Go Back and Pop Myself
Marco:
Hi everybody!
Marco:
We are live!
Marco:
Live from the show floor here at the Microsoft event where we are covering all of the Windows 10 X10 live Surface events and all the new Surface X hardware with all the dual tuck screens and the folding dual X10 screens and it's going to be a whole big event.
Marco:
So we obviously have the entire show devoted exclusively to Microsoft's new innovations here, and we cannot wait to see what you do with them.
Casey:
Oh my God, please no.
Casey:
I know I should probably care, but I don't think I care.
Marco:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
I really respect Microsoft for trying.
Marco:
And they really have been pushing the hardware forward over the last five years or so with their Surface stuff.
Marco:
And for the most part, you don't really see anybody using those big desktops and everything.
Marco:
But what you do see are a lot of people out there using the Surface tablets and laptops.
Marco:
Those actually seem to have...
Marco:
somewhat significant market success not by anywhere near like what apple might get with some of their stuff but you know in the world of pc hardware microsoft surface stuff looks like it's all right like it isn't perfect but it's it's pretty decent people seem to pretty much like them
Marco:
and so i do have to give them credit they do seem to make successful hardware in if you're grading on a curve of like not again not like apple level success but they do make successful hardware in the sense that it sells reasonably well for you know for what it is uh people do seem to like it it does seem to do what is advertised for the most part and not have too many horrible problems and
Marco:
And so I, you know, I, I give them ultimate respect for that.
Marco:
Like when they first started making weird surface hardware, like back when surface meant the giant table and even the first like one or two surface tablet things, they were really weird and not very good and nobody bought them really.
Marco:
But, like, they've been pushing.
Marco:
They've been advancing.
Marco:
And now they make, like, pretty okay PC hardware.
Marco:
In some ways, it's pretty good even.
Marco:
So I got to give them credit.
Marco:
The only problem is that we don't care about PC hardware.
Marco:
And we don't care about Windows.
Marco:
And we don't care about Surface and Android and all the stuff that's running out.
Marco:
Like, we don't care about any of that on this show.
Marco:
Like, none of us are in those worlds, really.
Marco:
Not anymore!
Marco:
The world of tech is a really big place.
Marco:
And I don't think it's unreasonable for us to specialize.
Marco:
And we don't cover Android stuff because we don't use Android.
Marco:
We don't cover Windows stuff because we don't use Windows.
Marco:
So, you know, I don't see a lot of anything for us to cover here.
Marco:
The one thing I do like about it is how much they stick their finger in Apple's eye about laptops.
Yeah.
Marco:
I do really enjoy that because Apple could use a good finger in the eye sometimes.
Marco:
Apple does not make good products when they think they're on top and they start coasting.
Marco:
So it is nice to see Microsoft poke fun at things like all the digs they made about the keyboard and everything.
Marco:
Yeah, they do okay.
Marco:
I'm proud of them for what they do, but we don't live in that world at all.
Casey:
It's funny to me that you apparently either haven't looked at the show notes or don't care because item number one, two, three, four, five.
John:
I'm going with don't care.
John:
Both of you still do not understand the show format.
Yeah.
John:
If we're going to talk about a thing, we'll talk about it during the show.
John:
How is that so hard?
John:
If we've learned anything, it's that neither one of you can say, I don't want to talk about this, and then proceed to not talk about this.
John:
If you ever begin any sentence with, we're not going to talk about this, everyone but apparently you two knows that you're going to talk about it.
John:
You're going to.
John:
Otherwise, you wouldn't have said anything.
John:
I want you to say...
John:
I'm not going to talk about pumpkins and then just not say anything about pumpkins.
John:
Just try that as an exercise every day when you wake up.
Marco:
In my defense, I did read the show notes document, but I stopped at about three topics into the topics.
Marco:
We never get through more than that in an episode.
Marco:
That is true.
John:
They're very small.
John:
They're very small.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apparently we should start with some follow-up.
Casey:
I don't know if this is even really follow-up, but I'm going to call it follow-up.
Casey:
I wanted to give everyone a few updates and also maybe complain a little bit because that's what I've been doing a lot lately.
Casey:
First of all, my iMac half died and now it's back to life.
Casey:
It did not go back to the Apple store.
Casey:
Let me explain.
Casey:
It did not go back to the Apple Store yet, but I was noticing very similar problems to what I was having earlier, like where it wouldn't survive overnight without just hard locking and things just seemed wonky.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, Self, before you go to the Apple Store and tell them to fix this again, why don't you eliminate the one thing you could...
Casey:
I couldn't really eliminate last time, which is the software installation.
Casey:
So if you recall, last time before it went to the Apple store, I couldn't get the SSD to work.
Casey:
I couldn't even repair it, much less format it, etc.
Casey:
So that's why I threw my hands up and just said, Apple, please deal with this.
Casey:
So, uh, this time things were just not seeming right, but weren't as catastrophic as they were before.
Casey:
Thankfully, one of the first things I did when I, when I had restored from time machine backup was I took all the detritus and cruft and garbage that was strewn across my computer's desktop and moved it off to the Synology.
Casey:
So God forbid something happened, I would be prepared and that mostly worked and
Casey:
And so then I did an Internet Recovery, which put High Sierra on the iMac, which was a little unexpected.
Casey:
I got very confused by why APFS wasn't an option during the format.
Casey:
And it was either Stephen or John or maybe Marco.
Casey:
It was always John.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I forgot.
Casey:
It's always John.
Casey:
John pointed out that it was because the Internet Recovery was putting on High Sierra.
Casey:
And anyways, I put on High Sierra and then migrated to Mojave.
Casey:
And this was a couple of days ago.
Casey:
And so far, it seems like everything is better, question mark.
Casey:
So I'm really not confident in this iMac right now.
Casey:
I feel kind of similarly to it as I did my BMW before I got rid of it.
Casey:
But it seems to be working.
Casey:
Maybe there was some sort of software agita in addition to the clear, to me, clear hardware issues.
Casey:
I also, while I'm thinking of it, got some feedback from someone who was a former genius who kind of threw some theories at me as to why I wasn't charged for the repair.
Casey:
And there are many, many different options, but it sounds like it is possible that
Casey:
There were no favors called in.
Casey:
And like I said, I didn't call in any favors, but nobody else, it seems, may have called in favors.
Casey:
And just because Apple wasn't exactly sure what did or did not fix the problem, they might have just said, eh, the heck with it.
Casey:
We'll just let this guy walk away for free.
Casey:
So I wanted to, now that the iMac update is done...
Casey:
I wanted to also update on my watch.
Casey:
My battery life has gotten considerably better as of what are we on?
Casey:
What day is today?
Casey:
What are we on?
Casey:
13.1.2 on the phone and 6.0.1 on the watch.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
Anyway, the latest updates as of Wednesday, October 2nd have gotten me to the point that I can make it all day without charging again.
Casey:
My watch was brought off the charger 14 hours ago.
Casey:
I did a half an hour of exercise and I'm currently sitting at 21%, which is not great, but is livable.
Casey:
So I am mostly happy with that.
Casey:
I did, with both my watch and Aaron's watch for different reasons, I did not restore them.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I set them up as new.
Casey:
That did fix Aaron's problems with not having photos on her watch.
Casey:
It's one of the 13 different things I threw against the wall to fix my battery problems, although I think ultimately it was the new versions of the OS.
Casey:
And so my computing world is...
Casey:
mostly better now.
Casey:
There's still so much broken with iOS 13, though, and it's driving me insane.
Casey:
And Erin is so, so annoyed because she's a regular person, and to her, she just spent $1,000 on this phone that compelled her to go to iOS 13, and now nothing works the way it should.
Casey:
And mail, particularly, is such a dumpster fire in iOS 13.
Casey:
And it's just... I don't...
Casey:
I don't understand how a company as big as Apple ships something that broken.
Casey:
I just don't.
Casey:
And I maybe I'm too far removed a year in.
Casey:
I'm too far removed from how big business works and how QA works in a big business.
Casey:
But I just I don't get how like let's just pick on mail for a second.
Casey:
How is mail that friggin broken right now?
Casey:
How does that happen?
Marco:
And that wasn't new.
Marco:
Mail has been broken the entire beta period.
Marco:
It's not a brand new thing.
Marco:
It has been incredibly broken all summer, and it seemed to only slightly get better towards the very, very end.
Marco:
I think ultimately...
Marco:
We can keep making excuses all we want.
Marco:
We can keep saying, well, last year was the stability year, and this year was the features year, and they had two years with the features then to catch up on, and we can keep making excuses.
Marco:
We can say, oh, they couldn't hold up the iPhone shipping because that would be a big problem for the company, so they had to ship it when they did, and they had to give it to the carriers a month early.
Marco:
There's a million excuses, but the fact is all of these things either happen every year,
Marco:
And so they've been doing it for a while.
Marco:
They should expect things like earlier carrier submission.
Marco:
They should expect things like when the iPhone has to ship.
Marco:
Like, none of that is new.
Marco:
All of that is predictable under their control.
Marco:
And, you know, when it comes to things like, oh, well, you know, last year was super stable and lowered our standards or raised our standards or whatever, like...
Marco:
That's not good enough.
Marco:
That's not a good enough excuse for a company that's running 10-year-old operating systems or more on the Mac side and having all these stability problems.
Marco:
We haven't even gotten to Catalina yet, which is a disaster as well.
Marco:
Thank God it isn't out yet, but it's about to be.
Marco:
So we have a problem there, too.
Marco:
All the iCloud stuff that goes along with it.
Marco:
WatchOS is itself a mess.
Marco:
iOS is a mess.
Marco:
The now renamed iPadOS is a bit less of a mess, but still in some ways messy.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it's just bad management in the software quality side.
Marco:
Somehow, I'm not going to blame a certain executive because I don't know how things went, but this beta cycle proves that
Marco:
Something went seriously wrong here in the management and direction and shipping and releasing of these software platforms on this schedule.
Marco:
They took on too much or they shipped too soon or whatever the case is.
Marco:
Things went really badly and that lies right at the feet of management because they should have been able to see all of this coming months ago and they chose to do what they did anyway.
Marco:
So rather than cut certain features, they decided to plow ahead.
Marco:
Rather than delay certain things or whatever, they plowed ahead.
Marco:
And certain things are still delayed.
Marco:
And what's left is still a mess.
Marco:
And it's hard to look at this and come up with any other conclusion other than the software quality is being poorly managed by this company.
Marco:
And for a company the size and prestige of Apple...
Casey:
That's not good enough.
Casey:
Yeah, agreed.
Casey:
And, you know, I want to talk to John about this a little bit because I think he will have a more even opinion about all this.
Casey:
But looking at myself and particularly Erin, so I'm picking on Erin in a sense because she's a regular person who doesn't understand what it's like to write software.
Casey:
I can...
Casey:
I can both be more annoyed and also more forgiving because I write software and I know how difficult it is.
Casey:
But if you look at it from our slash her perspective, each of us just bought a brand new iPhone to the tune of like $1,200 or something like that, which was a choice.
Casey:
I'm aware it was a choice.
Casey:
I'm just saying we each bought a brand new iPhone, we each bought a brand new Apple Watch.
Casey:
So we're each like almost $2,000 a piece in a new hardware.
Casey:
And my Apple Watch was not literally a brick, but it felt almost as though it was a brick and
Casey:
For a week?
Casey:
What has it been?
Casey:
A week and change?
Casey:
Something like that?
Casey:
I couldn't get through a day without charging halfway through the day.
Casey:
How is that possible that this is what they release?
Casey:
And what an absolute buzzkill it is to get this new toy that you've saved your money for, and then it's just a piece of garbage that can't get through the day.
Casey:
Like, you can't even get through 12 hours.
Casey:
It's six hours sometimes.
Casey:
It's just...
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
And Aaron has said to me a few times over the last week, I think mostly to get a rise out of me, but somewhat seriously, like, why am I continuing to buy Apple stuff if it's this broken?
Casey:
Like, why?
Casey:
It never used to be this way.
Casey:
Why would I continue to do this?
Casey:
And you know the answer I've had for?
Casey:
Yep, that's it.
Casey:
That's what I got.
Casey:
I don't have a good answer.
