Throw the Fork Away
Casey:
Out of curiosity, and you can choose not to answer this, what did we conclude with regard to headgear for the live show?
Casey:
Did we ever reach a conclusion?
Marco:
You have to wear your retainer, Casey.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm definitely wearing headphones.
Marco:
I don't care how nerdy I look.
Marco:
You guys are welcome to make that choice for yourselves.
John:
You should have headphones available for us.
John:
Put them on the table in front of us.
John:
We can choose to put them on or not.
John:
For me, it depends on whether it's weird for me not to be able to hear myself or whether just the in-room speakers will be enough and hearing the audience.
John:
And so I'm going to make the call at the moment to see what it's like.
John:
I'm going to try it without first, and if it's weird, I'll put them on.
Casey:
So what I'm hearing is I will bring a pair of scissors and hundreds of dollars to refund Marco for the headphones that I break if John tries to put them on.
John:
No, it's on myself.
John:
I'm not going to put them on you.
Casey:
I know, but if you put them on and Marco has them on, what am I going to be, the lone cool kid?
John:
No, you can totally, you're your own person.
John:
I'm not the boss of you.
John:
You do what you want with your own head.
Casey:
Ian McDowell writes in, he is not an Apple genius, but apparently heard from an Apple genius, if I understand this correctly, that the keycaps on the new scissor key keyboards are not removable.
Casey:
Dirt commonly gets under the keys, and they now have special tools in the stores to help fix them.
John:
I would love to know what the special tools are.
John:
Is it like tiny nanomachines that they send in through those little cracks between the keys, and then they grab little pieces of dirt and come out?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Actually, it's a magical school bus that they drive through and use to clean things up.
Casey:
Speaking of the keyboard and cleaning it, there is actually – did Stephen Hackett send this to us?
Casey:
Somebody sent this to us.
Casey:
There is actually a knowledge-based article, so I'll just assume it was Stephen, that's entitled Clean the Keyboard of Your MacBook Retina 12-inch 2015 and Later.
Casey:
And it describes holding your MacBook at exactly a 75-degree angle.
John:
Exactly.
John:
This is very important.
John:
You hold it to 80.
John:
This does not work.
John:
Forget 90.
John:
Forget it.
John:
What are you even doing?
John:
75.
Casey:
Obviously, I'm joking, but it really does show a 75 degree angle and with a little diagram of what that looks like.
John:
I don't know if that's really 75.
John:
Someone get out your protractor.
John:
But anyway, they're very insistent about the degree.
Casey:
Yeah, and so then you use compressed air to spray the keyboard or just the effective keys in a left to right motion.
John:
Very important.
Casey:
Then rotate your MacBook to its right side and spray the keyboard again from left to right.
Casey:
And they have a little diagram.
John:
You rotate it to your left side, this will not work.
John:
Warranty voided.
John:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
So anyway, so yeah, they have this whole process that apparently amounts to blow crap out from under the keycaps.
Casey:
And that is an actual knowledge base article.
Marco:
So in the time since our last show, I had my whole rant about the heat and the keys, right?
John:
The expanding, like when it gets warmer weather, you thought maybe the keys are expanding and filling the openings more and getting stuck.
Marco:
So I went on a little Twitter rant about this almost a week ago.
Marco:
I heard from a lot of people who have computers with the new keyboards.
Marco:
And it actually seems like this might not be as much of an issue on the MacBook One's keyboard, the first generation of this on the 12-inch.
Marco:
But it seems like this is a major issue for a lot of people.
Marco:
And, you know...
Marco:
And when I say a lot of people, I'm saying I've heard from a lot of people on Twitter.
Marco:
That doesn't mean that a large percentage of customers have this problem.
Marco:
Only Apple knows that.
Marco:
But it certainly seems like this is a noteworthy problem that keys get stuck or feel different or get stuck down or repeat or somehow don't work properly.
Marco:
on a pretty regular basis with a lot of these keyboards, a lot of people have to get them replaced.
Marco:
And also, it seems to be related to heat.
Marco:
That when they are warm, either when the computer is working really hard, so it's getting warm, or if you're just in a hot environment, like I was when I was having this problem.
Marco:
I was outside on a hot day.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The keys tend to stick a lot more then.
Marco:
And so I don't know enough about the way these are built to know why that is.
Marco:
Some of the Twitter people were speculating that maybe the tolerances are so tight that maybe a little bit of thermal expansion is enough to make it not work properly.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it does seem like that's kind of a problem, if that's true.
Marco:
That seems like a big problem.
Marco:
So I don't really know what the answer here is.
Marco:
I hope that Apple is doing so many replacements of these keyboards under warranty that it motivates them to change things if they can.
Marco:
The only question is, can they, or are they going to have to wait until the next major revision of the keyboard in new, in new laptops entirely?
Marco:
And everyone who owns this generation might just be out of luck and just might have to get frequent keyboard replacements.
Marco:
And I hope that's not the answer because that's not a good answer.
Marco:
Um, and as an owner of one of these, I'm, I'm really not happy with this.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
The idea that I'm going to have to bring it to Apple at least once and go without it for like a week at least once to get this keyboard fixed if I want it to work reliably, that is not very appealing to me because I buy a laptop because I need a laptop.
Marco:
And going without it for a week is usually not very convenient.
Marco:
Not to mention having to get an appointment with Apple or call them and wait on the phone and do mail order or whatever else.
Marco:
Like none of these are good options.
Marco:
None of these are great solutions to what should be a pretty basic thing, which is I expect the keyboards on my laptops to work reliably.
Marco:
And this is all like feeling aside.
Marco:
Like we've talked at length about how much we like or dislike, mostly just like the new, you know, shallow keyboards.
Marco:
And I've heard from people who defend them, who like the feel, and that's fine.
Marco:
It's a personal preference.
Marco:
The feel of the keyboard doesn't bother me as much as it used to now that I've used it for a while.
Marco:
But what does bother me is reliability being bad.
Marco:
And I think regardless of what you think of the feel of the keyboard, I think we can probably all agree that an unreliable keyboard in a laptop, especially such a young laptop...
Marco:
is really worrying.
Marco:
If it was just me, then that's fine.
Marco:
And you can disregard it.
Marco:
I would disregard it as, well, I got a bad keyboard.
Marco:
You know, you should get it fixed.
Marco:
But from what I keep hearing from people over and over and over again when I bring this up, a lot of people have had to get multiple replacements.
Marco:
And the replacements have the same problem.
Marco:
And so it just seems like it's a design flaw.
Marco:
And that's a pretty big design flaw.
Marco:
I hope...
Marco:
that this is smaller than it seems.
Marco:
I hope that I can just get it replaced once and then have a reliable laptop keyboard for the next, you know, one to four years that I use this laptop, whatever it ends up being.
Marco:
I hope that's it.
Marco:
But so far, what I have heard is discouraging in that area.
Marco:
It sounds like this might just be a problem with this entire generation of keyboards that's in the 2016 MacBook Pro.
John:
think this is solvable if they you know if apple figures out what the problem is like they you know they diagnose this and they figure it out and say aha if we change design in this way change a different material make little bits of the key differently shaped or larger or smaller or whatever it takes make the key caps themselves slightly smaller this all seems like something that could be solved by it's kind of like they do with the screen image retention where it's like oh we sold you a bunch of
John:
uh you know retina macbook pros and if you got the lg screen or the samsung screen i can't even remember which one was the bad one you might have image retention problems they don't fix it by giving you another one of the same screen that had image retention problems they give you a different better screen that still fulfills the same purpose has the same resolution and the same characteristics but doesn't have burning but it's like a different part either a new part from the same maker or apart from a different manufacturer so if they figure this out with a keyboard they will make a new keyboard that fits these things and
John:
And when you come in for a repair, they'll replace it with the new version.
John:
It's just a question of how long it takes them to figure out what the heck the problem is, assuming it even is a problem according to their numbers.
Marco:
Well, first of all, to save you a bunch of email, image retention, 15-inch 2012 Retina MacBook Pro screens, they didn't guarantee that you got a better one.
Marco:
Like, the LG was the problem.
Marco:
The Samsung was the good one.
Marco:
When you got it replaced, you could get either one.
Marco:
It was just kind of dumb luck which one you got.
Marco:
And you just hoped that you got the Samsung panel.
John:
But they could do that.
John:
If they know one's good and one's bad, assuming that's even true.
John:
That's our conventional wisdom of, oh, if you got this one, you're okay, and if you got this one, you're not.
John:
But assuming they know one is better, they have the option.
John:
What I'm saying is they have the option of giving you one.
John:
They don't have to redesign the thing.
John:
You don't have to wait for the next model.
John:
If Apple knows...
John:
replace this part with this other part that is different and it will fix the problem.
John:
They have the ability to do that with it.
John:
You're not, you're not out of luck is what I'm saying with this thing.
John:
You don't have to wait until you buy the next computer.
John:
You don't have to return this one and get a different one.
John:
You just need Apple to a make an improved thing and be actually give it to you when they replace it.
Marco:
When it comes to moving along with Apple, moving along with the newest technologies and getting the newest stuff and keeping up with Apple, you have to swallow some things.
Marco:
You have to, okay, yeah, I guess I'll get rid of my headphone jack.
Marco:
I guess I can get rid of all my ports and my SD card reader and everything else.
Marco:
And a lot of these things are easier or harder to swallow.
Marco:
Having a keyboard not be reliable is a massive problem.
Marco:
I don't care what you think of this keyboard.
Marco:
Having it not be reliable for almost everyone who buys one, that is unacceptable.
Marco:
That is not a trade-off.
Marco:
That is not moving towards the future.
Marco:
There is no excuse for that.
Marco:
That is a design flaw, and that needs to be fixed.
Casey:
Yeah, I really want to tell you that you are especially early on that you were being a big baby about the keyboard and how you didn't like it, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But you know, you're allowed your opinion.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
However, I could not agree with you more that if the if these reliability problems are as widespread as they anecdotally seem to be, then this is definitely a step backwards and needs to be addressed.
Casey:
all right moving on if you do have a problem with your keycaps uh there are some people that apparently do remove them without breaking them according to a somewhat shady uh youtube video asterisk asterisk at the end of that without breaking them because well we'll continue to the next following but anyway this is a video of someone showing you how he can price he cap off with a guitar pick
John:
And kind of how they work under the covers so you can kind of visualize what it is that you're doing when you pry this thing up.
John:
So some people are doing it.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a thing, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
Casey:
And that was sent in by Kuba B. Additionally, Michael M. writes in regarding the fragility of the new keyboard types and how they differ from the days of old.
Casey:
uh here are some photos of the damaged key caps so far that i've replaced and we'll put a link in the show notes there are four uh pictures here of what appears to be four different or three different key caps and a scissor switch that have been an issue uh note the clips at the top each top corner should have two fingers to clip around a pin on the butterfly and the hooks at the bottom to remove these keys must be pried up at the top and then removed by moving the cap toward the top of the keyboard
Casey:
Anything else would break the fragile clips, as will any misalignment on reassembly.
Casey:
I only broke the pins off two butterflies while I damaged at least seven keycaps.
Casey:
I have a first-generation MacBook 1.
Casey:
I've had it since early after release.
Casey:
My effing key worked properly, but didn't return to its full height correctly from new.
Casey:
I ignored the issue.
Casey:
Turns out that keycap had been broken for years.
