As Thin as Humans Will Tolerate
Casey:
We should start tonight with all the exciting announcements from Google I.O.
Casey:
So tonight is an interesting and peculiar night.
Casey:
I'm looking at the follow-up section of our show notes, and there's only one entry.
Casey:
So listeners, look at the timestamp on your podcast player of choice right now, and we'll see how long this one follow-up entry lasts, because in theory it should be quick.
Casey:
Calamity Jan was the first of many to write in and point out the error in our ways in the last episode.
Casey:
When Syracuse had us do that quiz,
Casey:
I don't remember if John pitched it to us improperly, if we interpreted it wrong after John pitched it to us.
Casey:
But one way or another, we as a collective unit screwed it up.
Casey:
And the way the quiz was actually written is that it was not if we...
Casey:
It's not if the companies could disappear.
Casey:
It was that if we couldn't use them anymore.
Casey:
So we couldn't use Google, but the rest of the planet is still YouTube and like it's their job.
Casey:
And we totally screwed that up and several people written to us.
Casey:
And I don't know that we necessarily need to redo the quiz all over again, but it certainly would make me think long and hard about my answers.
Casey:
That's for sure.
John:
Yeah, I think what we did was an interesting question, but it was not what I was asking.
John:
And by the way, since having just recently listened to the episode, what happened was that we all correctly read what the quiz was about, but then immediately forgot about it and did something different.
John:
Wait, you listen to the show?
John:
Yeah, I always listen to the show.
Marco:
So you can hear my edits?
John:
It's not a secretly published show.
John:
Other people can get it.
John:
It's like it's there.
John:
Anyone can download it.
John:
This might change some things.
John:
How is this news to you?
John:
How is this news?
John:
I know I listen to all of the podcasts that I'm on.
Casey:
In any case, so how would I change things?
Casey:
Although I don't feel like I'm reliant on YouTube, I think I did not appropriately weigh access to YouTube.
Casey:
So I think Google may have risen a little bit.
Yeah.
Casey:
i don't think i would change my opinion of like instagram although man do i love instagram i was thinking about that earlier today instagram always makes me happy you know what sometimes makes me happy twitter you know what i'm totally addicted to twitter but you know what always makes me happy instagram anyway um i don't know i don't think i would change microsoft oh that's the other thing like aws just disappearing that would be tough because half the darn internet runs on aws so that would be very tough
Casey:
but in broad strokes, I don't think my answers would be too different.
John:
Well, the difference is that it means our whole discussion of like, oh, well, if we got rid of that, something else would come along to replace it.
John:
That's not true if the service remains and we are just choosing not to use it.
John:
So if we just choose not to use Instagram, don't hold your breath for an Instagram replacement to come along.
John:
Same thing, we just don't use YouTube.
John:
It's not like a YouTube competitor is something going to spring up because we're not using it, right?
John:
So that makes it...
John:
I think that changes my opinion a little bit about sort of my faith that if I get rid of Facebook, an Instagram replacement would come along.
John:
I still think I would ditch Facebook first, but I would feel worse about it because I do use Instagram.
John:
And knowing that I couldn't use it and that there's not going to be an alternative would make that decision harder.
John:
And Amazon...
John:
Kind of similar if I don't use Amazon, but everyone else still gets to use it and you're waiting for something to come and replace Amazon.
John:
It's not going to come along anytime soon.
John:
Yeah, I think my rankings would probably stay the same, but I think I'd feel worse about all of them.
Casey:
Wow, we did well.
Casey:
That was like five minutes.
Casey:
I don't even know what to do with this.
Casey:
This is a weird night.
Casey:
I don't know if I can even handle the rest of the show.
Casey:
So how does this work?
Casey:
Do we just immediately move on to topics?
Casey:
Is that what happens?
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
I'm so confused.
Marco:
It feels wrong somehow.
John:
I'm just thinking about it like when we have, you know when we have the follow-up list shows?
John:
Yeah.
John:
WWDC ones always have no follow-up.
John:
Our one interview show had no follow-up.
John:
When that happens, we seem to handle it.
John:
So I feel like we're prepared for this.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's move on.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Betterment.
Marco:
Investing made better.
Marco:
Go to betterment.com slash ATP to learn more.
Marco:
Betterment is a smarter way to invest your money, providing investing advice through smart technology, automated investing, and human advisors all together.
Marco:
betterman has changed the industry by using the same strategies that financial advisors use with clients who have millions of dollars but now making them available to everyone including smart rebalancing global diversification tax efficient strategies and much more betterman's mission is to help you manage and grow your investments to build your financial future and keeping the fees very low along the way because you lose less money over time because if you do the math you
Marco:
Typical investment fees and costs can really add up to big, scary numbers over time.
Marco:
It kind of makes you wonder what you're paying for.
Marco:
And Betterment's fees are a fraction of the cost of other financial services.
Marco:
So you save more of that money over time.
Marco:
And Betterment is so easy to use, they've won awards for their customer experience.
Marco:
For a limited time, you can even sign up for Betterment, and you may qualify for a free canary home security system to help secure your home.
Marco:
Terms and conditions do apply, and investing involves risk.
Marco:
To learn more, visit Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Betterment.
Marco:
Investing made better.
Casey:
Marco dropped some knowledge on the internet this week and talked about how MP3 is or isn't dead.
Casey:
And I don't know, I can summarize this if you'd like, Marco, or since you're here, maybe it would be better if you just kind of talk us through this.
Marco:
Yeah, so basically the Fraunhofer Institute for something for science, I think.
Marco:
I love their chocolate chip cookies.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yes, it's a big German research, I don't know, organization.
Marco:
I don't honestly know that much about it.
Marco:
But they invent a lot of technological compression formats and signal processing things and everything, and then they patent them.
Marco:
And one of the things they invented was, I think most or all, of the MP3 format, of MP3 audio compression.
Marco:
The MP3 patents have all expired.
Marco:
The last one expired in mid-April, so a few weeks ago.
Marco:
Until then, they were running an MP3 licensing program where if you made any kind of MP3 hardware or software, you had to pay them for a license to the patents.
Marco:
And they also would sell you reference implementations of
Marco:
MP3 encoder and decoder if you wanted them for an additional fee.
Marco:
Basically, what happened was when the patent expired about a week later in late April, Fraunhofer published an update announcement to their site basically saying, we are terminating the license program for MP3.
Marco:
We will no longer license MP3 technology.
Marco:
Pretty much everyone has moved on to AAC and all of you should too.
Marco:
And this was picked up by a lot of low-value news sites around the tech sphere as an announcement by the MP3 creator that the MP3 is dead and that we should all just, it's time to move on.
Marco:
It's time to move on to AAC.
Marco:
The reality, of course, is all that patent stuff.
Marco:
And this actually means, you know, they had to terminate the license program because there were no more patents left to license.
Marco:
And I'm guessing they decided at that point, well, why even bother licensing our encoder software since it doesn't have that many users?
Marco:
And if we're not going to make any more money from the patents, that's where the big money is.
Marco:
So why even bother administering this program at all?
Marco:
That's my guess of their logic here.
John:
I'm kind of surprised they didn't continue the program anyway just as a bluff because there's so many people who will just like sign up for it anyway because like they'll just have heard that's the thing you have to do and it'll be years before word of mouth gets around among people who are not clued in.
John:
You don't have to license anything.
John:
You can just use it.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, the real story here is that MP3 is now patent free.
Marco:
It was patent free in Europe, I think, since 2012.
Marco:
Wikipedia has a whole list of all the things and when they expired and everything.
Marco:
And it is now patent free in the US.
Marco:
And to the best of my knowledge, it is effectively patent free or totally patent free worldwide now.
Marco:
And so this means that there have been a couple of little irritating things that we've had to do over the years to work around MP3 being patented, we as computing users or as software developers.
Marco:
So, for example, open source OSs and projects like browsers, like Firefox, open source things would almost never support MP3 or would require you to do some kind of weird jumping through hoops like, all right, go download MP3.
Marco:
the lame mp3 encoder which is an open source uh encoder uh go download that and get the compiled binary library for it and place it in this directory we won't distribute the mp3 code because that would be breaking this patent but if you have this encoder on your own you can put it in this location and we will support mp3s in our software and that was done by things like um the audacity uh free open source audio editor um i think i want does handbrake ever do that it might have i forget i
Marco:
But basically, open source tools that would support MP3 in some way would have to usually do things like that.
Marco:
There was also a debate back when the HTML5 audio and video tags started coming out, and there was a debate about codec support, about what audio and video formats would the browsers all support.
Marco:
And there was this big debate when Firefox announced that they would only support free open source things, which at the time was only Ogvorbis for audio and Ogtheora for video, I think.
Marco:
I don't think there were any other ones.
Marco:
And the problem with the Vorbis and Theora formats is that they're just not very widely supported.
Marco:
But Firefox being an open source project said, well, we can't support the patented ones because of open source and we don't believe in it and everything else.
Marco:
There's lots of practical reasons why patented stuff is a problem in open source projects.
Marco:
So basically, it was this big problem that we always had to keep jumping around like, well...
Marco:
If we want this to play, we have to encode this file in two different formats, use MP3 for everybody else, or use AAC maybe, and then also use OGG or WebM or whatever else for the open source slash open standards friendly holdouts.
Marco:
It was just a big annoyance, a big tax on everything.
Marco:
It just made everything more complicated and suck, because that's what patents do.
Marco:
And so this is great because for the first time ever, we now have an audio format that is supported everywhere by everything.
Marco:
I mean, MP3... Like, I wrote in my post that it's...
Marco:
the most widely supported audio format of all time and i really do think that's true um one reader and i i figured this would come up uh emailed me hi chris pepper to say uh what about wave slash aif um i i thought of that when i wrote that sentence i think wave is actually less widely supported than mp3 if you look at like
Marco:
all the hardware and software that's out there all the little like little audio players car audio players like home stereo deck things like so many things can play mp3 files off of either a memory card or a usb stick or a cd you know full of files that i bet there's a good number of those things that will ignore a dot wave file but will play an mp3 file i think you mean wow right
Marco:
oh my god i was gonna say the same thing you beat me to it nice anyway so i really do think mp3 is the most widely supported audio format of all time and it's now patent free now the story from a lot of the a lot of the stories that that that talked about this said we should all move to aac because it's better it's more efficient and mp3 is lower quality and everything else
Marco:
And that is technically true.
Marco:
AAC is better.
Marco:
There are a couple of flaws in MP3 that very, very well-trained people are able to reliably hear, allegedly.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I've never met one, but they claim to exist, and for the purpose of this discussion, I'll believe that they exist.
Marco:
This is all true, but most of the benefits of AAC are at very low bit rates.
Marco:
Things below 64k or below 48k, where you're trying to get acceptable quality at an extremely low bit rate.
Marco:
It's not going to sound great, but you want it to sound okay at 32k or something like that.
Marco:
This is not what people are using for music, and it's not even what people are using for podcasts anymore, because the standards for podcasts have gone up.
Marco:
people now expect podcasts to sound effectively perfect or at least very professional.
Marco:
And so nobody wants super highly compressed voice stuff in distribution of podcast or music.
Marco:
And so the advantages of AAC, while they exist, and there are newer formats as well, things like the Opus format.
Marco:
It's basically the new hotness from the people who made Ogvorbus.
Marco:
And they're super smart over there.
