Simon Says Volume Five
Casey:
As we've already discussed, I have my paneled setup of windows and the one... Where does that accent come from?
John:
It's not a Connecticut thing.
John:
I wasn't aware I had one.
John:
The word for the thing that you cook in and the first syllable for your arrangement of windows.
John:
P-A-N-E-L versus P-A-N.
John:
Panel?
John:
Right.
John:
How do you pronounce it?
John:
Not the same way as the thing that you cook in.
John:
Well, he says panel.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Wait, what do you cook in?
John:
a pan oh not a pan so wait so i i'm you say them both the same you say i cook in a pan and i have a bunch of panels yeah so how would you say it i cook in a pan i have a bunch of panels that sounded the exact are you trolling me right now that sounded exactly the same analyze the waveforms pan panels pan panels
Casey:
marco you said what do you have going on with that uh i cook in a pan yeah and i have panels interesting middle ground they're slightly different from each other i don't understand what am i hammered what is happening i can't hear the difference what is going on right now is this what being colorblind feels like what the hell is happening
Casey:
All right, so we talked a lot last week about onboarding screens and why they're there, what is their purpose, whether they're good, whether they're bad, etc.
Casey:
And I was informed that the reason that these screens are happening is because of GDPR, which I know almost nothing about.
Casey:
And I've been a little busy, and so I'm a poor chief summarizer-in-chief, but nevertheless...
Casey:
gp gdpr is a general data protection regulation which is something that the eu passed recently and has come into effect or is coming into effect very very very soon oh it becomes enforceable from the 25th of may 2018 so we are coming up on it now uh i guess this doesn't apply to uh britain too soon anyway um point is point is sorry everybody
Casey:
The point is, apparently, it talks about how companies store your data and tries to give you more control of your data.
Casey:
And I've been told that that is the genesis of all of these onboarding screens.
John:
I'm not sure if I buy that because I bet that screen is going to be everywhere, not just in Europe.
John:
And it's not like Apple is above doing region-specific UIs.
John:
They do a bunch of stuff that I think is only visible in China, for instance.
John:
interesting maybe yeah on the other hand i feel like this gdpr thing which i'm basically just learning about now because i didn't actually follow your link in the show notes reminds me of the european cookie regulation stuff do you remember that oh yes you have to remember i think it's still in effect like if you go to they gotta throw up a pop-up that says just so you know this website is gonna you know use cookies to keep track of you agree or disagree right there's another example of
John:
properly motivated but ill-conceived legislation where the motivation is pure like there's these computers and they potentially could be storing us our personal information and tracking us which by the way they totally do um let's do something with the law to deal with that but this uh
John:
You know, the impulse to do this comes really early on in the history of the Web when the scariest thing out there is a cookie.
John:
Right.
John:
And the legislation is, I know, let's make every Web site in the world annoying forever and let's never do anything else related to other kinds of tracking.
John:
That'll be much, much worse than cookies.
John:
And, you know, like so many other laws, like it just sits there until someone, you know, who's going to have the motivation to say, you know, we should stop doing that because it's dumb.
John:
Or like we should realize the folly of this particular technique of trying to get people to grapple with privacy.
John:
Right.
John:
Because if you if you say this is this is the way we should deal with everything, then you got to have stuff like that for all forms of JavaScript, every kind of local storage, all the flash based super cookie, whatever thing it just it never ends.
John:
And, you know, you'd have to plow through 50 layers of stuff.
John:
click wrap as they call it to get to the website that you want um so if there's some new kind of legislation says by the way every time you launch an application you gotta throw a thing in someone's face which i don't think that's what this gdpr thing says but if there were such a thing i think that would be sort of the modern equivalent of the uh the cookie legislation uh perhaps um motivated by noble intent but ill conceived badly implemented and sure to age badly
John:
So we'll see.
John:
Maybe when these things roll out and Apple talks about them on stage, maybe they will make a pitch in that direction.
John:
But as far as I can tell, it looks a lot more like what we talked about last show, a way for Apple to advertise one of its competitive advantages and to provide some reassurance and to explain what the applications do in a more clear way than just showing an empty list view.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
But supposedly that is kind of the genesis for this.
Casey:
There's also going to be a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Smashing Magazine has how GDPR will change the way you develop, which talks about kind of how all this will affect developers.
Casey:
And the rumblings I've heard through various sources is that this is a bigger deal than any of us Americans are realizing because it doesn't seem to apply to us, but it applies to any of us that have...
Casey:
code that reaches more than one country and more than just America.
John:
And by the way, I think it is possible to make good legislation to protect consumers' privacy.
John:
It's just really hard to do when it comes to tech because the tendency is to pick whatever the specifics of the technology are at the moment and attack them and demonize them when really it's a much more general concern.
John:
And historically speaking, legislative bodies have not had a good track record with
John:
Legislating technology, essentially like understanding what the underlying issue is rather than attacking a specific technology as the one and only vehicle through which this issue will manifest.
John:
And that's never true.
John:
Like maybe that, you know, cookies were how privacy manifested a long, long time ago.
John:
Privacy issues manifest.
John:
in the following decades in so many more important ways than cookies, and yet the legislation just sits there staring at cookies, which is why you can't really legislate to technical details.
John:
You have to figure out what it is that we're really concerned about and make a law such that it applies in a useful way
John:
Yeah.
John:
perhaps take the advice and consultation of people who know things about technology who don't have a vested interest in one way or the other like kind of like talking to mathematicians and cryptographic experts when you when you make any laws related to cryptography which the u.s seems completely incapable of doing or they talk to them and ignore what they say and said i think i'll listen to industry lobbying groups instead they have all the money so they must know what they're talking about
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, like we can't even agree that facts are facts.
John:
I know.
John:
I know.
John:
I'm thinking back to a more naive time when we could simply just complain about how technologically illiterate our legislative bodies are.
John:
Now we have much more pressing concerns.
Casey:
And now I'm sad.
Casey:
Thanks for that, John.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Last week, we talked about how if you are a member of one or 30 Slack teams, you can actually, a little known fact, you can access Slack via IRC.
Casey:
I don't know when this announcement actually happened, but as it turns out...
Casey:
we got word within moments of releasing the episode that that's going away now.
Casey:
So it has been disabled for Slack teams that haven't enabled it.
Casey:
And I think it will be the, it will be phased out in the next some duration of time.
Casey:
So whoops.
John:
I'm not surprised by this because it totally seems like a thing that Slack might do early on as part of it.
John:
Let's make sure you have no excuse not to use Slack.
John:
And then as Slack becomes more successful and as they can compare the statistics of how many people use our IRC gateway versus how much does it take to maintain it versus how much does it help our strategic intent of the company...
John:
it you know it's probably used by a vanishingly small percentage of slack's customers they no longer are in that mode where they need to convince people to use slack because the ball started rolling and it probably does take some amount to maintain and it's just a distraction so it kind of makes sure it makes sense that it goes away but i bet if you use it you're probably pretty annoyed by that
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So that happened coincidentally right around the time we were bringing up on the show that, hey, you can do this too.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Amazon's Alexa is gaining a new follow-up mode, which no longer requires a trigger word after every request.
Casey:
So what will happen is Alexa will listen for five seconds after your previous request to see if you're wanting to ask another question.
Casey:
The blue ring on your echo will remain lit, and it will indicate that she is still listening.
Casey:
In this time period, you can ask her another question.
Casey:
Otherwise, she'll go back to sleep mode.
Casey:
That's cool.
Marco:
See, this to me, this is... It sounds cool until you actually think about how that works in practice.
Marco:
And I think you can actually enable it now.
Marco:
But the problem with that is it's not addressing what you actually want.
Marco:
What you actually want is to say, Cylinder, play El Scorcho by Weezer and turn the volume to five.
Marco:
You want to be able to do multiple commands in one sentence or in one command.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
They can't do that right now.
Marco:
None of them can, as far as I know.
Marco:
And that's what you actually want.
Marco:
What this feature does is, hey, Cylinder, play El Scorcher by Weezer.
Marco:
And then it says, okay...
Marco:
And then it starts playing.
Marco:
You don't want that.
John:
I don't think it's stopping on the command.
John:
I think all it's doing is, I mean, my reading of this article is all it's doing is it will immediately start playing the song that you asked for, but for the next five seconds, anything else you say it will try to interpret as a command as if you had prefixed it with a cylinder.
Marco:
Right, but then I'm pretty sure then the volume still stays ducked, and it's just like, I feel like the percentage of the time that's going to actually do what you want,
Marco:
versus the percentage of the time that it's going to either keep listening to something you say afterwards that you didn't intend for it to be a command, or just delay what you were trying to do, or do something... Or, like, you thought it was still listening, gave it another command, but the five seconds had just ended.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I feel like the failure rate of that to do what people actually want is going to be way, way too high to be acceptable.
Marco:
It's not going to be good enough of the time.
Marco:
And it's also like, to me, that's not smart.
Marco:
That's just like a very small implementation detail.
Marco:
That's not actually making the service smarter.
Marco:
What we actually need is for all these voice assistants to become smarter and to recognize compound commands.
Marco:
That's what people actually want.
Marco:
Play El Scorcher by Weezer and turn the volume to 5.
Marco:
Set a rice timer for 10 minutes and a pasta timer for 7 minutes.
Marco:
This is what people actually want to do.
Marco:
And so, you know, a little trace like this, like, that's a dumb hack.
Marco:
Really what we need is for the voice assistant to get better to actually recognize multiple commands the way humans will actually give them.
John:
So this is also not what I was asking for last week.
John:
I think that's why it was sent to us as follow up.
John:
What I was asking for was context awareness such that follow up commands could be aware of what you asked for previously and interpret your subsequent commands in light of what you had just asked it based on like like the way a person would if you say something to a person and an hour later you say something else.
John:
There's no way they're going to connect that to the context of the last thing you said to them.
John:
But if you say something to them and then add an addendum two seconds later, they have the context of the first command, you know, to understand what you mean.
John:
And the key part of that is that the second thing that you say is not itself a complete command.
John:
It relies on the knowledge of the context.
John:
That's why I said last week that it probably requires some more local hardware.
John:
because you would want i mean for privacy reasons or whatever you'd want some some of that local context awareness to happen you know locally you don't need the server to keep track of like your session or whatever so it can understand that i think if you keep some of that locally um compound commands would also be good and actually seem much easier to me than what i'm asking for because like it's two commands and there's a joiner and you can figure it out and break it up into pieces but
John:
I think it's more natural to have a conversation, to hone in on what you want, because that's what you do with other people, than to formulate even a single command, let alone a compound command, as if, as I said a couple weeks ago, you're playing a verbal text adventure, where...
John:
maybe you don't have to get the syntax just right but you understand that you're issuing a command and now you maybe you can issue compound commands but it's not the way you would yell into the other room for marco to add something to your shopping list you would you don't you don't have to formulate a command for marco you can basically say it in any way that you want including addendums and revisions and uh you know what never mind about that just get the other thing you can say stuff like that and it knows what the heck you're talking about and the cylinder does not and that is a really tall order uh
John:
delay mode or follow-up mode or whatever is not close to that but it at least shows then the next it shows that they understand that the current mode of uh wake uh wake uh wake word or wake phrase followed by single command followed by i forget you exist is pretty primitive
Marco:
Also, like, I feel like this is... This kind of has, like, a Simon Says problem, where, like, if you get accustomed to not saying the wake word before every command you give, that doesn't work all the time.
Marco:
Like, you can't say, cylinder, play a scorcher by Weezer, and then...
Marco:
10 seconds later say volume five because it won't recognize it yeah you have to say simon says volume five you got to say cylinder volume five right and it's like but but sometimes you don't have to say that like if you say it within five seconds of the previous command being completed then you can omit the word cylinder and it's like well that's like that's going to be confusing like that's going to it's going to trip you up when you're like it's going to increase your error rate like this is again this is this is just one of the reasons why this isn't a solution i feel like
Marco:
at a high level I think what kind of makes me sad about the voice assistant market is that all of us like Apple fans are accustomed to somebody being you know historically Apple being really good at designing really smart software and really good software experiences and the rest of the industry has always been pretty crappy overall there's been a couple of bright spots here or there but not many and
Marco:
I feel like we're all having to use Amazon and Google stuff.
Marco:
And Amazon and Google have always been pretty rough, especially Amazon, pretty rough at user interaction design and software usability design.
Marco:
And what we're seeing here is just like...
Marco:
you know tech companies making stuff that's mediocre which is what we've always seen and apple was always the one who could save us from that but unfortunately in this particular market they just seem not capable of that for whatever reason um and that just makes me sad like because it's like usually apple will be the ones to save us and to make like the really good thing for people like us who cared about good experiences and all the details and everything and in voice systems they they just aren't capable of doing that for whatever reason that's kind of sad
John:
I continue to think that this is much more in Google's wheelhouse than Apple's because, yes, it's a part of user interface design, but specifically this realm of translating words that a human comes up with into an intent is what the Google search box is all about.
John:
It frustrates some of us because it no longer works like AltaVista where you can formulate like a Boolean query with exact substring matching.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and get predictable results but that google search box is all about saying people just type lots of stuff there and you can type things there and i'm still amazed at the google search box i type things there and it finds what i meant for it to find and i don't even know how it's doing it like i didn't it's not it's you know how did you get what i was trying you know you go to the page or whatever and like none of those words are on this page
John:
Like you somehow figured out what I meant.
John:
Granted, it's still a single command and response and it's not a conversation.
John:
But Google was founded on that strength of going beyond the sort of simple direct computer search to intelligent interpretation of human generated words and translating that to an intent and satisfying the request.
