You Know My Pouches
John:
i think watch out for the jellyfish is the bigger like there's a lot of stuff in the ocean that wants to kill me the jellyfish will not kill you i promise they might hurt this thing a little but it won't kill you getting stung by jellyfish is part of the experience i don't want to mention that part it is part of the experience you're really not selling it john it's not that bad
Casey:
All right, so at the top of the show, I think we should take a serious moment to thank everyone for contributing to Stephen Hackett and his family's fundraising effort for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
They were, where were they at, like $16,000, $17,000 or something like that when we recorded?
Casey:
They were less than $20,000 when they recorded.
Casey:
I genuinely am overjoyed to say that as we record tonight, they are at $42,399.
Casey:
Whoa, that's awesome.
Casey:
Which is amazing.
Casey:
I think we can hit 50, and I'm not going to be so bold as to say 60, but I think we can get to 50.
Casey:
Just saying.
Casey:
So if you've listened to this, if you're listening to this and have already donated, thank you.
Casey:
If you haven't donated...
Casey:
Thank you for thinking about it.
Casey:
And thank you for going, as I'm talking to you right now, to heroes.stju.org slash Hackett, H-A-C-K-E-T-T, and throwing them at least $5.
Casey:
I said last episode that even $1 would help, which is true, but it turns out you need to do at least $5 for some reason.
Casey:
So if you have at least $5, which you probably do, I mean, you're probably listening to this on a $1,000 iPhone.
Casey:
You probably have five bucks.
Casey:
why don't you throw St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital five bucks?
Casey:
It'll make you feel good.
Casey:
So thank you.
Marco:
Also do it soon because this is a September fundraiser.
Marco:
And while I'm sure you can donate to St.
Marco:
Jude whenever you want to, it would be extra cool if this happened during the last few days here of September.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So genuinely, as much as I'm trying to snarkily encourage you to donate more money, really and truly thank you from the three of us, for anyone who listened to this show and donated.
Casey:
I don't know if it was a big push from Stephen, if it was us, if it was a combination of things, but no matter who or how or why, Stephen and his family have doubled what their goal was, which makes me exceptionally, exceptionally happy.
Casey:
So thank you to everyone who donated.
Casey:
I really appreciate it.
Casey:
And now back to regularly scheduled programming.
Casey:
And let's start off with something else that's cool, except way less cool.
Casey:
I don't know which one of you guys found this, but Apple made a watch face making of video, which is only like, what, two minutes long, three minutes long?
Casey:
This is amazing.
Casey:
I am so glad one of you put this in the show notes because I would not have seen it otherwise.
Casey:
Oh, it's one minute long.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
That's a little bit longer than I spent using that watch face.
Yeah.
John:
It was circulating on Twitter.
John:
It's kind of weird that it's a minute.
John:
It's more like just excerpts.
John:
It's more like an ad for a longer video.
John:
If the longer video exists, I don't know where it is.
John:
This just show clips of it.
John:
But here's the upshot.
John:
We talked when the Series 4 Apple Watch came out about...
John:
how apple was showing off the power of the gpu and i mentioned they do that in the heart rate monitoring thing where they have that particle effects with the heart and whatever and they have all the other effects that are like flames and like water and stuff like that that your vapor watch faces and i said i didn't know if those were just video but the the heart one definitely isn't well
John:
not only like what i meant was i didn't know if the the all-encompassing watch faces were like oh it's just a movie that's playing like there's a there's you know a video file in there and it just plays the video and i assumed that they had created that video like in a special effects application with the flame effect or whatever or some you know like that it was it was computer generated but all it was doing was playing a computer generator like it wasn't procedurally generated on the fly it was a pre-recorded thing
John:
Well, it turns out it is prerecorded, but they didn't make it in like After Effects or in, you know, some sort of special effects application.
John:
They made it with like flames, like actual flames for the flame face.
John:
How did they make the vapor one?
John:
They made it with vapor.
John:
How did they make the water one?
John:
They made it with a big thing of water.
John:
Uh, and it's, the video shows you them doing it.
John:
It's almost as if like, you can imagine it being like a joke video where there's some special effect, uh, that someone sees in television or a video game or whatever.
John:
Uh, and, and they show people making it for real when it would be so much easier just to make it on a computer.
John:
Uh, but like in, in the, uh, keynote, you could see the effect of these things, like hitting the curved corners of the watch and bouncing off.
John:
And it's like, wow, they modeled the walls of the watch.
John:
So the thing that's expanding outward, like hits the edges of your watch and reacts to it.
John:
Right.
John:
What they did was made a giant thing that's like two feet by two feet in the exact shape and proportions of the watch and put fire in it and put water in it and put flames in it.
John:
And in the cases where the bubbles touch the little tick... What are those called, Marco?
John:
I think we didn't have a name for those.
John:
The tick marks that go around there?
John:
They're called indices.
John:
The indices, right?
John:
So the effects hit the indices, like the little bubbles hit the indices.
John:
They made big plastic sticks in exactly the places where the indices are.
John:
in the graphic and put water in it and filmed it uh and so this looks like such a fun project like if you get to work on something as part of a marketing push getting to do this looks so fun it's like a combination of marketing and special effects and to see it all boiled down to these tiny tiny little videos that end up on your wrist i thought this was very cool and very fun
John:
And I wish it was more than a minute long.
John:
And I would love to hear people talk about how they decided to do this.
John:
Like coming up, we need some cool new watch faces.
John:
What can we do?
John:
And someone's like, I know we'll build a giant scale model of a watch and set it on fire.
John:
Good.
John:
Sold.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Friend of the show, Steve John Smith, noticed something in the last day or two, which was actually in turn noticed by Miguel de Caza.
Casey:
I hope I pronounced that right.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
This is actually a throwback to our interview with Chris Ladner a while ago, and it's about BitCode.
Casey:
John, would you like to take over and kind of explain this?
John:
That'll throw back to our interview.
John:
We did talk about bitcode when we had Chris Latner on the program.
John:
So here's the context.
John:
We mentioned on the last show, I think, or maybe show before anyway, that the Watch Series 4 uses a 64-bit CPU, but the actual sort of what you compile down to is called ARM6432, where it's for 64-bit CPU, but it uses 32-bit pointers, which is a little bit weird.
John:
And that was what we were remarking on because a bunch of other people had noted it as well.
John:
We'd forgotten at that point, although we'd mentioned in many shows in the past, and as any watch developer knows, if you develop for watchOS, you don't send Apple binaries.
John:
You send them bitcode.
John:
And if you're wondering what bitcode is, you can reference the link we'll have in the show notes to our interview with Chris Latner where he talks about it, and that show has links to all the webpages on bitcode or whatever.
John:
But the bottom line is it's a...
John:
Not a completely machine agnostic format, but it is a less machine specific format for encoding, you know, compiling something down to not an executable that can run on a machine, but to an intermediary form, which can then be turned into machine code and executed.
John:
And they, you know, you can do this for iOS, too.
John:
Is that correct, Marco?
John:
You can submit bit code to Apple for your iOS apps?
John:
Yeah, with iOS, it's optional.
John:
And I believe with watchOS, it's mandatory.
John:
Yeah, but you can do it for iOS, but you have to do it for watchOS.
John:
And we talked about the advantages.
John:
Why would you want to do this?
John:
Why would you not give Apple a binary?
John:
And the advantage is that Apple can basically build your binary on the fly for the people who want the thing by excluding instructions that aren't relevant to the device that's being loaded on and making your application smaller.
John:
And Chris mentioned on the show when we talked to him that you could...
John:
When you change it into machine code, you know exactly which instructions exist in the hardware that you're targeting.
John:
So in the bit code, it could say that you just need to divide two numbers, but you don't know if there's a divide instruction for numbers of that size.
John:
Maybe one platform has it, one platform doesn't or whatever.
John:
Anyway, Steve Trouton Smith was discussing on Twitter that...
John:
The fact that the watch has always required bit code means that watch applications that were submitted well before any ARM64 watches existed can run without being resubmitted and without being recompiled on the Series 4, which we didn't really talk about.
John:
But it's not like, you know, do people have to recompile their watch apps?
John:
The answer is no, they don't.
John:
Because every single watch app that has ever been submitted is bit code.
John:
And apparently, Apple can take that and target the 64-bit architecture without asking developers to do anything additional.
John:
Now, I don't know if that's because it also uses 32-bit pointers.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
We need to have Chris back in the program explain...
John:
you know, how, how they pulled this off.
John:
And if the architecture was significantly more significantly different, like different ND in this, or like it was X86 or something, could they have not done this, but because it's still arm.
John:
And the only difference is that, you know, a 64 bit insert or whatever, uh, that they can pull this off anyway.
John:
Point is, they did pull it off.
John:
And I think this is a very, you know, it was wonder how long Apple's roadmaps are.
John:
But it's kind of hints at the idea that when they came out with the first watch and were trying to decide what the rules would be about submitting watch applications, someone said, let's make everybody submitted in bit code.
John:
And the answer to why was...
John:
because like in five years we'll probably have a 64-bit cpu in the watch and it would be nice if we didn't have to ask people to recompile like we asked them to do for the phone and the ipad and stuff like that and so they did it the magic of bit code uh went basically unnoticed like i didn't see a lot of stories about boy the new watch is great and by the way isn't it great the developers don't have to recompile their apps like they did when the phone went 64 bit no one said that where is that story uh
John:
But I think that's actually the lack of a story is the story, that it's not a thing we had to talk about, that it just worked.
John:
Yay for Apple and yay for cool compiler technology.
Casey:
Moving on, David Hanemeyer Hansen, is that right?
Casey:
DHH has noted that the iPhone X is faster than an iMac Pro on the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark.
Casey:
It's the fastest device I've ever tested.
Casey:
It's an insane 45% jump over the iPhone 8 or iPhone X chip.
Casey:
How?
Casey:
So this is better than your computer, Marco.
Casey:
Maybe you don't even need a Mac Pro.
Casey:
You just need an iPhone.
John:
I mean, the screen's a little small.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Who gets so excited about saying how my phone is faster than my computer?
John:
Marco's phone is faster than his computer in at least one thing.
John:
Now, granted, benchmarks are weird.
John:
Sometimes benchmarks exercise a particular thing that one particular CPU can do really well or that a benchmark fits entirely within a cache of one thing but not in the other.
John:
But...
John:
But this is not like the phone against an OK computer.
John:
This is a phone against like Apple's fastest computer with the Xeon head that surely has more of everything.
John:
You know, it can address more memory.
John:
It's at a higher clock speed.
John:
It has more cache at every possible level, has more, you know, instructions in flight, more execution units.
John:
Everything is wider in it.
John:
And yet, for whatever reason, assuming this is valid and DHH, by the way, is the
John:
creator of ruby on rails and what else did he make uh the old base camp 37 signals 37 signals is now called base camp anyway i'm assuming this is a legit thing and i'm assuming speedometer 2.0 is not a ridiculous benchmark at least uh and obviously this is not a cpu benchmark it's an application benchmark and mobile safari is not exactly the same executable as desktop safari yada yada yada but the fact that it's even in the same ballpark that we're discussing phone versus three gigahertz xeon on anything on literally any task is
Casey:
really ridiculous so i'm i was i was impressed by that so the next item of follow-up is listed in our internal show notes document as follows more about the iphone tennis to woo casey
Casey:
Which one of you jerks put this in here?
John:
I did.
John:
You've been hanging out in all the various Slack channels with us and people talking about how great the iPhone XS camera is.
John:
And you're like, don't tell me about this.
John:
I don't want to have to buy... And I feel like you've got your real camera in it.
John:
Your real camera is still better than this camera.
John:
I feel like you're hold strong.
John:
But then I heard the most recent episode of the talk show with John Gruber.
John:
I know exactly what you're going to talk about.
John:
They were specifically talking about how...
John:
Uh, sometimes the image stabilization in iPhones can fight with you when you're using a gimbal to record video.
John:
Is this sounding familiar yet, Casey?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And in fact, that is right after that moment, like within a minute or two of that moment is when I had to turn it off.
Casey:
And I will go back to it later.
Casey:
But I did hear that right before I had to stop listening to the show.
Casey:
And I probably would have stopped anyway because I was so damn annoyed at that point.
John:
and what they said just to finish this up was that apparently apple told one of them that the iphone 10s does a better job of dealing with being on a gimbal it's not that it has the ability for you to just turn off the stabilization in the camera which would be nice but that somehow it does a better job of dealing with being on the gimbal which is such a narrow particular use case that we just so happen to talk about on the very last show which is very relevant to casey's life and i feel like
John:
The world is aligning to make Casey feel bad for not buying this phone.
Marco:
Not only is the XS apparently better about this, but they also said that apparently the X was especially bad about it now.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So Marco's advice to use like an old seven or something is looking better and better.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And by the way, we heard you just just follow up on that topic.
Marco:
We heard from a bunch of people.
Marco:
We had a brief discussion during the show about using an app like Filmic Pro or something like that.
Marco:
And I cut it from the show because everything we were hearing was kind of all over the map about whether it actually works or not.
Marco:
And what I think the truth appears to have settled on is that you can use apps like Filmic Pro to disable stabilization, but it only disables like a software part of it.
Marco:
And it can't disable the hardware part.
Marco:
That's like,
Marco:
you know suspending the camera in like magnets and stuff like there's there's some part of it that can't be disabled in software so you can partially disable but not fully and apparently some people have tried just putting like a magnet behind the phone and that apparently like kind of locks it in place yeah like sticking a powerful magnet right next to your camera which seems like i maybe don't want to do that like yeah it doesn't sound like a great idea but i'll just throw it out there that people have said that worked uh but not a lot of people so
Marco:
But yeah, so all this is to say it's really funny that like you literally – the phone you have is apparently the worst possible phone for video stabilization finding a gimbal.
Marco:
And that you could upgrade to this better one that we will talk about in a little bit that among the many problems it would solve for you, this is one.
John:
You know, it occurs to me when I was listening back to the last episode that when I think about Casey doing his videos, I don't often think of the fact that he's shooting all of it on an iPhone.
John:
I mean, obviously he is like it's like I don't think he bought like a separate camera for.
John:
But in my mind, I don't see like an iPhone sitting on a tripod.
John:
And yet that's that's obviously what it is.
