Christmas Phone
John:
maybe you can switch to maybe maybe you have sufficient girth to do a one-legged thing where like instead of putting a laptop on both legs can it can it sit can it sit on one leg you can have one laptop on each leg you would do wielding cool i think we're all set uh so i have notes on everything that happened but i didn't check the notes in the document great yes your own personal notes well guess what i have notes shared notes follow up you of course you do
John:
We can breeze through it.
John:
These are all quick items.
John:
As long as we don't get bogged down, Marco, into a long tangent about your deep 20-minute feelings on each one of these items, we can get through it.
Marco:
Oh, shots fired.
Marco:
It's going to be like that?
Marco:
I would like you to listen to recent episodes and see what percentage of follow-up items I emit a single word about.
John:
Yeah, but it just takes one.
John:
It only takes one that gets you going, and that becomes half the show.
John:
Anyway, we can get through these quickly because Marco's not interested in them.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Every time you say that, all that means is everyone's looking at the chapter mark to see where the first topic begins.
John:
Don't look at the chapter markers.
John:
Just listen to the show.
John:
Just experience the show.
John:
Be in the moment.
John:
Be the show.
Casey:
Be in the moment.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Stephen Impson writes, in case nobody mentioned, turns out the Wii U gamepad had less display lag than most TVs.
Casey:
And we'll put a couple links in the show notes.
Casey:
John, you're the only one of us with a Wii U, I believe.
Casey:
So you want to tell us about this?
Marco:
I think John's the only one with a Wii U.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Very well.
Casey:
Maybe.
Yeah.
John:
That was last week where I was saying that I like to use the game pad for Mario Kart because it felt like there was actually less lag than a TV, which seems crazy because it is wirelessly sending video to the thing.
John:
So I actually, I had read this article back when it came out.
John:
I just forgot about it because I'm old.
Um,
John:
apparently it's measured to be about 33 milliseconds of lag for the video on the Wii U gamepad, which sounds like a lot until you realize that TVs, especially TVs that are either not in game mode or can't get into a decent game mode where they turn off all the image processing, the input lag for TVs, especially if you're going through a receiver and then through a TV, can be up to like 100 milliseconds.
John:
So I wasn't imagining it.
John:
It is very likely that my complete TV setup
John:
as configured at the time I was doing this, is actually slower than using the Wii U gamepad itself.
John:
So good job, Nintendo.
John:
I'm minimizing that lag.
John:
Bad job.
John:
Whole rest of the AV industry on having horrendous input lag for television setups.
Casey:
What's the mechanism that the video is being broadcast to the gamepad?
Casey:
Is that like a private Wi-Fi or something?
John:
Yeah, I think it's like an H.264 stream over wireless thing.
John:
I think it's proprietary.
John:
I don't think it is just like literal Wi-Fi, but I don't know, actually.
Casey:
So it could be like an airdrop, like a peer-to-peer thing that's kind of stood up just in the moment and then destroyed after you transfer the file or files or something like that.
Casey:
Maybe it's one of those sort of scenarios.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
In the interest of speedy follow-up for the first time ever, tell us what happened with your Zelda HUD.
John:
i'm playing zelda as everybody knows uh and zelda does have a hud so is every past zelda game they always have something on the screen that's showing like a little mini map or that like skyward sword had this giant honking picture of the wiimote which you could turn off and i did turn off um another little status indicators uh breath of the wild has
John:
The traditional line of hearts in the upper left-hand corner.
John:
In the lower right, it's got a little circular map thing and some other little icons.
John:
Underneath the hearts, it has a couple of other items that appear as you progress through the game.
John:
Don't want to spoil anything for people.
John:
The problem with those items is that they are white much of the time.
John:
100% completely opaque white.
John:
And my TV hates that.
John:
And so after playing Breath of the Wild for, I don't know, 20 or 30 hours, I noticed I'm getting imagery retention in the upper left corner for the white items.
John:
Luckily, Breath of the Wild has a HUD option, which I saw when I first started playing the game because, of course, being a nerd, I always go into all the options first before starting anything.
John:
and they call it the pro hud which turns off basically everything except for your hearts uh and i said well i don't want to turn everything off it's a pretty minimal hud to begin with it's very minimal very pushed off to the side so it's nice but and i like seeing the things some of them are useful like you're just seeing the compass direction and stuff like that so i left it on that turned out to have been a mistake so now i'm using the pro hud which only shows hearts the hearts are 100% red and opaque so they are causing some heart-shaped image retention in the upper left
John:
but they do vary a little bit as you take damage at the very least and 100 red is much better than 100 white so i'm not kicking zelda off my tv yet and moving it to to the the gaming uh monitor or anything i think i'm just going to accept the amount of image retention because i know from our destiny experiment that yes you will get image retention but it is not permanent if you merely wait a year it will go away
John:
And someone is suggesting that I get OLED.
John:
OLED also has image retention.
Casey:
Guess what?
Casey:
You know, if you had bought a TV with a proper technology that doesn't have image retention, this would have been a lot easier.
Casey:
But no, you had to have the blackest blacks and the darkest.
John:
Even LCDs have image retention.
John:
Mine has it worse.
John:
And vibrant colors.
John:
Like, seriously, on my gaming monitor, it is such an incredible difference in what the game looks like compared to what it looks like on TV.
John:
And Breath of the Wild is the type of game they want to experience.
John:
And there's not a lot of HUD in Breath of the Wild.
John:
It is actually pretty darn minimal.
John:
So I want to see the full, rich experience and to get the 5.1 surround sound, which they don't take that much advantage of, but the speakers are better.
John:
Anyway, I'm not kicking it off yet.
John:
We'll check back in next week.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Karsten Weiss, maybe Weiss, writes in to talk about high-end desktop processors, which I really don't care that much about, so one of you can take this.
John:
This is in reference to me asking the last show if Intel makes any processors that are not Xeons that have more than four cores that in theory could be used in an iMac.
John:
And Marco said no.
John:
And a lot of people tweeted that actually they make these a bunch of processors with indecipherable alphanumeric names that have 10 cores and 8 cores and 6 cores.
John:
And other people chimed in on Twitter to say, actually, those are basically just Xeons rebranded and renamed, but without ECC RAM and different chipsets that require them.
John:
um either way it seems like however you want to slice it there are other options that are not the same as the processors in the mac pro that apple could put in the imac if it wanted to so maybe if they make an imac pro instead of having a xeon in there they could have one of these in between easy on things which would be kind of cruddy because i really want ecc ram so if i'm you know if i'm gonna pay for an imac pro but anyway i'll buy whatever they put out because what the hell choice do i have
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, sorry, I'm going to talk to Sean during follow-up.
Marco:
Yeah, this is the X99 series that people keep telling us about.
Marco:
And I honestly don't know much about it.
Marco:
I had it in the back of my mind and just had forgotten about it.
Marco:
But it seems like if you're going to go to the trouble of having a very expensive processor that puts out a lot of heat and needs a big socket and everything else, like...
Marco:
Why not just use Xeons at that point?
Marco:
I bet the engineering constraints and cost constraints and everything else around using these is probably not that different from just using Xeons in the first place, which is probably why Apple doesn't just put one of these in an iMac.
Casey:
Jason Breckenridge writes in to say more about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
The Mac Pro delay is likely due to wait for AMD to produce something that they can leverage to get Intel's Xeon prices down.
Casey:
That seems bold to me.
Casey:
But anyway, he continues.
Casey:
Margins are everything in Tim Cook's Apple.
Casey:
Not sure how you can know that, but I'll continue, especially for low-volume products.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What do you guys think?
John:
I put this in here for not to address it directly, but just for the...
John:
For the larger issue, because it's interesting to me that the three of us on this show seem to all come to a sort of, I don't know, I'm going to say unspoken agreement, but chances are we spoke about it because we talk about the Mac Pro a lot.
John:
Agreement that there is no new Mac Pro coming.
John:
And yet, when I see people, like when listeners write in or tweet or whatever, there is still a contingent out there that is on a different page than we are.
John:
They believe that...
John:
there is a delay like the mac there is a mac pro delay that a new mac pro is coming and maybe i'm wrong but do we all basically be the three of us like obviously we don't know we're just guessing right but uh do we all kind of agree there is no new mac pro coming in in the terms that we understand it to be basically like a thing that you buy from apple that is their their fastest computer that doesn't have a screen attached to it
John:
i don't know you're the you're the one you're the one hold out i mean i think marco agrees right yeah pretty much i'm i've been on the page for a while they're just like there is no new mac pro coming and all i'm thinking of is like you know in the way that we understand it i'm i'm 100 pinning my hopes on an imac pro at this point but the mac pro like so many people write in to talk about what do we think the next mac pro is going to be and what might be delaying the next mac pro and i feel like writing back saying
John:
I've lost my faith.
John:
What new Mac Pro?
John:
What are you even talking about?
John:
There is no new Mac Pro.
John:
There never will be a new Mac Pro except for something different.
John:
Again, when I say it, I'm talking about...
John:
A box that you buy that doesn't have a monitor built into it from Apple that is their fastest computer.
John:
I think that's gone.
Marco:
I've been using this iMac since 2014 because it just fit my overall desires better.
Marco:
I really wanted Retina.
Marco:
I desperately wanted desktop Retina.
Marco:
And I thought for years...
Marco:
that it was it was further away and so and then when they released the 5k iMac it like it blew my mind and it was so good and it still is so good you know I decided then like okay I will trade some processing power and I will trade the freedom of this external cylinder or tower and having it separate from my monitor I'll trade that for this awesome screen experience and at the time there really was no great way to get 5k externally and
Marco:
now well maybe you can argue that the lg still sucks so badly that maybe maybe uh there still isn't a great way to get 5k externally that is what broke me if you recall that was that was the end that was like i now i accept i accept that apple you're telling me in no uncertain terms
Marco:
give up yeah maybe i don't know anyway so i the the problem is like i hear from various tipsters and rumors and birdies and everything else i hear a different thing like every month every month i hear oh the mac pro is really dead this time or oh no it's not dead yet it's coming you know they're they're starting up a new thing yeah but every time i hear that like i think does what i'm hearing fit into the idea of an iMac pro and every time i go that totally could be an iMac pro
Marco:
All I want is for them to address high-end needs and for the current iMac series, as we know it, to not be the highest they ever go.
Marco:
Because it is very limited in limiting itself to the primarily four-core desktop line and not having desktop-class high-powered GPU support and desktop-class high-powered CPU support and workstation-class, I should say, CPU support.
Marco:
There's a huge ceiling above the current iMac series.
Marco:
And it isn't just about getting a higher clock speed on single core.
Marco:
It's about if you need multi-core performance, which lots of things use these days...
Marco:
It isn't a matter of just wait until next year's iMac and the four-core line will be good enough that a Mac Pro won't be necessary.
Marco:
It's literally like the iMac grows like 5% or 10% performance a year and a Mac Pro with more cores could have like six times the performance.
Marco:
That's the difference we're talking about here.
Marco:
It's not...
Marco:
It isn't something that we can just wait a couple of years and the need goes away because a couple of years down the road, the multi-core high power workstation chips have gotten better too.
Marco:
So having a gap, like there's a big gap between what the iMac can do and what a computer that has a much higher power and heat budget and money budget can do.
Marco:
And that used to be the Mac Pro, and now it's kind of gone.
Marco:
And that huge gap is just being unserved.
Marco:
And the people who need that huge gap are going to Windows and Hackintoshes and other crap.
Marco:
That's what I hope Apple addresses.
Marco:
Whether it has a screen built into it or not...
Marco:
I would prefer if it didn't just for additional flexibility, but I don't really, I'm not going to be massively disappointed if they give me a new high-end 16-core Xeon workstation that happens to have a 5K screen in front of it, which is, by the way, the best screen I've ever seen.
John:
Yeah, I'm actually like now that I know there's no third-party monitor, that's what makes the iMac Pro so much more palatable to me because I will still have an Apple monitor and that's what I want.
John:
And so now I'm just pinning my hopes on the insides of that iMac Pro being all that they can be.
Casey:
You two, you have had your talking privileges revoked for the remainder of follow up.
Casey:
I was trying to get through this quickly.
Casey:
And then I said those two cursed goddamn words, Mac Pro.
Casey:
And then everything took a turn, as it always does.
Marco:
Anyway, I mean, in our defense, I'm pretty sure you started it.
Casey:
Well, I didn't put this in the show notes, but I was dutifully reading John's show notes and here's where we ended up.
Casey:
So anyway, we'll move on to talk about how Americans are cheap.
Casey:
So Jake writes in to say, I wanted to tell you all what I've seen with a family member that has been in education for almost 30 years.
Casey:
And this person's family member works for a 12,000 student school district in America and
Casey:
In this district, there are several schools that need repairs or renovation to keep students safe.
Casey:
Over the last two years, the district has presented a referendum, which goes to a public vote, to the public, which gets voted down, a secondary referendum for a lesser amount of money, which is also voted down, and now there's a third referendum on the table.
Casey:
The current referendum has a lot of opposition at this time, and
Casey:
According to Jake, they don't play nice.
Casey:
So Jake summarizes,
Casey:
And this is an exact retelling of my childhood.
Casey:
Now, how do I say this?
Casey:
Because however I pronounced it, apparently everyone was very, very upset with me.
John:
You're just putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.
Casey:
That's all that's happening there.
Casey:
What flight attendant movie was that?