John:
despite spelling errors weird phrasing uh you know the foibles of humans right and the verbal one of that now that uh speech to text is as good as it is it maps very well onto the search problem in that you have to figure out intent and you can get the words from it pretty well and then you have to figure out intent and same thing with spelling errors same thing with like you know
John:
homonyms or whatever that google is good at figuring that out that's always been google's strength so i totally look to them to be the ones to figure to figure out this aspect of user interface before apple and i think they are doing it better than apple but i agree that all of them are are not not as good as i could hope like apple is way behind and amazon and google have been ahead but i'm waiting for them both to take like the next small step
Marco:
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Marco:
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Oh,
Casey:
well did you guys see there was some sort of like drama about siri that happened today i did not get a chance to look up what happened but apparently someone was like oh siri's garbage it's not my fault did you know what i'm talking about yeah i know it's a it's a story on the information which when i when i see that website i always think of marco and i'm like there's someone the website it's much worse it's much worse than the magazine ever was because the information is like anyway
John:
You know, the information is really spammy.
Marco:
I really don't like like they signed me up to their mailing list when they launched as if I had signed up saying I was interested.
Marco:
And as a result, even though I have never responded to anything, never signed up for anything, they still incessantly spam me.
Marco:
And I really like, you know, I know it's kind of low to call them out publicly for this, but that is not OK for anybody to do.
Marco:
It just drives me nuts.
Marco:
You can unsubscribe.
Marco:
I just unsubscribed today.
Marco:
Speaking of them, I did because I finally drove me that nuts.
Marco:
But I'm just like, like I never signed up for this.
Marco:
And all you're doing is promoting articles that I can't see because I'm not going to pay 40 bucks a month to a spammer.
Marco:
And so like it just it drives me nuts.
Marco:
I just people play fast and loose with mailing lists all the time.
Marco:
And the mail list companies like MailChimp and everything, they're all complicit in this because they don't require double opt-in when you import a mail list from another service, allegedly.
Marco:
And so they're all complicit because they all make spamming people in mass really easy.
Marco:
And as a result, I get on all sorts of spam lists that appear like I signed up for them.
Marco:
And it's a dirty, scammy trick when you're launching something like this to use a PR list you find somewhere or you buy somewhere.
Marco:
And the information was one of the companies that does this, one of the many companies that does this.
Marco:
And so I just have zero respect for them.
Marco:
Zero.
Marco:
And I know it's a dumb reason, but that's how nuts this drives me.
John:
Well, anyway, this explains why none of us actually read the article, because none of us have paid for the information.
John:
But we know about it because they're good at spamming people and letting them know this article exists.
John:
It was, I think, summarized on 9to5Mac, which is also kind of a scummy practice of taking a paywalled article and then...
John:
basically rewriting it worse on your site so that people read your site instead of the paywall thing yeah i love this business it's such a great business i should really go back to publishing web content that sounds like a lot of fun i mean i can understand like a paragraph and a link seems reasonable but once you've gone on for a page and a half with laboriously summarizing an article that you didn't write anyway
John:
The story, as far as I could tell, was a bunch of a bunch of reports from people inside Apple or X Apple people who know about the internal workings of Siri over the years and saying how and where things went wrong with specific quotes from specific people assigning blame to other people, not to themselves, explaining the situation.
John:
And it's just the typical, you know, things aren't going great inside a big company.
John:
product launches and it's not scalable and it's band-aided and everyone points fingers about who set the priorities or what they should be doing and how often it should be updated.
John:
I mean, it's mostly details that may be interesting or from a business case perspective, if you're learning about how businesses run, interesting.
John:
But practically speaking, I care less and less about the
John:
internal political goings on in apple and uh and mostly just say like that's apple's job to figure out like i'm not running apple i'm not an executive there i'm not a high level manager that's their job as a company to figure out how to corral the people to produce results and if it doesn't go well i'm not that interested in why it didn't go well who was to blame which person was more difficult which person made the big wrong strategic decision at what point and
John:
They just need to figure that out.
John:
But on the outside, I just say, look, how's the product doing?
John:
And the product, as we've discussed in the past, not doing that great.
John:
And they've had a long time, so I hope they get it sorted out.
Casey:
I don't even want to get angry about Siri again.
Casey:
So let's just move on.
Casey:
And instead let's get angry about keyboards.
Casey:
Marco, this is your cue.
Casey:
Apple apparently has patented a keyboard that cannot be defeated by crumbs.
Casey:
Marco, I know you have been celebrating.
Casey:
You are swinging from the rafters.
Casey:
You're so excited.
Casey:
So I don't know when we're going to expect to see this, but hopefully it will mean that I don't need to invest in compressed air anymore.
Marco:
I mean, this is a problem I don't have because I have a laptop that has a functioning keyboard.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
I walked right into that one.
John:
But why do you think Marco would be excited by this?
John:
This seems like Marco's nightmare to me because Marco loves the fact that the keyboard he hates also has a terrible reliability problem that allows him to righteously rail against it.
John:
Imagine if they made that keyboard 100% reliable.
John:
Then all he's got is this keyboard works all the time, but I hate it.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, when it first came out before we knew how badly it would break all the time, that is what I did.
Marco:
And also the arrow key placement is still horrendous.
Marco:
Not having the, not having the gap above the arrows is above the left and right is, is unforgivable.
Marco:
But anyway, look, I, I, I'm of two minds of this, you know, number one, John's right.
Marco:
You know, I, I,
Marco:
In a way, I don't want to see this keyboard succeed and be fixed.
Marco:
I'm not going to lie.
Marco:
That is part of my motivation because I don't like it so much.
Marco:
But also, keep in mind I had those keyboards for, what, about a year before I finally gave up?
Casey:
Across 13 different laptops.
Marco:
Three.
Marco:
And so I had the keyboard, and I got used to it enough.
Marco:
I never liked it, but I was able to function with it until it stopped working reliably.
Marco:
And so the reality is I know – I got to choose my battles here.
Marco:
I know that a lot of people out there don't care or even like this keyboard.
Marco:
I know that Apple is always going to press to make these things thinner.
Marco:
And I think Apple has shown across multiple years and multiple products that they only care about making the keyboard thinner.
Marco:
And they will make some efforts to make the thin keyboard tolerable.
Marco:
But they are no longer interested in keeping it a good keyboard if that means they can't make it thinner.
Marco:
And so I just have to kind of resign myself to accept that.
Marco:
I'm not going to rail on this for a half hour like I usually do because...
Marco:
I fought this battle.
Marco:
I lost this battle.
Marco:
And I'm going to continue to lose this battle into the future.
Marco:
The last thing I think Apple's going to do in the next MacBook revision is to make the keyboard thicker.
Marco:
It's just not going to happen.
Marco:
And I fundamentally don't believe that they can make a keyboard with this little travel good.
John:
I just don't think they can do it.
John:
Good as far as you're concerned, though, because lots of people do really like the keyboard.
John:
I mean, Casey and I included have basically been converted to this new keyboard.
John:
It's just the reliability issues and, as you said, the key layout.
John:
Right.
Marco:
And so, basically, if they can fix the reliability problems...
Marco:
I would love if they made the keyboard a different style, but if they can fix the reliability problems, that's the best I can hope for.
John:
The key layout is just sitting right there, too, because there can be divisive opinions about, do you like how this keyboard feels or not?
John:
Some people like it, some people don't.
John:
Fine.
John:
But I feel like key layout changes, there are certain key layout changes that...
John:
would be universally praised from the perspective of using the keyboard and the only naysayers would be aesthetic for example inverted t full size breaking the rectangle of the keyboard aesthetically people would hate that it would be like the notch on the keyboard it would be like an asymmetrical notch on the bottom of your keyboard and those people would yell about it but from the perspective of people who type how does it feel to type on i don't see anybody saying please bring back the half size arrow keys
John:
with or without the gaps above them.
John:
I mean, are there fans out there who would say, please bring them back?
John:
Again, people from an aesthetic perspective, I can imagine it, but not from a functional perspective.
John:
Did you just say that you would ask to bring back the half arrow keys?
John:
You mean the way I have them in my 2015, where the left and right are half height?
John:
No, I mean, make a full height and have the rectangular shape that the keyboard defines be broken.
Marco:
So basically have the up key in line with the other ones now, but have the down, left, and right in their own row below it.
Marco:
Yes, exactly, and have all of them be full-sized and have gaps above them.
John:
I mean, that would be cool, but they're never going to do that.
John:
I know, I'm just saying, there are key layout changes that I think would be universally praised from a functional perspective, but derided only from an aesthetic perspective.
John:
And I'm not even saying they're wrong, because I understand...
John:
thinking that's ugly but boy would that be nicer for people use arrow keys a lot which is i think everybody like who doesn't use the arrow keys a lot like my son oh god when he's taking those online those online coding courses these days he's using the mouse to move his insertion point one space i'm just like
John:
use the arrow keys use them like stop he goes from the keyboard to the mouse to the keyboard well he can't reach them he can't figure out where they are because they're all the same height as everything else oh no he's using a full-size apple extended keyboard with full-size arrow are you kidding we're not using this is on not my house yeah we're using real real keyboards here
John:
And like I even showed him the modifier for moving a word at a time and beginning of end of line.
John:
But just for single characters, like seeing him take the mouse and steer it to go to the left of, you know, the place where he needs to insert a quotation mark to match the other one.
John:
It's like, just just hit the left arrow once.
John:
I swear to you, it will work.
John:
And he's just not he's not on that page.
John:
This is what happens from not using computers and only using like iPads and iPhones like your whole formative years.
John:
You have no idea about moving the cursor with arrow keys.
Marco:
Anyway, I wouldn't expect Apple to do anything that's going to make the keyboard less attractive to the current Apple design team's aesthetic.
Marco:
I agree, unfortunately.
Marco:
They're just not going to do it.
Marco:
This is not a rare thing with Apple these days.
Marco:
Look at the Apple TV remote.
Marco:
Even look at their regular keyboards and mice and everything.
Marco:
if they were willing to make it a little bit ugly they could make it better economically or feel better or work better or whatever else but they're not and it's easy to see both sides of this argument like we all argue like these things should work better design is how it works they argue we are printing money and this is how we like to design things and this is what looks good and people buy our stuff in part because it looks good and yeah it is aesthetically better i i think we would all agree it does look better when the keyboard is just a rectangle like it just does like as a piece of art as a you know but yeah
Marco:
And look, Apple these days is really good at designing beautiful things that kind of suck to use.
Marco:
Like, that's kind of what they're best at, right?
John:
It could even be argued that the uniformity is the reason the right and left arrow keys became full height, because those little gaps were in asymmetry.
John:
I guarantee you that's the reason.
Marco:
because there's no there's no other reason to do it it doesn't make them easier to use the same reason that the bottom row of keys is now the same height as all the other rows again uniformity yeah oh totally yeah it's you know because it's it's design it's design purely to aesthetics it's egotistical design it is indulgent design for the designers to indulge themselves and what they think looks the best without regard to how things work
John:
Someone, I think, also pointed out that even on the external keyboards for desktop computers, the bottom row of keys is now the same height as all the other ones.
John:
I didn't actually check this because I don't have one of those new keyboards to compare with, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case, if only for part-sharing reasons, because we all know how Apple likes to use the same keyboard across all of its laptops from 12 inches to 17, which I will forever remember as...
John:
ridiculous thing and now it is only slightly less ridiculous it's shared between the 15 and the 13 and the 12 i guess um oh so on this before we leave this this bit of follow-up here on this this patent uh the date of this patent is uh 2016 which makes me think like just as the original macbooks were coming out
John:
Was that 2016 or was that later?
Marco:
They came out in early 2015, a year and a half before they brought this keyboard to all of their laptops, during which it was very clear during that year and a half that it failed a lot.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But in 2016, they introduced the MacBook Pros with the same keyboard at the same time they filed this patent.
John:
So it shows that they had been thinking about at some point...
John:
you know before 2016 they had been investigating these different ways to seal up the bottom of that thing now i i think i brought this up when we talked about the original slimline keyboard or maybe it was when we talked about the touch bar but i think this is i'll use this opportunity to once again promote the idea that i think apple would benefit from on all of its laptops this idea of sealing up the key caps with a little membrane so that stuff can't get in there just take it to the next level and make these damn things waterproof
John:
right if you can waterproof a phone if you made a waterproof keyboard include which would also obviously include as a side effect the inability to get crap underneath the keys i would imagine i mean it doesn't have to necessarily but i would imagine that would be that could be part of it people will love you for it um how many people casey spill things on their laptops uh
John:
if you could like is it beyond us technologically speaking to make a sort of sealed keyboard that feels good i mean maybe these patents are just patents because apple figured out if you do this it makes the keyboard feel even worse i don't know we'll see if they ever produce something like this but well no i mean we we kind of know that from the smart keyboard
Marco:
the the ipad pro smart keyboard has i think but the same butterfly switches or at least similar feeling switches but it has like a membrane across the whole thing and so it is i think roughly water resistant at least um but it doesn't get it doesn't get stuff under the keys it at least doesn't do that so
Marco:
we kind of know, like, this is possible to do with just a membrane.
Marco:
I know that one of the Microsoft Surface notebook lines does it, too.
Marco:
And they have issues with it, like, you know, getting dirty and looking really grimy and gross really fast.
Marco:
But, like, that's not to say that it has to go that way.
Marco:
Like, maybe different materials choices could have different results there.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
that's not actually that bad of a thing to try.
Marco:
I don't know if it would feel better or worse than we have now, but like the smart keyboard, like I use the smart keyboard all the time on the iPad.
Marco:
I wouldn't call it great, but it's tolerable.
Marco:
And that's about what I can say for the notebook one as well.
Marco:
So it's just tolerable in slightly different ways.
Marco:
But you know what?
