Smooth Scrolling Is For Suckers
John:
We're not going to get through all this follow-up.
John:
So just a certain point, someone just pull the ripcord and we'll get the hell out of the show.
Marco:
Now, we have crossed a wonderful threshold that is totally worth pointing out and calling out on this show.
Marco:
We have?
Marco:
On my desk is an iPad that is faster in every measure I could possibly think of than John's Mac Pro.
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
You are so mean.
Marco:
Oh, you're so mean.
Marco:
It beat the single core a couple generations ago, and it has finally crossed the multi-core.
Marco:
So now... And I'm pretty sure the GPU is probably way ahead.
Marco:
I'm also pretty sure that the screen on it is higher resolution than the screen connected to John's Mac Pro.
Marco:
So if we have finally...
Marco:
Cross the point where not even the best iPad, but just like the middle of the road iPad is faster in every respect I can possibly think to measure than John's Mac Pro.
John:
It's the best iPad, isn't it?
John:
Is the 12.9 faster?
John:
Does it have higher clock or something?
Marco:
Actually, I think it's the same in all respects, just the higher screen resolution.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, my fans are faster, so beat that.
Marco:
I've got so many more of them.
Marco:
It's a divide by zero.
Marco:
That's not fair.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, just put an event in your calendar, and we'll revisit that iPad in 10 years.
John:
Uh-huh.
John:
We'll see how it's doing.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what you're clinging to?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's the...
John:
the shattered glass on its surface long after it's been dropped down at least my hardware still works 10 years on barely but it works that's all i've got so i've got to hang on to now and i want this i want this mac to feel safe and loved and to just carry me through until i can turn place it oh now that now that the ipad like medium size has usb3 over its lightning port i also have faster ports than your mac pro
Casey:
Oh, that's magnificent.
Casey:
All right, let's get this show on the road.
Casey:
This is going to be an all follow-up episode, and it's just the way it's going to have to be.
Casey:
Well, all follow-up episode, we will do an after show that has some quasi follow-up, but we should dig right in.
Casey:
John, here we go.
Casey:
Tell us about APFS.
John:
So the APFS session was on Friday at WWDC.
John:
They saved it till the very end.
John:
So obviously we couldn't talk about it when we had our live WWDC episode because the session hadn't been run yet.
John:
There was some new information in this session.
John:
In particular, all the issues about file name encoding that we've been talking about on the show.
Casey:
We're still talking about this.
Casey:
Of course we are.
John:
So this was the one and only bug I filed against APFS like last year back when it was introduced.
John:
Was it last year?
John:
I think it was last year.
John:
whatever it was yeah i i filed the bug we talked about it on the show what are they going to do about uh encoding and we had you know and we've been talking about off and on for a long time so i think it is the the biggest aside from a data integrity which basically was a no-go on that you know as we found out last year so set that aside it's just a feature it doesn't have um the encoding issue uh seemed like a big deal and it turns out it is a big deal so
John:
Some caveats here.
John:
The session about it was kind of vague, and I tried to talk to the Apple folks afterwards, and I did get to talk to a few of them, including one of the guys who implemented the stuff I'm going to talk about now.
John:
But I didn't have that much time to talk to them because they went down to the labs.
John:
And labs this year had a big line and everything, and it seemed super official, and I didn't want to get in that line and hog...
John:
the file system engineers from people who are developing apps so i only got a brief time to talk to them sort of in the hallways in transit so forgive me if i got some of this wrong if anyone wants to write in and clarify they can let me know but here's what i've got so
John:
in high sierra there's something that they're calling native normalization and that's gonna be in apfs i remember apfs came to ios in what 10.3 point something or other a couple weeks or a month ago and we talked about it on the show and the question we had was what is it going to be like when apfs comes to the mac is it going to be the same deal so on so forth well one thing right off the bat is different
John:
apfs on high sierra has native normalization what that means is file names are stored as provided by the program in the file system so whatever whatever garbage you give it it says i'm writing that as the file name there you go um but directory lookups are done through hashes of normalized versions of the file name so if you put in some file name that's you know i don't know just any valid sequence of you know unicode whatever's
John:
And you do a lookup on it with a different but equivalent sequence, and it's the whole thing with, like, cafe with an e with an exclamation... with an accent on it.
John:
You can do that e with an accent as a single character or as two combining characters, right?
John:
As far as you're concerned, that's the same file name.
John:
So what native normalization will do is...
John:
when it stores the hashes for that directory, it will not hash the file name that you gave it, the file name that's actually in the file system.
John:
Instead, it will normalize that file name and store that hash.
John:
And then when you try to look it up, it'll take whatever you gave it, normalize that, hash it, and compare it to the other hash.
John:
So it's kind of weird that you've got in the file system a file name, and each file name has a corresponding hash that is not a hash of that file name.
John:
It's a hash of the normalized version of that file name, and they're using NFD normalization.
John:
Put a link in the show notes to look at the different...
John:
normalization forms in unicode the one they're using uh according to one of the engineers to talk to is nfd and this is what they call native normalization so that will make it so that on the mac when you when a program tries to look up a file name no matter how sloppy the program is with the encoding it will find it because it's going to be looking it up by a hash of the normalized version of that not by what you gave it so it's not going to take what you gave it and compare it to the actual file name because then it might not get it
John:
And here's the other interesting part about this.
John:
So iOS still doesn't do this yet.
John:
They're going to add something they call runtime normalization in iOS 10.3.3 and iOS 11, which will not change what's in the file system, but will do something that is vague and I don't understand at the file system level to make it so you can find your files.
John:
And here's the kicker of this.
John:
This is right from the APFS presentation slide.
John:
future update will convert all devices to the new native normalization so what that means is some point in the future they're going to update all ios devices file systems again and they're not going to convert them from one file system to another they're going to basically add all the hashes of the normalized forms of all the file names i don't know if that is more dangerous or less dangerous than the other thing it seems to me that it could be more dangerous but i'm assuming they're doing
John:
in an additive way but this is what i was getting at when i was hemming and hawing over this encoding stuff it's going to cause them to have to change the file system on every single ios device at some point in the future like they didn't get it over with there's another one looming whereas the mac is going to do this one-time conversion and it will have the system from the get-go and it seems to me that apple's file system engineers were surprised at how many ios programs they
John:
take strings directly from the ui and feed them to file system apis without doing like fs representation or any other sort of apis that turn the string into the form that the file system understands it just says oh someone typed something in a field however that field in my application got that string however it was typed however it was you know whatever uh however it was normalized or not normalized or decomposed or whatever
John:
I'm just going to pass it straight through to the file system.
John:
And that in turn ends up having people not be able to open up their files, usually in non-ASCII languages, obviously, because ASCII is very simple and maps one to one to UTF-8 and all that.
John:
So surprise, your iOS devices are going to get updated again.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
There's actually something really fascinating about that, and I think I'm jumping ahead in the show notes, and I apologize to Mr. John Siracusa.
Casey:
During the talk show, I think it was Federici had mentioned that whatever version of iOS, it doesn't really matter what version it was, that really flipped the switch on APFS and that migrated everyone to APFS.
Casey:
apparently for like two or three versions prior during the upgrade they would do and jump in john when you're ready they would do kind of like a a trial run of the apfs migration try to figure out did this work what went right what went what went wrong phone home the results and then revert it all back to hfs plus is that a fair summary
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that's the only way I think people were surprised by this.
John:
But if you've ever done a sort of a production rollout on a large scale, it's the only way you can ever do something like this.
John:
The first time you run it for real on everyone's devices can't be the first time it runs.
John:
Right.
John:
You have to have run it several times before doing it unbeknownst to them is certainly a novel way to do it.
John:
One possible way to do it is to roll it out to a small subset of your users and use them as the guinea pigs.
John:
i'm not sure how big like were everybody the guinea pigs but either way you want you have to you never you know programmers know you never find out how your thing actually works until you you know run it for real and server-side programmers know production is never like exactly like staging is never exactly like dev and so on and so forth you think it is you try to make them as much the same as you possibly can but inevitably you roll something out to production and surprise it behaves a little bit differently in strange ways that you never could have predicted and
John:
Yeah.
John:
until you know like it could be that you know ios 11 would have been the conversion for but i guess they did it enough times and got enough results to say it's safe to do it in 10.3 whatever that they you know uh conversion was so that's just uh good engineering there and uh you know like i said before it's the design of apfs the type of file system that is allows them to do both the trial runs and the conversion in a fairly safe way
Casey:
I mean, again, like you said, it does make sense, but I just found that fascinating that that was the path they chose.
Casey:
And just very clever stuff.
Casey:
It's super cool.
Marco:
Yeah, that was really cool.
Casey:
There were a couple of other interesting tidbits we got from the talk show, which I'm sure we'll discuss later.
Casey:
Keeping with the APFS train, tell me about the compression versus HFS+.
John:
Yeah, this was a question I had a couple shows back.
John:
Hey, HFS Plus has compression, and a lot of OS files are compressed, and other files can be compressed, both by user programs and by the OS and stuff like that.
John:
That's totally transparent to you when you read the file off of a file system in HFS Plus.
John:
If it's compressed, it just decompresses it on the fly.
John:
You never see it.
John:
It never looks any different.
John:
They added that feature many years ago, right?
Yeah.
John:
my question was how do you non-destructively convert an hfs plus volume to apfs while not moving any of the data because if you have a compressed file and you leave it compressed and you convert to apfs and apfs doesn't understand that compression when you read that file it will be garbage because it's not apfs won't know how to decompress it so it'll just read the compressed bytes which is not what you're going to expect
John:
And in the grand tradition of Gruber forgetting to ask Phil and Craig questions, I forgot to ask anybody, WWDC, how the heck they're doing this.
John:
So if anybody knows, tell me, and it'll be a follow-up in a future show.
John:
I just totally forgot to ask.
John:
I should have, like, written it on my palm or something.
John:
Say, hey, by the way, when I've got you, how the heck are you handling compression?
John:
Again, the easiest solution is obviously that APFS just understands that compression and handles it.
John:
That could be the case.
John:
You know, it's a simple solution, but I have no idea.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So next time, next WWDC, you'll have to remember.
Casey:
iOS 11 dots versus bars for signal strength.
Casey:
So I am only vaguely familiar with what's going on here, but apparently in some contexts, either screenshots or perhaps the OS itself is showing circles for signal strength for your cellular carrier.
Casey:
But in other contexts, it's vertical bars.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
I don't know about that.
Marco:
Who is running iOS 11?
Marco:
I have it on my iPad that's faster than John's Mac Pro, and I can tell you that it is definitely using bars all the time.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think people were confused by that because in the keynote, they showed the notification center slides were near when you first saw the bars, and they're like...
John:
And we all know the Notification Center.
John:
Here's the things you can do in Notification Center.
John:
Those were all iOS 10 screenshots.
John:
That's why it was showing like existing stuff you can do in Notification Center.
John:
It was like a lineup of big things.
John:
And they all had dots in them.
John:
And the next slide was like, here's what you can do in iOS 11.
John:
And those had bars.
John:
Someone told me they thought there was a screenshot in the keynote that was supposed to be iOS 11 that also had dots.
John:
But I don't recall seeing it.
John:
But either way, Marco's got the actual beta and their bars.
Marco:
Again, whatever you see in betas and stuff is never actually final.
Marco:
But I can tell you that in beta 1 on my iPad, it is bars, all bars, all the time.
Marco:
And this is a welcome change because dots always sucked.
John:
I've grown to like dots.
John:
But the most important thing about bars versus dots, as far as everyone's conspiracy theories go on this, is that bars take up less width in the top bar.
John:
And why would that be important?
John:
Why do you need them to be smaller?
John:
All of the weird rumors about...
John:
the iPhone 8 or whatever they're going to call it, having something in the middle of the top of your screen that doesn't leave enough room for the five dots to, you know, lay themselves out.
John:
That something could be part of the case of the phone, like the cameras and stuff.
John:
And it could be like a little monobrow type thing where the top of the phone is not straight across, but actually there's this little dip in the middle.
John:
It could be that the cameras are behind the screen at that point.
John:
I don't quite understand why you'd have to get rid of the bars.
John:
Anyway, there are a lot of theories about why it has to be thinner.
John:
the thing that bothers me about the bars is and one of the reasons that uh well i don't know if the reason apple got rid of them but it was one of the things that people don't like about bars and it was discussed when they did get rid of them was that visually speaking like the visual weight of one two three four five bars is not even so if you have two bars it doesn't look like
John:
half the the lit up pixels of four bars because it's like a stair step thing and you know it just it looks like your signal is weaker than it is than you do with dots if you have five evenly sized dots then sort of one you know two dots is exactly you know almost exactly half the lit up pixels as four dots you know
John:
And so it seems more fair.
John:
And you don't like to see your phone with these tiny little one or two bars.
John:
Even though two bars could be perfectly good, you feel a little bit better when you see two out of five dots.
John:
Or at least that's my impression anyway.
John:
Remember when they fixed antenna gate by making the bars taller?
John:
Yeah, or didn't they just like change the scale?
John:
Because like, what is three bars really?
John:
You know, there's some...
Marco:
yeah they did some fussing they actually did both like they i think they changed i think they changed some of the like you know decibel cutoff points of what the bars are presented and also they they made the shorter like the leftmost bars a little bit taller so that's why it's kind of like a like almost like a curved ramp up from the left instead of a straight ramp up they make all the bars the same height so it's like a block or something well that's what dots are yeah but they're all spread out
Marco:
These whole things about trying to make room for a cutout in the 2017 new iPhone, I'm not sure I buy that.
Marco:
The whole idea of having these protruding camera and speaker things and then having a screen that goes above to the left and the right of it,
Marco:
i still don't get that at all because i i just i mean i think we've learned by now that the rumor cycle with this kind of stuff gets about a third of what they predict correct like it's it's not a great ratio and i think this is just one of those things like this this sounds like something an android maker would do not something apple would do because if you think about how that screen space would actually be used first of all there's a lot of stuff that goes in the status bar
Marco:
Still, even in iOS 11, there's lots of stuff that goes in the status bar.
Marco:
One of the big things is, where would the clock go?
Marco:
The clock is right there in the middle.
Marco:
And there's not really room on the sides to put it there unless you get rid of something else that everyone likes or that you need.
Marco:
So it's just like, I just don't...
Marco:
I don't see how the status bar morphs to have a big cutout in the middle of it and still be good in any way.
Marco:
And then I also don't see why you would have the screen extend with this giant rectangle sticking into the middle of it.
Marco:
Because what are you going to do with that space?
Marco:
Are you going to show parts of a photo that extend into that space?
Marco:
Then you see the big black cutout?
Marco:
I don't see any way in which that looks good and actually works in practice.