Casey:
The bigger and more concerning issue, which is why I've not yet made a second or third round of keycap and butterfly replacement part purchases, is that a couple of keys I'm having difficulty with do not have any apparent physical damage to the keycap or the butterfly.
Casey:
And they do not have any bits stuck under them that can be seen upon very close inspection.
Casey:
So I still dearly regret taking these keycaps off.
Casey:
This isn't a keyboard to be worked on by an expert.
Casey:
It's a keyboard to be worked on by a trained expert with a spare parts stash.
John:
That's the lesson of all portable devices, like everything that, you know, Apple increasingly the things that are assembled with glue or the one way assembly where it goes together, but it does not come apart and go back together the same way it was.
John:
Maybe you can take it apart and maybe you can put it back together.
John:
But it will never be the same.
John:
And so the idea of like, oh, I'm a do-it-yourselfer.
John:
I can pry these keycaps off.
John:
I can see how they work.
John:
You look at these pictures and look at the size, sort of the feature size in, you know, silicon chip parlance.
John:
How small the little clippy things are on the bottom of this.
John:
And the tiny little pins on the butterfly switch that they grip.
John:
very very small very delicate right and so if you are thinking about prying these things off the possibility that you're going to break off or bend or otherwise screw up one of those clips or one of those pins seems very high which is probably why apple doesn't like repair these keyboards they give you a whole new one wasn't on the last show someone said it's not it's not if they're going to fix one key for you they're going to replace the whole keyboard as far as i know that's true
John:
Yeah, this doesn't seem like a repairable thing.
John:
Now, in Apple's, you know, knowledge-based article, they tell you how to blow compressed air on it to maybe get the grit out, you know, because it's not going to shake out on its own because all the gaps are so small.
John:
And that might solve your little grit-type problem.
John:
But the other interesting thing about Michael's story here is that he had a key that had one of the little clippy things underneath it broken, you know, from the... I'm not sure how he knows this because maybe he broke it when he took it off or whatever, but...
John:
that it hadn't been working uh and and he had just been ignoring it and it had been broken for a really long time um if these little clippy things are broken under one of your keycaps you can't know that it's not like you have x-ray vision like maybe that could explain why it's not working because the little clippy things help the key rise and fall in sequence with the butterfly switch and stay you know stable and everything and if it's not connected to one of the little clippy things it's kind of like you know
John:
And independent suspension when you want are, you know, really live rear axle and strong anti-roll bars, car analogies.
John:
I think this one actually works, but it only works for people who know what those things are.
John:
So I can imagine if you have a bad clip and one corner of your key is not being pushed upwards and pulled downward with the whole rest of your key...
John:
No matter where you hit it, it is basically like, you know, an anti-roll bar under the cover.
John:
When one corner of the key goes up or down, you want the whole rest of the key to go with it.
John:
That can make the key tilt in a way that it doesn't expect and get stuck and do all sorts of other things.
John:
And just looking at the pictures of these keyboards make me start freaking out a little bit about how...
John:
How delicate these little bits are and how easy it is for something to go wrong.
John:
Now, if you open up a scissor key keyboard like the one I use every day, it's also extremely delicate and tiny inside there.
John:
I don't know if the features of the keycaps and mechanisms are actually all that different.
John:
It could just be a matter of, you know, butterfly versus scissor and travel distance and maybe the switching mechanism underneath it.
John:
But...
Marco:
i do not i do not like keyboards i don't like thinking about these keyboards it almost makes me long for a non-moving uh iphone 7 home button style keyboard where nothing actually no don't say that they'll do it no like i don't like thinking about keyboards either that's why this this annoys me so much because i've had every other laptop i've ever had from apple i have never had to think about the keyboard it just worked and it was fine the
Marco:
That's why this bothers me so much.
Marco:
I feel like we're moving backwards in technology if the basics become unreliable.
Casey:
Hector Ramos wrote in to tell us that he worked at a big company's tech conference at the McEmery Convention Center last month, which I don't even know, but I'm assuming that's the one that we're going to be in for WWDC.
Casey:
Having been to WWDC, says Hector, I think it's fair to say that the box lunches in the San Jose McEmery were worse.
Casey:
Sad trombone.
Casey:
So don't get your hopes up.
Casey:
The box lunches were all cold sandwiches with either soggy bread or hard and impossible to eat bread, along with mystery dessert.
Casey:
They also had salad-only options that were passable.
Casey:
However, the real news here, which is terrible, there was no Odwalla.
Casey:
Sorry, Casey.
Marco:
I'm so sorry, man.
Marco:
Are you going to be okay?
Casey:
Well, I'm hopeful that it's just that this particular event may not have sprung for the Odwalla option, but I'm nervous.
Casey:
And also a real-time follow-up from friend of the show, Jason Snell.
Casey:
It's McEnery, not McEmery.
Casey:
So that's M-C-E-N-E-R-Y before I get all the San Jose residents writing me.
John:
He wrote it with M's.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
So in any case, yeah, so no Odwalla for this particular tech conference.
Casey:
And reading between the lines, it was not the sort of tech conference where they needed to worry about money.
Casey:
This was a spared, no expense kind of experience.
Casey:
So I'm nervous, but hopefully, hopefully Apple will...
Casey:
will spring for the Odwalla just for me.
Casey:
I know that there's discussion somewhere in Cupertino.
Casey:
You know, Casey made it this year.
Casey:
He won the lottery this year.
Casey:
And we don't want to hear him whining and moaning for a year if there's no Odwalla.
Casey:
So we might as well just pony it up.
Marco:
My favorite thing about this is that we have become the podcast of conference box lunches.
Casey:
So true.
Casey:
So anyway, so we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But that is sad times, tentatively.
Marco:
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Casey:
News broke earlier today as we record this.
Casey:
Denise Youngsmith, who used to be the vice president of worldwide HR, has now been named the vice president of inclusion and diversity, which is cool.
Casey:
I think that's pretty awesome.
Casey:
We don't really know much about it yet.
Casey:
So, you know, obviously we don't want to celebrate it too much quite yet.
Casey:
But this is absolutely a step in the right direction.
Casey:
And she's not a white dude, because that seems to be the classical thing to do, which is to put a white dude in charge of diversity and diversity.
Casey:
And inclusion.
Casey:
And so at least Apple wasn't so tone deaf that they made that faux pas.
Casey:
So this, in theory, seems like a great thing.
John:
This is a newly created position.
John:
Like, this position didn't exist as a new vice president level position that they've created.
John:
And I don't know how this is going to work out because so much corporate stuff is opaque.
John:
Like...
John:
When I see stuff like this in companies other than Apple, because I think Apple is an exception in many ways, but when a big company makes a new role for a vice president or someone who's going to address some problem that they think they have, I always fear that that person is being set up for failure because how is it that they're going to pursue their agenda
John:
in a company that didn't even have this position previously and and to pursue the agenda requires you know massive company shifting policy changes um so that's that's my usual fear with these type of things that you know what can they even do is it just symbolic will the rest of the company listen to them and you know this will they be empowered to make change the thing that encourages me about this for apple specifically is that
John:
It seems like Apple has done this to pretty good effect in the past.
John:
One example is Lisa Jackson, who was on the talk show, who does environment or whatever.
John:
I'm assuming that position was newly created at some point in the past too.
John:
Apple 20 years ago probably didn't have a...
John:
you know, environment czar or whatever her title is.
John:
Um, and she's got results.
John:
Like she does things that change the way Apple makes its products.
John:
Right.
John:
And so she wasn't just put in this position and say, Oh yeah, no, we have someone worrying about environment.
John:
That's a whole vice president role.
John:
And then they just continue to do what they did and, you know, put out press releases or like, you know, it becomes like a PR type position from the interview, which you should definitely listen to.
John:
Like the,
John:
Apple is changing what it does across its entire business because of initiatives spearheaded by this person and what in any other company would be like a symbolic position.
John:
So let's hope that this newly created position is just successful.
Casey:
That's a good sign.
Casey:
And Apple's been reasonably good about publicly sharing their diversity report, I think at the end of the year.
Casey:
I forget exactly when it is.
Casey:
But at some point during the year, they share it.
Casey:
And so in theory, we can judge them on what their results are after this move over the coming years.
Casey:
Obviously, they massage that report to be as complimentary as they possibly can while still being truthful, hopefully anyway.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Um, but certainly this is a good sign and I, I'm hopeful and, and I think we should celebrate it.
Casey:
All right, John, tell us about Thunderbolt three and what's going on with Intel.
John:
Every time we talk about Apple not using Intel chips, uh, someone will write us, many, someone's writes and say, oh, but that's not going to happen because if you don't use Intel chips, you can't have Thunderbolt and Apple needs to have Thunderbolt because reasons, uh,
John:
uh therefore don't worry about it and i think the last time we discussed this what i tried to emphasize was i think it was when we were talking about like ryzen amd's ryzen and you know making reasonably competitive chips in certain market segments again and they're sort of their comeback bid that if apple decided to go to amd for whatever reason
John:
you know amd apple intel are all companies things can be worked out money can change hands deals can be made uh i feel like it's a type of a type of thing that all three parties would be able to work out that none of them would be so adamant that they would say there is literally no amount of money that you can give us apple that would that would allow that would let us you know that would make us license thunderbolt 3 to amd like there's no kind of grudge like that going on there so i'm like
John:
set that aside yes it's an issue it would have to be worked out by the people involved but if apple thought it was to their advantage to start going to amd for certain chips or certain things like it has the advantage that it wouldn't be an architectural change and having two vendors is the thing that apple loves to do for every part and all of its things and at a certain point it's kind of against apple's
John:
instincts and general policy to have a single vendor for like an extremely important component you know a single non-apple vendor i suppose like they always want to have multiple people multiple people fabbing their chips buying their chips from multiple vendors if they can help it pitting them against each other like you know just typical business um so today's announcement for i think it's today from intel is
John:
uh, it's an interesting twist to this first is that Intel is adding Thunderbolt to their CPUs.
John:
Uh, so you don't have to buy a separate chip set, which apparently has been a barrier to, uh, you know, PC manufacturers, you know, aren't willing to spend the money to, you know, license or buy the, you know, Alpine Ridge or whatever the, the latest, uh,
John:
chipset is for thunderbolt sports like that we'll just take the cpus they have support for like usb blah blah blah and pci express like on the chips i don't care about thunderbolt and i'll buy another chip it's it's it's pointless right so now they're putting it on the cpus with so many other things and that will make it cheaper for people to use and you basically can't not get it if you buy a part that has it built in i mean maybe they'll still sell parts that don't have it built in and i assume it's better for packaging
John:
Probably also better for power.
John:
And it's a move that will make Apple computers better because Apple likes to put Thunderbolt 3 on its high-end computers.
John:
And if Apple can get that built into the CPU, they'd love it because they'd love to make everything small and lower power.
John:
And if it's cheaper on top of that, all the better, right?
John:
And the second part of the story is Intel is going to license Thunderbolt 3 for free to anybody who wants it.
John:
then that would obviously include AMD.
John:
So that barrier to Apple using AMD CPUs, assuming it ever was a barrier, because I'm not entirely convinced that Apple is so wedded to Thunderbolt 3 that they wouldn't consider a CPU, consider building a Mac without it, because they do.
John:
Um...
John:
That barrier is gone.
