1.0 Was Just Speed
John:
I heard an interview with Jon Hamm.
John:
Marco, do you know who that is?
John:
Yeah, Mad Men.
John:
Yeah, Don Draper.
John:
Yay!
John:
Good.
John:
And that's how I learned that he was going to be in the sequel to Top Gun.
Casey:
Oh my.
John:
Wait, they're making it in Top Gun?
Casey:
Yes.
John:
Did you ever see Top Gun?
John:
I hate that I'm saying it like Top Gear because of Casey.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I've seen like bits and pieces.
Marco:
I don't know if I've actually sat through the whole thing.
Marco:
All right, that's a no.
John:
That's fine.
John:
Sorry.
John:
I thought there was a chance.
John:
You knew who Jon Hamm was.
John:
I was like, this is it.
John:
This is going to be Marco's day.
John:
He's going to have seen a movie.
John:
He's going to have seen like an incredibly popular, influential movie that everyone has seen.
John:
But no.
Marco:
Oh, I had a movie-related accomplishment last night.
Marco:
Well, I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe accomplishment is too strong a word.
Marco:
Did you watch The Godfather?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I saw that a long time ago, although I never saw two or three.
Marco:
I know don't see three, but see two.
Marco:
Anyway, last night, for the first time ever, a movie that I searched for via Siri on the Apple TV was available to watch for free on Amazon Prime Video.
Marco:
It's the first time that's ever happened.
Marco:
Unfortunately, it was a terrible movie.
Casey:
Ryan Jones wrote in to point out that this is the existing 15-inch laptop, right?
Casey:
It's actually 15.4 inches, which means that the mythical 16-inch laptop that we had talked about last week would be between six-tenths of an inch and 1.1 inches bigger than what we have today, which is really not that much.
Casey:
And I think Ryan was making this point in the context of, would that be a completely different thing, this mythical 16-inch laptop?
Casey:
Or would that be just slotted in as a replacement for the 15?
John:
Yep.
John:
This was an important point.
John:
I'm sorry if we missed it in the chat room.
John:
I assume someone in the chat room made this point, but I didn't see it and we didn't bring it up.
John:
And that's a big difference.
John:
That half inch is a big difference or that almost half inch is a big difference.
John:
Someone else did a calculation of saying basically if the bezels were the same size as the iPad Pro, like if you assume like you have to have some bezel, otherwise like the screen's going to shatter if you tap it on the, you know, you put those size bezels on it, you could fit a 16.21 inch screen into the existing quote unquote 15 inch case.
John:
So now I'm back to Marco's side of believing.
John:
If it's like a 16-inch screen, they can fit it in.
John:
They don't need to make the laptop bigger.
John:
If it's 16.5, it won't fit.
John:
They'll have to make it bigger, and then I start to wonder if you're pressing up against a different size class.
John:
But it's way closer than I thought it was, so...
John:
Maybe that's what they're doing.
John:
Especially since the rumor wasn't like, we know exactly the screen size.
John:
It waffled.
John:
It was like, well, it's 16 to 16.5 inch, which I don't know what that means.
John:
But if it's 16 inch, it'll definitely fit.
Marco:
I would also say like, if they do end up making it a little bit bigger,
Marco:
It's the 15-inch.
Marco:
No one is buying the 15-inch because it's small.
Marco:
People are buying the 15-inch because they want the biggest screen possible and the most power possible.
Marco:
So I understand.
Marco:
I wouldn't recommend that they make a change that would increase the size of, say, the 12-inch because the whole point of that is to be as small as possible.
Marco:
But if the largest laptop in the lineup gets a half-inch larger, like case-wise, I don't think anyone's really going to care because people who care that much about minor size differences are not buying that model to begin with.
John:
Of course, if they make it any bigger, and I would argue at its current size, it just makes the keyboard more ridiculous looking.
John:
It just makes this tiny keyboard floating in the middle of this expansive metal look ridiculous.
John:
There's so much more room for keys, but
John:
baby stops let's get keys that work reliably first and then maybe we can talk to them but they can do both at once you know i don't think it's too they can do both at once there's room for more keys you can put a real inverted t you could put function keys in home and end in there you could do all sorts of things but no uniformity
John:
wins out above all.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
Maybe we'll be shocked.
John:
Can you imagine that?
John:
Can you imagine if they made new laptops with a new reliable keyboard with native resolution with more ports on them and the big one had a bigger keyboard?
John:
We would all die from shock.
John:
Invert a T, please.
John:
We would all die.
John:
That's never going to happen, but we would just die from shock if they basically did
John:
what every other large PC-style laptop does.
John:
We have to pick from that menu, and I guess what we're all picking is reliable keyboard, bigger screen, maybe with better res.
Marco:
I'm not even asking for what the PC makers do with their keyboards.
Marco:
A lot of them will have numpads on the side because they'll be really huge aircraft carrier-sized laptops.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
I'm not even asking for that.
Marco:
All I want is what they used to do, which is like keyboards that worked.
Marco:
A forward delete button.
John:
Yeah, like a little home and end shoved in the corner.
John:
So you don't have to hit like a FN right and left arrow and FN delete for forward delete.
Marco:
See, I'm not even asking for that.
Marco:
No one's asking for that except you.
John:
All we want is just reliable keyboards like you used to make.
John:
If they actually made it a half an inch bigger, it just looks so ridiculous to have the same keyboard that's in the 12 inch.
Marco:
be floating there in the middle of the 15 inch but i think they would it would mostly be it would basically be the size of the old one like the footprint of the old one just thinner like that's roughly what it would be if these at these sizes so i don't like again like i don't think we're asking for a lot here and again if that model gets bigger and the other ones mostly don't that's fine like no one is no one with the 15 inch is saying you know what my biggest problem with this laptop is that it's a quarter inch too wide or too narrow like that's
Marco:
That doesn't matter at all for that model.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I have conflicting opinions about this.
Casey:
I rocked 15-inch machines for the last, I don't know, six years of my old professional career.
Casey:
And I liked that size a lot until I didn't like it anymore.
Casey:
It is big.
Casey:
I don't know how those people did 17s.
Casey:
I know they loved them, but I don't know how they did it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
I suspect that this is a real thing, though, and we'll see more about this at some point or another.
Marco:
God, I can't wait.
Marco:
I can't wait.
Marco:
Even though I don't use a laptop full-time, I'm so excited and nervous about whatever the next laptop is because the stakes are so high to me.
Marco:
Because for three years now, we've had...
Marco:
really compromised controversial unreliable laptops and so we know that like you know a the status quo is bad uh b we we hear rumblings now that something new is going to come out soon c we know that if apple takes a direction that we don't like it takes like three to five years for them to change that direction
Marco:
So the stakes are pretty high on these.
Marco:
And it does seem like they're getting a lot better at designing new Macs in the last couple of years.
Marco:
You know, see the iMac Pro and the Mac Mini.
Marco:
So it seems like they're lined up to do something really great here.
Marco:
But I also don't want to get my hopes up because it's still Apple and they still only ever give me about two-thirds of what I actually want at best.
Marco:
And so I'm nervous, but...
Marco:
I'm fundamentally excited and a little bit optimistic that I think this time they're going to get it a lot more right than they did last time.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
We have talked on and off in the past about how there's a real lack of USB-C hubs and things of that nature, but one of you has discovered there is not one, but two bus-powered Thunderbolt 3 hubs.
Casey:
I know that is not exactly the same as USB-C, but...
Marco:
So last episode, I went in this rant about how very few hubs, USB-C hubs, are actually Thunderbolt certified and are Thunderbolt hubs.
Marco:
They're almost all USB-C things that are like $40 to $100, and they have the USB and USB-A and card readers and network and HDMI ports on them.
Marco:
And almost everyone I know who has a USB-C MacBook of some kind has at least one of these like multi-port dongle things.
Marco:
And they're all unreliable pieces of garbage.
Marco:
And what I've been told is that Thunderbolt certified things are way more reliable.
Marco:
So last episode, I said, as far as I could tell, there weren't any Thunderbolt 3 hubs that were like portable and powered by the port itself, like all these little USB-C things that we all use.
Marco:
Almost every other one I could find that was actually Thunderbolt certified was like a desktop hub that required external power, was much bigger, usually in like the $300 range.
Marco:
So I was saying, does anybody make anything that is small, that is bus powered, but is Thunderbolt instead of USB-C?
Marco:
And it turns out I was able to find at least three different companies selling what appears to be the same thing, just with very minor branding and port configuration differences.
Marco:
So Elgato sells it.
Marco:
So does Caldigit.
Marco:
And there was one other one I forget that I was able to find.
Marco:
They're all about $100.
Marco:
And the weird thing, and the reason you can tell that I think it's the same thing being sold by three or four different brands, is they all have the exact same port configuration, and it's slightly odd.
Marco:
It is two either DisplayPort or HDMI ports, one USB-A port, and Ethernet.
Marco:
So it's kind of a weird combination that I don't think a lot of people need.
Marco:
And so some of them have both of them as DisplayPort.
Marco:
Some of them have both of them as HDMI.
Marco:
And some of them have one DisplayPort, one HDMI on those two.
Marco:
And then it's always one USB port and one Ethernet port.
Marco:
So I'm glad this exists.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing I'm looking for.
Marco:
Not a very mainstream port configuration and not one that I would really use.
Marco:
But
Marco:
There should be more of these.
Marco:
There should be more things like this.
Marco:
And I don't know if this is actually reliable or not.
Marco:
I mean, I don't have one, but to get Thunderbolt certification requires quite a large degree of testing from either Intel or Apple.
Marco:
It bodes well for the quality of the product if it actually has that certification compared to the USB hubs, which I think, you know, anybody can just tape some metal together and call it USB and that's it.
Marco:
So please don't email us about that.
Marco:
I know there's probably some kind of certification.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
The results speak for themselves.
Marco:
Anyway, so I'm glad these exist.
Marco:
I hope there are more of them soon because this appears to be the only one and it's not very useful.
Casey:
So Marco, did you order any of these or you're not really interested?
Marco:
Well, because I don't I would only use probably the USB port.
Marco:
Like I even stopped bringing any kind of wired Ethernet adapters with me on trips and stuff with my laptop because I haven't actually needed wired Ethernet on a trip.
Marco:
probably for three or four years at least.
Marco:
What I really need out of my USB-C dongles is USB-A ports and card readers.
Marco:
And that's why almost every one of the USB-C dongles out there has those things in it.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Again, I hope more Thunderbolt certified docks and hubs come out soon because they are supposed to be way more reliable and way higher quality than the USB-C ones.
Marco:
And we desperately need that in this ecosystem.
Casey:
So speaking of the confusion between USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, there are a lot of very perturbed nerds about what's been going on with USB 3.2.
Casey:
And I have tried very hard, gentlemen, to summon up a little bit of interest in this, and I just really don't care.
Casey:
So John, tell me about this.
John:
This is just based on last episode.
John:
I forget how it came up.
John:
We were talking about the USB standard and how they had all sorts of wacky names.
John:
What was the context of this?
John:
Anyone remember?
John:
I don't.
John:
I think it was something else that had weird names.
John:
And I think I said it's kind of like USB when they had those very confusing names when they made the bus faster.