Casey:
I never actually saw it, but that preview that was on the commercials just made me laugh.
John:
It is very popular.
John:
I've heard it back in middle school, so I don't know what the original origin is.
John:
Anyway, affluent is what you're trying to say.
John:
Thank you.
John:
Oh, you said affluent?
Casey:
Yes, apparently.
Casey:
There were a lot of people who were very pertinent.
John:
It's probably an alternate pronunciation because everything is.
John:
I bet you're right.
John:
You always have that defense.
Casey:
You can look it up.
Casey:
I'm sure that's true, but whatever.
Casey:
So affluent, is that correct?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
I lived in an area that had a lot of rich people in it.
Casey:
So the point is, this was the exact same behavior that I saw at my school district, which we went over last episode.
Casey:
We had several other people write in to say very, very similar things that were equally depressing.
Casey:
And this was just a really great summary of how Americans are cheap.
Casey:
And I hate all of us.
Casey:
So I just thought I'd share that little anecdote.
Yeah.
Casey:
Speaking of things that we won't talk long about at all, I'm quite sure.
Casey:
Twitterific for Mac.
Casey:
The Kickstarter made it.
Casey:
And the stretch goal of $100,000 to get basic things like direct messaging support also made it, which is super exciting.
Casey:
So congratulations, John Syracuse.
Casey:
This moment is yours.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
This is a great victory lap for the project and for all of the listeners to the show who I'm sure heard my plea and pledged support.
John:
And it amazes me like I was just the goal I set for everybody says ignore the fact that the goal is 75 grand.
John:
The stretch goal is 100 grand.
John:
And we need to get that because that's where like direct messages come in.
John:
And as much as I love Twitter, I really don't want to use a Mac Twitter client doesn't support direct messages.
John:
So we did it.
John:
108 000 is the total we passed 100k uh as uh marco was pointing out now i have to pay the money that i pledged towards it and a lot of people i know on twitter told me that not only did they pledge because they heard uh my encouragement to do so but they also upped their pledges when they saw that it wasn't close to its goal or whatever so
John:
thank you to everybody who did that i'm sure this will turn out great the one the one bad thing for me is that of course i can't or i may not be able to run this uh project if it's sierra only until and unless i get a new mac that runs sierra so i mean it's not supposed to be done until much later this really is going to be the most expensive twitter client ever for you yeah well i want to get a new mac anyway but it's gonna be a few hundred bucks for twitter and a few thousand bucks for a new mac and
John:
I'm also lobbying them through certain channels to perhaps try to support back to LCAP, but I don't know if that will happen.
John:
But either way, I want a new Mac that runs Sierra, and I want to be able to run this thing, and it's not done yet.
John:
So fingers crossed, everybody, but thanks to everybody who helped.
John:
This is awesome.
Casey:
Congratulations, John Syracuse.
Casey:
I'm very, very, very excited for you.
Casey:
I know this was a big deal for you.
Casey:
You could just use TweetBot, but that's cool.
Casey:
Siri has multi-language support.
Casey:
Several people wrote in with regard to our ladies in the cylinder conversation last episode to remind us that – and it is – we needed a reminder that what is the Amazon –
Casey:
I'm stumbling so hard because I'm trying not to say her name.
Casey:
Yes, the Echoes Lady.
Casey:
I didn't want to say the A-L-E-X-A word.
Casey:
The Echoes Lady does not have a lot of multi-language support, whereas the Apple Lady does have considerable, by comparison, multi-language support.
Casey:
And that's a big deal for anyone who doesn't speak English.
Casey:
And obviously, we tend to be more myopic than we intend when it comes to these sorts of things.
Casey:
But for people outside of the United States, Britain, et cetera, Australia, too, before we get people emailing us about that, people outside those areas, you know, the only choice they really have is Siri.
Casey:
And that's kind of a big bummer.
Casey:
So anyway, it's worth considering.
Casey:
And we didn't really give any thought to that last episode.
John:
Well, it wasn't somebody wrote in before we get onto the well actually for this.
John:
Someone wrote in there in a foreign country and they said that they had to speak to whatever thing they were speaking to in their native language.
John:
But they had to pronounce things the way an English speaker would try to say the words in their language in order to be understood, which I thought was interesting.
John:
Even though it purports to understand your language, if you speak sort of colloquially and just casually as you would, it doesn't work as well.
John:
If you think like, how would an American trying to speak my language say this and say it that way, then the cylinder picks up, which I thought was funny.
Marco:
I mean, Worktown works the same way here.
Marco:
You have to kind of think, like, how would somebody in California say this?
Marco:
Like, the way I say it, it never works right.
Casey:
You just got to add in a groovy and, you know, and whatever the other lingo is.
John:
That's right.
John:
Can you get me a Jaguar with an automatic transmission?
John:
Wow.
John:
That'll work perfectly.
Marco:
Don't forget the passive aggression.
Marco:
No, I mean, so I think what bugs me about a lot of the times I see this pointed out is when it's used as a defense for areas in which Siri is not doing so well or is stupider than it should be.
Marco:
So to me, these should be carefully considered as separate factors.
Marco:
Yes, Siri is better at international and multi-language support.
Marco:
Amazon sucks internationally.
Marco:
They have terrible coverage outside the U.S.
Marco:
for all of their services.
Marco:
And the Echo's voice service is no exception to that.
Marco:
But what Amazon's even better at is in the one language that they support well, it simply works more reliably.
Marco:
And I know that there are areas in which Siri is better, and that's fine.
Marco:
There's areas in which Amazon is better.
Marco:
But these are separate discussions.
Marco:
And I don't think it's a valid excuse for Apple or for Apple fans and commentators to use Siri.
Marco:
Whenever anybody points out that Siri does something less well than it should or that Amazon does something really well, it is not a valid excuse to say, well, Siri supports 75 different languages.
Marco:
It's like, well, okay, it does.
Marco:
The sky is also blue.
Marco:
These are separate facts.
Marco:
These are separate discussions, right?
Marco:
So I see this a lot in a way that bothers me, but that is...
Marco:
An attribute that should be commended.
Marco:
It is great that Siri supports all these different languages, and if you speak one of those languages, that's a huge factor for you in the same way that other factors of these products might influence other people's decisions.
Marco:
I would just be careful how we throw that around because so often it's used in this kind of invalid defense.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I have a very quick question about the Apple Watch, which is kind of a call to the listeners to tweet at me and me alone.
Casey:
And then I'd like to go to Marco Waffling.
Casey:
I am going to regret this, but I'm curious.
Casey:
And then Marco has a tale of waffling, which is a lot less delicious than it sounds.
John:
You have a brief tale of waffling, right, Marco?
John:
Yeah, very brief.
Casey:
Well, I do.
Casey:
I wasn't aware you guys knew about it.
Casey:
Somebody put it in the show notes.
John:
We know everything.
John:
We're watching.
John:
Always watching.
John:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, anyway, I wanted to ask the audience, and you can tweet at me and me alone.
Casey:
You don't need to bother Marco and John.
John:
I can't believe you're doing this, by the way.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
If you have a Siri, what are we calling this?
Casey:
A Siri Zero, an original Apple Watch.
Casey:
Do you find that the battery is starting to get a little long in the tooth and it's starting to wear out a little more quickly than it used to?
Casey:
Because I took delivery of my Apple Watch in early May, and the last couple days it has been nice enough out that I can go for my afternoon or really evening walk with Declan.
Casey:
And I'll do a walking exercise on my Apple Watch.
Casey:
And as soon as I've started doing that in the last few days, at unreasonably early hours,
Casey:
My Apple Watch is going from, oh, I'm fine.
Casey:
I'm asleep.
Casey:
And power reserve mode is on.
Casey:
And I basically don't have a watch at all anymore.
Casey:
And this only started when I started doing these exercises.
Casey:
Well, for loose definitions of exercise.
Casey:
But anyway, exercises in the evening and tracking these 15 to 30-minute walks.
Casey:
And I'm curious, those who listen, only if you have a Series 0 original Apple Watch, do you also find that you're having battery woes?
Casey:
Let at Casey List know.
Casey:
I'm curious to hear.
Casey:
That's all for now.
Marco:
You need to restore your phone.
John:
I have a series zero watch and my battery is awesome as it sits there on its charging thing on top of my dresser.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fracture, who prints beautiful photos in vivid color directly onto sheets of glass that you can hang up around your house, give us gifts or whatever else, and they are awesome.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com to learn more.
Marco:
Fracture wants you to actually take your photos out of your camera roll, out of your social feeds, and actually put them on your wall so you can really see them and really enjoy them beyond just the one day that you took and shared them.
Marco:
So what you do with Fracture, you go to their site, FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Use promo code CLEAN.
Marco:
C-L-E-A-N.
Marco:
CLEAN.
Marco:
You can save 20% by the end of March if you hurry up.
Marco:
Because they want you to clean out your camera roll and refresh your walls in your house with actual photo prints that you can enjoy of your photos.
Marco:
It's really nice to see your photos.
Marco:
We have these great cameras in our pockets.
Marco:
We're taking more photos than ever.
Marco:
But then we see them that day and then they're just gone.
Marco:
Fracture wants you to enjoy your photos.
Marco:
Use promo code CLEAN by the end of March to get 20% off any Fracture print.
Marco:
And I highly recommend these fracture prints.
Marco:
They look great.
Marco:
I have them all over my office, all over our house.
Marco:
They look awesome.
Marco:
These are edge-to-edge printing on glass, and it hangs up nicely on the wall.
Marco:
They ship it nicely.
Marco:
I've never had one arrive broken, although, of course, they guarantee it if it does.
Marco:
They have a 60-day happiness guarantee, so you're sure to love your order.
Marco:
Every fracture is handmade and checked for quality by real people in Gainesville, Florida, and it uses U.S.
Marco:
source materials and a carbon-neutral factory, so you can feel good about it.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com.
Marco:
You will be amazed how nice these photos look when you get them, how nice these beautiful panes of glass look.
Marco:
They make wonderful gifts as well.
Marco:
If you have a gift for a relative or some of the holidays coming up, like Mother's Day and stuff, it is totally worth it.
Marco:
Try Fracture.
Marco:
You will see for yourself and you'll be a convert.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
They can't pay me to say that.
Marco:
They can't pay me to say how much I love them.
Marco:
And I'll tell you what, I love them.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
FractureMe.com.
Marco:
And when they ask you where you heard about them, make sure to enter Accidental Tech Podcast or ATP, whatever they have there.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
Once again, don't forget to tell them where you heard about them.
Marco:
FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So tell me about your waffling.
John:
I'm going to say this is, by my count, your third Mac laptop order since the new Mac laptops were released.
Casey:
Again?
Casey:
Oh, my God, Marco.
Casey:
Here's what happened.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Casey:
Yeah, you had to do it.
Casey:
Why did you have to do it?
Marco:
Here's what happened.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I'll try to be brief because we have all this other stuff to talk about.
Marco:
on my i i recently came back from a trip on the way home i was i was supposed to have downloaded a tv show for tiff and i to watch on the plane and last minute at the airport i realized like at the departure airport i realized i had not done it over the hotel wi-fi overnight like i had planned and i had to very quickly download episodes of a tv show and
Marco:
And of course, nothing was available in any legal fashion, so I was going to ship them to myself on a truck.
Marco:
And there are numerous ways to do this on airport Wi-Fi, none of which are very good.
Marco:
And the only way I found for this show that I was supposed to have downloaded but didn't download, the only way that I could find it is a certain kind of truck that, let's say it forms a torrential downpour of data pieces into a TV show.
Marco:
I knew if I could just use a group of newspaper delivery trucks, that would be better.
Marco:
But the torrential downpour of trucks was the only thing I could get to work in a reliable fashion from the airport Wi-Fi that I was on.
Marco:
And the plane was taking off in like a half hour, and I just had to get something quickly.
Marco:
So I installed...
Marco:
A type of torrential downpour truck that I had trusted in the past, even though I knew that, you know, I heard they kind of got shady with bundling smaller satellite trucks with it.
Marco:
Did it install a Yahoo search toolbar in your browser?
Marco:
Did it install Java?
Marco:
It did set my homepage to Yahoo in all of my browsers.
Oh.
Marco:
oh my god that's the stuff and on my home mac i have an older version of this truck that has no i downloaded it years ago that has no problems uh but on on the the new version that i could get off the website quickly um it did a bunch of weird stuff that i don't trust and so because of this i now consider my 15 inch touch bar macbook pro compromised and i need to format it and reinstall basically um for my own sanity
John:
do you guys remember what made mike hurley quit his job oh god it was him having to buy a new pair of shoelaces and yes how does that justify you getting a new damn computer i was just gonna say to remind everybody this story about him uh forgetting to download a tv show and trying to do it in the airport is going to lead to him buying a new computer just so everyone's on the same page here
Marco:
All right, so basically, the gist of it, if I can summarize my Curly story about what made him finally quit his job and become a professional podcaster, is that he was going to his office job where he had to dress up, and he broke the shoelace on his shoe, and he was thinking about quitting for a while, and that finally pushed him over the edge because he's like, you know, I don't want to buy a new pair of shoelaces for these shoes because it was kind of like...
Marco:
reinforcing and reinvesting in the world he was not happy with and trying to leave.
Marco:
So he decided to just stop at that point.
Marco:
I'm sorry if I butchered that.
Marco:
And Casey, do you remember offhand what episode of Analog people should listen to?