John:
they'll just have eyebrows rendered there you know like rendered hair little bushy eyebrows yeah you know so the non-conspiracy theory other than someone that Apple just doesn't like dots which is perfectly valid is that having more room in the status bar
John:
it's always a good thing right i mean that gives you more options sometimes a status bar looks kind of crowded up there and if you're taking up less room with dots then you get a little more breathing room and it looks nicer if they wanted to say take that weird back arrow thingy that is always squished up in the is that even in the status bar i don't even know yeah it does yeah like lay that out differently now they have extra room who knows anyway it could just be they didn't like dots we'll find out you know in a couple months
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Another thing that has happened in iOS 11.
Casey:
Apparently, the third party service integration that came in a couple of versions ago, I don't remember exactly when.
Casey:
So this is integration at the system level with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo.
Casey:
You could enter your passwords for any of those services at the system level.
Casey:
And then when an app wants to leverage those services, it can kind of ask the system for the accounts, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Those have all been removed.
Casey:
And according to the iOS 11 beta release notes, quote, social accounts have been removed from settings in iOS 11.
Casey:
Third-party apps no longer have access to those signed-in accounts.
Casey:
What's that about?
Marco:
That's about adding one more thing to my to-do list this summer because I used the Twitter one.
Marco:
And now I have to stop using it and write my own stupid Twitter login.
Marco:
And I'm not happy about that.
John:
Sorry.
John:
So Darren Cohen says that Facebook and Twitter are getting rid of the APIs that do that stuff.
John:
And that's why Microsoft also had to pull that support out of Windows.
John:
I'm not sure if that's the case.
John:
But, you know, so fine.
John:
Facebook and Twitter got rid of them.
John:
What about Flickr and Vimeo?
John:
Like, no one is even developing.
John:
Well, I was going to say no one's developing.
John:
Someone might be developing Vimeo.
John:
Anyway, it seems more like a policy decision.
John:
This is interesting about the beta release notes, by the way.
John:
I read them a couple times.
John:
Like, they have a known issue section, but sometimes they just talk about changes.
John:
and sometimes they phrase it so you realize oh in this build such and such a feature is like this but we don't mean it to be that way it's just the way it is in this build sometimes some things like that under or under a known issues header sometimes they're just in the changes section and the reason i quoted this is because i think this sentence expresses pretty clearly that this is not just something that's missing in beta one but that marco really does have to do work and they're just not leaving them in there
Marco:
No, they're officially deprecated in the API.
Marco:
They're gone.
Marco:
It's not like a temporary beta one thing.
Marco:
This is actually they're gone.
John:
So it does simplify things because anytime Apple has one of these things where it's like certain blessed third parties are given deeper hooks into the operating system than other ones, it's kind of convenient.
John:
But then Apple has to...
John:
they eternally maintain an awareness of the of the social service zeitgeist they're like what's popular now because they can't they can't just keep the same set of things and support them forever because three or four years later then there's something new and and some old one needs to go away but if you take the old one and go away then people like marco are sad because they use it in their app and the the most apple-like solution is you know what you don't get any just deal with it yourself
John:
Like, because then you don't have to worry.
John:
We don't have to keep up with this anymore.
John:
If they change their APIs, they won't break our stuff.
John:
We don't have to do deals with them.
John:
Every developer can handle it for themselves.
John:
Obviously, the best solution would be some way for some sort of extension mechanism for the third party services themselves who are highly motivated to have this type of integration to write such an integration for iOS.
John:
But that's
John:
kind of along the lines of third-party keyboards and that something doesn't seem like Apple would do.
John:
But they could do it someday.
Marco:
Well, and also, like, the existing share extension framework really does most of what you need for that and puts the power of creating those things and maintaining them and designing them into the hands of the app makers who run those services and have their apps.
Marco:
So it, like...
Marco:
rather than having Apple design the share to Twitter sheet, for instance, that is built into the system and have the system maintain a separate Twitter login account that is separately set and separately managed, now that's all on Twitter or whatever happens.
Marco:
So now Twitter can just, with their app, have your own login in their app, which they already have to have, and then Twitter can design their own share extension and have it do whatever they want it to do and look however they want it to look.
Marco:
And then it isn't now just Twitter, but now when something new comes along,
Marco:
If Manson wants to have a share extension from micro.blog, that will now get equal billing as a share extension as things like Twitter.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
And again, like we were saying, the system of having Apple maintain this fairly short list of services that matter, that will have first-class integration, that's not scalable.
Marco:
I think we've seen over time, so many new networks have come up since then.
Marco:
There was never a share to Snapchat.
Marco:
That's crazy.
Marco:
Snapchat is bigger than some of the things that are in that list, but they just didn't get to it.
Marco:
The share to Twitter that Apple made that was there for the last few iOS versions, the share to Twitter and iOS 10 broke on me all the time.
Marco:
I would post a tweet with it, and it would just never post.
Marco:
And presumably it was hitting some weird API limit or it wasn't counting characters correctly or something.
Marco:
And there was no interface to report an error to me or to report that it failed or to retry.
Marco:
And it's like the system Apple had before just did not scale.
Marco:
And so it's nice to have... Now that we have a new system of share extensions that we've actually had for, what, like three iOS versions now?
Marco:
Now Apple can step back and say, all right, you know what?
Marco:
We tried doing this ourselves.
Marco:
It was okay.
Marco:
But now this is up to you guys and we're going to step back from it.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
you can always kind of tell the data sharing relationship between Apple and Twitter and Facebook.
Marco:
You can always tell it was a little bit tense.
Marco:
They're really very much at odds with their business models and what they want to do with the user and who owns the user and who owns the user's data and what kind of integration they want and everything else.
Marco:
And so to have Apple just fully step back from that and to just tell everyone else, like, look,
Marco:
You're now cut off from any kind of privilege.
Marco:
You can do these things, but so can everyone else.
Marco:
And everything that's part of the system is off limits to you.
Marco:
That, I think, is better for everybody, really.
John:
Yeah, it reminds me of when Apple first added Facebook integration to what was then OS X. One of our reviews, I remember hearing about how they sort of bent over backwards to try to integrate Facebook with Apple's contact databases without giving Facebook all of your contact info, but having them sync.
John:
And it was tense is definitely the right word for it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The only bit about not having these things as part of the system is, I guess this is probably good for the services, but maybe some users won't like it.
John:
You have to have the app for these things installed now.
John:
Even if you're like, oh, I'm never going to use Flickr on my phone.
John:
I just want to be able to post to it from my phone.
John:
Well, you got to have the Flickr app installed because the extensions come from the app.
John:
So whatever, just put it in a folder somewhere and you won't notice it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you very much to MailRoute for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
In iOS 11, according to Fraser Spears, on the home screen, there are like four different things you can do.
Casey:
So a short tap means open whatever app icon you just tapped on.
Casey:
A medium tap apparently opens a popover menu.
Casey:
A medium hold.
Casey:
What is a medium tap then?
Marco:
I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
It took me a very long time to figure out how to move multiple apps at once on Springboard.
Marco:
You can move an app around just with a regular drag and drop, but you can't do multiple apps with that.
Marco:
To do multiple apps, you have to put it into wiggle X mode.
Marco:
The old way where you long press on it and eventually it goes into wiggle X mode.
Marco:
Then you can do the multi-tap thing.
Marco:
It took me so long to figure out some of this stuff.
Marco:
There are now more modes than ever before.
Marco:
It's very powerful, but there are so many modes and gestures and alternate taps and everything.
Marco:
It's going to be a while before even power users figure out what all this stuff is.
Casey:
So to come back to Fraser Spears, who's a power user.
Casey:
Yeah, sorry.
Casey:
Short tap is open the app.
Casey:
The medium tap is the popover menu.
Casey:
Medium hold is begin to drag.
Casey:
Long hold is enter rearrange mode.
Casey:
All of those different things based on you putting your meaty finger against the screen on top of an icon.
John:
For various amounts of time with various amounts of movement.
John:
I think Force Touch is separate because Force Touch brings up whatever the Force Touch menu that the application implements.
John:
This reminds me, of course, of the home button, which started out as the button you press to go back to Springboard and ended up having a Morse code set of things that you can tap on it to do all sorts of weird stuff.
John:
I mean, at the point where we talked about this before, the accessibility thing where it slides down the screen, whatever that's called, that was like...
John:
two taps but don't actually press the button that's the level they were getting at where like they'd use up the one to tap and hold do this to that it's like okay now now this is a tap but don't press the button i know it's weird because the button doesn't move anymore but like don't press it enough that it would move if it did move it's very strange
Casey:
Continuing with iOS 11, a new feature of iOS 11, which was mentioned, I thought, somewhere maybe during the keynote, but I might be wrong about that.
Casey:
But I saw this somewhere last week.
Casey:
You can now share your Wi-Fi passwords.
Casey:
So there's an article in 9to5Mac we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
If a friend comes over with an iPhone running iOS 11, you can automatically log them into your Wi-Fi in one tap.
Casey:
And this looks very similar to kind of the AirPods charge status when you flick open the AirPod case.
Casey:
I don't obviously think that that's how it's activated, but they have a screenshot in here on the 9to5Mac article.
Casey:
And what a cool idea.
Casey:
I dig it.
John:
So my question is, do they get to see your password?
John:
Like, is this just a convenience feature of not having to read something off to somebody and they type it in and get capital letters wrong?
John:
Or is this a security feature where you can let someone log on to your thing, but they can't see your password?
John:
I'm inclined to think it's just a convenience feature because once the password is on their phone, surely they can get it off if they wanted it.
Marco:
yeah because presumably i mean because they have to know like they have to have the password in their device possession for it to be on the wi-fi so i'm guessing like it probably isn't shown to them it's probably just put in keychain but there are ways to access things in keychain like if you sync if it's synced with icloud keychain and it syncs to a mac then you can go to keychain access and you can get the password right there uh so put in the secure enclave impossible to get off the device right right
Marco:
So, yeah, I'm guessing that, you know, they end up having a way to get to the password if they want to.
Marco:
And this is more for quick convenience and like casual security than it is about real security.
Marco:
Because real security is if you're letting them on your network, then they're on your network.
John:
That's it.
John:
Everyone's Wi-Fi passwords are like their kids' names anyway.
John:
So, come on.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And no one ever changes their Wi-Fi passwords because now they have like 16 different things on it.
John:
People have years in their Wi-Fi passwords and it's like 1999.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Mine's 2008, if I'm not mistaken.
Marco:
Yeah, Wi-Fi really needs like a token system, like OAuth, where you can just like issue devices tokens and then like you can change the password for new devices.
Marco:
It really needs that.
Casey:
So before everyone writes in, I know there are flavors of Wi-Fi security that allow that sort of thing.
Casey:
But it is generally speaking, it is not the sort of thing you'll ever find at somebody's house.
Casey:
Is that like all the enterprise things?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And there are I've seen installations in the home that will do this sort of thing.
Casey:
I understand that's a thing.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter the details like a friend of mine.
Casey:
had some setup with like a raspberry pi or some such where you would push a little button on some device it would actually like print out a temporary wi-fi password for you just because this is the sort of thing you did for a living so you had like crazy enterprise hardware in his house and it was actually very cool but but yeah for any normal person you're absolutely right marco like this would be kind of cool if it was usable and i consider myself a normal person in this context because i'm not like a super network administrator
Casey:
So, yeah, so for me to, like, issue a temporary password would be pretty neat.
Casey:
But that's not the sort of thing you find in normal, like, WPA2 or whatever it is, households.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Steve Trouton-Smith, he pointed out that drag-and-drop upload of files to mobile Safari works now.
Casey:
And I actually saw – I don't think I'm going to have it handy, and I'm not going to be able to dig it up.
Casey:
But I think it was Serenity Caldwell –
Casey:
had a tweet about this you can take several files from say like the files app for example and you can drag them into mobile safari much like you would do in regular desktop safari and it will actually upload all of those files which is super cool
John:
it's another thing uh marco's ipad can do that my mac can also do finally file uploads the final frontier for ios web file uploads the final frontier oh my word the reason i put this in here is because not because like you know drag and drop works everywhere but because until i read this it wouldn't have even occurred to me to try that on ios because i've been so conditioned but from so many years like oh you're gonna do like a
John:
a file upload, you got to go to a Mac for that.
John:
Right.
John:
And even though we all know drag and drop is there, I wouldn't like you have to change your mindset now with these drag and drop features to think to try something instead of just like walling it off in your mind is like, oh, you can only do that in the desktop.
John:
Not true anymore with iOS 11.
Marco:
This is, I think, going to be like one of the I mean, this is always the case, like with new platforms.
Marco:
But like, this is one of the reasons why I think young people have a way better chance of working on these platforms than we do.
Marco:
Because like, it is so easy as someone who's been who's been around since the earliest of iOS like us, you know, it's so easy to forget all the new things that you can do that you used to not be able to do.
Marco:
And we just don't even think to try those things because we, like, quote, know, you know, subconsciously, we just know that that's not a thing you can do here.
Marco:
And, like, you need somebody younger than you, like, Vitixi to come around and be like, no, look, you can do all this crap.
Marco:
You guys are dumb.
Marco:
And he's not that mean, of course.
Marco:
He's super nice.
Marco:
But, you know... He's young at heart.
Marco:
Yeah, he's... Well... Yeah, like, you need somebody who's, like, more fresh to the platform or more willing to experiment or more open-minded than us old farts to actually, like...
Marco:
push the boundaries of using the thing and actually use all these new features that we might see in a keynote for five seconds and immediately forget about.
John:
The flip side of that, by the way, is whenever the youngsters see me and Old Fart use my Mac, they never know.
John:
All the things that I'm dragging around and the fact that proxy icons and title bars, totally undiscoverable stuff if you haven't been using the Mac forever.
John:
Or like which applications you have to hold long and then start to drag or start drag immediately versus holding to drag large pieces of text to copy it inside terminal without blowing away your buffer or before you even get into multiple clipboards and all that other stuff.
John:
There's lots of things that old platforms can do that young people don't learn.
John:
as well because they didn't go through all the you know they didn't start out with a simple system and see new features get added they just use the system they use enough of the system to get their job done and didn't have this history of learning all these other obscure features so there's there's secrets uh lying in mac os as well especially if you're an old next user there's stuff from next still lurking in there and there's stuff from the old mac still working on there so we have something to teach the youth right before we die
Marco:
Wow.
John:
On our slow Mac Pros.
Casey:
Man, you are really drilling this home.
Casey:
You're savage.
Marco:
Well, I mean, to be fair to John's very slow old Mac Pro, it is really impressive.
Marco:
Like, this is kind of an argument for the Mac Pro that, first of all, that he's still using it almost 10 years later and it's mostly fine.
Marco:
Second of all, it's an argument for upgradability because upgrades like an SSD and a new GPU have made this possible.
Marco:
And third of all, it really shows quite the difference when you buy a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
the ios hardware surpassed five-year-old macs you know long ago but it took it took until now for it to surpass this 10-year-old mac in multi-core performance because when you have eight cores it takes a long time for things to catch up to that and like one of the reasons why i love the mac pro so much is you get so much headroom like
Marco:
You literally, you know, your single core performance is always limited by whatever the technology of the era is for single core design.