John:
Thunderbolt 3, and from Intel's perspective, it's not like they're doing this to let Apple take AMD CPUs.
John:
They're doing this because they want Thunderbolt to spread more widely, and a barrier to adoption is you've got to buy this extra chipset, and you can only get it from us, and you can't make your own thing.
John:
So Intel's like, no, no, we want to see Thunderbolt 3 everywhere.
John:
It's really important for us for the standard to spread.
John:
Guess what?
John:
It's free for everybody, and it's cheaper when you buy Intel CPUs.
John:
And I'm hoping that all the other manufacturers of PCs and parts and so on and so forth
John:
will take the ball and run with it i'm hoping the reason they were staying away from thunderbolt was that it was too expensive uh i'm assuming intel and you know intel and apple are you know the people who created this standard have still have the most influence of it so maybe people were staying away because they feel like it's not like an industry standard it's more like an intel or intel apple standard
John:
uh but either way i'm happy to see moves that will that have a a chance of keeping thunderbolt from firewire's fate firewire just never got the wide adoption that uh that would have helped it to stick around longer and be a viable technology was only used by apple and video and a few other things and usb meanwhile went literally everywhere so this seems like
John:
yet more of the usb-ification of thunderbolt you know they already stole their connector and and their port confusing the world with a port that is 17 different things in one but i think that's really cool tech wise uh and now it's free for everybody so go forth and thunderbolt do you think that thunderbolt has already been firewired because i i see a lot of the same signs of it like
Marco:
The earlier versions of it, I think, had a more severe problem of this where just very few peripherals were ever really made for Thunderbolt.
Marco:
What was made for Thunderbolt was always much more expensive than the USB 2 or 3 version of the same thing.
Marco:
For things like hard drive enclosures or SSD enclosures,
Marco:
Like, there's almost no reason for anybody to go Thunderbolt when USB 3.0 is an option unless you have really, really high-end parts and you need maximum bandwidth and you don't care about the price.
Marco:
For most people, one of those things is not true.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
I don't think Thunderbolt really has taken off very far.
Marco:
I would say Thunderbolt is exactly where Firewire was, both 400 and 800.
Marco:
It is this standard, in quotes, but in practice, it is only used by some Apple stuff and some high-end peripherals and storage enclosures.
Marco:
But almost everything that most people use uses USB 2.0 or 3.0.
John:
Apple did a really smart thing here when they changed the connector.
John:
Because you're right that there are many people who don't need Thunderbolt.
John:
They just need USB.
John:
It's the same little hole in the side of your computer, right?
John:
And so if Thunderbolt gets confined to be, oh, it's just this weird thing that Apple does...
John:
like Intel may not be happy with that because maybe Intel wants it to be used more broadly for whatever strategic reasons, but it's not like Apple has to change anything about its strategy.
John:
As long as Thunderbolt continues to be made, or like basically the little plugs on the side of the computer, we already have a situation where you can get, doesn't the low end like MacBook not have a Thunderbolt 3 port, but instead just has the USB-C and power thing?
John:
Am I wrong about that?
Marco:
That's correct.
Marco:
The 12 inch MacBook does not have Thunderbolt.
Marco:
It only has USB 3 over that port.
John:
But it's the same old little connector, and similarly, the Thunderbolt ports can just run USB off of them.
John:
The main place, sadly, the main place, or maybe not sadly, depends on how you look at it, the main functionality that Thunderbolt 3 brings to Apple's products is they can put a small set of very, very small, uniformed ports on the side of their portable computers, and
John:
And people can connect stuff to them that give them all the other ports, all the other things you can imagine, all those different breakout boxes.
John:
That's the magic of Thunderbolt, right?
John:
Do you need Thunderbolt 3 for that or whatever?
John:
And I guess I suppose, you know, high-end monitor support, depending on how they want to implement that, whether they want to do it with, like, multiple DisplayPort streams or tunneling things over Thunderbolt and external GPUs and all the other fancy stuff you can get.
John:
But if you don't take advantage of that fancy stuff, it still just looks like you're plugging a little USB type C connector into the side of your computer.
John:
If you do take advantage of it, you buy the fancy Apple computer and the same little port, you can plug in all that other stuff, but also you can plug in these other things and get these cool breakout boxes.
John:
I think Apple would be perfectly fine with that.
John:
They're not faced with a FireWire-like situation where they have to say, oh, all those peripherals you bought are useless.
John:
As long as Thunderbolt continues to be an ongoing concern in some fashion, Apple can continue to ship all of its peripherals, all of its Mac stuff, all of its dongles and adapters with that one little hole on them.
John:
So I think they're better off.
John:
But the reason I brought a FireWire is exactly the reason you said, that it seems like...
John:
thunderbolt is being confined because usb 3 is so fast and so good and so cheap and so ubiquitous um but in some respects the other angle on this usb type c is kind of i'm gonna say it's the same as firewire but i get a little bit of whiff of that firewire on it in the general reluctance of the rest of the industry to follow apple along with this even like microsoft not putting usbc on all of its new service stuff and then making excuses about like well when we think the world is ready for usbc we'll change it but in the meantime you can get a dongle
John:
They'll let you connect USB-C stuff, which is a pretty good snark there.
John:
It seems to me, when I look around and see laptops, the only ones I ever see with USB-C ports are Apple ones.
John:
So maybe they're just ahead of everyone else and people will convert over, but...
John:
that stupid usb type a connector may be very difficult to dislodge and it could be that like firewire the only hardware you ever see with these weird usb things are probably cell phones because size is going to make those people turn over and mini usb sucks and then max but every other portable you know pc or tablet or surface thing or whatever will have just a bunch of usb type a connectors on the side of it i don't know
Marco:
I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
Now that I'm in the USB-C ecosystem with my new laptop and I've been looking at USB-C peripherals and looking for adapters and dongles and various peripherals that use it, there are not many.
Marco:
I thought that with the 12-inch MacBook being now two years old, I figured there's got to be tons of them now.
Marco:
And there are a small number of things that can plug into that port natively, but it seems like almost all of them are like cheap crap from no-name brands on Amazon for $40 that is all unreliable and badly built and all probably used the same chipset inside.
Marco:
And it seems like it's still a very immature market.
Marco:
And I hope it matures soon, now that all the MacBook Pros use only these ports.
Marco:
That should be enough of motivation for peripheral makers, but...
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
It's not where I thought it would be by now.
John:
Yeah, I don't know what the resistance is to USB-C because, again, it's just USB still.
John:
I mean, it's a different spec and the cables are different and maybe they're more expensive and the connectors are more expensive than they used to be.
John:
But it seems like I fully expect just a complete turnover eventually to USB-C because it's not...
John:
It's not a FireWire situation in that, oh, it's so much more expensive and you have to put these way more expensive chips in the things and the chips have to be on both ends.
John:
Or Thunderbolt with the weird chips in the wires for the high-speed connection and all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
It's just a different physical connector for USB plus a different chip set.
John:
And USB 3, I think, is rolling out pretty well.
John:
3.1, maybe?
John:
I don't know what the holdup is.
John:
People in the chat room are saying that there are Windows laptops that have USB-C.
John:
Of course, there's Windows laptops that have everything on it.
John:
It's just that I don't see the – it's not like – remember when USB 2.0 came along?
John:
USB 1.1 did not last long in the face of USB 2.0.
John:
USB 2.0 just rolled out across the whole industry, and you would have USB 2.0 ports everywhere except for your keyboard and mouse, which would be 1.1 for a while.
John:
But USB-C has not rolled out like that.
John:
well for a long time like almost every pc you would buy would have like two blue ports and then six black ports yeah but but the point is it had the blue ones like it had like you know keep the old ones around the same reason they kept like parallel port and the ps2 port around because they're they're pc makers they'll always do that but yeah
John:
You had the new ones.
John:
To buy a PC without USB 2.0 anywhere on it in the USB 2.0 age was unheard of.
John:
But like I said, Microsoft, with these very expensive, high-end, fancy Surface, tablet, laptop, convertible, whatever thingies, seems proudly to be shipping them without any USB-C ports and defending their decision by saying, oh, you can get an adapter.
John:
It's USB 3.1.
John:
It's totally the same thing.
John:
We just don't like that connector, which is weird.
Casey:
You know, having now had my first – well, what I consider to be my first USB-C device, which is the Switch.
Casey:
Yes, I have an Apple TV, and yes, it's USB-C, but that doesn't really count.
Casey:
The idea of a theoretical future where I have a MacBook that has been updated, which in and of itself is a very theoretical future –
Casey:
I have a MacBook that's been updated that is powered by USB-C.
Casey:
I have a Switch that is powered by USB-C.
Casey:
The thought of a phone being powered by USB-C for convenience alone sounds pretty awesome.
Marco:
Doesn't it?
Casey:
Now, I don't really love the USB-C connector as much as I like the lightning connector.
Casey:
No small part because the lightning connector is smaller and also because I have 11 billion lightning cables strewn throughout my entire life.
Casey:
But having one port, one connector that can really be all things to all people is pretty neat and does sound appealing.
Casey:
So as much as I don't actually begrudge the lightning connector because I think it's really, really good, especially in ways that the dock connector wasn't, I still think a USB-C future might be pretty cool.
Casey:
Hell, it would make the phones get thicker, too, right?
Casey:
So that's a win as well.
Marco:
Yeah, that means more battery.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
But, I mean, it certainly does sound appealing.
Casey:
In that sense, I am a little bit envious of the Android folks with their USB-C lives.
Ooh.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Apple has maybe started working on, I mean, presumably started working on a Siri thing with the screen.
Casey:
And obviously this is all rumors.
Casey:
There's been a lot of rumors that this might happen in a couple of weeks at WWDC.
Casey:
uh there's tech crunch article uh get ready for a new ipad and a mysterious series speaker at wwdc uh as we've talked about numerous times i currently anyway don't really care about ladies in a tube so marco or john do you want to kind of take this one over
Marco:
Our timing on this is terrible.
John:
This is an old story and there's no rumors about it now?
Marco:
No, just because it's rumored to be announced in two weeks.
Marco:
It's probably not a great time to speculate too much on it.
Marco:
I would simply say that...
Marco:
If you're in the market for one of these home speakers like the Amazon Echo or Google Home or whatever else, I would say it's probably worth waiting for this announcement just to see what it is, see what you're dealing with.
Marco:
But I also am concerned because this is the kind of product...
Marco:
Apple historically has not done well.
Marco:
Something that has to be cheap and integrates well with everything else people have and based on a really reliable, really advanced voice assistant.
Marco:
Maybe they've become a different company.
Marco:
Maybe they have really ramped up the API.
Marco:
I mean, I do expect WBDC to have a lot of SiriKit advancements, the Siri API for third-party apps.
Marco:
I would love to have some kind of like audio library functionality so that Overcast could actually use the Siri API because right now there's nothing for it to use.
Marco:
But that would be nice if there were some way to say, you know, hey, thing, play this podcast in Overcast or something like that.
Marco:
That would be awesome.
John:
You can't do that now?
John:
No, you can't say, hey, play episode number 17 of My Favorite Podcast?
John:
Nope, can't do it.
John:
Oh, that's right.
John:
We talked about this after last WDC, but it was like a really limited domain of things you can do.
John:
It's not so much the playing of the audio.
John:
It's the idea that this is a voice command that you can issue that causes something to happen.