Casey:
No, I don't, but I'll have it in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't remember which episode it is, but we go into detail about this.
Casey:
And it is one of the better episodes of Analog, if I do say so myself, so it's worth listening to.
Marco:
Okay, so when faced with the need to reformat my 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro at the end of this trip, probably the third or fourth trip I've taken it on, I was already not loving this computer on this trip.
Marco:
So many things about it that when I bought it, I was like, you know, I don't love this, but I'll get used to it maybe.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And some of those things I've gotten used to decently enough.
Marco:
Some of those things I haven't.
Marco:
I just have no motivation to fix this computer, even though it's just software.
Marco:
I just have to reinstall the OS, which I have to do.
Marco:
Even if I get a new one, I will then start on a fresh one, and then I'll have to put everything back on that one.
Marco:
I don't want to... This is my shoelace, and I don't want to...
Marco:
fix this laptop because i just don't like it uh and i i'm finally admitting to myself you know what the 15 inch touch bar macbook pro it's not a bad computer it's just really designed with different priorities and different needs than what my needs and priorities actually are and i thought i would get past it i thought i'd get used to it and i thought certain things would would stick better than they have like for me honestly the touch bar um doesn't work for me uh it may be down the road it will but right now it doesn't
Marco:
And it causes a lot of problems, like accidentally brushing against it and other issues, bugs, things like that.
Marco:
So anyway, so I thought, you know what?
Marco:
I can't do this anymore.
Marco:
I'm going to switch to a computer that I actually like.
Marco:
And my original plan was I'm going to wait for the next update to the MacBook One and give that a solid try again.
Marco:
Because when I first got the first one and really hated it, part of the reason I hated it was the keyboard.
Marco:
But, well, now they all have that keyboard.
Marco:
And so I was like, well, I'm forcibly getting used to that keyboard.
Marco:
So it's like, all right, well, that is kind of now an equal between them, almost.
Marco:
I mean, the one on the MacBook One currently has less feedback.
Marco:
It is still the same low travel, but it has less feedback than the ones that are on the new 2016 MacBook Pros.
Marco:
I'm used to that one now on the MacBook Pros.
Marco:
I still don't like it, but I'm used to it.
Marco:
So I can tolerate that.
Marco:
And I was assuming that the next update to the MacBook One would get that keyboard.
Marco:
Also, the original MacBook One, I mean, all the MacBook Ones are very slow.
Marco:
But in the 2016 update, was it, they dramatically increased the speed of the SSD, which dramatically increases the performance of lots of things in the system.
Marco:
And so the gist of what owners have reported basically is that
Marco:
The second version of the MacBook 1, which is the one that's been on for about a year now, is significantly faster than the first version was.
Marco:
Oh, also, thanks, Tipster.
Marco:
The GPU is also a lot faster, which also helps.
Marco:
So I thought, you know, let me just wait for that, and then I'll make a decision.
Marco:
Well, I'm about to go on a trip in like a couple of weeks to Ireland to the UL conference.
Marco:
And like our other friends, I will pimp the UL conference, not because they've asked me to, not because I feel obligated to, but because if you are anywhere near Ireland or can get to Ireland...
Marco:
In a couple of weeks, you should go to the UL conference.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
So go to the UL conference, everybody.
Marco:
U-L-L dot I-E is UL.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm going to Ireland.
Marco:
This is the perfect kind of trip where I want to have a laptop with me, but I don't really get a lot of work done on trips anymore.
Marco:
I try.
Marco:
I always try.
Marco:
And I just I don't.
Marco:
You know, it's very rare that I actually get a lot of work done.
Marco:
Since the 15-inch was not for me, I was thinking, you know, this would be a great time to have a new, smaller laptop to try, to use, to enjoy.
Marco:
And since the 15-inch is not working for me for lots of reasons, and one of the main reasons is the touch bar that really is not working for me, I think my choices were basically the MacBook 1 or the MacBook Escape.
Marco:
or an old macbook pro you know like i can get the old 13 or the and i already have my old 15 so i took out the old 15 figured i'd boot that up for a little bit use that for a couple days see how that goes and it's fine but i'm ruined now for the weight difference on the new one even though going from the old to the new 15 is only a half pound savings i went from like 4.5 to 4.0
Marco:
That's enough to ruin me.
Marco:
So now I pick up the old one and it feels really old.
Marco:
Then the event or the announcements, rather, the other day, yesterday, the other day came out.
Marco:
And I thought, Apple is sure to update the MacBook One.
Marco:
So let me wait for this announcement.
Marco:
And then I will probably just order a MacBook One, which with the new, hopefully with the new keyboard and with the new, you know, maybe, maybe a faster Thunder, maybe Thunderbolt instead of just USB-C or whatever else.
Marco:
Okay.
Casey:
I was going to do the same thing for the record.
Casey:
I had every intention of buying myself a MacBook adorable slash MacBook one slash officially called MacBook.
Casey:
The 12 inch MacBook.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I was planning to buy one yesterday.
Casey:
I was locked and loaded, ready to go.
Casey:
And then not so much.
Casey:
So what did you do?
Casey:
See, I know how I know how to not spend money.
Casey:
But if there's anything you know how to do, not spending money is not on that list.
Casey:
You do not know how to not spend money.
Marco:
All I can do is rationalize spending a little bit less money than I was going to spend anyway.
Marco:
But anyway, the day came and went.
Marco:
They had their big browser press releases, which we will get to.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
Everyone will get to that.
Marco:
And they didn't release basically anything I wanted, but they didn't release the MacBook One.
Marco:
So I decided, you know what, let me go to the Apple Store.
Marco:
Now that everything's in stock, I'll spend some real time with the MacBook Escape and the MacBook One side by side.
Marco:
And to just see, like, should I just wait for an Escape?
Marco:
Or should I just buy an Escape now?
Marco:
Or should I wait for the MacBook one update that might happen in a couple of weeks or it might happen in six months or it might never happen?
Marco:
We have no idea.
Marco:
This is modern Apple.
Marco:
Who knows when things will come out?
Marco:
There's no relation anymore to like Intel schedules.
Marco:
So it could come out anytime or never.
Marco:
So anyway, so I went to the store side by side.
Marco:
MacBook escape to MacBook one.
Marco:
the weight difference between them is noticeable it's two pounds versus three pounds so it's a noticeable weight difference it's a noticeable size difference but the macbook escape is the same approximate size and weight as the 13 inch macbook air has always been it feels great uh it's small you know and and critically it is basically a retina macbook air in its internals and so it has amazing battery life the best battery life in the whole lineup
Marco:
And one of my problems with the 15-inch is that the battery life is just not that great.
Marco:
It's not horrible, but it's not great.
Marco:
And it varies tremendously with what you're doing because it has that high-powered GPU and the nice big four-core CPU and everything else.
Marco:
So 15-inch varies a lot and isn't even great to begin with.
Marco:
The MacBook Escape has... And by the way, I should clarify my stupid name for that.
Marco:
That's the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2016 with two Thunderbolt ports, also known as the non-touch bar 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
All these wonders... See, my name is better than Apple's, right?
Marco:
Okay, so anyway, the MacBook Escape.
Marco:
It is not as small and light as I would love it to be, but it's pretty small and light.
Marco:
The MacBook One... Now, again, this is the now year-old version, so maybe this will change in the new one.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The keyboard difference side by side is not a big difference, but it is noticeable.
Marco:
And the MacBook One keyboard is worse by a noticeable amount.
Marco:
The ergonomic difference is more noticeable than I would have guessed.
Marco:
The MacBook One feels great when you're holding it.
Marco:
When you pick it up, when you're carrying it around, it feels great.
Marco:
I don't care for how you have to open the lid basically with two hands because it's so thin and so small that you can't really wedge your thumb under the little lip area and push down on what's below it like you can with the bigger ones.
John:
You don't have to.
John:
That's Apple's whole big thing.
John:
You can do it with one hand and the base stays down.
John:
It does.
John:
It really does.
John:
I try it all the time in the Apple Store, and I'm amazed at how often it works.
John:
You're right that it's hard to get your finger under it, but if you let go of the notion that you actually need to hold the bass down, and you can manage to get your little finger under the lip, I swear to you that the bass will stay on the table.
Marco:
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Anyway, so it didn't feel as good.
Marco:
It felt a little bit flimsy to do that.
Marco:
It's not a huge deal, but when you compare them side by side, it's an obvious difference.
Marco:
Also, when I had the MacBook Escape for a day and a half when it first came out, one problem I had with it was that actually on my lap, it was too narrow.
Marco:
And it would sit too low on my legs as a result.
Marco:
It wouldn't quite span across my leg gap quite well enough.
Marco:
And I actually found it not that pleasant to use on my lap.
Marco:
It would be great on like an airplane tray table and it'd be totally suitable on a desk and anything else.
Marco:
But on my lap, I actually found it was actually not quite wide enough to really be comfortable there.
Marco:
And the biggest difference to me is that the MacBook One's trackpad is truly awful.
Marco:
It is horrendous how different, like when you feel them side by side, even on the same settings, on the same like force touch firmness level or whatever, the difference in the click feel and the responsiveness between the MacBook One and the MacBook Escape is massive on the trackpad.
Marco:
It's a huge difference.
Marco:
I basically decided then that, you know, I actually don't think I want a MacBook One again, even if it gets updated.
Marco:
So I played with the Escape a little bit longer, played with the One a little bit longer, firmed up my decision, went home and ordered a maxed out MacBook Escape.
Marco:
Except for I didn't get the terabyte, I got the 512.
Marco:
still time for you to cancel that order again i already canceled the same order once six months ago i know that's what i'm saying i think we're gonna make it this time is it gonna make it i uh i'll see how it goes and ask me again you know in a couple of weeks what are you doing with your with your old one um once once i'm sure that i'm going to keep the escape i'll sell the 15 unless casey wants that i can sell it to you
John:
So you were like the proverbial little lady who only drove to church on Sunday.
John:
If you want a lightly used laptop for a reasonable price, just wait for Marco to get bored of it.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
I don't even know what to do with you.
Casey:
I'm most disappointed that you didn't get a MacBook One because I would have bought that off of you in two weeks or two weeks a day when you decide that you don't want this one.
Casey:
But as it turns out, that's not what you bought.
Marco:
Well, now you can have the complete opposite.
Marco:
You can have a 15-inch.
Casey:
No, I don't want a 15-inch.
Casey:
The touch bar does interest me, but I don't want that.
Casey:
I'm not saying that it's bad.
Casey:
Today, with my needs today, I don't want it because what I really want is a new 15-inch with touch bar for work, but I'm not going to get another computer for work for like two or three years.
Casey:
So, alas.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
The reason I got the 15 to begin with was that I had originally ordered this exact same MacBook Escape configuration that I just reordered.
Marco:
On day one, I ordered that.
Marco:
And because it was day one, there was like a two-week delay or something because they were all backed up.
Marco:
And in the meantime, I convinced myself, you know, whatever, I think it's like $2,200.
Marco:
Like $2,200 for effectively a souped-up MacBook Air is kind of a lot.
Marco:
And I didn't feel good about the value of that.
Marco:
And the 15-inch, for bang for the buck, the 15-inch is a way better buy than any of the other laptops.
Marco:
And so I kind of rationalized myself into a 15-inch.
Marco:
And I also thought the Touch Bar would be a bigger deal, and I should have some experience with it.
Marco:
And it turns out that...
Marco:
In an effort to get the best value for my money, I got a computer that was actually not the right computer for me.
Marco:
So there's a lesson there somewhere.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And the touch bar ended up not really sticking for me.
Marco:
So there we go.
Casey:
All right, 45 minutes into our recording, we can finally be done with follow-up.
Casey:
Told you, John, it was going to be a quick one.
John:
That was a topic.
John:
Come on.
John:
Somebody spent a while on a particular topic, but I'm not going to say who.
John:
Casey.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, totally me.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
Make your next move.
Marco:
Get your unique domain and create a beautiful website at squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Squarespace sites look beautifully designed regardless of your skill level.
Marco:
You don't have to be a developer.
Marco:
they have intuitive, easy to use tools, you can drag and drop things, you have like these wonderful like color and text pickers and everything you can drag drag these content blocks around and Squarespace sites can do so much.
Marco:
It's so easy to do, you know, the simple requirements like you know, I want the content to be over here, but then I want the sidebar here that maybe has a calendar there for events and maybe a little blog newsfeed in that area, you can do all that.
Marco:
And it's
Marco:
It's wonderfully designed.
Marco:
at no additional charge.
Marco:
So much functionality is built into Squarespace.
Marco:
Whether you're making a simple content site, like a blog or a site for a real-world business, like a restaurant or something, and you need just a page to put your phone number on, or you're making an entire elaborate storefront or a podcast or a video series or a big site for a big business, you can do it all with Squarespace.
Marco:
Check it out today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
If you sign up for a year, you get a free domain along with that.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
You'd be amazed what you can do at Squarespace.
Marco:
Give it an hour.
Marco:
This is what I always say.
Marco:
Give it an hour.
Marco:
Try your next site there for one hour and tell me if it doesn't work for you.
Marco:
I really want to know because every time I've had somebody do this or I've done it myself...
Marco:
You do it in an hour, you realize, oh, that's pretty much it.
Marco:
I'm pretty much done.
Marco:
And then you can move on.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
Squarespace.com, offer code ATP to get 10% off.
Marco:
Squarespace, make your next move.
