Just Smush the Screen Somewhere
John:
It would shoot it out about halfway, like kind of a tongue sticking out of your mouth.
John:
It would make this little noise.
John:
And then it would pop out.
Casey:
Okay, we can get started as always with follow-up.
Casey:
And approximately one-tenth of the internet, I counted, wrote in to tell us about a drag-and-drop replacement.
Casey:
If you recall, I spoke about drag-and-drop last week, and it was a thing where if you wiggle your mouse, you get kind of a shelf, for lack of a better term, where you can store things temporarily and then drag them off of that shelf into somewhere else.
Casey:
So it allows for you to...
Casey:
you know, manipulate your computer rather than having to commit to a drag start to finish all in one shot.
Casey:
And a bunch of people wrote in very helpfully and suggested Yoink, which I have installed.
Casey:
There is a demo outside of the App Store.
Casey:
I installed it, ran the demo for about a day, realized this is pretty much as close to drag and drop as I can possibly get without actually being drag and drop.
Casey:
And so I then purchased it for $7 from the Mac App Store, and it is quite good.
Casey:
Yoink basically allows you to have a shelf, not unlike drag and drop.
Casey:
In some ways, it's actually better than drag and drop because it allows you to put multiple things on the shelf.
Casey:
Whereas my recollection of drag and drop was that basically it was one item and that's it.
Casey:
Or, you know, like one collection of items.
Casey:
Basically, one drag operation into the shelf was all you got.
Casey:
Whereas with Yoink, you can put several different things in the shelf all at once.
Casey:
You can drag them out as one unit or drag them out as individual units, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
It's very, very good.
Casey:
I like it a lot.
Casey:
Pro tip in the preferences, which I don't have in front of me and I'm not going to try to dig up, but there's a way to say rather than having the shelf appear on one of the edges of the screen, you can have it appear very near where the drag is happening, which is a faux replacement for the wiggle the mouse approach of drag and drop, which I loved.
Casey:
So yeah, having used Yoink for all of two or three days, two thumbs up from me.
Marco:
I wonder if the reason why drag and drop in our business was that it's impossible to talk about on a podcast without saying the animal dragon and the word drop, not drag dash and dash drop.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
To clarify all these things.
Casey:
But yeah, it's good stuff.
Casey:
So I definitely recommend it.
Casey:
And like I said, there's a demo if you want to try it out for a little bit.
Casey:
We'll put both a link to the developer's website where you can grab the demo and the app store link in the show notes.
Casey:
So several of you wrote in to encourage John Syracuse to talk about old Mac stuff, which is almost as bad as encouraging Stephen Hackett to talk about old Mac stuff.
Casey:
So let's talk about old Mac stuff.
Casey:
John, tell me about old Mac menu UI, if you please.
John:
This is a quickie.
John:
We talked about it last show, the old Mac way of doing menus in the menu bar, having to hold down the mouse button.
John:
And many people wrote in to tell me a thing that I guess they think I didn't know, but maybe other people don't know as well, that you can continue to do that in case that wasn't clear from the discussion last show.
John:
you can continue to use the menus the old way because, of course, that way still works.
John:
Like, it is kind of a subset of the regular way.
John:
So go try it right now if you want to feel like you're living in the days before, I'm going to say...
John:
mac os 8 mac os 7.6 i don't know if someone in the chat room can look up when uh the mac operating system switched to the windows style of clicking on menus and they stay down but anyway the window i love the way you say it the windows style it is i mean there's i mean i guess you could say it's an x windows system style some some x x windows manager probably
John:
did it before windows and next probably did it before windows i don't know anyway it certainly wasn't the mac style the mac style was the mac style from the very beginning uh anyway you can continue to do it the old way if you want to some people have continued to do it the old way i thought i was going to continue to do it the old way in the same way that i continue to remap command n to create a new folder because
John:
You know, I tried it the other way, didn't like it.
John:
Some habits die hard, but I totally switched to the Windows mouse technique way as soon as they added it.
John:
Not by any conscious choice.
John:
It just happened, and that's just the way it is.
John:
But some people wrote in to say, hey, I'm still doing it the old way.
John:
So it works for some people.
John:
So anyway, give it a try.
Casey:
All right, so to keep with the theme, Jira Cox writes in and says, I'm 33 and have used most Macs since the PowerBook 160.
Casey:
I've never even heard of, quote, floppy auto-inject, quote.
Casey:
When would you use that?
John:
So we talked about floppy auto-inject and eject last show.
John:
Floppy auto-eject is pretty self-explanatory.
John:
Macs, from the beginning...
John:
could eject their own floppy disk there was no button that you would press to make the disk come out through software through the operating system you would do something to make the disk be ejected like select disk and then select eject from the file menu or wherever the hell it was and the disk would come popping out not all the way like in the mac portable in space shooting the disk out because we have gravity here and friction that caused by that gravity as the floppy the floppy disk rubs against the lower parts of the apparatus but anyway um
John:
It would shoot out about halfway, like kind of a tongue sticking out of your mouth.
John:
It would make this little noise.
John:
And then it would pop out.
John:
That is perfect.
John:
I've heard that noise, and that is perfect.
John:
I heard that sound a lot.
John:
Having an original Macintosh with one floppy drive, and so you'd have the operating system on one floppy, and then you'd have the application and the data on the other floppy, so you'd boot from the operating system floppy.
John:
And then you'd eject that, a ghost image of that disk would stay on your desktop.
John:
So the computer still knew that was there, but you would eject it, but not unmount it.
John:
Then you would stick in, like, say, the Mac Paint floppy disk, which can contain Mac Paint plus maybe five or ten of your own images, you know, the app plus your files.
John:
and you'd have to do this floppy disk dance of operating system disk, application disk, whenever the computer asked for it.
John:
And the computer would ask for it by spitting out one disk and saying, please insert the disk, system disk.
John:
And you would take out whatever disk it just spit out and put the system disk in.
John:
Then it would ask for the application disk back and forth and back and forth.
John:
Being able to do that...
John:
The floppy swap of taking out the one that it has auto-ejected and putting in the other one with one hand was a very important skill for Mac users.
John:
Because then you could have the mouse or the keyboard or be doing whatever and also be swapping the disk back and forth.
John:
It got a little bit ridiculous at certain points.
John:
Anyway, that's auto-eject.
John:
Auto-inject is the more subtle and therefore the more valuable attribute of Mac floppy drives.
John:
which was when you took a disc this had to do with the switching back and forth auto eject meant that you didn't have to like press a button like the disc was already there you could just grab it an inch of the thing was already sticking out of the thing auto inject meant when you stuck a floppy disc in you wouldn't have to like you did on a pc shove the three and a half inch floppy all the way in like in and down kind of like a nintendo cartridge right an nes cartridge like you didn't have to shove it all the way in and down
John:
It was so much work.
Casey:
Oh, it was just egregious, Marco.
Casey:
Do you remember the pain we went through?
John:
Yeah.
John:
What you would do instead is you would push the floppy disk in, and just as you were getting towards the end of the travel when the edge of the disk would start to be flush with the edge of the case, the drive would pull the disk out of your hand.
John:
It was just a spring-loaded mechanism.
John:
It wasn't complicated.
John:
It would suck the disk in.
John:
So you'd just have to push it in and give it a little flick, and it would go, and it would just stick in by itself.
John:
So you didn't have to take the disc out yourself by pressing a button, and you didn't have to shove the disc all the way in and down.
John:
It would pull the thing.
John:
It's kind of like the Mercedes, whatever, auto soft-closing car doors.
Marco:
Yeah, soft-close car doors.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But it wasn't soft.
John:
You know, Mercedes is not the only car that offers that feature.
John:
I think they were the first one with the S-Class many, many years ago.
John:
But anyway, it was not soft.
John:
This was a very, very hard thing.
John:
And since I had, you know, the only thing I had used before the Mac...
John:
were five and a quarter floppies, which, you know, you just slide in and turn that little knob thingy down, right?
John:
There's no... They didn't go in and down.
John:
They just slid directly in and they were actually floppy, right?
John:
So I had never used a three and a half inch floppy that wasn't an auto-inject and eject until like the first time like I encountered a PC that used them.
John:
Maybe it was like the PS2 or whatever.
John:
Whenever PC makers finally started bundling three and a half inch drives.
John:
And it was just so gross because, you know, you got the...
John:
Wait for the light to stop blinking and press the eject button and cross your fingers.
John:
That's on the eject side.
John:
And then on the inject side, I would push the disc in and it would just come bouncing back at me.
John:
I'd be like, is this thing broken?
John:
Push it in.
John:
Oh, it just comes bouncing back.
John:
It's like, no, you have to shove it all the way in.
John:
Anyway, that's auto-inject and it was awesome.
Marco:
I love that we've become like the podcast all about USB ports and floppy drives.
Marco:
That's the most important parts of computing, the most relevant for today's audience.
Casey:
Do you know when you see a BMW driver on the road and they're driving aggressively, not using their turn signals and just generally living up to the BMW stereotype?
Casey:
You know that moment where you're like, you know what?
Casey:
Yeah, those are jerks.
Casey:
Well, then you hear John Syracuse talk about how egregious it was to use a PC floppy disk drive back in the 90s.
Casey:
And you think, yeah, those Mac guys, they were kind of obnoxious about the Mac.
John:
Well, it's hard not to be obnoxious when you have something so much better that everyone says is worse.
Casey:
My eyes just rolled right the hell out of my head.
John:
The thing about auto-inject and eject, though, is Apple didn't make these drives.
John:
They're sourced from Sony or whoever makes them, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Every PC vendor could have had auto eject and inject.
John:
The eject part was you needed OS support for that because that was just a philosophical and technical difference of like, does the OS manage when the disc is unmounted or does the user manage it?
John:
And you know what Microsoft chose there.
John:
But auto inject could have been added to PCs and probably was on a bunch of PCs.
John:
It's just that PC makers, you know, ever pinching those pennies,
John:
would not spend two cents to add a feature like that, which in the days of swapping floppy disks was a huge quality of life difference, but there's no way they would buy the fancier drive that would do that because everything had to be as cheap as possible.
John:
That's why PCs suck.
