Ghost Finger
Marco:
We should do some of that.
Marco:
I have some things to say about that.
Marco:
So write it in a document somewhere, please.
Marco:
I don't have the authority to do that.
Marco:
You do.
Marco:
You can do it.
Marco:
To add a top-level topic?
Casey:
I think you're just f***ing around, but I hope you're just f***ing around, because of course you do.
Marco:
He is, because he adds stuff all the time.
Marco:
I mean, I wouldn't feel bad editing the document when John's not looking, but at the same time John is editing it, I can't.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, no.
Casey:
In that sense, I'm right there with you.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
A lot has happened since we last spoke.
Casey:
I feel like it's been a month since I've spoken to you fine gentlemen.
Casey:
And we're going to go through things in probably random and weird order.
Casey:
But here we go.
Casey:
Let's start out with I will not be seeing you guys in a few months.
Casey:
That makes me sad.
Casey:
It's for the best, but it makes me sad.
Casey:
WWDC entirely online this year.
John:
You won't be seeing anybody.
John:
Well, you'll be seeing them from a distance, I suppose.
John:
From a safe distance.
John:
You'll be seeing videos.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I won't be on stage with you guys.
Casey:
I know that John looks forward to that every single year.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Officially, WBC has gone online only for this year.
Marco:
No statements about future years, as you'd expect.
Marco:
This is not a surprise.
Marco:
In fact, I think having it in person would have been a huge surprise, given the state of everything right now.
Marco:
in the middle of the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic and everything, there's no reason anybody should be holding giant in-person conferences in the next few months.
Marco:
This is the world we're in right now.
Marco:
It's rough for a lot of reasons, but we're getting through it, and Apple did what they had to do here.
Marco:
And compared to our speculation last week that they would probably cancel it, we actually don't have any additional information than what we had last time, really?
Marco:
We were wondering last time, what are they going to do about things like labs, where you have access to the engineers?
Marco:
And the press release that includes the cancellation changes and everything, it does vaguely mention something like they're trying to find new ways to give people access to the engineers that work on this stuff.
Marco:
So it does sound like they're working on something like that, but we don't know what that is yet.
Marco:
Presumably because they just have been scrambling to get all this together and it's just not ready to be announced yet.
Marco:
Among other details that are lacking, we also don't even know the dates that they're going to do the online conference or what the online conference will even really be.
Marco:
All they said was June, but June is 30 days long, so we'll find out.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, since nobody has to make travel plans to be there, with the exception of possibly if they have a media-only keynote in their Steve Jobs Theater, which even that, I think, is a big question mark, whether that would be appropriate to do.
Marco:
But that only takes a short notice to plan.
Marco:
That takes a couple of weeks maybe to set up.
Marco:
So they can hold off on that.
Marco:
But in the meantime, all they say is June.
Marco:
And I think that gives them the flexibility to not necessarily have to rush that beta one as hard to hit this like early June target, you know, travel time and booking this big conference and everything like now it can be mid June or late June and they can kind of do it whenever the software is ready for that beta one.
Marco:
And I've always heard, as you have, I'm sure, that the rush to get that beta one is a really big push.
Marco:
And it's like massively overworking everybody to get that beta one there in time for day one of WWDC.
Marco:
And so now that this is kind of free floating within the whole month of June, maybe it'll help that.
Marco:
Maybe it'll help software quality a bit.
Marco:
We can be optimistic, but either way, we don't know most of the details yet, but they did the right thing.
John:
flip side of that presumably like everyone else their productivity is going way down so maybe they will have to pull even more things from the os to even hit the vague june date uh we'll see uh and though you characterize this as like they announced the cancellation they didn't announce cancellation they announced the conference they announced wwdc online 2020 there was no nothing was canceled what could possibly have been canceled because nothing was announced they had an announcement this another example uh
John:
you know apple's typical pr it'll be interesting to see how their pr strategy holds up or evolves in the crucible that is the the coronavirus situation so they did you know they did a press release and a website and all that stuff hey announcing wwc it's online uh their press release managed to go for a page and a half without mentioning corona or covet 19 a single time an amazing exercise in uh
John:
I mean, it's weird, like, because, you know, it's not, we all know, they said health reasons or whatever, some vague phrase or whatever, but they still didn't want to put the word in there.
John:
It's like, does that imbue it with some power if you name it?
John:
Or is it the opposite by not naming it like Voldemort or you...
John:
It's fine.
John:
Typically understated thing.
John:
It makes sense that we are announcing an online thing.
John:
And you're right, Margo, they had vague notions of how they're going to do things about it, but they don't know yet.
John:
Honestly, how long could they possibly have had?
John:
We know when this thing
John:
uh came to the awareness of the public it's only a couple of months and so it's very difficult to formulate a plan to change what your plan was before and to formulate an entirely new plan even in a couple of months is you know quite a scramble to figure out what to do um but i'm sure it'll be fine uh i'm not actually expecting them to call a bunch of press there but june is a ways away so who knows what will happen
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think we're seeing, and we'll get to this in a little while, this morning they released a bunch of new products, and there had been this rumored March or spring event for this year, and that didn't happen.
Marco:
They're kind of releasing products now without having press events, or without having big press events.
Marco:
And they're probably shipping people review units, or maybe, I don't know if they're going to have small briefings with certain journalists, I have no idea.
Marco:
The releases that came out today, which we'll get to in a little while,
Marco:
they were not like big flashy releases.
Marco:
There was not a lot to necessarily demo with the exception of maybe that mouse stuff, but again, we'll get to that.
Marco:
But it was not like, you know, this wouldn't have made an event all by itself, like what we saw today.
Marco:
So maybe they still haven't figured out how to do something like WBC, which usually it's all software, and usually that's a lot of things that need to be demoed.
Marco:
It's a lot, it's like, you know, a big, you know,
Marco:
presentation telling the story of why certain features are there or certain needs they tried to solve.
Marco:
And you can do all that with like a pre-recorded video with no audience.
Marco:
You know, you can do that.
Marco:
But will they do that?
Marco:
It's not really something they've done before, but it doesn't mean they can't.
Marco:
so yeah we'll see i also i do love before before we move on i do love the the writing of this press release you know as john said you know very like pre's my favorite thing is that it's actually fairly hard to tell for a while as you read it that like the in-person part has been canceled and that it is online only because they're they're using such optimistic pr speak the whole time that it almost sounds like they're announcing the conference is going to take place normally
Marco:
You really have to kind of read between the lines for a little while before you realize, oh, this is online only.
Marco:
But you kind of have to dig for it.
John:
Yeah, you don't say anything negative.
John:
You don't say what's not there.
John:
You say WWDC is back with a new online, you know, what's good about it?
John:
It's back.
John:
It's here.
John:
It's online.
John:
It's new.
John:
It's cool.
John:
And you never mention what it is not.
John:
Look at all these USB-C ports.
Casey:
I also thought it was interesting that this line from the press release, Apple also announced it will commit $1 million to local San Jose organizations to offset associated revenue loss as a result of WWDC 2020's new online format.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, we're never going to really know what that means.
Casey:
Does that mean they're writing checks to businesses?
Casey:
Like, what do you guys reckon?
Casey:
I do think it's a good idea.
Casey:
Like, I think that that's the kind and appropriate thing to do, although $1 million seems a little bit cheap, but that's okay.
Casey:
But who is going to be receiving this money, do you reckon?
Marco:
I don't know how those, those mechanics work.
Marco:
That's a huge question mark because like a million dollars, if it's going to like every business, if it's going to offset like the, the amount of commerce that would have been generated by 5,000 nerds living there for a week, that probably isn't enough money.
Marco:
Uh, but it depends.
Marco:
Like, is it including things like the hotels, which is probably everyone's largest expense to be there?
I,
Marco:
I think they'll be okay without the money.
Marco:
The rates they've been charging there consistently for the last few years, I think they'll be all right if they don't have this one summer with that.
Marco:
But the way it's worded and with the amount that it is, it's probably, I would assume, the intention is going to things like bars and restaurants and event venues and stuff like that that would be much more strongly affected by this.
Marco:
But how do they determine who gets what?
John:
like where do they draw these lines of okay we're gonna have like what a radius around the conference center and like every restaurant within this like that's it's just a weird it's a great intention but i'm really curious how the heck the details work on that yeah i don't know anything about this and knowing apple they could do something weird but when i read it my assumption was that they're giving it to the city giving to some form of government and then the government will decide how to spend it and honestly at this point like even back when they announced it which was so long ago like several days it seems so long ago
John:
So much has changed that it's like any money, if they did just give it to the government, any of that money, like the best place to use that money is changing all the time.
John:
Like right now it's like, oh, it should go to workers who are laid off.
John:
Like, oh, so Marriott will be fine, but what about all of the staff that runs it?
John:
And they're getting laid off because nobody is booking hotels, right?
John:
So they need support so they can continue to live, right?
Yeah.
John:
drawing the line from you know getting it to them they had seen the right thing to do five days from now the right thing to do may be uh fund the manufacturer of new ventilators like we don't know what the best place to do that money is but in the triage like it starts off as like oh let's offset lost business oh let's give money to people who have no job oh let's try to keep people alive i don't know what comes after that last one but i don't think we want to find out but
John:
Anyway, a million dollars is nothing.
John:
Hopefully, you know, trying to do a token gesture in the direction of we're taking economic activity away.
John:
Again, it's a three days ago gesture or four days ago gesture.
John:
Like we're less worried about the economic impact of Apple not holding a conference.
John:
We're more worried about the economic impact of people no longer moving about society.
John:
It's a bigger concern.
John:
So again, five days from now, we'll see what it is.
Casey:
Either way, I am very, very sad.
Casey:
You know, WWDC and seeing all of my friends and colleagues there, it's a highlight of my year and I'm really sad to miss out on it.
Casey:
But I absolutely unequivocally think this is the right call.
Casey:
And who knows?
Casey:
It may be better and probably will be better in at least a handful of ways, maybe even in a lot of ways.
Casey:
So I am very excited to see how this happens, what comes of it.
Casey:
Are there labs?
Casey:
How does that work?
Casey:
How is the keynote?
Casey:
Is it just a prerecorded thing?
Casey:
Is it something that's done live with a handful of people in the audience?
Casey:
I don't have the faintest idea.
Casey:
None of us do.
Casey:
But I do think it'll be a very fascinating and interesting thing to see.
Casey:
And certainly, as I think we've talked about on this show, and certainly other shows have also talked about, you know, WWDC is actually attending the conference itself as an extremely exclusive club.
Casey:
And just going to San Jose...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But it is a lot of money.
Casey:
And the conference itself is $1,700, $1,600, something like that.
Casey:
And it's very expensive.
Casey:
And so I am happy not to be spending all that money this year.
Casey:
But I'm sad to be missing out on so much of it because so much of it is so great and so much fun, too.
Casey:
And as much as I joke about how John doesn't really love doing the live shows, I really enjoy – and I think John does, too, even though I'll never admit it – I think we all really enjoy –
Casey:
doing the live shows and getting to meet listeners.