Casey:
I mean, at one point, if you want to get an Android phone next, I don't think that's really going to be a lot better, Aaron, but I'm not the boss of you.
Casey:
If that's what you want, go for it.
Casey:
And it's just very frustrating.
Casey:
So, John, let's put on a happy face, hopefully, or at least maybe you could explain to me, how does a company this big have this many problems that
Casey:
And maybe corollary to that, do you think, John, that maybe this is stemming from this one big splash every year release cycle?
John:
Before we get to that, I think it's worth considering that there are things that you can change in your behavior that will...
John:
help with this issue, you know, setting aside what we can and can't do to change how Apple works.
John:
Buying an Android phone, yes, is one choice.
John:
Another choice is to not buy the phone on day one.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
I don't know what's worse.
John:
If you waited six months...
John:
probably the stability of the software will be a lot better.
John:
I think it's safe to say that.
John:
Now, who wants to wait six months?
John:
No one wants to wait six months.
John:
People can't even wait a week or a month.
John:
But that is a way you might be able to change how you purchase things or Erin can change how she purchases things to avoid issues like this.
John:
Because as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been an iOS release where six months in, it was still a buggy piece of crap.
John:
There have been releases where within the first week or two, there's lots of things that are buggy.
John:
This may be the worst it's ever been.
John:
It's hard to know because, you know, your memory fades, especially if, like, if, you know, 13.2 fixes it all, we're all going to forget about this or whatever.
John:
Maybe we'll just remember it because it's lucky number 13.
John:
But, yeah, that is, as someone who is relatively technically savvy,
John:
You and Aaron will have the choice to understand that that's a thing.
John:
Now, that said, most people don't know that's a thing or should have to know.
John:
Like, that's not on anyone's radar.
John:
If you're not listening to technology podcasts, you have no idea that this is even a thing, that you shouldn't buy the iPhone on day one because the .0 software is bad and it gets better and so on and so forth.
Yeah.
John:
most people don't even know the new iphones are out until they wander into an apple store a month and a half later right so that's you know or see an ad on tv or think oh is that did that just come out or has that been out for a month or a year anyway um so that's my suggestion uh to consider alongside getting an android phone the question of like you know why do we keep buying apple stuff it's usually as marco just talked about in a part that may or may not be before this in the release version of the podcast
John:
The alternatives are usually worse, or maybe not worse, are less to our liking, right?
John:
So, you know, you got complaints about the Mac when I get a Windows computer.
John:
All right, well, how do you feel about Windows?
John:
Worse than I do about the Mac?
John:
And then, you know, so...
John:
It's not like we're captive, but we are trying to, as consumers, we're trying to make the best choice available to us.
John:
Is the best choice good enough?
John:
Perhaps not.
John:
Like I said, is the best choice perfect?
John:
The best choice might not even be good enough, to Marco's point.
John:
Like, there is a bar, and a reasonable bar of consumer expectations, and sometimes Apple doesn't reach it.
John:
As for how stuff like this shifts, it's clear that...
John:
You know, 13 had a bunch of stuff pulled from it at the last minute.
John:
Pulling stuff at the last minute while it may be the right move is also risky.
John:
Because if you pull stuff at the last minute, then what you're releasing is not the thing that you had been working on and testing for the past, you know, X months.
John:
Right?
John:
Maybe a better move would have been to delay the phones, but I'm sure there are much bigger issues involving...
John:
who knows what i mean all sorts of you know apple apple has its priorities whatever its priorities may be whether it's because of you know tariffs or manufacturing costs or just who knows what it is but they they made their decision right and they have to deal with the consequences and it seems like the consequences of their decision are you know that we end up with a perhaps the buggiest release of ios ever now it it does depend on what you're doing with ios if you don't for example use the mail app
John:
iOS 13 probably is less of a tire fire for you.
John:
If you just happen to use the parts of it that work okay, which I think is most of it, maybe it's mostly alright.
John:
Maybe people don't mind too much, especially with a new update coming out every three days.
John:
Maybe this window of instability will pass us by.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
Obviously, we're all cranky about it because we know the intimate details of this stuff, but
John:
I'm wondering if people who aren't listening to this podcast and who aren't into technology who just happen to get a new phone feel the same way about it.
John:
Obviously, Erin does, but she, I feel like, is definitely technology adjacent.
John:
Yeah, no, I mean, it's a bummer.
John:
I'm sure Apple's disappointed about it, too, as to how Apple ships something like this.
John:
In some respects, Apple surely knows where many of the bugs are, you know, mostly because Apple is always...
John:
experiencing a version of the operating system that is far ahead of what's released.
John:
And there's this release pipeline that puts out actual releases.
John:
By the time we see the release, Apple has moved on to the one where the thing that we're worrying about is fixed and so on and so forth.
John:
So it's difficult for them to get an idea of what the consumer experience would be like.
John:
But for apps like Mail or anything that's data-driven,
John:
despite their public betas, it's unfortunately reasonable to assume that, not to assume, reasonable to imagine that there are things that customers may see that Apple has never seen.
John:
That's just a fact of software life, unfortunately, especially when it's an application that deals with data, because all of Apple's mail and all of Apple's test data and all of their public data things like it's you just don't have you don't have the kind of like over the shoulder metrics to know what everyone's experience is like.
John:
And the channels for feedback are limited.
John:
And it's like, you know, it's like, how could they have shipped this?
John:
Like, my mail is all blank.
John:
Maybe there's something, you know, like it's still a bug.
John:
Like I'm not saying it's not their fault, but like this is, again, the thing regular consumers shouldn't need to know.
John:
But software developers, especially people who do software that has a server or data component, know it's impossible to know exactly how your software is going to behave when it's in the hands of your consumers.
John:
And very often it's difficult to know how it is behaving.
John:
That's why people put all those, you know, all that telemetry into their applications and have all this spyware installed because they want to know how is it going for the people who are using my application.
John:
And yes, they can sell the data and the evil nefarious side of it as well.
John:
But the white hat side of it is if you really want to know how things are going for your consumers, you want to know like everything about how they're using the app.
John:
Did they go to a screen and leave immediately?
John:
Did they go to the screen and their stuff didn't display?
John:
How long are things taking for actual consumers?
John:
And my impression is that Apple does not put that much telemetry in their apps for obvious privacy reasons.
John:
But I'm willing to believe that Apple's out there thinking, mail's probably working okay for most people, right?
John:
It's working for us, right?
John:
Yeah, I haven't heard anything about it in the public beta, maybe one or two complaints, but I think we fixed those.
John:
Meanwhile, mail is completely unusable for, you know, some specific individual person.
Casey:
You know, I take your point on that, and I think that's fair.
Casey:
But the number one thing that's driving me insane about mail is I'll go to, like, archive or trash a message when I'm looking at a message, like on my phone.
Casey:
So I'm looking at a message.
Casey:
I go to trash it or delete it – or excuse me, trash it or archive it.
Casey:
And at that point in every other version of mail ever –
Casey:
It would pop to the prior view controller, which is the list of messages.
Casey:
And a lot of times what will happen is the message in question will disappear.
Casey:
The screen will almost entirely become blank, but I'm still looking at the message detail view controller.
Casey:
I'm just sitting there.
Casey:
And I have to go back and pop myself, which is a stupid thing to whine about.
Casey:
I totally hear myself saying this and I'm thinking to myself, wow, you're a big baby.
Casey:
But when you do this many, many times in a row, it's infuriating.
Casey:
And to me, it's like, how did you not catch this?
Casey:
It's happening to me.
Casey:
It's happening to Aaron.
Casey:
I'm sure it's happening to other people.
Casey:
How do you not catch this?
Casey:
How is this not a thing?
Casey:
And the battery life on the watch...
Casey:
How do you not catch that?
Casey:
Like, how is this not obvious?
Casey:
And I know there's probably a million and six reasons how it could have slipped through the cracks.
Casey:
But how do you not catch that?
John:
Well, so the first one, I think we have a good answer for what you're looking for before some sort of explanation for big corporations.
John:
That strikes me as the kind of bug that they absolutely knew about, but that they ship it, knowingly ship it anyway for the reason that you should know, Casey, because bugs get triaged and prioritized.
John:
Is that a data loss bug?
John:
No.
John:
Is it a crash bug?
John:
No.
John:
Is it a security bug?
John:
No.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
We're shipping it.
John:
I mean, that's what it comes down to.
John:
It's crappy.
John:
It's about, you know, as we all know, everybody who works in a big corporation shipping software ships software with known bugs.
John:
all the all the time i do right it's just it's just a fact of life now no you're right you know it like you know you don't get credit for the bugs you don't ship right oh well we didn't ship any bugs that erased all your mail right it's it's a it's a bad bug and that if it's consistent it seems like that's definitely a thing that they know about they don't feel good about shipping software with bugs i'm sure but that's the decision they made you can make the decision of you know when do we ship when do we not ship and the
John:
When you roll it all up or whatever, they said, you know, with all the put, you know, things on one side of the scale with selling iPhones and, you know, manufacturing and tariffs on the other side of, you know, non-data loss, non-crasher bugs.
John:
Like, I don't think there's a single application that Apple ships that doesn't have a huge list of known bugs, many of which will never be fixed because they're not crasher data loss.
John:
So that's crappy.
John:
And the watch thing, here's what got me scratching my head about the watch thing.
John:
I have no idea what was causing it, but the watch thing is baffling because it is such a top-line performance characteristic where...
John:
Unless watchOS inside Apple is so incredibly far ahead, I wonder how Apple could have the confidence to know that this product will eventually last all day like we said it would.
John:
Unless they had seen it last all day internally...
John:
because they're using some version of watchOS that's way ahead of what they ship shipping.
John:
It seems like a huge risk, like shipping, shipping it and saying like, well, it doesn't last all day now, but we'll fix that in software in a couple of weeks.
John:
That's a hell of a risk.
John:
And I'm thinking they wouldn't take that risk.
John:
I think they know what was killing the battery, but just didn't have time to fix it.
John:
And you know, like, like the fix for that thing was too risky to shove in.
John:
So yeah,
John:
that's the only thing that occurs to me because I've heard that story from now multiple people where the watch had terrible battery and some software updates went it also could just be like day one or week one like random you know in the old days when you get a new Mac out of the box and you do spotlight indexing and it would make your thing slow to a crawl for the first day or two that you use your computer it's the thing that Apple knew about and that sucked but Apple could have some confidence to say you know it'll settle down in a week and you'll be okay
John:
Um, so I have to think that the watch situation is like that too, that they shipped a thing that they knew either was bad because of bad, you know, bad software or unoptimized things somewhere, or was like, there's some initially setting up your watch with a new phone kind of grinding.
John:
That's going to kill your battery on the first day or two, but it'll get better.
John:
But either way.
John:
I'm glad to hear that the battery got better, but that is the one that I would love to know the inside story on.
John:
Because I would think that Apple would never ship a product with the hope that an upcoming software update will fix the battery life.
John:
Because battery life is a thing that people do notice.
John:
It's not something like, oh, my view controller didn't pop off and I have to do some manual thing.
John:
It is...
John:
It's sort of an existential threat to the product that you say you're selling.
John:
So I have to believe that they didn't just hope that the battery life would get better.
John:
They knew, and it was just a question of time.
Casey:
I hear you and I almost entirely agree.
Casey:
But at the same time, I can't get past what a terrible purchase experience it was.
Casey:
And I don't mean purchase experience like going to the store.
Casey:
I mean, you know, I've got my new treat and I want to use it and I can't use it for more than four hours at a time because then it dies.
Casey:
And I don't know, like we would rake them over the coals probably worse if they said, you know what, we need another week on this watch.
Casey:
Especially if they said we need another week on this watch that you've already pre-ordered and we told you would arrive on Friday or whatever.
John:
We wouldn't.
John:
I don't think we would.
John:
I think we'd say, good, fine, ship it to me when it's stable.
John:
I think that's, you know, tech nerds is what we've always said.
Casey:
I'd like to think that, but I don't know if that's what I would be saying.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I keep coming back to it was just such a crummy several days.
Casey:
And again, ultimately, it's a computer on my wrist that I can make a phone call to China with if I so desire.
Casey:
I really probably just need to... Who was the troubled comedian?