Casey:
I wanted to cover something before we go too big into the last 48 hours worth of announcements.
Casey:
There was a little bit of talk, but not a lot, about the Apple shareholder diversity proposal.
Casey:
And this always struck me as a little weird.
Casey:
And how Apple's handling it is a little weird.
Casey:
But if you recall, for the last couple of shareholder meetings, maybe even several now, there's been some sort of, and I don't know the appropriate terminology, but there's been a thing that they had to vote on that shareholders had petitioned Apple for, where the general premise of this particular thing they're voting on is to adopt an accelerated recruitment policy to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors.
Casey:
That's actually coming off a Verge article put in the show notes.
Casey:
and this has been voted down yet again and i i have mixed feelings about this which i probably shouldn't because on the one side i feel like well they have an executive team that everyone but marco thinks is working okay it seems a little silly to just throw one or more of them out for the sake of diversity but but on the other side of the coin
Casey:
Diversity is a good thing.
Casey:
I think that having a more diverse executive team might help get rid of some of these issues that we've seen.
Casey:
I don't know which one specifically, but just a different thing.
Casey:
I was going to say outside the box thinking, but it's not even outside the box thinking, just different thinking could be helpful, which to Marco's credit is, I think, a lot of the point that you were trying to make last week.
Casey:
I'm disappointed by this.
Casey:
I'm not entirely surprised that this is the way the vote came.
Casey:
And I know that Apple was pushing pretty hard for shareholders to say no to this.
Casey:
And so I am disappointed.
Casey:
I'm not surprised, but I'm disappointed.
Casey:
And I kind of wish that Apple would say...
Casey:
something more directly about their lack of diversity really across the company, but particularly amongst executives.
Casey:
And yes, I'm aware that they've been making this big push for diversity, or so they say, but I feel like it's not really hitting the upper echelons of Apple, and that's not a good thing.
Casey:
And I guess maybe my conflicting feelings are just about, I think it would be good to do what this
Casey:
what this shareholder whatever is trying to do this just seems like a peculiar way to go about doing it but i guess this is the only way a shareholder can force apple's hand i don't know it's i know that's very muddy and gray but do you guys have any thoughts on this well they're not this thing doesn't ask them to throw out executives like that's not the choice they're making here oh adopt this proposal and you have to can one of your top executives no they totally don't um
John:
I think we talked about this maybe one of the earlier times that it came up, and I think the situation is still the same.
John:
And it boils down to companies don't like being told what to do, right?
John:
So the fact that this is a shareholder proposal and that it's coming from the outside and that these shareholders are trying to say, Apple, you should do this specific thing.
John:
I think just institutionally, all corporations are like, you're not the boss of me.
John:
And Apple's answer is always this weird sort of...
John:
It's vaguely hostile mumbo jumbo to say, like, we already have we already have our own initiatives about diversity that are actually broader than this very narrow proposal.
John:
Therefore, we reject it.
John:
But every time I look at this thing, go, I have to think, like, it's this this is not even actually about diversity.
John:
It is totally about diversity.
John:
the idea that big companies and especially apple their default position on every single shareholder proposal is no no no no we have a board of directors we are the bosses of ourselves even though you technically own the company or some large portion of the company through your shares or whatever there are not enough of you there is not enough of a coalition to make it worth our while to listen to you you cannot tell us what to do and it doesn't matter what it's about whether it's about you know renewable energy or
John:
uh executive compensation or diversity over the years uh looking at these type of proposals and seeing all the stories about like just apple apple always advises to reject all of them and it's kind of a shame that this one is specifically about diversity i'm not sure i'm not sure if the proposal it would be better or worse uh
John:
at advancing the cause of diversity within Apple than what Apple is already doing.
John:
It's difficult to tell because again, these are, you tend to be very focused and kind of not vindictive, but like, like, come on, Apple, you gotta, whatever you're doing, it's taking too long and it is being ineffective.
John:
So here is a more aggressive thing that,
John:
And that may or may not have as much regard for the success of the company overall, but just saying, look, Apple, you got to get off your butt.
John:
So it could be the most important function of these is to let Apple know and know in certain terms that they're not doing a good enough job.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's why enough shareholders got together to make this proposal to vote on it.
John:
Apple's still going to recommend against it, and Apple's still going to think their plan is good, but hopefully the message is getting through that whatever it is that you're doing, you're not doing it fast enough or well enough.
John:
But I continue to think that Apple will reject every single one of these proposals.
John:
Apple will encourage the rest of the shareholders to reject them either, because these go up for a vote for all the shareholders, and Apple has a recommendation.
John:
We think shareholders should vote this down, and in the end, they tend to because...
John:
The shareholders of Apple, you know, at a certain point, it's a small number of very rich shareholders who are inclined to do what the corporation says versus a much larger number of not quite as rich shareholders who are backing this type of proposal.
John:
So it is kind of a difficult and uncomfortable situation.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I think Apple should be getting the message, and Apple needs to change what it's doing, even if it continues to encourage its shareholders to vote these down, and those shareholders continue to do so.
Casey:
It's just a tough situation, and I wish that there was an easy turnkey answer, but I just wanted to call attention to that.
Casey:
So breaking news, just before we recorded, in a rare stroke of good luck for ATP, it seems that Apple, clearly the executives listen to this program because we're getting a new Mac Pro.
Casey:
Wait, never mind.
Casey:
I guess they don't listen.
Casey:
But anyway, the Apple executives seem to always want to do Apple News on Thursdays, which is the day after we record.
Casey:
But in a rare stroke of good luck on this evening, like an hour or two before we started recording,
Casey:
It was announced, and I first saw it on TechCrunch by a friend of the show, Matt Panzarino, that Apple has bought the app and the company that makes it called Workflow, which if you listen to any of the shows of some of our friends, you'll know that people like Mike Hurley and Federico Vatici, for example, are huge into Workflow.
Casey:
I've used it a bunch.
Casey:
I really like it.
Casey:
I'm nowhere near their level, but I do like it and use it.
Casey:
And this is just whether or not workflow has a place in your life, it is a phenomenally impressive app.
Casey:
And basically, it's sort of kind of like Automator is on OS X or excuse me, Mac OS.
Casey:
That's not a truly fair analogy, but sort of that kind of thing where you have a series of different actions that you can string together, also vaguely similar to if this and that.
Casey:
And you can string these actions together to create workflows and to do these just unbelievably complex things.
Casey:
So Apple has bought Workflow, and I guess the three founders of the company are going to be working for Apple.
Casey:
And that's really, really exciting.
Casey:
Now, I'm also hearing breaking news that I haven't yet confirmed that apparently they've already made the app free.
Casey:
Good.
Casey:
Good.
Casey:
But they're already removing Chrome support and Street View actions because Apple.
Marco:
Well, actually, there might be something else to that.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So a couple of weeks ago, or yeah, recently, like a week ago or something like that, I got an email from Workflow.
Marco:
And I don't want to go into too many of the details because I don't know if they wanted this to be public or not.
Marco:
So I'll try to be tasteful here.
Marco:
But basically...
Marco:
Workflow has supported Overcast's URL scheme for quite some time.
Marco:
And I got an email basically from asking me to sign a legal document that basically says it's okay for them to call my app via its URL schemes.
Marco:
Something on the lines of like, if you want us to continue supporting this in the future, please sign this document.
Marco:
My best guess at the time, which turned out to be true, is that somebody is about to invest a lot of money in them or acquire them and is doing due diligence.
Marco:
And somebody's lawyer told the somebody with all the money buying them or investing in them, you know, they should really shore this up in some kind of legal fashion to make sure that none of the apps that workflow calls via URL schemes would later threaten them in any legal way for using like an undocumented API or using an API without permission or something like that.
Marco:
My best guess with the immediate removal of the Google-related features is not that Apple is being a jerk to Google, but that Google probably just didn't respond and didn't even consider signing this document.
Marco:
Because, like, it was basically a very, very simple but still legal...
Marco:
contract-like document.
Marco:
I'm not a lawyer.
Marco:
I can't tell you exactly what it was, but it looked like a very simple contract.
Marco:
So you would imagine emailing Google to say, hey, sign this contract, please, so we can keep calling you from our iOS app.
Marco:
I don't think that's going to be a high priority for Google's legal department to review.
John:
But they're usually so responsive to people who email them.
Marco:
It's so out of character for them.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So basically, I'm guessing that... Again, this is not some kind of like Apple immediately being a jerk to Google because they're Google.
Marco:
It's probably Google didn't feel like it was worth responding to that or hasn't gotten to it yet or legal decided it wasn't worth the legal implications of it.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
After the acquisition, Apple probably just says, all right, well, this is your deadline that anybody, just for legal protection reasons for themselves, anybody who hasn't signed this document saying you can call their secret APIs or URL schemes or whatever, you can't do it anymore.
Casey:
That's an interesting take.
John:
Yeah.
John:
After saw this acquisition, what I immediately felt was I felt bad for Vitici and Mike and all the other workflow enthusiasts because when Apple buys a company that does something like this,
John:
It can go a couple different ways.
John:
It can be what they call an acquihire, where the whole point is they're just buying it to get these employees who have proven that they're really, really good iOS developers.
John:
And so we, Apple, we would love really good iOS developers.
John:
Let's buy the company.
John:
And now we've got those developers.
John:
And then the product just gets sunsetted.
John:
becomes free it hangs out for a while is it sunset sunset yeah and then it just goes away other possibilities like what they did with test flight where they buy it and it continues to exist but now as an apple internal thing but here's the deal even in that scenario
John:
Apple's priorities are different than the priorities of an independent workflow company, even for strategy tax things like even though this Chrome thing is probably not that right.
John:
But Apple has different priorities, different things are important to Apple as the platform owner than they are someone writing application on the platform.
John:
So.
John:
Even in the best case, workflow is going to change in ways that are better for Apple and probably not better for existing workflow customers.
John:
It could change in ways that are better for both because now workflow has access to private APIs and knows about the roadmap or whatever.
John:
Workflow itself could be integrated into the next major version of iOS as a core feature of the OS.
John:
to stop being an independent application or become a bundled application.
John:
Like there are good scenarios to this, but either way, it is a disruption to the workflow of all the people who use this application as part of their daily work.
John:
Even if you just have to rejigger all your scripts and change things around.
John:
So...
John:
i there there may be it may be a really bad situation for people who love workflow but as someone who's has workflow and uses a little bit but don't have my work is not intimately tied into it um i think i'm hoping that it is a yet another sign that apple is trying to do things to make ios a more powerful platform for people with more demanding needs because i
John:
I don't want to believe that it was purely these guys are good iOS developers, get them and have them do something.
John:
I want to believe it's because they recognize that the people who are using iOS devices in the most sophisticated way love workflow.
John:
And that's something those capabilities should be part of the operating system to make.
John:
ios on the ipad or even on the phone for that matter a more capable system so i i think overall it's encouraging but for anybody who really really love workflow i think the the very near future is either slightly painful or very grim but the longer term future for the platform i think is better
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's right.
Marco:
I mean, the way Workflow... You know, Workflow has a lot of different features these days.
Marco:
But kind of the core of it and the first part of it, before it had all these new API-related features, was it was just calling URL schemes for apps and using xCallbackURL and everything else.
Marco:
And, you know, xCallbackURL... I don't say this to brag.
Marco:
I say this as historical context...
Marco:
um greg pierce and i actually invented that that's um greg pierce is the developer of drafts and and also a couple other apps and one of them is terminology and which is like it's like a fancy dictionary app basically uh and back in 2010 uh he contacted me asking like is there a way that we can make instapaper basically shell out to terminology for its dictionary lookups and
Marco:
And we basically went back and forth over a couple days via email and worked out this URL scheme called xCallback.
Marco:
And it had these parameters.
Marco:
And it was basically the first thing I knew of on iOS where there was a defined protocol that you could launch.
Marco:
You could shell out to another app via URL scheme and give that app a way to call you back when it's done.
Marco:
At the time, I think both of us looked at this as a tremendous hack.
Marco:
And it became big anyway.
Marco:
And Greg went and really kind of took the ball and ran with it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But even back then, this was 2010, remember, even back then, I think both Greg and I looked at it as this is really a temporary need.
Marco:
That surely in the future, iOS is going to add some better ways of inter-app communication and scripting and things like that.
Marco:
Other ways to solve this problem that isn't calling URL schemes in the background and launching apps and then kicking you between different apps and having them all come to the foreground for a second and then kick you back.
Marco:
That is kind of a terrible hack.
Marco:
Um, and now, uh, you know, almost seven years later, uh, iOS has added extensions, which helped tremendously, but only in certain ways, like only in the, in the extension points and only in the very strict ways those are defined and in the very limited areas that they exist in.
Marco:
So extensions help a little, but what they need is something bigger.
Marco:
And on the Mac, they have the entire AppleScript interface, not to mention everything from the Unix system below it, all the different scripting and IPC mechanisms that are all over Mac OS.
Marco:
The Mac has this very well covered, but iOS still really doesn't.
Marco:
So there is very much a need...
Marco:
If Apple wants to keep pushing iOS into productivity, which is especially important for the iPad business, I'd say, and it sure wouldn't hurt the iPhone business either, but if Apple wants to push people into more productivity use on iOS...
Marco:
They need automation systems like this.
Marco:
They need mechanisms in the OS itself for apps to communicate with each other, automate each other, and for users to help define, write, and edit, and chain together those automations.
Marco:
And again, on the Mac, they have all this already.