Marco:
The smart keyboard keys have never failed on me, not once, because stuff can't get in there.
Marco:
So it's not a ridiculous idea.
John:
Do you have the problems with the smart keyboard with, like, I think it was iOS 11 or something?
John:
People are complaining the smart keyboard doesn't work reliable anymore due to, like, some change in the debouncing firmware or some crap?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
No, I mean, it's not... I haven't had... I don't know if it's related to debouncing or not.
Marco:
No, it definitely is less reliable.
Marco:
That seems like an iOS software thing, like, just, like, the way the apps behave with the keyboard attached or detached has been more buggy.
Marco:
Rotation has been more buggy.
Marco:
Yeah, it's been kind of a mess, but I attribute that to iOS 11.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, I think one challenge you might have with the idea of waterproofing a laptop is ventilation and cooling.
John:
Yeah, no, I mean, obviously the MacBook is your easiest one, right?
John:
Because the reason I bring up this whole idea of waterproofing now is that Apple has slowly been sealing up its laptops, not for the purpose of waterproofing, but just for the purpose of Apple being Apple, like getting rid of moving parts and seams and making them unibody and then the battery is not removable.
John:
I think another way to look at this is decontenting.
John:
i mean it's a simplification it's moving towards this platonic ideal of like this is a featureless uh you know uh smooth uh they are certainly featureless right uh and so the macbook no vents right you still have to deal with the ports which i think might be challenging because apple doesn't get to define all those ports you have to come up with the sealed but still repairably internal or replaceable usbc port or whatever but there's not a lot of holes in a 12 inch macbook right um so i feel like that is that is a good candidate if you can seal an ipad
John:
or an iPhone, it has a similar number of holes to a MacBook Adorable, the 12-inch Apple laptop.
John:
For the ones with vents and fans, granted, it's a lot harder, but even on those, if you say, look, it's not waterproof, but the top surface, the keyboard surface, if you do a spill on it,
John:
you'll be okay like the water will shed away and not be sucked into the vents and the top is sealed so that it's waterproof so it can take a spill you can't dunk the thing in water but it's better than it was before because where if you spill on the keyboard you're doomed and apple would never repair your thing again
John:
And if this membrane keyboard, like if they do this for Chrome reasons, I say, while you're in there, see what you can do about water.
John:
Let's call it water resistance or something.
John:
You know, I I just think it's it's kind of silly as time goes on that.
John:
our phones can be dropped into a glass of water and come back out okay but our much more expensive laptops like a a pin drop of water fan falls on the keyboard and filters down into the inside and starts corroding things and it's all over one speck of dust 700 one speck of wet dust 1200 yeah no more than that it's like total replacements like sorry it's like probably like the phones water got in this and we don't cover water damage
John:
I don't know if that's true of laptops, but I know the phones have those little water damage sensor thingies on them that they yell at you about if it turns out your thing has water damage.
John:
No, it is also true of laptops.
John:
Use desktop kids.
John:
They don't get wet.
John:
I don't know.
John:
They don't get wet unless Casey's around.
John:
I bet he could find some way to get water into one of them.
Casey:
Challenge accepted.
Casey:
I would say hold my beer, but I'm going to need it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
What do you guys think?
Marco:
I know this has been very well covered, especially on the talk show a few days ago.
Marco:
But what do you guys think of the rumors of a potential MacBook Air update?
Marco:
This to me, I think, is potentially very interesting.
John:
Yeah, I heard that the talk show with Jason Snell was on.
John:
Yeah, Jason Snell and John Gruber were talking about that.
John:
I kind of agree with Jason about his consternation of this, like, somehow we can't kill this laptop.
John:
And I'm mostly coming at it from a sort of Apple should be embarrassed angle.
John:
Not so much that the MacBook Air is a bad machine, but there is one part of the machine I think is inexcusable, and that's the screen.
John:
not because it's not in retina like they made all the points on the show some people don't care about retina some people can't even see the difference but because it has such incredibly bad viewing angles brightness and uh color reproduction right it just it's just at this point when it was introduced fine at this point it is just a bad screen it looks worse than basically any new pc laptop screen you could buy at any price wait hold on honest question have you seen a 12 inch macbook screen
Marco:
yeah sure because they like if you look at the 12 inch compared to the other higher end ones the 12 inch screen is also noticeably worse at things like viewing angle of color everything it's it's not a good screen but it's better than it's better than the air that's true i'll give you that but but but it's not it's still like a crap screen it is not oh a slow down it is not a crap screen when you compare it to a macbook pro screen of any even the old ones
Casey:
I do that every day.
Casey:
I would take the MacBook adorable one any day.
John:
It's retina, so it's like way better than the MacBook.
John:
But I'm just saying for color reproduction and viewing, a thing that Apple used to pride itself on, that they never really had crap monitors, that they always had pretty much the best monitors, and that they wouldn't let a really old monitor stay around for a long time, that they would refresh.
John:
And they have been refreshing the MacBook Air, like ripping out the, you know, changing the internals and everything like that.
John:
But leaving that screen...
John:
It just boggles my mind because I feel like at this point, I would never want to buy a $1,000 laptop with that screen on it.
John:
It seems inexcusable.
John:
So if they had been updating the MacBook Air to keep it limping along on life support and had also updated the screen, I would be like, well, this is not ideal.
John:
But they found themselves in a weird place with their product line, so let's see what they do with it.
John:
I think Jason and Gruber had a good analysis of that.
John:
It's conceivable they somehow found themselves in this scenario where...
John:
Any move to replace it would result in reduced margins on one or both lines as the buyer shifted.
John:
And the Tim Cook philosophy is like, if it ain't broke, if people are still giving us money for it, don't fix it.
John:
Which is terrible from a coherent product line directive.
John:
And if there is another live talk show with Apple executives on it, I really hope John asks them...
John:
i hope he doesn't ask them because if you ask them uh it seems like your laptop line has no coherent story you can make a coherent story like well the air is for people who like blah blah blah blah and then you have the macbook is for people all you're doing is like risk listing the pros and cons of your models but there there is no coherent story to the naming features or pricing of the current apple laptop line it is a mess and so i would state that and say you know like exactly there's no coherent story to the naming features or pricing of your laptop line why is that
John:
And if they want to contest that, I would push back pretty hard to say, come on, one of them's called Air, but it's not the lightest, but it's super old.
John:
It's got MagSafe on it, but the other ones don't have MagSafe.
John:
One of them's called MacBook Pro, but it's got the internals of the Air, and it's just like, your brain explodes.
John:
So I think their line is in disarray, and I think they can make...
John:
And I think the MacBook Air was a great model of laptop, but we have the technology now to make a line of computers that spans the exact same price range that offers a better computer at the $1,000 price point than they currently offer now.
John:
And also, if there's a better computer at all the other ones, you know, depending on how you want to do it, hey, put on MagSafe and USB-C and let people charge from both, and let's see which one people like better, right?
John:
Because then you get the advantages of Casey using his Switch charger, and the advantage of if you trip over my card, you won't break it, and maybe you can choose when you order it, whether you want the MagSafe or not, because maybe you just want to be able to use all your same charge, anyway.
John:
Or put an SD card slot on the side of these computers, or maybe have an HDMI port on one model, like...
John:
I'm going a little bit crazy here, but I long for the days when you can look at the line of Apple laptops and say, I see how it goes.
John:
Big, small, low price, high price, not a lot of features, a bunch of features, and have them all look like a family.
John:
And that's not the case now.
John:
Not the case at all.
Marco:
So one, I think, curiosity that I had throughout the other nice discussions about this, and again, I think listening to the talk show this week, it's a really good discussion about this from a lot of different angles.
Marco:
But one thought I had was like, if they make a Retina MacBook Air,
Marco:
If they literally change nothing else about it except a retina screen and maybe replacing the two Thunderbolt 2 ports, or does it have one or two?
Marco:
Replacing its Thunderbolt 2 ports with USB-C ports.
Marco:
And then, of course, you know, a modern chipset of the same type that's currently in the MacBook Escape.
Marco:
would anybody still buy the MacBook Escape?
John:
No.
John:
That's the problem we've talked about.
John:
If you improve the MacBook Air, why would anyone buy a MacBook?
John:
Sorry, a MacBook Pro, rather, not a MacBook.
Marco:
The MacBook Escape, a 13-inch MacBook without touch bar,
Marco:
is by many measures a MacBook Air.
Marco:
It has the MacBook Air class processors, the MacBook Air class chipset, and everything else.
Marco:
It's the same approximate size and weight.
Marco:
It's slightly different, but roughly the same size and weight as the 13-inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
But if you put a retina screen in the old ancient MacBook Air body that was designed in 2010, I bet it would sell better than the 13-inch MacBook Escape.
John:
It would be a better laptop.
John:
It has an SD card slot.
John:
It has MagSafe, the option for MagSafe.
John:
It has legacy USB ports, which Apple acknowledges is a thing that some people want.
John:
Otherwise, they wouldn't have put them on the iMac Pro, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you showed a regular person which one of these laptops do you think is better and which one do you want and didn't tell them about the price and they weren't sensitive to styling cues that clearly indicate that the MacBook Air is super old, they would say, well, that one's got more stuff.
John:
It's got more features.
John:
It's got more things.
John:
And this magnet power cable is really smart.
John:
Right.
John:
Why would you ever pick the other one?
John:
If we tell you, guess what?
John:
That one's $300 more.
John:
You'd be like, well, who would pay $300 more to have no ports on the side for a computer that is basically the same size and weight?
John:
And it perceptibly seems thicker because it doesn't taper.
John:
Right.
John:
Like the MacBook Air is thicker on one end, but thinner on the other.
John:
But it seems smaller because it gets skinny just for that perception type thing.
John:
like that that's the and and it's fine if they do that like if they want to remake their line in that way you'd have to sort this type of thing out but instead they they leave it in the current scenario where the old one is clearly old and has serious downsides versus the regular one in terms of the terrible screen they have on it right um
John:
The new one is expensive for no perceptible reason, and you trade off a bunch of stuff, and then it gets even more super expensive, and you still don't get your ports back, and you still have Nomadic safe, and the keyboard is weird and breaks all the time.
John:
So they need to do something.
John:
I really want them to just clean house on the laptop line and say, all new line, one nice family, unified in appearance features, and has a coherent ramp from expensive to inexpensive.
John:
And by the way, at all price points and at all sizes, every one of them is better in some way, whether it has more features or better reliability or, you know, faster or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, I suspect we're going to see some kind of major movement in the laptop line this year.
Marco:
I really hope we do.
Marco:
The current line has so many of these weird issues, not to mention some of the problems it has, but just these weird things that make it more or less compelling or seemingly weirdly priced in certain ways or really segmented in other ways.
Marco:
It needs help, and...
Marco:
I have a feeling Apple knew that two years ago, like shortly after it launched.
Marco:
And I have a feeling they've worked to fix it.
Marco:
And so the only question is how they're fixing it.
Marco:
And I don't expect this to be giving me all my hopes and dreams or anything.
Marco:
But I do expect change and hopefully improvement.
John:
And so we'll see what that means.
John:
Speaking of hopes and dreams, this is a tough question in the style of these recent ones that listeners have been sending us.
John:
for the high-end laptops which is where we're all shopping well you two are shopping because i don't buy laptops um i'm getting towards that point if you had to pick one port to add to the current crop of macbook pro parts let's just pick the 15 inch macro progress that has the most you can only pick one uh for your own personal purposes not for like what would make a better laptop for apple to sell what would you pick
Marco:
On a 15-inch, no question, an SD card reader.
Marco:
Casey?
Casey:
i'm torn between ancient usb and sd card reader i would probably or actually hdmi would also be convenient a big one i know i'm thinking uh see and like to me like if you if it's less if it's not the 15 inch like if you ask me what what port i would add to the macbook escape it would be a third of anything like a third usb c port just one more of anything because that's what it most desperately needs like the 12x too right yeah yeah the same thing i would kill for a second usb c port in my
John:
That's why I picked the 15, just to see, like, you know, you feel like there's enough USB-Cs on the 15, but you can add one more thing.
John:
You know, what would it be?
Casey:
I am very torn between SD, between old USB, and between HDMI, but I think if I had to pick...
Casey:
For me, I would probably come down on SD card reader because I don't find a need for plugging in HDMI that often, and I have a dongle for it.
Casey:
I don't have a need for plugging in legacy USB stuff that often, and I have a dongle for it.
Casey:
But I do have an SD card reader that I like quite a lot, but it would be more convenient to just be able to slot that thing right in the computer.
Marco:
yeah like to me it's like you can solve a lot like a lot of the annoyances of the new of the new laptop ports are solved by just having a lot of them like you know like when you have four of them well technically really you have three of them because one of them has a power plug in it um but we know when you have three useful pass through like you're i i i hear your point 100 but then you're in dongle town and like okay you're gonna be in dongle town regardless yeah i know well that's part of the problem we're all landowners in dongle town my friend
Marco:
yeah but i feel like you know like the other ports you know you can you can fix a lot of the inconvenience of usb-c only laptops with getting new cables for old devices like you can you can you can go on you know monoprice or amazon or whatever and get inexpensive cables that have usb-c on one end and whatever your peripheral needs on the other end and you can just replace your cables and and you know there's some issues with hubs and multiplying those that i've talked about before which is still annoying but um but i feel like you can reduce a lot of the annoyance with just like new cables
Marco:
But if you need SD cards as part of your workflow, there's no way to reduce that annoyance.
Marco:
You're always going to have an SD card hanging out of the side of it through a cable or something.
Marco:
That sucks.
Marco:
And when it's built in, it sucks less.
Marco:
So other problems can be solved with either time or cabling choices or peripheral choices.