John:
So it never I never really thought about.
John:
how suitable the particular phone you're using to record this is i mean maybe maybe it's because most of the time i think of that like i think of stephen hackett with his crazy setup and he's got like marco's old camera on this big you know like a it's also not a movie camera it's still still an image camera but it's definitely like a big rig setup but casey's just got like this little flat slab point and his gopros which we also see on camera we never see the iphone on camera and yet there it is recording all the video for him
Casey:
Yeah, and I've gotten asked in the past, you know, why not use my Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera?
Casey:
And the answer is it doesn't do 4K.
Casey:
And the only camera that I regularly use of the trio that I use that does not do 4K is my old GoPro, which is a GoPro Hero 3.
Casey:
3 plus, I believe.
Casey:
I don't have it in front of me.
Casey:
But the GoPro Hero 6 and the iPhone both do 4K.
Casey:
So the videos are released in 4K and it just, I guess, upscales, upsamples, whatever the term is, the brief windows of time when I use the old GoPro.
Casey:
But I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade to a newer version of my OM-DEM 10.
Casey:
And so maybe using it for video will be my excuse and or I'll cave on the phone issue because...
Casey:
As of now, I have not bought myself any new treats.
Casey:
I am still on the iPhone 10.
Casey:
I'm still on the Series 3.
Casey:
Everyone's gotten treats but me, you guys.
Casey:
Everyone else has their treats, not me.
Casey:
So, Marco, tell me about all your treats, including the watch that you seem to be wearing more than I expected.
Marco:
Yeah, by the way, honestly, don't upgrade your camera.
Marco:
Get the iPhone instead.
Marco:
I've said this before, that the iPhone is the best video camera in the world in most people's hands for most reasons.
Marco:
There's always exceptions.
Marco:
Pros have good reason to get different cameras, to get pro cameras.
Marco:
But most people operating a camera to film most things most of the time...
Marco:
The iPhone is the best video camera in the world.
Marco:
It is so much easier to use in so many ways than other cameras.
Marco:
And the results you get are so good in so many ways that you should probably stick with that.
Marco:
And that money would be better spent getting a better iPhone for shooting video, as long as it can work with the gimbal somehow, than anything else, honestly.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Marine Layer.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's basically the first shirt you grab from your stack and you pick that up and you put it on.
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:
It's not just like, oh, that feels nice, soft.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Because the softest t-shirts, turns out, come from trees.
Marco:
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Marco:
In fact, our saleswoman here, Jessie, tried them out.
Marco:
She has a lot of experience with them, actually, and as soft as the clothes are, and they are truly, truly soft, she says they also keep their shape well, the t-shirts never look wrinkly or unkempt, and they always look flattering on both men and women.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Enter code ATP at checkout to get 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Marine Layer for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So tell me about your new treats, Marco.
Marco:
Did John get it yet?
Marco:
Yeah, I got it on Friday.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So, I mean, my thoughts on the XS are boring.
Marco:
Let's start with the phone and we'll go to the watch next.
Marco:
So start with the phone.
Marco:
John, I want to hear what you think of it because you didn't have the X. So you're coming right from your Jet Black 7, which is somehow scratch-free, to this, right?
John:
yeah yeah so this is my first i'm this is like a year old stuff because everyone else got used to the 10 last year but i didn't i still been using my seven and i was happy using it for another year because i've just i felt like it was the peak of that form like it felt really good i mean i suppose the innate would have been better but it felt really good to me no i agree especially with jet black and using it well you didn't use it without a case but jet black no case iphone 7 i think was the peak of that form
John:
Well, we can start.
John:
We can start with the case.
John:
So I had a leather case on that one, and I liked it.
John:
It was great.
John:
I got a leather case for my XS.
John:
And, you know, the first thing I do is put it in the case after I get the SIM card into it and everything.
John:
And the leather case for the XS is...
John:
like harder and slipperier than the seven now granted it's leather so i'm like well maybe maybe this is exactly what the seven case was like when it was new maybe it will break in it definitely looks like it's more textured or whatever but anyway i'm hoping it does break in it's not like i'm oiling it like a like a like a baseball mitt but no it totally like all their leather cases even the one you got for your seven most likely did this when they're brand new they're fairly slippery and they're fairly firm and within about a month or so they really get nice and they get kind of tacky and they soften up and everything
John:
Yeah, so that's what I'm hoping happens.
John:
I'm sticking with it.
John:
It was two years ago.
John:
I didn't remember what the heck the 7 case was like when it was new, but that's one of the first things I noticed.
John:
And so now this is my phone.
John:
I did add my face to my wife's 10 as soon as iOS 12 came out, so I've been unlocking her face ID when I needed to.
John:
Now I've got my own phone, so I'm dealing with all the things that everyone else has already dealt with.
John:
Face ID, the gestures, all that other stuff.
John:
Face ID, I find...
John:
mostly delightful because i still get that weird nerd tingle thinking about what it's doing and i'm being amazed that that it works and how fast it does it it it happens faster than my brain can consider how amazing it is and and i don't consciously this just unconsciously i think about how amazing it is and it makes me smile obviously this is a nerd thing most people don't care about this stuff or whatever but definitely gives me the nerd tingles when i unlock the thing and i love how how they've managed the uh
John:
sort of the interface, sort of that it doesn't really matter what order things happen.
John:
I just pick up the phone and swipe from the bottom and sometimes it's already unlocked and sometimes it unlocks later and it doesn't matter.
John:
There's not some sort of order of operations.
John:
It's just like, we'll do the things and if all the things assemble and if the, you know, big added conditional is satisfied at any point, I don't care what order things happen and it's just your phone will unlock.
John:
So I'm finding that really nice and I'm finding it very fast.
John:
being sideways it doesn't work i don't still don't quite understand why it doesn't work sideways but i hopefully hopefully they'll work on that um i'm amazed that it works when i like i'm holding like a piece of laundry under my chin or in my mouth to help fold it or something or like like parts of my face are obscured or one eye is closed with glasses without glasses with you know weird things on my head it's just it's pretty phenomenal um so that's
John:
mostly a non-issue surprisingly my biggest stumbling block so far is the lack of a home button and i didn't think that would be the case i just you know i think it is a thing i would get used to really quickly and it's no big deal and it's not because the gesture is bad or anything it's perfectly good gesture um
John:
it's not slow right but i've breaking my habit of pressing somewhere on my phone to either go home or to wake it up it's finding it hard to get out of that habit i also find it somehow more difficult to you know it's a slightly bigger phone but i find it somehow more difficult to get my thumb down there to the to the very very bottom to do a swipe up gesture than i did to pinch the bottom center of
John:
my iphone 7 i want to press things so much that i find myself occasionally hitting the side power button to try to go home like i'll be using my phone i'll be like i want to go home and i want to press something to go home and i press the side power which of course doesn't take you home right you know it just turns the thing off or whatever like it's not it's not doing what i want you know every once in a while that happens so i
John:
It's still early.
John:
It's only been a week.
John:
Hopefully I got used to it.
John:
But my programming to touch the home button is apparently very strong and I really want to press something.
John:
And it's easier to not press something.
John:
It's easier just to swipe for the most part.
John:
Other than the reachability, it's easier in terms of having to... I mentioned before about forced touch is a more difficult gesture to do.
John:
It's just that my hand is so trained to do that that I'm having trouble getting out of it.
John:
And very often there's this brief microsecond pause as my brain figures out
John:
okay you same thing with multitasking okay you want to go home or you want to bring up the multitasking switcher or you don't want to bring up the multitasking switcher you should just use a stupid side to side swipe which i keep forgetting exists right because it's not you know so i have to break those habits and they're taking longer than i wanted and face id i think is great um and the final thing is apparently when i hold my phone in my left hand it didn't occur to me this would be an issue until i got this thing but
John:
my left pointer finger ends up in the spot where the lower camera is and this has never been issued before because we never had a camera I never had a camera that you know extended down mine's were all just a circle in the corner so I didn't have anything there and even like on the plus phones it goes sideways instead of vertically
John:
so i find my finger kind of hanging when i hold it in my left hand which happens hanging around hanging out by the bottom camera like by that little ridge and like touching the cameras and i don't want to touch the camera lens i don't get my camera lens all mucky right and so it's like but i but i want to put my finger there and so like i shimmy the phone a little bit uh i would like it if that camera lens would get out from under my finger and maybe be horizontal instead of vertical i think it looks cool vertical but it's but it's under my finger which is a little bit weird
John:
you don't you don't put that finger near the sleep wake button uh apparently not like i don't really hold my phone in my left hand that often like i'm a right i hope my phone my right hand but every once in a while i have occasion to hold it in my left hand and when i do that's apparently where my finger goes and i've noticed it well as a left hand phone holding pro because that's my primary way of holding my phone i can tell you you're holding it wrong
John:
anyway um the setup setup process was uh mostly uneventful this isn't really 10s specific although i check in on it like this this is the year i kind of sort of started to believe marco saying i'll just use the icloud thing with icloud keychain you restore everything will be fine uh i did that
John:
and when i realized i would have to reset up all my slacks i said forget it and restored from itunes backup which took forever and took two tries as usual the first time it took like an hour and a half and right at the end it's like an error occurred sorry couldn't do a thing and then my phone rebooted and it was like half installed so then i had to take another hour and a half and it finally completed
John:
But there's no way I was going to recreate all my slacks.
John:
Even when I did the iTunes restore, my Google Authenticator app was missing stuff in it.
John:
I had to figure out how to re-add things to Google Authenticator, which is never easy to do.
John:
Every one of those servers has some totally Byzantine way to do that.
John:
uh i wish you could transfer them from one phone to the other like i kept my seven around but anyway it transferred the thing that i really loved is i was dreading this but it didn't occur to me that i wouldn't have to rearrange all my home screens for once because it's the same number of icons vertically and horizontally on the home screens so i don't didn't have to do anything i was like oh thank god and the ios 12 didn't screw up my icons too much but that was already on the other phone
Marco:
All right, two things before you continue.
Marco:
Number one, if you do iCloud Keychain, then you get what used to require the iTunes encrypted restore, where all your passwords are saved with it.
Marco:
As you mentioned, there are some apps like Slack that store their authentication keys or login info in a way that is not backed up.
Marco:
And there's a few different ways you can do that with the SDK.
Marco:
They probably don't need to be doing it like this.
Marco:
They probably should be using the Keychain, but they're not.
Marco:
Or at least they're not using it for something else critical.
Marco:
But Slack also has a pretty nice feature these days that you can just enter an email address and it lets you like then one button add any Slack where that email address has a login.
John:
I noticed that today when I was adding a Slack to my iPad and it said, do you want to add your Slack by email address or sign in?
John:
And I was like, what the hell does by email address mean?
John:
I said, let me just sign in.
John:
And I did because I was just adding one Slack.
John:
if I had known that feature existed, maybe I would have tried it.
John:
But at the time I was doing it, I also believed that the iCloud restore was the reason my Google authenticator crap was missing.
John:
Apparently that wasn't because like I said, I did the iTunes restore and the exact same things were missing, but, but adding slacks, like I would rather wait for another hour and a half iTunes restore than to add slack.
John:
I'm glad, I'm glad there's a more efficient way to do it.
John:
Maybe next time I'll try one more time to do the laborious iCloud restore.
John:
Cause I do use iCloud key chain and use the iCloud restore, do the slack thing to get all my slacks back.
Marco:
uh and then deal with my authenticator stuff manually which apparently i'm forced to do yeah i'll also say i had pretty good luck this year with the whole like hold your new phone next to your old phone thing and it like arranges it for you with a little pop-up thing like when you can when you connect to airpods yeah i did that it was actually really nice like it worked perfectly for me yeah if you're doing iCloud restore that totally works like that it's fun and it works and you don't have to worry about i even did the watch transfer thing during that setup process with my ancient watch
John:
and it worked fine and it's way faster than an itunes restore and it's way faster than iCloud restores used to be yeah and then i just turned off my watch and put it away but you know i transferred transferred it to the new phone uh i think it rebooted during some point i got to see the you know again 20 minute boot process of the series zero phone running watch os4 oh boy yeah um
John:
yeah so i'm liking it so far uh i haven't actually taken a lot of pictures i was actually inspired today uh by tiff's picture of chestnuts i'm like oh i saw some cool chestnuts on on the outside work and so i took a picture of chestnuts with my new i think it's the first picture i've taken with my new camera because they look cool and shiny like they're all broken up on the ground like yeah in her picture she was holding them in her hand um so i think that's a good uh picture to take but i haven't i haven't really done anything exciting with it so far um let's see yeah i think that's about it
John:
oh i forgot one more thing oled screen on a phone i'm sure everyone who has oled screens on their phone already knows about this i already knew about it but i guess it didn't really occur to me how much it would bother me and also now i want to look into this further and figure out what the exact cause is so i can be properly annoyed by it
John:
whatever it's called like the the jello type thing like if you just go to messages and scroll up and down it looks like the bubbles are like wobbling and getting closer to each other and farther away have you all seen this effect well they are but they're not i know i know what you mean but no that that actually is a ui kit dynamics effect also right but no let's say i thought maybe that's just an effect and i'm going crazy so i pulled up my iphone 7 and did the same thing and they don't do it there
John:
it could maybe it's reduced motion maybe that's it all right before i go off of the deep end let me let me let me turn on reduced motion which is another thing by the way i mentioned this before but i don't i had reduced motion on my seven i didn't do it on the the 10s just because it bothers me less and i assume the transitions are the same let's see it
Marco:
general accessibility well so if you want if you want to see an example of the effect you're talking about it mostly doesn't show up on light backgrounds it very much shows up on when you have a very dark background and something scrolling so one area that i know that you can see this very well because it was reported to me as a bug is if you go to the overcast about screen in the black theme and you scroll up and down real fast it looks like the logo is jittering in the middle of the screen
John:
hmm so anytime anytime you scroll up and down really fast on a black background where something in the middle can can move it looks like it'll be jittering oh whoa whoa all right so the dynamic effect in the messages bubbles was a was a reduced motion thing uh but yeah the effect you're talking about is still a real effect and i do see it
John:
The bubble effect was extreme, and that is apparently a real effect.
Casey:
Oh, God, Marco, why did you show me this?
Casey:
Next you're going to tell me about the FedEx logo.