Marco:
They've had it for years, decades even.
Marco:
If I was a user of Workflow, I would not feel great about the future of that app right now because...
Marco:
In any acquisition, the future of the app that... And this is, I think, clearly mostly an acquihire.
Marco:
In the official story to the press, I think they said it wasn't, but I think it pretty clearly is.
Marco:
Everyone always says it isn't.
Marco:
Everyone always says their product is going to keep going indefinitely and it's going to be wonderful.
Marco:
We have a great plan for the future.
Marco:
And then it gets sunset.
Marco:
So I would not depend on this app being there in, say, a year or two.
Marco:
But I do think that there's a good chance that the reason they bought this app and the reason they hired this talented team who's really good at iOS automation probably has something to do with an effort to improve iOS automation at the system level.
Marco:
And again, I think pretty much everything John said, I agree with that.
Marco:
I would not expect this app to continue to exist in two years, say.
Marco:
I would bet that... It's too late probably for iOS 11, but I would bet by iOS 12 or 13, there is some kind of system or new technology in the OS that is...
Marco:
better in some way at automation than URL schemes and things like that, which would make, say, 70% of workflow unnecessary.
Marco:
And Apple would consider that good enough, and then they would kill the app.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
My first reaction is, oh, this app is going away immediately.
Casey:
And then as I thought more about it, I thought, you know, the most obvious answer to me is what you said, Marco, which is it'll get sucked into iOS maybe in 12, if not 11, or whatever we're on now.
Casey:
God, I'm losing track.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
It'll get sucked into some version of it.
Casey:
Yeah, thank you.
Casey:
It'll get sucked into some version of iOS and then it'll go away and that'll be that.
Casey:
But then I got thinking about it more.
Casey:
And the reason I felt like it would get sucked into iOS is because it feels like this is wrong for Apple to make an app that is so feature rich and offers so much functionality that isn't part of the OS itself.
Casey:
And that very well still could be.
Casey:
But then I got to thinking about like iMovie or GarageBand or, you know, some of these other apps like that.
Casey:
And it occurred to me that, you know, those are pretty full featured apps.
Casey:
And yeah, it's less of a system level thing.
Casey:
Like the problem domain, I think, is a little more bounded.
Casey:
But they're really, really big, complex, kind of intense apps that are Apple-branded but are downloaded optionally from the App Store.
Casey:
And so this may not be any different.
Casey:
I'm disappointed, but like you said, Marco, maybe it's for good reason that some of the third-party stuff is already getting neutered.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
And I'm pretty optimistic about this, probably in part because I don't rely on it to get my job done.
Casey:
But I'm pretty optimistic about this because it's kind of a win-win, right?
Casey:
Either a lot of this functionality gets built into iOS and makes iOS more powerful, or if it's kept in some vague form like it is today, well, it's a great darn app.
Casey:
And so that's a win, too.
Casey:
So I'm very tentatively optimistic about this.
Marco:
Well, and the other thing that people, that workflow users, I think, should find somewhat comforting,
Marco:
is that most of the app, you know, it's not doing things that only these developers and only this app could do.
Marco:
It's doing things that are possible for anyone else to step in and recreate with a new app.
Marco:
I don't say this to insult the app or to say that it was easy to make, but that it is a combination of things that each one of which is fairly easy.
Marco:
And so, like most apps, honestly...
Marco:
But the point is, if workflow disappears, if it shuts down or it is made to suck in a way that people find intolerable, there will be a new one.
Marco:
Someone else will make a new one.
Marco:
It might take a few months, but someone else will make a new one.
Marco:
Because there's clearly a market demand for it.
Marco:
And these are high-end, technical, and very devoted users.
Marco:
If workflow disappears, there's going to immediately be a...
Marco:
not massive but very passionate and very desperate market who would probably pay like 10 15 20 bucks for an ios app to replace it uh so i wouldn't worry too much about that unless apple actually starts prohibiting apps that are like this which would be possible that is certainly a risk i wouldn't say it's incredibly likely but it's it's certainly a risk but anyway um you
Marco:
basically workflow people there might be some disruption and i don't mean that in the tech guy sense i mean that in like the literal meaning of the word there might be some disruption to your workflows i'm sorry but god this is a terrible phrase in this market uh but uh i think in the long run you'll be okay so we brought up test flight already which is i think one of the most uh
John:
the best example of an application that was bought and content didn't even change the icon did they the test flight continues to be called test flight yeah as as a separate application and apple uses it for the purpose the test flight was created so it's like it survived the acquisition right um and then of course your applications that totally go away or become free and disappear uh serenity colwell just pointed out on twitter that siri siri was an independent company by the people you know like
John:
same thing it they had an application on the store and it went free when it got bought back in 2010 but eventually it got rolled into the os so that's another possibility for this is that you know we we hope that this what this means is uh that apple wants to make automation better on ios like it's that seems clear like why you know in some fashion whether you're just gonna have these people do a new thing or you're
John:
with a different icon perhaps bundled with the os perhaps free downloadable uh you know as an apple branded thing until the big new we have big improvements automation come in ios 12 or something so it could be the application like becomes part of the os in terms of uh
John:
It's still called workflow.
John:
It still more or less works the same.
John:
Maybe gets a new coat of paint.
John:
And while that sits there doing its thing, those people who made that application are working on the next big thing in terms of automating workflows.
John:
Maybe incorporate, maybe, you know, working in conjunction with whatever...
John:
possible multitasking improvements that may be coming into ios that we'll see this summer or whatever so there are a lot of possibilities and i see all of them point towards to me anyway automation becoming better on the mac but it's really especially with the portability like will my workflows port over to the new apple one will my workflows carry over to the new world of automation that's going to happen in ios 12 who knows but i think i think things are going in the right direction even though it might be a little painful short term did you mean ios there you said the mac
John:
Yeah, yeah, I know.
John:
I got Mac on the brain.
John:
Yep, you know, just replace what I said with the words you know that I meant.
Marco:
We're sponsored this week by HelloFresh.
Marco:
Go to HelloFresh.com and for $35 off your first week of deliveries, use code ATP when you subscribe.
Marco:
Whether you're a busy couple or a large family or someone who just simply wants to start cooking more, HelloFresh makes it easier, tastier, and healthier than ever to enjoy the experience of cooking new recipes and eating together at home.
Marco:
From creating the recipes and planning the meals to grocery shopping and even delivering all the pre-measured ingredients to you, HelloFresh delivers right to your door so you can skip the trip to the shop.
Marco:
They currently offer customers a classic box, veggie box, or family box with three, four, or five different meals per week and either two or four people's worth of food.
Marco:
There's lots of options for whatever you need.
Marco:
And new recipes are created every week by their full-time registered dieticians on staff who review each recipe to ensure it's nutritionally balanced.
Marco:
All this food gets delivered to your doorstep in a special insulated box for free, and they source the freshest ingredients measured to the exact quantities you need so there's no food waste.
Marco:
These meals take only about 30 minutes for everyone from novices to seasoned home cooks, and they give you step-by-step instruction cards so you know exactly what to do.
Marco:
There's pictures.
Marco:
It's very clear.
Marco:
There's no confusion.
Marco:
I've tried HelloFresh, and I absolutely love how nice it is to cook at home and to have these things delivered to you, ready to go, these meals ready to cook in the nice little pre-proportioned ingredient packages and everything.
Marco:
It's just really nice to cook this way.
Marco:
It kind of forces you to step out of your comfort zone a little bit and learn new recipes, and that's great too.
Marco:
And you don't have to figure out what to eat every single night of every single week.
Marco:
You can just have them choose for you, which is kind of nice when you're busy.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
Go to HelloFresh.com and for $35 off your first week, enter code ATP when you subscribe.
Marco:
Once again, HelloFresh.com and for $35 off your first week, enter code ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so there was yesterday, and we've made several references to this already in this episode.
Casey:
Yesterday, there was an announcement or a series of announcements of new Apple products.
Casey:
And so I'm going to try to run through just a very high level each of them, and then we'll step in and do a deeper dive through each of them after that.
Casey:
So there's now a red iPhone 7.
Casey:
It is a product red, which means some subset of this money is donated towards AIDS research, et cetera, et cetera.
John:
Except in China.
Casey:
Except in China, which we'll get to in a minute.
Marco:
Well, I think they actually got clarification on that.
Marco:
I think Cook gave some statement to somebody somewhere saying that actually, yes, a portion of the proceeds are also being donated from China sales.
Marco:
I think it just isn't branded as such.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Casey:
That makes you feel a little better.
Casey:
There's a couple of new iPhone SE storage sizes.
Casey:
As far as anyone can tell, the internals are otherwise identical.
Casey:
But the SE no longer has the 16 gig option, which means that there are no more 16 gig iOS devices.
Casey:
John Syracuse, how happy are you right now?
John:
I should have looked up the timelines for this.
John:
Like, how long did we have to wait from the first introduction of 16 gig to it disappearing?
John:
It's taken long enough, but I'm glad it's happened.
John:
Although, Apple always manages to frustrate me with the sizes because they changed it now.
John:
What is the SE comes in 32 and 128?
John:
It's like, boy, 64 seems like the perfect size, but nope, nope, you got to pick 32, which at this point, it doesn't feel as small as 16, obviously, like 32 is great, right?
John:
It's huge, you know, kudos to getting rid of the 16 gigabyte finally, but for me personally, like...
John:
I'd be like, oh, 64, if I was recommending it for somebody, I would say, well, 32 will be fine, right?
John:
And 128 is probably too much.
John:
64 would be great, but now they just skip that size.
John:
So, I mean, that's part of the strategy.
John:
They want you to step up.
John:
They want you to pay the premium that you pay for the larger size.
John:
But I'm glad that 32 is no longer ridiculously, painfully, way too small.
John:
So, thank goodness.
Casey:
All right, there's a new 9.7-inch iPad.
Casey:
Everything that's old is new again.
Casey:
We've gone from iPad to iPad 2 or something like that.
Casey:
I forget the timeline, but it's ridiculous.
Casey:
iPad with Retina Display to iPad Air and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
You forgot iPad 4th generation and iPad Air 2.
Marco:
So this, the seventh iPad, is called the iPad 5th generation.
John:
yeah remember the new ipad yes that was the original name for the ipad 3 yep they're just called the new ipad yeah anyway this this new ipad is uh is the basic spec bump and price drop which would be boring i think if it wasn't seemingly so rare these days because you either get a spec bump with a price increase or it just something just lingers on but this is like the old style it's like we make it faster because new stuff is available and
John:
And it's like the middle-of-the-road product, so we can actually make it a little bit cheaper because there's just not much in there, and it's not getting the top-of-the-line system on a chip.
John:
It's getting a better one.
John:
So I think this 9.7-inch iPad has become more attractive to people who...
John:
uh would otherwise buy you know who are who are shopping for a full-size ipad but don't need an ipad pro especially the education because they've they've brought it down below the magic 300 mark so it's it's 299 uh for education buyers uh and it's it's thicker than the one that it replaces um presumably it's got a little bit more battery the system on a chip is faster but not as fast as it could be uh so it looks like a good middle-of-the-road big ipad
Marco:
Yeah, so when this was first announced, I was kind of puzzled.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, that's kind of weak.
Marco:
But if for some reason I had mis-parsed the price in my head as $4.29, it's actually $3.29.
Marco:
And that's actually a bigger deal on the price point than I originally thought.
Marco:
And as we get more detail on it, it seems like it's kind of arguable whether it's like a spec-bumped Air 2 or whether it's more of a cut-down 9.7 Pro.
Marco:
It's kind of in the middle, really, with some new ways to cut the price down.
Marco:
It only has the...
Marco:
The two speakers, like the older iPads, it does not have the laminated screen.
Marco:
When the Pros came out, they came with this really nice, beautiful laminated screen where there's a smaller or basically zero screen gap between the glass and the screen.
Marco:
And the iPhone did this a couple versions back, too.
Marco:
And the iPad finally did it, I think, with the 9.7 Pro, if not the Air 2.0.
Marco:
And anyway, so this one has the old style screen where there's like that gap there.
Marco:
It's kind of a visible gap between the glass and the screen.
Marco:
So there's things like that where it's cut down and it lacks all the pro, you know, the quote iPad Pro feature.
Marco:
So it does not have pencil support.
Marco:
It doesn't have a smart connector.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For a lot of iPad buyers, that's pretty great.
Marco:
For $329, it's an amazing value compared to the rest of the lineup.
Marco:
Whether you think it's an amazing value compared to other tablets, like from Amazon or other Android weirdos, that's up to you.
Marco:
It probably isn't, but oh well, I don't think Apple cares.
Marco:
But compared to other iPads, it's a fantastic value for the money.
Marco:
As long as you don't need any of those pro features, but
Marco:
I think if you're willing to drop $160 on a keyboard, you probably aren't that price sensitive about the purchase price of the initial iPad.
Marco:
It's obviously being targeted strongly at educational buyers, but I think it'll also just be a really good entry-level iPad.
Marco:
I think that's going to be, you know, they're probably going to sell a lot of these things.
Marco:
And the fact that it has fairly modern internals is really nice from a user perspective, from a developer perspective.
Marco:
It's really, really nice.
Marco:
I mean, to me, oh, and also I wanted to point out, Stephen Hackett wrote a wonderful article on 512 pixels citing the interesting marketing copy differences between the way Apple brands this new cheaper iPad versus the way they brand the 9.7 Pro.