Marco:
But not having an SD card reader, if you use SD cards, is always a pain.
John:
so the reason i ask this question is because i've been thinking about it a lot lately and i can tell you if you if you surveyed all the people at my office at work they would all say hdmi because every time increasingly when we we land in a conference room and someone needs to project never mind the fact that they should really with the number of macs that are in this office they should really have apple tvs connected to every single thing so we could airplay to them because it would solve this problem in a much nicer way steve jobs would approve you don't need an hdmi part you just need to be able to airplay to everything i agree steve but
John:
can't fight the it department anyway they would all say hdmi because it's so frustrating we all sit down there and it's like we look around for the one person with with the 2015 laptop who can actually plug in because everyone forgot their dongle and it used to be there was just one person with the new laptop and we would laugh at them and now there's like one person left with the old laptop and once the old laptop disappears there's going to be a bunch of people sitting around unable to project i don't understand why they don't put the adapters for this but anyway that's what people at work would say but that's not what i would say because in my regular life if i was buying a laptop for myself i don't need
John:
to connect hdmi so i'd never pick hdmi but work totally would um i would have said in the past sd right because i do have cameras that have sd cards when i go on vacation i like to offload pictures from my camera to my thing without a dongle it's convenient build it in it's small it's skinny it'll fit fine but the more i've been thinking about it the more i've been getting attached to the idea of taking a 15 inch macbook pro and adding magsafe
John:
and still having the ability to charge by any of the usbc things like not removing that ability but adding magsafe as an addition because i feel like you get the twofer you get magsafe which is better to trip over and stuff you get as uh i think it was uh was it jason snell or maybe it was a gruber saying you get the indicator light which i think is a useful feature when you have your closed laptop and you plug it in to make sure you see the little light that shows uh amber or green to show whether it's fully charged or is charging right yeah
John:
it's a great feature it's not like an apple had that like what 15 years ago like it's not a new thing in laptop design right and you also get one of your ports back now you really do have four ports instead of three if you want the convenience of i just have usbc charger with me on vacation it can charge everything you've got it but also you could have the mag safe and then the only question is what do you ship in the box you ship mag safe do you ship usb or do you ship both and probably apple would make you pick or something and
John:
And I know it would be backsliding, and I know MagSafe had problems too, and that's why I feel like ship them both.
John:
Let people decide what they want to use.
John:
Hell, Apple can collect stats about what they use and anonymously send them back with its differential privacy for how often laptops are charging via MagSafe versus how often they're charging via USB-C.
John:
I probably would get more benefit out of SD, but I'm finding...
John:
the twofer of getting a getting a port back and having the option of magsafe irresistible and so now i'm envisioning before i was envisioning apple revising its laptops by adding an sd card slot and now i'm envisioning them adding back magsafe which i think is astronomically less likely than adding sd card slot because it just it would be like egg on face of like oh remember magsafe we're bringing it back that would be a tough sell whereas sd
John:
God, there's so much room alongside the edges of those 15-inch laptops, right?
John:
It's just a giant expanse with these two little tiny USB-C holes.
John:
An SD card slot, even Johnny Ive can tolerate the aesthetic marring of a very skinny, discreet SD card slot in there.
John:
Hell, it looks fine on Marco's 2015 MacBook Pro.
John:
I think it would be fine on a 2018 model.
Marco:
One thing also that they could do that I think it probably goes against their sensibilities, but I think it probably shouldn't because I think it's one of the biggest engineering flops of the new lineup, is that the number of USB... To me, one of the biggest problems with these, as I've said numerous times, is just there aren't enough ports.
Marco:
If you're going to sell us on an all-USB-C world...
Marco:
Okay, we can adapt to that over time with dongles and stuff and new cables and everything.
Marco:
There still aren't enough ports, especially with one of them being lost to power.
Marco:
As you said, you basically lose one during most practical usage for most people most of the time.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The MacBook Escape basically has one port.
Marco:
Casey's MacBook One has no ports.
Marco:
Pretty much.
Marco:
And the 15-inch has three.
Marco:
And if you look at... And the 13 Pro also.
Marco:
And if you look at what the previous ones had, you could connect more than that amount of things to them without adapters.
Marco:
And I feel like one of the... If you look at the engineering behind this, one of the challenges... For example, one of the reasons why the MacBook Escape only has two ports...
Marco:
is because of limitations of how many Thunderbolt channels you can deliver because Apple decided to make all of these USB-C ports also Thunderbolt 3 ports, except for the one in Casey's MacBook 1.
Marco:
And that's a choice that they made.
Marco:
They didn't have to.
Marco:
It is possible to have a USB-C port.
Marco:
that does not support Thunderbolt 3 like the one in Casey's MacBook 1.
Marco:
And so Apple, no, trust me, this is in many ways a good thing.
Marco:
You just need more of them.
Marco:
And so I feel like, you know, one of the biggest ways to solve the annoyance of these laptops is to just, if you're going to insist on USB-C, okay, but we need more of them.
Marco:
two total including your power hole is not enough if you can't make them on certain models if you can't make them full-blown thunderbolt 3 ports which you already can't they're already not thunderbolt 3 the macbook one and the ones on the right side of the 13 inch macbook pro are half bandwidth or whatever it is so there's already exceptions
Marco:
The cable that comes with it that charges from the brick to the computer is a USB-C cable that is not a Thunderbolt cable.
Marco:
In fact, it's a USB 2.0 USB-C cable, which shouldn't even exist.
Marco:
But they do, and that's what it is.
Marco:
There's already all these exceptions to what the ports can and can't do.
Marco:
In addition, Thunderbolt usage in practice is pretty low, and it is not the common case.
Marco:
What most people are plugging into these things needs either just power or power and USB.
Marco:
It's, you know, most of the peripherals being plugged into these ports do not need Thunderbolt 3.
Marco:
And so by Apple taking these ports on most of these laptops except for cases and saying, we can only have as many as the Thunderbolt controllers allow us to with this chipset or whatever,
Marco:
that's very limiting to the number of ports you can have.
Marco:
If they had like, you know, two to four of them that could do Thunderbolt 3 and two more that couldn't, maybe on the other side or whatever...
Marco:
That's not ideal, but I think that's better than not having enough ports to do basic things that you need.
Marco:
So I know it'll be more complicated.
Marco:
I know they wouldn't be able to put the little thunderbolt, lightning bolt symbol next to all of them, but I think that is the best compromise that we have if we're going to do an all-USB-C world.
Marco:
We need more of these ports.
Marco:
And it is a waste to suggest that they all need to have Thunderbolt 3.
Marco:
I mean, look, one of them most of the time is used for power and nothing else.
Marco:
No data at all.
Marco:
You're wasting Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth on a port that transfers nothing except power.
Marco:
so like obviously like you know there's there's a there's a major engineering inefficiency in tying thunderbolt 3 to usbc for all these laptops if you can separate them you could give us way more ports and well not way more but you can give us like two more ports at least on most of these without having any bandwidth challenges you could give way more like they have they have usb inside these cases you
Marco:
could give you could give six usbc ports along with four thunderbolt ports like i feel like they have the controller capacity or space inside the case to put a controller that can support that like usb connections are cheap in the grand scheme of things yeah i mean it becomes i think more complicated like with like the wiring and stuff if if the other ones could also do some of the other alternate modes um like if they can take power input or if they can do certain video output types but because i know thunderbolt's required for some of the alternate modes but not all of them or it is one of the alternate modes i don't know something like that but like
Marco:
tying this to thunderbolt 3 made these ports very limited in number and probably fairly expensive to implement but that was an unforced error they didn't need to do that i understand why they did but i think that was the wrong move and i hope they fix it
Casey:
Okay, a couple of things.
Casey:
First of all, you just said unforced error, and to my ears, it was the correct usage of the term, and I'm really uncomfortable with my reality right now.
Marco:
Wait, so is that a sports term?
Marco:
Because I learned it from John.
Marco:
It is a sports term.
Marco:
Okay, to me, it's a Syracuse term.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Well, now my reality is back to being reality.
Casey:
So I appreciate that.
Casey:
Let's go on an adventure together, a little mental exercise together.
Casey:
It is 2016 or whatever year it was that the USB-C MacBook Pros came out.
Casey:
It doesn't matter when it was.
Casey:
But whenever they debuted, it's that year, that moment.
Casey:
And within a few weeks of each other, the new MacBook Pros come out.
Casey:
And let's pick on the 15 specifically.
Casey:
There's a new MacBook Pro.
Casey:
It's 15 inches.
Casey:
It has four USB-C and Thunderbolt ports.
Casey:
Simultaneously, Lenovo or Dell or somebody else comes out with effectively the same thing as they are off to do.
Casey:
And it has the same four physical USB-C ports, but only two of them are Thunderbolt.
Casey:
Do you know what the three of us would be doing at that moment?
Casey:
We would be saying, oh, ha ha, these idiot PC vendors.
Casey:
Now that you have to worry about whether or not you're plugging into the right port.
Casey:
What a ridiculous mess that is.
John:
We didn't say that on the MacBook where, as Marco just pointed out, it's a situation now where you have to know one side is special than the other.
John:
That's been a thing on Apple laptops for a long time that certain ports on one side are better than the ports on the other side.
John:
That's been true for many laptops in Apple's history.
John:
And yeah, it's always kind of annoying, but we understand why it is the way it is and we accept it.
John:
I don't think it's a source of ridicule.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I just feel like all I can imagine is all of us going, ha-ha, those idiot PC people.
John:
I mean, we have talked about that as an inherent problem with using the same connector for all these things.
John:
I still think that the advantages of using the same connector for all of them outweigh the disadvantages, but as Marco just said, your laptop has a port as a whole that's exactly the same shape as the ones in Marco's, and yet it is not capable of the things that Marco's old ones were capable of, right?
John:
The same cables fit into both of them, but if you plug in a thing that expects Thunderbolt into yours, it won't work.
John:
and there's no indication for that physically speaking i don't even know if there's a little lightning bolt thingy next to them anymore no so i mean that's just that's just the nature it wouldn't be next to yours yeah maybe you shouldn't ask me after all so uh i you know i think the implicit uh assumption i'm also thinking of my own feelings about uh underlying discussion is that i still i still believe i'm still hoping i guess that when apple does you know make a big revision to their laptop line um
John:
that one or more of the new laptops they introduce will have more ports than the thing that it's replacing and that's why i keep getting to like what do you think they'll add or whatever if if i'm wrong about that and if they introduce a whole new laptop line that's like the next generation after like this current crop of 2016 2017 like they've had time to process the the feedback from the market and you know so on and so forth and none of them have any more ports
John:
I will be extremely disappointed.
John:
Like I realized in myself that I've just been assuming basically since the Apple round table about the Mac, when they talked about the Mac pro from that point on, I, you know, I read into what they said with my hopes and dreams of saying, yeah, I know you're talking about the Mac pro and the iMac pro.
John:
Like I know that's what this is really about and about rededication to the Mac, but the few sentences they said about the laptops, uh,
John:
I latched on to really hard and said, that means eventually, you know, after, you know, two year cycle, whatever takes a long time, like not, not immediately, but eventually when they do the next big laptop revision, you know,
John:
one or more of them will have more ports.
John:
And I don't know what I'm going to do if that turns out not to be the case.
John:
Like my faith, and I'm already a laptop hater, I guess, but my faith in Apple's laptops will be fundamentally shaken because so far it's still just like they made a wrong turn and things were already in the pipeline and they couldn't really do much about the revision for 2017.
John:
All they did was have the rubber gaskets and stuff.
John:
And it's like, hopefully they know what's wrong.
John:
Next time they do the big revision, it's
John:
that'll be the time to make more different fundamental decisions but if the next ones come along and they're exactly the same set of just usbc only macbook one is still the macbook one the the other ones still just have two ports and you know and there's no changes and no magsafe and no sd card no hdmi no like nobody gets anything not even an additional usbc port nothing um
John:
i don't i'm gonna be super disappointed i'll probably you know i'll probably console myself by hugging my new mac pro but uh but i you know i i don't know about you have you you guys like have you internalized that as a thing you expect and so now you're set up to be disappointed by not being there or are you still like pessimistic and you'll be pleasantly surprised if they do anything
Casey:
that i will be stunned if there's any sort of not really mea culpa but like if they add any sort of ports to any of these laptops i will be flabbergasted i'm not saying it's it's unreasonable but i do think it is a what did you say like egg on the face sort of admission that oh maybe we didn't get this exactly right
John:
if they add a usbc or a thunderbolt 3 i feel like it's not an admission of anything it's just they added a more port even that will be something it'll say look we realize usbc is great but when you only get two of them ones taken with power it really limits things so now you got one more so you got three yeah i mean and and let's be realistic here also like if you look at if you look at the side one of these things and you look at like the height of ports
Marco:
um i think it's very unlikely that we will see the return of usba or even magsafe because i don't think they fit i think they're too tall i don't think they could reasonably fit those oh it would have to be a new magsafe yeah it would have to be magsafe 3 yeah right which i don't i can't see them doing that um
Marco:
And honestly, I'm totally okay with USB-C charging.
Marco:
I wish the charger was nicer.
Marco:
I wish it had things like the charging light and some kind of version of MagSafe would be nice.
Marco:
But other than that, I actually like USB-C charging because you can get third-party chargers that have like the wonderful Anker one that has the built-in USB charging also.
Marco:
It makes the charging situation much more flexible and then you can travel a little bit lighter and stuff like that.
Marco:
So I like that.
Marco:
But if you look at what can actually fit in this new super thin case design, not a lot can.
Marco:
USB-C, you know, you could fit more of them.
Marco:
And maybe, you know what, Apple, maybe you could put them a little...
