Three Major Zippers
John:
I'll go with the zipper one just because I feel like I have a mnemonic for remembering.
John:
Yes.
John:
Three major zippers, four apple hay days.
John:
That's my mnemonic.
John:
That's how you're going to make this work.
John:
Whatever you need.
John:
That can be the title.
John:
Three major zippers, four apple hay days.
John:
Too long.
Casey:
So I don't know where to begin here because in our show notes,
Casey:
It reads, follow up.
Casey:
Casey was right about something.
Casey:
I don't know if I should be really excited and really smug about this or really fearful about this.
Casey:
So I have steeled myself.
Casey:
I am bracing myself.
Casey:
Marco, what was I right about?
Marco:
As you know, we are going to the beach with increasing frequency.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
Sometimes we go there for long spans, and electric cars are not ideal to leave at the ferry because of gradual self-discharge, basically.
John:
Marco bought a Jeep Wrangler.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
Now, there's no charging available there, so electric is not great.
Marco:
We kind of decided we need to maintain a gas car.
Marco:
Also, normally the only way to get all the way to the beach town that we go to is via ferry.
Marco:
And the ferry's fine, but, you know, it's slow.
Marco:
You know, it's not impervious to weather.
Marco:
It runs very infrequently in the offseason.
Marco:
Marco bought a boat?
Marco:
You can save a lot of time and you could be able to go there a lot more easily in the offseason by driving all the way there, which requires you to drive across the island itself, which requires a permit for driving on the sand.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Now, there are very, very few of these permits are tightly controlled by the National Park Service.
Marco:
They're very hard to get.
Marco:
Now, there was an opportunity to get one, but we had to act quickly if we wanted it.
Marco:
And the only downside is that it requires a four wheel drive vehicle.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
All wheel drive is not good enough.
Marco:
It needs true four wheel drive and it needs at least 10 inches of ground clearance.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
But it also has to be reasonably compact to actually fit in the beach town once you get there.
Marco:
Now, this didn't have to be a very nice high-end vehicle, just something usable.
Marco:
And of course, if it's going to be a gas car, I wanted it to be a transmission I could tolerate.
Marco:
So I wanted it to be a manual transmission, if possible, because I couldn't find anything with a DSG or whatever.
Casey:
You guys, I'm so happy right now.
Marco:
Carry on.
Marco:
Now, as you know, there are not a lot of options that fit this description.
Marco:
And because we wanted it used and we wanted it quickly, we also didn't have a lot of choices on things like what color it was.
Casey:
Oh my god!
Casey:
Oh my god!
Marco:
my god tell me you tell me a white wrangler happened to you now certain colors despite not being my favorites are more popular than others oh my god i'm gonna be so sad if that's not where this ends up and sometimes these lighter colors happen to be what you find on used listings
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
So, I have some news that you're never going to let me hear the end of.
Casey:
Tell me about your new car, Marco.
Marco:
god damn it you're the worst all of this to rickroll me are you serious is it too late for an april fool's joke yes it's like a friday the 13th joke i guess oh god i was so happy there was one thing there was one thing that i was not lying about you were right about something oh here we go all right it was tom bin oh i just got a tom bin backpack and it's really nice who knew
John:
damn it marco yeah you were right you were right about something big tom benn is actually really good i was at some point i was trying to square the idea of you getting a wrangler like he's no way in hell he got a wrangler like even if all that other stuff was true like oh i got a chance to get one of those things and we're going to drive across the thing instead of taking the ferry and so on and so forth there's just no way
Marco:
The truth is, almost everything I said would have been a sound thinking process, but there's no way we're ever going to get one of those sand permits, and we would never have any reason to drive there.
John:
Yeah, and you would have gotten a Land Rover.
John:
That's what you would have ended up with.
Marco:
That's probably true.
Marco:
There'd be nowhere to park it.
Marco:
No, honestly, if I ever would get a sand permit, a Wrangler would probably be what I'd get.
John:
Because you do want some things to be small, inexpensive.
John:
Yeah, but you would have to drive it from home.
John:
And you do that once, you'd be like, there's no way I'm getting into that rickety shopping cart again.
John:
I'm driving across the Belt Park, wherever you're going.
Casey:
I was waiting for you to say in your terrible joke that somehow the permit was associated with the car.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You had a friend at the beach that was unloading a Wrangler, and the permit is associated with the car.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Which I understand would have been like a nutso scenario, but that was the only way I could fathom that you would actually end up with a Wrangler.
Casey:
It turns out you're just a big jerk.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
I knew we were low on topics this week, so I figured I'd start with that.
Casey:
So starting by trolling me is your new amusement, and I see how it is.
Marco:
I mean, it's better than just whining about the Mac Pro or Destiny or something, right?
Marco:
Debatable.
John:
Who would whine about Destiny?
John:
Who would do that?
John:
Besides, you already kicked that question out of this episode.
Casey:
Yeah, true.
Casey:
Thank goodness.
Casey:
You're welcome, everybody.
John:
Next week, watch out.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Okay, so HomePod sales, not looking too good.
Casey:
According to Bloomberg.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
This is better.
Casey:
Well, during the HomePod's first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10% of the smart speaker market.
Casey:
Compared with 73% for Amazon's Echo devices and 14% for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence.
Casey:
Three weeks after launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4% of the smart speaker category.
Casey:
On average, the market research firm says.
Casey:
I'd also seen, maybe it was in this article, that Apple retail employees are saying that they'll sell like a couple companies.
Casey:
Each day, which I guess maybe shouldn't seem that dramatic to me, but it seemed pretty dramatic to me.
Casey:
So who knew when you have a speaker that is completely reliant on good software and that good software is Siri?
Casey:
Well, guess what?
Casey:
The software ain't so good unless the speaker is kind of useless.
Casey:
Who knew?
Marco:
Well, it's also about price and features, too.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
There's a lot they can do in the short term that a lot of people are not buying the HomePod because of its price versus its competitors.
Marco:
A lot of people are not buying the HomePod because it lacks features people want, like the stereo pairing or the multi-room audio or whatever else.
Marco:
So I can see over the next year, as Apple presumably improves the features of it via software and maybe drops the price during the holiday season or something like that, I can see it getting a small boost.
Marco:
But ultimately, I do think that the biggest problem it has is still Siri.
Marco:
And if Siri ever gets really meaningfully better, it's going to be a long-term thing.
Marco:
It's not going to happen quickly.
John:
So I don't know if I buy the premise of this article because, well, first of all, Apple's not telling people what its HomePod sales are.
John:
So it's all these market research firms trying to come up with things and interviewing Apple store employees.
John:
So it's not concrete numbers.
John:
And second of all, because Apple's not giving you numbers, you don't know what Apple expected.
John:
It's just kind of saying from the outside, as far as we can tell, it doesn't look like they're selling a lot of them.
John:
And presumably Apple wanted to sell a lot of them.
John:
Therefore, it's selling less than they wanted to.
John:
um we talked about the product and how it stacks up right but given how it stacks up and i know it's the launch and so it should be bigger numbers but 10 compared to google homes 14 that's not bad considering how much worse home pod is than google homes product at this point right i don't and i think about the slow start that lots of apple products have had you know from the ipod all the way to obviously the apple tv is the other uh obvious example um
John:
is apple super disappointed in this i mean we hope they're a little disappointed that they couldn't get all their planned features out the door but in the grand scheme of things if they are really dedicated to this market this is you know i i think that this is kind of what they would have expected like i don't i don't think you could have put out the home pod missing some of your announced features knowing that your competitors are on
John:
multiple generations ahead of you and not expect to you know start off in in third place uh so i you know i i'm not too upset about this now maybe apple's upset about maybe they had grand visions of you know suddenly becoming the market leader and i think despite how vague market research can be uh i think we'd be able to tell if suddenly the home pod was the dominant smart home cylinder thing that you talk to you
Casey:
and it's not and i hope apple expected that because i certainly did yeah no argument here all right so cloud flare is on arm servers so cloud flare is that that's sort of like a linode or something along those lines is that right no it's a it's like a really big cdn and like they provide advanced services that that are related to being a cdn so like ddos protection and stuff like that that
Casey:
We talked about them from the DNS thing the other episode, right?
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Sorry, I got my wires crossed.
Casey:
So apparently they're using ARM.
Casey:
I didn't get a chance to read this article before we recorded tonight, so I apologize.
Casey:
I am slacking on my chief summarizer and chief duties.
Casey:
Can one of you give me kind of a quick summary if you don't mind?
John:
I put it in the handy quotes.
John:
Cloudflare has servers, right?
John:
That's how they do all of this CDN and DDoS.
John:
They have things out there on the network that serve content and that route traffic and do all sorts of other things, a lot of them, right?
John:
And so this is from the Matthew Prince, the Cloudflare COO.
John:
He said, I'd give better than even odds that by Q4 this year, we will no longer spend any money on Intel.
John:
What he's talking about is they want to buy ARM for all of their servers from now on.
John:
And they talk about the performance for Watt and everything.
John:
And he says, we think we're now at the point where we can go 100% ARM.
John:
In our analysis, we found that even if Intel gave us the chips for free, it would still make sense to switch to ARM because the power efficiency is so much better.
John:
Wow.
John:
narrow and it's the type of like they're not running applications that you know they're not running a bunch of software that they need x86 compatibility for and to them what's the most important as they say in this other quote is how many cores per watt can we possibly get because in a cdn or ddos type of environment or whatever you want lots and lots of hardware out there and you want
John:
them to be as small and as efficient as possible because part of their money, I mean, the reason they say, you know, if Intel gave us chips to free, it would still make sense to switch.
John:
Electricity costs money.
John:
It costs a surprising amount of money when you've got tons and tons and tons of servers and space and data centers cost a lot of money.
John:
and so on and so forth so perhaps they are the ideal case but this is an example a very timely example given what we just talked about uh apple potentially switching to arm of arm on the server still trying to you know get a foothold it's been a thing for many years now that pushed for arm on the server mostly from people selling arm chips but maybe it's finally getting a little bit of traction like we'll see uh but if it's going to start somewhere starting someplace like this seems like a safe bet
Casey:
Yeah, I had no idea that this was a thing.
Casey:
So that's pretty cool.
Casey:
Oh, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Which backpack did you end up getting, Marco?