Marco:
And this new cheap one is all about fun.
Marco:
It's like, you know, casual fun and games.
Marco:
And the pros like this is your new supercomputer.
Marco:
It's like totally different marketing guidelines.
Marco:
But I think that makes sense for how they're targeting it.
Marco:
The only major question I have about it.
Marco:
is it kind of leaves the iPad mini in a weird spot because they also discontinued the old mini.
Marco:
So now there's only one iPad mini available.
Marco:
It's more expensive than this.
Marco:
It's the $400 mini 4 128 gig.
Marco:
And so this, to me, kind of looks like...
Marco:
This is their gradual way of maybe killing the Mini?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But this new 9.7 is now, I think, better than that Mini in most ways.
Marco:
And this is clearly their new entry-level iPad.
Marco:
So I don't think the Mini has a lot of places to go anymore.
Marco:
But I don't know.
John:
uh i've never been a big fan of the mini and if it's not going to be cheaper than this then i don't know uh why anyone would be uh into it unless they really love that size but i mean in all fairness they do still sell the ipod touch yeah i was gonna say by the way there is actually one 16 gigabyte model that the ipod touch which everyone forgets exists is still available in 16 even apple forgets it exists it almost doesn't count but hey you know what you can get the ipod touch and you can get it in 16 32 64 and 128 no gaps no 256 model but whatever um
John:
So for this iPad, this I think is one of the things that we on the show, at least, would probably love it if Apple did with its laptop or desktop line, which is take a middle-of-the-road model and make it...
John:
cheaper and thicker like trade like bring the price down you know make something that is you know make it more powerful bring the price down by sacrificing the like the nice to have the laminated screen the couple of millimeters uh of thickness the little bit of extra weight in exchange for like in in this class like do you need the fanciest most laminated screen do you need true tone
John:
Wouldn't you just rather have a machine that is like a hundred bucks cheaper, but also pretty darn fast and sacrifice like a millimeter of thickness?
John:
Yes.
John:
Like that's what a middle of the road model should be.
John:
It makes the expensive one look like, what am I getting for money?
John:
You're getting fancier crap, right?
John:
It is actually faster.
John:
It's nicer.
John:
It's, it's, it's got the laminated screen on it.
John:
It's got the smart connector or whatever.
John:
You see what you're paying for there, but it is a thing that gets bumped and doesn't just, you know, it's not like the iPad two that stays the same and it's just like super crappy and you feel like you're getting a terrible model.
John:
um and the fact that they made this thicker like i think that's great that's exactly what we're looking for please make those trade-offs in the middle models to make a machine that has better it gives people better value for the money and so i'm encouraged by this and i think someone pointed out that the the ipad line is now much simplified over its previous thing now we have two ipad pros one of which is a little creaky we'll talk about later two ipad pros the big one and the small one and then you have two other ipads which are not pros the big one and the small one and it's weird that the mini is called like
John:
the ipad mini 4 and i agree that it's a weird product in it with a weird price and maybe it will go away or maybe it itself will get bumped in the same way and that it will there will be a faster mini 4 that is cheaper and that sacrifices i don't know what you can sacrifice what's left to sacrifice on the mini i don't know um but overall i think this was a good announcement and especially especially for education i think they need to drive it down farther uh for that purposes like kind of like the ipad 2 was in the end of its life when it was just so
John:
incredibly behind the times that they could probably sell it to education for much less money.
John:
But anyway, thumbs up.
Casey:
So continuing with the summary, and then we'll come back and talk about each one individually, like I said.
John:
No, that's not happening.
John:
I was not on board with that plan.
John:
But I did like the fact that we cruised through the red iPhone and the SE with appropriate speed.
John:
We don't need to circle back to them.
John:
It's red.
John:
It looks cool.
John:
It's nice.
Marco:
Yeah, so I guess since we're talking about this now, sorry, Casey.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
John:
You deserve this for all your follow-up complaints.
Marco:
Yeah, the red iPhone.
Marco:
It's nice that it's product red.
Marco:
This is, you know, as you mentioned about the charitable donation part of this, it is nice that they finally, for the very first time, brought that to their most profitable product, the iPhone.
Marco:
Like, I guess maybe back in the iPod days it might have been.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
It's been a while.
Marco:
You've been able to get red stuff from Apple.
Marco:
The red iPod Touch has been there for a while, which, by the way, looks a lot like the new red iPhone.
Marco:
You had the product red watch bands, stuff like that.
Marco:
It's really nice to be able to finally get it on the iPhone.
Marco:
I hope... Basically, before we saw the 7 and there were some rumors of new colors, I believe I made some comment back then about how I would love for them to replace all of the old metal colors, like the silver, space gray, gold, rose gold.
Marco:
Those all, I think, look stale to me now.
Marco:
All four of those, I would say, look fairly...
Marco:
overdone and dated these days on most of the products, especially the iPhone.
Marco:
So to have new colors is very, very welcome.
Marco:
And I think this phone looks great.
Marco:
I do think it looks a little bit like the old iPod Touch to an uncomfortable degree.
Marco:
And I agree with Mike's complaint that it should definitely have a red circle around the Touch ID button because all the other phones have metal color matching circles.
Casey:
It should also have a black front.
Casey:
I do not like white-fronted phones.
John:
i don't like white fronts for the things but a lot of people do so like if they're not going to make it in two colors like hey here's a red back and a black front and a red black and a white front like they have to pick one of them and it's just a personal taste thing honestly i think the white front looks really good i would never want to own it for the reasons i've talked about before by putting some a reflective white surface next to the screen just makes your screen look dingier because it can never compare to the sun shining off a white thing like i think it's a
John:
i don't want it but it's totally personal preference i think it looks i think it looks really it looks like a christmas phone looks like a piece of candy i've always people say it in like a bad way like oh this looks like the ipod touches the ipod touches look cool i and you know and because this is entirely a fashion thing and a taste thing i i have no complaints about the white front despite the fact that i would never ever ever buy one because
John:
you know they they make phones that some people are gonna like how it looks that's why they make them in different colors the whole point of different colors you don't like this color pick a different color and i love the fact that now there is a color that is not silver black or some tint thereof like it is a bold color for a phone and last time we saw that was like the 5c i guess which i thought were also really fun
Marco:
Well, I would say Jet Black was a bold color of that scale.
Marco:
It wasn't expected.
Marco:
You can get any bold color as long as it's black.
Marco:
It wasn't something that I would have predicted or expected how good it ended up being.
Marco:
But I would say Jet Black is one of those game-changer colors that really did feel new and awesome.
Marco:
That being said, I do wish this was jet red.
Marco:
I wish it had the finish of the jet black, the tacky, because it would increase grip and everything, and I think it might look a little bit more modern.
John:
It would look more like the 5C, which was also very glossy in color.
Marco:
Yeah, but more saturated and newer and thinner and everything else.
Marco:
I think that would help but not look like an old iPod Touch.
Marco:
But I do think this is overall a very nice looking phone.
Marco:
The timing is interesting of it being mid-cycle.
Marco:
This is about when they launched the SE last year, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is, you know, the cynical take on this is this is a nice way for them to boost sales in a very slow, traditionally quarter.
Marco:
You know, it's a nice way for them to boost sales on their most profitable product line.
John:
I wish they did this more often.
John:
Like, who would complain if they treated the phone back like watch bands?
John:
Like, just throughout the year, every couple months came out with different colors of phones.
John:
Because, I mean...
John:
It's, you know, it gives them the freedom to have lots of different ideas.
John:
And honestly, it does get people more excited because phones are very much faster than accessories.
John:
And if you can come out with different colors in different parts of the year, people are like, it does renew your interest in getting the phones, especially if you see the phones and you're like...
John:
I don't know if I need a new phone.
John:
I'm not sure I like all these new colors, especially if they're the same as last year where it's like gold, rose gold, and maybe you don't like the jet black or whatever.
John:
If you knew you could wait three months and there would be like, you know, a teal one or a purple one or a yellow one.
John:
I mean, I still see five C's that are white and I'm like, that's a cool looking phone, right?
John:
Um, it,
Marco:
you know if it's fashion and the watches certainly are and the phone is at this point too by all means do this as many times as you want apple i think it's i think it's great yeah also by the way i think a jet white phone like with the same finish but in white that would look amazing oh yeah um but yeah how are you allowed to say that and i'm sitting here quietly come on you're thinking it's a jet white phone with a black front on it though i guess but i don't know that's true but
Marco:
Well, I think that would look better.
Marco:
I agree with you.
Marco:
I think the red with the white front, I think that does look better, even though I agree also that I wouldn't want the white front.
Marco:
But I think a black back, or I mean a white back, I think would only look good with a black front.
Marco:
Anyway.
John:
Yeah, it's a Stormtrooper phone.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Anyway.
Casey:
I'm Marco Armin, and I want a white phone.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
You're killing me.
John:
That's because it's in a pleasing shape, so it does look good in white.
Casey:
Ooh.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
What do I do to deserve this?
Casey:
I just try to keep you two in line.
John:
It's not to deserve it.
John:
That's just the foundational theory of white cars.
John:
Have we not gone over this?
Casey:
No, we have.
Casey:
We have.
Casey:
I think we started with this.
Casey:
I think we did.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, I hope – I would just love to see more color in Apple's line in general.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
So I hope they keep this up.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
I don't really – I'm not going to go trade in my still perfectly fine working iPhone 7 that's halfway through its cycle for this.
Marco:
But if I were buying new today, I'd seriously consider it.
Marco:
Although, ultimately, I still want the grip of the Jet Black finish.
Marco:
So I would probably still decide against it.
Marco:
But give me Jet Red and Jet White, and we'll talk.
Marco:
But anyway, I hope this fall, when presumably new iPhones come out again, although it's hard to say with Apple when things will come out, but presumably this fall, I hope they continue, even with the new products, to offer cool new colors.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Casey:
I really like the look of this.
Casey:
I really do wish it was a black front.
Casey:
There's something to be said for white perhaps being a better match.
Casey:
But the back of this does look awesome.
Casey:
And they've also released a couple of new colors for iPhone cases.
Casey:
And I believe it was Sapphire on screen anyway.
Casey:
It looked really nice.
Casey:
I haven't seen it in person.
Casey:
And they've also released a bunch of new watch bands, which largely match the case colors.
Casey:
They've also started selling Nike Plus bands separately, which if you want something that is, for the most part, visually extremely loud...
Marco:
power to you i guess and now you can buy the band as a sport band having all those holes in it is really nice for ventilation because the regular sport band is pretty sweaty because it just you know that solid surface that does not breathe at all so the nike bands actually are nicer for sport use for any kind of you know if you're going to be hot and sweaty um if they're way nicer because they have those holes my wife picked that when she bought her watch she bought the nike plus one and i think in part because of the she didn't get like the neon one but the holes and she's she likes it
Marco:
Yeah, like, you know, it does look like some kind of crazy alien creature, but it is highly functional.
Marco:
But anyway, one more thing before we get off the phone, the red phone.
Marco:
One angle I think might be interesting to consider, or I guess we'll see, is like... So there's two cynical takes in this.
Marco:
One I mentioned, you know, to boost sales in a slow quarter.
Marco:
The second is...
Marco:
Will they release a product red phone with the charitable donation portion of its profits during the peak season in the holidays?
Marco:
Like, will they release it on day one, basically, for the next phone?
Marco:
Because that could cost them more money in donations.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that I hope they would say, you know what, it's worth it.
Marco:
And knowing Tim Cook, I think they probably would.
Marco:
You know...
Marco:
Tim Cook, he cares a lot about charitable causes and things that are good for the world and for people's health and everything else.
Marco:
So I can see him saying, you know what, screw it, we'll take the hit.
Marco:
But it's so much money at that scale during the peak quarter that it might be a tricky balance.
John:
Well, it did.
John:
Back in the day, they did introduce several iPods at the time when the iPod was still a very important product that when a new line came out, it would come with the product red one.
John:
Like there was no delay like what you're talking about.
John:
Here are the new iPod nanos and you can get these five colors plus product red.
John:
That happened routinely.
John:
I know because my wife bought a lot of the red ones because they were cool and they were red.
John:
So I totally think they'll do it.
John:
I think it's just a question of like manufacturing ramps and how many different colors they can handle and being able to deal with multiple SKUs and the color variant.
John:
Like we always have problems with that.
John:
Like no matter how well they try to predict what the color mix will be, they're always off by a little bit.
John:
And at the scales they do it, it makes people frustrated.
John:
They got to like look for a jet black one or remember when people couldn't find the gold phones for the very first gold one.
John:
It's difficult.
John:
So I feel like if they don't do it, it will mostly be for inventory control reasons.
Yeah.
Casey:
Clips for iOS, a forthcoming app that will – how are they pitching this?
Casey:
It will basically let you make little videos.
Casey:
And I think it's apple.com slash clips.
Casey:
We'll have a link in the show notes.
Marco:
It's like Snapchat for old.
John:
But it's not like Snapchat.
John:
No, I know.
John:
To many people who have heard from Apple about this topic –
John:
This appears to be surprisingly to, you know, we were all looking at the announcements yesterday.
John:
Surprisingly, perhaps the most important announcement from Apple's perspective of all the things we just listed, even though it is software and not hardware.
John:
And even though it seems like, great, you made an app that we can make videos with.
John:
Unlike Snapchat and Instagram and all these other applications that people use to take videos of themselves and put words over those videos and stick stickers on their faces and do all the other stuff that they do.
