Typing on Pillows
Casey:
Hi, this is me and I'm talking to you.
Casey:
Things are happening, John, sounds good.
Casey:
Marco, the fact that you're asking me if I'm still here is alarming, but I'm just going to keep talking until somebody starts to interrupt me and talks over me, which is pretty much the story of this entire show.
Casey:
Serendi Caldwell, friend of the show, has some iPad size comparisons, and so we'll put a few links in the show notes.
Casey:
I briefly, earlier tonight, handled my friend Stee's iPad and was playing with his 10.5, and it, again, seems nice.
Casey:
It doesn't really seem any different in size in the hand than the iPad I used to own, the full-size iPad.
Casey:
But Serendi has some thoughts and some comparisons and things.
Casey:
So, I don't know.
Casey:
John, you want to take us through this?
John:
I like the diagrams.
John:
She originally tweeted them, presumably, when she was writing the article.
John:
But those little, like, yellow rectangle diagrams.
John:
Take a look at the one that shows the iPad body size comparison.
John:
uh you got like the mini is the little thing up in the corner and then the 12.9 inch iPad Pro is the big thing the difference between the 9.7 and the 10.5 is so tiny proportionally that's why they feel almost the same because they really almost are the same and if you look at the screen difference between the 9.7 and 10.5 it's a little more uniform where it's not like a you know it's it's more substantial looking so um
John:
This is a great representation of how they've managed to put a bigger screen on an iPad that's not that much bigger and why it doesn't feel monstrous, why it just feels like, you know, if you gave it to a regular person and they weren't intimately familiar with a 9.7, they might not even notice that the physical size of the thing is bigger.
John:
So I think that's a big selling point of this device.
John:
And if you had any doubts, take a look at these diagrams.
John:
They're pretty convincing.
Casey:
Speaking of Serenity Caldwell, she also has some information about typing to Siri in iOS 11.
Casey:
So in iOS 11, when it comes out in the fall, users will be able to turn on Type to Siri in their accessibility settings, which will let you write your commands to Siri rather than shouting them into space, which we had known about.
Casey:
But, you know, she has a little bit more detail.
Casey:
And I can't decide if this is going to be awesome or kind of redundant and useless.
John:
I think it's nice to have that option because sometimes you either don't want to speak out loud, but you want to use the functionality provided by Siri.
John:
Even if it's just – I don't know if this is the case, but imagine, for example, that you routinely ask to set a timer or reminder in a spoken way, but you don't want to go through the hassle of launching the reminders app and then typing that same English sentence into the –
John:
into the little reminder, new reminder field, which you can do.
John:
You can say like, you know, pick up laundry at 4 p.m.
John:
tomorrow and the reminder will like set itself to 4 p.m.
John:
tomorrow and the name of the thing will be pick up laundry.
John:
But if you spend most of your time interacting with Siri, you may not know sort of the syntax that is understandable by reminders.
John:
And I don't think it's exactly the same syntax that Siri understands.
John:
So it's nice to be able to essentially type into sort of a one...
John:
One stop shop for all the things that you can make your phone do in a vaguely unattended way and not have to say, oh, I'm in a place where I can't speak out loud.
John:
So rather than me trying to whisper to Siri, let me just type with my thumbs.
John:
The thing I know will work with Siri in a nice, quiet way, because like all sane people, you have key clicks turned off.
Casey:
I don't know how people have key clicks on.
Casey:
Ryan Jones made an interesting observation via Twitter.
Casey:
He said, this is with regard to iOS 11.
Casey:
On the iPhone, you can lock an iPhone.
Casey:
And I still haven't had a chance to play with this.
Casey:
I want to see this.
Casey:
But anyway, he said, you can lock an iPhone by pulling down from the top.
Casey:
And additionally, there's a software shutdown button in settings.
Casey:
This is still quoting Ryan.
Casey:
Very fishy.
Casey:
The power button may not be long for this world.
Casey:
So Ryan's point is, if you can lock your phone rather than with the button on the right hand side on most phones these days, but rather by just swiping down from the top.
Casey:
And if there's a software shutdown button, then what is the purpose of that right-hand button anymore?
Casey:
Obviously to turn it on, but there's no reason you couldn't use one of the other buttons to do that.
Casey:
So does that mean the power button is going away in the future?
Casey:
And if so, what are we going to do about screenshots, man?
Casey:
I want my screenshots.
Yeah.
Marco:
So I have an alternate theory on this one.
Marco:
I'm thinking that, you know, first of all, I really hope they don't get rid of the sleep-wake button.
Marco:
You know, it serves a very useful purpose, and while they might be able to come out with software workarounds, I like having that physical button there to control that very, very useful function of sleeping and waking the phone.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And if they get rid of it, I assume we'll have some kind of like other way to sleep it or automatic.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, you know, there's also like different recovery things that this enables.
Marco:
But the biggest thing that I think this might not be a big deal is maybe that button is that is being added to settings, not because they're getting rid of the power button, but because they've learned that a lot of people don't know how to turn their phones off.
Marco:
Like the way you turn your phone off is to hold this button down for a while.
Marco:
How many people know that?
Marco:
I bet a lot of people actually don't.
John:
I wish fewer people knew it.
John:
Having just taken a couple of plane flights and seen people on the plane both seated next to me and in other seats because, you know, I see them when I'm walking up and down the aisle to go to the bathroom or peeking through the edges of the seats.
John:
When I see people who own iOS devices who turn them off, like off, off, shut down completely when they're done using them, and then boot them back up when they want to use them again multiple times during the flight, I want to pull my hair out.
John:
It's like, just don't do it.
John:
Just...
John:
hit like hit the power button or whatever just put it back in your bag and when you take it out later just hit any kind of button on and it will come back on instantly you can pick up where you left off and it will be fine but people want some people want to turn them off and you know how long they take to boot it's not a fast boot process it's i don't maddening so
John:
i don't think the i think you're right marco most people don't know how to turn off their phone i don't think people should know how to turn it like it's not it's not a thing that they should be doing routinely obviously if there's some kind of troubleshooting you need to reboot it or whatever look it up online or you know you can figure it out or ask somebody or worst case go to the apple store and they will show you but it should not be a routine part of everybody's day so i don't want a way for people to better know how to shut down their phone that's not that that's not a good idea
Casey:
All right, and additionally, Ryan noted that in iOS 11, there's a setting to, quote, offload, end quote, unused apps.
Casey:
So there's a screenshot, offload unused apps, and then there's an on-off switch.
Casey:
This will automatically remove unused apps, but keep its documents and data.
Casey:
Reinstalling the app will place back your data if the app is still available in the App Store.
Casey:
Which is very interesting because a lot of us, and I'm sure I'm included in that as well, have a whole bunch of ancient apps on our phones that we think we'll need one day but probably never will.
Casey:
So in settings and iTunes and app stores in iOS 11 in the beta, there's offload unused apps, which is kind of cool and kind of interesting.
Marco:
This is an interesting problem that I think maybe Apple's trying to solve.
Marco:
Gruber's been blogging a little bit about this recently, about how the size of apps, just the sheer size of apps is just tremendous in the last couple of years.
Marco:
So many very common popular apps are well over 100 megs.
Marco:
And it's full of bloat from frameworks and various assets and everything else.
Marco:
And Apple has tried to do various things to reduce this, the app-thinning group of initiatives and various technologies and things like that.
Marco:
But ultimately, if you think about how much collective bandwidth and battery power are being used by the App Store diligently auto-updating apps that people are not actually using ever on their phones...
Marco:
You can definitely make a good argument for why not only should this feature exist, but maybe it should even be defaulted to on.
Marco:
Because there is just a tremendous amount of data and battery being wasted to update 50, 100 meg apps on people's phones that are buried in some folder somewhere that they're never actually using.
Marco:
So it is an interesting problem.
Marco:
I do think it is wise for Apple to start tackling this somehow.
Marco:
But we'll have to see, I guess, the implementation details of how this is actually done to know whether this is the right solution or not.
John:
I don't think this should be on by default because the idea that your phone like rots, like a couple screens away, the app that you only use once in a blue moon, and the one time you want to use it, it's like, oh, I don't have this app.
John:
I have to re-download it.
John:
And you have to wait for it and you're on a bad connection or it's a large app or something like that.
John:
It doesn't strike me as a good idea.
John:
I think a nice – and here's the thing.
John:
If someone's phone like fills up and they go to the Apple store and they're like, hey, my phone is filled up, which I bet is a genius bar thing they get a lot –
John:
help me what do i do how do i make more space be on my phone um aside from buying a new one and it's like well are there any apps you're not using let's sort them by size let's go to the usage screen and settings and see what's using most of your space and all those things that i'm sure the the genius bar people do all the time um
John:
one possible solution i found reasonably nice that is not the same as this preference that either you manually turn on or is on by default that slowly rots out the applications that you don't use and just deletes them out from under you and makes them like these little booby traps that cause big downloads when you tap on them is to do what slack does and say every once in a while and i know this sounds like nagging and skype does this uh this type of thing all the time but i found it not to be particularly annoying it says
John:
On a fairly infrequent schedule, hey, I've noticed these three apps that are this big.
John:
You haven't used them in six months.
John:
Do you want to delete them?
John:
And you can say no.
John:
And you can say don't bother me about this again.
John:
Or you can say yes.
John:
And that seems like...
John:
do that like once a month right and have that be a preference but have it on by default or something i bet people would go oh yeah i forgot i installed that game delete or they'll say you know as long as you have the button that says no and never ask me about this again it will never ask you about that app again you know slack does this for tons of stuff hey these channels haven't had anyone talk with them in a while do you want to keep them or do you not want to keep them you know like
John:
Maybe the Slack frequency is a little bit more frequent.
John:
I don't know what their frequency is.
John:
But I find that a very useful, you know, if I was a marketing person, I would say it's an intelligent assistant that uses machine learning to aid you.
John:
But bottom line is it presents options in an understandable way.
John:
uh without introducing any new mechanics in gaming parlance like the mechanics are still you have apps you know you can delete them right you have you can add apps and you can delete them every once in a while the thing will ask you you haven't used this do you want me to delete it as opposed to let me introduce the concept of offloading to you and now do you want me to do that automatically in a way you have no awareness of yes or no
John:
um so that i mean we'll see well i'll try it i will probably turn on too because i have tons of apps that i don't use that frequently but i well maybe i won't turn on because i don't want to like offload my downloaded for the 24 hours they were up illegal nes emulator apps that i've had on my phone forever like i don't want to delete that stuff and and in typical apple fashion it's not as if i'll be able to exclude those or anything so i guess i probably won't turn this on
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense for people, of which there are many, who are really short on space on their phone pretty much all the time.
Marco:
And this is, you know, largely because Apple has for so long sold phones with really small storage sizes as the base model.
Marco:
And I think that's less of a problem with the recent phones, but there's still a lot of those out there.
Marco:
You know, a lot of those like 16 gig phones are still being used.
Marco:
And so this is a big problem for lots of people or people who, for any size phone, their storage is full of like photos and videos and stuff.
Marco:
And they don't want to or can't pay for additional iCloud storage and everything.
Marco:
So like they need the space.
Marco:
And so, you know, I think I would venture a guess that space management is a really big vulnerability.
Marco:
very common problem for ios device owners so anything to reduce space is a good thing especially in this age where pretty much any app you download is going to be like 90 megs all right uh we have some observations from front of the show steve tron smith
Casey:
So iPad multitasking spaces persist after you reboot so they can be permanent, which just heightens my desire to be able to pin favorites.
Casey:
So apparently spaces are a thing and they're a persistent thing so that you can kind of set up your different, you know, multitasking panes and whatnot for different tasks and just swipe between them as necessary.
Casey:
Not unlike what you would do on the Mac.
John:
Pending favorites, the fact that it keeps track of what you did.
John:
Hey, you put messages on one side and your text editor on the other, and you put Slack on one side and a web browser on the other, and it keeps those as little spaces and it keeps them together.
John:
And it's good that it keeps track of them if it really does, because people, as I've said a million times, people want to arrange their working environment in the way that suits them, but they will give up doing it if they spend any amount of time arranging it.
John:
And then that arrangement is forgotten.
John:
I've always used Springboard as my modern example to get people to understand spatial interfaces.
John:
If you picked up your phone and all of a sudden all your icons in Springboard were randomly arranged and everything was out of your folders and all scrambled over, A, you'd be pissed.
John:
And B, after three times, you would stop rearranging stuff in Springboard.
John:
You'd be like, why bother?
John:
Why do I bother carefully making these screens?
John:
Because the next time I pick up my phone, chances are good that everything will just be randomly shuffled, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's that's how the finder is to me these days but yeah to get people to understand like why do you care why do you care about your screens you hear all these podcasts you know cortex talks about it all the time i think they talked about hello internet we've talked about in here uh talked about it on connected upgrade is there a tech show that hasn't talked about hey how do you arrange your home screen the fact that that is a discussion topic at all is because you can arrange your home screen you can arrange springboard and you put things in a place and they stay there and that's why it is a thing at all um
John:
So with spaces, having them persist is great because that will let people start to get kind of an arrangement.