Casey:
I was so grumpy about your troll that I didn't actually ask you which backpack it was.
Marco:
Oh, I feel bad.
Marco:
It's called the Wrangler.
Marco:
Yes, it's white and it's, yeah.
Marco:
Whatever.
Marco:
Anyway, I got the Synapse 25.
Casey:
That's what I figured.
Marco:
I can talk about it a little bit if you want.
Casey:
Sure.
Marco:
The only thing is I haven't traveled with it yet.
Marco:
um because it just arrived yesterday i've been playing with it packing it configuring it stuff like that um but i haven't actually traveled with it so far uh what i like about so so i you know in my in my great backpack odyssey of spring 2018 i have uh tried a few different ones the one that i've been using for the last couple of months is the peak design everyday 20 liter and the peak design is a
Marco:
Really, really nice backpack in a number of ways.
Marco:
It is far better looking.
Marco:
It is a much more fashionable backpack.
Marco:
If you want to look cool every day with where you're going, you want to travel in style, the Peak design is by far the better choice.
Marco:
It also has a few nice advantages, like the Peak Design can stand up on its own.
Marco:
The Tombin, I guess maybe you could load it in a way that it would do that, but I haven't yet.
Marco:
So it's just, you know, you've set it down and it flops over, you know.
Marco:
But the Peak Design can stand up.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Marco:
It has really good handles.
Marco:
It has handles on the sides.
Marco:
So you can carry it sideways if you need to do that for some reason.
Marco:
I found that kind of useful.
Marco:
So the Peak Design is good in a number of ways.
Marco:
What I didn't like about the Peak Design...
Marco:
And what made me ultimately start looking around again is the first of all, there really is not very much space.
Marco:
And all the reviews said the 30 liter version was really like bulky and big looking.
Marco:
And so like, you know, good reviews like our friend Chase Reeves does really great bag reviews on YouTube.
Marco:
And and, you know, and he said and I saw a number of other things in the photos that said like basically nobody should get the peak 30 liter because it's just too big visually.
Marco:
and just looks weird on people.
Marco:
So that's kind of what scared me away from it.
Marco:
But the 20 liter really does not hold very much.
Marco:
It's very hard to put things in it.
Marco:
And one of the big problems with the Peak 20 liter, well, with the Peak in general, all of the compartments in it
Marco:
into the space of the main compartment so even like the laptop thing on the back like when you when you put a laptop in it it pushes into the main compartment which has a number of problems number one you lose space in the main compartment but number two if the main compartment is full it's really hard to put a laptop in or it's really hard to have those side pockets close things like that so like it's it's you're constantly intruding into that center space which is already not really big enough so
Marco:
And then the side pocket, basically the Peak Design has very little exterior organization.
Marco:
It has all the organization interior.
Marco:
So like there's like three major zippers to it and everything else is like inside like sub pockets of those or something like that.
Marco:
So it's all like these like sub areas.
Marco:
So like to get to the side pockets, you have to actually open two different zippers.
Marco:
Like first to open the main flap and then second to actually get into the side pocket.
Marco:
The side pockets I did not find very useful because they're very skinny.
Marco:
All the little like pen slots and like wire slots are like super tall and skinny or super tiny.
Marco:
And it's very hard to actually use that space.
Marco:
And then when you close it up,
Marco:
Like you can't close those very well if the center is full.
Marco:
And if you open it and the center is full, your center stuff can fall out when you're just trying to get to stuff in the side pocket.
Marco:
So the Peak has a lot of great things going for it.
Marco:
Ultimately, it is not very good when it's filled up a lot.
Marco:
And like if you're carrying around a small amount of stuff, it's great for, you know, they call it the everyday.
Marco:
And I think that's a really good summary of it.
Marco:
It's really good for like taking to work or something.
Marco:
It's not, I would not say it's amazing for travel.
Marco:
Because it just doesn't hold enough, and a lot of the organization inside is really clumsy.
Marco:
It's also just heavy.
Marco:
I weighed them with a little luggage weighing thing.
Marco:
The peak empty is four pounds.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
And by comparison, the Tom Bin Synapse 25 is 2.2 pounds, including the 15-inch MacBook Pro cache pocket inside.
Wow.
Marco:
So 2.2 versus 4, that's almost an entire MacBook 1 difference.
Marco:
So that's, like, the Peak, it's made of this very thick, you know, heavy-duty material.
Marco:
It's really made to be, like, a camera and gear bag.
Marco:
Which one?
Marco:
The Peak?
Marco:
The Peak, yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So, like, all surfaces are padded.
Marco:
Like, you know how, like, you know, certain bags, they have, like, padding around the laptop compartment, but then if you, like, put the laptop in a different compartment and there's no padding, you know, you just, like, slide it in and it could, like, hit the ground really hard, you know, so you don't want that.
Marco:
So the Peak, the whole bag is padded.
Marco:
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's so much heavier.
Marco:
But the Tom Bin, you know, the bag is just like thin fabric.
Marco:
It's strong, but it's thin.
Marco:
And, you know, if you want something padded, you have to buy some kind of insert like the 15-inch laptop cache that I got with it.
Marco:
Anyway, instead of, in the Peak, all the, as I said, all the organization is internal.
Marco:
With a Tom Bin, all of the organization is external.
Marco:
You have, like, many different pockets accessible from the outside.
Marco:
You don't have to, like, unzip one thing and then go into another pocket on the inside.
Marco:
Now, you can, if you want to, have all these, like, sub-bags that you put into their pockets, and they have this whole system for how you can attach them to these O-rings and everything.
Marco:
I'm not sure I'm going to get into that.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
what I like about the Tom bin is that you can, it seems you can more easily access stuff.
Marco:
Like there's, there's fewer steps.
Marco:
There's fewer like pockets and sub pockets.
Marco:
It's more easily accessed, uh, to all your stuff.
Marco:
and it's also just way lighter and it holds way more i cannot believe how much more it holds i can't say much more than that until i actually travel with the tom bin i did travel with the peak a couple times so i i kind of knew like what wasn't so good about it um but the tom bin so far i think i'm going to like it it does seem like it would it would i think be overkill for an everyday like carry to work bag um
Marco:
but for travel especially like if you want to do like traveling light and maybe just taking the backpack as your only bag or as like one of only you know two small bags uh then it's pretty i think it's going to be a lot more useful so ask me again after a few more trips this summer and then i'll give a final verdict on it but so far it does seem really nice it's also a lot cheaper if that matters it's like a hundred dollars cheaper but it just it just seems really nice so far
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it's kind of like this rubberized, tough... It's really... Just using the Peak feels really nice.
Marco:
It's a very nicely constructed bag.
Marco:
Everything has a great look and feel and style.
Marco:
But it just really... Parts of it are very clumsy.
Marco:
Oh, also one big thing to mention with the Peak...
Marco:
The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro from 2015 barely fits in the laptop compartment.
Marco:
And I absolutely cannot recommend this bag if you carry anything else that would go in a laptop compartment besides a laptop.
Marco:
So, for instance, an iPad.
Marco:
It technically has two different segments of the laptop compartment, but it's so tight that even getting an iPad in and out is really hard, especially if you have one of the silicone covers on it.
Marco:
It's really, really hard.
Marco:
So I cannot recommend The Peak if you carry a laptop and an iPad.
Marco:
But otherwise, I really do like it.
Marco:
I like a lot about it.
Marco:
But I think for my actual needs where it's mostly a travel bag and I do need to hold a lot when I do travel, I think the Tombin's going to work out better.
John:
So if you're able to tolerate this backpack, you are very close to tolerating the LB one because this has a lot of pockets, a lot of zippers, a lot of straps.
John:
It is not particularly sleek.
John:
So and the LB1, just to be clear, holds way more than this and has like 10 times as many pockets and it's 80 bucks.
John:
It's 80 bucks.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
The other thing is I don't want it to be too massive because I also usually want this to fit under the seat in an airplane.
Marco:
yeah mine fits under the seat okay well yeah so i like the peak the 20 the 20 liter peak does fit very well uh i don't think the 30 would or at least it would be a maybe not on the planes that have the big like computer box under the seat you know but oh yeah the box under the seat that's terrible yeah i always get a different seat
Casey:
I use a Tambin Cadet, which is similar, except it's a messenger bag, which is terrible if you're going to be carrying it for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.
Casey:
Then I would use something like a Synapse.
Casey:
But I only have it on my body for half an hour at a time at most, generally speaking.
Casey:
And I tend to prefer messenger bags.
Casey:
um for for those sorts of uses and i love my cadet i've had it for like three years now it looks brand new it it fits my i mean my everyday carry for work is my 15 inch macbook pro that i use begrudgingly and you sought out um it has my macbook one in it both in their own individual um caches i used to carry my ipad with me when i still used ipads and then uh you know other miscellaneous cables and goodies and things of that nature so
Casey:
I love my cadet.
Casey:
I cannot say enough good things about it.
Casey:
I'll link my review in the show notes.
Casey:
Tom Bin's stuff is great.
Casey:
The people there are super nice.
Casey:
I adore their stuff.
Casey:
And even if you prefer a backpack, get the Synapse.
Casey:
If you prefer a messenger bag, get the cadet or something else.
Casey:
You can't go wrong with Tom Bin.
Casey:
It's great stuff.
Marco:
And definitely, I would strongly recommend anybody who's looking at these kind of things, check out Chase Reeves' video reviews on YouTube.
Marco:
He is incredibly well-versed.
Marco:
He travels a lot, first of all, and he has tons of bags.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, at this point, if I was a bag manufacturer, I would be sending him the bags to review.
Marco:
I don't know if that's the situation, but he has tons of great bag reviews, mostly of backpacks, and he's like...
Marco:
He really takes the whole in and out of everything and I think has a really good point of view on them.
Marco:
So definitely check out Chase Reeves on YouTube.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Away.
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:
The suitcases range in all different sizes from
Marco:
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Marco:
If you have a kid and you want them to bring their own suitcase, which they tend to feel fulfilled when they have their own little workload to do in the airport.
Marco:
All of these suitcases are made from premium German polycarbonate.
Marco:
It's very lightweight and very strong.
Marco:
The interior has a patent-pending compression system, which helps you pack more in there.
Marco:
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Marco:
If you've only ever had two-wheeled suitcases, I urge you to try a four-wheeled suitcase from Away.