John:
Yeah, and I don't know what caused this.
John:
I'm assuming it's like pixel transitions being different from light to dark and dark to light, or maybe it's about how the screen is refreshed.
John:
I'll look it up between now and the next show, so I'll figure it out.
John:
But that's one of those things where OLED screens behave differently than LCD screens in a way that is visible during motion.
John:
I suppose I'll get over it.
John:
But here's the thing about I was thinking about this when I was thinking about the the iPads that are coming in the fall.
John:
I would love it if the iPads were OLED because I watch a lot of video on like TV shows and stuff on my iPad.
John:
It's great that I have perfect blacks on my phone, but I don't you know, I'm not watching television shows on my phone.
John:
Like I'm sure it makes the pictures pop and you know, it's a great screen and everything.
John:
But especially, again, after hearing the talk show and hearing Nealey Patel and Gruber rave about how good the LCD screen on the XR looks.
John:
If someone said you can have the XS but with an LCD screen on it without these weird visual artifacts and it looks just as good side by side when showing your photos as the OLED screen, I might opt for that.
John:
I want OLED in a situation where I want to see video.
John:
But on the phone, I don't care quite as much about it.
John:
Maybe I'll get over it, especially now that I know that the message bubble effects was because I didn't have reduced motion on.
John:
Maybe I'll leave reduced motion on now to get over that.
John:
But the effect that Marco has now showed us all and you should not look at if you don't want to be.
John:
Don't do it.
John:
That's that's the thing I was talking about.
John:
It's a real thing and I can see it and it bothers me ever so slightly.
Marco:
I wonder, because it really is only a problem when you have a black background.
Marco:
I wonder if maybe Apple held back on the dark iOS theme in part because of this problem.
John:
Yeah, because it would show up everywhere.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
I always think I'm done with this one more thing.
John:
It's always one more thing.
John:
I learned that from Steve.
John:
So, part of the home button thing, me pressing on a thing to wake my phone up because it was also Touch ID or whatever...
John:
my expectation that i can pick up my phone and touch all over the screen without waking it as long as i don't touch the bottom center of it is throwing me off a little now immediately i turned off i turned off raise to wake i turned off raise to talk i turned off uh right you know talk to raise to listen i turned off all the things that try to detect when i'm picking up my phone uh and the phone actually does do a good job of detecting like oh you just picked up your phone like i can pick up my phone now and grab it by the screen it doesn't wake up it knows like i've just grabbed you by the screen but if you just tap it
John:
It wakes up, which is great.
John:
Like, oh, I love waking up my phone by touching the screen.
John:
I can't go back to the thing where I had to.
John:
But very often now I will inadvertently wake my phone because I will brush it.
John:
And if I'm what I'm usually doing on my phone, if I'm picking it up and not looking at it, it's playing overcast and overcast has a little, you know, it shows up in a little sort of what is that called?
John:
the control center now or like the springboard now playing right thing the widget yep and dead center and that is a little control that controls my position in the show and if i accidentally grab my phone and it wakes up and i slide my finger and i move that scrubber there's no undo as far as i aware and i just scrubbed you know 35 minutes into the podcast i was listening to so now my phone is a little tiny bit like the apple tv remote and it's like it's like a hot phone hot phone you pick up the phone it's hot
John:
you know i don't like i don't i don't want to wake my phone i want to be able to grab it and only when i want to wake it i'll press the home button on the but it's not there anymore so i'm i'm working through those issues again i appreciate the fact that it tries to be going to therapy we're working through it
John:
Yeah.
John:
I love the fact that it tries to be smart and like ignores my touches when they're clearly not meant to be a waking touch, but sometimes it's a little bit confused.
John:
So I'm still working through those issues.
John:
That's it.
John:
That's it.
John:
I think I've covered everything.
Casey:
So do you, or do you not like the phone and do you miss, I like, do you miss this, the jet black seven?
Yeah.
John:
but also the 10 and the 10s perform the magic trick that they did all great apple technology does which is like within three and a half minutes uh using using the 10s and taking possession of it as my phone when i went back to the 7 to check some settings because like it didn't transfer like my my screen wake time for some reason like a couple of my preferences like this seems to be going to sleep anyway
John:
oh yeah the the 10 and 10s reset your the 10s didn't do it for me but when i moved to the 10 it reset the idle time out to be super short yeah i don't know what the deal with it anyway when i went back to the 7 because i'm keeping it on to like to look up settings and you know stuff like that the 7 now looks like i'm looking through a tiny porthole onto onto my phone i'm like what
John:
Why is the screen so small?
John:
And what are these things on the top and the bottom blocking my view of the phone?
John:
Did someone put tape over my phone?
John:
It's not that much smaller.
John:
The device isn't that much smaller.
John:
The screen's not that much smaller.
John:
But I can't go back.
John:
That is now an old phone.
John:
It's garbage.
John:
I can't look at it.
John:
I can't touch it anymore.
John:
I do kind of miss Touch ID, but I look at it, and it looks like the original iPhone to me, like the 3.5-inch.
John:
It's like, what is this thing?
John:
I do kind of miss the size because I feel like this is a little bit big.
John:
Oh, I bought a new pouch.
John:
You know my pouches.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, my God, John.
John:
You should have led with that.
John:
This is breaking news.
John:
i bought the larger size pouch because the pouches are like this pouch fits these phones and i you know and i use that for those things and then it's like oh if you want to fit a larger phone like the 10 or the or the you know buy this one so i bought that one but it's i think it also fits the max and it's just it's just big it's just too too big there's too much extra space in there like it there's like a centimeter extra bag once i slide the thing it's too loose
John:
so then i realized maybe i could just stick the 10 in the bag that was holding my seven and i can like the butt sticks out a little but just barely and mostly i just wanted to cover the screen so i can like put things in my pocket with it and not worry about it scratching that's basically why i have especially since i don't know how scratch resistant resistant this actually is um so i'm using the the pouch for my seven with it even though i have a new pouch
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
So I like it.
John:
I've totally transitioned to it.
John:
I can't go back.
John:
I've got some issues.
John:
We're working through them.
John:
Face ID is really neat.
John:
It's a little bit touchy.
John:
I'm so happy we asked.
Casey:
And people are actually asking for a link to the pouch.
Casey:
So, John, I don't want to receive this email.
John:
i have that link to i have i started a notes document like a year ago that just has urls in it like it has the url of your toaster thing casey on your blog because people ask about it all the time and i was sick of looking up the url and copying a bit so just put urls that people ask me for the pouch url is on there we will put it in the show notes
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Well, I don't have that much to add about the XS except for the fact that I really am very, very glad I did the upgrade because my God is the camera better.
Marco:
Like, I really think they underplayed the camera.
Marco:
I said that before last week.
Marco:
I won't go too far into it.
Marco:
But wow, is the camera better.
Marco:
If you see in people's reviews, you see the side-by-side shots, and you think, oh, maybe that's ideal scenarios that really show the difference well.
Marco:
As soon as you use the camera for a day, you're like, oh my, that was really easy to get a really good shot with very little effort.
Marco:
In the little bit of time I've used it so far...
Marco:
it was really stunning how well it dealt with HDR.
Marco:
How well it dealt with mixed lighting where maybe you have a sunset or something or a reflective surface or a bright surface or a bright light.
Marco:
The way it manages HDR is so good.
Marco:
And it seems very sharp.
Marco:
Shutter lag, I expected more of an improvement with shutter lag.
Marco:
It actually isn't very much improved.
Marco:
But the result of what you get out of it is really, really good.
Marco:
Even portrait mode.
Marco:
I'm a huge portrait mode skeptic.
Marco:
I have never seen a portrait mode picture that I thought was really great and perfect.
Marco:
but i came close like the one i it's on my instagram feed i shot a portrait of tiff uh on the beach dock and it that's portrait mode and i had to tune it down a little bit from like the f1.4 that it wanted to be because that looked totally ridiculous and unreal but i put it in like the f5.6 or f4 range and it looked pretty good um and it didn't look obviously like oh that's portrait mode it just looked like a nice picture
Marco:
So I'm very, very happy with the camera on it.
Marco:
Additionally, I shot some video with stereo sound.
Marco:
And it's kind of nice.
Marco:
The one thing I will say is that it doesn't sound... The stereo effect, I think, is being amped up slightly, but not to an extreme degree.
Marco:
It's like they turned up the boost slider a little bit on the stereo separation to make it slightly...
Marco:
wider sounding than it naturally does when you're standing there but it's very very slight otherwise it really is nice to have stereo sound especially like like one of the examples i did was we were at the beach show i shot standing at the beach looking at the waves and the waves were crashing down like from left to right and you could hear that you could hear that right in the in the video like and listening on headphones really sounds awesome and it really sounds better than than just having mono audio before so overall
Marco:
very very impressed by the camera it is not a small upgrade the rest of the phone is a small upgrade the camera is a major upgrade this is like an every three years kind of upgrade for the camera yeah well one of the things we forgot to mention about the camera that maybe we talked about on the keynote show but we didn't uh haven't really uh leaned on too much and has been coming up in blogs and also on that episode of the talk show um
John:
We mentioned that if you take the camera into dim lighting, it will lower the frame rate to gather more light in each frame during the same video to just salvage what would otherwise be a completely dark video.
John:
But it will also, if you have it set to a lower frame rate, it will double the frame rate and take a frame in between the frames that it's going to use and use that frame to add more...
John:
detail and lighting to the frames that it did take so if you're shooting at 30 frames a second it'll actually record at 60 and take every other frame and just use it to make the two you know in between each frame it'll use another frame to make those frames better which is pretty amazing yeah it's doing exposure bracketing so it'll
John:
expose one low and one high and merge them together every for every frame of a video yeah because it's like i can do 60 why am i just gonna do 30 why don't i just do 60 and do one high one low one high one low and then i'll make you 30 good ones out of those things which is pretty and you may be wondering like okay well then why doesn't it just leave the the quote-unquote shutter open for a longer time and get me 30 but expose each one longer
John:
right the longer you leave the shutter open the more you're going to get blur uh and so this technique is you know i only need to be open for a 60th of a second to get a decent exposure and if i do that and take two of those one high one low they'll be less blurry and then i can combine and match them and compensate for the motion between the like it's all it's computational photography right
John:
um it's pretty amazing uh you know the same way people don't think about the fact that when they press the shutter button it is basically telling it you know that picture you captured several milliseconds ago save that one like it's not taking a picture when you press the button it's always taking a picture it's got a rolling buffer of the last you know whatever it is you know 10 or 4 or however many frames and when you press the shutter button especially since you're like when you press the shutter button you probably move your phone
John:
right like you you shake it or whatever it's like oh it's gonna make the picture blur it's like it already took the picture by then you're just telling it to save the picture phone cameras don't work the way you think they do and they're fiendishly fast and it's all pretty amazing um and as as for uh uh what do you call it portrait mode when you posted that picture of tiff on your instagram i immediately zoomed in on her hair and said aha portrait mode so it's good but yeah it's portrait mode
Marco:
No, it's not perfect, but there are way fewer artifacts than there used to be on the earlier implementations of this feature.
Marco:
Especially if you tone it down.
Marco:
I didn't go with 1.4.
Marco:
If you go with one of the really extreme ones, the artifacts become more obvious where it didn't make the right decision.
Marco:
But if you go with something like F4, F5.6, it's a lot easier and nicer.
John:
instagram sizes you don't see that but you know yeah yeah i did i did i had to zoom let's put it this way i had to zoom in on her wispy little hairs to see oh i see where it's mangling the blur right but but an instagram size not zoomed in you're like that could have been a real camera almost
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
I really am trying to resist buying a phone, but my ability to resist is wearing thinner and thinner.
Casey:
I've already told myself I will be getting a watch.
Casey:
I just haven't done it.
Casey:
So, Marco, tell me about this watch that I keep seeing pop up in all these pictures of you, Mr. I only like fancy mechanical watches.
Casey:
What's going on there?
Marco:
i'll start with the size thing because this is you know we talked about this before to wrap up i got the 40 i tried them both in store i got the 40 the smaller of the two for the most part watch sizing is like you know you can wear what you want and you know as long as it's what you want who cares some people like really big watches some people like really small watches there's a lot of a lot of leeway but ideally you follow two principles number one is
Marco:
the lugs of the watch those are like the little like sticks that come out of it top and bottom that hold the strap on so it's you know the body of a watch is like the middle part that has like the main case with the dial and everything and then the lugs kind of stick out from it to hold straps not on the apple watch of course but you know and so one fashion thing is the lugs should not overhang your wrist you know that's fine if you don't care but if you're caring about like watch proper watch fashion the lugs should never overhang your wrist
Marco:
Part number two, to understand this, I want you to picture an icon of a watch.
Marco:
What does it look like?
Marco:
the watch cursor and mac os yeah that's perfect yeah the watch cursor mac os right so you have a watch body in the middle and you have kind of like a short little strap on the top and a short little strap on the bottom and it's kind of assumed in the 2d representation that the strap is like curving under the watch but you see the two ends of the strap and the middle the watch head right so it's a top-down view of how how a watch is expected to look on a wrist that is a watch shaped watch you know john has a dog shaped dog i have i want a watch shaped watch all right
Marco:
For a watch to look like that in real life, this is the second rule of watch sizing, which is often disregarded.
Marco:
The strap should not come straight down from the watch at a 90-degree angle.
Marco:
It should have some curvature on your wrist before it comes straight down.
Marco:
If the watch is so big that the strap basically falls straight down, where it's like filling your wrist to that degree, and the strap just kind of falls straight down, that's a pretty big look.
Marco:
And that might be what you're going for, but it's a big look.
Marco:
I don't like that look.
Marco:
I like the more classical watch-shaped watch look.
Marco:
And so what I don't want is the biggest watch that will possibly fit on my wrist.
Marco:
The 44, when I tried it on, looked like that.
Marco:
It dominated my wrist with a giant screen.
Marco:
And so for many people, that's a feature.
Marco:
For me, that's a bug.
Marco:
I do not want that.
Marco:
I want a more classically proportioned watch.
Marco:
So
Marco:
So for me, the 40 provided that.
Marco:
It provides enough leeway in sizing that the strap has room to curve around my wrist instead of just falling straight down, which is important on the support strap since it doesn't fall straight down no matter what.