Casey:
We're in a tube in the sky browsing the internet.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
Like, everything's amazing and nobody's happy.
Marco:
We had a chair in a sky, you know?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
You know what I'm saying.
Casey:
So, like, everything's happy.
Casey:
Everything's amazing and nobody's happy.
Casey:
And I know I'm having that moment right now.
Casey:
And I am a little bit sorry for that.
Casey:
But the reason that I love, maybe loved Apple so darn much is that...
Casey:
These things wouldn't happen.
Casey:
These are the sorts of things that would happen to Microsoft stuff years ago.
Casey:
I'm not saying now.
Casey:
I'm saying years ago.
Casey:
This is the sort of thing that happened on Microsoft stuff.
Casey:
It's the sort of thing that happened on all sorts of other technology in my life.
Casey:
But Apple would never do that.
Casey:
It would always have it right and it would always be right or mostly right at least in the first, right out of the box, right out of the gate.
Casey:
And I just, I don't know, cranky old man yells at cloud, right?
Casey:
But I just, I miss those days.
John:
Those days never existed, though.
John:
It was just rose-colored glasses.
John:
I mean, I think, like, 10.5 Leopard was so much worse than iOS 13.
John:
Now, it mattered less, to be fair.
John:
It mattered less because who the heck was running Macs at all back then compared to the number of people that own iPhones?
John:
Like, I understand that it is a different scale.
John:
But Apple has, oh, shit, buggy software.
John:
This is probably the worst, unless one of you remembers an iOS that's worse than this, probably the worst initial iOS release.
John:
But I think it may also be the fastest...
John:
Fixed, certainly the number of updates and how close they are together has been faster than any previous point releases after an initial release of iOS.
Marco:
Well, because A, first of all, it's not fixed yet.
Marco:
B, it's basically on fire.
Marco:
They're having significant issues that are even to the point of impacting almost every review of the new iPhone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
has mentioned the buggy software many reviews of the new apple watch have mentioned the poor battery life like it's you know apple is clearly you know prioritizing hardware over all else and it's hard to look at the company and think they should do anything else honestly they are you know they are a hardware driven company and certainly a hardware funded company uh so it makes sense why they would prioritize hardware but
Marco:
They basically really forced their customers to have really buggy software this time in order to get that hardware schedule to be kept, and it's hurting now.
Marco:
It's hurting the press reviews, and it's hurting the public opinion of their new hardware, and I hope that's really kicking them in the stomach because they need that.
Marco:
This is not good enough, and they shouldn't –
Marco:
They should realize quite how expensive it is to deprioritize software quality to make a hardware release schedule like this.
Marco:
Again, I'm sure they considered this.
Marco:
They have smart people there.
Marco:
I'm sure they considered this would be expensive.
Marco:
But they should really feel how expensive this was to maybe make better decisions in the future.
Marco:
For instance, like you mentioned, John, they could delay stuff.
Marco:
I think as long as two things continue to be the case, this is still going to be a problem.
Marco:
Thing number one is that they keep releasing new hardware on the same schedule every year that seems very inflexible.
Marco:
Based on things like the stock market, that seems unlikely to change.
Marco:
I think they're probably always going to release new iPhones in the fall, probably in September, for the foreseeable future because that's such a big part of the company and its finances and everything else.
Marco:
The other thing that they could change is disconnect the major OS releases from the hardware releases.
Marco:
Now, I know this is complicated.
Marco:
I know that, you know, you have, like, they couldn't have just shipped the new iPhones all of a sudden with iOS 12 because new iPhones have new hardware in them and the new OSs have, like, basically, like, the drivers for that hardware, whatever the equivalent of that is in modern iOS architecture, like...
Marco:
And they have to test and certify that the drivers for the new hardware work in the OS that they're in.
Marco:
So it is a non-trivial job to backport the, quote, drivers for the iPhone 11, to backport those to iOS 12.
Marco:
But it's not so much of a non-trivial job if you plan it that way from the start.
Marco:
So maybe the right thing to do here is to disconnect the brand new cutting-edge software, which is so frequently hard to nail down a release date for, for quality purposes, because it's software, if that's reasonable.
Marco:
Disconnect that from the hardware release.
Marco:
So for the iPhone 12, or whatever the next year's iPhones are called,
Marco:
Develop their drivers and test their drivers for iOS 13.
Marco:
Don't make it iOS 14 only so it bonds those things together in their release schedules.
Marco:
Develop the next iPhones for iOS 13.
Marco:
And if it just so happens that iOS 14 is ready on time, great, you never had to use it.
Marco:
But to have that contingency plan from the start, to have that be planned and be the official target from the start that you can ship those phones with iOS 13 point whatever...
Marco:
I think that is a recipe for much better outcomes, much better software quality.
Marco:
And then if iOS 14 has to slip until November, fine.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
But that isn't what they've done so far.
Marco:
They've bonded these things together.
Marco:
And while they have reasons why they've done it, I don't think they're very good reasons.
Marco:
And it isn't the way it has to be.
Marco:
They can choose to do it a different way.
Marco:
They can choose to do OSs differently bonded to hardware.
Marco:
They can choose to write the drivers for the last OS versus the next OS.
Marco:
They just don't do that yet.
Marco:
But there's no reason why they can't.
John:
They've done that on the Mac in the past as well, having new Macs come out without an entire new major operating system.
John:
It would just have a new point release.
John:
The interesting thing about this whole conundrum is that Apple just learned this lesson after iOS 11.
John:
That's what iOS 12 was about.
John:
So they swung.
John:
They said, well, we learned our lesson.
John:
We needed to concentrate on stability and speed and making old phones faster and not so much on the new features.
John:
They did iOS 12.
John:
And then just swung right hard back in the other direction.
John:
Right.
John:
And so, you know, 14, they'll probably learn the lesson again.
John:
They need to need to get a steadier state and a longer memory.
John:
Like there is a there is a happy medium.
John:
You know, Casey, you mentioned the beginning of this, like is the.
John:
yearly release schedule uh to blame for this and marco was talking about decoupling them and all those you know decoupling is perfectly fine like i said they did it with the mac os you know it is a little bit more expensive but it gives you more flexibility you could also go with like the infinite version where you just pick a name and you stop incrementing the number and there's no much no such thing as a major big bang release anymore and it's just incremental features forever and ever lots of reasons why apple wouldn't want to do that for marketing and so on and so forth
John:
Uh, but the thing I always come back to is whatever scheme you pick big yearly releases, uh, never any releases, just point releases, uh, totally decoupled independent timelines, uh, or, you know, like they, they can all be made to work and you can screw all of them up.
John:
So if Apple wants to do for marketing reasons, a year, like the current thing where they do a new OS and a new phone at the same time every year, so on and so forth.
John:
It's possible to do that and not mess up.
John:
It's just as possible to do that and not mess up as it is to do the Marco scheme or any other scheme.
John:
Every system that you come up with and schedule or whatever is possible to be successful at.
John:
You just have to have different trade-offs.
John:
If they're totally decoupled, you have more flexibility.
John:
But on the other hand, you also can get into a situation where you bite off more than you can chew and then 14 doesn't come out until two years later and then you paint yourself into a corner or whatever.
John:
You always have to pick.
John:
how many features can we fit when do we decide if it's a go or a no-go uh you know what do we use to judge quality like the you know it's and sometimes they get it right and are very conservative like ios 12 and sometimes they bite off more i think and chew like 13 and it goes terribly um so i'm i'm all for changing the scheme if it seems like they're having you know
John:
having more difficulty with this stem system i want to have a different set of trade-offs but i fully believe in every company's ability to screw up any software release plan because you know like you know big companies for a long time he's like we had all these problems with with strategy x of of release we're going to change the strategy y they'll eliminate those problems and it does but it comes with its own new set of problems and five years later everyone's sick of those problems and they swing back in the other direction so
John:
You know, this is not related to Apple and quality, but people in the Destiny community know that this was a big week for Destiny because they released a big expansion and the game is now free.
John:
So there's tons more people coming on to play.
John:
And Bungie, the creators of Destiny, had tons of server issues as the flood of people came into play.
John:
And, you know, gamers being gamers were all angry at them and yelling and say, you knew this would happen.
John:
The game was free.
John:
You knew people would come.
John:
Why didn't you just, you know, double your server capacity?
John:
Why didn't you just, you know, provide more?
John:
And it's like, that's exactly what consumers should think.
John:
They have an expectation that, you know, maybe not their free game, but they have an expectation that the game will work.
John:
That's the consumer expectation.
John:
They shouldn't need to know anything about software.
John:
All they know is, I paid for a game, I'm supposed to be able to play for a game, and I can't play for the game.
John:
They don't have to be jerks about it.
John:
But anyway, I excuse them from not knowing.
John:
But as someone who has worked in server-side software my entire career, it's totally obvious to me why you might have a problem.
John:
Why is it that...
John:
Even today, when people say, even today, even in 2019, you can release a new thing and then a flood of people go to use it and it has problems?
John:
Like, of course.
John:
Of course it does.
John:
There is no magical... I'm willing to say that even with almost infinite money,
John:
It wouldn't even be possible to predict how it's going.
John:
The systems are so complicated, and we don't fully understand them, and we don't account for so many different variables.
John:
And Bungie's doing exactly the same thing as Apple, only on a compressed timescale.
John:
Not sleeping, scrambling on like chickens with their heads cut off, fixing problems as fast as they possibly can.
John:
You know, launch day.
John:
That's what it's like.
John:
yeah how is the new destiny stuff uh once i could get logged in and not get booted out in the middle of the thing yeah it's there's some bugs let me tell you uh it's much less critical for when it's a game but like i say so far there have definitely been crashing bugs but no data loss bugs so thumbs up so far
Marco:
I'll see you next time.
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Casey:
I don't think we spent the time last episode or the one before, whenever it was, talking about our X in my case or XS in Marco's case to 11 Pro transfer.
Casey:
Because I, amongst many other people, tried the, I forget what the term is for, but basically the direct transfer between the two phones.
Casey:
And I did that with mine and I did it with Aaron's and it didn't work exactly flawlessly, but it worked pretty darn well for this having been the first year of it and to kind of turn our frown upside down.
Casey:
I wanted to commend Apple in that the direct transfer worked pretty darn well for me.
Casey:
Comically, the thing that tripped me up the most, although it only took me a minute or two to figure out, was that it didn't transfer my phone number from the old phone to the new phone, which to the best of my recollection always happened in years past.
Casey:
And I couldn't figure out what to do about it.
Casey:
And I was really kind of stuck and wasn't sure what to do.
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, no, you idiot, you just move the SIM.
Casey:
That's all you need to do.
Casey:
And then it worked no problem.
Casey:
But my recollection from a couple of years ago was that all I needed to do was restore backup and magically everything would work.
Casey:
Maybe my recollection was wrong.
Casey:
But anyway, all that to say that it worked pretty darn well for me.
Casey:
Marco, what did you do?
Casey:
And John, what did Tina do in order to transfer stuff between phones?
Marco:
So I did, this is the first year, normally I do the, for the last couple of years I've been doing the whole like, you know, setup wizard thing where you hold the phone, you know, the other one, take the picture of the cloudy thing.
Marco:
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Marco:
And then it does like the direct transfer for some stuff and then it does iCloud for most stuff.
Casey:
Was this not the first year for that?
Casey:
I thought this was the first year for that.
Marco:
No, well, the iCloud part of it, that's been a few years old, I think, at least one or two years old.
Marco:
But what was new this year was the offer to do a direct transfer, and I thought that would bypass the need to download all my apps again.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
It didn't do that, and it did take a very long time for me, and it took a very short time for some people.
Marco:
And what I think we've worked out here is that the direct transfer seems to transfer downloaded media between the two phones.
Marco:
So in my case, I had a bunch of music downloaded to my phone.
Marco:
I think it might also transfer downloaded photos, but I'm not sure about that.
Marco:
But anyway, so downloaded media, if you have music or movies and maybe photos...
Marco:
the direct transfer will actually transfer those instead of relying on the phone to redownload it from my cloud.
Marco:
So it takes a pretty long time if you have a bunch of music down or other stuff downloaded there.
Marco:
Uh, and it, it did work for me eventually.