Marco:
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Marco:
They'll have TSA-approved combination locks built into the top, a removable washable laundry bag to keep your dirty clothes separate during your trip, and their carry-on sizes have built-in batteries to help you charge your
Marco:
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Marco:
You can charge all your stuff and be all powered up for the flight.
Marco:
It's a great feature.
Marco:
Their suitcases are also backed by a lifetime warranty.
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:
And there's not even any risk because there's free shipping on any away order within the contiguous U.S.
Marco:
So check it out today at awaytravel.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP during checkout to get $20 off your suitcase.
Marco:
Once again, awaytravel.com slash ATP, promo code ATP during checkout for $20 off your suitcase.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Away for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
You have a Facebook groups problem, apparently.
Casey:
Can you tell me about this?
Marco:
Yeah, I tweeted about this a couple weeks ago.
Marco:
The gist is, you know, I've never been a fan of Facebook.
Marco:
We discussed a couple weeks ago how I really don't like Facebook, but I really do like Instagram, and it's owned by Facebook, and so it's kind of awkward.
Marco:
Anyway, I would love to delete my Facebook account entirely.
Marco:
I've never actively used it.
Marco:
It's only a source of spam and stuff I don't care about and drama for me.
Marco:
So I just want to escape Facebook.
Marco:
The only thing keeping me there is these two private groups.
Marco:
One for the local parents of our school.
Marco:
And the second one is the beach town has a local community group.
Marco:
And they're both private.
Marco:
You've got to apply to get in.
Marco:
So no kind of public scraping of them would ever actually work, at least in a simplistic way.
Marco:
Maybe I could scrape something together with using my login cookie or whatever.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I want to just delete my account and just be done with Facebook entirely.
Marco:
And so my question was...
Marco:
do I, first of all, do I need to retain membership in these groups?
Marco:
And then second of all, could I attempt, you know, the local parents one is very unimportant to me.
Marco:
The beach one is actually pretty important because it's a, you know, it's a small community there and, you know, it's a lot of old people who live there year round at least and so I like to keep up with what's going on in the town and they can like, you know, check on everyone's houses to make sure it's not flooded and everything else and it's just, it's a nice little community.
Marco:
So I was wondering, could I plausibly start another community to replace it and maybe get some or many of those people to move to it?
Marco:
And what I came to, so I asked Twitter this, like, you know, basically asked, like, have you ever, you know, has anybody tried to move a community like this off of Facebook or to start another one somewhere else?
Marco:
If so, like, how did it go?
Marco:
And where do you, where are you supposed to do that?
John:
That was the plot of The Secret of NIMH, wasn't it?
Marco:
I think so, yeah.
John:
Didn't go well.
John:
Spoiler alert.
Marco:
yeah anyways so so i you know my first thought was like maybe a slack group but like i don't know how how older people appreciate or don't appreciate or understand slack um and i don't know how i don't know how regular average people like who aren't like nerds i don't know how how popular slack is or how how amenable people would be to it um
Marco:
i didn't want to just go to some other like you know crappy social network like a bunch of people recommended things like like next door which i what i hear from merlin about next door makes me not want to attempt that well well that's that's my first question for you on this topic is how much you know speaking of next door
John:
how much like next door is the facebook group is the facebook group as it exists now just like forget about moving it but just like as it exists now if you had to characterize it what is it most like because yeah there's the mechanism yeah people type words into boxes in facebook but what does it seem like what do people talk about does it seem like a next door community does it seem like a slack channel does it seem like a web bulletin board like what's the best analogy
Marco:
It's it's pretty low traffic.
Marco:
First of all, there's only like one or two posts a day.
Marco:
And it's usually people posting, you know, photos of what's going on in town, which I think is interesting because like over the over the winter, a lot of construction happens and I like to watch like, oh, look, there's a new store getting built or all they tore down that thing.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
So that's kind of fun.
Marco:
And it's also like local political summaries of like, oh, there was a board meeting of the village or whatever, and here's the notes from the meeting, or here's the issue people are talking about, requesting public comment, stuff like that.
Marco:
It's not...
Marco:
If I'm honest, it isn't that important, but I kind of like it.
Marco:
And I also feel like it'll be useful to be a part of some kind of community like this as we spend more time there.
Marco:
Because one thing you can do in the summertime, it's like, oh, I have to get rid of this old fridge.
Marco:
Anybody want it?
Marco:
Come pick it up for free.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
Or anybody have any recommendations for where to get prescriptions when we're out here?
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
I feel like being a part of a community like that is useful in ways like that, especially when it's a fairly small and hard-to-access community, I guess.
Marco:
It helps to have connections to people like this.
Marco:
So I went through basically all people's replies, looking at all the services people were recommending, and it was totally unproductive.
Marco:
There was basically no consensus except either...
Marco:
using next door but nobody even had done it like everyone was saying like oh just use that but the people who had said they'd actually tried to do it almost all of them said it just didn't work like that nobody moved over or they couldn't get it to work or everyone moved back or the people complained they couldn't understand it whatever else
Marco:
And that was for everything people tried, for things like Slack, for things like, I think Discord can be used in this way, but I don't understand Discord yet, so I don't even know.
Marco:
Or somebody's setting up a forum somewhere.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So there were a bunch of options.
Marco:
None of them were very good.
Marco:
And so here I am basically back at square one, which was the situation that most of the responders were in who had tried it.
Marco:
Basically like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
I tried.
Marco:
Nobody wanted to move.
Marco:
And so my current theory is I want to find out like how much I actually need to be a part of these communities.
Yeah.
Marco:
i think the right answer is ultimately going to be i just don't need these you know like you know because one thing is like i found uh the other day i found um basically the instagram community for this place and i thought well that's actually much more pleasant there's way more photos i can see like kind of what's going on and there's nobody like complaining to the mayor about stupid stuff that doesn't matter so i kind of felt like maybe maybe instagram is enough uh it's certainly you know nicer and
Marco:
And I'm there anyway.
Marco:
So I might as well enjoy this part of Instagram instead of just dogs and watches.
Marco:
So I guess maybe I could just have Instagram satisfy like the photo fix and just stop the community interaction.
Marco:
Or I could, you know, this summer, you know, stick a bunch of papers on the telephone poles and try to start my own Slack group.
Marco:
And I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know how that would be received.
Marco:
If anybody would actually join it, if that would matter, I have no idea.
Marco:
I think the conclusion I'm coming to is that the Facebook groups are probably not able to be easily moved, but are also either low value or low traffic enough that I might just go without them and that might just be fine.
John:
I think you have a pretty reasonable long-term solution here.
John:
I think you're right that you're not going to be able to move these people, right?
John:
I also think you should not go to Nextdoor because I think that is all, from what I've heard, it's all the worst things about the Facebook group and it involves moving people.
John:
But what you can do, I think eventually pretty successfully, is start a new community.
John:
Don't try to move anybody.
John:
Start a new community and
John:
wait for the old people to die aggregate the young people so that eventually the facebook community just dwindles like you're not going to convince them to come over don't stick anything on any polls just get two or three people who are similarly inclined to go on whatever you want to use with those two or three people right
John:
and those two or three people probably will still be on the facebook group but just slowly over the years many many years start moving the traffic there start to build a critical mass until people on the facebook group start hearing about things that were discussed on the slack or on the whatever else other thing you have that's the way you win in the end uh
John:
And in the meantime, you can do what we do in our household, which is have one designated person in the pair be the person who uses Facebook.
John:
And so you don't have to use it, but Tiff could use it.
John:
So I don't use Facebook, but my wife uses it to look at things.
John:
And sometimes she tells me what's happening there.
Marco:
Well, the sad part is I used to be in that situation.
Marco:
Then Tiff got fed up with Facebook and deleted her account like three or four years ago.
Marco:
And so now I'm that person.
Casey:
So you're that person.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
Well, I mean, like I said, you know, start the parallel thing like it's the it's the advantage you have of coming into a neighborhood as the new person in the neighborhood.
John:
Hopefully you're younger than a lot of the people that are there and there will be turnover.
John:
And so you can if you start a new community and start it small, you can build it up over the years.
Marco:
Yeah, that's probably the right answer.
Marco:
And the reason I wanted to bring this up on the show is because, A, it's relevant because Facebook is horrible, and B, I think a lot of people are in situations like this.
Marco:
I think a lot of people are in a situation of like, I want to stop using slash delete my account on Facebook, but...
Marco:
I quote, have to be there for something that's there, whether it's like, you know, my my grandparents, because that's the only place they post or some group they have to be a part of for family or work or something.
Marco:
You know, and I heard from so many people who this was the case for.
Marco:
And so I feel like maybe I could come up with some kind of solution or set a good example that could maybe help more people than just me on this.
Marco:
But I do think you're probably right that I think the best solution, not only for me, but probably for a lot of people who find themselves in this situation, is to just abandon those Facebook groups and just take the hit of whatever you're missing.
Marco:
Because honestly, I'm probably not going to be missing that much, honestly.
Marco:
I wasn't a part of these groups six months ago, and I was fine.
Marco:
So maybe it isn't that bad.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
The big advantage you have is that it's not like this is the only place where you can talk to your grandparents.
John:
These aren't your families.
John:
You don't have any reason.
John:
You're not abandoning anybody.
John:
So you are just going off and doing your own thing.
John:
It's much more difficult when this is the only thing my whole family knows how to use.
John:
So if I want to know what's going on in their life at all, I have to go to Facebook to find out.
John:
They're never going to move.
John:
I'm never even going to ask them to move.
John:
That's just not how this is ever going to work.
John:
But I can't abandon them and go, see you, Grandma.
John:
We're starting our own group over here.
John:
Join us when you can.
John:
she will never join you'll just never hear about your grandmother again so take advantage of the fact that you don't have those kind of ties to the group and just start your own much better cooler group and then you'll take to the streets snapping at each other in groups mark hasn't seen that movie no but tiff has it's probably true
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast.
Marco:
Subscribe in your podcast app right now to Tech Meme Ride Home.
Marco:
Before you forget, before you go home for work today, because that's kind of what it's for.
Marco:
Before you ride home, go subscribe to Tech Meme Ride Home.
Marco:
So techmeme.com has been around forever.
Marco:
I've been reading this site for probably over a decade at least.
Marco:
It's great for kind of collecting important stories that are happening around our world in tech, in Apple, and kind of related fields.