John:
Like they had abstracted it away from the level of the app to just be like,
John:
This is a desire for a thing to happen that is not app-specific that your app can deal with.
John:
It's all coming back to me now.
John:
It'll come back to me more at WWDC sessions.
John:
But that's a killer feature that you just described right there.
John:
Just like it is a killer feature of many of these TV-attached pucks where you can say, you know, play episode 5, season 2 of Seinfeld.
John:
And it does that.
John:
And even if you don't have the world's worst television remote, a.k.a.
John:
the Apple remote, it's a pain to use any remote to do that.
John:
The sentence I just said, you will be watching that episode so much faster than if you have to navigate, find Seinfeld.
John:
So in my recent shows, oh, Seasons, Season 2, Scroll, Scroll, Scroll, Episode 5.
John:
Like, it's so much better.
John:
So being able to do that, especially on, you know, overcast feature suggestions, especially...
John:
if it doesn't expect you to all have that already downloaded like if overcast understood uh you don't have to be subscribed to the podcast i will go to overcast directory find the podcast that i think is the best match for that download the episode number that you asked for and start playing it like all in one thing again doing that by hand you could do it by hand in overcast right now but being able to say that sentence into your phone and have it do that that would be like magic
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that is, I assume, if and when they do any kind of like music or audio type integration with Siri, with SiriKit, I mean, I assume that's the kind of thing that they will do because most other services that would use this, you know, think of like a music streaming service.
Marco:
They're not going to have the entire index of all songs that are available on the service stored locally in the app.
Marco:
They're going to have to make a network request.
Marco:
They're going to have to have some way for Apple to index their libraries and
Marco:
And that way, the Siri logic, probably server-side, could then figure out what you're actually asking about and send an ID to the app.
Marco:
And I think this is probably why they didn't have it last year.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
All the existing intents, they call them, for SiriKit, like all the different ways you can use SiriKit, it's stuff like booking a ride or sending a payment or things like that.
Marco:
And those are things that have a limited command dictionary that you could pretty much deal with locally without having to custom index content from Uber or whatever else.
Marco:
or Lyft, you know, or, you know, any of the other things they can do.
Marco:
Whereas if you say, like, integrate with Overcast or Spotify or things like that, Siri has to have some way to index these services just to see what are the possible things people can be asking for.
Marco:
And, you know, and then have some way to interpret what people are asking to be those things and then tell the app, this person just asked for the, you know, artist with this ID and the track with this ID or whatever else.
Marco:
and that's a lot more to build so that's why i assume that it wasn't there last year and i don't even know if it's going to be there this year or ever but if if they give the the option for siri to integrate with audio services to do it right is going to involve all that stuff and that's a lot of work and that's a lot of stuff for us to implement on our side as well but it could be awesome the one advantage i feel like they have on this is the you know we this happens every time we talk about the thing is if you're in the audience and
John:
And they're announcing whatever whatever their Siri thing is that you talk to.
John:
Right.
John:
And you don't already have one of the existing things that you talk to.
John:
Almost anything in the demo will look amazing if you've never seen it done before.
John:
So assume speaking of the audio thing, assume they say even if it's just integrated with Apple Music, it's not third party.
John:
You can't do it.
John:
But Apple Music has it.
John:
And they go up there and demo something and they rattle off some sentence that's like, what's that song that goes blah, blah, blah.
John:
And maybe they hum a tune or do the lyrics or, you know, some kind of vague, touchy feely thing.
John:
They definitely won't do that.
John:
Right.
John:
And it finds that because, like, you know, all the, you know, Amazon and Google both have the say an arbitrary lyric from a song and it will find it.
John:
uh i don't know if either one of them has a do uh you know hum the tune and it will find it i mean i guess people aren't in tune enough to do that echo has lyric search at least i don't know if it has like like melody search yeah that's what i'm saying like google home has it too if you if you say if you say literally any lyric from a song if you get it close to right it will find that song and play it and it works amazingly well right so
John:
it's almost as if apple doesn't demo that they're just showing that they're behind two people who know but if you don't have an echo and don't have a google home that demo is incredibly powerful and because it's apple this is one of those places where it's true they're like oh apple just announced something that everyone else has had for years and they just get pressed because they're apple that that effect exists right because you know they're they're good showmans and you know the showmanship that they have and
John:
The way they're able to give a compelling demo in ways that the Amazon Echo commercial or the Google Home things are not able to.
John:
And because there's so many eyes on Apple and yada, yada, yada, it is an opportunity for them to...
John:
Really sell features that other people have had for years that Apple is probably going to do worse and come out looking like, wow, Apple is amazing and innovative.
John:
And the only stories that will be, hey, Apple's playing catch up are going to be in the nerdy tech press that we read, you know.
Marco:
Well, I mean, I think Apple is going to own privacy looks probably the UI on the screen.
Marco:
And then maybe sound quality, because the Echo sound quality is not that great.
Marco:
I don't know about the Google Home, but who cares?
Marco:
Sorry, Sean.
John:
It's not great.
John:
I mean, you've seen it.
John:
It's not very big.
John:
It's one little dinky speaker thing in there.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
So Apple's probably going to own those things.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The usefulness of these products is based so heavily on the incredible speed and reliability of the voice service.
Marco:
That's where I have concerns about Apple.
Marco:
Because Siri, for all of its smarts, for all of its wonderful international support...
Marco:
for all of the different... The more advanced API that it has compared to the Echo.
Marco:
What I was saying earlier about Siri having to parse the way that people say things and kind of just pass off to the application, like, all right, the user requested this artist ID, this track ID.
Marco:
The way that the Echo does it is it has a very limited vocabulary of what you can specify, and then it just can tell you the exact words somebody said, but then it's up to the application to figure out, like, how do I parse that?
Marco:
Which is...
Marco:
Easier to implement.
Marco:
It enables a lot more things from day one to be possible in that API because you don't have to wait around for them to design your specific use case.
Marco:
But it's way harder to actually use for anything non-trivial.
Marco:
Where Apple's going to come in from is...
Marco:
they're going to come in with SiriKit support only, I would imagine.
Marco:
It's going to be really great for these 12 app types to integrate with this, but nobody else can.
Marco:
Or nobody else can do anything useful with this.
Marco:
So that's going to be problem number one.
Marco:
And problem number two is just, again, the reliability of Siri and the advancement of Siri...
Marco:
I don't think they have kept up.
Marco:
And this is always an argument.
Marco:
Everyone always thinks like, oh, well, I asked the Amazon device about this thing, and it gave me this kind of weird answer, and then I asked Siri, and it gave me a better answer.
Marco:
Or the Google and Amazon devices don't support my language or my country, and Siri does.
Marco:
And that's all valid.
Marco:
Everyone can have their own opinions.
Marco:
But I think overall, it's fairly clear that Siri has been, for most people, less reliable and less smart.
Marco:
on the whole, than the other services.
Marco:
And this is the kind of device where, like, you know, on your phone, it's kind of a secondary thing.
Marco:
You know, some people use it heavily, but for the most part, like everywhere else, the Siri exists is kind of a secondary input type.
Marco:
With this kind of device, it is the primary input method.
Marco:
And it has to be fast, and it has to be reliable, and it has to get it right almost every single time.
Marco:
And that's what makes the Amazon products, which I have the most experience with, that's what makes them so compelling when you're used to the Apple ecosystem, when you're used to Siri.
Marco:
When you first see an Echo, you're like, oh my god, that was fast.
Marco:
And then as you start using it more and more, you're like, this works every time.
Marco:
And that has just never been a lot of people's experience with Siri.
Marco:
So for this product to succeed, I think Siri has to be way better than it is now.
Marco:
And maybe it is.
Marco:
Maybe they're about to unveil a brand new version of Siri to everybody to see that is way better and way more reliable.
Marco:
I just don't think it's very likely based on their past performance.
John:
Yeah, those are all things they can hide in the demo, though, from the PR perspective.
John:
Like, of course, it's going to work amazingly in the demo because they rehearse and, you know, it's all set up to work perfectly.
John:
We won't know whether they've actually done a good job with it until we get things in our hands.
John:
So which is why they could get, I think, a bunch of positive reactions from the audience that's there because most people don't, you know, won't have any experience with the existing devices like this.
John:
So everything they see is new and amazing.
John:
And the performance will be awesome on the stage because they're good at making a demo and everything like that.
John:
And they'll get good press out of it from everybody except the tech press who knows they're playing catch up.
John:
And this is assuming they don't even have some big wow feature.
John:
I bet they probably will have at least one headlining feature that Echo and Home don't have.
John:
Whatever it may be, something that plays to Apple's strength.
John:
It'll be privacy.
John:
There's the privacy angle too, but also especially if there's the one with the screen.
John:
I bet they can put better stuff, more impressive things on that screen than Amazon can on their Amazon show, whatever their terrible name is for their thing.
Marco:
And I pre-ordered the Amazon thing, but Amazon is so bad at user interface design, I expect that to be clunky.
John:
And it'll be underpowered, so they can't do whatever crazy GPU is going to be in the Apple one to have cool effects and just the same kind of functionality, but even if it's just like...
John:
nice screen savers of your family that it pulls from your photo library.
John:
This is another angle, by the way, of like, A, it's why Casey will get one of these no matter, you know, and B, it's why I'm interested in like, it's because the Google home one I got because I have lots of my life.
John:
I use the Google ecosystem.
John:
It's got my email, my calendar, and one copy of my photos, but the real copy of my photos are in Apple's photo library and Google photos is just my sort of redundant backup that I use for, you know, for search and other things like that.
John:
Um,
John:
I'm interested in this one because the other half of my life is not in the Amazon ecosystem is in the Apple ecosystem.
John:
So I would like one of these in my house so that I'll have something that I can talk to that has access to the other half of my stuff and hopefully can do something interesting with it.
Marco:
The other problem it's going to have is that the support for home automation devices is going to be limited to HomeKit.
Marco:
And the Echo and the other things... Echo supports way more than just HomeKit.
Marco:
And HomeKit is still like... Like every new smart home device...
Marco:
is still not shipping with HomeKit today.
Marco:
Many of them are, but there's still a lot out there, and especially most of the cheap ones that most people are probably actually buying.
Marco:
A lot of them are not HomeKit compatible.
John:
They could play that up with the privacy angle, right?
John:
I think you're right about that, but the way they can spin that is as part of their pitch to you about privacy...
John:
Like, I think that's one of the strengths HomeKit has and the stringent requirements, the more stringent security requirements for devices that comply with it.
John:
They won't come right out and say, yeah, there's not as much HomeKit stuff out there and the best stuff is not HomeKit compatible.
John:
But the stuff you do buy that is actually HomeKit certified will have a slightly less chance of letting people own your entire house.
John:
That's true, yeah.
Marco:
Again, it's going to be the kind of thing where the main selling points to this are going to be things that most people aren't really going to think to ask about or care about.
Marco:
And the main downsides of it are probably going to be cost and support of devices out there and the reliability and intelligence of its voice assistant.
Marco:
Those are pretty big things.
Marco:
That's why I'm worried about this product.
Marco:
I don't think...
Marco:
that it's going to go very far in the market.
Marco:
I mean, we haven't seen it or know anything about it yet.
Marco:
We don't even know technically that it's real.
Marco:
So this could all change when we see it, but I am very skeptical of this product just because it seems like it requires strengths that Apple doesn't have.
