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John:
I want to be a good connector designer.
Casey:
Do we have anything to talk about tonight?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I guess.
Marco:
I mean, there were new iPhones and stuff, but it's really funny how unsurprising it was.
Marco:
Even the parts that we expected to be surprised by, we were wrong.
Marco:
Actually, so I guess, therefore, it was surprising in those ways.
Casey:
And I thought the camera stuff was mildly surprising.
Casey:
I hadn't heard anything about that.
Casey:
Now, obviously, it's to be expected that there will be better, newer, faster camera things.
Casey:
But I didn't know the magnitude of it all, and I don't think anyone did.
Casey:
And it seems pretty compelling.
John:
That's because it wasn't really camera hardware so much as it was applying even more software to the camera problem.
John:
Because there is a point of...
John:
diminishing returns with camera hardware and phones because you know optically speaking you only have so much room to work with there right but uh if the computing power keeps you know going up and up hey let's do something with that that may be the better place to get benefit from it and uh that seems like that's what it is and that's why we wouldn't have heard about that or thought about that because you can't leak well i guess you could but it's not it's not on the supply chain the software side is not in a supply chain all over the world
Marco:
And there was a small hint in the WBDC slides for iOS 7's announcement.
Marco:
There was one of those million little bullet points that they put all over the place.
Marco:
One of them was 120 frames per second capture.
Marco:
Oh, really?
Marco:
I didn't recall that.
Marco:
Yeah, there was a little 120 FPS on one of those in the upper right, I think.
Marco:
And I don't think any hardware before the 5S could actually do that.
Marco:
So I think that was a slight give.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Otherwise, I mean, I think that whole camera stuff is awesome.
Marco:
I cannot wait to use it.
Marco:
I mean, there was an app called... Is it SnappyCam?
Marco:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
I know what you're talking about, but I've never used it.
Marco:
I'll put the link in the show notes.
Marco:
But I believe it's called SnappyCam.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It was a camera app that was written by some incredibly good programmers who basically wrote their own JPEG encoder and really tweaked the heck out of the CPU to get tons of performance so that they could capture, I believe it was 30 frames a second on the iPhone 5.
Marco:
and it was either 30 or 60.
Marco:
They couldn't reach 120 because the hardware couldn't do it, but it was either 30 or 60, and so they could capture that, and then similar to what we saw on yesterday's iPhone announcement, you could scroll through and pick your favorite photo from that giant burst.
Marco:
So that was pretty cool.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I'm actually really happy.
Marco:
They might not be, but I'm really happy to see that now be a regular feature and to have it be better integrated in the camera roll, too, because now you can do things like pick the two or three shots out of that that you like and delete all of the other ones, which SnappyCam can only do in very limited ways because it doesn't have full access to the camera roll because we don't have those APIs, etc.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's... I'm really looking forward to playing with that camera.
Marco:
That, to me... You know, the 5S is actually a pretty substantial speed upgrade.
Marco:
So it looks.
Marco:
I haven't used one yet, but it sure looks that way.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The two things I think that I'm most excited about are fingerprint unlocking, because as we discussed last episode, I believe I'm one of those people who never sets a passcode on my phone, because I don't want the constant day-to-day annoyance of that.
Marco:
And so now I will do the fingerprint lock, and I'll just put a couple of my fingers, I'll put my wife's finger, and that's it.
Marco:
Then I'm done.
Marco:
Maybe Adams, if he's lucky, maybe he'll have to earn that.
Marco:
Maybe hops his nose.
Marco:
Otherwise...
Marco:
I think that works, but we'll see.
Marco:
Maybe I'll try that with my new iPhone 5S whenever I get one.
John:
So what is your annoyance thresholds for stopping using that feature?
John:
What would make you stop using it?
John:
What percentage of it failing?
John:
You try to do it, and it doesn't work.
John:
You try again, and you try again, and you're like, 50% success rate?
John:
90?
John:
When do you say, all right, forget this?
Marco:
I would say it would have to work probably at least 95% of the time within about a second.
John:
See, I didn't read, I tried to read as much as I could of the coverage, but what I wanted to see, I guess probably Apple controlled this.
John:
If they had direct access to the, you know, the hands-on area afterwards, do 50 trials, do, you know, 100 trials, do as many trials as you can with success or failure, you know what I mean?
John:
And get some kind of number about, you know, percentage-wise, instead of just trying and say, oh, it seemed to work pretty well, and you tried it two times, you know what I mean?
Marco:
Yeah, maybe.
Marco:
I mean, like the ones we saw in the Nantech video, and a few other people took videos, I think, but the one I watched was the Nantech one, and it was really good.
Marco:
And they put it through the whole process of registering the fingerprint, which looks like it worked really well, and then they unlocked it a few times, and it worked very quickly in all instances.
John:
Yeah, well, the thing that they showed in the little movie or one of the ads or something, they showed the guy like grabbing your phone like you do and kind of activating it.
John:
And like in one of the things he was using, like the side of the corner of his thumb, like we all do when you grab the phone and go for like the home button with your thumb, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that, if that works that well, that, cause that's, I found that impressive because if that really works that well, that means that like, or maybe did he have to train it on the corner of his thumb?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, because we don't always like, if you're going to go and like, let me give you the full frontal of my thumb or finger and to test the feature versus let me grab the thing out of my pocket, put my finger on it without looking and, you know, get a good read on it.
John:
Uh, and I think that's where, you know, using it in real life is going to be different than, uh, trying to put your finger on it in a demo area.
John:
But, uh,
John:
But yeah, if it works like I saw it work in all the little demos all the time, then especially in Apple's ad, that'll be great.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm looking forward to trying that and having that.
Marco:
I mean, as they said in the keynote, most people don't use a passcode, and that's kind of bad, and it would be better if security could be reasonably secure, yet also very easy, so that people would actually do it.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
Marco:
I think that's going to be cool.
Marco:
I don't know, though.
Marco:
I feel like us talking this much about the iPhone 5S is almost like talking this much about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
I feel like we've now left the mainstream.
Casey:
Were the three of us ever the mainstream?
John:
But here's the thing, though.
John:
Everything you see on the 5S will eventually be on the mainstream.
John:
So it's a glimpse of the future of the rest of the iOS line.
John:
Even though it's only on this one product now, surely, unless it's a gigantic flop, it will move on down the line until it's everywhere and just becomes standard, just like a rephrasing camera.
Casey:
Hey, can we go back a step to the camera?
Casey:
Marco, I'm curious to hear as a quasi-professional photographer at one point in your life, what do you think about the flash?
Casey:
Because I remember vividly years ago when the four of us, you, me, and Aaron and Tiff were somewhere and we were talking about how I wish I was a better photographer.
Casey:
And you said, well, let me give you a tip.
Casey:
The number one best way to be a better photographer is to never use the flash ever, ever, ever.
Casey:
And so I've stuck by that anytime I could, and it has made for much better pictures.
Casey:
But I'm curious what your take is on the two flash setup.
Marco:
Well, that rule still holds true.
Marco:
If you can avoid using the flash at all, you should.
Marco:
The flash introduces two huge problems to the entire scene.
Marco:
One of them is it messes up all the colors of everything, and the other one is the direction of the light makes everything look really weird and unappealing.
Marco:
Now, the flash, the new dual-color flash, which is a really cool idea, only solves one of those problems.
Marco:
It only solves the color problem.
Marco:
And that is a big problem, certainly.
Marco:
But I think the amount of light coming from straight on is a bigger problem that makes things look worse than just having the wrong color light shown on them.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It's a very good idea for when you have to use the flash.
Marco:
A lot of people just leave the flash on auto and use it whenever the phone thinks it should or needs to.
Marco:
It's going to help a lot of pictures out, but it's not going to make a flash picture look anywhere near as good as a non-flash picture.
Marco:
A lot of times, if you're in such a dark place, if you're in a bar with your friends, there's no light.
Marco:
And you're going to have to use the flash.
Marco:
You just don't have a choice.
Marco:
If you want a picture at all, you'll have to use the flash, and that's it.
Marco:
And so if your choice is picture or no picture at all, maybe take the picture with the flash.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
But it's not – I certainly wouldn't rely on that, and it's not going to –
Marco:
It's not going to make me want to use the Flash any more than before.
Marco:
But when I have to use it, which is very rare, but when I have to use it, it'll be a little bit better.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
So what do you think of the little ridges for the little Fresnel lenses on the flash?
John:
Oh, I didn't see that.
John:
What's that about?
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't see this either.
John:
I saw it on all the slides, and if you look at Apple's website, they zoom right in on it, so they must not be shying away from it.
John:
But it is totally at odds with every other physical design feature of this iPhone and all past iPhones.
John:
Go to Apple's iPhone 5S site and scroll down to the part that shows you the flash.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
I wonder if that's to spread the light more, which would help.
Marco:
But still, the direction is, oh, yeah, look at that.
John:
Someone says it's pronounced Fresnel, but I will have you know that I looked it up.
John:
And both pronunciations are valid according to Wikipedia.
John:
And as we know, Wikipedia never contains any errors.
John:
nope now is that let's see I'm looking at my iPhone 5 yeah the 5 flash does not look like that at least from eye distance I am not a macro lens but I think you're right I think that is new I think that will help because just having a little like white LED you know probably doesn't have a great spread pattern for the light and now they're taking it more seriously like what can we do in this limited amount of space we can put a little lens on it so that's pretty good
Marco:
Yeah, I think that could be good.