Marco:
Mostly, you know, mostly the tech and Apple area.
Marco:
And so if you listen to this show, you're probably going to like Tech Meme right home as well, because it talks about many of the similar kinds of areas.
Marco:
And Tech Meme has been doing this on the web for years.
Marco:
And what they're doing is they're taking it to a podcast now.
Marco:
So they take the same headlines from techmeme.com, the same context, the conversation and thoughtfulness and the curation.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
That's been running for four years now.
Marco:
They have 170 episodes of interviews with entrepreneurs, engineers, and the people that made the entire internet era happen.
Marco:
So this is a really top quality group of people making this show.
Marco:
It's a great site, great host, great stories.
Marco:
I highly recommend you check it out.
Marco:
It's 15, 20 minutes a day, and it's exactly perfect for your evening commute going home from your job.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
Go to any podcast app, whatever you're listening to now, go to your podcast app, type in Tech Meme Ride Home and hit subscribe.
Marco:
I wish them best of luck with Tech Meme Ride Home because it's a really good show.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Tech Meme for sponsoring this show.
Casey:
So this topic has been in the show notes for, I feel like, a couple of months.
Casey:
John's Mongoose Californian?
Casey:
Yeah, actually, it's been a couple of years.
Casey:
Didn't I talk about that?
Casey:
We did eventually.
John:
Yes.
John:
We got to that one eventually.
Casey:
Even I remember that, and it took a couple of years.
Casey:
This showed up a couple of months ago, and pretty much every episode for probably the last eight to 15 episodes has had us on the verge of doing this topic, and then we just run out of time.
Casey:
So tonight's the night.
Casey:
And Kyle Gieter writes in to say,
Casey:
and full of innovation, something they seem to be lacking lately.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong, I love Apple's ecosystem and its current state and perfections and all, but I find myself agreeing with you when you're discussing everything that is currently lacking.
Casey:
That's not to say that all their products are stale, but you get what I mean.
Casey:
My question, or ask rather, is if you guys, John specifically, can explain what that time was like.
Casey:
I'd love to hear a first-hand account of what using a new Apple product was like when it genuinely had new features that no other product had.
Casey:
I've watched some Steve Jobs documentaries and ended up watching the dramatic movies Jobs and Steve Jobs pretty frequently because I find the idea of old Apple or Steve Jobs's Apple very fascinating.
Casey:
I wish I had migrated to it earlier so I could have been a part of it.
Casey:
i don't have a clear answer for this and i bet you john will but he's going to be disgusted by what marco and i have to say so we're going to start and then john will clean up our mess and and i can since i have the floor i'll go ahead and start and i was thinking about this earlier as i was washing dishes and i have two answers and i'm not sure which i prefer and
Casey:
The answer that speaks to me the most is a few years after the Intel transition, I want to say probably the late aughts or early 2010s, which actually was quite a few years after the Intel transition, if I remember correctly, when the laptops were getting really freaking good.
Casey:
And when you started to see regular people understanding the fact that if you want a good laptop, you're buying a Mac.
Casey:
They're reliable, they're reasonably rugged, and they pretty much just work.
Casey:
And at that point in time, they really did just work.
Casey:
And we've talked a lot on this show about whether we're just getting old and curmudgeonly, which we are, whether things are actually worse with software on Apple platforms, which it is.
Casey:
Or a combination of the both, which it is.
Casey:
But nonetheless, I remember, and maybe it's rose-colored glasses, but I remember a time when my computer always just worked.
Casey:
I never had to take compressed air to it, which, by the way, don't tell Marco, but I need to take compressed air to my MacBook One again.
Casey:
I'm shocked.
Casey:
I know you are.
Casey:
I never had to worry about things just randomly breaking or not working anymore.
Casey:
It was just – it was great.
Casey:
And as a PC – well, PC as in like personal computer user, it was awesome.
Casey:
And this was, again, probably – if I were to try to pin it down even more, right around the time that –
Casey:
SSDs were starting to be affordable so most computers did not have them but those who were willing to part with a lot of money to get them could and so I want to say this is roughly 2012 maybe actually and I just feel like that was the heyday of Apple laptops and I think things have taken some turns from here and even though I don't think it's so bad that if I was buying a new 15 inch I would actually buy an old 15 inch Hi Marco but
Casey:
I definitely agree that there are problems in the current lineup.
Casey:
The other answer I had is perhaps a couple of years ago when the iPad Pro was announced, the 12-inch iPad Pro.
Casey:
And even though that didn't really do anything for me, if I am willing to concede that the Mac is a relic of a bygone era, or soon-to-be bygone era, and the iPad is the future...
Casey:
I think the iPad Pro probably was the inflection point at which it became clear that the iPad was a real computer.
Casey:
And as much as I snark about it, it's not a toy anymore.
Casey:
Not specifically because the iPad Pro, but I think that moment in time was about when that happened, which is a combination of iOS...
Casey:
10?
Casey:
iOS 11?
Casey:
It doesn't matter, really.
Casey:
But, you know, multitasking got a lot better.
Casey:
The software got a lot better.
Casey:
The device was far more capable.
Casey:
It was bigger.
Casey:
Everything about it just seemed like a confluence of good events.
Casey:
And I know that the iPad lovers of the world, like the Mike Hurley's and the Federico's and the Jason Snell's, could not have been happier.
Casey:
And so that actually was just in the last couple of years.
Casey:
The Intel pinnacle of the Mac laptop was a few years ago, and I would choose probably one of those as my answer.
Marco:
So I actually feel a little more positive than you do about this.
Marco:
The idea of trying to nail down, like, when was Apple's heyday?
Marco:
Like, that's...
Marco:
It's hard because, you know, first of all, you know, you do have the rose colored glasses issue, which is hard for us to really think past objectively.
Marco:
It matters a lot like what's important to you and what stage of your own life you were at when certain things came out or whether you missed certain things because you came too late or because you're young, which I'm sure John's going to tell us about.
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, there's a lot of and also, you know, parts of this are tied up in things like just kind of missing Steve because he was a big personality that we all really liked.
Marco:
And, you know, Apple's not going to recapture that without him.
Marco:
So it's hard.
Marco:
It's hard to try to think about this objectively.
Marco:
Getting around the rose-colored glasses thing, I think it's also hard to look back and to remember there actually were product flaws and software flaws and missteps and iPod hi-fis.
Marco:
There were these things...
Marco:
During the times that I think of as like, you know, really great times in Apple's past.
Marco:
So it's really hard to nail down one time and say like this was significantly better than today.
Marco:
You know, obviously the implication with the question of when was Apple's heyday is that it's not today.
Marco:
What I think my answer is for when the heyday was, was probably right around 2012 or so.
Casey:
Okay, that's what I was thinking somewhere around there.
Marco:
And I know this is like, you know, right after Steve died.
Marco:
So, you know, his influence is still very strong.
Marco:
So this kind of sounds like it was partly like a Steve versus Tim thing.
Marco:
And I don't mean that specifically.
Marco:
I do think there's some elements of that.
Marco:
But I don't think that's like the only problem or even the biggest difference.
Marco:
If you look back, when I wrote my best laptop ever post, praising the 2015 laptop in a thinly veiled attempt to insult the 2016 laptop, I realized the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro, which was actually the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro just after a few updates, really is such an amazing computer.
Marco:
I can't point to any time before that computer and say, I'd rather be back then than now.
Marco:
or like the Macs back then were better.
Marco:
Like, no, they weren't that computer, which I'm still using is to me.
Marco:
That is like the pinnacle of what I love most about Apple design.
Marco:
And yeah, it isn't like totally perfect.
Marco:
There have been problems with screen delimination for some people and, and the ones with, with dedicated GPUs often had GPU failures.
Marco:
Well, that was a problem with pretty much every MacBook pro generation.
Marco:
Um, so it, you know, it's not perfect.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But it's really damn good, and I think it's better than everything that came before it.
Marco:
And I can't say, you know, obviously I have a lot of problems with modern laptops, so I can't say that about the current generation.
Marco:
The current ones, I cannot say either that they are really good or that they are better than the ones that came before them.
Marco:
But I think that's actually a fairly recent thing.
Marco:
Most of the rest of the Mac lineup has been pretty great in the meantime.
Marco:
It isn't always updated as much as I want it to be.
Marco:
And the Mac Mini, I know some people look at the Mac Mini these days and say, oh, they haven't updated it forever.
Marco:
Yeah, they never updated the Mac Mini very often.
Marco:
It's always been a last priority, even under Steve, even when it first came out.
Marco:
It's always been a very low priority.
Marco:
And it's always been very overpriced for what it is and very rarely updated.
Marco:
So anyway, the...
Marco:
iMac, the MacBook Pro up through 2015, the MacBook Air, which got that amazing update in 2010 that made the best computer possibly ever for most average people.
Marco:
They had some really good years fairly recently and some really good products.
Marco:
Look at the iPhone line as it's matured, the iPad line as it's matured.
Marco:
They've made some amazing products across almost all their product lines.
Marco:
up until either the present day or pretty recently you know like the crappy laptops only came out in 2016 that wasn't that long ago it feels longer by the day but you know it's like a lot of bad decisions were made by the world in 2016 and apple was not immune to that but uh you know maybe there's hope in some of these areas i hope god i hope
Marco:
But so the premise of this question is that Apple is currently in a really, you know, in like a bad state and that their heyday was maybe a long time ago.
Marco:
And I do think Apple has some problems today, which I could talk about every week.
Marco:
But I don't think that their best times were that long ago.
Marco:
Their best times, I think, were only a few years ago and included years that were under Tim Cook and included years where Johnny Ive was designing things.
Marco:
And, you know, so like I don't I don't think this is like a massive problem that we have to look back very far to get what we think is the heyday.
Marco:
And I also wouldn't say that today isn't the heyday for everything.
Marco:
I think the iPhone is great today.
Marco:
The iPad is great today.
Marco:
That's a good point.
Marco:
And the iMac.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is amazing.
Marco:
And even the 5K iMac before that in 2014 was also amazing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There are parts of Apple that are still doing amazing work.
Marco:
And I would say almost all of Apple was doing amazing work not that long ago, if not today.
Marco:
So I don't think it's that far in the past.
Marco:
I don't think it's like this thing that can never be achieved again or cannot be maintained.
