MacBook Hierarchy of Needs
Marco:
So I'm seeing people all over Twitter say, oh, my God, update Chrome right away.
Marco:
I can't for the life of me figure out how to update Chrome.
Marco:
About Google Chrome?
Marco:
About.
John:
Yeah, that's always where it is.
John:
Oh, updating.
John:
Well, mine's up to date already.
John:
I'm on the beta channel, though.
John:
Why?
John:
What's going on on the regular channel?
Casey:
What's the issue?
Marco:
I haven't bothered to look yet.
Marco:
Everyone's saying update now.
John:
Maybe they're just finally getting the new ugly tabs that I've had for like three months now.
Casey:
What happens if your Chrome colon slash slash help is spinning?
Casey:
That seems not good.
John:
You go to the task manager window that Chrome has.
Marco:
oh god i don't you know i i just don't know how people tolerate chrome it's so i like chrome oh god how i how can you be such like a mac person seriously it's not i'm not gonna say it's mac like you won't even own an xbox because microsoft makes it microsoft doesn't make chrome
Casey:
Like, no, seriously.
Casey:
Marco, I could not agree with you more.
Casey:
I am right there with you, dude.
Marco:
You might as well be using Windows.
Marco:
Chrome is so bad.
John:
It's not Mac-like, but it is a good web browser.
John:
It is not a Mac-like web browser, but it is a good web browser.
John:
And dev tools are still better than Safari's.
Marco:
Yeah, that you're probably right about.
Marco:
I can't really say.
Marco:
If you're not a web developer, I don't understand why you would use Chrome for anything besides... I guess I use it for Google Docs.
Marco:
That's about it.
Marco:
I don't like it.
Marco:
It's so wrong.
Marco:
Everything it does on the Mac is just so wrong.
Marco:
It just behaves horribly.
Marco:
Nothing is where it should be.
Marco:
Not to mention all the battery life issues on laptops and stuff.
Marco:
It's just bad.
John:
yeah i wouldn't use it on a laptop if i oh it is so rough because i mean i do use it on a laptop all day but my laptop is plugged in all day but battery life forget it it's it's brutal um but no it loads all my web pages and sometimes safari doesn't it's like it's like the unreliable keyboard i just need you to always load web pages sometimes safari decides that it's not going to do that anymore and it makes me angry i even i run both web browsers all day long i'm always running both i'm never just running one so it's not like i'm picking favorites but
Casey:
i like chrome i could not agree with you more marco like chrome is so i am not one of those people that's super angry about things being not mac like like slack is a show and chrome is probably second place for that it just chrome chrome was worse than slack
Marco:
yeah i agree actually it is less mac like than slack well and and because like chrome you have alternatives like slack it's like if you have to run slack you probably have to run it because because of a decision other people have made that you need to interact with so it's fine like you know you run it you deal with it it's no big deal
Marco:
whereas with chrome like that's less defensible like you can just run safari and chances are everything you need to do probably works in safari so like why would you not run safari why why are you running chrome oh god it's so bad oh i gave you a reason because those web browsers so looking at this tweet that just in one of our channels also seriously update your chrome installs it sounds like a security thing there's some kind of security flaw in existing chrome
Marco:
Yeah, that's why I tried to figure out how to update Chrome for a good, like, two or three minutes before giving up and asking you guys.
Marco:
About Box.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Why is he... Every other... Every other... So I... First I checked the Chrome menu for, like, a check for updates thing.
Marco:
Then I went over to the Help menu, because sometimes things put it in the Help menu.
Marco:
Then I went to Preferences, which, of course, is not a real preference window.
Marco:
It's just this crazy URL that opens up the preferences in the browser.
Marco:
And I'm scrolling through all these things that make no sense.
Marco:
And then it's like, well, it's not here.
Marco:
I click on Advanced...
Marco:
And it's nowhere in any of those either.
Marco:
Like, for God's sakes!
Marco:
Like, where the hell do you have to get this app?
Marco:
I would never have thought to go to the About Box.
Casey:
I would have done the exact same steps.
John:
Uh, you just gotta know that.
John:
Whoever goes to the About Box of anything.
John:
So, Chrome is so aggressive about updates, though.
John:
Like, there should be an icon in your toolbar that's like a colored arrow, whether it's green or yellow if you've been waiting a while.
John:
Like, Chrome totally wants to update itself.
John:
And will update itself whether you ask it to or not.
John:
Um...
John:
But if you need to do it in a hurry, either quit and relaunch, which I think will also do it, or the about thing.
John:
But you can't even quit it anymore.
John:
You've got to hold down the quit button.
John:
They don't even have an about window either, by the way, just in case you think they're actually going to pop up a dial.
Marco:
No, of course not.
Marco:
It's like everything about Chrome is just a giant middle finger to the Mac, but I like the Mac.
Marco:
So it's like a giant middle finger to me.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
A lot of the internet wanted to write in and tell us in generally very gentle ways that we are all idiots and there is a fix for the springboard rearrangement woes that John was talking about last episode.
Casey:
So if you didn't hear last episode or would like a brief recap, John was lamenting in the way that only John can, and I mean that in the best possible way, that it is nigh impossible to rearrange things using springboard, using the home screen.
Casey:
on an apple devices these days it is just an exercise in frustration from top to bottom and i was quietly and silently cheering along with john as he made this entire rant because i could not have agreed more however i forgot and i bet john also knew this and also forgot that there is a pro level maneuver to fix this problem john can you tell us about this
John:
I did not forget the suggestion that many people think is a better way.
John:
Some people said easier.
John:
Some people said less error prone.
John:
Some people, you know, whatever.
John:
But there is another way to rearrange things, which is to use two hands.
John:
And you may be asking yourself, if you think like me, adding a second hand to the surface of the screen does not make this operation any simpler.
John:
But their theory is, okay, it's more complicated, but it's less error-prone.
John:
Because, yes, you have to put two hands on the surface of your screen
John:
thing or at least be very dexterous with your one hand and have one finger holding the icon and another finger swiping across or whatever um but the advantage you get is that you don't have to hit the edge of the screen which is true but now like you're still hovering over you're still the icon or icons you can do multiple that you're holding and
John:
You're still hovering over the screens as you swipe past them.
John:
And unlike the edge thing, you're not guaranteed that you will advance to the next screen at the fastest possible rate because you have to swipe a second time.
John:
So that gives you even more time to perturb the icons on the screens that you're passing through.
John:
um and i think a multi-handed multi-finger gesture actually is more difficult and more likely to screw you up especially if you foolishly grab multiple icons because then when you accidentally drop those somewhere it's all over so i don't think this actually things makes things any easier yes it is an alternate way you can do it it works a little bit better on the ipad where you have a chance of perhaps it's sitting on a table or you have more space to put two hands or whatever but it doesn't change the fundamental problem which is that there's
John:
No undo.
John:
And it's very easy to accidentally mess up things you didn't want to mess up.
John:
And then even when you get to where you want to go, there is a very small, ill-defined safe area where you can actually hover where it won't cause something you don't want to happen to happen.
Marco:
To me, the multi-finger drag-and-drop thing has the similar kind of value proposition and also downsides in practice as the rest of the iOS drag-and-drop system that was introduced in, what was it, iOS 11?
Marco:
It adds a bunch of delays to things that used to not have delays, like tapping to get a menu in Safari or things like that, or it accidentally starts a drag when you might not want to start a drag.
Marco:
See also Force Touch, which has similar problems.
Marco:
But
Marco:
it brought the great advance of being able to hold down something with one finger and use a set.
Marco:
You don't have to use a second hand, but you can use a second finger to like scroll a view or to navigate the interface such that you can drop the thing with the first finger somewhere else in the interface.
Marco:
And it's great that they added that to springboard, but it has the same problem that that has everywhere, which is that not only is it a big delay to get into that mode and it's very error prone to enter the mode or to not enter it, depending on what you want to do.
Marco:
But once you're in the mode, it's also very error prone to move around with the second finger because a lot of times what you do with the second finger when you think you're going to swipe or scroll, you actually end up picking up a second item.
Marco:
And if that's what you want it to do, great.
Marco:
But the problem with this whole system is that it's kind of unreliable and, as John said, very error prone.
Marco:
So in practice, you know, I've known about the second finger trick since iOS 11 or whatever it was, was released and I've been using it, but I would say I fail and it does something I don't want it to do probably at least half the time that I'm actually trying to use it.
Marco:
And honestly, I have the exact same error rate with drag and drop on the iPad as well, and the exact same error rate with reordering things in Overcast.
Marco:
I had my own drag handles before, and then when this system came in, not only did I want to implement the new system, but it also broke my hack that gave me drag handles before, so I figured I was kind of forced to implement the new system.
Marco:
And it's just like the rest of drag and drop on iOS.
Marco:
Like I find it very error prone.
Marco:
And when it's, when it works, it's great.
Marco:
Like when you can pick up one or two things and then scroll with another finger and that's great.
Marco:
But in practice, it's very error prone and does something I don't want it to do a lot of the time.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I'd completely forgotten about it.
Casey:
And it's funny, this is a tangent, but as I've been using my iPad Pro more and more, I do really, really like it.
Casey:
But it's apparent to me, even as I've adjusted a lot of my workflows is overkill for what I'm describing, but like my process for doing things.
Casey:
It occurred to me just in the last month or so when I was trying to like send a link to somebody, but I didn't have messages open or something like that.
Casey:
or maybe it was an image, I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but I can, oh, wait, wait, wait, I can tap and hold and that'll start a drag operation.
Casey:
And then with my other hand, sound familiar, I can swipe up to get the dock and open messages and then flick, not really flick, but kind of, you know, drag the other thing that I picked up over to messages, drop it there and be good.
Casey:
which is actually really, really nice and fairly intuitive once I thought about what I needed to do.
Casey:
But because I grew up with an actual, well, I shouldn't say an actual computer.
Casey:
Oh my God, please don't email me.
Casey:
But because I grew up with a traditional computer, it's just very foreign to the way I think.
Casey:
And I'm trying to get better about embracing the touch way of life and
Casey:
And I am getting better about it, but it's definitely a slow journey for me that has taken longer than I expected.
John:
So getting used to stuff like that, like this, you know, part of it is just, like you said, what you grew up with and what you are accustomed to.
John:
But there is another aspect of it.
John:
You can't actually...
John:
measure people's performance with different operations, and certain things are more friendly to the way people work than others.
John:
So to give an example of the original Mac and using a mouse, this comes up a lot when someone digs up some old computer stuff, maybe in my attic, maybe on eBay.
John:
The original Mac came with a guided tour
John:
It was a floppy disk that was a guided tour, but it also came with an audio cassette that you would play while the floppy disk was in because you can't fit that much audio on a floppy disk.
John:
That would be madness.
John:
And one of the first things they taught you on the guided tour was how to use the mouse.
John:
And they had a little animation, and they showed when you're moving on the horizontal surface of your desk, the cursor moves to match it.
John:
And they had a little graphic that was showing that, and the voice is explaining it to you because you had to explain to people how to use the mouse.
John:
But touch is a much more direct interface where it's like, well, there's a something that looks like a button on the screen and we say hit the button and you just shove your finger.
John:
And, you know, we all see with our toddlers how quickly, you know, you don't really have to be taught that much about that.
John:
Once you realize I can just put my meaty paws on the screen, I can do something.
John:
That's an example of improving an interface before there was a.
John:
indirection however slight it might be and however easy it was for people to overcome it but it was still an indirection getting rid of that is better but the same token all these things we just described with rearranging icons and starting drag operations and holding your finger down and using another finger swipe through that's never going to get more friendly than it is like that is inherently an awkward error prone thing to do
John:
And there is no amount of culture or getting used to things that's going to make that a more friendly interface than alternatives that don't require that kind of both mental and physical gymnastics is just a more difficult things for people to do.
John:
It's not impossible.
John:
You can do it.
John:
You know, toddlers can learn how to do it as well.
John:
Like you see a two year old doing the same operation, but all things being equal.
John:
compare that to an operation where you get to split the task up into pieces, first set the icon aside, next find the destination, then put the thing in, it's less error-prone.
John:
It may actually be mentally, there may be more cognitive load to do the multi-step process because you have to sort of understand what you're going to do, but if you were to test people for their error rates or whatever, you'd see that it's more error-prone to do their thing, especially if you tested a wide swath of humanity.
John:
This is a thing that Apple used to do back in the day
John:
that they stopped doing roundabout when Steve Jobs came back, which is, you know, you don't have to just have your intuition and gut about
John:
what is better for usability you can test this you can use science to determine given given a wide swath of people of varying ages and abilities whatever thing we're trying to make happen here we want people to be successful we want them to be few errors we want them to feel less frustrated we want them to be able to accomplish a task in a small amount of time we want them to remember how to do that some a task we
John:
across a long period of time like all you can pick what your goals are and then you can test your interfaces against those goals and find out how miserably you're doing on them and compare multiple approaches um uh bruce tognozini if i'm pronouncing his name right uh has a what ask tog.com or something he's got a website you can go through all the old tests they did to figure out to come up with the mac interface how many buttons should a mouse have how should the menus work
John:
You know, all that stuff, which it doesn't mean like once you test it once, that's it forever and ever because things get refined over time and we come up with improvements.