Marco:
little further apart because they're really close to each other and it makes it a little bit annoying to use um also uh the headphone jack should move back to the left side where it belongs because there's a reason why headphones were always on the left side of laptops before it's because when you have a headphone cable that only has a wire on one side historically that has been conventionally on the left ear cup
John:
so your headphone cable goes down the left ear cup down your left arm into the left side port of the laptop when it's on the right side you have to cross your headphone cable over your laptop which sucks so that's wrong anyway you can wrap it around the back oh by the way speaking of ports on different sides i do that's another thing i appreciate about usb power uh that you can connect the power to either side so depending on like where you are on the couch or wherever if you're in some weird place that you can do it like that's why i think they should always keep that and i really don't ever expect them to make magsafe 3 but i've been musing on it lately
Marco:
Anyway, so I think if we look at what kind of ports we might realistically actually get, I wouldn't expect USB-A.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect MagSafe.
Marco:
SD cards are actually plausible.
Marco:
That, I think, could fit.
Marco:
I'm not sure if they want to, but again, I think that would go a long way towards addressing a lot of people's complaints.
Marco:
HDMI almost certainly won't fit.
Marco:
They could do mini-HDMI, but they won't.
Marco:
They're going to rely on Thunderbolt and USB-C for that.
Marco:
Ultimately, I think the most realistic option is to either get no port changes at all, which, like John, I would be very disappointed by, or to get more USB-C ports, which I would be very happy with.
Marco:
So we'll see.
John:
Yeah, more USB-C ports is the most likely.
John:
I'm still rooting for SD.
John:
I think back when we talked about this originally, I said just add an SD card and it'll be fine.
John:
But the more I think about the port being taken up by power and experiencing myself, the more I think more USB-C would be a good idea.
John:
And by the way, for a MagSafe 3 design, again, not that they're doing this, but if you give up on the notion that the magnet is on the side of the computer, you can do lots of interesting things.
John:
Imagine if MagSafe looked like a little shovel and it was large surface area magnet on the bottom, like in an L shape, like it clipped onto the corner and tucked underneath the little curve.
John:
There are things you could do to add much more magnet surface area while keeping it very thin.
John:
We don't have to think inside the box defined by MagSafe as it previously existed.
John:
Magnetically detachable
John:
Charging cables for trip-proofness is, I still think, a good idea and an idea that could manifest in a way that will work with the thinnest possible laptops still.
Casey:
So in the chat room, Espresso Lee asked an interesting question.
Casey:
They said, would you prefer a second USB-C on the Adorable or a headphone jack?
Casey:
And I presume the genesis of this is that on the opposite side of the laptop, on the right-hand side, and Marco, you're right to say that that is bananas, but on the right-hand side of the laptop of the Adorable, there is a headphone jack.
Casey:
And I would absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, trade in that headphone jack for another USB-C port without question.
John:
Because you've got AirPods, and that's why.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, and all sorts of other Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
And yeah, there are occasions that I have plugged in headphones to this laptop, but they are extremely rare.
Casey:
And I would get much more, maybe not daily, but much more frequent use out of a second USB-C port than I would the headphone jack that's there today.
John:
There's no reason to make that trade, though.
John:
We already did 20 shows about complaining about it.
John:
There's no room for another USB-C port.
John:
There is.
John:
There's room for another USB-C port and a headphone.
John:
It will be fine.
Marco:
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Casey:
WWDC is announced.
Casey:
It is in San Jose again.
Casey:
It is the 4th through the 8th of June, which is phenomenally great because that's what the three of us guessed it would be.
Casey:
And that's what we booked hotel tickets for a long time ago.
Casey:
So that's great news.
Casey:
Uh, it is going to be, uh, apparently about Marzipan or whatever it's being called today.
Casey:
If you believe what people are looking at on the invitation, which I think is a exercise in futility because the invitation never means anything.
Casey:
Um, but also of interest on that Monday, which is the fourth, uh, all three of your hosts will be there to do another episode in addition of ATP live, which is part of a, uh, what are they calling it?
Casey:
Like a podcast fair or something like that.
Casey:
Um, festival festival.
Casey:
That's what I was looking for.
Casey:
Thank you.
Marco:
Which means two live podcasts at Alt Conf.
Casey:
Whee!
Casey:
So yeah, so we're going to be doing a kind of a joint thing between us, Alt Conf, like Marco said, and Relay.
Casey:
They're going to be doing an episode of Connected.
Casey:
in addition to some other things that I genuinely don't know what's happening, but I know enough to know that it's going to be an extravaganza.
Casey:
So if you are interested in coming to see ATP Live in San Jose on Monday, June 4th, you can get tickets at AltConf's website, and we will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
They are $5 a piece.
Casey:
If they are still available, I honestly haven't even looked.
Casey:
That money goes to AltConf, which is good because AltConf is free.
Casey:
So we don't see any of that money, but I don't think that's a bad thing at all.
Casey:
And additionally, you can get tickets to the relay thing as well or to altconf.
Casey:
And it's worth noting that even if WWDC, if the lottery doesn't work out well for you, in addition to altconf, there's also layers that will be going on the same time run by friend of the show, Jesse Char, and a couple of other lovely women.
Casey:
Actually, I think it's just Elaine and Hershey.
Casey:
But anyway.
Casey:
They are awesome.
Casey:
They are super, super awesome.
Casey:
And the conference is super, super awesome.
Casey:
And the snacks at the conference are super, super awesome.
Casey:
So no matter how you slice it, Layers is great.
Casey:
AllConf is great.
Casey:
WWDC is great.
Casey:
Plenty of options if you can find yourself in San Jose that week.
Casey:
Is that it?
Casey:
Wow, that was fast.
Marco:
You covered it pretty well.
Casey:
Go team.
Marco:
You summarized in chief.
Casey:
Yeah, chief summarizer in chief.
Casey:
Chief actually doing my job for once.
John:
We can talk about the WWC graphics, which you alluded to earlier.
John:
I think some of the commentary about this or commentary, tweets, whatever, about this have kind of combined two things that are not really related.
John:
One is the artwork Apple puts on the email invitations to select press when they are going to have an event.
John:
Come hear us talk about whatever we, you know, like iPhone announcement event or, you know, Mac updated press events.
John:
Right.
John:
And traditionally they make a little graphic and usually sometimes a little phrase underneath it.
John:
Right.
Yeah.
John:
And then there is what we're actually talking about here, which is every year when they do WWDC, there's some kind of graphical motif or theme.
John:
It's used like in the banners that hang in the exhibition halls and the rooms where they have things.
John:
It's used in all the websites and the materials and the emails.
John:
And it started off pretty generic many, many years ago, but it has evolved so that now each WWDC has kind of like a branding theme or flavor.
John:
So for the press invitations,
John:
sometimes those have been intentionally pointing to something they're going to say like the one with the little rotating apple with the like back to the mac thing behind it where they were going to talk more about the mac and guess what they talked more about the mac some of them are only uh explicable in hindsight where you can tell some of the graphic treatments on the invitation were the same ones they would use when they announced a particular product whether it's the iphone or whatever um
John:
But sometimes it's just a fun graphical theme that has to do with, hey, we have an app store and you make apps for it and apps are these little rounded rectangle things.
John:
So we use lots of rounded rectangles in our stuff.
John:
But I would say that there is a fairly solid track record of some of the time the press invitations do in fact intentionally indicate something that they're going to talk about in a vague way.
John:
wwdc art on the other hand has a much worse track record of communicating anything about what's going to be presented other than the fact that it's a developer conference where they tell you about developing for apple platforms as far as i can recall there has never been a wwdc website
John:
that hinted strongly at the specific nature of a specific thing they're going to announce.
John:
Probably mostly because at the time this artwork is commissioned, they're not even entirely sure what's going to be presented at WWDC, and things, you know, are going into and out of the keynote and into and out of the sessions for a long time.
John:
So...
John:
I feel like trying to read the tea leaves in this artwork is probably about as useful as trying to read the tea leaves in last year's artwork, which was all those top views of people.
John:
Yeah, the little people.
John:
It's a particular artist who does that style of stuff.
John:
That aesthetic theme was all over WWDC last year, but it had nothing to do with anything that was presented.
John:
It was just a cool, fun marketing style that talked about people, developers are people,
John:
and they're doing developing things and it's fun and interesting or whatever right this one looks super cool and it's got these cool 3d representations of like uh you know ui elements from ios and the mac uh it's because and it's got curly braces and other weird shapes
John:
It communicates like, hey, these are things you use when you're developing for our platforms, and this is a conference about developing for our platforms.
John:
It's really hard to read anything into it, but people are so – they so want to see something in it.
John:
They're saying, see how these are all 3D?
John:
It's showing that they're moving away from flat design because nothing is flat in this.
John:
Get it, man?
John:
They're –
John:
and like it's really reaching and i have to admit when i saw this my thought was nostalgia because one of i tweeted this one of the elements in this very cool looking like there's an animation that goes along with very cool looking 3d rendered thing showing a bunch of controls one of the elements in the lower left corner are three translucent spheres with and with symbols in them an x a minus and then two little arrowy things like a box with a slash through it
John:
And I tweeted about it with one word tweet that said memories dot dot dot.
John:
A lot of people didn't know.
John:
They responded and thought I was referring to things in like iOS 10 or something or, you know, or pre iOS 7 or whatever.
John:
What I was actually referring to was.
John:
The window control widgets, what we used to call the stoplight widgets, red for window closed, yellow for minimizing, green for what used to be zoom and is now full screen or whatever the hell it does now.
John:
Um, they used to be rendered as if they were glossy spheres of,
John:
And when you brought your mouse near them or hovered over one of them, you'd see these symbols appear in the spheres.
John:
And they were glossy spheres just like these spheres.
John:
Oh, this is just viewing them from a different angle.
John:
Later in the life of the Mac operating system, they became flatter and eventually they just became like what they are now, which is like, you know, flat colors of red, yellow.
John:
They don't even look like they're spheres at all, right?
John:
Even though they still have the symbols in them.
John:
But floating in this thing are not the flat window widgets of today's High Sierra.
John:
Floating in this thing are the window widgets of, you know, Cheetah, Puma, and Panther.
John:
Mac OS X. I forgot.
John:
I missed Jaguar.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Mac OS X 0.01, 2, and 3, I think, is how long these things last before they start getting really flat.
John:
And that I thought was a nice nostalgic nod or an indication that the Mac is considered legacy, but it's a nice nod towards the past because most of the other controls that you see here are clearly elements from iOS or elements from applications that are popularized by iOS, like the little dot, dot, dot, when someone's typing in messages, right?
John:
I think it's the same graphic they use in, in messages on the Mac, but I associated with iOS just because that's where, you know, text messaging first came to the Apple platforms.
John:
So yeah,
John:
My take is that you should not read into these type of graphics.
John:
I think this is an awesome graphic.
John:
I love the aesthetic theme, and I'm just enjoying it as cool branding for WWDC.
Casey:
I agree with everything you just said.
Casey:
So we will all be there, and I'm excited for it.
Casey:
It's one of my favorite times of year, and it's really, really fun.
Casey:
I don't really care at all about texture, so I don't know which one of you added this to the show notes, but do you want to take it away?
Marco:
Apparently, magazines are a really hot business right now.
Marco:
It's really a growth industry Apple's getting into here.
Casey:
Yeah, you really messed that one up, Marco.
John:
So we should explain what this thing is.
John:
I hadn't heard of it before today.
John:
Surprise.
John:
Because it's really popular.
John:
But anyway, Apple, as an Apple press release and or PR person would say, Apple acquires small companies all the time.
John:
uh you know and it actually is really a high number every time they say like did you know the last year apple acquired 35 companies or some some huge number like really they you know it's mostly small like apple doesn't want to buy them when they're a 10 bazillion dollar company they want to get them before that sometimes they buy companies just for the people sometimes for the technologies or patents uh rarely do they buy them for complete working businesses but that does happen too
John:
like beats they bought beats and continue to sell beats headphones as beats headphones right like it's maybe the the one of the most recent full-fledged businesses they purchased so texture seems like one of the small ones it's not clear to me whether they bought it for the business or the people or the tech or anything like that but it what it is described as is netflix for magazines where you pay a flat fee and get access to a bunch of magazines in the same way you pay a flat fee every month for netflix and you get access to a
John:
Why does Apple need to buy this?
John:
I'm not sure why they might want to buy it, but Apple has in the past shown that they're interested in being some kind of a platform aid to periodicals.
John:
We all remember Newsstand.
John:
Marco, I'm sure, most fondly.
John:
And that was an attempt to do something like this.
John:
Newsstand did not work out so well.
John:
Newsstand is now gone.
John:
But it signals Apple's interest in this.
John:
texture strikes me as all right the approach with newsstand of making this weird app slash folder where a bunch of things go and putting weird limitations on them and giving them you know recurring structures like the whole newsstand thing didn't work out having individual applications for individual things but having them be newsstand savvy that that model didn't work for us
John:
Let's try this model.
John:
And this model seems a little bit more like Apple News or Apple itself could potentially make an application.
John:
And within that application, you see a bunch of magazines, just like within Apple News, you see a bunch of news and other content.
John:
You know, content providers can participate in Apple News, not by launching their own application that is Apple News powered, but rather by getting their news into the one and only Apple News application.
John:
texture is an established business that works in a certain way so i'm not sure if apple's going to rebrand it or just put it out the way it is or just scrap texture entirely and take those people and tell them to make newsstand version two this time it'll be better but as marco or maybe casey pointed out
John:
It's great that they're kind of into that, but I'm not sure magazines on computers or otherwise are really where it's at in terms of a growth industry.
John:
But, you know, I would give Apple full credit for recognizing the newsstand didn't work out.