Marco:
I think they have to do some course correction in a few areas, some big, some small.
Marco:
There's evidence that they maybe have or are beginning that process in some of the bigger ones, like the Mac Pro and stuff like that, and Siri maybe, I hope.
Marco:
And so I think we're actually going to be okay eventually, I hope.
Casey:
All right, John, tell us the real answer.
John:
Marco will like this because there's four.
John:
Here are my top four heydays of Apple computer.
John:
Yeah, there's been four heydays for Apple computer.
John:
Do you have any honorable mentions?
John:
No, there's no honorable mentions.
John:
There's only four.
Marco:
How many number fours do you have?
John:
Just the one.
John:
Actually, I'm not going to even rank them.
John:
I'm just going to do them chronological.
John:
And at the end, I think we can try to decide.
John:
Well, I can try to decide because you don't know three of them.
Marco:
Or two of them.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Finally, how can you possibly think that Western Pennsylvania is not the Midwest?
John:
Uh, it's state borders, man.
John:
Like there's lots of places that are a lot like the Midwest, but they're like in China and they're not part of the Midwest.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, so the four errors and I'll do them chronologically.
John:
Uh, and you can, you can vote for your favorite.
John:
Uh, the one I'm not going to talk too much about is Apple too.
John:
That's the obvious one.
John:
That's Apple, the tech company from nowhere, the big tech company, uh, IPO, the company that's making personal computers, computers for the rest of us.
John:
That was a big thing.
John:
It only doesn't seem big in hindsight because of the much bigger things that would come after it.
John:
That's true of a lot of these earlier errors, but at the time, the Apple II was very big.
John:
Also, the IBM PC came along and kind of cut short their reign, but for a long time...
John:
uh then the go go 80s uh 70s and 80s uh apple and the apple 2 were a big story and a big deal and if you are getting back to like you know how old you are at the time or you know what point you were in your life if you are just getting into the technology scene when the apple 2 came on board it can be you know the most important event in your life it was very important event for the entire industry
John:
So that's the first heyday.
John:
The second heyday starts with the advent of the Mac, which was not a particularly successfully launched product.
John:
And then Jobs was booted out shortly after, right?
John:
So this is actually Jobs' exit.
John:
He does this great thing with the Mac.
John:
in uh you know that's and mac is a super important product for the world and for apple uh you say for for kids that it was the iphone of its day because uh computers didn't look or work like the mac before the mac like computers that regular people bought like just you know run-of-the-mill personal computers the ibm pc existed but it did not look or work like the mac and after the mac all computers looked and worked like the mac they all had mice they all had a graphical interface so on and so forth
John:
So the Mac was super important.
John:
And the reason I think this is a heyday, not because, oh, great, so you made the one Mac with not enough RAM that nobody bought because it was too expensive.
John:
That's not what made this the heyday.
John:
The heyday is actually the dawn of the Mac and then after Steve Jobs left, the era that everyone complains about, the Scully era, essentially.
John:
When Apple produced a bunch of computers with, like, the Snow White design language, the Mac SE, the SE30, the 2CI, the 2X, the 2FX, that whole era of sort of platinum, pinstripe, Snow White, Macs, the dawn of desktop publishing, the dawn of color on the Mac...
John:
That was perhaps the, you know, strongest run of Mac models, one after the other, from the perspective of someone who understood what made the Mac good.
John:
To everyone else, they're like, Mac, whatever.
John:
Everything's about, you know, MS, DOS, and IBM, and eventually Windows.
John:
Who cares about the Mac?
John:
It's just a silly toy, right?
John:
But that's kind of what made it special.
John:
I mean, to get back to what the experience was like, you had a secret.
John:
You and a bunch of other people understood, A, that Apple was special.
John:
Maybe you understood that from the Apple II.
John:
heyday and b that the mac was head and shoulders above anything else that anywhere it was was there and you had like a long time to be living in everyone else's future it's as if the iphone came out and nobody copied it for years but they just derided it like they kept making you know nokia candy bar phones where you typed with like the number pad and stuff like that like they didn't immediately copy it right
John:
but instead they gave you several years where they made fun of you for using the phone that you had that it's your whole phone is a screen you don't even have a keyboard i don't know how you can text people like that didn't happen that happened for like a month and a half right and then everyone's like oh yeah no that we need to do that right um and so there was a long time there where apple was putting out great amazing macintosh computers solely for like this this narrow audience of people who understood how great they were
John:
And we got to see all the computing revolutions.
John:
Yes, the GUI revolution, but also desktop publishing revolution and even things having to do with like, you know, color graphics, high resolution graphics, lots of things that were available in a personal computer that was widely sold for the first time and would only much later be copied.
John:
So that's the second error, which is that they're often derided that the Mac, you know, Scully, you know, Jobs is gone and Scully's making all these computers.
John:
They cost way too much money and they did cost way too much money, but they were great.
John:
um the third era is the return of steve jobs the imac and the ipod and i think we're getting to the things that you remember now you've got the imac obviously is the big you know jobs comes back uh the next he comes back with next but that's not the era i'm talking about it's not like the mac os 10 era it's he's working on mac os 10 they've got to figure out the whole
John:
They have the false start with a Rhapsody and a Mac OS 10 server, which is not what you think it was.
John:
But in the meantime, when he came back, what they first did was the iMac that, you know, Johnny Ives big coming out party that made all of our irons and vacuum cleaners teal for a decade.
John:
and the ipod and the macs at this point are running classic mac os they're not running mac os 10 the ipod has like a monochrome screen and a wheel that moves and it is mac only and it's firewire but this little section here that extends a little bit farther into the mac os 10 era where
John:
Every time Apple came out with anything, you never knew what the hell it would be.
John:
The iMac was like, what is this?
John:
A weird teal computer?
John:
And then after that, the iMacs would come in different colors.
John:
They're going to make them in all sorts of colors.
John:
Then the iPod, and it's kind of a curiosity, but then it starts to gain a little momentum.
John:
Then they got those toilet seat iBooks, and then you got the G4 Cube, and tower computers are weird looking.
John:
Every time they went up on stage, there was the expectation that Apple could do anything.
John:
You don't know what to expect.
John:
You are ready to be bowled over every single time.
John:
and that is the sort of the defining period of the of the steve jobs keynote where we would all gather and it was like we're just waiting for like you know candy to rain from the sky it's like i don't know but every time we go to one of these things something amazing happens uh whether it's just i mean in a way the bar was lower because back then
John:
The audience would be blown away by just the audacity of the industrial design.
John:
You can't do that anymore, right?
John:
If they came out with the toilet seat iBook now, it'd be like, that's an ugly computer.
John:
I don't know why they made that.
John:
Like, we're so used to the fact that you can make computers in colors and make them have fancy design, do all this stuff.
John:
But back then...
John:
it was mind-blowing and every single time even if it was like a flop like the cube the cube you know was insane everyone loved that everyone was like could not believe he's pulling this little core out of the thing up on the stage and it was like wow it it almost doesn't even matter that it wasn't particularly successful in the market because we got the benefit of like the the amazing reveal and the uh i don't know it's sort of like
John:
making people expand the notion of what the possibility space is that every time they put something else it pushed some corner of the possibility space out again like i didn't even think you could put anything over there but now they've pushed the envelope out over there now who knows maybe this product was a dub but who knows what else they can put in there it made room for the next product the next product the next product um and then the final uh heyday of apple is
John:
is the iphone error uh which i don't know where you want to cap that but it starts with the iphone and it extends at least through like probably the six six and six s where they finally made the big phone but that run from the original iphone redefining this entire category uh you know the three gs but the four the four s and then the five and then i guess the big phone with the six that run right there of of apple and
John:
Once again, redefining a whole product category.
John:
And also, by the way, redefining a product category that would become the most important product category in all of technology.
John:
Despite the fact that they don't dominate at market share, but saying, we define this category, and it's not just like, oh, we make some cool Macs and iPods, and it's kind of cool, and the iPod gets big a little bit, but then it sort of dies down or whatever.
John:
It was...
John:
You know, huge numbers, gigantic numbers.
John:
If you graph any of these other areas I talked about, graph Apple to sales, graph Apple's original IPO, graph Max or the iMac.
John:
The iPod is nothing.
John:
It doesn't even show up on the graph until the iPhone comes.
John:
And it's not like we're all about, oh, you know, how much money Apple makes.
John:
Who cares?
John:
We don't run Apple.
John:
It's not our money.
John:
But it is.
John:
like the dawning of the modern apple as like the biggest and this incredibly important you know uh technology company that everybody knows about that is no longer the secret that we had back in the you know the scully era and it's no longer like a bunch of uh tech crazed technology fans just waiting to see what what jobs uh you know has hidden under a black cloth on a stage or whatever this is the iphone age is where everybody cares what apple does and everyone has to care um
John:
Yeah.
John:
And if you want to cap that because you think they've lost their way in some areas or because the iPhone is tapering off or whatever, I'll allow that.
John:
But I would actually honestly extend the iPhone error probably all the way up to today.
John:
Despite the fact that we complain about the Macs, the fourth heyday of Apple is not about the Mac.
John:
It's about the iPhone and iPad and other stuff.
John:
So those are the four heydays of Apple.
John:
What do you think is, if you had to pick one, because it's kind of cheating to pick four, even though I'm following the rules of top four, unlike some people.
John:
If we had to pick one, what would you guys vote for?
John:
so so we're talking apple 2 yep mac the mac the mac and the scully area you know you know what i'm talking about when i say those like the the snow white design language is the ones that are platinum and they have lots of pinstripes on them a whole line of ones they're all in ones oh yeah mac 2 the mac 2 fx mac 2 ci the se the se 30 uh portrait displays desktop publishing the laser rider all that
Casey:
Right.
John:
And then your third option was what was the third one is the iMac iPod era where everything was teal and candy colored.
John:
And you got the toilet seat iBooks and the blue, white Power Mac G3 and the cube and, you know, all the different color iMacs and the iPod mixed in there and the various lines of iPods.
Casey:
And the fourth one is basically iPhone iPhone really coming into its own iPhone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just iPhone period.
John:
Like from it's like the Mac one is from the dawning of the first iPhone and the whole line of like just the just, you know, took took Apple from a company.
John:
Those three heydays before that were like Apple heydays.