Casey:
And I'm bummed that we're not gonna be able to do that this year.
Casey:
So hopefully next year, maybe possibly we'll see.
Casey:
But you know, next year is like 15 years from now, or at least that's the way it feels.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But all in all, I do think this is a good call.
Casey:
And I am curious and excited to see how it how it ends up.
John:
Don't forget the plane flight.
John:
I hate that part, too.
Casey:
Yeah, that's right.
Casey:
I forgot how much you love being in the plane, too, staring out the window for six hours straight.
Marco:
You know what I'm really going to miss, though?
Marco:
The box lunches.
Casey:
Oh, I should have known.
Marco:
You didn't even have one last year, did you?
Marco:
Yeah, I did.
Marco:
Yeah, he ate one with us.
Marco:
Oh, that's right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I'll miss those box lunches.
Marco:
Definitely going to miss the beer in Sausage Place too, though.
Casey:
Yeah, Original Gravity is very good.
Marco:
I hope they don't go out of business.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't know what their finances are.
Marco:
They probably won't because they are the best place in that entire area.
Marco:
I hope they don't.
Marco:
But I think one of the challenges of the COVID-19 economic fallout is going to be I think we're going to lose a lot of restaurants because restaurants are mostly having to shut down or entirely having to shut down for...
Marco:
And restaurants are not high-profit businesses.
Marco:
They don't have a lot of slack in their finances, usually.
Marco:
So I'm very concerned about just the entire restaurant economy, how many people work in it, how many people are...
Marco:
directly related to working in it or supplying it.
Marco:
Same thing with travel and tourism.
Marco:
There's all sorts of industries that are going to be hit very hard by this.
Marco:
One of the lasting economic problems that we're going to have from this is we're probably going to lose a lot of restaurants that we like.
Marco:
In addition to all the people who are going to be directly affected by losing their jobs, which is itself a huge problem.
Marco:
Even if you think this won't affect me, I bet it will affect something in your town.
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Casey:
And it's that kind of fallout that is freaking me out.
Casey:
And I'm trying not to think too much about it because there's nothing I can do to stop it.
Casey:
So you just got to move on.
Casey:
So speaking of moving on, let's do that.
Casey:
You know, I got to tell you, gentlemen, I am becoming ever older and ever more curmudgeonly.
Casey:
And so I really do not care for the thing on Twitter where you make some sort of cutesy name, particularly around the holidays.
Casey:
I find it to be very gross.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I have to say that if you're going to choose a cutesy name, you got to go all in.
Casey:
And so we have the following tweet from incoherent toots.
Casey:
You can rebind those Xcode commands, John, in Xcode settings, not in system preferences.
Casey:
Can you tell me about the context here, if you don't mind?
John:
Yeah, this is me talking about Control-6 for the function pop-up thingy, and I couldn't find the menu command.
John:
Two points here.
John:
One, there actually is a menu command.
John:
It's buried in the view menu somewhere.
John:
It's like a submenu, so I could have found it if I had searched.
John:
It's just not called what I thought it would be called.
John:
I forget what it's called.
John:
It's like show document items or something.
John:
It is a name that I never would have guessed.
John:
And two, Xcode, like BBEdit and like lots of fancy apps, has within itself a way for you to change key bindings for stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You don't need to go to System Preferences and mess with it that way.
John:
You can actually go to the Xcode Preferences, and there you can set all the key bindings.
John:
And I did, and now it's Control-F, and I feel better.
Casey:
Yeah, it's View Editor Show Document Items, as you suspected a moment ago.
John:
yeah the one complaint i have is that like it does give you a warning like a little yellow triangle or something if you bind it because ctrl f was bound to something else but it lets you bind it and then if you don't notice that little warning now it's bound to two things and i have no idea how it resolves that and when it bound like i would expect it to say like bb edit does hey you can't use ctrl f it's used for watch a movie and then even better would say it's used for watch a movie do you want to steal it from watch a movie and then i would say yes and i'm done instead it let me bind it showed me a little icon that i had to click on and then track down the other one and
Casey:
erase it so still a little bit of work can be done but um it's pretty good interface if you want to customize things in xcode i encourage that well i approve incoherent too it's a great name uh we had a couple of very very cranky people uh perturbed at the way in which i had ordered the uh different modifiers for shortcut keys and i don't remember what i did but it was very very wrong and we it was made clear by the cranky people that i was very wrong
Casey:
And it turns out a couple of people pointed out to us that actually Apple has a print style guide that explains exactly how this is supposed to work.
Casey:
And it reads keyboard shortcuts using combination keystrokes and combination keystrokes use hyphens to signify that the user should hold down the first key or keys while pressing the last key.
Casey:
Don't use a hyphen if each key should be pressed and released separately.
Casey:
Be sure to explain this convention in first use.
Casey:
So for example, control hyphen shift hyphen N versus escape space N. Capitalize but don't italicize or use code font for letters used as key names.
Casey:
So for example, capital C command hyphen C or capital C command hyphen X.
Casey:
If there's more than one modifier key, use this order, function, control, option, shift, command.
Casey:
Again, function, control, option, shift, command.
Casey:
When a keyboard shortcut includes a mouse or trackpad action, use the lowercase for the mouse or trackpad action.
Casey:
So, for example, capital O option, hyphen, lowercase c, click.
Casey:
Or option swipe, which capital O, lowercase s, with three fingers.
Casey:
And this is from the Apple Style Guide, which we will link in the show notes.
John:
We forgot about the effing key, Marco's favorite key, as a modifier, which I think is mostly bogus because, like, honestly, you're not using the effing key in keyboard modifiers unless you're trained to get at something in one of the effing keys.
John:
But, yeah, so last show we talked about adjective order and the way these modifiers should go.
John:
When you're talking about them, command shift three, command shift four.
John:
And then we also talked about the order that the symbols appear in the menus, which was a different order.
John:
There wasn't a reverse of the order that you talk about them.
John:
Here is a third order.
John:
And people saying this is like, oh, you're wrong about the spoken order.
John:
Apple says this.
John:
No, this is for print.
John:
So we weren't writing it.
John:
If you're writing stuff and you want to conform to the Apple style guide, yes, use the Apple style guide.
John:
But if you're speaking, it's Command Shift 3.
John:
And if you do not say Command Shift 3, if you do it in this order, you will sound weird and you are basically saying Brown Big Bear.
John:
So it's great that they have this guide.
John:
I'm not sure why the order is different in their print style guide.
John:
If you look through Apple's print style guide, they do a lot of things that seem strange in there.
John:
I'm sure the print style guide has evolved over time.
John:
But trust me when I tell you, Command Shift 3.
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
Marco:
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I can actually tell you firsthand experience.
Marco:
I did this.
Marco:
This past winter, I took a trip to Mexico and I wanted to watch US Netflix while I was there.
Marco:
My wife and I were watching TV series on Netflix.
Marco:
We wanted to keep watching them.
Marco:
And they weren't available when we were connecting directly.
Marco:
So we clicked the ExpressVPN icon to turn it on.
Marco:
And instantly it was there.
Marco:
It's like we're at home and we were able to watch our U S things while we were on vacation outside of the country.
Marco:
And it was super fast.
Marco:
I couldn't believe how fast it was.
Marco:
You know, they say here in their copy, there's never any buffering or lie.
Marco:
You can stream in HD, no problem.
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I can actually verify that literally was true for us.
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It was rock solid.
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Casey:
Apple dropped some new stuff on us.
Casey:
We should probably take this from least interesting to most interesting.
Casey:
So let's start with the Mac mini.
Casey:
It's new.
Casey:
It's got better stuff.
Casey:
That's good.
Casey:
I like that.
John:
Is it new?
John:
I thought they just changed the storage options.
John:
I haven't even had time to look at all the details.
Casey:
I should say it's refreshed a little bit.
John:
Well, I wouldn't even call it that.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The Mac mini had things happen.
Marco:
They've given you more capacity and stuff for the same price as before.
Marco:
So that's nice.
Marco:
That's better than no change at all.
Marco:
This Mac Mini was introduced at the exact same time, at the exact same event as the last generation MacBook Air, although not the latest MacBook Air, but this MacBook Air and the now outgoing iPad Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, so this Mac Mini is a year and a half old now, and it got no change.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I maintain that we are still just kind of lucky to have this Mac Mini existing in the world at all.
Marco:
It wasn't especially price competitive when it came out.
Marco:
It still isn't, but that's not really what it's for.
Marco:
It is continuing to quietly and unglamorously serve the market it is for.
Marco:
And the marketer's 4 doesn't really need aggressive, frequent updates.
Marco:
And they sure as hell don't get them.
John:
So I guess it's fine.
John:
I always wonder when they do, and we'll talk about this more on the MacBook Air, when they do things like storage adjustments, oh, now for the same amount of money you get more storage.
John:
It always makes me unreasonably angry.
John:
It's like, so do you
John:
care about the economics of storage or do you not because your prices seem so disconnected from reality if you want to do that it's like oh well there's no connection it's just that's how just how they do things and that's how they price them and just deal with it like all their profit margin is in the flash right but then when they adjust it it's like what do you think you're doing like it's obviously i should shouldn't you be happy they adjusted you thought it was too expensive and now you get twice as much for the same price like yeah but it's still so far off of
John:
like competitive market prices that it doesn't seem to make any sense.
John:
Like why adjust it at all?
John:
Like, do you think it makes it more attractive or is it, do you think it just makes it less embarrassing?
John:
I don't think it makes it more attractive and I don't think it makes it less embarrassing.
John:
I mean, it's less embarrassing than if you didn't change it, but only barely.
John:
right only barely is it less it's just it's like look if you want to get one of these with any reasonable amount of storage you're going to be paying a whole bunch more memory do we really care that you you know even double the capacity because you're overcharging so much of the storage or i don't know i'm i'm this is my new thing that i'm annoyed about used to be know about ram when apple would ship max with just way too little ram we would all have to buy third-party ram because apple's ram prices were crazy and be like why are you offering this machine with so little ram it's criminal and
John:
They don't do that anymore, mostly because the RAM is soldered to the motherboard and you really can't upgrade it on most of the machines.
John:
So they give reasonable amounts of RAM when we celebrate that.
John:
But Flash is soldered to the motherboard or in a M.2 card or whatever.
John:
Flash is almost as integral as RAM and still the pricing is not great.
John:
Setting aside, like Marco said, the whole rest of the Mini and how expensive it is for the power you're getting, yada, yada, yada.
John:
We probably shouldn't complain.
John:
We should applaud them for making any adjustments at all.
John:
But as I said, it makes me unreasonably upset when they make these adjustments because it breaks my mental model and just makes me angry all over again about the very uncompetitive prices they offer for internal flash storage on Macs.
Casey:
Norgerman here.
Casey:
Moving on from not very interesting to slightly interesting, we have a new MacBook Air, which is exciting.