Marco:
But they cram so many cores in there that for parallel workloads, which is what a lot of pros do, you can basically buy yourself 10 years from now levels of performance today.
Marco:
And so the Mac Pro, it's useful to a lot of types of people for way longer than any other computer is.
Marco:
So that just shows why having these high core count workstations is still valuable because you're literally buying yourself a place 10 years from now in performance.
John:
Yeah, just wait for the iMac Pro with its 18 cores.
John:
That'll give you another good head start on the phones.
Casey:
Okay, so we made a reference to it earlier, but there were a couple of things that were, I mean, the whole show was interesting, but a couple of interesting tidbits that came out of the talk show live from last week.
Casey:
So this was, as per tradition, it was John Gruber, and then as of the last couple of years, it's been Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi.
Casey:
And as usual, it was a great show.
Casey:
I like that John doesn't just throw up the softball questions.
Casey:
And I can't think off the top of my head of what the hardballs were, but he always asks at least a few hardballs, which I like.
Casey:
And at one point at the end, Schiller actually said to him, hey, man, in so many words, you know, hey, man, you always say a couple weeks later, man, I wish I asked Schiller this.
Casey:
So what do you got?
Casey:
And I think it took Gruber by surprise, which was kind of funny.
Casey:
And I forget exactly what he came up with.
Casey:
But in summary, it was a really great show.
Casey:
If you haven't listened to it and or watched it because there's a video available, you really, really should.
Casey:
And John and I had the pleasure of being seated front row and watching it.
Casey:
Marco had the pleasure of sitting in a 90 degree sound booth and watching slash listening to it.
Casey:
But there were some interesting things that came from it.
Casey:
One of them was the trial APFS migrations we mentioned earlier.
Casey:
But the other thing that all of us, I think, picked up on and were also amazed by was the photo data that is synced in between devices, which was mentioned in the keynote, or maybe not the keynote, but the State of the Union, if not.
Casey:
That isn't what we thought it was.
Casey:
So the way I understood what was said in whatever keynote or State of the Union was that, hey, all of the metadata that we generate during the photo crawl process on any of our devices, all of that is getting synced via iCloud to all your other devices.
Casey:
And we were all very, very, very excited about this.
Casey:
Turns out that that is not the case.
Casey:
And what's actually happening is only the stuff that Apple has complete certainty in, and I'm slightly paraphrasing Craig here, only the stuff that Apple has complete certainty in is what's synced, which in turn means only the stuff that a user has actively said yes or no to.
Casey:
So in the case of photos, what that means is if there is a photo that has the three of us in it, and I as a user say that one is Marco and that one is John, then
Casey:
That photo and the information about it that I've provided will be synced via iCloud to the other devices.
Casey:
But anything else, any of the generated metadata and all that, that isn't synced at all, which probably isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's a good thing either.
Casey:
And I presume that this is because of privacy concerns.
Casey:
But I feel like it was a little bit of a bait-and-switch process.
Casey:
Or maybe I just misunderstood what was said in the keynote, but it felt like a bait and switch compared to earlier that week when we had heard, oh, yeah, we're syncing things between devices.
Casey:
It's great.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I understand why they're doing it this way, but I think it's the wrong choice.
Marco:
So basically, there were a few problems with the way it was before.
Marco:
Problem number one was that if you actually took the time to enter things like faces data, that wasn't synced between multiple devices.
Marco:
So it was very frustrating.
Marco:
It's like a form of data loss.
Marco:
You input that on one device, but then you go to some other device and it's not there or it's different.
Marco:
So that's no good.
Marco:
So that's the part they're syncing.
Marco:
Problem number two is that every time you do an OS restore or get a new phone or replace a phone from service or a new Mac or any new devices with photos on them, your device would basically run really hot and have terrible...
Marco:
battery life if it misbehaved and CPUs will be maxed out for hours or days after you got it as photo analysis D went through your entire photo library and tried to recognize objects in the photos so you could search for them.
Marco:
That one they didn't fix.
Marco:
That one is still being done on all the different devices individually.
Marco:
And it sounds like the reason why is because that's something that they're kind of guessing on each device.
Marco:
They're using machine learning to try to figure these things out, and that's fine, but it seems like the reason why they don't want to sync that is so that
Marco:
a newer device that maybe has a newer OS that can be smarter about what it recognizes, you can get smarter results on that.
Marco:
And that way you don't have like bad results synced forever from old photos.
Marco:
But that creates the experience not only of having your devices be really hot for the first couple days you have them and your CPU cores be maxed out for a long time, but that also makes it so that you get different search results on different devices for the same query.
Marco:
And that's not really great either.
Marco:
So I'm not really sure what led them to make this decision.
Marco:
There's probably more information here that we don't have.
Marco:
I'm sure there were good reasons.
Marco:
But from where I sit, from the subset of the real information that I have, I still think that's the wrong choice.
John:
Yeah, it's not just object recognition, too.
John:
The faces thing is the thing that bothers me the most because I think most people don't spend that much time confirming faces because it's annoying to do.
John:
You confirm some or whatever.
John:
The way the system is supposed to work, especially on a single device scenario, is you confirm a bunch of faces and say yes, no, no, yes, maybe make some corrections.
John:
And based on your confirmations...
John:
The system then guesses all the other pictures that have this person's face in them.
John:
And that type of feature, I've always wanted this face recognition feature to replace my manual tagging system, where if I want to find all pictures of my wife, I don't want to have to manually tag every single picture that she's in.
John:
I just want to tell the system...
John:
This is her.
John:
This is her.
John:
This is her.
John:
This is her.
John:
I'll do that 100 times.
John:
Like, I am sure I've spent way more time in that photo confirmation thing than most people have.
John:
Right.
John:
And then based on that data set, find all the other ones.
John:
And the end of my interface to this is I want, you know, somewhere in the sidebar, like a smart folder or whatever to say, you know, pictures of my wife.
John:
Right.
John:
And as far as I'm concerned.
John:
The set of pictures of my wife is not a thing like finding like telephone or plastic or like, you know, garbage can in a picture that new versions and different machine learning algorithms can, you know, do better in future things.
John:
It should be the same.
John:
Like, I want it to be the same as if I had manually tagged it.
John:
Right.
John:
And and I want the same experience on every device.
John:
Right.
John:
And if it is better in some future device, because it's like, well, we are technically guessing and this one is able to guess better.
John:
If it is better on another device, they just need to like version that stuff or, you know, so that.
John:
when as soon as they get the better version sync the better version ever bottom line if i have that smart folder whatever this is pictures of my wife i don't want to see wildly different counts on them and they will be pretty different because depending on how much time you've spent adding the people's faces or how many other people you have look similar or whatever
John:
I don't want it to re-guess at different times and see like, oh, why do I have a different number of pictures of my wife on these two devices?
John:
You don't.
John:
It's just that one has a different notion of how many pictures of your wife there are because even though they're both working from the same small data set of manual selected pictures, there's too much variability, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's better than it was, but I still think there's room to grow.
Casey:
It's always funny to me that Craig seems not like obviously uncomfortable, but not totally in love with being on stage.
Casey:
And I think we talked about this last year, too.
Casey:
Until a technical thing comes up.
Casey:
And suddenly everything changes and he's like super confident, awesome engineer guy to the point that like his depth of knowledge in things that are reasonably, I don't know if esoteric is the right word, but like he'll happily go deep.
Casey:
On damn near anything on the drop of a hat.
Casey:
And I don't know how the man can keep that much stuff in his head.
Casey:
It's just stunning to me because especially my stereotypical view of managers is that they're so far outside of the weeds.
Casey:
They're sitting on their fancy thrones looking down at their kingdom of minions and saying, oh, minions take care of things.
Casey:
Not having any idea what the weeds are and what's in the weeds, et cetera.
Casey:
But he can go all the way down on anything.
Casey:
It's just stunning.
Casey:
And, man, I love listening to him talk.
Casey:
And Phil is great as well.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
But, man, Craig is a nerd's nerd.
Casey:
I dig it.
John:
Agreed.
John:
I didn't listen to the recording because I saw it live.
John:
But in the live thing, there was one heckler who shouted out to her in one point in the show.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
When is Siri going to get better?
John:
I don't know if they cut that out of the final recording, but that did happen.
Marco:
No, it's it's there.
Marco:
But they, you know, they didn't address it because it was like they were basically like John was like in the middle of asking a question.
Marco:
So they just kept moving like because it was it was not like at a at a point at a point where it even makes sense to address it.
John:
There's two ways you can go on this.
John:
One is that from a hosting perspective, it's a good idea not to encourage hecklers by addressing them.
John:
John ignoring the heckler is the way of saying, don't heckle.
John:
It's my show.
John:
I'm going to pretend you don't exist.
John:
On the other hand,
John:
When is Siri going to get better?
John:
That is a line of questioning that could have been brought up in the context of HomePod or whatever.
Marco:
Well, but again, when you have limited time on stage with Apple executives to ask questions...
Marco:
You have to have some degree of just predicting, like, you know, what's a good question here?
Marco:
Like, what's actually a good use of time?
Marco:
And a question where they're just going to give, like, a pretty canned PR-like answer is not a good use of time.
Marco:
Because, like, what are they going to say on stage?
Marco:
Do you honestly think Phil Schiller is going to be on stage and be like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
Siri isn't very good.
Marco:
We're working on it.
Marco:
No, of course not.
Marco:
It's going to be an answer of... Even if you ask that question directly to them, it's going to be a relatively informationless answer of like, well, here's all the ways that it's already world-leading and it's always getting better.
Marco:
It's a PR question that's going to get a PR answer.
Marco:
It's like all the...
Marco:
stupid analyst questions on the earnings calls.
Marco:
When are you going to make a TV?
Marco:
That kind of stuff.
Marco:
It's not a useful question because you know they're not really going to give you an answer that you want.
Marco:
So you might as well not even waste time on it and ask a better question.
John:
So I think you can ask this question in a way that it will get a non-PR vague answer because Apple itself opened the door to this line of questioning with their HomePod announcement.
John:
I said this in the last show too, but to reiterate and further emphasize, Apple's pitch for HomePod was, look at these two competitors, Sonos and the Amazon Echo.
John:
Sonos sounds good, but is dumb.
John:
Amazon Echo sounds like crap, but is smart.
John:
HomePod sounds great and is smart.
John:
Typical great Apple sales pitch for their thing, right?
John:
So here's Apple opening the door.
John:
But the only thing Apple demonstrated or in any way described, both in the live room where the press could hear it and in the slides where they talked about it, well, we know HomePod sounds good because a whole bunch of people heard it and they said, hey, this thing sounds good.
John:
It sounds as good or better than the Sonos, which was the thing Apple held up as sounding good.
John:
But the pitch of HomePod is...
John:
Unlike those two other devices, this one sounds good and is smart, right?
John:
Apple itself is saying we're making a device that combines the best of these two things.
John:
So the is smart part is your entree to say, okay, Apple, you have presented us with HomePod telling us it is going to be as smart as Echo and sound as good as Sonos.
John:
Uh...
John:
do you think siri is currently as smart as echo or will it be getting better for homepod because it's not you're not it's not a gotcha question like they haven't is the product isn't done yet like they did list a bunch of stuff that it's going to do on the slide here's all the things that homepod's going to do that are smart right so they put them up there but i think it's open question at this point okay like it gives them an opportunity to brag about the product they just announced they should say the good answer is the
John:
HomePod is going to be great.
John:
It's going to be just as smart as Amazon Echo.
John:
It's going to do all these things, so on and so forth.
John:
That's the answer to when is Siri going to get better.
John:
It's going to say, okay, when HomePod comes out, Siri will be much better than it is now, and they can explain all the reasons why or the progress they've made on Siri.
John:
I feel like it's an opening for Apple to brag about the product they just announced.
John:
But...
John:
in in the stuff that they put out in the keynote and in every part of wwdc the only thing they demonstrated or pressed on at all was that it sounds good and the smarts they're like it'll be smart just trust us we'll see which is fine like but now that's what i'm waiting for is it kind of worked if this thing is just a sonos you know if it's just a sonos with like existing siri built in i mean i guess it's still smarter than sonos you know but is it as smart as echo you know we'll see so i think this is this is the competitive question for the home pod apple's pitch is clear we have to just see if they can deliver
Marco:
yeah that's the thing like they really they showed us the home pod and they showed us why we should care about it and why it's cool but they didn't they didn't convince us like they didn't really like all they said was basically like it sounds great trust us and that's cool i mean the press press heard it and they said it does sound good yeah and that's great but but again but you know what you're saying is like that doesn't actually put it above where sonos is now
Marco:
All we have is a vague promise that it has Siri and it is smart, but they didn't actually show that.
Marco:
And I think you're right.
Marco:
I think it's mostly because it's pretty clear that it's pretty far from being done.
John:
It's not done yet.
John:
So it's not like they're hiding it.
John:
If they could have demoed it, they would have.
Marco:
yeah i i would honestly the the fact that it appears to be in such an early state now if they couldn't even demo a single siri command uh but they say it's going to be shipping in december that actually sounds really aggressive to me i would be impressed if they hit that because it sure looks like it's a year away one of those december launches just in time for the holiday oh never mind march
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
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Marco:
Investing made better.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
WWDC keynote and tvOS.
Casey:
One of you picked up on, and it was not me, a quote.
Casey:
You'll be hearing a lot more about tvOS later this year.
Casey:
And apparently it's just shy of nine minutes through the keynote.
Casey:
Interesting.
Marco:
Well, first of all, it isn't hard to hear less about tvOS.
Marco:
It's a lot more, though.
John:
We heard something about tvOS.
John:
They're like, look, dark mode can turn on automatically at night.
John:
That's something.
John:
So it's non-zero.
John:
And we're going to be hearing a lot more about it later.
John:
I mean, I guess that...
Marco:
That means there's going to be new hardware and stuff.
Marco:
I'm sure it would be nice to see 4K.
Marco:
It would be nice to see a redesigned remote.
Marco:
They're probably going to talk about... Oh, a redesigned remote.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
You want them to keep the current one?
John:
No, I'm just like, I wasn't even daring to think that.
John:
I was just picturing the puck.
John:
I'm like, oh, it'll finally be a puck that supports 4K and HEVC and there'll be 4K content on the iTunes store.
John:
I didn't dare to even dream that they would fix that damn remote, but I suppose they could.
Marco:
I suspect the Apple TV remote is going to be looked upon in retrospect the same way the hockey puck mouse is as like the worst design offense of the decade by Apple.
Casey:
I really don't think it's that bad.
Casey:
I will not say it's flawless by any stretch, but it doesn't bother me near as much as it bothers pretty much everyone else in the world.