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I got to say, you know I'm a sucker for any kind of cool, like, fancy little luxury feature.
Marco:
But auto-inject and eject just never crossed that barrier for me where both the hassle of pushing a floppy disk into the drive and pushing a small button to eject it.
Marco:
was never a big deal to me.
Marco:
And then having it be entirely software-based and having to do software ejects on the Mac always was more of a hindrance to me.
Marco:
And I recognize things like you mentioned about unmounting the disk.
Marco:
I recognize why it's useful to have that be software-driven or software be involved.
John:
but the fact is that it's worse as a user to to have that be software based and then have all these additional parts that could fail in the drive like the drives did not fail first of all someone asked that in the thing no they did not fail and my entire life of max with floppy drives not a single one ever failed in any way no part of it inject eject the reading no part of the drive ever failed
John:
I had a lot of Macs with floppy drives.
Marco:
I'm curious to know whether on a large scale there was a meaningful difference in failure rates.
Marco:
I feel like my lifetime usage of Macs represents a large scale.
John:
It probably does.
John:
But I've never heard of a PC floppy drive failing.
John:
Never.
John:
Never.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a generally reliable thing.
John:
Like, I'm not saying the non-auto-injector ejects won't fail, too.
John:
I just think it's a very, very chunky, reliable piece.
John:
And they got so much use.
John:
I mean, you know it was like swapping floppy disks.
John:
They were pretty solid.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Lewis Garberg writes in to say that I guess we as an Apple considered naming the Damon for this is DYLD.
Casey:
We considered naming the Damon DYLDD for a while, but settled on ClosureD.
Casey:
Naming is one of the hardest problems in CS.
John:
He's the one who gave the presentation or part of the presentation on DYLD3 at WWDC.
John:
I think his last name is Gerbarg, not Garberg.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Anyway, you can watch the presentation and see and or hear him.
John:
I forget if he appears in the video.
John:
But yeah, DYLDD was on the table.
John:
Sadly, not chosen.
Casey:
Why is that so sad?
John:
Because it would have been funny.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, John, why don't you cover this next piece of follow-up for me?
John:
Here's another difficult name you're trying to get me to pronounce.
John:
I can't pronounce the first name.
John:
This is a problem.
Casey:
I'm going to go with Yuba.
John:
Anyway, this is someone linking to a blog post.
John:
I'm assuming this person works at Automatic, the company that is the same company that makes the box that you put in the old Dirty Bastard port on your cars.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
You don't even try to say his name?
Marco:
Is there a name?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I let Casey do it.
Marco:
It's probably something like Luba Milikovic.
Marco:
Wow, that was pretty good.
John:
Did you cheat with the internet?
John:
No, I'm just guessing.
John:
All right.
John:
I'm impressed.
John:
Maybe it wasn't pretty good.
John:
Anyway, I'm sorry.
John:
I apologize.
John:
This thing was added while those two were talking on the live streams.
John:
I'm a little bit behind in show notes today.
John:
I talked about Automatic, how they just cut their iOS apps launch time in half.
John:
and how do they do it obviously dold3 isn't like out for everybody yet they're talking about like their existing ios app they did it the old-fashioned way based on some advice they got from a wwc 2016 talk it's like hey if your app is taking a long time to launch and you use a lot of dynamic libraries actually you may be spending a lot of your time in the whole part that happens before main is called where it figures out all the dynamic libraries and loads them and loads all their symbols and
John:
does all the uh code signature verification all sorts of other stuff that happens before your code even begins executing and to avoid that you can take all that stuff and compile it into one giant static framework that's a part of your executable and you can skip all those steps and that's exactly what they did which is not really what you probably want to do because you know it's convenient from both a development perspective and also obviously when you're dynamically linking to system libraries it's necessary um
John:
uh to not have everything compiled into a giant static binary uh and so they talk about in this blog post what they had to do to make that happen it will be better if they can say oh we don't have all this hack that we did to put everything into one giant static library we don't have to do that anymore in ios 11 because uh closure d not do a ldd uh will do all this caching for us and instead
John:
on startup on the second time we start up we'll just say we'll just ask closure d hey do you do all that look up stuff for us good just give us the answers and then we'll continue from there uh but either way it's interesting blog post we will link it in the show notes and they they break it down into like how much time was spent doing dynamic library loading rebasing and binding for for all the addresses and everything and they have an other category and you can see how they uh they cut it down so
John:
People are trying to, I guess I maybe underestimated exactly how much time is spent in the dynamic linker for large, complicated applications versus how much time is spent like in your application, launching, loading, all sorts of resources and other things like that.
Casey:
All right, Walter writes in, any ideas how Apple will handle the transition to new file formats on older Macs that don't support hardware encoding and decoding of H.265?
Casey:
What will happen with users who have a mixture of old and new devices like a brand new iPhone and a four-year-old Mac?
Casey:
How's that going to work?
Marco:
Well, we already have some indication of this because if you happen to have installed the beta on your phone and have taken any pictures with your phone and you don't have the beta on your Mac of Hi Sierra, then you can see what happens in the photos app where it actually is handled somewhat gracefully.
Marco:
It downloads the Heaf version as the photo.
Marco:
And it's able to show you a render of it as a JPEG in some kind of fallback mode.
Marco:
But if it's a live photo, it can't play it.
Marco:
And if you try to export the original or do any kind of meaningful operation on it, it says something along the lines of the full resolution version of this is in a format that isn't supported.
Marco:
So it actually does, like, you know, it has all these HEF files sitting there that are being synced over from the phone running on iOS 11, but the Mac Photos app on whatever version I'm running that's not... Hi, Sierra.
Marco:
What is this?
Marco:
Regular?
Marco:
Yeah, regular Sierra.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
lose track when they shape that now they're changing names every year i lose track i like forget entire mountains and stuff uh but anyway um so that's that's how they're doing it so far uh we'll see like the other like they they try to be smart about things like in share sheets and ios like they like they'll share out a jpeg or they'll share out you know presumably for video they'll probably share out an h.264 mp4 file or something like that
Marco:
So they're trying to be smart about it, but in certain places, if you have some devices that are upgraded and some that aren't, it's just going to be little bumps in the road like this.
John:
I think you can't actually export H.265.
John:
I remember one of the sessions talking about that, like your export options if you use their framework.
John:
The only option is H.264.
John:
That's a subtle way of encouraging you, hey, if you're about to share this out somewhere, don't even try to do H.265.
John:
This question, though, is specifically about Macs that don't support hardware encoding and decoding of H.265.
John:
What will they do?
John:
Well, we've seen this before with Macs that didn't support hardware encoding and decoding of H.264 back when that was a thing, because most of them do these days.
John:
But a long time ago, they didn't.
John:
And the same thing happens with every video codec, whether it's, what was the one that, what was the cool one in the era of the blue and white G3, the cool video codec?
John:
DivX?
John:
No, no, like the QuickTime one.
John:
Like, QuickTime always had a choice of, like, which codecs you want, and they would add new ones.
John:
Oh, yeah, it was called MoV.
Marco:
Come on.
John:
Oh, this is going to kill me.
Marco:
I mean, MPEG-4 is pretty old.
Marco:
Before H.264, there was regular MPEG-4 video.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
It's not what I'm thinking of.
John:
It was a codec that Apple was really excited about and would promote.
John:
as as their fancy their sorensen there we go someone got it finally anyway uh back when sorensen came out it's like what if my or you know h264 is better example because that is hardware support for that what if you can't support it well your video playback is choppy or you can't play it at all worth a damn like it you know it will fall back to software so for h265 apple is supporting decoding on like every mac they sell obviously and
John:
and lots of old Macs, too.
John:
And there is a software fallback if you don't have hardware, because a lot of Macs don't have hardware.
John:
In fact, most Macs don't have hardware for it.
John:
And will the software fallback be fast enough?
John:
You can find out now.
John:
Go find an H.265 movie in an MKV format off the back of whatever truck you want to find it on, and try to play it.
John:
And if it is reasonable resolution, and you play it in MPlay or X for Mac or whatever, it'll play fine.
John:
But you'll find one that's like 4K or even in some things 1080p,
John:
And you'll try to play it in M player or VLC or whatever, and it will be choppy and it will drop frames and it will be crappy.
John:
But in general, I think Apple's software implementation of H.265 encoding and decoding will be just fine for any reasonably modern Mac.
John:
But just like the H.264 changeover did leave behind some Macs that could play MPEG-4 video perfectly fine in the days before or MPEG-2 or whatever,
John:
and had trouble with H.264 without any hardware to help it out for really big videos, that will happen, but it will be fine.
John:
I wouldn't be worried about this.
John:
If you don't remember the super painful transition to H.264, you also won't remember the super painful transition to H.265.
John:
If anything, H.265 transition will be easier because I think we'll see the hardware support for it come online sooner because a lot of the hardware that's used to do it is similar enough to H.265 decoding that we already have
John:
close analogs to it.
John:
So I think the hardware vendors won't, it won't be too painful to add the hardware to do H265 decoding.
John:
It's already in the newer chips.
John:
Oh, and related to this, um, similar questions that any of the chance to put in here, a lot of people asked, uh, kind of what Marco was getting at.
John:
um for the heath stuff um actually it's tangentially related will they take all the my existing pictures on my phone for example is a common question and convert them all to heath to save space right because i've got you know i've got 100 000 pictures or whatever from i've had an iphone since day one they took all these pictures they're jpegs he is supposed to be half the size will apple convert them all
John:
I'm almost 100% sure the answer to that is no, they won't because that would be a quality loss.
John:
Now, that doesn't mean could Apple convert them or could there be a way for you to convert them all?
John:
Of course, yeah.
John:
I mean, they're your photos.
John:
You could convert them all.
John:
You could buy a third-party program to convert them all and delete the JPEGs or whatever.
John:
um i don't think this is a feature that apple will add but they could they could have a big button in icloud that says hey take all my jpegs and convert them and i'll accept the quality loss which probably won't be that big deal um to get the space savings or whatever but i really don't think they'll do that because
John:
converting a giant library would take a really long time unless they did it server side which is not apple's forte and you will lose quality on them and there's lots of things having to do with losing edits and other type of things and lossy ways like that it's basically a destructive operation converting jpegs to to heath would be
John:
if you want to get space savings out of them would be destructive because you're taking a lossy compressed format and you're doing another lossy compression on top of it.