Marco:
Anyway,
Marco:
So there are newer formats like that that improve low bitrate quality.
Marco:
But once you get to about 128K or higher, the differences between these formats are really small.
Marco:
And none of them can really represent music.
Marco:
like transparently well enough for most people at bit rates below that so it's not like you're gonna you're gonna have your music collection which is currently probably you know 256k on average you're not gonna have that suddenly being coded into like a you know a 128k aac and think that's okay or or a 64k opus file like that's it's gonna sound worse and it's gonna be amazing for the size but it's still not gonna be as good so basically there's not a lot of reason to dump mp3 as a format and
Marco:
Now, that being said, if you're acquiring new music, if you're buying from iTunes, if anybody still does this anymore, buying from iTunes or anything else, sure, buy AAC because it is better in that context.
Marco:
But basically, if you already have MP3s, there's no reason to put any effort into replacing them or upgrading them to AAC or anything else.
Marco:
And if you are choosing a format to distribute files in, like what podcasters have to do, or just to encode your music in,
Marco:
you know there it's not that different basically is what i'm saying and aac is still patented i i honestly should have but didn't look up for how much longer aac is still patented i think it's a while because mp3 is really old and aac is only kind of old so i i think it's it wouldn't surprise me if it's another 10 years like there might have been that big of a space between them
Marco:
basically aac is good and in some ways it is better but it is still patented and it's not better enough for that to be a big issue for most people who are considering using mp3 and mp3 is still more widely supported you know aac it's kind of like the year of desktop linux aac is always about to be supported everywhere it's always like on the horizon next year or in the next few years everything will support aac
Marco:
And that just never comes.
Marco:
And we are really close.
Marco:
Lots of stuff does support AAC.
Marco:
But when you go into the more edge cases, like I was seeing earlier, things like car stereos and stuff like that, the support for AAC is much more spotty, and everything supports MP3.
Marco:
So when you're distributing files like podcasters, for instance, MP3 is still the safest choice.
Marco:
And I actually ran some numbers to see if I was just nuts.
Marco:
And I probably am nuts, but maybe not for this reason.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
In Overcast's entire database, this is every feed I know about, every feed anybody has ever searched for, every feed anybody has ever added.
Marco:
I crawl all of these feeds.
Marco:
I have a database that has 50 million episodes in it from over half a million podcasts.
Marco:
The entire database was, I think I said 92% of them reported themselves as MP3s.
Marco:
99% of the top 500 were MP3.
Marco:
So basically all podcasts use it.
Marco:
There are some holdouts that use AAC, but very, very few.
Marco:
The vast majority use MP3.
Marco:
For this reason, basically.
Marco:
That...
Marco:
If you're going to distribute a file, you're only going to make one file for most of these contexts.
Marco:
So you might as well distribute the one that can play on by far the most devices.
Marco:
And that's MP3.
Marco:
So basically, going back to the original point, MP3 was declared dead, but it's very much not dead in a lot of areas.
Marco:
And in fact, I would now say that if you're debating which audio format to use...
Marco:
For almost anything, MP3 should be very high in your list and it's probably the right choice because it is pretty efficient, you know, not as efficient at the low bit rates as the newer ones, but close relative to like a WAV file, supported by everything.
Marco:
And now totally patent free to encode and decode and distribute.
Marco:
You can do anything with MP3 now.
Marco:
It's totally patent free.
Marco:
There's lots of great software that supports it.
Marco:
There's lots of great tooling around creating and editing MP3s.
Marco:
So basically, I don't see it as an argument of like, you got to justify using this old format.
Marco:
I see it as an argument of these new formats have to justify to me why I should give up the freedom that MP3 now has and the widespread support that it has.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We wanted it for a long time.
John:
It's been annoying us for a while, and now it's open to everybody.
John:
Like, that's the obvious story to make out of this, regardless of what someone's press release does.
John:
But the fact that it got picked up so much and passed around with a dead thing, even if it was just a bunch of articles refuting the fact that it was dead is...
John:
Oh, disappointing.
John:
Or like some amazing PR triumph by somebody who's like, let's see if I can convince the world that when MP3 is finally free for everybody, we'll call it dead.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's just a really tempting tech headline to proclaim things dead that either are or were once popular.
Marco:
This is dead or this is the X killer.
Marco:
And in tech, that doesn't usually happen.
Marco:
Very few things in tech ever really get killed or die.
Marco:
Usually they just kind of fade more into obscurity or they lose the dominant market share they once had.
Marco:
But they still continue to be used or to exist.
John:
The things that do die don't get stories declaring their death.
John:
They just get fewer and fewer stories progressively.
John:
And then they get a retrospective.
John:
I mean, just think of RIM as RIM slowly died.
John:
I think I said on an old hypercritical episode when I was going through things, it was like WebOS dead, RIM dead soon.
John:
But no one even cares enough to complain about that.
John:
And the way it dies is you just see fewer and fewer stories about it.
John:
And then you wait three years and someone posts a story about, hey, I didn't remember RIM.
John:
It becomes a nostalgia story, but it's not worth talking about while it is actually dying.
John:
That's what death means.
John:
No one wants to talk about you anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, and there are lots of places where MP3 either was never used or is no longer used, and these new codecs are used.
Marco:
For example, if you're making a streaming service, and you want to offer moderate quality at a cellular-friendly bitrate, and you want to save money on your bandwidth costs...
Marco:
It makes total sense for you to send like a 128K AAC or something even better like Opus because you're going to get more quality out of those bits than MP3.
Marco:
And you're not going to have to worry about support because it's only going to your app.
Marco:
So it's like from your servers to your app, you can do whatever you want.
Marco:
There's going to be patent issues.
Marco:
You're probably going to have to pay a license fee for that.
Marco:
and i i heard i haven't verified this i heard spotify actually uses vorbis so that they don't have to pay the patent licensing fees to anybody uh which is interesting if true but again it doesn't like the fact that that very little hardware and software supports vorbis out there for spotify they don't care all they need all they need to support it is their app which they control and their servers which they also control uh so for them you know it's it's it's a no-brainer um so anyway
Marco:
This is great news that we finally have this awesome everything everywhere format that is patent free.
Marco:
And so many little barriers in technology now no longer need to be there.
Marco:
And I don't expect this to revolutionize the world or anything.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
Heck, there aren't that many people encoding their own audio files anymore to begin with, with the exception of content producers.
Marco:
And most of them are not doing it directly anyway.
Marco:
They're doing it through software services that supports multiple things and everything else.
Marco:
But for the people who do still work on audio files and who do still distribute files to be played, like every podcaster...
Marco:
This is a big deal.
Marco:
And it's not going to be noticed by a lot of people, but it does greatly improve things in a lot of ways that it might take a few years for them to be deployed, maybe.
Marco:
As software slowly drops restrictions on MP3, maybe Apple builds in MP3 encoding support to the core audio APIs, which they've never had it.
Marco:
They've only ever had AAC encoding because Apple pays a license to use the AAC patents.
Marco:
But they never wanted to also pay one for MP3, except in their Pro Tools, which they sell separately anyway.
Marco:
So just things like that.
Marco:
Now maybe you'll be able to encode MP3s from all the system apps in the next macOS.
Marco:
And maybe iOS might get that support too now.
Marco:
Now lots of people, myself included, can ship apps that make or use MP3s in some way without worrying about getting hit by massive patent fees or lawsuits or worse.
Casey:
So two quick pieces of real-time follow-up.
Casey:
First of all, in the arena in the chat gives us a link to what bitrate does Spotify use for streaming?
Casey:
This is on Spotify's website.
Casey:
Spotify uses three quality ratings for streaming all in the Ogvorbis format, 96K, 160K, or 320K, which is only for premium subscribers.
Casey:
So I believe that's what you said, Marco, and your theory is correct.
Casey:
uh additionally you said a moment ago that uh you know it seems to your recollection that only paid apps support mp3 but you can actually uh encode something as an mp3 in itunes and that's effectively a system app so that's true i forgot about that yeah because i used to do that all the time back when i used itunes well really ever uh yeah but it was never in like in like the quick time apis that everything else and it's not it is not available in the low-level core audio stuff either
Casey:
That I didn't know, but either way.
Casey:
I mean, it doesn't make your point wrong, but it's just an interesting counterpoint.
Marco:
You can decode MP3, but you can't encode it.
Casey:
Ah, I gotcha.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
Yeah, but you're right.
Marco:
iTunes does include that, and I forgot about iTunes.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm just trying to save you a thousand well-actuallys.
Casey:
So instead, I will actually do.
Casey:
That's okay, though.
Casey:
Anyway, no, this is fascinating.
Casey:
And this really is the happiest possible ending to MP3, right?
Casey:
Which is to say it's a brand new beginning, or it's nothing else, a continuation.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And that's really fantastic that this format that is not perfect, but is pretty darn good, that to your point, freaking everyone knows how to read, that it's pretty much unencumbered at this point, which is fantastic.
John:
I wonder if we're, I keep wondering if we're going to get into a similar, but perhaps even worse, much worse situation with video.
John:
Like with audio, I think it's fine because like Marco said, like MP3 does the job and it does it in a reasonable way.
John:
And the ones that are better are not that much better.
John:
And all of them are kind of within the limits of normal person, human hearing.
John:
Like you don't, you don't care about the quality, like only super duper audio files even care about the bit rate.
John:
And most normal people like, it's just fine.
John:
Right.
Yeah.
John:
But for video, H.264 is the most popular sort of proprietary one that's out there now.
John:
Similar thing, you know, with the WebM and everything and web browsers don't want to include H.264 support.
John:
You know, in some cases, the free open ones aren't even as good as H.264.
John:
But H.264 has been around for a long time.
John:
There's a lot of hardware that knows how to decode it, but whether dedicated hardware or hardware designed to be good at decoding it in a low power way in our phones and other sorts of devices and dedicated chips for like embedded things.
John:
And it takes a long time for that support to come up.
John:
Kind of similar to the way Apple was kind of gung-ho about how awesome their AAC decoders were, encoders and decoders.
John:
And, you know, I bet even today it wouldn't surprise me if an iPhone is more energy efficient when decoding AAC files than when decoding MP3 files just because it's Apple's preferred format and they...
John:
sell stuff in that format and stuff like that?
Marco:
Well, there used to be in older generations of iOS hardware, there used to be hardware encoders and decoders for AAC and I think maybe even H.264, but at least for AAC.
Marco:
And as far as I know, in...
Marco:
In all the recent hardware, and not even that recent, there's no longer hardware encoders because the CPU just got so fast.
Marco:
I mean, like, I actually do... I use AAC encoding in Overcast for the watch transfers because I mentioned I transcode the files to lower bit rates to save transfer time to make them super small.
Marco:
It reads the MP3 or whatever the source file is and encodes a new AAC...
Marco:
at at like 110x on an iphone 7 like 110 times as quickly as playback on an iphone 7 which is incredibly fast um so and that that is using the software only decoders because the hardware ones they used to have lots of problems where like only one thing could use it at once if your app was backgrounded it would not necessarily be guaranteed to be there and it was really weird so it's and i actually encode things in parallel um because every modern iphone is dual core and
Marco:
And you couldn't do that with a hardware encoder either.
Marco:
Only one thing could be using it.
Marco:
So anyway, all this is to say that basically everything's done in software now, and it's so fast it doesn't even matter between the formats.
Marco:
But there was a time when you were correct.