John:
And what I was referring to was the
John:
I don't know how many years ago now, USB standards starting from 1.0 and up from there.
John:
Oh, I know what it was.
John:
It was HDMI cables we were talking about.
John:
HDMI has these marketing names, but they also have spec version numbers, but you can't buy a cable based on a spec version number because the spec version number contains a bunch of different parts that you don't have to have went all of.
John:
Anyway, it was very confusing.
John:
The names that I was thinking of are when USB...
John:
went above 1.0 and eventually had version 1.1 and 2 and 3 they had marketing names for the different speeds and they were called and i'm not going to put them in any particular order so you can just try to figure out which one was you know fast medium slow they were called high speed super speed and full speed and if you're keeping track if you're keeping track super speed is one word and both high speed and full speed are two words so which one of those is the fastest
Marco:
Hmm.
John:
All right.
Marco:
So I already know what 3.0 is.
Marco:
Is one of those 1.1?
Marco:
Because 1.1 was like 1.1.0 was almost nowhere.
Marco:
Like almost nothing ever used USB 1.0.
John:
And 1.0 was just speed.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So did 1.1... Because 1.1 was the one that actually was in most computers in the early days of USB.
Marco:
And then... So I'm going to guess 2.0 is...
Marco:
wait what was the first one fast full speed high speed and super speed all right so i'm gonna say 2.0 was high speed yeah what about the other two i know 3.0 is super speed
Marco:
So I guess 1.0 is full speed?
John:
1.1, yeah.
John:
They're dumb names because I think they would be fine if it was just high and super because you could reasonably expect to understand that super is better than high.
John:
But full makes it sound like all the other ones are partial.
John:
and so if you want full speed you should obviously get but this full speed is the slowest one anyway yeah like 1.0 is like beta speed the break-in period speed yeah that's what i was referring to with the confusing hdmi hdmi naming because they have like ultra mega high bandwidth whatever the hell they're called
John:
but since last episode there's been people passing around the new usb standards where the same brilliant people who came up with super speed high speed and full speed have renamed and remapped remapped a bunch of stuff to be even more confusing uh they have made one improvement they basically renamed everything to be super speed followed by a stat like super speed 10 gigabits per second super speed 20 super speed 50 which like okay well there's numbers and they're all called super speed so we can forget about high and full and just
John:
relegate them to the dustbin of history but then they renumbered a bunch of stuff so like everything is uh within 3.2 spec and then there's anyway it's very confusing i don't want to go into all the details uh but the the key points of this is that the usb whatever they are that consortium that sets those standards it's the usb if i forget what if stands for um
John:
continues to be very bad at branding their standards.
John:
There are reasons for it.
John:
It's not like, oh, they're just super bad at their jobs, kind of like the connector, where I argued they actually just were.
John:
It's as simple as that.
John:
They're just bad at their jobs.
John:
Back in hyperbole when I talked about that.
John:
But there are reasons to...
John:
to rebrand and renumber things they are trying to make it a bit more sensible but it is helpful for vendors to be able to say all our new pcs have usb 3.2 ports some of which support a usb 3.2 super speed 2x2 10 gigabits blah blah blah and something you know that you can go into more esoteric detail but you get to rebrand all your ports and they get to update the standard to say oh
John:
All your things have to be USB 3.2.
John:
They can operate at a slower speed, but they have to comply with all the other criteria that we standardized for 3.2 so they're better behaved citizens of the ecosystem.
John:
Just before our showtime, we got a 1,000-word email trying to explain to us how these standards aren't actually as confusing as people are saying they are.
John:
And I think that speaks for itself.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Arash writes in – this is slightly long, but I think it's worth getting the whole thing because it's just preposterous.
Casey:
This is with the context of your Apple ID woes, John, and how ridiculous Apple ID is.
Casey:
Arash writes, I recently moved from Canada to the U.S.
Casey:
for work.
Casey:
I figured I would change my Apple ID region.
Casey:
I went in settings and tried to change it, but it told me that I have to cancel my Apple music subscription before I can do it.
Casey:
I canceled it, but it kept saying the same thing.
Casey:
So I called Apple, and after staying on the line for a bit, someone answered, and he –
Casey:
He or she explained everything, and then the Apple person said there's nothing that they can do.
Casey:
So the Apple person checked with the Next Level Support, and apparently they can cancel Apple Music early.
Casey:
However, the Apple person told Arash that they have to cancel another subscription as well.
Casey:
So Arash looked, and it turns out that they had one subscription for an app, which was $0.99 a year.
Casey:
Well, they canceled that, but apparently that subscription was valid for another six months.
Casey:
And so according to the Apple person, there's nothing they can do about it.
Casey:
And that Arash has to wait six months until the subscription runs out before he or she can change their region for their Apple ID.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so Arash continues to write, I confirmed with disbelief that it's in fact correct.
Casey:
And she, the Apple person, confirmed and suggested that I create a new Apple ID until that expires.
Casey:
So to recap, says Arash, I have to wait six months for a 99 cent a year subscription to end before I can change my Apple ID region.
Casey:
Just well done, guys.
Casey:
Well done, Apple.
Casey:
This is clearly without fault.
Marco:
Yeah, because like with Apple subscriptions, when you cancel them, they don't end immediately.
Marco:
They end at the end of whatever you paid until because you prepay for all subscriptions.
Marco:
So if it's, you know, a dollar a year, when you say subscribe, you pay that dollar right then.
Marco:
And then one year later, it auto renews unless in the meantime, you have, quote, canceled it.
Marco:
But what canceling means is just telling it not to renew at the end of its period.
Marco:
So you can cancel it a day later, but you will have that subscription active for 364 more days, at which point it will just not renew.
Marco:
And at that point, it will stop.
Marco:
So I didn't realize quite how deep this went.
Marco:
But yeah, apparently this goes into their billing systems such that you can't move an Apple ID directly.
Marco:
with any active subscriptions and god i hope they fix that because now that they're pushing so hard into subscriptions as a more mainstream monetization method for apps and they're really promoting it hard in many different ways um stuff like that has to catch up like that i hope this is a problem that gets solved in their back end because stuff like that makes me feel like their back end is like running dos
Marco:
What year is this?
John:
Their back end is running a music store.
John:
That's why it's running.
John:
That's why their entire back end is so screwed up.
John:
Because at the time the iTunes music store was created, and still to this day for lots of media, there is region locking and region specificity and different rights of intellectual property in different regions.
John:
And so just being able to take your Apple ID and change regions is somewhat fraught.
John:
But then they just added to it an actual app store.
John:
on top of the music store back end.
John:
And there's all the things related to that.
John:
And then they added subscriptions on top of that, and it's just a giant house of cards with extremely surprising interactions between the components.
John:
I have follow-up on my Apple ID woes, but I don't think it's particularly interesting.
John:
I also talked about it on other podcasts for a while, but suffice it to say that I'm still learning new and interesting things about the limitations of the Apple ID system and what exactly is preventing me from doing what I want.
John:
The one I think what I expected to happen happened at least once, which is there's something messed up with one of my Apple IDs and someone behind the scenes does a thing and then says, okay, I did a thing, try it now.
John:
That actually happened and worked for one small aspect of the problem that I'm working on.
John:
So I was excited by that because that's all I want to happen.
John:
When I get on a support phone call, I want to be like, look, here's the situation.
John:
Do whatever you have to do on the back end to make it work.
John:
I don't know, you know, you have access to things that I don't have access to.
John:
I almost never want them to say, let me take you through a series of steps that you could have done before you called.
John:
Because I feel like I've exhausted most of the reason.
John:
Sometimes those will work because they have, you know, you wouldn't think this would work, but try this weird combination.
John:
Hey, it worked great and it's a successful call.
John:
But really what I want them to do is find out what's broken in your system and fix it.
John:
Is there something corrupt or unexpected in my data?
John:
Fix that about it that I can't fix from my end?
John:
Just fix it.
John:
Is there a bug in your code?
John:
Fix that.
John:
And so they did that once, and then I got to proceed to continue to do a series of steps, all of which were very surprising to me from the outside.
John:
So I think I am mostly unblocked and on my way.
John:
I haven't completed all the things I wanted to get done, but I don't think I'm currently blocked on anything other than
John:
like the seven day waiting period or something for Apple IDs to get deleted before I can move on to the next step.
John:
So that's where I am with that.
Casey:
Speaking of things that I'm not, I don't think I have too much of a strong opinion about this, but we'll see what happens in a few minutes.
Casey:
Uh, mobile world's con Congress is, was going on over the last few days and,
Casey:
And the star of the show seems to be phones with bendable screens.
Casey:
And there was a great discussion about this.
Casey:
Was it Upgrade this week, I believe, where Mike and Jason talked about there are two different kind of approaches to this.
Casey:
One is where you're kind of folding.
Casey:
The big version of the display is like the inside of a book.
Casey:
And so when you fold it, one of the manufacturers has a second display on the outside.
Marco:
It's the Samsung versus the Huawei approach right now.
Marco:
So the Samsung approach is the screen folds in on itself so that when it's closed, the screen is in and the Huawei one, the screen folds out.
Marco:
So it's kind of like the Samsung one is like the inside of the book is the screen and the Huawei one, like the cover of the book is the screen basically.
Marco:
I personally think the Huawei one with the screen on the outside looks way better from the little bits of these things that we've seen.
Marco:
You do have the issue of, like, the screen is on the outside.
Marco:
So, like, if you set it down on a surface and there's a little bit of sand on that surface, like, there's no way to set it down to avoid grit possibly scratching your screen.
Marco:
With the second problem, that these screens are not glass.
Marco:
They are plastic, which in some ways should be better for durability, but also probably means they will scratch more easily.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of weirdness with foldable phones, but honestly, I am very interested to follow this.
Marco:
Not interested enough to actually buy one of these things, because these are two very first-generation attempts, and there's a whole lot of unknowns.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that I don't care about Android phones at all, and I probably shouldn't even be talking about this, because I'm so out of that world.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
you know that but the the idea of a foldable phone is so like if you would have asked me six months ago if that was coming out in 2019 i would have said you're crazy yeah no way like like we've we've seen at various like ces's and things in the last few years we even more than that we've seen like
Marco:
rollable screens folding screens and they all it's always that kind of thing where like it gets shown off at a trade show with like one concept product that like one manufacturer was able to make one of these things and then it never comes into reality it's never a real product so to have
Marco:
foldable screens actually come into the world in what appears to be usable products, even if they're weird and even if they have weird downsides, like the fact that these are released or going to be released, I guess they aren't out yet, but they're going to be out in the next few months.
Marco:
That is really cool to me.
Marco:
Like just from a technical level, again, I don't actually want these things, but just from like a cool gadget, like I can't believe what technology can do kind of perspective to,
Marco:
That's really cool, and it's very new.
Marco:
That's something that we have not had.
Marco:
It's not just another evolution of something else.
Marco:
This is a totally new thing that technology can now do.
Marco:
And there's going to be lots of applications for flexible, bendable, foldable, rollable, tuckable, screens you can fold into a paper airplane, whatever it is.
Marco:
There's going to be fun stuff with that that we can do.
Marco:
So the main thing I like about this...
Marco:
is for as long as I can remember, like the main problem with phones is we want, in many times in which we are using them, we want the screen to be as big as possible.