John:
And being able to pin favorites to say, like, I guess it sorts them in, like, the most recently used order or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I haven't tried it.
John:
But I'm assuming it's some kind of automatic order that says, all right, well, when you go back to that switcher, the last two or three spaces you used will, you know, will be in the first two or three positions, so on and so forth.
John:
If you could pin a small set of things to say, no matter what I do with my iPad,
John:
these spaces are always in this position that would also i think help people's workflows because they have kind of a way of working and a set of applications that they group together and they're going to do other stuff they're going to jump off to some other weird application go over here over there but when they come back to the switcher to be able to know when you invoke the switcher just just stab in this position and it'll always be your safari messages space or whatever this is you know this is a tiny miniature version of
John:
of uh window arrangement on on uh personal computers but uh as we've seen in personal computers just too many damn windows for most people and they uh they they don't even if they use spaces like hazy does uh i rarely see people who aren't pretty darn computer nerdy develop any kind of system with spaces just because it's so it's so difficult to do the same thing trying to do on the ipad to pin them to say
John:
This space should be here, and it should be full screen, and it should have these three windows in it, and it should never change.
John:
If you can do that on the iPad, if you can make more people be able to do that on the iPad, people will be a lot happier.
John:
People who could not accomplish the same task on a Mac.
Casey:
More from Steve Troughton-Smith.
Casey:
iOS 11 lets document-based apps pretty much present the file system as their launch UI, replacing all the galleries or grid views that everyone writes.
Casey:
So this is kind of cool that you can just use basically a file browser as the thing you land on when you launch an app.
Casey:
And so that makes a lot of redundant code that all these different companies and people have written just go away, which is really exciting.
Casey:
And this is more embracing of the iPad having a file system.
John:
I put this in here because I just immediately upon reading this tweet imagined the very first application that tries to ship and do this.
John:
The App Store rejects and says, sorry, you can't show the file picker as your launch UI.
John:
Doesn't that totally sound like an App Store type thing?
John:
I mean, he means technically speaking, yes, now there's like a canned Apple view that shows you the file system.
John:
And in a lot of applications, it makes sense.
John:
where on mac apps do it where you you launch office apps do it and maybe even pages you launch and you get an open save dialogue or you get well i guess someone do have those custom galleries like choose from these templates and make a new document or whatever um but in many types of applications that is a natural way to do it and i think most of the best ios applications still would want to write their own like procreate or whatever or like uh linea however you pronounce the name of the icon factory app
John:
they all have kind of a view where it shows you here's all your stuff and especially if it's an image editing application i show you little thumbnails and stuff rather than showing you just a bunch of file icons but if you really do have an application that mostly deals with just files that are not graphics files um it might make sense to launch into the apple provided picker at least maybe in version one of your app before until you make the fancy version that shows you a preview like the google docs app shows you it's just a bunch of text documents but it shows you little previews of them which is actually
Marco:
surprisingly useful um so anyway i'm i'm watching this to see the first person brave enough to ship an app like that to see if they get rejected it's not gonna be a problem apple like they're holding wbc sessions about doing this like they want people to do this it's gonna be fine we'll see famous last words no if it's an nes emulator you have a problem
Casey:
Do you remember way back when, when there were tethering apps?
Casey:
Like, I think I had iTether or something like that.
Casey:
And I kept that because it was on the app store for like a week.
Casey:
And it was basically like you needed a component on your Mac and you needed the app on your phone.
Casey:
And I kept that thing on my phone for years because I had the AT&T Unlimited plan.
Casey:
And one of the ways they tried to shimmy you off of that plan was by never, ever, ever, or as far as I knew anyway, never allowing you to tether.
Casey:
So I had this like tether or I tether or something like that.
Casey:
That I would use to be able to tether from time to time.
Casey:
And I remember I like had a saved version of the installer somewhere on my hard drive.
Casey:
So just in case the installer went away, I would still have it.
Casey:
I had the app that I like cherished more.
Casey:
I probably had a backup of the IPA somewhere just to be safe.
Casey:
I mean, oh my God.
Casey:
I remember that.
Casey:
Those were the days.
Casey:
And then there would be other apps like a flashlight app that would, oh, by the way, have a SOX server on it.
Casey:
If you triple tap in the upper one third of the screen while holding your nose and bouncing on one foot, you would engage a SOX server.
Marco:
Yeah, like two hours after that was discovered it was off the store.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
The Apple Design Awards, the ADAs, they were a thing, which I think we spoke about last time, but it used to be that – what was it?
Casey:
The Monday evening of WWDC, the first night of WWDC, they would have an event where the –
Casey:
uh apple design awards would get would be given out and and it would be done in front of an audience blah blah blah this this past year they kind of did it quietly but people got to schmooze with some of the execs which is pretty cool well zach uh con writes and says it's worth noting that apple gave out ada's to indie alternatives to mail notes and reminders but still won't let you set any of them as a default which was a pretty observant thing that uh that zach had noticed
John:
Yeah, they're rewarding, like, oh, these are well-designed applications, and they may well be.
John:
But I always feel for people who try to use the non-default applications, because in each one of them, there's some aspect of it that is less privileged than the Apple one.
John:
Like, for a mail application, it could be as simple as when I click a mail-to link, when I tap a mail-to link on my phone, which application launches?
John:
Or when I tell Siri, remind me to blah, blah, blah, where does it put that reminder?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like...
John:
And they're so close.
John:
I don't even understand why.
John:
Apple clearly wants to encourage notes and mail and reminder applications.
John:
They're a staple of the non-game section of the App Store.
John:
Apple is not growling at them and saying, why are those people trying to compete with our built-in applications?
John:
They want to encourage it.
John:
And here they are, 88 winners.
John:
These are great examples of applications that Apple apparently wants to encourage.
John:
let people use them as their default right for for all these calendar notes reminders mail they're so close and the limitations are less than they used to be used to be much harder to use alternate applications uh but like why why not go all the way like every year we wait for this some years there is more to look forward to than others so we don't talk about it but because i don't think we mentioned this year but
John:
I'm always thinking about it.
John:
Hey, when will I be able to use alternate applications?
John:
Even on the Mac, back in the classic Mac OS days, there was an entire control panel for you to set up.
John:
This is the application I want to use for mail.
John:
This is the one I want to use for instant message, so on and so forth.
John:
That kind of is still in Mac OS if you know where to mess with things, but it does not...
John:
prominent like some of the things are hidden like you go to the safari preferences to pick your default browser and chrome will constantly try to change your default browser it's all weird uis to the same underlying data store but it's clearly not as prominent as it used to be at least power users can figure it out on ios a lot of times it's just not possible i suppose unless you jailbreak which is frustrating especially we already talked about this but you know siri and the increased number of intents
John:
It would be great if they made intents for all the things that you can do with Siri for mail notes and reminders.
John:
If those things don't already exist, I suppose they don't.
John:
But certainly you can't tell.
John:
I mean, Google's applications do it.
John:
When you'll tap a link in the Gmail app, it will throw a thing in your face that says, hey, do you want to open this link in Chrome, hint, hint, hint, or Safari?
John:
And then there's a little switch that says, ask me about this every time.
John:
So I always just hit Safari and hit the don't ask me about this every time and be done with it.
Marco:
i feel like apple can implement this well and it's not not rocket science so again maybe in a couple years yeah and actually for the record i'm pretty sure they did add there they are adding it for notes in ios 11 that's one of the two things that they added um i think but if i get that wrong i'm sorry i'm still buried in wbc stuff because i learned that i have to rewrite my entire audio engine
John:
You mean the tent you mean is in iOS 11?
John:
Not that you can change your default application, right?
Marco:
Yeah, the change in the defaults, I can't imagine.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
That's one of those things where every WDC that comes around, we get a whole bunch of stuff that is no big surprise.
Marco:
And there's usually a couple of things that we always say, wow, we never thought Apple would do that.
Marco:
And so we've been for years saying, we're pretty sure Apple's never going to allow you to change the default app for these kinds of things.
Marco:
But one of these years, it could be one of those things.
Marco:
They could just do it.
Marco:
And then we'd be like, oh, look at that.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
And we'd move on.
Marco:
The same thing with deleting the built-in apps.
Marco:
We never thought they would do that either.
Marco:
And there's all the little asterisks on how they kind of sort of offer it now.
Marco:
It's not...
Marco:
really deleting it and things like that but like you know they did it and they put the effort into that to make that happen and so like you know as as ios gets more and more mature many of the arguments against them offering defaults like for instance one of the arguments used to be like well things like mail there are places all over the os where they have like built-in mail composed sheets and
Marco:
And yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But then they made extensions and they made Siri intents and things like that, which kind of break down these barriers and let anything plug in and kind of do similar things.
Marco:
So, you know, the idea of having custom integrations with certain things, like those are actually slowly being removed in favor of things like extensions and intents.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It would not surprise me if they decided to actually let you change things like your default mail app and your default browser at some point in the future.
Marco:
I still wouldn't say it's likely, but I think the technical foundation is now there that they could do it if they wanted to without massive weird side effects.
Marco:
I still don't think they will, but again, with Apple, you never really know.
Marco:
Never say they'll never do something.
John:
Well, they're so close now, like you said, with the extensions.
John:
In each individual application, just take mail applications, for example, is all they would need to do for mail make a preference in Safari that controls where mail-to-links go to?
John:
Is that it?
John:
Like, what's left?
John:
Because, you know, there's...
John:
There's the extensions for, like, add this as a bookmark.
John:
I mean, I suppose they also have, like, tapping links in Safari search and Siri search results or something.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Or do you want me to open this web page and stuff like that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's probably weaved throughout the system in more places than I think.
John:
But it always seems like they're so close.
John:
Like, there's no... What are they holding back for now?
John:
Because extensions really did blow it wide open.
John:
And now almost all the things that you had previously done...
John:
with the single default application now you can pick from a list and you can rearrange that list which by the way i really hope the rearranging of that list sticks better or i hope these spaces stick better than the rearranging that list because i've always had problems with that oh yeah um but yeah it seems it seems i don't know i don't know what the holdup is other than just you know not a big priority and it's like one of those sort of small things most people don't care about that they'll get to eventually
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Marco:
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Marco:
Because the last thing you need is a suitcase that starts out heavy before you put anything even in it.
Marco:
And the interior is incredibly thoughtfully designed.
Marco:
It has a patent pending compression system.
Marco:
And it has a wonderful built-in laundry bag so that as your clothes get dirty during your trip, you can put them right in this laundry bag.
Marco:
And then when you get home, you can detach it and drop it right in the wash.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
There's a TSA-approved combination lock to help prevent theft.
Marco:
They have four 360-degree spinner wheels.
Marco:
Now, this is – if you've only ever used two-wheeled suitcases –
Marco:
Four-wheelers are a whole different experience, especially if you have a heavy bag.
Marco:
It's way easier to roll through an airport on all four wheels.
Marco:
You just hold the handle up top.
Marco:
It's super easy.
Marco:
And one of the coolest features about the Away suitcase line is that their carry-on model has a built-in USB charging battery.
Marco:
So if you want, you can charge up your suitcase before a trip and then throughout as you're going through different airports, maybe waiting for a layover, you can plug in your phone right to your suitcase and you can charge up your phone.
Marco:
It can charge an iPhone five times at the built-in battery capacity.
Marco:
And there's a lifetime warranty and all this.
Marco:
So if anything ever goes wrong with your Away suitcase, they will fix or replace it for you for life.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So you can literally buy it for a trip, take on a trip, get it beaten up by the airline.
Marco:
And then if you decide it's not for you, they will take it back.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, awaytravel.com slash ATP, and use promo code ATP at checkout for $20 towards any suitcase.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Away for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, speaking of photos a moment ago, let's talk about, what is it, heaf or haif?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Marco:
The Apple people have been saying heaf.
Casey:
Heaf, okay.
Casey:
All right, so somebody in the show notes, I'm assuming John, says that heaf is good.
John:
Heave is good.
John:
Heave is like, those are some of my favorite sessions, the Heave HEVC sessions.
John:
If you want to take a look at some sessions, tech nerdy stuff at WWC, I think these are some of the best ones for a bunch of reasons.
John:
So the first is that Heave is good.