John:
Slightly interesting?
John:
This is the most interesting announcement.
John:
No.
John:
Why?
John:
You're used to anger all the iPad people.
Casey:
I know.
John:
I'm just trying to anger the iPad people.
John:
Well, obviously, I like Macs better than iPads, but I don't like laptops.
John:
But I've always been a fan of the MacBook Air and the quote-unquote return of the MacBook Air with the butterfly keyboard, blah, blah, blah.
John:
The computer that's sitting five feet away from me over here.
John:
Never felt like...
John:
a proper sequel to what was one of the best Macs ever made, which is its predecessor, the non-retina one, back when it was not embarrassingly non-retina.
John:
That was a great machine, a great balance of size and features.
John:
It was the one we recommended everybody get.
John:
It had a great balance of portability and power and utility, and it was sturdy.
John:
boy it was great and then this in betweeny one which is nice form factor wise but not that great and had the bad keyboard and it was just kind of like it's good but and then of course they replaced the 16 inch with the one with the good keyboard and now we're just staring at every other laptop saying okay well when is it your turn and i'm pleasant super pleasantly surprised that
John:
the macbook air didn't have to wait like at the end of the line right it came it got it's the first one to get updated after the fancy one and now i feel like especially with the speed bump and everything they put the and the price drop you know there's a model under a thousand dollars which isn't that great of a model again because of the meager city space but anyway there's a model under a thousand dollars it has a good keyboard it still has a great balance of size and weight and functionality i'm
John:
I think this is a really good laptop now, whereas the old one was like, it's okay, and if you don't want a big MacBook Pro, you should consider it.
John:
Now I feel comfortable recommending this computer based on the price, the features, and the good keyboard.
John:
So I'm excited about this.
John:
This is the announcement that I am the most happy about.
John:
Because the other announcements that we'll talk about, obviously the iPad Pros are really cool, and there's a bunch of stuff we'll talk about there, but they've always been hitting it out of the park with the iPads, right?
John:
Not so much in the laptop line.
John:
So I feel like it's worth celebrating this MacBook Air much more so than the iPad Pros, even though they're probably, you know, more impressive technically.
Marco:
In many ways, the MacBook Air was more badly needed.
Marco:
The iPad Pro has been fine.
Marco:
Yes, it is a year and a half old going into today, but it's been great.
Marco:
I use mine every day for various stuff around the house, and it's totally fine.
Marco:
In fact, which we'll get to, I actually am not that motivated by the new one.
Marco:
That's how fine the old one is.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
Whereas the Air, it had the stupid butterfly keyboard.
Marco:
It was most surprising to me that the Air got updated with...
Marco:
seemingly almost no other major case changes so it actually did i looked at the numbers it did get slightly thicker and heavier but to give you some idea the thickest part went from 15.6 to 16.1 millimeters so it gained it gained half a millimeter or 3.2 percent uh at the thickest part of thickness because you know it's wedge-shaped and then the weight
Marco:
also gained 3.2%, coincidentally.
Marco:
So it got 40 grams heavier, and it gained half a millimeter of thickness at the thickest part.
Marco:
The battery is the same size as the 2019 model.
Marco:
Kind of the most galling thing about this is we've always been assuming that the butterfly keyboard was necessary to achieve certain size goals for the 12-inch and then later the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And I think what this shows to kind of like my great joy and also frustration is that it was totally unnecessary.
Marco:
That it is clearly 100% possible to design this size computer.
Marco:
Like it got 3% thicker and 3% heavier.
Marco:
And it completely and vastly fixed its greatest problem.
John:
I mean, you don't have to do that much complicated math.
John:
The old keyboard was whatever it was, 0.56 millimeters of travel, and the new one was one millimeter.
John:
So you got to make it about a half a millimeter thicker at minimum.
John:
And they basically made it a little bit, you know, they made it almost a millimeter thicker.
John:
But either way, like, you know, you factor in.
John:
No, they made it exactly half a millimeter thicker, the thickest part.
John:
But the thinnest part's the same.
John:
And no one's going to notice that and no one's going to care, but everyone's going to appreciate the better keyboard.
John:
And I've always liked this one because it's got the real function keys, but it still has touch ID.
John:
I'm not a big fan of the touch bar.
John:
The other thing that I enjoy about the MacBook Air is it's a computer, it's a size and weight where the fact that it only has two ports is somewhat more excusable, right?
John:
I get angry about the ports on the big, fancy, super expensive ones, but if you're going to have a limited number of ports...
John:
On a MacBook Air-sized machine, I can say, okay, fine.
John:
Like, honestly, you should have four on it.
John:
But the fact that you have two, you're only half off, right?
John:
You missed it by 100%, which is better than, you know, Casey's computer, which missed it by, like, 200% or 300%.
John:
So I feel like, you know, this is...
John:
I'm happy that there is a cheap, good laptop from Apple that I can feel comfortable recommending to people because that's always been the problem with the laptops.
John:
Like for the longest time, people would say, hey, I'm thinking of getting a Mac.
John:
Which one should I get?
John:
I'm into, you know, you know, they don't have to say they're into laptops.
John:
You know, when they say that they mean the laptop because nobody but I just stopped.
John:
And I've always had to be like, oh, the current laptops aren't that good.
John:
But I was like, you should probably wait.
John:
But like, especially years into the butterfly, I was like, I can't tell people to wait.
John:
I have no idea if and when this is going to resolve.
John:
And I'd have to give this sort of sad answer.
John:
And they'd be like, oh, no.
John:
Well, it was just a depressing conversation.
John:
And even with the 16-inch, if they wanted a super-duper fancy one, I'm like, oh, the 16-inch is good.
John:
And they'd be like, oh, I don't want something that big.
John:
That's gigantic and super expensive.
John:
I want just a regular Mac laptop.
John:
And then I'd have to have the sad conversation again.
John:
Now, I can have a much nicer conversation and say, look, there's one under $1,000, which gets people in the door.
John:
They won't actually buy that one.
John:
If they follow my advice, they'll get one with more.
John:
But it's a good, cheap laptop.
John:
And I think the reason they did this one second
John:
We worried about, oh, they're going to leave this one at the end because I think the butterfly is fine.
John:
As we pointed out many times, every time we talk about this, this is surely their best-selling, you know, this slot in their lineup is always their best-selling computer because it's cheap and Macs are expensive and people like laptops.
John:
Therefore, people who want a Mac, they go in there and say, how can I get a Mac laptop without breaking the bank?
John:
The answer is always whatever machine is in this slot.
John:
so i'm really happy to see them dropping below a thousand i'm really happy to see this computer getting better and i will be able to have a happy conversation if someone says hey i want a new mac i'll just be like macbook air done and then we can talk about how to spec it but you will be happy with that computer that's what we've been missing for for all these years in the interim like ever since the old air you know got kind of you know embarrassingly out of date with with the retina situation uh and then when the new one came out that was
Marco:
okay but had this terrible keyboard it's funny actually my mother just needed a new computer she what she's been using is first a macbook a 2010 macbook air that i bought for her in 2010 when it was new
Marco:
And then at some point, a few years back, something about it died, and her friend gave her the MD-101.
Marco:
And so she's been using the 101, that old non-retina 13-inch MacBook Pro, that last one that was for sale forever.
Marco:
She's been using that for a few years.
Marco:
That has finally had some fatal problem.
Marco:
And she was just asking me what to get, and I'm like, look, it's kind of a bad time, because it's bad.
Marco:
What you should have is a new Air that has these things, but that doesn't exist right now.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's coming next week or next month or never.
Marco:
We didn't know until today, until this new Air came out with this keyboard...
Marco:
We didn't know if the Air would ever get this keyboard because we didn't know.
Marco:
Will it fit?
Marco:
Will they be able to do it?
Marco:
Or will they give the good keyboard to the Pro line and then leave the Air with this butterfly keyboard as a compromise for its size and thinness?
Marco:
We didn't know that this would even be possible.
Marco:
And yet, now, this is resolved.
Marco:
Now, like, here we are.
Marco:
We have a new Air.
Marco:
We are still not back to where we were with the Air, like, in terms of how great it is.
Marco:
We are closer.
Marco:
We are a lot... We just took a big step closer by getting rid of that terrible keyboard.
Marco:
But, you know, keep in mind, the previous... You know, the 2010 to 2015 MacBook Air...
Marco:
That had all the ports.
Marco:
There were basically no compromises to it, except a little bit of performance compromise compared to the higher-end machines.
Marco:
But it was still a very, very strong option for almost everybody, almost all the time, including a lot of pros who chose it just because it was smaller and the performance was good enough for a lot of development work and stuff like that.
Marco:
Maybe not if you're doing high-end video stuff, but I know a lot of developers who use 13-inch airs
Marco:
for for a long time or even or even the 11 inch and the 11 inch was even greater it was like all those exact same ports and power and versatility and and there were almost no compromises for the 11 down from the 13 and it was super tiny
Marco:
And then we entered this era where you got less for more.
Marco:
The 12-inch MacBook came out replacing the 11-inch MacBook Air, and it was a way worse computer than the 11-inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
It had way fewer ports.
Marco:
It had way worse performance.
Marco:
It had worse battery life even.
Marco:
I know everyone loved it, Casey, but it was in many ways a step down.
Marco:
The only real step up was that it was a little bit smaller and lighter, and it was Retina.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But if they would have just done a Retina 11-inch Air instead, I think people would have liked it better.
Marco:
And then we moved into the 13-inch Air replacement eventually through the Escape Jungle.
Marco:
But eventually we got to the 13-inch Air replacement.
Marco:
And it wasn't a direct replacement for the old 13-inch Air.
Marco:
It had this controversial and very breakage-prone, expensive, repair-prone keyboard.
Marco:
It only has these two ports.
Marco:
It had not great performance because they actually reduced the thermal class of processor that went into it compared to the old Airs.
Marco:
And so it actually didn't have the same performance category as the old ones.
Marco:
But it still cost the same, or it was still in the same cost ballpark.
Marco:
And it had, you know, it had this retina screen.
Marco:
That was nice.
Marco:
But even the screen was a pretty big compromise.
Marco:
Like, it was a lot dimmer than the other screens.
Marco:
Actually, I forgot to look if that's changed.
Marco:
But anyway, it wasn't the, like, be all, must recommend this computer, this is great for everybody thing.
Marco:
There were all these asterisks on it.
Marco:
And all these ways in which it was newer than what it replaced.
Marco:
But it wasn't necessarily better.
Marco:
The new one still has a lot of those aspects, but this gets it a lot closer to where it should have been all this time.
Marco:
It gets it way closer because it totally solves the keyboard problem.
Marco:
The Magic Keyboard is, I wouldn't call it an amazing keyboard.
Marco:
It isn't an amazing keyboard.
Marco:
It's a totally fine keyboard.
Marco:
The way laptop keyboards work forever.
Marco:
It is a laptop keyboard that works, and that's the way they have been throughout most of laptop history, and they've been...