Marco:
But we also want a small body to be hand-holdable in one hand a lot of times, and we want it to be able to fit in a pocket.
Marco:
And kind of nearby to this whole struggle and compromise and debate, we have phones versus tablets also.
Marco:
I really enjoy using my iPad quite a lot at home, around the house, and sometimes while traveling, but
Marco:
I also would love it if I didn't need to have an iPad.
Marco:
Wouldn't it be great if a phone could just get a bit bigger?
Marco:
Because ultimately, that's all my iPad is.
Marco:
It's just a bigger phone.
Marco:
It has the same processor as the phones.
Marco:
It has the same software stack.
Marco:
So ultimately, if a phone could just unfold and get bigger...
Marco:
Yeah, it's not going to be as big as my 11-inch iPad Pro, but it could be the same size as an iPad Mini.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, that would negate the need for a tablet at all.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, many people are not having a tablet to begin with because they've made the calculus that a 5-inch phone is better than having two different devices.
Marco:
But if you could have a 5-inch phone that unfolds into an 8-inch tablet...
Marco:
That is awesome to have in one device.
Marco:
Then you don't need a tablet separately.
Marco:
That's huge.
Marco:
That's a huge deal.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, that makes it even easier for their phone to be their only or their primary computer, which is a trend that we've all been moving towards slowly.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Even if these two products that are out today are weird and have things about them that totally suck, it's still super exciting to be moving towards a point and to have taken this very large step towards this direction where you can resolve these two conflicts of –
Marco:
Having to own both a phone and a tablet or wanting both but not being able to have both or not having one with you all the time or whatever, you have that possibly being resolved with this as well as phone sizing being helped out a lot by like you want something pocketable and one-handable but also that can occasionally be as big as possible so that you can browse larger content with it and do more things and everything.
Marco:
If these can do that, even if they have large downsides down the road, like even, you know, suppose, you know, these, these are weird.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Suppose in, you know, two, two to five years we have like good foldable phones and that's actually like a more mainstream choice.
Marco:
I don't think they're ever going to be compromise-free.
Marco:
There's always going to be compromises with this, and maybe the compromise is the screen covers have to be plastic again forever.
Marco:
Maybe the compromise is, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
Your screen just gets scratched a lot more, and that's just a thing that happens.
Marco:
Cases are a huge unknown.
Marco:
How the heck do you put a case on one of these things?
Marco:
That's a big question mark.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Whatever the downsides are, you have these two massive upsides of you have a phone that can be two different sizes whenever you want it to be, and you might not need a tablet anymore.
Marco:
And those are so big.
Marco:
Those are such massive advantages that I'm willing to overlook a whole lot of the weirdness and the downsides and the clumsiness in order to get those.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with you.
Casey:
It's so clear, as you said, that this is the kind of us... We're dipping our toe into the water of foldable phones, right?
Casey:
And it's clear that these are going to be just compromised machines.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I think this is the time at which everyone starts getting grumpy that Apple doesn't seem to be doing anything related to foldable phones, which is almost certainly untrue.
Casey:
But that's what we see is that they're not doing anything.
Casey:
And this is when Apple is at their best in the past is when they kind of sit back and wait.
Casey:
And say, all right, how's this all going to shake out?
Casey:
You know, maybe we don't want to be trailblazing on this one.
Casey:
Maybe we want to see how this goes.
Casey:
And then fast forward a couple of years and suddenly the, you know, well, not a lot of Apple just works anymore.
Casey:
See Apple ID.
Casey:
But, you know, the it just works version of Apple's foldable phone comes out.
Casey:
But this seems like it's an extremely cool idea, and it seems like this has legs, and I'm curious to see where the industry runs with it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, are you excited about it?
John:
This is why we should have more segments on the show where we talk about television screens and television screen tech.
John:
Because, you know, the whole exciting thing with OLED, the fact that you don't need to have a backlight behind it, it can be very thin.
John:
You've seen all those OLED televisions that have a very, very thin portion and then maybe like a thicker portion down below where like the power supply and stuff is.
John:
Uh, it's because all LEDs are bendable.
John:
And, uh, if you're wondering, will I see, when will I see bendable phones?
John:
If you'd watch in CES, uh, yeah, they have all sorts of weird demos and everything.
John:
But this year we, you know, what happens is you get a bunch of tech demos and then eventually you get a products.
John:
This year we have actual products.
John:
Uh, they're selling a roll up television that they sell.
John:
It looks like a sound bar and has a slit in the top and the television rises up out of the slit.
John:
That's not a tech demo.
John:
That's an actual product.
John:
They're going to sell to people.
John:
It's because OLED screens have reached a level of maturity where we can do stuff like that with it.
John:
So that's where you get these bendable phones as well.
John:
The main reason people haven't done bendable phones before this is not because they couldn't make a bendable OLED screen.
John:
It's all the other ancillary concerns.
John:
How do you power it?
John:
How do you deal with the hinge part?
John:
How do you deal with the compromises of product design?
John:
How do you do it in a reasonably affordable price fashion?
John:
And, you know, we're still not there with a reasonable solution, but people are trying stuff out.
John:
That's why Android stuff is interesting, because someone will try every idea.
John:
Like, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.
John:
Like, they have ones, you've seen a bunch of stuff where they have like a phone that goes around your wrist.
John:
It's not bendable, but it's curved, you know, because you can wrap an OLED screen around your wrist.
John:
that's probably not going to catch on either, but try everything and see what sticks.
John:
Um, I, the main thing that I'm interested about these bendable, I've noticed that by bendable screens, not bendable phones, because is it, I mean, obviously if it makes phone calls, I suppose you can call it a phone, but most of these things are bendable tablets because a bendable phone would start the size of a phone and then bend into something half the size of a phone.
John:
These things all start the size of a smallish tablet and bend into the size of a phone.
Um,
John:
But bendable screens in general, what I'm thinking is like, what benefit are we trying to get out of it here?
John:
I can envision some scenarios where the folding and bending they have now might be beneficial.
John:
But kind of like the naked robotic core thing where there's a certain amount of stuff on the outside.
John:
Like basically the argument like taking a case and putting it on a naked robotic core ends up with a thicker phone than if you had built that case into the phone.
John:
And the exchanges, you get more flexibility that if you don't want a case, you don't have to have it and you can pick your own case.
John:
But because there's like the innards of the phone, the outside of the phone, and then the case, you sort of double stack everything.
John:
So with these current phones as they exist or these bendable tablet things, it's basically like a regular device, more or less at regular device thicknesses that has parts inside it and circuit boards and batteries and radios and all that other stuff.
John:
throughout the entire thing and then somewhere in the middle there's a hinge so when you fold it over it is necessarily thicker than you would expect a phone or tablet to be and i think for the current for a current level of technology i'm not sure there is a
John:
situation where you would want to trade width and height for a doubled thickness if the single thickness is roughly the same thickness as current tablets and phones because doubling that makes it pretty big like you could take an iphone 10 and fold it in half and what you would get is my wallet that you two make fun of all the time like yeah it's small it's smaller in width and height but it's kind of thick and like what's easier to put in your pocket something that is an iphone 10 folded in half
John:
So that it is like pretty chunky thick, but smaller in width and height or something that's like this.
John:
I don't know if that is a big trade off.
John:
And to Marco's point, like if you want to go the other direction, say, no, no, I don't, I don't want it to get smaller than a phone.
John:
What I want is a phone that folds out to be tablet size.
John:
Well, you can't make it that big of a tablet, as Marco pointed out, maybe an iPad mini.
John:
And while it's in phone, it's a mighty thick phone.
John:
And, of course, they're very expensive.
John:
Like the Samsung one, I saw it described in a video as basically – it's basically two phones.
John:
If you take two iPhone Xs and connect them with a hinge and make it one continuous screen –
John:
That's basically what it is.
John:
You have twice the battery, but it's also twice the weight and twice the thickness.
John:
And I think the Samsung one also has screens on the outside, too.
John:
So there's the big screen on the inside of them.
John:
When you close it, you can't see the inside screen anymore because it's inside the book, essentially.
John:
But the outsides also have screen on them, so there's no place to escape the screens that are on these things.
John:
And then you have extra screen and extra power and how do you deal with the software.
John:
It's very confusing.
John:
So... And Apple...
John:
Apple has patents on all sorts of bendable screen stuff, and they've been doing bendable screen stuff forever, but Apple doesn't have a product with it yet because they're not ready.
John:
I'm not sure if Apple will ever jump into this, at least for a couple years, but really I feel like what we're working towards is not so much a bendable screen as a situation where...
John:
The screen part is separated from the guts part.
John:
The guts is the battery, the circuit boards, the radios, all that other part.
John:
Because the screen part can be incredibly thin and flexible.
John:
And because it's OLED or similar technologies that don't require a light behind a bunch of things, it emits its own light.
John:
And it can be very thin and very flexible, which is why we can have these things exist anyway.
John:
If you can separate that part from the guts part, then you can get situations where, you know, look at the giant rollable television and imagine a shrunken version where there is the computing part and what comes out from it is a screen that could roll out and extend like a scroll of paper.
John:
And that type of thing, you could like suck that thing back in and now you have something the size and thickness of a pen with a screen that pulls out of it as far out as you want to pull the thing.
John:
We don't have the tech for that yet, but that would be a situation where you're not just taking a phone and trading width and height for thickness.
John:
You are taking something that works as a phone and getting rid of all of the width and most of the... It becomes like a pen.
John:
It's a different form factor entirely.
John:
You could put it in your front pocket of your shirt, right?
John:
That's not the case with like fold your iPhone 10 and a half and shove it in the front pocket of your shirt.
John:
It's just not going to work out that way.
John:
So that's what I'm looking forward to.
John:
But in the meantime, I'm happy to see people experimenting with bendable.
John:
I still think the person who can get the most stuff out from behind the screen is going to win in the bendable thing.
John:
Um, I am concerned about the plastic screen just because anything with that, you're going to bend back and forth a lot is going to like crease and kink.
John:
And if it's made of plastic, you're going to have the ugly crease part in the plastic, like setting aside how it feels when it's brand new, eventually, um,
John:
open close open close imagine if every time you took out your phone you unbent it or maybe some percentage of the time you if you can use it when it's in bent mode that's not a great experience the ones that have the the screen on the inside the radius and that bend is really rough like it's it's a tighter turn for even the oled screen to make if your screen is on the inside which is why screen on the outside is much friendlier to both creasing and the uh the underlying screen but you know people will sort that out
John:
I don't see Apple entering this market unless they can either make a significant leap or unless it be a particular arrangement of screen and hinge and device.
John:
And, you know, like if something becomes popular, then yes, Apple, I feel like will enter the markets and say, well, we didn't think the market would want something like this, but all the Android phones now look like this.
John:
So we'll try it.
John:
But honestly, I'm not actually predicting that for a little while.
John:
I think,
John:
I'm not going to say it's like curved televisions because that was stupid, but I think we're going to have some experimentation and then another regrouping and then another run at this because I really think the big win is get the guts out from behind the screen because then many more exciting things become possible.