Marco:
And it was great cause all, you know, all my music and stuff was, was there.
Marco:
It did successfully transfer like, you know, key chain logins, passwords, uh, Slack finally learned to use the key chain API.
Marco:
So that was nice.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So almost everything transferred without needing to redownload.
Marco:
But then it's funny, after this big long transfer, I kind of assumed, because it took I think like two or three hours, and I kind of assumed like, oh, now my phone will boot up and it'll be ready to use.
Marco:
And nope, it booted up and still downloaded all the apps from iCloud.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
That was kind of annoying in that it just took a lot longer than I expected.
Marco:
But the result was really nice.
Marco:
And one little nice thing I noticed, I don't know how recent this is, but so if you have test flight apps, they don't transfer in this kind of thing.
Marco:
You have to launch test flight on the new phone and reinstall them from test flight.
Marco:
And one little nice thing that I noticed this year that I don't think was there in previous years is when you do that,
Casey:
if you had it on your phone before and you reinstall it from test flight on the new phone it puts it back in the right spot on springboard yeah yeah i noticed that too and i thought i saw maybe i'm making this up but i thought i saw that they would have there would be like proxy icons almost that's my term not an official term where there was like a cloud and a down arrow so it's like download this from the cloud where the cloud in this context is test flight so i would say oh really i've seen that for other apps i haven't seen it for test flight stuff that's
Casey:
I may be lying to you about that, but I'm doing so accidentally.
Casey:
But I think what that meant was you need to go back to TestFlight and download it.
Casey:
And I'm sure we'll follow up next week to correct me.
Casey:
But I thought that's what that was.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, how did Tina handle it?
John:
So I suggested to her that she just do the, you know, the hold the phone up and the little cloudy picture thing.
John:
And then iCloud restore from iCloud back up because I knew about the direct transfer thing.
John:
But I'm like, I don't I want I want to wait.
John:
She got her phone on day one.
John:
So I wanted to hear if people had success or not.
John:
So I told her the old fashioned way.
John:
and it worked fine.
John:
But then when we were, it's not setting up a new phone, but we were transferring her old phone to my son's, basically taking his iPhone 6 and replacing it with her old iPhone 10, I decided to do the direct transfer.
John:
Mostly because I knew that he doesn't have a lot of data, right?
John:
So, you know, I figured I'll try it, see how it works.
John:
And it worked fine.
John:
It's the same process, only instead of picking from iCloud, you pick data transfer from the other phone.
John:
The only tricky bit about it is there's a whole bunch of screens to get through to get to it.
John:
i thought i had gotten to the screen where i could just plug it in and walk away and let them do the transfer i had not so i came back like it said this will take about 20 minutes i came back 20 minutes later and realized there was one more confirmation screen or something so stupid um but yeah it seemed to work okay um you mentioned sim swapping before of course i we got a new case for the phone and i
John:
did the thing i always do which is i put in the new case and then realized i forgot to swap the sim so i had to take the case off which is very painful to me you know i want the case to go on once and off once but what can you do uh so i swapped the sim and then to make sure everything worked after the phone was all set up and everything was transferred
John:
To the thing I usually do, which is I call that phone from my phone to make sure that the new phone rings, right?
John:
And the new phone did ring, but so did the old phone.
John:
What?
John:
All right, well, Wi-Fi calling, you know, it's audio FaceTime, it's internet, blah, blah, blah.
John:
So let me fix that by making sure I'm doing the phone number.
John:
And not like iMessage or FaceTime audio.
John:
And both phones still ring.
John:
And I just did the Homer Simpson's backing to the bushes thing.
John:
And I just turned off the old phone and walked away.
John:
Because the new phone does ring.
John:
And so I just turn off the old phone.
John:
And I've got the old phone sitting in front of here, by the way.
John:
I've been looking at it while we've been podcasting.
John:
iPhone 6, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
We talked about how thin it is and everything.
John:
He managed not to bend it, which is amazing, because the first phone we gave him, the 5S, he bent, which is a hell of a thing.
John:
Wow.
Marco:
On a 5S, it's kind of impressive.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It has bent pretty badly, too.
John:
Like, separating the layers kind of bent.
John:
Oh.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, you can see inside the phone.
John:
It's bad.
John:
But the 6 survived.
John:
It is very thin.
John:
But the most hilarious thing about the 6 when I look at it is you look at the front.
John:
Okay, fine.
John:
You turn around and look at the back, and you're like, that's the camera?
John:
it's so small and there's only one of them it's the small it's like it's hilariously small it's it's it's like a little tiny baby camera looks like an ipod touch yeah that's what it's like and it does stick out but barely it barely sticks out it's like a tiny little tiny little blueberry
John:
remember how much everybody cared too like because that was the first one that stuck out like that was such a big deal among like you know nerds like us like oh my god there's a camera bump now how could we stoop to this level lay flat on the table yeah rocks and now it's just like there's a giant mountain back of the phone for the camera and the camera and the phone itself is much thicker
Marco:
Well, that was also the slipperiest phone I think they've ever made.
Marco:
And so they solved the doesn't lay flat on a desk problem by making all of us need cases.
Casey:
Yeah, for real.
Casey:
John, in settings, cellular calls on other devices.
Casey:
Do you see what the story is there?
Casey:
That could be what it was.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
yeah i know like the thing is the phones were near each other and they're both on the same wi-fi so i'm like it's probably just the phones knowing about because i didn't like it didn't erase the other phone yet it just didn't have the right sim in it so anyway i'm i'm it's fine like this is this phone is going off it's going up into the attic and it won't receive calls anymore and the new phone is receiving calls so it's all set
Casey:
I'm surprised you're not erasing it before putting it in long-term storage.
John:
Whatever.
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Casey:
All right, so tell me, one of you, about XDR display tech being in iPads and MacBook Pros sometime between 2020 and 2021, maybe, possibly.
John:
I thought this rumor was interesting because it's our old pal Ming-Chi Kuo, who is actually fairly accurate with the parts leak-type rumors, and the part in question is...
John:
badly described in this article i've amended the quote here you know they're talking about high-end ipad and macbook models with mini led they i think it said mini led displays that's they don't have mini led displays they people keep talking about this and they keep calling them mini led displays not what they are it's mini led backlights in front of lcd displays which is that's the xdr technology right between uh late 2020 and mid 2021 so this got me thinking um by the way you know
John:
The specifics of the tech, there is a big step up from the XDR because the XDR is like 576 backlights, like tiny little LEDs forming the backlight, which is a lot, although I think they're not all independently controlled.
John:
Anyway, the new one is supposedly using 10,000 LEDs.
John:
Which sounds like a lot, but it is way smaller than the number of actual pixels still.
John:
Again, OLED has the advantage that there is no backlight that's controlled with a bunch of stuff in front of it.
John:
Every single pixel is its own source of light.
John:
An actual mini LED display, every single pixel will be made up of tiny little LEDs.
John:
That's not what this is.
John:
This is a backlight that is more granular than one big light and more granular than three regions, you know, and they keep increasing the number of regions.
John:
10,000 is a lot of LEDs, but it may be a smaller number of regions, even though that's the number of LEDs.
John:
The reason I'm interested in this story is...
John:
I'm trying to imagine how it could possibly be true.
John:
Because this particular technology, having a big grid array of lights, essentially, and then a bunch of layers sandwiched in front of it, culminating in the typical layers that make up an LCD...
John:
is really thick, and I can't imagine how you could fit that in an iPad or a MacBook without making it hugely thick and also hot, right?
John:
I mean, if you look at the Cinema Display XDR with 500 little LEDs in it, it's not thick for the hell of it.
John:
They use all that space.
John:
There's lots of stuff inside there, including fans.
John:
If you're going to make one for the iPad or a MacBook with, you know, 10,000 LED backlights inside it,
John:
I don't understand how that can be the right thickness.
John:
So it got me thinking like, Oh, maybe it's, you know, maybe they're making XDR displays that aren't as big as the giant one.
John:
Maybe this rumor is just off, or maybe there is an advancement in this type of display technology that I'm not aware of because they are making televisions with it.
John:
And the televisions,
John:
They're also kind of thick, but maybe they're thinner than the Cinema Display XDR.
John:
Anyway, I'm interested in this rumor just because it's a head-scratcher in terms of feasibility.
John:
And I would just dismiss it as like, oh, whatever, but, you know, it's from a source that has been right in the past, so I'm willing to entertain the idea.
John:
that either this is an entirely different product, or that Apple has found a way to make the Cinever Display XDR technology much, much thinner.
John:
Stay tuned in 2020 or 2021.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
A week or two ago, maybe even a little more than that, there was something that happened wherein...
Casey:
a bunch of some sort of professional like audio or video software, I don't recall what it was in front of me.
Casey:
Thank you, Avid, would just stop working all of a sudden.
Casey:
And nobody really knew why for like a solid, I don't know, 12 to 24 hours.
Casey:
And it turns out, you know, even though we just spent, especially me, spent some time saying perhaps yearly releases aren't the greatest.
Casey:
Well, it turns out daily releases or whatever Chrome is on these days may also not be the best.
Casey:
So in certain situations, which I guess a lot of Avid or computers dedicated to Avid ran into, in certain situations, Chrome would cause the computer to, what, not be bootable or something like that?
Casey:
Tell me about what's going on.
Marco:
this was, this was kind of amazing.
Marco:
So like it wasn't, it turns out like this was, it started being reported as like, Oh, there's something up with Mac pros running avid that are breaking.
Marco:
And at first it was like the Mac pros are breaking.
Marco:
And then, then it became avid is breaking them.
Marco:
And then eventually what they figured out is, is that had nothing to do with Mac pros or avid.
Marco:
It just so happened to spread a lot among that community first, because many people who run avid and many people who run avid running on Mac pros, uh,
Marco:
disable system integrity protection for whatever reason i don't know if it's due to those weird little like anti-piracy keys they use or whatever it is whatever the reason a lot of people running some of those pro tools disable system integrity protection and if you were running on a mac with system integrity protection disabled and you happen to run chrome and it happened to run this update in just i guess just the wrong way it would delete your slash var folder
Marco:
Which, on a Unix system, is kind of a problem.
Marco:
So, John, did I get that roughly right?
John:
Yeah, I actually deleted the symlink, because slash var on a Mac is actually a symlink to slash private slash var.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Yeah, like, so the Chrome, Chrome is what I was talking about before, of like,
John:
deciding to go to what jeff howard called the infinite version which is like don't worry about versions anymore we will the application will update itself as new updates appear you don't have to worry about it all every time you run it it will basically be the latest version occasionally maybe we'll nag you to reboot to restart the program if you haven't done so in a while right that's what chrome does it does that with this background process called keystone or whatever
John:
That you'll see running on your Mac for many years that is responsible for doing updates.
John:
And this is basically might as well be like a, you know, the poster child for system integrity protection.
John:
System integrity protection is supposed to, as the name says, protect the integrity of your system, meaning there's parts of your computer that are the operating system.
John:
And.
John:
It should not be possible to mess with them.
John:
They should be invulnerable.
John:
Even if you try to delete them, you shouldn't be able to.
John:
And this, as we all know from the stories at the beginning of Mac OS X, is a real problem for real users.
John:
user would boot into mac os 10 coming from classic mac os and they'd see this folder called library and they're like well i don't want any of this library stuff unless it just come with a bunch of books and they would delete it and that's will render their computer inoperable because your computer needs those files because they're part of the operating system and they're they're going to say rightly so how am i supposed to know what the heck is part of the operating system all i know is i see a bunch of stuff that wasn't there before it doesn't belong to me i don't want it i'm going to delete it
John:
System integrity protection makes it so that you can't delete it.
John:
And, you know, more recent versions within the past few years of Mac OS 10 hides the library folder and do all sorts of stuff to prevent this.
John:
But bottom line, there's the UI aspect of it, of not putting things in people's faces they don't understand.
John:
And then there is the sort of security and reliability aspect of it, which is don't let people delete that.
John:
It should be impossible to delete it.
John:
That's exactly what system integrity protection does.
John:
It makes it impossible to delete things that are essential for the operating system to even boot the computer.
John:
Disabling system integrity protection, I can imagine lots of reasons why they might do it.