John:
sunsetting in a fairly graceful way you know as i think marco said the best time to cancel something is when no one no one notices that you can't let and many people don't realize newsstand is gone now because if you never really knew that you're like is newsstand gone or if you remember what newsstand was yeah it's gone and no one really kicked up a fuss about it so that was that was good and i think it's worth taking another run i know i read magazines and i do have individual app you know i have like edge magazine application like
John:
i i read magazines on my ipads i don't i'm not totally offended by that idea i read ebooks on my ipad too and so if apple wants to make a really nice service application thingy for reading magazines sure give it a shot why shouldn't they be allowed to give that a try yeah no argument here it's just this was not on my radar before and as soon as we see stalking about it it will not be on my radar again do either one of you read magazines at all on any ios device no i don't read magazines at all on anything ever
Casey:
Hmm.
John:
Yeah, no, I mean, I still read Car and Driver on paper, and I read Edge on paper and also in iOS, because I think their iOS app, I mean, it's not great, but it's not the bad old days of, like, the original Zinio.
John:
For all I know, this is the new Zinio behind these.
John:
I have no idea what technology powers it is.
John:
But it's not just a bunch of PDFs that they throw under your screen.
John:
Although, with today's Retina, they could probably do that, and it would probably be okay, especially on a 12.9-inch, because it's practically magazine size, and with the Retina screen, it would look great.
John:
I'm mostly doing it for Edge and Car and Driver because I like the content.
John:
But the presentation on iOS isn't bad.
John:
And it's nice not to have to carry around, you know, if you're going on vacation and you want to read through your last three issues of Edge magazine, to have them all on your iPad rather than three paper things.
John:
Yeah, it's convenient.
John:
So I will probably download this and try it and see how good the app is and if there are any magazines that I care about in there.
John:
I doubt I'll subscribe to it, though.
John:
cool i i have nothing to say about this at all i know i just i don't care and maybe i should care but i just apple buys leading manufacturer of fax machines fax machines yeah i mean here's the thing with magazines like we're making fun of them because magazines is the old world or whatever but websites most websites are not that different from magazines and once you have a magazine that publishes through an application it's like is this just like a closed version of the web and a closed version of a web browser
John:
maybe but i you know websites and magazines still seem slightly different like magazines have websites but i don't know maybe i'm just nostalgic for the old days of magazines and there's lots of legacy businesses that are tied to the magazine format that i'm glad to see allowed to live another decade or two through an effort like this
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So time for Ask ATP.
Casey:
Matt Wallin writes, my Mac Pro does not have a Wi-Fi card.
Casey:
Wait, this is a Mac Pro question.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
Bill Ballinor writes, I'm just kidding.
Casey:
I'm just kidding.
Casey:
My Mac Pro does not have a Wi-Fi card.
Casey:
My wife and son both have accounts on the Mac Pro, and I was thinking of using Migration Assistant.
Casey:
Copy stuff from the old machine to the new.
Casey:
Can I connect them via Ethernet for this purpose?
Casey:
Does or will it matter that the new machine will be running on High Sierra and the old machine is El Capitan?
Casey:
I've looked for specific documentation on this online and haven't found a satisfyingly definitive answer.
Casey:
Now, I don't think I have ever used Migration Assistant ever.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's bad.
Casey:
I'm not saying that I'm doing things the right way.
Casey:
It's just I like to kind of start fresh each time.
Casey:
I know that this is also a little bit different because you're talking about other people and they may not want to start fresh, even though you do.
Casey:
But I don't really have any good answers with regard to Migration Assistant.
Casey:
Have you guys used that?
Casey:
I thought both of you have.
John:
I definitely have.
John:
I'm a big proponent of Migration Assistant.
John:
I think there are a couple parts to this question.
John:
Starting at the very end, I've looked for specific documentation, haven't found anything.
John:
I almost guarantee that there is satisfying definitive documentation related to this on Apple's website.
John:
But yes, sometimes it can be hard to find.
John:
The beginning of the question, going back to the beginning, I can connect via all these different things.
John:
I don't have Wi-Fi.
John:
Does it matter?
John:
I can tell you that you do not want to use a migration assistant over Wi-Fi.
John:
If you can at all help it.
John:
So the fact that your Mac Pro doesn't have a Wi-Fi card, don't worry about it.
John:
I would never recommend doing it.
John:
It was worse when Wi-Fi was slower.
John:
It's better now that Wi-Fi is faster.
John:
But I have not had good luck with using migration assistant over Wi-Fi.
John:
The good news is that most reasonably modern Macs can do migration assistant through almost any of their ports.
John:
I don't know if they can do it over the headphone jack yet, but who knows?
John:
Like the old iPod shuffle syncing over the headphone jack?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I used to do it through Firewire.
John:
You can do it through Ethernet.
John:
You can do it through Thunderbolt.
John:
There's all sorts of ways that migration system will work.
John:
The bad news is figuring out how to get it to work, especially with the more obscure ports, can be tricky.
John:
So what I would recommend is going back to Apple's website and digging through this stuff and finding the documentation for your specific computer.
John:
And it will usually tell you, and by the way, from your computer, you can only migrate to this set of computers through these interfaces.
John:
There is sort of a matrix of what connection it's going to use and how it's new as the computer.
John:
And you can, unfortunately, find yourself in a situation where you're trying to migrate from a really old computer to a really new one when there's no great way to do it, except for maybe Ethernet, but then you need an Ethernet adapter or whatever.
John:
But I have never, as someone who keeps computers for a long time, I've never kept on long enough that I was unable to run Migration Assistant.
John:
So I would suggest using the fastest connection you can.
John:
Ethernet is probably sufficient and it's probably the sort of the baseline.
John:
So try to do that if you possibly can find the docs for it and just give it a try.
John:
I think you will be mostly pleased with the results.
John:
I always have been.
John:
I find like that migration assistance really does migrate my stuff.
John:
And yes, it does take a long time.
John:
But the amount of time it takes when I do the math works out to be roughly amount of data it has to transfer, you know, divided by the transfer rate or whatever.
Marco:
I have had almost similar luck as that.
Marco:
The only differences I would suggest are when you connect the old Mac via target disk mode, it tends to be significantly faster.
Marco:
My great suggestion has a pretty big problem that I think it's had basically forever in that it is terrible at estimating how much time you have left.
Marco:
And it will frequently get into a state where it appears as though it's making no progress at all.
Marco:
And it could stay there for hours or even days.
Marco:
And that's very frustrating.
Marco:
It's very hard to tell often what it's doing, whether it is still going to go, how long it's still going to go for.
John:
That's why I said do the math.
John:
Like if you know you have, you know, a one terabyte hard drive that's mostly full and you know your connection is one gigabit, like do the division, figure out how long you think it's going to take and use that as your outside, you know, like to get an idea of how long you think it's going to take.
John:
If it takes 10 times that thing, something has probably gone wrong.
John:
But don't believe the progress bar because it doesn't know.
Marco:
Well, anyway, I have had significantly better luck with doing it via target disk mode on the sending machine rather than having both machines run the mega-consistent app.
Marco:
This would probably also, if there's any problems with the old one being El Capitan,
Marco:
Target disk mode would probably avoid those problems a little bit more likely or more easily than running the Migration Distance app on both sides.
Marco:
But also, yeah, I've found the disk method to be way faster and way more reliable, and I have never had it reach one of those states where it seems like it's going to just take forever.
Marco:
Whereas over Wi-Fi and even gigabit Ethernet,
Marco:
i've had that happen um so by doing target disk mode you have most of the options that john suggested um on the old mac pro you probably let's see the mac pros that had wi-fi are optional would be 2006 to 2008 i believe it was standard after that so it's pretty old it will definitely predate all thunderbolt because thunderbolt came after the mac pro um so your best port is probably firewire 800 and
Marco:
assuming you have... Well, you definitely have that.
Marco:
Assuming it still works, then I would suggest, you know, if you have any problems trying to do this over Ethernet, I would suggest, assuming the new machine has Thunderbolt, go to the Apple Store, get a Thunderbolt to...
John:
Well, let's see.
John:
You're going to need two dongles.
John:
No, FireWire 800.
John:
That's what I've got on the iMac right now.
John:
I was going to suggest.
Marco:
But does it go FireWire 800 to USB 3, Thunderbolt?
Marco:
Or do you have to adapt 2 to 3 and then 2 to 800?
John:
I only have one adapter in the back of my 5K iMac.
John:
It's like FireWire 800...
John:
Into this adapter and this adapter into the back of the iMac.
John:
But I confess I do not recall what exactly it's going into the back of the iMac.
Marco:
So assuming that you're... He doesn't actually say what he's going to, right?
Casey:
No, I believe that's correct.
Marco:
Okay, so assuming that it's a current generation machine that only has Thunderbolt 3 ports, you might need two dongles to go once from...
John:
800 to thunderbolt 2 and then once again from thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3 uh so that might be like 80 worth of dongles because thunderbolt one's like 50 bucks we have to start considering ethernet because if they really do both have ethernet parts ethernet as fast and practically speaking the reason i find myself using ethernet is because i'm doing two desktops and they're far away from each other and it's kind of a pain to like disconnect the desktop and lug it over and put it close enough so your little firewire or
John:
thunderbolt or usbc cable can connect to the right ports it's just then you're like the you know ethernet is easier even if your home isn't wired for ethernet to just get 100 feet of ethernet cable and plug it in and snake it over and leave it there for a day for you to do the transfers that'll of course encourage you to wire your house for ethernet like a civilized person
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, if they have a Mac Pro that doesn't have Wi-Fi, they probably have this covered.
Marco:
Anyway, so yeah, I agree.
Marco:
Try Ethernet first and only go buy the $80 worth of dongles and cables if for some reason Ethernet always fails.
John:
and backup before you do anything backup make a bunch of backups take the backups disconnect them from all your computers put it you know put it someplace else and then have fun screwing through computers worst case scenario you screw everything up you erase everything you restore from backup and then you're back to your initial stage again also wait if you can back up to like a usb3 hard drive your old mac pro doesn't have usb3 migration but yeah you could just then plug that into the new computer and just do it that way oh my word
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Bill Ballinor writes, is it OK for developers to force polite interactions on their users, such as labeling the OK button in a prompt?
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
Or the dismiss button in a confirmation dialogue?
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
These things make me cranky.
Casey:
You're wrong.
Casey:
This is absolutely acceptable and I like it.
Marco:
oh god no what's okay so okay there's there's if done in a non-intrusive non-suggestive not putting words in my mouth kind of way it can be fine unfortunately that's how it happens in practice in practice you have things like no i don't want to subscribe to the newsletter and get all these special deals because i'm cheap
Marco:
like or like something like that like they they make you so often the words they use are passive aggressively condemning yourself for making a choice that does not benefit the developers business interests and it's really obnoxious oftentimes other than that it just you know it tries to sound human and hip and cool but it's from like a big corporation and we know that's fake the
Marco:
And it comes off as just insincere fakery trying to appeal to be more human from a company that is anything but.
Marco:
So it's very hard and very rare to get this kind of thing right in a way that sounds both sincere and non-offensive.
Casey:
I think you're reading too much into this, or maybe I'm not reading enough into it.
Casey:
To me, having a dismiss button that says, thanks, I don't have a problem with that.
Casey:
Having a dismiss button that says, no, I'm too cheap, or even if it's passive aggressively saying, no, I'm too cheap and not using those literal words, that, yes, I agree with you.
Casey:
That's total garbage.
Casey:
But something as simple as, yes, please, or thanks, or no, thank you.
Casey:
I don't have a problem with that at all.
John:
I think you would have a problem with the thanks because thanks is putting words in your mouth.
John:
You just want the box to go away.
John:
So there's two aspects of the problem.
John:
One is giving your personality and putting words into the mouth of the user because what if they're annoyed at your application right now and are forced to hit a button that says thanks and they don't want to thank your application at all because they're frustrated with your application.
John:
The thanks button makes them hate your application even more because you're forcing them to pretend they're saying thanks, right?
John:
But the second reason, independent of all this stuff, is...
John:
people are accustomed to dialogue boxes learning a certain way yes no okay cancel like there are interface standards that they're accustomed to and if your application deviates from those standards in any way there should be a reason for it maybe you care at weather and you have a personality type thing and that's part of the selling point of your application fine but if your application is selling point is not like there's a cost to define expectations it causes people to pause and have to look at it and think about what they hit and
John:
and like read it causes them to have to read whereas no one reads yes no or okay cancel if they see them a million times they just you know it becomes like a visual macro you're just like oh i recognize that i know which thing i want to hit um or even just a single button dismiss thing on ios where the button is always labeled as okay and now suddenly suddenly that button has different text on it you're forced to read it you find out it says thanks you don't feel like thanking anybody and now you're annoyed so i would
John:
I would in general say there is no 100% safe way to inject personality into labels like that.
John:
There are a lot of downsides, and the only potential upsides are if your application's value proposition is based on its personality and whimsy, which can be done, but is much trickier than you think.
Marco:
It also be very careful when you're writing dialogue text, if you're a developer or if you're Apple, that attributes malice or actions to the user or if there are attributes an intent or actions to the user that may or may not be the case.
Marco:
One of the most infuriating pieces of text in all of Mac OS is the dialogue that comes up after it has a kernel panic and shuts down and reboots that says you shut down your computer because of a problem.
Marco:
And a lot of times, no, you shut down my computer because of your problem.
John:
It doesn't say that, does it?
John:
It totally says that.
John:
It says your computer shut down due to a problem.
Marco:
It says you shut down your computer.
Casey:
I got to Google for this now.
Casey:
I agree with John.
Casey:
That is not how I remember this.
Casey:
Are you sure?