Marco:
We haven't had to think about them.
Marco:
They work.
Marco:
They aren't as nice as using a big desktop keyboard, but we don't care because they're convenient and they're in our laptops.
Marco:
Okay, so it's one of those again.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Just like the old one, basically.
Marco:
So that's wonderful.
Marco:
It still only has those two ports, which is still not enough.
Marco:
And I maintain that they can fit more because they could at least put a USB-C next to the headphone jack because the way the ports were arranged physically, you could see they could at least do that.
Marco:
But otherwise, with a few nitpicks that I have with it, things like the port situation,
Marco:
Overall, it's close enough now to being that generalist, all-purpose computer that, for most buyers, I would recommend this now.
Marco:
And that's something I haven't been able to say about any Mac experience.
Marco:
since probably 2014 2013 like like like when how how long has it been since there's been one mac in the lineup where we can say most people should buy this one without qualification i think that was the 2010 macbook air and that lasted until retina became a thing that we decided everyone should have
John:
Yeah, I feel like the things that are deficits in this are now our cultural deficits.
John:
Like if you, you know, the lack of ports is now not just like, oh, an oversight in this model.
John:
It is a, at least within the Apple world, a pervasive cultural thing.
John:
Like it's an expectation.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, yes, we assume that they won't have enough ports.
John:
Every single model won't have enough ports.
John:
Again, if you're going to have a small number of ports, a tiny model is easier to excuse than the big honking one.
John:
Because like, what's the point of having a big honking one if you're still going to starve for ports?
John:
So it's more excusable.
John:
But in general, it's just like a cultural thing.
John:
And if you think about the 13 that we all loved, try to forget that it had an SD card slot, because that's just a thing we don't even talk about anymore.
John:
I didn't forget.
John:
It's a cultural thing.
John:
It's like, oh, well, Apple's laptops just don't come with that anymore.
John:
why uh because they don't like they think it's not it's not worth the space and expense for the number of people who use it that's their calculation uh and you know right or wrong it is a a cultural thing in the apple world so that's why i feel like this is you know this is a right up the middle like within the constraints of the current culture which we may or may not rail against this fixes all the problems with this computer and it is a great price and it's the one we recommend everybody
John:
But if you're still angry about the cultural constraints, especially say someone's upgrading from the old 13-inch and they say, oh, you should get this new one.
John:
It's a good computer.
John:
And they get it and they bring it home.
John:
They're like, where do I plug in my thumb drive?
John:
And where did the SD card slot?
John:
You still have to have that conversation.
John:
But at least that conversation is like, look, none of them come with it anymore.
John:
You have no choices.
John:
It's not just this model.
John:
You didn't get a bad model.
John:
You didn't make a bad choice.
John:
And in the recommendation discussions, that's what we're saying is –
John:
If you are going to get a Mac, which setting aside like, oh, let's look at PCs or let's look at iPads or whatever.
John:
If you're going to get a Mac, this is an easy recommend.
John:
We all give it a thumbs up or whatever because what other choices do you have?
John:
If you're not set on a Mac, then we can talk about iPads.
John:
We can talk about PC laptops, whatever it is that you're doing.
John:
So that's why I still mostly feel good about this, even though I still feel slightly bad about the pervasive cultural thing because
John:
As I said when the 16-inch came out and everyone was excited by that and I was still a little bit cranky, like imagine if this thing came out with three USB-C ports and an SD card slot.
John:
Everybody would buy this.
John:
People would be ditching their 16-inchers to buy this thing.
John:
Like it would be – I say everybody would buy this, which is stupid.
John:
For tech nerds and people who have tech podcasts and who love Macs, we would all flip out about it.
John:
Would it sell better than this model with two ports?
John:
I don't know.
John:
And again, maybe that's why Apple's calculus is right.
John:
But we tech enthusiasts would love it a lot better.
John:
And we tech enthusiasts would be considering ditching our 16 inches to get this model because it just has one fewer port but has an SD card slot and it's so much smaller and cheaper, yada, yada.
John:
So I continue to think that if Apple really wants to please the super nerds,
John:
Which is a thing that it does because this Mac Pro that I'm sitting next to is a stupid computer and the only people it pleases are the tiny sliver of professionals who need it and super nerds.
John:
So I feel like pleasing super nerds is a viable strategy that Apple sometimes does.
John:
The whole laptop line is waiting there for them with one model to say, you know what?
John:
we're going to please the super nerds with this model we're going to add more ports we're going to add an sd card slot whatever that is you're going to do to you know you know what we want make one model that does it they did it for the desktop max still waiting for the pro line but for it to be the macbook air it's very unexpected i would expect it to be you know the big pro laptop that they do this on so again that's why i am
John:
At peace with this computer and I recommend it and I'm happy about it.
Marco:
One thing that I'm also really curious about is the new one has moved to quad core for two of its CPU options.
Marco:
And I believe that's new for this thermal class.
Marco:
And these are, as far as I can tell, I think these are the first 10 nanometer Intel chips in Macs.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
John:
Yeah, like the performance numbers on this are good.
John:
The price is good.
John:
Like this is now a computer that, again, we can all feel comfortable recommending.
Casey:
But is the performance good?
Casey:
And I'm not trying to snark.
Casey:
I'm genuinely asking because I was looking at this and I was thinking to myself, you know, I plan to replace my beloved Adorable that is slower than Dirt now.
Casey:
And I mean, it's relatively old, so it's not entirely unreasonable that it's slower than Dirt.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I'm looking at the MacBook Air, and if I go whole hog and get the most expensive one in terms of processor and RAM and stuff that I can, it's still under $2,000, which is, I mean, it's a lot of money.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
But for what you're getting, it's not a bad deal at all.
Casey:
But I'm looking at it, and the most fancy processor, unless I miss something, is a 1.2 gigahertz quad-core 10th generation i7, which can boost up to 3.8 gigahertz.
Casey:
And as I stall for time and look over at my adorable, it has a 1.4 gigahertz.
Casey:
Now, admittedly, it's dual core, but it's an i7 and it has the same amount of RAM.
Casey:
So it's two more cores, which definitely makes a big difference.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
But like, would I be gaining that?
John:
that much by yes yes you would they're not really the same cores even though apple has been stuck on god i can't remember what what is the architecture that they've been stuck on not 14 versus no not not the process size the last major architectural change was it like kb lake or something i forget they have oh yeah right because the new one is ice lake yeah back when they were doing tiktok the last big architectural change they've been tweaking over the years so anyway the cores are better per clock than yours are for sure and i think the turbo boost is higher but it like
John:
none of us have used this computer but i have the previous generation macbook air and it is for sure slower than this thing and when i use it it doesn't feel particularly slow it doesn't feel fast but i think it's fine which makes me think that doubling the number of cores and having the cores themselves be you know less power because it's a better process and a little bit faster i think the performance of this will be fine for this class of computers
John:
because i think the performance for my computer is mostly fine and this and this is a huge step up from that you know because like you say oh two more cores but what if i don't have multi-threaded work like just doing stuff on your computer going from two to four is significant there's enough going on that you're going to use four cores it's not like you have 28 cores and you have to have some special application to take advantage of it going from two to four is a big bonus so
John:
oh yeah because one goes to dropbox one goes to photos agent i none of those are on any of my computers thank you very much yeah although like if you want to like we'll get to this in a second but if you want to feel good about the performance of saying like it's going to be way better than the old mac do not look at the ipad pro performance numbers just just pretend they don't exist because you will be depressed about the mac in general
John:
That's so true.
Marco:
You can't compare the base clocks.
Marco:
Not only are these different architectures, but also it's weird turbo boost stuff.
Marco:
Whenever any of the power classes have gone up in core count, usually the base clocks have gone down as a result.
Marco:
And you're still coming out way ahead because usually for single core stuff, they usually can turbo boost up to the same levels or similar levels as the lower core predecessors could.
Marco:
And then in almost every case, you're coming out way ahead performance-wise or at least tying where it was before.
Marco:
So in this case, yeah, this would be a massive upgrade from your terrible MacBook 1.
Marco:
And also, like, in many other ways, it's just so much better for just general day-to-day usability.
Marco:
First of all, you have more screen space.
Marco:
Like, yes, it is bigger and heavier.
Marco:
Not by that much.
Marco:
It's, you know, it goes from 2 pounds to 2.8.
Marco:
I know that's percentage-wise a big increase, but in absolute terms, that's not a lot of difference.
Marco:
When you put it in a bag, it's not going to make a huge difference in how the bag feels, whether it has a 2-pound or a 2.8-pound laptop in it.
Marco:
Unless the bag itself is made of nothing and there's nothing else in it, I don't think you're going to notice that difference.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Just having two ports instead of one is going to be a massive convenience for you.
Marco:
Like, you know this.
Marco:
Oh, I know, I know.
Marco:
Having lived with the one in your torture chamber.
Marco:
Like, it's just, you'll be able to actually power it while plugging in a peripheral.
Casey:
Oh, imagine that.
Marco:
Without having to use, like, dongles or weird flaky adapters that might work and might not, and that you might not want to run, like, audio stuff through and everything.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a world of difference, believe me.
Casey:
Ultimately, I'd like to wait for the Mythical Phantom 14-inch MacBook Pro because I think that's probably going to be a better fit.
Casey:
Now, with that said, I don't know where it is.
Casey:
I think I'm using this computer because I can't leave the house for weeks.
Casey:
But in this hypothetical world that will eventually come back to some sort of new normal, I would like a new laptop.
Casey:
And I think it's worth holding out to see...
Casey:
whether the 14-inch, if it ever exists, is going to be a better fit for me.
Casey:
And I think it might be, but this is a very compelling computer.
Casey:
And I think the broader point that the both of you are trying to make is absolutely true, which is almost without reservation for almost anyone.
Casey:
I mean, I'm looking at using this for Xcode and iOS development and things that are, you know, they're not video editing, but they're not exactly easy.
Casey:
I'm looking to use it for that, and it's a legitimate contender, which I think is a big improvement.
Casey:
I would like to state for the record that I think that the olds, and I'm halfway including myself in this, I think the olds need to get over the SD card slot, boys.
Casey:
It's not going to happen.
Marco:
SD cards are not some past technology that has been replaced.
Marco:
That's why this is different.
Casey:
But they are.
Marco:
I don't agree with that at all.
John:
If you buy the fanciest modern camera, like the fancy, super fancy, oh, I can't use an iPhone because I don't want money.
Casey:
But who does that?
John:
Well, that's what I'm saying.
John:
It's a high-end choice.
John:
So again, on the MacBook Pro, the high-end computer, who's buying fancy multi-thousand-dollar cameras?
John:
People buy them and use them.
John:
Professionals buy them and use them to shoot pictures.
John:
And if they buy a professional laptop, they've got this professional camera, the current model, that takes this supposedly obsolete piece of media and it's faster to transfer it when you can take the card and stick it into the thing than it is to try to do it wirelessly or even over dealing with cables and stuff like that.