Marco:
Again, it's one of those things that I don't think it's going to really meaningfully make you able to use the flash in a lot of cases where you couldn't before and have the pictures look good.
Marco:
I think this will just make the pictures look a little bit better when you have to use the flash.
John:
But this is a key... I think this is a key feature because...
John:
This gigantic, vast majority of people who use phones do not follow Marco's advice, don't know about Marco's advice, and will just always use whatever the thing does automatically.
John:
And don't care.
John:
Yeah, they're taking a picture of their friends in dark rooms.
John:
And if this can make their pictures look better, it's like the fingerprint thing.
John:
It's such a huge win for all the people who never used any security at all.
John:
Maybe if the team that does Chrome security was considering this feature, they'd say, well, fingerprint is not as good as a password, therefore we shouldn't include it because it gives a false sense of security.
John:
I think we should probably also go through the few handful of things that we know are going to be true about this fingerprint thing and why it doesn't matter.
John:
Like, you will be able to spoof it.
John:
Jailbreakers will get the little fingerprint signature things out of that chip somehow, and none of that matters.
John:
because it's not you know and passcodes are also more secure uh not four digit passcodes obviously but like you know a big long one or password would be more secure but i think none of that matters because this is not an attempt to heighten the maximum possible security of the iphone this is an attempt to heighten the average security of iphones in use and i think if it works it will definitely do that oh yeah definitely
Casey:
Yeah, what I'm curious to see is, is it possible to have the fingerprint scanning in addition to a passcode to have arguably two-factor security, which in big corporate jobs can make or break your ability to use things?
Casey:
services that you want to use so for example a lot of vpns that you need to get on for a corporate environment they might require like an rsi an rsid or in addition to a password or something along those lines and i wonder if there will be a way that you can have the fingerprint in addition to some sort of passcode thus you have two-factor security and thus you can do all these things you want to do on your corporate network
John:
Yeah, they didn't mention that, and I'm guessing the reason they didn't mention that is even... I mean, obviously, it is possible, but even if you can enable that feature in the OS, the pitch for the fingerprint thing is get all those people who aren't using a passcode to use something.
John:
The pitch is not, let's double up security, because that would be the worst way to advertise the fingerprint thing would be to pitch it as a...
John:
as a heightening of maximum possible security.
John:
Because, you know, I mean, even though with the two-factor, it maybe would help with that.
John:
I think it's so important to pitch this as a casual convenience for people who don't want to enter code.
John:
And I'm one of those people.
John:
Like, I have never had a passcode in any of my iOS devices.
John:
And, in fact, when I connected one of my iOS devices in the past to my work's VPN, and the VPN or the Exchange server or something in the stack there required that I put a passcode on my thing, I immediately disconnected from it and said, well, never doing that again.
John:
Exactly.
John:
I'm never going to enter a passcode, but I will try this fingerprint thing if it works, if I ever get a device that has a fingerprint scanner in it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Marco:
Do you think this is going to filter down into the iPod Touch and the iPad?
John:
Yeah, like 10 years or something.
John:
No, I don't know.
John:
The iPad will get it.
John:
I don't see why they would leave it out of the iPad.
John:
It's so much bigger.
John:
The top-end iPad will surely have the A7.
John:
The only reason not to would be some crazy segmentation.
John:
It doesn't even make sense to me.
John:
I don't see why it wouldn't be on the top-end iPads.
John:
The iPod Touch, of course, Apple doesn't care about that.
John:
This is an S year, and an S year is the iPad Touch gets screwed.
John:
We'll wait until next year.
Marco:
I am curious to see what happens with the iPad this fall.
Marco:
Because it seems like most of the time, the iPhone is Apple's big thing for the year.
Marco:
And it's the event that most people watch.
Marco:
It's the one that breaks all the live streaming or live blogging things.
Marco:
It's the highest profile event they have of the year.
Marco:
But they started with it this year.
Marco:
And there's still a whole lot of products to announce that are very likely to be coming out in the next few months.
Casey:
i wonder if you know how quickly are we all going to forget about how unsurprising this was once we see the other product unveilings yeah i don't know i'm not sure what i'm still processing like the whole event um i watched the video and i have some thoughts on that that we should get to at some point but i i'm i'm a little disappointed and this has been said a lot that that so much was known i am very enthusiastic about the camera
Casey:
I'm very enthusiastic that the thumbprint scanner seems to work as great as it does.
Casey:
Obviously, we'll all find out whenever we get them.
Casey:
I'm super disappointed that there's not going to be pre-orders on the 5S because it is our year in the Liss household to get a new phone, and I'm very excited.
Casey:
But I have an actual J-O-B job, so I can't just blow off work on a Friday and wait in line for hours and hours, not that I'd probably want to anyway.
Casey:
So now I've got to just suffer the...
John:
unbelievable tragedy of not having my 5s on launch day yeah it's a probably a good bet that the uh the 5s will be supply constrained yeah which means we won't have them for a long time it might not be that long but like you know they're gonna they're gonna sell out not because it's wildly popular though it may be but merely because this is the first device ever to have the a7 in it and presumably that's the the gating factor
Marco:
Yeah, and Gruber wrote about this in his post about the event, and I think that's spot on, which is that splitting up the phone line like this and making the old iPhone, or at least the old iPhone core, making that the new mainstream model,
Marco:
allows them to do things like, remember there were all the rumors they were having trouble with in-cell touch and getting good yields on that.
Marco:
Things like Retina iPads and stuff like that.
Marco:
Like all the big, bold, forward-looking supply decisions or component decisions that can severely limit yields and limit supply and make that a big problem.
Marco:
They can now start doing that because the highest-end device is no longer the mainstream device.
Marco:
That's true of iPads and iPhones now.
Marco:
And I think that's actually a good move.
John:
Presumably they're getting... I don't know if they're making more money, but if the most popular phone turns out to be the 5C, they've been making that phone for a while now, and their costs of manufacture must be down, even if they hadn't gone to plastic, which they also did.
John:
Of course, they also lowered the price as well, but I wonder if the smile on Tim Cook's face was an expression of the fact that
John:
we're going to sell a ton of five C's and they actually might have higher, you know, profit margins for us than the original five did, which would be an amazing thing where like, uh, they sell the same phone a year later and they drive down the cost of manufacture so much that actually gives you bigger profit margins than your previous top end phone.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And they need that.
Marco:
Wall Street's been picking on them a lot recently.
Marco:
And a lot of it is just temporary and unfounded.
Marco:
But it's also pretty obvious that their margins are going down slowly over time because these markets are getting more competitive, especially price-wise, especially in tablets.
Marco:
And so their margins are just getting smaller and smaller.
Marco:
The iPad, they used to be able to sell these things for like $600 or $700 to the mass market.
Marco:
And now they're selling the $300 iPad Mini and...
Marco:
Who knows what's going to happen there this fall?
Marco:
I think they need something like the 5C.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it's a brilliant move.
Marco:
It's a brilliant product, and it's a brilliant launch to do this.
Marco:
I bet you're right.
Marco:
I bet their margin is substantially better on it.
Marco:
They're also now selling first-party cases again.
Marco:
You cannot discount how significant that is.
Marco:
If they...
Marco:
Let's say they make $200 or $300.
Marco:
I don't know what the profit margin is usually on an iPhone.
Marco:
It's something like that, I think.
Marco:
Let's say $200.
Marco:
If they're also selling you a $40 case to 60% or 50% of the people who buy the phone, which I think is probably fair, that's really good.
Marco:
They made a killing off the bumpers for the iPhone 4 and 4S.
Marco:
I think they're going to make a killing on these cases too.
Marco:
That's just so much money.
John:
They probably still make more money from the, you know, made for iPhone certification program because they get a cut of every single, you know, other case manufacturer's profit.
John:
So the cumulative total of their license fees for the made for iPhone product seal or whatever thing they have going there.
John:
still is going to dwarf their own things.
John:
But they're probably like, hey, if we can make a product with 90% margins, even if it's only 90% of $40 or $70, let's do that because it can't hurt.
John:
The other thing on the 5C margins is if you think back to the earning calls, before the iPad mini came out, they said, you know, our margins are going to be decreasing, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then the mini came out and it made sense.
John:
It's like, okay, that's why your margins are decreasing because you know you're going to sell a ton of these minis and they cost less money.
John:
and you know you don't make as much money in each one of those as you were making on the previous ipad so there you go but that don't recall a similar warning about uh margins or at least not one to such a degree uh before the 5c announcement and i think it's because they feel like they can maintain like they're probably going to go down a little bit but it's not going to be as dramatic a drop as it was when they released the ipad mini
John:
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
Casey:
And I certainly did not put two and two together, but you make a very good point.
Casey:
And it certainly seems to me that the 5C is a play to continue to make a tremendous amount of money from people who maybe like what would if you if the 5C didn't exist, what would they be fine just buying just a regular iPhone 5 and probably doing so begrudgingly because it's not new and shiny.
Casey:
So I'm two thumbs up for the 5C in principle from a from a business perspective.
Casey:
I don't
Casey:
personally see why I would want one because it's older tech.
Casey:
And there's a few things in the 5S that I still think we should talk about that are also very interesting.
Casey:
But from a business perspective, it seems like a killer deal.
John:
We were talking last show, I think, about how are you going to differentiate the two?
John:
We were talking about a 5C envy, like, boy, the 5C looks really cool, and it feels nice in your hand, and it comes in colors.