Casey:
I am not sure, but...
John:
i would check because every i don't see it often but every time i see it i'm like oh i'm on fire you shut down my computer i didn't shut down my computer so so here's what the kernel panic you know the overlay the overlay that comes on in five languages when you get a kernel panic yeah it's not that it's it's the dialogue that shows up on the first boot after right okay but so anyway the overlay says your computer restarted because of a problem so that may be what i'm remembering for that wording all right
John:
Now, after your computer restarts, Marco is right.
John:
I'm looking at this thing on Apple's website.
John:
It says, you shut down your computer because of a problem.
John:
Wow, really?
John:
It sets me on fire if I ever see it.
John:
It's right on Apple's website.
John:
We will put it in the show notes.
John:
I'm assuming this is the current dialogue, but it's an Apple support document.
John:
It looks like it might be an old theme, but yeah, that's definitely the current wording.
John:
Yeah.
John:
maybe i was reading it as your because you know the the kernel panic one does say your but the dialogue after says you shut it doesn't even make sense if how would you shut down the computer like spontaneously because of a problem like is it just like all of a sudden you saw a problem and you reach for the plug in the wall and yanked it out like how is that even a thing that you could do because if you if you found a problem and you selected shut down you would never see this dialogue box
Marco:
you know it's kind of like putting words in my mouth but in this case it's like putting actions in my mouth it's like no i didn't do this you know you did this you know like and it's like you know like so when you're you know when you see an app that's like you know forcing you to say thanks or no i don't want to see your great deals i don't like great deals like it's like
John:
that that is it seems like it might be cute or helpful or something and trust me it's not at all like it you have to be so careful with that stuff uh that you know and there is there is an additional dog by the way that says your computer was restarted because of a problem and that one it says the uh you know ignore more info and move to trash
John:
for like an application that crashed like we see that one when an app crashes so there is one that is more you know less blamey but the fact that there exists any dialogue that says you shut down your computer because of a problem it's the dialogue that's asking whether you want to restore all the applications that were open so your choices are please reopen everything like it was before it cancel to not reopen stuff which by the way i'm sorry what reopen everything please reopen everything
John:
yeah i'm not a dialogue box i don't have to put that like the button does not say please open the button says open and the cancel button says no thanks comma cancel oh i'm sorry it doesn't say no thanks comma cancel it says cancel because that's what cancel buttons say i don't know um i'm not a button i'm a person um
John:
Yeah, that's that's what it's asking you.
John:
And so, again, if it's asking you that it means the entire thing abruptly stopped functioning and it realizes that abruptly stopped functioning because it didn't do all like the nice shutdown cleanup stuff.
John:
So the next time it starts up, it says, I don't see the nice shutdown cleanup stuff, which means things ended abruptly last time.
John:
and i honestly don't think there's any user action that you could take other than if it knew somehow because of cameras that you had yanked the cord out or flick the power switch the hardware power switch yourself even if it sees you do it it still shouldn't say that it's just it's just setting you on fire unnecessarily and how would it know it was because of a problem maybe you shut down your computer because you couldn't figure out any other way to like you know you're
John:
You're an inexperienced computer user, and the only way you know how to turn it off is to hold down the power button for five seconds.
John:
Maybe you shut out your computer as a statement.
John:
Yeah, because of a problem.
John:
It wasn't a problem with your computer.
John:
It was just like a problem in the world.
Casey:
I think you might be reading too much into this.
Casey:
I think the way I've always read this and why I haven't been perturbed by it is because the computer...
Casey:
Well, I guess it can turn itself off.
Casey:
But in this scenario of a kernel panic, it doesn't turn itself off.
Casey:
It is you that is physically turning the computer off and restarting it.
Casey:
Not always.
Marco:
No, not in the case of... In fact, by default, it reboots itself, doesn't it?
Casey:
Does it reboot?
Casey:
I didn't think it did.
Marco:
I think it does now.
Marco:
I think that's been the case for the last few years.
Casey:
Oh, no, you're right.
Casey:
Press a key or wait a few seconds to continue starting.
Casey:
No, I guess you're right.
Casey:
I guess you're right.
Casey:
All I know is you guys are clearly from the Northeast or have lived there too long because you're impolite assholes.
Casey:
Moving on.
John:
Before you move on, again, I want to iterate.
John:
It's not about politeness.
John:
It's about the fact that there are conventions for the user interface.
John:
Anything that deviates from the convention, it's like, don't make me think, whatever.
John:
Don't make me think book-like.
John:
Anything that deviates from the convention...
John:
requires thinking and processing time and it's cognitive load for no benefit unless there is actual benefit of the personality application otherwise every time we look at a dialogue we'd have to parse each person's uh you know politeness and phrasing and preambles and stuff and we just want okay cancel or you know we're just standard buttons that say standard things that fit in a standard amount of space and we don't want to have to read them
Casey:
I actually do completely agree with you on that.
Casey:
Chad Teporski writes, when it comes to video games, how much of a completionist do each of you consider yourselves to be?
Casey:
How much does it depend on the type of game, scope of the game, and your level of interest in it?
Casey:
I will start by saying I am not at all a completionist.
Casey:
And obviously, I think Marco and I fight over who is the least video gamey person of the three of us.
Casey:
But I do play video games from time to time.
Casey:
As I think we mentioned last week, the week before, I've been getting back into Breath of the Wild and
Casey:
Uh, but there, whenever it is, I beat Ganon at the end of breath of the wild.
Casey:
If I don't have all 120, whatever it is, shrines, if I don't have all 80 gazillion Kurok or Kurok or whatever they're called seeds, I am not going to care.
Casey:
I will be putting that game down and probably never playing it again.
Casey:
And that's just me.
Casey:
Marco, since you are also useless like me, how do you treat this?
Marco:
Kind of in between you and a normal person.
Marco:
I will try to be fairly complete as I'm playing, but then I will usually reach a point at which my interest just falls.
Marco:
For a game that can be, quote, beaten, or that has a main storyline that can be completed, I do really want to complete that main storyline.
Marco:
But like you, once I... And on my way there, I might be collecting as much as I possibly can.
Marco:
Like when playing Mario Odyssey,
Marco:
I really try to get as many of the moons as possible as I'm going through each world.
Marco:
I don't just fly away as soon as I can.
Marco:
But then after you complete the main storyline, you can go back and get a whole bunch more.
Marco:
And I started doing that, and I just haven't really continued yet.
Marco:
And I intend to go back and play it.
Marco:
I don't know when I will exactly because now I'm playing other games.
Marco:
I don't know when I actually will, but I do intend to still go back and do that.
Marco:
I don't stop because I like decide I'm done with this game forever.
Marco:
It just kind of happens like like Stardew Valley.
Marco:
I played Stardew Valley very heavily for a long time and I intend to go back to it.
Marco:
But the last time I played it was probably three months ago, you know, and I just haven't gone back to it yet.
Marco:
But I do intend to.
Marco:
I haven't had a kid yet.
Marco:
I want to see how that works.
Marco:
There's more I want to do in that game.
Marco:
But once I reach a certain point where I feel like I've done mostly everything there is to do, I find it hard to motivate myself to go back and get the last 10%.
John:
Well, you did have an actual kid.
John:
What do you mean is a pixelated kid?
John:
Yes.
John:
All right.
John:
Just to make that clear.
John:
You feel like, I haven't had a kid yet.
Marco:
In Stardew Valley, the game I was talking about during that sentence.
John:
It just seems context-free.
John:
Where's Adam?
John:
He's upstairs, asleep.
John:
So this question doesn't really define what completionist means, but I'm kind of with Marco in that there's two strains.
John:
I like Marco if I'm playing a narrative game that is trying to tell me a story.
John:
And if I like the game well enough, like, you know, like I'm having fun playing it, I do want to see how that story turns out.
John:
But the modern practice of video games of basically providing...
John:
A tremendous amount of things to do outside the main story means that for me to actually 100% clear a game by getting all the things that you can get and doing all the things that you can do has actually become a lot harder over the years, both in terms of time investment and skill.
John:
uh it used to be that if you finish a story then there'd be a couple of ancillary things to do but mario odyssey is like the story is like one eighth of the game and then like if you really wanted to complete it in terms of hours spent and effort required the real game begins after you finish the story mode so i did finish the story mode of mario odyssey and i did enjoy it and i do like the fact that there's a lot more after that and that you can do it kind of in any order that you want but i don't think i will 100 clear mario odyssey ever
John:
contrast that with mario sunshine which was not as good a mario game but any stretch of the imagination as odyssey and yet i 100 cleared sunshine because the amount of stuff that you had to do beyond the main story and sunshine seemed so much more tractable to me and because the things they had you doing were like
John:
one annoying collection quest and a bunch of levels that were hard but of the variety that they'd already had that i really enjoyed um and so it seemed like a thing that i could do and lo and behold i did do it um similarly with zelda games i you know i will always finish a story in any zelda game i love zelda games i 100 cleared a couple of zeldas but not all of them because some yeah especially as time goes on when they start adding even more and more collectibles like i'm never going to get all the korok seeds in uh
John:
in Breath of the Wild.
John:
I won't.
John:
It's never going to happen, right?
John:
But I probably will do eventually all the shrines.
John:
And that's a game that I love.
John:
If it's not a game that I love, I'll do the story and I feel like I'm done with it.
John:
What if the game has no story?
John:
If the game has no story, I'll just play it when it's fun and when it stops being fun, I'll stop playing it.
John:
I feel like I will actually...
John:
continue to play a game after it stops being fun if i'm really close to the end of a narrative story just because i want to see how it ends that's kind of true like movies and books too sometimes you're like well i'm invested and i know there's only three chapters left and even those books kind of annoying me i still want to see how it ends and so you'll power your way through so that's that's kind of my take on completionism in video games
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Aftershocks, Backblaze, and Jamf Now.
John:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
Declan.
Casey:
And then this week I did a full day Tuesday, but only half of it at work.
Casey:
I did the rest from home.
Casey:
So you can guess where this is going.
Casey:
I went to work when Declan was at preschool.
Casey:
Then I came home and was here working on my iMac for the remainder of the day.
Casey:
And then tomorrow, I am doing sort of kind of the same.
Casey:
We have an appointment to get Michaela's passport for some events that are happening in a couple of months that I believe I'll be seeing both of you at.
Casey:
So we need to get that squared away.
Casey:
But this week, I'm doing two days.
Casey:
Next week, I'm doing three whole days.
Casey:
And I think the week after that, I'm actually ramped up to full time.
Casey:
Now, I might be doing some of that from home here and there, which is not what I usually did.
Casey:
I usually pretty much only worked in the office.
Casey:
But
Casey:
it's week after next that I will be a real, real adult worker again.
Casey:
And it's going fine.
John:
It's a pretty understanding job letting you ease back into it.
John:
I've never even heard of a company doing that.
Casey:
This is the second time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Like the last time I took less time easing my way into it.
Casey:
And I also didn't take an unpaid leave, but they were fairly cool about it.
Casey:
Both, both the last job and this job.
Casey:
So that's good.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think I've ever had a job that would give me that.
Marco:
At most of my jobs, I had trouble taking vacation days, let alone doing anything like this.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, I didn't as much ask as said, this is what I was planning to do, and waited for somebody to say no, and nobody said no.
Casey:
And that's been nice.
Casey:
And I mean, the place I work, it's pretty...
Casey:
I was going to say chill, but I sound like a tool.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's very relaxed.
Casey:
And I think in part because it's not consulting like most of the last few jobs I've had, there's a lot less urgency and it's kind of okay if I'm gone.
Casey:
That being said, I'm easing back in terms of hours worked.
Casey:
I am not easing back in terms of stress level and need for me to be paying attention to things again.
Casey:
The staff that I work with is excellent, but at least on the iOS side, but is very young.
Casey:
And that's not a bad thing at all.
Casey:
But that means that they've kind of been queuing up a whole bunch of questions to ask.
Casey:
And how do I do this?
Casey:
What should we do here?
Casey:
What are we going to do about this other thing?
Casey:
And so I have been in high demand in the little bit of time I've been working, which is a good problem.
John:
Are they elementary school students?
Casey:
What the hell does very young mean when you're saying one is one is she started as an intern and is still in school and is part time.
Casey:
So she is.
Marco:
What major version of Pearl were they born during?
John:
So are you at the stage now where anyone in their 20s counts as very young?
Casey:
I'm getting there.
Casey:
I mean, my birthday is Saturday, for goodness sakes.
Casey:
I'm turning 36.
Casey:
I'm getting old, John.
Casey:
Getting old.
John:
Hey, I'll be that old in a couple more months.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
So the 29-year-olds at work are very young.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
The intern just turned 21 at the end of last year.
Casey:
She was born in 96, I guess, which is bananas.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
She's younger than Weezer.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So the intern, who is now part-time, was born in 96.
Casey:
And we just hired a...
Casey:
uh, guy who I don't know how old he is, but I would guess 25 or less.
Casey:
So, and that's, that's the whole staff is me and, and, and these two, well, the whole Iowa staff that is.
Casey:
And so it's me and these other two.
Casey:
So, um, and they're great.
Casey:
They really are great.
Casey:
And, and I'm really, really lucky to have them as my coworkers, but they're, they're young and that's not a bad thing.
Casey:
It's just, you know, is there, there are things that you only get from being in the trenches, uh,
Casey:
in any sort of code base, be it iOS or otherwise, for a long time.
Casey:
And so I am the old man in every measurable way.
Casey:
And that's just my life I need to adjust to.
Marco:
So here's a question.
Marco:
Do you have anybody yet who is either so young or just so new to iOS programming that they have no Objective-C experience, that they only have Swift experience?
Casey:
I'm trying to think if the part-time person did.