John:
And even if you, you know, even if you think you won't notice any difference or whatever, and you're desperate to save the space, you'd be way better off for both your sanity and like tech wise to just get a phone with more space on it than to try to convert all of your things.
John:
So I don't recommend that.
John:
And I don't think Apple will do it, but surely some third party will.
John:
So if you're desperate to do it, you will be able to.
Casey:
Sebastian Krause writes in to say, I think the reason why Apple is finally supporting the Opus codec is that they've announced WebRTC support for iOS 11 and Hi Sierra.
Casey:
And Opus is one of the required codecs that you have to support in WebRTC.
Casey:
And Sebastian has provided a couple of links to put in the show notes.
Casey:
This is also why I think that Opus will see a very high adoption rate eventually because every device with a browser that supports WebRTC, according to SPAC, also has to support Opus, which was news to me and I thought very interesting.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the news to me too, and this is very promising because, again, as much as you know that I'm a huge fan of MP3, the fact is it would be nice to have a more modern codec that was as widely supported as MP3 and was unencumbered as far as we know by patents.
Marco:
And that's what Opus is and that it would be wonderful if Opus had widespread support because it is so much better than MP3 at lower bit rates that there really are a lot of good uses for it.
Marco:
And it really might be worth developing standards for things like podcasters to be able to offer multiple versions of the same file in a reasonable way and have that supported by the tooling and the hosting and everything else.
Marco:
So if Opus can be more widely supported, it makes all of those things more worth doing.
Marco:
And so I honestly don't know anything about WebRTC.
Marco:
All I know is that it is potentially useful for things like recording podcast double-enders in browsers.
Marco:
And that's cool.
Marco:
I've...
Marco:
Don't know if I'd use that, but it's cool.
Marco:
So I'm glad it's available.
Marco:
So anyway, this is nice.
Marco:
We'll see what happens.
Marco:
I do still have reservations that I'm a little worried about possible patent issues with using a free codec that has not been under much patent scrutiny yet.
Marco:
But it is a really good codec.
Marco:
So any support for it is probably good.
John:
Listing support, making support for a codec mandatory as part of a standard, it's good.
John:
Like, it's better than not doing that.
John:
But it's not a guarantee that people will actually support it, especially if it's obscure.
John:
People could say, oh, well, you know, we have WebRTC support.
John:
But don't bother with the Opus support or, like, do a half-assed job of it and don't really, you know, like – because who uses Opus?
John:
It's not a big deal.
John:
There is no – no one's going to stop us from shipping a web browser.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and claiming WebRTC support when our Opus support is terrible and crashes or is slow or only half exists or, you know, whatever.
John:
So these type of formats, all of them that begin with O, whether they be OG or Opus or whatever, Vorbis, all this other stuff, WebM, all these supposedly patent-free formats that are...
John:
less popular because they don't have some big corporation that's monetarily motivated to spread them everywhere and put them and you know and platform owners are less motivated to support them because they have their own things that they want to do um it's always an uphill battle for them but putting putting support for it mandatory support for it in the specs certainly helps so we'll see we'll see how this shakes out like like apple's opus support like their limited support for opus
John:
uh if we uh talk about this three years from now and they still have limited support for opus that's not a good sign because it's it would show that they have you know web rtc itself they might decide is no one's using it it's not that big a deal and the safari team's priority should be elsewhere the webkits team's priority should be elsewhere so concentrate on other standards it takes a long time to stop for something to go from standards defined by a stance about standards body to being implemented uh
John:
Widely enough in the browsers that people use to actually be useful to people.
John:
I mean, just look at CSS, which I think was CSS one was finalized in 1996 or something.
John:
And we didn't get decent browser support for it for many, many, many years, way too long.
John:
And even even when people were claiming CSS support, it took them so long to actually pass.
John:
Like, remember the original CSS1 ACID test?
John:
Like, do you actually comply with all the CSS1 specs?
John:
Like, no, we just comply with the parts that most websites use.
John:
Isn't that enough?
John:
And the answer is no, that wasn't enough, but it took so long.
John:
So here's hoping Opus does better.
Marco:
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Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
One of you would like to talk about iOS 11 in use, and I cannot because I have not installed it on any of my devices because I am not a maniac.
Casey:
And I am traveling later this summer, and even on my iPad, which is the most non-essential of non-essential devices, I don't want it to be on my iPad until it is extremely stable.
Casey:
So speaking of me being quiet, I am going to turn this over to Marco.
Marco:
Well, I didn't put this here.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
Just kidding.
Marco:
You think I added the show notes.
Marco:
That's adorable.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
No, but so far, I put iOS 11 on my iPad in the very first week.
Marco:
And I put it on my phone with Beta 2, which was now about two weeks ago.
Marco:
And so far, it's mostly good.
Marco:
There are some things about it I'm not crazy about yet.
Marco:
And I guess I'll start with the bad so I can end with the good.
Marco:
Like a compliment sandwich in a big company.
Marco:
I guess it's maybe an open-faced sandwich.
Marco:
Anyway, I don't know.
Marco:
Open-faced sandwiches are terrible.
Marco:
But anyway, so I'm not crazy about the new giant text navigation bar style that is in all the system maps and everything with the big header and all that white space.
Marco:
That's kind of weird.
Marco:
I'm also...
Marco:
The multitasking stuff on the iPad takes me getting used to because it feels like I have to do a lot more swipe gestures than before to set up apps in a multi-window way.
Marco:
And some of those swipe tests, maybe because I haven't done them enough, some of them don't make a lot of sense to me.
Marco:
The way you have to...
Marco:
pull up an app off the dock to create it.
Marco:
And then you also have to then pull it again from his little dragging handle to like stick it down.
Marco:
I don't love the way that flows.
Marco:
I'm also not a huge fan at all of the new notification center.
Marco:
The way you have to swipe it down now, and this is on the phone.
Marco:
I think it's the same on the iPad, but it's mainly getting in my way on the phone.
Marco:
The fact that you have to swipe it down, and then it looks like your lock screen, even though it isn't your lock screen.
Marco:
And then you have to, in order to see more notifications than the first little bit, you have to swipe on the screen again to then show the all notifications view.
Marco:
I don't know why that isn't just the first view.
Marco:
I don't know why the extra swipe is necessary.
Marco:
And it took me a couple of days to even find that and to find where is the clear all notifications button.
Marco:
And so there's stuff that's now hidden behind these weird gestures that seem like it's actually just more manual work than before for common tasks.
Marco:
So I don't love that.
Marco:
However, other stuff in the OS seems great.
Marco:
You know, on the multitasking side on the iPad, I'm just glad they did so much.
Marco:
And some of it is not the way I would do it.
Marco:
You know, the weird, the thing about how like apps are kind of fixed as they're like two by two or they're two at a time sets.
Marco:
And you like, you kind of can't mix and match an app between different like quote spaces.
Marco:
That whole thing's a little weird for me, but I'm not an iPad power user.
Marco:
So it's not really getting in my way.
Marco:
iPad power users who actually have better things to say about using the iPad in that way, people like Mike and Vattici, Fraser Spears, they have more opinions on this.
Marco:
And I suggest listening to all their shows, which you'll put in the show notes.
Marco:
They've been talking about this a lot recently.
Marco:
And so – and their opinions seem to be fairly mixed on the thing as well about how like everything is kind of like – these groups are kind of fixed in these like app pairs and an app can only be in one pair and you're always bringing up the same pair of apps at a time.
Marco:
So like there's things about it that are clunky but it's really cool that they're doing as much as they're doing and all that stuff I think is going to be way better in time.
Marco:
Now, the problem mainly, though, is that, like with any iOS beta every summer, most of the apps that we are using are not taking advantage of this because apps can't ship versions to the App Store that use iOS 11 APIs yet.
Marco:
Apple does not accept submissions of apps built against the beta SDK.
Marco:
You have to wait for its release in the fall.
Marco:
So the only way to run iOS 11 apps that actually use iOS 11 capabilities that aren't built into the system to begin with is to get on developers' test flight betas.
Marco:
And test flight is wildly broken for most people on iOS 11.
Marco:
So that isn't happening very much as far as I know.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There's a great, bright future here of things like the new multitasking stuff, the new files stuff, the new drag-and-drop stuff, and some of the new APIs that make developers' lives a lot easier and that lead to better things for users.
Marco:
There's a lot of great stuff here, but most of it is still on the horizon.
Marco:
And on the phone, it makes way less of a difference because most of the really big stuff that users can actually use right now and start taking advantage of right now instead of waiting for the summer or waiting for the fall when everyone's apps get updated, most of that stuff is – there's more of that stuff on the iPad than there is on the iPhone, and especially if you are an Apple Pencil user and an Apple Notes user.
Marco:
So it's really cool for iPad power users and pencil and note people.
Marco:
Everyone else, I feel like, I don't know, it's kind of a mixed bag for now.
Casey:
John?
John:
I think I put this in because I couldn't figure out multitasking on iOS 11, but it turned out to just be a bug where it just wasn't working on my iPad.
John:
I mentioned it last week, but I was doing the things that you're supposed to do to combine apps into sets and stuff, and nothing was happening, and I thought I was just crazy, but it was just a bug, and restarting my iPad, fix it, whatever, it's a beta.
John:
About the things that people can be complaining about, like the limitations of mixing and matching applications and stuff, we're getting into some weird territory with...
John:
the mental model of how things work on iOS.
John:
The old model was so simple and so straightforward, especially before multitasking.
John:
It was just such a solid mental model that it was obvious to anybody using it that when you hit the one and only big button on the face of your device, you went back to Springboard, and that's where you saw all your applications.
John:
And when you launch any application, your entire phone became that application, plus or minus the status bar, which is small enough and incorporated into the application enough that people didn't think of it the same way we think of the menu bar.
John:
Right.
John:
And if you want to do anything else, you hit the home button again to go back to springboard.
John:
And that was it.
John:
That was the model.