John:
All that said, it's definitely cool and futuristic, and this is going to make movie props probably a lot easier to make because rather than just doing it entirely in CG, it's great when you can buy a real thing and glue a bunch of futuristic-looking crap to it, and I bet these phones will be used for that.
John:
Probably not.
Marco:
I think the screens on devices are usually composited afterwards for movies, so they're better off just carrying a piece of cardboard that's folded in half.
John:
Maybe.
John:
In Westworld, they have foldable tablets, but the interesting thing they did in Westworld is they didn't make the screen continuous.
John:
They made it like the two halves are separated so that when you unfold it, the two halves just abut up against each other, but the joint is so precise that you don't really see the crease.
John:
right and i've actually i think that is potentially an option if you wanted to have glass screens but folding you'd have to have like these sharp glass edges or something that like abutted each other and you know on a television show you can actually make them sharp because it's not a real device but in real life if you actually made them sharp enough so there wouldn't be a seam they would like cut you if you ran your finger along the edge of them so there are challenges there but it's interesting that even in the visions of the future on television they don't always pick the thing that actually seems more futuristic like oh the screen is continuous and it wraps around the corner
John:
probably because it's just easier to make a prop that doesn't work like that but now that we have real devices that work like that they can use that as the prop yeah and also still composite the screen afterwards but the actual you know that the screen would be continuous all the way around the corner uh they could use that prop and people would buy it because eventually people are going to be seeing these things this is what we should put in our calendar first sighting in the wild of somebody with a bendable screen device of any kind i haven't seen one yet in the wild and so far you know we've only seen them at trade shows but
John:
If you go over some fancy rich person's house and they have that roll-up television, that'll count too.
John:
So keep your eye out for that.
Marco:
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Casey:
So there's one other phone that we should at least briefly discuss from Mobile World Congress, and that is the Energizer phone.
Casey:
That is not a joke.
Casey:
Energizer, the people who make batteries, have made a phone that is basically a Mophie battery pack with a phone on top.
Casey:
and it's more it's more than just a mophie battery back it's like four mophie battery this thing we'll put a link in the show notes to a picture of it next to what appears to be an iphone or maybe not an iphone but something similar uh this thing is preposterous and yes everyone's saying oh ha ha ha all you idiots who want more battery life in a thicker phone well here you go put your money where your mouth is but of course nobody wants this like i don't know why this was even made to be honest but
Casey:
What we do want is maybe a teeny, teeny bit thicker phone for a little bit more battery, just to get us right over the edge from, you know, ending the day a little uncomfortable to ending the day very comfortable.
Casey:
This is cranking that all the way past 11 to like 45.
Casey:
So it is preposterous, although that shade of blue is nice, but it is otherwise preposterous, and I don't know why anyone would want this.
Marco:
First of all, it was probably designed for more of a publicity stunt.
Marco:
I can't imagine they're serious about this because it's Energizer making a phone.
Marco:
Energizer is not known for their phone.
John:
Did Energizer make it or are they just applying the branding to it after the fact?
Marco:
Probably that.
Marco:
They probably paid some contract manufacturer to make 10 of these things for them just to have it a trade show.
Marco:
I think the Verge headline is perfect.
Marco:
This 18,000 mAh battery has a phone in it.
Marco:
It isn't a phone with an 18,000 mAh battery.
Marco:
It's a battery with a phone glued inside of it, basically.
Marco:
This has got to be some kind of gag or publicity thing.
Marco:
It is kind of funny, though, to consider...
Marco:
maybe there might be some people who might actually want this not us not almost anybody but there's a lot of people out there and everyone wants a phone and there's probably at least five or ten people who would buy this thing but yeah it is kind of comical like
Marco:
18,000 mAh, that's the size of the large battery packs, the ones that weigh a pound by themselves.
Marco:
It's the kind of battery pack that if you were going on a trip and you wanted to charge three or four phones, or you wanted to charge your iPad or a Switch for a flight to New Zealand...
Marco:
This isn't the little tiny ones you put in your pocket.
Marco:
This is the big brick ones that you hope you don't carry, but you hope maybe you can convince your partner to carry it for you.
Marco:
That's what these batteries are.
Marco:
And so to have this be an ostensibly pocketable device...
Marco:
it's just hilarious um but yeah it's it's fun for for the publicity stunt but no one's going to buy this because anybody who needs that much battery life you can just buy any phone and get a giant battery to use with it like you don't you don't need it to be always with you always built in like i i thought about like like when i when i wear dress clothes
Marco:
I will take my phone out of its case so that it's thinner in my pocket because you don't want a big, thick phone when you're wearing, like, dress pants.
Marco:
I was thinking, like, I have the luxury of doing that because my phone is the naked robotic core style where it comes with an okay battery in it.
Marco:
And if I really need more battery, I can get a battery case.
Marco:
But most of the time I don't, so I never even bother.
Marco:
This phone always has that giant battery brick on it.
Marco:
So even if you're the kind of person who sometimes or even routinely needs that much battery life, I can't imagine that you would want it to just always be there and not be easily removed from it on the few cases where you didn't need that much battery life.
Marco:
So yeah, it's a fun thing to consider the existence of, but it's not a real viable product.
John:
i think this phone is great i think it highlights the uh i think it highlights the advantages of the android ecosystem where if someone has some idea for a phone i'd make it like this is the thing like apple is never going to make a phone like this and really no one should probably make a phone like this but in the android world somebody can make a phone like this and i don't doubt that there are people who want
John:
the the this phone like they want a big giant phone they don't want to have a separate battery thing because they'd constantly be charging it or they don't want to slap battery case on they want it all in one unit the only place i think this falls down is those people probably also want this thing to be totally encased in rubber so they can drop it from 50 feet and it'll survive like these are people who are like
John:
you know i don't know like going out into the woods to do like logging or something for weeks at a time and they you know they don't have time to recharge and they're using the phone constantly and they don't want to have a separate battery pack and they don't want to have cables they just want to have one big thick rugged thing that lasts a week right and here you go almost this one is not rugged though like something like the old tough book laptops or whatever
John:
And that's the advantage of an open ecosystem.
John:
Apple's never going to make products like this.
John:
Apple's going to make products for the mainstream that they can sell a lot of that most people want.
John:
If you have exotic needs, your best bet is to hope that Apple sticks to the naked robotic cross-ratching and see if you can slap a bunch of stuff on to an Apple phone, which for the most part you can, but there is something to be said to integration.
John:
So I like the idea that things like this exist, even if this one just happens to be a marketing gimmick.
John:
It is real weird, though.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So there is rumor of a March Apple event.
Casey:
And I haven't read too much about this yet.
Casey:
It seems to be that there was a little flash in the pan and then it kind of just disappeared.
Casey:
But people seem to think that this will be the unveiling of this Apple video, as I keep petitioning for it to be called, this Apple media thing, offering.
Casey:
And supposedly a lot of movie stars have been invited and stuff.
Casey:
What do we make of this, fellas?
Casey:
What's going on here?
John:
Yeah, the rumors did sort of come and go, but this is supposed to be the subscription something-something event.
John:
Apple has a bunch of subscription stuff in the works that we more or less know about.
John:
There's the video service you just mentioned.
John:
They bought Texture, that sort of news subscription service.
John:
There's rumors about the apparently ongoing contract negotiation with news vendors where Apple wants to take 50% of their money.
John:
If we're going through the service...
John:
There is Apple's gaming subscription service that we have a separate item about below.
John:
Basically, subscribe to all the things.
John:
Another area where Microsoft was ahead business model wise because they were forced to because their old business models fell apart sooner than Apple's did.
John:
But Apple stuck stubbornly to selling music for way longer than most people thought they should until they eventually got a subscription service.
John:
And basically all the other things that you can buy from applications to video to news to I don't know, you name it.
John:
Apple would probably love to sell you a subscription.
John:
At a certain point, all the things that I just listed that are rumors, you have to start actually announcing some.
John:
It took them a long time to come out with Apple Music.
John:
And that was like just one.
John:
It's like, is Apple just going to keep selling music forever?
John:
Surely they have a subscription service.
John:
Oh, these other people are going to launch.
John:
And finally, Apple Music.
John:
And then we've been waiting since then for the other seven shoes to drop.
John:
So this March event seems to be
John:
The time when Apple really needs to announce one or more of its new subscription services.
John:
The difficulty is that...
John:
All the stories about all the subscription services, none of them seem like they are slam dunks.
John:
Like, this sounds awesome.
John:
Apple has special advantages that it's going to make it attractive to people.
John:
Everyone is excited about signing up for it.
John:
And, you know, it's going to be smooth sailing.
John:
All of them are fraught in some way.
John:
We've already talked about their video business and their original content and what the landscape looks like there.
John:
The news thing is all tied up in how much money Apple...
John:
seems to want out of this and whether that's viable for the the content creators in that case and whether people want to subscribe to news in that way through apple uh the gaming services i think is the most unproven even though like everyone else is trying to come up with a gaming service i i pulled this uh quote from satya and adela talking in in january like some microsoft earning thing about
John:
their gaming service and he's like you know we are we are we are well poised to do a netflix for games and uh we won't be the only ones doing it but you know we've got a gaming console and we've got pc games and it'll be great and we already know about subscriptions and that's you know that's probably not a lot of people's radar because who cares enough about games to subscribe to games in that way and that's not really a proven business model for games and you know to be clear we're not talking about
John:
paying every month to play world of warcraft we're talking about paying every month to get a selection of games just like you pay every month to netflix and you get a selection of video that you can watch um i haven't been keeping up with the march event rumors but i assume the one and only thing they're going to announce is either their texture thing or apple video thing if they announce both of them i'll be shocked uh if they announce only apple video i won't be surprised surprised i don't expect gaming subscription to come out and honestly
John:
Given Apple's track record with games, I feel like that one, we should just call that one Ping 3.0 preemptively and just assume it's going to be a miserable failure because Apple doesn't understand games.
John:
But anyway, if and when they announce a March event, we're almost at March right now, it's time for them to announce a subscription thing, and hopefully it will be good.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, the subhead on the original article from John Pazowski at BuzzFeed is the company is expected to show off a long-rumored news subscription service.
Casey:
So there seems to be conflicting theories as to whether or not the video stuff would be there after all.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't see – would they really do a whole event just for this news thing?
Casey:
I guess if they thought it was a big deal, but –
John:
They did events for the iBook store.
John:
They do all sorts of weird things.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
They bought Texture a while ago, and they have Apple News, and it's surprisingly popular, so that would make sense.
John:
But the video subscription service has more concrete evidence behind it.
John:
They could buy Texture and try to come up with
John:
a periodical news subscription service and then just, in the end, decide that it didn't work out.
John:
Oh, well.
John:
Lesson learned.
John:
We paid some money for another company.
John:
We tried to do something and it didn't work out.
John:
That happens, I'm sure, all the time.
John:
But they can't really do that with video anymore.
John:
They have to launch a video subscription service.
John:
It's really hard to write off the $1 billion, even if you're Apple.
John:
It's a lot of money that we know that they're spending.
John:
They've actually paid for stuff.
John:
Things have already been produced.
John:
Contracts have been signed.
John:
That's a lot of public egg on your face if they decide, actually, never mind that video streaming thing.
John:
So I'm not quite sure what they're waiting for for the new streaming.