John:
you know, it'll be a good test for this because this device is in many ways like Apple TV.
John:
Like it's, you know, a, especially the one with no screen, a kind of a faceless device that's cheap, small.
John:
It's not a Mac.
John:
It's not an iOS device, strictly speaking, even though it's running iOS under the covers.
John:
Um,
John:
And Apple TV is like, oh, look, look how badly they've done with that device.
John:
They've made so many revisions of it used to be this giant Mac running, you know, Tiger that did some weird stuff with iTunes and it morphed into this puck, which was better, but then it didn't get much better.
John:
This the Siri and a puck and a tube and a whatever thing is a great test to say.
John:
is the apple tv not great because apple's not good at making this kind of device or is the apple tv not great because they were never able to do the content deals or is it some combination because it could be that the apple tv the biggest thing hobbling it is all their grand visions for how this is going to change the way you watch tv have been thwarted by the fact that they can't get their deals done they cannot produce a compelling offering that lets people actually do all the things they want to do and the
John:
The poor kind of orphaned ghost town TV app on the Apple TV is, you know, there's no better example of the Apple's failure to bring it all together on the TV front.
John:
Most people don't have complaints about the hardware, again, other than the terrible remote, which hopefully will not be an issue on this tube thing.
John:
So it could be that Apple's really good at making embedded devices that efficiently listen to audio and play music and maybe they're really good at that.
John:
And in this case, they don't need any content deals because it's just a speaker and a microphone's in a tube.
John:
But on the other hand, if they roll this out and it looks to us two years later, like, oh, it's one of those...
Casey:
things that apple makes like the apple tv that is kind of mediocre more expensive than the competition and not as good and then we just like sit there and wait year after year for it to be updated in some way while apple refuses to acknowledge its shortcomings yeah i take small issue with what you said i really love my apple tv now to be fair i use it for a very particular set of tasks and it is very well suited to basically what it boils down to is playing plex or playing netflix and that's basically all it ever does
Casey:
But for those things, it's actually quite good.
Casey:
And I mean, I'm not saying the remote is perfect by any stretch, but it's fine.
Casey:
It's not great, but it's fine.
Casey:
It works.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I wish it wasn't so symmetrical.
John:
But compare it to the competition.
John:
The other pucks that have 4K support that cost less money that play Netflix just as well that the remotes are better on.
John:
Like, that's why people say Apple TV is not bad.
John:
The remote is bad.
John:
But Apple TV itself is not bad.
John:
I use it all the time, too.
John:
Right.
John:
But if you are in the market for a puck and you don't have a bunch of movies that you bought on iTunes, Apple's puck costs more, does less and is worse in pretty much every way than the competition.
John:
And that's why people say it's you know, it's not the best puck offering.
John:
yeah that's fair i don't know we'll see i mean we're only a couple weeks away so we'll see what happens yeah oh and on the other puck front is like when the various versions were introduced sometimes they were pretty darn good right but apple just is not interested in keeping up with the joneses so everyone else gets 4k support or does 24 frames per second output for the film nerds or whatever and apple's like the one we got is fine let's stay there for a few years don't worry about it maybe we'll update it maybe we won't who needs 4k is that a thing
Casey:
That can't be a thing.
Casey:
No way that's a thing.
Casey:
That's not a thing.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We're going to take a really weird turn now.
Casey:
We're going to talk about Google I.O.
Casey:
Because that's a thing.
Casey:
And it was somewhat interesting, believe it or not.
John:
And it's so timely, right?
Casey:
And it's so timely, given that it happened like two weeks ago.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So Google I.O.
Casey:
happened May 17 through 19.
Casey:
We're recording this on the 24th.
Casey:
and the only bit of IO that I watched was the keynote, but I did watch the keynote, and it was very... Well, given it was not an Apple keynote, it was very good, and if there's anything that we can all agree that Apple is very good at, it's doing a keynote presentation, and so I watched the keynote, and by and large, I didn't think...
Casey:
that there was that much to discuss for us to discuss there were a couple things though one was the updates to google photos which i am a devout fan of yes i understand that i'm giving google my data yes i understand that that can be creepy yes i understand that there are penalties for doing so yes i understand i am paying them and yet they're still scanning all my data despite the fact that i'm paying them
Casey:
However, I made the choice that to me the benefits are worth it in the case of Google Photos.
Casey:
And so that's just my choice.
Casey:
It may not be right for you, but it's right for me.
Casey:
So what they've done is they've done a lot with sharing with Google Photos.
Casey:
So it's much easier to share kind of your photos with your spouse or with those that are at like an event, like a party or something like that.
Casey:
And that looks really cool.
Casey:
It's trying to be more proactive about, you know, hey, it looks like Marco and John are in all these pictures.
Casey:
Do you want to share this with them?
Casey:
Make an album and automatically share it with them.
Casey:
And that sort of stuff is really cool.
Casey:
And I'm looking forward to it.
Casey:
Although I think it'll be more useful if I knew more people that were devout Google Photos users like myself.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
But I thought the photos improvements looked neat.
John:
So I tried to merge this in the notes with an old question that we had from many, many months ago from Mark Wadham, who was asking about family iCloud photo libraries.
John:
This is a general question.
John:
I think it was like, we talk about it a long time, but what the heck do we mean?
John:
And it's suddenly more relevant because like Casey said, this was a headlining feature of their Google I.O.
John:
presentation of the Google Photos portion of it.
John:
Like, hey, look at this neat way to do a thing that they think is common.
John:
Like,
John:
You know, you and your partner, your spouse, whatever, just want to share all of your pictures with each other.
John:
Not like on a case by case basis, like Casey was talking about, which is another feature of like, oh, I suggest sharing these or whatever.
John:
Just say, look, everything that I take also show it to this person.
John:
And the way they implemented it is they get to see that stuff and then they can look at them and save them into their own library if they like them.
John:
right oh i like that one i want to keep that one i want to keep that one so it's not it's it's more like automatic by default offering of your photos to someone else but it's still two separate libraries and the broader question about from you know from way back and then hypercritical and no i life is an island is the very difficult problem that apple has not yet tackled but that they're slowly building up the infrastructure to tackle i feel like and i hope they address it soon is
John:
The way my family, at least, uses photos and the way I think a lot of families would use photos if given the option, which is, you know, if you have two parents and children, both parents take pictures of their children, depending on maybe at the same time at the same event or if one parent is with one child, one parent's with another.
John:
They take pictures on their phone.
John:
They take pictures with their cameras, however they take them.
John:
Each parent is an adult and has their own Apple ID or whatever Google account or they have their own accounts, which means in the Apple and Google worlds, they have their own photo libraries.
John:
And, you know, it's kind of this siloed arrangement.
John:
And yet in a family situation, usually you want all the pictures, at least all the pictures of the kids, probably all the pictures, period, to be together in one big library and not have to deal with
John:
you know, two different people's libraries and sharing between them.
John:
It's inefficient.
John:
It's hard to keep track of like the one master library of family photos.
John:
Very often the solution is, oh, just designate one parent to be the official holder of their Apple ID has the library, right?
John:
That's what we do at our house.
John:
My wife's Apple ID, she is the owner of the photos library.
John:
So on her iOS devices, she has access to all of our pictures.
John:
On my iOS devices and on my Mac,
John:
I have access to only the pictures I've taken with my iPhone because all the other pictures go into the big library.
John:
And periodically I have to manually export unmodified original, you know, to make sure I get all the stuff.
John:
You know, I can't bother editing them on my, on my phone or anything.
John:
I have to just let them stream into my Mac, export all the unmodified originals and import them into the quote unquote real photo library that is hers.
John:
Okay.
John:
And this used to be mine, and now it's hers, and we've gone back and forth with it.
John:
But this is not what I want, and this is not what any family wants.
John:
And I think a lot of families do get by by having the designated person who owns the photo library, but it's terrible because we take so many pictures on our phones.
John:
I don't want to be signed into my wife's Apple ID on my phone.
John:
It's bad enough that we all had to do that from the old days of like,
John:
buying things through the app store and apple does let you be signed into the app store as your spouse but sign into everything else is you like they let you do that for sharing of apps that's what we do that we you know aaron is me for the app store but she is her in every other way
John:
Yeah, and Apple added the capability to do that because it is a common arrangement, but it's not great.
John:
So Apple eventually added a couple of years ago now the concept of a family where you can make a family in Apple's interface to say, here are the people who are members of the family.
John:
Here are the adults.
John:
Here are the children.
John:
And family sharing allows you to share applications that allow this.
John:
I think the default is to allow, but Marco would know.
John:
I think you could configure your app to say it's not shareable.
John:
Like, I don't want you to be able to share this.
John:
But in my experience, pretty much all apps are like this.
John:
If I buy an app, my children's iOS devices have access to that app just because I bought it.
John:
It's a little bit weirder within-app purchases.
John:
And since so many things are free within-app purchases now, it's still a little bit weird.
John:
But the key thing is Apple allows...
John:
the concept of a family to exist and membership in that family to exist.
John:
And that membership brings certain sharing privileges that only exist within the family, including from things of like my kids try to buy stuff on their iOS device.
John:
And it sends me a notification that I have to approve or deny.
John:
Like they're leveraging that functionality to do that.
John:
So they're,
John:
They're creeping up on it.
John:
Before, it just would be a bunch of Apple IDs that you'd be shared in weird ways.
John:
Now you can construct a family unit and specify everything about it.
John:
You can give kids Apple IDs, which you didn't used to be able to do, and now you can.
John:
They just need to take the next step, which is stop siloing libraries of photos.
John:
And it's a really difficult problem because you might think, well, I don't want all the photos from two people to be shared forever into one giant library.
John:
Like, how would that even work in terms of billing?
John:
And how do I keep some photos private if I'm taking a million pictures with my phone of like, you know, a bunch of...
John:
you know, things in the hardware store for some repair I'm doing and my wife doesn't want them appearing on her phone because, you know, that's just relevant to me.
John:
Like, it is a hard problem.
John:
Don't get me wrong.
John:
It is not like they should just snap their fingers and do this.
John:
They just need to make incremental progress towards it and eventually they need to get there.
John:
And even Google with their thing of like, oh, you can just see all my pictures and pick the ones that you want.
John:
That is still incremental progress because it's still two entirely different libraries.
John:
It's just easing the friction of how you get from one thing to the other.
John:
But I wouldn't like that solution either because I'd constantly be thinking, oh, did you pull in all the photos I took yesterday?
John:
Or did you forget some?
John:
Or where did you leave off?
John:
I just want them all to be in one big pool.
John:
I just want them to be our photos like the way it is now.
John:
And so I really hope...
John:
Apple is slowly but surely working towards this.
John:
And I hope Google is too, because I think that is a better way for families to manage their photos than any of the current systems.
Casey:
I agree with you.
John:
Who has the photo libraries in your houses?
Casey:
I do.
Marco:
We have two different ones with lots of duplication and lots of wasted effort and lots of wasted iCloud space and hard drive space.
Marco:
And we are our own people.
Marco:
And we have our own ways of doing things.
Marco:
We have some of our own pictures.
Marco:
We have a bunch of family pictures.
Marco:
It would be nice to have both.
Marco:
But usually what actually happens is whenever one of us wants a picture that the other one took...