John:
What can they do to the boring old little black, gray, white, monolith, iPhone 5-looking thing to make it an object of desire for anyone?
John:
Gold.
John:
Yeah, besides gold.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, although that probably is a factor there.
John:
And we got the answer.
John:
And the answer was the fingerprint thing, which we knew.
John:
And Apple's second part is emphasizing, you know, plain old fashioned computing power.
John:
Like that was their pitch to people.
John:
It's got a fingerprint thing and it's twice as fast.
John:
And the combination of those two, they hope, is enough to securely grab all the people who got to have the latest, greatest thing and to make us forget about the colorful, more comfortable, nicely curved 5C.
Casey:
Yeah, Stephen Hackett in the chat said, I talked to several semi-nerds who said they were thinking about, quote, upgrading to the 5C from the 5.
Casey:
That's the power of colors in marketing.
Casey:
And I think that's dead on.
Marco:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
I mean, you cannot underestimate the importance of things like color and appearance and newness for something like this, for most products, really, but especially for something like this, where people are kind of, you know, there's a fast upgrade cycle relative to most electronic products, and it's very much a personal item.
Marco:
It's always with you.
Marco:
People always try to personalize it with cases and stuff like that, and so to have something visibly very new and different...
Marco:
Especially something that's so visually different from what came before it.
Marco:
I think that's really valuable, and a lot of people are going to want that, even who already have iPhone 5s.
John:
And I've been on the bandwagon for a long time of, like, Apple needs to make a new...
John:
upgrade the phone line to be more than just one phone to make a new, varied thing.
John:
And it's like, why would they make it new?
John:
Why wouldn't they just keep selling the old one?
John:
They've got all the parts.
John:
They know how to make the old one just fine.
John:
And I've always said, I think you can make a better phone if you start, not from scratch, but
John:
Make a purpose-built phone that you know you're going to sell for less money.
John:
And people say, well, what could they do?
John:
Why don't they just keep selling a phone?
John:
Well, you know, Apple has shown what they can do.
John:
What can you do?
John:
You can stop using aluminum.
John:
You can use plastic.
John:
It's cheaper, right?
John:
You can make the battery a little bit bigger.
John:
You can put it in a nicer camera.
John:
You can give it colors to differentiate it.
John:
And...
John:
You know, we're right.
John:
Technology-wise, there's a slightly bigger battery.
John:
It's probably not going to make that much of a difference.
John:
And no one's going to notice that the front camera is a little bit better or anything.
John:
But everyone will notice the lower price, which, you know, the plastic helped derive.
John:
And everyone will notice the different shape and color.
John:
And it's such a dramatically different product, sales, marketing, and performance-wise, like market performance-wise, than the 5, even though it is like 99.9% just a plain old iPhone 5.
John:
And this is what I was talking about, and the fact that, of course, they can sell it for $100 less for the bottom-end model.
John:
So I'm glad to see they went through with it.
John:
I still think there's more diversification possible, but one step at a time.
John:
This is a good step in the right direction.
John:
Definitely.
Casey:
Do you want to tell us about something awesome?
Casey:
Then I'd like to get nerdy about the A7 for a few minutes.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
Do you mean the Audi or the Apple CPU?
Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to MailRoute for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, so during the event, they talked a lot about the A7, which is Apple's new system on a chip.
Marco:
I believe it's pronounced SOC.
Casey:
Like NAS.
Casey:
No, anyway.
Casey:
So they talked a lot about how it's 64-bit, and I'd like to explore that a little bit.
Casey:
And they also talked...
Casey:
about how it's a different instruction set, and I believe during the keynote they also talked about there being more registers, which is what's really interesting to me.
Casey:
Yeah, twice as many.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
So let me start with the 64-bit piece.
Casey:
So it's been a long time since I've taken computer hardware courses and things of that nature, but...
Casey:
I'm trying to grasp why that's a big deal today.
Casey:
I'm guessing that it's important for multimedia applications, such as moving data for images around and things of that nature.
Casey:
But if you take the very shallow view, if you're not addressing more than four gigs of memory, why does this matter?
Casey:
And I'm kind of looking to you, John, to fill us all in.
John:
The reaction to this, I was kind of disappointed in the nerd reaction to this because as far as I can tell, and I did watch the video plus all the live vlogs, Apple never said that the A7 is twice as fast as the A6 because it's 64-bit.
John:
And every single thing I saw from nerds was like...
John:
64-bit doesn't make it faster.
John:
64-bit is not twice as fast.
John:
Of course it's not.
John:
They never said it was.
John:
Who's saying it was?
John:
Like, everyone just set up that straw man and just beat it to death over the course of the whole day.
John:
And I know regular people are confused and they think 64 is twice as big as 32 or whatever.
John:
But, you know, we're all nerds here.
John:
We know 64-bit doesn't make it twice as fast.
John:
Like, I mean, if anyone was alive during the Nintendo 64 era, you learned that when you were eight years old or however old you were when the N64 came out.
John:
uh so that was that was disappointing because i because i don't think it was bashing on anything that apple said apple said it was 64 bit apple said it was twice as fast but i don't think they drew any sort of line dotted or otherwise between those two things uh so that's that's issue one uh and by the way the reason people for people who don't know the tech details the reason that's uh people were beating up on that straw man is because all other things being equal 64 bit
John:
CPUs are slower than 32-bit because all your pointers are 64-bit, and if all other things are equal, that means your instruction and data caches are the same size, and now they may be the same size, but now you've got to store 64-bit pointers instead of 32, so now you have more cache pressure.
John:
It's not memory bandwidth for getting instructions to and from.
John:
Things get bigger in 64-bit, and unless you increase everything else, which, of course, regular 64-bit chips usually do, but again, all other things being exactly equal, 64-bit is actually slower than 32.
John:
And when you make a real 64-bit chip, they know that you have more data to move around, and they make the caches bigger, and they make the buses wider, and they tweak things and do all this stuff.
John:
So in the end, it can end up being a wash, but you're not getting twice as much performance out of it unless other things are different.
John:
And the reason there might be some misinformation floating around about this is that...
John:
In real live CPU architectures, there have been cases where 64-bit gives you a boost that has nothing to do with 64-bit directly.
John:
So for example, x86, the 32-bit instruction set on Intel's chips, is ancient and crappy and disgusting.
John:
And when AMD created a 64-bit extension of that instruction set, it says, now it's our chance to get rid of some of the crappy stuff, and let's make instructions that are nicer.
John:
And so 64-bit Intel chips that use the x86-64 instruction set from AMD...
John:
got like a 15% speed boost, not because they were 64-bit, but merely because the 64-bit instruction set can do less stupid-ass backward things.
John:
And so you'd want to use the 64-bit instruction set because you got access to more registers because the old x86, the IA32 architecture, was like register-starved by modern standards.
John:
And they made instructions that could execute faster on the way modern chips are designed and everything like that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
64-bit Intel chips were faster than 32-bit ones, but not because they were 64-bit, merely because the 64-bit transition gave the designers a chance to update their thinking.
John:
That could be the case in the ARM architecture as well.
John:
Maybe they got a couple percentage speed boosts of saying, okay, well, a lot of these ARM things were made back in the day when we were designing really tiny chips, and smartphones were just a glimmer in our eye.
John:
Now is our chance with this transition from the 32-bit to 64-bit
John:
to revisit some of those assumptions and maybe make an instruction set that's more tailored to modern, you know, hardware capabilities.
John:
And maybe we'll get, like, a couple percent here and there speed boost from that.
John:
That's still not where you're getting your double performance from.
John:
And that, I think, is the place where people are still scratching their heads.
John:
It's like, okay, well, you know, anyone in the know, like, you know, Antec or whatever says, okay, Apple says twice as fast.
John:
If we take them at their word, there has to be some explanation of that.
John:
Higher clock speed, you know, a larger amount of, you know, instructions per clock, you know, extracting more instruction parallelism with bigger, you know, windows, more rename registers, you know, like...
John:
All the typical things that you do with any CPU, making the pipeline longer and cranking up, we don't know what they did because Apple didn't tell us.
John:
All they did was show us a chart.
John:
So once the CPU guys get their hands on this thing, they will tell us, is it actually twice as fast, under what conditions, and how did they do it?
John:
And the answer of how they did it is not going to be they made it 64-bit.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And some of the things you said, I think are absolutely true in this case, specifically by moving to a new version of the ARM architecture.
Casey:
So based on a little bit of reading I did before the show, accidental, it seems as though they moved to ARM V8.
Casey:
And I found a blog post that has a couple of great links, which I put in the chat a moment ago.
Casey:
And it talks about some of the changes that were made.
Casey:
Now, I think the speed increase...
Casey:
to me probably comes from more registers, but we can talk about that in a second.
Casey:
But some of the things they did were they made all of the instructions exactly 32 bits.
Casey:
And so instructions are always the exact same size.
Casey:
They added a crud load of registers, like I said, and they did change the instruction set, just like you said, John, in order to simplify it and get rid of some of the cruft that they didn't want anymore.
Casey:
So if the A7 really is using ARM V8, then that could explain a lot of these differences.
John:
That's not going to give you double performance, though.
John:
Adding double the amount of registers is not going to double your performance.
John:
And none of those things you listed are going to double.
John:
If you're going to get a doubling, it has to be...
John:
more execution units, bigger execution window, higher clock speed, maybe longer pipeline to get that.