John:
You already mentioned the dongles, software that hasn't been updated to account for it, software that expects to be able to spray its files into directories owned by the operating system just because that's what it's always been able to do.
John:
It's very difficult to transform a...
John:
PC operating system from a world where programs can write anything anywhere, as long as you give them permission to a world where certain things are absolutely positively off limits.
John:
Um, it's also, I suppose maybe possible that those computers for running a version before system integrity protection came out, um,
John:
When I saw this story, I immediately thought, oh, no, I have Chrome on my Mac.
John:
Does my Mac even have system integrity protection?
John:
But guess what?
John:
System integrity protection was introduced in the latest version of the operating system that my Mac can run.
John:
So I do indeed have system integrity protection.
John:
It is indeed enabled, which is good because I do run Chrome and it probably did run that updater.
John:
So, yeah, why does system integrity protection exist?
John:
To protect the operating system from bugs in other programs, like, say, a bug in an updater that accidentally deletes an essential part of the system without which your computer won't boot.
Casey:
My favorite thing about this, I think, is the official Chrome, or I believe this to be the official Chrome, like, statement on it or Google statement on it.
Casey:
Chrome update impacts some macOS systems.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Impact is an understatement here.
Marco:
Yeah, for real.
Casey:
They describe what's going on, and then update number two, September 27th, 2019.
Casey:
A new recommendation has been added in place of the previously provided terminal commands.
Casey:
The recommendation is as follows.
Casey:
To recover a machine that has been affected by this bug, use the directions found here to reinstall macOS for macOS recovery.
Casey:
That is brutal.
John:
Honestly, I was surprised when I saw there was a bug report thread where like, oh, here's what you do to fix it.
John:
That's just like a tech person telling other tech people, here's how you can fix it.
John:
But thinking that you can put instructions...
John:
like that you know how to restore things the way they were you're probably mostly right but apple changes stuff like that all the time the bottom line is it's part of the operating system that you deleted you may know how to put it back now so that it works but are you sure you got everything and what about the next version of the operating system and the next version and so on and so forth now this is not going to be a persistent problem because again the infinite version and they'll just move on and no one will ever install this version of chrome again and that version of keystone will be gone yada yada but
John:
So telling people the fix for our bug is to paste a bunch of these commands into the terminal as root, it's not a great solution.
John:
So although it sounds ridiculous for us to like, you know, nuke and pave and say reinstall the operating system, that is really the official supported way to fix it.
John:
If something borks your operating system, you probably should reinstall it because who knows if your supposed fix running a bunch of commands as root is going to work.
John:
And it's just another opportunity for you to put in typos or whatever.
Casey:
So that was almost a sad day for John, but there was a sad day for John recently.
Casey:
Sounds like you're going to have to divorce your TiVo, John.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Lots of people are upset about this, but I think I have a slightly different attitude towards it.
John:
So the news...
John:
as of what, this is older news, but it hasn't changed since, is that TiVo, well, there's two sets of news.
John:
One, TiVo is making new hardware, which, yay, TiVo's not out of business and they're making new hardware.
John:
And I was excited about that for those two reasons.
John:
I was also excited because the new hardware is not bent.
John:
For people who don't know, the current line of TiVo products come in this jauntily bent box.
John:
It's like, imagine a little rectangular box, but like bend it about a third of the way through it.
John:
Like literally bend it so it's up like a little, you know, like a little tent.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
You can't stack anything on top of.
John:
And they're noisy and annoying, and I don't like them.
John:
We have one of those in the house, but...
John:
And they ship them for years and years, so finally they're going to ship hardware that's not bent.
John:
So I was excited about that.
John:
But the news that I'm not so excited about came a little bit later, which is that TiVo is going to basically add pre-roll advertisements in front of recording.
John:
So you go to your TiVo, you find a recording, you hit play to watch the recording.
John:
And rather than playing the recording, what it will do first is play an ad and then play your recording.
John:
which is terrible because most people have TiVo, so they can skip ads.
John:
And TiVo touts all of its ad-skipping features.
John:
They haven't gone all the way to the old replay TV thing where they automatically skip all the commercials for you, but they basically do that.
John:
They have people put little waypoints in all of the popular programs.
John:
So to skip commercials, you hit a single button and it jumps past all of them immediately.
John:
It's really nice.
John:
But then they're going to insert their own ad.
John:
Now, you can skip...
John:
their own ad as well so practically speaking it impacts your experience by adding one more mandatory ad skip and also people have said that it's slow because it loads the ads from the internet and and you know it's actually worse worse experience than just skipping an extra ad but it's it's basically that but setting aside the practical things sort of spiritually thinking ethically emotionally morally and
John:
It's not what anybody wants from TiVo.
John:
It goes against everything that their loyal customers, their few remaining loyal customers want out of TiVo.
John:
And so you may be asking yourself, or maybe Casey's asking himself, how could a corporation do this?
John:
I mean, I think we all know the answers, right?
John:
TiVo is not doing great, right?
John:
When the companies aren't doing great, it isn't surprising.
John:
It's sad, but it's not surprising when they do something desperate to try to make more money.
John:
And I can, although I think they're making a terrible mistake, as everybody thinks they're making a terrible mistake, I can actually argue for the other side of it.
John:
And the other side of it is this.
John:
They have this small set of loyal customers.
John:
They could be making the calculation that we can afford to annoy them because where else are they going to go?
John:
What are they going to switch to?
John:
The whole reason they're using TiVo is because they think that they don't like their cable company's DVR.
John:
They think that they can't get by just using streaming.
John:
That's why they're still using TiVo.
John:
If they...
John:
Thought otherwise, they wouldn't be using us at all.
John:
They're basically trapped because we are the last player standing in the standalone boutique, very expensive DVR that you run yourself.
John:
So we're about to go under.
John:
We need money.
John:
Can we squeeze more money out of our customers by showing them mandatory ads that they can skip?
John:
It's a terrible mistake because there are so many other ways you could squeeze money out of those people, like, say, doing that for everybody and then charging an additional fee to not do that because we would all pay it.
John:
Again, these are all people who think that they still want TiVo.
John:
But I can understand why they think they actually have a captive audience.
John:
Their audience is so small and so desperate and so loyal and have so few alternatives that they're making the calculation that this won't push them over the edge to say, I thought that I couldn't use my cable company's DVR, but this is going to make me try.
John:
Because now, forget it.
John:
TiVo has completely betrayed me.
John:
They don't even have a way that I can pay the money to make this go away, which is like the worst sin.
John:
Because that's basically what TiVo people do.
John:
They pay huge amounts of money that other people don't pay for a slightly better, in their opinion, experience.
John:
Tebow could have just charged more money or put in the ads and charge people skip.
John:
It'd still be screaming.
John:
Don't get me wrong.
John:
Cause people pay like the, I pay the big upfront fees for like lifetime.
John:
So I don't have to pay them on a monthly basis.
John:
Right.
John:
And apparently that's still not enough money.
John:
So if you came back to those lifetime people and said, Oh, now you're going to have a monthly fee again, or you got to pay another 500 bucks or whatever.
Um,
John:
people would be up in arms, but they'd be less up in arms than if you make them watch ads or make them skip ads.
John:
So good old TiVo.
John:
I actually prefer this to them going out of business because at least it gives me the option.
John:
I can leave TiVo or I can not leave TiVo.
John:
If they go out of business, I don't have that option anymore.
John:
But I will say that this made me look at the Fios DVR to see what state it's in, which is something I had never done before.
John:
practically speaking, unless they screw it up even more, I probably will eventually get one of these Tevos, assuming they're still in business at the time I need to get a new one.
John:
The only thing that's scaring me about it is I didn't see a large capacity model.
John:
That's one of my complaints about the...
John:
The ones you get from cable companies, they tend not to come in high capacity.
John:
So you can store like 100 or 200 hours of HD, and my current TiVo store is like 500 hours or something insane.
John:
It's like twice as big as the biggest one you can get from the cable company.
John:
And we, you know, we're always at like 85% capacity or more, and we have to sort of manage to that.
John:
So...
John:
That's why I'll probably still end up buying one of these.
John:
I'm hoping I can do like a DNS black hole on the address for the streaming.
John:
But what I'm really hoping is that the incredible bad press that TiVo is getting about this bad press, like anyone talks about TiVo, the incredible bad reaction, the incredible bad reaction they're getting from their loyal customers will make them think twice about this and say, maybe we shouldn't do this.
John:
Because if they had thought, if they had made that calculation, like, look, our customers are captive.
John:
One look at literally anywhere this story appears from anything said by any actual TiVo customer.
John:
And they would know, well, 100% of the TiVo customers who have commented on the story had said they're leaving TiVo unequivocally.
John:
Like, that's it.
John:
But, you know, so we've miscalculated.
John:
We thought they had nowhere to go.
John:
they're going whether where they're going we don't know but they're going so this is a terrible decision tibo needs to reconsider the fact that this hasn't shipped yet makes me think there's time to reconsider because they are right and that the customers really don't have any place great to go they straighten the box and they add ads you know just do one of those things and it'll be much better
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like, maybe it'll be fun for the program because, you know, if I get one of these things, I'll get to tell you just exactly how grim it is.
John:
Oh, and setting aside the ad thing, the new software for TiVo is so bad.
John:
Not in terms of, like, bugs or, you know, again, data loss crashes.
John:
No, not in terms of that.
John:
In terms of the UI, both on iOS as an iOS app for TiVo and on the actual television device,
John:
It is worse than the previous UI in every single way, in hilariously obvious ways that I could go on about for hours and hours and hours.
John:
It just boggles my mind how they could screw things up so incredibly badly.
John:
To give just one example, which grinds my gears every time I look at it, on the iOS app, they change from...
John:
a text list of episodes.
John:
Like you go into a show and here's all the episodes of the show and it would show that just, you know, just a list and it would have the title of the show and a date and, you know, some basically like list view, right?
John:
They went from that on iOS to a thing that shows thumbnails and the thumbnail is very often a single static screen that is the same for every single episode.
John:
Like it's just like a, you know, a splash screen for the show.
John:
I don't know if other shows don't have this, but all the shows that I watch, it just shows the same image from every single thumbnail.
John:
It's horizontal scrolling, and of course, they're little 16x9 things.
John:
They're like little TV screens, so you can fit maybe three or four or five of them, depending on what orientation you have your iPad in.
John:
So they scroll horizontally.
John:
The whole rest of the screen is wasted where you could have a list.
John:
They scroll horizontally.
John:
No text.
John:
What episode is that?
John:
What episode is that next to it?
John:
What episode?
John:
They're, they're literally identical.
John:
There is nothing on them to distinguish them from each other.
John:
So if you go into a show and you say, I want to see episode number five or episode number 11, you got to count squares.
John:
One, two, three, four.
John:
Or what if you're looking by title?
John:
Tough luck.
John:
You can't see the title.
John:
If you tap on it and go into a detail view, then you can see the title.
John:
How does that even happen?
John:
Like, like, like I first, I thought it was like a bug or maybe it's just for some shows.
John:
That is one sample of the huge downgrade that is the modern TiVo software.
John:
And I have the modern TiVo software because one of my old TiVos got a bad hard drive, and I got it replaced under warranty, and the replacement unit they sent came with new software.
John:
There is a way to downgrade it.
John:
I didn't want to bother going through it because my quote-unquote main TiVo still has the old software.
John:
TiVo was really swinging and missing lately, but that is not surprising for companies that are not doing well.
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Casey:
We already covered the new Microsoft stuff in the pre-show, so we're good on that, right?
John:
Yep.
John:
Actually, yeah.
John:
I did have some things to say about this.
John:
I don't know how long we want to go here, but it's not about the products themselves.
John:
One meta comment before we get to the products.
John:
To put a link in the show notes, I did the typical Google thing for like, you know, I search for Microsoft Duo Neo, right?
John:
And I expected after scrolling past a couple of things, I'd find eventually the link to Microsoft site, right?
John:
Where they, you know, the official pages, because if we're going to put something in the show notes, I don't want to put like a, a wired story or a link to the verge.
John:
Let's just go to the Microsoft site.
John:
As far as I could tell.
John:
There is no Microsoft site for these products.