John:
it is better than jpeg it's better than ping it's better than all the existing formats in terms in the in terms of the things that apple cares about and that you should care about too image size flexibility of the format it's kind of it kind of reminds me of like the various i'm not gonna call them pirate formats but like the matroska or whatever mkv container thing like where they just say here is a really super generic container uh
John:
that can you know that is flexible and straightforward and fits a whole bunch of stuff in it uh and look at all these things that it can do and we don't pin it down with these arbitrary limitations that you know make sense at the time and one of the examples in the thing was like whatever the maximum size of a jpeg is i forget what it is but i'm sure it seemed ridiculous when jpeg was created in whatever 1980 or 90 something or uh
John:
and yet here we are today and it's like actually it's an actual legit limitation that that is problematic for jpegs one of the demos they had and not to spoil too much one of the demos they had of heath was of a panorama that they zoomed in on and they just kept zooming and zooming and zooming and it was this ridiculously large panorama and it was like is this is this some cool new application like google earth that just reloads new tiles and you know uh
John:
like totally custom ui no they were just zooming a heath image which itself internally can use a tile-based format and its resolution can be massive and you literally couldn't do it with jpeg like all it was was an image view as far as i could tell but you couldn't do it with jpeg because jpeg can't support an image that size period right never mind the efficiency of being able to quickly read and display just the portion that it's on the screen with the whole tiling stuff
John:
The pictures are smaller for the same quality or better quality for larger sizes.
John:
And they can contain lots of different things.
John:
It's almost like Heath was made for live photos.
John:
I bet it was kind of the reverse.
John:
And it's a shame that live photos came before Heath.
John:
But, hey, you can store a series of photos, photos plus video at the same time, with smart diffs between the frames of the stuff in them is what I was talking about in the live show where I was speculating that perhaps...
John:
uh that every frame of a live photo stored in heat format is of equal quality that's why you can pick among them reportedly that's not the case we got at least one report that if you pick the real photo it is still like you know the still photo is still higher quality than any of the animation frames
John:
but maybe the animation frames are higher quality than they were.
John:
I suppose it makes sense that if you had to shave full quality for every single frame, you'd take up a lot of memory because those are actually pretty big.
John:
Maybe you couldn't even dump them off the sensor they fast, but even if it could, you probably wouldn't want them to because it's kind of inefficient even with inter-frame diffs.
John:
But anyway, the reason HEATH and HEVC are big deals is because, aside from them just being new formats and better,
John:
This is like a foundational technology.
John:
They didn't really hammer on it too much, but this is going to last, if all goes well, this is going to last 10, 15, 20 years.
John:
It's going to define your experience on iOS and Mac in terms of...
John:
What are my images?
John:
What is my video made of?
John:
How good does it look?
John:
And how much room does it take?
John:
And it's so fundamental to every single thing that we do, especially with cameras being as pervasive as they are today, that any kind of change in them is like, you don't change it for the hell of it.
John:
Oh, this year we use a totally different image format.
John:
Next year there's a different image format.
John:
No, we pick an image format.
John:
We stick with it for a long time.
John:
And these formats are just better.
John:
They're just better.
John:
And this will, this will change all of our computing's lives in, in like boring ways.
John:
Uh,
John:
and will continue to change them for years and years and years.
John:
I don't think this is a weird fad type thing.
John:
I really hope it really does catch on and sweep across the entire industry because I'm ready to get rid of those old formats and change to this new one.
John:
Why hold on to a format that makes larger files that are worse quality, that has less flexibility and is more difficult to deal with?
John:
So I encourage everyone to look at these sessions.
John:
I think this is exactly the type of underlying core technology that's certainly within the Apple ecosystem and hopefully within the ecosystem across the whole industry because I hate it when
John:
Apple does something better and no one else copies it.
John:
And again, Heath and HEVC are not Apple standards.
John:
These are ISO standards, international standards.
John:
Apple, I don't know if Apple had any influence at all on making them, who knows, but either way, they're not Apple proprietary.
John:
So I really want the whole world to move to this.
John:
Every time I think about the whole world moving to it, I think back on GIF.
John:
And then I think we couldn't, we couldn't even escape GIF.
John:
How are we really going to change?
John:
Are we all going to change the Heath and HEVC?
John:
How long did it take to get transparent ping support in all of our browsers?
John:
Uh,
John:
I'm old, I know.
John:
But my fingers are crossed for these standards.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's see what else we've got going on.
Casey:
I didn't entirely understand this tweet from not underscore David Smith from from Apple employee David Smith.
Casey:
He'd said that 32-bit support is sunset in Mac OS.
Casey:
This is a bigger deal than it seems.
Casey:
i386 is the last fragile hyphen obc hyphen ABI non-Swift supporting architecture.
Casey:
I understood bits and pieces of that.
Casey:
Can one of you translate for me what the crap that actually means?
John:
It says it in the notes right below it.
John:
So the fragile Objective-C API.
John:
So the fragile Objective-C API is where, well, the non-fragile one is where it escapes the fragile base class problem, which is basically if Apple ships a framework and they have a class and it has, like, fields name and age in it, right, and people build applications on top of that framework and they ship them.
John:
And then the next version of the operating system, Apple wants to add a hair color field to that same class, right?
Yeah.
John:
the fragile base class problem is like, Oh, we can't add hair color fields to this class because a bunch of applications are shipped that are compiled against the old version that just has name and age.
John:
And so the only way we can add a field because of the fragile base class problem is all those people need to recompile their application against the new version of the framework that has this new field.
John:
Right.
John:
And so the Apple effects this, I think maybe in the, in the upgrade to 64 bit, uh, runtime.
John:
Um,
John:
And it's not a problem now, but it is still a problem in the 32-bit Objective-C ABI.
John:
So they didn't bother fixing it there because, you know, backward compatibility and also because I assume they were moving away from 32-bit eventually, and now they are.
John:
And so this is, that problem goes away entirely.
John:
Like, then everything that they have, certainly Swift and also, well, Swift eventually will get a stable API, but I'm sure, I'm assuming they will do the same thing there.
John:
And all the 64-bit Objective-C don't have this problem.
John:
So they're,
John:
leaving behind a limitation and also uh 32-bit uh doesn't support swift switch is 64-bit only so that's another reason to ditch it so yeah 32-bit mac not long for this world and someone asked me on twitter recently why do i care as a user
John:
whether uh aside from a bunch of my applications potentially breaking what benefit is there is there to me as a user for apple ditching 32 bits for i don't care if it's a problem for apple and they have this fragile you know base class problem and they can't update frameworks blah blah who cares i'm i'm not a developer i'm just a user i don't want a bunch of my applications to go away why do i care um the main reason especially on phones is
John:
Once you load a 32-bit application that loads 32-bit libraries, those take up memory, and it's better to just have the 64-bit ones in memory instead of having, you know, you could have seven 64-bit applications all sharing a single, you know, shared memory instance of a library, and then you launch one 32-bit application, and it has to bring in the 32-bit version of the library just for that application.
John:
So, you know, your phone will use less memory doing the same things in theory.
Yeah.
John:
And then the other one is just, you know, simplification.
John:
If Apple doesn't have to support this old runtime, they can, you know, it's a simpler operating system to not have to support this old stuff.
John:
And anytime you can delete code and not include things and just, you know, it simplifies everything.
John:
So presumably that will make your phone more stable and faster and your application is more stable and faster and yada, yada, yada.
John:
So the benefit to the user is kind of esoteric and maybe not that particularly visible, but this is what we call progress.
John:
You can't support 32-bit forever.
Casey:
More on High Sierra.
Casey:
The High Sierra format is the early logical file system.
Marco:
I love that we're actually following up on this.
Marco:
Used for CD-ROM.
Marco:
The joke that John made during the live show.
John:
Was that a joke?
John:
It was a memory.
Marco:
Yeah, about High Sierra being like a CD-ROM format name.
John:
Just to say that High Sierra is not two words that have been combined just by Apple for the purpose of its operating system, that it is, in fact, a thing.
John:
Not just, you know, this volume format, logical file system used for CD-ROMs in 1985, 1986, right?
John:
They named it after High Sierra.
John:
Like, they didn't also make up that term.
John:
So I'm just defending the High Sierra name.
John:
Put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia article on the topic.
Marco:
Oh, that's really old.
Marco:
Yeah, because it's before the ISO 9660.
Marco:
That's the one that most CD-ROMs were, right?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Remember the Mount Rainier packet writing standard that was trying... Did you guys ever get packet writing CD-Rs to actually work and not be a problem for something?
John:
yep i did because i got like i got the super expensive fancy one that all the magazines said would work and it really did you could incrementally add data cds it was amazing technology that was so like the the whole thing in cdrw's too how incredibly slow and unreliable they were like
Marco:
There were so many efforts put into trying to make CD burners behave more like floppies so that you could just write part of one and then add some files to it later and then maybe delete some files which wouldn't actually really delete them but would just mark that block as deleted and just add some more to the end.
Marco:
There were all these different standards of doing it, and they tried to define industry standards to combine them all.
Marco:
And it was always a just giant buggy mess.
Marco:
And maybe this is one of those things that like you Mac people, John, like maybe it was perfect for you and it was just crap on the PC side.
Marco:
But I can tell you one thing.
Marco:
It was really crap on the PC side.
Marco:
And my first CD burner, which was a SCSI 4x2x6 from Yamaha, which was awesome.
Marco:
we might have had the same one probably that was like it was so good at everything else but you try to get any of those packet writing things to work and it just like no other computer could ever read them you were lucky if your computer could read it tomorrow like it was just terrible
John:
I was going to say, the reason you have all those problems is using crappy IDE CD round drives, but you're using SCSI ones too, and Yamaha was a pretty reputable vendor.
John:
All of mine were obviously SCSI, and mine were super expensive, top-of-the-line Yamaha things with fancy Mac applications.
John:
I had pretty good luck with it.
John:
I did it all the time.
John:
That was my form of backups back before I had enough money to have duplicate hard drive space.
Marco:
Because hard drives were still quite expensive back then.
Marco:
Having the first CD burners, it was awesome.
Marco:
It was amazing being able to make your own mix CDs, but everything that tried to make it more like a floppy or a hard drive just always sucked.
Marco:
It had so many problems.
Marco:
Before we leave this topic, I will say one of my favorite pieces of esoteric
Marco:
optical disc technology i ever owned was i had one of the kenwood truex cd-rom drives that read at 72x by by splitting the laser into seven different beams and reading seven tracks in parallel that's different that sounds super reliable and i'm sure it was very quiet when it's spinning at 72x
Marco:
No, because I think it was only spinning at like 12x.
Marco:
So it was way better than the 52x CD-ROMs of the time that it sounded like a four-stage jet engine that would spin up one stage.
Marco:
Like a really super loud.
Marco:
It was waiting for the disc to shatter apart like a wheel that's going too fast.
Marco:
Which they occasionally did.
Marco:
And I was always kind of surprised with the 52X CD-ROMs.
Marco:
That sounded so crazy.
Marco:
It was kind of surprising how few discs shattered inside.
Marco:
Like, they actually worked most of the time, and they really shouldn't have.
John:
Yeah, I always got nervous putting the sticky labels.
John:
You ever do that?
John:
The sticky labels on top of your things, right?
John:
You have to put them on perfectly because it's like having an unbalanced tire.
Casey:
You get it in there and the label is a little bit off.
Casey:
I remember all of that.
Casey:
I remember when we had one of our earlier PCs that had an external CD-ROM drive that was, it had like a little tray or cartridge that you would put the CD in.
Casey:
Yeah, the caddy.
Casey:
Yes, I couldn't think of the word.
Casey:
I knew it wasn't cartridge, but I couldn't think of the right word.
Casey:
Yeah, it had a CD caddy.
Casey:
I remember that.
Casey:
I remember getting the CD burner early on.
Casey:
This was high school for me.
Casey:
And I remember I was very popular amongst the high school kids because I could make a mix CD, just like you said.
Casey:
And I also remember, Marco, you particularly will appreciate this.
Casey:
I briefly got into trading tapes in the Dave Matthews Band taping community.
Casey:
Because Dave Matthews Band, as we all agree, is a jam band.
Casey:
And so my first couple of trades, what I had done was I had said, hey, send me cassettes of what you've got.
Casey:
And since I have nothing to trade, I have no concerts of my own, I will digitize them, put them on CD, and send them back to you.
Casey:
And that's how I scored my first couple of concerts.
Casey:
And these were concerts that I had been at.
Casey:
And these concerts were very different from each other because, as we said, Dave Matthews Band is a jam band.
Casey:
Anyway, we should move on and talk about APFS.
Casey:
APFS is good as well, as it turns out.
Casey:
And yeah, apparently.
Casey:
And, you know, I know, John, you don't have many words to say about this.
Casey:
So, Marco, would you like to take over?
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
It's a file system, and it's new, and it's not HFS+, and so therefore it's good.
Marco:
Let's move on.
John:
Moving on.
John:
Seriously, did I talk about all these things on a past show already?
Casey:
I don't think you did.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think you did.
John:
I'm not done.
John:
In a rare case of me not finishing the previous episode, I have like 40 minutes left on last week's episode because we're recording this early.
John:
Slacker.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Did I talk about all this already?