John:
You don't get double performance from those things.
John:
You get percentage increases.
John:
You have to do something fundamental, like how many instructions to dispatch per clock?
John:
How high is the clock speed?
John:
Those type of things.
John:
That's where you get your doubling from.
John:
And again, all we have to go on is Apple's claim of doubling.
John:
There may be specific benchmarks in which it really does double, but we need to get this into the hands of someone who's going to do real benchmarks and say, okay, what is the actual increase?
John:
Is it double in SIMD stuff because the SIMD instruction set in 32-bit was crappy and now it's way, way better?
John:
That's easy to get a double win there if you just say, look, you know,
John:
The new SIMD instruction set is way better than it was before.
John:
We have twice as many SIMD registers, and we can address them as 64 bits in addition to 128 bits.
John:
And so now we get an easy doubling on this particular benchmark.
John:
But do you get doubling across the board?
John:
Probably not.
John:
So we'll see.
Casey:
No, I agree.
Casey:
And I think the thing that's interesting to me about the significantly increased, I guess, doubling of the amount of registers is that if you're not familiar, you know, so registers are little bits of memory that are basically on the CPU for all intents and purposes, oftentimes literally.
Casey:
And so if you need to store something somewhere, the quickest and easiest place to store that is in these registers, and then eventually you can move it off into other memory elsewhere.
Casey:
And so having a lot more of these registers makes things, like you said, a lot quicker.
Casey:
Now, how much is a lot?
Casey:
Maybe it's 1%.
Casey:
Maybe it's 10%.
Casey:
I would tend to agree it's probably not, you know, 200%.
Casey:
But I'm curious to see what's going to be made of that.
Casey:
And I'm curious to see, just like you said, what is this really all about deep down inside?
John:
Did you find out if it's really double the number of, you know, code addressable registers or if they're talking about rename registers?
Yeah.
Casey:
I thought it was double the number of registers.
Casey:
Like TP4 in the chat, and this sounds right, 14 to 31 with a hardwired stack pointer and one other special register that I'm forgetting.
John:
Yeah, I looked at that thing and I said that...
John:
I don't know anything about the previous ARM instruction set, and just looking at the slides, assume that you do, but it was like, oh, now the program counter isn't in a register.
John:
I guess it used to be.
John:
Oh, now the stack pointer isn't in a register.
John:
A, stack pointer, and B, yeah, okay, that's good, and a dedicated zero register.
John:
All sorts of things that give me a vague, indirect picture of what the old ARM instruction set in 32Bit used to be like.
John:
compared to the new one i've heard reports from people on twitter that the new that the the 64-bit instruction set for arm looks a lot like mips which was a very sort of classical risk type thing again you know the old instructions the same size you know executing in predictable number of clock cycles and the whole nine yards versus arm which looks kind of weird but those you know power sipping features where things could be small and variable size and stuff like that
Casey:
Yeah, so we'll see what Anon Tech says when they dissect it whenever they get their hands on it.
John:
And another easy way, by the way, before we leave this topic, to get speed boost is to just add a bunch more L1 and L2 cache.
John:
That's a cheap way to... Well, it's not cheap.
John:
Well, you know what I mean, but to win benchmarks.
John:
If it couldn't fit in L2 cache before, but now it can, suddenly you get a double speed up.
John:
It's like, hey, we're twice as fast, provided you use something that fits in cache.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, so any other extraordinarily nerdy bits?
Marco:
I think it's worth looking at a lot of these things.
Marco:
The CPU is one thing.
Marco:
We saw last year when the A6 debuted and it used Apple's new Swift architecture.
Marco:
We saw the beginnings of it there.
Marco:
I think we're seeing Apple do more and more specialized things
Marco:
Maybe not necessarily primarily, but certainly secondarily for the purpose of making it harder to copy or match what they're doing.
Marco:
If you look at a lot of these things, iOS 7 is a total redesign.
Marco:
We talked about this back when it was announced and how a lot of that is going to be...
Marco:
not it's not impossible to copy but harder in certain for certain hardware for certain designs for certain um setups um you look at things like the crazy camera stuff that the camera stuff you can copy because that's just like an app and samsung can bundle their own camera app and uh and and do that but like
Marco:
to do something like the fingerprint unlock of not just the phone but to use fingerprints to uh read or to to um authenticate you to the store to buy things that's going to be one thing like you need a lot of integration down the line to make that happen and i don't know if android's gonna be able to pull that off windows phone could
John:
The cloners can do the crappy clone of that.
John:
Here's the crappy clone of fingerprint unlocking the store.
John:
They make you enter your password, and then they store it off the side somewhere, and then they recognize your fingerprint, and then they get the password out of the little file.
John:
Like, you can do a terrible copy of all these things.
John:
And you say, who would make a terrible copy of Apple's thing?
John:
Hmm.
John:
I don't think they're above like, you know, I mean, doing it the right way.
John:
Yes, it's difficult to copy.
John:
I'm not sure these doing these things to be difficult to copy.
John:
And one instance, when you were saying like the with the OS, it reminds me that Apple, some of Apple's features in iOS 7 are actually difficult for iOS developers to copy.
John:
I'm thinking in particular of like the little transparent things that fuzz out the background that slide up over.
John:
Those are actually very easy to copy interface.
John:
It depends on the context.
John:
I've seen a lot of people in the NDA forums discussing this very issue and saying we'd like to be able to have a way to do that kind of filtering that you do in iOS 7 and then Apple people saying there's not yet a public API for that and then them fighting with each other about why there's not yet a public API for all the things they want to do.
John:
Although you can rip the layer off a toolbar and done.
John:
Yeah, you can do some things, but they're like, basically, you know, you'll see an Apple app that will do something.
John:
You'd say, hey, I'd like to do that same thing in my app.
John:
And you'll find out that there's a public API that does something close to that, but not quite.
John:
And there's no public API to do exactly what they do.
John:
And then you complain.
John:
So and it's not because Apple is obstinate.
John:
It's because, you know, technically speaking, Apple is barely able to do what they're able to do.
John:
And they can't do it in a way that works in a general purpose API.
John:
They can only do it the crazy cheating way that they have to do it, you know.
John:
It's true of anything that Apple does.
John:
Like a lot of times Apple gets the APIs first.
John:
Like I think even Cortex and like boring things like that, you know, Apple gets them first.
John:
They're in Apple's apps first.
John:
You don't get them.
John:
They're private APIs.
John:
And in the Mac days, it's like, well, you could, you know, figure it out and use them anyway, but at your own risk.
John:
But in iOS, it's like, no, you don't get them at all until or unless Apple decides we can make a general purpose API from this that we're going to support forever.
John:
And if they never can, you never get the API.
John:
But in the meantime, only Apple apps get it or the OS gets it.
Marco:
Thank you.
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Casey:
All right, so I realize there's another bit of nerdery we should probably talk about, which is the M7.
Marco:
Wait, did I miss a BMW announcement?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Somebody joked, I don't remember who it was now, that Apple's come out with the M7 and BMW's come out with the i8.
Casey:
So things are totally backwards now.
Casey:
So we should talk about this M7, which is, I'm going to call it, and I'll probably wrongly call it a coprocessor, but it's kind of like a second chip.
Casey:
that sits there and apparently deals with the accelerometer and I believe the GPS and a bunch of other motion-related things.
Casey:
And the implication, but not statement to my knowledge, was that it will also log a lot of these events so that the A7 doesn't have to power on and handle them and deal with them.
Casey:
And then it can potentially fish all these log entries off to some app, like a Fitbit app or something like that.
Casey:
And it seems like a very interesting play in order to enable some really interesting, more biometric data on the phone.
Casey:
And somebody might have been one of you guys pointed out, you know, I wonder if this M7 is going to end up in some other kind of device eventually, like maybe a watch or something like that.
Casey:
Do you guys have any thoughts on this?
John:
Yeah, that's the obvious move for the M7.
John:
And also, by the way, for the A7.
John:
I mean, the buzz about both of these things is other devices that they could appear.
John:
And M7, obviously, if Apple makes something wearable, yeah, you'll be seeing that chip again.
John:
or the marketing label for that chip anyway.
John:
And the A7, 64-bit ARM chip.
John:
Everyone is always like, well, we're going to put an ARM in the MacBook Air and get 50 hours of battery life out of it or some crazy thing.
John:
Well, the Airs are already up to a ridiculous amount of battery life with Intel chips in it.
John:
So I'm not entirely convinced that there's any need in particular to bring the ARM to the Air because I think...
John:
Intel's coming from the other direction, and they haven't yet met in the middle.
John:
The A7 isn't as fast as current MacBook Air CPUs, and the current MacBook Air CPUs are nowhere as power efficient as the A7.
John:
But they're converging on a middle point.
John:
And wherever they hit each other, look at where that point is and decide, is this a viable, you know, can we make a viable Mac with this amount of processing power?
John:
Because if you can't, then, you know, there's no point in enduring the pain and fat binaries of trying to make an ARM-based Mac.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But the M7 in some other device that you wear seems like a slam dunk.
Casey:
We should also point out that it enables... They say it enables things like knowing the difference between you driving and walking.
Casey:
And I'm not really clear why we didn't already know that by way of the GPS or something power-hungry like that.
Casey:
Maybe it's just that it doesn't need something power-hungry to figure this out.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
That presumably will lead to some interesting use cases that I can't fathom.