John:
you know springboard application application springboard and obviously that's not viable for a sophisticated uh workflow of any kind and so we had to leave that and multitasking came in and we had the multitasking switchers and now we've got these little floating don't call them window window things and combining multiple applications on the screen at the same time kind of a tiling window manager but
John:
the mental model is starting to break down and it like what is what is an ios application in its running state is it just represented by a single rectangular region of the screen that it controls and within that rectangle there can be other floating rectangles or like the the model that a lot of uh heavy ios users are asking for which seems reasonable to me but is super weird is like
John:
I have messages alongside my text editor.
John:
I also want messages alongside my web browser.
John:
Why can't I have two spaces or whatever, one of which is web browser and messages and one of is my text editor messages?
John:
It's like, well, you can't do that.
John:
You got to pick which one you want messages next to.
John:
But if you did have it next to both of them.
John:
The easiest way to do it would be like, all right, now it's next to both of them.
John:
But it's not two instances of messages.
John:
It's the one and only rectangle of messages, right?
John:
And it's exactly the same between the two places, presumably.
John:
Like, this is the way they could implement it, right?
John:
And I think most people would be fine with that.
John:
They don't think they have two separate copies of messages running, like one is signed into some different thing or whatever.
John:
It's like, this is just the one and only messages, but it appears in two places.
John:
It's like having...
John:
two copies of the well the finder does all the time two copies of the same window on your mac like this is literally the same window anything you do in this window exactly happens in real time in the other window like you could move things around it and they would move it because that's that would be the mental model the other possible model is no you actually have two messages windows but now all of a sudden there are ram implications and application development implications like wait how do i manage that is my application in two states does my application know it has two windows this is you know uncharted territory in terms of
John:
api and ui for ios developers to handle this you might have multiple instances of you running so i hope you can manage that internally with the stuff that you're doing that's not how ios applications work if they have multiple quote-unquote windows up it's still within the one only rectangle that is owned by that application it's not like
John:
you have two totally divorced ones um but both of those things i just described are pretty weird both from a developer's perspective and trying to explain them to user i had a difficulty trying to explain them right now and i don't know if i could explain them to someone using the device like this is how things work and yes you don't have to you're like oh i don't have to worry about that i'm never going to do this thing where i split up my ipad screen i'm just going to treat it like my old ipad where you go to the home button and that that it's good that the ios falls back to that model you don't know about any of this stuff you know about swipes you don't do them accidentally
John:
Use it just like the old iPad.
John:
Application, home.
John:
Application, home.
John:
It's inefficient, but you can stick with that model.
John:
But if they're going to try to expand iOS with multitasking, as they should, to become more sophisticated, there should be some kind of coherent, explainable model available.
John:
for how things work and i don't think apple has quite hit on that yet as evidenced by like the the immediate reaction of people who are every ios user like oh this is great but here are a couple scenarios that are not possible within this current paradigm and everyone is mostly just so jazzed to have a new paradigm to even talk about that you know this is the honeymoon period but i think eventually a year or two from now
John:
Apple will have to continue thinking about this and say, how do we address that?
John:
Is there is there a new mental model for rectangles in iOS and how they relate to applications that is understandable and also useful and generic in the same way that the, you know, the window implicit.
John:
Windows input mouse pointer?
John:
What does WIMP stand for?
John:
I forget.
John:
Anyway, the traditional Mac user interface, the Windows-style user interface for PCs that everyone is used to.
John:
And a lot of the things you talked about, Marco, were like the edge swiping and how Notification Center works and all the weird gestures or whatever.
John:
All that is made necessary by the simplified iOS interface that doesn't have, essentially, Chrome.
John:
There's no menu bar.
John:
There's no title bars.
John:
There's no scroll bars.
John:
That's an advantage of iOS.
John:
But...
John:
The way PC operating systems get around all these things is you don't have to know any weird gestures.
John:
If you want, I mean, just look at this on like notification center on the Mac.
John:
It's an icon in the menu bar.
John:
It has a privileged place in the menu, but the menu bar is always there.
John:
And an icon is the thing you can bring a cursor over.
John:
And it's like there's always visible interface element and it slides in from the right.
John:
It's very much like an iOS interface element, but you deal with it like a Mac interface element, even though you can actually slide with two fingers or whatever to make it appear on the Mac.
John:
there's a place for visible ui to be for all this stuff that's what window chrome is that's what you know i mean they kind of went a little in that direction by bringing tabs to ios where safari has actual tabs like where that was kind of weird like where did that come from there's no title bars or scroll bars or window widgets or menu bar but guess what tabs appear and they turn out to be great so maybe maybe some chrome will start creeping into ios as a solution
John:
And we kind of do it with the status bar too.
John:
Hey, you want to zoom to the top of a really long document?
John:
You can tap the status bar, which we cheat and decide is a giant button in most scenarios because it's convenient to have a thing that you can press that's on the screen that does an operation.
John:
So I'm keeping an eye out.
John:
That's a lot of talking for a topic that was really based on a bug.
John:
I am using iOS 11.
John:
I'm using iOS 11 on my iPad and I am using the multitasking features and I'm, I'm hitting a lot of the same pain points, albeit to a much lesser degree as all of the super heavy iOS users.
John:
Cause you know, I mean, I think about this, I was thinking about this when I was listening to one of those podcasts while using my iPad.
John:
I'm like,
John:
people think of me as a big mac head and i do love my mac and it is the the thing that i care about the most but on a day-to-day basis i forget about my phone i spend more time with my ipad than my mac easy when i'm not at work when i'm at work obviously that's not true when i'm work it's you know sitting in front of the mac all day but when i'm not at work like on weekends i use my ipad way more than my mac and my phone probably more than my ipad so i think it's just everyone's reality these days um
John:
So even though I'm not a heavy iOS user in that I need to use it for my work and I'm annoyed if this thing interferes with my ability to perform sophisticated tasks, I do spend a hell of a lot of time in it.
John:
And as someone well-versed in the ways of the Mac and PC-style operating systems, I do feel those limitations.
Marco:
Actually, and a little bit of attention on that note, one of the reasons why I am pushing myself to try to do more on the iPad is because if I can set things up in such a way that I can get more of my work done on an iPad, that also probably means that I can get more of my work done on my iPhone.
Marco:
And my phone is always with me.
Marco:
I'm always given chances where I could use it, where I wouldn't have a chance to use my computer.
Marco:
And so anything I do to benefit my iPad working life will almost certainly help my iPhone working life, which will help my working life regardless of what I think of the iPad.
Marco:
So if you are...
Marco:
a mostly or entirely Mac head like John or I or Casey, that is one reason to investigate productive options for yourself on the iPad is that it'll help you in general on your phone too.
John:
one other item I had on iOS 11 that has been a lot of stumbling block, but one of, one of the things that I felt most immediately and continue to feel is the keyboard, the new keyboard in iOS 11.
John:
And it's mostly just muscle memory because using iOS keyboards for so long, I've become accustomed to where things are, especially like, and when you type your passwords and stuff, you're kind of,
John:
memorize the pattern of where things are right on an ios keyboard like the way you you know like and they move stuff around the ios 11 keyboard they moved lots of stuff around like punctuation characters um and how you get it special characters uh and the uh the flick thing where
John:
there'll be you can get to like the number symbol you don't have to switch the entire keyboard into like number mode the little number is like grayed out above one of the letters like one over the q wherever the hell it is i don't have an ios 11 device in front of me and you can get to that by putting your finger on the key that you're going to hit and instead of picking it up slide it downward and as you do that the the higher uh item on the key like slides down it becomes bold to indicate
John:
If you were to release now, you would get a one instead of a letter, and then you release.
John:
When I first saw that...
John:
feature described in the wwdc i thought it meant to flick up so as soon as i first installed ios 11 and i saw this keyboard i'm flicking up on all the keys and it's not doing anything yeah it's flicked down um and i think down probably makes more sense because as you slide down you can see the key cap changing of what you know what you're going to get at least i'm again i'm doing on the ipad i don't know what it does on the phone um so i do like the flicking things but i cannot find the hyphen for the life of me i'm like
John:
where the hell i end up i'm already switched into punctuation mode and then i can't find the hyphen i need to just not switch into punctuation mode and like pull down on the x or wherever the hell it is now and i thought i would have remapped but i guess using my iphone which is still on ios 10 it's not allowing me to remap so i would say that uh
John:
For all the people who haven't tried iOS 11, be warned that adjusting to the new keyboard might take a little doing.
John:
I just can't wait until all my devices are iOS 11 because then I can just convert and just forget the old keyboard because the new keyboard is better.
John:
I really do like the flicking.
John:
I just need to break myself of these old stupid habits of like having to switch modes, right?
John:
It's much better to just remember where all the flick things are and flick at them.
John:
That's great.
Casey:
I still haven't used it, like I said, so I'm looking forward to it.
Casey:
And I think once my beach trip in August is over, I will absolutely put whatever the latest beta is on my iPad.
Casey:
But I am not touching my phone with this thing until it's done done.
Casey:
And I don't want to touch my iPad with it until I'm done traveling.
John:
Why don't you put it on your iPad now?
John:
It's perfectly safe for iPads.
John:
Yeah, and you hate your iPad.
Casey:
I don't hate my iPad.
Casey:
That is fake news.
Casey:
Fake news.
Casey:
I don't hate my iPad.
Casey:
I just don't love it as much as I used to.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Because when you go to the beach, as I'm doing at some point in August, you never know what the internet situation is.
Casey:
And in all likelihood, if there isn't internet in the house, I will be able to tether off my phone.
Casey:
But I like having the backup of my iPad, which is on a different network.
Casey:
And thus, I don't want to mess with anything just to be safe.
Casey:
Although the last time I heard a podcaster talk about this, it was Mike Hurley, and he lasted approximately three seconds before he caved and put iOS 11 on one of his 17 iPads.
Casey:
So it's probably going to end up happening before I go on this trip in August, but we'll see.
Marco:
Well, but, and like, you know, people like Mike, these iPad power users, they were like desperate for Apple to show any kind of, you know, it's like if Apple released the new Mac Pro in an early beta tomorrow and they said, all right, you can buy it now, but you'll have to reboot it once a day.