John:
so i i will never did the dented version the puck they they tried to like fix it they're like oh the puck the puck is a problem so they put a little dent in like the button so you could feel for which side was the top they should do that with the apple tv remote just put a dent and i guess you can't do it on the trackpad side put a dent in the bottom side or something so you can feel for oh god
Marco:
i mean yeah it's it's not great i'm not trying to say that it's graded flawless or anything like that but i just i really don't think it's that bad it works okay for me okay it is that mouse look better than the apple tv remote your computer was like turning itself off randomly and you're like this is fine like this i think you might you might need to raise your expectations a bit of what technology should be especially from apple you know like i don't know i this i just want everyone to be happy
Marco:
The thing, I still use the Apple TV every day.
Marco:
It is our primary TV device.
Marco:
The only things we ever use our TV for are the Apple TV and the Switch.
Marco:
I use it all the time, which is why I'm so critical of it.
Marco:
One thing I would love to see in tvOS, and this is the thing, they say you're going to be hearing more about tvOS later this year.
Marco:
Actually, all I want is hardware stuff, like hardware changes.
Marco:
I basically want a new remote.
Marco:
4K would be nice.
Marco:
I don't have a 4K TV yet, but it's probably going to happen within the next couple of years, so that would be nice.
Marco:
And tvOS, and maybe it's the hardware, maybe it's the software, I don't know.
Marco:
It's just really slow.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
This is current hardware that isn't that old.
Marco:
It's so slow.
John:
I think the remote makes it feel slow because it's clumsy.
John:
By the way, we always complain about the remote, and I just want to reemphasize this again.
John:
Apple TV has an ability to learn remotes, and if you are a lifetime TiVo customer like me and you have extra TiVo remotes hanging around, you can use an old TiVo remote with the Apple TV, and it makes it way better.
John:
It doesn't have a touchpad, obviously, but it has a five-way pad, and I think clumsily swiping on that touchpad to move the focus feels
John:
feels slower than tap tapping on a digital you know right left up down center d-pad so i attribute some of the slowest in that uh there's more with like hey i hit the little home button how long does it take for me to get out of this app and go back to the whatever screen that also feels slow but i attribute a lot of it to the remote
Marco:
Well, and some of it's clearly software.
Marco:
Some of it is like you wake up the remote when you're first sitting down, and a few seconds later, eventually, you see the home screen.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Swipe over to the thing you want.
Marco:
Oh, nothing happened.
Marco:
Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe.
Marco:
Wait, wait.
Marco:
What's going on?
Marco:
Button, button, button.
Marco:
Swipe, swipe, swipe.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
Push everything.
Marco:
What's going on?
Marco:
Wait, wait, wait.
Marco:
And then, boom, everything happens all at once.
Marco:
It's queued up all that time.
Marco:
It's like, come on.
Marco:
Like, what year is this?
Marco:
Like, this device doesn't do that much.
Marco:
Like, what is it doing?
Marco:
Is it conserving power all that time that I'm not using it?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
It's plugged into the wall.
Marco:
Like, what is it doing?
Marco:
I have no idea what it's doing.
John:
Yeah, the...
John:
The sleep thing is brutal.
John:
I mean, there's no fans in there.
John:
Just leave it on all the time.
John:
I'll take the energy cost if it means that I don't have to wait for the internal seven seconds that it takes to be ready to respond to my commands.
John:
That's the thing.
Marco:
In 2017, for the most expensive TV-connected box...
Marco:
why am i ever waiting on the box for anything like why when i push the menu button to wake it up why does it take more than one second to become ready and most of that one second should be waiting for my tv to recognize the input like there is no reason it should take any time at all it's not doing that much i don't have that many apps on it i'm using the same like two over and over again like netflix and plex that's it like what what is what is it doing
John:
So the other hardware thing that I'm looking forward to is, as alluded to in the promotion stuff, hey, output at 24, 48 or whatever, you know, different frame rates so that movies can look correct and so it doesn't have to...
John:
down sample everything or whatever do three to two pull down to output everything at 60 hertz uh and that will be great um i don't know if that's in the cards i would assume it is but a lot of the things that could potentially that we talked about like why doesn't apple already do this oh changing the output uh frame rate is annoying uh
John:
Uh, because of HDMI and it's not an Apple like experience, although what Marco just described isn't exactly an Apple like experience either.
John:
Um, one possible way to sort of deal with this is the same way LCD TVs dealt with this, uh, in the past and probably still do is to just pick a really high frame rate.
John:
That's a multiple of 24.
John:
Ideally, you should be able to support any reasonable frame rate, but if you could just get 24, 60, and 30 or something, that would go a long way.
John:
I am looking forward to that.
John:
There's a lot of things that I would like to watch.
John:
I bought a Blu-ray drive a while back because it was cheap to rip Blu-rays.
John:
I was like, oh, well, I have all the storage space.
John:
Why don't I losslessly rip them
John:
and have a way to watch any movie at blu-ray quality through plex on my tv the problem is i have no device connected to my television that can read a ripped blu-ray and play it on my television at the correct 24 frames per second cadence for you know movies and stuff
John:
So I still have to put the blue area in the drive, in my PlayStation 3, by the way, which does output correct 24 frames per second cadence, to my television, which does display it correctly, and I can watch my movies the way I want to with plastic discs.
John:
But I'm just waiting for... Maybe I have to wait for a new TV, but it could be that Apple says, no, we're never going to support 24 frames per second on your old plastic TV.
John:
Get a new 4K TV with...
Casey:
240 or 120 hertz refresh and hook it up to a new apple tv and that's how we'll deal with it and i suppose i'll do that like marco eventually fair enough but yeah we'll see what the announcements uh that are forthcoming include but uh apparently whenever the next grand tour season starts if any of us choose to watch it which is relatable i can tell you one thing i'm not so yeah it's up to you guys if you want to watch it
Casey:
I certainly will, but we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But anyway, apparently that'll be on the Apple TV.
Marco:
I have to reserve all my TV watching time now for Planet of the Apps.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I didn't see the first one because I'm not an Apple Music subscriber, but did you guys?
Marco:
I haven't watched it.
Marco:
It's on my to-do list.
Marco:
I did not do my homework.
Marco:
I did not watch Planet of the Apps.
Casey:
Really?
Marco:
But I do plan to watch it.
Marco:
i think i should see it just to know what it is and to know whether i like it or not i'm gonna have a somewhat interesting perspective maybe because i've never seen shark tank or any of the shows like shark tank so it might be slightly interesting for me to see it but i'm i based on the reviews from our friends stuff so far i don't have high hopes but i do want to give it a chance yeah i'm gonna need a reason to watch the show
John:
Uh, right now I don't have a reason and everyone who has seen it tells me it's bad.
John:
So until I get a reason, I will just let everyone else take that bullet for me.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Uh, iCloud storage prices, uh, Apple dropped the two terabyte iCloud storage price to nine 99.
Casey:
It eliminated the one terabyte option.
Casey:
So the one terabyte now is two terabytes.
Casey:
Um, it turns out Jason Snell had that upgrade happen to him.
Casey:
One of you, it sounds like had that upgrade happen as well.
John:
Yep, came back from WWDC, pulled up my preference pane on the Mac.
John:
Hey, guess what?
John:
I got two terabytes now.
Marco:
Me too.
Marco:
Merry Christmas.
Marco:
And you can now share it within families.
Marco:
So I haven't actually tried this yet, but Tiff and I have each been paying for the terabyte plan separately, and we do have a family account.
Marco:
So I want to try to see.
Marco:
They might have just saved us $10 a month.
John:
Do you know where you do that?
John:
We mentioned it.
John:
I actually mentioned the iCloud storage sharing on the last show, but between then and now, I never actually went onto my Mac and clicked around to try to figure out where you do that.
John:
Do you happen to know?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like managed family in the iCloud preference?
Marco:
Sam the Geek in the chat is saying it requires iOS 11, which probably also means it requires High Sierra.
Marco:
And so this might be a thing that has to wait till the fall.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, well.
Casey:
Can we also, by the way, this is not in the show notes, but can we reconfirm that High Sierra is a terrible damn name?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm still not used to it.
Marco:
No, it's awesome.
Casey:
Majority rules.
Casey:
It sucks.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Andrew Pauls writes regarding the Apple eGPU.
Casey:
In the slide, in the presentation, in the keynote, according to Andrew, the pictured box is actually a Sonnet eGFX box.
Casey:
And we will put a link in the show notes to the box that we're talking about.
Casey:
Can you buy this?
Casey:
So it says sign up for Sonnet online store ship date.
Casey:
So apparently it is not available yet.
Marco:
I mean, you've been able to buy other similar boxes for a while now, so it's not like this is a massive thing that's all of a sudden brand new.
Marco:
Maybe support for it in the OS is newer than that, but the actual boxes are nothing new.
John:
Yeah, people have been hacking this stuff together ever since Thunderbolt appeared, even Thunderbolt 2.
John:
Someone wrote in saying that if you're wondering if Thunderbolt 2 is going to be officially supported by Apple for external GPUs, the answer appears to be no.
John:
Thunderbolt 3 only.
John:
So, oh well.
John:
And by the way, on that topic, talking about more things that happened later in the week at WWDC, Apple itself in one of the sessions, I think it was the AR or the VR thing or something, put up a diagram of
John:
that like with a graph that in no uncertain terms explained exactly how slow thunderbolt 3 is compared to like internal cards to say all right so because it was for programmers like you would think oh okay internal gpu external gpu it doesn't make that much of a difference it's like it's all good thunderbolt 3 is really fast
John:
uh but it's not it's like a quarter of the speed of an internal card and maybe your application doesn't need that but if you're not careful and you don't realize that your application is shipping stuff to and from the card a lot your thing can go way slower on external gpu and this session was trying to emphasize like this is something you may not have needed to think about before but suddenly now that you're sipping through a smaller straw think you know you may need to think about it here's how you can you know check your application to see if it's doing this thing um
John:
it's you know apple is not a unified coordinated beast so it's very possible that that could have happened and also that that the future mac pro comes with an external gpu or something but it seems to me that it would be a much better story much better coherent story even if it's like you know uh
John:
a retrospective story or in hindsight to say and that's why the mac pro has multiple internal gpus because we don't have to worry about limited thunderbolt 3 bandwidth we've got the full 16 pci express lanes and your apps will just be super fast all the time and there's your mac pro i hope that's the case
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's gotta be the case, because, like, if that wasn't the case, the iMac Pro would beat the Mac Pro in GPU throughput.
Marco:
Oh, there's no external stuff on the iMac Pro.
Marco:
It's all in one!
Marco:
Yeah, so, no, I'm pretty, you know, the eGPU support is clearly meant for laptops.
Marco:
Like, that's really what this is for.
Marco:
It's for...
Marco:
Pro customers who have pro GPU needs who are using a MacBook Pro and they want something they can like dock with that has a big GPU for certain things.
Marco:
But if you're going to be really pushing it, the answer is still going to be get a desktop and probably get a Mac Pro or at least an iMac Pro.
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Matthias Bessemin writes in with some nitpicky follow-up, and to his credit, he actually labeled it himself as nitpicky follow-up.
Casey:
Apple did actually have a previous Bluetooth keyboard.
Casey:
How is this not Stephen Hackett that wrote this in?
Casey:
Apple did actually have a Bluetooth keyboard with a numpad.
Casey:
Previously, the Apple wireless keyboard, which is A1016, and this was in 2003, and
Casey:
We will put a Google image search in the show notes for your viewing pleasure.
Casey:
Apparently, it was a thing in the past.
Casey:
Do you remember that keyboard?
Marco:
I remember seeing... I never bought a Mac that came with this, but when I was Mac curious for the few years before I bought my first Mac, this was the one that was in the stores that I would play with and try.
Marco:
It's the one with the white keys and the clear plastic case around them.
John:
So I've got one of these.
John:
Of course you do.
John:
This keyboard is most notable for being perhaps the most disgusting keyboard Apple has ever made because the entire top of it is open.
John:
It's kind of like a bathtub, like a clear plastic bathtub, and the keys are in it.
John:
And as food and gross stuff falls between the keys and the keyboard, it's like a glass-bottom boat for the scum of your keyboard.
John:
You can see all the crap down there.
John:
It is the worst.
John:
Like nothing makes you feel more disgusting than having one of these keyboards than just like tilting it up and looking at the sides and the bottom.
John:
Like, oh, the worst.
John:
It's amazing.
Casey:
Sounds wonderful.
John:
Ever since then, they've been opaque for a reason.
John:
And way thinner.
John:
Like this is giant.
John:
Like look at this thing.
John:
Can you believe?
John:
Talk about key travel.
John:
Like the keys alone are like three times the thickness of the Apple aluminum keyboards.
John:
I would still prefer that.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
John:
The keys on this keyboard were not great, by the way.
John:
There's a reason I used my Apple Extended 2 up until RSI stopped me from doing it.
John:
This was not a good keyboard in any sense of the word.
Casey:
Can we just not get Marco started on keyboards?
Casey:
Which is actually a tangential real-time follow-up.
Casey:
My MacBook Adorable should arrive tomorrow.
Marco:
Oh, you don't have it yet?
Casey:
Oh, man, I wanted to ask you about it.
Casey:
Yeah, no, not until tomorrow, unfortunately.
Casey:
And knowing UPS, it'll be the end of the darn day, which is frustrating.
Casey:
Of course it will.
Casey:
It'll be like 7 o'clock.
Casey:
First world problems.
Casey:
Yep, first world problems, if there are any.
Casey:
Okay, moving on.
Casey:
There was some anonymous feedback about the HomePod screen, and we're putting that in quotes.
Casey:
And so to set a little bit of context...
Casey:
There is there's been a little bit of debate over whether or not the HomePod has a screen on the top.
Casey:
And I think that some people had said like there were some leaks beforehand that it either absolutely would or absolutely would not have a screen and whatever the leak was doesn't really matter.
Casey:
And then when it when it was announced last week, there was a lot of debate over whether or not what they showed is or is not a screen, because all they really showed was this like Siri waveform on the top of the device.
Casey:
This is parallel with like the surface it's resting on parallel with the floor.
Casey:
It's the Siri looking waveform on the top.
Casey:
Is that really a screen?
Casey:
Like you could hypothetically present that just by having some LEDs, like a handful of larger LED lights behind some sort of like translucent top.
Casey:
Can you really interact with that?
Casey:
Can you show anything on that screen or can you only show the waveform and nothing else?
Marco:
And also complicating matters.
Marco:
Some people have said that it can also show a plus and minus for volume control that are touch sensitive.
Marco:
So there's some speculation about it's actually a touch screen.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so there was some debate about this.
Casey:
Gruber, I don't remember what side he came down on.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But he said it's one thing.
Casey:
There are many people who disagreed.
Casey:
So an anonymous person wrote in and told us the following.
Casey:
The Siri waveform on the top of the device is an LED array covered by a circular feathered mask to prevent bleed and a diffuser or two.
Casey:
Each LED is rather large, about half a centimeter in diameter arranged in a somewhat circular pattern.
Casey:
The purpose is only to display the Siri waveform, but it does change behavior and color based on the state of Siri and the device.
Casey:
There are also plus and minus buttons, like Marco was commenting on, for volume control, which appear during music playback or when hovering your hand over the device.