John:
This is not a ping version 2.0.
John:
This is not an Apple social network.
John:
This is not a way for you to share videos for people.
John:
This is a video production tool.
John:
This is a way for you to make impressive looking videos that you then shove onto all those social networks run by companies that are not Apple.
John:
And it's leveraging Apple's strengths.
John:
We know how to make nice looking video transition effects.
John:
We know how to take video and incorporate other elements into the video.
John:
We know how to let you somehow edit video with your fingers on this tiny little phone screen.
John:
We can help you in the same way that iMovie helped you make like family movies that looked a hundred times better than the family movies that were cut together and edited on someone's
John:
mini dv camcorder like literally on the camcorder like when you use your mac to do it you got these amazing transitions and effects and things that were previously only available on professional software and you're like you made that yourself even if you just use one of the stinking templates or keynote made you let people make tasteful presentations that didn't look like they were made in powerpoint because they weren't like just by providing good tools and templates that's what this seems to be a very well done
Marco:
application for video production whose output is targeting all those services that people use to share video of themselves yeah i think it looks really good like i this is this is trying to tie together like three or four different worlds none of which i really understand or participated in very much so it's hard for me to have a smart take on how it will do but how it looks on this page it looks good and i'm going to play with it
John:
you do participate in it because i watch videos of you on these services often taken by your wife uh i mean you do you do periscope a lot that is one of these services i know it's not like a pre-produced thing where you put stuff on but it is like hey i want to take some spur of the moment video that immediately gets shared with people onto a social network type of thing and it is is perhaps the the least invasive where they're not putting little stickers over your head or writing words on the screen
John:
But, you know, for Instagram, I follow people who post daily Instagram stories or whatever they're called, where it's just a series of small clips with some text occasionally over it or some audio.
John:
And I got to tell you, of all those things I look at, they look pretty rough.
John:
And if someone could use an app, you know, it's a question of like, do people care enough about the quality to go into an external app and like, you know, hit the share button and share to Instagram versus doing it from within the Instagram app?
John:
But this this should be Apple strength in the same way that iMovie was, you know, demonstrated Apple strength.
John:
And back in the day, I photo used to less now.
John:
They make good software for dealing with media and they're able to do it even on the phone.
John:
to leverage all the hardware they have there that makes it like a you know a little magical video production studio to to make clever with and what is what are the things they were saying there was clever does it does face recognition to know who's in the video matches it up with your contact photos to say oh it looks like in this video these three people if you want to share it with them here are their faces
John:
it does dictation for the text so you don't have to type it in and supposedly like when you dictate the text if you dictate the test the text with a certain cadence it will appear on the screen with that cadence so you can you know basically by speaking in a certain manner make text appear in a way that emphasizes the point of your video as opposed to trying to time that with like a bunch of curves you know and like a video like lots and lots of clever touches to let regular people do things that are much more interesting and i think
John:
It will probably create a middle tier class of produced videos in the same way that there were like professional people producing Vines, presumably using like I don't know if I even let you do this, but something, you know, for other other types of services where it's clear that there is a group of people using tools way more sophisticated than are available on the social services native app.
John:
to nevertheless share that video on that app so like they would make a video like in final cut basically with a bunch of cool effects and everything and trim it down and share it on a social network in the same way that i take pictures with my fancy camera and put them on instagram and some people get cranky because like it's only supposed to be pictures you take with your phone like that's not how i'm using instagram
John:
i would imagine there are people who are sharing things through social services that are made with very complicated tools but not everyone can do that so this is like an in-between thing you have you could use the built-in tools for the sharing services and make an okay video you go one step back which is just a separate application that's also on your phone and still pretty darn easy to use but you'll get a nicer result and then the final one is you know use final cut the pro to spend a week making this amazing video that you hope will go viral and you know do do it that way
Casey:
There's a video on the apple.com slash clips, and the section is called Say It, See It.
Casey:
And there's a little video of a gentleman who is saying how to tie a bow tie.
Casey:
And you see the words pop on screen just like you were describing, John.
Casey:
It looks very clever.
Casey:
I have a Snapchat account.
Casey:
I only ever use it to send or receive pictures with Aaron and Declan.
Casey:
So oftentimes when he wakes up from nap...
Casey:
She'll go in there and like take a goofy picture with one of the goofy filters.
Casey:
And I got to say, it is actually quite delightful.
Casey:
I don't have the faintest idea how to use the actual features of Snapchat that you're supposed to be using because I'm old.
Casey:
I do like Instagram stories.
Casey:
I don't find myself doing it very often because my day is usually pretty boring.
Casey:
but i think they're super cool and i like that the features they've added and so this to me i think marco i know you were being snarky but i think you're right to some degree to a small degree i do think this is snapchat for old people but i'm really amped about this i think this is going to be super neat to play with and it may be that i play with it twice and never use it again but i really think this is apple firing on all cylinders in theory anyway we'll see when it when it's released but
Casey:
It's embracing all the stuff they're good at, just like you guys said, and ignoring the stuff they're not.
Casey:
So rather than making another ping, they're just using this to create content and then pushing it to the places where you want that content to be, which is awesome.
Casey:
And a lot of really nice little touches on here, like the, oh, you have Aaron in this video.
Casey:
Do you want to send it to her?
Casey:
Like this all sounds really, really cool.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to playing with it.
Casey:
I'm not entirely sure why it was announced today.
Casey:
Like I'm not sure what that really buys them.
John:
Because it's almost done.
Marco:
i guess but like see that's that's the thing though like like what they did all these announcements via this barrage of press releases but after these announcements were over and throughout the entire day yesterday when they're getting all this press you still can't pre-order the red iphone you still can't pre-order the new cheap ipad you can't download uh the eclipse app or even they didn't even do like the app store notify me thing like they did for mario run
Marco:
Like, there's nothing we can do about this.
Marco:
Like, we're interested now.
Marco:
Give us a way to turn that into something for you later, Apple.
Marco:
But no, instead, we just have to try to remember about these things.
Marco:
And then when they are available in, you know, a week or three, then go get them then.
Marco:
But, like, why couldn't they do...
Marco:
Why do they have to announce this yesterday when none of this stuff was even ready to pre-order?
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
They could be trying to space it out.
John:
They have other announcements.
John:
They don't want to push it up against them.
John:
I don't really... I think the Apple line in this is that...
John:
they're not the type of products that there's going to be a mad rush for people to get like it doesn't really matter when they tell you about clips being a thing because it's going to be like a slow burn even though it's not even available it requires ios 10.3 actually so no one's gotten it until ios 10.3 comes out and 10.3 is not coming out until you know next month sometime probably uh but it's not this maybe the iphone you could argue like there could be a potential rush for that but you know i don't know why they all came together i don't know why they're all not available but
John:
i don't think it matters that much because for all these type of products it's not the type of thing where you have to strike while the iron is hot and build up a frenzy of activity it's just going to be cool new stuff that apple's coming out with just so you know here it is it'll be here it'll be here before you know it but it's not a big deal like i don't think anybody is it has money burning a hole in their pocket for that new ipad even though it is better than the old one it just lets you know if you're thinking of buying one maybe wait a little bit
John:
and for the application it'll be coming out soon but it requires the new os and you know i i'm i you can question why didn't they wait until like one of the items is available and like it was announced because that one's all that one's available and the other ones aren't because you can't really make try to make them all simultaneous but i don't particularly mind that they they talk about it ahead of time especially since like there is something to be said for
John:
having all the sites talk about it you can't get this net but here's our exclusive look like you know here here's here's the red iphone that you can't get your hands on and here is the clips app that i don't know if anybody has a clips app that won't be out until 10.3 that is another way to build hype so who knows
John:
i don't think anyone even has it i mean like the reviewers we at least know like reviewers seem to have red iphones but i don't think i haven't heard anybody mention that they have the clips anyway it doesn't matter although the clips out by the way getting back to that speaking of playing to their strengths the the more negative take on playing to your strengths is it is a further emphasis of your weakness because like if you had to pick
John:
Who do you want to be the company that is really good at making it like a high quality, clever, nice interface, powerful application that takes advantage of your phone's hardware to make cool videos or the company that owns a social network where all those videos will be posted, whether it be Instagram or Snapchat or whatever.
John:
I think Apple would trade in a second.
John:
to be the company that controls the social networks, because there's more value in being the place where people post all their stuff than there is in making the application that lets people post their stuff.
John:
And like when I gave the hierarchy before, I would say most people are going to use the app.
John:
a second tier is much fewer people who care more about quality will use this thing and then a third tier is even fewer people will use professional tools so they're not even getting the fat part of that market right i think if they could choose they would say boy we really wish we were instagram or boy we really wish we were snapchat or whatever but they aren't and they can't be and they're bad at that stuff so at the very least this is like we always talk about like uh people who say oh apple's good at software and they make good interfaces and eventually it's like are they
John:
What application have they made recently that shows that Apple actually knows how to make good applications?
John:
Workflow is an example and a phenomenal application.
John:
Like we got to the point where I feel like the ADA winners, I think Workflow won an ADA.
John:
The ADA winners are like all those applications are better than what Apple is doing.
John:
Whereas this feels like a return to form where Apple is saying the ADAs are for people making software that we feel like exemplifies the ideals and the APIs that we're promoting or whatever that we at Apple are interested in.
John:
And we at Apple also want to make applications to that level.
John:
And for a long time, it seemed like Apple was no longer able to make really great applications consistently.
John:
And Clips looks like a modern version of a really great application.
John:
And rather than being a Mac application or like a Pro application, it's like...
John:
This is an application to do a simple thing.
John:
It's almost like one of the demos they use at WREC.
John:
Say you want to make an application that does video that lets people make videos for social services.
John:
What kind of features could you add to it if you took advantage of all our APIs?
John:
And could you make a really clever interface and use all our new systems for laying out the UI and use everything you learn from it?
John:
It looks like a really good third-party application, which at this point is a high compliment for something that Apple puts out.
John:
yeah i'm looking forward to trying this and who knows like i said if i'll ever use it but i'm i'm really excited about it yeah and the application itself like i'm less concerned about like you know whatever maybe no one will ever use it but i'm i'm excited to see apple making really good ios applications again ios applications that even third-party developers say that's a good ios app in the same way we all say that about you know workflow or whatever that's that's what's encouraging to me about there's not the specifics of like oh you made an app to share video or whatever
Marco:
So I did briefly want to address the other thing that happened when all these announcements dropped, which is a bunch of people got really mad at things that weren't announced.
Marco:
And I was one of them.
Marco:
As I mentioned earlier, I was hoping for a 12-inch MacBook update that didn't happen.
Marco:
Many people have been waiting for...
Marco:
iMac updates that were supposed to happen last fall didn't happen lots of people expected the 9.7 and 12.9 inch ipad pros to be updated because the 9.7 is due now the 12.9 assuming it has the same cycle as the other ones is now past due by about half a year and so a lot of people were mad you know like and there was the rumored 10.5 inch ipad and i think john gruber's take on this on daring fireball is probably right which is like
John:
it probably never made sense to launch that in the spring that probably that sounds more like a you know let the iphone debut the new design language and then release the ipad afterwards kind of thing or do them at both at once to be a big bang you know but like yeah all sorts of things make more sense than what was predicted which was like you're gonna get 20 new iphones in march or 20 new ipads in march and they're gonna be weird sizes that aren't consistent with each other and one of them is gonna be amazing it's like really is that no
John:
Exactly.
John:
Never sounded right.
Marco:
And we keep hearing rumblings, too, about major iPad enhancements in iPad productivity, multitasking, things like that.
Marco:
Major enhancements that were originally supposed to be coming out about now with iOS 10.3.
Marco:
And that we've heard recently that those have been delayed until iOS 11, presumably in the fall.
Marco:
So if that's the case, it also might make sense to hold back this new 10.5-inch crazy awesome iPad Pro and maybe an update to the 12.9 as well, if that's going to happen, to hold those back until whatever September or October event is the public launch of iOS 11.
Marco:
That's usually what they do.
Marco:
Like, you know, they will show us all at WWDC in the summertime, like the core features.
Marco:
And then when it comes time for launch day for that OS in the September or October event, there will be new hardware that makes it even better.
Marco:
Usually it's an iPhone event, but, you know, as John just said, it could be both.
Marco:
So that makes sense.
Marco:
But I think the reason why people were so mad and still are so mad is that traditionally, most Apple products have been on a predictable schedule.
Marco:
The iPad and iPhone is about one year.
Marco:
Macs were about one year to maybe 18 months for most families.
Marco:
We complain about the Mac Pro and people complain about the Mac Mini.
Marco:
Those have honestly always been on ridiculous schedules.
Marco:
Usually not this ridiculous, but that's not new for those families.
Marco:
But most of Apple's products, you could pretty much extrapolate based on their previous release schedules.
Marco:
Okay, this one will be out in about a year.
Marco:
This one will be updated in about a year and a half, etc.
Marco:
And so even if Apple has said nothing about future products, which is usually the case, if you're waiting for an update, if you want to buy an iMac today, and if you do any research at all, which many people do, people in the Geeksphere often think that, quote, normal people just walk into an Apple store and just buy whatever's there and they don't do any research, but that's wrong.