Casey:
i would buy it in a heartbeat even though because i just want a mac pro again so badly like i would i would jump on that marco if you want it that bad i can stick a sticker on your imac and it didn't have it say mac pro or i can give it you know what i'll do i'll buy you a trash can and put some ports on the back and write i am new mac pro on the front of it and you'll never know the difference it'll probably be just as quick too
Marco:
I could probably just take a small amount of tape onto my MacBook Pro and cover up the book.
Marco:
There we go.
Marco:
Call it a day.
Marco:
New Mac Pro.
Marco:
Happens to be portable.
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Casey:
All right, so let's talk about iPhone rumors.
Casey:
This is the time of year where everything seems to amp up and the rumor mill seems to get ever more aggressive.
Casey:
And in the last few days as we record this, we're recording it on Wednesday the 5th, there's been some more rumors, particularly around Touch ID.
Casey:
There's been a lot of waffling, which Marco doesn't know anything about, about whether or not there will be Touch ID, where will it be?
Casey:
Will it be on the front, under the screen?
Casey:
Will it be on the front in the chin?
Casey:
Will it be on the back?
Casey:
How angry are all the Apple users going to be if it's on the back?
Casey:
Or will it maybe not exist at all?
Casey:
So Min Chi Kuo has said on the new iPhone that has OLED, which everyone is assuming is going to be called iPhone Pro, they're saying that there will not be any Touch ID at all.
Casey:
And instead, it will use some sort of face detection, including depth mapping, in order to authenticate you.
Casey:
I don't know how I feel about this.
Casey:
My initial reaction is, no, that's garbage.
Casey:
My second reaction is, well, if Apple was going to ship it, I'm sure it'll be fine.
Casey:
And my third reaction is basically the entirety of this week's Connected, where they went through this face detection thing.
Casey:
And I think all three of them kind of went through all five stages of grief.
Marco:
It really was exactly that.
Marco:
They went through everything from the anger and eventually to the acceptance.
Marco:
Like, oh, I guess this might be better.
John:
So they did a whole show on it, but did anybody say, my face is my passport, verify me?
Casey:
Nicely done.
Casey:
Nicely done.
John:
They didn't say that?
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
No, I don't think so.
John:
Is that what Mike in the movies is?
Casey:
Yes, remember that Mike hated that movie.
Casey:
Marty!
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
The movie isn't terrible.
Casey:
It's terrible that Mike hated it.
Casey:
It's a great movie.
Casey:
Freaking great movie.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Well, I didn't hear that episode, but I thought this was... I mean, I don't know.
John:
We're still... I think we're far enough out now that these rumors about what will or won't be on this phone are still mixed up.
John:
As Gruber pointed out this week, like...
John:
Pretty sure Apple knows what's going to be on this phone at this point, but we don't know exactly what's going to be on it.
John:
And so this is what's in the mix.
John:
We had a whole show where we talked about the fingerprint scanner on the back and the difficulty of putting it on the front.
John:
Everyone seems to agree that the whole front of this phone is going to be mostly screened, so there's no room for an actual home button, even a home button that doesn't move like the ones on our current, you know, the iPhone 7.
John:
um so it's like well if they can't do a fingerprint scanner on the on the screen they'll do it on the back but here are the problems with the ones in the back but it'll be all android has them on the back and it's fine again we have the whole show on that topic this is the new twist oh never mind that fingerprint stuff that's passe it's just going to scan your face and
John:
this, this seems like a lot of confusion in a short period of time about how we're going to unlock our phones.
John:
So from our perspective on the outside of like people trying to leak things and, and rumors cycling through, surely we are getting these rumors like a, like a six month to a year delay of like things that Apple has considered and investigated for the upcoming iPhone.
John:
But Apple has picked something and we'll all find out when they introduced their phone and
John:
It's just weird that none of the rumors so far present a product that we all agree that will be awesome and I can't wait to have it.
John:
All of them are like, hmm, well, you know, like when we talked about the fingerprint thing in the back or USB-C on the bottom, like you think about it and it seems kind of weird and there's always some downside and you're not sure and there could be cool upsides, but it's
John:
to the point where several times over the past few months i found myself thinking why are we doing uh all screen on the front of the phone again like remind me again what we're getting out of this because there's a lot of difficulties and you know apple is giving themselves lots of challenges right um and what we heard about this you know the oled all screen phone for many years was like oh it didn't make it this year
John:
uh because they couldn't they couldn't sort this stuff out right and so the apple won't release this until they come up with a way to do this and i think you know the iphone 7 year was like oh this was going to be the year for the all-screen phone nope never mind it's actually you know they couldn't do it and they couldn't get the fingerprint scanner to work through the thing they couldn't get the camera to work through the screen you know whatever the rumor excuse was it's not ready yet right but everyone seems to say this is the year the oled all-screen phone is going to come out
John:
uh and we're all waiting to see okay how did apple solve all those problems and every potentially rumored solution seems weird the face recognition one seems the most appley to me because it's kind of like cutting the gordian knot of having to touch your body to something to unlock your phone it's like nope nope don't worry about the touching don't worry about it all not on the front of the screen not on the back it will you know will just happen like magic it will read your face and by the way those same depth sensors can be used for the uh
John:
the fake background blur effect too so we you know we put the hardware in there and it's great and we'll use it for all this and it's better than a fingerprint because it's has more points of recognition and so on and so forth um but you know again i didn't listen to the podcast you were referring to but i i kind of feel the same the same trepidation about it
John:
about something that requires line of sight like that i mean that's what everyone immediately thinks about is like what about all the times i unlock my phone when it can't see my face and all the rumors like don't worry when it's laying on the table it'll still be able to see your face it's got a real big wide angle lens on it it'll pick up your face and you know or then you're like well what about when i when i exist near the phone but i don't want it to unlock based on my face so don't worry you'll have to hit a button you'll have to hit a button and then it will do recognition or whatever like
John:
these are all things where you want the apple magic to come in like just like touch id seemed like a thing that would be terrible and not work and apple i'd say pretty much hit it out of the park with touch id like it was if you told told us about touch id like when you read the rumors you'd be like that could be cool but i've never seen that work really well and guess what apple made it work really well and then they fixed it again and made it work even better and i love touch id i think i said in the
John:
the year we're talking about our favorite tech products that the iphone 7 was my favorite tech product and i love the fast touch id i love it love it so much i still love it if face recognition makes me do the same thing think like oh this i thought this was going to be a crap technology because no one's ever done it well but guess what apple finally did it well and it's awesome that's the best case scenario if this is as good as touch id just right now i'm still in a doubting phase
Marco:
Nothing I have heard so far about facial recognition speculation has made me say, oh, that sounds better than Touch ID.
Marco:
Touch ID is great.
Marco:
It works really well.
Marco:
It works the vast majority of the time.
Marco:
The second generation one got even better, and it's so fast, and it does solve a lot of those problems.
Marco:
Like you mentioned, what if you are there, but you don't want to authorize something?
Marco:
With Touch ID, you can be physically present in the phone, but you can be presented with a sheet or presented with a lock screen, and you can decline to authorize something if you don't want to authorize it at that moment.
Marco:
With facial recognition, there would have to be another step.
Marco:
You'd have to hit a button on the screen or something like that.
Marco:
There are ways this is worse.
Marco:
Touch ID works no matter how you're holding the phone.
Marco:
Even if the phone is still in your pocket, you can unlock it with Touch ID to do something.
Marco:
You can unlock it as you are taking it out of your pocket before you are fully holding it up, which saves time.
Marco:
You can unlock it in any lighting conditions.
Marco:
It is so incredibly versatile, and it works in so many ways that I hope that what we're moving to with whatever comes in the new phone, if we're actually going to get rid of Touch ID, which, by the way, I'm not entirely sure that I want to believe these rumors, and we'll get to that in a second, but...
Marco:
In so many recent Apple product developments, because so much of the low-hanging fruit of modern hardware has been picked already, we are so often having to make progress only by making certain things worse or by giving up certain things that we're not quite ready to give up yet.
Marco:
And we do this in order to get the new hotness.
Marco:
We judge, okay, well, I really want my phone to be not a bigger phone, but to have a bigger screen.
Marco:
So I guess I'll give up X, Y, and Z.
John:
Is that, by the way, when I asked before, remind me again why we're all about this all screen thing.
John:
Is that it?
John:
Is it the only one that just like more pixels?
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Yeah, it's fitting a bigger screen in a smaller phone.
Marco:
That's what it is.
John:
I'm thinking that there are other, that's the main thing.
John:
I think there's at least a couple other small potential things.
John:
I mean, that's a big thing.
John:
But the simplification of kind of like the simplification of making the whole thing a screen with the exception of the home button was such a vast simplification over, you know, the BlackBerry or whatever.
John:
But going a step farther and saying it's just all screen is, you know, further in Johnny Ive, you know, distilling the thing to its essence, getting rid of extraneous stuff.
John:
Can you, you know, like you was trying to make your app with no settings.
John:
Like this is part of the drive, part of the simplification drive.
John:
And the idea that this phone, you know, the rumors was delayed because they couldn't pull it off.
John:
But then now what we're talking about is like, they keep talking about the brow, you know, the thing like where the cameras are or whatever, because they can't get them to go through the screen.
John:
It's like, are you kind of like the laptops?
John:
Are you just...
John:
You're grasping for the bigger screen on a smaller phone, and at a certain point you're like, look, we're going to do bigger screen on a smaller phone, and we're just going to do it, and we're going to make it work.
John:
If we missed last year, we're going to do it this year no matter what it takes, and that doesn't excite me that much, I have to say.
John:
It might look cool, but I would prefer that they delay for a third year.
John:
uh if they can't get these issues worked out i mean you know again they haven't shipped anything yet we have no idea they may have hit this out of the park and maybe the delay was exactly you know it'll be fine but i am the more i hear about potential compromises the less excited i am about i get more pixels in a smaller case except for the brow which does something to the status bar but anyway like that doesn't excite me that much i really you know again it'll probably excite me a lot if everything works awesome but
John:
i don't know i'm just trying to think of like what else do we get out of this this is setting aside oled which obviously oled we get a lot out of oled but you don't need to do an all-screen phone to get oled so wait so slow down what makes oled so much better because i genuinely know nothing about this stuff blacker blacks uh you know if you watch a video on your thing like uh so oled takes less power so when you're not lighting up sections on an oled screen there's it's not on whereas with an lcd
John:
the backlight is on behind the whole screen even when it's entirely black which is why the black levels are terrible because we don't have dynamic backlights on our ios devices as far as i know they're not dynamic backlights and even if they were dynamic backlights suck because they're not behind every single pixel they're regional and so on and so forth so anyway uh lower power and uh much higher contrast and the challenge is to get one that has the color reproduction of apple's lcd screens because apparently
John:
getting a P3 OLED the size Apple wants with all the characteristics it wants is not straightforward.