Casey:
These work similarly to the waveform in that they are white LEDs covered by a mask and diffuser.
Casey:
The entire top panel is covered in glass.
Casey:
This individual would consider the controls more like capacitive buttons rather than a full-on display.
Casey:
However, the entire top panel is capacitive, so gestures could hypothetically be performed for additional controls, like a tap, double tap, swipe, etc.
Casey:
And this seems to be true as of what we saw at DubDub.
Casey:
I don't know where I come down on this.
Casey:
Like, I don't think it's a screen in the sense that most people mean and that it can show really anything.
Marco:
I mean, if that's a screen, then the Amazon Echo has a screen because the Echo also has a whole bunch of LEDs on top that show different states.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So it's like a semantic.
Casey:
I think it comes down to a semantic argument about what is or is not a screen.
Casey:
And I don't think it really matters.
Casey:
But this was certainly some interesting feedback about how supposedly this is all wired together under the hood.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's not a screen.
Marco:
That's indicator lights.
Marco:
It's indicating state with lights.
Marco:
That is very much not a screen.
Marco:
That might still be very useful.
Marco:
I mean, the LEDs on the Amazon Echo cylinders are very useful.
Marco:
They're quite nice.
Marco:
They do indicate the state of the device, and they provide useful feedback.
Marco:
So it's not to say that this is bad.
Marco:
However, I would never in a million years say this has a screen.
Marco:
And I think in this day and age...
Marco:
I think what we're seeing from this market is maybe there's something to having a screen.
Marco:
There are certainly cases where at least having some kind of screen output would be nice, such as watching a timer countdown.
Marco:
So it depends.
Marco:
This is very early hardware probably.
Marco:
This is probably why you couldn't even demo Siri and stuff on it.
Marco:
So this could change.
Marco:
That could be a placeholder.
Marco:
Maybe the software UI for the final screen that will be there wasn't ready yet.
Marco:
And so they just put this thing in there as a temporary thing to show the demo units during this listening test and stuff.
Marco:
We don't actually know yet.
Marco:
It does seem like a lot of stuff to put in there and have a big touch panel to then not have at least a small OLED screen below.
Marco:
I'm thinking basically have it be roughly the capabilities of an Apple Watch face.
Marco:
Not having a ton of smarts and lots of apps and everything, but just some display of some things.
Marco:
Clock, weather, timers, basic stuff like that.
Marco:
So that when you ask for things, it can be more useful.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Marco:
However, if the focus of this is going to remain pretty much mostly for music and then just a little bit for smart home stuff, basically the way it was presented to us, then it doesn't maybe need a screen.
Marco:
like if the idea of this is to have it in a big white Ikea room with nothing in it and you're looking at it from 10 feet away when you ask it to play something by Drake or whoever, uh, that I don't know anything about music, at least modern music.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
then it wouldn't need a screen, especially one on top, because you won't be able to see it from 10 feet away.
Marco:
But if it is going to compete also in the smart assistant area, which I think it should, and I would like it to, then I don't think for a $350 product, I don't think that's good enough.
Marco:
I think it should have a small screen that can actually do things like display timers.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I hope this is just a placeholder hardware thing until they get the final hardware done.
Marco:
Or it's also possible that this tip is complete garbage and total BS.
Marco:
And maybe that was actually a bitmap screen.
Marco:
But from the way people were describing it, who saw it, who had hands-on, or actually nobody had hands-on, but people were like in the room with it.
Marco:
And from what we saw, this does sound like a pretty plausible explanation for what that was and why there's why there's now this kind of disagreement on whether or not it has a screen because it kind of looks like one.
Marco:
But this explains it pretty well.
John:
So does the Echo have a touchpad on top of it?
Marco:
No, it has the whole top of the Echo is a turnable knob.
Marco:
So you can turn it for volume, which is very nice.
Marco:
Physically turnable?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it has two physical buttons on top, a mute and like an action button.
Marco:
So like if a timer is beeping, you can hit the action button and it stops it rather than having to say, stop.
John:
So on the Google Home, it seems like they're doing a very similar thing to the Apple thing where it is a bunch of colored LEDs, like light changing LEDs underneath a diffuser type thing.
John:
and for volume control in the Google Home, you trace out a circle along the line of the circle of LCD.
John:
Basically, it's a touchpad, like a very crude trackpad-type thing.
John:
Apple having a whole glass top, and according to which this thing is to be believed, supporting not just arbitrary gestures like you would on a trackpad on the glass top of it, but also apparently hovering, so it must have proximity detection, like when your hand gets close to it, the plus and the minuses light up.
John:
Yeah, that definitely makes me think that this is not a temporary piece of hardware, but this is a design that they have done.
John:
Whether this is an earlier design and they have already changed their mind, but they don't have it manufactured and they're going to put a screen, I'm not sure.
John:
But the second thing is what Marco just pointed out.
John:
They can't put a screen on this to any great effect unless they totally redesign it.
John:
Because a screen that faces the ceiling, it's better than nothing, but it's pretty crap compared to the Amazon whatever show thing.
John:
Right.
John:
you can't glance at this from across the kitchen to see what your timer is because you probably won't even be able to see the top of it to see the timer.
John:
Time needs to be facing you.
John:
You need to in the, preferably like multiple timers.
John:
You can't sort of see it at an angle depending on where you nestle this thing in the corner.
John:
So they need an entirely different device if they're going to go screen, all of which makes me think this thing in the top will be a thing that you can gesture and wiggle your fingers on and have some status information on, but not a thing that Apple expects you to look at because it's just in the wrong place.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Indochino.
Marco:
Go to Indochino.com and use code ATP to get any premium suit for just $3.79.
Marco:
Indochino makes made-to-measure suits.
Marco:
You actually take your measurements, and there's these great videos to show you how to do this on their site and everything.
Marco:
It's very, very easy to do.
Marco:
And they custom make a suit.
Marco:
So you can get a generic off-the-rack suit, and it'll probably fit okay.
Marco:
If you've ever rented a tux for a wedding, you've seen this.
Marco:
Probably most suits that most people have are not really tailored.
Marco:
They're just off-the-rack.
Marco:
And they fit you okay at best.
Marco:
But there's always some part that's a little too baggy or a little too tight or doesn't flatter you well.
Marco:
So one option you have is you can get them custom tailored.
Marco:
And that's good.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So moving on to iPad, we have a bunch of things to talk about about the iPad and some of it we'll cover this week.
Casey:
And I think some of it will cover next week because we have some food stories to tell.
Casey:
But a friend of the show, Serenity Caldwell, has written a lot about the iPad, has used the new iPad quite a bit and has tweeted about the iPad a fair bit.
Casey:
So I'm just going to kind of shotgun approach some of the things she's talked about.
Casey:
One of the things she was speaking of now, Serenity, if you don't know her is a very talented illustrator.
Casey:
I don't know if she's like professionally trained or not, but to my eyes, she's really, really good at it.
Casey:
And so she has some very strong and, and, and,
Casey:
and good opinions about the pencil in a way that I would never be able to because I don't know how to draw anything but stick figures.
Casey:
So Serenity was saying that the pencil has always been 240 hertz on both old and new iPad Pros.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
It samples at 240 hertz.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But the difference is, is that the touch input on and correct me if I get this wrong.
Casey:
The touch input on the old Pros was much slower than 120 hertz.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Touch was sampled at, I believe, only 60 because touch, I believe, was sampled with the rest of the display.
Marco:
Only the pencil was sampled at the super high rate, I think.
Casey:
um i know at least the pencil was but i think only the pencil was and then also the frame rate of the display of the entire ui was 60 frames per second i think she's saying the touch was 120 okay so no matter it says in her tweet you know so it's the difference between input and output touch input was 120 pencil 240 but output was only 60 so there you go the point we're driving at is the particular numbers don't actually matter that much it's just the point is just that it's all better now
Casey:
So Serendi continues, you know, that was great info for predicting lines and touch, but it couldn't render the input at the rate it was being given.
Casey:
With these new pros, the screen can now output at 120 hertz.
Casey:
So touch is at par, pencil input is closer to par.
Casey:
less prediction and more accuracy and so there's a series of tweets that we'll put in the show notes uh talking about all this and uh one of them if if i open these up i believe she has a video do we have that here the video of her showing the difference um between the two different devices the old ipad pro and the new one if we don't have that in the show notes and i'll try to dig it up but uh
Casey:
In summary, it's damned impressive.
Casey:
It really, really is.
Casey:
It's super duper impressive.
Marco:
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that I wish I used the pencil more.
Marco:
I wish I had that kind of sensibility and habit.
Marco:
I don't, but I wish I did because seeing Serenity do stuff with it in person that everybody see, like, wow.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, yeah, she's really good.
Marco:
Typically, it's like the talent of the person is way more important than the tools in most of these things.
Marco:
But just as a nerd looking at the tools,
Marco:
wow they're impressive like it's i could not believe the latency and and just the the smoothness of it it it is incredible and if you are a heavy pencil user
Marco:
I highly suggest you consider upgrading your iPad because it is remarkably different.
Marco:
Like I was able to see it side by side and it really is a big difference.
Marco:
Don't tell my wife because then I'll have to buy another iPad.
John:
So the sample rate thing, like, it may seem weird to people that both the previous and the new iPads are sampling at a faster rate than the screen could display.
John:
Because it's true of both of them.
John:
Because, you know, the pencil's at 240, and now the screen is only at 120.
John:
And back then, the pencil was 240, and the screen was only 60.
John:
What good is it to sample...
John:
If your output is only a fraction of that frame rate.
John:
And as Serenity points out, it's about knowing where the implement, whether it be your finger or the pencil is so you can make predictions about the line.
John:
It's kind of like client side prediction and first person shooters and that.
John:
You want it to feel like there is less latency than there is.
John:
And so as the pencil is gliding along, even though you don't get to display this frame and you don't get to display this frame, but you're sampling it fast enough that you know, OK, now I know where it is and in time to render this frame.
John:
And so it reduces the perceived latency.
John:
And Serenity's numbers were 20 milliseconds versus 50.
John:
So the old pencil was 50 milliseconds.
John:
The new one is 20.
John:
And the Pencil is being sampled at exactly the same rate, 240 hertz, on both the old and the new.
John:
The difference is all about the display can now refresh more frequently.
John:
And once again, referring to that, what was it, the Microsoft video with their little test demo device where they can scale the latency from like 100 to 10 to 1.
John:
All right, so this halved the latency, less than, you know, so it got cut in half even more, more than half.
John:
How close are we to...
John:
an actual pencil which is zero milliseconds latency um in the demo video we'll put a link in the show notes 10 milliseconds still feels better than uh then you know obviously better than 100 and probably better than 20 one millisecond looks a lot better than 10 so if you want to say like how close are we for this being just like real pencil we're getting close but we're still an order of magnitude off we're still you know 20 versus one so
Marco:
hold on tight for i guess you know five years from now we can get it down from 20 milliseconds to five or something and we'll start to be in the ballpark and then things start to get really interesting also one more reason why you want to sample the pencil at a faster rate than the display possibly uh is that if you're making if you're drawing very very like big lines quickly so like you're moving there's a
Marco:
If you're only sampling it at 60 hertz, or even 120 hertz, if you're drawing really fast, big squiggly lines, the number of points that you're capturing might be further apart than the pixels.
Marco:
And so you have to then, if you're drawing a line from the software side, you just have to interpolate.
Marco:
You have to say, all right, well, it went from this dot to this dot, and we'll assume it's going to be a smooth curve between those two dots.
Marco:
And the higher sampling rate is, the less interpolation you have to do, and the more you're actually capturing what the movement was that the artist was doing, if they're making a really big, fast stroke.
John:
Yeah, and it takes time to render frames, too.
John:
So you always have to pick, like, okay, tell me where all the inputs are, because I'm going to start doing the work to draw the screen.
John:
And then it says, okay, I got all your inputs.
John:
And that input...
John:
if it was exactly the same frame rate as a screen, you might fall on a boundary where like, oh, I would have liked to wait three more milliseconds and get the next input.
John:
And that would, you know, that would be a better prediction.
John:
But it turns out, you know, they weren't lined up in the... Video games have a lot of problems with this, like in terms of the game engine, trying to get its work done at just the right time to give the rest of the system time to render out that frame.
John:
You don't want big gaps, since this is also in the AR VR things, where they put up a big, like, sort of...
John:
like a Gantt chart and Microsoft project of like all the different things that are happening in a system.
John:
And you don't want to have big gaps there.
John:
You want everything to finish just in time to get the optimal frame rate output for the optimal experience.
John:
And same thing with those, uh, what was it?
John:
The Nvidia, I think G sync thing where they try to synchronize the, the refresh of the monitor with the game engine again, to reduce those gaps.
John:
So you get a smoother tear free, you know, uh, drawing at variable frame rates instead of having like a 60 Hertz vertical blanking interval, uh,
John:
hold over from the CRT days, doing away with that and trying to get the engine and the screen all on the same page.
John:
Having more samples also makes it more likely that you will be able to get a recent input close to the optimal window for handing off to the system to render and display.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And speaking of those sorts of things, Joel LeBlanc writes in and saying people are preferring 120 hertz displays and blind tests.
Casey:
And this appears to be gamer related.
Casey:
In fact, the actual title, vast majority of gamers prefer 120 hertz monitors.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
people like them although uh did you it's somewhere i feel like i i heard some people saying that it kind of made them a little queasy which is interesting i hypothetically may have seen one of these ipads very briefly and i liked it but i haven't used it for a long time marco you received yours today yesterday yesterday okay and what do you think it is ridiculously good it is so good um
Marco:
Not only is it faster than John's Mac Pro, but it is just so good in so many ways.
Marco:
I'm not a heavy iPad user.
Marco:
I use my iPad lightly, but frequently.
Marco:
Like I sold my old one on Twitter about 24 hours before my new one was going to arrive.
Marco:
So I went like 24 hours without having an iPad and I actually really missed it.
Marco:
And I never thought like two years ago, I would never, I never would have guessed that I would be in that state.
Marco:
What really changed the iPad for me, what, what,
Marco:
And for everyone, this is a different thing.
Marco:
But what really made me get the iPad finally after years was the combination of having really great speakers and the smart keyboard.
Marco:
And basically leaving the smart keyboard permanently attached combined with really great speakers so that it basically became my kitchen computer.
Marco:
Because it plays podcasts.
Marco:
I can look stuff up.
Marco:
If I'm cooking off a recipe online, I can hold the recipe there.
Marco:
I can browse the web while I'm waiting for coffee to roast.
Marco:
And having it always in the keyboard made that difference for me.
Marco:
And having the great speakers made it by far the best podcast player that you can have in a kitchen.
Marco:
Because Overcast, the experience of using Overcast through something like Sonos or Alexa is not great.
Marco:
And using the app is always going to be better than that by a mile.
Marco:
And the speakers are really good.
Marco:
And the keyboard puts it up in a nice position for standing up at counter use.