Casey:
You know, it's fine.
Casey:
The people love you, John.
Casey:
If they want, they can skip to the next chapter.
Casey:
That's what it's there for.
John:
I will add a caveat.
John:
I may have talked about everything I'm about to say in a past episode.
John:
If I did, I apologize.
John:
Or just pretend I'm like a teacher and telling you things multiple times to make you retain it more.
John:
um so apfs apfs is good i learned some things about it in the apfs session that i may have talked about last week um it will convert your encrypted drive so if you have file vault on you don't have to worry about oh it won't be able to convert by thing because it it understands the file vault encryption and it will do all the things it has to do so you won't lose any data and you won't lose any encryption um
John:
it will convert your fusion drives.
John:
And when it converts them, it will improve your fusion drives because APFS, unlike HFS plus will guarantee that the metadata all stays on the SSD.
John:
Like that's where it writes the new APFS metadata and it keeps it all there.
John:
So aside from the fusion drive saying, you know, moving the actual data, like, Oh, the files you access frequently will move to the fast storage and leave the files you access less frequently on a slow storage.
John:
You know, that's how fusion drive works.
John:
uh apfs will make sure that all the metadata all the information about the files all the file names their sizes their dates where all the little data blocks are all that will stay on the ssd always which will make things a lot faster because reading metadata is you know it involves a lot of seeks and a lot of small reads and it's great to have them on the ssd
John:
uh disk utility the new version of disk utility uh which i don't know if it has a resizable window and resizable columns yet i haven't checked but that would be a great feature anyway it will convert your volumes so you can open disk utility and point at any age of s plus disk and say please change this to apfs it will not currently make them bootable i'm assuming they're going to fix that if you want to make it bootable you have to run the installer the the high cr installer to make it bootable but again i'm assuming that'll be fixed um
John:
mobile time machine a thing that most people don't know exists but does i think it still only runs on laptops like if you're on your mac laptop and you're not connected through a time capsule wirelessly or any other time machine interface like you know you have time machine on but as far as you can tell like your backup drives are not you're not communicating with your backup drives like say you're on an airplane or something you're editing a document many years ago apple added a thing that still backs up
John:
using Time Machine to your own disk.
John:
It's not going to protect you if your hard drive dies because you're backing up your disk to your disk, but it's supposed to save you like if you're editing something and then a while later you accidentally delete it and you're like, oh, I want that back.
John:
I'm on a plane and it was my important presentation.
John:
Well, Mobile Time Machine had been in the background making copies of your stuff to this other location on your disk and you can invoke Time Machine on an airplane with no Wi-Fi and get back old versions of your documents.
John:
There are some caveats to that, which I'll get to in a second.
John:
But the APFS story here is that because APFS has constant time snapshots, where they can take a consistent snapshot of your disk in a small and fixed amount of time, like it doesn't depend on how much has changed since the last time or anything like that.
John:
It is just...
John:
mark this as a consistent state, and it takes space on your disk, obviously, and retain that.
John:
But it can do it very quickly and very efficiently, which means the previous implementation of Mobile Time Machine, which is fairly intense, like it was mounting a virtual file system in a secret corner of your drive and then writing to it as if it was another volume, but it's not.
John:
Like it was really weird involving hidden directories and fakery making it look like you have a second volume inside your first volume.
John:
And it would have to like crawl over all your files and find the ones that have changed and make copies of them to this virtual file system.
John:
Very, very slow.
John:
Whereas the APFS one is just snapshot.
John:
And it's like literally a couple seconds.
John:
It doesn't matter how much stuff you've done since the last time you did that.
John:
The snapshot itself, it takes constant time.
John:
Um...
John:
you can do it yourself with a command line tmutil the time machine command line utility which is useful by the way on any mac if you've never just type man tmutil to see all these different things you can delete old backups and mess with your backups and you know screw yourself if you're not careful but anyway it's uh it's a neat utility new command tmutil space snapshot we'll take a snapshot you can if you have high cr beta run it now you'll be amazed at how quickly it runs the thing that bothers me about mobile time machine and i kind of understand why apple's doing this but it's still a
John:
it runs hourly and so for you like working on a presentation and you hose it in some way you want the backup you can get the one from an hour ago but if you just created this thing within the current hour there are no backups of it it's like oh hourly that's not good why don't you take you know i wish i wish i had backups every five minutes or ten minutes well remember all these snapshots take up space because it basically says everything that's on your disk right now
John:
save it and so if you delete a bunch of files they're still taking up space in the snapshot right um so i understand why they don't want to do like a snapshot every five minutes because you'll fill your disk with snapshots even if they trim them off the end so hourly is probably a reasonable compromise uh but you know i i mentioned tmutil snapshot it's like well if you're paranoid you can set up a cron job that runs tmutil snapshot every five minutes while you're on the flight and you'll be saved that pain just remember to turn off later otherwise you're going to fill your disk
John:
but the important thing is those snapshots happen really really quickly and it's got to be way more reliable and efficient than all the weird stuff that was going on before so this is a nice upgrade for mobile time machine we mentioned a couple shows ago hey when will apple release the version of mac os that uses avios to make time machine better this isn't that because it's only for local backups but i assume in a future version of the mac operating system
John:
assuming apple continues along this road that i guess you called remote time machine you know actual time machine backups to a different volume hopefully on a different disk uh will use the the smarts of apfs to do something intelligent i think they might be using it now to just take the snapshot and read from that snapshot to send to the remote disk but it's not quite the same thing as you can imagine like
John:
smart deltas over what's changed i'm not quite sure what they can do they can't do the same thing as zfs where you get like block diffs and stuff like that which is really cool but they didn't go with zfs they went with apfs so we got what we got but anyway i feel like they can make strides there as well
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Oh.
Marco:
Can we please do a topic?
Casey:
No, we have two, three pages of follow-up left to do.
Marco:
This feels like we need to declare a follow-up barrier.
John:
We can go through them quickly.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
John:
Start the clock.
Casey:
Challenge accepted.
Casey:
Start the clock.
Casey:
All right, here we go.
Casey:
You two ready?
Casey:
Buckle up.
Casey:
Matt Bidolf writes, iMac Pro's price comparisons.
Casey:
PC Gamer had a hand-built PC from parts that matches the iMac Pro in spec.
Casey:
It cost $4,686 versus Apple's $4,999.
Casey:
Billy Flattery writes, iMac model price comparisons.
Casey:
That's not how you do it.
John:
You can't just read the follow-up items.
John:
That's not how you go through it quickly.
John:
You have to have commentary from everybody on each item.
John:
We just have abbreviated commentary.
Marco:
The iMac opening price is fine.
Marco:
Bill Flaherty, go ahead.
Marco:
No, no, no, no, no.
John:
You have to have discussion.
John:
Marco, we tried.
John:
It's not just a race to read things.
Casey:
This is what people tune in for.
John:
This is the show.
John:
So you think just reading quickly is how you get through it quickly.
John:
How you get through it quickly is by not having extended conversations, by saying one or two.
Casey:
How we get through it quickly is by not breathing when I'm reading at all.
Casey:
That's how we get through it quickly.
Casey:
I'm going to build some gills and give them to myself.
John:
I will show you if you'd like me to do the next one.
John:
Anyway, iMac Pro price comparison.
John:
The thing I want to point out here is anytime there's price comparisons from the iMac Pro versus some PC that you build, they're like, hey, if you match the specs of the iMac Pro, you end up with a pretty expensive PC, too.
John:
The obvious little asterisk that's on all these stories is no sane person would build a PC like the iMac Pro.
John:
Because most people who need, like, say, a really big GPU for gaming aren't going to put a Xeon in it.
John:
And they're not going to have ECC RAM.
John:
And they're not going to have this really expensive 5K display.
John:
So even though this price comparison is right...
John:
nobody no no pc builder would build a pc like the imac pro uh for most of the things that people build pcs for because they would tailor build it it wouldn't be the most expensive best everything you can put in a computer they would decide i care about you know do i care about ecc do i care about the cpu do i care about the 5k screen and they would end up with less expensive machine that's all i wanted to say on that
John:
So Billy Flaherty said.
Casey:
He points out that between the mid and high end iMacs, not the iMac Pro, iMacs with the same configuration, have the same price, but the high end has the better video.
Casey:
Is he missing something?
Casey:
And there's a screenshot.
Casey:
We will put his tweet in the show notes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, look, when you play with a configurator, sometimes things don't make sense.
Marco:
Oh, well, Apple's, you know, not always perfect and we aren't always perfect.
Marco:
Let's move on.
John:
Well, that means the advice here is if you're configuring a Mac, try config, you know, you click on one of them and like pick three or whatever.
John:
Try the other one, too, and try to match the specs.
John:
It's worth doing once or twice just to make sure the prices aren't out of whack.
John:
Bingo.
Casey:
John, you had volunteered to cover this next piece.
John:
Oh, that's because you can't pronounce Victor's last name?
John:
Well, I'm not going to pronounce his last name.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Victor wrote in to tell us that HomeKit protocol spec is now open to all devs.
John:
You can build a smart device using, how do you pronounce that?
John:
Arduino?
Casey:
Arduino, yeah, I believe that's right.
John:
And control it via HomeKit without getting an MFI license.
John:
So this seems like, oh, great, Apple has opened up HomeKit, and now you don't have to go through all this onerous stuff to get HomeKit certified.
John:
But there's a twist, right?
John:
So this is for interoperability.
John:
People can build things that are compatible with HomeKit, but
John:
uh and you don't have to be an mfi made for iphone is that still what it stands for is this made for ipod i don't know it should be for made for ios anyway you don't have to get that that license um and this is apple's explanation say at a user level differences will include the process for onboarding an ip-based accessory to the network and a warning dialogue in ios that the user must acknowledge before continuing so
John:
Yeah, you don't have to be certified as part of the program, and you can interoperate, right?
John:
But you won't have the Apple authentication coprocessor, and you won't have the Wi-Fi Alliance certification, and the user of your device will get a warning dialog.
John:
So it's not...
John:
It's great for hackers.
John:
It's like it's open up.
John:
Hey, if you want to mess with something and you can bypass these, that's kind of like when you right click, open something on the Mac, you know, power users can do it, but it doesn't suddenly make HomeKit a free for all for everybody.
John:
In practice, if you want to be part of the HomeKit ecosystem as a first class system, you still have to go through all the old stuff.
John:
But this is nice for people who just want to hack something together to get it working.
Casey:
The App Store guidelines have been updated to allow programming environments.
Casey:
And so I'll put a link in the show notes to this.
Casey:
Apps designed to teach, develop, or test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes.
Casey:
Such apps must make the source code provided by the application completely viewable and editable by the user.
Casey:
Not surprising, but nevertheless somewhat interesting.
John:
Yeah, they've been against like, hey, no programming environments for such a long time.
John:
It's nice to see them turn the corner on this.
John:
Does this mean that Xcode for iOS is any closer?
John:
No.
John:
You know, it's the same distance it's always been, which I think is actually pretty close.
John:
But it does mean that people trying to make programming environments for iOS no longer have to deal with AppReview just summarily rejecting them because they execute code from the Internet or whatever.
Casey:
Speaking of the App Store reviews, no longer reset on update, but may optionally do so.
Casey:
Did we not get to this last episode?
John:
I don't think so, but it's an exciting development in App Store land.
Marco:
Yeah, short version is basically before when you submit a new update to an app, all your reviews would reset.
Marco:
And you'd have to click over to the All Reviews tab.
Marco:
Now there are no more two different tabs.
Marco:
Now there's only one set of reviews.
Marco:
And every time you submit a new version, you could now choose whether you want your reviews to reset.
Marco:
By default, they don't, which is good.
Marco:
So if you have like a really huge, buggy, horrible version of your app and you get a whole bunch of one stars and your next update you want to reset the slate, you can do that.
Marco:
But by default, you're going to get a whole bunch of reviews all mixed together from all previous versions and it'll be fine and you won't lose your ratings anymore.
Marco:
Awesome.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Additionally, with the App Store, the review API, this is for developers to say, hey, why don't you go review my app or rate my app or blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
They had announced a new API somewhat recently.
Casey:
It doesn't matter exactly when.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But apparently it is now mandatory.
Casey:
Quote, use the provided API to prompt users to review your app.
Casey:
This functionality allows customers to provide an app store rating and review without the inconvenience of leaving your app.
Casey:
And we will disallow custom review prompts.
Marco:
Yeah, the only thing here is, like, we don't know.
Marco:
They don't actually say when they're disallowing your own custom rate this app prompt.
Marco:
And they also don't say how they're actually going to be enforcing this.
Marco:
And they're probably not going to ever say that.
Marco:
But, you know, there's been rules against using push notifications for promotional or marketing purposes since the beginning of push notifications.
Marco:
And yet, if you look at pretty much everybody's phone that isn't, you know, yours as a computer nerd and maybe even yours...