John:
Maybe they want to wait for more original content to be in the can so they have a strong launch lineup or something.
John:
But I feel like the clock is ticking on their video service way more than it's ticking on a subscription news service.
John:
If the news service is all that's ready...
John:
then they can announce that.
John:
But if they announce that, all the stories are going to be, hey, Apple's new service, let's talk about the economics.
John:
And by the way, where is that video service?
John:
When is that coming?
John:
Is that a 2020 product?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I still am skeptical that all these different things that we keep hearing that are rumored from Apple are separate subscriptions.
Marco:
Yeah, these are not three separate services.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
It would be so much more compelling if it was a bundle.
Marco:
And I think it would serve Apple's business interests better if it was a bundle.
John:
Can Apple produce things all at the same time anymore?
John:
Because they can't even ship AirPods in their wireless charging mat at the same time or in the planned year.
John:
So forgive me if I'm pessimistic about their ability to ship a news thing and a new storage plan and a video service and combine it with Apple Music all at once and call it Apple Prime or whatever.
Marco:
Honestly, that's a valid concern.
Marco:
One thing Apple is really not very good at is multitasking.
Marco:
That's why they tend to focus on one area, get something out the door, and then not touch it for years as they move their focus to other things.
Marco:
The idea of having to coordinate multiple different things all together to have one big combined launch is admittedly a high risk for them.
Marco:
But these are three different things or however many things that
Marco:
are theoretically all under the same organization.
Marco:
It's all like the services and content sales kind of organization.
John:
They're all backed by a music star, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So I think in this case, it's at least possible to have all those things be launched together.
Marco:
I don't see any of these things being incredibly strong on their own.
Marco:
But they could be incredibly strong when bundled with Apple's other services.
Marco:
So if you consider, you know, Apple Music is very strong.
Marco:
It took a while to get there because it wasn't bundled with anything else.
Marco:
So it took a while to get there.
Marco:
But it is now pretty strong.
John:
Well, Apple Music was bundled with something else.
John:
The only reason Apple Music is as big as it is and the only reason Apple News is as big as it is is because it's bundled with the iPhone.
John:
I know we don't think that counts, but that's why.
John:
Because they are first-party things that come on your phone.
John:
That's the reason the podcast app is the biggest app.
John:
So when we talk about being bundled, we're talking about bundled with another subscription.
John:
But the only reason Apple is successful at all in this round was because they have...
John:
This incredibly popular product and whatever they put on the home screen of that product when you take out of the box and prompt you to potentially sign up for that is their, you know, their power move.
John:
So I think they actually can launch all these services piecemeal individually and eventually get traction because they come on the iPhone.
John:
They'll be on your home screen.
John:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
But anyway, so I'm hoping that there is a strong bundle here.
Marco:
Because so many people would enjoy, say, the magazine service or whatever it is, like the news service.
Marco:
They would enjoy that, but they're probably not going to pay for that separately.
Marco:
and but if you can if you can say look you could now you instead of just buying apple music for whatever it is 10 bucks a month you can now spend 15 or 20 bucks a month and get music video and news and then you know they'll throw games in later maybe games yeah yeah yeah i mean we'll see how that you know how that plays out and whether that's actually going to be strongly compelling for a lot of people i don't know it might be
Marco:
But if you can, you know, again, if you can have that bundle where you can have multiple things where at least one of them is a strong draw and the value proposition isn't too bad.
Marco:
I mean, heck, I would love if they threw in iCloud backup space.
Marco:
I don't know that that's realistic, but I would love that.
Marco:
And so to combine all these things into one bundle,
Marco:
That gives them incredibly strong leverage to get these services off the ground from nothing.
Marco:
That's why Amazon was able to do Amazon Video, because they bundled it with Prime, and they shoved a bunch of people into that service because you couldn't not get it.
Marco:
If you had Prime, you had Amazon Video, and therefore Amazon Video became big.
Marco:
Bundling is incredibly powerful.
Marco:
And I really hope Apple takes advantage of that because I think it would be better for them and their services as a whole to be that strong right from the start.
Marco:
Because otherwise, if they just launch a paid new service that's just another separate thing, billing you every month in iTunes...
Marco:
They'll get people to subscribe to it, but I think the numbers are going to be way lower.
Marco:
And I think they're going to lose a lot of more casual people like us who might not be super into magazines to pay for it separately.
Marco:
But if it's part of a larger thing that we're already paying for, or if it's a very small upgrade fee from what we're already paying, then we might be into it.
John:
With the video service, though, I think despite the fact that that is how Amazon Video came to be what it is, the current thinking on video, which Amazon eventually adopted, albeit after the fact that Amazon was the pioneer in its original content.
John:
And Apple seems to subscribe strongly to that aspect of how do you be successful as a video, that you have to have original content that people want.
John:
So they're doing that.
John:
It doesn't mean they're not also doing the, oh, and by the way, also hit your...
John:
thing to a star and you know do the amazon video thing but i think if amazon video was launched today
John:
I mean, it took a long time for Amazon Video to get on the original content bandwagon.
John:
Like, there was some original content, and they were slow-moving.
John:
Like, Netflix was the first mover and the strongest mover there.
John:
And, you know, Netflix has really doubled and tripled down on it in years.
John:
And so that's, like, that's the defining way of, like, you can't be... Forget about being a video service if you don't have original content.
John:
That's why all the other players are entering the market, Disney's streaming service and CBS or whatever.
John:
Like, those things don't launch streaming services until and unless they have...
John:
original content that nobody else has because that's how you succeed so the all we see from apple is that aspect of it that they're putting money into original content so i still think it's plausible that they launch without tying it to anything else video specifically without tying it to anything else as a standalone thing on the strength of the original content
John:
uh given apple's video content so far it's reasonably pessimistic about how successful they'll be but uh we'll see uh if they did both i think that would be a very powerful solution awesome original content and also by the way it's tied to something else in part of a larger bill and so on and so forth for the other things like the far less proven things like gaming subscription and new subscription i don't think there is a strategy other than tying it that has been that is a
John:
a reasonable way to get traction in that market is you're not going to get exclusive games on your gaming subscription thing it's just not no one's going to take this economics doesn't make any sense um and the news stuff again you're not going to get exclusivity washington post and new york times aren't going to shut down their website and say you can only get our content through apple news like especially if they're giving apple 50 of the money so all you can do with those services is either
John:
Make them extremely cheap or bundle them with something else at a nominal fee to try to get traction.
John:
The reason Apple News is so incredibly popular is A, it comes on your iPhone, and B, it's free.
John:
It comes on your iPhone.
John:
You don't have to sign up for it.
John:
You don't have to do it.
John:
It's just there on your home screen, and you can read news, and it gets crazy numbers and huge traffic.
John:
which Apple is now using as a hammer to bash publishers over the head and say, we have all the billions of users, and these users have money in their wallets, and they just bought a really expensive phone, and boy, you want these users, so we're going to make you pay through the nose for them, but we're never going to give you their names.
John:
And so that's going on over there.
John:
The game thing is, like, we have tons of people who play games, granted mostly free games, and you can fleece them with your free-to-play mechanics, but
John:
uh but maybe you know if we could collect some money on a subscription basis we could distribute that to you in tiny little pennies uh most of which would go to the games that were making all the money anyway like i don't even understand the gaming argument of how you get people on this service uh but it's you know it's something they can try and if it doesn't work out and no one signs up for it it's no skin off apple's back and you just feel bad for the people who uh went all in on the gaming subscription service
John:
I don't know.
John:
If the March event is really just about one of those services, I am probably the least interested in the news one, and I think I'm most interested in the video one.
John:
Uh, but yeah, I'm my, my faith in Apple's ability to do the grand gesture, to do the big giant unification, to do the, you know, sea change, large unified product, making sense out of a, what was once a complicated mess of different services.
John:
I just, I just don't see that happening anymore.
John:
Uh, and it's a tall order.
John:
Like I'm not saying, Oh, they should be able to do this.
John:
I'm the Apple is one of the few companies that has ever done anything like this successfully.
John:
So yeah,
John:
Doing a piecemeal is probably the smarter move.
John:
And then you can discard the ones that don't work out and then, you know, unify it later and everyone will still be happy.
John:
But if they do a March event and it's just a new subscription service, the most interesting story is probably about the thing they're not going to tell you, which is what the split in revenue is between Apple and the publishers.
Marco:
And honestly, a lot of people are getting their hopes up for hardware in this event.
Marco:
I would not do that.
Marco:
I haven't heard anything, but it just seems unlikely.
Marco:
Apple, when they have a strong content story to sell or some strong other narrative to sell, they tend not to blend hardware with that in the same event.
Marco:
And so in this, if the rumors really are strong, which they are, that this is going to be focused on some kind of new subscription service launching,
Marco:
I really don't think there's going to be AirPods thrown in for some reason, or the AirPower mat.
Marco:
I think those things, if AirPower and AirPods are going to be released in the first half of 2019 before June...
Marco:
I think it's going to be a separate, either a separate event or just, you know, briefings and press releases.
Marco:
Like I don't, I don't think that's going to be a, you know, combined with the news service and possible video service and possible game service launching a new subscription.
Marco:
Like that's, it's, it's too different.
Marco:
It's two different things.
John:
they can just release air power in the dead of the night and hope no one notices it'll just appear on their web page with no press release yeah it'll start being in the stores like just what do you mean you always you always want to buy air power but they've announced they announced that so long ago they you know the air pods into the case that you can charge wirelessly they announced that like a year ago like that's already out yeah right of course that's already out
John:
i need i need new airpods guys because i've got the same sickness that everyone else has that mine low battery life yep yep yep and i don't i don't want to buy a new set like not now i mean i want to wait i want to get whatever's the new hotness and ah man become very familiar with that with that awesome sound this is a great sound design i'm reminded of the wwc session where apple talks about uh like how they design sounds for their things that's a great session very much yeah very much like game sound design like you've
John:
good sounding games is much harder than you think it is when they do a good job you don't notice it and so the sound when your airpods are low on battery it goes you know the little noise it's a sad noise she's like no no airpods and you start doing the thing where you put one in the case and just go with one ear and then swap it back and forth to try to extend i do that sometimes yep i need new airpods too but i'm not buying them if i can possibly help it until the new ones come out i hope this is not going to be another mac pro situation we're going to be 10 years from now
John:
with AirPods with, like, wires glued to the ends of them or something.
John:
Those are little batteries in there.
John:
I feel for the little AirPods.
John:
I'm very satisfied with the AirPods, despite the fact that – and this is a fundamental problem with our current lithium-ion battery world.
John:
All these devices – I don't want removable batteries for my AirPods.
John:
I don't want them to be bigger or heavier.
John:
I understand this is as good as they can be, given the current technology.
John:
Uh, it is a bummer to have to buy a new pair every two to three years or whatever.
John:
It's like, Oh, they make disposable technology, but I don't want the, you know, the thing is if Apple didn't make everything all sealed up, you could just buy new batteries for your AirPods.
John:
I don't want the AirPods that have removable batteries because they would be bigger and heavier and more awkward.
John:
The beauty of AirPods is that they are these beautiful things.