Marco:
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Marco:
One of the reasons why I'm a little hesitant to believe this rumor, and the only reason everyone's talking about this, is because Ming-Chi Kuo reported it.
Marco:
And Ming-Chi Kuo has a really good record.
Marco:
But his sources tend to be supply chain sources only.
Marco:
And he doesn't have a perfect record.
Marco:
He often misses the story, and he often predicts things that are wild and then don't come true.
Marco:
The entire Apple rumors game for a few years there were seemingly reporting on every single major product launch before it happened.
Marco:
And we all joked about Tim Cook doubling down on secrecy a couple years ago when he said that, but it really does seem like that has happened.
Marco:
And in the last year or two,
Marco:
We are seeing very few substantial leaks and even fewer leaked parts and everything.
Marco:
And we are basing all of our discussion about this year's presumed new iPhone on almost zero good information.
Marco:
Like there's almost nothing solid out there.
Marco:
There are still no credible parts leaks.
Marco:
And for this point in the year, that's saying something.
John:
You don't think those?
John:
I haven't been keeping up, but the thing with the fact that the cameras are arranged vertically and all those things, I'm assuming at this point that that is a pretty accurate representation, even if it's not a real parts leak.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think that's plausible, but that's not that big of a thing.
Marco:
It has two cameras.
Marco:
You can hold the phone in any orientation you want.
Marco:
So if you turn the iPhone 7 Plus sideways, then they're vertical, and it still works.
Marco:
What's the big deal?
Marco:
That means nothing.
John:
And the materials rumors are pretty close, like glass front and back with stainless steel rim.
John:
That seems pretty solid.
Marco:
But that hasn't converged.
Marco:
No one's agreeing on any of these things.
Marco:
It seems like Apple tried a bunch of stuff for this generation.
Marco:
And it also seems like nobody has a credible report out there that indicates what direction they chose on almost any of these issues.
Marco:
The only thing people seem to agree on is that they're probably launching three phones this fall.
John:
And the expensive ones are going to be OLED.
John:
And it's got more screen for less front place.
John:
And that probably is not going to have a physical home button.
John:
I feel like right before the phones come out, it's inevitable that we'll see some kind of parts.
Marco:
like legit parts you know the front and the back of the phone and some cutouts and stuff but it is really interesting that we haven't seen them yet like in most most years in recent times by summertime we were seeing credible parts leaks and not even a small number we're seeing like starting to see substantial numbers of credible parts leaks
Marco:
And I don't know if the phone is behind schedule, or maybe it is just the improved secrecy at Apple.
Marco:
But it really does seem like we have less information than ever this time on this phone.
Marco:
So when you see a rumor come out, even from somebody who has a pretty good track record, like Ming-Chi Kuo or like Mark Gurman...
Marco:
I honestly don't believe it because I, I don't have much reason to because they're still all over the map.
Marco:
And again, these people with, you know, a really good track record for Apple rumor prediction is like, maybe you're comically wrong less than half the time.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But that's not a very good record still.
Marco:
The standards for what makes a good record in Apple rumors are pretty low.
John:
So which part of this is the part you don't believe?
John:
The face recognition or no touch ID?
Marco:
All of that.
Marco:
Face recognition, no touch ID, rear touch ID, what materials the case is going to be made of, what the sides of the case are going to be made of.
Marco:
I don't buy whether there's going to be that big notch in the top for the cameras and stuff that is going to interfere with the status bar.
Marco:
Right now, I am not confident in any of those rumors to say, oh yeah, that sounds likely.
Marco:
Let's talk about it as if it's going to happen.
Marco:
It's because there really is no coherent direction that everything is focusing in on.
Marco:
There's no...
Marco:
Well, the direction is, how the hell did we get this complete screen phone to work?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That's the direction.
Marco:
And that, again, that is interesting.
Marco:
And we saw there were some allegedly leaked parts earlier from a safety inspector who was inspecting U.S.
Marco:
customs packages.
Marco:
And they look pretty questionable.
Marco:
It's probably fake.
Marco:
But it did present an interesting idea of what if the new phone looked like this?
Marco:
And it looked nice.
Marco:
It looked plausible.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, here's how you can cram a big screen that is still rectangular, that doesn't have a weird little cutout on the top for the camera and stuff.
Marco:
Here's how you can shove a big screen into a phone body that is still not that much bigger.
Marco:
And that's nice.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But it was probably fake or probably was a different phone or something like that.
Marco:
You can't draw any real information out of any of these things.
Marco:
And this year more than ever, because everything is so all over the map, it seems like either Apple has gotten so good on secrecy that these rumors are all based on total BS.
Marco:
And I'm not to say that, like, you know, Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo were making things up, but that they are really grasping at straws and that they're trying really hard to extract a coherent story out of very minimal and questionable information.
Marco:
or that this phone is super late and that it's not going to be coming out or available in september or october and and in which case who knows what's going on with it but i think it's more likely that it is still coming out this fall that secrecy has just gotten better and that they're just getting less and less information to report on and they're trying like mad to try to get stories out of whatever they have
John:
It's a safe bet to say that the new iPhone, whether it's iPhone Pro or whatever the hell, like the fancy expensive all screen one will be supply constrained, like more than usual, because all we've heard about it is things that sound like they would be difficult to manufacture because they're unprecedented as far as an iPhone is concerned.
John:
and rumors of delays and stuff like that, it's going to be hard to get one of those.
John:
It'll be at least as hard as getting a gold iPhone, maybe even harder.
John:
And I guess they control that by making the price more, because obviously it'll be more expensive than the other ones, and maybe that will help control demand a little bit.
John:
But I think that's a safe bet.
John:
And for these rumors, I'm not sure what to believe out of them all, but I will say that face recognition sounds like an Apple-style thing.
John:
That it's a type, like I said, with Touch ID, a type of thing that sounds cool, but every time we've seen it done before, it's been crappy.
John:
But if it worked well, would be nice to have.
John:
Doesn't mean you have to get rid of Touch ID to do it or whatever, but face recognition definitely seems like an Apple feature.
John:
Is it an Apple feature for this year?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But...
John:
I think it would fit in well and it would make Apple's products better if they actually worked on that and got it to the point like they did with Touch ID where it passes over that barrier of being a technical curiosity and it is something that just naturally becomes part of our life and we take for granted.
John:
And especially if it's not the only way to unlock your phone.
John:
If you're going to incorporate all of those sensors and all the inputs and user preferences, I can imagine a phone that supports face recognition being better than one that just supports Touch ID if done really well.
John:
So I'm actually kind of excited for that being true.
John:
I'm trying to forget things like the Fire Phone from Amazon that tried to do stuff with multiple cameras that was just a...
John:
giant mess and just assuming like apple just won't ship it if it's crap yeah and samsung also had face recognition too in one of their recent phones and and the reviewers all crapped all over it because it was terrible and and we didn't hear about it again and and the good thing is like that you know apple can ship a phone with a depth sensor and just say no we're not doing we couldn't get face recognition to work worth a damn but hey guess what that depth sensor is still really useful for features that we already have it will make the what is it called i keep forgetting the name of the fake depth of field that they
John:
what do they call it portrait mode yeah portrait mode it'll make portrait mode better and so that you know it's not a waste of hardware and it will not be like well look at like what was the time it was like an ipod touch or something shipped with a cutout for the camera would go but there was no actual camera like uh
John:
This won't be like that.
John:
If they have depth sensors in there, which this could also be the origin of these rumors.
John:
Hey, they have depth sensors.
John:
I think they're using that for facial recognition.
John:
One thing supply chain doesn't know about is software.
John:
I'll tell you that because that happens someplace else.
John:
Also, you know what else uses depth sensing?
Marco:
ARKit.
Marco:
Hello?
Marco:
There's lots of reasons why the phone could use depth sensing on front and back cameras that are not necessarily just for this.
Marco:
I mean, they could be using a depth sensor just to get the portrait mode on the selfie camera.
John:
like that's not that unreasonable like that could be it right but the ones you have the depth sensor like that that almost guarantees that they looked into face recognition because you're you're all you're almost all the way there at that point like you've got your core ml you've got these machine learning things you've got this the vision framework whatever the hell it's called you've got ar kit you've got portrait mode like
John:
everything is already there to say of course apple has been looking into face recognition like they've got all the pieces the question is oh is it did they did it get to the point where they're going to ship it and we'll see but i i actually i kind of hope they do have it working because i think it would be a really cool reason to try the new iphone because i have some confidence that they won't ship it if it's crap that they'll ship it if it's cool and great and
John:
And I'm just really hoping that it's not the only way to unlock it, because that'll be weird.
John:
What Apple doesn't want to happen is for its expensive iPhone Pro, like the fancy one that is supposed to be the object of desire and lust, causing everybody to make that noise, even the people who, you know, the target audience are like...
John:
I do want the fanciest and best phone, but this has weird compromises that are confusing me and making me second guess.
John:
Like, you want it to just be, like, better in everything or have some amazing feature that you can't resist.
John:
Even if you buy it and have buyer's remorse and it turns out not to be as cool as you thought...
John:
before you have it in your hands it has to look like obviously i want the pro like if i've got the money i want the fancy phone because it's the cool one i really can't wait to try that face recognition or whatever but if it doesn't have touch id and like you just you just think about it like well they get like you know
John:
How do I unlock it when it's in my pocket?
John:
Well, you don't.
John:
How do I unlock it in the dark?
John:
Well, it's got IR sensors so it can see in the dark.
John:
Okay, well, that's cool.
John:
Like, there's all this sort of negotiation that you have to go through to convince yourself that you really do want the supply constraint.