John:
Oh, cool.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong.
John:
I will grant that I did not go past the first page of Google results, but I did manually go to Microsoft.com and I didn't see these products on the homepage.
John:
And it just shows how accustomed I am to the Apple way of doing things where they get up on stage, they have a thing, they say, look at this great new stuff and this is coming in the fall or coming whenever, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then as soon as they go off stage, you can go to Apple.com
John:
And probably on the homepage, some big image about one of the things they showed and maybe some smaller images about other stuff.
John:
Like there's an official site.
John:
I don't think there's an official site for these products yet.
John:
So we'll link to the Verge story, I guess.
John:
But anyway, what I wanted to talk about in relation to these products, which we should describe briefly, is not the products themselves or the operating systems or all the reasons that Marco already outlined about why we're not particularly interested in them and intend not to cover them.
John:
but a larger point but so description these are basically foldable devices where it looks like a a big or a small book where each half of the inside of the book is a screen when you close it the screens are facing each other when you open it there the screens are flat
John:
uh it's not a continuous screen like all those other you know cell phones with like a piece of plastic across it it's two screens with a hinge between them there is like a gap there is a crease it is two physically separate screens connected by a hinge there's a little one which is called the duo and there's a bigger one which is called the neo the bigger one is like laptop sized and it comes with a little keyboard that you can lay on top of the screen element and the little one is i'm not going to say it's phone size but it's
John:
It's phablet-sized.
John:
Yeah, I guess it's phablet-sized.
John:
And the main thing, you know, for these announced like today, yesterday, there hasn't been much time, plus I've been playing Destiny, so I haven't had a lot of time to look at these.
John:
Time flies when you're playing Destiny.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Something like that.
John:
The one thing I wanted to talk about is kind of the same thing we talk about with the foldable stuff.
John:
So what advantage, what advantages do we see to having two screens?
John:
And I want to talk about the smaller one first, I suppose, right?
John:
It's the bigger one.
John:
I think I have clearer answers, but the smaller one, I'm kind of left with the same question as the foldable phones.
John:
let's pretend that this was awesome.
John:
Let's pretend it ran iOS, like pretend whatever you want, like setting aside anything that may keep you away from it.
John:
Do you want, do you think you would want, would you find useful something like this where there are two screens that fold in on each other?
Casey:
What's the advantage?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I got to imagine there would be one, but sitting here now, I don't have the faintest idea.
John:
I mean, the obvious thing you can think of is, well, you can see more stuff.
John:
We all want to see more stuff.
John:
That's why bigger phones are nicer than smaller ones.
John:
You can see more email messages.
John:
Things are bigger.
John:
With a crease between them, you can't really see one thing bigger.
John:
But you can see two things, right?
John:
People like multiple monitors.
John:
What's the advantage?
John:
I get that.
John:
I get the same exact reason why you'd want two monitors on your Mac is why you'd want two screens on your phone.
John:
But you don't carry your two monitors in your hands.
John:
So I'm looking at this device, and I'm like, okay, it's thicker than a phone.
John:
It's about phablet-sized.
John:
would I ever use both of the screens?
John:
Like, you can have it folded up like a phone and just use it like a really thick phone with one screen that you can't see because it's not facing you.
John:
But would I unfold it to look at that second screen?
John:
Would I go into, like, productivity mode with my phone phablet thing?
John:
Would I take it out and say I'm going to set it up in front of me and fold it like a little laptop or hold it like a paperback book and read a book, one on each page?
John:
Like...
John:
And almost every scenario I can think of is like, I wouldn't do that.
John:
It would be more cumbersome for me to do that.
John:
It would never make up for the additional weight and complexity and size and heat and everything with that utility because it's a phone size thing.
John:
Now, maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe...
John:
we've crossed some threshold and we've gotten to the point where it actually is small enough and it won't bother people.
John:
And suddenly we'll see people in one smooth motion, pulling this thing out of their jacket pocket and flipping it open like a paperback book and looking at it and have Instagram on the left and Twitter on the right, or been messaging somebody on the right.
John:
And it'll be like an awesome dual screen experience.
John:
And then they'll fold it back up in one motion and shove it back in their pocket.
John:
Because you can imagine that if it was thin enough and light enough that you could maybe pull it off.
John:
But I've,
John:
feeling like we're not there yet and i just i don't i don't think the utility i don't think this is a thing that we should be shooting for quite yet like it seems like something that should remain in the lab now it's hard to say because i haven't used one maybe maybe it's awesome maybe the utility will be clear as soon as you get one you'll be like oh i can't go back to an old phone because i can see so much less and i can't set it up as a mini laptop in front of me when i sit down in starbucks or whatever but
John:
Looking at these pictures, I am not sold on the utility of that small sucker.
Casey:
I mean, I have no argument here.
Casey:
I also, sitting here now, I'm not really sure what's getting Mike so jazzed about the Galaxy Fold or whatever it is that he's extraordinarily horny for.
Casey:
Whatever it is, I mean, if it makes him happy, that's fine.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
I'm sure there will come a time that I will want something like that in an Apple product or Android, depending on the way things are going, which I know that is Android.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Right now, today, it just seems way too clunky to me.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I get the appeal.
Marco:
The whole reason why big phones are popular is because when we're using it, we want the biggest possible screen we can get.
Marco:
And unfortunately, that, you know, we also want something that's small enough to fit in pockets and bags and everything.
Marco:
And that that's oftentimes harder.
Marco:
And so the appeal of the folding phone, which this kind of isn't, but the appeal of a folding phone is you can get a much bigger screen with a smaller footprint when it's in your pocket or bag.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So that makes sense as a theory of like why this is cool.
Marco:
That being said, I think as we're seeing with the first generation of foldable phones that are just kind of barely fumbling out the door, it seems like there's still a lot of just physical, real-world reality problems with these things that we're just not there yet.
Marco:
And so the Surface Duo that we're talking about now, none of us have seen these in person yet, but looking at their images and videos and stuff they announced today,
Marco:
It sure looks like, yeah, that would be really cool if it was maybe five years from now, and we've had all these times for advancements.
Marco:
Right now, it looks like a really big, clunky, thick, heavy thing that...
Marco:
has some really cool functionality that I would use sometimes, but not most of the time.
Marco:
Most of the time we're using our phones, most of us at least, I think we're doing things that don't require a massive screen.
Marco:
But sometimes it's really nice to have one.
Marco:
If you're doing something with media, obviously, you're looking at photos, video, whatever, it's really nice to have those things, great.
Marco:
But if you're just trying to read an email,
Marco:
it doesn't make a huge difference how big your screen is.
Marco:
Or if you're messaging, doing text messaging, which is probably the most common thing people do with their phones.
Marco:
Screen size doesn't matter a whole lot.
Marco:
It matters in the sense of how big you can make the keyboard, and that can affect typing accuracy and stuff.
Marco:
But once you get beyond a certain point, like this diminishing returns, what they've achieved here seems like it's kind of halfway between a phone and a tablet.
Marco:
In a way, phablets now, we just call those phones.
Marco:
What we used to call phablets when that was a word, that was five and a half inch or six inch displays.
Marco:
We just have those now in our regular phones.
Marco:
This is something else.
Marco:
This is significantly larger than that, significantly thicker.
Marco:
I think it's just too clunky for most people to want this for the value it provides.
Marco:
And so down the road, when, you know, as John said, like, you know, when technology advances more, this could be really cool.
Marco:
I think what's interesting though also is that the Surface Duo is, while it was announced today, they're saying it's not going to come out until the holiday season of 2020.
Marco:
So it is still a little bit over a year out if it's on time.
Marco:
And so this is still like, they've barely even been able to achieve this.
Marco:
And even this is not imminent.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens, you know, as this stuff actually comes out, if it actually comes out, which is a big if.
Marco:
But even in what they're showing today, which is probably best case scenario, it's
Marco:
just looks like it's a bit too big and clunky for what people actually want but hey you know we could be wrong look big phones surprised us when back when phablets were first thing we were all making fun of them and saying oh who's gonna hold up an ipad to their face and now we all basically hold up ipads to our faces and you know and it turns out that all the rest of the time that we're using it that we aren't holding up to our face no one cares about how big it is and we all just hold it you know it might be that
Marco:
First of all, while pants pockets are the way that most men hold their phone, that isn't the case for most people.
Marco:
A lot of people carry bags and there's lots of ways that we can carry things like this where if the utility is high enough,
Marco:
people will do it.
Marco:
People will buy it.
Marco:
And maybe it isn't exactly what individuals like me or you might want, but that doesn't mean there won't be a market for it.
Marco:
If I carried some kind of bag or purse with me every day and this would fit in there and I kept my phone in there anyway, I got a lot more leeway on how big that phone can be before it gets unwieldy compared to a pants pocket.
Marco:
And if I could have much of a tablet's functionality in a footprint closer to a phone,
Marco:
that's pretty cool.
Marco:
That would have high utility for me.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I'm really curious to watch this.
Marco:
I'm hesitant to outright say, oh, it's too big.
Marco:
No one will use it because we've been burned predicting things like that in the past.
Marco:
But I'm also hesitant to be super optimistic about something that is still more than a year away if it goes well.
Marco:
So we'll see.
John:
Real-time follow-up.
John:
Microsoft does, in fact, have pages for these products.
John:
We'll put the links in the show notes.
John:
Why they're not linked from their homepage, I have no idea.
John:
Or maybe they are linked and I just couldn't find it.
John:
But anyway, there are pages.
John:
The fact that they're not coming out until late next year explains why there's not much on these sites.
John:
But, you know, that's fine.
John:
The size thing...
John:
The screen space, the utility, the size stuff, I see that.
John:
The part I keep getting hung up on is the folding.
John:
Now, this is modified somewhat by the fact that lots of people do use folio cases for their existing phones.
John:
You've seen people who take out their phone, and they actually do have to open it before they can use the phone.
John:
What they're usually opening, though, is a very thin flap over the phone, and then there's the phone or anything.
John:
It's not an equally sized...
John:
computerized device that they have to fold over.
John:
But the phone habits that I see people, you know, performing in public is people look at their phones a lot.
John:
People take their phones out and put them away a lot.
John:
That motion gets repeated.
John:
The people with folios do have an additional thing in that motion.
John:
I've got my pouch to deal with, right?
John:
They've got their little flappy cover.
John:
But all those things are significantly less cumbersome than...
John:
actually unfolding a, you know, a device that is equal parts electronics on both sides, let alone folding all the way back on itself on that big hinge, right?
John:
It almost strikes me as a play at a smaller laptop than a play at a larger phone.
John:
Because it just doesn't seem like it would accomplish the job that I see these phones performing, which is to be ready at hand at a moment's notice to look at Instagram, right?
John:
To be able to take it out, send a text, and put it away.
John:
To see who was that that was texting me.
John:
Because when this thing is closed, you can't see anything.
John:
There's no screens on the outside, unlike some of the other folding phones, right?
Yeah.
John:
I just feel like it's the utility of this device is trapped inside the clamshell.
John:
It's not up to the task of being your ready at hand, you know, quick phone like device.
John:
It's so silly that we call these things phones or whatever, but it doesn't it seems like it's fulfilling a different role, which is fine.
John:
Maybe there's a role for it or a role for people who don't use their phones like that, who don't.
John:
pull out their phone and see who it was they texted them, who don't take a spare moment waiting in line to read Twitter, right?
John:
If that's not how you use your phone, this is much more appealing as a, you know, as a phablet type thing with more utility.
John:
With Mike and his love for the foldable phone stuff, there is a certain amount of like techno future lust of like, wow, it's just like we talked about bendable screens, like the fact that it is all one screen.
John:
that you can actually do the thing that I said you couldn't do earlier on this, which is see one thing larger.
John:
Have a video playing bigger than it could play.
John:
I don't think you'd want to play video with a big split down the middle, right?
John:
But if it's actually all one screen like those bendy phones are trying to be, you could, in theory, unfold it and watch a movie on the plane just on your phone.
John:
Don't have to bring your tablet because look how big the screen is when you unfold your phone.
John:
Obviously, those foldy ones have serious problems with...
John:
The folding part, we think we talked about this before, that technology is nowhere near perfected.
