it you can kind of you know look and look into the the female connector on usbc and you see the little circuit boardy thing with the contacts sticking out and in theory you can stick your fingernail in there and just crack that thing down and your port is dead um
i haven't don't have enough real world experience plugging and unplugging usbc to say how fragile that thing is and how likely it is to either get stuff jammed around it or break these are all question marks um i would imagine that it is probably sturdier than you think because it's wedged up in there and unless you actually stick something in there to get at it it's not it's not someplace where it can get bumped or hit or anything and when the connector is around it it's very secure because it's completely surrounded by the thing so
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, give Apple the benefit of the doubt, or whoever designed this connector, that it is okay.
And what this question made me think about, and some other people who asked similar questions about the springy bits and the contacts, and made me think about what I was saying last show about how it is better to have the springy bits in the cable, because if they fatigue and start making bad contacts, you just throw out the cable and get a new cable, whereas the springy bits...
fatigue inside your iPhone what can you do there's not much you can do about it but that was in the context of the the hardware virus where the the springy bits get less springy and don't contact well with the contacts and start arcing and make a little Bernie spot and that Bernie spot doesn't connect with another one it spreads from thing to thing
It seems to me that that could still happen no matter where the springy bits are, because if it starts arcing because the springy bits in your cable are bad, it's going to leave that little scorch mark on the stationary part inside the female USB-C connector.
You won't see it.
You won't see the little stripey thing, but it'll be there.
which means that even after you throw out the cable now one of your contacts inside your usbc connector inside the female end is a little bit scorchy and so when you stick your brand spanking new cable that you bought in there it's going to have poor contact with the scorch bar so like that that it could still happen is what i'm saying now i guess this all depends on how resilient the springy bits are maybe it's the design of the springy bits that's different they certainly you know
look different if you look inside the connectors and they do inside lightning so i don't know again it's very difficult to eyeball these things based on like the few people you know and your guesstimation by looking at connectors only the companies that make the products have actual numbers and they don't seem to be sharing them but i imagine if there is a large reliability difference between lightning and usbc we as a society will learn that together over the next few years because even though we won't have the data
eventually it'll be clear is there some sort of widespread problem with this and not a widespread problem with that or is there problems with both of them or you know like i imagine it'll be about a wash but we'll see
Jeff Spivak writes, more naked robotic MacBook Pros.
And there's a link to Yanko Design, which has a super case for your MacBook.
What the deuce is going on here?
It's just like the MacBook Pro.
This isn't a MacBook Pro.
This is a MacBook.
But hey, you know, these laptops that Apple makes have USB-C and or Thunderbolt 3 ports on them.
but don't have any other ports that people wanted.
No SD card slot, no big honking USB-A slot or whatever.
Maybe you want more battery on it.
And these sort of cases for your laptops that plug into the USB-C and or Thunderbolt 3 port and add a bunch of other ports, just like one of those adapters or docks that they sell that are external, and maybe also adds a battery.
And so here you go.
Make a robotic core of your MacBook.
You want it to be thicker and a little bit heavier and have an SD card slot and a USB-A thing and another USB-C pass-through and a micro USB.
I can't even tell what the hell this thing has on it.
Anyway, you want a bunch more ports and you want it to look like an ugly PC laptop with a bunch of plastic crap?
Get this.
Way to sell it, John.
It doesn't look good, but what I'm saying is this is 100% the naked robotic core as applied to Macs.
We made it as small and as thin as possible.
If you want something different, you can add it.
uh like the tech is there you know like all the like all those breakout docks and adapters like the tech is there you could put an ethernet port in this thing right go ahead um and it's kind of amazing that this you add this thing to it and it makes your laptop like seven times thicker but it really does on one side have usba and an sd card slot on the other side have another usba usbc and a micro usb or whatever the hell or maybe it's just another usbc i can't tell like suddenly your macbook one is macbook way more than one
Yeah, this thing is something else.
I do commend the effort of things like this to make these laptops more useful, but I think they are destined to have the same problem, the same thing I always complain about with battery backpacks on phones.
that all of the casing and electronics overhead of having to have the separate standalone device with its own plastic on both sides and its own metal shielding and different parts and charging components and discharging components and everything else, the additional bulk of having to bolt this on as an external thing,
makes the entire package end up being so much bigger and heavier than if you had a laptop that just had these things in the first place built in that it just doesn't seem compelling to me.
And so the alternative in Apple's universe, assuming Apple doesn't actually make a machine that has the ports that you want on it, because Apple does make these things with a very capable port on it that is capable of supporting all this.
The reason these didn't exist is because there is a capability.
The Apple alternative is a whole mess of adapters and wires.
And we look at this and we say, oh, isn't it ugly?
Is it inconvenient?
It makes it thicker.
It makes it heavier.
Yeah.
Is it uglier and more inconvenient than a whole mess of adapters or an external breakout box dock?
I mean, it really depends on the environment you're using it.
I wouldn't want to be I would be more happy carrying this from conference room to conference room, attending a series of meetings, no matter how ugly it is, because it's self-contained and I don't have to have.
like put down my laptop then dump on the table a handful of adapters or a breakout box or this big hydra of cables like that that is worse in many ways for a machine that is supposed to be portable so yes it is technically possible to plug in a bunch of wires it kind of reminds me of those old uh iMac ads where they would show like the pc with a million wires poking out of the back of it and show like the iMac and how clean it was and you didn't need all this stuff just had one power cable right that's another mouse that is like every macbook one that people use to get anything beyond like the basics done on
Yeah, and arguably they're using the wrong computer for that, but even, I recall seeing, like, if you ever see a picture of a real person's, like, not just a marketing shop, but someone who bought a Mac Pro and uses it for work, bought a trash can and uses it for work, there's a million wires coming out of it, and it looks for all the world like those ugly PCs.
I'm not saying this is the wrong solution, but
it's kind of like how they always show like lamps in in product shots without wires coming from them or like appliances or like there's never any wires like wait how does that lamp get power they erase the wires because wires are ugly they don't want you to see them when they're showing a picture like you know here is samsung's fancy new tv they don't show the wires coming out of it because that's ugly you know even when they show the back of it they don't show the wires because they want to show you all the ports
wires are ugly and inconvenient and make your products look worse and are generally annoying to wrangle and so as ugly as this weird little sleeve thing is i hope the signal it's sending to apple is hey apple if you made a laptop that made a different set of compromises you may be able to you know i feel like it should be apple's job to make sure that no one ever wants to buy this thing and maybe they don't want to buy it just because it's ugly but say they had just an sd card slot as we've discussed on the macbook pro 13 inch
would that satisfy everybody no because it doesn't have micro you know usb and and usba ports or whatever but it would satisfy slightly more people and what would the cost be so it's it's very difficult knowing what what the right compromise is for the complement of ports i do like the idea that things like this are possible i don't like the idea that people would be driven to buy them because they're
you know they're when you say they're they're not of apple quality for the most part yeah i mean this like you know what you said like if apple were to allow us to make a different set of compromises if you had to boil down all of my complaints about apple's hardware lineup from the last five years or so that's it like i wish apple would allow me the choice of different compromises
Because for the most part, they tend to enforce the same compromises on their entire product line, on every member of the family.
So, for instance, like, you know, all the laptops are now thin and lights, which sacrifice ports and now keyboard usability and trackpad usability.
Like, they sacrifice things in the name of thinness.
And for a lot of people, that's great.
It's great to have that as an option in the lineup.
But I just wish it wasn't now the only option in the lineup.
And I think products like this just show that there is still substantial demand, even though any given one of these types of things is not going to sell very well, I don't think.
But I think it says something that this is not the first thing we've seen like this.
And there's also the whole...
beyond just the whole new bottom case thing like this that you kind of sit the laptop in, there's also the entire ecosystem of all these different USB-C hubs that almost every MacBook One owner has one of these hubs, at least one, if not seven from different Kickstarters and everything.
This really says... I wish Apple would look at these results...
and realize it would be better for a lot of customers to just have different choices, not just to be able to pick your given screen size of the same compromised ultra-thin laptop.
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All right, so we're going to start tonight with... We're starting tonight?
Well, sort of.
With a couple, maybe all three of us, iPad grumps talking about Windows or windowing, I guess I should say, on iOS.
And Stephen Troughton-Smith, who is probably the best iOS hacker, and I don't know, I hate using that term unironically, but I don't know what else to call him.
I don't think he would take offense.
Yeah, I don't mean it in a disparaging way.
Anyways, he has been putting together over the last week or so, basically a windowing system for iOS, I guess specifically for iPad.