Marco:
So it's just great.
Marco:
I very much enjoy the iPad for that.
Marco:
And then if we're watching some low mental effort TV...
Marco:
at night, I will bring the iPad over to the couch, and it'll be on my couch computer, like what everyone else in the world has done for years.
Marco:
So this is basically me discovering what everyone else discovered about the iPad a long time ago.
Marco:
So anyway, I now like the iPad.
Marco:
Even though I'm not using it to get much work done, I do enjoy it as a basic entertainment device and a light work device.
Marco:
Anyway, so the new hardware is ridiculously awesome.
Marco:
Would you say it's blow-away?
Marco:
In general, you're not waiting for anything.
Marco:
And I'm using the iOS 11 beta.
Marco:
First thing I did was install the beta because I was using it on my other one because this is clearly something that I want to be in.
Marco:
I want to get used to it.
Marco:
I want to learn it.
Marco:
And the iOS 11 beta is buggy and slow and slaughters the battery.
Marco:
Nobody should be using the iOS 11 beta.
Marco:
I am using it, but nobody should.
Marco:
It is a terrible idea to put this beta on any device that you rely on or care about at all.
Marco:
It also apparently has been bricking some people's devices.
Marco:
So again, I really don't recommend that anybody install the beta.
Marco:
But I did, and so I can't really judge things like battery life and even performance.
Marco:
The beta is really slow, and it was really slow on my old iPad, but on the new one, it's substantially noticeably faster because the hardware is so much better.
Marco:
If you do anything heavy on the iPad, if you were just a heavy iPad user, I strongly suggest you check it out.
Marco:
And I should clarify also, this is the 10.5.
Marco:
I did not get the 12.9 because for my aforementioned use of basically like casual plus light work,
Marco:
I think even the 12.9 fans would agree that the 10.5 is the size to get for that.
Marco:
The 12.9 is the size to get if you are a heavy iPad productivity user and you want two full screen apps side by side on a regular basis and you don't really need to carry it around a whole lot.
Marco:
Then the 12.9 is for you.
Marco:
But that's not going to be most people.
Marco:
Most people, the 10.5 is the size to get.
Marco:
And this is all.
Marco:
Everything I've just said is not even mentioning the 120 hertz display.
Marco:
But let me tell you, when you see the 120 hertz display, it ruins everything else for you forever.
Marco:
It is as big to a lot of people, I think, or will be as big to a lot of people as the retina transition was.
Casey:
You know, I'm glad you qualified that because had I hypothetically spent a little time with one of these last week, I came into it and my first impression was, meh.
Casey:
Then I saw it being used for a while, hypothetically.
Casey:
I saw it being used for a while and I was like...
Casey:
Actually, this is pretty impressive.
Casey:
And where I left it, not having used one, even hypothetically, for more than a few minutes, was this is important and it's a bigger deal than I initially thought.
Casey:
But a lot of people have been saying it's as big as retina.
Casey:
Perhaps I'll feel that way later.
Casey:
But sitting here now, after only brief usage, it is certainly the most impressive thing that I've seen in a long time, a la Retina, but I didn't think it was as big as Retina.
Casey:
But we'll see what I feel like whenever I get my hands on one of these eventually one day, or if the phone, for example, has them, you know, something like that.
Marco:
It isn't as big as Retina in the sense of looking at it.
Marco:
If you just look at a screenshot, you don't see it.
Marco:
It is basically the motion version of Retina.
Casey:
That's an interesting way of looking at it.
Marco:
Any kind of motion, any animation, any touch input, scrolling, especially scrolling text, like if you're reading a webpage, you notice that.
Marco:
Because when you're scrolling, the text blurs less.
Marco:
So if you're reading while scrolling, it's a noticeable difference.
Marco:
Even just moving page to page in Springboard.
Marco:
That's the first thing I did when I got it, right before I installed the beta, was I just swiped back and forth on Springboard.
Marco:
Between my two pages of apps, I was like, whoa, it's so smooth.
Marco:
It really is...
Marco:
It is a way bigger gain than I thought it would be.
Marco:
You know, I didn't think it would be that noticeable, but it really is that noticeable.
Marco:
And yeah, I mean, if I had to pick either only having retina or only having 120 hertz, I'd pick retina every time.
Marco:
but we already have retina you know retina is a done deal now like it you know well tell it to the macbook air but for the most part is a done deal now uh and so now we now that we've all established that we've that we can move on from that now wow 120 hertz is that that level of advancement and it won't be as high for some people for me though i i really think it is on that magnitude
John:
I think the comparison to retina is extremely apt because just like retina, I guarantee you there are people who you will put this thing in front of who have no idea that it's 120 hertz, will not be able to distinguish between the two, and will not care about it.
John:
Like, sure, I've shown a lot of people retina screens, and they're like, don't you see how different these screens are?
John:
These pixels are the size of boulders, and you can't even see them here.
John:
They'd be like...
John:
like the thing again in the tv parlance thing that they are much more likely to notice say that screen's brighter they they don't like some people just don't care about retina they don't see it you point it out to them look at the text look at the serif see how they're like oh yeah i don't care now it could be those same people who don't care get used to it and can't go back to the other thing but it could be that they're just always like well that's not not important to me or my vision is not acute enough for me to be able to notice the differences
John:
120 hertz is just like that.
John:
Some people will be like, but how can you not?
John:
It's just like what Marco said before about drawing with the pencil.
John:
When you scroll really fast, if you've only got 60 frames per second, it could be that the line that was previously in the middle of the screen in the next frame is at the top of the screen.
John:
So your device shows two frames, line in the middle,
John:
and line at the top, and you get to see no position in between, despite the fact that if you were taking a piece of paper and moving it by that same speed, you would see more positions in between, right?
John:
And so 120 hertz gives you more frames in between that makes it appear smoother.
John:
And I'll bet there are people you show that to, you know, look at the slow motion, look, look, can't you tell the difference?
John:
They'll be like, oh...
John:
all right i guess that's nice um but so i think a retina is perfectly apt it's a thing that's going to mean so much to certain geeks and other people will absolutely take for granted and i think that everyone will just become accustomed to so that if you fast forward many years like say we get the screen up to 240 and you pull out it's too bad we never had a 30 frames per second because ios is always aiming for 60 wasn't it 60 from the beginning i don't remember that's right
John:
Like, if we had 30 and compare that to a 240, people are like, oh, how did you ever use this 30 frames per second thing?
John:
It's so terrible.
John:
And that gets back to this gamer story here that I mentioned in the last show.
John:
Like, gamers are always obsessing about frame rate.
John:
And the question was like, what is the point of diminishing returns?
John:
Like, should you get a system that can play this game properly?
John:
you know, at 500 frames per second, or once you pass 60 or so, like, does it not matter anymore?
John:
And that's what gamers are always obsessed with.
John:
And this test of 120 hertz monitors was trying to figure out, like, asking these gamers who are presumably very sensitive to frame rates and their first-person shooters and everything,
John:
one of the questions was can you even tell like they put them in front of a screen we're not going to tell you if this is one of the 20 120 hertz one to 60 hertz one can you even tell if the screen you're in front of is 120 or 60 and most of them could not all of them though but most of them like 88 could say oh yeah i've correctly identified the screen that i'm using this is a 120 and this is a 60 so the fact that there are even some gamers who couldn't tell
John:
shows and by the way this was a game obviously this that with a frame rate that exceeds 60 so it would you know it would look different in things sometimes it's not even that easy to tell and the other question for the game is perspective is like did i do better on the screen with the higher frame rate and the methodology of this article is not conclusive because you know have a few people playing something or whatever but that's what they want to know is like does this make me a better player or not and that probably all comes down with what it's used to but for things like drawing with the pencil
John:
It's pretty clear that if you're drawing with something and the line you're tracing lags behind your cursor by twice as much on one device as another, you're going to like the other one better.
John:
But the fact that most people can tell shows that maybe the point of diminishing returns for first-person shooters may be hovering somewhere past 60 or whatever, but that people can see the difference, especially with very fast motions,
John:
uh pretty easily uh if you're looking for it if you know what to look for if you have the two devices there and you move your finger on you can totally see the difference which makes me think that you know where where is the limit on this for seeing the difference uh in terms of human visual acuity is would 240 would we be able to tell the difference between 240 and 120 and look at it and go oh wow i can really see that 120 looks like it's all stuttery and this one is as smooth as butter right or is there a point after which
John:
we can't tell anymore.
John:
And you'd put the two devices side by side, and you'd scroll them as much as you want, and you'd be like, I can't tell.
John:
Is this one 5,000 frames per second, and this one is 2,000?
John:
I can't tell anymore.
John:
So we may be approaching that.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
Someone should write in about the human visual system and tell us at what point will the side-by-side scrolling test stop working on humans.
John:
And that's where Apple can stop their work.
John:
But in the meantime, they should keep going.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I would even go further to say, this is so impressive that
Marco:
First of all, I think the reason why maybe some people, this makes them feel weird, and there actually is an accessibility option to cap the frame rate at 60 hertz, which is probably for this reason.
Marco:
In addition to looking really cool, it's jarring.
Marco:
how different it looks the first time you see it and the first time you you you touch it and move and you see an animation it actually is like jarring um and it's kind of like the first time you see a like high frame rate movie and like the soap opera effect on on tvs that john loves so much like it's kind of like that but but like you know the the the computer interaction version of that where like you're looking at you're like oh that's
Marco:
this is surreal in some way.
Marco:
It's a very jarring thing to see.
Marco:
So I will go as far as to say, I like it so much, it makes such a big difference, that between the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro...
Marco:
if one of them somehow supports this on its display, but the other one doesn't, this might be enough to convince me to make a decision one way or the other on that.
Marco:
Like, in the same way that when the 5K iMac came out, I gave up my Cylinder Mac Pro because I wanted desktop retina so badly, and that was the only way to get it at that time, at that size.
Marco:
This is that big of a deal to me now that I've seen it, now that I've played with it.
Marco:
Like, now...
Marco:
If the iMac Pro, say the iMac Pro can do it, like maybe the built-in screen can use the advantages of an internal bus and everything, say the iMac Pro can do 120 hertz, but the Mac Pro over some cable to some separate display can't, I'll get the iMac Pro for that reason alone.
Marco:
That's how good this is.
John:
i might consider that as well although the the mac pro is further hindered by the potential rumors of 8k because remember we were just talking about boy when will we be able to do 5k at 60 frames per second over a cable it's like surprise 8k and 120 hertz where is your god now yeah like that's a lot of damn pixels coming over it's there's almost no hope and that's why marco is right to like if you're going to pin your hopes on anything pin it on the thing where they have everything in the box they can hide the two ugly cables and the
John:
the timing chip and all that other stuff like they could conceivably pull that off but even then like the gpu starts to weep at a certain point like start doing the math that is a lot of pixels per second yeah it's it is a difficult challenge and
John:
Honestly, I would imagine that it is more perceptible on a device that you're constantly touching and swiping.
John:
Maybe if you have the Apple Touch mouse and you're swiping for scrolling, it would start to show up.
John:
I do.
John:
Boy, that's a difficult... I have two Apple Touch pointing devices, one on each side of my keyboard.
John:
Yeah, and you're not drawing on your Mac screen with a pencil, I suppose.
John:
No.
John:
You can use your iPad as a 120 hertz display that you can draw on when you connect to your Mac.
John:
That didn't get announced at WWDC, by the way, but it's still out there.
John:
Yeah, if that feature ever ships.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, but one thing you do on desktop a lot is scroll.
John:
you know like you're scrolling web pages all the time on desktop so like you just page down and page up and have it set to jump smooth scrolling is for suckers instant scrolling so old i think they removed that feature i had that that secret pref set for a long time i think it's gone now though like i think you have no choice you get smooth scrolling whether you like it or not yeah i think when they went when they went fully gpu rendered i think that happened it's another another reason to use chrome right guys oh god
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Indochino, and MailRoute, and we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin 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 because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N
Casey:
We need to discuss a few things.
Casey:
And the last of the three things we need to discuss, the other two should be quick, is the food at WWDC.
Casey:
So this is your teaser, everyone, that it is coming.
Casey:
It is coming this episode.
Marco:
I can't wait because I haven't had it yet because I didn't have a ticket.
Marco:
I can't wait to hear about it.
Casey:
Mm hmm.
Casey:
Before, though, we need to talk about a couple of different things.
Casey:
Number one, I stole something from Dub Dub.
Casey:
I'm admitting it publicly, except not really.
Casey:
Is it everybody's heart, Casey?
Casey:
No, it is not everybody's heart.
Casey:
But that is very kind of you to even make that joke.
Casey:
Now, I actually didn't really steal anything.
Casey:
This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I just thought it was funny and a nice story about how Apple nerds are actually nice people.
Casey:
So I forget what day it was.
Casey:
I want to say it was Wednesday.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But one of the days toward the end of the week, I went and I sat down with my old and busted 2015, circa 2015 MacBook Pro before Touch Bar, before anything fancy and cool.
Casey:
And I had wanted to use Ethernet.
Casey:
And so as with prior years, I...
Casey:
Plugged in my Thunderbolt Ethernet connector, plugged in one of the Ethernet ports.
Casey:
And let me back up a half step.
Casey:
So basically, they have areas in the conference center where they'll have Ethernet ports.
Casey:
They'll have power strips.
Casey:
And in years past, they used to actually provide Thunderbolt Ethernet connections.
Casey:
that that that you could use you don't have to bring your own but because the new hotness is usbc that's what they had this year instead so uh but they had just plain old ethernet uh cables that you could plug into a to a connector that you provide which is what i did so i sit down i plug in my you know ethernet adapter i i download a bunch of videos i leave and i completely forget my ethernet adapter
Casey:
Crap.
Casey:
I go back almost exactly 24 hours later.
Casey:
You know what was still there?
Casey:
My Ethernet adapter.
Casey:
I was overjoyed because that's like a $30 damn adapter.
Casey:
And no nerds, none of these nerds was a big enough jerk or noticed to take it.
Casey:
I was so excited.
Casey:
But then you have that awkward social moment where there's a bunch of people around you.
Casey:
And you sit down, and you plug in, and then you take the adapter and walk off.
Casey:
And I can only imagine what the people around me thought.
Casey:
Because hand on heart, it was the exact same spot I was the day before.
Casey:
I am 99% sure it was the same adapter.
Casey:
But here it is.
Casey:
I sit down without an adapter and walk away with an adapter.
Casey:
And I'm sure the people around me were like, what just happened?
Yeah.
Casey:
But anyway, so yeah.
Casey:
So when I say I stole something from DubDub, really, I stole something that I had left at DubDub.
Casey:
Also, tangential note, I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show.
Casey:
And you two obviously know the answer.
Casey:
But for the listeners, if you have...
Casey:
One of these Ethernet to whatever adapters.
Casey:
So maybe Ethernet to USB-C, Ethernet to Thunderbolt.