John:
You can't actually buy one for three months, $1,500 iPhone Pro.
Marco:
and it's also it's entirely possible that they do have a depth sensor that it is ir that it can work in the dark that it is using facial recognition uh technology from that company they bought that does that that it is part of ar it's possible it's doing all those things but just isn't being used to unlock your phone like that is all that can all be true if you're a hot dog or not that's right yeah
Marco:
All of this could be them just adding all this technology for other uses, for portrait mode, for face recognition in the Photos app, for AR.
Marco:
There are so many other reasons that they could use all these technologies, all these sensors, and have them all work together to make cool features that people want.
Marco:
They can do all of that and also decide, you know what, this isn't actually good enough for unlocking your phone and proving secureness for purchases and stuff.
Marco:
But we're going to ship all this stuff anyway because it's useful for all this other great stuff.
Marco:
That is totally a thing.
Marco:
So I'm guessing this is two different things that don't follow.
Marco:
Maybe some analyst or rumor reporter got info that says Apple's building in facial recognition.
Marco:
And maybe they also got info that we all heard months ago that said Touch ID under the screen is proving to be difficult.
Marco:
But that might not mean that they are canceling Touch ID and using face recognition instead.
Marco:
Those are separate things.
Marco:
And that conclusion might not be the correct conclusion to draw from those two possibly totally independent pieces of information.
John:
By the way, one more thing in the world of security and everything, the whole idea of like that you can be compelled to unlock your phone with touch ID because of U.S.
John:
law, like they can they can push you, you know, they can just take your finger and put it on there in the same way they can take your finger and put on an ink pad or whatever.
John:
I don't think facial recognition changes that.
John:
It just makes it even easier.
John:
They just have to hold the phone up to your face.
John:
And you can't turn your head away.
John:
And guess what?
John:
You just unlocked your phone with your face.
John:
So all the same protocols apply to locking your phone so it requires your passcode and using a sophisticated passcode and all that stuff.
John:
I don't think facial recognition changes that.
John:
But just like your finger.
John:
your face is your face your finger is your finger we talked about this before um if your biometrics are compromised and you can compromise fingerprints you can lift them you can compromise faces you can fake them um even if faces are better than fingerprints if someone is sufficiently uh motivated they can do this so you know as in all cases like
John:
know the protocol if you're fine if you're going to be in a situation where you don't want to involuntarily unlock your phone know the correct protocols to get it to the point where it demands your very arbitrary length alphanumeric password to be unlocked and you know continue to do those
Marco:
The really funny part is that somebody could like if the iPhone has all these technologies to measure like the depths of your face and everything, the iPhone itself could be a wonderful tool to use to capture other people's faces to make clone models of.
John:
You have to also make them like I'm sure they have like heat signatures.
John:
You'd have to make like a like a fleshy, you know.
John:
hot thing that has it would be a little bit more complicated but you know it could be done but yeah you're right they are giving you the tools and technology to do at least the depth part of it although presumably bad actors could get a fancier depth sensor than one that fits inside a phone but who knows apple's pretty good at this type of stuff um on the face recognition of the marker you didn't say regardless of whether you know like whether you think this is true or not
John:
Would you find it attractive?
John:
Is that a cool thing?
John:
Are you hoping that they did actually figure it out?
John:
Setting aside whether Touch ID is there or not, does it sound like a cool thing?
John:
Would it make you want to get the new phone more?
Marco:
Not at all.
Marco:
It sounds like a gimmick.
Marco:
Whether it would be or not, I don't know.
Marco:
But I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
When Samsung did it, it sounded like a gimmick then.
Marco:
It sounds like it's easily faked and unreliable.
Marco:
Whether it actually is or not, who knows?
Marco:
I don't think Apple would do it if it was that bad.
Marco:
But the concept, as it sounds to me right now, sounds like a gimmick that I don't want.
John:
Did Touch ID sound like that to you at first or not?
Marco:
Honestly, I don't remember, but probably not.
Casey:
Okay, but that's a hard comparison, though, because Touch ID, I think, was an easier sell in that it was a deliberate action that you can control that presumably is something similar to the crappy things that we've all experienced in our past, except just not crappy.
Casey:
But in every other way, it was predictable and understandable.
Casey:
Whereas right now, not having seen the keynote, not having been instructed on how to hold your face and how to hold your phone to your face and et cetera, it's hard to say what this would really entail.
Casey:
And on the surface, I would agree with Marco that this doesn't sound like it's for me.
Casey:
But I also agree, and I think that this is an important point, that Apple wouldn't ship it unless it was really, really solid and it worked really, really well and had thought of these things like what happens in the dark, what happens when the phone isn't pointed square at your face, what happens when you have sunglasses on or different glasses.
Casey:
What happens when there's direct sunlight and you're washed out?
Casey:
What happens if you want to look at your phone but not authorize a charge?
Casey:
I have to assume that Apple will have worked all this out.
Casey:
So if this really is a thing, I'm pretty amped to try it.
Casey:
But I mean, I'm still kind of excited to one day eventually get a touch bar Mac and everything I've heard from almost everyone is that that's a gimmick that's a waste of time.
Casey:
So who knows?
Marco:
Because keep in mind, Apple, for the most part, they've had a couple of stumbles here and there in this way.
Marco:
But for the most part, they won't release something unless it works reasonably well.
Marco:
So I'm not worried that face recognition would be badly functioning.
Marco:
But I think the touch bar is a wonderful example of how...
Marco:
they will release things that aren't necessarily compelling you know they do occasionally have that kind of flop and the touch bar i think is one of those things you know as time goes on and when it first came out people oh well this is kind of interesting i guess we'll see what people do with it and yep turns out no one's doing anything with it and it's not that interesting and it just doesn't not it's not really uh i don't i don't think it was worth what they did um simple as that um
Marco:
Face recognition might be one of those things too.
Marco:
I don't think they would release it if it was much less secure than Tuxia ID.
Marco:
They have very good security people working for them.
Marco:
And Tuxia ID I don't think was ever really compromised in a meaningful way in the security sense.
Marco:
So if they release face recognition as an unlock thing or secure thing,
Marco:
I bet it will work fine, and I bet it will be very secure.
Marco:
Whether it will actually be compelling and cool, and whether you will want to use it all the time instead of using Touch ID, that's a different story.
Marco:
That's a big unknown.
Casey:
Well, but if it's really what it promises, and of course there is no promise yet, this is all hypothetical, but...
Casey:
I would assume the Apple pitch for this would be, hey, this is even faster than Touch ID and you don't even have to think about it.
Casey:
You just raise to wake and then suddenly your phone is already unlocked.
John:
Well, I was going to say, like, the sales pitch of this is pretty easy.
John:
Like, Casey, we went through all the things like what about this, what about that?
John:
Like, there are answers for all of those, pretty easy answers for all of them in terms of darkness and using IR and being washed out and it doesn't matter and security and using more than just the depth, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the solution to what if I don't want to authorize is what you just described, like pitching it as a better touch ID is that it's not just the face.
John:
It's the face and you also have to press the screen, right?
John:
The face and you also have to force press the screen.
John:
It's imagine touch ID, but it doesn't matter where the heck you touch or with what finger and there's no training.
John:
You pick the phone up and you just smush the screen somewhere.
John:
the bottom half of the screen you smush or anywhere maybe it's anywhere on the screen you smush right but that it's two-factor right that your face has to be in view and what if it's at an angle that is really good doesn't matter if it's on a super oblique angle it's very wide angle whatever right just needs to be somehow able to view your face in some way and you swish the screen and and in use that's like the world's fastest most efficient touch id just yank the phone out of your pocket your pocket and squeeze it
John:
And by the time you're looking at it, it's unlocked because the combination of your face being in view when his head is in view, hit it with the rock.
John:
Anyway, that combination.
John:
What?
John:
Don't worry.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
This time you got not just a reference, but a bad impression.
John:
The bonus.
John:
It feels like magic touch ID.
John:
Right.
John:
And it solves all the problems you did combined with IR and all those other things.
John:
The only one it doesn't solve is when it's in your pocket and you want to unlock it.
John:
But that's kind of a weird thing to do anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's why I'm excited about it, because I can imagine a version of this with current technology, no magic involved.
John:
That is really awesome.
John:
But I can also imagine, like Marco said, that it's just people getting confused about hardware that's available and this is not coming this year and that would be fine too.
John:
But I'm actually kind of excited for it.
John:
I think it will be more like Touch ID if they ship it and less like the Touch Bar, which I think, by the way,
John:
the touch bar works like aside from weird graphical glitches having to do with like weird os bugs and gpu things or whatever it does what it's supposed to do like it looks good yeah it feels good uh the functionality that it implements is there it's just like oh well it turns out no one is super excited about that functionality but but it actually works it's not kind of like the other example says like siri where or apple maps or something where they shipped it and maybe it was like well even for the thing you were trying to do you didn't quite pull it off and so we can't really evaluate this idea uh
Marco:
the value of this idea because you kind of screw up the implementation initially and eventually we'll get better right so we'll see thanks for our three sponsors this week casper squarespace and fracture we will see you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
A real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Windows, icons, menus, and pointer.
Casey:
Wimp.
John:
Ah.
John:
I always forget the I is icons.
John:
I go for like input, I-beam cursor, what the hell?
John:
Icons.
John:
I gotta follow the reference.
John:
Whoever made that up.
John:
I really hope it wasn't an Apple or a Mac person.
John:
First, it's a bad acronym.
John:
And second, icons?
John:
Ugh.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Whatever.
Casey:
So what else is going on?
Marco:
Well, so far, my 15-inch MacBook Pro is doing just fine.
Casey:
Oh, actually, I meant to ask you, how's your monitor?
Casey:
Seriously, I'm not trying to snark.
Marco:
So the LG 5K, whatever it's called, UltraSharp, whatever it is, the LG 5K that Apple pushed last fall,
Marco:
that's dell dell has ultra sharp okay sorry but they look about the same so that's uh it is what you'd expect from if apple dictated quality standards for a panel but had a pc manufacturer actually make and sell the case and everything else
Marco:
So it is a beautiful screen.
Marco:
It is just as good as the iMac that I had, the 2014 one.