And it is absolutely bananas how impressive it looks and how fluid he's gotten it to look.
and there are several tweets about well there's many tweets about it we'll put one or two in the show notes but what's of interest to us i guess um is he he tweeted phone call from app review side-by-side windows fine resizable windows fine overlapping windows scream emoji so
Apparently, AppReview does not like the idea of having two windows or views on top of each other.
And this relates to one of my favorite iPad apps, not necessarily in terms of how much I've used it, but just I think it's an unbelievably clever idea.
which is Panic's status board app, which, if you're not familiar, is basically you can arrange a series of widgets on the iPad screen and use your iPad as a status board.
Or if you want to, you could plug it into a TV and use a whole TV as a status board powered by an iPad.
And it's very similar to this.
And so Cable Sasser of Panic says, still in our blog, CMS is a never posted goodbye status board post from the time Apple said widgets are OK, but we can't have more than one widget.
And this post included an illustration that may have helped change their minds.
And it's an illustration of this humongous TV with a little teeny tiny widget on it trying to make the point of, you know, this is kind of ridiculous.
So, I don't know.
There's kind of a lot to unpack here, but before anything else, I am so unbelievably stunned and impressed by what Stephen Trouton-Smith has done with this iPad.
I was going to call it a mock-up, but I mean, it's working.
It's real.
It's a tech demo.
Yeah, that's a much better term for it.
It's so freaking cool.
He basically made Finder.
Yeah.
Like a really simple version of Finder for...
with like Finder Windows and being able to browse files and preview them and everything.
It's pretty impressive.
It's kind of like the Mac OS X Finder anyway, not the real Finder.
Yeah, and the point of it is not to be like a useful application.
The point of it is, I think, to show off like, here's a really easy, obvious way that you could do windowing on iPads and let's see how it actually behaves and works.
Like, is it useful?
Is it easy to do?
Is it confusing?
Or does it just kind of work?
And so far, I think it just kind of works.
You left off the last few tweets here, which I think are important in both Steve and Cable's thing.
So Steve continues after his scared face emoji or screaming face.
Sorry, Casey, I didn't know the correct name of that emoji and Chrome couldn't handle it.
So I couldn't actually paste it.
If only we had a resource on this show of somebody who was really an emoji expert.
He handled it.
He read right over scared face and he replaced it with the correct, which I assume is the correct one because we'll just defer to him.
He's fluent in emoji.
So this is about AppReview saying the side-by-side overlapping windows is no good, right?
So he's saying, effectively, this is merely an informal heads-up that if it were to be submitted to the App Store with overlapping windows, it would be rejected.
Remember, he's not submitting an application to the App Store.
He's just doing, like, tech demos on Twitter.
And he gets a phone call from AppReview saying, by the way,
if you were to submit that no all right and so the final bit here is this is why the ipad can't have nice things you're stuck waiting for apple to innovate which is exactly the point of all this is like who knows if this is a good idea maybe this is a terrible idea but if apple is going to not just enforce a set of guidelines in terms of quality and viruses and advertising and you know adult content and all sorts of other things that the app store does but to at the level at this level to say uh
you know you can do whatever you want if you're making a game and you i can't look you make a bunch of guis but in the in-between place where you try to make your own gui we're gonna say no to that and it's like apple
you don't know like it's a third-party application maybe it's a terrible idea when everyone will hate it maybe it's a great idea and you'll end up stealing it like pull to refresh you have to allow application developers to do things like this with the devices that you're making like this is not a ridiculous notion right and and maybe if it was more ridiculous it would be allowed because again games can like look my whole screen is a big open gl view i can do whatever the hell you want and apple's not going to be like oh your menu system in this racing game looks a
like they don't care it's fine but this looks too much like a regular ui and this is not like the image that apple wants for their thing and i feel like this starts to cross the line of you're not ensuring quality in the app store you are constraining you know you're constraining innovation like legitimate innovation not he's not trolling with this he's trying out an interface idea an interface idea that is just as valid as half the other people's terrible uses of ui kit that end up being terrible interfaces but
maybe this would be terrible too.
Who knows?
But why is this not allowed?
But so many other like sketching applications that have like drag off pallets that you can float.
It's like, Oh, that's okay.
Because the background is your painting or your sketch that you're doing.
And that's not a window.
And then the things that are floating on top of it are windows, but they can't overlap with each other.
It's, it's ridiculous.
Like,
and so we are forced to wait for apple to slowly but you know perhaps surely perhaps not decide what it's going to do with this whole window okay picture and picture is fine and apple do that and make an official api for it can we have any other floating windows on top of the windows maybe
one or two and apps all out but don't try to solve the whole problem in a general purpose way because only apple's allowed to do that so you're so the users of the ipad the users of ios are stuck waiting for apple to figure out what to do it is impossible for third parties to innovate
on ios devices because apple simply won't let them and that is terrible because most of the awesome innovations on the mac and many of them on ios came from third-party developers that did something it became popular apple saw it and said oh that's a good idea we should build that into the u.s or incorporate a similar mechanism or you know buy super clock and put a clock in the menu bar i mean come on come on apple this is super disappointing especially since they're proactively dickish about it calling him and saying you're
You better not submit that to the app store because we'll reject it just so you know.
Hold on, though.
Was that I don't think that was out of the blue and I might have this wrong.
But my interpretation, which may be my own fabrication, was that he had submitted it for like test flight or something.
And so as part of that, he got like a little mini review.
And it was then that it was brought to Apple's attention and then that they called him and were like, oh, no, that's not going to work.
but either way like but whether even if he had officially submitted the bottom line is that they are they're saying you are not allowed to innovate in this way which i think is ridiculous let the app die on its own if it's a terrible idea right it's not it you know it's not malware well so there's there's been this rule and i i just checked it's still there uh there's been this rule this app review rule since i think the first publication of app review rules back whenever that was like 2009 2010
And it's rule number 258.
Apps that create alternate desktop or home screen environments or simulate multi-app widget experiences will be rejected.
I know.
Like Launch Center Pro had that problem a while back, too.
I think that rule is bogus, too.
I think so, too.
But I think it's worth questioning why that rule is there.
And it might just be some crazy Steve Jobs control freak holdover.
But there also might be good reasons for it.
So it might be, for instance, they don't want another app to basically start its own entire app ecosystem within itself.
Although you can kind of argue that's kind of what WhatsApp does and everything.
Yeah.
and snapchat anyway um facebook geez uh anyway but um i think there's probably like this rule is probably not helping innovation overall like this is probably holding things back now that being said you know for for any kind of like windowing system like this to get anywhere the way to do it on ios is for apple to do it like it's it's never going to get anywhere you know in the market like this
Well, I disagree.
If it was actually a good idea and it was implemented in a popular or soon-to-be popular widely used creative application, like, for example, if Adobe Illustrator came and it had tear-off pallets that you could overlap and rearrange just like the desktop one, right, there would be disallowed under these stupid overlapping rule things because you can overlap two pallets with each other.
But...
if it was popular on that application and people liked it on on their big ipad pro every competitor application would be scrambling to implement that any new competitor in the market would say if i want to make a professional vector drawing application on the 12 inch ipad pro i need to have these floating overlapping palettes because the market leader has them and everybody loves them and if i don't have them you know what i mean like
let the idea live and die on its own i agree that if you're going to say okay well individual applications going to be windowed only apple can do that period and that's fine but just to see if bearing out the idea of like is it is it ridiculous to have people poking their fingers at window widgets is this a dumb idea does it not work in a touch interface like the only way you will know is by trying you can think about it you can do the mental exercise and be like oh i don't want to drag around a window with a title bar how would i arrange them how does it work
You have to try.
Like, I feel like it's this is the role of third party developers.
If someone wants to muck with that and see if it's useful, I think you can get a result that says either this is useful and maybe it would be even more useful if applied broadly by Apple.
But even just within the confines of an application.
just like the floating pallets that are in a lot of applications now where there's one floating thing that you can tear off and move around.
That, I think, is proving its own utility because you don't know where it has to be.
And if it's always stuck to the side, it's kind of difficult.
Let the person move it around so it's out of their way when they're drawing, but it lets them sort of configure their tool set and, you know, push it off to the side where they want it.
Like, I think that is an idea that is showing its value merely when confined to third-party applications.
And this is just taking to the next step.
And maybe it's a step too far and it's a terrible idea, but Apple, you just got to let people try it.
Have you seen PanelKit, which is apparently an open source framework to do these kind of like snap to the side and like sticky popover panel sort of things?
There's a really good animated GIF that's on the readme for this thing, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
But it's not exactly apples to apples what Steve Trouton-Smith was doing, but it's very much of a similar spirit.