John:
So...
John:
It may be gone for most of the world, but on the high end for that one weird model that's 16 inches and has got all this room along the side, those are the people who are going to buy an expensive camera.
John:
When it disappears from cameras, we'll say, okay, well then there's no point in this.
John:
When the new cameras come out and they no longer have removable media in the form of an SD card, then we can say, fine, then the time has come and we need to get rid of that.
John:
But until that happens, I think it is still...
John:
A reasonable thing for Apple to consider for their one highest-end model.
Marco:
It isn't even just about cameras.
Marco:
And yes, I know to stave off some of the emails, I know there's these XQD or whatever.
Marco:
There has been a successor to the SD card that is in some high-end models, but it's still not mainstream.
John:
Yeah, replace SD card with whatever the current high-end camera little flash storage thing is.
John:
CF had a big thing in the Canon world as well.
John:
But what I'm saying is that removable media and cameras is still a thing.
John:
Whatever the most popular removable media and cameras is, it is reasonable to consider Apple putting that on their highest-end laptops.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it isn't only cameras like so cameras.
Marco:
That's a big one.
Marco:
That's a huge one.
Marco:
And in fact, almost it's funny, like the way that Apple markets these laptops and, you know, the way they have this pro workflow group, I bet most of the people who are demonstrating workflows and things and Apple marketing materials and most of the people in the pro workflow group are
Marco:
probably could use an sd card reader in their macbook pro like so all these use cases that they demonstrate as like this is who they want us to believe is using these computers and who largely is using these computers those people those workflows those awesome demoable like cool people making videos they use sd cards not only them of course pro photographers as you as you said amateur photographers anybody who still has a standalone camera that is not their phone chances are that camera uses an sd card
Marco:
Also, audio.
Marco:
There's tons of audio recorders.
Marco:
There's also tons of specialty equipment that is stuff that doesn't usually make it into marketing presentations.
Marco:
But a lot of equipment and peripherals and devices have SD cards for data for some kind of use.
Marco:
Hobbyists use it for things like Raspberry Pis.
Marco:
There's all sorts of uses for SD cards that many people who use an SD card as some part of their job use a nice computer as well.
Marco:
And it's nice to have a slot.
Marco:
There's a reason why it was on there for so long.
Marco:
And certainly while it has become a little more specialized than it used to be,
Marco:
Not that much more specialized.
Marco:
Not as much as you would think.
Marco:
Just the fact that, like, quote, most buyers may not use it, which I don't necessarily believe, but if, quote, most buyers may not use it, that doesn't mean that there's no place for it.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff that they put in their computers that's nice to have for some people some of the time.
Marco:
And most people might not use it all.
Marco:
But as I said, there's stuff in every Apple laptop that I don't use, that I'm happy never to use.
Marco:
I almost never used HDMI ports when those were there.
Marco:
People still miss those because HDMI dongles suck.
Marco:
For a long time, there were things like FireWire ports.
Marco:
I almost never used those.
Marco:
USB-C even.
Marco:
I have very few devices that are USB-C.
Marco:
I have a lot of devices.
Marco:
Very few of them are USB-C.
Marco:
I have, I think, almost nothing that is Thunderbolt.
Marco:
The last thing I need is all four ports to have all this Thunderbolt bandwidth, but it's there.
Marco:
Because sometimes people need these things.
Marco:
Some people need them.
Marco:
And it's nice to have it when it's there.
Marco:
So any argument that's like, well, most people don't need this so we can remove it.
Marco:
No, that's not a valid argument.
Marco:
Do some people need it some of the time?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
What does it cost to leave it in?
Marco:
Is it really that bad?
Marco:
It's not an expensive part.
Marco:
It takes up some space, but it's not a lot in a large laptop.
Marco:
The thought process has to change from...
Marco:
well, do you really need this anymore?
Marco:
To what are we gaining by removing it?
Marco:
And is that going to be worth it to all the people who still do use it and need it?
Marco:
And finally, one more use case to consider.
Marco:
These laptops are very expensive.
Marco:
The storage on them is very expensive.
Marco:
And you cannot upgrade the storage later.
Marco:
And many people use the SD card slot on the previous generation, the 2012 Retina Map of Pro generation.
Marco:
Many people ended up using those as add-on storage down the line.
Marco:
There's a whole, there's all those like flush mount micro SD things that like stick in there and match the metal.
Marco:
Remember those things?
Casey:
Yeah, I had one.
Marco:
Those are very popular and things like that are very popular.
Marco:
It's a very good way to temporarily or kind of semi-permanently expand your storage
Marco:
inexpensively, lay it down the road or even up front, on a laptop where it's very expensive to buy storage built in and you can never update it.
Marco:
So it's good for economy, it's good for longevity, upgradability, in addition to all those pro use cases.
Marco:
So, you know, the SD card slot, man, I...
Marco:
Nothing has replaced it.
Marco:
You can't apply the same logic as when they removed the USB from the iMac.
Marco:
That was moving the industry forward.
Marco:
No, that's different.
Marco:
This is a different thing.
Marco:
This isn't going from one type of port to another.
Marco:
This is going from having a complete type of ability to not having it.
Marco:
But that role still exists in the world.
Marco:
Now you have to use a dongle to use it.
John:
For people frightened by that, they have not removed USB from the iMac.
John:
Margo just misspoke.
John:
Don't be scared.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Sorry, yeah, whatever.
John:
They have not removed USB yet.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
No, the iMac still has, the desktops are still full of ports.
Marco:
The Mac Mini, the iMac, the Mac Pro even, although less for some reason.
Marco:
But like, these are full of ports.
Marco:
Like, they're fine on ports on the big ones.
Marco:
It's just the laptops where they rationalize away, and they, both Apple and Apple fans, rationalize away that, oh, it's okay to remove this stuff because people don't use it anymore.
Marco:
But no, no, they do.
Marco:
It's still a thing.
Casey:
I feel like what you're asking for is, well, I'm a developer, so I need that special developer key on my keyboard.
Casey:
And if other people don't need it, fine, whatever.
Casey:
It doesn't cost them anything.
Casey:
It's just one more key.
Casey:
Who cares?
Casey:
They can just ignore the special developer key on the keyboard.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
Casey:
But I need it.
Casey:
So it better be there because I need it.
Casey:
And I feel like the SD card slot is the same thing.
Casey:
Like, I look at the regular people in my life.
Casey:
I'm not talking about the people in this racket.
Casey:
I'm not talking about YouTube.
Casey:
I'm not talking about the people at Relay.
Casey:
I'm talking about regular people.
Casey:
I am sure I know a couple of people with DSLRs, but I'm struggling to come up with it.
Casey:
And I don't think for a regular human, they're looking at whether or not this thing has an SD card slot and saying, oh, well, screw that.
Casey:
It doesn't have an SD card slot.
Casey:
In fact, I'm glad you brought up the HDMI port because I was going to bring it up myself.
Casey:
I think that makes way more sense in an SD card slot because it is far more likely, in my opinion, that the millions of these devices that are used in a workplace back before workplaces weren't a thing, or back when workplaces were a thing, all those people want to plug into projectors and things of that nature.
Casey:
They would do that with HDMI.
Casey:
And so I don't disagree with your final thesis, you know, that that especially on the bigger devices, as John has been saying, on like a 16.
Casey:
Why not throw it all in?
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with you there.
Casey:
But for something like a MacBook Air, like I don't want to have a developer key on the MacBook Air.
Casey:
I want it to be flexible.
Casey:
I almost feel like we're arguing for a hardware keyboard on our Blackberry still.
Casey:
Like, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
OK, we could do the software keyboard.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
Oh, you're making so many bad arguments.
John:
oh i mean i wasn't really arguing it for or beyond i'm just saying if it was on there all right we made it seven years the show's over people would people would flip uh if it was on there because they would be excited by it and the reason of you know hdmi is another one but like this is a really skinny laptop sd card slot is a really skinny slot it would fit physically speaking and sort of in the spirit of this machine is this the machine that's big and has tons of room on the side reports no it's not it's the second smallest one they may or no it's the currently the smallest they don't make the super skinny macbook anymore right
John:
So this is not the one to put tons of stuff in it.
John:
So if you're going to fit anything, more little USB-C holes.
John:
And then if you really wanted to go nuts, SD card.
John:
Obviously, I feel like that's a stretch and I still advocate for it on the bigger computers or whatever.
John:
But HDMI, I would have a hard time arguing for it just because physically speaking, it's very difficult to wedge that in here just because this is the super slim laptop.
John:
You can totally fit it on the bigger ones.
John:
I'm all for that.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
My point that I'm making poorly is just that I feel like, you know, we're arguing for things that we personally want and not just understanding that by removing all of these things, you're leaving the ultimate amount of flexibility.
Casey:
Yes, you have to use a dongle and yes, dongle suck.
Casey:
I'm not arguing those points.
Casey:
And candidly, I would like an SD card slot in my laptop, but I feel like I'm acknowledging the fact that I'm a weirdo and I'm not sure that everyone on the show right now is acknowledging
John:
that.
John:
You're not gaining any flexibility from removing them.
John:
By removing them, you gain flexibility.
John:
No, you don't.
John:
We're not saying remove the USB-C ports.
John:
We're not saying make them any less flexible.
John:
You would have all the same flexibility, plus also an SD card slot.
Casey:
Fair, fair, fair.
Marco:
Your example of having a developer key on the keyboard, I mean, first of all, there are lots of keys on the keyboard that confuse regular people, but that aside, that could be maybe getting in people's way.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Again, I think that's a stretch.
Marco:
I think people are already...
Marco:
confused or not by certain keys, but oh well.
Marco:
Ultimately, having something like an SD card slot or an HDMI port on the bigger models, that doesn't take away anything.
Marco:
That doesn't cost the user anything.
Marco:
No one is like, oh, I'm so confused by this hole in the side of my computer, I'm not going to buy this computer now.
Marco:
It's not a thing that gets in anybody's way.
Marco:
It isn't a thing that's really a problem for anybody.
Marco:
But then the flip side, think about all the people who need to plug something into their computer
Marco:
And they go to do it and they realize, oh crap, I can't.
Marco:
This thing doesn't fit in this hole or I lost that hole or I lost that slot.
Marco:
Now I have to go buy and then carry with me a dongle, an adapter, a different cable, whatever it is.
Marco:
That is such a negative customer experience.
Marco:
that I feel like for some of these decisions, maybe you make the laptop thinner and lighter and you have to cut some things and people like it.
Marco:
That's kind of a net win for a lot of cases.
Marco:
But some of these things like reducing the amount of ports that it has or dropping things like the SD card, some of those things seem to have no real upside or very little real upside.
Marco:
And then for the people who need it, a significant downside.
Marco:
There's stuff in my laptop I don't use.
Marco:
They spend a lot of time talking about the speakers and the microphone.
Marco:
I don't use those that much.
Marco:
They spend a lot of time, they're always demoing FaceTime and everything, using the camera on the front.