Marco:
So if it's too big on you, it just kind of makes these big air pockets on your wrist, which kind of look weird.
Marco:
So anyway, 40 is great for me.
Marco:
And I got the steel one as I planned on it.
Marco:
And it is really, really nice.
Marco:
What I like about – the final thing I'll say about the size, besides the fact that it finally looks more classily proportioned on me, is that –
Marco:
It gives me the same screen space and therefore, for the vast majority of the case, the same utility as the old big watch did in the smaller watch size case.
Marco:
So I have the same utility in the smaller case.
Marco:
And I finally understand why most people like the tiny crappy laptops in the lineup.
Marco:
Because when you're not an extreme enthusiast of something...
Marco:
Having your needs completely solved by a new smaller thing than what you needed before with no downsides that matter to you is incredibly satisfying.
Marco:
So for me, like, I don't love the Apple Watch.
Marco:
I kind of like it.
Marco:
I like other watches better.
Marco:
But I need to use the Apple Watch on a certain basis for my job.
Marco:
It's exactly how a lot of people think about computers.
Marco:
I am much happier with this one than I've ever been with any other Apple Watch.
Marco:
And because of that, I'm wearing it more.
Marco:
You know, it's still not my favorite watch.
Marco:
It's still never going to be my primary watch.
Marco:
But I am wearing it more than I've worn any other Apple Watch since the very first one, since before I switched to regular watches.
Marco:
and i'm very very happy with it it is a very very nice smart watch it's even a pretty decent regular watch not a great regular watch i still there's still things about it that annoy me uh but pretty decent uh for a regular watch and excellent for a smart watch um i do have some more specific reviews of things like the faces before i get into that do you have any questions on what i just talked about
John:
I should talk about my watch experience based on the sizing, too, because we went to the store to look at watches.
John:
My wife got the gold small watch, which is what she wanted.
John:
And I tried on all the different sizes of watches many different times, many different finishes, trying to think about just exactly what Marco was talking about.
John:
Is the 44 too big?
John:
Is the 42 small?
John:
And do I want to buy a watch?
John:
And so I spent a while while she was getting, she got her watch set up there and they transferred it from her phone and all this other stuff.
John:
So I had plenty of time to mess with the things.
John:
And I understand everything Marco was saying, and I mostly agree with it.
John:
And I even took pictures of my wrists and everything.
John:
And boy, it's tough because here's the thing.
John:
The 44, as my wife put it, it doesn't look too big on you.
John:
It doesn't look like it's too big.
John:
It doesn't look like this watch is definitely too big for you.
John:
but it's really close to like, it's not, but you know, it's weird.
John:
Right.
John:
And so, but here's the problem.
John:
I'm like, okay, well, whatever.
John:
Let me try on the 40 or is that what size is the 40, the small one.
John:
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
John:
40 just looks too small it just looks too small like i know this is this is just you know a cultural thing and like it's just my upbringing but when i wear it i feel like i'm wearing a woman's watch because for my life women's watches are all smaller and when i put this on like it feels and looks too small to me and yet when i look at the pictures i took of my own wrists with these watches on them
John:
It looks right in the pictures.
John:
In the picture, I'm like, that's exactly the right size watch.
John:
It's like the watch icon.
John:
Like, that is exactly the right size for you.
John:
But when I put it on in real life and I look at my wrist, I feel like, why are you wearing your mom's watch?
John:
It just feels too small.
John:
And secondarily, like, I don't really care about fashion, right?
John:
So I'm thinking about this mostly just from the perspective of, like, that's why I'm showing my wife.
John:
I'm like, look, does one of these look ridiculous on me?
John:
Just tell me.
John:
Like, whatever.
Yeah.
John:
from my perspective i want the one with the bigger screen because it's all about the screen and why wouldn't i want the bigger screen right like i even though i recognize that it is probably borderline and it's like so close to the edge and i should really probably get the smaller one but then the smaller one feels i just want the bigger screen because it's a bigger screen and the whole point is it's a screen right uh in the end this whole experience basically led me to the decision that i'm not going to get a new watch
John:
just because the sizing i feel like if i bought either one of them i would regret it and seeing them in person i was like yeah i just i'm i i pulled the casey so i was i'm holding strong with you casey so you know what i'm just not gonna get one i thought i was gonna get one i thought it would be a great year to get one they're really good i like them but the sizing thing and me saying do you really need this are you gonna wear are you really gonna wear it that much more often than you are the other one my answer is no and so i'm not getting a watch
Casey:
Well, slow down.
Casey:
I intend to get a watch.
John:
I mean, like comparing you to the phone.
John:
There's reasons I might want to get the phone, but do I really, really need it?
John:
That's what I'm comparing it to.
Marco:
Yeah, and honestly, when I tried the one in the store, the 40 was smaller than I expected it to be, but the 44 was bigger than I expected it to be.
Marco:
And I had the same dilemma in my head of like...
Marco:
is this too small for me?
Marco:
Might it look more traditionally feminine?
Marco:
Which, by the way, is hilarious because until the 90s, men's watches were 35 millimeter.
Marco:
That was the standard size for men's watches.
Marco:
That's the size of my Minimatic that I talked about before, which I thought is pretty dainty on me.
Marco:
And when I was buying that watch, I saw it in the store.
Marco:
I'm like, oh my God, I love this, but I'm so afraid it's too small for me.
Marco:
And I really waffled about it for a while, and I ended up buying it because I loved it so much otherwise, and I didn't regret it at all.
Marco:
I love that watch.
Marco:
It's one of my favorite watches.
Marco:
And that's kind of how I felt looking at the Series 4 40mm in the store.
Marco:
Like, I was really questioning myself.
Marco:
I was like, oh boy, maybe I should cancel my 40 order and just get the 44 or whatever else.
Marco:
but when I tried on the 44 I'm like no you know what this is too big on me period and so it's either have one that's too big or have one that might be a little too small but you know your perspective on the watch sizing is actually a lot like what you were just saying about the iPhone 7 feeling small like when you're accustomed to a certain size you know the transitions bigger or smaller look crazy for like an hour and then you get used to it like whatever it is you get used to it and you can get used to it going in the smaller direction too it isn't just going bigger that you get used to things
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I also realize you mentioned like the men's watches being like 35 millimeters.
John:
Like I wore when I did wear watches, they were all way smaller than the Apple Watch of any size, like the 44, the other 44.
John:
But the thing is, I realized I'm judging the Apple Watch not based on the standard of it being a watch.
John:
I'm basing on the standard of essentially it being an Apple Watch.
John:
Like I have this this image in my mind of how big a smartwatch should be.
John:
And that's why the small one seems so small, because I'm like, it's like a miniature Apple Watch that I'm wearing on my wrist.
John:
It's not like a regular.
John:
So maybe I would get over.
John:
Anyway, I'm not getting one.
John:
But like if they stick with these two sizes, I will still face this dilemma at some point in the future when my Series Zero like eventually dies.
John:
But for now, like because I took the Series Zero out to pair it to my phone and everything, I got to spend more time with the Series Zero.
John:
I still like it as a thing that tells time and shows me my message bubbles.
John:
So I'm just going to keep rocking the series here.
John:
I can't use the overcast stuff, but like, you know, I use my phone for that.
John:
I'll be OK.
Casey:
Yeah, I went to the store very quickly and very briefly and by myself.
Casey:
So I didn't have the voice of reason of Aaron with me to help.
Marco:
So why didn't you get one?
Casey:
because uh i don't believe they had the stock i wanted at that particular time there's the real reason it wasn't self-control it was stock no actually no it was self-control that's right because i actually even brought my business credit card with me because this was going to be on the business and i did not leverage it uh and i didn't even ask that's what it was but now a week later i would it's it's a stock issue i haven't been looking at istocknow.com every day no of course not
Casey:
Anyway, I went and tried on both, and I'll put a link to some very poor shots I took of myself and posted on Twitter.
Casey:
I thought that the 44 was fine, and I was convinced when I left the store that whenever I go and actually buy one, I'll get a 44.
Casey:
And then ever since I left the store, I've been wondering, should I really be getting the 40?
Casey:
And at first, I was like, man, if I'm in the 40, then Erin, if whenever it is, she gets around upgrading, which will probably not be this year—
Casey:
That's going to look ridiculous on her, isn't it?
Casey:
And then I thought to myself, well, you know, wrists probably aren't that different, truth be told.
Casey:
And then I got angry about, you know, losing out on my watch bands, of which I have like two official sport bands, two hilariously crummy Amazon knockoffs that I use every great once in a while, and a reasonably crummy Amazon knockoff Milanese loop.
Casey:
and guess what you can buy more knockoffs yeah well that's the thing and then it occurred to me but it would be kind of nice to be able to share bands with aaron actually yeah that never had crossed my mind until after we recorded last that if we're both on the 38 40 size then we can swap bands back and forth and that would actually be kind of nice so i still am not sure which one i should get and
Casey:
And truthfully, I should probably wait to buy one until Erin's with me so I can try them both on.
Casey:
And in between her rolling her eyes, she can suggest a size for me.
Casey:
But I don't know what I would do because I was so convinced that 44 was just fine.
Casey:
And then ever since I've left, I've somewhat convinced myself that maybe 42 is the right answer.
John:
so in the past show we're all like oh hemming and hawing and printing out well we want to print out pieces of paper to check the watch sizes just go to the store just go to the store we all just went to the store now we still can't decide which is pathetic i decided and i'm very happy with my decision marco is decisive he's more much more experienced watch decider
Marco:
than we are yeah no and i have a feeling you know we know that a lot of our audience is men and a lot of men are especially a lot of men who listen to the show are like us not that great or confident at our fashion skills and so a lot of men might not feel confident picking the smaller one even if that's the one that actually seems to fit them better because you might think will you know is this a more feminine model and i'm here to tell you it's not like the apple has done a very good job of
Marco:
at minimizing the gender styling differences among the Apple Watch models.
Marco:
Like in the rest of the watch world, they don't do a very good job of this.
Marco:
But Apple does a very good job at not overly gender targeting most of the Apple Watch models or bands or sizes or anything else.
Marco:
some are a little bit more feminine or a little bit more masculine but very few it's it's almost all unisex and so don't worry about that you know there's no reason you should be worried about to begin with just for lots of reasons but like none of these will nobody's gonna look and say like oh you're wearing a woman's watch like what year is this like you know like we're a little bit better about things as a society yeah i just want to emphasize that that emphasize that point that you just touched on which is a thought technology that people may not have in their arsenal but they should add uh
John:
Something looking feminine, if you think about that being derogatory, doesn't make any sense.
John:
Because what are you saying?
John:
People don't give that a second thought.
John:
They're like, well, of course, I don't want to wear something that looks feminine.
John:
Why not?
John:
Well, because girls are bad?
John:
Think it through.
John:
It's horrible that so many people just accept that as a thing that is not actually bad.
John:
I'm not telling you what to watch to buy.
John:
Buy whatever you want.
John:
Pick the one that you think looks nicest on you.
John:
But...
John:
I would invite you to noodle around with the idea in your head that something looking feminine on a man is bad and follow that through to its conclusion about, like, why that is.
John:
Again, not saying that you... Anyway, it's worth thinking about that.
John:
Put that aside and maybe, like...
Marco:
twiddle it with your brain finger every once in a while and think about it yeah exactly i mean and so yeah don't like there are certain bands that are somewhat gender targeted almost all of them aren't almost everything is neutral like the my you know my steel one comes with the white sport band
Marco:
this is about as neutral as you can get.
Marco:
Like, I'd say it's right down the middle.
Marco:
Like, this is not gender-specific or gender-targeted or anything like that.
Marco:
And, you know, you can wear whatever size fits you, and that will look better than wearing the wrong size for you, no matter what those sizes are.
Marco:
I feel like one does look a little California, though.
John:
It's kind of like no white after Labor Day kind of...
John:
It reminds me of Johnny Ive and his white slacks.
John:
And it's like you want to go yachting.
Marco:
I was kind of worried about that because I've never owned a white band before.
Marco:
And I've tried them on in a store a couple of times and always got the feeling like, oh, that's kind of nice for somebody cooler than me, maybe, but not actually for me.
Marco:
But this one, this is the only band that this configuration came on.
Marco:
And because I changed size classes with my watch, this is now the only band I have that fits my watch.
Marco:
And I thought about buying a new one, but I'm actually pretty happy with this.
Marco:
It actually...
Marco:
I think I will be this cool person, this cool California summer person, you know, for the time being.
Marco:
Because I think it looks really good.
Marco:
It's nice and neutral.
Marco:
It's not too casual and not too dressy.
Marco:
Like, it's right down the middle.
Marco:
So I'm actually, I'm pretty happy with just the white sport band, to be honest.
Marco:
Anyway, so I do have some criticisms and opinions about the watch faces.
Marco:
Some of this has actually covered pretty well in Upgrade this past week, so listen to that as well.
Marco:
You should be listening to that anyway because it's a great show, but sorry for the overlap here.
Marco:
So everyone is really excited about these new infograph faces.
Marco:
These are the ones... The analog one was the one that was in the press shot that was leaked a couple weeks ago.
Marco:
They have these new fancy, colorful, curved complications.
Marco:
I...
Marco:
I have tried over the last few days since having this watch, I have tried to configure the infograph analog face in a way that I like.
Marco:
The one with the regular hands in the middle, not like the big modular one.
Marco:
I cannot come up with a configuration of that face that is good, that also allows me to tell the time quickly.
John:
Yeah, I fought with that face, too.
Marco:
Yeah, like, it is really... And to Apple's credit, they've given us all sorts of new garbage things to fill the complications with.
Marco:
Like, you can put the moon and the Earth in some of the round faces.
Marco:
What does the Earth one do?
John:
The Earth just shows like the shadow on the Earth, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, it might be like a time of day kind of thing, but I don't know.
Marco:
It's not great.
John:
Can I put the Overcast logo in some places?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Well, actually, with the build that should be coming out maybe tomorrow, yes.
Marco:
It's really hard to make that face...
Marco:
Both useful and not super busy.
Marco:
And there are just so many things I would do differently if I could design my own faces.
Marco:
I wish I could design my own faces so badly.
Marco:
Oh, I would do so many things differently.
Marco:
By the way, quick props to Carrot Weather.