Marco:
Almost everyone else's phone always has on the lock screen a notification from some mass market app that's like, hey, these things are now on sale.
Marco:
Come buy them now or something.
Marco:
Those are against the rules.
Marco:
They have always been against the rules.
Marco:
But Apple has never enforced it because it's a hard thing to enforce.
Marco:
So this is one of those things, too.
Marco:
Are they actually going to find a way to enforce a ban on custom rate this app dialogues?
Marco:
maybe but it sounds like you know what are they going to do like have people using the app inside apple and hitting the report button when an app does this because it's not going to do it during like the two minutes that they're reviewing it during app review so i this this sounds like something that it would be nice i hope they can find a way to enforce this but based on their rate of enforcement on spam push notifications i'm not hopeful yep no argument here
Casey:
Uh, there's a question.
Casey:
Can we see iPad and Mac apps on iPhone in the iOS 11 app store?
Casey:
Probably not.
Casey:
If so, it's a bug.
Casey:
Who cares?
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Uh, Trood Winterborg writes, uh, previous keynotes, you've discussed Apple's efforts for quality on stage.
Casey:
It's even more important to do so when it's as bad as this year.
Casey:
Was it that bad?
Casey:
Did I miss something?
John:
I think it was pretty bad.
John:
Like, can you think back to who you saw on stage during the keynote?
John:
Did you see anybody except for white guys?
Marco:
There were a couple of women, but I think it was a worse ratio than usual.
John:
Yeah, and as we discussed in the past, this is not the type of thing that you can easily solve in a year because it's not like you're going to fire all your senior executives and bring up other people.
John:
What you want to happen is the people who are in charge of the things that are being announced, like the people who are most responsible for them, get to get up there and show off their thing.
John:
And you would hope the people in charge of the important things at Apple have a reasonable ratio, uh, you know, some, some kind of diversity that, uh, you know, that, that reflects the diversity that you want your company to have at Apple's top executive ranks, the diversity is not that great.
John:
And so every time there is a product that is announced, uh, for, you know, this is your department, come up and talk about it.
John:
Guess what?
John:
It's another, you know, gray haired white guy.
John:
Um,
John:
And so, you know, it's good to mix in other people for other portions like they brought up some women to do demos, for example, or if you get third party people up there.
John:
I mean, they're faced with the same problem because who knows who's running those third party companies as well.
John:
But yeah.
John:
It's a thing that I'm sure Apple is watching, and I think we should at least continue to be cognizant of it as well.
John:
I don't know what the solution is other than for Apple to continue its efforts to hire and promote all different kinds of people instead of making it an old boys club.
Casey:
I'm now disappointed in myself because I usually am at least basically aware of in a broad strokes how good or bad it was and I really didn't think it was this it was that bad this year and I must be wrong but I feel like I remember a handful of women up there certainly not in the executive roles but nevertheless so that's that's a one demerit for me apparently.
John:
Well, it's like that thing where they say, like, you know, people's perception.
John:
What was the one with people talking?
John:
If you're in a meeting and you ask the men in the meeting what percentage of the time were women talking, what percentage of the time were men were talking, the men will say it was about 50-50 when in reality it was like...
John:
15% of the women were talking, right?
John:
And 85% of the men were talking.
John:
That seems like 50-50 to men.
John:
I forget what the exact numbers, but it was some absurd amount that men perceive it to be equal when women get a fraction of the time.
John:
And if women even start to approach like a quarter of the time or a half of the time...
John:
then men perceive it as the women talking all the time, and men don't get a chance at all.
John:
And it's just what you're used to, right?
John:
So if you're used to seeing a keynote, which is literally three well-known white guys who we see every single year, and there's one woman, you're like, wow, it was 50% women this time, and really it was like one woman out of three other white guys.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's something to be aware of in terms of cognitive biases.
John:
It all depends on what you're used to and where you're coming from.
John:
So the perception that it was not that bad and seemed like it was pretty even is just based on what you're used to seeing and if it was different than what you're used to.
Marco:
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John:
Are we done with follow-up?
John:
See how we're able to do it?
John:
Even with the middle part where Casey's trying to speed run through it and I had to scold him.
John:
Even with that.
Casey:
Still got through it pretty quickly.
Marco:
I'm so sorry, Dad.
Marco:
So, Casey, you have a new Mac in your family.
Casey:
I do.
Marco:
It's a baby Mac.
Marco:
You've got a baby Mac in your family.
Marco:
Congratulations.
Casey:
It is an adorable baby Mac, isn't it?
Casey:
Yes, I think I spoke about at the live show that we just mentioned that I had placed an order for a MacBook Adorable for those who are not aware of the lingo.
Casey:
Which, by the way, was it you or Gray that coined MacBook Adorable?
Casey:
Gray.
Casey:
I want to say it was Gray.
Marco:
I call it the MacBook One.
Marco:
um and i've even mostly stopped doing that recently because i feel like now it's been long enough that i can you can just hit the 12 inch macbook now so that's i usually just call it the 12 inch macbook now um but cgp gray on hello internet or was it cortex i forget on which it might have been cortex um yeah i think it was harvey cortex anyway uh on cortex uh gray was the one who coined the term macbook adorable um and then you know mike and you stole it
Marco:
I don't think anyone else calls it that among our podcaster friends, but yeah.
Marco:
Regardless, the 12-inch MacBook slash MacBookAdorable slash MacBookOne.
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
So, when Apple announced that they had refreshed them at the WWDC keynote, which was mildly surprising to me.
Casey:
I know a lot of people had said, oh, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, but I wasn't so sure.
Marco:
At this point, every time Apple refreshes a Mac, it's mildly surprising.
Casey:
Yeah, that's actually pretty accurate, but...
Casey:
Yeah, so within hours, I had placed an order for my MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
It arrived Thursday of last week, so the day after we recorded.
Casey:
I don't recall when the episode went out, but it arrived after we recorded.
Casey:
And I have been using it on and off for the last four days, whatever it is we're recording on the following Monday.
Casey:
And, um, I have to say so far, I freaking love this thing because imagine how amazing it would be to have a computer, the size of a device, the size of an iPad, but it's a computer and
Casey:
So it can do anything.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
You're going to hear about that.
Casey:
It's not a toy.
Casey:
It's not a thing.
Casey:
There's no ball and chain involved.
Casey:
Asterisk.
Casey:
There's no ball and chain there.
Casey:
It's a full-on computer that can do, prepare yourselves, computery things.
Casey:
amazing you know what i did just a few minutes ago i transcoded something on ffmpeg did you hear it no why because it was slower than dirt but also because there's no fans because there's no fans on this device are you sure it's done yet uh no it is done it took forever it was running at like one half x whereas uh i think my macbook pro would do it at like one and a half x and i haven't done this on my iMac in a long time but um
Casey:
But anyway, all kidding aside, I do love this thing.
Casey:
It is not without problems, but I do love it.
Casey:
It is unbelievably light.
Casey:
And I picked up Aaron's MacBook Air, which is several years old now.
Casey:
But I mean, obviously, nothing has changed on the MacBook Air except that megahertz boost that it got.
Casey:
Um, so her MacBook air is a aircraft carrier by comparison.
Casey:
It is mammoth by comparison and weighs a ton.
Casey:
And in fact, just the other, just, uh, this morning I was carrying my beloved iPad mini, which is also ancient and also effectively brand new.
Casey:
Funny how that works.
Casey:
Um, and I was carrying my iPad mini and my Mac book adorable.
Casey:
And it occurred to me based on no facts, based on just what it felt like in my hand and
Casey:
It felt like my third-generation iPad, you know, the one that John and I both had that we both loved.
Casey:
That was the first of the Retina iPads, which kind of weighed a ton, kind of overheated a lot.
Casey:
The combination of my MacBook Adorable and my iPad felt like roughly the same weight as the full-size iPad from a few years ago.
Casey:
The keyboard...
Casey:
There are pluses and minuses.
Casey:
Overall, I would say I like it.
Casey:
I absolutely do not love it like I do the Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
If it had 20% to 30% more travel, I think I would start moving toward love.
Casey:
And it's hard to describe because it's a weird turn of phrase, but it feels more stable, this keyboard, than perhaps even my beloved Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
Like, the keys just don't...
Casey:
move laterally in the way that certainly my macbook pro does my macbook pro is effectively unusable that keyboard right now because between the magic keyboard and this keyboard the macbook pro is like it's like typing on you know the macbook pro keyboards not the not the new fancy pants ones i'm talking about before the scissor switches
Casey:
The MacBook Pro keyboards are the Lexuses of keyboards.
Casey:
They are the marshmallows of keyboards.
Casey:
It's like typing on pillows.
Casey:
And I don't mean that in the, like, ah, comfortable way.
Casey:
I mean that in the, ugh, God, this feels gross way.
Casey:
I like those keyboard pillows.
Casey:
They're comfortable to type on.
Casey:
You can feel the keys.
Marco:
I hate them.
Marco:
And you can feel where the arrow keys are without looking or missing them.
Marco:
Oh, God, I don't know.
Marco:
First of all, I think it's hilarious how many people have yelled at me for complaining about the new keyboard so much.
Marco:
Basically, if you're a fan of the new keyboard, you will tend to complain that much about the old one.
Marco:
Either way, because the new keyboard is so different from the old ones, if you like the new one, you're going to complain about the old one and vice versa.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But no, I do love this MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
I don't feel, generally speaking, that it's particularly slow.
Casey:
I have done a little bit of Xcode on it.
Casey:
I've done some basic computing tasks.
Casey:
And to be fair, this thing is never really intended to be a powerhouse, right?
Casey:
It's intended to be a travel computer.
Casey:
It's intended to be an around-the-house computer.
Casey:
It's intended to be basically a I don't want to use my work computer or I don't want to be sitting in my in-home office computer computer.
Casey:
So it's for anywhere that's not either my actual office or the office in my house.
Casey:
Everywhere else I would be using this.
Casey:
I do still use my iPad from time to time.
Casey:
And for better or worse, as much as I snark, I absolutely believe that you can get work done on an iPad.
Casey:
For me, as I've said before, and I was joking earlier, but for me, every time I use an iPad to do work and define work however you would like,
Casey:
For the sorts of work that I do, I either can't do it on an iPad because there is no Xcode on an iPad, or it would be considerably more difficult because something like transcoding a video in FFmpeg, which I do way more often than any normal human should, I would have to, you know, remote into my iMac and do it that way.
Casey:
And the particular iPad I have doesn't have a keyboard attached to it.
Casey:
And so for me, anytime I try to accomplish anything on the iPad, it genuinely feels like I have a ball and chain attached to me.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's true for you, Mike.
Casey:
It's okay.
Casey:
You don't have to yell at me.
Casey:
But for me, that is true.
Casey:
And so having an actual frigging computer that can do anything that's as light and portable as an iPad, in my personal opinion, is amazing.
Casey:
And I love this thing.
Casey:
The one thing I'm not sure I love is the one part of the MacBook One.
Casey:
Because by and large, I actually don't mind having only one port.
Casey:
I mean, I'm pouring one out for MagSafe because, man, do I love MagSafe.
Casey:
But generally, I don't really mind having one port.
Casey:
I've gotten two or three, I think three dongles.
Casey:
I have a, I think it's Anchor.
Casey:
We'll put links in the show notes.
Casey:
I believe it's an Anchor device that has three traditional USB.
Casey:
What is that, USB-A?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Three USB-A ports and a gigabit Ethernet jack or port connector, whatever, interface on it.
Casey:
But it does not have pass-through power.
Casey:
And that's a bummer.
Casey:
So as an example, when I wanted to do my initial time machine backup, I had to make sure that this damn thing was topped up because otherwise I wasn't going to make it.
Casey:
And there's like not that much data on this thing to begin with.
Casey:
So that's uncomfortable.
Casey:
And that's something I've never had to worry about before.
Casey:
And that's kind of frustrating.
Casey:
If this particular device, if this particular Ethernet adapter had passed through power...
Casey:
That would go away.
Casey:
I got a SD card reader.
Casey:
I don't often take pictures off my camera.
Casey:
I almost never do it on the road, but I want to have the ability to do so.
Casey:
I don't lament the fact that there's not an SD card slot on the device.
Casey:
Would I like it?
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
How much do you pay for that card reader?
Casey:
30 bucks?
Casey:
um 12 i think from monoprice and i've already used it and it works um it was very very cheap um would i prefer it to be on the on the computer of course but am i bitter about it not being no it's very small it was like 12 or 13 dollars again i'll put a link in the show notes and it seems to work just fine
Marco:
Yeah, just add it to your dongle bag that we all have to carry now.
Casey:
And that's the thing.
Casey:
Like, yes, I do have to have a dongle bag.
Casey:
The other thing I got was a HDMI adapter, which does have pass-through power.
Casey:
And this particular one also has a single USB-A port on it.