Marco:
I hardly ever use that either.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff that modern Macs include and can do that I never use.
Marco:
Casey, you gave the example of using video out.
Marco:
I almost never do that.
Marco:
And in fact, I would say for people who don't connect to office projectors, I bet video out is incredibly rarely used on laptops.
Marco:
So it wouldn't surprise me if the percentage of people who use video out
Marco:
It might actually be similar to the percentage of people who use the SD card slot.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
It's probably at least the same order of magnitude.
Casey:
Please.
Casey:
I would – obviously we'll never be able to arbitrate this, but I would take that bet any day of the week.
Casey:
Absolutely I would take that bet.
Marco:
I don't think that's true either.
Marco:
I think it's just like the SD card slot where a lot of people never use it and some people use it all the time.
Marco:
And so for the people who use it all the time, you think, well, what do you mean there's part of the world that doesn't do this, right?
Marco:
But I haven't used video out on a laptop on a regular basis for, geez, since I owned a desktop.
Marco:
So since 2008.
John:
So the part of the world that uses video out is like all office workers who are issued Macs, which is a larger group than professional photographers.
John:
So people use SD card slots.
Marco:
That's neither here nor there.
Marco:
We don't need to argue the details of this thing.
Marco:
Right, but that's ruling out all people who mostly just have it for home.
Marco:
It's also ruling out people who don't present things in their workplace but happen to also have a laptop.
Marco:
That's a pretty big group of people, I think.
Yeah.
John:
i think i think we're workers with laptops who have to project as a bigger group but it doesn't it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it's a moot point for the details of this particular computer we're just i just threw in the sd card because i remember the 13 hab on and i thought it would be super appealing to geeks and i think it would be and i understand why it's not on this computer but marco mentioned something that i think we should touch on before we finally move on from this eternal uh laptop debate which is
John:
The microphones and speakers.
John:
I didn't see all the details, but it seems like they're pitching this one.
John:
It's similar they did to the 16-inch.
John:
Hey, we improved the laptop speakers and microphone.
John:
I think they even... Did they say they improved the camera?
John:
Is that too much to ask?
John:
But either way, I think they definitely improved the audio, which is good.
John:
Like, to see these...
John:
The benefits that they did on the 16-inch, they spent a lot of time saying you could use the 16-inch to record podcasts.
John:
And we had the sample recordings of it.
John:
And it's a big step up.
John:
The thing that no one was asking for that we were excited that we got because it is an incremental improvement in a subsystem that definitely needed some improvement.
John:
So yay for better microphones.
John:
Yay for better speakers.
John:
Even on laptops, making that stuff better is important.
John:
camera does anyone have time to look to see if that's better 720p facetime hd camera so that does not sound like it has changed same old garbage front camera that's basically only used for facetime and skype and zoom and that's it again perhaps excusable on their very smallest very cheapest laptop so i'm not gonna ding them for that i'm glad the speakers and the mic got better
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Marco:
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Casey:
Let's talk about what I personally think is the most interesting thing that happened today, which is not even the new iPad Pros, but the new keyboard.
Casey:
I guess we should start quickly with the Pros.
Casey:
They look about the same as the, I don't know if I should say outgoing ones, but the ones they replace.
Casey:
The camera array is a
Casey:
But otherwise, they are physically about the same.
Casey:
The internals, we've heard reports earlier today that all models get six gigs of RAM, which is very impressive.
Casey:
I think storage remains the same.
Casey:
Did the base go up?
Casey:
No, the base went up, didn't it?
Casey:
uh yeah base is now 128 it was 64 before right i believe that's right yeah so 128 256 512 or one terabyte for storage uh starting at 800 bucks for the 11 inch the cellular still i believe 150 bucks extra correct
Casey:
But I would kind of like to move on from the iPads themselves as quickly as possible, but I'd certainly like to give you guys a chance to weigh in.
Casey:
I have the 11-inch that came out when Marco and I were together in October of, what was that, 2018?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That was when the iPad Pro was brand new.
Casey:
I have the 11-inch.
Casey:
I can't say I long for a new one in terms of hardware.
Casey:
Maybe I'll change my tune once new AR stuff lands that uses this fancy pants LiDAR sensor.
Casey:
But in terms of my hardware, my iPad itself, I'm pretty happy with it sitting here now.
Casey:
I don't plan to replace it.
Casey:
But I really am excited about that keyboard, which we'll talk about in a minute.
Casey:
Marco, thoughts on the iPad hardware itself?
Casey:
And we'll talk about the keyboard in a moment.
Marco:
I mean, as I touched on earlier, I am so incredibly happy with my 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018.
Marco:
Same.
Marco:
The iPad itself, we'll get to the keyboard in a minute, but the iPad itself is seemingly a fairly minor speed bump revision.
Marco:
Like, it's kind of funny to think of iPads as having speed bump revisions now, but I think we're to that point.
Marco:
Like, I think the hardware is mature and advanced enough now that in many ways it's almost like a Mac where you have some big years and some kind of, you know,
Marco:
Kind of just basic speed bump years, and that appears from what we know so far.
Marco:
Again, this is still very early.
Marco:
No one has these yet.
Marco:
It appears that this is pretty much, you know, a speed bump upgrade.
Marco:
The camera got a little bit better in some ways, a lot better in others, but...
Marco:
Again, this is one of those things.
Marco:
How many people use their iPad camera?
Marco:
It's not zero.
Marco:
It's a good number.
Marco:
I use mine occasionally.
Marco:
If I happen to be chatting with someone on my iPad and I want to show them a picture of something that I happen to be looking at, I'll stick it in that way.
Marco:
And FaceTime, I will use it.
Marco:
If I'm facing on the iPad, I want to turn the camera around and show them somebody else in the room or whatever.
Marco:
But I'm not tempted by this camera technology and the iPad because it's just such a low usage camera for me.
Marco:
So it's a speed bump and a fun camera thing.
Marco:
That appears to be it of what has actually changed here.
Marco:
At least the big headlining features of what has changed.
Marco:
So from that point of view, I'm actually fine with my current one.
Marco:
It isn't to say that anything's wrong with this, but just like when a Mac speed bump comes out, you don't buy every one of them.
Marco:
Even people like me who are totally ridiculous and try to find excuses to buy everything Apple makes, I don't buy every revision of every computer of theirs that I use.
Marco:
You know, like Macs have speed bump revisions and they go a few years before things get interesting again.
Marco:
And I think that's happening with this one.
Marco:
If you have an 11 inch from 2018, you probably don't need this one.
Marco:
But if you have an old one and you are looking to upgrade and you are waiting for something to change, this is a good time to buy it because it's great.
Marco:
Like, I'm sure it's going to be just as great as the 11, better in some ways.
Marco:
You know, great.
Marco:
Good for them.
Marco:
But certainly at this price point, this is not like an every year kind of upgrade for most people.
John:
It's an exciting advance in nomenclature because we used to have the X chips where there would be an A something and then the iPad would have the A something X. I think this is our first year with an A something Z. Skip right over Y. Go right to Z. This is the A12Z.
John:
Most notably, it's not an A13 variant.
John:
It is still an A12 variant, but instead of the X, it's a Z. Oh!
John:
I was trying to figure out – I was trying to look up what the actual differences are.
John:
I don't think the CPU core count changed.
John:
I think it's still for fast and for, quote-unquote, energy efficient – don't call them slow cores.
John:
I think the GPU is 8 instead of 7 cores.
John:
I do wonder if that's – I don't know.
John:
I don't have the dyes in front of me.
John:
In the world of consoles, they often ship –
John:
architectures where they allow one or more cores to be duds so their yields go up so i wonder if the a12x is actually eight core where one's allowed to be bad but i'm thinking apple being apple i'm thinking that's not the case but anyway i think that's the only difference i can find in this five seconds of frantic googling for a thing that was announced today the a12z might have one more core on the cpu uh
John:
We'll have to look at the performance numbers.
John:
As I said in the Mac section, if you own a Mac, especially a laptop, do not look at iPad performance numbers because they will make you weep.
John:
The iPad hardware is so much better than Mac hardware in the portable space.
John:
It's not even funny.
John:
It's so much faster in single core than any Mac that Apple sells at any price, including my ridiculous computer sitting next to me here.
John:
The multi-core numbers are getting very frightening very fast as the core counts go up.
John:
This new iPad Pro is so much faster than the new MacBook Air we were just talking about.
John:
Just try not to think about it and just wait patiently for those ARM Macs to appear.
John:
So I think this hardware wasn't broken.
John:
There was nothing bad about the previous iPad Pro.
John:
They gave it better specs.
John:
gave it a better cpu and gpu by how much we're not sure until we start seeing benchmarks of these things the camera on the back it's got two cameras now before it yours just has one right marco yeah yeah so this has the wide angle now the lidar thing makes perfect sense because apple's been pushing ar and one of the things that makes ar better is a better sense of what your surroundings are so now they have lidar which is a better class of sensor than just trying to develop something
John:
depth sensing with multiple cameras it's better depth sensing than facetime ir sprayer which is very close range lidar is much bigger so you know the ipad is the platform they've been pushing this on because until and unless apple gets something you can strap on your face if you're going to look through a magic window that makes things that aren't really there appear to be there
John:
uh looking through a bigger window is better than smaller i had that same thought today when i was pulling up the incidentally the new ipad in ar apple you know on their product pages often has this thing that if you're on an ios device there'll be a little thing that says view this in ar and if you tap it it will let you put whatever it is you're talking about whether it's the new mac pro like they had wwdc or this new ipad and place it on a surface
John:
And I did that so I could take a look at it and see how the AR was and look at the different aspects of it.
John:
But I'm looking through my phone, which is like looking through a very small, skinny portal into a magical world where there is a new iPad sitting on my bed.
John:
Would have been better with a bigger screen.
John:
And so I understand why this makes sense as the first platform for a LiDAR to appear on because it's big.
John:
They have the room for the sensor.
John:
It's not so important for it to have the third camera like the phone, which is a much more important camera system.
John:
And, yeah, Apple is plowing, you know, bravely ahead with the AR stuff, as they have been for many, many years.
John:
I expect this to make what is already a very good AR experience even better.
John:
Like, you know, I said I did it on my phone.
John:
I'm always amazed at how good it is and how stable, how good it looks because they have really good, you know...
John:
and graphic technologies to make it sort of sit in the environment and match the lighting and everything how stable it is i was doing on my my bedspread which is a rumply surface but like and i'm going real close to it i'm looking at like the side and the little ports and i'm looking all over this this 3d model it was incredibly solid this is with no lidar this is with you know not even a current iphone this is the the year ago model of iphone so
John:
Apple's doing really well in the AR space, and I think this will be a fairly amazing tool.
John:
The LiDAR, I think, brings it up to the next level of precision where it can be used in even more professional contexts, like an interior designer or an architect trying to walk people through a space and how it's going to look.
John:
People are doing that today with much worse hardware on some ancient PC running Windows XP that they're doing a fly-through of some architectural thing.