Marco:
I have never been a Karatweather user.
Marco:
I prefer Weatherline for my weather needs.
Marco:
I just like the way the interface works.
Marco:
But I started using Karatweather today because they offer such amazing customization of the watch complications.
Marco:
And they can do things... Not only do they add things like... There are things like humidity that you can't get with Apple's watch thing.
Marco:
Because all the different... They added like air quality index...
Marco:
But they didn't add humidity.
Casey:
That's because humidity doesn't exist in California.
Marco:
But I've been to San Francisco a lot.
Marco:
They seem to have humidity there.
Marco:
That isn't that far from San Jose.
Marco:
I think people have been there a lot.
Casey:
Humidity is a state of mind, Marco.
Casey:
Humidity is just a state of mind.
Marco:
So Carrot Weather is really great, not only for certain things like humidity that you just can't get with Apple's complication, but also they have a lot of customization options where you can say, like, all right, when the Carrot Weather complication is in this face, in this shape type, display this piece of information.
Marco:
When it's on this shape, on this face type, display this other information.
Marco:
So you can actually have Carrot Weather in multiple complications on the same face displaying different things.
Marco:
And you can combine two values.
Marco:
So if you want to know... One of my favorite faces... Actually, my favorite general purpose face is utility.
Marco:
And it has two small complications and one big text run at the bottom.
Marco:
Well, if you want to know a fourth piece of information, Carrot Weather has a thing where you can... I want to know the temperature and the weather and also sunset time.
Marco:
and you can do that it's one of the options to have weather and sunset time in in that one big bottom complication on utility and on other faces like that so like it's really really great i'm a huge fan of carrot weather for the for the customizability of watch complications it's fantastic that does require i believe a four dollar a year subscription but for god's sake it's four dollars a year uh so don't worry about it um
Marco:
Anyway, so getting back to infograph, I cannot come up with a way to make that face legible to tell time quickly.
Marco:
It can do lots of other stuff.
Marco:
You can fit lots of other information in those complications, but it ends up being so busy.
Marco:
Even if you keep the center dial empty, or if you just put the date blob up there and you don't fill the other three things that are in the sub-dial positions, even if you don't fill those...
Marco:
The design of the hands and hour indices is so minimal, and you have to look at it for a little while to tell what hour you're on.
Marco:
And so it's really not a good face design.
Marco:
It shows well in marketing, but if one of the things you want your watch to do is tell the time quickly...
Marco:
I don't think Infograph is a good way to do that.
Marco:
The Infograph modular one, the one that's like a digital face that is just basically a colorful version of the old modular face, that I can see the argument for way better because that is – it's an all-digital face.
Marco:
There's no giant dial in the middle.
Marco:
That I can see is –
Marco:
substantially more pragmatic and a cleaner design but i like i like analog time you know it's it isn't just because of you know having old watches i also just like telling time that way you know you see like a proportional view of what's going on and it's kind of how my brain works so i want a good analog face and infograph doesn't do that for me
Marco:
my favorite face to look cool even though it isn't analog is still solar this is the one that has that big sun curve in the middle and it goes like for through the sun phase i love solar i'm a little worried for its future because it's no longer in the default set of faces like you have to go to that ad menu on the far right that no one knows is there and it's without like the other forgotten faces of your like the like all the different ones uh
Marco:
but it is it still is really good a lot of people haven't known that the solar face which used to have zero complications and maybe you all stopped using it like in watch os3 i think in watch os4 it was solar got complications either it has two complication slots uh so you know you can put like the day and date in one you can put weather in the other or something like that um the only thing is it doesn't appear to use the complications or offer them on series zero and may
Marco:
series one and two so you might need a more modern watch but anyway solar has complications now if you haven't looked at it for a while give it another shot um and if one of the things you want to know is sunrise or sunset time that's built into the face so you actually need fewer complications on it so it's actually a pretty high utility face if you want digital time but ultimately my favorite watch face for general use is utility you know
Marco:
If you're offering a range of watches, like you would if you're designing faces for the most popular smartwatch in the world, I think it's not an uncommon desire to tell time with analog hands on a round dial that has the 1 through 12 hour numerals around it.
Marco:
Only two Apple Watch faces of like the 20 or something that they have now can actually show the 1 through 12 hour numerals around the dial, around an analog dial.
Marco:
The other one is the Mickey Mouse face.
Marco:
So I think I might even rule that one out for lots of reasons.
Marco:
Only utility can display the 1 through 12 numbers.
Marco:
the explorer face can do 12 3 and 9 but that's it and the explorer face is kind of ugly in lots of other ways although it still remains the only one that can tell you your cellular reception and whether you're connected to cellular which is bizarre to me that that isn't a complication uh but only one face has that for some reason uh but utility is the only face that gives you 1 through 12 without mickey mouse dancing in the middle all right so
Marco:
It is still, I think, the best all-around general-purpose Apple Watch face if you want analog time.
Marco:
And it looks way better on the Series 4 than it did before.
Marco:
Because on the previous ones, because the screen bezels were so much larger, it looked like you had a tiny watch dial in the middle of a giant watch body.
Marco:
And that is not a good look.
Marco:
The new one, because the screen goes more edge-to-edge...
Marco:
The size of the round part of the dial in the middle of it, the size is much better proportioned to the overall watch body.
Marco:
In mine, I have about the same size watch dial as my old 42 watch in this new 40 size body.
Marco:
So it looks like a much nicer proportion to watch.
Marco:
It no longer looks like a tiny dial in the middle of a giant expanse of black.
Marco:
So it's way nicer than that.
Marco:
I will say, though, I have the exact same complaint that John Gruber cited in his review.
Marco:
I really don't like how they now curve the complications around all these old faces.
Marco:
Oh, by the way, HTML Arson in the chat is saying, I'm not counting the chronograph face.
Marco:
I could be wrong.
Marco:
I'll double check after the show.
Marco:
The curved complications around these old faces, it just looks terrible.
Marco:
It looks like a mistake.
Marco:
It looks like something you would try in the design labs once.
Marco:
You'd look at it and be like, nope, that doesn't work.
Marco:
And you'd cancel it and you'd go back to something else.
Marco:
I wish they would just...
Marco:
put those back in the corners the way they were and make the text straight again and this applies to almost all of the old faces that have this style of complication which used to be the only style where you have like generally a monochrome or almost monochrome like short line of text or a corner like round thing or like a corner you know three characters of text kind of thing
Marco:
i really really don't like that and it greatly messes with my utility face i really don't like that so i really hope apple changes that or offers an option or reverts or something i i'm not holding my breath on that because i bet they won't but it really does make the old faces which otherwise look very good in the new models because the new margins but that those curve complications make the old faces pretty rough
Casey:
I only have an old and busted Series 3 watch, but I agree with you about the utility watch face.
Casey:
I actually use it with no numerals.
Casey:
So your quest for numerals, I can't agree with, but I almost always use the utility watch face.
Casey:
When I was still in a regular jobby job, I did like the Siri watch face for when it was an easy way to scroll through upcoming meetings and stuff like that.
Casey:
But now that I never have meetings, I've been on utility pretty much nonstop for the last couple of months.
Casey:
And I love it.
Marco:
All right, real-time follow-up.
Marco:
I was totally wrong.
Marco:
Chronograph is another face that has the 1 through 12 digits.
Marco:
So my mistake, there's actually three, and if you rule out Mickey Mouse because it's ridiculous, two.
Marco:
Although Chronograph has the same problem of utility in that it has those rounded text complications now in the corners, and that just is not a good look.
Marco:
All right, I just tweeted to the ATPFM account the picture because that was the easiest way to get it off my phone quickly.
Casey:
So this is your preferred non-solar setup.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Solar doesn't look very good at night.
Marco:
So I have switched to this for the podcast.
Marco:
How about that?
How about that?
Marco:
so the bottom is the carrot weather combined weather conditions and sunrise sunset complication which is i think a very only a watch nerd would put sunrise sunset on his watch no i so here's why i like you know max temkin funny about this too i like having the sunset sunrise i don't care about sunset i like having because i like to do dog walks in that range of the evening but
Marco:
But I want to know how much light I have left because that way, like as I'm working, trying to get like trying to finish whatever I'm doing, like programming at 530 or six o'clock, I want to know like how much daylight do I have left to do a dog walk?
Marco:
And then when I have too little daylight left, I leave for the dog walk.
John:
Somehow I managed to do that without knowing when sunset is.
John:
It never occurred to me to look up sunset.
John:
I just look out the window and I could tell how much light is left.
Marco:
yeah but it's nice to know like like you start developing a sense for like you know how dim is it versus like do i have like 40 more minutes of reasonable sunset or do i have 20 more minutes of like it's nice to have it's the thing like i i messed with all the new watch faces on my wife's watch and in the store to try to get them to some state where i felt like it was a compromise that i would want on my watch and
John:
I couldn't figure anything out.
John:
I mean, it was only like, you know, 5-10 minutes.
John:
Couldn't figure it out.
John:
I had lots of arrangements that looked really good.
John:
Like, if you just wanted to take a picture of them, they looked cool.
John:
But I'm not sure if I could read the time off of them, because some of them were extremely busy.
John:
And B, if I would want that to be my watch.
John:
I use utility on my watch too, but of course now, like Marco said, it looks like this tiny little circle in this vast field of blackness, because, you know...
John:
the new watches they do that screen thing where your old one looks really small and cruddy and everything like that um but yeah the especially the curve things around the corner not sure i gotta like i think i think their default face they use in the ads looks really cool but i just think it's like total visual noise if i was to glance at my watch and try to figure anything out from it
Marco:
Another problem I have – so you're talking about infograph.
Marco:
Another problem I have with the infograph face is when you're configuring it, what you ideally want is some kind of visual balance or symmetry between the corner complications that are super bright and have maybe a big colorful bar and the ones that don't.
Marco:
And there just wasn't enough stuff that I wanted that had the nice color bar to actually fill it nicely.
Yeah.
Marco:
I could do it poorly or put stuff on there I didn't really care about, but I couldn't really do anything nice.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I couldn't come up with a configuration of infograph that looked good and was functional enough for me to actually tell the time.
Marco:
oh i was surprised you couldn't get rid of like i was cycling through the complications and the big circle three circles in the middle i'm surprised you couldn't set them to none like as far as i could tell there was no none choice you totally can the circles in the middle yeah you can you can set all of them to none you can even you can even blank out the date on top i was cycling through them to try to get activity like earth moon workout timer it's it's weird because like whatever the scroll direction on the crown is for those i i kept doing the wrong one like just intuitively i just kept getting it wrong but before the a's is blank
Marco:
hmm well maybe i just missed it i'll check again yeah anyway it's you know i i continue to be fairly disappointed by the selection of apple watch faces i just i wish so badly that there were either either that apple would make more that i like as much as solar and utility but
Marco:
or ideally that they would just open this up to third-party developers.
Marco:
And I know that's an unlikely wish at this point.
Marco:
I think they've made themselves clear by their inaction on this front, this is probably intentional.
Marco:
This is probably like a decision.
Marco:
They don't want people doing this, not that they just haven't gotten to the API for it yet.
Marco:
So it does seem intentional, but boy, I wish they would change their mind on that because I would love to design a face.
Marco:
I would love to see what other people design.
Marco:
I would love to address the complaints that I have with things like how it's not smart enough with certain times of day or certain modes or having certain events be present when they shouldn't be.
Marco:
I would love a chance to design that or to see what other people would do to solve that problem.
Marco:
I would love the artistic freedom and the freedom of expression to have more watch faces than just the same three that everyone else is using.
Marco:
The Apple Watch gives a ridiculous amount of customization potential in areas that don't matter, basically in the straps.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
It's better than nothing.
Marco:
But everyone still has the same three watch faces on because they're the only good ones.
Marco:
and that's not how the watch business works you want it to be individual and you want to be able to update it every so often and that's you know it's personal fashion and personal expression and they they just have not budged like you know this utility face that is pretty much still the only reasonable face to use still looks almost exactly the same as it did when the first watch came out when when john bought his that was forever ago
Marco:
And so I feel like they keep doing new cool things with the bands, but what I really want is customization in the software side.
Marco:
More of that, please.
Marco:
Something that allows people, ideally, to design their own watch faces.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by RX Bar, because it turns out real food ingredients actually taste really good.
Marco:
RX Bars are those wonderful little bars that you've probably seen by now in grocery stores where they just list the ingredients right on the front of the label.
Marco:
And it's something like, you know, some number of almonds and dates, and it says at the bottom, and no BS.
Marco:
And that's what RX Bars are.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And there's an RX bar flavor for you, whether you like sweet or savory, chocolate or fruit flavors.
Marco:
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Marco:
And these are great for a number of occasions.
Marco:
Breakfast on the go, a snack at the office, especially in the afternoon when you're getting hungry around like 3 p.m., bringing on a plane for travel.
Marco:
They're great for that.
Marco:
You toss them in your backpack for a bike ride or a hike or have a snack after a workout.
Marco:
egg whites are a great source of protein it's because it's easy for your body to absorb so they use egg whites as the protein source there there's lots of different there's 14 flavors so far mango pineapple chocolate hazelnut peanut butter and berries those are all really good by the way chocolate sea salt berries blueberries like it's not even time to list them all that's how many flavors there are
Marco:
Whether you like peanut butter kind of flavors or fruit or whatever, there is something for you in the RX Bar lineup.
Marco:
They also have RX Nut Butter now, which is kind of similar ingredients in these single-serve packets with delicious creamy nut butter.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Code ATP for 25% off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you to RxBar for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I need new toys.
Casey:
But you know what I did do?
Casey:
I installed Mojave on my MacBook Adorable.
John:
Oh, yeah?
John:
We don't have time for that.
John:
We gotta get to the book.
Casey:
Are we actually doing the book now?
John:
Did you read it?
John:
What if I didn't?
John:
Oh, come on.
John:
Come on.
John:
You got an extra week.
John:
You got an extension from the teacher and you still didn't do it?
Casey:
I have things to do, John.
John:
What things are you doing?
Casey:
Actually, I read the book.
Casey:
I'm just messing with you.
John:
Good.
John:
Well, let's talk about the book then.
John:
All right.
Casey:
So this is going to be spoiler-filled, although I don't know if it's really spoiler since it's not a work of fiction.