Casey:
But I think the example I saw was that Apple said when you are getting directions somewhere, let's say you're driving into a metropolitan area and you park your car, but you're not quite where you need to be, then maps will automatically switch from driving directions to walking directions once it sees that you've slowed down to the point of walking.
Casey:
So things like that are pretty cool.
John:
Although if you're at a red light, that would kind of suck.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Well, I can tell whether you're in the car from maybe the vibrations of the butt massaging.
Marco:
It doesn't vibrate.
John:
Yeah.
John:
These are not features of the M7, obviously.
John:
These are like APIs that Apple, you know, core motion APIs that Apple's going to expose.
John:
Like you said, Casey, all the chip is doing is
John:
Being really low power and writing a bunch of information out to someplace that when this whole system comes back up, they can read and interpret.
John:
And the thing that's reading and interpreting them is code that Apple writes that then provide APIs to figure this stuff out.
John:
The M7 itself is just, you know, not...
John:
The impressive thing is that it exists, not the implementation of it, because it's probably, you know, hey, this tiny chip has, I don't even know if it's a separate chip, Apple presents it as such, but for all we know, it could be on the same package somewhere.
John:
Sits there and does one job and does it well and doesn't have to involve the CPU, and its whole job is to be there and write stuff down so when the CPU wakes up,
John:
They could say, oh, I don't know what was happening because I was asleep, but that guy over there knows.
John:
Let me get the list of everything that happened and let me run a whole bunch of software that Apple wrote to grind over that data to figure out, okay, driving, doing this or whatever.
John:
And, of course, if everything's turned on at the same time, then they're working in concert.
John:
But the key feature is you walk around with your phone in your pocket and you grab your phone, take it out, open your fitness tracker, and it immediately wakes up, reads all the historical data, and tells you how many steps you've taken.
Marco:
Well, and it's also maybe doing a lot of that in hardware or in very, very lightweight software.
Marco:
Because, you know, so far what we've had, even with the very first iPhone, we had the accelerometer, but the data you get from it is raw.
Marco:
It's just like the current, you know, the current motion acceleration being put on the phone in three axes, X, Y, Z. That's it.
Marco:
And then when they added the gyroscope, then you could get things like the current phone alignment or attitude, they call it, I think.
Marco:
which is the angle in space the phone currently is, and then the compass doesn't work.
Marco:
So have you ever had a compass that worked?
Marco:
I haven't.
John:
You have to move it into figure-eight pattern.
John:
I'm not sure if you know that.
John:
It never works.
John:
That's an elaborate troll by someone inside Apple to see if they can make people take their phones and wave them around.
Marco:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
So before, even – and Apple has improved the API.
Marco:
I believe iOS 5, was it, at CoreMotion?
Marco:
It might have even been 6.
Marco:
But they improved the API to make this a little bit easier, but you still had to deal with raw data for the most part in software, in the full user space code that you were writing.
Marco:
And so if they moved some of that down, which it sounds like the M7, regardless of what its hardware implementation is, it's something that parses all that raw data for you in some kind of extremely low power state.
Marco:
And so rather than saying, here's all of the data from 60 hertz for the last six hours, here's this tremendous array of floats that you have to deal with and figure out yourself, they can shrink that down with some kind of heuristics that are hopefully very lightweight to say, all right, if you want to know how many steps the user took, just register for number of steps, tell us when to start and when to stop, and we'll give you what was there in the middle.
Marco:
And if that's really what it does, that's a massive, not only time saver for developers, but if they do it right, if they've implemented this in low-level hardware that's very low power, which it sounds like that was the idea, then this is a whole new class of possibilities that before would have just been not only way too power hungry, but you wouldn't be able to do them unless you were using GPS constantly because you wouldn't be able to run in the background that long.
John:
It's kind of analogous to FS events in Mac OS X, where you have something that's trying to keep track of everything that happens to the file system, but it's just too much data.
John:
So it massively compresses stuff, it coalesces similar events and periods of time, and it summarizes, and then it jams it all into a log.
John:
So yeah, this little thing has to be doing, if only for compression purposes, some interpretation of the data, because you can't store that recorded data for an hour's worth of walking, and if it really was at 60 hertz, that's just too much data to be putting somewhere.
John:
So I have to imagine that it's doing some sort of coalescing and compressing and summarization and interpretation, or even just like lowering the sample rate, because seriously, you know, your sample rate doesn't need to be 60 hertz to tell when people are walking.
John:
And then anything up the chain could further massage the data.
John:
But I think it's probably like a storage issue in terms of...
John:
Who decides to summarize data?
John:
Who does the motion smoothing?
John:
Who does the interpretation?
John:
And they must be doing something down there in the M7, because otherwise it would just be filling up this giant buffer full of stuff.
Casey:
You know, it's funny you bring up coalescing.
Casey:
I was thinking and I was going to say a minute ago that this is almost like the year of coalescing for Apple because, you know, we had the timer coalescing in OS X Mavericks and now we have this motion coalescing.
Casey:
And I know Federico is going to be very happy about that.
Casey:
So in any case, anything else on either of the bits of hardware?
John:
uh the the 5c case we were talking about oh yes about it you know if they make if they make this no not that well i mean i mean first before we get to the thing with the holes in it uh the plastic back of it you know it being curved and more comfortable we all saw from the pictures but what we can't see in the pictures is what kind of material is that and i mentioned uh last time that if they made it out of a material that's more grippy and less slippery uh
John:
than the glass back or the metal thing, then maybe you wouldn't even need a case on it.
John:
And again, because they're coming in different colors, who's going to buy a colorful phone and slap a case on it completely covering the color part?
John:
So Apple's answer was, we're going to make it out of a super hard, super glossy material, so forget about it being remotely squishy.
John:
And we're going to sell our own case made of silicone, my old favorite case material, because it is squishy.
John:
And they're going to solve the problem of, okay, why am I going to put a case over my colored phone by just punching a whole bunch of holes in it?
John:
Which, when I first saw that holes, my first reaction was, yeah, I guess that's one solution to making the case color continue to matter.
John:
But I also wondered, like, are they doing that for heat reasons or something?
John:
Because it just seems like, I mean, it doesn't really make sense that they'd be doing it for heat reasons over only half of the phone or something.
John:
But who the hell?
John:
Otherwise, they can't be doing it for heat reasons because...
John:
There's going to be cases without holes in them, so it's got to be able to deal with that anyway.
John:
But it is definitely odd, and I love the fact in all of Apple's videos when they showed this case with the holes in it, no FCC information and no iPhone text was on the back of the phones.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's that's real convenient for your ads, but the real phones have that text there and it looks awkward.
Casey:
That's not true.
Casey:
One of the one of the videos definitely had it because I backed it.
Casey:
I was watching.
Casey:
I want to say it might have been the keynote.
Casey:
I was watching it on my TV and I thought to myself, oh, look, it doesn't have the HON or whatever it is that shows through.
Casey:
And I actually backed up, got off my butt, walked up to the TV because my eyes are terrible.
Casey:
And sure enough, it was there.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure this was the keynote.
John:
They had some videos with it without, with the text, not there very clearly because they were super zoomed in, which is a total cheat and not something I would expect from Apple because they're supposed to design, like they idealize things.
John:
Sure.
John:
Like you have 3d renders or whatever the heck they're doing, or, you know, completely massage to look real, but it shouldn't be like a racing stuff.
John:
You shouldn't erase the word iPhone because it actually is in the back of the phone and you shouldn't erase the FCC things because they actually are there.
John:
So that's a shame, and that's strange, and...
John:
i don't like i haven't felt any of these things in my hand but i'm kind of disappointed that it's not squishy but on the other hand i found from you know from my tpu case which is very shiny and very very smooth it's not textured like you know like silicone would be it's not fuzzy or anything like that it's still supply surprisingly grippy because you get a big contact patch it's kind of like slicks on a race car you actually do get a big contact patch as long as that contact patch is not wet uh like slicks in the rain which are bad uh
John:
then you actually do get some grippiness.
John:
But in terms of resting on the curved arm of a sofa with that shiny back thing, that's not so great.
John:
So I'm kind of disappointing they didn't go with any kind of squishy back, but I kind of understand it as well because if I thought about it for more than a couple minutes, I would have said, how can they make the back of a phone squishy?
John:
It would have to have a complete rigid sort of...
John:
inner skeletal structure over which they stretch the squishy stuff and instead they didn't do that they have the antenna which is rigid but it's only around the edge and the whole back its rigidity comes from the fact they're using the super hard plastic
Casey:
Yeah, and the case, to go back a step, the case, I cannot believe that Apple did that.
Casey:
And if this were any other manufacturer that had done that, the internet would have blown up 10 times worse than it did about how stupid they are.
Casey:
They don't pay attention to detail.
Casey:
This is ridiculous.
Casey:
This is why Apple's so much better than everyone else.
Casey:
And yet here it is, Apple letting Hun show through.
Casey:
I just can't believe it.
John:
It's French.
John:
It's N-O-N.
John:
To the top of the age, it's chopped off.
John:
is the french people saying no apple that's you can't do that i mean like realistically speaking though like it's a judgment call of saying like apple knows that no one except for super nerds are not going to notice this but all the super nerds rightfully flipped out about it and will continue to flip out about it and i don't think the super nerds would buy that case because i even ignore for now the the terrible cutting off of the words i think it's just ugly anyway with the little circles over half
Marco:
of the surface do you think anybody do you think even one person who is who is currently complaining about the han slash non uh do you think even one of them was actually planning on buying one of these right like if that wasn't there like well i would buy that ugly case if it wasn't for how it cut off the letters but i don't i don't you won't even be buying the 5c
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Like the 5C, I've seen – I think people who have held it to say it feels impressive and if you like the color, a lot of people, especially people who customize their phone, you can make an interesting phone like the yellow one.