John:
But you don't just have to guess about these things.
John:
But Apple today tends not to do that much of that type of formal research.
John:
More, you know, if you read Ken Cushenda's book where they're like,
John:
doing that but in an informal way like amongst uh other engineers in the hallway hey i tried this and here's how it felt or whatever which is better than nothing like if you read a lot of usability books especially about web usability they'll say like it doesn't take much to get a you know 60 to 70 percent of the value of usability testing you don't need this big complicated usability lab and
John:
big one-way mirror and cameras on people's faces and you know pulse monitors you can just informal testing with your co-workers is much better than no testing uh and but but i would say
John:
there's still a place for that sort of actual scientific testing to come up with something better.
John:
Because right now, the reason we have all these weird interfaces in iOS is because there's nothing obvious and better.
John:
Like, if you want this capability, if you want to be able to do all these things, it's cool that you can do them.
John:
It's awkward, but it's not obvious how you would be able to do those same things with less awkwardness and fewer errors, other than the things I just suggested, which is like...
John:
you know a shelf to put things on or using it using i'm gonna use case here using an interface on a on a different computer on a personal computer if you could use a mouse and a keyboard and a much larger screen i could rearrange springboard uh you know and and some holding areas and stuff and a trial commit interface it would be much easier to rearrange springboard even itunes was better i think but even that uh could be improved upon so
John:
I look forward to rearranging the springboard on our Apple glasses in 2035, being a much simpler, less error-prone experience.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Speaking of simple and error-prone, Apple supplier Corning is working on flexible glass for foldable displays.
Casey:
There's a post on The Verge where this is discussed.
Casey:
Apparently, there's, you know, I don't know, someone from Corning, the CEO or R&D person, whatever,
Casey:
has said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're working on this foldable glass thing.
Casey:
And they have a very fascinating GIF that they have provided that is at the top of the page that I could watch all day.
Casey:
And there isn't too much to say here, I don't think, other than this is, I guess, a subtle hint that Apple, who uses Corning and their Gorilla Glass for iPhone displays,
Casey:
Apple could hypothetically use this forthcoming glass that they say is coming in the next couple of years for a foldable display if they so choose.
Casey:
So that's good news if you're into it.
John:
That's definitely an Apple-style thing to do because, like I said last show, plastic, no matter how good that plastic is if you're constantly going to bend it, plastic is not known for its ability to be bent back and forth many, many times.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and not show any signs of wear.
John:
Same thing, plastic is not known for its ability to resist scratches.
John:
It's just generally a softer material than glass or metal or all these other things.
John:
There are many reasons that Apple settled on aluminum and glass for basically all of its products.
John:
They have the properties that make the products pleasant to use and stand up to wear and tear.
John:
Plastic less so.
John:
The original iPhone almost had a plastic display, but they dodged that bullet at the last minute.
John:
The iPod Nano did have plastic over its display, and that was very bad.
John:
So here's hoping Apple can figure out the bendy glass, because that would be a hell of a way to enter the bendables market.
Casey:
Is that a thing?
John:
We got wearables?
John:
Yeah.
John:
then bendables foldables is what you're looking for isn't that what mike and jason it's like it's uh it's like uh phones that fold in half bendy straws uh what else is in the market iphone 6 pluses yeah i guess uh folding chairs yeah i i would love to see if if bendable glass can actually be a thing i mean i am no expert in materials that sounds impossible to me transparent aluminum but yeah i mean it'd be worth something to you
Marco:
If it can be done, that sounds great because I think it is a critical problem.
Marco:
If folding phones are going to take off, we are going to have to get over this issue of right now all we know how to make the front of the screens out of is plastic and plastic kind of sucks as screen material.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But if we can have glass, we'd rather have glass and it makes a pretty big difference in niceness if we can have glass.
Marco:
So that would be great.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I mean, I'll believe it when I see it, I guess.
Marco:
Computer?
Marco:
Computer.
Casey:
What was that?
Casey:
Star Trek 4?
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Marco hasn't seen it.
Casey:
That Star Trek should not have worked, and now I'm going to get everyone emailing me about how it didn't work, but I loved that one.
Casey:
I thought it was hilarious.
John:
Everybody loved that one.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Oh, I assumed it was just me.
Casey:
It's universally beloved.
Casey:
But it shouldn't be.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
It's a good movie that makes people happy.
Casey:
It is a good movie that makes people happy.
Casey:
But can you just concede that if you look at the description of, oh, all these future people are going to come back in time to get some whales.
Casey:
Like, come on.
John:
It's fish out of water.
John:
It's beloved characters coming back to Earth.
John:
And we get to see the crew that we know and love being in a fish out of water type scenario.
John:
And it's fun.
Casey:
Again, I agree with you.
Casey:
It's just if you were to look at it only on paper, I maintain that it should not have worked even though it did.
John:
Bats aren't bugs and whales aren't fish.
Casey:
Anyway, all right, moving on.
Casey:
We have more riveting USB naming related news.
Casey:
And this actually is kind of cool.
Casey:
Apparently, USB 4 has been kind of announced in a way.
Casey:
And that is that Thunderbolt 3 is not patent encumbered isn't what I'm looking for, is it?
Casey:
It is the specification has been made royalty free.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
And Intel has given the spec to the USB implementers forum, which are the people that decide how USB works.
Casey:
And so Thunderbolt 3 will eventually be called USB 4.
Casey:
And that's actually really cool because that theoretically paves the way for what we know as Thunderbolt today to be more universal and not require maybe a Intel CPU.
Casey:
Hint, hint, Apple, hint, hint.
John:
Yeah, this is a smorgasbord of USB Thunderbolt and naming stuff.
John:
So first, the royalty-free nature, we've covered that before.
John:
That's been a while coming, I guess.
John:
This is one of the most prominent fruits of that labor.
John:
Second is that Intel is building...
John:
Thunderbolt and the new USB into its CPUs.
John:
So that will make both much easier to implement.
John:
You don't have to have a separate chip for it.
John:
If you get an Intel CPU, it's got it built in.
John:
It being open, anybody else could do the same thing.
John:
Hint, hint, Apple could make ARM CPUs and build in Thunderbolt.
John:
And then you have the USB 4.0 spec.
John:
being a superset of thunderbolt 3 and all the usb 3.2 stuff which makes sense usb 4 is not here yet usb 3.2 is like this year usb 4 is like out next year somewhere and then finally uh just to add a little bit more uh ridiculous naming all the other versions of usb were like usb space 2.0 usb space 1.1 but usb 4 removes the space between the b and the number so it's usb 4 because it has to be different
Marco:
Everything they do is like it's it's so close to good.
Marco:
And then they do something to make it either bad or confusing or both.
John:
They're going to run out of variations.
John:
What do they do for five?
John:
Roman numerals.
John:
They haven't done Roman numerals yet.
John:
So USBV can't wait.
Casey:
There you go.
John:
I have to keep saying it's pronounced five.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I'm not looking forward to that.
Casey:
No, this is very cool, though.
Casey:
I am really enthusiastic about Apple being able to use Thunderbolt 3 slash USB 4 on their forthcoming ARM computers.
Casey:
Am I right?
John:
Yeah, and Thunderbolt 4, I think we talked about that before, but Thunderbolt 4 is also a thing.
John:
So I don't know if that has to be in a separate chip, but seeing Thunderbolt built into CPUs and subsumed into USB means that it is much more likely to be a part of everyone's future than it was before.
Casey:
Moving on, we had talked last episode, I think it was an Ask ATP, about, hey, how do I know what my 32-bit apps are on my iPad?
Casey:
So if I upgrade this or update the software, what am I going to lose?
Casey:
And we weren't entirely sure how to do this, but unsurprisingly, there's a post at iMore.com.
Casey:
That describes exactly what to do, which apparently is settings, general, about applications.
Casey:
And then in there, it'll show you an app compatibility screen that will tell you which apps are no longer going to be compatible in the future.
Marco:
everything's in settings somewhere that's why they have search but the search doesn't work the search never works exactly i have i think i have i've had the search work i think one time out of the probably at least five or six times i have tried to use it to find something i don't know how they possibly implemented the search and settings to make it so bad at finding things that like i'm typing the exact name of does it work for anybody
Marco:
It works okay for me.
John:
It's kind of like the search.
John:
It reminds me of the search and system preferences on the Mac.
John:
Remember when they added that?
John:
That actually works.
John:
Right, but it's hand-tuned.
John:
They added, I think, attached metadata.
John:
You could type wallpaper, which is not a word that Apple uses to describe the desktop background, but it would find that preference pane because they put a bunch of synonyms in.
John:
but in in ios like either it's not hand curated like that or they didn't do a very good job of attaching metadata because you'll type a word that is a reasonable synonym for what you're looking for and it won't find it and as you pointed out sometimes you'll type in a word that you think is an exact match and it still won't find it so i'm not sure what data it is searching across but it's certainly not searching it's certainly not doing a full text search of all text that appears on the screen and settings screens
Marco:
No, you can type literally a word that is in the title and the thing you're looking for will not show up.
Marco:
It isn't even a failure of synonym search or a failure of a spell check or anything like that.
Marco:
It's literally not indexing the words that show up on screen.
John:
I feel like it doesn't go very deep.
John:
I remember I was looking for something that was three or four screens deep and it could never find it.
John:
Maybe it just does the first two layers or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, once you have a search in your UI, it's probably a sign that something is amiss.
John:
I'm still not entirely convinced that the idea that your settings are in a settings application rather than within the apps themselves is long term the way to go because settings just gets tremendous.
John:
And it's not like we haven't figured out ways to put screens for configuring your applications within your application.
John:
And most apps do it anyway.
John:
So it's weird.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Cirilla writes that Microsoft already has Xbox Game Pass, which is a quote-unquote Netflix for games service with millions of subscribers.
Casey:
I had no idea this existed, but I also have not owned an Xbox since the original Xbox way back then.
John:
What I was getting at on the last show, which is not very well communicated, was how different the phone is.
John:
game market is than console games like uh playstation has something similar where you subscribe to playstation plus and you get like a bunch of free games each month it's not the same thing as like a subscription service but it is a i mean it is a subscription service but you don't get access to a ton of games you get like one or two handpick free games a month or whatever um but both of those things like they both xbox and playstation have a large game library of 60 games of you know 15 to 60 games um
John:
that people want to play, each of which is significant and worthwhile, kind of like Netflix with a whole bunch of movies, whereas Apple has a collection of literally hundreds of thousands of mostly very bad games that most people don't want to play, and a small collection of good games that are already either selling well or getting people to download for free and then selling them in-game stuff.
John:
And I'm not sure...
John:
your typical iOS gamer feels like they would derive enough value from any reasonable subscription.
John:
Uh, because most people I see playing games on, on their phones don't, don't go through enough games to make the subscription work at it.
John:
Like if this, because iOS games are so cheap or free, if the subscription was $5 a month, they'd be like, why don't I just spend that $5 on games?
John:
Like I, I spend $1 and 50 cents on games a month and you want me to subscribe and
John:
I guess I would have access to way more games, but history has shown that I only play three free games and one $0.99 game and one $0.50 in-app purchase per month on average.
John:
So it's harder to come out ahead versus $60 Xbox games, where if I can get access to a huge library of $60 Xbox games, it's easy to have math work out if you have enough time to play games.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It remains to be seen.
John:
There could be some untapped market for people who want access to 100,000 games, of which they're going to play too, but we'll see.
Marco:
This is just one more argument for why it makes way more sense to have this as part of a bundle than to try to sell it as a standalone service.
Marco:
I see why it makes sense on game consoles.
Marco:
Even then, it isn't for everybody, but I see why it makes sense for some people on game consoles.
Marco:
Everything you said was correct, but the iOS market, it's just so different for games that I don't see people wanting to pay separately for this.
Marco:
But if it was part of a bundle, they would, they would think aspirationally like, that's great.
Marco:
I would use that.
Marco:
You know, even if they don't end up actually using it for much, like it would add to the perceived value of the bundle and it would help people justify purchasing the bundle.
Marco:
If it includes games and stuff, you know, and just all sorts of things that they may or may not actually use in practice.
Marco:
Whereas if you try to sell it separately, there, there's going to be a lot more like scrutiny on that purchase.
Marco:
And yeah,
Marco:
even after they subscribe for the people who do, if they aren't really playing the games, they'll be way more likely to cancel that pretty soon.
Marco:
Whereas if it's part of a bundle, they aren't going to be scrutinizing every single part of that bundle every month to say, am I still really using this or not?
Marco:
So again, it's ever more reasons why I think and hope this is all going to be one big bundle rather than individual services.