Casey:
It's not spoiler-filled.
Marco:
No spoilers for the past.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Spoiler, the iPhone came out.
Marco:
It had a keyboard.
Casey:
You know, I'm trying to treat the listeners with respect, gentlemen.
Casey:
I'm just trying to say, hey, if you haven't yet read Creative Selection, we're about to talk about it.
Casey:
And if you're not interested in that, that's why the Germans forced us to use chapters.
Casey:
So skip to the next chapter.
Casey:
That's all.
Casey:
That's all I'm saying.
Casey:
So Creative Selection.
Marco:
First of all, I totally butchered the author's name in the ad read a few weeks ago.
Marco:
He was very kind.
Marco:
He didn't actually tell me this.
Marco:
I learned it when he was on Rene Ritchie's show, Vector, and he said his own name.
Marco:
And I was like, oh, my God, I butchered that.
Marco:
I mean, he was very gracious.
Marco:
I emailed him and asked him how to pronounce the name for our show.
Marco:
So we wouldn't mess it up.
Marco:
It's Ken Cushenda.
Marco:
And it's spelled, if you didn't know how anything was pronounced, you might say Casienda, like I did, but that is not at all how it said.
Marco:
It's pronounced Cushenda, so sorry, Ken.
Marco:
Yeah, so this is a book on Ken's time at Apple.
Marco:
He was an engineer who worked on seemingly a lot of different projects, but the ones he goes over in the book were the first iPhone autocorrect keyboard, the iPad keyboard, briefly, is covered there, Safari,
Marco:
And what else?
Marco:
Oh, and I learned on Twitter the other day that he also wrote the code for the original solar watch face, which I like so much.
Casey:
That's funny.
Casey:
Now, I did not know what to think coming into this book.
Casey:
A lot of people had said, oh, it's really great.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I did that really annoying thing that only annoying people do, apparently, where they're like, oh, everyone says it's so cool.
Casey:
It must not be cool.
Casey:
And I was not overly enthusiastic about reading it.
Casey:
And it was really good.
Casey:
And I'm really glad you made me read it because I really enjoyed it.
Casey:
And I think perhaps the thing I enjoyed most about it was...
Casey:
It was the best description I've read yet of what it's like to write software for a business.
Casey:
And when I say business, I mean a business with like many employees within it.
Casey:
So I'm not trying to poop on your parade there, Marco, but...
Casey:
writing software for tumblr is very different than writing software for marco and um i i i don't know if i have off the top of my head any specific passages which really exemplify this i did highlight a few of these on my kindle a few passages that is but uh the the thing that struck me the most was how good a job it did of trying to explain what it's like to write software and how difficult it is to write good software quickly and
Casey:
And then my second favorite thing about it was learning about how different Apple's processes are than anything I have done.
Casey:
Well, maybe not anything, but almost all the time I spent working for bigger companies, our processes looked almost nothing like this.
Casey:
And that probably explains a few things.
Casey:
But no, I thought it was very good.
Casey:
And obviously, we were paid to talk about it a week or two back.
Casey:
But I am telling you, hand over heart, it is very good.
Casey:
And I think it was only like 15 bucks on the Kindle.
Casey:
And it is definitely worth 15 bucks.
Casey:
And it took me something like three and a half, four hours to read.
Casey:
And I am not a particularly quick reader.
Casey:
So I definitely recommend it.
Casey:
It is very good.
Casey:
And I really enjoyed it.
Marco:
Yeah, I too.
Marco:
I mean, I said this in the ad read, but, you know, and, you know, he didn't pay me to say it was good.
Marco:
You know, you can pay us to read your ad script and to talk about your product in like objective terms or in, you know, your marketing copy.
Marco:
But, you know, people can't pay us to say that we like something.
Marco:
And, you know, that like if you if you hear me say that in an ad read, I'm saying that because I genuinely did like it.
Marco:
And that's never guaranteed.
Marco:
It's never part of our deal.
Marco:
and i really did like this book like i really liked it i i did the audiobook version which is also interesting because he reads it like ken himself reads it and he's a pretty good reader at it too so it was really fun and um the only thing is you miss out on the illustrations in that like there's a whole bunch of illustrations that are in the book so it's kind of nice to actually have access to both copies if you can uh but
Marco:
It was a really good audiobook, too.
Marco:
And it was not too long.
Marco:
And I got to listen to it while testing Overcast, while walking my dog on the beach all summer.
Marco:
It was actually really nice.
Marco:
But anyway, it was so good because so often... I mean, first of all, this is a book that has Steve Jobs in the subtitle.
Marco:
And if you look at books that name-check Steve Jobs, and if you look at the quality they have had...
Marco:
It's pretty inconsistent, pretty spotty.
Marco:
Clearly, there's a lot of opportunistic business book types trying to cash in on the Steve Jobs name.
Marco:
And I didn't get that feeling from this at all.
Marco:
Not at all.
Marco:
And there are certain things about it.
Marco:
There was a good review on it.
Marco:
I think it was in the RelayFM B-Sides feed where John Voorhees and Stephen Hackett did a review of this.
Marco:
And I share a lot of their – they had a few minor complaints about it.
Marco:
it does format everything in kind of a business book type narrative, but that's easy to just kind of breeze through.
Marco:
And then you get the meat, which is like the actual like engineering stories and stories about demoing.
Marco:
And, and so it tries to form these back into like these like, you know, seven or eight core lessons of like Apple's process.
Marco:
And I couldn't care less about that.
Marco:
But it, even if you don't want to hear that kind of stuff, um,
Marco:
this book is still very enjoyable because it doesn't dwell too much on that, and it just gets right back into the good stories.
Marco:
And that's what I'm here for.
Marco:
I'm here for the engineering stories.
Marco:
And we really don't hear a lot of modern Apple engineering stories.
Marco:
We really don't.
Marco:
And the way Ken has done it is pretty, I would say, very respectful.
Marco:
it sounds like it's probably fairly accurate like it sounds very plausible to be very accurate and he is he said a lot in this book but i don't think he like burned any bridges like i would guess i don't know this for i don't know this for sure of course i don't really have any way to know but i would guess apple's not mad about this book you know like he i think he's very fair to the company but he doesn't he doesn't like candy coat everything he doesn't say everything's perfect
Marco:
But he's very fair to everyone.
Marco:
And it seems like it's probably a really accurate portrayal of this time.
Marco:
And it doesn't go too deep into Steve stuff.
Marco:
Because he didn't see a lot of Steve.
Marco:
He was an engineer.
Marco:
He saw some of Steve, but not a lot.
Marco:
So it doesn't go too far into that.
Marco:
It's a nice normal amount.
Marco:
There's a lot in this about...
Marco:
Well, not a lot, but a moderate amount about Scott Forstall.
Marco:
And I think it's really interesting.
Marco:
We, in these parts, everyone thinks of Scott Forstall as the guy who was fired over either maps sucking and the apology letter he wouldn't sign, or he was fired because Johnny Ive wanted to get rid of skeuomorphism.
Marco:
And I don't think either of those even come close to the full story there, nor do either of those, I think, pay the right amount of respect for Scott's role in the company and what it was and what was lost when he left.
Marco:
And I've heard from a lot of people over the years who used to work with Scott or worked under Scott and –
Marco:
I really think it was a real shame that he was let go.
Marco:
And none of us know the whole story.
Marco:
And from the bits and pieces we've heard, it does sound like he was at least partly at fault.
Marco:
But I think we're going to look back on that, on Scott being fired as just a real shame.
Marco:
Whether Tim made the wrong call, whether his hand was forced, I don't know.
Marco:
We'll probably never know.
Marco:
But I think it was a bad outcome.
Marco:
Whatever the reason, the outcome of not having Scott there, I think, really hurt and has been a strong influence over things happening or things getting worse in areas that we complain about, in areas that really hurt us.
Marco:
Because what's very clear is that Scott really was like a vice Steve, almost.
Marco:
It's hard to word this in a way that doesn't sound like diminutive or anything weird, but Scott really, I think, had a lot of Steve sensibilities and was in a kind of vice Steve-like position in the company.
Marco:
And so to lose him after also losing Steve...
Marco:
I think it really took a lot of the Steve essence out of the company.
Marco:
If Scott was still there and still in a powerful role as he was, I think we'd have a lot more of those things that we miss about Steve.
Marco:
We'd have a lot more of those still there.
Marco:
And that really sucks that we had to lose both of them.
Marco:
It was bad enough if we lost Steve.
Marco:
We didn't have a choice in that.
Marco:
But to lose Scott also, I feel like that really hurt the product.
Marco:
And it's not about felt and leather in the interface.
Marco:
It's not about that at all.
Marco:
Clearly, the story is much deeper than that.
Marco:
And again, we probably don't even know it.
Marco:
And it does seem like, to some degree, maybe Scott was being difficult.
Marco:
But it's hard not to look at this and to see...
Marco:
Maybe Scott was mad that he was passed over for CEO.
Marco:
Maybe he was mad that under Tim he didn't have as much influence as he did under Steve.
Marco:
I don't know the reason.
Marco:
But clearly from this and from stories I've heard from people who worked with Scott, losing Scott Forstall was a huge blow to Apple.
Marco:
And I don't know if Tim really had any choice in the matter.
Marco:
But if he did, I think he made the wrong choice.
Marco:
And I think that will go down as a really bad choice historically.
Casey:
Yeah, I've heard a lot of the same about how working for forestall can certainly be difficult, but by and large was really, really, really good.
Casey:
And I agree with everything you said about how this paints forestall in a light that was different to me anyway.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I thought it was just a terrible slog and I never finished it.
Casey:
And so I was kind of half expecting this to be the same, but it was not at all.
Casey:
And yeah, the business-y, like, here's the seven keys you need in order to be like Apple like that.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
Marco didn't really do anything for me, but...
Casey:
I really think that it is a darn shame that so much folklore of modern Apple seems to be just kind of disappearing into the wind.
Casey:
And I don't know if Ken burned bridges to write this.
Casey:
Typically, Apple does not like to air even clean laundry, let alone dirty laundry.
Casey:
But I am genuinely, genuinely glad that this book and things like it exist because...
Casey:
It's going to be too bad if the design and creation of one of the most influential products of the last 10, 20, 50, 100 years, if all of those stories just go away with the people that worked on it.
Casey:
And so I'm really, really glad for this book.
Casey:
And it really talks about how interesting and difficult it is to design software.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that that's unique to software by any means, but it's the only thing I really know about.
Casey:
And, you know, if you look at the keyboard on the iPhone, and as much as we all say, damn, you autocorrect, the story of how the keyboard came to be and how it came to be what appears visually to be a very traditional QWERTY keyboard, but behind the scenes is working quite a bit differently.
Casey:
It's a fascinating story on iterating software design.
Casey:
And what seems so obvious at the end, a QWERTY keyboard with some autocorrection, with some very clever and interesting autocorrection...
Casey:
That seems so obvious at the end, but the meandering path they took to get there is fascinating.
Casey:
And it shows why doing this sort of thing is so difficult.
Casey:
So, yeah, I really loved it.
John:
So I've read a lot of Apple books, like even the ones that you think are boring.
John:
I've read those too.
John:
I've been reading stuff about Apple since I was a kid.
John:
Like the very first issue number one of Macworld Magazine, like it had the biggest story in it was about the team, the people that made the Macintosh.
John:
I think unimaginable today that there'd be a giant magazine spread during the launch of an Apple product interviewing individual people who were on the team about what it was like to develop it.
John:
But back then, that's the thing that they did.
John:
and it was very glamorous and of course steve jobs is one of those people he's on the cover of the magazine um and since then i've been reading every like every business book you can possibly that i wouldn't call them business books some of them are some of them aren't but books about apple books about the people the history of apple you know the history of individual products and teams i have the big giant newton book with the typo on the spine i've like i've read all these things um and ken's book
John:
was pretty much unique in that like there's, there's a curse that afflicts many of the books about Apple, which is that they tend to be written from a remove where they're talking about Apple and
John:
And necessarily, they are expected to analyze Apple and look at it and say, this is what Apple is like.
John:
And let me, like, tell you about it and draw conclusions.
John:
Like, and they've got the big picture.
John:
They're very often drawing Apple or Steve Jobs or a particular product in a larger context of the world, of, you know, their companies that are peers, products that are peers.
John:
How important was this product to the technological march of progress?
John:
Like...
John:
They're burdened by that.
John:
Like they have to, that's how wide their lens is.
John:
And they have to say things about, uh, all of those issues that, yeah, there's subjective aspect to it, but there's, there's also kind of an objective reality.
John:
Was this important or was it not important?
John:
Why did thing X happen?
John:
Why did thing Y happen?
John:
Like the, the big picture and draw conclusions.
John:
This is, this was good.
John:
And this was bad.
John:
This was a failure.
John:
This was a success, right?
John:
Ken's book is,
John:
doesn't have to do that because it is a story of one person's experience at Apple.
John:
And that person is not the CEO.
John:
It's first person he's writing about his own experiences.
John:
It is not.
John:
Let me tell you about other people who worked at Apple.
John:
It's like me.
John:
This is my story and his story, even though it, you know, touches upon greatness many times and he worked on some very important, significant products.
John:
he's not the ceo he wasn't you know he's not even at scott forestall's letter level right he came in at a lower level and climbed up the ranks but didn't even make it up to the point where he was like you know middle management he briefly touched in management that didn't didn't appeal to him right so all this book has to do is say
John:
This is what it's like to be one person who had this particular career at Apple, which is much less of a burden because there's no way you can read it and say, well, you're wrong about that.
John:
It's like he's telling his story.
John:
And so that aspect and the fact that his story is not...
John:
Because I read Gil Emilio's book.
John:
He's also telling his story, but his story is I'm the CEO of the company, right?
John:
And he's got the head the size of Texas, right?
John:
Anyway, it's different, right?
John:
But even in that respect, you can read Gil's book and say, well, this is what Gil thinks of himself and his job, but you yourself are pulling back.
John:
But in this story, it's like...