And it looks really like I haven't looked at the code, but just the demonstration looks really good.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the more productive conversation to have on this kind of thing is not like how we can get Apple to let it through AppReview, because let's face it, they won't.
Or if they suddenly have a change of heart on an ancient rule like this, it won't be because of us.
I think it's worth all these things, PanelKit and Steve Troutensmith, you know, his thing, whatever.
It doesn't even have an official name.
I don't even know.
I don't think so.
You know, I think it's worth talking about, and I think this is probably why he made it.
It's worth talking about, like, does this work on iOS?
And do you think there's a future of windowed apps in some form like this on iPads?
Yeah.
i don't know so yeah on that topic like because i brought this up several shows back when what was it we were talking about that had the floating thing it was when we were talking about picture in picture and there was some application that also had a floating uh thing on top of it oh i don't know you got all the references it was a thing that we took come on chat room marco will cut this out as we discover it what was it
uh floating ipad keyboard see see oh that thing okay you're right yeah it was a floating keyboard that i'm pretty sure steve trottensmith also found yes a secret a hidden api private api for to put a keyboard that wasn't just the bottom of your screen that slid up from the bottom but rather was a floating keyboard that was much smaller that you could move wherever you wanted on the screen and that's
That made me say, this is kind of like a window.
And we have another example of that, which is picture in picture was another kind of window, basically a little square that's on the screen that you can move wherever you want it more or less within constraints, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is different than the traditional iOS experience, which is a panel comes in from a side or goes out from whatever, but you can't move it around.
Right.
And that that was me initiating a larger discussion about windows with a lowercase w on iOS.
spawned by this you know hidden keyboard type thing and we also talked about some existing ios applications like drawing applications that also have floating palettes usually only one of them and it floats over the background which is your drawing but that is a thing a lot of people are trying and what i was trying to pitch them was that uh as if you want to keep taking the ipad even more and more pro uh in addition to making the screen bigger and especially when you do make the screen bigger you want to make better use of that screen
and one proven way to let people make use of a larger screen is to give them different regions of it to do things more than just splitting it up into halves or thirds or whatever but even within an application to be able to move things around to arrange things the way they want them now the thing i'm going to add to this conversation here is based on
things that have been discussed on other podcasts, uh, starring, uh, Mike Hurley, but also on, well, in Cortex, that's also him and CGP.
Great talking about their multi iPad type things.
And all for all the people out there who use it's multi pads.
Come on.
Yes.
Or, or phones and iPads, which is just as common where you got the iPad, but your phone next to it or whatever.
Very often this is presented as a way to basically to multitask, like to say, uh,
my smaller ipad over here has this thing on it my bigger ipad has this my phone has this so my phone i have messages available on my little ipad i have like slack and on my big ipad have the thing that i'm doing right uh cgp gray often refers to it the same way that people have multiple pieces of paper around their desk at the same time you have this pile of paper over here then the main thing you're working on then you're referring to your notebook for notes and you have a book open over here i think it's more like having multiple desks like
I have this desk over here, and then my left-hand desk and my right-hand desk.
Geekshan has its own desk.
It is like papers.
Again, if you were writing a paper, referring to another thing and had a book open, referring to your notes and had a reference book open, you would do that.
Now, every time I hear them discuss this, and I'm not caught up on Cortex, so forgive me if this comes up sometime in 2015, but every time I hear this discussed in the distant past where I'm living in Cortex right now,
I keep waiting for one of these two knuckleheads to realize that what they're talking about is called Windows.
Why do you think we made Windows on personal computers?
It was like a desktop, like a literal, like not a literal desktop, but the other meaning of literal, which is figurative.
Desktop, a metaphorical desktop.
Right?
Like, it's the top of your desk.
Like, it's not even a distant... It's not even a distant... Like, they were talking about the top... And then on that desk would be different documents, each of which would be represented by a window that you could move around.
The only difference is that it was all within one piece of glass.
So you would take the windows, slash documents, and arrange them how you wanted, with the thing you're writing in the middle, and the notes you're referring to on the left, and an open reference book on the right.
Only middle, left, and right would all be on the screen.
Right?
And so it's maddening to hear people talk about, oh, I have my big iPad and my little app.
Those are just Windows, but they're physical now.
And in some respects, it's better to have physical Windows.
There are advantages to physical Windows, but imagine if your whole desk was a freaking giant retina screen and you could arrange these Windows, we'll call them, and you'd have your little phone and your iPad.
They're just differently sized Windows, guys.
You're just reinventing Windows in meatspace.
They're just meatspace Windows.
And like...
It's so painful to me.
And I know they'll say, like, I don't want that.
I don't want Windows.
Window arrangement sucks.
Arranging my two iPads on my desk is great.
And there is, I'm not going to say, there is something to that.
Because dealing with physical devices is better than dealing with Windows.
There are compromises to having them all be virtual on a 2D device.
But there are also advantages.
Really, really big advantages.
And people with long experience with using very large screens with lots of Windows on them.
Hello, that's me.
can tell you that they're off there are also advantages to that approach and so i'm not saying one precludes the other and you have to stop the other one i'm just saying they are siblings they are they are solving the same problem in almost exactly the same way with only slightly different compromises and if they're going to say that that the multi-device thing is the way they prefer versus the other one that's fine but to never mention the other but never realize that what they're essentially doing is exactly the same as having a really big screen with multiple windows and that there are advantages to having a really big screen with multiple windows in that
virtual things are easier to deal with and manipulate than real things like you can't switch spaces that you can't swipe your four fingers to the left and suddenly a new desk slides in with a new set of ios devices on it like casey does with his spaces right you can't minimize or window shade or or snap them to edges or resize them because you can't make your ipad mini into a different different orientation or a different size like
There are trade-offs to be sure, and I'm not saying one is dominant over the other, but as a strong, strong proponent of the virtual pieces of paper as a better approach for me personally than the physical pieces of paper or the virtual screens, aka Windows, instead of the physical screens, aka iOS devices, I think this has to be
in the mix and that's why when i say see steve trout and smith's like let's make some windows on ios devices i say yes yes finally because if apple ever does make a 27 inch ipad an approach that i think would appeal to a lot of people is to be able to have
different overlapping resizable things to so that you're not it was who wants to split a 27 inch screen into thirds or halves or quarters or like i know everyone loves tiling window managers on linux or whatever but there's a reason they have not taken the world by storm right not that overlapping windows is the greatest either they have anti-patterns too and people do like to zoom everything for full screen but
I feel like this is an avenue that has to be pursued.
It may not be the ultimate answer, and it may be some hybrid of panels and snapping actually is the best compromise for most people, but you have to pursue it because it has proven utility.
We all sit in front of Macs all day, and somehow, somehow we manage to get work done in this chaos of overlapping windows where we can never tell what the hell's going on, and we're the janitor.
Like, somehow we do it.
right so i i desperately want to see this avenue pursued in every every way by third-party application developers by apple experimenting and yes by apple doing things in the os and releasing larger ios devices and for all you multi ios device users oh you're butchering i kind of say more power to you because you are kind of like the steampunk uh of multiple windows because like they're steampunk windows basically they're steam powered uh they're physical manifestations of windows and
And they're ugly and dirty and grimy and they're made of brass, but you like them, so go for it.
Add some beard oil.
Wow.
John, I love you.
That was incredible.
Oh, my word.
I feel like this episode's done.
We're done.
Good night, everybody.
That's it.
It's over.
Do you guys get what I was saying with the multiple window light?
I don't know where you guys fall on multi-devices versus multiple windows.
I know you're not as gung-ho on multiple windows as I am.
Multiple devices is a terrible solution to this problem.
In some contexts, if you're trying to do certain things as an iOS power user, sometimes it's the only solution to the problem.
But, you know, I think and granted, you know, to be fair to the multi-pad lifestyle people, I don't think this is the only reason they do that.
It's not just to have two different applications running at the same time.
There's other reasons why they would have multiple devices for, you know, the same reason that many of us have multiple Macs, like, you know, to have like a big one and a small one for travel versus home, you know, stuff like that.
So all those things aside, and honestly, I think running two apps side by side on two different iPads is probably a fairly...
uncommon use of multiple devices from the people who have them.
But if you can picture a future version of iPad multitasking where you could just resize the app's
Not just with the split view that we have now, where you can have at most two apps on screen, if you don't count picture-in-picture video playback as one of them.
You have at most two apps on screen, and they can only be arranged left and right in just different split sizes that are like three different preset sizes that they can possibly be.
That's very limited.
It's a lot better than having no multi-window environment on the iPad like we had before iOS.