Marco:
We ask across the office, hey, can you send me that picture of whatever, whatever, and then we either airdrop it to each other or we go browse our hard drives on our network share and do it that way.
John:
Do you get freaked out about whether you're actually getting original quality when you share them with each other?
John:
Because almost all the sharing interfaces do not give you original quality.
Marco:
Yeah, we don't do any of the sharing with, like, you know, inside the Photos app, like the shared albums.
Marco:
Like, that we'll do with, like, sharing photos with friends or, you know, for an event.
Marco:
But those are not full quality, as Jason Snell pointed out, I think on Upgrade this past week.
Marco:
Those are only, like, three megapixels or something.
Marco:
They're very, very small.
Marco:
When I'm doing, like, transfers between Tiff and I, you know, we either do airdrop or, like, direct file transfer over the network.
John:
Airdrop from the Photos thing on iOS?
Yeah.
John:
Sometimes.
John:
Is that full quality?
John:
Do you get the RAW?
John:
If she shot it in RAW, do you get a RAW coming over the wire or do you get a JPEG?
Marco:
For transfers of RAWs, that's when we'll usually involve just the network shares.
Marco:
I will just open up her hard drive on my computer over the network and pull the file over Ethernet because Ethernet's awesome.
Marco:
Airdrop is usually when the photo has originated on an iPhone, when it was taken by an iPhone.
Marco:
Then we will airdrop it.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that is the original file in that case.
John:
The other terrible thing about separate libraries and sharing photos is it either discourages you, the individual people, from doing edits or it makes you feel bad about it.
John:
Because say you both have your own photos and your own things and you've done your own edits and cropped things and made them look nice.
John:
you would like it.
John:
And like, what I would want to happen is look, we're both say you are both using photos.
John:
I don't know if you are, but if you are both using Apple's photos app, why can't I get all of that?
John:
Give me the unmodified original, give me your modifications.
John:
Like it keeps them all losslessly.
John:
Like it has all that information.
John:
Your only choices instead are what I do, which is export unmodified original, which I really hope does what it says because I'm trusting it.
John:
But you are losing all of the edits at that point because you're saying forget about the edits.
John:
And it's like, oh, why did I even bother?
John:
It happens when we go on vacation a lot.
John:
A lot of times I go on vacation and I'll be putting the photos into my photos library and my Apple ID and like picking favorites and doing edits.
John:
And then I have to do this laborious manual sync process.
John:
It reminds me of the old days when I would get a new Mac and like manually do what Migration Assistant does today.
John:
which, you know, was funded the first 500 or 600 times, so it eventually gets old.
John:
I will, you know, do all this picking and editing and cropping and all this other stuff, and then when I come back to the home computer, I have to, like, make a bunch of smart albums to, like, pull all the favorites and export unmodified originals for those and then redo my edits to make them look like I did over there, cribbing off of them to see how I decided to crop it and stuff.
John:
It's just, it is not good at all.
John:
And the other choice is to just be like, okay, well, I'm not going to, I'm gonna,
John:
import them into my library because i i have the device with me and then when i get home to the real library i will you know i'll just dump them because i haven't done any modifications to them or i'll be logged in as my wife the whole vacation and use her account on this thing it's just a bunch of bad options
Marco:
Yeah, we solved that problem again by duplication.
Marco:
There's lots of duplication.
Marco:
The only thing that helps here is that Tiff and I both have very different editing styles.
Marco:
She's way better at it, but I will often take my own pass at things before her or if I don't think she's going to care about that photo or if it's something I took.
Marco:
Hmm.
Marco:
And so usually anything edited in my library was edited by me.
Marco:
And she takes her version and makes a way better version later.
Marco:
Again, we solved this problem just by duplication, more and more duplication.
Marco:
And it's a terrible solution, but it does avoid a lot of the problems that any kind of shared library would add.
Marco:
It's just really inefficient.
John:
Another feature request I have are photos and a thing that I do a lot is that I don't have two people conflicting editing styles.
John:
I have just me who has different ideas about how to edit things.
John:
And a very frequent operation for me is to duplicate a photo so I can do a different edit on it because you can't have more than one edit per photo.
John:
Right.
John:
So with a shared library, family photo library, one of the features they should have is the ability to do multiple edits of a single photo.
John:
So then you could have the TIFF edit and the Marco edit.
John:
with one uh you know unmodified original beneath them and have an interface to that that would be great instead of me you know instead of me duplicating the thing getting image one two three four you know copy.jpg and they do my modifications there and you know like again it's a thing i think i think people do multiple possible edits even if it's just two different crops right one one crop that you're going to use for sharing with the family because you know they're going to be looking at it on a phone
John:
And then a different crop and edit for the one that you're going to like, you know, print on a fracture or something and throw up on the wall because it'll be much bigger.
John:
Lots of low hanging fruit in the photo world for, you know, just features like this.
John:
But then the family sharing is not lying.
John:
It is a really difficult problem.
John:
And I do see Apple making progress towards it.
John:
I just can't wait for them to just finally to finally do it.
Marco:
I think, in general, kind of broadening this a little bit, one of my biggest wishlist items for the Mac specifically, and I know this would probably involve iOS also just because of the way this big sync setup works, but I just want the Photos app to just get more.
Marco:
Just get better and get more added to it.
Marco:
First, on the realm of get better, I really hope they finally sync the
John:
the recognition data between images so that each new device doesn't have to run its cpu hot for three days just to figure it all out itself that's you still do you still use that feature i've kind of given up on it already i don't think you can turn it off i know but like in terms of oh i'm thinking mostly of the faces i know you're talking about like find me the picture of like a boat right that whole thing uh which i think works okay yeah it works okay the google photos one is better but the face one is the one that i had the most hope for and that makes me the most disappointed i
John:
I continue to manually keyword label the faces that I care about, which is incredibly tedious.
John:
And the Photos app fights you every step of the way.
John:
Like when they remove the keywords from underneath, you can't display them anymore.
John:
It's so hard to figure out which ones have keywords on them or not.
John:
And I was like, well, why do you need to do that?
John:
Just let the face recognition figure it out.
John:
And I try to train it.
John:
And I try to convince it.
John:
And it's close.
John:
But it's still just, you know, guess what?
John:
People who are genetically related to each other tend to look similar.
John:
and it's it's a hard problem i don't blame them for it google doesn't get it perfectly either but i just wish i could just say i don't have to worry about that if i want to find pictures of my son i can just type in his name and it will find all the pictures of my son reality and photos it will find 15 of the photos of my son
Marco:
Yeah, so photos, there is so much area for improvement with photos.
Marco:
Not only in the intelligence of what you were just talking about, like the intelligence of the recognition and the faces and everything, and the syncing of that data, which is always my complaint, that like, why does each device have to do this over and over again and burn through its battery for the first few days or weeks that you own it?
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
Just the entire Photos app.
Marco:
On iOS, it's fine.
Marco:
I wouldn't say it's great, but it's fine.
Marco:
The Mac Photos app really needs a lot of help.
Marco:
It is seemingly designed by people who don't use Photos apps and who have never used it to edit more than one photo or to browse a library that had more than 10 photos.
Marco:
It really does seem like it was...
Marco:
rushed out once three years ago whenever it came out, and then not touched since in any meaningful way.
Marco:
And I really hope that changes because there's so much promise.
Marco:
Because the syncing system they've built for iCloud Photo Library has been rock solid for me and for everyone else I've talked to who uses it.
Marco:
It has been rock solid.
Marco:
It's a great sync system.
Marco:
It's integrated into everything.
Marco:
It gets everything off your phone automatically.
Marco:
The sharing is decent.
Marco:
You know, it's not amazing, but it's decent, good enough.
Marco:
I just wish the app on the Mac was better.
Marco:
It is still not as good or not as responsive or not as easy to work through, you know, more than four photos as even iPhoto, let alone Aperture or Lightroom.
Marco:
Like, there's so much room for improvement.
Marco:
And just the basics of navigating it, picking through photos, rating photos, deleting the ones you don't want to keep, editing ones, performing minor edits, like...
Marco:
it seems like it's designed right now for maximum friction and to be as error prone as possible and i just really really wish and i know this is a long shot i wish they would like i don't know put a different team on it put a different designer on it something get some new blood in there to make the photos app on the mac great and or even just good i'm
Marco:
I'm not asking for a lot here, but make it usable for people to actually go through and sort through the thousands of pictures that we can now take with these amazing devices in our pockets all the time.
Marco:
Make that better.
Marco:
Make it easier.
Marco:
Don't show me 16 different animations to go all these different levels deep in this weird hierarchy.
Marco:
Just do it.
Marco:
Just respond to my keystrokes quickly.
Marco:
When you're deleting photos out of a big list, move it to the next one.
Marco:
do what every other photo app has ever done before.
Marco:
And this one doesn't do it.
John:
So I really, really hope they got better.
John:
Imagine if they added features too.
John:
Imagine that, like they actually added features.
John:
Like the next year there would be more features in it.
John:
Imagine.
Marco:
That would be great.
Marco:
I'm not asking for much.
John:
I'm kind of asking for features at this point.
John:
I feel like it's been long enough.
John:
But what you said about the – I think I listed photos.
John:
Apple's Photos is one of my favorite applications one year when we did like a favorites list.
John:
And it's for the reason you just said.
John:
It's for the syncing.
John:
And I know people have horror stories about like all my images were black thumbnails and I lost all my data and blah, blah, blah.
John:
but like you marco for me it has been solid i just have my fingers crossed that i'm not just lucky right and that you know that it really is i think it really is reasonably reliable um and so that's why i love it because it solved that problem for me or not for me for my wife because it's on her phone but anyway it solved the problem for one of us that's by the way that's one of the things i use google photos for because we have this thing where her apple id is the family photo library and it's on her phone and her ipad
John:
But then I have Google Photos running on her account on her Mac, uploading to my Google account.
John:
So if I want to pull one of our family photos, I launch Google Photos on my phone because it's the only way on my phone that I can get to our family's photos.
John:
And so, yes, I pay for one terabyte of storage in Google and also the maximum amount you can buy in Apple.
John:
So it is not particularly monetarily efficient.
John:
This is the system I have.
Yeah.
John:
I've just now remembered that we're talking about Google I.O.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yep.
John:
This is a song about Alice.
John:
Well, I mean, the photos was the thing they talk about.
John:
And my credit where credit is due to Google, they are very smart for giving me that ability.
John:
The fact that I can run a client a thing, a terrible thing on my Mac that somehow sucks all of the photos out of my Apple Photos library and uploads them to Google.
John:
By the way, I'm going to give a two-second rant on this little thing.
John:
It's like it's a little menu bar icon, and it does what I want it to do, which is like...
John:
I'll find I don't know how I'll do it, but I'll dig through your Apple crap and I will find your photos probably in a way that Apple doesn't want us to do, but they do it and it works.
John:
And I will push them up to the Google account of your choosing.
John:
And so from my wife's account, I can push up to mine.
John:
But this little menu bar thing has this feature in terrible scare quotes where it will say it will tell you how many uploads failed.
John:
And sometimes it will give you a notification to say, I tried to upload these pictures to Google Photos and they failed.
John:
Click here to learn more.
John:
And you click and it gives you this terrible little tiny dialogue that lists these very long file paths that you can't see the right-hand side of unless you scroll.
John:
And it says, these are all the ones that failed.