John:
so many other books about apple try to sketch the outlines of like them you know let me tell you about this person this person this event and you can kind of like by coloring in certain areas you can get the shape of apple but this is so precise and right down into the middle of the thing is like i worked at apple and this is what i did and this is what it was like and that is so refreshing because it frees me from having to essentially like
John:
you know look at this this big important analysis and say well is that really true of the entire company or that particular vendor was that really a success or really a failure was that really better than that or is that why this happened it's like there's no arguing because it's one person telling their story and for the most part the story doesn't have like world shattering implications right the iphone has world shattering implications but the story of the development of the keyboard is the story of the
John:
And it's not even the full story of the development of the entire keyboard because other people helped on that, too.
John:
And he brings them into the story as well.
John:
So I thought that was fascinating.
John:
And it really helped me, you know, basically read it and enjoy it without constantly banging up against places where I think, like, the analysis is wrong or I've read contradictory things or whatever because it was so personal.
John:
The business book aspects of it, like, given that it's a personal story, I can...
John:
forgive a lot the business book aspects of it of like let me have a theme and let me weave it throughout the book and let me explain it or whatever i feel like is also fine because it's you know you have like there are less you do you can't have this career at apple and not come away with some lessons right some things that you think that you learned working at apple and thinking about them enough so you can distill them into a coherent way and make it a theme of your book and support that theme
John:
is a good thing to do instead of just entirely being like you know like a travel log or like a diary dear diary here's what it is today here's what it is today like there is an overall theme and surely if you ended your career at apple you would think about that and you would you know so i i think that is a reasonable thing to do the thing to avoid and the thing this book mostly avoids for the most part is and this happens in tons of other apple books which is
John:
Apple did a thing.
John:
Thing was successful.
John:
Therefore, everything Apple did that led to that is a thing that you should do to be successful, too.
John:
That's what every business book says, right?
John:
Which is like the worst possible analysis.
John:
The same thing that anyone who's successful like.
John:
It could.
John:
they think every like they can't distinguish like because apple operates in this way and apple was successful you too should do these things so then you'll be successful it's like well all we have is this is the way apple operates and they were successful but for all we know apple would have been 100 times more successful if they didn't operate that way and you know the thing that made them successful is not this way of operating or this particular thing or the fact that they have you know pizza on tuesdays and if you have pizza on tuesdays you'll make an iphone too it's like
John:
Like it's very easy.
John:
It's very easy when you're fantastically successful as a large endeavor to look at every single thing you do and say those are pick out the ones that you think were important.
John:
Like every morning I have a hard boiled egg.
John:
Right.
John:
It's important to have breakfast.
John:
If you don't have breakfast, you're never going to make the iPhone.
John:
You know, people think all sorts of weird stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
So there's a there's a little tiny bit of we were successful.
John:
This is how we operated.
John:
Therefore, this led to our success.
John:
not as much as in most other books and and the thing is like this book is much better about like this aspect of a product i think you know was successful after struggles but it wouldn't matter if it was if this keyboard was put into a crap product it would have failed like as as a cog in the machine you don't get to decide that you're going to make a phone with or without a keyboard hardware keyboard you just get assigned the task
John:
of making the software keyboard and making it work but big picture wise if it was a terrible idea to make a phone with with a software keyboard no matter how good they made the keyboard it would have failed right and it could also be argued that if they made the keyboard terrible that the iphone would have succeeded anyway because they would have worked out the issues right uh you know it brings up the newton as handwriting handwriting recognition syncing it so i'm not saying like oh what you did doesn't matter but all i'm saying is like it's very difficult to draw conclusions in the big picture from like what you did
John:
Um, and, and saying that directly led to your success.
John:
And, and to that end, I think one of the things that was interesting about this book and definitely ranked true to me, knowing people who work at Apple is, and you know, if I don't know how many, how many people know in real life people who work at Apple these days, maybe, you know, people who work in Apple retail, cause that's like a huge number of employees.
John:
But if you know anyone who works at Apple, or if you read books about Apple, learn stories about them, you will probably be surprised, especially if you're, especially if you're a person who works in a big company, um,
John:
to learn exactly how few people Apple employs to work on particular things.
John:
How many people were working on the keyboard for the original iPhone?
John:
What would become Apple's most important product?
John:
Or is it a team of 100 people?
John:
It was not.
John:
It was like basically one person with some helpers, right?
John:
It was not a lot of people.
John:
How many people were on the Safari team for the first year?
John:
Three.
John:
They have really small teams.
John:
And if you work at a big company where you work on a 10-person team that works on one tiny corner of some sprung enterprise application, and that 10-person team adds one feature every month to that one tiny corner, and then Apple puts a three-person team on for a couple years and gets Safari,
John:
Like, it can be depressing.
John:
It can be, you know, you'd say, like, what are we doing wrong?
John:
The other part is it can be inspirational to say, like, and this goes to describing the system, like, is the fact, like, you know, this book does a good job of explaining what it's like to be a developer at Apple.
John:
And as Casey said, it's very different than a lot of... It's much more like a startup.
John:
Because in startups, they operate like this because they don't have a lot of people.
John:
And it's informal, and there's lots of personal opinions, and you don't have the staff to do this methodical system involving research and some sort of...
John:
All the sort of business stuff, like they're not doing agile on this particular team in Apple, though maybe other teams were.
John:
They're not using a methodology.
John:
They're not using this elaborate planning and estimation system.
John:
There's not a lot of management overhead.
John:
It operates much more like a startup.
John:
And they get amazing things out of it, right?
John:
The book more or less says we worked this way and this led to our success.
John:
And it does comparisons with Google, who there's some stories about some teams at Google working in a very different way and saying they weren't successful and we were.
John:
Therefore, this way to work is better.
John:
That way to work is definitely different.
John:
It has pros and cons, though.
John:
Like if you have really good people, it's awesome.
John:
It's the best way to work.
John:
If you don't have really good people and you put two mediocre people on, you will never get Safari out of a two or three person team, right?
John:
And so like a lot of the, I've said this before, a lot of like the business methodologies and software methodologies is a way to get good products out of so-so companies.
John:
Which is an important thing.
John:
It's not, oh, it's insulting.
John:
You should feel bad that you're a so-so employee.
John:
Like, we're probably all so-so employees, right?
John:
Like, in the grand scheme of things, we're not.
John:
None of us are, like, writing operating systems or web browsers by ourselves that are taking over the world for the most, except for maybe Marco.
John:
But, like, it's important to have those methodologies in there.
John:
And that's why I think it's a dangerous lesson for big companies to say, we shouldn't have these big teams and these systems and all this infrastructure.
John:
We should just say, give two or three person teams and just let them go wild.
John:
It's such a cultural change that you can't turn your big company into Apple.
John:
And it would probably be dangerous to try, and you probably don't have the right employees to do it anyway.
John:
But it is inspiring to see that system working at Apple.
John:
The darker aspect of it, which I think was highlighted in this thing and was emphasized as a benefit, which is like the demo culture, where you iterate by making a thing and then demonstrating it.
John:
I like the idea of making demos for themselves among their little team and showing it to each other.
John:
As a way to just like test their ideas and stuff like that.
John:
And basically all of them using their personal pains and tastes to herd a product towards something that's good, which relies on you having employees who have good taste essentially, and who are smart and have, you know, opinions that will lead to good products.
John:
um the downsides of that is if you're if all of your teams are entirely made of three white dudes you are going to be blind to certain aspects of products that make them good maybe you'll produce a health app with no ability to track menstruation for many years like all sorts of things will uh will will potentially be blind spots but
John:
The upsides are also big, but one of the other downsides of the small demo culture is the idea of, and this is probably worse when Jobs was there and even Forrestal, the idea of taking a bunch of people who worked really hard on something and thought about it a lot and iterated and talked to each other and giving them 10 minutes in front of a God figure to issue some kind of snap judgment with incomplete information, overriding the opinions and experiences of the people below them.
John:
And in some respects, that's what you're paying them for.
John:
You have a Steve Jobs or a Scott Forstall because in theory, they have the best tastes and the best instinct for what makes a good product.
John:
And someone has to decide and that's their job.
John:
That's why they are the CEO or the vice president and you are not.
John:
On the other hand, they are very often the least informed on an issue.
John:
And I wouldn't want a five-minute, essentially, performance to be an environment where an idea that really was the best idea gets shot down on a whim by somebody who doesn't know all the factors.
John:
Now, you can't have too many chiefs, not opinions, whatever.
John:
Everyone can't be the boss.
John:
I understand the things, but a lot of the scenarios where he was describing those demos, I was like...
John:
Oh, boy, this is not the way I would want a really important decision to be made about a really important product.
John:
Not that it needs to be a giant committee or whatever, but I feel much more comfortable about a group of five or ten peers arguing amongst each other over the course of weeks and trying things out to come up with a solution.
John:
I don't like seeing that being brought up and...
John:
And being given a thumbs up, thumbs down by Caesar up in the upper levels of management.
John:
Now, to the credit of the people involved in the story, if that person happens to be Steve Jobs, guess what?
John:
You're really lucky because he's really smart and has a great track record.
John:
Same thing with Scott Forstall.
John:
And all the stories in the book are like cases where something was brought to the higher ups after being worked on for a long time.
John:
And the higher-ups not only made the right call, but also added value and saying, you know, what you're doing, okay, but I have an idea that will make it even better.
John:
And it actually was better because you guys down in the trenches, you're maybe a little bit too close to it.
John:
Or even just like going ancillary for the UX people where the guy was like, oh, can't you just put a letter on each key, right?
John:
That was a weird way to say it, but that was the right call.
John:
And that I think is one of the best aspects of Apple culture is that
John:
like in a big company maybe uh you know certainly as big as mine maybe also as big as casey's if someone from another department gave a cranky snarky opinion about like the keyboard that you were showing they'd be like hell no they'd be like this is not even your department like it would be like it would be like if the you know if the market like essentially the marketing department has an opinion about what the keyboard should be it's like you're not even in the software group like shut up like they'd be they get dirty looks certainly their opinion wouldn't be taken seriously certainly it wouldn't affect the thing but but in this environment
John:
everyone is there to contribute we're all trying to work on the same i mean think of freaking phil schiller who came up with the click wheel for the ipod he's in marketing he came up with the click wheel for the ipod a pretty big feature of the ipod the big wheel on the front of it the marketing guy came up with that right and who who came over gave him the log jam of all the developers like oh we got to have big hit areas so we'll have keys multiple keys on them for months and months they're banging their head against this and the ux guy's like can't you just make it like a single key on the key cap
John:
And then they went back and instead of like being annoyed or getting angry at each other, Ken went back and said, yeah, maybe I could do that.
John:
And just like the buttons will be bigger, but we'll still show the keycaps not to freak people.
John:
And that essentially was one of the biggest breakthroughs in the entire product.
John:
And it's to the credit of the engineers that they listened to that person.
John:
And it's to the credit of Apple that that person felt empowered to say that, wasn't immediately shut down.
John:
There wasn't like interdepartmental fighting over it and everything like that.
John:
That was a beautiful example of the system working.
John:
I'm sure we can all think of, if you've ever worked for a startup, I'm sure you can all think of examples of exactly that same system not working and descending into chaos and just blood being on the walls everywhere.
John:
It can definitely go horribly wrong.
John:
I
John:
I read the book with like fascination and joy at seeing like things fire on all cylinders and fear that people read the book and think that they can recreate Apple in their own companies and some trepidation about whether this is actually a system that should ever be imitated or whether it's just like there are aspects of it that you should that you should take away from it.
John:
as being good but on but the bulk of the lesson i feel like you could take from this book is here is one person's story here's what it was like to be this person in this position at this time making this stuff and i think that like that that alone is enough you shouldn't be reaching to draw anything grander from it than just sort of like taking taking this person's experience that they shared with you and try not to go overboard with the uh
Casey:
modeling your life after what you read about it was funny though for me to hear or i guess i should say read uh passages wherein ken described like classic issues that i've had at places i've worked in the past um i have a couple of quick highlights uh this is well i would tell you a page number but a it's not showing on my kindle right now and b it wouldn't matter anyway but uh in in a chapter somewhere in this book he wrote
Casey:
You could have conflicting lines of authority and fail to ever reach universally recognized final decisions.
Casey:
Like when a lot of people all think that they're the most important person in the room, all saying this is what you should do.
Casey:
Bad things happen.
Casey:
And that is something I saw a lot.
Casey:
um where was another one oh here we go this one's a little bit longer so bear with me detached high-level managers making all the key decisions is such a widespread affliction that it has its own internet meme the seagull manager it describes a top executive who is rarely around but flies in occasionally and unexpectedly from from who knows where
Casey:
lands on your beach squawks noisily flaps its wings all over the place launches itself back into the air circles overhead drops a big poop on everyone and then flies away leaving the rest of the team to clean up the mess figure out what it all meant and wonder what to do about the inevitable follow-up visit at my last job we called this the swoop and poop and it happened all the time and this is what you were describing earlier john like
John:
Well, see, but Steve Jobs did that all the time, too.
John:
Like, that's the thing.
John:
He would occasionally do the swoop and poop.
John:
It would be like he would come swooping in to a department that's working on a thing that he knows much less about than they do and say, this looks dumb.
John:
I don't think you should do that.
John:
And then leave.
John:
And that it basically means...
John:
don't do that particular thing or do that thing differently and they would take serious it's inevitable when you have a powerful person especially a powerful charismatic famous person they come in and they mention something offhand about how they think that screen should be simpler or there should only be one of those things or this whole application should be in one window they come in they say that one afternoon they leave
John:
you are left to say guess what we are rewriting our application and all be in one window why are we doing it because the seagull boss came by now again if your seagull boss is steve jobs you basically won lottery because his track record is really really good if it is not steve jobs the poop is less appealing to clean up i guess you have you have less you have less faith that what that the scrambling that you have to do will actually result in something better i mean like the
John:
I keep debating whether I think this is an anti-pattern or a good thing.
John:
In a situation where you have an authority figure, especially a charismatic one that you actually admire and look up to, the employees are motivated to please the leader.
John:
Right there.
John:
They're you want to please.
John:
You work at Apple during this time.
John:
You want to please Steve Jobs.
John:
Like presumably you like him.
John:
You think he's good.
John:
You like his company.
John:
You're working at it in the height of his, you know, his power and his influence.
John:
You want to please him, which sounds like a good motivation.
John:
But on the other hand, I would rather people be wanting to make good products than wanting to please their master.