John:
The iPhone is like worldwide payday.
John:
Like everybody, you know, they come to come to the size that they are today.
John:
They become a much more important company to everybody.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, for me, you just answered the question because what I was going to say is exactly that, that the three prior heydays, because I picked the last one if I had to pick one of those four.
Casey:
The three prior heydays, there is an argument.
Casey:
I guess it's how do you define heyday, right?
Casey:
And I don't mean that to be silly, but to me, the heyday of a company or Apple specifically is the moment at which everyone –
Casey:
be it the quote-unquote fanboys and girls or sheeple or whatever, when everyone thinks that Apple can do no wrong.
Casey:
And so back when the Mac was new, and I was only slightly paying attention at that point.
Casey:
Actually, no, the Mac was new in 82, right?
Casey:
Do I have that timeline wrong?
Casey:
84.
Casey:
84, thank you.
Casey:
Okay, so I was two, so I was not paying attention.
Marco:
I was new in 82.
Casey:
Yeah, so was I. So anyway, point being, I was aware of the Mac versus PC wars when I was a kid.
Casey:
So this is, you know, I would guess late 80s, early 90s.
Casey:
But I never thought that Macs were that particularly superior.
Casey:
With the hindsight of adulthood, I can see that I was wrong.
Casey:
But at the time, I wasn't impressed.
Casey:
And to me, the heyday is when even if you for some reason choose not to use an Apple product, even if you choose to use an Android product, you can look at an iPhone and say, yeah, I can see why people would dig this or look at a Mac.
Casey:
I can see why people would dig this.
Casey:
And thus, because to me the heyday is about achievement in the hive mind of popular culture, to me that leads me to the iPhone, your final option as being the actual heyday.
Casey:
But that's all based on how I'm defining heyday, and it's completely reasonable for either of you to disagree with that definition.
Casey:
So before you argue with me on that, Marco, what would you pick of those four?
Marco:
I think I would also pick the iPhone in part just selfishly because I was there for that one.
Marco:
You know, like when the one or two I was, you know, a child and using a PC for.
Marco:
Number three with all the candy color computers, that was like right before I started really getting into, you know, looking at Macs and then eventually getting my own Mac in 2004.
Marco:
That was all late 90s, early 2000s.
Marco:
By the time I bought a Mac, they were all metal again.
Marco:
So I missed that whole era.
Marco:
But also, the Mac was... I was not a big fan of classic Mac OS when I used it three times ever.
Marco:
So I can't say that really enthralled me when I would see it as a kid.
Marco:
I think Mac OS X is really...
Marco:
mac os 10 is the mac that i know and i know that that you know kills people like john who've been around here for much longer uh but at this point mac os 10 has been around longer for classic longer than classic you realize okay i guess that makes sense yeah but like i think it just barely crossed crossover like 16 years anyway so like to me that like the apple i know is the apple that made os 10 and metal laptops like that's that's all i've ever known so
Marco:
Just by default, number four would win.
Marco:
That being said, I do have some, I guess, slight hesitation or ambivalence about the iPhone coming out because what I love so much, the Mac, has undoubtedly been really deprioritized because of the iPhone.
Marco:
So like in some way, even though I love using the iPhone and my entire career now is writing apps for the iPhone and then talking about them.
Marco:
You did this to the Mac, Marco.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's like instant paper.
Marco:
Like it is kind of like I have mixed feelings about it because, you know, most of my statement about Apple's heyday had a lot more to do about the hardware than the software.
Marco:
But in reality, the software is is, you know, just as much of a part of the story.
Marco:
And.
Marco:
No question, the advent of having Apple's attention being split between two different major OSs and one of them being way more popular and profitable than the other one, no question, that split, which started with the iPhone, has done serious damage to the Mac.
Marco:
It is really, in many areas, software-wise, the Mac is really behind, really in disrepair in certain areas.
Marco:
Again, it seems like this might be turning around based on rumblings and rumors and statements, and we'll see if that actually turns into actions hopefully over the next couple of years.
Marco:
But I do have some ambivalence over the fact that the iPhone killed my Mac basically as much as I like the iPhone.
John:
iPhone bought your Mac.
Yeah.
John:
that's true um so if i had to pick one of these errors uh so first if i was picking personally i would pick the the mac the introduction of the mac but that's just for personal reasons that's like what you know the age i was at the time what i was into so on and so forth but i recognize that that is the only way i could argue for that is it wouldn't be apple's heyday it's because we're using the word heyday if if we fast forward 200 years i can retroactively argue why the introduction of the mac was
John:
was you know super important even more important than the iphone in some specific aspects but heyday it was not apple's heyday right but for me that is the era of apple that has the most emotional resonance mostly because of the age i was and the fact that i was getting into computers that time and
John:
how I idolized all the people who made it and read all about it and all that stuff, right?
John:
But if I have to pick the Hay Day out of these things from a less personal perspective, I would actually pick, surprisingly, and mostly based on Kyle's question and what I think he wants out of Hay Day, I would pick the iMac iPod era because I feel like that was...
John:
The most exciting time to be into Apple.
John:
And it culminated with the iPhone.
John:
The iPhone marks the end of that era, right?
John:
So this iMac, iPod era was, like I said, it was the dawn of the Steve note.
John:
We would go to Macworld Expo, which was still a thing then, and WWDC.
John:
And it was a transitional period.
John:
Steve Jobs is back.
John:
We're not sure how things are going to go down.
John:
And it got kicked off with the iMac, which was a big surprise.
John:
And then from that point up until the iPhone...
John:
Every time we sat down there to hear what Apple had to say, nobody knew what it was going to be.
John:
It could be anything.
John:
And every time it was something that nobody expected because, again, the possibility space had been so small.
John:
And every keynote just kicked that possibility space out bigger and bigger and bigger.
John:
And it was just...
John:
you know keynote after keynote of just surprising exciting stuff and it built to the iphone the most surprising the most exciting and you know the most successful of all the stuff they reduce and everything in there like i i just think back through those keynotes it wasn't you know i wasn't in my formative years then right but uh so i'm it's not i don't think it's like rose-colored grasses of like you know the the rock music you listen to in high school or whatever but
John:
this was if you wanted to know what it was like to be uh you know an apple fan at a time when apple was doing the most stuff to make apple apple fans eyes had the little emoji hearts over them right it was this era this was the heyday and i would say it wasn't apple's best products there was lots of not so great stuff mixed in there not just the cube like a lot of the stuff
John:
the computers yeah they they look neat but were they good computers even some of the iMacs were like man not quite like the the move to like the aluminum glass era like like you said Casey that you know 2011 MacBook Air stomps all over like everything during this heyday but if you just wanted to be like super excited about what the heck Apple is gonna do next and have have it climax in like the most important technology product of our lifetime this was the era
Casey:
That was a good discussion.
Casey:
Thanks, Kyle, for that question.
Casey:
I really dig it.
John:
You know when you said like, oh, John's going to tell us, be disappointed because we're so young and everything.
John:
What kills me every time we talk about this is that you guys both just missed this era.
John:
And looking back on it, like I said, you look back on it and it's like, that doesn't look that good.
John:
The computers now are better.
John:
And they were like the computers were better when you came on board.
John:
But you just missed this like super exciting time when when like every every keynote was just like Christmas morning and you had no idea what was going to happen.
Casey:
I remember vividly that even when the iPod came out, I don't know why I wasn't that impressed by it.
Casey:
And obviously it didn't work with PCs for the first.
John:
It was $400 and it was FireWire and it was Mac only.
Casey:
And this screen was monochrome leaving aside the Mac only part like once it was available to be used with the PC even at first I guess it was the price because at this point in my life I was considerably more price sensitive than I am now but for whatever reason I remember not being impressed.
Casey:
And then all of a sudden, and it looks like it was 2005, all of a sudden the iPod Nano happened.
Casey:
The very, very first iPod Nano.
Casey:
And that was the first Apple product that I really and truly coveted.
Casey:
And I wanted one badly.
Casey:
And I eventually got one.
Casey:
And I loved it.
John:
That was a great example of having a keynote where...
John:
you know like at that point it was clear apple was making ipods like ipods was much we're going to be successful it was like what apple's going to be the ipod company they don't even know that company anymore ha ha ha uncomfortable laugh um but we had seen the big white ipods and we'd seen the mini which were candy colored and you know seem not to be worth the price from people who are measuring specs and everything and yet sold like crazy you know as an indication of where this market was actually going and the nano is a great example like we
John:
oh so they're gonna announce the ipods whatever wonder what these will be like and to no one was thinking hey guess what you see what what they look like now the ipods you're looking at now take them and cut them into like seven pieces and that little skinny sliver that you've had that's gonna be the next ipod it's like yeah right yeah but maybe that's like the cover of the next ipod it's like no that's the whole thing
John:
It just seemed impossible, right?
John:
Because it was in his change pocket, right?
Casey:
I was just about to ask.
Casey:
This was the one that was in the change pocket, wasn't it?
John:
Right, right.
John:
It was like, you have got to be kidding me.
John:
Like, every keynote was like that.
John:
Every time they pulled it out, there was the reaction, you've got to be kidding me.
John:
Like, it doesn't happen anymore because we all know so much about the tech that's available.
John:
We're following so closely that, like, we know two years ahead of time that Apple's going to use an OLED screen and its phone, and it's going to be, like, it was...
John:
I guess mostly because people weren't paying enough attention, people were just learning to start paying attention, that we were all just surprised.
John:
And the rumor scene was completely bonkers.
John:
Like, because anything was possible, the rumors that were happening then were just as outlandish as the things that came out and, like, massively wrong and not founded in any information and just...
John:
would you know amuse us to no end because nobody knew anything and like when things did leak like we weren't sure whether to believe them or not uh so it was it was a hell of a time to to be an apple fan yeah i gotta say the the that ipod nano reveal was i think one of the best apple reveals of all time
Marco:
It might have even been the best short little moment because with the iPhone, Steve really built up to it slowly.
John:
Although, are you going to fault them for building up?
John:
Are you going to build up to something?
John:
Building up to the iPhone?
John:
It's a good thing to build up.
Marco:
No, it's true.
Marco:
But if you're talking about the moment of the reveal, I think...
Marco:
You know, the original MacBook Air coming out of the envelope was good.
Marco:
That was very good.