John:
At the very top cutting edge,
John:
being able to have this technology to, you know, spray it around the room and place a bunch of furniture will just be amazing.
John:
We're not there where it's going to be useful enough that it's a game changer because we have glasses on our face, but we are, you know, as I've said every time we talk about this, Apple is doing what it didn't do for many years when it came to many of other technical areas like having a modern operating system with memory protection and preemptive multitasking or having a modern computer programming language.
John:
They are laying the groundwork
John:
way ahead of time so that if and when the time comes that you can put all this magic into a pair of glasses they will have an extremely mature hardware and software stack ready to plug into that right as opposed to saying oh it's suddenly technically possible to put a cool little camera in glasses how are we going to take advantage of that they'll they'll be perfectly positioned to do that so i continue to look forward to that day
Casey:
John, what kind of iPad are you rocking these days?
Casey:
I don't recall.
John:
I have the original iPad Pro.
John:
I thought about upgrading to one of these fancy ones.
John:
Mainly the thing that kept me away, this is a good transition to our next topic, is the stuff that you stick to the iPad.
John:
Having looked at the new iPad in person, I love the hardware itself.
John:
I love the new pencil, but I didn't love the ice cream sandwich case.
John:
I really love... What I have on my iPad Pro is the...
John:
the rubbery whatever it is the thing that goes around the back and the smart cover on the front and they match and meet up like the back cover wraps all the way around and makes it very grippy and not that much thicker and the front smart cover just goes in the front i don't need or use a keyboard right so i just want basically an ipad that i hold in my hand that i can use to prop it up in landscape mode to watch tv shows on it and then i can use hold in portrait and
John:
And the new one just seemed, I don't know, had like sharper edges or just didn't feel comfortable.
John:
I wasn't a big fan of the clothes, the accessories, even though the new iPad is amazing and so much faster than mine and better and has a bigger screen, yada, yada, yada.
John:
So that had me hauled off.
John:
Now this new iPad has some new outfits.
John:
I'm not sure if it changes the equation for me, but it certainly changes the equation for a lot of other people because this new outfit looks pretty snazzy.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So the thing that John is talking about, I usually, I'm the one that goes all in on these ridiculous analogies.
Casey:
I'm glad that it was you this time.
Casey:
Uh, the thing that John is talking about is the new keyboard, which is the new, what are they calling it?
Casey:
A magic keyboard?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Magic keyboard for iPad pro.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
I want this.
Casey:
I want this in my life right now, if you please.
Casey:
So what is this?
Casey:
So the iPad Pro, what is it?
Casey:
The Smart Keyboard Folio?
Casey:
I forget what their ridiculous names are for these things.
Casey:
So Smart Keyboard Folio, I actually do really like it a lot.
Casey:
So I'm talking about the one that existed.
Casey:
Well, it still does exist, but existed yesterday and was, as of yesterday, the coolest thing in the world.
Casey:
Now it's not the coolest thing in the world anymore.
Casey:
But anyway, unlike the home button iPad Pros, where if I understood it right, it did like some sort of like John's, the keyboard for his would do some sort of like fold up on itself and then fold on top of the iPad.
Casey:
So it was like this three layer dip sort of ridiculous thing.
Casey:
Is that a reasonable explanation, Marco?
Casey:
Do you want to kind of help me out here?
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Yeah, because on that one, on the 9.7 and the 10.5, the keyboard accessory attached via the smart connector on the edge of the iPad.
Marco:
And so it would like magnetically stick on that one edge and you have to like fold the case into this little triangle thing.
Marco:
I have it right over there actually.
Marco:
Yeah, you fold it into this little triangle thing and stand it up and the triangle angle was a little bit floppy but overall it was fine if not a little fiddly to get set up and to get used to.
Marco:
And then the 11-inch and 12.9 that came out last fall with the new flat-edge design and everything, and then the face ID and everything, that changed.
Marco:
It moved the smart connector from the side of the iPad to the back.
Marco:
And then those mounted by basically having the entire back rectangle of the case stick to the iPad with magnets, and it happened to stick at one point for the connector.
Marco:
And so it just totally changed and moved the smart connector, but made it much simpler.
Marco:
Now you have this whole plane attaching to it and mounting to it for the keyboard.
Marco:
It made it way, way, way simpler to operate and more stable and in one dimension, and it was fine.
Marco:
So that's what I've been using.
Marco:
Again, that's how I use it every day.
Marco:
For me, I'm a very heavy iPad keyboard user.
Marco:
I almost never use an iPad without the keyboard.
Marco:
And all those years that iPads didn't have good keyboards from Apple,
Marco:
I mostly just didn't use them.
Marco:
I would buy them, telling myself every time, I'm going to use this thing more.
Marco:
And inputting text was always so cumbersome that I would just not end up using it.
Marco:
It would sit in a drawer.
Marco:
It would discharge somewhere, and I would forget about it for weeks on end.
Marco:
But the keyboard really made me an iPad user.
Marco:
I keep it in the keyboard full-time, all the time.
Marco:
It is my kitchen and dining room computer for the most part, and I really enjoy it for that.
Marco:
That being said, I'm actually less excited about the new Magic Keyboard because of certain details of how it works, which we'll get into, I think, in a second.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm very curious to hear that, but let me kind of finish explaining what this is.
Casey:
And I should also point out that the smart keyboard folio will...
Casey:
charge or provide power to the keyboard that's attached to it.
Casey:
So you never have to worry about like charging.
Casey:
So take that in contrast to say the Logitech, like, you know, turn my iPad into a laptop things or the bridge is the other one that I'm thinking of.
Casey:
that you know the mike hurley's of the world love and reasonably so i'm not trying to take away from them but one of the things that they have to do is because the keyboard or at least i'm pretty sure this is accurate the keyboard works via bluetooth and you have to charge the keyboard periodically and that's not a big deal but it's a nuisance and the smart keyboard and for the record i do think i think there might have existed or might still exist some keyboards that plug into the usb port on the ipad pro
Marco:
But I think those are fairly unusual.
Marco:
And you're right, the smart keyboard is self-powered by the iPad, and pretty much everything else out there is Bluetooth.
Marco:
And in fact, I actually have direct experience with this currently in my household, because my son, he's small enough that an iPad mini is still the size that makes sense for him, and there is no iPad mini smart keyboard from Apple.
Marco:
And he really wanted a keyboard for his, for his iPad.
Marco:
And so I actually got him one for Christmas.
Marco:
It was just like, you know, no name, cheap one from Amazon and, and it's Bluetooth.
Marco:
And yeah, I mean, he loves it, but he doesn't know any better.
Marco:
The experience of using it kind of sucks because it is separately charged.
Marco:
Sometimes it's just out of power, and you have to get a little micro-USB thing to plug in the side of the keyboard and charge it up separately.
Marco:
It does have a power switch.
Marco:
You have to worry about having it on or off.
Marco:
If you leave it on all the time, it does stay active and drain the battery sometimes.
Marco:
And if you want to use it without the keyboard, not only is it hard to detach and reattach it, much harder than Apple's case, but
Marco:
you have to make sure that it's off when you move away.
Marco:
Otherwise, the Bluetooth connection will stay active and the OS will still behave as though you have an external keyboard connection.
Marco:
So it won't show the on-screen keyboard by default and stuff like that.
Marco:
So the experience of using the Apple keyboard compared to any other keyboard is just so much nicer.
Marco:
because it is powered by the iPad.
Marco:
It is easy to attach and remove.
Marco:
And when you remove it, the keyboard is off.
Marco:
The keyboard does not have its own separate power switch.
Marco:
It is just, it's there unless you detach it and then it's gone.
Marco:
And it's just so much simpler to deal with.
Casey:
Yep, couldn't agree more.
Casey:
So the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, it's spiritually the same, but in execution a fair bit different.
Casey:
So first of all, it includes a trackpad.
Casey:
I'm just going to put that aside for a moment.
Casey:
We're going to come back to that for sure.
Casey:
But it includes a small trackpad on it, which is very interesting.
Casey:
But what I am almost more jazzed about is the way in which you can mount the iPad and use the iPad.
Casey:
So the one big problem I have with the smart keyboard folio, or whatever the hell it's called, is that you have two different positions that you can sit the iPad in, and both of them stink, if you ask me.
Casey:
Like there are some, there are some occasions when one of them is just perfect, but almost always they're not where I want them to be.
Casey:
And you have literally only two choices.
Casey:
The way it works is all powered by magnets and divots.
Casey:
And there is literally no other way to use it other than these two positions.
Casey:
Short of like, you know, building an erector set around it or something.
Casey:
Well, with the Magic Keyboard, if I understand things right, it uses this crazy cantilever system that looks like it should not possibly work.
Casey:
Or if anything, it would be, you know, extremely unstable from the looks of it.
Casey:
But from what we have understood as we record on the 18th, before any reviewers have these in their hands...
Casey:
It's supposed to work from what we're told from Apple, and you can pitch the iPad at a varying range of angles, which is amazing.
Casey:
I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's amazing and dramatically increases the usefulness of this device.
Casey:
And while we're increasing the usefulness of this device, it has its own USB-C port.
Casey:
Now, mind you, that's not because you need to charge the keyboard.
Casey:
The USB-C port is pass-through charging for the friggin' iPad.
Casey:
How cool is that?
Casey:
So you plug in power to the keyboard.
Casey:
The keyboard is then powering the iPad via the smart connector instead of the other way around.
Casey:
And then that leaves you a port to do things with on your iPad.
Casey:
So now if I get one of these keyboards, my iPad has more ports than my freaking computer does, which is both ridiculous and awesome.
Marco:
But Casey, most people who use an iPad don't need the port for anything other than charging.
Marco:
They should just remove it.
Casey:
You know, you're right.
Casey:
They probably should.
Casey:
Wireless charging all the way.
Marco:
You're asking for a developer port, basically.
Casey:
I am asking for a developer port.
Marco:
Why should they ruin my iPad with a developer port I'm never going to use?
Casey:
The funny thing about it is, I actually don't feel, I mean, I totally take your point.
Casey:
I actually don't think that this is going to provide any real utility for me because the amount of times I've plugged other things into this iPad is almost zero.
Casey:
But I do like the fact that it's at least giving me the option to do this and it makes it more useful, including for other things like SD card dongle.
John:
Well, there's a utility for it for sure because the port that is on the keyboard case is low down next to the desk.
John:
It's not in midair next to the thing.
John:
So, you know, like it kind of makes sense where the, you know, traditionally where the lightning slash USB-C port is on iOS devices –
John:
But having this thing down, it makes it, you know, this whole thing with the iPad, setting aside the whole, you know, cultural war of interface paradigms and all the iOS 14 potential changes and multitasking and a lot of stuff.
John:
This is a build-it-yourself floppy laptop, right?
John:
That's how Marco's using his computer.
John:
That's how this is used.
John:
It has advantages and disadvantages.
John:
One of the disadvantages for a long time has been...