John:
Well, so no, there's still hardware support.
John:
Like I said, even if it's not a literal dedicated separate little area on the dive with a hardware H.264 encoder or decoder or both.
John:
The hardware in these chips, in many ways, is designed around these particular difficult problems, whether it's encryption for SSL or for, you know, just basically other kinds of encryption.
John:
Like the SIMD instruction sets and specific instructions that you know are going to be a linchpin or a critical path along particular algorithms.
John:
So it's not dedicated hardware just for this purpose, but it is hardware designed around a set of problems that they know the things they need to solve.
John:
And like, even if it's just, again, adding a special instruction...
John:
It's more energy efficient to do that than to sort of manually implement that special instruction by a series of other instructions.
John:
And they test these things to say, this needs to be low power, not use a lot of power when showing H.264 video.
John:
If you're going to do that with a dedicated H.264 decoder on a system on a chip on the iPhone 3G, fine.
John:
If by the time the iPhone 7 comes along...
John:
You can get that same job done with less die area by using special instructions and the extended instruction set of the new ARM whatever thing or using your GPU or like a shader on the GPU to do it or whatever the hell, you know.
John:
That's fine, too.
John:
But this is a known problem set.
John:
And I don't think for...
John:
I don't think they're doing that same test for WebM, in other words.
John:
Maybe the hardware is just as good for WebM, but it's not an important use case for them because as far as Apple is concerned, H.264 video is kind of the standard for the stuff that they're expecting you to play on iOS devices to the degree I don't even know.
John:
what kind of support there is for any other kind of video playback on iOS devices if it's not H.264.
Marco:
Yeah, and I should clarify too, my statement earlier about there being no more hardware stuff, I was only talking about audio.
Marco:
Video, I don't know.
Marco:
I'm guessing there probably still is hardware acceleration for video just because it's so much more complicated.
Marco:
And I think you might be right that it might be at the GPU level instead, but we'll see.
John:
Yeah, these system-on-chips are big and complicated, but the point is, like, that's the use case.
John:
And, like I said, H.264 is the proprietary one.
John:
It's the one that is patent-encumbered, that would be annoying for people to use, that is very widely supported, but only because, like, this big industry effort to get everyone to pay these patent fees, you know, and just, like, and it's part of the Ampeg Consortium, and historically they have had good success getting their standards implemented in everything from DVDs to Blu-rays to, you know, the iTunes Music Store and YouTube and everything, right?
John:
Now...
John:
i don't know when the patents run out in h264 probably a long time from now but h265 is already here and h265 is better than h264 in a more significant way than aec is better than mp3 in terms of how small the files can be and at a very high quality and like h265 is essentially required for
John:
reasonable streaming 4k video over connections that are not massively bigger than they were before so on and so forth h265 support in hardware uh and the decoders and everything is not great right now which you know if you ever encounter some h265 hardware and try to play it on like your dinky little mac laptop that had no problem playing giant full screen h264 files and all of a sudden the fans are spinning up you're like why the hell the fans spinning up this is just 1080 video oh it's h265 and my computer doesn't know what the hell to do with that and so it's
John:
doing it the slow way with a plain old algorithm running on you know the the no special purpose hardware instructions not tuned to a decoder not tuned to my specific system like it's not like apple has i don't know maybe they have but as far as i'm aware apple has not written the hand tuned perfectly designed for a mac hardware h265 decoder let alone having a dedicated h265 decoders in your old uh mac laptop again maybe it's in new ones um and there's a bunch of drm crap in there i'm sure too
John:
um i mean that's basically what kaby lake is for it's kaby lake is basically to add like h265 support in various places and also lots of drm for 4k and the hdcp crap yeah i know all right so um this long road to me to get to this analogy say h264 uh you know its patents run out and we're like yay this video format that's massively popular that has wide support again like every phone can view h264 video and
John:
in energy efficient way and it's supported in all sorts of set top boxes and you know it's very popular and right that becomes patent free they like uh i wouldn't want to be stuck with that what i want to happen is the industry to move on to a format that is better than hd64 now
John:
maybe that's H.265, which has all the same downsides of being proprietary and having all these patents associated with it, but it is better enough that I'm saying, like, I want that.
John:
I don't want to be stuck with H.264 for the next 20 years, right?
John:
That seems like a bad scenario, whereas I'm okay to be, you know, quote-unquote stuck with MP3 because I think it's fine, but H.265 is a big step up.
John:
And if there is a free and open source alternative, like the next version, whatever, not VP9 is the next thing, but whatever the sibling open equivalent
John:
of h265 is ideally we would move to that but the problem with those other ones which you didn't mention but it came up with the whole aug theora thing and everything's like oh these are these are free and open and there's no patent licensing people get a little scared for maybe it's just you know fud or or uh or it's founded in uh some some reality uh
John:
that just because the thing is free and open doesn't mean that someone will find that it actually infringes on some patents anyway, right?
John:
And so the creators say, here, it's for you to use, and you can use it and don't have to pay me anything.
John:
But if it became widely used, it could be that a bunch of people with a bunch of super dumb patents come wandering by and say, oh, the whole world is using this AugTheora format.
John:
Well, it turns out AugTheora infringes on my patent on ones because it uses both ones and zeros.
John:
And so now I'm going to collect money from everybody who has Augtheora support and it's spread over the whole industry.
John:
So I'm going to be rich.
John:
And so people worry about that.
John:
And in some ways, the format backed by some giant consortium of companies, like basically of all the companies that would sue you with their super dumb patents or all the companies that could support a lawsuit against them from people with even dumber patents, it's safer to buy from them to say, well,
John:
I'll license your patents and I'm legally covered.
John:
And if someone decides to sue, they're going to sue you.
John:
And you're a consortium of all these rich companies and you can handle it yourself or whatever.
John:
I think it's one of the things that also keeps people away from the open formats is the fear that maybe they're not as open as they think they are because lots of patents are out there and lots of patents are really dumb.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Because they haven't really been challenged.
Marco:
They are not usually used widely enough for any submarine patents to actually surface.
John:
Yeah, they want to wait until it becomes popular and then collect the money.
John:
So even if someone knows, oh, that totally infringes on my patent, they're not going to challenge it now when nobody uses it because you can't get blood from a stone, right?
John:
They were just like, go ahead, spread that everywhere, and then I'll attack and get all the money.
John:
So anyway, all this is to say is that I hope – it's kind of weird to hope this, but I kind of hope that –
John:
The video industry, at least, does not settle down and say, once H.264 is free of all of its patents, we'll just settle down into an H.264-only future and we'll all have royalty-free, beautiful video everywhere.
John:
Because I think video still needs to improve.
John:
Things like color depth and frame rate and resolution and size and HDR and all sorts of those areas that I think are perceptible to regular people and important.
John:
especially if internet bandwidth doesn't improve at the same rate as our demand for all those neat things that i just listed which i think it's not in the u.s anyway um i basically hope we move to h265 and i hope hardware support for h265 comes and i hope it doesn't make the fans on my mac spin up anymore and i hope we leave h264 behind but all that really does is reset the patent clock so maybe when h265 patents run out when we're all 87 years old then we can say this is good enough for human eyes and
John:
And it's fine for 2D video, but by then we'll be arguing about proprietary patent-encumbered things for VR or whatever.
Marco:
So probably in about five years, I think we might be allowed to use DivX patent-free.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
I haven't heard that in forever.
Casey:
God, that was so amazing when it first came out.
Casey:
Holy crap.
Casey:
I remember thinking this looks phenomenal.
Marco:
It did at the time.
Marco:
And I love it.
Marco:
It was just like a stolen MPEG-4 codec, basically.
Marco:
It's just MPEG-4.
Marco:
But before H364, like the first version of MPEG-4.
Marco:
That's what DivX was.
John:
It was also that terrible disk format where you would get the disk and then I would have to destroy it or something.
John:
The disks would self-destruct or some terrible thing.
Marco:
Yeah, it was like a rental thing, but yeah, the discs would like... It just had an expiration on the DRM, and it would check in with a service, I guess, to activate or deactivate.
Marco:
And so you would, quote, rent a movie, and then a few days later, it would stop playing, so you'd just have to throw it away.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Surprisingly, consumers were not that into that.
John:
What a great idea.
John:
Wasn't it like Best Buy or something that was back in the... It was Circuit City.
John:
Yep.
John:
Circuit City.
John:
There you go.
Casey:
Which, by the way, fun fact, Circuit City used to have its headquarters, guess where?
Casey:
Richmond, Virginia.
Marco:
That's quite something to brag about.
Casey:
Congratulations.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And CarMax is still here, though.
Casey:
CarMax was spun off of Circuit City.
Casey:
They're still around.
Casey:
Anyway, any other thoughts about file formats, MP3s, etc.?
Casey:
I'm pretty amped to see if this changes things for the better.
Casey:
And I think it will in some minor ways.
Casey:
We'll see if it really makes any empirical difference in major ways.
Casey:
But for nerds like us that occasionally encode things, I think it'll be a lot better.
Marco:
Well, and the reality is the problems that John is citing with video formats, which are very real problems, and we're lucky in the audio world that audio is not necessarily a solved problem, but it's a lot closer.
Marco:
It's solved well enough for the most part with MP3, which is like a 25-year-old format.
Marco:
We've basically solved this problem.
John:
The bandwidth of ears is so much less than the bandwidth of eyes, and ears are so much better, more tractable as sort of simple sensing machines than eyeballs and the perception of vision is, which is way more complicated.
John:
And so, you know, once we have a format that fits over our wires with the bandwidth most people have, that it sounds as good as any normal person can hear, you're more or less done, plus or minus, like...
John:
dynamic range and like you know multi multi sound field crap and stereo imaging and stuff like that but but that's why we get to the limits of sound sooner and vision vision is going to be a while because even when you fit you've you've uh exhausted all the 2d
Marco:
things then you have like well what about actual depth perception and being able to focus on the background of the foreground and then you're like oh no you gotta start all over and the bandwidth gets even worse right and like and so you know not only have we reached the limits of what people can hear but like even if you try to go like video is gonna have higher density resolutions and stuff or higher higher you know bit rates or higher bit depths for things like HDR for a while to come you know we're not we're not at the limit of our vision yet as you said but
Marco:
audio like cd audio 44k you know back in whenever that was introduced like the the mid 80s that's basically as good as it gets for our ears and there's lots of people who say oh i can hear up to you know 24 192 or whatever and if they think they can good for them we have the bandwidth of that too it's not a problem and that's exactly the thing like with audio
Marco:
We're talking about such smaller files that if you care that much about the quality of them, you can just get lossless.
Marco:
And the file sizes are not that prohibitive in modern technology.
Marco:
You can get a massive hard drive from Amazon for like $100 that can hold as much audio as you're likely to have ever, even if you store it losslessly.
Marco:
So it's not really...
John:
we don't really need so badly to move on to better and better audio compression standards every five years like we do with video because the need just isn't there like we're already pretty good well we or we accept the size hit because i remember every time i rip one of my blu-rays and i decide to put like one of my anime blu-rays and i put multiple languages on it those 5.1 tracks for you know dts hd the size of that stuff adds up pretty soon the vast majority of the data in this file that i'm ripping is audio
John:
So even though they are small, if it's two hours of audio and it's six channels and multiplied by three languages, suddenly you're talking some real bytes.
Marco:
Yeah, but I would say that's not a major case.