Casey:
So that's probably going to be my general purpose adapter because it has pass-through power, it has USB-A, and it has HDMI.
Casey:
So it has any of the things I would typically want to have while having pass-through power.
Casey:
The only thing it doesn't have is Ethernet.
Casey:
So I guess maybe in retrospect I should have gotten a USB-A Ethernet adapter, but presumably it would have been speed limited, whatever.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
But to your point, I have yet to order but plan to order a small little, I forget the name of it, but a Tom Bin bag that I can put all of these little dongles in and have my USB-C dongle bag.
Casey:
There's not that many of them.
Casey:
I don't feel like I need any more.
Casey:
But I needed them.
Casey:
Well, need is relative.
Marco:
In the name of portability, you now need a dongle bag.
Marco:
I have one too.
Marco:
And for the same reason.
Marco:
Because I use these new computers now when traveling.
Marco:
And well, you just kind of need that.
Marco:
I mean, the one thing... So before I make you continue and tell me all about more stuff about this, I do want to interject one brief thing here.
Marco:
And that is that even that I've been using the MacBook Escape as my computer for this role, the MacBook Escape has only two ports.
Marco:
And I have found that to be incredibly inconvenient more often than I expected.
Marco:
How so?
Marco:
Well, so, for example, during our live stream, the MacBook Escape was my computer.
Marco:
It was doing the live broadcast.
Marco:
It was playing sound effects into the PA system for our ad bumpers and stuff.
Marco:
And it was a backup recording.
Marco:
Anyway, so I was using it.
Marco:
Because we were in a room full of laptops and nerds, I didn't want to rely on Wi-Fi.
Marco:
So I had an Ethernet connection for the live stream internet connection.
Marco:
So that's Ethernet takes up one of the spots.
Marco:
The audio interface, because there's no more audio line-in functionality in any Mac, except for the Mac Mini anymore.
Marco:
I don't know why, except just to save money, I guess.
Marco:
I...
Marco:
Line-in used to come on every computer.
Marco:
I don't know why Apple decided nobody needs line-in anymore because it's really cheap to add.
Marco:
It's really cheap to be there.
Marco:
It doesn't take up a lot of space.
Marco:
It's just another headphone jack.
Marco:
There's room for that.
Marco:
Why isn't there room for a line-in?
Marco:
But whatever the reason, Apple decides that computers don't need line-in jacks anymore.
Marco:
So you need an entire audio interface or USB sound card or something if you want a line-in on a computer.
Marco:
So anyway, Ethernet in one port.
Marco:
line-in audio interface on the other port.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
And I also wanted power.
Marco:
So I have a few options here.
Marco:
I can get some kind of dongle.
Marco:
And I actually bought the Apple dongle that is the expensive $70 one that has the one HDMI port, one USB-A port, and a charging pass-through.
Casey:
That's basically what I have, but a cheap knockoff.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the reason I bought the Apple one is because I was using this in production, like in a live show with a thousand people in the room.
Marco:
I did not want any part of that thing to fail.
Marco:
The other problem is that that's a USB-A port on there.
Marco:
And so one thing that's very interesting, as I found, as I'm trying to convert to a USB-C lifestyle as much as I can, just for my own convenience when traveling, trying to get as much USB stuff as possible.
Marco:
And actually, listener Remy wrote in.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
He didn't say whether we can use his last name, so I'm not going to.
Marco:
But listener Remy wrote in a few days ago, basically pointing out this problem in the USB-C ecosystem right now, that as far as he could tell, and I agree as far as I can tell,
Marco:
Is anybody making hubs that convert a USB-C port to more USB-C ports?
Casey:
Yeah, that was a very interesting point.
Casey:
And I'm sure that there is one somewhere, or maybe there's many, but I certainly have not stumbled across one.
Marco:
Yeah, neither have I. And actually, the LG 5K monitor is one such thing.
Marco:
But I'm not aware of any standalone hubs that you...
Marco:
convert one usbc port to like four usbc ports like i've never i have not seen that one of the problems with usbc lifestyle is what i was facing with this apple dongle which is like okay so i have a usbc cable for my sound interface and i have a usbc ethernet adapter and i have a usbc power adapter
Marco:
The Apple dongle thing only converts one-to-one on C. So it has an A port, but then I need to have an A Ethernet adapter, which I don't have.
Marco:
I haven't had it since the MacBook Air.
Marco:
I can move the sound card to that, but I wasn't sure I wanted something as critical as the sound card to be going through a dongle with a weird little mini hub in it.
Marco:
So the USB-C ecosystem is actually kind of hard to fully adopt right now because you can't – generally, as far as we can tell, you can't multiply USB-C ports.
Marco:
You might think, oh, good, my computer has two or four or, in your case, one USB-C port, but that also replaces the power port.
Marco:
so like that well if you actually want to be plugged into power you just lost a port which might be your only one or at least so now you're down from two to one so like if you've been if you've been accustomed to most apple laptops for the last many years have generally had two usb ports on them and you could be plugged into power and also have two usb things plugged in well now you're down to on the macbook one you're down to zero on the macbook escape you have one if you're plugged in
Marco:
And if you actually spend the lots of money on one of the Apple dongles or the less money but still money on one of the third-party ones, that by the way, if you look at Amazon reviews for third-party USB-C hubs and dongles and things, the reviews are all over the map and most of them seem like they're
Marco:
at best inconsistent, maybe unreliable, they have a lot of problems, it seems.
Marco:
And they're probably all using one of a very small number of chipsets and things, and maybe those are the problems.
Marco:
Who knows what the problem is?
Marco:
But regardless, it's a problem.
Marco:
Like, if you want to reliably multiply these ports, it's really hard to do that.
Marco:
So that's a big problem.
Marco:
And now that you're in this ecosystem, you're going to find that as well.
Marco:
Anyway, so what I ended up doing for our live show, I just ran on battery power the whole time.
Marco:
which is a terrible solution.
Marco:
And the MacBook Escape, which has amazing battery power when you're not doing much, goes from 12 hours battery life when you're casually browsing Safari to, if you're actually running stuff off of it, it goes to about three hours of battery life.
Marco:
And that's not great when you're running a podcast like this one.
Marco:
So it was like, you know, I was basically juggling like before the show, I would like, you know, unplug the sound card and plug in power for a while.
Marco:
And then right before we started, like, you know, yank that out and like switch over.
Marco:
But then you can't test things.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It was actually really incredibly inconvenient.
Marco:
And that was one of the first times, besides when my keyboard stopped working, that was one of the first times when I actually did regret having the escape.
Marco:
Because having only two ports is incredibly inconvenient.
Marco:
And this is not the first time that this has been inconvenient for me.
Marco:
But having one port, I imagine for you, is even worse.
Casey:
Yeah, it is and isn't.
Casey:
I think if this was my only computer, it would get really ugly really quickly, and I would probably have some sort of ridiculous dock.
Casey:
But again, the whole point of this machine is to be super portable.
Casey:
And so what I ended up with was $80 worth of dongles and cables.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So the Lightning, I didn't mention previously, but I got a Lightning USB-C cable off Amazon, again, a knockoff.
Casey:
That was $8.
Casey:
The HDMI adapter, which is basically the same thing that Apple sells except a knockoff from Monoprice, that was $30.
Casey:
The SD card reader was $12, and the Ethernet thing was $30.
Casey:
And so that's a total of $80, roughly.
Casey:
I'll have links in the show notes.
Casey:
All of these seem to work fine.
Casey:
They're not terribly large.
Casey:
They seem to work okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
uh if this was my only computer i'd be really grumpy and bitter but since it's not and since i'm not going to be doing terribly challenging difficult tasks on it for the most part it's it's really not bad at all and i i can see where usbc will be pretty cool and the reason i can see that is i wanted to try out my hdmi cable and so i brought the the macbook adorable downstairs
Casey:
I hooked up an HDMI cable to the TV, hooked up that cable to the dongle, hooked up the dongle to the MacBook.
Casey:
And then I thought to myself, I wonder if I can power this all at the same time just to see, because I thought for a minute I would like maybe watch a movie off of it just to see if it would work.
Casey:
And it occurred to me, wait a second, my switch dock is right here, as is my pro controller charging cable.
Casey:
I wonder if, and sure enough, it wasn't actively charging the MacBook, but it was at least slightly keeping it afloat by taking the charging cable for the Pro Controller on the Switch, which I believe is USB-A to USB-C.
Casey:
as usb c and it seemed to work and i'm sure over hours it would eventually drain my battery but it was very wild that that was an acceptable way of doing things and additionally i was talking to underscore uh who has one of these as his travel computer as far as i'm aware anyway and he was saying that what you can do is you can issue the the actual charging brick that came with it which by the way to my eyes looks barely any bigger than the you the um
Casey:
the ipad charging brick that's been the ipad charging brick forever i understand that there's one that works with the ipad blah blah blah or the same one with the right cable that works with the ipad but this thing the charging brick is comically small well anyways uh what underscore was saying was just use like one of your anchor or whatever uh usba like hubs that does nothing but charge just let the thing run sit overnight suspended charging and it'll be just fine it'll be topped up by the morning
Casey:
And I don't know if I necessarily need to go to that route, but the fact that that's an option, that's super cool.
Casey:
So I can see how this USB-C lifestyle could be awesome, but it's definitely not 100% awesome yet.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Now, John, you haven't gotten your new computer for work yet, right?
John:
No, they notified me about it.
John:
They said, hey, we're going to buy the new ones.
John:
Guess what?
John:
And then they started giving me flack about wanting a one terabyte drive because it costs a bazillion dollars from Apple.
John:
So we're working on it.
Casey:
Why do you need a one terabyte drive for work?
John:
I've got a lot of virtual machines.
John:
They asked me the same question.
John:
Why do you need such a big drive?
John:
Do you have unlimited space on Microsoft OneDrive or blah, blah, blah?
John:
It's like, you don't want to run a virtual machine off of that.
John:
Why do you have so many virtual machines?
John:
Well, because I do.
John:
We're doing local development and you're doing it on a Mac.
Yeah.
John:
and docker runs in a virtual machine and i have virtual machines for other kinds of flavors of linux and it's just the way it is so you sound just like them what do you need all this stuff this is what i got as soon as you said vm the conversation was over for me and it's not yeah it's not just one vm and like try to convince them that you can't run a vm off like one drive or google drive i mean you could but it'll just be painful so we'll see how that goes but
Marco:
Also, one of the big reasons is you can never upgrade it.
Marco:
That is all the justification you need.
Marco:
If you are buying an Apple laptop, or at most Macs today, actually, if you're buying a Mac today that does not have upgradable storage, then the answer to why do you need the terabyte?
Marco:
is literally like you can never upgrade this so if you want this laptop to last however many years that you intend it to last you have to really get as much storage as you can afford because that is one like barrier to just run into and that's like you can never change it
John:
At work, they're never going to upgrade anything anyway.
John:
They don't care.
John:
My main pitch was like, look, the Mac I'm using right now is eight years old.
John:
Cut me a break here.
John:
I already saved the company a lot of money.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
Yeah, and I don't think I was specific, by the way, about what I ordered.
Casey:
And for the record, I ordered the basically maxed out MacBook Adorable because to build on what you were just saying, the conclusion I've come to is when buying a Mac, this may not be applicable to other manufacturers, but when buying a Mac,
Casey:
The order of operations is get as much RAM as you possibly can.
Casey:
That's step one.
Casey:
Step two is get as much disk space as you possibly can within your budget.
Casey:
And then step three, in my personal estimation, is get the biggest processor you possibly can given your budget.
Casey:
And I find that RAM makes the biggest difference, SSD because of all the reasons Marco just gave you, and then finally CPU because why not?
Casey:
And so I got a maxed out MacBook Adorable version.
Casey:
And it was not cheap, but it can do anything I want it to do.
Casey:
Maybe not with the speed I want it to.
Casey:
Because like I was saying, you know, transcoding something in FFmpeg is not fast.
Casey:
But it is otherwise, to me, a no-compromise machine.
Casey:
And that's really awesome.
Casey:
The only thing that I think is slightly a compromise that does make me jealous of my iPad mini is I kind of want cellular in it.
Casey:
I don't need it.
Casey:
I don't need it.
Casey:
It's really kind of frivolous.
Casey:
No, you do need it.
Casey:
It's kind of frivolous, but God, it would be so nice.
Marco:
No, it's not frivolous.
Marco:
It's 2017, for God's sake.
Marco:
Having cellular and laptops, which PCs did in 2005, this is not a ridiculous thing to ask for.
Marco:
This is something that a lot of people could use.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I've been getting it on iPads basically forever because it really does make iPads way, way more usable for people who are picky like me.
Marco:
And yes, I know tethering exists, and tethering has gotten way better than it used to be.