What was it?
Nine out of that?
It's a lot better than that.
But it's not nearly as powerful as having a more free-form system like overlapping windows or just more... Even if it has to only be tiling windows and so they can't ever overlap.
Even if that's the case...
Yeah.
uh why couldn't you do something like that like have six apps open at once or have four apps open at once where they're all small rectangles or something like that like i feel like there's so many more places ipad multitasking can go and granted there's a few fundamentals that really need to be built first before that makes a lot of sense things like drag and drop and some kind of more coherent file system access in some form uh but
Ultimately, multiple applications being open at once and not just two of them is the direction this has to go for these devices to become more productivity powerhouses.
I think that Mike and CGP Grey would both say that this is a terrible solution.
I think one of you said that a minute ago, but it's important since they're not here to defend themselves to stress that I don't think that they love the solution.
It's just that they do love iOS and they're hamstrung by the things that iOS lets you do.
And I feel similarly, I mean, I do love my iPad, but I've been really, really strongly kicking around the idea of getting a MacBook Adorable expressly because I want something that's effectively as portable as an iPad or as close as I can get to that, but that doesn't make me feel hamstrung every time I use it.
And to me, the best answer to that question is a MacBook Adorable.
For them, I don't think they feel near as hamstrung in general.
The problem is simply that they can only do but so many things at once.
And so for them, it does make sense to live the multi-pad lifestyle.
I think it's a little bit kooky, but just because I think that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work for them.
And clearly it does.
The most common multi device thing I would imagine is a personal computer style device and your phone, because like I said, there are there are definite advantages to steampunk windows.
And one of them is you you compartmentalize the thing.
So very often it's text messaging, whatever your text messaging services of choice, text messaging on your phone.
Yeah.
that that steampunk window it's physically in a different location you're in a portable scenario where you can't have a gigantic 30 inch drafting board you know surface book pro like you can't have that you're you're on the go it is a different sight line a different focal distance it is a physical device that you're used to texting people from all your past texts and the apps that you love are on there using that as as a steampunk window to do your uh
Your texting is perfectly valid and probably is an advantage over trying to cram your messages window onto your 12 inch MacBook screen next to the thing that you were trying to write in your distraction free writing environment.
Right.
So like I.
I get it.
I get why there is I do it myself sometimes when I'm at work.
Sometimes at work, I will send and receive text messages on my phone, even though I could be getting them on my Mac screen just because it is a nice compartmentalization of work versus personal, you know, texting over who's going to pick up what kid from what activity or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like, it makes sense to me to do that.
starts to make less sense when you're in an environment where you have a big desk and a raid on your desk, you have a series of iOS devices of different sizes because then I feel like you're compromising in ways.
Who is this?
Casey is saying they're using iOS because they want to, and I understand that, and they have to do this because they're limited and they're multitasking, and they more than anyone would like richer multitasking.
So I'm not slamming them for saying, you should just use Windows because you can't.
You can't use it on iOS, and if you want to use iOS devices, we're stuck waiting for Apple to innovate there.
It's just frustrating to me that
we seem to be creeping users are organically creeping up on on that solution uh and that the solution is much bigger ios devices suitable for a desktop environment that supports something like windows that gives the users more flexibility in how they arrange their space everybody does it this is one of my big things with the whole spatial founder rant everybody arranges their workspace especially if it's a job you're doing all the time whether it is
a carpenter arranging their tools or an artist arranging their palettes and their paints and their brushes and their easel like and having or a chef setting aside all the ingredients that they're gonna you know use in their thing like everybody arranges their workspace efficient workers do arrange their workspace we all do it on our computers now we all have different arrangements and different amounts of things and whether you use spaces or not our tiling window manager or not or maximize everything and flip through them with your fingers or
alt tab through things or click like that's the thing that we're going to do no matter what we do with we do with windows we do it with our steampunk windows we do it in the physical world and i think no matter what our interface to work is it has to allow us to do that in some way and so you know mike and cgp gray and everyone else who's living the multi-pad lifestyle they're doing it the only way that is available to them with the tools that they like but i think uh we have to acknowledge the other approach
is fairly well proven at this point for a certain set of users it is disproven for a certain set of users as well because we all know that novice users the reason why they love ios is because it doesn't let them have to deal with this crap they don't get all confused by a bunch of windows right but for a certain set of users you know if you were to tell someone that they had to you know uh do 3d animation for pixar but they weren't allowed to use windows they just had to use everything full screen or a split screen they would have a much harder time getting their job done i would imagine
Also, I mean, one other side benefit, if Apple were to do windowing on iPads, it would also solve a tremendous problem of the iPad app ecosystem, where iOS apps are often not very well optimized for the iPad or aren't optimized for it at all.
And sometimes they're really big apps like Instagram, which famously still does not have an iPad app, and also shut down the API that allowed other iPad apps to exist for them.
Yeah.
Imagine if, instead of having the, you know, the dumb, like, you know, giant letterboxed iPhone simulator version on iPad, what if you launched a non-iPad-optimized app, and it just launched in an iPhone-sized window?
And you could drag it around, and you could have other apps that you could shrink down to that size and tile around your screen if you wanted to, like...
Almost every iPad app that is a universal app with its phone version can, again, it can scale to all these different sizes.
You can solve problems like this very, very well.
Also, things like, you know, when Apple does make larger iPads, there's still a lot of iPad apps that aren't optimized for the 12.9.
What if when you launch one of these things on a 12.9, it just launched in a 9.7-sized window, and it was just one of many windows on your screen?
Like, there are lots of benefits to this.
And granted, there's a lot of UI challenges and a lot of probably technical challenges of things like how do you manage memory for all these different apps that could be, you know, appearing to be running all at once and be in the foreground all at once.
Yeah.
lots of API challenges or things like touch handling and what, what kind of gets the attention and what doesn't.
And there's some weirdness already with like multitasking of like, if you have a keyboard connected and you have, you know, two and you have two different apps open right now during multitasking and you hit a shortcut key on the keyboard, which app gets it?
And right now I think it's just like whatever app you tapped last or something, but it's like, but there's no active state on the title bar to indicate which one that is.
So you just have to know or guess or try it.
So like,
If they were to go in a direction like this that brought full-blown windowing in some form or full-blown multitasking like this to iOS, there is a lot of work to be done.
It's not a small task.
This is not something they could do in likely one release.
This is like a massive undertaking.
And they've already done some of it.
But doing a more freeform system like what we're describing would require a lot more of it.
But I think the result would be pretty great and incredibly powerful and would really revive the iPad for productivity use, which it does seem like Apple needs something to do that.
That would be great.
If we do it the way I was saying, where non-optimized apps would just launch in old device-sized windows, that could also solve this major market and software ecosystem problem that the iPad also faces.
This would be a really great solution in a number of ways.
The only question is, would they ever do it?
Would it be worth devoting the resources to?
And would they then just be recreating the Mac poorly?
Like the old Lisp joke, or Unix, or whatever.
They should be recreating the Mac better.
They should be learning from the Mac and making it better, faster, like the $6 million man type of thing.
Trying to slowly convert the Mac into a thing...
into a thing that is better than mac is difficult but ios you know is a relatively clean slate they they can reconsider everything they can only bring over the things that are good they can make different compromises they can skew it in a particular direction they can make they can try to make it so users who can't deal with lots of windows don't have to like make get shave off the sharp corners because you've seen everyone's seen someone struggle to manage windows on a
You know, the lowercase w again, whether it's on the Mac or on the PC, even in on the PC where everything is full screen and people are all tabbing, there's still some confusion about floating things and layering and dialog boxes that appear and where did it go and mission, you know, mission control and formerly expose and all that was supposed to help with that.
And all those are great things.
Those are all things to learn from.
So finding the right compromise for iOS devices, where most of the time it works the way most people want it to, but that the more advanced users have the ability to get the productivity advantages that these people are currently getting with multiple physical devices.
that's that's the balance that apple should strike and i think it's great to do that on ios where you are not constrained by even making something like steven's thing here where it looks like a mac window who says the title bars are the right thing who says that the window should have window widgets what about scroll bar like you rethink everything but yeah i'm thinking broadly speaking like you were saying
applications running simultaneously as we get more and more ram becomes much more viable and figuring out what that means as screens get bigger letting people divide up the screen space the way they want to divide it up among the applications that they want to run um and then eventually gets in you know you can decide if space is the right approach to this thing what about preserving the arrangement because sometimes you do side-by-side windows but then you go off and do something else how do you get back into that side-by-side arrangement or maybe you want to go back to just one application and not be in a side-by-side arrangement
There are so many things that are still undetermined and it's young and they haven't made a lot of decisions yet.