Marco:
Anyway, and also, the whole patent issue is, I think, more of a problem in many ways in...
Marco:
in audio, and I guess not anymore, but it was more of a problem in audio, because the world of audio distribution, especially in the form of podcasts, which is close to my heart, obviously, is decentralized.
Marco:
And so you don't have to worry...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So YouTube can buy one giant license for these formats and basically be done with it.
Marco:
And video creators aren't needing to worry about that themselves or making a whole bunch of other services because the world of video is so concentrated in this very small number of proprietary places.
Marco:
YouTube, Facebook, that's basically it.
Marco:
But audio is different.
Marco:
Audio...
Marco:
Didn't get that centralized for the most part.
Marco:
And so the formats and the patents around them and the support still matters.
Marco:
Like if you're going to embed a video on a web page, you're probably not going to have to encode the files yourself and put them on your server.
Marco:
You're probably going to embed a YouTube embed and you don't have to worry about any of this stuff.
Marco:
But you can plausibly, and people often do, embed audio files on their page, like direct-served audio files from your own hosting.
Marco:
And then you do have to worry about encoding, and you do have to figure out these formats and players and things like that.
Marco:
In more proprietary worlds, like what video is, like what you were saying earlier about big companies like to license the other major formats...
Marco:
this is less of a problem in practice for the producers but an audio because it's so open and decentralized and way simpler it actually matters so that's why it's another reason why the video formats being patented probably forever practically speaking um are is is i think less of an issue in in practice or rather it's
Marco:
it's less avoidable in practice than the freedom that we now have with MP3 and the need for that in the first place in audio.
John:
The only other thing that occurs to me is on video formats.
John:
Because we don't need to know what format things are, very often a video codec will get embedded in a context where it will just stay, will overstay its welcome.
John:
Arguably, DVDs kind of did that with MPEG-2.
John:
MPEG-2 is a bad...
John:
compression format by modern standards it makes files that are big that don't look that good um you take a dvd and if you take the same source material and code it h264 it will embarrass the mpeg 2 as well it should because it's an old codec right but for a long time and i bet probably today still somewhere
John:
cable television that you got over your coaxial cable after they switched to digital cable from analog, right?
John:
Whereas a lot of those channels were using MPEG-2, which was state-of-the-art at the time that they decided to do that.
John:
And a lot of them kept using MPEG-2 for a long time, delivering you substandard video quality
John:
we're using more bandwidth and to some degree that's the cable company's problem not your problem what do you care as long as you see the picture on your tv um i think over the air still does that i think over the air hd is still mpeg 2 and and the other thing is the other side of the coin is like i wish you would use more modern codecs like h264 but very often your your telco in the u.s anyway provider will say great this lets us jam more channels into the same bandwidth let's massively compress these things and
John:
to produce tons of artifacts because look how small you can make h264 and it still looks kind of good i remember watching mad men and amc and watching the incredible banding in the background of like dark scenes oh all those dark rooms yeah and they were just i don't know how it's like they they discovered it's either they had discovered h264 and managed to jam the show down to a tiny little size or they were still using mpeg 2 and using tons of bandwidth to give me a substandard uh quality image um so in those embedded contexts
John:
I still favor advancing the codec to keep up with the times, but there's very little incentive to do that, especially if they have their own dedicated lines and they're the ones who decide how to chop up the bandwidth.
John:
I saw something else recently with terrible banding in it, and I was super angry about it because it didn't seem like... Maybe it was... I don't know.
John:
I wish I could remember what it was.
John:
When I see banding like that, especially if it's in some piece of media, like if it's on a Blu-ray that I paid a lot of money for to get the highest quality of an image, and it's just...
John:
Like a bad choice in coding or something.
John:
Down with banding.
Marco:
Don't forget all the blocking, like the famous example of the HBO intro with the static.
John:
Oh, that's the worst.
John:
That seems like trolling at this point, doesn't it?
John:
Like, change your logo.
John:
Come on.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Marco:
fracture wants you to get those printed directly onto glass and they have a laser cut rigid backing so it's actually very lightweight because the whole it's like glass in the front and it's backing on the back so all you see is the glass but it's not this giant thick heavy pane of glass that would like you know rip your wall apart
Marco:
All you got to do is upload your digital photos and pick a size.
Marco:
It's that simple.
Marco:
The fracture process makes the color and contrast really pop.
Marco:
And the sleek, frameless design lets your photos stand out while still matching any decorating style in your house or office or whatever else.
Marco:
And they also make amazing gifts.
Marco:
Because not only can you get your photos printed for yourself, but go ahead and get one of those photos printed for somebody who might care about it or whose day it might brighten.
Marco:
Maybe it's a photo of your kid for their grandparents or something like that.
Marco:
These make amazing gifts.
Marco:
People love them.
Marco:
I've given them as gifts.
Marco:
I have lots of them around my house.
Marco:
So many compliments on these Fracture prints.
Marco:
It's really incredible.
Marco:
Fracture comes with a 60-day happiness guarantee to make sure you love your order.
Marco:
And each Fracture is handmade in Gainesville, Florida from U.S.
Marco:
source materials in a carbon-neutral factory.
Marco:
For more information and 10% off your first order, visit fractureme.com slash podcast.
Marco:
And don't forget to mention ATP in the one-question survey so they know you came from here.
Marco:
Once again, fractureme.com slash podcast.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So we are coming up on WWDC time.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Two weeks away?
Casey:
Three weeks away?
Casey:
I can't even keep it straight anymore.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
And there's a couple of rumors that are starting to come out, which may or may not even relate to WWDC.
Casey:
But the first one is...
Casey:
And I'm sad, you guys.
Casey:
Apple is supposed to be phasing out the iPad mini, so says 9to5Mac.
Casey:
And truth be told, this makes me sad, but at the same time, as I've been telling the two of you guys for a while now, really, I am just waiting for the MacBook to get a refresh so I can replace my iPad mini with the MacBook.
Casey:
So this doesn't make me as sad as it used to, but this would be a real bummer.
Casey:
And my dad was really thinking about getting a new iPad mini, and I told him, well, you might as well wait to see when the new one is presumably coming out any day now.
Casey:
And according to Zach Hall at 9to5Mac, maybe not.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, obviously the iPad line is in the middle of a transition right now.
Marco:
Because if you look at the prices, the new iPad, whatever they're calling the new low-end 10-inch iPad, is $329.
Marco:
If you leave out the mini for a moment, the next one up is $599 for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro.
Yeah.
Marco:
And for almost twice the money, you don't, I would not say you get twice the iPad.
Marco:
And I love the 9.7 inch iPad Pro, but that's a massive price jump for what you get for that.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that if you actually use it like a pro and get either a pencil or a keyboard or something, you're adding even then a lot more to the cost.
Marco:
But anyway, that huge price hole in the middle of $329 to $600?
Marco:
Like obviously this is the beginning of some kind of move and it's not complete yet because that just makes no sense.
Marco:
Like that is obviously like, you know, something else is going to change in this lineup because that is ridiculous because it's not a very strong selling proposition for the 9.7 Pro to be twice as much as the next model down and, you know, be not that different from it.
Marco:
I'm guessing there's another shoe to drop here.
Marco:
And if the Mini goes away, and the Mini right now, they reduce it to only the 128 gig model, right?
Marco:
And it's $400.
Marco:
Is that right?
Casey:
I think that's right.
Marco:
It is a significantly worse deal for what you get than the new cheap iPad.
Marco:
And it's significantly old by this point.
Marco:
And the Mini was never updated that well, with the exception of the Mini 2.
Marco:
That was the only time it was ever updated well, in line with the rest of the lineup.
Marco:
But otherwise, that was it.
Casey:
Yeah, to that end, to put things in perspective, Aaron got me a then-brand-new iPad Mini for not this past Christmas of 2016, but Christmas of 2015.
Casey:
And if I'm not mistaken, that is effectively the brand new iPad mini you could buy today.
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so you're right also, by the way, that it's 128 for $400.
Casey:
Or what you didn't mention is LTE also at 128 gigs for $530.
Casey:
But that's kind of off to the side.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And they all kind of.
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
You're correct about 128 at $400.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and so basically, by introducing the new cheap 9.7 and not touching the mini, actually reducing the amount of mini configurations you can get at the same time, I think it's plausible this rumor is correct.
Marco:
Regardless of whether they're going to end it or do something else...
Marco:
I think this is very clear, though, that they do not intend for you to buy the Mini right now.
Marco:
Because no one's going to look at that price and say, you know, if people were buying it before, which is, that's worth asking, you know, were people still buying Minis in meaningful numbers?
Marco:
And from most of what we've heard from various analysts and stuff, the answer is no.
Marco:
But if anyone was thinking about buying a Mini, they would look at this lineup now and they would have serious second thoughts.
Marco:
Because why would you?
Marco:
I think that the new cheap 9.7...
Marco:
is probably better in pretty much every way except size um and maybe maybe screen quality uh with the you know the laminating method and stuff but uh it's basically there's no reason to buy it now and there's been lots of speculation about why the mini is not doing that well you know because assuming that's true assuming it's not selling very well which i think it's
Marco:
You know, based on what people have been able to derive from earnings and stuff like that, it does seem like that's probably the case, that it's not really selling well at all.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons why there might be.
Marco:
I mean, we talked years ago about how the iPad in general was being squeezed on both sides by...
Marco:
MacBooks and MacBook Airs and stuff getting smaller and better and lighter, maybe taking away some of the high end of iPad size-wise.
Marco:
And then phones getting bigger and even more awesome and big enough that you would often just not want to have a separate device for a tablet anymore.
Marco:
You would just have a phone and that would take your tablet role close enough.
Marco:
And I think that the market has kind of, you know, supported this theory that indeed tablets are getting squeezed by both of those sides.
Marco:
And if you look at the iPad lineup, I feel like the Mini is the one that is most likely to get squeezed out first, if that makes sense, like by these forces.
Marco:
Because if you have the bigger iPads, there's probably something you do on them or something you like about the bigger screens or whatever else that maybe your phone can't do.
Marco:
The Mini, though, is, I mean, it's still a lot bigger than even the biggest phones, right?
Marco:
But it's a smaller difference.
Marco:
And so that's why I feel like it probably wasn't selling well because most people who buy it were either looking for basically a bigger device that's still somewhat small, which now big phones do better, or were buying it because it was the cheapest iPad, and now it isn't.
John:
It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy to not update the iPad mini for two years and say, well, it's not selling that well.
John:
I know that's not the only reason.
John:
I think everything you said is true, especially especially about price, because when the mini first came out, it's big selling point was like, hey, it's the cheapest way you can get into an iPad.
John:
But there is like, you know, Apple always does these photos and you can other people compose them as well.
John:
Line up all of the glass and aluminum rectangles that run iOS that Apple sells.
John:
And you expect to see some kind of reasonable gradation from the smallest to the biggest.
John:
And at various points, there have been weird jumps in the size of it.
John:
And if you put prices along with them, too, then sort of there's weird jumps.
John:
And they're like, OK, well, these ones are phones and these ones aren't technically phones, but you can get them with LTE, but you can't make phone calls on them unless you FaceTime audio.
John:
It's like it's this weird differentiation.
John:
But that continuum, you know, that that.