John:
Interestingly, I think they can basically give away access to tons of games without being afraid that they're going to end up paying out a huge amount of that subscription fee to the developers.
John:
Because most games are free, and I can't imagine in-app purchases being part of the subscription.
John:
Because that's the way they make all their money.
John:
Yeah, sure.
John:
You can get the games for free, but the games are probably free already anyway.
John:
Maybe it'll open up a slightly larger market for 99 cents games than exists now.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, all the popular games are free, and then they get in there and you buy whatever thing they're making you buy in the game.
John:
And Apple can't allow that to be part of your $5 subscription because everyone would subscribe just so they could play Candy Crush without whatever limitations they put in your way.
John:
Just, oh, unlimited and not purchased.
John:
Go, go, go, go, go.
John:
It breaks the whole...
John:
model that they've you know corner they painted themselves into there it's not a thermal corner what's what's a word other than thermal it's a casino corner i don't know like it's it's uh the the game the game market on ios is so strangely shaped from a historical perspective and you know it's fine that it works for apple and people enjoy it but i i'm not sure how like you could throw a subscription into there and it's almost like
John:
you know, like Margaret was getting at, like it seems valuable from the outside, but in reality it's pointless because no money really changes hands and it just makes you feel better about a bill you're already going to pay anyway.
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Casey:
I don't really know what this next topic is about.
Casey:
So what we're going to talk about is Apple and NVIDIA.
Casey:
And I know enough to know that NVIDIA and Apple used to be chummy, and now they're not.
Casey:
And because I am not someone who really cares about 3D cards and fancy graphics cards and things of that nature, I've never really spent the time to really dive in and understand the history here.
Casey:
But luckily, I have a John Syracuse that can tell me all about it.
Casey:
So, John, what's going on here?
John:
As we approach Mac Pro Day, which could be today.
John:
It could be the day you're listening to this.
John:
Probably not.
John:
But it could be.
John:
It's time to revisit this, especially in light of semi-recent development.
John:
So...
John:
We talked about NVIDIA and Apple in the past, and particularly NVIDIA's place in the 3D market.
John:
They have had the best, fastest cards for gaming for a long time.
John:
The lead used to swap between NVIDIA and ATI, AMD, and whoever else every once in a while, but we've been in a long phase where NVIDIA is in the lead.
John:
They also have the most mind share and market share in NVIDIA.
John:
AI applications with their CUDA language.
John:
And for a long time, Apple has not been including NVIDIA GPUs in any of its products.
John:
That's not that big of a deal if the Apple doesn't make any kind of computers that are focused on gaming or...
John:
really gpu intensive ai pro 3d machine learning yada yada yada stuff but in theory the mac pro could be targeted at some of those markets and so it's an open question hey this mac pro apple's going to learn from all its past mistakes uh
John:
is nvidia going to be an option on the new mac pro either from apple or uh you know separately like if you buy one but then you could upgrade the card if the thing is indeed upgradable and on that front you're like well if they make it any kind of computer with replaceable cards uh apple doesn't need to participate in that they can ship it with an ati card amd card i keep calling it ati whatever same company now
John:
They can ship it with an ATI card, but if it gets old or if you don't like it, you can buy an NVIDIA card and swap it in, and you'll be fine.
John:
The wrinkle there is you need drivers for it, and NVIDIA, in recent months and years, has been very willing to write drivers for macOS,
John:
But they've hit a snag.
John:
And the snag is that in the latest version of macOS, I forget when they did this, they've been locking down kernel extensions for a long time in macOS.
John:
And the current iteration, basically, and this is a quote from NVIDIA and one of their support forums, Apple fully controls drivers for macOS.
John:
Unfortunately, NVIDIA currently cannot release a driver unless it is approved by Apple.
John:
That's not strictly true.
John:
You could tell people to boot with a NVRAM ARG that disables the system protection and loads unsigned kernel extensions, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I think they could get around it in that way, but that's not something people want to do, and it's not really feasible for a consumer product.
John:
But what they're complaining about is that...
John:
You have to be like a licensed developer and you have to sign your kernel extension.
John:
Apple has to co-sign it essentially to say, yep, we're okay with this kernel extension shipping.
John:
And for whatever reason, political, technical, bureaucratic, apparently NVIDIA can't get drivers for its latest GPUs to go through the process that's required to get them to load on Mojave Macs.
John:
And so this is upsetting for people to say, like, I can't even I can't even just buy.
John:
I can't do it on a Hackintosh.
John:
I can't take my old Mac Pro and put in one of the new cards because there are no drivers for it.
John:
And, you know, the Mac Pro is a chance for Apple to fix all of its mistakes and to make a great new computer.
John:
It's not the end of the world if they continue to have this vendetta against Nvidia and say we are just never going to deal with them.
John:
But it is kind of a problem for Apple that Nvidia is the leader in so many different markets and continues to have the best cards, quote unquote, best cards for many different purposes.
John:
And Apple apparently not only refuses to ship things in there, but refuses to even let NVIDIA do all the work itself and ship things that can work with Macs.
John:
I hope that's not true.
John:
I hope something else is going on.
John:
And maybe behind the scenes they're working with NVIDIA and these things will come out with NVIDIA cards and it'll be great.
John:
Another possibility is that, oh, ATI takes the lead again.
John:
They just released a new card.
John:
I think they were the first to market with a 7 nanometer GPU.
John:
They're, you know, the new architecture, a new process.
John:
It's impressive, but they did not take the lead.
John:
Like this new card they came out with, it's on a smaller process than NVIDIA is currently shipping at, just barely matched an existing year old NVIDIA card.
John:
So ATI has not regained the performance lead.
John:
i think this is actually a little bit of a problem obviously some of the stuff nvidia does competes with apple and its metal initiatives and maybe this is all mood if apple starts making its own gpu so who the hell cares about nvidia and nati but in the world we live in today a mac pro produced by a company that refuses to have anything to do with nvidia and also refuses to let nvidia ship anything that can work inside a mac pro is slightly lesser for it and i really hope that's not how things turn out and so this is
John:
Of the many things that we'll all be watching for on Mac Pro Day, one of them is, does it ship with an NVIDIA card?
John:
And the second one is, can someone put an NVIDIA card into it, a good modern NVIDIA card into it after the fact and have it work?
Marco:
We've heard various rumblings and rumors and things from alleged employees for years now about how there's this massive bad blood between Apple and NVIDIA.
Marco:
The main reason I heard stemmed from back a few generations ago.
Marco:
NVIDIA had those GPUs and MacBook Pros that died a lot and caused a lot of expensive repairs for Apple.
Marco:
Basically, Apple blamed NVIDIA, NVIDIA blamed Apple, and Apple had to eat the bill for all that and kind of shunned NVIDIA from all their products since.
Marco:
And so if that is indeed the reason why we haven't seen a lot of NVIDIA stuff from Apple in the last few years, I think that's a dumb reason.
Marco:
If there is bad blood between these companies and it is within Apple's power to fix it,
Marco:
I think they should fix it.
Marco:
Because, as you said, there's pretty strong demand from high-end GPU users for NVIDIA support.
Marco:
By continuing to not offer NVIDIA GPUs, I think Apple is hurting itself and its customers more than whatever any dispute is worth.
John:
Yeah, and the interesting part is like it's not even that Apple has to ship NVIDIA cards.
John:
They just need to not prevent it, not prevent their customers from using NVIDIA cards.
John:
And that's a – like they've talked about how they're changing their attitude about the Mac Pro and they're going to make the computer the pros want.
John:
But part of it is like Apple's stance.
John:
The idea that Apple would sell you a computer –
John:
knowing that the people who buy it are going to change it after they get it, whether that's upgrades or even just component swaps.
John:
That mindset, which Apple used to have, that they would sell you a computer with the expectation that whether it's you're going to buy third-party RAM or you're going to buy a hard drive from someone else and slap it in there or you're going to buy a second GPU and put it in or you're going to replace the GPU that it comes with a different one, selling you essentially a platform.
John:
a modifiable platform obviously it's that's not appropriate for laptops for your iphone for a mac mini even right but the whole point of the mac pro is to be different from those other computers it's different than an imac pro different how because they sell it to you and it's got card slots or expansion or whatever like i don't know if they're going to go that far maybe they're like oh yeah it's expandable but it's only expandable with apple widgets right so you know you you have to buy components from apple and stick them in there and if apple doesn't sell it tough luck right but that's i feel like that's
John:
leaving money on the table if they really want to be serious in the pro market part of what makes something pro is the idea that you can buy sort of the chassis and the guts and be able to upgrade components as you go along right that's that's what you're paying all this money for to have an upgradable reliable sturdy core computer that you can augment and build just the machine that you need for whatever you're doing and
John:
And again, that doesn't require Apple to deal with NVIDIA at all.
John:
All require a system to allow NVIDIA to do what apparently wants to do, which is sell cards to Mac users and write the drivers itself.
John:
And then it's between those customers and NVIDIA.
John:
If the drivers suck, then, you know, it's like anything else.
John:
If you...
John:
people used to sell like raid cards and you know their own video cards and their own uh you know usb uh cards for macs that had an older version of usb like that's part of what makes a part of what has historically made a mac pro is the ability to do things like that so this situation where apparently nvidia can't even get its drivers to work on mojave because of signing things i really hope is some kind of misunderstanding and on the bad blood front the only company i can think of that apple's had
John:
worse bad blood with if that makes sense uh than nvidia is qualcomm and apple solution to that is they're going to make their own freaking modems like you know short-term solution is we're going to have intel do them and long-term is we're going to make them ourselves which fine if apple the short-term if apple short-term solution is we're going to use amd ati gpus and all our stuff and our long-term is i'll make our own gpus fine then do that but right now
John:
We don't know that that's the plan.
John:
Right now, we just see Apple about to release a Mac Pro that before it's even released, the smart money is that it will not have GPU performance that is competitive with the best GPUs offered in PCs.
Casey:
Yeah, it just seems so obvious to me that this is, as you guys said, this is a problem that, from what we can tell, Apple needs to fix.
Casey:
And being stubborn and petulant doesn't seem to do anyone a service.
Casey:
It doesn't help the users.
Casey:
It doesn't help Apple.
Casey:
It doesn't really help anyone.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I feel like my perception of Apple is that they can be extraordinarily stubborn and extraordinarily petulant if they so desire.
Casey:
And oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes it's for at least understandable reasons, if not good reasons.
Casey:
But geez, this time, I don't think so.
Casey:
From everything I know, which admittedly is little, it seems like they just need to put this all to bed and start fresh.
Yeah.
John:
so you are you going to put a nvidia card in your forthcoming mac pro john if it's possible to do so uh i can imagine doing that because i i have a i've had multiple gpus in the mac that's sitting right next to me right now and i don't see why i wouldn't upgrade the gpu in my future mac pro assuming that's a thing that is possible
Casey:
And speaking of that, will you be able to configure that Mac Pro, John?
John:
This is on the other end of the spectrum.
John:
This is a couple of old articles.
John:
I've got to look at the dates on these.
Casey:
This was January, I believe.
John:
Yeah, one from Jason Snell, and then Gruber chimed in about it.
John:
But the end of configurable Macs.
John:
Some of it is like looking at the products that Apple has released recently, and some of it is just sort of tea leaf reading and thinking about where all this is going.
John:
I think Jason was mostly inspired by the MacBook Airs.
John:
The fact that there's only one CPU option, which is fairly unheard of for Apple laptops usually.
John:
They have a fast CPU and a regular CPU, and they charge you a couple hundred bucks to get a small amount of clock speed increase, and people wonder whether they should buy it.
John:
Sometimes they'll do an i5 or an i7.
John:
This has historically been a way for Apple to boost its margins because they'll charge you a lot more than it costs them to get the...
John:
You know, the faster CPU, more RAM, more storage, so on and so forth.
John:
On the iOS line of computers or computing devices, there's configurability, but it is along fewer axes, mostly just storage.
John:
You can't get an iPhone or an iPad with a faster CPU or more RAM.
John:
Or if you do get more RAM, it's part of the more storage model.
John:
Like, I forget which one.
John:
The big iPad Pro, I think, had more RAM with the one terabyte of flash or whatever.
John:
And so eliminating things that you can vary.
John:
Like, oh, you can get a bigger, you can get more storage, but you can't get more memory.
John:
You can't get more CPU.
John:
Or maybe you can't get anything at all.
John:
Maybe just this is the way it comes.
Yeah.
John:
seems to be the direction apple is going and so the the open question is can we envision a future where all of the macs except probably the mac pro and maybe the imac pro uh have far fewer things that you can configure about them maybe color would still be in the mix because that's the thing that everyone wants to pick but that you wouldn't have a choice of cpu across any of the macs again except maybe the the super duper pro models that
John:
macbook macbook pro mac mini all those would come with just one cpu is the one and only cpu that they come with and it is a good one and it's made by apple for example like it's all arm cpus it comes with the we went through this before the m11 the x12 whatever the letter and number combination that apple comes up with for the max and like all of the macbooks come with that all the macbook pros come with the you know the m37 or whatever it's going to be
John:
Uh, and you don't have a choice.