John:
And there's a button on it or a button or a menu item or whatever that lets you through this thing say, please retry them.
John:
And it's like, don't wait for me to tell you.
John:
Just keep trying little Google thing.
John:
And maybe here's the thing.
John:
Maybe it does automatically retry.
John:
Maybe it's going to retry no matter what anyway.
John:
But the fact that the UI has a way for you to see what failed and click the retry button compels me to every time I'm on her computer, do that.
John:
and and because their file names are all obscure i can't is it trying to re-upload these seven raws over and over again can it just not upload raws at all and every time it fails to upload them it tells me about it or is it if i never touched it would it merely retry constantly and eventually succeed no way to tell
John:
one of the worst like sort of like nerd baiting interfaces because once you give me an interface to see the things that failed and you give me a button to tell it to retry it's cruel it is a cruel interface and if someone google is listening to this a either make your thing never tell me about this and just upload them all or b man
John:
Make it so that I have some explanation for the failures and like, or some kind of progress indication or something that will like, if you're going to give me information, give me actionable information.
John:
But otherwise I would prefer it if you just did your best and kept trying without any input from me.
John:
And it drives me nuts.
John:
I've lost my train of thought and I wasn't too busy being angry about that thing.
John:
Google IO.
Casey:
No, I know exactly what you're thinking of, and it's so bad.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
John:
Do you use that thing as well, Casey?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, the uploader that's on the Mac.
John:
And do you get suckered into going into the failed dialogue, failed uploads dialogue?
Casey:
Oh, yes, I do.
Casey:
And it seems like there's about 10 files, mostly raw.
Casey:
Now, I have a ton of raw files, don't get me wrong.
Casey:
So it uploads a raw as a general point of fact.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
There are like 10 files that it just seems to forever be confused about.
Casey:
And you can sort of figure out what they are, but yes, the, everything you described at emphatic thumbs up to, well, really thumbs down to the uploader, but thumbs up to what you were saying.
Casey:
Cause I completely agree.
John:
Have you gotten to the point where you wrote down the file paths so that the next time a dialogue comes up, you compare or screenshot it or otherwise try to record it because I'm coming close to that because you know, you can't remember what they're all like nonsense names or whatever.
John:
Like,
John:
Is it the same three files that it's been telling me about every day for the past year and a half?
John:
And I don't know.
John:
It's different amounts, I can tell you that.
John:
Sometimes it's 5, sometimes it's 100, sometimes it's 35, sometimes it's 50.
John:
It tells you the counts on them.
John:
Anyway, this is a very long trip around for me to emphatically agreeing with Marco's other complaint that using Apple's photos feels like walking through waist-deep molasses.
John:
And this is an esoteric thing that I think only that I'm particularly sensitive to.
John:
And I think not everybody has the same hangups that I do about responsiveness.
John:
But I have big, deep, deep hangups about responsiveness.
John:
And...
John:
everything i do in photos because in photos you do a lot of repetitive operations go to the next thing crop move resize adjust star favorite keyword go to the next thing delete go to the next thing like that cycle that thing i do when i when i do photos when i go through my photos
John:
Every single operation takes just a little bit longer than I think is reasonable.
John:
Everything has this lag, has this, okay, eventually I'll do that.
John:
Oh, did you want to crop?
John:
Oh, you want to exit full screen?
John:
Oh, you want to enter full screen?
John:
Oh, you want to edit this photo?
John:
Wait a second.
John:
Okay, now I'm drawing the edit thing.
John:
I want this to be so fast that before the key comes up off the keyboard, like have it activated on key down for, like, I want it to be so incredibly fast because, I mean, I bought, at the time we bought this 5K iMac, it's the fastest iMac you could buy.
John:
And the fastest Mac you could buy, period, in single-threader performance.
John:
I don't know what the holdup is.
John:
I do have a massive library.
John:
I admit that my library is not small.
John:
Maybe if I literally did have 100 photos, it would be fine.
John:
I have, I think I'm up to 80,000, 90,000.
John:
I forget.
John:
I don't know if I've broken 100K yet.
John:
I have a lot of photos.
John:
I understand it's a difficult problem case, but...
John:
If, like, this is what I want out of it.
John:
And my perception of it is that it is slower now than it was with iPhoto.
John:
And that's not fair, because when I was using iPhoto, especially older versions of iPhoto, I had way fewer photos, right?
John:
But on the other hand, I also had a slower Mac, and there was no SSD, and, like, I don't know.
John:
Either way, that's what I personally want out of this program.
John:
And aside from the features, I want it to just be so, so much faster.
John:
Make every single operation that I do...
John:
like have as little lag as possible.
John:
No transition, no, no, you know, redrawing things.
John:
And again, it's not just the transitions.
John:
Very, very often I will hit a key combo to like zoom to full screen and either it will ignore it.
John:
The fact that I hit space bar, it'll be like, that never happened.
John:
I'm never going to do that.
John:
Or it will start its animation to go into editing mode when I double click the thing or click into edit mode.
John:
It will start it perceptibly after I am completely done with the input.
John:
I have clicked or double clicked or done whatever.
John:
Nothing happens on the screen for fractions of a second that seem like an eternity.
John:
And then the animation begins and I just want to strangle somebody.
Casey:
All right, let's bring this back around.
Casey:
Remember we were talking about Google I.O.
Casey:
like three hours ago?
John:
Related to that, I'm getting back to Google Photos.
John:
Getting back to Google Photos.
John:
There was a comment I saw from somebody.
John:
Maybe it was Gruber.
John:
Maybe it was just retweeting somebody.
John:
Somebody saying that using Google Photos in your web browser is more responsive than using the native Apple Photos app.
John:
I wouldn't quite go that far because I don't do the sort of going through photos, picking and editing and tagging and stuff in Google photos.
John:
But I do use Google photos in the web interface frequently, basically to find a picture that I'm looking for.
John:
I go into it.
John:
I use a search, which I think is pretty neat.
John:
Um, I try to use its face recognition, which is not really that much better than Apple's, but it's, you know, it's what I've got or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
And my perception of scrolling through photos, especially like scrolling through photos by date or filtering or searching, those operations do actually feel faster in Google Photos in Chrome than using the native app.
John:
But for the picking and zooming and everything, I imagine you'd end up with like download speed being an issue because you got to.
John:
If I want to see the full res photo to edit it and I want to go to the next full res photo, that's going to happen way faster on my 5K iMac with everything coming off the SSD than it is going to be pulling that stuff over the network.
John:
So I'm not going to go as far as whoever that person was who said that the web version felt better than the native.
John:
But the fact that there are any operations in which it's a contest shows that Apple Photos has a long way to go.
John:
And kudos to Google for making essentially a web page that you can go to that I can scroll through literally 90,000 photos and find what I want.
John:
It's pretty amazing.
John:
Yeah, because this isn't like a web versus native argument.
Marco:
This is just the Photos app on the Mac is just not very good at all.
Marco:
It really is quite poor, especially when you get into any kind of operation like this where you're trying to go through a batch of photos and pick through and delete and maybe star or do minor edits on even.
Marco:
it again it's just like it fights you at every turn like it seems like it wants to show you its animations more than it wants you to get your work done uh you're just you're always waiting for it to do its thing to transition itself to animate something um it's also i don't know what do you guys think of the the incredibly deep like modal hierarchy that it has in the various editing controls like
Marco:
You know, typically, like in a lot of image editors, you have like a browsing mode, and then you enter editing mode.
Marco:
And in editing mode, pretty much all the controls are visible, or at least can be collapsed out really quickly with like a triangle drop down thing.
Marco:
But with photos, both on iOS and on the Mac, it has this second tier.
Marco:
So everything is two or three levels in where you go into editing mode, and you don't just have a crop control.
Marco:
You have the controls box, and you open up the controls box, and then you can crop from in there.
Marco:
And everything is two or three levels deep.
Marco:
And I find that...
Marco:
quite cumbersome in real use and I know it's kind of a challenge on mobile because there's not a lot of space for controls but on the Mac that's not true but it seems like on the Mac they have copied over the iPhone style anyway unnecessarily I guess for consistency or because they didn't have any better ideas I don't know but
Marco:
there are a lot of powerful controls that photos on the mac has but they're buried under so many different levels and modes and you have to toggle them on every single time and all these different things that i find it just incredibly cumbersome is it just me no that's that was i remember the last time i complained about it was about the crop aspect original crop aspect original crop because because it wouldn't remember and also as you point out because why do i have to go three levels deep to get to this anyway like
John:
On my 5K iMac screen, it's comical that I have to click the thing to go to the screen where I can get my crop options, then click the thing that brings up the crop options, then click like there is so much room on the side of that screen.
John:
You could put literally every edit control.
John:
I mean, it is a big screen.
John:
There's a lot of resolution.
John:
There's not that many controls here.
John:
That's why applications from Adobe and some of it have a bunch of configurable palettes.
John:
Now, I'm not saying Photos needs configurable palettes.
John:
That is a pro feature that regular people, you don't want to throw a bunch of palettes in their face.
John:
It's too much.
John:
the old version you know ifoto before photos had a more mac like interface where they said well we got all this screen real estate let's put as many of the commonly used editing functions on the screen at the same time it's you know it's visible interface in the same way that apple used to be all into the toolbars and stuff like don't hide everything away if you have if you can make the controls visible to somebody it's easier than going going hunting for them and the multi-layer certainly is elegant and clean but
John:
it adds insult to injury on the timing thing because even setting aside the mysterious lag before anything happens all those transitions have you know some kind of animation and they add up and it doesn't remember your preferences and if you do the same thing over and over again you just feel like you're it's like you're eating dinner but every time you wanted to take a bite of your dinner you had to go to the kitchen take a fork out of the silverware door close the silverware door come back down
John:
take a bite of your dinner and then throw that fork away into the garbage the next time you want to take a bite you got to get it from your seat go to the chicken go to the kitchen go to the silverware door take out your fork close the door come back sit down take a bite with it throw the fork away that's what using photos feels like my word i could not have put it better that's that's perfect that's exactly how it feels
Casey:
So Kotlin's a thing.
Casey:
Remember, we're talking about IO kids.
Casey:
So Google announced first-party support or official blessing, if nothing else, for Kotlin.
Casey:
Now, Kotlin is a language by JetBrains.
Casey:
JetBrains is a third-party entity.
Casey:
If you're a .NET developer or were once a .NET developer like myself, ReSharper is a JetBrains thing, if I'm not mistaken.
Marco:
You're a recovering .NET developer.
Casey:
Recovering.net developer.
Casey:
And so JetBrains knows development tools pretty darn well.
Casey:
And they decided to come up with Kotlin, which my vague understanding is runs on the JVM.
Casey:
It is compatible with the Android libraries.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Android Studio, I believe it is.
Casey:
shoot, I probably have that wrong.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
But anyway, the thing, the IDE that is the official blessed IDE, I believe started as a JetBrains IDE.
Casey:
This is for all of Android development, not just Kotlin.
Casey:
And so, so yeah, now Google has said, hey, we understand that Kotlin's a thing.
Casey:
We embrace it.
Casey:
If you want to make your apps in Kotlin, then feel free.