John:
the the plus size phones have to have hurt the mini size factor now with the possible size reshuffling of this rumors of the bigger than 9.7 inch but smaller than 12 point whatever inch ipod or ipad pro whatever that'll be like 10 and a half inch or something like that that in other words that the quote-unquote normal ipad size will get bigger
John:
Or at least the screen will get bigger and maybe the margins will pull in again or whatever.
John:
If that happens, does that open up a big enough gap for something that is not as big as that new iPad size, but not as small as an iPhone 7 Plus?
John:
Does that open up that gap enough for them to put one in there?
John:
Because I think there are customers who want that entire range.
John:
If the spacing and the range is right, if it's not too close to the phone, if it's not too close to the next size of an iPad, and if the pricing is right, if for the smaller thing you spend less money, which is a perception that customers have, and there is some vague reality because bigger screens are slightly more expensive than smaller screens, unfortunately for Apple...
John:
The internal guts don't get cheaper unless you give them crappier guts.
John:
And that really hurts the product.
John:
What people want, same thing the iPhone SE people want, is like, give me the best insides, just a smaller outside.
John:
And Apple's like, eh, that doesn't, it's not great for us.
John:
We'd rather give you the same insides with a slightly more expensive screen and charge you 100 extra bucks for it and call it the iPhone 7 Plus.
John:
They like that end of it, as opposed to shrink the screen by some percentage.
John:
You save a few bucks on the screen, but all the rest of the insides, I want them to be just as good as the iPad Pro.
John:
It's like, well, then I can't really price that.
John:
People want to look at the rectangle and say the smaller rectangles cost less money than the bigger rectangles.
John:
It gets totally messed up by this iPhone 7 Plus, which is super expensive.
John:
And then to go back down to a lower price for the in-betweeny iPad is a difficult problem.
John:
But I think there is a place in Apple's lineup for something around the size of the Mini.
John:
But it totally could be that this particular Mini is the wrong size in the new lineup.
John:
And obviously, it's currently the wrong price.
John:
um so we'll see how this shakes out but if it disappears for a while and like makes a comeback as like an eight inch ipad or something in a few years when they're filling in the gaps i won't be super surprised at that because you know i i've relearned anything from the big phone thing is that different people have different size holes in their life to put rectangles with screens whether it is your pocket or your purse or your backpack or your end table or your nightstand or whatever
John:
there you know we all find the size of the device that fits into our lives you know or whatever maybe it's just like the first one you got and you get used to it and you build your habits around it and if the mini goes away entirely i bet there's a bunch of people still running around with minis who won't be enthusiastic about buying something bigger and won't be enthusiastic about you know replacing it with a big phone because maybe they don't want a big phone like maybe they're iphone se users so now they have this this role that's just not being filled and they're going to end up getting like a seven inch
John:
android tablet or something and be sad um so i i await the ipad mini's glorious comeback even if it never actually goes away because at this point it needs to come back even though it's still for sale they're selling one model that's really old for a crappy price it needs to come back now so if it wants to take a break and then come back i'm fine or if they just want to you know replace the wwc i'm fine with that too
Casey:
I feel like almost all of this could have been said about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
And I don't mean that to be silly.
Casey:
I mean, it's a model that's kind of been on life support.
Casey:
They're kind of, you know, making sure everyone stops buying it because they won't update it.
Casey:
Like, so much of this is, I don't know, I don't want to say it's becoming the Apple norm, but certainly we're seeing more than one data point of this strategy of just kind of making it fade into the distance.
John:
It's more like the Mac Mini because the role of the iPad Mini and the Mac is right there in the name.
John:
The role of both the iPad Mini and the Mac Mini is not to be the fastest, most awesome computer for its most demanding users.
John:
That's always a thorn in the side about the Mac Pro, is that particular role.
John:
Other devices, you could say, you know, well, it's always been the most boring, least popular, with the least attention paid to it.
John:
That's not really true of the iPad Mini.
John:
When it came out, it was the darling.
John:
It's like, wow, they finally made a smaller tablet.
John:
And wow, look how well it's selling.
John:
And then the next, you know, Ernie's call, like, wow, look at the iPad ASPs.
Casey:
Hmm.
Marco:
yeah i mean and also like the ipad mini competes now against areas in which apple is doing worse and worse over time namely very cheap tablets uh like that like it was always the the budget option the value option the option that maybe you'd get for kids you know and actually and my kid his ipad is a mini an old one that i had you know
Marco:
collecting dust in a drawer for a while and he loves it it's great like it's perfect it's it's a really good kid size so it is a nice size to offer however in that market in the market for like smaller ideally as cheap as possible tablets apple has not done well in a very long time basically since there have been other tablets you know besides the ipad that were at all competitive
Marco:
Now there are so many other options.
Marco:
And I think the market research has kind of supported this idea that there's basically two tablet markets.
Marco:
There's tablets that are basically used as screens for video playback and not much else.
Marco:
And then there's computing tablets that people use for computing tasks and stuff like that.
Marco:
And the iPad does very well in the latter category.
Marco:
And if you restrict what you're looking at to tablets priced above a certain level, maybe it's like priced above $300 or whatever, Apple does great by share in that market.
Marco:
But the total tablet market, most of the tablets being sold are these cheap ones that are being sold for very simple purposes where the OS and the quality of the tablet matter a lot less than
Marco:
And so Apple doesn't do well there.
Marco:
And the iPad Mini might have served that role for a few years in the middle there before the rest of the world kind of caught up to that.
Marco:
But now, anyone looking for a super cheap tablet for some embedded use or some kind of disposable use is not going iPad at all.
Marco:
They're going with something very cheap from Amazon or something.
Marco:
So I think maybe Apple decided to bow out of that market because it just isn't
Marco:
Not only was it not profitable per unit for them, maybe, but maybe in order to succeed at selling into that market at a very good rate, they would have to lower the price even further to the point where it's not even worth them competing at all.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Audible with an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you want to listen to something, Audible probably has it.
Marco:
Listen to audiobooks from virtually every genre, anytime, anywhere, and now also original audio shows with news, comedy, and more.
Marco:
You can play Audible's audiobooks and other content on phones, tablets, computers, and even a bunch of other kinds of devices too.
Marco:
Audiobooks are great for flights or long road trips or even just your daily life, your daily commute to and from work maybe because you may think you don't have a lot of time to read books.
Marco:
But if you listen to audiobooks at these times in your life when you're like sitting in a car or walking or whatever, that time really adds up and you can burn through a lot more books per year than you might think if you do that every day.
Marco:
audiobooks bring books to life many of them are even read by the authors themselves and you can take risks and try new authors without regret because audible offers their great listen guarantee if you start an audiobook and don't like it you can trade it for another one for free so see and listen for yourself when you begin a free 30-day trial you get your first audiobook for free and there's no stress or obligation because you can cancel at any time
Marco:
With audiobooks and all these wonderful spoken word audio products, you will find what you're looking for at Audible.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Speaking of other rumors, suddenly there's new laptops coming.
Casey:
And my best or my favorite part of this is not only are there new laptops coming, but they're to take on Microsoft, which is kind of interesting.
Casey:
This is a...
Casey:
In Bloomberg by Mark Gurman and Alex Webb.
Casey:
And basically they're saying, well, Microsoft is really doing well these days with all their fancy new laptops and tablets and whatever they are, surfaces.
Casey:
So maybe Apple will update some stuff after all, especially the MacBook, which would make me very happy.
Casey:
And interestingly, they're saying that this might happen at WWDC, which, I mean, certainly computers have been unveiled at WWDC, but it's not a terribly common occurrence.
Casey:
So I'm very intrigued by this.
Casey:
I'm super skeptical, but it would make me very happy, if nothing else, if I could finally buy a MacBook that I've wanted for like six months now.
John:
I think what we want out of revised MacBooks is more like what they hinted at at the Mac Pro event, where people who were there were asking, hey, what about the MacBooks?
John:
And were you surprised by the reactions?
John:
And blah, blah, blah.
John:
And they vaguely hinted that they're...
John:
looking into the idea of making a new version of the macbook pros that is more satisfying to the people who are upset with the current ones for whatever reason obviously they don't go into any details but it makes everyone who's reading about that say oh maybe they'll add more ports or you know maybe they'll uh think about the the the touch bar some more or you know if you're casey maybe they'll actually update the 12 inch macbook
John:
to have faster insights because it totally needs them and everyone's dreams just attached to the vague idea that they're going to revise them with uh you know which is what of course they always do now this rumor seems suspect on the whole to take on microsoft angle because microsoft may be introducing hardware that's causing people to write stories about it but their surface sales numbers are not
John:
Not particularly indicative of a world-conquering product line, at least not yet.
John:
And the things they're talking about, even just in this rumor, seem like, I mean, fine, it's a good speed bump, especially for the 12-inch MacBook that needs it.
John:
And the other ones, you know, couldn't hurt.
John:
We all like speed bumps.
John:
Like, they're good.
John:
But it doesn't seem like, in a WWDC timeframe, they could have the newly rethought, revised...
John:
different in ways that will make people who didn't like the first ones happy about them sort of MacBook Pro.
John:
It's like if you're expecting a new MacBook Pro with an SD card slot and maybe, you know, more different ports on the other side of the thing to arrive at WWC, that seems highly unlikely to me.
John:
there's also mixed in with this rumor the idea that they would update the 13 inch macbook air with new processors which at this point like we all you know we all love speed bumps and if you want to update the internals that's fine but you can't like they cannot update the macbook air again with leaving that screen they just can't it is an embarrassment it is just it's not even just that it's non-retina it's that it's non-retina and it's not even a good non-retina screen and
John:
It has not been a good non... I don't think it was ever a good non-retina screen, but it was acceptable for the price point at one point, but now it was just embarrassing.
John:
So if they want to update the... Here's their problem.
John:
If they updated the internals of the 13-inch MacBook Air and put a retina screen on it, it would suddenly become their best-selling portable again.
John:
And I don't know if Apple really wants that.
Marco:
that's so true i don't know marco thoughts it's unlikely that people are going to get what they want you know because it has been such a short time everyone has a wish list for what they wish the new macbooks did myself included or you know changes they wish for them um like and i ever since i switched to the escape i love the macbook escape so so much in almost every way
Marco:
But of course I have a wishlist too.
Marco:
Like my key, I got a stuck key the other day.
Marco:
My O key doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
And then I kind of jiggled it around and then started working again.
Marco:
So maybe there's something stuck under there.
Marco:
And I tweeted about it and I heard from so many people who have had multiple keyboard failures.
Marco:
And the new keyboard, in addition to all of its other problems...
Marco:
of having very low travel, being hard to feel, being very weirdly loud in a very unpleasant way.
Marco:
All the different problems the new keyboard has, the arrow keys being the way they are.
Marco:
Another problem that it seems like is possibly a pretty big problem with them is that they fail all the time.
Marco:
It seems like this is a big thing.
Marco:
We heard from 12-inch MacBook owners for the last couple of years that it was a big problem on that.
John:
and it seems like whatever the revision was that they did to make it a little bit clickier and louder for the new macbook pros last year it seems like that didn't get fixed it seems like it's still they still fail all the time i have a theory on this not having owned any one of these keyboards but having seen the previous ones i have a theory on what the failure mode might be and maybe you can check your okey to see if this is the case
John:
In addition to having less travel and having like a different, slightly different like activation mechanism underneath the keycaps, another thing that distinguishes to my eyes anyway, the new crop of very low profile keyboards on these portables is that the gap between the top case and the key is smaller than it used to be, which is great for like, this looks fancy and expensive and it's precision engineering to just cut out the hole just big enough for the keycap to slide up and down.