John:
There's not clock speed differences.
John:
There's not, you can't get different amounts of Ram on them or whatever storage.
John:
I can imagine them still, you know, they need some, I feel like they need some, uh, dial that they can turn to charge people more money.
John:
So I can never imagine them being totally unconfigurable and just having a one price, one product.
John:
just because they make so much money by charging you more for more storage.
John:
But other than storage, I can totally imagine, especially if Apple's making the CPUs on all of them,
John:
No longer doing what they have done when other people make the CPUs, which is always getting, you know, different binned parts and charging you a couple hundred bucks for a minor percentage clock speed increase.
John:
And not only can I see them doing that, I don't think it would be that big of a deal.
John:
I mean, witness the new MacBook Air.
John:
It only comes with one CPU.
John:
Nobody cares.
John:
There wasn't even, like, a fake controversy article about it.
John:
Like, the best we got were these articles, which is like, like, hey, look at this.
John:
They only offered one CPU on the MacBook Air.
John:
Basically, what Apple's revealing is nobody, like, it's not a thing that people want.
John:
Like,
John:
And past MacBook Airs, you had choices of CPU speed, and all it did was require the customers to make another decision in the purchase process.
John:
And they'd have to think, hmm, do I want this?
John:
Do I want that?
John:
And probably the decision most of them made was, oh, minus $99, minus $200, minus whatever, or like, you know, that I have to charge this much more for some number, decimal point to go up that I don't care about?
John:
Forget it.
John:
I'm skipping it.
John:
um and so i feel like this is an entirely safe thing to do for cpu speed oh probably also a safe thing to do for ram again they've done that before i think there's some is it macbook or some mac models that i think only come with one amount of the 12 inch only has one option yeah yeah like i think that's mostly safe on the low end especially if they give you a reasonable amount
John:
And that just leaves storage, which is where Apple can put all their money by charging their normal exorbitant prices for additional storage.
John:
And they will.
John:
So I think this is a reasonable prediction.
John:
I think we're already most of the way there.
John:
And I think...
John:
It's both a good move and no one will care about it.
John:
What do you guys think?
Marco:
Well, first of all, some real-time follow-up before everyone emails us.
Marco:
Apparently, the 12-inch now does come with configurable RAM up to 16 gigs.
Marco:
It didn't when it first came out.
Marco:
The 12-inch?
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Yeah, now the high-end 12-inch can go to 16.
Casey:
Yeah, that's been the case for at least a year because mine is 16.
Casey:
I'm almost sure.
Marco:
It hasn't been updated for at least a year.
Casey:
True.
Casey:
Actually, that's a very good point.
John:
What are you going to do with all that RAM?
John:
I don't think the CPU can work its way through all that RAM.
Casey:
No reasonable amount.
Casey:
Don't even get me started.
Casey:
I was just thinking to myself just a couple of days back.
Casey:
I still do love my little MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
It is a great machine.
Casey:
It is exactly what I wanted in the sense that it is hyper portable more than anything else.
Casey:
But holy crap, is this thing slow?
Casey:
Getting the iPad Pro was the worst mistake I've ever made when it comes to continuing to enjoy my adorable, because it's just painfully slow.
Casey:
It really, really is.
Casey:
Like, when I was not comparing it to an iPad, it wasn't that bad.
Casey:
It didn't seem that awful.
Casey:
Of course, it's slower than my iMac.
Casey:
You know, that's to be expected.
Casey:
But holy cow, the iPad Pro is so much quicker than this thing.
Casey:
So I'm kind of of the camp of bring on the ARM Macs because clearly that'll solve all our problems.
Casey:
But to answer your question, do we want configurable Macs?
Casey:
You know, 10-ish years ago, maybe a little more than that, I would have been probably offended.
Casey:
And I choose that word on purpose.
Casey:
I would have been maybe offended at not having any choice as to CPU options and many, many RAM options and storage options and this and that and the other.
Casey:
But now I mostly don't care.
Casey:
And I think Gruber's point at the very, very end of his link to Jason's post, I think it's perfect.
Casey:
And I agree with it.
Casey:
Gruber wrote, I want Apple's system architects to do all the work to make the decision for me to find the perfect balance.
Casey:
And I agree with that.
Casey:
I think...
Casey:
Storage, especially while it's still pretty expensive, I think it makes sense for that to be something that you can tweak.
Casey:
I'm less convinced that RAM is also on that list.
Casey:
I kind of feel like within financial reason, just dump as much RAM as you can into these laptops until you can't anymore because it's just unaffordable.
Casey:
Storage, it makes sense.
Casey:
I'd also love a configurable cellular radio, but we know that's not going to happen.
Marco:
By the way, why not?
Marco:
Why is that not going to happen?
Marco:
I know you're right, but just for the sake of putting Apple's feet to the fire, why does cellular seem like it's something that everyone is just okay with not happening?
Marco:
We have it in the iPad, and it's great.
Marco:
Other PC makers have it in laptops, and it works for them.
Marco:
Why can't we have it in Macs?
Casey:
Well, let me tell you, Marco.
Casey:
It's because when I try to tether to my phone from my Mac, you know, and I don't touch my phone, it works flawlessly every time.
Casey:
It never has a problem.
Marco:
Plus, everyone loves draining their phone batteries, right?
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
And plus, there's no mechanism for having like a software-based SIM card, so you'd have to add another door to the laptop because we haven't figured that out yet either.
Marco:
But it's okay.
Marco:
Nobody has unlimited data plans.
Marco:
Those don't exist yet and definitely are not widespread.
Marco:
So I understand why they wouldn't want Macs to burn all your data.
Casey:
God, I agree with you.
Casey:
Although, all kidding aside, where would you put the little plastic piece for the cellular antenna, though?
Casey:
Where do they put all the other antennas?
Casey:
Yeah, but I don't know.
Marco:
I think they're hiding in the hinge right now.
Marco:
They find places to put antennas because laptops are made out of metal and they have a lot of wireless radios in them.
Marco:
So they find places.
Marco:
This is a solvable problem.
Marco:
All of these are solvable problems and are solved problems in many other devices, including Apple's own devices.
Marco:
This is why I'm just – it makes me so angry that they don't have cellular because PC manufacturers have been shipping cellular in laptops for over a decade.
Marco:
Apple has been shipping cellular in iPads since the very first iPad.
Marco:
Well, since 30 days after the very first iPad.
Marco:
But it blows my mind.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
it would be so useful.
Marco:
And as time goes on, we have more and more justifications for it.
Marco:
Like it isn't like the need for cellular online pipes is going down over time.
Marco:
It's actually going up over time as more and more people, first of all, want to avoid like, you know, using public wifi for God's sake.
Marco:
Um, and you know, second of all, as like hotel wifi and everything gets all crapped up with, uh, with people trying to download the entire internet worth of video all at once.
Marco:
And so it becomes, you know, decreasingly usable.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And you have huge increases of unlimited data plans, which neutralizes a lot of the arguments that macOS is not optimized for conserving cellular data, which, by the way, is true, but is also a solvable problem.
Marco:
Apple introduced the NSURL session cellular permission flags years ago, and those same flags exist on macOS, and I don't know...
Marco:
If Apple knows about these yet, maybe, I don't know, but they could have rewritten all of their apps to use these.
Marco:
So it's like, it's not, it isn't a big deal, I don't think, to add support for this kind of stuff.
Marco:
And again, over time, we have unlimited data plans becoming more and more common anyway.
Marco:
And cellular carriers making it easier and easier to add additional devices to your account that have cellular modems besides just phones.
Marco:
Things like smartwatches, iPads.
Marco:
The reasons to exclude cellular from Macs keep getting eroded away over time.
Marco:
And there's all the more reason, too.
Marco:
The only reason, you can say, for not having it is, well, you can tether to your phone.
Marco:
And yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But why do they have it in the iPad, then?
Marco:
If tethering to your phone is good enough, why have cellular in the iPad?
Marco:
The reason why is because it's way, way better than tethering.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons to do it besides just tethering.
Marco:
And the same things all apply to laptops.
Marco:
So for God's sake, put cellular in the laptops.
Marco:
Anyway, sorry for this massive interruption.
Marco:
Please continue with upgradable Macs.
Casey:
So I have to ask you and continue your interruption because I agree with you.
Casey:
If you had to choose only SD card slot, have I asked this already?
Casey:
SD card slot or cellular radio, what do you choose?
Marco:
Cellular, no question.
Marco:
I would use it more often and it's harder to add later.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
I'm not going to argue, but I'm slightly surprised because I know you really, really miss your SD card slot.
Yeah.
Marco:
I do, but I would use cellular a lot more.
Marco:
Because I have it on my iPad.
Marco:
I use it all the time.
Marco:
And there's lots of places where I would take my laptop, but I end up taking the iPad because I know it'll be easier to just quickly get online and check stuff on the iPad because it has built-in cellular.
Marco:
But I would like to use my MacBook for a lot more of those things.
Marco:
Anyway, so regarding upgradable Macs, I do have a small rant on this, too.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
People are really bad, and I mean this, I know lots of people, I'm friends with people, but people are really, really bad in general at estimating or guessing or deciding which hardware features or upgrades on a computer purchase are going to be useful and important and necessary for them, and which ones are worth the money and which ones aren't for them.
Marco:
I can't blame people for this because these things are marketed in certain ways that make you think that you need certain things or that certain things will be insufficient for you and you need to upgrade X, Y, or Z in order to do application A, B, or C. The reality is many, many, many of these upgrades that they sell you are things that you don't actually need or that have way less of an impact on actual usage than you might think.
Marco:
And CPUs, I think, are the number one offender here.
Marco:
And this doesn't apply to all the product lines.
Marco:
The product lines where you have meaningful differences in, say, the number of cores between different options.
Marco:
Like the iMac Pro.
Marco:
You can spec the iMac Pro from, what's the base model?
Marco:
Six cores?
Marco:
All the way up to 18?
Marco:
There's a massive difference in core count there.
Marco:
even then it's not a linear increase in performance because the clock speeds come down as the core count goes up but you still do get a substantial improvement in performance between those low end options and those high end options for you know things like the iMac pro or the Mac mini where you have huge differences in cpus that are available to you but in most of the products and especially the portable products and this is because of power constraints
Marco:
the difference between the lowest end CPU offered and the highest end CPU offered the difference in performance is usually very small way smaller than you would think from like the numbers that are on the page and it's usually on the range of like
Marco:
10 to 25% maybe.
Marco:
And so you might be paying like $300 extra to improve your CPU performance by 15%.
Marco:
And it seems like it'd be more than that, but the numbers that are on screen, but because of things like turbo boost and thermal limits and power limits, it actually ends up being less than you think in practice.
Marco:
But people tell themselves wonderful marketing lies like, I want to be doing video editing.
Marco:
And so I have to get the absolute highest end thing possible.
Marco:
And it often has very little relation to what their actual hardware needs are in practice and what the thing that they're saying will actually use in practice and will actually need in practice or the difference it will actually make.
Marco:
And so many people are totally fine for their needs to be solved by the lowest end option in a lineup or at best the mid-range option in a lineup CPU wise.
Marco:
RAM wise, I find I don't even know how much RAM to buy when I buy computers.
Marco:
Let alone, I can't even imagine how other people make this decision.
Marco:
And I think it's based on the same kind of voodoo.
Marco:
It's like, well, I want to edit videos, so I guess I'll get the biggest.
Marco:
Or, I'm only browsing the web most of the time, so I'll get the smallest.
Marco:
And the reality is, how are people supposed to know whether they need 8 or 16 gigs of RAM?
Marco:
If I can't even tell you whether I need 8, 16, 32, or 64, I have no idea.
Marco:
I usually get something near the middle because I can and I figure I'll probably use it.
Marco:
But I don't know what I'm actually using.
Marco:
How can anyone else know?
Marco:
And the reality is I have used high-end Macs like this wonderful iMac Pro I'm using now that has pretty high specs.
Marco:
And I've used mid-range Macs like my MacBook Pro, which has – it's a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
It has nice mid-range specs there.
Marco:
And I've used the 12-inch MacBook and the crappier one.
Marco:
I think it was the second-generation one that I used briefly.
Marco:
I felt some difference between them with the things I did.
Marco:
But it wasn't like – it wasn't as big of a difference in most operation as most people think.
Marco:
Like my MacBook Pro, which by the numbers should be like a quarter of the speed of my iMac Pro, isn't actually that much slower.
Marco:
And the things I do, even things like building overcast from scratch in Xcode, it's not that much slower than the iMac Pro.
Marco:
When I was testing the Mac Mini...
Marco:
I found the same thing.
Marco:
You would expect the Mac Mini to be a lot slower than the iMac Pro, but it wasn't that much slower.
Marco:
It matched it in CPU performance for the things I was actually doing, and it was just slower in a few other ways.