John:
Taking something that is made of some kind of plastic or polymer and bending it back and forth, eventually it's going to crease or bend or crack and then the crap gets inside them.
John:
And it's like what Microsoft is doing is...
John:
Much easier to do engineering wise and a better solution engineering wise.
John:
They can make two solid, in theory, even waterproof, basically phones and connect them with a good solid hinge.
John:
There's no weird bendy plastic part.
John:
There's no gaps where crap can go in.
John:
You know, none of that is a problem.
John:
But you got a big crease down the middle of the screen.
John:
So I understand the tradeoff they were making, but it does.
John:
I can't imagine Mike being as excited about this because it's not cool and techno, not as cool and techno future as the all one screen thing.
John:
This one, though, I think could actually work and not break within the first 24 hour period.
John:
Unless Casey washes his car with it.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's a pro tip.
Casey:
Don't don't have this with you when you're washing Aaron's car.
Marco:
I do wonder, though, it's been a while since we've had phones that had moving parts, besides camera lenses shaking around and stuff.
Marco:
The haptic engine.
Marco:
Yeah, but to have a giant hinge as something that is put under a lot of stress every single time the phone is used, this is going to be a hinge that you're operating...
Marco:
thousands of times over the lifetime of this device and that is dealing with lots of potential stresses.
Marco:
Some of the times that it is being operated, it might have some grit or dust or something in there and you might be jamming it up somehow.
Marco:
There is going to have to be some kind of cable that runs between the two halves so that probably some big ribbon cable that goes between them or something like that.
Marco:
That can wear out or break or pull away from whatever it's mounted to or flake out or whatever.
Marco:
I wonder, like, you know, back when we had phones that folded and everything, everything was a lot simpler technically.
Marco:
And people were not using their phones nearly as often as they do now.
Marco:
And there wasn't nearly as much in those hinges and everything.
Marco:
Now, like,
Marco:
I almost wonder, is that going to be a problem where many of these devices might have significant physical issues with usage over time?
Marco:
It's actually pretty hard to develop a hinge that is that good and that sturdy and that reliable under all the crazy conditions that people put their phones in now.
John:
Yeah, that's a good point with the flip phones.
John:
That gets me back to what I was saying about the Folio before.
John:
So the aspirations of this Duo product are that it is possible to use it kind of in a laptop mode.
John:
They show it in the video like, oh, you could open it up and have the flat screen on the table be like a keyboard and the other part kind of up like in an L shape.
John:
That's your screen, right?
John:
So the hinge has to have a mode where it is stiff enough to support itself.
John:
but all of the things that have succeeded in the market for phones have had the ability to flip open and close quickly flip phones we've seen that little motion take out your phone you flip it open and more importantly when you're done snap close it right back up when we had flip phones that's how they operated you could do that because they either didn't have a screen on one side or had very sturdy plastic screens or whatever but like
John:
They were treated in a way that you would not want to snap something like this closed.
John:
They weren't as delicate, let's say, as our current smartphones, where if you were to take two smartphones and slap them together with the ferocity that we closed our flip phones, that would not be a good idea.
John:
They would last probably a few of those snaps and eventually they would crack.
John:
And so this hinge has two things.
John:
This design has two things against it.
John:
One, the hinge can't be really loose.
John:
And yet loose is exactly how you'd want it to be, like a folio case.
John:
You want it to be loose, you can flip it open real easy.
John:
That's what we demand of our devices, whether they be flip phones or a phone in a folio case.
John:
If you had a folio case with a hinge that you had to pry open, no one would buy that case.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
But two, if you're going to have aspirations to use it like a laptop, the hinge has to at least have a mode where it is stiff because it has to support the weight of the screen screen underneath the keyboard screen.
John:
So it is not just a challenge to make a hinge that is durable enough, but I think part of the challenge is also to make a device that can be flipped, opened, and closed in the way that thus far we have demanded of our phones...
John:
while also not shattering itself when doing that, while also having a mode in which it is stiff.
John:
So it is quite an engineering challenge.
John:
I'm assuming they will solve it by not doing any of that and simply making it like a laptop hinge, which is already a challenge.
John:
It has the same challenges, but presumably laptops are not opened and closed as much as this would be.
John:
Although, again, I get back to my discussion before.
John:
Will this appeal to people who need to look at their phone every two seconds?
John:
Or will this only appeal to people who basically use a laptop?
John:
In which case, you're basically just making a good laptop hinge.
John:
Which is itself a difficult task.
John:
Just ask anyone who's had a Mac laptop repaired for ribbon cable stuff or whatever.
John:
But the characteristics that would make this
John:
useful as a phone seem counter to the characteristics that would make it good as a little mini laptop thing.
John:
So it's quite a challenge.
Marco:
Keep in mind also a few other factors here.
Marco:
Number one, anything their phones can do, people will idly fidget with that.
Marco:
So if you have a phone that can open and close...
Marco:
we did back when you know back when we had headphones people would just idly like flip it open flip it closed it's just as like an idle animation like they would just like you know just fidget with it as anywhere they were all day long just fidgeting people do it with airpods cases now like so that's going to be a problem number one it's just like the the number of open closed cycles on these things is going to be way higher than a laptop um and and number two um
Marco:
Back when we had flip phones, phones were heavily subsidized by the carriers on only two-year contracts at most in most places, and they didn't cost $1,000.
Marco:
So now, if you're going to have something like this, I don't think they talked about pricing.
Marco:
I'd be surprised.
Marco:
But assume something like dual-screen phone like this is probably going to be, what, $1,500 maybe?
Marco:
It's not going to be cheap.
Marco:
And so you're going to have this $1,500 unsubsidized phone that most people want something like that to last them at least two or three years.
Marco:
And then add to it this moving part that is critical to its operation.
Marco:
Oh, geez, that is a recipe for disappointment.
Marco:
And I think this is all part of also why...
Marco:
All of the Samsung Galaxy Fold and whatever the other one was.
Marco:
I think that's why these products are having so much trouble getting to market also.
Marco:
Because this is going to be a problem with any foldable phone.
Marco:
Any phone that can open and close that is not a basic clip phone.
Marco:
They're all going to have this problem.
Marco:
And you're just battling against physics at some point here.
Marco:
To design things that can take that kind of abuse in such a small size and have all those characteristics and be affordable and be mass-producible, you're just asking for trouble here.
Marco:
So I think it's going to be a while before any of this stuff is good.
Marco:
And it might never happen.
John:
Yeah, we've been discussing this in the context of foldable phones because that's really what I wanted to talk about.
John:
But it occurs to me that I have no idea if the Surface Duo is meant to be a phone in any way whatsoever.
John:
Like, this may not be the intention of the Microsoft device.
John:
I'm just, you know, so forgive me for seeming to slam the Surface for a thing that it's not even intending to do.
John:
I think it is just a small laptop, in which case a lot of these problems don't go away.
John:
But I'm thinking of the larger thing that we keep seeing, which is...
John:
phone-ish size devices that are foldable with the idea that you get more screen space, but then it can become a smaller size to fit in your pocket or something.
John:
So setting aside the Duo itself, just all the foldable phones, many of which are similar in size to the Duo, in fact, that's kind of what I'm getting at, that like
John:
Are we ever going to get to the place where a foldable thing replaces the thing that we're all using and now calling a phone?
John:
Or is this only of interest in sort of the laptop space?
John:
And we've been going a little while, but to briefly touch on its larger sibling, the Neo, it is a much more understandable device.
John:
It's basically laptop-sized.
John:
It's the same thing.
John:
If you didn't see anything next to it for scale, you'd be like, is that the Duo or the Neo?
John:
They look basically identical.
John:
They may even be proportionally identical, but one is much larger.
John:
One is like a laptop size.
John:
If you can imagine a modern MacBook where instead of a screen and a thing with a keyboard and a trackpad, it's just got a screen and a screen.
John:
We talked about this when the touch bar came out as the natural evolution of the screen slowly expanding to fill your laptop.
John:
There was another laptop that actually was released recently.
John:
from maybe asus or something it's pronounced asses john yeah it has uh like a half a screen like if you can imagine a touch bar that's four inches high have you seen that one i think it was hp actually but yeah i know what you mean yeah yeah like the expansion of screens on there makes sense for all sorts of reasons and it doesn't make sense for all sorts of reasons um
John:
uh the natural extension of that is like just make it all screen then it's infinitely configurable you could use it as a one larger screen with a big seam down the middle if you want you can use it for the the screen that's on the bottom is like a to draw on and then you can look at stuff there's all sorts of things you can do they've added into the mix here and if you want a hardware keyboard you can just lay the hardware keyboard like a little kind of smart keyboard just lay it on top of the screen and i'm sure there's some smart to let it know the keyboard is laying there and scrunch your stuff up and you know it's it's much more interesting because no one has
John:
that they're going to be carrying this in their pocket or whipping it open and closing it.
John:
It's just a very interesting laptop.
John:
And seeing people ship the sort of one and a half screen laptops, this is exactly what we need people to do.
John:
Try things out and see if there is an arrangement that is actually good.
John:
The half screen laptop sounds like such a mongrel thing, but looking at it and looking at the various applications, it occurred to me that there's lots of
John:
i found it appealing i found it appealing in some ways but then i also looked at it and said yeah but if you can do that you should just make it all screen and microsoft is not the first one to go all screen i think there's a couple of pc vendors that have sort of two screen uh laptops but then you got the keyboard problem right because no one wants to type on an on-screen keyboard so you could have an external keyboard and then what are you even doing right finding the sort of
John:
The form factor that everyone agrees is pretty much okay is very difficult.
John:
We've been with the same laptop form factor basically since the PowerBook that introduced the form that we currently know as laptop, which is a screen, clamshell, a keyboard that's shoved back up against the screen, and a pointing device right in front of you in the middle.
John:
That is the PowerBook design.
John:
Before that, laptops didn't look like that.
John:
After that, all laptops look like that.
John:
And we've been stuck with it slash enjoying it for many, many decades now.
John:
is double screen the thing that's going to replace it i mean maybe especially if apple keeps going the way it's going with its keyboards especially if you can slap a hardware keyboard on top of it uh but i'm glad someone besides apple is trying it out because i am not yet convinced you know i wonder like do we need to replace this like you know you said like you know what's going to be like the the like next form factor or like or the the decided on form factor for laptops and like and
Marco:
I think we've already had it.
Marco:
I think we solved this problem.
Marco:
We solved the laptop problem.
Marco:
We like laptops.
Marco:
I think the market has proven over and over again that in this era that we're seemingly in for the last five to seven years of just massive throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks.
Marco:
How many screens can we put on things?
Marco:
How big or small can we make them?
Marco:
There's been this massive era of experimentation that's been going on
Marco:
But I think overall, I think what the market has actually shown us is, no, actually, laptops are great.
Marco:
We like laptops the way we've had them.
Marco:
Just keep evolving them slowly, not trying to make radical changes like getting rid of the entire keyboard and trackpad section.
Marco:
It turns out laptops are great, and so are tablets, and so are phones, and they need not necessarily converge.
Marco:
Like, we are fine having multiple devices.
Marco:
And I think, you know, all of the... For all the years that... Like, you know, you mentioned the PowerBook form factor.
Marco:
And you're right.
Marco:
That did define things for a long time.
Marco:
But the PowerBook form factor was...
Marco:
not that much of a massive step over what came before it.
Marco:
It was a gradual evolution into this is what laptops are, and the whole industry kind of consolidated on this one thing of making everything look like Apple's laptops, and everything was fine for a long time.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Once we figured that out, we didn't keep changing everything.
Marco:
We just refined it and made it better.
Marco:
Until the last few years, we started making it worse.
Marco:
But up until the last few years, we just kept making it better.
Marco:
And I feel like we're so... As an industry, we're so...
Marco:
We're innovation happy right now in the hardware area, in the form factor area, that we're just doing a bunch of stuff, throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks.
Marco:
But I feel like everyone is so quick to try to replicate the success of the smartphone and then the smaller success of the tablet.
Marco:
We're so quick to try to replicate that everywhere we can because there's a lot of money to be made if you succeed at it.
Marco:
that we're reinventing things that don't need to be reinvented.
Marco:
The laptop is great.