John:
But if anything manages to wiggle its way through that gap, A, it's not coming back out the way it came in because the gap is really, really small.
John:
And B, if it gets itself underneath the keycap to enough of a degree that it causes the thing not to activate.
John:
I've seen this exact problem with my keyboard and the old laptop keyboards, the old Apple flat keycap ones.
John:
Because the gap was big enough for lots of junk to fall under there, but it was easier also to get it out even without prying the keycap off.
John:
And it would sort of jiggle loose.
John:
I'm wondering if the new ones are kind of like a one-way trap for like mice or whatever that is a really, really skinny opening.
John:
and tall bits small bits of like dust or food crumbs or whatever the heck else is floating around can get in there but there's no way in hell they can get back out and stuff builds up and it causes them to fail that's just a theory if people have failing keyboards and they say no it's actually the key switch i don't know what the actual problem is and i'm assuming you don't know either because all you're doing is kind of like poking at it like a like an ape and wiggling the o key oh work work now key okay key work now like like what can you do i don't think have you pried off the key cap yet
Marco:
I haven't, and I don't think you can on these.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure.
Marco:
I have to verify this.
Marco:
Maybe I'm sure people will email us.
John:
Ifixit probably knows.
Marco:
But I think somebody told me that with this new butterfly switch type that they use in these new keyboards, I'm pretty sure you can't actually pop them off for service or cleaning.
Marco:
um and like whenever people say that like when people were telling me all their stories on twitter about getting their getting these keyboards replaced by the way this laptop line has been out for six months or something like seven months like it's not that long so to have a whole bunch of keyboard failures this soon is not good yeah like it could be you know it could be a design flaw like if it turns out that that little gap is great for looking cool in photos but terrible for actual use then that's your problem and getting a new keyboard it's not going to solve it it's going to reset your timer
Marco:
i mean i would argue that's the failure mode of almost every decision on this keyboard it designed for product photos but not good in actual use some people like typing on it some people like it i mean some people like dell pcs you know some people like dave matthews band
Casey:
Is there a quota?
Casey:
Is there a freaking quota at this point?
Casey:
What the hell is this?
Casey:
Anyway, yeah, I'm super skeptical of the timing.
Casey:
I'm super skeptical that Microsoft is the reason why.
Marco:
Oh, Microsoft is definitely not the reason why.
Marco:
If they're going to change anything, it's going to be because of feedback from Apple's customers or performance of the sales that are maybe not doing what Apple wants them to do or things like that.
Marco:
It's not going to be about what Microsoft is doing in their laptop line.
John:
Or because the 12-inch MacBook really needs an update, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
like that's the other reason to do it well it's been a kind of a long time does apple care about that though really i think they've shown that they mostly don't hey maybe we're hoping that like one of the lessons it learns from the mac pro fiasco is that if you want people to think that you care and to not be afraid to buy your computers and to not be angry when they buy them that like update them and not me you know there always be ones that are the least favorite child like the mac mini or whatever but the macbook the new macbook the macbook one the 12 inch macbook
John:
the macbook adorable that's not supposed to be a forgotten child that was one of your flagship we're so excited look at this amazing new thin computer and then a couple of revisions later it's like 18 months two years do we really need to update it that often and that's bad that's a bad look like some someone has to be the favorite child in that lineup it can't just be the macbook pros and even those went a long time before the touch bars appeared
Marco:
oh yeah i mean that's why i like i i think if apple's going to change anything else with the kb lake revisions of these laptops you know if they're going to make any other edits to the design um it's probably not going to be anything large it's probably not going to be anything that would require like new cases or anything like that i think it's most likely to be price changes or new low-end configurations to hit new lower price points because
Marco:
i think much of the criticism has correctly been about the increased prices of these new laptops compared to the old ones and so if apple just drops some prices a few hundred bucks on a couple of models here and there or makes like a new like a new low-end 15 inch that doesn't have the discrete gpu and prices that come up eventually it's marco's wishes just a 15 inch 15 inch with real keys but with also with touch id but with no discrete gpu that's a marco computer a 15 inch escape basically like that with touch id don't forget
John:
Oh, that would be great, but I'm not holding my breath on that one yet.
John:
I feel like that's a change they could do.
John:
I'm hoping that Touch ID proliferates, that it spreads across the Mac line slowly but surely because it is a universal good.
John:
As long as you can find a place somewhere to put it, who doesn't want that to authenticate and do all sorts of things?
John:
I think it would be very popular just like it's popular on phones.
John:
Um, but if it has to come with a touch bar, then suddenly at least Marco is less interested in it and it's more difficult to implement.
John:
And so I'm hoping it's more expensive.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm hoping a touch ID on, well, you have to end up putting like the secure enclave and everything in there anyway.
John:
So once you have all that, it's like, well, we basically have the guts for the touch bar.
John:
Why don't we add it?
John:
But anyway, um, touch ID spreading to like the escape lineup, um,
John:
uh does not seem uh out of the question for me unfortunately for you marco i think the even more likely scenario is the escape disappears as a touch bar proliferates across the entire line as it comes down in price and so on that that is definitely a big risk to the escape line but i think it's more likely that it would just replace the macbook air eventually as the cheap one
Marco:
And so they would keep this configuration around basically just like the Air is now.
Marco:
They would update it occasionally, but probably not even as often as the rest of them.
Marco:
And they would push it slowly towards $1,000.
Marco:
Right now it starts at $1,500.
Marco:
So there's a long way to go.
John:
The iPhone SE of the Mac laptop line.
Marco:
yeah it really might be honestly um because again it's an awesome computer really my my biggest complaint about it is that it's not a very good value and then my my second biggest complaint about it is the you know the keyboard sucking but but other than like other than those two things it is quite awesome and yeah i would love another i would love another usb port i would love an sd card reader
Marco:
But those aren't massive problems for me.
Marco:
I think it's just a really nice computer.
Marco:
I really enjoy the MacBook Escape.
Marco:
And I enjoy it more and more the more I use it, which is the opposite direction, my opinion, took of the 15-inch Touch Bar model.
Marco:
I think that one of the more interesting questions is, what do they do with the Touch Bar?
Marco:
Because I think it's pretty clear by this point.
Marco:
Now that we've had...
Marco:
seven months or whatever, we've had enough time for everyone's keyboards to die.
Marco:
So I think it's enough time to judge the touch bar a little more objectively than when it first came out.
Marco:
And I've heard a few other podcasts talking like, so hey, how are you using the touch bar these days?
Marco:
Are you getting into it?
Marco:
What do you think of it now?
Marco:
And the universal opinion from nearly everybody seems to be either negative or kind of middling.
Marco:
I haven't heard from anybody who loves the Touch Bar.
Marco:
I haven't heard from anybody who's like, man, I use it all the time.
Marco:
I'm so glad of all the new capabilities it offers or whatever else.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I haven't heard of any interesting app uses for it.
Marco:
And I think it'll be interesting to see what Apple does with that.
Marco:
Because I think they've kind of felt this, too, that the Touch Bar did not land as well as they hoped it would.
Marco:
Will we see more options in the future, such as a 15-inch escape?
Marco:
More options without the Touch Bar for people who don't want the Touch Bar itself or don't want to pay the premium for it?
Marco:
Or...
Marco:
Will Apple kind of double down on it and kind of force it into the market as much as possible, even more so they do now, and eliminate all the options that don't have it anymore?
Casey:
I think it's way too soon to judge the success of the Touch Bar, in no small part because for a lot of people, they...
Casey:
often don't buy laptops for themselves.
Casey:
They just use whatever laptop work issues them.
Casey:
And I can assure you that most workplaces that I've ever worked are on two to three year refresh cycles.
Casey:
And a lot of workplaces aren't really buying touch bars yet in part because they don't have to.
Casey:
And so I think it's, I would say it's not worth judging the touch bar as a success or a failure because
Casey:
For at least another year, if not another two years.
Casey:
So for me, this job and the last job I was at, I was on a three year cycle.
Casey:
So every three years I get a new computer, which means I'm not getting a new computer for two more years.
Casey:
And I've been at my job over a year now.
Casey:
So I mean, we are two years removed.
Casey:
from me getting a new computer, which if history tells us anything, it means I'll be getting the exact touch bar model that's out right now.
Casey:
But you see what I'm driving at.
Casey:
It's a long time for a lot of people to get into the touch bar.
Casey:
I think we're judging it way prematurely.
John:
Well, one of the things, my work made some judgment on the touch bar model because I am due to get a new computer, but my work refuses to buy the touch bar models because they perceive them to not be
John:
a good enough value uh upgrade over the old one so i work i have i guess it's the 2015 macbook or whatever i don't know the specific model that i have but anyway the pre uh touch bar macbook pros does it have a force click trackpad yeah then i'm just i'm wondering if i have a 20 2015 was that literally the last one before the yeah i think if it's a 15 inch and if it has force touch then it's 2015 yep that's what i have and i think that's what you probably have too john
John:
yeah but anyway this this is not just a company saying oh we're on this upgrade cycle and we're not thinking about buying ones like uh i i was waiting to get the touch bar ones like well the touch bar ones are out um and you have no more laptops in stock so you're gonna have to buy a new one and when you buy a new one like obviously you're gonna buy the touch bar ones and they were like no they still sell the old ones
John:
We're not buying the touch bar ones.
John:
Why not?
John:
Well, they're expensive and get worse battery life and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And so, like, that's a judgment call.
John:
They're not making it based on the touch bar.
John:
The company is deciding that these are not better enough and are worse in enough ways that they don't want to deal with it.
John:
Now, eventually they'll have to be – if this touch bar spreads everywhere, eventually they'll have to buy them because they'll have no choice.
John:
But that is not a – I'm sure Apple doesn't like the idea that –
John:
A corporation decided not to buy the new laptops and continues to buy the old ones.
John:
I mean, maybe that happens all the time in enterprise.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Meanwhile, my computer at work is eight years old.
John:
It's great pairing with my home.
Marco:
But as I'm saying, like, I think Apple could solve a lot of this need by just making a couple of low end configurations and making them cheaper.
Marco:
And then that would get people like your company to at least get their foot in the door for new upgrades in the new line.
Marco:
Because now instead of starting at $2,300 or whatever it starts at, now it might start at $1,900 or something like that.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
It's just such a hard thing.
Casey:
But the only thing I feel like I know for sure is that it's way too early to judge.
Casey:
And we need a little time to kind of figure out whether or not this is for real.
Casey:
And I think one way for Apple to compel adoption or to compel people to take the touch bar more seriously, well, I guess two ways.
Casey:
One is to make them cheaper or a better value by whatever metric that may be.
Casey:
And two is to just force it across the entire line.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
It'd be cool to have some hardware at WWDC, though.
Casey:
That'd be neat.
Casey:
I doubt it'll happen, but it would be neat.
John:
One thing that Marco can be optimistic about, by the way, speaking of his complaints with laptops, is that Apple has shown that it is willing to revise the new weird keyboard that he hates because it was released on one model of computer, and then when the new MacBook Pros came out, one of the things that was emphasized was that they had...