Marco:
People are really bad at guessing what they need and what they should spend their money on for upgrade budgets and everything.
Marco:
And I think the two worst areas of that are CPU and RAM.
Marco:
So if Apple is removing CPU customizability from low-end and or thermally constrained products, that's fine.
Marco:
Because the fact is, we don't have that much choice there now.
Marco:
We just have different ways to spend arbitrary amounts of money to get performance gains that are actually way smaller than we think that we probably won't even notice.
Marco:
RAM is a little more noticeable if you get it wrong, but the base model RAM in most of these machines is what most people buy anyway, and it's fine.
Marco:
You know, we have SSDs now, so running out of RAM when you have an SSD is a lot less of a performance penalty than it used to be when you had spinning disks.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
If we're getting less configurability in these two areas, that's fine.
Marco:
For most products in the lineup, that's fine.
Marco:
Now, that is not fine for something like an iMac Pro, where the potential range of processor options and the potential range of RAM mounts is way bigger, and you have more outliers at the high end because these are pro machines for pro workloads and everything, and who knows what pros need.
Marco:
So anything that is targeting a high-end use where...
Marco:
thermals and cost aren't necessarily constrained very well or very much it makes sense to offer huge options whatever the chips that can handle whatever the power can handle offer the biggest options you can and give people a range to pick from but as you get further down the line when you're in the smaller products like especially the small laptops
Marco:
it totally makes sense to just lock in one CPU option, one or two amounts of RAM, and then whatever storage customizability you can afford to put in there.
Marco:
Because the CPU matters almost not at all when you're deciding between... The 12-inch is offered in three different CPUs.
Marco:
If you actually look at the difference between those three, it's very, very small.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why is it three different CPUs?
Marco:
The answer is Apple wants free money, right?
Marco:
Like, that's basically what it is.
Marco:
And so does Intel, right?
Marco:
Because some of it's them.
Marco:
But, like, the reality is, like, if somebody has the top end, what is it, the 1.4 gigahertz processor?
Marco:
Yeah, the top end, the 1.4.
Marco:
If you substituted that out for the 1.2, the base model...
Marco:
I bet they wouldn't even notice.
Marco:
I bet almost no one who has the 1.4 would notice if you swapped it out for the 1.2.
Marco:
And that's a $250 premium option.
Marco:
The fact is, with the small processors, the small laptops, the small thermal envelopes, this stuff doesn't matter.
Marco:
So fine.
Marco:
With the new Air, we have one option.
Marco:
I have heard zero buyers of the new Air and zero potential buyers of it complain that there is only one CPU option.
Marco:
Literally none.
Marco:
I've heard it from none of them.
Marco:
And same thing, I don't know if the RAM's configurable, is it?
Marco:
But if it is, that's a lot less important as well.
Marco:
Storage does make a lot of sense to have configurable because storage is something that is hugely variable in people's needs and is extremely expensive.
Marco:
So you can't just put in the biggest amount of storage and call it a day because that would drive up the price of the machine way too much.
Marco:
So that makes sense.
Marco:
And also storage is...
Marco:
a hard limit with a CPU.
Marco:
Like you can edit video on a 12 inch MacBook.
Marco:
It'll just take longer.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
It just takes longer.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
You can do it.
Marco:
And you know, it's, it's a soft limit.
Marco:
Like you'll just be delayed, but it, it still has the same capability.
Marco:
You can still do the task you want to do.
Marco:
It'll just take longer.
Marco:
RAM, similar.
Marco:
You can still do most things you want to do, whether you have 8 gigs or 16, it'll just take a little bit longer if you don't have the high amount.
Marco:
Storage is a hard wall.
Marco:
You can't just fill your hard disk up bigger if you just do it more slowly.
Marco:
You don't get more space by filling it up slowly.
Marco:
That's one thing where it matters a lot more to give that a high ceiling for people to configure.
Marco:
And because it's so expensive, you can't just give everybody the same high ceiling.
Marco:
So yeah, I'm on board with this.
Marco:
There really hasn't been an area that Apple has removed customizability from recently that I have really run into as a real problem.
Marco:
I do have problems with other things that Apple makes non-customizable, like the fact that they use the same keyboard for all of their computers.
Marco:
That I have a big problem with, but that has never been customizable.
Marco:
Apple has, as long as I have been an Apple customer, which was since the PowerBook G4,
Marco:
they have used the same keyboard in all of their laptops.
John:
I never thought that Apple would introduce third-party keyboard support for their laptops, but then they did it.
John:
Right.
John:
We used to think that about iOS, and they actually had a third-party keyboard.
John:
No, they'll never do that.
John:
For the RAM question, if you're wondering how much RAM you should have or whatever, we all know this as developers, but customers probably don't, but iOS...
John:
started as a RAM-constrained environment.
John:
It was a very different fitness criteria for applications on iOS.
John:
And so iOS devices can get away with a fixed, very small amount of RAM.
John:
The Mac has a different history.
John:
And yes, even with all those iOS apps coming over to the Mac, that's not going to change anytime soon.
John:
So I would say on the Mac, if you're wondering whether you should get 8 or 16...
John:
uh if you're gonna run a web browser plus slack plus one other app gets 16 because if you haven't looked at activity monitor lately just look at how much ram like your chrome tabs and slack are taking by themselves like it is obscene how much ram they take not the virtual memory like measuring memory is very complicated there's no one thing you can look at and add up a numbers and come up with a thing that's saying it's very very complicated but
John:
And yes, SSDs are way faster than spinning disks, so it's much less important than it used to be, but SSDs are still way slower than RAM.
John:
So if you ever have a choice between 8 and 16, and you can stomach Apple's prices, which are ridiculous for that extra 8, get the 16.
John:
But you don't need 32 unless you know you need 32.
John:
So that's the tricky part with RAM, is that even on the low-end models...
John:
If Apple standardized on eight, it would be bad.
John:
If Apple standardized in 16 right now, that would be fine.
John:
So whatever the inflation adjusted equivalent of 16 is, like they would have to revisit that number once in a while.
John:
But 16 is fine for pretty much everybody.
John:
But eight, it's not you don't have to be running fancy applications to use up all of eight.
John:
And then you're swapping to an SSD.
John:
And yes, it's fast, but it is not as fast as RAM.
John:
But I mostly agree with everything else that Marco said, and it was making me think.
Marco:
Real-time follow-up.
Marco:
Apparently, I have 64 gigs of RAM in my iMac Pro.
John:
Yeah, maybe that's why you don't notice any issues.
Marco:
And I'm currently using 39 gigs.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
How about that?
John:
What are you running?
John:
What things have dots under them in the dock?
Marco:
uh oh boy i mean how much time do you have it so uh finder mail messages uh safari things itunes textmate chrome xcode dash terminal tower slack preview calendar notes solver numbers tweet bot photos or read kit audio hijack colloquy and skype and activity monitor all right so that's a lot of apps
John:
but you you're just over the threshold of a 32 so you wouldn't be fixed uh fit into a 16 i'm only using around eight i am running safari bb edit terminal colloquy chrome uh and slack and audio hijacking and uh and skype um
John:
But there is a gig of swap in use, and I don't actually have a lot of windows or tabs open at this point because I close everything down when I podcast for the most part.
John:
But anyway, yeah, 8 is a little bit too little to have breathing room, especially when there's another reason people spend the extra money for the faster CPU is they feel like it's going to give them more longevity out of the machine, and it might, but RAM will give you much more longevity than CPU will because...
John:
There's some, you know, say you bought RAM not knowing that Slack would come into existence.
John:
Then it becomes an important part of your life.
John:
You just realize how much of a RAM pig it was going to be and the fact that it's going to be running all the time and potentially has a memory leak.
John:
Like on the Mac, that's the type of thing that can happen.
John:
iOS, it can happen because anything that was that much of a RAM pig would never run for more than 60 seconds at a time before being killed.
John:
What the hell is Adobe desktop service?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's half a gig right there.
John:
yep like well you gotta what column are you looking at you can't really this is the memory ram no you have to look at a real memory real memory okay memory is the virtual memory but even real memory it's not you can't just add up all those numbers it's way wait real memory is way more than memory for some of these like it says photos 4.5 gigs but real memory is 4.5 memory is 730 megs
John:
I don't know.
John:
I thought memory was V-size and real memory was RSS in PS parlance.
Marco:
Yeah, see, it's very hard to actually know, like, how much RAM is an app actually using because it isn't that simple.
John:
Yeah, real memory says R-size, which itself is a complicated concept when you mouse over it.
John:
Private memory is R-size.
John:
I think I did.
John:
I tried to do an article about this once explaining exactly how RAM is divvied up.
John:
And like there is there is no number you can get out of PS where you can add up a bunch of things and get two values.
John:
That's like here's how much is in in the RAM chips on my computer and here's how much is in the SSD.
John:
You'd have to go page by page and figure out who's sharing this page from this shared library, and is it in RAM?
John:
You'd have to dump the whole page table.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
Anyway, it's very difficult to express this to users, but you do know when swap is in use because you can see things getting paged in and out, and you can feel things getting slower.
Yeah.
Marco:
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John:
Anyway, your discussion before of, like, cellular and the configurability of laptops and everything was making me think of something I've been thinking about for a couple weeks now, but I haven't been able to come up with a good visualization, so I suppose people can make a bunch of charts and spam them at us.
John:
And I just wrote it in the notes doc to remind myself to talk about it as the MacBook hierarchy of needs, but it's not really a hierarchy.
John:
It's not really what I'm thinking of.
John:
It's like...
John:
So new laptops, new laptops are coming.
John:
We're all excited about them.
John:
There's a bunch of things that, uh, that could potentially come in new laptops.
John:
And I was visualizing them as kind of like a, an ordered list.
John:
And as you go down the list, like if you went down the whole list, it's a short list.
John:
It's maybe like five or 10 things, maybe probably less than 10 things.
John:
If you, if everything on the list appeared like in the new laptops, you'd be like, these are the best laptops ever.
John:
Apple is amazing.
Um,
John:
And if none of them appeared, you'd be super mad.
John:
It's like they didn't fix anything.
John:
Like, you know, they're still crappy like they are now, right?
John:
And it's a ranked list.
John:
So the top item is the one that you say Apple has to do this.
John:
This is the most important thing for them to do.
John:
And the second one is like, oh, here's the second most important.
John:
And you have to decide as you go down the list, sort of like a color coding, at what point do you draw a line and say, this is the line of acceptability, like let's say, where if they do this one or these two or these three things,
John:
they will have acceptably addressed the shortcomings of the current laptops.
John:
And then there's the next line, which is like, if they do these four or these five things, they will have really good laptops.
John:
And then if they do these six or seven, they will have great laptops.
John:
And if they do eight, nine, and 10, they have the best laptops ever.
John:
And I'm sure we all have different lists, but I, you know, and I can imagine a diagram and sort of like color or maybe like a temperature bar thing or coloring in.
John:
And what I'm referring to, by the way, with the MacBook hierarchy needs is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is actually kind of inverted where it's like the basic things that everybody needs is like...
John:
what is it safety is the bottom no actually this the wikipedia page says psychological is the bottom need anyway there's safety then there's love and belonging then there's esteem and there's self-actualization and so you need safety because if you don't have safety if you don't have physical safety who's worried about self-actualization right that's the idea that there's certain things you need to address because they're like serious concerns and you can't worry about the other things until you address that but as you go
John:
up in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
John:
You get to things that are sort of more nice to have, where at the very top is like, I've got everything else going on in my life, and my final thing is self-actualization, right?
John:
So the inverted version of that in the MacBook hierarchy of needs is, I'm assuming we can all agree, number one is keyboard.
John:
And I would say, if you have to subdivide that, you would say keyboard reliability, because you can't start addressing key layout or key feel or anything else you care about keyboards until you do reliability, right?
John:
And then we can start arguing about what number two and three and four are.
John:
But I think the most interesting part there is where would you draw the line?
John:
Like, let's say the line of acceptability where they introduce new MacBooks and the new MacBooks have a reliable keyboard, right, as determined over the next six months or whatever.
John:
Do you draw a line right after that and say they will have crossed the line of acceptability if everything else about the laptops doesn't change or like is a wash doesn't get any better, but they have reliable keyboards?
John:
Is that acceptable or is there a second item and a third item?
John:
I don't think we have to solve this now, but I am visualizing like a color coded rainbow chart that we work our way down during the keynote.
John:
i know they're not really ordered and i know apple could like introduce items number one and five and seven so there's probably some visualization that would let us know ahead of time so we sort of for our own personal opinions and say here's what i think if they hit x y and z here's how i'll feel about it and doing that before the announcement as opposed to just seeing what they announced and then deciding how you feel about it is a way to keep yourself from going off the deep end and saying this one pet thing that i wanted whether it's like an s
John:
card slot or cellular or whatever isn't there and therefore I think these laptops are crap even though they have like five of the items that I said I wanted and they've passed into the line of greatness or whatever.