Marco:
The laptop is fine.
Marco:
And there are still ways we can make the laptop form factor better without dramatically throwing a whole bunch of stuff out the window like the way these dual-screen things do by getting rid of the keyboard and all that stuff.
Marco:
I don't think we need this.
Marco:
I don't think the world needs this.
Marco:
I honestly don't.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
If the world decides it needs this, it's going to be similar to how when tablets came out, a lot of people who were very innovation-happy and future-obsessed, a lot of people said, oh, well, laptops are dead, computers are dead, everyone's going to be using tablets only.
Marco:
And what actually happened is laptops and computers are fine.
Marco:
Some people use tablets only, but most people use tablets and laptops.
Marco:
And I think that might happen.
Marco:
This to me looks more like a fancy tablet than a fancy laptop.
John:
Well, to that point, though, I feel like part of the evolution of a laptop is the current what you're calling tablets as a separate thing.
John:
Like the Surface, you know, to name just one thing, but even just all of our friends who we know who basically have a weird floppy laptop, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they're choosing to do that, despite the fact that there are advantages that we often cite for an actual laptop over those weird floppy things.
John:
I think kind of the surface design, the reason you see Microsoft Surface around and the reason you see people using iPads with keyboards is because that is a potential...
John:
new iteration of the laptop it's a different decision than to screen it's basically screening keyboard as separate things where sometimes you just use the screen and the keyboard as an accessory that you can arrange and you know it's it's it's a different set of trade-offs but i don't you know setting aside the operating system i don't view that as like oh tablet and laptop i view that as
John:
a redefinition of the sort of a new form factor for the same job as a laptop with a different set of trade-offs, and it's one that actually has gained some traction.
John:
Obviously, it hasn't replaced laptops, and I would argue that it's not better than laptops, but...
John:
It's a thing that people use.
John:
It's not a curiosity.
John:
Like, you're not shocked if you go on a plane and you see someone take out this big floppy foldy thing, whether it's a Surface or an iPad, and start typing on it, right?
John:
That has some traction, which makes me think it has some utility.
John:
And that, some of the things, the utility that has, are also shared by these dual screen things, right?
John:
And then you have more flexibility.
John:
You can use it just as a tablet.
John:
You can have flexibility about what you use for the other space and how you arrange it and whether it's a hinge or a stand.
John:
And, you know, like Surface has both of them.
John:
And so I think there's something there.
John:
And I'm lumping that in with laptops, despite the fact that we all just call them tablets.
John:
And in the Apple world, they run an entirely different operating system.
John:
That's a whole big thing.
John:
Really, it's a thing that I can put in front of me where I can type and look at a screen at the same time in a laptop-y kind of way.
John:
So I would lump that in there.
John:
I don't see as many people using a dual screen.
John:
Maybe it's because they don't like the keyboards.
John:
But I feel like the jury's still out on that.
John:
And the point about the laptops, the PowerBook being an evolution of what came before it.
John:
it's in some ways yeah because it's an unfolding thing with a keyboard and a screen right but the diversity of things with keyboards and screens and they folded like where the hinges were even the first apple laptop the mac portable was not a clamshell many laptops were not clamshell so even just clamshell as in where there's two halves that are the same size with the hinge at the back that wasn't a given for a long time in the pc industry let alone the
John:
Like, you know, the whole PowerBook design was just shoving the keyboard back and having a pointing device.
John:
Because there was no pointing devices.
John:
It was just DOS.
John:
The entire bottom of the laptops was keyboard.
John:
And the top part was screen.
John:
There was nothing else.
John:
And then when pointing devices came, the PC laptops had a thing where they shoved like a track pad on the side of it.
John:
It could have been that track balls back then.
John:
If you shove a track ball on the side of it.
John:
It could have been the case that a pointing device along the right or left edge.
John:
could have been the thing because, hey, I don't have a hand coming out of the middle of my belly button.
John:
I don't know about you.
John:
So why is the trackpad in the center middle of the thing?
John:
How is that the right call versus not having a pointing device on the left or the right side?
John:
It seems obvious in retrospect, like, oh, all they did was move the keyboard back and put a pointing device in the middle.
John:
But for whatever reason, that was the arrangement of things that stuck.
John:
And unfortunately, getting back to the experimentation, whether or not something succeeds in the market doesn't necessarily reflect whether it's a good idea.
John:
These Microsoft things could fail for the same reasons that Marco outlined in the beginning, because people might not be interested because they run Windows.
John:
There's all sorts of like platform ecosystem, marketing, reputation, historical reasons why a good product can fail and a bad product can succeed.
John:
i think the powerbook design is a reasonable compromise and is better than having a pointing device left and right but there is something to be said with the fact that it was apple and apple has a reputation and lots of people copy apple because they're good at designing yada yada in the same way that there are many microsoft products and designs that if apple did them we would be going gaga over them but we're not going gaga over them because they run windows and we don't like windows and microsoft is not in the power position in the pc industry and microsoft is not one of the big players in the phone world and you know
John:
A million reasons why these things might not succeed to the degree that they quote-unquote should or would and under ideal conditions.
John:
But someone needs to try these things out.
John:
If only so, people with a more viable platform can copy them and be more successful.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Eero, Squarespace, and Burrow, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-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
Casey:
They finally fixed my bug in 13.2 beta 1.
Casey:
Hooray!
Marco:
They finally are going to stop corrupting my navigation bar whenever you touch the search bar.
Casey:
So can you describe either for me, an iOS developer, or preferably for those who are not iOS developers, what was the behavior that was broken?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So anyone who's still on 13.1, you will see this.
Marco:
Open up Overcast.
Marco:
On the root screen is a search box.
Marco:
Tap the search box.
Marco:
Then tap outside of the search box.
Marco:
Then tap something like a playlist or anything.
Marco:
Then tap back.
Marco:
You will see in the navigation bar at the top of the screen all of the items start accumulating.
Marco:
They no longer transition.
Marco:
They also no longer work.
Marco:
And that bug will persist until the app is forced quit and restarted.
Marco:
cool yeah i'm getting many bug reports a day now that ios 13.1 is out from people running this this was a bug that all summer during ios 13.0 betas this bug was not there this bug was introduced in beta i forget two or three of ios 13.1
Marco:
so not even the first build of the bug fix update introduced this horrible navigation bar bug and it isn't just overcast there's a couple other apps basically you will suffer from this bug if you use UI search controller with in a certain combination of conditions where like it's not auto hiding and everything and so like
Marco:
And UI Search Controller, this is the thing for non-developers out there.
Marco:
UI Search Controller is the API that Apple has provided for a number of years now.
Marco:
And before that, I think it was called UI Search Bar Controller or something.
Marco:
There was some variant before that.
Marco:
This was the rewrite from a few years back.
Marco:
And it's the thing where when you have a navigation bar at the top of an app, you can integrate a search box into that in the way that when you start, when you tap it, a cancel button appears.
Marco:
Sometimes it moves up and replaces the contents of the bar with the search box only.
Marco:
So any title or icons that were there before, it slides up and replaces it.
Marco:
As you scroll, that box might go away or it might not.
Marco:
These are all configuration options.
Marco:
And then as you type and you get results, it overlays what was on the rest of the screen with a list of results that you can then tap and get into.
Marco:
This is all the role of UI Search Controller.
Marco:
This class has been notoriously buggy in iOS, which is why they keep having to rewrite it.
Marco:
And in iOS 13, they rewrote it again.
Marco:
And in iOS 13, the rewrite actually did fix a lot of previous bugs and actually has overall been pretty good, except for this one little thing.
Marco:
But there have been so many bugs related to this during the beta cycle.
Marco:
So many weird layout problems and other issues with UI Search Controller that
Marco:
And, you know, little gaps appearing, you know, between the search results in the background and stuff like that, like all sorts of weird stuff we had to deal with this summer with this class because they rewrote the whole thing.
Marco:
And then for them to throw in that middle finger at me at the very last minute with iOS 13.1 and then ship it to all their customers.
Marco:
Oh, God, it's been a hard week.
Marco:
It's going to keep being a hard week.
Marco:
And my solution to this was, well, I guess I can rewrite the screen to not use a search box anymore.
Marco:
That's ultimately what I want to do because...
Marco:
the search box is just too buggy it's just i i don't i don't like having to rely on this all the time i also don't like how it looks in my uh current prototype three column mode for ipad and future mac app uh so i want to get rid of the search box but that's a much bigger job and it's going to take time so in the meantime i need the search box to work and today the very first beta for ios 13.2 came out and the bug is fixed
Marco:
And the search box works.
Marco:
So I'm just hoping beyond hope.
Marco:
Two things.
Marco:
Number one, please, for the love of God, don't break it again.
Marco:
And number two, how quickly can you ship this band to customers as 13.2?
Marco:
Because I am getting so many bug reports every single day from the stupid navigation bar corruption bug.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
I just, I can't wait for this.
Marco:
I hope they actually keep this fixed and I hope they actually ship this very, very soon to customers.
John:
Did you file a radar on this one?
John:
I forget.
Marco:
No, of course not.
John:
It's a waste of time.
John:
I was going to ask if your radar had been updated or if they just suddenly fixed it, but you didn't even file one.
Marco:
And that wouldn't have mattered because my radars never get updated.
Marco:
When I do get over myself and file radars, most of my bugs remain open with no response forever.
Marco:
Even the ones that are fixed, they won't ever tell me.
John:
You know, when we get the people who email us and say, hey, just checking in, just wanted to see if you got my past, you know, that spam.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm doing that with my radars now.
John:
So I have a radar for if I on my wife's computer, if I do customize toolbar in Safari to customize the toolbar.
John:
uh safari immediately beach balls and hangs forever 100 reproducible so i filed that as a bug and we did some you know cyst diagnose and other stuff and people had some theories and but anyway i filed it as an official writer so look it's 100 reproducible hang i was afraid they would go away i was afraid like some update would come and it would just go away and i wouldn't be able to reproduce it anymore so i would have a useless bug report because i'd be like does this still happen no but every once in a while i check
John:
In fact, I wanted to check to actually customize my toolbar and I totally forgot about it.
John:
It's still there.
John:
And that bug has not been updated.
John:
So I went back to the bug and I said, just so you know, this still happens on insert new versions of all the software that I'm running.
John:
And maybe I'll do that every couple of months, right?
John:
Until the bug goes away.
John:
So just so you know, this still happens.
John:
Did you get my last email?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just checking in to see if you got this bug report.
John:
They didn't even market as duplicate.
John:
That's not what happened to mine.
John:
It's like, oh yeah, duplicate, and then whatever.
John:
But no, nothing.
Marco:
No, that's the thing.
Marco:
When they do market as duplicate, it used to be that you got no response ever after that.
Marco:
At least sometime recently, they changed it so that you can see the status of the bug that it's duplicated to.
Marco:
You can't see the title or anything about it, but you can see whether the bug is closed or not.
Marco:
So that's at least nice.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Even then, most of my bugs literally don't even get that far.
Marco:
They don't even get a response at all.
Marco:
They literally just stay open forever.
Marco:
I could have put tons of time into it.
Marco:
I file lots of things here and there that are super... I filed a bunch of AirPlay 2 bugs because I want to support AirPlay 2 and still can't really do it very well.
Marco:
um and you know so i filed all those got no responses whatsoever i filed bugs about watch kit and the only time i ever got anything that resulted from it was when i also made a blog post about it and even then i wouldn't get responses to the bugs just those things might be fixed the next year
Casey:
Marco, never run to the press.
Marco:
It never helps, right?
Marco:
Except it seems to literally always help.
Casey:
Except it always, always helps.
Marco:
And more importantly, not running to the press seems to not do anything at all.
John:
I don't have like a bug that I want them to fix.
John:
I just want to fix my broken computer because I want to customize my toolbar.
John:
like i don't care what the bug is like i'm sure it's some data bug i have some file that's corrupt somewhere like i'm sure that's what it is i don't i don't care about that i just i literally want to customize my toolbar in safari that's all i want if someone says oh just delete this file and it'll go away i haven't gone to the point where i've deleted everything because you know i don't want to lose all my settings and preferences and everything but i would love to actually know how to fix it without totally removing every single one of my preferences from safari