John:
made a revision to what appears to be the same keyboard presumably in response to people using the macbook one and not being happy with the keyboard now this has a different set of problems of being noisy and maybe they both have the problem of the keys dying or whatever uh but i was encouraged by the fact that they didn't say well let's just ship this keyboard for five more years and see how things work out they immediately revised it and attempted to improve it
John:
And so it's not inconceivable that the next major revision, maybe not this kind of speed bumpy thing, but the next major revision of the laptop line will have yet a third iteration of the keyboard Margo hates, which presumably will make a different set of trade-offs and maybe be better overall.
John:
That's something to watch for and potentially look forward to.
Marco:
I mean, it's possible.
Marco:
I just think that they went into the original MacBook 12-inch one baby, whatever, keyboard design, and the goal of that was make this keyboard as thin as humans will tolerate.
Marco:
And they did.
Marco:
And they made other design decisions around that, but that was like the invariant.
Marco:
You could not... Number one had to be thin, and all other parts of its usability were numbers two through N. And with this, I think when they carried this over into the entire MacBook Pro line,
Marco:
I think that invariant held.
Marco:
I think that was, again, it's like you can do whatever else you want to it, but it must remain super thin.
Marco:
Again, at all other costs.
Marco:
Make it less reliable.
Marco:
Make us spend a fortune on warranty repairs.
Marco:
Make people hate this keyboard at a large scale.
John:
Wow.
John:
I don't think the reliability was a factor.
John:
Reliability may have been a result of that, but I don't think they factored in.
John:
I think they expected the reliability to be about the same as the old ones.
John:
And only they know for sure whether it really is, how big the scope of the problem is.
John:
But I don't think they traded the reliability.
John:
It just turned out, perhaps, to be, oh, surprise, you made that tradeoff and you didn't realize it when you made...
John:
The gap's really tight, which really has nothing to do with the thinness because that's like lateral width and stuff.
John:
They could have made the gaps around the keys, changed the size of the keycaps and make the gaps bigger.
John:
It wouldn't have looked as nice.
John:
It's almost like a design decision as an aesthetic design more than it is a functionality decision because...
John:
That gap has no influence on – again, assuming that gap has anything to do with this problem, probably know it's something entirely unrelated.
John:
But if it is that gap, they can fix that while keeping all the thinness benefits.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But anyways, the point is thinness was number one priority.
Marco:
Everything else was secondary to thinness.
Marco:
And so it's like when they made the revision between the 12-inch original keyboard and the new MacBook Pro keyboard, they said, okay, we can improve these other areas, but you cannot make it thicker.
Marco:
Whatever you do, we are using this keyboard, damn it, and just make it tolerable a little bit more if you can.
Marco:
You know how they love to use the same keyboard everywhere.
Marco:
I don't expect any revisions of this computer to make the keyboard significantly better because I think... I'm not a keyboard engineer, but just seeing the performance of this, the original MacBook One, and every other keyboard in the world, I think in order to make it better, in order to fix the problems with it, they're probably going to have to go back to a scissor switch instead of these weird butterfly switches.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I don't think you can get scissor switches that are this thin that are any good.
Marco:
I think that's the reason they went to this switch in the first place.
Marco:
So I don't think they're able to fix this keyboard's biggest shortcomings without making it thicker, which is something that I just think there is no way that modern Apple would ever ship a laptop that was thicker than the one that came before it, even if it made it a lot better in a lot of different ways.
Marco:
I don't see that happening.
John:
I think it changed the switching mechanism underneath it yet again because that's what they did with the thing.
John:
They revised the little switchy thingy to have different feel and different sound, as it turns out.
John:
They could revise that little switchy thing again, keeping it the same size to try to find a different balance.
John:
Again, maybe that will or won't help reliability depending on what the heck the problem is or if it really is how big the problem is at all.
John:
But if you wait long enough, it'll be as we talked about when the touch bar first came out.
John:
The other possibility is that touch bar slowly expands to fill the entire bottom of your screen, and now you've just got two screens that close like a clamshell, and you don't have to worry about key travel anymore.
John:
The MacBook DS.
John:
Yep.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's hard to say what's going on in Apple.
Casey:
Marco, it almost sounded as though, and I think I am taking this a half step further than you intended, but it almost sounds as though you're attributing this to like malice or just unbelievable hubris.
Casey:
And maybe you're right.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But I think if I were to wager a guess, I think what's really happening is Apple is saying, hey, lighter computers and thinner computers as well.
Casey:
Let's leave lighter out of it.
Casey:
I shouldn't have brought that up.
Casey:
Thinner computers.
Casey:
Generally speaking, they're better for everyone.
Casey:
I would like a thinner computer.
Casey:
Now, granted, I may not want to make a bunch of the tradeoffs necessary to get it thinner.
Casey:
But if you said to me, you know, you don't have to make any tradeoffs, but would you like your computer thinner?
Casey:
Well, yes.
Casey:
Yes, I would.
Casey:
And everyone likes thinner computers.
Casey:
Part of the reason I want this MacBook so bad is because it's so portable and so thin.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I just, I don't think it's that they're like, screw it.
Casey:
This is the new design.
Casey:
And if anyone else doesn't like it, tough noogies for them.
Casey:
It's just, I think that they're marching toward as thin and as light a laptop as they can possibly get.
Casey:
And one of the things that stands in their way in making that is these big switches that they've used classically.
Casey:
And so now they have these new switches that they're trying and they'll iterate on it and they'll make it better.
Casey:
But obviously there are trade-offs and I don't know.
Casey:
I, I,
Casey:
I haven't used one of these new laptops with these new switches, but the brief—well, I haven't used them for a long period of time, but the brief times I've used it, I didn't find them that offensive.
Casey:
And I think that all the nerds, the same kinds of nerds that often but not always like mechanical keyboards, all them kvetching and whining about the feel of this keyboard, yeah, okay, that's to be expected.
Casey:
But I cannot remember a single time I've spoken to someone that's in the quote-unquote real world—
Casey:
That has been so upset about this keyboard.
Casey:
I'm sure those people exist, but I certainly personally have never noticed that.
Casey:
And I would think it would make the rounds as like, oh, these Apple keyboards are garbage.
Casey:
Everyone agrees if they really were that bad.
Marco:
Well, again, I want to be clear.
Marco:
First of all, I don't think this is malice.
Marco:
I think this is bad design decisions or bad design priorities.
Marco:
It's not that everyone hates the new keyboard.
Marco:
Maybe even most people can tolerate it.
Marco:
My dislike of it – I'll try to be brief because we talk about this so often.
Marco:
But my dislike of it I think blows down to that it's an unforced error that –
Marco:
they have taken this, what used to be fairly ignorable, like no one talked about the keyboards on Apple laptops for years.
Marco:
It was just never a thing that mattered because every laptop had a keyboard that was pretty good and it was fine and no one cared.
Marco:
And once the MacBook 12 inch one baby came out,
Marco:
Now, all of a sudden, there's this extremely controversial keyboard that a lot of people are okay with, but a lot of people are like, oh my god, I hate this.
Marco:
They took something that was not controversial and made an extreme version of it that was very controversial.
Marco:
That was probably okay if it was only ever on that model, which was the assumption that we all had when it came out.
Marco:
But now it's on all the keys.
Marco:
Now it's basically the same keyboard everywhere.
Marco:
Now it's on every laptop that you buy that is new, that has been updated in the last 20 years, now has this keyboard on it.
Marco:
And so it's like now there's no more choice.
Marco:
This extreme polarizing thing in this category that used to not be polarizing
Marco:
Now this is your only choice.
Marco:
So if you want to keep buying modern Mac laptops, you now have to accept this keyboard whether you like it or not.
Marco:
And there's a lot of people who don't.
Marco:
And nobody was really begging for the previous generation of laptops to get thinner.
Marco:
They do love lighter.
Marco:
And thinner does feel great in the store and sell well.
Marco:
But there's also a balance to be struck with.
Marco:
How many people find this appealing?
Marco:
Do people make more errors?
Marco:
Does it break more often?
Marco:
Because you know what?
Marco:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
Apple might not care about the warranty costs so far of replacing all these dying keycaps and dead keyboards on all these laptops.
Marco:
But you know what?
Marco:
I, as a user, care quite a bit.
Marco:
I have bought something like, jeez, I don't know, 10 Apple laptops in my life so far.
Marco:
Something in that ballpark.
Marco:
i've never had a key problem i've never had a key break that seems ridiculous ridiculous to me and this now i have this macbook escape that's like two months old and i already have a key problem and so even if apple fixes it for free which they they damn well will um i still have to like now go get it serviced i have to be without it for a certain amount of time i have to go through the process of getting it service which is its own pain now with apple because they're so crowded now with everything
Marco:
And so I, as a user, now I feel like I've bought this fragile thing.
Marco:
Now I'm thinking, you know, I should probably buy AppleCare on this, another $300 or whatever it is, because if it's going to be this fragile and have a key break after very light use for two months, obviously this is not a well-built machine.
Marco:
And all of this is an unforced error because they didn't have to make the machines this thin.
Marco:
They could have just made them this light and made them almost this thin and given like an extra millimeter or whatever it would have been to have a less controversial, more durable keyboard in there.
Marco:
But they didn't.
Marco:
And they made that choice now for the entire product line.
Marco:
So if you disagree with that choice, you now have no more options.
Marco:
uh i'd like to respond to that very quickly in two ways one you said unforced error which is a sports reference and i don't think we appropriately congratulated you for that so well done i actually didn't know that i i've only heard john say it oh god can you guess which sport it's from then since you heard me say it i know baseball has errors so i'm gonna say baseball no good try no is it exceptions in baseball
Marco:
Tennis.
John:
Tennis, come on.
John:
One sport I know stuff about.
Casey:
It's an exception.
Casey:
The other thing I want to say is you've said a couple times, Marco, that not a lot of people seem to care about thinness or why would people care about thinness?
Casey:
I disagree.
Casey:
I think thinness really matters.
Marco:
Well, no, I didn't say that.
Marco:
I said it does sell well.
Marco:
It feels great in stores and it sells well.
Marco:
But ultimately, weight is much more important.
Marco:
And the laptops were already really thin before.
Marco:
So people weren't crying out.
Casey:
See, but weight's more important to you.
Casey:
If I carried a purse every day, thinness would be pretty darn important to me.
Casey:
I don't think that... I think you're underselling the importance of thinness.
Casey:
I do agree fully.
Casey:
I completely and utterly agree that weight is more important.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I think a lot of times, or I would wager a lot of times that people conflate weight with thinness.
Casey:
And, you know, especially if you're carrying something a lot.
Casey:
It's not just going in like a backpack.
Casey:
It's not just going, I don't know, in a laptop bag.
Casey:
You're carrying it like...
Casey:
on your personal lot, like in a purse or in the same way you would carry an iPad.
Casey:
That's exactly why I want the MacBook.
Casey:
In many ways, I want the MacBook not only because it's light, but also expressly because it's so thin, because it feels like nothing.
Casey:
That's why the Air was so cool the very first time we saw it, because it fit in that damn envelope that Steve had.
Casey:
I think, maybe not for you and maybe not for everyone, but for a lot of people, I think thinness is certainly important.
Marco:
Yeah, it is, but we're talking about such small numbers.
Marco:
We're talking about single millimeters or fractional millimeters, and it's like, yes, thickness and thinness do matter, but as the absolute values of these numbers get smaller and smaller, the relative differences matter a lot less because we're talking about...
Marco:
Every laptop that Apple sells is ridiculously thin.