Marco:
I think that first iPod Nano coming out of its change pocket, I think that wins, though.
Marco:
I can't think of anything that was like a more shocking initial view of something than that.
Yeah.
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Colin McKellar writes, could the Apple CPU in Macs, the potential forthcoming, you know, ARM CPU or whatever, is it possible that might not be ARM or x86, but an Apple-designed architecture?
Casey:
If Apple's switching architectures anyway, why not move to one they create or control?
Casey:
It's not like they would ever use a non-Apple ARM chip in a Mac.
Casey:
In short, how feasible is it to create your own chip architecture?
Casey:
And what are the disadvantages or advantages from using an existing architecture?
Casey:
This is an interesting question.
Casey:
I don't really know what Apple would have to gain.
Casey:
Like, yes, it would all be custom-made directly for Apple, but chip architectures, it's by design.
Casey:
The programming interface to a CPU is, I want to say simple, but somebody's going to weigh it.
Casey:
Well, actually me.
Casey:
But it's...
Casey:
It's a bunch of fundamental building blocks that you can build into very impressive things.
Casey:
And I don't feel like this is an unsolved problem.
Casey:
I don't know what they would have to gain, really, by doing this.
Casey:
But maybe I'm missing something.
Casey:
So, Marco, thoughts on this?
Marco:
Yeah, I think you basically covered it.
Marco:
I don't think, you know, creating a new architecture is a significant upgrade in the amount of work they will be spending on their own chip design.
Marco:
Like, there aren't that many chip architectures in the world.
Marco:
And there's even fewer that are actually in widespread use for general purpose computers.
Marco:
I really don't think that they would have nearly enough to gain.
Marco:
You know, they already control a lot about their chip design.
Marco:
And and they they license the architecture from Arm and Arm designs it.
Marco:
And, you know, I'm sure Apple influences it pretty heavily these days.
Marco:
But, you know, it's still being like, you know, that's mainly being outsourced and pooled with, you know, lots of other companies that are all using Arm or making Arm chips or whatever else.
Marco:
And then also on the software side.
Marco:
There's a lot of software that can compile to ARM that they take advantage of.
Marco:
They can only be running on the same number of architectures that the rest of the world is really running on because lots of stuff in the world now is split between x86 and ARM.
Marco:
Adding a whole other additional instruction set for just Macs, I don't see that flying in today's world.
Marco:
I think that would be a really tough sell for a lot of people.
Marco:
And also, I just don't see it being worth the work for Apple.
Marco:
i wonder if there's patent issues too i mean probably right there's always patent right like like arm is the one who would be facing any patent issues with their instruction set not maybe not apple directly but you know it would probably become apple's problem at some point but like you know if apple started their their own whole thing they would have to dodge a whole bunch of patents and file a bunch of their own in this area and have problems with those and
Marco:
So using someone else's instruction set helps them probably avoid quite a lot of that as well.
Marco:
So there's lots of reasons for them not to do this.
Marco:
And I don't think there's enough good reasons for them to do it.
John:
So making your own instruction set, like Casey kind of played it down as if like, I don't see why they would do that.
John:
There is a bunch of important advantages to being able to define the instruction set.
John:
And that's the reason we're not using the same instruction set now that we were in the 60s or whatever, before there were instruction sets, or before there were widely shared instructions.
John:
What was it, the IBM...
John:
oh god someone in the chat room looks up for me so i can correct myself later uh system 360 something anyway um in the modern era instruction sets the advantage you get for defining one is you get to learn from the mistakes of everybody who made instruction set before you and more importantly much more importantly you get to tailor your instruction set to the nature of the hardware and software of the day uh so
John:
A lot of the older instruction sets are tailored to hardware designs that are no longer relevant.
John:
Like, you know, CPUs are not designed the same way, and the problems they're asked to solve are not the same either.
John:
Like, for example, instruction sets that don't have any SIMD capability...
John:
We're creating an error before sort of large scale multimedia processing operations.
John:
Right.
John:
They didn't need an instruction set like that.
John:
If you make a new instruction set or, you know, you append an existing one, you have the opportunity to say today.
John:
One of the problems we have is dealing with lots of data that might be, you know, audio or video or sound or things where we can do lots of operations in parallel.
John:
uh you know on on big chunks of data and the old instruction sets don't work with that so we can define a new one that that fits that and fits like you know modern cpus and we have more transistors and we can put more cash than we used to so on and so forth right um ibm system 360 i knew there was a slash in there system slash 360. um
John:
I think it was the first computer with a common instruction set, so they were going to make a line of computers that all use the same instruction set instead of making a new instruction set for every computer, which was a thing to do back then.
John:
Anyway, so...
John:
The question is, has enough changed in the industry or in the hardware world that Apple would gain some advantage from making a new instruction set?
John:
Now, ARM, in the grand scheme of things, is not new, but it's not super old.
John:
If anything, you know, it's a modern-ish risk architecture, but ARM has warts and it has extensions for SIMD stuff.
John:
If Apple, knowing what it knows now, could design a new instruction set for iPhones or Macs, they can make one that's better than ARM.
John:
It wouldn't have as many warts.
John:
It would be a better fit for their compiler technology, for the hardware that they know is out there.
John:
It would be better.
John:
But it wouldn't be that much better.
John:
On the flip side of this is what we talked about all last show.
John:
If Apple wants to have any chance of maintaining or eventually regaining the current situation where you can run...
John:
all the legacy x86 binaries from like you know in fast fast uh virtualization for windows and for unix and all those things like that the client side and the server side and cross-platform is all unified and x86 if they ever want to get that again they can't have their own instruction set
John:
if they make their own arm chips and that somehow the whole rest of the industry, as we talked about for also goes arm and yay, we're back into our, you know, golden age again, where everything is arm everywhere.
John:
And it's not because they're all using Apple chips, but it's because they're all using arm and arm is an instruction set that Apple doesn't own and control.
John:
And so servers are free to use it.
John:
And we have this nice ecosystem.
Um,
John:
If I were Apple, I would never give up that possibility.
John:
Even if it didn't look like it was going to be likely, I wouldn't give up the possibility.
John:
So it's either Apple tries to define a new instruction set and then sells it to the whole rest of the industry.
John:
Not likely.
John:
Or they really, really need to pick one that there's at least some slim chance that the whole rest of the industry will eventually use.
John:
They should not and will not go their own way on a CPU architecture for phones or Macs.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Scott Norris writes, do you think Apple will upgrade the cooling design for the 2018 iMac lineup using ideas for the iMac Pro for longevity or perhaps better GPU options?
Casey:
I don't think that's unreasonable, but I don't know that they would put that much cooling in a machine that they don't feel like needs that much cooling.
Casey:
So I would be slightly surprised, but I don't know.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
I think they totally should, because this is a very well-worded question here.
John:
Using ideas from the iMac Pro, they can't just take, oh, let's just take the iMac Pro, the exact cooling design, because it's probably expensive, and like you said, you don't need to remove that much heat from the lower-powered chips.
John:
But the ideas, whatever they did to the iMac Pro, a machine that dissipates more heat but is quieter than the 5K iMac, yes, please, bring those ideas.
John:
Because if you can make the iMac Pro that quiet...
John:
Use slightly less money and you have slightly less power to dissipate.
John:
Use those ideas in the 5K iMac.
John:
Make it be less of a hairdryer.
John:
They should totally do that.
John:
Will they do it?
God.
John:
maybe in a couple of years like i don't see them because the iMac pro is so big and important and expensive and seems even though it looks the same from the outside it seems when you look at it on the insides it seems like a different planet like it's made it was like made by a different set of people than the 5k iMac entirely even though it looks so similar on the outside so i'm not particularly optimistic about suddenly now that the iMac pro is at the very next 5k iMac is going to look like the iMac pro on the inside but i hope
John:
in a few areas there is a trickle down of that of those ideas and that cooling and that uh you know airflow and heat management solution because apple has proven they can do it uh they just need to do it slightly cheaper in a slightly easier situation
Marco:
Yeah, I would love for them to do it.
Marco:
I think they absolutely should.
Marco:
I agree with everything you just said.
Marco:
The only problem is that the iMac Pro cooling solution won't fit in the regular iMac unless they eliminate options for spinning disk hard drives, which would also eliminate the fusion drive options.
Marco:
And so it would significantly drive up the cost of low-end iMac configurations for people who need a lot of space.
Marco:
Now, I'm of the opinion that they should probably be doing that anyway.
Marco:
I think that the time has passed where Apple should have stopped selling spinning disks in the same way that I don't think they should be still selling anything with non-retina screens.
Marco:
Even fusion drives are not very good and not very fast and very inconsistent.
Marco:
They even like a few years ago when they cheaped out and made the SSD portion of fusion drives even smaller than it was before.
Marco:
Like the fusion drive is a bad hack.
Marco:
There was a time for it when flash storage was smaller and more expensive than it is today.
Marco:
I think that time has passed.
Marco:
And while they wouldn't be able to offer, say, a terabyte or two terabytes as cheaply as they could today, I think this is the kind of situation where it's worth taking a temporary higher price on larger storage tiers like that
Marco:
especially now as people need less storage because of various cloud services and the lack of large music libraries anymore.
Marco:
This is a good time to do that, even though things would be temporarily more expensive because it would allow all of the iMacs to then have this awesome cooling design.
Marco:
And I think they would benefit significantly from that.
Marco:
You'd probably have longer component lifespans.
Marco:
You definitely have less noise.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is a fantastic thermal design.
Marco:
At least as we know it so far.
Marco:
I mean, we don't know if it has any kind of massive flaw that'll happen three years in.
Marco:
But so far, it appears to be a great thermal design.
Marco:
So the sooner that can get into all iMacs, I think the better.
Marco:
And the only thing holding that back is probably...
Marco:
cost of you know of doing a redesign and then you know the three and a half inch drive that's in there the other problem is if apple decides to remove the three and a half inch drive from the iMac they might decide to just make it thinner which nobody wants except probably apple they might decide to make it thinner instead of spending that newfound space on additional cooling capacity i hope that's not what they do
Marco:
I especially hope they don't also then force that onto the iMac Pro somehow and then make it just louder and worse or make it lower power and make it throttle its CPUs at even lower speeds.
Marco:
Both of those would be terrible because nobody's asking for that.
Marco:
But I also can't deny this is Apple.