John:
The great thing about the 5C is they all have black faces, right?
Yeah.
John:
I think that's right.
John:
I'm pretty sure they all have black faces.
John:
So it's kind of – it's an interesting combination of like you can have a black and yellow phone if you're like, you know, if you're a Georgia Tech fan or something.
John:
I only know those colors because my wife went there.
John:
But, you know, whatever your school colors are.
John:
And the cases with the holes in them, though I find it ugly, the color combinations do give you a lot of options to sort of accessorize.
John:
And I think Apple is sort of giving the people what they want.
John:
They want, you know –
John:
Sometimes they want cases with rhinestones on them, and they can still get that in the aftermarket.
John:
But Apple is giving many more options than just black and white, and I think it's going to be a net win for them, except for the lint collection thing, because I think even normal people will notice after a while the amount of lint it's going to collect in those little circles.
Marco:
I can confirm, yes, they are indeed all black faceplates in the 5CE, which is weird because they offer a white back color.
John:
I like that one.
John:
I like the white back plate with the black front.
John:
I think that's a cool combination.
Marco:
i'm i'm thinking this this is the first time that i've been tempted to get the white phone not the 5c but the 5s um because of ios 7 no no the other the real oh all right okay the white one's still there yeah the silverback white yeah
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
This has been the first time I've attempted to get that because – Wait, are we talking about gorillas?
Marco:
I'm just going to cut that out and pretend like you didn't say it.
Marco:
You know, because iOS 7 is so white and light.
Marco:
And, like, I'm finding – as I'm designing my own app and as I'm seeing what Apple has done with their apps –
Marco:
The default before was everything was just dark, black, textured.
Marco:
It was like you were sitting in a bar.
Marco:
Everything's black and leather and everything like that.
Marco:
Well, a weird bar.
Marco:
I'll stop there, but it's...
Marco:
By the way, John, in this picture on the 5C site, the top of the N is clearly not fully cut off, and it looks like Han.
Marco:
Anyway, iOS 7, I think white is in style now.
Marco:
Before, people would joke that it was for women or something else, probably horribly insensitive, but...
Marco:
It's just the style now.
Marco:
Most of the iPods ever sold, or the original ones at least, those were all white.
Marco:
I think there are eras where this is going to be in fashion, and this is one of them.
Marco:
Having everything be white, my whole app design is white-based because iOS 7 is white-based, and it looks really good.
Marco:
It's kind of refreshing.
Marco:
It makes it look newer.
Marco:
It makes it look nice and modern.
Marco:
And to put all that on a phone with a black faceplate, I think, kind of weakens it.
Marco:
or doesn't take advantage of the new style.
John:
I think you'll have to see it in action to make that... I mean, you're seeing it in action, but I haven't yet, because I fully plan to put a black background, as I always have on all my iOS devices, on iOS 7.
Marco:
You know, I did that.
Marco:
I did that for my first few... Probably my first month using it.
Marco:
I had a solid black background, and I turned off the parallax and everything, and just solid black background.
Marco:
I did that, but it...
Marco:
It was okay, and it worked for a while, but then when I was picking colors and an icon for my app, I decided, let me put the phone in a more stock configuration so I could see how most people are likely to see the app on the home screen.
Marco:
And so I switched over to a stone graphite-looking wallpaper.
Marco:
It's like a stone texture.
Marco:
There was that, and I was like, you know, I'll live with it light for a while, and now I like it light.
Marco:
Now I feel like going back to all black would be kind of retro in a bad way, like just kind of going backwards in time, like going back and using a Sega Saturn.
Casey:
You know, I have never wanted a white iPhone.
Casey:
I do not understand the appeal, but if that's what makes you happy, then feel free.
Casey:
And I should add, the last time I said I just didn't understand the appeal of something, it was a BMW, and we all saw how that ended up.
Marco:
Don't forget Apple products before that.
Casey:
And Apple products before that.
Casey:
So yeah, I'm sure I'm doomed to drive a 911 with my white iPhone sometime in the future.
Casey:
But regardless, I don't know.
Casey:
I never understood the white iPhone thing personally.
Casey:
John, if you had an iPhone, what would you have?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I've always liked how the white ones look as devices, especially being an old-school Apple guy.
John:
I really love the people who found a tiny rainbow-colored Apple sticker and stuck it on the back of their white iPhone.
John:
Because back in the days of the Snow White design language of the MacBooks,
John:
SE30, my favorite old Mac, and the 2CI and all those things, whether it was like Apple Platinum with slats in it and everything, if you had envisioned a futuristic Apple phone, it would be platinum or white and have a rainbow-colored Apple logo on it.
John:
So I think those things look great, except for, as I mentioned on the past show, the fact that, okay, it's not a piece of art.
John:
It's actually a device with a screen that you have to use, and the white on that screen is never going to be, or not never, but certainly with current LCD technologies, is not as white as actual real live white, right?
John:
reflective surface that's next to it so in any kind of bright light i think a white ios device makes the screen look worse and that's why i always go for black face plate like that's that's why i think the 5c is so great because they all have black face plates even the one with the white background so you can get and really the 5c colors do not appeal to me except for maybe the yellow if i was really into something yellow like a sports team or something uh
John:
But the white one is the only one that could be considered neutral, but it still has a black face.
John:
So thumbs up.
John:
So fashion wise, although I do like most of the white devices and I do like the silver back on that thing, pragmatically, I think I'd still prefer a black face to make the screen look better in more conditions.
Marco:
I will say, too, I have a white iPad Mini because after buying the iPhone 5 in its very dark black color last year, I learned after having it and getting it that the black isn't that good.
Marco:
It's too dark.
Marco:
I've said that before on this show.
Marco:
I'm not going to go into it again.
Marco:
But the iPhone 5's black was just too dark, and I don't think it looks good.
Marco:
And so when the iPad Mini took the exact same design options, basically, I said, no way I'm getting that again.
Marco:
I'll get the white.
Marco:
And I like it.
Marco:
It looks really nice.
Marco:
I got the little red, crappy Apple cover with it, and it looks really good.
Marco:
It's a nice pairing.
Marco:
And I think certainly on future iPads I'll do that.
Marco:
The issue you raised, John, I have it out here with me right now, the issue you raised about the white of the faceplate not matching the color or the brightness of the white on the screen is
Marco:
That's a very real issue.
Marco:
Right now I'm sitting in a room painted red at night lit by a warm temperature LED bulb.
Marco:
So the light in the room is very yellowish.
Marco:
And the faceplate very clearly looks yellowish, like a warm tint.
Marco:
And the screen, of course, is relatively neutral.
Marco:
And so the screen is a very bright, cool, more closer to 5000K kind of white.
Marco:
So there is that imbalance right now, but it doesn't look bad.
Marco:
It doesn't look great if you look at it and pay attention to it.
Marco:
Most of the time you don't pay attention to it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Once you get out into sunlight, that backlight is just totally overpowered.
John:
And you thought, boy, this thing was so bright, it was blinding me when I was inside my house or laying in my bed or whatever at night.
John:
But once you go out into bright sunlight, it is totally overpowered.
John:
And, you know, that type of underpowered backlight in the face of bright light of any kind, indoors or outdoors...
John:
really benefits from having from being next to black it needs all the help it can get because colors look bright you know white will look brighter when it's next to a dark color so it's an optical illusion saying like i will make my screen look brighter to you because it's next to a black thing when you put it next to a white thing it's the worst possible condition it's it's highlighting all the weaknesses of the screen i mean i i agree that it's a real issue but i disagree how much it's actually noticeable in practice
Casey:
Well, you're not John Syracuse.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
It also depends on when you use your thing most.
John:
If you use it mostly indoors or use it mostly in dim conditions, then it doesn't matter.
John:
And it doesn't bother a lot of people.
John:
But for me, it bothers me because I feel like it's just – it also distracts me visually.
John:
Like my eyes would be drawn more to the outer.
John:
I just want a black frame.
John:
It's like getting a TV.
John:
I want a black frame around my TV.
John:
as well you don't want a white or a shiny frame or anything that's going to draw your eye around the tv because the screen is supposed to be the star not the other thing and the only way i would go with the white face is when we finally get the screen technology there really is like they could they could match it so that the white is exactly the same some kind of combination of reflective emissive screen uh in some distant future that really does look the same then fine get the whole thing white
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on hardware?
Casey:
I'd like to talk about the actual presentation, the keynote briefly, but anything else on the hardware?
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I feel like Tim did not do a particularly good job.
Casey:
He stumbled a lot and seemed really nervous, which is weird because usually he's extremely not nervous.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And he's very deliberate, which is something I wish I was a little better with.
Casey:
He'll oftentimes leave long pauses if he's thinking something through or perhaps trying to remember the next line.
Casey:
I don't know how scripted these things are.
Casey:
And he's always very deliberate.
Casey:
And I felt like this time he didn't feel that way.
Casey:
He felt like – it seemed as though he felt like he was out of his element.
Casey:
And conversely, Craig Federici, who we've said for a while now has actually turned into one heck of a great presenter –
Casey:
He, as he did in the WWDC this year, he absolutely killed it again.