Casey:
And what's really fascinating about Kotlin is it's,
Casey:
really eerily similar to swift now at this point uh anyone with a neck beard is probably saying well actually it's not exactly like swift at all and blah blah blah but the point is at a glance it looks really really really similar to swift and that's a huge improvement because if you've ever seen how absolutely bananas closures are in java
Casey:
or at least up until modern versions of Java, which I don't think Android supports or maybe has just recently supported, closures are comically awful.
Casey:
And so Kotlin is a new-ish language.
Casey:
It was started around the same time as Swift and looks really, really similar to Swift.
Casey:
There's a website that's going around.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
It is not a flawless comparison of Swift and Kotlin, but it gives you a basic idea of what the two of them look like side by side.
Casey:
We'll put that in the show notes.
Casey:
Like I said, this is super cool.
Casey:
The team at work had been kind of looking at Kotlin and the
Casey:
debating whether or not they, they wanted to dive in with it, but it kind of pushed their pump the brakes because it wasn't officially blessed.
Casey:
Well, now it's officially blessed.
Casey:
And so now we're going to start using it as far.
Casey:
Well, really the Android team's going to start using it as far as I'm aware.
Casey:
So this is all really cool stuff and I'm really excited about it.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
I'm interested to see if server-side Swift and server-side Kotlin, if either of those really becomes a thing.
Casey:
And if so, do both of them become a real thing?
Casey:
Or is it just Swift or just Kotlin?
Casey:
And are there cross-compatibility libraries between the two?
Casey:
I'm just curious to see where all this goes.
Casey:
But I think this is a super positive move by Google because, man, the versions of Java that our team is using, oh, they're ugly.
Casey:
Man, are they ugly.
John:
So this website that compares Swift and Kotlin, I mean, it's a useful thing to have.
John:
And, you know, one of the things people are most interested about when they hear a new language is like, what does it look like?
John:
And so this website is kind of saying...
John:
at the top level here's how they look similar and they do look very similar like what is the syntax so what do they use for defining these common constructs and everything um as you scroll down this page you will eventually get to the things that i'm more interested in which is all right well so for the easy stuff like how do you define a function in a variable and how you iterate over things and stuff like that yeah yeah every language has those um but
John:
You get to the things that define the language that have nothing to do with the syntax, like the way Swift leans on protocols and how it uses them to implement its standard library and how you're expected to use them in your functions versus using inheritance and stuff like that, and the struct versus class thing.
John:
Those are the things that make Swift Swift more...
John:
You know, practically speaking, more than the than the syntax, because the syntax is the thing people care about.
John:
It's kind of like that's the cover of the book.
John:
But what's in the book is what really makes it different.
John:
And if you scroll down this thing, you see the Kotlin is actually at least superficially similar to Swift in that it supports a lot of the same constructs as tuple return values.
John:
It does have protocols.
John:
it's difficult for me to tell without knowing anything about Colin, other than reading a couple of web pages about it, how deep the similarity goes in terms of the things I just said of like, you know, how, how does it use protocols in, you know, how does it, the language expect you sort of culturally and as expressed through its own standard library to use protocols versus inheritance?
John:
Does it have the struct versus class, uh, distinction with the same trade-offs that Swift has, or does it not have that at all?
John:
Um, that's, that's kind of the interesting question to me, uh, is, uh,
John:
you know, how language looks is kind of good in that you'll be like, okay, I'm not scared of this.
John:
It doesn't look like, you know, Erlang or Haskell.
John:
It looks like something I'm familiar with.
John:
So I feel comfortable diving right in.
John:
But then, you know,
John:
What does this language bring in terms of new constructs and new ways of programming?
John:
And to that end, one of the other things I've heard about Kotlin, maybe Casey could correct me if I'm wrong, is that it has some things in its tool chest or standard library or whatever that Swift doesn't yet in terms of concurrency.
John:
Is that the case?
Casey:
I don't know if Kotlin has it, but I can assure you that Swift is not really yet.
Casey:
I mean, Swift has Grand Central Dispatch, but it's not entirely the sort of thing that most people want.
Casey:
Like, what most people want is more along the lines of .NET's async await, and that certainly does not exist in Swift.
Casey:
I honestly don't know if it exists in Kotlin.
John:
Yeah, but that's what I had heard, that it had either some kind of async stuff.
John:
The Kotlin has some kind of async stuff or maybe also coroutines like Go or, you know, that it was the head of Swift in the area of concurrency because they had chosen a solution for that and had undertaken it.
John:
And Swift is still like it's still Swift knows that it needs to add it eventually.
John:
And they don't have their their big solution for that.
John:
And like you said, in the meantime, it's like use Grand Central Dispatch, obviously.
John:
uh kotlin is not an option for apple because colin does not prioritize objective c interrupt which is kind of important for apple um so yeah there's that um and you know for google this is kind of weird that this is coming from a company that's outside google like does is the move for google to buy them now because the reason this can happen is this is a jvm based language and they have this you know you don't have to use java there's lots of other languages that are on top of the jvm and here's one of them
John:
And Kotlin is reportedly really, really good about Java compatibility because that's their equivalent of Objective-C interop.
John:
No, you totally can use this with your Java code.
John:
And even the weird nitty-gritty corner case details will make that interop perfect because that's this thing's whole purpose in life.
John:
So it could be that Kotlin ends up being...
John:
google swift or they just buy this company or whatever if it was an open standard just adopted a whole hog and say you know what stop like apple has said stop using the other language use this one instead from now on all of our examples are our libraries all of everything will be in this kotlin world i mean two main barriers that one this company is not owned by google yet and two the name is terrible
John:
Fair enough.
John:
K-O-T-L-I-N.
John:
Big thumbs down.
John:
I apologize if that's someone's last name, but when you're naming a computer language, marketing counts, and Swift is a better name.
Casey:
It's an island off Russia, I believe, or something like that.
Casey:
It's...
Casey:
There is a thing or place that it is named after, and I don't remember what it is.
Casey:
And I mean, it's okay.
Casey:
On the plus side, it's a little easier to search for because there are a few things other than this island or whatever that are named Kotlin, whereas there's a gazillion things that are named Swift or that have the word Swift in them, not the least of which is Taylor Swift.
Casey:
But I don't think it really rolls off the tongue either.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Win some, lose some.
John:
It's like Apple with the place names for macOS.
John:
Like it's good for you just this year's OS is named after this place in California.
John:
You can get it with kind of vanity place name, sort of regional things like that with yearly releases.
John:
But if you're going to name a language, probably not the best idea to name it after some obscure place that's like near the people who made it.
John:
But what can you do?
John:
It's their thing.
John:
They name it right up until Google buys it and rebrands it.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
But no, I'm really excited about this.
Casey:
I think this is really awesome.
Casey:
Again, I mean, look at
Casey:
I forget what version of Java that our team is using, but it's at least a generation or two old.
Casey:
And when you look at how they use closures and what they, I think what they have to do is they have to make like an anonymous class and like implement a function on that class or something along those lines.
Casey:
The particular details aren't really that important.
Casey:
Just the point is that to make a closure, it is just comically just weird and in clunky and ridiculous.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
And so even just getting a language that supports closures better, I think is a huge win.
Casey:
Yes, I know that more modern versions of Java do support this sort of thing.
Casey:
But again, based off of what I see day to day, it isn't a thing in our world in whatever version of Java we're running on.
Casey:
And this is already a huge improvement.
Marco:
I thought Java programmers liked tons of complexity and making tons of classes.
Marco:
Isn't that the whole point of programming in Java?
John:
They like it when their IDE does that for them.
John:
They just type two or three characters and just autocomplete it all.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, MailRoute, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't lose.
Casey:
You know, I really hope that the new MacBook actually comes out soon.
Marco:
And people are saying it might come out next week or two weeks from WBC.
Marco:
I really hope that it does because I cannot wait to hear what you think of it after you've used it for like a month.
Marco:
I really am curious to hear this because you tend to have relatively similar needs as I do.
Marco:
And most people who I know who have had the 12-inch MacBook, who have enjoyed it, have had much lighter needs.
Marco:
It's people who are writers or who are doing basic productivity tasks like email and stuff on it mostly.
Marco:
um i don't know a lot of programmers who use them and so i would i would love to hear your opinion of it when you when you get it and i can't say i'm rooting for you to hate it but i i am that might be interesting if you did i don't know i i just i really want to hear your opinion of it and so and that's assuming that they don't make like massive upgrades to it in this next version which i doubt they i i'm expecting the same thing but with kb lake
Casey:
Well, to be fair, I don't think I would be doing very much development on it.
Casey:
You know, if I did, it would just be for personal things like it's unlikely that I would do any real work.
Casey:
And by that, I mean, work for my job work on it.
Casey:
I would certainly write for my blog.
Casey:
And that's just Visual Studio Code, which is electron based, but unlike Slack is actually well done.
Casey:
And so I would do a little development sort of kind of in that regard.
Casey:
But the likelihood of me running Xcode for more than a few minutes to do like a quick fix or something like that is not terribly likely.
Casey:
So I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
And by and large, I agree with you.
Casey:
And I am also interested in it.
Casey:
But I don't think it's a perfect apples to apples comparison because I will probably not be doing much, quote unquote, real work on it.
John:
So eventually, assume my work ever buys a new line of Apple's laptops and doesn't continue to buy the 2015s.
John:
All three of us will have daily access to a Mac with a new low profile keyboard.
John:
And that will be.
John:
Interesting test case one, I guess, for reliability.
John:
Well, speaking of reliability, I just learned that the Mac, the 2015 MacBook Pro I have at work has the screen delamination problem.
Casey:
Oh, delightful.
John:
At first, I thought it was like someone had rubbed off the empty glare surface, but now seeing...
John:
gruber post pictures of his issue and hearing other people talk about it that it's a delamination thing which in theory i could just go get and replace but i'm not going to because it's not my computer and i don't want to be without it at work um but then all three of us having the keyboard we'll see where we all end up with in terms of liking or disliking the feel of the keyboard we have heard a lot of reports from people saying that they really love it and that the old keyboards feel like junk now and i feel like that could definitely be a thing
John:
but then also reliability if all three of us get it and within a couple months all three of us have keyboard problems that cost them to be repaired again perhaps not statistically significant even though that phrase means nothing and none of us know anything about statistics but anyway it is something uh versus if it's just marco that has the problem and our keys work fine for year after year
Marco:
yeah i mean if that ends up being the case and if yours are perfect then i will gladly go in and get mine serviced and not complain about it anymore after well for maybe we should also use ours like outdoors where it's hot i mean casey can do that down there in the south but like if you're going to take yours to the beach and stuff i'm just using mine in an air-conditioned office i'm never going to run into whatever heat expansion thing you're running into you know it wasn't even it was like in the 70s it wasn't even that hot
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
But what happened when I first had the problem, just the O key was stuck down.
Marco:
And then I eventually dislodged it and it kind of stuck back up.
Marco:
When I realized it was a bigger problem was when I was sitting in this 75 degree environment typing away...
Marco:
All of a sudden, lots of keys started misbehaving and feeling weird, sounding different, and clicking weirdly and being less reliable.
Marco:
And that's when I realized this is not just one speck of dust under one key.
Marco:
This is like many keys suddenly misbehaving.
Marco:
And then since that day, it hasn't happened again.
Marco:
This is not just a dust thing.
Marco:
This is an actual flaw in the way these things react to something.
Marco:
It seems like it might be heat, but I don't know.
Marco:
I hope this is a temporary thing that I can just get it fixed once, but I don't have high hopes.