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure this also supports DisplayP3 color, so it's actually better in that spec.
Marco:
I have not compared it side-by-side to a modern iMac with the newest P3 screen, so I don't know if it's better that way.
Marco:
Or if it's comparable to them or if it's a little bit worse.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe on some spec it might be a little bit worse.
Marco:
But to my eyes, it looks pretty amazing.
Marco:
So the panel is awesome.
Marco:
The rest of the monitor itself is generic PC maker stuff.
Marco:
It has a big, ugly black case around it.
Marco:
It has a big, ugly stand.
Marco:
The speakers are embarrassing.
Marco:
I'm not even sure why it has speakers.
Marco:
They're so bad.
Marco:
uh and the it has some useful it has uh three usbc output ports on the back and it charges my laptop when it's plugged in so it functions oh and it has a webcam up top and because it has a webcam up top it has this giant like top bezel that does not match the bottom bezel and looks weird i have not used the webcam yet i don't care i probably never will um so it's fine but
Marco:
But as soon as Apple says they're making a Pro display with next year's Mac Pro, I'm probably going to get that when I get the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Because this is fine.
Marco:
It's serving me fine for now.
Marco:
But it certainly does not make me think, wow, this is an amazing piece of computer that I have here.
Marco:
Because it's just so blah, ugly PC hardware.
John:
I was at an Apple store recently and I saw the 5K and 4K sitting over there and they just look so incongruous in an Apple store.
John:
Like it's all this Apple hardware and then these big black shiny PC looking things.
John:
It's gross.
Marco:
Yeah, they really are gross.
Marco:
And the good thing is the panel does work great.
Marco:
It is a beautiful 5K panel.
Marco:
And it does work very well with all the recent laptops.
Marco:
The only thing I will say is that, as I mentioned last episode, with the MacBook Escape, the GPU performance is not great on it.
Marco:
So things like moving around or resizing large windows, you actually see some stuttering there and stuff like that.
Marco:
But on the 15-inch with the discrete GPU, it's great.
Marco:
Totally fine.
Marco:
There is a minor issue with the 15-inch that some people point out on Twitter that I don't think I care about because I don't think I can notice it outside of benchmarks.
Marco:
But if you install the Intel Power Gadget, which is basically Intel's little extension and widget thing to show you your CPU's dynamic clocking and temperature and everything in real time as a little graph, kind of like activity monitor but for your CPU's clock speed,
Marco:
If you install that, you will notice that when the 15-inch is plugged into an external display...
Marco:
it actually throttles the CPU speed more so than it throttles it when it's running just by itself.
Marco:
Weird.
Marco:
I assume this is for thermal reasons, and that's kind of BS-y.
Marco:
I don't like that.
Marco:
I feel like that's kind of cheating, and that means that if you use this computer... So it has power.
Marco:
It's getting powered by the monitor, so it isn't that it has to conserve power.
Marco:
It seems to be thermal, and I tried it both with open lid and in clamshell mode, and it seems to be the same...
Marco:
So it's kind of weird that if you plug this computer into an external monitor, you get worse CPU performance.
Marco:
But it doesn't seem to be by enough to make me care.
Marco:
It is frustrating, but I think I'm going to just deal with that because, oh well.
Marco:
And this might only be with the high-end CPU model, but it clocks it down pretty far.
Marco:
It clocks it down from like 2.9 to 2.0 when it's in this throttling mode.
Marco:
So that's a pretty big drop.
Marco:
But anyway, not a big deal, I don't think.
Marco:
Again, I haven't been using it for that long, so ask me again later, but I think it's probably fine.
Marco:
Sounds like somebody needs a Mac Pro.
Marco:
I do, yes.
Marco:
Tell me about it.
John:
That's why people who use laptops as their main machines, the fan noise alone is such a compromise because you work it hard.
John:
It's connected to your big screen.
John:
You're going to do your big important work.
John:
You have it plugged in.
John:
You think everything has adequate power.
John:
And even if everything is going off without a hitch, still the thing sounds like a dentist drill over there.
John:
And now it's like throttling stuff and it's getting too hot and you don't want to have it in clamshell mode because it gets too hot and thermal throttles itself.
John:
It's just...
Marco:
yucky well it's just it's weird like that's the kind of problem that i would not expect a brand new computer in 2017 to have especially a revision two of a new hardware design i would definitely not expect that and honestly i actually considered for my needs you know being all weird and temporary and changing and needing to be portable and
Marco:
I actually did consider getting out of the trash can and just using it for the next year.
John:
That would have been awesome.
John:
Casey's brain would have exploded.
John:
If Apple waits long enough, Marco will rebuy the same computers multiple times.
Marco:
Really, one of the biggest reasons I didn't do it is because it can't drive a 5K display very easily.
John:
You can drive it in non-native res.
John:
Are you interested in that?
Marco:
Or downscaling over the wire and then re-upscaling it.
Marco:
I've seen it in the Apple store.
Marco:
It does not look right.
Marco:
But if it could drive a 5K display nicely, I might have actually gone that route instead.
Marco:
Because I do love desktops so much.
Marco:
And there's some weirdness with clamshell mode.
Marco:
It's mostly fine.
Marco:
It's fine enough for the next year for me to just deal with.
Marco:
But boy, I'm going to...
Marco:
As soon as that Mac Pro comes out, I'm switching back.
John:
And when I was in the Apple Store recently, I also saw the trash can.
John:
And you know what?
John:
It still looks cool.
John:
It does.
Casey:
If you get a trash can again.
Casey:
Because you did sell it, right?
Casey:
You did get rid of the last one.
Marco:
And I sold it for enough to cover the entire purchase of the iMac.
Marco:
Because you can actually sell them for quite a bit.
Marco:
Buy high, sell slightly less high.
Marco:
That's Marco's philosophy from high school.
Marco:
So Tipster in the chat is suggesting, and this is actually not the first time this has been suggested.
Marco:
Why don't I just buy an iMac and bring it to the beach house?
Marco:
And this is actually something that I considered.
Marco:
But the fact is, it's so expensive to get a decked out iMac.
Marco:
And I already had this 5K display.
Marco:
And so like, if I was starting over again, maybe I might do that.
Marco:
Um, but it also, for whatever reason, like, like, you know, when next year, when the new Mac pro presumably comes out and when I presumably buy one, this laptop will be freed up.
Marco:
And then I just have a really nice laptop.
Um,
Marco:
if i don't do that then you know then it doesn't do anything for my laptop need so it's like i i don't know somehow i rationalize this to make sense but uh you me yeah yeah but i i don't know i really do honestly like desktops are really nice
Marco:
Oh, I have already found a USB-C dongle that I don't like.
Marco:
I have the Anker one.
Marco:
I think it actually might be the same one you have, Casey.
Marco:
It's the Anker one that has three USB-A ports and gigabyte Ethernet.
Casey:
Yeah, what's wrong with it?
Marco:
Stuff that I plug into the USB-A ports is not reliable.
Casey:
Oh, really?
Casey:
I don't know if I've ever plugged anything into the USB-A ports.
Casey:
I got it mostly for Ethernet.
Casey:
And I used it like twice.
Casey:
So that's unfortunate, though, if it's unreliable.
Marco:
Oh, and one awesome thing that I've found about this setup is that because everything is running over this Thunderbolt cable that goes to the laptop.
Marco:
The way I have it set up now is everything I have plugged into the monitor.
Marco:
And the only thing I have plugged into the computer itself is the cable from the monitor.
Marco:
And then while I'm podcasting, the USB interface.
Marco:
Because it's always nice if you're running like audio gear, especially audio recording gear.
Marco:
It's wise to plug that as directly into the computer as possible to try to avoid hubs and things like that.
Marco:
Just for various USB weirdness reasons.
Marco:
Otherwise, everything's on this one cable.
Marco:
So the laptop, I actually have four feet away from the monitor.
Marco:
like on the floor leaning against the wall, buy some bags, which is great because it's nowhere near me.
Marco:
So if the laptop's fans spin up, I will hear them much less than I would if it were on the desk or if it were an iMac.
Marco:
So that's kind of nice.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
of course now as john as john sits there with his decade old mac pro it's probably like dead silent down the floor as well sometimes i don't even know if it's on it was on all day today i forgot i forgot to put it to sleep when i went away from it i didn't realize you know how i found out it was on all day because when i came in here to podcast and i'm like why is this room so hot it's because it's a space heater and running in it all day that's one thing my computer does do is it takes in cool air and it expels hot air and it does it very efficiently
John:
10 years of heat right most most of the energy that goes into my computer is converted to heat do you have have you ever dusted the inside of that or is that 10 years of dust in there too oh yeah yeah it's although it's so old now that like despite being dusted many times um
John:
you know it's pretty clean in there like the the vents and the heat sink are pretty clear but there's like the dust that like the thin layer of dust that welds itself to the surfaces like i don't know what this phenomenon is but like it's dust free as far as like pressurized air is concerned but if you run your finger along the surface nothing comes off on your finger but you can feel that like there's a layer of dust that is fused to the metal now that has become part of the aluminum
John:
It's a hell of a thing.
John:
I'll try to take some good macro photos of it when this thing finally retires in glory to my attic.
John:
This has to go into a museum or something.
Casey:
Yeah, it's going into his attic.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Not a mausoleum, a museum.
John:
Not a mausoleum, it's the thing from the end of Raiders.
John:
Which is a reference.
John:
Please tell me you both got it.
John:
Come on.
Casey:
You're going to kill me.
Casey:
It's been a long time since I've seen Raiders.
Casey:
I'm not sure I have seen it.
Casey:
God damn it.
Casey:
I've seen it many times.
Casey:
It's just been a long time since I've seen it.
John:
Nothing is safe.
John:
Nothing is safe.
John:
At least Casey got my damn sneakers reference.
John:
This is all I've got to hold on to.
John:
Casey's favorite movie he got a reference to.
John:
Yay.
Casey:
wait so is this where they where they like have the forklift and the ark or something like that is going into like this random ass warehouse where there's just a billion random boxes is that what you're thinking of that's the part okay see i got there just give me a second and marco may may or may not have seen raiders of the lost ark ladies and gentlemen marco armand