Marco:
This is especially today, Apple and heyday arguments aside.
Marco:
We all know they love making things thinner that nobody was really asking for.
Marco:
So they might just do that instead.
Marco:
I hope they don't.
John:
Well, the iMac is going to get thinner.
John:
It's just a question of when.
Casey:
Probably right.
Casey:
Nick Alexander writes, a legitimate question that's not trying to stir any bad blood.
Casey:
Do you think Steve Jobs' Apple would have treated the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini generally the same way that Tim Cook's Apple have?
Casey:
If so, what do you think that Jobs would have done differently?
Casey:
So I have no interest in doing the, oh, if Steve were alive thing.
Casey:
So if one of you has a different angle on this, then I'm happy to hear it.
Casey:
But I respectfully abstain from this one.
Marco:
So I added this one because I thought it was interesting not to just bash on Tim Cook and wish for Steve to be here again, but I thought there was some constructive commentary to be had here.
Marco:
Basically, we can ask ourselves a lot of questions like, what would Steve do?
Marco:
How would things be different if Steve was still here?
Marco:
Or would Steve have done the things that Tim Cook's Apple has done?
Marco:
And
Marco:
There's a number of sides to this, some of which are constructive, some of which are just useless speculation.
Marco:
What we have to really consider here is that this is a completely different time and a fairly different company from when Steve was alive.
Marco:
He passed away in 2011.
Marco:
That was a good amount of time ago now.
Marco:
Since then, the company has gotten substantially larger.
Marco:
It has more product lines.
Marco:
It has significant maturation of the existing product lines that were there when he was there.
Marco:
So the iPhone, even though he was there for the launch of the iPhone, the iPhone today is very different from what it was.
Marco:
He passed away right after the iPhone 4S was unveiled to give you some idea of how far we've come.
Marco:
So it's hard to say...
Marco:
what this person would have done who led a company that was much smaller than it is today in a very different time seven years ago.
Marco:
In general themes, we can speculate.
Marco:
We can say things like, you know, Steve did seem to really like computers a lot.
Marco:
And Tim seems to have bigger picture ambitions that don't prioritize computers.
Marco:
But ultimately, you know, Steve deluded things too.
Marco:
Steve shipped bad products too.
Marco:
I do really miss Steve for a lot of reasons.
Marco:
I really, really miss Steve.
Marco:
And I bet Apple does too.
Marco:
But it's hard to say what he would have done because what we saw from him and the company that he saw was so different from the one today and the environment and the competitive landscape and all the product lines today.
John:
So I think Steve Jobs probably would have treated the Mac Mini just as badly because he didn't really care about the computer either.
Marco:
He did treat the Mac Mini just as badly.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
You don't need to speculate on that one.
Marco:
The Mac Pro, I think he had a pretty decent record with the Mac Pro.
John:
Yeah, well, I think the best way to characterize how Steve would have done things differently is that we wouldn't have been... I wouldn't have had so many situations where things were in limbo because Steve was very decisive, right?
John:
And so if he had decided that the iPhone and the iPad of the future and the Mac...
John:
uh, was, uh, was the past, he would have not hesitated to can the Mac.
John:
Like if that was the thing that he wanted to do, right.
John:
On the other hand, if he decided that because he's a computer guy and because of the time that he grew up and he just, you know, he loves computers as, as, as evidence by his entire career, he just loves computers that he was never going to let them go.
John:
He would not have let the Mac pro language like that.
John:
Cause he would have been said, look, either we're doing the Macs or we're not doing them.
John:
Are we doing them or not?
John:
No, I'm the one who decides and I decide we're doing them.
John:
So don't leave that thing out there for all those years.
John:
Right.
Marco:
used a mac pro yeah like that that's like i don't think tim cook has ever sat in front of a mac pro once i don't think tim cook really gives two craps about macs or computers he you know he's a businessman first he's not a product person at all whereas steve loved computers he he lived and breathed computers even more than i do and that's like this is like my frustration so often is like i want apple to care as much about computers as i do and a lot of times it seems like they don't
John:
but like with steve i never had that concern so and the important thing to remember is like with the mac mini right it's not as if you know that steve gave 100 attention to every product like yeah he'd let the mac mini be mostly languish right uh and so how can you say he loved computers if he's not constantly updating the mac mini or the mac mini is such a bad deal and like you know like what how can you say that like
John:
uh it's going back to the uh the case for the true mac pro successor car guys analogy steve jobs was a car guy when he was a computer guy right and computer guys mostly you know they have something that they like whether it's like big american muscle cars or sleek fast sports cars
John:
There are far fewer, you know, car enthusiasts who are really, really into, you know, sort of low-powered, inexpensive cars.
John:
Part of being into cars is about, you know, speed, right?
John:
This is the slowest car ever made.
John:
Isn't that great?
John:
Speed is part of car and motorsports, right?
John:
So, of course, Steve Jobs, the computer guy,
John:
love the big fast computers love to have all that you know computing horsepower up there and was less enthused about making a really inexpensive headless mac where you could use your own crappy logitech keyboard or your own crappy pc monitor with it like that wasn't his thing it wasn't elegant it wasn't beautiful it was like a product that you make some people like maybe it's neat isn't it kind of cool that it's small whatever but he was never enthusiastic about it right um but
John:
he was enthusiastic about computers.
John:
And in the same way that you can imagine the CEO of a car company, you know, I mean, something like Toyota, like, you know, they make all these Camrys and, you know, all the Corollas and everything, right?
John:
But if you are the CEO of Toyota and you're going to like, you know, hang out with the workers and see what they're up to, you want to go to see the team making the LFA.
John:
Yeah, you're going to visit the Camry line and check out the Corollas and everything like that.
John:
But if you're, you know, really into cars and you're the CEO of Toyota,
John:
you're gonna you want to go talk to the lfa people you want to say like how's the lfa coming i know this is like not important to our bottom line and shareholders care about how many cameras we sold but i want to see how the lfa is coming right and steve jobs always seemed to be the same way so i feel like he would have been more decisive and uh and that would have worked you know like i said one of two ways he decisively cut off the mac when he felt like it was time because he was ruthless in that way even though he loved computers but up until that point
John:
he would have supported ridiculous overpowered computers that were he would have made that jellyfish 100 the mac pro jellyfish he would have made that he made he made the cube he made all those weird imacs he would have commissioned the jellyfish and he would have been like this is awesome it's got tentacles and it's it's amazing each one has a cpu and it probably would have flopped but he did love some computers all right thanks to our sponsors this week away squarespace and tech meme ride home and we will see you next week
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Casey:
And if you're into Twitter, 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-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean
Marco:
I do want to, since we don't have anything else to talk about in the after show, I do want to very briefly address topics that have come up that people keep asking us to talk about that we haven't mentioned.
Marco:
One of them is Apple hiring that dude, and the other one is Mark Zuckerberg being a d***.
Marco:
And I just don't...
Marco:
everything apple does you know we also didn't cover the red iphone everything apple does doesn't warrant mentioning honestly it does a lot of stuff these days that's really boring that is not newsworthy and so we can't mention everything and some of the stuff just gets cut
Marco:
And as for Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress and everything else, it's all just a dog and pony show.
Marco:
He's going to keep doing what he's doing.
Marco:
No one's going to do anything.
Marco:
No one's going to leave Facebook except me and maybe two people in my group.
Marco:
Big companies do boring stuff all the time, and Zuckerberg is going to be a turd all the time.
Marco:
Nothing's going to change either of those things.
John:
i can always talk about apple things like the the person they hired the reason uh the reason i think this didn't come from the show uh like what was it the the ai person from google or whatever oh this one this one hire is going to make siri better like that's not that's not how these things work yeah exactly how it works like the only the only the times that happens it's very notable because it's rare like getting hiring steve jobs that was a big deal for apple in 1997 right that's one case where you could say you have this one guy is going to turn the company around yeah actually he did
John:
uh but it's hard to think like it's not saying that they're not gonna help and it's not a good move or anything but we don't know this person we don't know it's so hard to tell when you're like someone who works at that level in a corporation it's so hard to tell exactly what their skill set is right like what are they bringing to the table uh
John:
uh were they just in the right place at the right time and had the minimum uh necessary skills to take advantage of a success that was going to happen with or without them or did that success happen only because they were there right and you we don't know because we don't know these people we're not like we don't have like uh you know tech executive trading cards i don't i've never heard this person's name i don't even remember it anymore so when there's some big hire like that
John:
i say oh good good for apple looks like they're they know they need to work on siri and then i just don't pay attention for a couple years and we'll see and if a couple years it turns around and be like see you thought about that guy wasn't gonna do it but he did great fine show me but i'm always like show me the results that's all i care about even steve jobs show me the results i didn't think he was gonna succeed either famously because history had shown that he'd flamed out spectacularly every time he tried to do something and he was a mess uh but he figured it out so uh i always just think show me the results um and then the facebook stuff
John:
yeah i can't can't be bothered like our entire government is so depressing nothing's gonna happen from that facebook thing facebook is depressing i try not to pay attention to it yeah it's the best you could do anything else oh and the the red phones i do like uh the fact that they're giving red backs with black fronts because that's the thing that i always wish i love that i started the segment with here's things we're not going to talk about on the show and then we're talking about them on the show that's two seconds it's a quickie and that's that's the take everyone everyone has on it it's like everyone who likes the black fronts of the phones
John:
and i kind of like my kids have a lot of like mostly ipod touches and stuff that are colored backs but white fronts they do look kind of cool they look kind of like uh like the the red ones look christmassy like the white and the red and we have like a blue and the white front like it's not ugly but i like the black fronts better for contrast reasons and having always to have the white front with the colorful backs and the black front only with the boring backs
John:
Uh, that streak went on too long.
John:
So that and the, the, uh, supposed FCC picture of the gold backed, uh, iPhone 10.
John:
Did you see that one?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yep.
John:
Same thing.
John:
Black front gold back.
John:
I think that looks super cool.
John:
It's like a bumblebee and the, uh, the, the red, the red back black front, uh, product red iPhone eight.
John:
I think it also looks cool.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I just wish it was, like, it's just so, like, shameless that they wait until the slow mid-cycle time and then they update the phones.
Marco:
And they didn't even update the flagship phone that costs more money and the people really want.
Marco:
You know, it's just, like, it's just so bleh.