Marco:
Every laptop Apple sold before these came out, the entire 2012 Retina generation, was also really thin.
Marco:
And the MacBook Air generation before that, also really thin.
Marco:
Apple doesn't really sell a thick computer anymore.
Marco:
Right, but that's a competitive advantage.
Marco:
yeah but i'm saying like you're talking about the difference between it's literally talking about the difference of like a millimeter for different keyboard types like that's that's the the scale of what we're talking about here so i don't think and and like look at look at the 11 inch air before this the 11 inch air had a regular scissor switch keyboard uh and it was a really small thin computer that is of similar dimensions although again slightly larger as the 12 inch macbook
Marco:
but it was still like it was really close to those dimensions and that thickness.
Marco:
And so it's like I just don't think they needed to make this decision for the entire lineup and that has consequences.
Marco:
And what I'm saying is it was a poor design decision to go with this extreme polarizing option
Marco:
When going with something that was a little more mainstream acceptable, like your beloved Magic Keyboard 3 or whatever it is, like the current Magic Keyboard, that has scissor switches.
Marco:
And if they put that in the laptop, that would be great.
Marco:
Wait, I thought it didn't.
Casey:
I thought it didn't have... No, it does.
Casey:
Okay, so I almost said that, and then I could have sworn I was wrong.
Casey:
So, okay.
Casey:
Then I agree with you.
Casey:
If this thing was in a laptop, oh, my God, I would be in heaven.
Marco:
Right, but they didn't do that.
Marco:
And to do that would not have made the laptops that much thicker.
Marco:
It would have been a really small difference in thickness.
Marco:
It would have been probably zero noticeable difference in weight, because keyboards are mostly empty space.
Marco:
They're pretty light.
Marco:
So it would only have made it a little bit thicker, probably.
Marco:
But they didn't do that because they made this decision for everybody now that I think was a bad decision.
Marco:
But that's it.
Marco:
We don't need to keep talking about this.
Marco:
We don't want to.
John:
You're losing sight of the real crime, the real multi-decade crime, which is using the same keyboard no matter how big the laptop is.
John:
You have all this room for other keys, but they cannot handle the asymmetry.
John:
they just cannot handle it you can't they can't give us an inverted t at home and end and like nope they just not gonna happen same keyboard exact same keyboard constrained to its little rectangle no matter how big how much aluminum there is around it just sitting there with tiny little holes that look like speaker grills but aren't really that is the real crime and that is a multi-generational multi-decade crime instead of this very recent uh really shallow key travel thing
Casey:
Real quick, a real time follow up.
Casey:
The 13 inch MacBook Pro, I think I'm looking at the 13.
Casey:
One of the MacBook Pros, it doesn't matter, is 1.49 centimeters height.
Casey:
The MacBook is a maximum of 1.31 centimeters height.
Casey:
So that's a difference of, what is that, 18 millimeters?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I can do math.
Casey:
It's late.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But it's not that much, to your point, Marco.
Casey:
1.8.
Casey:
Yeah, that too.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, point is, it's not a lot, no matter how you slice it.
Casey:
And that is absolutely true.
Casey:
But one of the benefits of this march to thinness is that a person who maybe always carries their computer with them, be it somebody with a purse or somebody who just always has a laptop bag on them,
Casey:
maybe they always, always, always have to have a computer with them for whatever reason.
Casey:
And they might have been forced to, in the past, use either the underpowered MacBook or the slightly less underpowered MacBook Air.
Casey:
Now, because of Apple's general march of thinness and toward thinness, now they can, to your point, Marco, use a MacBook Pro, because really the Delta isn't that big in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
So
Casey:
Again, I think thinness does matter to everyone in ways that may not be obvious, even though I completely and utterly agree, I'll say it again, that weight is the ultimate number one issue.
Marco:
In better real-time follow-up, chatroom user Jobius says, baseball errors are not called exceptions, even though they are a failure that occurs in the try-catch block.
Marco:
Well done.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Audible, and Fracture.
John:
And we will see you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
Tech Podcast, so long.
Marco:
about either hardware or software, it's going to be a big one.
Marco:
And I'm looking forward to that.
Marco:
I'm excited.
Marco:
As much as I seem skeptical of a lot of things that Apple does in recent times, they also do a whole bunch of stuff I'm really excited about.
Marco:
This is one of the biggest events of the year.
Marco:
I would say probably the second biggest.
Marco:
I think the biggest is probably the fall event where they announce new iPhones and stuff.
Marco:
But this is probably the second biggest event of the year.
Marco:
And lots of stuff is going to probably be mentioned that's going to be really cool.
Marco:
I'm just looking forward to that.
Marco:
Like Tipster says, we might even get the new Mac Pro teased.
Marco:
Who knows if that's the case.
Marco:
But I'm just really excited about...
Marco:
whatever it is, because even if they only deliver on a quarter of the rumored things, that's still going to be really cool.
John:
Yeah, I agree with you.
John:
I will be incredibly surprised if there is anything that they could even tease about for the Mac Pro.
John:
Even a logo with words on it.
John:
Not even a glimpse of the computer or anything about it, but I was surprised that they even had time to do that.
John:
It just seems like...
John:
They maybe wouldn't want to remind us about that fiasco at this time, especially if they have tons of other stuff to announce.
John:
So I'm not looking forward to that.
John:
The thing I think I'm most looking forward to is hopefully improve weather because I'm always tired of like being cold in June is just not right.
John:
and and it's the kind of weather where it's not really cold cold so you don't bring like your warm clothes but then like suddenly you're out and it's like 1 a.m and you're freezing you're like why isn't this june well that's that's why they always give everybody jackets that everybody see because like those jackets are the cruelest jackets because they're like oh this jacket like you'll be baking in the sun in the middle of the day in that jacket but if you wear that jacket all night you will eventually be freezing in it so it's it's a cruel jacket oh yeah i have a whole stack of them in my closet that i just never wear because
Marco:
It's always either too sweaty or too uninsulated for whatever condition I'm in.
John:
Or it has no pockets like that one year.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about this Stephen Levy new Apple New Campus Apple Park thing?
John:
I didn't read that yet.
John:
I opened it and I scrolled the page and I went, ugh, one of those.
Marco:
I mean, here's the thing.
Marco:
I don't really care about Apple's office building.
Marco:
I think it's cool that they do stuff like this, that they put so much thought into it, but I think it's also arguable, based on some of the reporting coming out of this, that maybe this was a massive distraction for them, and especially for people like Johnny Ive.
Marco:
And maybe it's better that Johnny Ive was busy doing this instead of making our keyboards even worse, but I don't know.
Marco:
Or making our Mac Pros even less useful.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It is certainly arguable that this has been a massive distraction for a lot of top people at Apple.
Marco:
But other than that, I don't really care about the details because I'm probably never going to be allowed inside the giant ring.
Marco:
And I'm probably never going to work there.
Marco:
So I don't think it's ever really going to affect me.
John:
It'll be a great place to probably settle in in the end times if you're able to secure that facility and protect it from the zombies and the chuds because it'll be like fairly self-sustaining and probably have like nice views and be secure and look kind of cool.
John:
So look forward to that being a good apocalypse bunker.
Casey:
You know, it's interesting having read the article.
Casey:
I do think it's worth reading.
Casey:
But what I found interesting about it was that you can read it two ways, right?
Casey:
You can read it as this is the epitome of Apple taking things seriously.
Casey:
They're just taking the stuff seriously.
Casey:
Even stuff like the handles on the doors they take seriously and it matters to them.
Casey:
And that's just admirable and respectable, how seriously they take even the most minute stuff.
John:
Well, there's a line between admirable, respectable, and pathological.
John:
That's, I think, the line.
Casey:
That's exactly where I was going with this.
Casey:
Or you can say, this is just freaking crazy pants, that they are going this deep on these stupid decisions that really don't matter.
John:
I don't think...
John:
I don't think it's the fact that they matter or not.
John:
Like, oh, you shouldn't be worried about that.
John:
I think it turns on the sort of anti-pattern that you see with a lot of these fancy buildings.
John:
They should care about these things.
John:
And they should care about all the details.
John:
And I think it is not beneath their level of concern because it's just a doorknob.
John:
I think the problem is, from my perspective anyway, that...
John:
Apple doesn't have a lot of experience building buildings.
John:
And when you go from one domain where you're building a computer hardware or things related to that and go into another domain and say, just because we care a lot and we have a lot of money, we will be able to produce a building that fulfills our desires, but also functions in a way that fits with that.
John:
And one of the best examples is like the...
John:
The status center at MIT was his name, Frank Geary or whatever, the guy who makes those buildings look like they're falling down.
John:
If you just Google for it, you'll see the picture of it.
John:
And it's very strange and interesting looking from the outside.
John:
And it is also strange from the inside.
John:
And regardless of what you think of the aesthetics and the style and the statement that it's making.
John:
As a building, because of those design decisions, which were probably expensive to have him do and all these non-rectilinear walls and all this weird stuff, it fails in some of the basic functions of buildings, like, for example, sight lines from certain places where you can see downwards into a bathroom on another floor.
John:
That's failing as a building.
John:
Doors with motion sensor things, which because of the way everything's are connected, it's possible to trip them and open a supposedly secured door because there are gaps or other things that allow the motion sensor to be triggered.
John:
Like, it's failing as a building.
John:
So when I see...
John:
Apple spending all this money on tables and doorknobs and stuff like that.
John:
I don't think it's because those things are below the level of concern.
John:
They shouldn't worry about it.
John:
They should just accept it.
John:
I have just have little faith that no matter how much money and, and, you know, especially if it's a Johnny Ive type thing and style, they put into this design that, uh,
John:
It's not going to work as well as a building if you had just taken the standard contractor office door.
John:
Because the standard contractor office doors have had years and years to be honed to, like, this is the right balance between reliability and cost, you know, over time.
John:
This door is going to work.
John:
The knob is going to work.
John:
It's going to fulfill the function.
John:
It's going to last you 5, 10 years, and you won't have to replace it.
John:
As opposed to this beautiful artisanal door handle that you've designed that no one else has installed that, like Marco's keyboard, six months later, like, the doors aren't working anymore.
John:
and that's that's but you know the status center is is the like a flagship for that because like you spend all this money and all this time and all this prestige of this fancy architecture this thing and it fails as a building someone in the chat room says it also leaks like you're yeah and a lot of the frank lord right office buildings were like that too the big lily pad thing like leaks and stuff it's like this office building looks really cool and has all these great architectural aspects but it doesn't keep the rain out that seems pretty important and i don't think that's a smart trade-off to make now
John:
it could be that apple has spent all this time and money and actually has gotten all these things right but in every area where they innovate innovate quote in every area where they do something different than every other office building if it hasn't been done a million times before by other people's office buildings i worry about it in the same way that it was a no-brainer to predict problems with the the tesla model x's going or eagle wing or whatever they are falcon wing sorry falcon wing doors it was a no-brainer to predict there would be problems with that because
John:
that's not how every other car door in the world is made and you're not going to get it right in your first try it seems to me that if apple is doing anything in this building that hasn't been done many many times before uh but it's being done for the very first time in this building those things are going to have problems and that's probably not a good trade-off now it's possible that they pulled it off and this this building is like the iphone where like they just nailed it like
John:
They did an amazing new thing, and they got so much right about it that it overwhelms any possible problems that it has, and it'll be great.
John:
But it's also possible this will be a beautiful round status center.