Marco:
A lot of people do research and a lot more people than we give credit for
Marco:
uh do the kind of research that that can tell them like you know i should probably wait and not buy this yet because the new one's probably coming soon anyway so when the product that you're waiting for is past due for an expected update every announcement
Marco:
Apple makes every event they have every new product release that passes by that you don't get the thing you're waiting for that feels like a delay even though they never said they were going to release it it isn't officially a delay because they never announced it but it feels like you were told this and you might have even been told that by Apple experts by the Apple press by Apple commentators
Marco:
who you know the rest of the year they tell you oh you're being impatient just wait until wbdc or the fall event or the spring event like it's always like oh just wait till the next x and just keep waiting keep waiting that's what you're told when you look into this kind of stuff and so when that event comes and goes and you still don't have your update that you thought was due that feels like something was taken away from you it feels like it was delayed even though apple never never officially promised it
Marco:
And when there's only a couple of products that are on these delays, like the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini, well, those are always on these delays.
Marco:
That's no surprise.
Marco:
But as we mentioned in the past shows, it does seem like there's more of those product lines than usual right now.
Marco:
um 2016 was an especially bad year uh we're still you know at least the laptops recovered from that uh that was a big one but you know there's still some of these products like the 12.9 inch ipad that's kind of sitting around waiting for an update um and you know as i said earlier i think the new reality uh is that there is no apple product line except probably the iphone that is on a regular schedule anymore
Marco:
every other one they could they could have updated it every year for the last five years and then well now it's on a two-year cycle now it's on an 18-month cycle what like we can't depend on that that way of predicting long schedules anymore like whatever interval they've been on in the past is now totally irrelevant for possibly every product but if not probably not the iphone
Marco:
But probably everything else.
Marco:
So there is some speculation there might still be like an April event.
Marco:
There was like on the big WWDC wall of text that was on the big walls downstairs.
Marco:
There was like, hello, April.
Marco:
Is it April 18th?
Marco:
What was the date on that?
Marco:
Do you guys know?
Marco:
I don't remember.
Marco:
I know what you're talking about, but I don't remember.
Marco:
Somewhere in the teens, I think in April, that was printed on there as a possible Easter egg.
Marco:
So there might still be an April event.
Marco:
Maybe they're going to be at the new Steve Jobs Theater on the new Apple campus.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
If I had to bet money on it, I would guess they probably aren't done announcing things for the spring yet.
Marco:
Because the other thing is like WWDC in recent years has really been a software only event for the most part.
Marco:
There's usually there's so much to talk about.
Marco:
during that keynote because there's usually so many changes to ios watch os tv os like there's so much to cram in there that they have they have in recent years been minimizing or eliminating any kind of hardware release talk from that keynote and they also don't tend to do any other events in the summertime besides that one because you know everyone's on vacation in july and august and everything so so i'm guessing if they have anything more to announce before september
Marco:
we're probably like hardware and product wise not software wise we're probably going to still hear about it maybe you know maybe in april we'll see uh if i had to bet whether or not they would be an event in april right now i'd say probably yes but i wouldn't bet casey five bucks on it
Casey:
You know, it's funny you bring all this up.
Casey:
I was thinking about this earlier today.
Casey:
And we've also gotten a couple emails.
Casey:
And I don't have them in front of me.
Casey:
But somebody wrote in saying, you know, listing this scenario, I don't know, maybe five years ago when, like, Snow Leopard was about to come out or something like that.
Casey:
And, you know, hey, here's the scenario.
Casey:
Everyone was upset about A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. We all thought the world was ending.
Casey:
All the pundits, all the podcasters, everyone thought the world was ending.
Casey:
Turns out it really wasn't that bad.
Casey:
And yet I left yesterday.
Casey:
I didn't go anywhere.
Casey:
But, you know, at the end of yesterday, I felt like, man, I don't know if I was too excited about all this.
Casey:
Like I knew that clips looked kind of cool, but the rest of it, I just didn't really care.
Casey:
And the first constructive thought I had was, well, it's just that these weren't for me.
Casey:
These announcements weren't for me.
Casey:
It doesn't make them bad.
Casey:
And in fact, reflecting on them now today with you guys, they're pretty good, truth be told.
Casey:
But they weren't for me.
Casey:
And most specifically, I don't have my damn MacBook adorable refresh, but that's okay.
Casey:
But I started thinking, you know, why is it that I feel disappointed about this in a way that I don't think I would have a few years back?
Casey:
And I think a lot of it, Marco, was what you said, was that there was a pretty reliable cadence to how Apple released stuff up until fairly recently.
Casey:
And that's not quite so reliable anymore, which on the surface I should be excited about because it means things are less predictable and more exciting.
Casey:
But I'm not that excited about it because I'm not always excited about what Apple is releasing anymore.
Casey:
I am always excited about new iPhones because every single time I think there's been an improvement.
Casey:
But everything else, it's hit or miss, right?
Casey:
Like I've not used a touch bar for more than a couple of minutes to this day, but I'm not overwhelmingly amped to go get myself one.
Casey:
And so I've been trying, and I haven't come to any great conclusions, but I'm trying to figure out, you know, why am I less excited about announcements of late than I have been in the past?
Casey:
And the only other thing I can come to is that...
Casey:
I feel like there was always something in every single product that I could be like, holy hell, that looks awesome.
Casey:
And so maybe a product that I didn't really care about.
Casey:
So as an example, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, I don't have any desire for that in my life.
Casey:
But I can see cool things about it.
Casey:
And similarly, like the smart keyboard for both sizes, that's cool.
Casey:
And that was fairly recent, in fairness.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like in years past...
Casey:
Everything had something really cool about it.
Casey:
Maybe I'm just becoming a cynical old man and maybe that's the problem, but I'm just less excited about it.
Casey:
And I think a lot of that is the cadence.
Casey:
Some of that is that these products just may not be for me anymore.
Casey:
And and maybe I just got to get OK with that.
Marco:
You know what still is possibly for you?
Marco:
What?
Marco:
The MacBook Escape, man.
Marco:
It's a really good computer.
Marco:
I think.
Marco:
Ask me in a few weeks.
Casey:
Yeah, I'll ask you in 15 days after delivery.
Marco:
If it's not a really good computer, I might have a MacBook Escape to sell you.
John:
yeah funny how that works so for people being angry about this like i mean i i think it's what we talked about a lot a lot of the other announcements where it's like it's not so much about what's announced it's just like sort of simmering uh desire slash resentment for things that aren't getting updated and so every every time something happens and it doesn't include the thing you want that just makes you angrier but
John:
Everyone knew this was going to be like there was no event where people were going out to sit in a room to listen to someone talk.
John:
This was a press release only thing.
John:
Right.
John:
It wasn't it wasn't like they they had everyone come out to a location, you know, so everyone knows when when it's a press release only thing, it's lesser stuff.
John:
The idea that they would release a new 10.5-inch iPad with an entirely new physical design without calling a bunch of press to come to a room and sit there and get a presentation, that's not... The amount of ceremony surrounding the announcements matches the...
John:
the magnitude of the announcements so this is going to be hey it's just going to be a bunch of press releases and some journalists will get briefed in various locations but we're not gathering everybody into a room we're not doing a live streamer you know what's the caliber of the stuff that's going to be there so being disappointed that you didn't even get like a macbook refresh i mean it's conceivable that you could have got a macbook refresh with this caliber of announcement but what i don't think is that it doesn't actually reset the
John:
like oh now now it's almost like a delay because they're not going to have event right after this i think it's entirely conceivable that they could have here's the press release only stuff and then here is an event where we actually invite people out in the near future that it doesn't push any future announcements out at all because very often they have the thing where they dump a bunch of pre-announcements and press releases sometimes they do it like the day before like the real event where actual you know people sit in a room and get it get a little song and dance from apple right so
John:
I totally understand the idea that every time Apple says anything, and it doesn't include the thing that you think should be coming, that it's painful, but the actual things that were announced here all seem fine, and I actually don't think it pushes anything back.
John:
It doesn't mean that there's an imminent announcement or anything.
John:
You can still be cranky about the fact that the iPad Pro does need an update and hasn't got one, and when is it going to come, and if it doesn't come in April, does that mean I have to wait until they'll be able to receive it?
John:
You can continue to be sad about that, but...
John:
honestly like i guess it's just people getting over the idea that the ipad pro might not be updated every time there are obvious technology upgrades to it like you would think oh well surely the big ipad pro will get the true tone screen now the small one has it and you wait and wait and wait but you know talk to mac pro people about waiting like you're cranky because you're like it's one year come on chop chop and like one year haha so young so young at least your product will still be released
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, HelloFresh, Squarespace, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Casey:
So long.
John:
We have important after-show facts about APFS.
John:
I know you guys are dying for an exciting after-show on that topic.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I'm so ready.
John:
What mailing list is this on?
John:
This is on one of Apple's mailing lists.
John:
People complaining about bugs being closed about APFS on iOS, obviously, because it's not out officially for the Mac.
John:
Actually, it's still beta for iOS, too.
John:
Anyway, the bug was closed with this explanation.
John:
uh ios hfs normalization and unicode names i have ios hfs normalized unicode names which as we know like they folded it all into a particular normalization of their thing and so that's why you would no matter how you entered the file name it would all fold it into a particular form so you could only have one file named cafe with an e and an accent on the end no matter how you encoded it because you can you can write that in 20 different ways in unicode with combining characters and stuff
John:
apfs now treats all files as a bag of bytes on ios um and so they closed it as closing the bug report so if you use apple's apis you don't care about this because it does all that sort of normalization for you but if you use the direct file system apis for like the bsd you know the unix layer it is apfs behaves like like a plain old unix file system which is basically
John:
give me a buffer full of bytes and i will write that to the part of the file system that says it's supposed to hold the file name and and that's it so if you want to write one file name in utf 32 and one file name in ascii and one file name in utf 8 in a particular normalization i'm just a file system man you just gave me a sequence of bytes when you ask me later what the name of this file is i'm going to give you that sequence of bytes back i hope you know what encoding it's in good luck
John:
which is exactly how I believe Linus Torvalds of Linux fame really wished HFS Plus behaved because he hated the fact that it did normalization.
John:
He said, just take the bytes that I give you and stick them in your file system.
John:
That is apparently how APFS works.
John:
And I filed a bug on this as well to say, look, I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but...
John:
hfs plus behave this way and your new replacement behaves that way and it seems to me that could possibly cause some incompatibilities uh down the line so is this something you intended to do or what and i don't remember what the status of that bug is but this this bug report if it is to be believed that this radar that was closed is like on ios anyway this is totally what we meant it's now just a bag of bytes uh
John:
user apis you'll be fine but it certainly simplifies the file system because file system no longer needs to be concerned about what the heck is in the the file names it's just it's just a big data buffer and everything else is handled at a higher level and arguably that is a cleaner layering but it is definitely a definite break with how it was done before so uh be careful out there
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
So are you excited for APFS?
Casey:
I know we've talked about this in the past, but sitting here now, it seems like you're keeping up with it at least a little bit.
John:
I am excited for it.
John:
I'm a little bit worried about compatibility things because of this encoding issue, and I'm a little bit worried about bugs and stuff, but I want a new file system, and I'm getting one, and
John:
you know i'm still i still think about it and get sad about the the lack of data integrity features and stuff like that but there there are enough new interesting features that i'm that i'm still excited for it i just do worry about you know i mean maybe i'll just like i should really upgrade my synology to btrfs which it now actually supports with the new uh thing but i don't know a way to do it in place and i don't have any place to copy all this data off to and put it back on except for the network and so
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I would like it if my backups, at least, were someplace where I knew that they were not bit rotting.
John:
I'll just continue to have to sort of bury my head in the sand about the state of the data on my actual Macs because APFS is not helping me there.
John:
all right titles uh what is it that you and i suggested simultaneously oh christmas phone yeah that was that yeah that's it what was the shoelace thing i've already lost the thread on the on the what was the analogy thread hey what was the analogy for the show i was the macbook pro like once you had to reformat it right okay yeah because if you listen to analog john you would know the story of i know the shoelace story i've heard that episode stop it
John:
heard that episode you can jump in anytime john you don't have to go to the back catalog everyone knows the shoelace story and and if you had and if you didn't hear it in analog you can hear mike talk about it on 8 000 other episodes of other shows so it's not like you can avoid the shoelace but he told it the best with me damn it i know i heard it i heard it first there
Casey:
I still like Christmas phone, although span across my leg gap actually is starting to edge that out.
John:
I don't like leg gap.
John:
What was that?
John:
Shoelace is rising.
John:
This is my shoelaces rising.
Casey:
Oh, boo.
Casey:
Plus, then I got to hear Mike talk about how awesome he is for inspiring the title, and I don't want to deal with that.
Marco:
But he is that awesome, because that was an amazing story.
Casey:
Yeah, but we don't need to tell him that.
Casey:
We don't need to give him that moment.
John:
What is he doing with the shoelaces that they're breaking?
John:
That's my real question.
John:
I can't remember the last time I had a shoelace break.
John:
Like, is he being very rough with them?
John:
Is he rubbing his shoe against something and they're fraying?
John:
Like, who shoelaces break?
Marco:
Maybe the style in Great Britain is to have really tightly laced shoes, like to really tighten them up, you know?
John:
They're just very thin.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's a suspicious story.
John:
My shoelace just broke as I pulled really hard.
John:
Snap!
John:
Oh, I can't.
John:
I have to quit my job now.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
We should check his lightning cables.
John:
How are they doing?
John:
If I replace this lightning cable, I'll just use this iPad Pro for another year.