Casey:
That's tough, because on the one side, I want to snark and say, oh, well, obviously, if they don't have a good keyboard, I can't buy it.
Casey:
But that's not really true.
John:
I'm going to buy anything that has... It's not a question of, like, whether you'll buy it or not.
John:
It's like, the line of acceptability is basically, have they improved on the current models?
John:
Let's say they just kept giving the current models butterfly keyboards, they update the CPUs, they give more RAM, they're like, blah, blah, blah, like...
John:
It's not like we wouldn't buy them because we'd have no choice.
John:
They'd be the only Mac laptops.
John:
But I think we would all agree that they have not addressed any of the problems that we see with the current laptop lineup.
John:
We feel like the current crop of laptops over the last three years or so have problems.
John:
We want to see those problems addressed.
John:
And I feel like the line of acceptability is, okay, Apple, you have acceptably – you've addressed enough of the problems from our personal estimations with the current laptops that I feel like, you know –
John:
Okay.
John:
All right.
John:
Maybe they're still one of my favorite laptops in the world, but you've gotten out from under the dark shadow that is the butterfly keyboard, for example.
John:
And then from there, like, oh, these are good laptops or these are great laptops or these are the best laptops Apple has ever made.
John:
Like, you know, all the way up and or down the hierarchy, depending on how you invert your pyramid.
Marco:
Yeah, for me, I mean, I agree with your definition of the pyramid.
Marco:
Like, you know, it's not necessarily would I buy it because we all know I'm going to buy no matter what it is.
Marco:
But it's more like, you know, what will make it fixed?
Marco:
Like what will be like this is now on the right track or this is no longer a product category that is on fire or covered in asterisks.
Marco:
And yeah, for me, keyboard is number one.
Marco:
And if they...
Marco:
If they did nothing else except give it a good keyboard again, and I define good there as multiple facets.
Marco:
Reliability is number one.
Marco:
But if all they do is replace the keyboard with a good keyboard again...
Marco:
I consider that good enough.
Marco:
I would like to see more improvements than that.
Marco:
Cellular is very high on that list, but other than that, it's literally just a good keyboard is the only single required thing for me to say, this product is back on track.
Casey:
Yeah, it's so tough.
Casey:
I think I'm less disgruntled with the current laptop line than you are, Marco, and John hates anything that you can move around.
Casey:
So obviously he doesn't like the laptops.
Casey:
It's tough for me to say.
Casey:
I have definitely had some keyboard problems with my MacBook, but they haven't yet been egregious enough to make me really angry about them.
Casey:
I actually quite like the feel of the keyboard, even if I don't particularly care for the reliability.
Casey:
So, I don't know, man.
Casey:
Like...
Casey:
I don't feel like there's anything really holding me back from buying another one today, except that I don't particularly feel like I need one.
Casey:
And in terms of in general, is the line back on track?
Casey:
Then, yeah, I think it's what you said.
Casey:
It's a reliable keyboard and probably little else.
Casey:
Now, John, earlier on, you had said basically, oh, if this, this and this happened, it would be the best portable computer ever made.
Casey:
I think for me that would be, you know, continued extreme lightness because that's the kind of laptop I favor these days.
Casey:
All-day battery, which is obviously indirect.
Marco:
Which your laptop does not have.
Casey:
Yeah, and I can't have them both, right?
Casey:
I can't have it be extremely portable and light and also have an all-day battery.
Casey:
something that's reasonably speedy with a reasonably nice screen.
Casey:
Another thing that, Marco, I know you're really bothered by that doesn't bother me as much is not having true pixel doubling, at least by default.
Casey:
I can understand why that annoys you, but it's not something that I'm particularly bothered by.
Marco:
That isn't a huge deal.
Marco:
I consider huge deals to be things that
Marco:
I don't like or that I'm worried about pretty much every time I use it and really the number one thing on that list is the keyboard like I don't I never like it no matter how long you know I've been using these keyboards on and off now for almost three years and I still don't like them but I'm also always worried that it's going to break
Marco:
I use my laptop very gently and I'm afraid to use it in a lot of conditions where I'm totally fine using my iPad because I'm not worried about getting a speck of dust on it but I'm afraid to use my laptop in a lot of conditions because I know how incredibly fragile that keyboard is and if a speck of dust goes near it just the wrong way
Marco:
there goes $700 and a week of not having my laptop.
Marco:
It's a constant worry.
Marco:
And for anybody who has these machines, if it isn't a constant worry for you, it should be because they are that fragile and it is that random and capricious when they stop working.
Marco:
And it is that much of a pain to get them repaired.
Marco:
So it's like, that to me, that overshadows everything.
Marco:
The rest of it, like the USB-C only thing,
Marco:
the lack of the card reader, the lack of MagSafe, the higher price, like all that stuff is stuff that I have had, I've had, you know, two and a half years to very slowly come to terms with.
Marco:
And I mostly have the touch bar also, like,
Marco:
I still don't like the touch bar, but if my only option on the next laptop is a good keyboard that happens to also have a touch bar, fine, I'll take it.
Marco:
Everything else I can say, fine, I'll take it.
Marco:
But not the keyboard reliability.
Marco:
And in general, the keyboard design, but the reliability is the number one problem.
Marco:
I worry about that every single time I use the computer, and that negatively impacts
John:
when and how i feel comfortable using the computer and so that's bigger than everything else but i was thinking of this i was mostly thinking of it not so much as i mean the line of acceptability is an interesting question but i was thinking of it in terms of how if they go down the entire list they'd make you know the best laptop apple has ever made because in many respects apple's current laptops are the best they've ever made for example in terms of
John:
size and weight and sturdiness of the chassis they're better than they've ever been they're thinner than they've ever been they're very sturdy they look really good like that aspect of the design is great it's just they've dropped the ball in other areas so i was thinking like if they just go down this whole list they'll be great and i haven't really drawn lines but i i've
John:
typed up while we've been talking what i think is my personal list uh and it's not that long it's like seven items long and if they did all seven of these things potentially this is the greatest line of laptops apple has ever made um so my number one is keyboard reliability
John:
uh my number two is screen resolution like you know native 2x all the stuff we've talked about that's just important enough to me i feel like it's it's fundamental just like the keyboard i'm talking about the pro laptops by the way i'm not talking about the macbooks i'm saying the macbook pro in particular i'm thinking of the 15 inch but you can map to 13 inch you know it's a true true retina res at the at least the old uh number of points right
John:
number three is the keyboard layout and having like a real escape key so this includes anything improving the inverted t and you know that maybe in home and end key on the 15 inch and all like all that stuff like keyboard layout is my number three my number four is sd card just because i have a camera that uses sd cards number five is improved battery life because as bad as the battery life is with the current things i
John:
It's lower on my list than all those other things just because I can get by with the battery the way it is.
John:
It's ridiculous when WebEx drains my battery in an hour-long meeting, but I'm usually not that far from plugs or whatever.
John:
So for me, battery life is number five.
John:
Six is cellular.
John:
I think it's cool, and I would use it, but it's below all those other things.
John:
Seven is MagSafe, a return of magnetic attached cables.
John:
I can work around that with a little MagSafe thing that I have for my MacBook Air, but it would be great for it to be built in.
John:
And the last item is other additional ports, whatever those ports may be.
John:
I don't really care, but just the idea that it wouldn't just be USB-C on the side.
John:
If they did all those things, had a reliable keyboard, native 2X, improved keyboard layout, and a real escape key SD card slot, improved battery life, cellular, magnetic thing, and some other ports.
John:
that could potentially be the best laptops apple apple's ever made we're not going to get all that i know but i think that list is technologically feasible let's say apple could build this computer and sell it for a reasonable price as the 15 inch macbook pro and it would be the best laptop they've ever made they won't for reasons that i find personally frustrating uh but there's that so now my line of acceptability is
John:
I have to say, I think it's after number two, keyboard reliability and screen res.
John:
That's just my personal opinion, but the screen res thing really bothers me.
John:
And I can't live in a world where we just accept from this point on that there'll be non-native res on Apple's Pro laptops forever and ever.
John:
It's bad.
John:
I don't like it.
John:
So that's my line of acceptability.
John:
And then after that, things get scrambled because I don't think they're going to put an SD card in it.
John:
I don't think they're going to change the keyboard layout, but those are my next two items.
John:
So they're probably going to skip that and maybe go to, like, improve battery life and then skip everything else.
John:
And they'll end up having good laptops.
John:
That's just my current thinking.
John:
I'm sure everyone else's lists vary.
John:
If I had to make a similar list for the Mac Pro, it would be a big, giant mess.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
And honestly, the Mac Pro is more of, like...
John:
like i feel like i'm with the mac pro i have an out they don't make a mac pro that fits my bill i'll just buy an imac pro it's a good computer i just want them to be back in the market of making pro max uh and in hopes that there will be another one after that unlike the trash can and that they have another chance to take a run at just like with the laptops they made a bunch of laptops that we have problems with but they're going to keep making more laptops so they have more chances to get it right
John:
I just want the Mac Pro to be like that.
John:
You know, a computer that they make more of every year or two.
Marco:
That's all.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
It shouldn't be a lot to ask.
John:
Yeah.
John:
A keyboard that works.
John:
That's my laptop list.
John:
Maybe I'll refine it before WWDC or whenever we think they're going to announce laptops and then we can all go down the list and check off and see where we end up on our MacBook hierarchy of needs and or wants.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm working on mine as you're talking, and I'm not satisfied with it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What I've come up with, which, again, I'm not terribly satisfied with, is improved keyboard reliability, and I'd also like the inverted T. I do miss that.
Casey:
And that is pretty much the line of acceptability for me.
Marco:
Is that one item or two?
Casey:
Well, I don't know.
Casey:
Dealer's choice.
Marco:
Well, I said good keyboard, but that's a compound item.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, if they failed on the inverted T, then whatever.
Casey:
Like, I would be annoyed by it.
Casey:
And they will.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
And they will.
Casey:
I'd be annoyed by it, but I would move on.
Casey:
So to me, the line is just a better keyboard.
Casey:
Be that one item or two, it doesn't really matter to me.
Casey:
I'm counting it as one, though.
Casey:
My next thing is cellular.
Casey:
I would love to see cellular.
Casey:
Again, I don't think it'll happen.
Casey:
MagSafe, I don't think it'll happen.
Casey:
That's three.
Casey:
Four is an SD card slot.
Casey:
Five is improved battery life.
Casey:
Six is more frequent updates to the line.
Casey:
Even though I don't buy a computer every year or every month because my name is not Marco, I would still like to see more frequent updates.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think you guys understand how tough it is to be a laptop fan.
Casey:
We haven't gotten updates in like, I don't know, a year.
Marco:
That's not a feature of our product, though.
Casey:
No, that's true.
Marco:
I'm going to nix that one.
Casey:
Okay, that's fine.
Casey:
That's fine.
Marco:
To me, what matters... Some of these things matter.
Marco:
Updates matter only on an extreme scale.
Marco:
If a product line only gets updated every one and a half to three years, that matters if you're itching to buy one from one year in and you have to wait and wait and wait for the new models to come out in order to buy something that you think is current.
Marco:
That sucks.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
once you own it, that stops mattering.
Marco:
And there's a lot of these things like once you already own it, things like the release schedule or even like a lot of the purchase price or the upgrade pricing, a lot of that stuff is a one-time pain before or during purchase.
Marco:
But then after purchase, you can move on and it isn't constantly impacting you.
Marco:
Whereas things like an unreliable keyboard,
Marco:
that impacts you the entire life of the product.
Marco:
So to me, that's way more important.
Marco:
Any factor that impacts you the whole time you own it is way more important than one-time pains up front.
Casey:
I think that's fair.
Casey:
So my list then is keyboard, and that's where my line is.
Casey:
Better keyboard, more reliable, and inverted T. Then below or above the line, however you want to look at it, cellular, MagSafe, SD slot, battery life, and more ports.
Casey:
Because...
Casey:
I think I would move more ports, weigh the crap up if I was committed forever to only buying an adorable because I got to tell you, it is really nice to use, I believe they're a past sponsor, a Luna display with your MacBook adorable to get a lot more real estate when you're, say, working on like an iOS app or something like that or Final Cut.
Casey:
However...
Casey:
that is really, really, really not as fun when you only have one port and that one port is being taken up by the Luna display.
Casey:
And so I have a, I have a like two hour limit of having multiple monitors on my laptop because, oh, when it comes to, you know, using the iPad as the second monitor, because after that, my battery is dead and I need to disconnect the Luna display, which happened to me just the other night.
Casey:
So more ports would be like number one on my list if I knew I was going to buy an adorable and only an adorable for the rest of my life.
Casey:
But the fact of the matter is this is a self-created problem because I could have just as well chosen a different laptop that has at least one more port.
John:
Yeah, I've got improved battery life somewhere in the middle of my list.
John:
But obviously the ARM thing we expect will take care of that.
John:
Like we're going to get that whether we ask for it or not.