John:
It's a shame that the batteries don't last longer, but I feel like the answer to that is better battery technology, not, uh,
Casey:
like allow me to plug a triple a into my ear i mean i love my airpods even what are they like 150 160 bucks something like that even knowing that which is a fair bit of money particularly for headphones especially if you're not snooty about the headphones that you wear because 98 of the time i'm listening to either a podcast or music
Casey:
I don't really care what I'm listening to them on.
Casey:
The AirPods sound perfectly okay to me.
Casey:
But $160 or whatever is a lot of money for these things, especially if they're dead after a couple of years.
Casey:
But I tell you, I use my AirPods literally every day for at least 10, 20, 30 minutes a day.
Casey:
So given that the batteries in there are, as you said, John, freaking microscopic,
Casey:
I still feel satisfied with my expenditure on these things, and I'm ready and waiting to throw more money at Apple to get a new set.
John:
Yeah, new battery technologies will help.
John:
We're still waiting for the next leap in battery technologies.
John:
There's tons of ones that are in labs and in universities that have great promise of not dying after 1,000 cycles and retaining energy longer and charging faster and being more stable.
John:
Just none of them are commercially viable, especially in applications like this.
John:
But I have faith that in my lifetime we'll have the next leap in battery tech, and that will really help.
John:
Because think about it.
John:
Imagine if the only thing you changed about AirPods...
John:
was that it was using a different battery technology that
John:
Let's just say it doesn't charge any faster, doesn't have any larger capacity, but it lasts for 100,000 cycles instead of 1,000.
John:
That changes the product.
John:
Basically, if you didn't lose your AirPods, you would use them for your whole life, which is probably bad for Apple.
John:
I know we didn't really talk about this, but a couple of events ago, the environmental person whose name escapes me was like, Apple's working on making products that last longer.
John:
Yeah, there you go, Lisa Jackson.
John:
Products that last longer, and everyone was kind of like,
John:
Tittering about that is like, well, you say that, but then look at all these products that you have that are practically disposable that, you know, go bad after a certain period of time or whatever.
John:
But then if you look at what Apple actually has been doing.
John:
You know, up to and including the $30 battery replacement, they have been tending to try to make products that last longer.
John:
It's just that inherently sealed lithium ion batteries, you know, they last for a certain number of cycles.
John:
And if you use the thing regularly, there's your product lifetime.
John:
And I think it's harder to swallow for a thousand dollar phone for, you know, a fourteen hundred dollar phone.
John:
At least you can get the battery replaced there.
John:
But I think people don't consider that as an option for the most part, even after two years, just because it costs like $100 and you're not getting the cool $30 deal.
John:
And people are like, well, I'll just buy a new phone at that point.
John:
But just a simple change of a 10x or 100x cycle life.
John:
totally changes the face of these products and every other aspect of them is all ready to go it's not like oh they have to redesign a new airpod so that it will be a longer lasting product the only thing that's weak about them is that everything like my airpods look brand new they're not scratched they're not scuffed they're not bent there's nothing about the case or the operation like they have no moving parts right
John:
The case has one moving part that hasn't broken yet.
John:
That's why everyone loves their AirPods.
John:
It's the culmination of the platonic ideal solid of the Johnny Ive school design, where everything is featureless and no moving parts in all one color or whatever, that matches up in this case with...
John:
the best design from a user perspective of that type of thing that's why everyone loves the airpods it's like it's a miracle everything finally came together the way apple wants to make things turns out to be the best way to make this thing and the only problem is current battery technology means they're going to go bad and if you use if you use them every day and the reason you use them every day is because you love them so i forget when we did like what's your favorite product but i think a couple of us either picked airpods or talked about it and i still
John:
to this day i use my airpods every day too and god it's so nice not to have cords i was reminded of cords the other day when i got to see my daughter in her room like i'm walking by and i hear her like get angry and start yelling about something it's because god let's talk about first world problems when she puts her hand-me-down apple watch on the charger on her nightstand you know she gives hand-me-downs from uh from my wife
John:
uh every time she goes to do that and then goes back to her bed uh this is a separate issue from a separate podcast so both of my children cannot cannot live anywhere in in the house without holding an ipad in their hand that has a headphone cord snaking from it to their ears right so when she puts her hand-me-down apple watch on her nightstand charger and goes back to what she was doing the cord
John:
that is snaking from her ears to her ipad which of course she is holding because there is no time when she's not holding it gets caught on the little knob on the drawer on her nightstand and when she goes back to her bed it yanks the earbuds out of her ear and we've all had that feeling and it is as i said on twitter once instantly infuriating for you know way out of proportion to what happened right so she's like oh i'm so tired of these cords getting caught every time i do that you know i think we've all been in that situation where
John:
Whether it's your door handle or a car door or some other thing back when we were all using cords, we all left that behind when AirPods came out.
John:
I don't get my cord cord in anything because I don't have cords.
John:
And it was just such a huge upgrade in those sort of like minor annoyances of life that I like so many other AirPod owners.
John:
are so ready that if i lost my airpods or if they finally died or they fell into the ocean the you know the next 10 minutes i would have ordered new airpods because i can't like i can't go back i can't live without them uh and so far my kids haven't discovered this and they're probably not gonna get hand me down airpods because by the time i hand them down they probably will be well and truly dead
John:
But in the meantime, they're slogging around with their headphone cords getting snagged and everything, and I'm just gliding through life with my AirPods shoved underneath my winter hat.
John:
You can't even see them.
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And we start with Mark Healer, who writes, I had an iPad since the original one and have kept bringing the apps over ever since then.
Casey:
Some are for pacifying children on long flights and so on.
Casey:
And in the past, I've had a heap of games and junk that I've accumulated that I don't need anymore.
Casey:
How do you guys easily purge all of these old apps?
Casey:
And
Casey:
The apps in a screenshot that he provided no longer work in iOS 11 and so on.
Casey:
But how do you delete those easily?
Casey:
In his case, they're scattered all over the place in folders.
Casey:
What do you do?
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
How do you delete a whole bunch of stuff very quickly and easily?
Marco:
Well, the best way to delete a bunch of apps that don't work anymore is to do an iCloud restore.
Marco:
Like backup to iCloud, restore from iCloud, and they just won't be there.
Marco:
So it's not an amazing technique, but it does work that if you have a bunch of apps that didn't make the 64-bit transition or whatever, then yeah, just do a backup to iCloud.
Marco:
upgrade to iOS 12 if you haven't yet, and then do a restore.
Marco:
And those apps just won't be there.
Casey:
That's clever.
John:
The main thing this question made me think about is my continued frustration, and probably actually getting worse these days, about how meager the tools are for managing...
John:
applications on the ipad my main concern is usually uh how incredibly like i don't know how you describe it it's frustrating it is uh i'm gonna say dangerous it is it is fraught it is anxiety ridden anxiety inducing it is to rearrange icons on an ios device
John:
Uh, it's, it's like a terribly designed game of hot potato, right?
John:
The first thing I do is like, first thing I have to do is I have to pre-flight.
John:
My pre-flight is, okay, I'm going, let me find the icon I'm going to move.
John:
I'm going to move this icon and let me find where I'm going to move it and let me memorize the destination.
John:
So I have to go, okay, the destination is three screens to the left and it's to the right of the notes icon, right?
Okay.
John:
pre-flight go begin the flight begin the drag you can go into wiggle mode you can not go into wiggle mode in this modern area but you got to begin the drag then you have to hit the edge of the screen to go one screen two screen the animations go fast so pay attention you know don't don't uh all right oh stop we've got two screens go back to the middle you know all right get off the edge because you don't want it to go three screens
John:
By the way, when you were going through screens, just because you were holding it against the edge doesn't mean that the icons on the screens that you are merely passing through aren't themselves squirming out of the way and ejecting one of their excess icons over to the next screen.
John:
Don't think that they're not.
John:
Yeah, you were just passing through those screens.
John:
You may have perturbed those screens on your way through.
John:
You'll find that out later.
John:
But for now, just keep going, right?
John:
Then when you get to the screen and you pull the icon off the edge to stop the scrolling...
John:
God forbid you pulled it off of the edge and now you're over a folder because now that folder is going to open up.
John:
But I don't want that folder.
John:
Or maybe you hovered over another icon too long and now it thinks you want to make a folder out of those two things.
John:
Now you have to figure out how to back out of that action.
John:
Do you still remember where you were supposed to put that icon?
John:
Try to find the place where you want to put it.
John:
Oh, it's squirming.
John:
Oh, it's making a folder.
John:
It's squirming.
John:
Oh, no, you were trying to put it next near the edge.
John:
Now you've gone back to the previous screen.
John:
How many screens away are you from where you were before?
John:
Go back.
John:
Wait, no, you've gone too far again.
John:
Oh, just let go and cancel the operation?
John:
No, because if you let go, it'll drop the icon someplace.
John:
It is way harder than it's supposed to be.
John:
I don't know how normal people successfully arrange their icons.
John:
It must be an incredible trial and error process.
John:
I find it so annoying that I very rarely rearrange anything just because I know the chances that I screw something up are very high and there is no undo and there is no aborting the operation.
John:
That's why I take screenshots on my home screen, not because I'm like, oh, look at my home screen.
John:
I remember this point in time is because when I screw it up, the only way I have to get back to the way things were is to refer to a screenshot and try to reproduce it and try to find all the icons that have gone everywhere.
John:
iTunes lets you, I think still, arrange your icons in a different interface with a mouse and keyboard, but it is still a crap interface.
John:
The main problem with the iTunes interface, and with the regular one for that matter, aside from the lack of undo and the crazy hover readings and all that other crap, is...
John:
they they want you to do direct manipulation pick up move to a new location drop and things will squirm out of the way what they need to do is have a sort of current state speculative future state commit type of thing with a buffer area like they need a shelf where you can chuck icons to the side and they'll be like i am about to arrange my new thing i haven't done anything yet i'm just saying here's my speculative way things are going to be with a shelf off to the side where you can chuck things for holding and then just arrange arrange arrange
John:
If at any point you're like, you know what, I've screwed this up or whatever, you haven't committed any changes yet.
John:
You just work.
John:
And I know this is a way more complicated mental model, but honestly, it is a more forgiving user model to let people rearrange it either on device or off in a noncommittal way in a better interface with a shelf or buffer area that is off to the side.
John:
That's just me ranting about rearranging springboard icons.
John:
This thing is like, okay, if you're going to do better management for springboard stuff, how about a way to sort icons, sort of the equivalent of list view, to filter by supported OS level, to filter by date last use.
John:
There's all sorts of features like that that are kind of in iOS where you can have offload apps that you haven't used in a while and they get a weird icon and they'll download on demand.
John:
But
John:
Very meager tools for doing this.
John:
Doing an iCloud backup to do it is clever, but is kind of dangerous in that I really hope iCloud backup doesn't have any weird, you don't lose any state in that transition or the backup and restore work the way you think they're going to.
John:
I would worry about messing something up.
John:
I know it's gotten way better, and maybe that's the only way to do it.
John:
But honestly, if you're just worried about the clutter, if you can't find the icons to delete them with their little badge that shows that they can't be launched, then why are you worried about them?
John:
And if you can't find them, then just delete them, right?
John:
Anyway, I think there is a lot of room for improvement in Springboard, both in terms of letting people do basic operations, like arrange their home screen in a much less fraught manner.