Casey:
How do you ensure that the ones that Casey doesn't leave behind don't walk away?
Casey:
What do you do?
Casey:
Because Apple came up with a completely genius solution to this problem.
Casey:
So obviously you two know, but the answer is take a, um, what do you call that tie?
Casey:
It's not a twist tie.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
A zip tie.
Casey:
Take a zip tie.
Casey:
And if you imagine an ethernet cable, the way they generally work is they have like the part with all the, you know, the eight or whatever it is wires in it.
Casey:
And then like a little tabby that pops up.
Casey:
And in order to pull the ethernet cord out of the device that's plugged into, you have to push the tabby down.
Casey:
So what they do is they take the zip tie and tie it super tight around the Ethernet cable under the tabby thing.
Casey:
So the only way to get this out is to push down on the tabby thing, but you can't because the zip tie is there.
Casey:
How freaking clever is that?
Casey:
It's been the same way for years, but I don't think we've ever had an impetus to talk about it.
Casey:
Super clever, such a low tech, but great solution to the problem, which I thought was really funny.
Casey:
So, yep, that was me stealing something from DubDub, except not really at all.
John:
You should have just told them you're using the Apple app that makes it look like you're stealing it, but you totally paid for it.
John:
I'm using EasyPay.
John:
Yeah, just point your phone at it for a few seconds and then take it.
Casey:
Yeah, just walk away.
Casey:
Surely nobody would have thought of that.
Casey:
That works with everything in Apple stores, by the way.
John:
Just come in with a phone.
John:
Doesn't even need to be on.
John:
Doesn't even need to have a battery or work.
John:
Just point it at things and walk out with them.
Marco:
Oh my God, please don't do that.
Casey:
Oh, don't do that.
Casey:
Okay, so we should also talk about what Marco did for the entire week.
Casey:
And as far as I can tell from every time I saw you, you just drank coffee and sat outside.
Marco:
That's basically it.
Casey:
It was glorious.
Casey:
It was funny.
Casey:
So at San Jose, there was a coffee shop called Social Policy, which was either genuinely or ironically called Sopo.
Casey:
I don't know if that was intentional or not.
Casey:
I mean, their sign said Sopo on it, so I guess it's embraced.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
But it was a, from what I could tell, a nice coffee shop.
Casey:
Actually, I guess I should say more of like a cafe because they had a little bit of food.
Casey:
And you talked about this on, was it Run Loop?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Which show were you on that you discussed?
Marco:
Yeah, Run Loop and also Under the Radar, but I don't think it's out yet.
Casey:
But yeah, so I'll put a link in the show notes to Run Loop.
Casey:
But yeah, so Marco basically each morning, and jump in when you're ready, but I'm just telling you my observation is
Casey:
uh would roll out of bed when it suited him and then shuffle on down to social policy which was like across the street from the fairmont hotel across the street from the four points hotel uh very very close to the conference center so you would roll into social policy and because california doesn't have weather you could sit outside and it seemed like no matter when i passed by social policy you were there i
Casey:
To your credit, often with different people, but you were a fixture the entire week.
Casey:
So it was really you just holding court in social policy.
Casey:
If anyone wanted a conference with the king, they just had to show up at social policy, and that's where you would be.
Marco:
That's basically true.
Marco:
And there was one day where I went there for breakfast.
Marco:
I tried to leave and then ran into a bunch of our friends who were heading there and went right back there with them.
Marco:
Then I had a lunch meeting there like 40 minutes later.
Marco:
So I just stayed, hung out with our friends and then changed tables for the lunch meeting.
Marco:
Then I had the lunch meeting.
Marco:
Then after that, there was some other reason why I had to be there.
Marco:
I basically spent a whole day there.
Marco:
It's a great place.
Marco:
This is one of the things in general that I like about having it in San Jose that we have never had really in San Francisco is that
Marco:
There are these clear common places.
Marco:
Because it's a much smaller area that most people are really walking between, the hotels that most people are staying in were very, very close to the conference center.
Marco:
And there were more affordable hotels close to this conference center than there are in San Francisco.
Marco:
And so everyone was in – not everyone.
Marco:
More people were in a smaller area.
Marco:
It seems like San Jose is a much quieter town most of the time outside of conferences, at least in this part of the town.
Marco:
So there were very few other people walking around who weren't conference attendees or adjacent people like me.
Marco:
And so it was a really, really good hangout area in general.
Marco:
There were a handful of coffee shops, a handful of bars, a handful of restaurants that are all right around there.
Marco:
And you could just hang out at one of them and you would see tons of people that were conference attendees.
Marco:
And if you know a lot of people there like we do, you'd see a lot of your friends.
Marco:
And so it was a really, really great scenario.
Marco:
And San Francisco never had that.
Marco:
There was no place in San Francisco that you could sit and just run into people that easily and that quickly that was that nice and that you would run into people that often.
Marco:
It was great for that.
John:
Summarize Marco's review.
John:
San Jose, a great place not to attend WWDC.
John:
Honestly, yes.
Marco:
Yes, it is.
Marco:
I didn't know what to expect going into it.
Marco:
This is my first time going without a ticket.
Marco:
But wow, was it great.
Marco:
And to clarify here, I talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar, which should come out about the same time as this.
Marco:
To clarify...
Marco:
One of the reasons I was able to do that is because I've been going for so many years with a ticket that I know a lot of people now.
Marco:
So when you know a lot of people, this is like a that's why I'm from Marco thing, like when you know a lot of people, you can do that really easily.
Marco:
It's harder if you don't know.
Marco:
It's like if you don't know anybody, I would not recommend going out there with no conferences to attend because I think you need something to anchor your day.
Marco:
Unless you know a lot of people there and you have a lot of other things scheduled, you need something to anchor your days.
Marco:
So get a ticket to a conference.
Marco:
Whether it's WWDC or Layers or AltConf, honestly, it doesn't matter that much which one you pick.
Marco:
Pick whichever one appeals to you most and that you can get into and afford and everything else.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If you are going out there mostly for social reasons and you already know some people out there that you can hang out with and stuff, then going totally ticketless is pretty cool.
Marco:
And I can recommend it because it's a very different experience in San Jose than it ever was in San Francisco.
Marco:
I mean, I can't count the number of breakfasts I had
Marco:
in san francisco in that sad little bagel deli next to the park 55 just like as i was rushing out the door like on the way out to try to make the morning session like i i just had so many like sad breakfasts alone just like rushing to moscone and that never happened in san jose like i would go downstairs for breakfast and there would already be four people i know at the coffee shop i ordered food and then eight more people would show up like
Marco:
It was awesome.
Marco:
It was a very, very different experience, so I really did appreciate that.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I'm giving you a hard time, but if it were me, I'd probably be in the exact same boat.
Casey:
And it was really nice to have a place that we could all gather that would appeal to everyone, because I'm not a coffee drinker, but they had other things to drink, and they had food to eat, and it was right by the two most popular hotels, or at least amongst our kind of social circle.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And yeah, you would end up because oftentimes you'd be eating outside.
Casey:
You know, you would be walking by maybe to go to your hotel and be like, oh, there's Marco.
Casey:
I'll swing by and say, hey.
Casey:
And next thing you know, it's three hours later.
Casey:
So I'm giving you a hard time.
Casey:
But but I couldn't agree more with pretty much everything you just said.
Marco:
Pretty much the only thing I regret about not having a ticket this year is I didn't get one of those cool jackets.
Casey:
They are pretty cool.
Marco:
And the pins, Marco.
Casey:
Oh, and the pins.
Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
For the first time in, I would say, four years, however long they've been doing those weird nylon track jackets, they finally have great jackets.
Marco:
And I even looked on eBay, like, should I just buy one on eBay?
Marco:
Because I'm sure people are dumping them.
Marco:
And sure enough, the answer is yes, people are dumping them.
Marco:
But they're going for like $150 or more.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
I don't want one that big.
Marco:
Sadly.
Casey:
Suddenly, I don't want mine.
Casey:
If it's the large, maybe let's talk.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
No, they were nice jackets.
Casey:
And yeah, I don't think we did.
Casey:
We talked about this last episode with the pins.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
The other people have, but we haven't.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So short, short version is when you walked in and registered, you would get a package of six pins and a country pin.
Casey:
So a pin that shows like the US flag or maybe like Federico got the Italian flag, et cetera.
Casey:
And the six pins, they're differing reports as to how many of them were consistent, how many were different.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
The point is that not all six were the same amongst every single attendee.
Casey:
So what ended up happening was you started like wheeling and dealing just like Disney style to
Casey:
trying to find somebody who like, uh, what was it, John, that you traded with Federico?
Casey:
You took a happy Mac and he took a metal logo.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
I had to sacrifice my metal pin, which is one of the ones I liked, but I got, I had to do what it took to get a happy Mac.
Casey:
So you end up like trading with people.
Casey:
And then at certain points throughout the week, if you went to certain things or did certain things, they would give you a pin.
Casey:
So at some point I was hanging out downstairs, maybe when I was, uh,
Casey:
And I got a San Jose pin.
Casey:
When you walked into the into the bash on Thursday afternoon, you got like, you know, metal, not metal, the M, but metal like, you know, pinky and forefinger up with WWDC on it.
Casey:
And I think if you went to one of the labs, you got like a space invader thing.
Casey:
If you went to another lab, you got something else.
Casey:
It was a rocket.
John:
Something got a rocket.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so if you're curious what the pins are, almost all of them, if not all of them, are in the WWDC app on the iPhone.
Casey:
And they're a sticker pack for messages, which I also thought was kind of neat.
Casey:
That's cute.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I'm being told via Sam the Geek in the chat room that Space Invaders was the game's meetup.
Casey:
And there were some other ones elsewhere as well.
Casey:
But anyways, the point is you would kind of exchange these pins, if you so desired, throughout the course of the week.
Casey:
And you could kind of, quote unquote, earn more as you did different things throughout the week.
Casey:
When you got your wristband to go into the bash, you got either a Command Z or one other kind of pin.
Casey:
I forget what the other one was.
Casey:
But anyways, I thought that was really clever.
Casey:
At first, I was like, come on, really?
Casey:
But it ended up being really cute and really fun.
Casey:
And I am fully on board with them doing that again.
Casey:
I put a sunglasses emoji and a thumbs up emoji on my laptop bag.
Casey:
So I'm a sunglasses guy giving a thumbs up.
Casey:
Jelly in the chat, Jelly Bean Soup said born to code was the other one when you got your wristband.
Casey:
To be honest, it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But the point is these pins I thought were really cool.
Marco:
Also, if you happen to be selling one on eBay with a good set of pins, they're going for over $300 then.
Marco:
My word.
Marco:
If you would have asked me before I did this search to predict how much they were going for, I would have guessed maybe like, you know, $50.
Marco:
No, they're going for a lot.
John:
especially if you have a lot of pins so apple is late to the pin trading game i think maybe disney started it but several years ago the penny arcade expo picked up on it uh yeah go and search go yeah go and search for how much a complete pin collection and any of those other conferences or venues goes for apple uh has finally found another market where they can make a small number of finely crafted things sell for a huge amount of money but they're not selling them that's
John:
That's why they're worth a huge amount of money.
John:
Well, secondary market.
John:
It's like when people get their iPhones early and then they sell them immediately on eBay.
John:
Same thing.
John:
Only there will never be any more of these pins if you didn't get one.
John:
It's too late.
Marco:
And thanks again to our friend Sam the Geek in the chat.
Marco:
We have learned that if I want to buy the same jacket without the WBDC logo on it, it appears to be the Levi's...
Marco:
it's called the trucker jacket and it's 70 bucks and so i'll put a link in the show yeah so we i actually might it's a really it looks really nice on everybody the only thing is i don't really know whether i'm a medium or a large that's the only question so i'll have to see okay the time has come uh we need to talk about the food and uh marco i know that this isn't going to be this isn't going to be as exciting for you perhaps but we have to talk about the food this is so exciting for me you have no idea yeah
Casey:
Let's start with the most important thing.
Casey:
There was Odwalla.
Casey:
However, there was no Mango Tango.
Casey:
And it was just basically the whole week was a long troll of Casey Liss.
Casey:
There were trams.
Casey:
I don't know what they're called.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But there were trams that ran actually right next to social policy.
Casey:
One of the tram or many of the trams, one of the designs on the tram, there was a billboard that took up the entire side of the tram.
Casey:
It was one of the situations where they painted an advertisement on the side of the tram.
Casey:
One of them was an Odwalla advertisement.
Casey:
And not only that, but it was featuring Mango Tango.
Casey:
We get into the show.
Casey:
And actually, I think people had seen some Odwala coolers, which is what we had seen in the past.
Casey:
And they had sent me pictures on Twitter.
Casey:
And I'm all excited with myself.
Casey:
And I did not see one mango tango all week.
Casey:
You guys, the struggle was real.
Casey:
There was orange juice.
Casey:
There was a chalky chocolate milk sort of thing.
Casey:
There was, what was the other one, John?
John:
There was that orange one that was the decoy.
John:
I almost rushed over to one to get him.
John:
I'm like, oh, finally, they got mango tango.
John:
I'm going to pick one of these up for Casey.
John:
But it was a decoy.
Casey:
It was a decoy.
John:
It had mango in it, right?
Casey:
Yeah, it was.
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
I tweeted about it at some point.
Casey:
But yeah, it was the entire week in terms of Odwalla was one long troll of Casey Liz.
Casey:
And now I know exactly how you felt several years ago, Marco, when you had the long troll of Marco Arment when they took away Strawberry Sea Monster.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
It was the worst, you guys.
Casey:
It was the worst.
Casey:
It was also funny talking to people because after I'd been chatting about it both online and on the show, people came up to me and one of the common things that everyone said to me was, did you ever look at the nutrition information on an Odwalla?
Casey:
And the story I told them, which is true, is that it wasn't until like my third or fourth dub dub that I finally took a look at the nutrition information.
Casey:
Those things are like 300 or 400 calories a bottle or something like that.
Casey:
Whatever the number is, it is intense.
Yeah.
Casey:
there's no way like any kind of like juice that you're going to be having like the general public drink it needs tons of sugar to taste good it's always going to have tons of sugar yep it was it's bad but anyway so the odwalla that was the thing so the boxed lunches and john at this point feel free to jump in whenever you're ready oh i'm sorry i shouldn't get to the box lunches i should mention the breakfast uh
Casey:
The breakfast, I think I only had one day because I was running around mostly the other day sometimes at social policy.
Casey:
Did they have the world's worst bagels, John, as per usual?
Casey:
Oh, they did.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
We have to talk about the cream cheese.
John:
Yeah, there was a downgrade.
John:
I feel like there's a downgrade on the breakfast.
John:
Starting off with the breakfast, I always have the breakfast because they usually have a lot of junk food for breakfast.
John:
It's like, well, if you're going to get bad quality food, make it junk food because junk food- I'll tell you one thing, by the way, the breakfast at social policy was amazing.