John:
Unlike all the other things on this list, other than keyboard reliability.
Marco:
Are we going to get it?
Marco:
Because any gains that are possible by moving to ARM, Apple could spend those by just making the battery smaller to make the laptop smaller and thinner.
John:
But I don't think they will because I think like the 10-hour battery on the iPad, I feel like Apple's line for – it's line for acceptability for a pro laptop battery life.
John:
They're currently below that line.
John:
They're below it because they – this is the tradeoffs they've made.
John:
But I think they're slightly below it.
John:
So I think we're getting improved battery life as a guarantee with the ARM.
John:
Not like fantastically better because like you said, they can choose to trade it off.
John:
But I feel like they're not going to say –
John:
the current laptops have about the right barrel, especially like in terms of peak performance, like if you run it hard, how they drain down so fast.
John:
Like I feel like Apple, you know, would like their current line of laptops to get a little bit better.
John:
So when they have the ability to do that, they're not going to trade it all away for thinness.
John:
I think they're going to, you know, they're going to do it for that.
John:
And, you know, in keyboard reliability, I'm thinking about this too in my more pessimistic moments.
John:
Like I'm very certain that they're going to come out with a new keyboard.
John:
But I guess nobody can be really certain that the new keyboard will fix all the reliability problems.
John:
Obviously, that's the whole point of the new keyboard is to solve the problems presented by the old keyboard.
John:
But it's not like Apple set out to make an unreliable keyboard, right?
John:
So...
John:
It's the type of thing where we'll all be happy when they announce a laptop with a new keyboard, however they present it.
John:
But we still kind of have to take a wait-and-see attitude to say, okay, is it actually more reliable?
John:
Because I don't think it's getting 10 times thicker.
John:
It's not going back to the old keyboard.
John:
It's going to be a new, thin keyboard that we hope doesn't have problems.
John:
But that's not an easy thing for Apple to make, apparently.
John:
Yeah.
John:
so there's that possibility as a way so i'm going to say improved battery life is you know even if only slightly is a guarantee with the arm transition keyboard reliability is a guaranteed thing apple will try to do and everything else on this list is potentially able to be ignored by apple which i find very annoying because once again
John:
Everything on this list is A, available on PC laptops and B, entirely within the realm of feasibility for Apple to make without any significant downsides in terms of, oh, we have to increase the price by hundreds of dollars or it is compromised in some terrible way that makes it a worse product.
John:
People would love this product that I listed on all these things.
John:
They would love it.
John:
Again, just for the 15-inch.
John:
Put all these things on the 15-inch.
John:
Nobody would say, I was going to buy a new 15-inch, but I found that it comes with an SD card slot, so screw that computer.
Marco:
Yeah, like if you want to have a minimal laptop that offers as little as possible, despite the hostility it provides to actual use, focus at all on the 12-inch because those buyers relish in that.
Casey:
Hey, guys.
John:
Sorry, Mark.
John:
We've covered this on past shows.
John:
There's no room for another port on that computer.
John:
It's impossible.
John:
Back when people were much more willing to believe that Apple could do no wrong, very strongly argued that there is literally no room for another port on a computer that size.
Casey:
Seriously, if you gave me the same computer or if Apple made available this exact same computer with all the same internals that I was just whining about what half an hour ago, if they made this exact same computer, but with a second port and charged me another $2,500, whatever I paid for this thing for it, I would buy that tomorrow.
Casey:
I really would.
Marco:
I have great news for you, Casey.
Marco:
They do make that computer.
Casey:
I don't want a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
No, get a MacBook Air.
Marco:
MacBook Air, yeah.
Marco:
That's true.
Casey:
You're probably right.
Marco:
The MacBook Air is almost exactly what you want.
Marco:
The only thing is, it is...
Marco:
significantly heavier and bigger.
Marco:
Going from 2.0 pounds to 2.75 pounds is a pretty big difference.
Marco:
Going from 12-inch to the 13-inch body, it is noticeably bigger and heavier.
Marco:
However,
Marco:
The new MacBook Air is basically a two-port MacBook.
Marco:
That's basically what they made.
Marco:
It's very similar in a lot of ways, and it's a lot better in a lot of ways.
Marco:
Every curve or continuum has a certain point at which you can make things smaller and smaller and thinner and thinner.
Marco:
And at some point, there's an optimal balance.
Marco:
And then at some point, you fall off a cliff.
Marco:
When you pass the certain point, the trade-offs are no longer worth it.
Marco:
And they start becoming really severe trade-offs that start to really impact you in ways that are no longer worth the trade-offs.
Marco:
I think the 12-inch, for a lot of people's uses, is on the fallen-off-the-cliff side of that.
Marco:
Whereas the 13-inch MacBook Air is comfortably on the other side of the line.
Marco:
So I think if you want a super portable computer and you're willing to give up some performance and stuff to get there, the 13-inch MacBook Air is a way, way better balance for most people's needs than the 12-inch.
Marco:
And I'm not saying the 12 inch should stop existing because there are people for whom that super tininess of it is worth those trade-offs, but it's such a severe drop-off in utility to get that that you're an able-bodied young-ish person.
Marco:
You can carry an extra three-quarters of a pound and it's fine.
Marco:
Apple already makes the computer that you should buy and it's the new MacBook Air, except for that stupid keyboard.
John:
Well, not with that keyboard, maybe.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Actually, the keyboard has proven to be pretty unreliable, actually.
Marco:
But yeah, they're almost making... I mean, the keyboard you have now is worse.
Marco:
It depends.
John:
It is an upgrade.
John:
Reliability-wise, maybe it's slightly worse, but it might be better feel-wise.
John:
Oh, and not so real-time follow-up.
John:
I realized that when I'm looking at this Wikipedia page, the bottom item in Maslow's hierarchy, I just misread the word because the text is small and I'm tired and my eyes are blurring.
John:
physiological safety not psychological physiological say is it's physio physio physiological needs like am i hungry you know and then above that is safety am i in danger of like being attacked by cougars or whatever and then love belonging then esteem and self-actualization so the hierarchy uh the macbook hierarchy is not so neat as maslow's hierarchy but what can you do
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
But again, the app is by far the easiest to set up Wi-Fi system I have ever seen, single or multi-router.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Eero for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Never think about Wi-Fi again.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And let's start with Matt Corkum, who writes, Hey, John, what is the maximum you would spend on the new Mac Pro?
Casey:
Maybe or perhaps the max on the tower itself and the monitor separately, if you'd like to enumerate those numerals differently.
John:
So keep in mind the answer to this question is heavily warped by the fact that I'm using a 10-year-old computer right now and I've been saving money for a long time.
John:
So this is not to say this is how much money I would typically spend on a computer.
Marco:
Wait, can we guess first before you say?
John:
Go ahead, yeah.
Marco:
Casey, what's your guess?
Casey:
I think John is willing to spend somewhere around $7,500 for the computer and the monitor.
John:
Yeah, I'm going to do the computer and monitor separately just so you know.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
So I think he would spend easily $5,000 on the computer, probably as much as... Actually, I bet you would do $7,000 on the computer.
Casey:
And I think you'd do another couple thousand on the monitor or monitors.
Casey:
So I would guess all in, you're sitting at between $7,000 and $9,000.
Marco:
Alright, so I'm guessing... See, there is going to be some kind of value judgment here.
Marco:
Like, I don't know what upgrades John will consider worthwhile to go all the way to the max, because when you go to the max for things like RAM or SSD size, there's a massive step up in price, right?
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I don't know, is he going to go for the 4TB SSD?
Marco:
Is he going to go for the 64 or 128GB of RAM?
Marco:
Those are going to be huge steps up in price.
Marco:
Those alone are probably $3,000 each.
Marco:
So there's going to be the question of that.
Marco:
But I'm guessing, because it has been so long, and because John has been so frustrated at not having a new Mac Pro...
Marco:
He's had so long to save, and he's even dropped hints before that he's had like 10 years to save up.
Marco:
And John doesn't buy a lot of expensive things.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that the budget for this is higher than what you said, Casey.
Marco:
I'm guessing that he will actually end up spending more like $9,000 or $10,000 on the tower or whatever it is itself.
Marco:
And the monitor, I mean, this is kind of just a guess at what the monitor will cost.
Marco:
I'm guessing the monitor costs between $2,000 and $3,000.
Marco:
So I'm going to say total of around $12,000.
John:
point you guys wanted just two or three shows ago you were trying to make fun of me for my frugality which you uh coarsely described as cheapness uh i think you're both underestimating my frugality my my limits and obviously this could change based on the computer and again based on the price of the options because uh like there is a possibility that i
John:
spend way too much on a really big SSD just because I hate running out of room on stuff I wouldn't spend on the RAM.
John:
My current thinking is not over 6K for the computer and not over 2K for the monitor.
John:
That's my current.
Casey:
Oh, so I was pretty close.
John:
Yeah, you were close.
John:
You were off by, like, just one digit, like, that I would be willing to spend $5,000-something for the computer, but if the computer was pushing up into $6,000, I would reconsider, and I'd be willing to spend $1,800 for the monitor, but if it's, like, a $2,500 monitor, I'd reconsider.
John:
Now, with the monitor thing, if there is no other monitor, I would probably go higher just because I'm going to have to have an Apple monitor, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
but i'm hoping that if that if the monitor is more than two thousand dollars that there's a 5k option i would just take that one it would cost less that's my current thinking you feel free to play this back to me when i plunk down 12 grand for the marco computer you know i i hope you do i really hope you do not not just to make me right uh because i'm i'm i'm right i'm right enough i don't i don't need you were describing the computer you're gonna get marco that's what you were describing maybe but like mr 64 gigs of ran in his iMac pro no
Marco:
But, like, seriously, like, you know, you've gone this long.
Marco:
It means so much to you.
Marco:
You don't really treat yourself in a lot of other ways.
Marco:
For God's sakes, like, life is short.
Marco:
Get the four terabytes.
John:
that's the new ad the new uh ad campaign from apple marker armament for apple computer life is short get the four terabytes don't look at the price tag cheat yourself worst oh man all right well i'm gonna i'm gonna claim victory on that one until you end up paying 10 plus thousand for this thing yeah there's no victory until until the receipts in hand
Casey:
Yeah, make sure we bring the receipts.
Casey:
Anyway, Asajj writes, for thousands of people, you are professional podcasters, but many of you do different things full time.
Casey:
What do you consider yourself to be with regards to career programmers, podcasters, quote unquote, influencers?
Casey:
I can start with this.
Casey:
You know, I still don't.
Casey:
think of myself as a really and truly professional podcaster because that's not really a job right but if you look at how i make money yes it is and yes i am um but i still think of myself as a developer um predominantly and uh if i wanted to use like a really self-involved term i guess a producer um because in terms of both creating video content and creating written content i
Casey:
And so I think I think of myself as a developer slash quote unquote producer, even though the reality of the situation is I am a podcaster.
Casey:
Marco, how do you feel about this?
Marco:
I for years, I would always write like in like, you know, anything that was asking me my job title, like like when I'm like.
Marco:
filling out something for the IRS or entering a country and ask for your occupation, I would always write software developer.
Marco:
And so for years I considered myself a programmer, number one.
Marco:
And it was only recently that I started, if somebody asked me what I do now, I'll usually say I'm a podcaster and an app developer.
Marco:
And I'll say it in that order.
Marco:
I spend more of my life creating podcasts than I do writing software at this point.
John:
Mine is easier because I just have a regular day job.
John:
I always tell people I'm a programmer and that just shuts them up because they don't want to hear about it.
John:
It's such a dated term at this point.
John:
Everyone says developer or software engineer.
John:
I always just say programmer because it dates me because that's how old I actually am.
John:
I'm of the age when what I wanted to be was a programmer and that's what I ended up being and I just keep calling myself that.
John:
Honestly, I don't really... My Twitter bio...
John:
I think says like programmer, tech writer and podcaster, but I haven't done tech writing in forever.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
Like it's hard to pin yourself down.
John:
Like I did do a bunch of tech writing.
John:
I feel like it's defining characteristic of my quote unquote career.
John:
But just because I don't do it now doesn't mean I don't feel like a writer.
John:
Just like if I stopped podcasting, I would still feel like a podcaster.
John:
But programmer is what I say to people.
John:
And then they don't ask any more questions.
Yeah.
Marco:
I should try that because app developer, I always hear people's dumb ideas for apps.
Marco:
Yeah, people love apps.
Marco:
No one likes programs.
Marco:
Hey, I have this great idea for an app.
Marco:
Can you help me make it?
Marco:
Well, first, you've got to sign this NDA so you don't steal my idea.
John:
10 print, John.
John:
20 go to 10.
Marco:
I'm a programmer.
Marco:
I write programs.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Hover, Eero, and Away.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-
Casey:
So since everyone loves hearing about cars, we thought we would move the last Ask ATP to the after show for you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Vincent S. was kind enough to send me a recording of how you pronounce his surname, but I genuinely don't think my mouth can make those sounds.