Casey:
And I was very confused by Tim's apparent confusion.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Did you guys notice that as well?
Casey:
Am I the only one?
John:
Well, I mean, he did call it... He called...
John:
Did he call Keynote a spreadsheet or Pages a spreadsheet?
John:
Did he call something a spreadsheet?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, Schiller called Firewire, Ports, Thunderbolt, or vice versa.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I know.
John:
But, like, that's – like, people misspeak.
John:
We, of all people, know better than anyone.
John:
The vibe I got from him was that he seemed like –
John:
giddy and happy like that he was excited that these products were going to be released and did that affect his performance he maybe he was you know he didn't care he's just happy boy I can't wait to these things you know he seemed he seemed very smiley to me like he was really happy about these products really happy that they're going to be out there and
John:
He wasn't, like, the serious, deliberate Tim Cook that we'd seen before explaining, like, you know, how only Apple could do this and what Apple's philosophy is or whatever, but I think that was okay.
John:
Like, you know, he's more of an emcee in these things anyway, and, you know, Schiller was Schiller, and Federici did his thing perfectly well.
John:
So I don't mind his...
John:
his stumbling and, and missteps or whatever, because I think it was not, I didn't get the nervous vibe from, I didn't get the, uh, I'm really nervous.
John:
Cause I'm worried about what we're going to announce.
John:
I got the, I'm excited about these products and maybe I'll trip over myself in the excitement.
Casey:
And what'd you think, Marco?
Marco:
Well, honestly, I skipped most of Tim's sections when I was watching the video.
Marco:
Well, just because Tim doesn't really say a lot that's new or interesting, especially the beginning half.
Marco:
I skipped over that entire thing.
Marco:
I just went right to the product introduction because I was watching the live blogs.
Marco:
I knew roughly what he said and what he was talking about, and that was all I really needed from this event.
Marco:
So I can't really comment on that, except that...
Marco:
When you're watching the keynote videos on your computer, if you open it up in QuickTime, you get a 2x control.
Marco:
You get a little speed control that you can adjust.
Marco:
I always put Tim on 2 or 3x because he just speaks so slowly.
Marco:
I have to get through it in a reasonable amount of time.
Marco:
So I really can't judge for sure in this case because I skipped most of what he said, and the parts I didn't skip I played very quickly because I was bored.
Marco:
Usually I liked him a little bit more.
Marco:
I just think in this keynote there wasn't a whole lot for him to say that was very interesting.
Marco:
I don't think it's necessarily his fault.
Marco:
I just think there wasn't a whole lot for him to say.
Marco:
There wasn't a whole lot for any of them to say, really.
Marco:
Here's some new iPhones.
Marco:
They're really good in some ways and really unsurprising and boring in others.
Marco:
And it's almost all exactly what you all expect.
Marco:
You've all already seen these things on rumor sites.
Marco:
Here you go.
Marco:
There wasn't a whole lot of room in this event to really get that interesting by the presenters.
John:
And they didn't drag it out.
John:
It was a pretty tidy presentation.
John:
It was pretty much right on the hour.
John:
So I think it was fine.
John:
There was no showmanship required for this.
John:
They weren't revealing iOS 7 for the first time.
John:
There's a time and a place for that type of thing, and this was just more of let it go out the door.
John:
Although, I mean, Steve Jobs would have been...
John:
flipping out about how much was known about these things ahead of time.
John:
But it seems like the current crew was like, supply chain's going to leak.
John:
It's going to happen.
John:
What can we do?
John:
I can't tell if people are still seething back there or if it was all like Jobs' secrecy personality that, you know... Tim said, oh, we're doubling down on secrecy, and people make fun of that.
John:
It was like, well, good job, because we knew everything about these phones, basically.
John:
But I'm assuming what he meant was like...
John:
Whatever new product category thing that they release, I'm assuming we won't have complete video of people playing with that ahead of time.
John:
In fact, we don't even know what they're doing.
John:
Are they making a TV set or are they not?
John:
Are they making a watch?
John:
Are they making a nose ring?
John:
We don't know.
John:
That type of secrecy...
John:
uh so so far assuming any of those things have any reality behind them so far apple really has doubled down in secrecy because we have no idea what they're doing in in tv that we haven't already seen and we have no idea if they're making a watch it's just a bunch of rumors now as we get closer we'll see if they really hold but i'm not ready to say that his doubling down secrecy thing was you know a total failure because i think that apple could still potentially have secrets that it's kept 100 like we nothing from those things we just have we have
Marco:
speculation and rumors we have no blurry pictures we have no videos of people playing with cases or anything like that yeah we and yeah we don't even know what they're doing you're right like it's like even when the ipad was about to come out everyone had pretty good you know pretty good rumors saying apple is doing a tablet specifically like it is a tablet it will run ios and it will come out roughly around this time and those those all ended up being correct um you know it it
Marco:
If they are indeed very close to launching a new category, which we don't really know, but if they're really close to launching a new product category, yeah, you're right, they've done a heck of a job keeping it secret.
Marco:
There's also a massive number of important product details that...
Marco:
We know are coming soon.
Marco:
One of the biggest is whether the iPad mini will have a Retina version this fall.
Marco:
That's a major product detail, and we don't know the answer to that yet.
Marco:
Everyone's all over the place with the predictions and the rumors and the BS analysts and all these things.
Marco:
So there's that.
Marco:
There's whether there's going to be Retina displays, Retina iMacs, what the heck's happening to the MacBook Pro line, when those are going to be updated, and what they will have in them.
Marco:
The Mac Pro release, when it's actually going to happen.
John:
Well, the Mac Pro itself, they...
John:
Totally kept that one under wraps.
John:
We didn't even know if they were going to discontinue the computer line.
John:
Nobody had spy shots of a black garbage can.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
So that's why I feel like the phone is always an exception, and the iPad a little bit.
Marco:
It's an exception because they just have to make so many of these things.
Marco:
And for them to say, you can buy this next week, they...
Marco:
had to have been producing them for a while already.
Marco:
And they had to have been testing and producing parts for a while before that.
Marco:
And they're making these things in such ridiculous quantities.
Marco:
So many suppliers are involved.
Marco:
That's why the phones always leak and a little bit of the iPads too.
Marco:
That's why they always leak in advance now because they're just making so many of them.
Marco:
Too many people are involved and they can't control them all.
Marco:
The other products, the Macs in particular, just don't sell anywhere near those kind of volumes.
Marco:
And so it's easier for them to keep those things secret.
Marco:
And certainly a new product category probably falls under that same protection.
Casey:
Well, depending on what it is, I suppose.
Casey:
If it's something that's as universally desired as an iPhone, then they're going to need to make a gazillion of those too.
Casey:
Although I guess it's a harder thing to bet on before you've even announced it to anyone.
Marco:
Right, and maybe the very first version won't be that successful.
Marco:
I mean, the very first iPad was not a massive blockbuster hit.
Marco:
It sold more than anyone thought, but it didn't sell as much as the iPhone.
Marco:
It still doesn't.
John:
Yeah, I mean, the iPhone is the best example.
John:
Like the very first version of the iPhone was, you know, not selling that many.
John:
It was a slow ramp up.
John:
So whatever thing they come out with, this watch or television, they'll have time to ramp up manufacturing.
John:
And as someone in the chat room said, the easy way to do it is what they did with the iPhone, which is like, you know,
John:
secrecy behind the iPhone, no one had any idea what it was going to look like, but we all know they were making a phone, uh, just to announce it six months before it ships, like they did with the Mac pro, like it did with the iPhone.
John:
I don't remember for six months or whatever it was, because then you haven't started ramping manufacturing yet.
John:
And there aren't a million of these things shipping around the world and you have a big lead time.
John:
Uh, and they did it with the iPhone because, you know, the FCC, uh,
John:
Clearing the FCC in the U.S.
John:
would require pictures of the device and everything like that, so it was going to be spoiled anyway, so they had to pre-announce it, which is fine.
John:
And the Mac Pro, they pre-announced it because they'd already made it wait God knows how long, and we were going to flip out.
John:
And so they were like, all right, here you go.
John:
We're actually making one.
John:
You can't have it now, but don't worry.
John:
It's not dead, and they needed to do that messaging-wise.
John:
And for new category product, if there's some sort of FCC stuff, maybe they have to pre-announce that too, but I don't know if there is going to.
John:
I don't know what the requirements are for,
John:
fitness trackery things that you wear and or for television sets i don't think you have to i don't think either one of those things is probably going to have its own lte 3g whatever connection so they're probably okay all right you want to wrap it up
Casey:
Yeah, that's fine, unless you wanted to do some late follow-up, which we can always save for the next show.
John:
Follow-up comes at the front of the show, Casey.
Casey:
That's why it was late follow-up, John.
John:
You can't just put a modifier in a word and change it.
John:
That works.
Casey:
Yes, we should end the show.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, MailRoute and Squarespace, and we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
We have the more important issue in the tail end here.
John:
Mark, could you see the two links I put in the Skype chat?
Marco:
Let's see.
Marco:
Are we talking about the Han versus Nan?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
See, there's enough of that H-shaft, I guess.
Marco:
There's enough of that...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
What's the typographical term?
John:
The yellow and green one shows more of the stem of the H than there is a stem on the N. But the white one shows pretty much equal amounts of stem above the H and the N. And as we know, this case is not like a precision aligned.