Marco:
It's way easier than it used to be to use.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
what to have cellular built in is way better and like like now the data plans are even are cheaper than ever and like when you have like a combined family plan like it only costs me 10 bucks a month to have my ipad on my cellular plan so and it's usually the same shared pool of massive data that i have from at&t for just another 10 bucks a month and that's great like
Marco:
So to me, it's a no-brainer on an iPad.
Marco:
And the second they release cellular laptops, if Apple ever does this, I will immediately trade in whatever laptop I have for a new one with cellular.
Marco:
That is how much I want that.
Casey:
It is such a big thing.
Casey:
It's one of those things that unless you experience having a Wi-Fi-only iPad and then having a cellular iPad, which is the exact path I went through, I don't think you'll ever really understand how much more convenient it is.
Casey:
Yes, I understand tethering is a thing.
Casey:
Yes, I'm aware that you can turn on tethering from the other device if they're all in the same iCloud account, yada, yada, yada.
Casey:
I am aware that it is as easy as it can possibly be to make tethering against another device work.
Casey:
I get it.
Casey:
But that will never, ever be as convenient as having the connection on the device you're on.
Casey:
It just won't.
Casey:
If you're sitting there and you have a furrowed brow and you're like, what is he talking about?
Casey:
No, I'm telling you, it's the way it is.
Casey:
Try it sometime.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like having to use a dial-up API, like a dial-up interface on your computer.
Marco:
Like, okay, connect to the tether.
Marco:
Now disconnect from the tether to save the battery on the tethering thing or to make it stop burning data in the background in my backpack.
Marco:
You have to manage it.
Marco:
It's still something you have to manage.
Marco:
You have to do.
Marco:
You have to sometimes wait for it.
Marco:
And you're still then draining the battery of your phone or having to plug it into one of your one USB ports.
Marco:
Everything about that is painful.
Marco:
That's another thing.
Marco:
Another reason I ran into with my laptop planning with the live show is that my backup option before I got to the venue, I was thinking...
Marco:
I might have to use tethering as the internet connection.
Marco:
And again, I'm not going to rely on wireless tethering in a room full of a thousand people with Apple devices.
Marco:
So I was going to use USB tethering.
Marco:
And I had to bring lightning cables with both types of USB ends so I could make sure that I'd be able to plug in with either the dongle or direct port or something.
Marco:
It's just friction.
Marco:
It's just all these things, they just add friction.
Marco:
The USB transition is adding friction.
Marco:
The fact that it still isn't like...
Marco:
No matter how much money you're willing to spend on dongles and new cables right now, you still can't fully transition to USB-C.
Marco:
So you're still going to be living in a mixed world for a long time, and it still sucks.
Marco:
And there's still these inconveniences like, okay, well, now my Ethernet adapter is USB-C, but now I can't plug it into a USB-A port if I ever have to use a hub or something that only outputs USB-A.
Marco:
There's going to be these problems forever, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
tethering versus built-in cellular is like a it's similar it's like it's just friction it's more friction and when there's friction you use things less or it gets in the way or sometimes it doesn't work like you know think like when it's built in it'll work every time when it's not built in when you're tethering like occasionally it won't work and that will be annoying or a problem for you like having it built in is just so much nicer yep i completely agree
John:
does your escape have thunderbolt yes you look into thunderbolt hubs to try to solve your because i know usb c hubs multipliers apparently aren't out there tipster hasn't delivered his promised one but uh like a thunderbolt hub that gives you ethernet and a bunch of usb ports and audio in and all the stuff you looked into that
Marco:
You know, I haven't yet.
Marco:
Maybe I should.
Marco:
I'm not sure any of those Thunderbolt hubs ever really were adopted by enough people to even know whether they suck or not.
Marco:
I would be hesitant to also invest in any kind of Thunderbolt 2 gear right now.
Marco:
And Thunderbolt 3 gear is probably still too young or not even out yet, depending.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, and I can't use it either because if I understand... Right, you don't have Thunderbolt.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
If I understand this whole kerfuffle correctly, I don't have Thunderbolt that I can get to externally.
Casey:
So for me, that's useless.
Casey:
I'm stuck with just straight USB-C.
Casey:
And I'm not saying, obviously, that that's true for everyone, but for me, it's USB-C or bust.
Casey:
And yeah, I mean...
Casey:
So far, I really love this thing.
Casey:
I'm traveling with it very, very soon, so we'll see what I think of it then.
Casey:
Part of the draw of getting such a small computer was on the plane back from DubDub, the person in front of me decided to recline, and I have very strong opinions about jerks, people who recline their seats in planes.
John:
Totally agreed.
Casey:
And when this person reclined their seat...
Casey:
There was no way for me to use my laptop, except perhaps reclining, but I'm a gentleman, so I wouldn't do that.
Casey:
There was no way to use my 15-inch laptop without giving myself horrible pain somewhere on my body.
Casey:
And as silly as it sounds, that two or three inches that that person infringed upon what is my space, damn it, that made the difference between me being able to use my computer and me not.
Casey:
Whereas this thing...
Casey:
I mean, it's almost an iPad.
Casey:
I could pretty much use it anywhere.
Casey:
And I just... I really, really love it.
Casey:
I'm super happy with it.
Casey:
The space gray is so darn good looking.
Casey:
I don't know why anyone would buy any other color.
Casey:
I love this thing.
Casey:
It definitely does have some problems here and there.
Casey:
It has some catches.
Casey:
It has some issues.
Casey:
Most notably, I do think even just one more USB-C port would make a world of difference.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Generally speaking, for the purpose this laptop exists in my world, which is to be an accessory, to be either a portable machine, to do everything in a pinch, or to just be an accessory so it doesn't have to do everything at all.
Casey:
It is pretty much perfect, and I am overjoyed with it.
Casey:
Now...
Casey:
Ask me again once I start getting some real time with one of the bigger iPads on iOS 11, and maybe I'm going to start having some buyer's remorse because this new stuff on iOS 11 does look darn good.
Casey:
But I don't think that will ever really change the fact that this computer can do everything I want it to do.
Casey:
Maybe not the speed at which I want it to do.
Casey:
Maybe not without a few dongles that I wish I didn't have to carry.
Casey:
But it can do literally everything I want it to do.
Casey:
Whereas an iPad, for me, either can't or can't do it without having a Mac nearby or having a keyboard nearby or without having any number of other things to support it.
Casey:
And while I deeply respect the Mikes and the Federicos and the Ben Brookses of the world who can figure out a way to make this technology work for them,
Casey:
For me, if I have to write a workflow, which again is one of the most mind-blowingly amazing apps written by unbelievably great, great people.
Casey:
If I have to write a workflow in order to get this device to do what I want it to do.
Casey:
then to me that it's already failed because I have to bend the device to my will.
Casey:
Whereas this computer, this tiny, adorable, darling little computer of mine can do everything right off the bat.
Casey:
And that's what's important to me.
John:
You know, they sell a ski racks for the top of cars.
Casey:
Mm hmm.
John:
They should sell that for MacBooks.
John:
Like it would just be like a ski rack for your MacBook and you just click on all your dongles, right?
John:
Yeah, right, right.
John:
I think that would really hammer home the point that Marco was getting at before, which is like you buy these computers that are super slim because portability is paramount, right?
John:
But then everybody needs to bring some other thing with them.
John:
to make the computer usable for them, and that some other thing compromises portability so much more than an extra millimeter would on the thing.
John:
Now, I suppose if you never need to bring anything, then you win the portability.
John:
Like, yes, thank God it's portable and smaller and light.
John:
But if you have to bring a single dongle, then it's like game over.
John:
And having an actual rack attached to the back of them would be a nice way to communicate to Apple, like, if that ever became a popular product.
John:
Like, look, you made this thing portable, but then we had to put a ski rack on it.
John:
Thanks a lot.
John:
Yeah, and that's the thing.
Marco:
Whenever Apple removes a port, we hear from people who say things like, well, you never use that anyway.
Marco:
Just now, 20 minutes ago, I was ranting about how no Macs have line-in ports anymore except the Mac Mini.
Marco:
The reasoning behind that, that almost any Apple fan would come up with in two seconds because it isn't that hard to come up with this reason, is, well, most people don't use that.
Marco:
I have one.
Marco:
I've never used it.
Marco:
That's what everyone says.
Marco:
Whenever Apple removes something that I like, everyone else says, well, I've never used that port.
Marco:
But for everyone, that's different.
Marco:
So one thing that I would say about that with all my previous laptops is that I've never used the HDMI port.
Marco:
But a lot of people do use the HDMI port.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
Even when I say I've never used the HDMI port, that's probably wrong.
Marco:
I've probably used it once or twice.
Marco:
And during those once or twice times, I bet I was really glad I had it.
Marco:
And a line-in jack for audio, this is one of those things where it's like, it isn't that hard to add.
Marco:
They already have the entire USB audio codec chip in these computers anyway.
Marco:
It would cost them almost nothing additional.
Marco:
And while most people don't usually use it,
Marco:
Sometimes people use it.
Marco:
And during those times, it's really nice to have it.
Marco:
And I would say the same thing about so many other features.
Marco:
Like, I never use the front-facing camera on any of my things.
Marco:
But a lot of people do, so it's fine.
Marco:
I never use many of the capabilities.
Marco:
Most people don't use all of the capabilities of the computers and the computer devices they have.
Marco:
That does not mean that the correct design decision is to get rid of everything.
Marco:
There's this obsession with getting rid of things, minimizing things, deleting things, erasing things.
Marco:
The reality is these are general purpose devices and the more they can do, the more useful they're going to be to people, the more they're going to help people, the more often they're going to be able to do what people need them to do with the equipment they already have without buying a bunch of dongles and having them with you all the time.
Marco:
I wish that Apple would have the courage, and I'm using this word deliberately here, have the courage to say yes sometimes.
Marco:
To have the courage to say, you know what, even though most people don't use, say, the SD card slot, for the people that do, that's incredibly useful, and it's not really being a problem for us to keep it there, so let's keep it there.
Marco:
Or how about maybe if we're going to have a whole new line of computers that is reducing the number of ports it has down to almost nothing, how about we give people the most of that port that we possibly can?
Marco:
And maybe they are now.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know the details about Thunderbolt bandwidth and stuff.
Marco:
But I feel like Apple needs to...
Marco:
step back a little bit from the obsession with removing things because it really does overall make these things less useful in times and people don't expect that or don't welcome that or we have to patch over over these wonderful beautiful objects with things like dongle bags in our in our bags that now we have to carry these additional things and
Marco:
Spend the 80 plus dollars on all these additional adapters that we didn't need before.
Marco:
With the computers that we bought a few years ago, we didn't need a dongle to do this common thing.
Marco:
And now we do.
Marco:
And so have we really made progress?
Marco:
Like that sounds worse to me.
Marco:
There's nothing wrong with a computer having a capability that most of its customers don't use.
Marco:
If it's not costing you a lot to have it there, if it's not causing some kind of big problem, what's the big deal with having it there for the time when someone does need it?
Marco:
And then they can be happily delighted that, oh, my computer can do this new thing that I need to do suddenly right now that I didn't predict or plan for or buy a dongle for ahead of time.
Marco:
What's so bad about that?
Casey:
I think the answer is to get rid of them simplifies things.
Casey:
To get rid of them makes things smaller and thinner.
Casey:
And as much as I am 100% behind you on thinness being a bad thing for phones, like we could stand to have our phones get a little thicker.
Casey:
And you've been saying that for a long time, and I agree with you.
Casey:
In this case, though, I have to concede that this thing being as thin and light as it is, it's pretty nice.
Casey:
That's exactly why I bought it.
Marco:
Well, yeah, and there's differences here.
Marco:
I'm not saying that the one super thin, super light computer in the lineup has to have a million ports on it because obviously that actually doesn't have the room for it.
Marco:
But I'm talking about, like, you know, okay, I got over them removing Ethernet a while ago because, well, Ethernet's really big, you know, so that makes sense.
Marco:
But, like, SD cards and audio jacks and stuff are pretty small.
Marco:
Like, you can fit those in thin bodies.
Marco:
It isn't a problem.
Marco:
Like, that's... A lot of these things seem to have been removed just because they thought...
Marco:
people didn't use them enough anymore or they were tired of shipping them or something like and okay but you know i i i really it's it's hard it's hard to tell whether some of these things were removed for good reasons that benefit the customers or for reasons that only benefit apple
John:
Or they benefit nobody.
John:
We all know they just need to add a second USB port to the adorable, and they need to add an SD card reader to the big, giant, expensive 15-inch, and then maybe put four ports on the Escape, and we're all happy.
John:
We're not asking for the moon here.
John:
Again, you're not going to put an Ethernet port on these things, but if you had four USB-C on the Escape, you'd be able to get over a lot of the weird USB-C ecosystems.
John:
You'd be like, well, whatever.
John:
I'll get four dongles and plug them all in and have power.