Casey:
So we'll just go with Vincent S.
Casey:
What do you think of the Polestar 2?
Casey:
Now, if you're not familiar, Polestar used to be like the M division of Volvo, or at least that was my understanding anyway.
Casey:
And recently they have kind of repurposed.
Casey:
They've pivoted.
Casey:
I'm sorry, let's bring this into programmer slash developer terms.
Casey:
They've pivoted to being Volvo's all electric arm or predominantly electric arm.
Casey:
And Volvo's recently announced the Polestar 2, which is kind of sort of a Model 3 equivalent.
Casey:
I happen to think it's pretty good looking, although, John, I know you and I were talking, well, all three of us were talking privately in Slack, and you said you did not care for the look of it, and we can talk about that in a minute, but...
Casey:
All told, it appears to be basically a Model 3, but to my eyes, better looking and from a manufacturer that's probably going to have a whole lot less problems and will probably be able to service this, which is a novel idea for a Tesla owner to actually get service and do so timely.
Marco:
Hey, low blow.
Yeah.
Casey:
It's true.
Casey:
It hurts because it's true.
Casey:
But I mean, I haven't looked too much into this.
Casey:
There's a really great video that John, you had linked to us from Top Gear, not the television program, but the journalist, I don't know, organization where they did like a 10 minute quick look on it, which I guess wasn't that quick.
Casey:
But anyway, it looks really good to me.
Casey:
I am really enthusiastic about other traditional manufacturers getting into all electric cars.
Casey:
And I am not in the market for a car and won't be hopefully for many years, you know, five plus years.
Casey:
But if I were in the market for a car today, I would take a very serious look at this.
Casey:
I really, really would.
Casey:
I'd like to hear Marco's input last as someone who actually has an electric car.
Casey:
But John, what do you think about this?
John:
I think modern-day Volvo has been on a bit of a run of making some really nice cars.
John:
In particular, I like the turn their styling has taken over the last five years or so, which is why it breaks my heart that this car is ungainly and ugly.
John:
Very much disagree.
John:
It's not ugly, but it is...
John:
It is ungainly, and it's just so slightly off of all their other beautiful cars.
John:
Like, you made all these beautiful internal combustion cars.
John:
You have a chance to do an electric car, which has far less stuff inside it.
John:
And this is what you come up with, this sort of tall, chunky-looking sedan-ish thing.
John:
It's just so... It breaks my heart.
John:
But all that said...
John:
I think it will probably be a pretty good car and it's a reasonable balance of features and range and performance and typical Volvo safety.
John:
So I think, you know, I mostly give a thumbs up to the car.
John:
I just, it just, the styling just breaks my heart because there's just no reason they needed to blow it like this.
John:
And then you see the Polestar one, which is their hybrid fancier coupe looking thing.
John:
And I, I think the Polestar one,
John:
is not as nice looking as some of their gasoline cars, but it is way better than the two.
Casey:
So anyway, the one is way better looking.
Casey:
I agree with it.
John:
I mean, it's a coupe.
John:
It's easy to like make it low slung and stuff like that.
John:
But like, I don't, yeah, I hope the Polestar 2 is not the way Volvos are going to look going forward.
John:
I hope it's just their first awkward electric and that they'll sort it out eventually.
Marco:
Marco, this is the kind of car that I've been waiting for more automakers to make.
Marco:
Tesla should not be the only car maker making the kind of cars that it makes.
Marco:
I'm very happy with my car, but Tesla is not perfect and they could certainly use more competition.
Marco:
And I would certainly like to have more choices that offer the kind of things that I like about my Tesla in the future.
Marco:
They should not be the only company making these things.
Marco:
And so the Volvo Polestar 2 – is Polestar the brand name?
Marco:
It's like saying Toyota Lexus.
John:
It's like AMG or like where it's affiliated but they want it to be a separate thing.
John:
I don't know how successful they're going to be.
John:
But like AMG is technically like not the same as Mercedes but everyone knows it is.
John:
It's a –
John:
Or what is it?
John:
Hyundai has Genesis, same type of thing.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
Genesis is a better example.
Casey:
I was going to say Ram versus Dodge, you know, because the pickups are now.
John:
No, it's not Ram versus.
John:
It's totally a Hyundai Genesis.
John:
Like the successful ones, Toyota, Lexus, and Nissan Infinity, those are the successful ones, but there's been a bunch of half-successful ones recently.
John:
And so far, I think this isn't a half-successful category, but we'll see.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Well, anyway, so the Polestar 2, I think,
Marco:
I'm really happy to see this coming from a company that has the longstanding manufacturing and logistics expertise that Volvo does.
Marco:
That is something that we really need.
Marco:
And that's like, I hope this takes off very well.
Marco:
It is, I don't think it's for me for lots of reasons.
Marco:
Number one, it says that, you know, in regards to like color material selection, it says no bad combinations.
Marco:
But I would argue there's also no good combinations.
Marco:
This car comes in six different colors of gray, ranging from white to black.
Marco:
It is literally like a gray.
Marco:
It's like you have six different shades.
Marco:
The top one is white.
Marco:
The bottom one is black.
Marco:
And you have four in the middle that are all kind of grayish.
Casey:
Yeah, that's very true.
Marco:
Have they ever had caffeine?
Marco:
These are the most boring configurations I've ever seen of a car.
Casey:
Midnight does look pretty good to me, though, which is the almost black but not quite black.
Casey:
Also, I like that their black, speaking of being a programmer, John, is called Void.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah, and I agree.
Marco:
From the pictures, midnight is the least terrible color that I can see in this list.
Marco:
But yeah, just come on.
Marco:
Give it some personality.
Marco:
But other than that, it's fine.
Marco:
It looks fine.
Marco:
My main concern with something like this is that even a company with the history of a big maker like Volvo –
Marco:
I still wouldn't want to buy their very first mass market electric car because you're still going to be a beta tester at that point.
Marco:
And it's going to have a lot of problems that they're going to have to work out just after it gets to market.
Marco:
It's going to have – you're going to have all those like 1.0 issues, right?
Marco:
And like I didn't buy a Tesla until they had been around for like five years or like shipping cars for five years.
Marco:
And I feel like I jumped in at a pretty good time because by that time, a lot of the kinks had been worked out.
Marco:
They were already on their second generation Model S interior and Model S design and everything.
Marco:
And it was way better than the earlier cars, which I would occasionally get a service loaner.
Marco:
So I know.
Marco:
I could see directly how much better it was than the earlier ones.
Marco:
And right now, there are very few other automakers that have even remotely mature electric options.
Marco:
And this is probably going to be great in five years maybe.
Marco:
Maybe it might take more than that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Hopefully not.
Marco:
But in five years, this might be a great option when it gets to its second version or its 1.5-ish kind of version.
Marco:
uh this could be great but i would not want to buy somebody's 1.0 in something like a car which is like if i buy your car if i lease your car whatever i'm stuck with that car for a number of years like that's a major purchase that you're going to be using for a long time do you really want to be stuck with somebody's 1.0 of a completely brand new thing they've never done before for that long and for that important of a purchase i don't think so
Marco:
So that's something like, that's going to apply to all of these newcomers.
Marco:
Things like the Porsche Taycan, this thing, pretty much everything that's like an established automaker's first real Tesla competitor.
Marco:
It's so different, like making an all-electric car is so different in so many ways that while I have full faith that they'll be able to do it well a few years in, I don't have that faith for the very first wave because I think they still have a lot to learn and I don't want to be their beta tester.
Casey:
You know, I agree with you all in all, but let's not lose sight of the fact that Volvo has been very forward thinking with regard to a subscription model for cars.
Casey:
And in fact, that's exactly what it says on the Polestar 2 page.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Can you explain that to me?
Marco:
Because I read the subscription thing and it sounds just like a lease.
Yeah.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
So it's a monthly fee.
Marco:
Polestar feels that car ownership should be more closely resembled phone ownership, an all-inclusive monthly fee with the option to return or upgrade at the end of your term without any hassle or headache.
Casey:
How is that not a lease?
Casey:
Because they include insurance as well.
Casey:
oh okay that's it no i could have sworn there was something else but i don't know what it is off the top of my head maybe that is it but um but the idea is that i think it was i think with the with other subscription services you might be able to change i don't know if it's volvo you might be able to change cars periodically didn't bmw do that they said that you like you could have different yeah you could pick any any other of the cars you want and they don't care which car you have you just pay them the same monthly fee and then you just
John:
So they make more money from you if you pick a cheaper car, I suppose.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's all ways to just figure out how to get money from people who otherwise wouldn't buy one.
John:
But I feel like it doesn't sound like it's going to be a good deal.
John:
If it's the only way you can buy this car, then tough luck.
John:
But I wouldn't choose it.
Casey:
I'm excited, though.
Casey:
I'm excited to see all these other manufacturers joining this electric future, which I think we can all agree is probably everyone's future.
Casey:
And I just wanted to reiterate what John said about Volvo lately.
Casey:
I definitely have problems with our XC90, but by and large, I cannot say enough good things about it.
Casey:
And I had no desire to own a Volvo before we bought it.
Casey:
Um, Aaron, you know, the car was for Aaron.
Casey:
So she basically chose it.
Casey:
And I would, I was supportive of it, not only because, you know, it's her car, but because it seemed like it would be nice.
Casey:
And I, I really do love this thing.
Casey:
It is not without faults, but I really, really love that XC90.
Casey:
So, uh, I agree, John, that Volvo has really been on a tear lately in the best possible way.
John:
I wasn't talking about your Volvo.
John:
I was talking about the cars.
John:
That's Marco's problem.
John:
He's just ignoring all the SUVs that are coming out because he's not interested in them.
Marco:
And for the record, this Polestar 2 does look a little bit crossover-y for me.
Marco:
It's a little high.
John:
It is.
John:
I would agree.
John:
The one thing they totally blew in this Polestar is the – I mean, just from looking at it, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the top gear thing.
John:
the giant walls surrounding their center console what are they thinking what are they thinking like they could have had an airy feeling interior that feels spacious like you know because you have less stuff that you have to deal with fewer buttons the big tablet it has a lot of the controls on it and they put these gigantic walls around the center tunnel yeah that's not great although you did say casey this has car play support right
Casey:
You know, based on what I saw on Twitter earlier, because I'd asked this question on Twitter earlier, and some people who are very self-assured indicated that it should have CarPlay, yes.
Casey:
But the tablet system apparently, or I shouldn't call it a tablet, but the infotainment system is actually all Google, apparently, and it's running Android and so on.
Casey:
But I'm told from the Internet, so it must be true, that it would support CarPlay as well, which is more than I can say for your two Teslas that you've owned.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Marco:
CarPlay support is tempting.
Marco:
I would actually really enjoy that.
Casey:
Aaron's – this is not the same setup in Aaron's car, but Aaron's car does have CarPlay.
Casey:
And whether or not you like the census, as they call it, which is basically their infotainment setup –
Casey:
And that is one of the things that I think is most frustrating about Aaron's car because particularly startup takes an eternity.
Casey:
But the CarPlay implementation is really solid and really, really good.
Casey:
And so I would hope and assume that it would also be good in this new Polestar.
Casey:
So in CarPlay, you know –
Casey:
I don't know if it's essential today, although I personally refuse to buy a car without it for future-proofing reasons.
Casey:
But it is really nice.
Casey:
I don't use it that terribly often in my car, usually only if I'm in the car for more than a little bit or if I'm navigating with my phone, which I don't do that terribly often because I don't go new and exciting places that terribly often.
Casey:
But I really like CarPlay a lot, and I've really been glad that I've had it on the occasions that I do use it.
John:
Can I just say that this configurator website is the worst one I've ever seen in my life.
John:
These giant semi-transparent overlays block the view of the car you're trying to configure.
John:
It's not obvious how to pick things.
John:
Fire the company that made this website.
Casey:
Yeah, it's not good.
John:
Fire this company.
John:
It took me the longest time to figure out how I picked from different options because it's got the text on top.
John:
It's like slightly grayed out.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Car configurators are not...
Marco:
high technology and this one has no features that those don't it's just harder to use bad volvo bad yeah it took me a good amount of time looking at this because the first thing you see is the exterior thing and it defaults to white and for for a good like 15 seconds i'm looking at this thinking what what an amazing troll this car's only coming in white like of course of course casey told me to go look at this and like poke through how could i not yeah like and
John:
oh no no there's an act there's there's a you can close that i just did it by accident there's a little close overlay yeah but then but then you can't pick things like the advanced technology of car configurators is you have a bunch of choices and you click on them and then you see the picture of the car change and neither one of those things blocks the other one that's the that's the technology yeah and i agree but then you can hit the the the bread icon it's not a hamburger because there's no inside hamburger this is bread chopsticks yeah it's just bread but it's chopsticks like yeah
Casey:
You hit the chopsticks and then it comes back.
John:
And blocks your view again.
Casey:
And blocks your view again.