John:
And then also, you know, to Mark's question here, to just manage your applications and have different views on them and to be able to perform operations.
John:
Basically, the stuff that we took for granted that we could do in the Finder in the 80s, we still can't do on our modern $1,300 super megaphones.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apologies for this pronunciation, but Platy Shue writes that they have been binge reading Syracuse's OS X reviews for a while, and it's interesting to find the discussion on the spatial finder as a recurring topic through the years.
Casey:
John, are you still a proponent of the spatial finder?
Casey:
Have recent improvements in the finder satisfied you?
Casey:
And for me, for Casey, would you mind restating or reminding all of us what is a spatial finder anyway?
Yeah.
John:
take the easy question first have recent improvements to the finder satisfied me no no i'm shocked i'm so surprised yeah the spatial finder is the finder that existed on the mac from the beginning of the mac up until the mac os 10 error so it's you know the the original finder from the original mac and it
John:
it was the only finder until Mac OS 10 and things started to get weird and whatever.
John:
So the spatial finder was, uh, you know, just go, go find a classic macro in classical Mac, Mac OS and use the finder.
John:
That's the spatial finder.
John:
Oh yeah.
Marco:
I'll just pull one right out of the closet and yeah, it's right there.
John:
Easy to run it on.
John:
You can run it on an emulator.
John:
You can run it on a web browser.
John:
Anyway, uh, the, the key part of it was that, uh, the entire interface was modeled, uh, with sort of a consistent model of state.
John:
So every folder that you saw when you double clicked it, it opened a window.
John:
Uh,
John:
that folder was that window like there was no way to open two windows that view the same folder because it didn't make sense and then the mental model was you open the folder the folder icon would change to show that it is opened and if it is open that means there was a window on the screen that is that folder that you know that that was the model same thing with the icons inside there and everything like that that there was no no way to look at the contents of the same folder in two different windows and
John:
if you change the view of that folder of that window it changes the view of the folder so if you change the list view and then close the folder and then open the folder it's in list view how could it not be in this view it's the one and only thing same thing with the icons if you moved an icon it was moved if you moved a window or resized a window it was moved or resized every manipulation you did to the spatial state of anything in the finder
John:
was retained because the model was completely one-to-one.
John:
There was no browser.
John:
There was no way you could model a window as a portal through which you have different views of different aspects of your file system.
John:
That just wasn't the model.
John:
So I wrote a big article about this, and you talk about it.
John:
I'm like...
John:
The main argument of the Spatial Finder and you can read the whole article about how great it was is because people are great at dealing with objects in space because that's what we're doing our entire lives.
John:
We've evolved to do.
John:
We have amazing skills related to that, both in terms of, you know.
John:
retention and remembering where things are and arranging our life and workspace to suit whatever it is we're doing and uh the low mental load of understanding like if i move that thing and it's over there it'll still be over there and like the one-to-one relationship between folders and windows the argument against this is like well we have so many files now and it's not tenable and yada yada yada
John:
uh my argument has always been that uh that doesn't mean you discard this that just means you add tools on top of it so you add like a quick launcher like quicksilver you add a file browser right but you but you don't destroy the spatial interface um
John:
These days, it's much less relevant because, you know, who uses Macs anymore and who uses the Finder and all that stuff.
John:
But I feel like the iPhone is the ultimate vindication of spatial interfaces.
John:
As much as I just complained about the particulars of how you arrange icons on it,
John:
The springboard and the user interface of smartphones as defined by the original iPhone are relentlessly spatial.
John:
If your icons on your home screen randomly rearrange themselves or you looked at it at a different day and things were in a different place, people would flip out.
John:
People arrange their home screens the way they like them and they expect them to stay that way.
John:
And how do they find things?
John:
Do they consciously say row three, column four?
John:
No, they just reach for it because they know where it is because they're used to knowing where things are in space.
John:
So I'm glad Apple sort of came back to spatial interfaces as not just an aspect of the interface, but the only way to get your applications.
John:
I think they could extend out from there and now perhaps have different views of things as we just discussed.
John:
But yeah, I'm still a proponent of spatial interfaces.
John:
I'm a proponent of the spatial finder as far as that goes, but I'm a proponent of spatial interfaces.
John:
Same thing with Windows and applications and state preservation that you all talked about.
John:
Those abilities of human users...
John:
uh are under leveraged they could be leveraged more because there are things that everybody is good at doing that has very low cognitive load uh that reaps benefits and makes things feel more effortless fun and natural to use and it's powerful it's powerful to always know that your camera icon is right where your thumb is going to find it
Casey:
Dan Zaccaro writes, hey, you guys talk about Synology a lot, or network-attached storage devices a lot, and that made me look into it, and yes, a NAS network-attached storage looks essential.
Casey:
Those specs, though, oof, they're super low for the price.
Casey:
Why didn't you build your own server for much cheaper?
Casey:
Seems like the best route for tech people, and you guys qualify.
Casey:
My parts are ordered, so wish me luck.
Casey:
Well, good luck, Dan.
Casey:
This line of thinking...
Casey:
I am not a fan of.
Casey:
I'm trying to be kind because Dan is well-meaning.
Casey:
I don't think he meant to say anything that would make me upset, but it kind of makes me upset because this is like, oh, why don't you spend 35 hours researching all the things you need and then another 40 hours researching?
Casey:
putting them all together, and then 15 hours, you know, installing and configuring everything.
Casey:
Obviously, I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.
Casey:
Why don't you do all this stuff?
Casey:
It's a small matter of effort.
Casey:
You know, it's like, oh, this rings the same as when I was, you know, consulting.
Casey:
And someone who had never written a line of code in their lives would say, oh, I'm sure that's just a small matter of programming.
Casey:
You know, I'm sure it'll be simple.
Casey:
Like, yes, the Synology is probably overpriced for what you get if you look at it on a spec sheet.
Casey:
But what I want from my Synology is to buy one, to be honest, ours were all comp, but in principle to buy one and then turn it on and then have it just work.
Casey:
I mean, to this end, Dan, do you drive a car?
Casey:
Did you build the car from scratch?
Casey:
You could have.
Casey:
You could have.
Casey:
Why didn't you?
Casey:
For something as complex as network-attached storage, I don't get this line of thinking.
Casey:
I understand the point that Dan is coming from, but maybe it's just because I don't have enough time.
Casey:
I'm sure 20-year-old me would have had a very different opinion about this, but very nearly 37-year-old me
Casey:
No, I don't have time.
Casey:
I just want something that I can turn on and just works.
Casey:
And I will trade money for that if need be.
Casey:
But Marco, you seem to like occasionally spending a lot of time on things.
Casey:
I'm thinking specifically about your Wi-Fi setup.
Casey:
Why didn't you just build one of these Synology clones on your own, Marco?
Marco:
Well, first of all, setting up ubiquity gear for a computer nerd is not nearly as time-consuming as building your own Synology-level NAS.
Marco:
But I would say that I kind of fall on the other side of this now.
Marco:
When we all got our Synology units, I mean this was a good two or three years ago now.
Casey:
It was like 2013, I think.
Casey:
2014, maybe.
Marco:
Yeah, so it was a number of years ago now.
Marco:
And things were different for my needs back then.
Marco:
If I were doing it today, I would not have a Synology or any other kind of dedicated NAS.
Marco:
I would just plug some kind of external drive thing into a Mac Mini.
Marco:
Back then...
Marco:
That was a harder sell because not only did I not own a Mac Mini and had no other use for one at the time, but I also, back then, hard drive sizes were such that to achieve the level of storage that I wanted, which was between 10 and 20 terabytes of total space, required eight disks back then to do that with any kind of redundancy and reliability.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so you need like a big box to have that many disks in it.
Marco:
And if you start looking at like eight bay drive enclosures, the cost between that and between like, you know, a USB eight bay drive enclosure and, or, you know, a Thunderbolt one and a NAS, you know, the NAS is actually pretty similarly cost, you know, at that point.
Marco:
So you might as well.
Marco:
And then also back then I wasn't, you know, I wasn't so clear on like how I was going to end up backing these things up and everything.
Marco:
And I thought I would use more of the applications on the NAS, but,
Marco:
But the way that I actually use it now is I basically use the NAS as a dumb drive box.
Marco:
I access it mostly via iSCSI mounted on a Mac Mini, so it behaves like an external disk connected to the Mac Mini.
Marco:
And this is not a setup I recommend, by the way.
Marco:
It's too complicated and weird.
Marco:
But if any part of it broke significantly...
Marco:
I wouldn't replace it.
Marco:
I would instead change to a setup where I'm just plugging in a smaller number of very large disks, like 10 terabyte disks, just a small number of those plugged into a dumb enclosure connected to my Mac Mini.
Marco:
Because all the things that Casey does with his Synology, with the fancier actually running the apps on it and doing truck downloading to it and everything, I don't do any of that stuff.
Marco:
I don't run Plex on it.
Marco:
I do none of that stuff.
Marco:
All my home server roles are served either by nothing or by the Mac Mini that I have now.
Marco:
And so just plugging in hard drives to a Mac Mini would be a lot easier and simpler for me.
Marco:
So that's the direction I will take in the future.
Marco:
And if your needs can be solved by just connecting a few very large drives to a computer, especially a computer you already own, then I would say a NAS is not worth it anymore.
John:
If you don't already own it, buying a Mac Mini plus hard drives is probably more expensive than a NAS.
John:
Probably, yeah.
John:
At current Mac Mini prices, it is not a cheap computer.
John:
Kind of like my AirPods, if my Synology died, I would immediately buy another one because I do use a bunch of features of my NAS.
John:
But in terms of like...
John:
The question really is making your own NAS versus buying one.
John:
If you think it's a fun project, do it.
John:
It's a fun project.
John:
But I wasn't interested in having a fun project.
John:
And honestly, I didn't know if the applications on Synology would be useful for me.
John:
But it turns out they are.
John:
And I don't have to maintain that software.
John:
I don't have to worry about weird open source incompatibilities.
John:
I don't want to have to do any of that stuff like as as nice as they make that like, oh, it auto updates and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like I've used Linux enough to know that there is still a substantial difference between a commercial integrated supported product.
John:
like this analogy, and a do-it-yourself one.
John:
Even if the do-it-yourself one uses a well-supported open source thing, and it's fairly straightforward commodity hardware, you can be successful with it, and you can definitely get it for cheaper.
John:
But when I look at the price of the Synology, I'm not saying, look at this crappy Atom processor and then a metal box and a power supply.
John:
I'm thinking of the whole package, like the fact that it comes with software, it'll work out of the box, and during the time I've owned the Synology, which, yeah, I think it's been 2013, so like six years, the software has been auto-updated over the network and has added features that I have found useful over time, and I haven't had to do a thing to it.
John:
Like,
John:
in the very beginning i dabbled with like sshing into it messing with it or whatever but eventually i was like you know what just let it be and like most of the features that i wanted eventually became officially supported and every time i want to do something with it i find it in some menu somewhere and it does it and to me who's not really interested in a build your own nas project that's what i want out of it but if you want to build your own nas you know go for it you definitely will save money
John:
As the saying goes, Linux is free as long as your time has no value.
John:
I forget what the saying is.