John:
And again, if you're master of Steve Jobs, they basically align.
John:
You will probably end up making good products if you do what Steve Jobs wants or what Scott Forstall wants or what all these good people down the line do.
John:
But I don't want the motivation to be, please, the authority figure.
John:
That seems like a misaligned...
John:
motivation and you don't want to end up elevating them and just taking everything they say is the word of god because they're the important person you've seen this in many companies where people who are not steve jobs nevertheless have tremendous authority and power and so many things are done to make that person happy even just working to make your your direct supervisor happy so you'll get a promotion it's part like you start playing the meta game and stop playing the game game
John:
that that is that is an affliction as well so like i don't know there's any avoiding seagull management and sometimes like it's what you need i mean hell even bill gates did it when he's like let's turn this whole company around and get focused on the internet that you know he came and laid a giant target on microsoft but it was the right thing to do at the time like in some respects that's that's the role of the ceo that's the role of upper management is someone has to make that decision so you don't get into the situation described before where there's no clear decision at all um you know big big companies are hard like
John:
Again, if you know people who work at Apple, you know Apple has lots of the same big company BS, too.
John:
There's lots of variation within Apple.
John:
Apple's not homogenous.
John:
It never has been and probably never will be.
John:
But big picture wise, like this is not the book to describe like how the five generals and Steve Jobs actually changed the company.
John:
Like there are a lot of other books to talk about that.
John:
This is just talking about someone who's a couple levels down from a general about one corner of the company, which I think is much more interesting.
John:
And there needs to be more books like this and fewer about the five generals.
John:
But
John:
When you get down to this level, I bet there are tons of people who can describe working at Apple during the exact same time period in a totally dysfunctional group that is not successful and it produces crap.
John:
That's just not this story.
John:
One more thing on the book.
John:
I just want to emphasize what Marco said.
John:
I love the illustrations.
John:
I didn't expect there to be any pictures.
John:
I think there's maybe two other books that I've ever read about Apple that have any kind of pictures.
John:
These were fun, kind of cartoony pictures, some of which depicted people that I know.
John:
It was fun to see.
John:
Oh, look.
John:
cartoon right is it was is a lot of fun they were like the whole book is very you know sort of casual and interesting and clever and you know like i feel like ken's personality comes through in it yeah definitely i feel like that massage has probably massaged his writing a little bit like i feel a little bit of the writing like has been polished up to the point where i feel like it's less of his personality coming through but there's a
John:
There's a certain... There are a bunch of different sort of personalities that you'll meet if you meet people who have worked at Apple during this time.
John:
There's a certain kind of personality, I feel like, that fits in well at Apple, both in the old Apple and in the new Apple, and I'm sure it changes.
John:
But like...
John:
I, you know, I've met some people from the original Mac team.
John:
I've met some people who are there around jobs is there.
John:
I know some people who work there now and it changes and there are, you know, definitely differences or whatever, but the sort of fun loving impish, uh, like,
John:
Not like joking in a mean way, but like joking in a good-humored way.
John:
Dedicated, sort of resilient people.
John:
Those, I feel like, are the people who end up being successful and enjoying their stay at Apple, if that's how they behave.
John:
A lot of the people who would be successful at a more dog-eat-dog corporate business would probably not be as happy or successful as Apple.
John:
And so I feel like Ken is definitely one of those sort of happy travelers that...
John:
that I've met who have worked at Apple or still do, who thrive in that environment, who do great work, who enjoy it, who are able to do it without burning themselves out because the pressures are tremendous there, right?
John:
So you have to have some kind of like, not laid back, but an ability to like...
John:
Not just like eat yourself alive with stress.
John:
Right.
John:
To sustain yourself in that environment for any long period of time without just entirely burning out and going nuts.
John:
And, you know, all the people, you know, listen to the debug podcast where Guy English talks to a lot of people who are there around the same time.
John:
and i feel some of those people who are higher up in in the the org chart the pressure was a little bit you know got to them a little bit more because it was just tremendously like the closer you get to steve jobs the more like erodes your soul or the pressure starts to erode you um but ken seemed to be in a sweet spot he briefly was it was in a management role that he thought he wanted and quickly bailed on that and that was a fun chapter of the book too where it's like i want to be the manager i'm why am i getting not getting promoted to promoted him it's like oh god i don't want to be a manager and
John:
And it quickly retreated to development, which is great that Apple allowed that to happen.
John:
Like, again, if you work for a company that's not as kind as the circle of people that was around Kim when he worked there, you can imagine him, you know, burning out or bailing out of that company.
John:
Like, it'd be like complaining about not getting a promotion.
John:
You are a troublemaker.
John:
Or fine, we'll give you this promotion.
John:
Oh, now you don't want it?
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
We're going to slowly exit you from the company over the course of the next year and a half.
John:
because you're just a problem child they didn't there was a nurturing environment and they understood that people are human and if he wasn't there you wouldn't have had many great things that we take for granted about the iphones that just goes to show that being kind to people and working to find their place in the company instead of just saying you're not a perfect fit and you're annoying therefore let's let's ease you out of the company that's a bad strategy
Casey:
Yeah, so it was a good book.
Casey:
I enjoyed it.
Casey:
You should read it.
Marco:
Yeah, agreed.
Marco:
And it's, yeah, Creative Selection, Ken Kishenda, highly recommended.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, RxBar, Prime Video Channels, and Marine Layer.
Marco:
And to our former sponsor, Creative Selection by Ken Kishenda.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
So inevitably, he was fated to come around on this.
John:
So since then, he started vacationing during the summer on the beach.
John:
And now he likes the beach.
John:
And the next step would be, okay, you go to the beach every summer and you like it.
John:
Do you go swimming in the ocean, which is part of the beach?
John:
It's the non-land part.
John:
And his answer was no.
John:
I think like this summer, maybe last summer.
John:
And I've always been waiting to see when he's going to take the next step and go from someone who didn't like the beach to someone who likes the beach to someone who likes the beach and goes there every summer and likes the beach, goes there every summer.
John:
and goes in the water which is a big feature of the beach and so i just wanted to get an update this summer has marco taken the next step in his beach life and gone into the ocean to go swimming
Marco:
I mean, I'll go in with my legs, but I haven't gone swimming in it, really.
Marco:
I'm not a big swimmer.
Marco:
I can barely swim.
Marco:
I've been meaning to work on that and take adult swim lessons, but I can barely function in the water.
Marco:
And so that's really the main story.
Marco:
I was never that into it as a kid.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I haven't really revisited that as an adult yet.
Marco:
The reason why I like the beach so much has very little to do with being in the water.
Marco:
There's so much else about it that I love, and that's just one part of it.
Marco:
the main things I like about being there, like it's a whole town.
Marco:
It's a whole community.
Marco:
It's a whole different way of life out there.
Marco:
It's like, you know, on Fire Island, there's no cars.
Marco:
And so everything is like, you're walking everywhere, you're biking everywhere.
Marco:
There aren't really streets.
Marco:
There's like these big wide sidewalks and everyone else is walking and biking.
Marco:
And it's like a nice safe place to let your kids and your dogs run around.
Marco:
And it's just really nice.
Marco:
Like a recipe for happiness on a vacation for me,
Marco:
is a place that is still familiar enough.
Marco:
Hopefully they speak the same language as I natively do.
Marco:
But that's a very different experience from my everyday life at home.
Marco:
So if I go visit another city...
Marco:
Well, like, you know, cities don't do much for me most of the time because, like, they're all pretty similar.
Marco:
Like, the difference between cities are not that big.
Marco:
Whereas, like, you know, when I visit a place like this, it's totally different.
Marco:
Like, the entire way of life is totally different.
Marco:
And yet, it's a really close drive to my house, really.
Marco:
Like, it's like I can be there in two hours if you include the boat ride.
Marco:
Like, I can be there in two hours.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so it's easy to get to.
Marco:
I don't have to fly to get there.
Marco:
They speak my language.
Marco:
They take my money.
Marco:
They even have Fios.
Marco:
But it's a totally different experience.
Marco:
And it's an experience and a way of life that I really, really enjoy.
Marco:
And so that's part of it.
Marco:
It's also just like environmental, like being near the water is really nice, even if you don't go in it that much.
Marco:
You still get like that wonderful breeze all the time.
Marco:
You get the sea air.
Marco:
You get the more temperate temperatures in the summertime, which is, you know, like I hate air conditioning.
Marco:
But I use air conditioning all the time at home because where I live the rest of the year doesn't get a lot of breeze.
Marco:
There's almost no air movement here.
Marco:
It's pretty much the only big downside of the climate here.
Marco:
There's not a lot of options for cooling off when it gets really humid and hot outside because the air just kind of sits.
Marco:
And we don't have too many fans, so it just kind of sits.
Marco:
At the beach, it's cool enough and there's enough wind that I don't need air conditioning the vast majority of the time.
Marco:
And to me, because air conditioning sucks.
Marco:
If you're sitting in air conditioning, which I am right now, actually, if you're sitting in air conditioning, it doesn't really matter what's going on outside.
Marco:
You're basically isolated from the entire world because the rest of the world is kind of uncomfortable for you.
Marco:
But what that means, like, it's not a good solution.
Marco:
Like, air conditioning doesn't work by filling the room with a 74-degree breeze.
Marco:
It works by blowing 40-degree air into a hot, sweaty room periodically and hoping that kind of gets around.
Marco:
And the result is...
Marco:
When you're in air conditioning, you're never acclimated to the outside temperature and the inside temperature for very long.
Marco:
And so you have these stupid transitions where you go to work in the summertime wearing a light outfit.
Marco:
You get there, it's freezing.
Marco:
You want to put on a sweater in July because that's the right temperature for air conditioning for it to work correctly and be comfortable.
Marco:
And then you go back outside and you're plunged back into the heat again.
Marco:
Like that sucks.
Marco:
All the transitions suck.
Marco:
It's weird to have to put on a sweater in the summertime because your air conditioning is too cold.
Marco:
If you put it up higher, it doesn't work.
Marco:
Like air conditioning just sucks.
Marco:
Like there's a lot about it that sucks.
Marco:
I see why it's necessary in a lot of places.
Marco:
it's necessary in my home but at the beach it is mostly not most of the time i don't need it there and so it's just it's a whole different environment in addition to the whole different lifestyle of how you function in this town with no cars and everyone's like reading you know riding bikes and walking everywhere i love walking and it's flat like i don't like walking uphill that much it's mostly flat so there's not a lot of walking uphill like so it's a great place to do things i like to
Marco:
to feel the way I like to feel in a really nice place.
Marco:
And part of that is that the ocean is right there.
Marco:
And so, you know, I'm working on stuff.
Marco:
Like, one of the reasons I didn't like the ocean before, I didn't think I did, was I don't like seafood.
Marco:
And I've been slowly learning to like seafood, basically.
Marco:
Which is surprisingly possible.
Marco:
I didn't think it would work.
Marco:
My strategy was basically, every time I went to a restaurant, I would try some of whatever TIFF ordered.
Marco:
Because it's almost always seafood.
Marco:
When I tried it when I was like 20, that never worked.
Marco:
I just hated everything.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
My theory was kind of like a tolerance.
Marco:
Like if I just try this like twice a week, I will probably eventually like some of it or at least be able to tolerate it.
Marco:
And for years, I was so disappointed that I couldn't like seafood because I like fancy food.
Marco:
I like everything that is usually served with and on top of and around seafood.
Marco:
Just didn't like the fish or whatever.
Marco:
And now I'm doing that.
Marco:
I'm like, I'm eating some of these things, not a lot yet, but I'm eating some of these things and I'm okay with some of these things.
Marco:
And sometimes I even choose to order some of these things.
Marco:
So anyway, it's, it's this whole thing, but like, you know, broadening my horizon and everything and, and going into the water to a deeper level is next on that list.
Marco:
But there's so much about the beach that I, I just love about the town, about the environment, uh, that, uh,
Marco:
It isn't all about the water for me.
Marco:
The water is one part of many of this place I love so much.
John:
Well, I'm glad it's on your list because all those things you listed are all great, but I feel like going in the water is...
John:
a very big part of the sensory experience of the beach basically because it's all around you like that the waves it's not just a still puddle of water like it is a full body all five senses big thing and it like like you know like all the aspects of the experience you were describing like the more of your senses that you engage the more the more it will be a lasting and powerful memory especially smell the more it will be a place that you think about and come back to and
John:
going swimming especially in the ocean and having fun in the waves really powerfully engages every single one of your senses including taste because you will get the water in your mouth so smell taste touch like every sight sound everything it's all even just getting knocked down in the waves and getting pulled under and the fear associated with that joy happiness fear like every it's just all in one right and it it can be daunting right so that's why it's a thing that you definitely ease into right and
John:
And, you know, especially if you're doing an adult, like you're easing into the seafood and all the other stuff.
John:
But I think it's it is worth it is worth doing to like I make it a point because I go on beach.
John:
I grew up on my own and I've been to the beach a bazillion times.
John:
So it's not like an experience that I'm missing out on.
John:
But like we go there every year for our beach vacation.
John:
And I'm mostly just, you know, running around and wrangling kids and dealing with stuff like that.
John:
But I make it a point every time we go to make sure I remember you should also do all the things you did.
John:
Yes.
John:
Even though you did them 100 times during your youth, like it's nothing new.
John:
You're not brought in your horizons at all.
John:
And it's not an experience that you haven't had.
John:
But keep doing it, like make make a point to do it, make time.
John:
Like for me, basically, the thing is put down the camera, like give it to somebody else and take a time to go.
John:
Yes.
John:
And not just go swimming in the bay, go swimming in the ocean, go out past the waves, do all the things, go on, put your head under, go, you know, all the stuff that you've done, like go through the checklist, because I find that if I don't do that, I feel like.
John:
I'm somehow missing an important aspects of, of the vacation.
John:
So I'm glad it's on your list.
John:
Um, you know, and take it easy with it and, you know, don't like go in when it's calm, take swimming lessons if you need to do all the things.
John:
Uh, but I think it will really add, uh,
John:
an important aspect even the parts of like getting out of the water feeling your skin tighten as the salt water like dries on it and having you know having it in your hair and just like the way it makes your body feel and smell for the rest of the day or going back to that like it's all it's the gift that keeps on giving the ocean is great everyone should go to the ocean