John:
right and on on the escape you know it is super thin you don't have room for much of anything but you know how about a second second port you know maybe a third if you can fit on that that's fine and on the big giant 15 inch that has everything in it sd card plus five usbc who's going to complain about that
John:
You'd probably still complain about the audio end being missing, although I think any analog input at this point is crazy.
John:
So it would have to be the optical one with a little light at the end of the thing.
Marco:
They got rid of optical, too, in all the new MacBook Pros.
Marco:
It used to be the hybrid jack that has the optical out.
Marco:
They have also the iMacs getting rid of them, too, which is unfortunate because I use mine.
Marco:
But, oh, well.
Marco:
I only pick certain battles.
John:
Yeah, I think they're saying that the, you know, digital audio through USB is the way to go.
John:
Like I said, I'm all on board with the USB-C as they are tiny.
John:
Just please give us more of them.
John:
Or I suppose Apple can come up with some kind of reliable hub because, you know, I suggest the Thunderbolt hub is a solution to your problem.
John:
But...
John:
You know, it's not the type of thing you'd want to order a week before going to WWC and cross your fingers that the thing doesn't flake out because, as we all know, hubs are notoriously flaky.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It would be nice if Apple didn't leave this as a third-party opportunity for those things.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know they're close like i think the lines are close on on you know their laptop lines are close on the things they're including and again like i said a couple shows ago i'm glad they put usba on the imac because it's not like there's not room for it back there plenty room and boy isn't it convenient to not have even more dongles hanging off the back of your fancy new imac um and i'm still pinning my hopes on those statements that whoever was said during the mac roundtable about the mac pro that
John:
They're thinking about MacBook Pros that address some of the customer's needs.
John:
The easy answer is, guess what?
John:
You already saw those.
John:
They announced them at WWDC.
John:
How do you like them?
John:
But I'm still holding out.
John:
They meant they're going to add SD card to the 15-inch, right?
John:
Right, Phil?
Marco:
Tell me.
Marco:
I wouldn't count on that.
John:
Oh, it could happen.
John:
There's so much room for it there.
Marco:
Also, one thing I want to argue about your Thunderbolt hub thing for a second here.
Marco:
So people in the chat pasted this link to apparently Belkin did make a Thunderbolt 3 hub.
Marco:
So first of all, it's $350.
Marco:
And this is not just the one time.
Marco:
Almost every Thunderbolt hub that has ever existed that actually is Thunderbolt-based and not just USB, they're almost all $300 range in that ballpark.
Marco:
So the reason this is not a solution, number one, is that it's very expensive.
Marco:
Number two is that it adds all ports that aren't USB-C ports.
Marco:
It adds USB-A ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and then two Thunderbolt 2 ports.
Marco:
Well, who needs that?
Marco:
If you're moving to this new ecosystem, you want Thunderbolt 3 devices that use USB-C.
Marco:
And on top of that, it needs its own giant power supply.
Marco:
And let me tell you, just as a geek wisdom thing, one of the biggest reasons why many peripherals or things like peripherals, why they often fail or suck is crappy or unreliable AC, DC power supplies.
Marco:
Basically, if your thing is not bus powered, if it is powered by its own external power brick, not only does that make your desk and stuff messier, but also it is way more likely to suck or fail because those power bricks are crap.
Marco:
They're always crap.
Marco:
And the one thing you do not want is to rely on one of those power bricks or to introduce them into your setup and cause possible like, you know, noise or interference.
Marco:
They always suck.
Marco:
They're always cheap pieces of crap.
Marco:
And so anything you can do to avoid needing external power into a peripheral, you will be better off for it.
Marco:
But that also means that USB hubs are often either unpowered, which sucks when you plug in devices and not enough power, or they need these things, or they only have like two ports.
Marco:
So it's like any of these hub solutions almost always suck.
Marco:
The way to make the USB-C ecosystem not suck is to A, just have as many of these ports on the computers as you can fit and as the chipset can power and drive.
Marco:
Step one, try to avoid the need for hubs at all.
Marco:
Because the correct answer, if you're arguing for the USB-C future slash, now it's really the present, if you're arguing for the USB-C world, you should be totally accommodating and it should be awesome for people who are willing to go out and buy USB-C everything.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Look, Casey, you bought a new laptop.
Marco:
I bought my laptop.
Marco:
I went out and I bought a USB-C Ethernet adapter and a USB-C SD card reader and USB-C Lightning cables.
Marco:
I'm like, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to go all in.
Marco:
I'm going to get all USB-C stuff.
Marco:
But if you do that now, it still sucks because there's still no, like, USB-C port multiplier hubs out there, as we said earlier.
Marco:
So, like, you still have to live in this weird mixed world and you're dealing with all these unreliable hubs with crappy Amazon reviews that are made by no-name companies.
Marco:
And even the ones from good companies like Anchor have terrible reviews.
Marco:
And it's like...
Marco:
It just seems like this whole world of USB-C relies currently today on this ecosystem of crappy hubs that kind of ruin the whole thing once you go beyond the ports in your computer.
Marco:
And so what we need is for the computers to need fewer hubs, A, by having more ports, and B, we need good hubs.
Marco:
And I know this is not an exciting topic, but...
Marco:
Think about how long it took to find good USB 3.0 hubs with USB-A ports on them.
Marco:
I don't know if you guys have good ones.
Marco:
It took me like two years to find a good USB 3.0 hub that didn't flake out and disconnect drives randomly that were plugged into it and stuff like that.
Marco:
Still today, USB 3.0, which is now comparably ancient, very few hubs are good.
Marco:
But there are a few that exist.
Marco:
We need good USB-C hubs now.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell from the world out there, I don't think we have any that actually give you more USB-C ports, let alone good ones.
Marco:
And the ones that give you different ports, again, as I mentioned, they don't seem to be consistently good.
Marco:
And so if this world is going to happen, if this is going to actually take off, we need those two things.
Marco:
We need more ports in the laptops and we need great hubs.
Marco:
And until that happens, it's going to be really a pain to have a USB-C devices.
Marco:
And that's why I kind of feel like, would it kill Apple to make a good hub?
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
I know it's the most boring Apple product in the world, but they make boring stuff sometimes.
Marco:
Like, all their little adapters and cables.
Marco:
Like, they make other boring stuff.
Marco:
That would enable this.
Marco:
Like, if Apple just made, like, a decent, like, you know, one to four USB-C hub, that would be great.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Because I think we have seen the entire rest of the electronics world.
Marco:
They have shown us over the last decade, they can't do this.
Marco:
They cannot do this reliably.
Marco:
The entire consumer electronics industry is not capable of putting out reliable USB hubs.
Marco:
We're lucky if we can find one model of one sometimes that works for a while.
Marco:
For God's sakes, Apple, just give us a USB hub.
Marco:
That's all we need.
Marco:
ATP tipster, you're our only hope.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Away, and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C
Casey:
So we didn't actually complete follow-up yet.
Marco:
Of course we didn't.
Casey:
Will we ever complete follow-up?
Marco:
Is it even a possible thing?
Casey:
If John has his way, the only way we complete follow-up is by ceasing to record the show anymore.
Casey:
In any case, we have one piece of follow-up that we did not cover but is very important, and it is WWDC breakfast.
Casey:
So Rich has written in and said, I had donuts at WWDC breakfast three out of five days this year.
Casey:
Maybe they were gone when you arrived, John.
John:
That shows that they're insufficient donuts.
John:
Because if they're gone, I feel like I was coming at the same time as I show up every year, and it's not the very first person in line, but I'm not super late either.
John:
You need to have enough donuts for everybody.
John:
I know that means there's a lot of donuts, but you've got to do what you've got to do.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I would also like to thank our listeners.
Casey:
I have gotten a surprisingly small amount of flack about my completely embarrassing Philadelphia cream cheese incident, and I appreciate you guys taking pity on me.
Casey:
So thank you.
Marco:
Yeah, it is summer break, though, for a lot of people.
Marco:
I bet a lot of people haven't gotten to the episode yet.
Casey:
That's possible.
Casey:
Give them time.
Casey:
And speaking of getting flack, one of the three of us was very bitter a couple of days ago.
Casey:
And one of the three of us had committed the ultimate ATP sin, which is not getting title case correct.
Casey:
Because I tell you, the audio could be totally garbage in an episode, and that would be less offensive to one of my co-hosts than the title case being incorrect.
John:
That is not the case at all.
John:
I can care about more than one thing at once.
John:
I like good audio quality.
John:
I also like...
John:
correct title case those two things it was particularly frustrating because we discussed on the show hey don't forget to use title case which letters should be capital just use the website and then marco decided you know what i don't like what the website said i have different opinions about what title case should be and he changed the title and i see it in my feed with the capital f and four and it just stabs my eyes like daggers
John:
so anyway i'm blaming marco for this if you look at the title of our show and said boy these guys don't know how to use title case no just marco yep it is i take full responsibility i i looked at the way it was capitalized and i thought that does not look right that's exactly how grammar works you're right you did it
John:
This word doesn't look like it's spelled right.
Marco:
I'm going to change it.
Marco:
First of all, spelling and stylistic capitalization are very different things.
Marco:
Secondly, there are many rules of both grammar and for things like style manuals for publications.
Marco:
Many rules that, with permission, you sometimes can break.
Marco:
If you know what you're doing,
Marco:
And you like, you know, you're breaking the rule, but you decide like the rule is wrong here.
Marco:
You can break them.
John:
You've drifted from all right, stylistic breaks and know what you're doing to just deciding that the rule is wrong.
John:
And there's two different things.
John:
I feel like one is like there's competing belief systems that you understand the nuances of and you choose among them.
John:
And the other is, I don't know too much about this, but that seems wrong to me.
Marco:
So for listeners who are not aware of looking at the list of episodes, basically the title of the last episode was, what was for suckers?
Marco:
Something was for suckers?
John:
Scrolling.
Marco:
Smooth Scrolling is for suckers.
Marco:
And titlecase.com, the website that we've used that we agreed upon is our title case capitalization authority.
Marco:
It capitalizes in the phrase title case or smooth scrolling is for suckers.
Marco:
It capitalizes the is and not the for.
Marco:
because for i guess i guess it probably has a rule not to capitalize prepositions but to always capitalize verbs that's my guess right um so is is the verb so you capitalize that but then for you don't and i thought having every single word capitalized in that and not the four looked wrong like having the is capitalized and not the four and i tried making both of them lowercase but that looked that didn't look right either
Marco:
And I made both of them capital, and that looked the least wrong of all the things that we had.
John:
The thing with style guides is you have agreed-upon set of rules that you use, and you can change the style guide, but you can't say, for this instance, I'm going to ignore the style guide, because why even have the style guide then?
John:
So, you know, it's like...
John:
consistency and and titlecase.com i do not hold up as like it's not how i would capitalize it either like i would do it differently if i was how you know but this was just the tiebreaker it's like to make casey's life easy so he doesn't have to guess and we don't have to discuss it just go to this website and the website's going to do stuff that we don't agree with but it's just consistent are you not able to deviate from the thing that you've decided is consistent if you think it's wrong
John:
But I think it's wrong, too.
John:
I would do lowercase i and lowercase f. That's what I would have done.
John:
But I deferred to the website.
Marco:
And I would have settled for that.
Marco:
All I decided was that capital I lowercase f looked wrong.
Marco:
And either they should both be lowercase or they should both be capital.
John:
Anyway, I just wanted to assign blame.
John:
That's all.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
It's totally my fault.
Marco:
I overrode it.
Marco:
And I knew you would be mad.
Marco:
And I made a calculated risk.
John:
You think I wouldn't notice?
John:
No, no, no.
Marco:
I knew you would notice.
Marco:
There was no chance you were not going to notice.
Marco:
But it was a calculated risk based on, like, I think John is relatively happy with me as much as he can be these days.
John:
uh i think i can probably get away with doing this maybe once a year and this seems like a good time to do it because the way that the titlecase.com did this looks so bad to me so i decided to spend the rest of the year making your piece with titlecase.com as i have because again it's not the way i would capitalize either you have to make your piece with it and casey can spend the rest of the year working on his comma usage i wonder if i could buy it and just change it oh yeah where where was there a an aggressive amount of commas and what what did you have to repair
John:
I didn't repair anything.
John:
I just left it as is.
John:
But, like, all right, so what do we got here for commas?
John:
You mean in the show notes?
John:
Yeah, in some sense.
Marco:
So for the listeners, so Casey usually writes all or almost all of the show notes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
John's ancient, slow, Mac Pro.
John:
Oh, yeah, it shouldn't be after slow.
John:
That should be gone.
John:
That's right.
John:
i don't know i i i'm not gonna argue that it's i i stand by it still looks right to me sitting here today no you're ruining my argument this is the new rule for english written languages does it look right to marco or casey no this rule number that is just wrong it's all right no no one reads the show notes anyway it's fine but a lot of people do read the title so