So I think it's fine.
But, you know, as Marco pointed out, they already painted themselves into weird corners where like, oh, we allowed multiple things on the screen and we allowed keyboard shortcuts, but we never thought of a way to indicate which one is the has the focus.
So already we're in a weird situation like.
you should they should think more of those through before they take the next step maybe they are maybe like we don't want you to do this because we have this awesome idea that's going to be out in five years and we don't want you stomping on it but i think it's silly i think you should let third-party developers uh go nuts and and figure out what works and maybe you get some good ideas from them
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Oh.
Speaking of iPad woes, Apple... God, we're going to get so much anger from the iPad people.
I'm so sorry, everyone.
We shouldn't.
We all said good things about the iPad.
Yeah, and the good thing is the Cortex hosts have now moved on from talking about the multi-pad lifestyle.
Now they're both just slowly becoming programmers, but they're both in denial of that fact.
Yeah.
They both just kind of keep inching more and more towards like, guys, you're actually just becoming programmers.
And it's okay.
And that's good.
It turns out there's a way to automate our computing tasks.
You just write these little things.
You could call them, I don't know, programs.
Yeah, it reminds me of some... What did I say?
Somewhere in some business snark website thing talking about specifications for software projects.
Like if you write up the requirements, right?
And you'd write up the requirements and typically the requirements are like, I want to do blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, that's too vague.
I don't know exactly what you want.
So you go back and forth about the requirements.
How do you want it to work?
No, how do you really want it to work?
Do you want it to work like this or like that?
And eventually the business person getting frustrated and it's like...
look just i'm going to tell you exactly how i want it to work with no ambiguity and it's like if you do that what you've done is write a program yeah eventually to specify it that's what programmers do like people just want to specify it and like and yada yada you start all the details in the computer you can't yada yada you have to say no how exactly do you want to work all right i'm going to tell you exactly how you want it to work in every kid in every condition here's what you should do blah blah blah it's like
That's program.
That's called programming.
You want to be a programmer now.
So go ahead.
All right.
Go for it.
You can very quickly find yourself becoming a programmer with an accidental programming podcast, becoming a programmer without knowing it, because eventually you'd be like getting down to a level of detail where you're telling it.
I'm going to tell you about every possible eventuality what you should do.
That's programming.
Cure does know it just does what you tell it.
Well, I love how, like, I think Mike in particular is in a special denial place here of, like, he makes fun of, well, not making fun of, but, like, he talks about the way developers use the terminal and just geeks use the terminal as this kind of, like, crazy opaque thing that is this, you know, incredibly, you know, geeky, obscure thing.
And then they're talking about using workflow against web APIs to automate certain types.
It's the same thing.
It's a different era of the exact same thing.
The same kind of learning curve, really.
The same kind of similar kind of capabilities.
As usual, the old people like us think the old way was better, but it's really the same kinds of things.
Yeah, although I think Mike, my understanding of what Mike is doing is that he's largely cribbing what others like Federico or CGP Grey have done and modifying them a little bit.
But to build on what you were saying, so on the surface, you know, it sounds like, oh, Mike's not really a programmer at all.
But really, that's how all programmers work is they take something that gets you 80% of the way there and fix what you need in order to get the rest of the way.
And so I agree with you.
And Federico, to me, is the king of this.
Oh, yeah.
Because he's writing ridiculous Python scripts and these hyper-involved workflows with potentially even recursion within them.
And it's just... He is a developer.
We actually... Federico and I, in a happy way, had this fight, I don't know, two or three months ago, where I said to him, dude, you are a developer at this point.
Don't even try to pretend you're not.
And he didn't want to hear it.
Not in a jerky way.
He just...
I was like, oh, I'm not a developer.
I don't know how to do the stuff you guys do.
I'm like, you're doing it.
It's not even a question.
It's already happening.
Yeah, in the same way that our friend Dr. Drang is, you know, like Dr. Drang posts on LeanCrew.com and he's not a programmer by trade.
But he writes tons of scripts, most of which are in Python, to do all sorts of things for his work.
And so while he probably does not consider himself a programmer, he uses programming.
He knows a programming language, and he uses it to get tasks done for his work.
And there's lots of room for that type of person.
You know, just like, look, I mean, like Microsoft Office has forever had its macro language, right?
That's the same thing.
That's just Visual Basic.
Like, it's the same.
That's also programming.
My first job was programming VBA in a giant Excel spreadsheet for some company to save them a bunch of time.
Like...
That's a lot of what programming in the world actually is.
It's like people doing little custom or one-off things.
That is programming.
There's kind of this continuum of power users.
The first thing you learn as a power user is you might learn a keyboard shortcut for some common stuff.
You're like, oh my god, this is great.
And then eventually, you might learn some kind of automation of something.
First, you kind of figure out, how do you do manual work faster?
That's the keyboard shortcut approach.
Then you start figuring out, how do I actually use the computer's immense speed and power to do things faster than I could do them manually?
And that's when you start getting into the basic things like...
batch operations in pro apps um on the mac you have things like automator and on the ipad you have things like workflow uh and then eventually i feel like the next step after that is like no you're actually just writing code of some sort whether it's just a simplest thing like a shell script
or a JavaScript thing, or whether it's actually a Ruby or Python, what we'd call a real language script or app to do something custom.
These are all just points on the power user curve.
And being a programmer is not like some special boundary that you have to go to college to know how to do.
No, it's just the next step on that curve after you've used tools like Workflow or Automator and you kind of want a little bit more customization or a little bit more power.
And then you get into these things that really are programming.
You just might not realize it until after you've been doing it for a while.
Yeah, Mike and Vettici would both be making HyperCard stacks 30 years ago.
You guys don't remember that era, but... I used HyperCard.
Yep, same here.
There used to be many more... Back before Apple and most of the rest of the industry gave up on the idea of trying to make programming easy enough for people who didn't want to be into programming, there were many, many attempts, AppleScript is one of them, to try to make programming more accessible to the masses.
Yeah.
With something that is farther along that curve that actually is a real programming language, but is a language that looks friendlier or whatever.
And lots of people may have hypercard stacks.
And like, it's another accidental programmer thing where, sure, people made hypercard stacks.
And most people, it wasn't easy enough for them to tackle.
But many people who didn't consider themselves programmers were...
like they weren't intimidated by hypercard and like oh i'll go through these tutorials so i can make a button new i click a button and it makes a beeping noise like and you know and for someone trying to make a button on a mac of that era was much harder if you were using the the mac toolbox than it was in hypercard and so they could be successful pretty quickly and for the people who had uh
who were into that who were like they they never thought of themselves as programmers but it turns out if you introduce them to it fast forward three months and they're writing this incredibly complicated hyper card stack using hyper talk like a real programmer and they have suddenly found themselves it's not everybody who does it's not like it turns people into programmers it reveals programmers that were always there right and they just you know what happens with someone who is who is like just naturally wants to do this they start off with the beeping button and you just
you just step away for like a couple of weeks and you come back and it's like, what have you done?
And like, they have made this entire world for themselves and they have no formal allocation.
They don't know what a subroutine is.
They don't know any theory about data structures, but they're like deriving from first principles, the basics of programming and hyper talk and, you know, doing incredible.
I saw it all the time doing incredible things.
And it's like someone who runs a general store and makes a hyper card stack to do their inventory.
And it's like,
You may not know it, but you are now a programmer.
And this is the thing you could have done as a profession, even though you have no formal education in it and really still don't quite know what you're doing in the formal sense.
But you are rediscovering the rudiments of programming with no instruction from anyone else, merely by having a box in front of you and knowing some basic things.
And that is a beautiful thing to see.
And I love hearing stories of places that are still running HyperCard stacks and their Mac SEs just because they run their entire business on it and somebody wrote it years ago.
I guess that's not... I guess it's more heartwarming because I know it.
It's not quite as heartwarming for people who are still running their payroll on COBOL or whatever, but I think YNUK took care of a lot of those.
But either way, like that... For people who are listening who think they will never be programmers, that's possible.
You may never be it, but...
it's like it's like there's a reason people call it like the programming bug like you get bitten by it and you just find this happens to all of us here on this podcast i'm sure and everyone else is into computers at some point you get exposed to something and it just you know it sinks its teeth into you and you lose track of time you lose track of the years and you realize this is just this whole world that you bury yourself into some people are exposed to the exact same thing are like meh not for me right um but
The distinction between homeless people has nothing to do with education or even desire.
It is just like how their brains work.
Is programming addicting to you?