Marco:
They had like five or six different amazing options.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
It was like the best breakfast I've ever had at a conference.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The social policy breakfast has definitely looked better.
John:
But the junk food they usually have in San Francisco for the past few years is...
John:
They have various kinds of danishes with some kind of fruit jelly.
John:
Again, 90% sugar, speaking of things that appear to be fruit but are actually just sugar.
John:
Donuts is what they normally have at San Francisco.
John:
They also have bagels.
Casey:
Are they really bagels?
John:
Whatever.
John:
west coast bagels with with with a bunch of different spreads that butter you can put on usually jelly and also uh whipped cream cheese right so this year it seemed like the same stuff oh there are the danishes with the little fruit in the middle oh there are the quote-unquote bagels but the cream cheese and the spread situation was kind of grim they did have butter in little balls but i think it was unsalted butter which is kind of a technical foul there i don't like that um
John:
cream cheese they did not have a giant yeah they did not have a giant you know open vat of whipped cream cheese instead they had casey proof packages of philadelphia looking cream cheese was it philadelphia brand casey it was okay what makes this casey proof okay all that so now i have to he is he's a tiny man i have to fill in some color commentary
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think I'm going to be able to find an image of this.
Casey:
But Americans anyway, I think this is a uniquely American thing.
Casey:
So Kraft makes a cream cheese.
Casey:
The brand is Philadelphia cream cheese.
Casey:
And one of the ways it comes is rather than in a tub, it comes as like a little brick.
Marco:
if you've ever held or opened a brick of philadelphia cream cheese it has this unique wrapper in it marco do you know what i'm talking about it's like sort of aluminum foil but yeah it's it's a rectangle that's kind yeah it's kind of foily but it's it's thick and it's lined right and and then and it has that weird ridge across the top that you gotta like try to peel apart
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So with that mental model in mind, and again, if you're not from America or have never seen this, I genuinely am sorry, but I don't know.
Casey:
I'm looking at Google search or Google images and I can't find an example.
Casey:
So if we find one, we'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
But anyway, imagine like a really thick aluminum foil and on the top of the brick, it's kind of, it's pushed together.
Casey:
The two ends of it are pushed together and you're supposed to peel them apart, just like Marco said.
Casey:
So what they had at DubDub was they had kind of like little mini versions of that.
Casey:
So it was the same material, but it was the size of like a ketchup mail, a little bit bigger than a ketchup packet, but kind of around that size.
Casey:
So you with me so far, Marco?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Like similar material, much, much, much smaller.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I sit down embarrassingly right at the edge of that outdoor seating area.
Casey:
So anyone can walk by and see me.
Casey:
And I try to open, and I actually got two of these cream cheeses because I'm a man that likes my cream cheese.
Casey:
And so I didn't think one would be enough.
Casey:
I get two of them.
Marco:
You've never sounded more New York than you just have right then.
Yeah.
Casey:
thank you so i try to open it on the side because it says open here and it points to the side and i noticed that you know at first i try to do the tear thing like tear off the side because you know you would expect like a perforation or something like that so i go to tear off the side i really shouldn't be telling the story publicly but it's too funny not to i go to tear off the side and that doesn't work and then i realize wait a second this looks a lot like the top of the brick of cream cheese i know what i have to do i have to pull it apart oh no
Casey:
So you just gave up?
John:
That's the best part of the story is that you were defeated.
John:
That it wasn't like it was really hard to get it out or you made a big mess when you opened it up.
John:
You were defeated.
John:
You surrendered to the cream cheese packets.
John:
Two of them.
Casey:
I did.
John:
It's like you had a second run.
John:
You're like, okay, let me just put this down.
John:
It's all hot and like slippery now for my finger reason.
John:
Let me get the second fresh one.
John:
Let me take a new approach.
John:
Nope.
John:
0-2.
John:
You were 0-2 against cream cheese packets.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
I wish I could tell you I was making this up just for the listener's enjoyment.
Casey:
I swear to God, this is exactly what happened.
John:
I feel like you should have at least resorted to your sort of like animalistic nature and just torn the thing open with your teeth to just be like, you know what?
John:
You're not going to beat me, packet of cream cheese.
John:
uh it's true i tried with my teeth couldn't get it so i am i am i i can laugh about it because it is pretty damn funny but it is also super and let me be clear these containers were not hard to open after he said this the next day i had to get a package because i didn't even see the package the first time i i didn't even bother getting a bagel because i'm like oh well there's no cream cheese what the hell am i going to do with that bagel and i had already discovered that the uh the head croissants but i already discovered that the the butter wasn't sold anyway i took one of those packets it has little things that open here i tore it opened it was like
John:
like humans with opposable thumbs can open these but not lies john syracuse they are lies i opened two packs on the first try two packs on the first try he really did send me a text and basically said you idiot look at what i was able to do oh my god it's so funny so anyway getting back to the breakfast like uh the lack of cream cheese for the bagels was good it seemed to be less variety of stuff the croissants were okay but sometimes they had weird almonds on top of them unsalted butter no good
John:
The Danish's seemed about the same, maybe less variety.
John:
Like usually in the old thing, there would be like all five flavors of Danish's.
John:
And there was no donuts.
John:
No donuts at all.
John:
Not that the donuts were great at San Francisco, but some donuts are better than no donuts.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I now have another thing that I regret about not having a ticket to the conference.
Marco:
I regret not watching the two of you react and experience this food.
Casey:
Oh, it's so true.
Casey:
Okay, so let's talk about the lunches.
Casey:
So we had heard rumblings of maybe there were executive box lunches, maybe they were just box lunches.
Casey:
And so on keynote day, we were eventually shuffled outside, if I'm not mistaken, and they were distributing lunches.
Casey:
So immediate win, they offered Diet Coke.
Casey:
I
Casey:
that they had either the world's worst lemonade or the world's worst iced tea.
Casey:
And those used to be your two lunch selections.
Casey:
And if you were there early enough, there was usually a single Odwalla fridge that would get rated in seconds.
Casey:
So you had to be there early.
Casey:
But those were your options.
Casey:
now this time they actually offered diet coke which is the nectar of the gods don't listen to the other two guys don't listen to the other two guys it's true wait so i was already excited were the only three options like country time lemonade crap iced tea and diet coke or was there more no they didn't have the lemonade and iced tea at all right i didn't see it
Casey:
I don't think I saw the iced tea or the lemonade.
Casey:
I had a bunch of sodas.
John:
I had regular Coke, Sprite.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I never got a soda when I was there.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
You don't say.
Casey:
So I had my Diet Coke, and the first day, what I had was actually a Caesar salad with some sort of seasoned shrimp on it.
Marco:
You had shrimp at a conference box lungs?
Marco:
That's a risky move, man.
Casey:
I have to say, it actually tasted quite good.
Casey:
I was very impressed.
Casey:
That was day one.
John:
Part of the rumor is, before you get to day two, part of the rumor is about San Jose.
John:
I was like, oh, there's going to be a different caterer.
John:
It'll be a totally different munch.
John:
Some people send us pictures of lunches in the same convention center that look very different.
John:
but whatever powerful force is behind wwdc lunch presentation like big plastic container split into three parts whatever it was basically the same container that you know and love clear boxes three little you know hospital tray sections one for your main course one for your side dish one for your dessert uh
John:
That was still in effect.
John:
So when I saw those things all rolled out, I'm like, oh, well, these lunches are not going to be
John:
radically different than the old ones and sure enough they weren't radically different and for the first day lunch i think what i had was i don't know some kind of sandwich so a reasonable default choice and i was mostly impressed with how like maybe they heard our last episode where we talked about this about the mystery side dishes yeah the mystery side dishes that are just unidentifiable and the desserts that are weird it just tastes like salad dish
John:
Yeah, the side dish was identifiable.
John:
I forget what it was, but I think it was like a macaroni salad.
John:
But it was not weird and had like unknown vegetable matter in it and tasted different than it looked.
John:
It wasn't good, mind you.
John:
Like the pasta or whatever in the pasta salad was like mush, right?
John:
It was bad.
John:
But when you looked at it, you say, I know how that's going to taste.
John:
And you put it in your mouth and you're like, and regretfully, you are correct.
John:
You know how it's going to taste.
John:
and the dessert i think on the first day was a cookie and like hey and it wasn't like a cookie that was like secretly something different it was a straight up whatever it was chocolate chip cookie or oatmeal cookie or whatever and again wasn't a good cookie but it tasted like a cookie so i applaud them for making those two sections of the container reflect their appearance in in a sane way and the sandwich was
John:
so this is day one the sandwich i'm like this is not a good sandwich particularly the bread which i can most charitably describe as a dark colored hot dog bun like like this is not this is not good bread but whatever it's day one so casey you can go on to day two did you get food poisoning from the shrimp
Casey:
no no i didn't not to my knowledge anyway did you get did you take one of the packages that was outside in the sun yeah but i was like one of the first people out there so i mean it was still cold like i'm not too worried about it all right things did take a turn on day two however on day two i think i went back outside i don't recall for sure i love that you had one of the day
Casey:
Well, this is the only other significant story.
Casey:
And then my stories are basically done.
Casey:
But on day two, I went and I grabbed my lunch.
Casey:
And I forget what the options were.
Casey:
But one of the options were a BLTA or a blat or whatever Californians call it.
Casey:
So bacon, lettuce, tomato and avocado because hashtag California.
Casey:
And it was in a wrap because hashtag California.
Casey:
It was tasty.
Casey:
However, I don't recall ever having seen any avocado anywhere inside of that wrap or even adjacent to that wrap.
Casey:
But it was very tasty, and I was actually quite enjoying it.
Casey:
And I was feeling pretty good about the food situation.
Casey:
I mean, yeah, the Odwalla is still annoying, but I've got my Diet Coke, so I got a win there.
Casey:
Two meals in a row, pretty tasty.
Casey:
halfway through the meal and god i wish i remember who i was eating with but halfway through the meal i looked down and there's a blue thing inside of my wrap this wrap did not contain any other blue objects yeah blue is not a common color in food
Casey:
I look down and I pull out this blue thing.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure it was a piece of glove of the person that was preparing my wrap.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And so my wrap, apparently whoever was preparing it, not only did they lose a section of their glove...
Casey:
But they didn't think it was worth bothering to go and find it again.
John:
You didn't complain when you ate their fingertip earlier.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the other question.
Marco:
Presumably there's a piece of glove because they probably sliced it off with a knife.
Marco:
So the question is, how deep did that cut go?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I did finish my wrap and it was very tasty.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
So first, I have many questions here.
John:
Well, let me do my... I'll do my rest of the week somewhere.
John:
Yeah, because that's the end of my story.
John:
Just one quick thing then.
Marco:
Is there any sandwich in the world that is improved by being in a wrap instead of on bread?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
We've discussed wraps before, and I think where I came down on the previous thing is like...
John:
I've tried them.
John:
I've gone back to them several times.
John:
But in general, F-wraps.
John:
Like, I regretted it every time.
John:
And I saw the wraps that were there, and I saw the one that you're talking about, Casey.
John:
I'm like, oh, that sounds like it might be an interesting combo.
John:
But I just can't do the wraps.
John:
Like I said, they just become one sort of homogenous, concretized solid with just this pasty starch on the outside.
John:
I think wraps can be done well.
John:
But they are never done well at WWC, and that trend continues.
Casey:
Now, a real quick question.
Casey:
John Syracuse of wrap, sandwich or not.
John:
Did we do that on the show?
Casey:
I don't remember.
John:
I'm trying not to contradict myself.
John:
I have to run it back through the machine.
John:
I'm going to say no.
John:
Briefly, I will say no.
John:
But anyway, to summarize the rest of my WWC lunch experience.
John:
So the staging was an issue.
John:
It was cool they had a lot of outdoor seating.
John:
uh we haven't really talked about the weather that much but there were some days where it was actually hot but you can't put lunches in clear containers out in the hot sun like you just can't one day i decided to have a salad i thought i had just gotten there like casey like oh i get there early the food's still cold apparently that stuff had been staged there longer than i thought my salad was hot
John:
Hot salad is not good.
John:
Salads do not respond well to heat in a tiny little greenhouse container.
John:
It was all wilted and gross and terrible.
John:
Here's the thing that occurred to me as I went through the week of having lunches, and I had that lunch every single day and had that breakfast every single day.
John:
By day three, it became clear that apparently the only non-wrapped bread offered by this catering company is the aforementioned hot dog bun.
John:
Every sandwich was in that hot dog bun.
John:
There was no escaping it.
John:
Eventually, it was like, you were telling me... That's why I got the salad.
John:
It was like, you're telling me not to get a sandwich because it's going to be in a hot dog bun.
John:
Like, that's all they've got.
John:
Like, maybe different shades of hot dog bun, but...
John:
It was just terrible.
John:
It was making me consider wraps.
John:
That's where I was getting at.
John:
I'm like, well, at least the wrap will have some more solidity than this puffy air thing.
John:
That hot dog bun destroyed every sandwich that they put in.
John:
The contents sometimes weren't that bad.
John:
vaguely passable lunch meat tomatoes look something like tomatoes um it was soggy about 50 of the time which is above average for wwdc normally it's soggy about 75 of the time i did have a dry hot dog bun a couple of occasions which was novel the side dishes always the side dishes always were explicable the cookies were always not very good uh i think it was like a brownie or something like
John:
I have to say, because of the hot dog bun and the explicable sides and the diminished breakfast, I started to miss the mystery sides from San Francisco because at least that had an interest to it.
Marco:
You never knew what the hell crazy thing you were going to get.
Marco:
It was almost like those magic taste berry things that alter your taste for your tongue and everything tastes weird.
Marco:
That's how trying every side thing at Moscone was.
Marco:
There was no connection to how it looked versus how it tasted.
Marco:
It was always kind of a fun surprise.
John:
And you try to identify the ingredients in it.
John:
Like, what is it that I'm even eating?
John:
So these were all explicable.
John:
And, like, because the bread was the same every time, like, there was no variety.
John:
It was like being in jail, being in prison.
John:
Like, just every day, the same gruel.
John:
It's like hot dog bun, smooshy side dish, wilted salad, and then, of course, wraps.
John:
But F-wraps.
Yeah.
John:
so overall i i'm gonna have to give the san jose food a lower grade than wwdc like it's kind of like his movies like you know the good bad movie and then flop house parlance where this was not a good bad this was bad bad bad bad lunch
John:
see that's funny because leaving aside the fact that i probably consumed a tip of a human finger i actually thought the lunches were pretty good besides that it's fine i don't think did we ever eat lunch together i think we maybe maybe the very first day we did but we didn't discuss it i we should have discussed the lunches we should have or at least i you should have given me some of yours say what what is this food you think is is good you should have snuck one out for me and then we could all have like we could actually try them
John:
together no it wouldn't have survived i think it would be like it would become a pool of liquid yeah if you get like 20 faces away from the conference center it's not the structural integrity is is not high yeah actually thank you for not doing that it sounds like i i didn't miss much yeah stick to social policy seriously