Casey:
I think she had done some Objective-C in the past, if I'm not mistaken, but it was a toss-up.
Marco:
Because I almost wonder, like, that might make things easier, right?
Marco:
Like, if you try to maintain an all-Swift code base, or a mostly Swift code base, and you have somebody who doesn't have any mental baggage of Objective-C, that actually might be a good thing, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I totally understand where you're coming from.
Casey:
And I'm not at all saying you're wrong.
Casey:
I really don't know.
Casey:
Because it's one of those things like, do you really need to understand what a pointer is to be able to write code today?
Casey:
And I know you're both probably going to jump all over me.
Casey:
In a lot of cases, you don't really need to know what a pointer is.
Casey:
Now, I strongly believe that you do.
Casey:
So I'm like, I'm presenting an argument I don't actually believe in.
Casey:
But you could make an argument that, you know, you don't totally need a pointer to understand what the concept of a pointer is in order to be able to write Swift.
Marco:
Yeah, I would totally argue that, actually.
Casey:
And I still think it's important to understand what a pointer is.
Casey:
It's important to understand these sorts of things.
Casey:
And I think to some degree you get a lot more of that from Objective-C, and not only because you have stupid asterisks everywhere.
Casey:
But what I'm meandering toward is I think having an understanding of what makes Objective-C Objective-C helps you understand what makes Coco and Coco Touch Coco into Coco Touch.
Casey:
Does that make any sense at all?
Marco:
Yeah, I could see that.
Marco:
Although I would also suggest that like, I mean, in my time working around other programmers, I was fortunate enough that to usually work around really smart people, but not 100% of the time.
Marco:
And I was always sometimes really surprised how little somebody could know about programming and be working full time as a programmer.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And I'm not saying this to say, oh, they're so dumb.
Marco:
There are a lot of programming jobs out there that are pretty forgiving of having a very shallow understanding of it or pretty forgiving of bad coding or mistakes or leaking memory or things like that.
Marco:
And iOS is a huge example of that.
Marco:
When the App Store was this huge explosion gold rush thing back 10 years ago,
Marco:
and you know in the intervening years since like a lot of people learned objective c just enough to get an app out there and just like kind of stumbling through and i mean heck that was basically me when i first started too and i mean i had a c background so i knew i knew that kind of stuff but like
Marco:
There's a lot of people who start knowing a lot less and can get an app in the store because if they leak memory all over the place, it doesn't matter at the scale they are.
Marco:
Or if their app gets kicked out of the background because it crashes in the background, you don't even notice.
Marco:
You launch it again, and there it is.
Marco:
Especially back then.
Marco:
It's actually a fairly forgiving environment.
Marco:
And the tools now protect you so much from doing things that are too horrible that you can actually get by pretty far without having knowledge of things like pointers and memory and stuff like that.
Casey:
yeah so and it's also you know to some degree like what what level are you hiring right like when we hired our our newest uh developer you know we were hiring somebody we were intending to hire someone that was a bit junior and and so i don't recall how this went during his interview i did interview him but like i i'm sure asked him you know what's a retain cycle how do you create it how would you well how would you accidentally create it and you know how would you
Casey:
find it how would you fix it and if i'm hiring a junior developer they can get that wrong and i i potentially would be okay with it like you know i would hope that they would at least somewhat understand what what i'm talking about but they can have a wrong answer and as long as they have a vague understanding and i feel like they're coachable and which is a very corporate thing to say um well yeah exactly
Marco:
We can have a coaching opportunity in the parking lot after we stand up.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So you have worked with me.
Casey:
Do you see what I'm driving at?
Casey:
I don't think that being – I'm agreeing with you in a roundabout way.
Casey:
I don't think being super experienced and having a deep, deep, deep knowledge of the history of Objective-C and why is message passing different than calling a method.
Casey:
I don't think you need all of that.
Casey:
But I do think it is – fair enough.
Casey:
But I do think it is assistive in understanding, like I said earlier, what makes Coco the way it is.
Casey:
It's because it's in large ways because of what made Objective-C what it is.
Casey:
And I don't think it's necessary.
Casey:
What is the thing?
Casey:
It's necessary but not sufficient.
Casey:
I screwed that up, didn't I?
Casey:
Sufficient but not necessary.
Casey:
You get what I'm driving at.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Sufficient but not necessary.
Marco:
That's what Johnson always says.
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
Casey:
But anyway, so the point is that it's useful to have but would not require.
Casey:
John, you've been very quiet.
Casey:
Any thoughts about this?
John:
I think this is a specific instance of the more general question of whether –
John:
Not whether you should have, but what the value is of having a background in the fundamentals when it comes to the everyday craft of doing a thing like so.
John:
Can I do a particular task without knowing what?
John:
uh the history uh cultural baggage and all the other lower levels of abstraction that i'm building upon the answer is yes you can you can be a craftsman at a higher level of abstraction without knowledge of detailed knowledge of history and culture and all the lower layers uh but there is most certainly value
John:
in knowing all that stuff i mean you could take it just auto mechanic right there's lots of things that you can be trained to do to a car without knowing the details of the levels of abstraction that you're not dealing with without knowing the history of internal combustion engines particularly the history of the features of the internal combustion engines of a particular make of car you don't need that background to be really good at doing the brakes changing the oil and
John:
even disassembling and reassembling a particular model of engine if you know how to do that at that level you're fine you know but and you know so the getting back to computer programming the question is do i need a computer science background and a knowledge of algorithms data structures electrical engineering circuit design basics of electronics like do you need to have all that to write an ios app hell no you do not but
John:
Having that background is valuable and makes you better at the job of writing an iOS application, particularly when, as inevitably happens, things go wrong and you have to figure out why they're going wrong.
John:
That's when whatever level of abstraction you're working at starts to fall apart and you find yourself looking at memory addresses in a debugger, assuming you even know enough to navigate a debugger.
John:
And if you don't know what a pointer is, it just feels like gibberish and you feel lost, right?
John:
But if you understand all those lower levels, you can drop down a level and drop down a little further.
John:
And if you're really good to know the whole stack and you're a Mike Ash type person, you can look at machine code and figure out what in the hell is going on, right?
John:
And even if you're not, though, even if you're not like someone who really can navigate the whole stack, just knowing how in general computers work from top to bottom lets you understand at least what parts you don't know and where you might go to look up something and understand.
John:
I know what I'm looking at here.
John:
I just don't know specifically what it says, but I understand where it came from.
John:
And I understand if there's a part of it that I need to figure out, I know where to look for it.
John:
And all the way down to hopefully none of us get down to the hardware level where you've got to figure out what's wrong at the hardware level.
John:
But I still feel like even that, which probably won't come up in debugging a program, is useful to know because it explains many of the features higher up.
John:
Just as you were saying, knowing about Objective-C explains a lot of the weird features of Swift.
John:
Like if you don't know about Objective-C, it may seem weird that Swift has these things and what the hell does at Objective-C mean and why is that even there?
John:
And what do you mean by an object being backed by the Objective-C runtime versus one that isn't?
John:
You can get by without it, but there is most certainly value for it.
John:
And I think the question when people ask about this, whether it's should I have to know pointers or do I have to have a computer science background, is they want to know if it's like a gating factor.
John:
And I don't think it is.
John:
I think you can actually be a successful, good programmer.
John:
I think all that background that you're like, do I have to know this?
John:
There is value for it.
John:
It's just a question of how much value does it have for the thing that you are doing?
John:
If you are working at Apple on frameworks, it's probably more important that you have that kind of background.
John:
If you're working at Apple on the compiler team,
John:
yet more important if you are designing a hardware and software system from top to bottom really really important so you just kind of have to decide how much how much of the background knowledge do I need to do my job well and what is the cost of me acquiring that both in terms of time and money
Casey:
I think you said something smart a minute ago with regard to it becomes important when things fall apart.
Casey:
that I start really getting stressed and I have to start kind of reaching way outside my comfort zone, trying to figure out what is broken and why.
Casey:
And so I think in some ways, if I was a more experienced developer, I would get through these problems a lot quicker, more experienced iOS developer, I would get through some of these problems more quickly.
Casey:
but it's my experience in general as a developer.
Casey:
And in general, it's my experience of understanding most of the stack.
Casey:
And that's what keeps me kind of level-headed, and that's what gives me the patience and tenacity to figure out a lot of these problems.
Casey:
And I wish I had a specific example offhand, and I don't, which is good, I guess, because that means things haven't violently died recently.
Casey:
But I do think it's valuable that
Casey:
That I have not only a CS background, but a computer engineering background, which to me is a combination of CS and electrical engineering.
Casey:
And I'm sure a lot of people will take offense at that.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
That's just the way I look at it.
Casey:
And that means where CS, from my experience, and I'm not trying to say this is fact.
Casey:
This is just the way I look at it.
Casey:
CS tends to stop...
Casey:
with code usually or maybe memory whereas computer engineering goes all the way down to logic gates and that isn't helpful in a day-to-day time but it is helpful just like john said a minute ago it's it's helpful to understand what at least vaguely what are all these abstractions and how do they relate to each other
John:
it demystifies it like it like you know i don't know the details of how anything works but i know how a cpu works and i have built cpu from the logic level up and i have built a logic gate with the solid state electrical components and you know like that that whole thing it doesn't mean suddenly you know how your computer works but there's no more magic like you know from top to bottom you know the magic starts basically at the quantum level where my physics courses ran out like that's where the magic starts that's pretty long that's pretty low down everything else is like i'm not scared of it it doesn't seem magical
John:
The other thing I forgot to mention about having a background in the fundamentals is it also gates how high you can go.
John:
So if you want to make an iOS application, chances are good that you won't need any sort of in-depth knowledge about data structures and fundamental computer science-y algorithms or even things like neural networks and stuff like that because
John:
the frameworks do a lot for you and probably your application is not as complicated as you think it is.
John:
Like probably it's just a fairly basic application.
John:
Right.
John:
But if you are building a more complicated application, games are a great example because they employ a lot of things where, uh, you know, the first approach that occurs to you is terrible and won't work well.
John:
That's the time where you're like, if I had a background in computer science, I might know some algorithms that would do this in a more efficient way.
John:
Um, if you don't have a background in that, um,
John:
Very often you'll find yourself deriving from first principles a sort of half-assed version of a well-known algorithm.
John:
I'm not saying you can figure it out yourself, but it's like you're wasting your own time.
John:
If you just had a background in data structures and algorithms, you would have immediately narrowed down to a couple of choices and maybe recalled off the top of your head the big O notation for all these different things and known which one works best and then just...
John:
you know you know implemented that yourself most of the time again most time you don't have to do this most time libraries implement these things for you if you have some sort of associative array or dictionary or hash structure or ns array under the covers is doing all sorts of smart things with all sorts of smaller algorithms switching from hash buckets to a linear search when the size dictates that it's smart like you don't even have to know about that the magic happens behind the scenes for you but if you are building a structure like that yourself to manage your own data again maybe in games where efficiency is paramount
John:
It really, really helps to have the background knowledge.
John:
So not just figuring out the lower layers above you, but being able to do for yourself the things that for most developers are done for them by the frameworks and the OS and everything does give you the ability to.
John:
do more complicated things and if you don't have that background you can still do it but you will essentially be figuring out things that people figured out tens or hundreds of years ago as you derive from first principles basic mathematical concepts and data structures which works fine but it's it takes more time
Casey:
There is a truly phenomenal series of YouTube videos that PBS made in association with, I think, a few other groups.
Casey:
It's called Crash Course Computer Science.
Casey:
And Mike and I talked about this a little bit on Analog.
Casey:
And we were trying to do like a...
Casey:
We'll watch one each week, and it turns out that it's not very entertaining as a podcast, but I cannot recommend enough watching this series.
Casey:
There's 40 videos of which each of them is like 10 to 15 minutes, and it brings you from the abacus all the way to modern computing.
Casey:
And I've only watched the first maybe quarter of them.
Casey:
But it is step by step going from an abacus all the way up to cloud computing and machine learning and stuff like that.
Casey:
And what you learn by watching these, even if you don't totally understand the ins and outs of what they're talking about.
Casey:
The thing that I think is most important that you can glean from these videos is that everything is just one abstraction on top of another.
Casey:
And it's abstractions all the way down.
Casey:
And it is impressive and fascinating to see this broken out in 40 different chunks, little bite-sized pieces.
Casey:
And you see, especially once you get into how memory actually works and how these logic gates are held together, or put together, I should say, in order to make memory work.
Casey:
even i sort of kind of have my eyes glaze over a little bit but the point that i'm that that you get from this isn't necessarily that oh you need you know 13 nand gates or whatever in order to you know store eight bytes of data and i'm obviously making this all up but the point is just that oh you take a bunch of transistors hook them up that makes gates you take a bunch of gates hook them up that makes memory you take a bunch of memory hook it up that makes a whole you know wad or block of memory and
Casey:
And it's just you build upon what happened before you.
Casey:
So if you happen to have roughly 400 to 500 minutes to spare, I cannot recommend Crash Course Computer Science enough.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
i'm behind an analog so you and mike just bailed on that yeah we did i knew that already that's disappointing i was excited for that series i was too i couldn't get him to get into it i tried and i don't blame him like the problem i think he enjoyed it to some degree but there isn't a lot for us to say about it because there's little interpretation involved right and and that's that's the bummer behind it but i i really i hope that he what he won't but i hope that he watches it he's just not that into computers
Casey:
Well, he uses a fake computer all the time.
Casey:
What do you expect?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Can you make him a video series called How iPads Work?
Marco:
And maybe that would work better.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
You open it up and it's just a bunch of unicorns and elves dancing around.
John:
Well, just two at a time.
Marco:
One maybe hovering over.