You will know that pretty quickly.
And you look at someone like Vitici, guess what?
Programming is addicted to him.
He would not be doing these things.
He's bitten so hard by this.
He's mad with the power of being able to tell the computer to do what he wants it to do in a series of sophisticated ways, breaking down the problem into smaller precincts and recombining them, right?
He's bitten by it so hard.
Just because he's not writing C doesn't mean that he has not, A, bitten by the programmer bug, and B, become a programmer.
And I feel like that's the whole beauty of computers, is when you break that barrier between, like when I was saying on my curve about when you're just doing manual things faster versus when you have the computer start working for you and way faster than you ever could manually...
The whole beauty of computers is the ability to cross that line, the ability to do that.
The famous Steve Jobs quote about the computer is a bicycle for the mind.
It's not because you know all the shortcut keys to do things repetitively over and over again.
It's because you can just put in just the right kind of input and this computer can just...
skyrocket past you executing that code way, way, way faster and more reliable and more consistently than you ever could or doing things that you could never do in a practical amount of time.
And it's just like... One of the reasons why I get frustrated when things like iOS move or start in directions where things are really locked down and it's hard to do that kind of stuff is because I feel like that's kind of...
missing or kind of like blowing the whole advantage that computers have given us as a society like the whole point of computers is to enable humans to do things to to to have these kind of you know information based tasks done in in ways and at speeds and in volumes that we could never do on our own like through manual calculations or anything else
And for any computer platform to be truly empowering to its users, it has to allow that in some way, and hopefully in a reasonably easy and capable way.
And efforts to do that on iOS are really, really held back by just the limitations of iOS.
And things like Workflow and Pythonista, like...
These things have existed and do exist and are good for people, but there's so much further to go to make them even just match the level of power and sophistication that regular people can achieve on Windows or a Mac, let alone on future things that we might think of even better ways to do these things.
And so that's kind of like...
It kind of hurts me philosophically whenever it appears the computing platform is going in the opposite direction.
And what most of these people are doing, by the way, like in the continuum is that you can use tools made by other people, which is what the app store is great.
Like it gives regular people access to tools other people have made for doing common tests.
Hey, so you've, you know, you're taking the inventory of all the books that are on your shelves.
There's an app that you can just point your phone at it and we'll look up, you know, someone and so forth.
Like it's a tool to do a job better, right?
Yeah.
The next step along that is I don't see any tool that does the thing that I want it to do.
I'm going to make my own tool.
So it's not just that they're automating repetitive tasks, but that they are building a tool for them to do whatever real world tasks they're doing, whether it's managing their business or doing their hobby, keeping track of their model trains or controlling their model trains or whatever.
Like they don't see the thing that they want in the world.
And they realize they can make this thing do what they wanted to do.
So they build a tool for themselves.
And it doesn't mean they have to suddenly become an app developer and sell that thing or whatever.
It's just like the people who use a FileMaker database to manage their retail store or something where they sell cameras.
They don't consider they're making a tool to accomplish some other task.
That's just another point in the line.
Using other people's tools versus saying no one else makes this tool or the tools they make aren't to my liking and I can make my own tool to do it.
fatigue is essentially making his own tools for his workflow because there's no existing thing that integrates all the different pieces the way he wants them to do and he has specific needs about it so you know it's not you know in some cases he is automating something you have to do manually but other cases like he's it's not application development but it's it's tool building and we all do that smart little monkeys that use a stick to you know hit something instead of our hands because the stick is better right you know it's it's
A bicycle for the mind has more poetry than a wooden stick for the mind.
A monkey with a stick.
Yeah.
Or the monkey with the bone from 2001.
But that's basically what it boils down to.
And taking away the ability to... Not taking it away, but...
making the barrier to making your old tools mean like either you get to use tools other people made giant giant gap xcode that gap is too big um yeah it's too big for most people to cross and there you know think apps like workflow show that there is or even an automator or
simple scripting languages or anything like that or hypercard or all that stuff even though most of the experiments failed in in what they thought the goal would be like everyone's going to be a programmer nope that's not going to happen right but you do need something on that middle tier for the people who are never going to graduate all the way up to being a full-fledged programmer and using xcode but they don't need to they just need something in the middle that can you know they can let them make the tools to make their life better and
Even though their goal in life is not to be an application developer and they never need to make something else code and submit it to the App Store.
So, Apple and education.
Bringing this back around.
Slight sidetrack.
Yeah, after that 45-minute sidetrack.
Wait, was that the topic?
Believe it or not.
Because then we got into saying how people with iPads are going to be mad at us and we just get buried back in iPads again.
That's all right.
They're all secret programmers.
All right.
Right.
So anyway, so Apple and Education, there's a New York Times article that says – well, the headline is Apple's devices lose luster in American classrooms.
And I didn't get a chance to read the article, but my understanding is basically that there are fewer devices being shipped to schools from Apple –
It seems like Microsoft is slightly on the up and Google, thanks to Chromebooks, is way on the up, which is great, I guess, for Google and kind of a bummer for Apple since this used to be their stronghold.
I mean, I think I can speak for Marco in saying my only exposure to a Mac or to an Apple II was at school.
Like I didn't have any friends that had one.
It was always at school that I was exposed to it, and that seems to be changing now.
It seems to be all Chromebooks, but I don't know.
My experience was slightly different in that my first exposure to Apple computers was indeed at school, but it was to the Apple II in the early 90s.
The heyday of the Apple II.
Yeah, my school was so poor that the only computers they had were like ancient hand-me-down Apple IIs, most of which were not even like, you know, the later models.
They were like, you know, the old like, you know, green and black ones, like, you know, before color and...
things like memory uh they were it was it was you know pretty pretty basic but i loved them because they were the only computers i'd ever used up to that point and they were amazing even in like 1992 whenever that was uh but and then after that like when i um a few years later i went to a different school and they had just pcs because at that point that was like that was like 93 ish and 94 and by that point like you know max i think were too expensive for most schools at that point and
i think like most schools there was like we had like there was one mac in one of the computer labs that you weren't allowed to use unless you were in some kind of like graphic design class that like they they could use it but otherwise it was all pcs for the same reason that we're probably about to talk about which is cost because when you're in schools cost is a really really big factor so that i mean this article uh the news in this article on the graphs in this article
It's not a surprise to Apple.
Apple knows all these things.
Apple knows how much it's selling.
Apple knows how much its competitors selling.
And the graph they show is only from 2012 to 2016.
So it's not a long span, but they show it basically because Google comes out of nowhere, basically like zero market share sometime in 2010 or 11.
flies past both apple and microsoft to a more or less flat uh flies past them around 2014 and now is at like four times their sales volume in terms of units right so that's in a very short period of time google comes out of nowhere and becomes the dominant player in the market and the fact that apple knows that this happened because they keep track of their own stuff but seemingly has
Not had a strong response to it.
I know we talk about the pro market mostly on this program, but imagine we were, you know, instead we were very interested in the education market.
We would be complaining that Apple has faced a strong competitor in the form of Google.
for many years now and its reaction to it has been half-hearted features to let more than one person use an ipad at the same time by logging in and out and storing crap on icloud and some improved management stuff and a bunch of new different shapes and sizes of ipads which all seem like they're good and fine kind of like their efforts to add like multitasking stuff to the ipad in a different realm but
If you look at the, you know, has this made them competitive again in the education market?
Or is Google still kicking the butt?
Answer, Google's still kicking the butt if you measure things in terms of unit sales.
Maybe Apple doesn't measure that.
Maybe I don't care what the hell the unit sales are.
We're making all the money.
We make all the profit.
that is i guess a reasonable place to be in but when it comes to education i have to think that you shouldn't really view it as a profit center not that you shouldn't make money on it but like the the one of the most important things apple is getting at it was just what marco talked about and casey talked about and me too like we saw apple computers in school and it doesn't mean that we're going to grow up to only use apple computers but it sure as hell doesn't hurt
being familiar with them getting comfortable with them uh conceptualizing computers in terms of what is presented to you like this is what a computer is so you know these multiple generations of students who are growing up using google docs in school and using chromebooks maybe they're conceptualized chromebooks as the equivalent of the crappy apple twos that are crappy computers they would never buy for themselves that are pieces of junk that are managed by the school and they have to use for school work
But they are becoming familiar with Google Docs, and they are associating Google with computing in a way that they used to be associating Apple with computing.
So there are pluses and minuses to being stigmatized as the computer I had to use in school.