John:
That amount of motion can clearly be, you know, from just shifting the case around a little bit.
John:
So I still say...
John:
NON, because the amount of extra stem that you're going to get above the N is so minuscule and may actually be non-existent.
John:
So NON is my take, and the white one supports my theory.
John:
They're super zoomed in, probably artificially rendered.
John:
Yellow and green one does show a tiny bit more stem on that H.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I think... Take out Photoshop and draw a horizontal line across the NON and the white one, you'll see.
Marco:
I would say the white one is a shadow.
Marco:
It's a shadow covering that part, and then we'll see.
John:
Well, now you have to buy one with a case.
John:
There's no way I'm buying that.
John:
It's silicone, so it stretches, so you can just move your thumb and say, see, now it's covering it.
John:
Now it's not.
John:
Now it's covering it.
Casey:
That's gracious.
Casey:
By the way, the real-time follow-up, Marco, I think you're thinking of Ascender.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Apparently.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I know descenders are the things that break the baseline, but yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Anyway, shaft is better.
Marco:
You want to talk about this USB 3.0 micro connector?
Marco:
I actually have one of these things.
John:
Yeah, I have one too.
John:
It's on my bus powered one terabyte drive.
John:
Yeah, I have a card reader that uses... Yeah, why is this a thing right now?
Casey:
We've known about this.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I guess people who either don't buy a lot of accessories or don't keep up with the umpteen different USB connectors think this is a new thing.
John:
The story was, this will be coming to your Android phone, which may or may not be true and whatever, and maybe it's more embarrassing because it's such a...
John:
relatively large connector for a phone uh but it's got one thing over regular you know the the regular whatever it is type b i think the the flat rectangular one is that at least it's externally asymmetrical at least we can give it that
Marco:
But, I mean, for mine, because it's on a card reader, I actually use it frequently.
Marco:
And it is really hard to insert or move that cable.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's just mine and maybe the socket on my card reader isn't that well made.
Marco:
But it's really kind of a bit to plug that in.
Marco:
And I always think I'm breaking it.
Marco:
It's that bad.
John:
Yeah, these are no lightning connectors.
John:
The lightning connector is genius both because it can be plugged in either way and there's no wrong way, and also because it inverts the normal relationship of connectors, which is a bent piece of metal into a hollow cylinder and then change the shape of that.
John:
So it's got this flimsy metal wall surrounding this internal thing where the pins are, where lightning says, no, we're going to make a solid metal
John:
and put our contacts on top of it.
John:
And anything with the flimsy metal wall, especially as you shrink it down, it just becomes ridiculous because lots of micro USB connectors are externally asymmetrical, but just barely.
John:
You have to squint at it to get the little trapezoid.
John:
Some of them are just microscopic.
John:
My new camera has whatever the super teeny tiny USB thing is, and it's trapezoid shaped, but you can't barely feel it with your fingers, and you have to really squint to see it, and you have to make sure you put it in the right way, and then you're shoving...
John:
a little you know ring of metal into another ring of flimsy metal it's much more satisfying to stick the solid metal lightning connector to something so apple's connector is way better here
Marco:
Yeah, I agree that the USB micro connector is, even the 2.0 one is awful.
Marco:
I mean, it's on almost every camera these days.
Marco:
And it's on every Kindle.
Marco:
It's on a lot of devices now.
Marco:
And yeah, I always have to look very carefully to see what direction it goes in.
Marco:
And I get it wrong half the time.
Marco:
It's almost, or even more, I would say it's almost as hard to plug in as a VGA cable.
Marco:
like those i i always got vga cables backwards even i would look and then i would i would like not quite see it right and still try to plug it in backwards oh vga never bothered me but dvi to this day i always get backwards every single time yeah dvi you got to look for the cross or well if it's not an i cable and you have like the dash but you know even then it's i still mess that up too although nothing i mean usb regular usb a cables those mess me up like because they're ridiculous too
John:
Yeah, I've said on past shows, if it's your job to design a connector, there are very few axes on which you can excel.
John:
And you would think, it's like, I want to be a good connector designer.
John:
Like, what do you even have to think about except these exact very issues?
John:
There's not an entire world of possibilities.
John:
There's reliability, there's fulfilling the spec, and there's...
John:
I've got to plug it in and unplug it all the time.
John:
Don't make that a pain in the butt like this.
John:
That's what your job is.
John:
You're a connector designer.
John:
I don't know how these people sleep at night.
John:
I sure did a good job designing that connector, didn't I?
John:
How?
John:
How are you measuring yourself?
John:
How are you deciding that you did a good job?
John:
I hope they suffer their entire lives just getting their connections wrong and fumbling with their cameras and not being able to... Then they must say, boy, I suck at my job.
Marco:
I'm sure that's what they're all going through.
Marco:
Keep in mind, Apple has two massive luxuries that most connector designers don't.
Marco:
Well, I don't know how big this field is, but they have two huge luxuries.
Marco:
They don't have to worry that much about cost, and they can completely break backwards compatibility.
Marco:
And a third, I guess, is they're kind of a dictatorship in that they don't have to work on some committee and please 16 different companies who are all trying to make the same connectors as you for the next 10 years and do all that stuff.
Marco:
They can just decree, this is what's best.
Marco:
We're going to do it.
Marco:
We don't care what you think, and we don't care what it costs you.
Marco:
And that's it.
John:
Yeah, cost has to be the biggest one.
John:
But I still think at this point...
John:
you should still throw in the criteria of oh and by the way it should be impossible to put in the wrong way and very clear which way it's supposed to go and you should like your job is to make that also make it cheap like yes make it reliable make it a good connector to use and also make it cheap and i don't think that's outside the realm of possibility granted maybe you can't make something as you know beautiful and precious as the lightning connector but surely we can do better than these crazy usb things like you know
John:
Even if you just, I mean, like the cost thing is like, oh, we can't have it be reversible because that makes it so much more expensive for the devices because now they have to handle it being both ways.
John:
I think we can overcome that.
John:
I think the universe of Ethernet cables being able to detect whether it's a crossover cable or not, like we crossed that hurdle.
John:
Now we don't have to deal with, you know, even the super cheap crappy PCs have that.
John:
So it's possible.
John:
It can be done.
John:
It's just takes just a little tiny bit of effort.
John:
We can make USB connectors that are impossible to put in the wrong way without breaking the bank.
John:
They're being penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Casey:
Oh, how was the review?
Casey:
Any update?
John:
I was so excited.
John:
Today, through Twitter, someone directed me to the dev forums, which gave me a solution to getting offline dictation working.
John:
You had to go there to get that working?
John:
I didn't have to.
John:
I was directed there by a helpful person on Twitter.
John:
You wouldn't think, okay, I've got DP7, but this feature doesn't work.
John:
Let me search the dev forum to see if there's a way I can make it work.
John:
And sure enough, there was.
John:
I'm assuming it was a bad updater or something, but it just involved making a symlink to a framework or something.
John:
Because it's an XPC thing, and the XPC thing couldn't find the thing that it was executing.
John:
So you just make a symlink, and then it works suddenly.
John:
So I was happy to see that this is some sort of packaging and installer problem and not a technical problem.
John:
The code was there.
John:
The code actually does work.
John:
It's just that the operating system couldn't find it because it wasn't in the right place.
Casey:
Fun.
Casey:
So does it work?
John:
It does.
John:
And I used it and I wrote up that little section, which was like three paragraphs.
John:
Nice.
Casey:
So it's being edited?
Casey:
It's done being edited?
John:
They finished editing what they had, but of course they haven't edited my three paragraphs on dictation.
John:
And we're still running tests, battery tests.
John:
I would like to get tests on the GM and put those in their review and not say, okay, well, on DP7.
John:
Although...
John:
I don't think things have been varying that much between these builds.
John:
So if we can't get the GM version, it won't be the end of the world to run tests against.
John:
I think the numbers that we get on whatever the second to last build are, we're probably going to be pretty accurate.
John:
But yeah, I would like a ship date and a GM.
John:
That's what I would like.
John:
And not have it be like iOS 7 where it's eight days from now.
Marco:
Well, it sounds like you're kind of ready for that, though.
John:
I mean, as much as you're probably going to be.
John:
No, I've got to send these things to the iBook store.
John:
I don't know what the turnaround time is because I have to assume I'm going to be rejected first.
John:
So there's the one turnaround time where you send it and they reject it for some crazy reason.
John:
And if you're lucky, the second time it will go.
John:
This will be the first time I'm sending any books to the iBook store.
John:
So I assume that I will be rejected the first time.
John:
I should have looked at my notes during the thing because I wrote stuff in them.
John:
I forgot to mention the storage shift.
John:
Oh, the lack of a storage shift?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Come on, man.
John:
But anyway, I just need a storage shift.
John:
Seriously, how much does an additional 16 gigs of flash cost these days?
John:
Not $100.
John:
Well, that's their margins.
John:
I know.
John:
But even Apple shifts eventually.
John:
Eventually, they stop shipping standard Macs coming with 2 gigs of RAM, and they change it to 4.
John:
That happens.
John:
It has to happen eventually.
John:
What is this going to be, 10 years from now?
John:
It's like, well, it comes in 16, 32, and 64.
John:
No.
John:
No.
I like it.
Casey:
I think we have to put this rant in the show.
John:
No, I'll do a better one next week.
John:
I'll still be pissed about this.
John:
I don't know why isn't everyone else pissed about this.