John:
There's some snarky saying about that.
John:
But anyway, if that time is fun time for you, then double win.
John:
You save money and you get a cool hobby.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Fracture, Discourse, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
John:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
We're getting an ear update.
Marco:
Not much to say they're not fixed, but they're less bad.
Marco:
My left ear is mostly normal and my right ear is making progress.
Marco:
It's like, have you ever, have you seen like, like, I don't know, John, like what are your, what does your school do for grades for on the report cards?
Marco:
Like are they letter grades or are they these newfangled things that are everyone, everything means something good?
John:
Newfangled things.
John:
Tell me about this newfangled thing.
John:
We have letter grades.
John:
What is the alternative to letter grades?
John:
An emoji?
Marco:
So our school, they do something, and I get the feeling this is like a more widespread thing now, where we don't have the traditional letter grades like A through F. We have on our elementary school report cards...
Marco:
they basically they change the letter grade so that everything is a euphemism for good but really it's like so like it's like developing or something or like developing towards standard is like the bad thing that's like the d or whatever and then like you know exceeds expectations is the good thing
John:
Yeah, I know what you're talking about now.
John:
Yeah, elementary school, preschool.
John:
Yeah, they have like on level or meets and exceeds.
John:
And it's kind of they do the same thing in yearly reviews and big person jobs, as Casey well knows.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, the problem is that none of them mean is getting worse.
Marco:
Like the negative thing, like the failure mode of it.
Marco:
The wording of it is they're getting better.
John:
Approaching level.
John:
I forget what their phrases are, but yeah, approaching level and stuff like that.
Marco:
But what if you're not?
Marco:
What if you're below the level and not making any progress towards success?
Marco:
What if you're actually having a downturn?
Marco:
There's no way to represent that in this system.
John:
But they're not vectors.
John:
That's the thing.
John:
They're not magnitude and direction.
John:
They're just magnitude.
John:
They're phrased as vectors, as in approaching mastery or whatever.
John:
But in general, it's because the schools are judged on how many kids do you have on level, below level, above level, or whatever.
John:
But all the points and times don't have any direction.
John:
So you're right.
John:
They don't express whether your kid is actually getting better or getting worse.
John:
They just express where they are.
John:
But the phrasing of it suggests a vector, though.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The only weird thing I've had in grading, I think it was my...
John:
daughter in one of her middle school classes it was like a like i say not a real class but it was one of the less academic classes i said it was like health class or wellness or whatever the hell they call it now and she got into this thing where uh she turned in an assignment but the teacher said she didn't have it and it's like well i did it well but i don't have it did you turn it on time yes i did well you know so it's like either she lost the assignment or the teacher lost the assignment but we were like at an impasse where it's like well
John:
You know, can she make it up?
John:
And the teacher's like, no, if she did the work, she shouldn't redo it.
John:
I'm like, OK, well, what are you going to do about the grade situation?
John:
Because right now in the computer, it was like a really bad grade because homework counts for X amount or whatever.
John:
And I'm sure my daughter did it.
John:
She's very conscientious.
John:
She does all of her work.
John:
I'm not sure she successfully handed it in because she does tend to be a little bit disorganized in that way.
John:
But either way, that was the situation.
John:
And so the teacher's solution was, okay, well, I just won't give her a letter grade for this.
John:
I'll just give her a P like for past.
John:
I'm like, but you can do that.
John:
You can just take a class and say, you're not going to get a letter grade for this.
John:
You're just going to get a, you passed.
John:
I mean, it kind of makes sense since again, it's like an elective and not like quote unquote real class and it's middle school and not high school.
John:
So it's not like an effect or GPA because no one cares what grades you got in middle school.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
But it was weird that that was even an option because in my day, not only did we get straight up grades, like they weren't letter grades, they were number grades from 0 to 100 with decimal points, with a single decimal point after the number.
John:
And there was no changing that to a P. It's like, you're going to get a number.
John:
It's like, what's my number?
John:
Even in middle school, it was like that.
John:
So there is more flexibility.
John:
And in elementary school, I think elementary school had actual letter grades.
John:
And it was just like A's and B's.
John:
I don't think I had like pluses or minuses, or maybe there were minuses.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But, yeah, the advent of often state-mandated standardized testing and measurement of school performance through these standardized tests, like in Massachusetts we have MCAS and New York.
John:
In high school, obviously, they have the regents, but that's a separate thing.
John:
I don't know what they have for elementary school.
John:
It has made all these schools, especially elementary, rephrase everything as –
John:
are you successfully educating the students to the level uh that we are targeting as determined by this set of criteria that's set down by the state and that all you care about is children's orbit about around that standard because it affects like your funding and all sorts of other stuff um so it doesn't surprise me that every school uh at the elementary level has shifted to that and honestly you don't need to be giving kids letter grades in elementary school it's kind of ridiculous like
John:
I have plenty of time to be anxious about their grades later in life.
John:
I'm happy to let the entirety of elementary school go by without kids having to worry about anything about their education because Lord knows that the helicopter parents are worrying about enough for everybody involved.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think – so Adam's only in first grade.
Marco:
but I don't think he knows that he gets grades yet.
Marco:
I mean, if these could be called grades even.
Marco:
He knows that we looked at a report card every few months or something, but I don't think he knows, because he doesn't even get it.
Marco:
When I was a kid, they would hand you the report card and you'd bring it home.
Marco:
Now it's all online or given to you in parent-teacher conferences.
Marco:
So I don't think Adam has even seen his report card.
Marco:
I don't think he even knows he gets one.
John:
let alone like worrying about what grades are on it but yeah there will be time for that that basically ruined my childhood so i'm hoping trying to have it not ruin his but we'll see about that the thing that's worse for kids now is like yeah we knew we were getting report cards and we had to bring them home and show them to our parents and often get them signed and go through all that crap but now since there's so much more like in my education i
John:
standardized testing didn't really become a thing that that approached our radar until like high school like we were tested with standardized tests in elementary school but it was like you know once in your entire elementary school career or maybe twice like at two key points the whole school would be tested and it was like a it was like a curiosity like oh look the scientists are coming in to
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it doesn't take them long to figure out when we go to the separate room and the teacher asks me a bunch of questions or when we all take the certain test, like the teacher is not that they have to teach the test, but they do have to prepare the kids for it.
John:
They realize that the children themselves realize we are being evaluated because it happens every single year like clockwork, sometimes two times a year.
John:
um so i think adam will pick up on it pretty quickly uh but in general good schools make it less stressful and it doesn't really matter it only it's only going to stress your child out to the extent that you stress your child out about it like like i don't think kids on their own for the most part are going to be worried about the grades unless there's unless their parents are worried about the grades and then they you know pass that anxiety on to them if everyone's all chill about it it can still be stressful to be put on the spot and ask questions but
John:
if you come home and your parents don't seem to care about that stuff like obviously parents do care but i feel like the parents these days fret privately between the parents and teachers about how they're going to get the kid to perform better if the kid is having problems and less like i'm going to yell at my children until they get smarter which is not a particularly good technique but you know sadly one that many of our childhoods involved
Marco:
i wonder what's the current you so i know you know you mentioned earlier like health class is like wellness now wellness or something yeah i don't know what the words i mean it might it might as well be called like genitals and drugs like that's really all it is but like yeah like what what do they call like what used to be called home ec which could be summarized as like sewing and cooking like what do they call that now because i i've heard like 10 different names for that
Casey:
Oh, God, I can't think of it now.
John:
They call that not in the school curriculum anymore because school funding is ridiculously lower than it should be.
John:
Nobody has home, act, and shop.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
If you want those classes in your school, you'd have to pay super-duper extra money.
John:
There are exceptions, but the total destruction of every class except for reading, writing, and arithmetic, the three R's,
John:
That is definitely a thing.
John:
Even in all of my... I'm in a rich person town with a rich person in school with high property taxes and all the kids are rich and everyone's got tons of money.
John:
And even here, I feel like there's less richness in classes taken in high school than there was in my high school, which is sad because...
John:
how much money does it take to get like so to that end i'm pretty sure there is no home ec course offered in my kids entire high school but there is like a 3d modeling class and the equivalent of a shop class and there is music and there is theater and there's other things but a lot of that costs extra so i wouldn't just assume that every school that children who are going through school now go to is going to have home ec on the menu at all wow
Casey:
Real-time follow-up is apparently called Family and Consumer Sciences.
Casey:
For me, it was called Food, I believe, or Foods.
Casey:
Literally, that was the title of the course.
Casey:
Foods.
Casey:
It was like a cooking course.
Casey:
That was all it was.
Casey:
It was like how to scramble an egg and things like that.
Marco:
And it worked so well for you.
John:
It exposed you to so many world foods and different cooking methods.
John:
Yeah.
John:
there's more to home economics than just food like i i think the most valuable thing that i learned that i wouldn't have otherwise was sewing how to use a sewing machine how to sew by hand like that was all part of my home ec class mine was called human ecology because it almost abbreviates to home ec like it's like they didn't want to change the abbreviation it's like humec it's close enough human ecology is like you're in your zoo animals none of us ever knew what that meant
John:
yeah it's a shame because i feel like you know those classes i'm glad to see like wellness still hanging on but again you do have to tell the people about the stds and the drugs and everything and vaping don't forget about vaping yeah i guess that's new now we didn't have that when we were kids yeah some so many vaping newsletters come in by email really vaping forums come learn about vaping yeah oh god it is a it's a it's a big thing
John:
I mean, I like to think, like, I used to think this about my friends because, you know, I was kind of at the tail end of smoking in high school.
John:
So, like, what was it called?
John:
We had a designated smoking area in our high school.
John:
Let's put it that way.
John:
For kids these days listening, just to think about this.
Marco:
It was, like, officially...
John:
done yes like like officially by the school an area designated by the school where students should go to smoke they were only it was called the smoking area the smoking lobby it was outdoors right lounge but it's incredible it wasn't a lounge right the teacher's lounge was filled with smoke because the teachers all smoke there the teachers didn't smoke in the classroom so they all smoked in the teacher's lounge and the students had an area where they could smoke
John:
But I was coming up with kind of the tail end of that where, like, basically me and all my other nerd friends, nobody smoked because we're the smart kids.
John:
And smart kids don't do stupid things.
John:
And smoking is really stupid.
John:
Right?
John:
And I was so confident that that was going to be the case right up until all my friends graduated and then half of them started smoking.
John:
I'm like, come on, people.
John:
Come on.
John:
You're the smart people.
John:
But it's like, nope.
John:
College and freedom.
John:
And just that was enough to make half of them succumb.
John:
So...
John:
It was sad.
John:
But anyway, these days, vaping, I feel like, is similar.
John:
Like, you would think, oh, all the smart students aren't going to be doing that because the smart students know, you know, and maybe that's true, but at a certain point, peer pressure and other things can overcome any amount of supposed smarts to make.
John:
Children do foolish things because their brains don't finish forming until they're 25, people.
John:
25.
John:
Not 18.
John:
Not 17.
John:
25.
Casey:
I got married when I was 25.
Casey:
Erin was 23, I believe.
John:
She wanted to wait for your brain to finish cooking.
John:
And you wanted hers not to.
John:
Exactly right.
John:
There you go.
Beep.