But I think if Apple, again, if Apple cares about the education market at all, it should not be happy to have its unit sales be flat over the same course of time where a competitor comes from zero to squash them by a factor of four.
like i i don't think that's a good position to be in the market now maybe apple doesn't care and they're willing to just let that ride but how many markets are we going to look at and say apple doesn't really care that much it's not a big deal like what does apple really care but it's just phones because even in the phone market they're still making all the money and selling lots of phones and i think doing a great job with their phone hardware but they're also getting their butt kicking unit sales there you know by an increasing percentage by this larger more open platform so
I don't know what to think.
Apple stock is way up.
The iPhone is awesome.
Everybody loves it.
I love it.
But when I look at education or the pro markets, maybe it's just nostalgia for the Apple that used to be.
But boy, things have sure changed.
I feel like both education and the pro markets are places that you go when you don't have the consumer market.
They're these nice...
holdouts that if you can get market share there, you can have a reasonably sustainable business even if you have lost or you never even gained ground in the consumer market.
And so when Apple was doing poorly in the 90s and stuff, they retreated to those markets because...
With education, you know, and pros to some degree, like there's like there's special needs and you can deploy a sales force tactically to like you need, you know, a relatively small number of very big sales to succeed in these markets.
And that's not necessarily easy to get, but that's easier than convincing the entire consumer shopping public to buy your stuff if they aren't already interested in it, you know.
And so, you know, Apple, I feel like Apple went to these markets not because they thought they were especially important necessarily for things like, you know, oh, your kids are going to use what they are familiar with, but because they were the only ones willing to buy Apple stuff for a long time.
And now that that's no longer the case,
Apple is seemingly being more managed by numbers these days, which is unfortunate, if that's true.
But that is sure how it looks.
And these days, because they are popular with consumers by so much that they can kind of afford to throw away less profitable market segments...
that is basically what they appear to be doing.
Regardless of whatever Tim Cook's vague statement of the week is about how much they still care about us, the reality is that schools are, especially these days, pretty hard to make money in.
I mean, again, Apple's heyday in schools back in the late 90s and stuff...
That was also at a time when technology was new and novel, and schools were getting all sorts of these funding grants for going and getting computers.
Granted, not every school, but there was a lot of other people's money being poured into, like, we need to get our kids into technology.
And I feel like it was probably easier to sell into that environment than it is now that computers are no longer new and cool.
Now it's just a budget item.
And now it's down to, okay, we really just need things to be cheap.
And whatever's cheapest and easiest for us to manage, and again, cheapest, that's what we're going to go with.
And so basically I feel like the conditions are very different now, that both...
Apple needs education and pros less than they used to.
And also in the case of the education market, the education market I think now is significantly more price-driven, specifically with regard to computers, than it was 20 years ago, you know, back when these things were new and there was all this grant money coming in.
I think it was always tight for schools.
I don't think it's that much of a difference.
I would probably agree that schools are not as well-funded as they used to be, but I would disagree that price consciousness is a new phenomenon when it comes to computers in schools.
Well, and again, that was also back in the 90s, too.
I feel like the difference in price was not as big.
Back in the 90s, you're killing me.
Yeah.
These days, the difference in price between a Chromebook and a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, it's like four times.
That's a massive multiplier.
You can literally get, depending on the model of Mac that you select, you can get four to eight Chromebooks for the same price.
It was worse when your choice was a Macintosh SE or an IBM PC, believe me, or a PC clone.
Gateway 2000 or Mac SE.
Gateway 2000 or Mac 2CI, right?
it was it was worse really it was more than like a four to five x multiplier on the price it was it was terrible and the numbers were all bigger right don't you remember how much i don't know if you remember how much max you said do you remember how much my mac and dash se cost i i wasn't there when you bought it no but i i but like i'm like bat like in the 90s a decent pc was about 2 000 bucks all right so i'm gonna do the calculation here
I don't know.
We spent like $3,000 or $4,000 at least, I thought, on my beloved Pentium Pro 100 megahertz machine.
It was a lot of money.
That's not to say that all of them were necessarily that much money because that was pretty cutting edge at the time.
And, you know, it was dad that was buying it for himself and I just never let him use it because I'm a jerk.
But...
that thing was not cheap yeah well but and you know and schools wouldn't buy the high-end ones usually you know schools they they did have to be conscious of the budget of course but basically my theory is basically that like the not only was the money a little bit easier to justify spending on computers back then because they were so new and everyone wanted to get their kids computers but also that you know now the price difference is is so vast between them and i don't think it was as vast back then it
It was for Macs, mostly because Macs were so much more expensive.
So the educational discount, the college educational discount for my Mac SE30, which again is not a color Mac.
Color Macs were available, but this was not a color Mac.
It was a monochrome Macintosh.
But was it still a high-end configuration?
it was more high-end than the se or the plus which were still for sale okay but still not like not color which again was a big thing in schools right which is a reason they would buy a color pc right so a 1990 ish four thousand three hundred dollars in 1989 dollars or 1990 dollars that if we converted to current dollars that's eight thousand six hundred dollars for a monochrome computer no keyboard no keyboard the keyboard was 189 in 1989 dollars and you had to convert that
$8,600 for one monochrome Macintosh, like the little, you know, the little, you know, iconic like vertical Macintosh thing.
You could get a gateway computer for less than $2,000 in 1989 money.
Uh,
the price difference was just as big if not bigger especially because schools needed to have color that's why they all had apple 2gs's in them because the apple 2gs's were color no but but you you just you just proved my point your your price multiplier was like 2x and i would also say that that the gate would like to get a like a mid-spec gateway but that
gateway is color though with a big color monitor if i go if i go with like the mac 2 with a big color monitor it's not for under two thousand dollars in 1990 if that's a mid-spec machine it's going to be a little over 2000 so you're basically you're roughly a 2x multiplier which is very different from a 5x multiplier which is basically what we have today i don't we don't have exactly a 5x multiplier now because they get educational discount on these things and they don't buy the top dollar macbook so i think that i'm talking like 250 bucks versus like 1200
they're not paying twelve hundred dollars for it and they're also not paying two hundred fifty dollars for for other things all told but anyway if i was go to like the mac 2 fx like a high-end computer that actually had color which against schools wanted colors it gets way way worse much faster like if you add a monitor just adding the cost of the monitor to the thing because you're just buying the mac but that doesn't come with a monitor and it doesn't come with a keyboard the multiplier was worse for mac versus pc than it is for chromebook versus ipad which is the real comparison you should be doing that chromebook versus macbook pro or something
No, but I... Well, I think that's the comparison Apple wants people to do.
I think Apple wants to present the iPad as the competitor to the Chromebook, but in practice, I don't think it is.
I think those are separate things.
It seems like schools have a pretty substantial need for...
laptop shaped things you know whatever form that takes it does seem like you know obviously they do sell a lot of ipads in education but that seems like it's almost a separate thing like it i think the the laptop form factor uh is has proven to be more popular in recent years than than tablets in schools
and in that form factor i mean that's i think that's one of the biggest reasons why the macbook air still exists you know if you look at uh at apple's average selling price of the mac it's basically the macbook air like by a long shot it's it seems very obvious that they sell like cratefuls of macbook airs like they just sell a ridiculous number of them um
But that really is like, I think most markets who are buying Chromebooks as an alternative, it's an alternative to MacBook Airs, not to iPads most of the time.
I'm probably going to get the non-education discount.
In terms of the non-education discount for the Mac IC30 was $4,000, but no hard drive.
no hard drive for the four thousand three hundred dollar model what did it have like a magneto optical or just floppy so so the non-educational discount for the good for the good se30 that had an 80 megabyte hard drive and four megs of ram six thousand five hundred dollars in 1989 money wow that's pretty bad that's the one that's one that's the one with the good amount of ram and and the big hard drive let's see what that one is uh thirteen thousand dollars
All right, so now we're getting into the modern multiplayer.
Still no keyboard.
Still no keyboard.
That's next to $200.
Yeah.
So how much was a Civic in 89 or whatever year we're talking about here?
I got to think it was around $13,000 or less than that.
That's what I'm saying.
It seems like it would be... Ridiculously... It's only ridiculously expensive when you convert... For old people, it's only ridiculously expensive when you convert to today's dollars because...
back then like you know it was the old adage from like whatever that was in a pc magazine the computer you want is always five thousand dollars and that remained true but that remained true as the decades passed and like you know inflation happened right so it was always five thousand in 1981 the computer you wanted was five thousand dollars and 2010 the computer maybe if your computer that you wanted was five thousand dollars but that five thousand dollars was worth a lot a lot more in 1981 than it was in 2010 right so it just it was a car
Yeah.
But anyway, Macs were astronomically expensive.
I was always amazed when I saw them in schools.
It's because Apple gave deep discounts.
So that $4,300... Because mine had a hard drive.
The $4,300 for the good SC30 was an amazing bargain.
But nevertheless, a tremendous cost.
And my kids' schools these days...
I see a surprising amount of desktop Macs still, like their old iMacs, right?
And then you see carts full of laptops, which are like ice books, right?
Because that's around the era when they bought these things.
Everything you said about Apple is like, when you have a consumer market, who cares about these things?
That's all true, except that Apple...
Apple's image of themselves and the image of themselves that they project to the world still seems to include a lot of stuff having to do with education.
Not that they lean on it that much, but I think they like the idea of showing students using these devices.
And even a lot of their advertisements for their modern hardware, granted, there may be pitched at college students or whatever, but I think the company always presents...
the use of its products in education as something that they are proud of.
Yeah, but that could just be marketing, though.
I mean, they're also very proud of people who can draw on an iPad and call that a creative pro, but that doesn't mean that they actually have interest in addressing more of the pro market.
But it means that they're not... What it says to me is they have not given up or are not abandoning that market.
They're just not competing that well in it.
And maybe that's okay.
Maybe you just have a...
a reasonable participation and don't really worry that like some cheap vendor is coming in and and swamping you in unit sales because you're still a player in the market like you're solidly second or third place among three players even though someone else is selling forex as many things as you are into the market and so maybe that's maybe that's fine with them maybe they feel like they have the high end of the market they're getting all the profits yada yada yada but i don't it doesn't seem like they're abandoning it whereas i see fewer and fewer instances where they're showing somebody doing pro work on pro hardware and
um because you know what would they even show them doing i guess they can show them using final cut and uh well they have them show they show them using final cut with a touch bar macbook pro with these two giant lg monitors behind it they did they did do that but it's i mean like even as far you know the recent history of the trash can
that their big demo at wwc was to have people from pixar using the trash can to do you know heavyweight stuff that basically like other computers can't handle this because it's just too much it's too much memory it's too much cpu that was a long time look at how this fancy new computer handles this that you know that was that was their demo of like this is pro hardware for pros yada yada and i haven't seen a demo like that since i haven't seen an ad like that since from apple you're right it's been more about like look this amazing laptop you can edit 4k video on this laptop isn't that great
um that's great and all but if your laptop is never going to leave your desk like is that the best choice for your editing bay or whatever like a laptop maybe maybe it is maybe that's apple's vision of the computer but it's that it's a far cry from look let's sling around multi-gigabyte textures and paint on these models in real time uh you know but the pixar employees doing that demo wwc so
I think my main skepticism here is like, I don't think there is any strong correlation anymore between the way Apple presents itself and its products in the marketing events and videos and commercials and what they actually make.
Like, I agree with you that they do present themselves as being, you know, as really being, you know, prioritizing education and creative people and things like that.
It makes for a great video.
It makes for a great commercial.
It makes for great statements.
And I'm sure that a lot of the executives actually believe that themselves.
They sincerely believe that.
But I think the actions and the results of the company say otherwise.
They really do say that they are totally fine pricing themselves out of education to a large degree and ignoring actual pro demands when they don't line up with what Apple wants to do for the consumer market.
It's funny you bring up the trash can Mac because just today one appeared at my desk, not for me to use, but just to share.
And it turned out we had just bought it just in the last week or two because we have a guy on staff who's a video editor.
And apparently the dual GPUs were enough to sway the IT folks to get the trash can rather than just an iMac 5K.
Yeah.
Did they do any research, Sean?
When the new iPhone comes out, be sure to show him your Geekbench score on your new iPhone 8 is higher in single core than that Mac Pro.
I know.
I know.
I wasn't involved in any of this.
It just showed up all of a sudden, but I thought you two would be amused.
We bought a trash can within the last week or two.
That's so sad.
Sorry.
I can't take it anymore.
Just please, Apple, please fix this.
I mean, the last thing that I want in the entire freaking world is a new Mac Pro because I might as well just retire from the show for like a month.
No, because that's the thing.
Because it's going to be nonstop.
If they keep not making one, we're going to keep talking about it.
If they release a new one, then we'll talk about it for like two weeks and then you won't hear about it for like a year and a half.
Until we start worrying that they're never going to make another one again.
Exactly.
Which will be about four weeks.
But what I was going to say was I do not want to talk about it for another four weeks if they do finally announce one.
Or God forbid they announce one that is called a Mac Pro but is in reality just a iMac 5K++.
The last thing I want is for that to happen, so I have to hear you two go on and on about it forever.
But even I am at the point that I'm like, come on, Apple.
Really?
Really?
This is still a thing?
Come on.
You're better than this.
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And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
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You know, speaking of another yardstick to seeing how into education Apple is, not that I'm saying this is the best idea in the world, but a thing they used to do is they used to make special computers just for education.
The EMAC.
They were designed and specced and priced differently.
Sometimes regular people couldn't even buy them.
Sometimes regular people wouldn't want to buy them.
But as a means of competing in what has always been a very price-sensitive market, they were like, we need to be able to sell into education.
Eventually they learned none of their existing computers, especially back in the day when...
every computer that apple made was better than better and more expensive than all the other ones they made special versions of computers and special entire computers just for education to suit education's needs whatever those may be uh that showed i think a more serious dedication to the education market again whether that was the best idea to make these special models but or they should have just changed their other models they were suitable for education or whatever
that's farther than today's apple seems willing to go um and on the flip side i think i don't know if this is in this new york times article but i've seen it bounced around maybe gruber talked about it that apple is doing much better in it recently mostly because i think the the cold war against max and and corporate environments has thought over the past i would say decade or so it used to be like you're not even allowed to bring your macintosh from home and connect it to my network because i'm the evil corporate it guy and the whole world's gonna end if you do that right
to today where i think most people joining a company have some expectation there's a chance that they will either get to choose between a mac and a windows pc or just everybody's using macs depending on the company
I mean, look at IBM.
They've got thousands of them, right?
Who would have thunk it, right?
And that Macs integrate better into enterprise environments.
That's because of efforts Apple has made.
Both iOS devices and Macs integrate better into enterprise environments because Apple has changed their software in ways that enterprise people wanted to make it more remotely manageable, to have it be compatible with various protocols.
It's been slow and it hasn't been that dramatic, but the series of things that they've done
have made Macs way more viable in enterprise than they used to be despite the fact that they're still pretty much enterprise unfriendly in terms of like how Dell will service and replace your things versus how Apple will do it and stuff like that like they still have a long way to go and it's interesting that they're sort of the same kind of I'm not going to say half-hearted but the same kind of
apple style approach where we'll make some changes on your behalf but we're not going to compromise our core beliefs about what a computer should be and how our business should run and so on and so forth has yielded dividends in enterprise probably because there is no equivalent to google coming from nowhere and taking over the enterprise they're basically just slowly trading market share with microsoft and other windows uh pc type things whereas in education they've been doing things as well to try to make their ios devices and macs better for education over the years but
their their pace of innovation there has been swamped by google coming out with a product that is cheap easy to manage people like to use it removes a lot of pain points that people have been experiencing because the the chromebook as we discussed before is not just like a slightly better or cheaper laptop it's not a netbook right they the advantage they have is that is a different computing paradigm with the you know things on the web right and that whole that that whole thing of i've heard them referred to as dumb terminals but i think that's a
that's a pejorative there.
They're not dumb and they're not terminals.
It is merely a computer using local hardware to run applications and then using the network for state preservation.
And it's a great solution and it's easier for people to manage than installing software and all that other stuff.
And that's, that I think is why they're winning, uh, not just because of price, because they could surely get trash, you know, windows PCs for something close to that price.
Um,
But a crappy Windows PC is not as easy to manage as a fleet of Chromebooks.
So I think there is no equivalent to that in enterprise.
There is no competitor in enterprise that is making things 10 times easier, let's say, for enterprise IT.
uh than apple or microsoft or dell or whatever whereas there was an education so i rather than framing this as a failing of apple i think it's more fair to frame it as a success for google let's give google credit for finding one environment into which it can sell its hardware that apparently loves it because it's not the consumer realm but they just they didn't just cancel the the chromebook pixels they're not making them yeah yeah yeah
consumers not so much but schools schools love it and you know kudos to google uh apple could have done better yes but and so could have microsoft but bottom line is google made a product that education loves john how much did you say your 1989 mac was eight grand in today's money
No, no, no, in that money.
It was $4,300 plus the keyboard.
So you would need another half of a Mac to get a three-door Honda Civic Hatchback four-speed, which was $6,385.
Almost, John, almost.