John:
Yeah, but when you – like is it really set up to be a laptop?
John:
Like laptops don't have their power cord connect to the middle side of the display.
John:
Because of the way iPads are, that's where the port is.
John:
The whole computer is in the display.
John:
It's a different arrangement.
John:
It's a little bit top-heavy, yada, yada.
John:
Having this cord down at desk level is going to be a big upgrade for people who spend like a lot of their day at a desk with an iPad.
John:
plugged in right i think the position of this port is just as important if not more important than the fact that now you have two of them because this really is just charging you can't use it for all your peripherals you still have to put your peripherals and dongles dangling off the side of the computer and you know i get that like you can't route all that through the smart connector it makes sense but that i think is the most exciting thing ergonomically and i will i'd
John:
do really want to go to a store someday when this plague is over and play with this thing to see how the cantilever stuff works.
John:
One point I haven't seen anyone mention, although I'm super far behind on Twitter, so I don't know, and this just came out today.
John:
When you look at the design, they show it in profile on Apple's site, and they have the
John:
in a strange handwriting font smooth angle adjustment the thing that casey was just getting excited about look i can i can put it any angle i want and he by the way i barely use the my wife has this keep the same keyboard as marco i barely use it and i'm i have already been frustrated by those two angles casey's right they're never they're never quite right and it's very very annoying right so the smooth adjustment and you look at it and you're like wow it's smooth adjustment because like the whole ipad is like hanging in midair how does it even work look at this amazing thing that apple's done so daring so light so floating in the air
John:
there's a reason it's floating in the air and that reason is not you know because it looks cool and it's a daring thing to do it floats in the air because if it didn't you wouldn't have at least one row of keys in that keyboard like if you look at how the angles work out at you know one at the most the steepest of the angles like the two angles you have on the current keyboards like at the i don't know what it is like maybe
John:
10 or 15 degrees off perfectly vertical or whatever if you extend the line of the ipad down you will see that you would lose whatever the top row of keys is on this thing like to you know to bring it back to what we mentioned before the trackpad how do they find room from a trackpad is this is this keyboard only available on the big giant ipad no it's available on the 11 inch model how is that possible i look at the 11 inch model now i see keys right from you know from the edge of the ipad screen all the way to the edge of this thing i just see keys keys keys
John:
How is there any more room?
John:
How can you find room for an entire trackpad?
John:
The answer is that the keyboard basically can now be sort of under the display.
John:
The display is over your fingers in certain angles when you were touching that top row of keys.
John:
That's how they found room for all this stuff.
John:
You can't get blood from a stone that didn't make the keys super duper tiny.
John:
They found room for a very short trackpad by allowing the computer to hover over the
John:
some of the keyboard at certain angles which i think is super clever and a perfect apple solution of like you know how do how do we do this can we only do it on the big model can we you know can we not have a trackpad at all this solution if it works is genius if it doesn't work then it's going to be an embarrassing thing that keeps falling over on people's laps and gets people angry but considering none of us have seen it in person yet i'm i'm willing to believe right now that it is genius
Marco:
Yeah, that's so many unknowns.
Marco:
This is why I'm hesitant to be excited about this for my own needs, just because I do wonder about that.
Marco:
That being said, you're right about the hinge angles.
Marco:
That's a huge thing.
Marco:
There's a reason why laptop hinges don't snap into only two preset angles.
Marco:
It's much nicer to be able to adjust it freely within a reasonable range because...
Marco:
your needs and preferences and situations change, and that's nice.
Marco:
So if you're going to push this thing to be more laptop-like, which is what the market seems to want at the high end here, by all means, give it a real hinge.
Marco:
And that is what they appear to have done here.
Marco:
One concern I have, though, is with the current one,
Marco:
When I'm using the keyboard, which, as you mentioned, the keys go pretty much all the way to the bottom of it.
Marco:
What that creates, when you include where the back of the iPad is, it allows you to place the iPad on a very short depth surface.
Marco:
In my case, where it usually lives is on a kitchen counter, right against a cabinet.
Marco:
So the current footprint of the previous 11-inch with the smart keyboard, with it propped up like that, that's about as much depth as will fit on that part of my counter.
Marco:
I actually think this might not because this is leaning the iPad back more at certain angles.
Marco:
And I think even though the total size of the keyboard case obviously is going to be the size of the iPad, which hasn't changed, I'm a little bit concerned that it won't fit where you need to go now.
John:
You can make the screen totally vertical.
John:
It'll take less room than your current one does.
John:
Maybe.
John:
I have to look at that.
John:
I'm going to look at that.
John:
Go look at the angle adjustment thing.
John:
Do this stupid vertical scroll thing.
John:
I got to hear my wife, whether she knew it or not, get frustrated with the vertical scroll because I sent her to the iPad page to take a look at it, and she's like,
John:
i just want to see the thing and i hear her mouse going because you just want to you just want to see the stuff but you have to basically manually it's like a jack-in-the-box you're rotating the handle to go through all the animations so you get the anyway do that on the page somewhere when your scroll thumb is somewhere in the middle you can make it perfectly vertical so it is yeah yeah assume assuming it stays in that position which you can't really tell from this animation i think you're probably fine
Marco:
That's interesting, yeah, because now that I'm looking at it, yeah, you might be right.
Marco:
I have to be able to see it, basically, and play with it.
John:
Look at the font, by the way, on that smooth angle adjustment, if you're on that thing.
John:
See where it says smooth angle adjustment?
John:
What is with that font?
Marco:
It's an Apple Pencil ad.
Marco:
Look, you can write with this.
Marco:
It's creative.
John:
I know, but among all handwriting fonts, it's an interesting choice.
John:
An all caps, very sort of aggressive marker.
John:
I don't know enough fonts to complain about this.
John:
It just strikes me as strange.
Marco:
It's a cute, like, look, you could create this entire ad on your iPad Pro kind of thing.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
So I do have a couple other bonuses and a couple other concerns.
Marco:
So my main other concern besides – so I am concerned about possible increased depth of the footprint by having this mechanism and being able to do that and having the trackpad push the keyboard up and everything.
Marco:
I also – this is going to sound completely ridiculous.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure the previous, which is now still for sale, but we're going to call it the previous smart keyboard, I think that used butterfly keys.
Marco:
It was this fabric-covered butterfly key thing.
Marco:
I never had a single issue with those keyboards.
Marco:
I had two of them.
Marco:
First, I had three.
Marco:
Yeah, I had the 9.7, then the 10.5, then the 11X.
Marco:
Those were three different ones with these keyboards.
Marco:
Never had any problems with any of them.
Marco:
I use them every day.
Marco:
And I actually don't hate them.
Marco:
I don't love them, but I don't hate them.
Marco:
They have a totally different feel and keycap design than the laptop butterfly keyboards.
Marco:
And for whatever reason, those differences, I liked them.
Marco:
They were fine.
Marco:
And they seem totally necessary for this kind of, you know, super thin, super lightweight thing.
Marco:
So this is the only time that you'll hear me defending what is...
Marco:
I don't even know if anybody's ever even confirmed that they are butterfly keys, but I think they're butterfly keys in those.
John:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right.
Marco:
Assuming they are.
Marco:
So I actually will defend that butterfly keyboard because that butterfly keyboard was actually very well sealed against the environment.
Marco:
The key caps were narrower and had lots of space between them, and it was inexpensive to replace, relatively speaking, if anything ever went wrong, but nothing ever did for me.
Marco:
So that was fine.
Marco:
Now going to the Magic Keyboard, I think I'm going to lose if I get this, which bonus feature, I'm able to without getting the new iPad because this Magic Keyboard will also work with the 2018 iPad Pro models.
Marco:
So if you have the iPad Pros that look like this one, it will work with those too.
Marco:
The downside is it costs a lot of money, but we'll get to that.
Marco:
But I actually think this actually might be worse for me, even if I can get past the angle issues, because I think I'd be a little bit more worried about things like having food around it.
Marco:
Because what if crumbs get under the magic keycap?
Marco:
Scissor mechanisms like the magic keyboard are way more resilient to stuff getting under them than the butterfly was.
Marco:
But the previous butterfly keyboards for the iPad were sealed.
Marco:
They had that fabric-y kind of sealing layer on top of them.
Marco:
And so they were basically immune to stuff like that happening.
Marco:
Stuff like that almost never happened.
Marco:
And I had no qualms, no reservations, no nervousness about...
Marco:
operating it while i'm cooking or you know having just having it around food and stuff having it around the kitchen i never was worried about like what might get into it and break the keyboard whereas having a more advanced and you know regularly open scissor mechanism like what the magic keyboard has might actually be worse for that or it might at least give me more anxiety about that
John:
I think you should be more excited because they'll feel better.
John:
I mean, I would expect that they will.
John:
I know you said you like the other one with the butterfly thing, but come on, these uncovered Scissor Switch keys have to feel better, right?
Marco:
They probably will feel better, but I don't know that that'll be enough to get me over the fear of stuff getting under them.
John:
I don't think you should be afraid given how much I personally have eaten over Scissor Switch keyboards at work and how much I've seen other people in the office eat over the keyboards and the exact amount of food that I have shaken out of my Scissor Switch Apple keyboards.
I think you're
Marco:
all right we'll see gross but true that's one area where the ipad has always been really really nice for me i will use it in situations and places like the kitchen or like you know certain things when you're out and about where i wouldn't take out a macbook because i i wouldn't want damage to occur to the macbook whereas the ipad seemed to be a little more better suited to certain type situations like that so i hope this maintains that if i if i decide to go this route
Marco:
The other concern I have besides price, which again is big is it's probably going to be significantly heavier.
Marco:
I don't think anybody has weight specs on it yet, but already when you feel an iPad pro by itself feels, wow, this is great.
Marco:
Then you stick one of the folio cases on a keyboard or not, but especially the keyboard ones, it becomes significantly heavier and bulkier, you know, just a bigger, it's a much bigger thing.
Marco:
this is probably going to add yet more bulk and heft compared even to the even to the regular other keyboard cover i i worry like how big and chunky is the resulting combination going to be and at that point like are you in macbook territory probably right you're probably very close to at least the macbook air territory at that point in both price and and uh and size and weight so i don't know i i think
Marco:
Those are my two big concerns about this.
Marco:
If I had to say I'm really concerned about size and weight and I'm really concerned about how high-end and fragile will this feel?
Marco:
Will it feel like a laptop that I have to protect a little bit or will it feel more like the iPad keyboard cover before that I knew I could kind of abuse and it would be fine?
John:
Yeah, you're definitely in big floppy laptop territory for sure.
John:
And I think the extra weight, I would also guess is going to have extra weight, if only because of whatever mechanism is in that big fat hinge, that mechanism has got to be weighty.
John:
And the rest of it, I don't see how they saved much weight on the rest of it.
John:
This has backlights in it too, by the way.
John:
So I think the weight is going to be equal or greater than the other keyboard.
John:
The good thing about it, though, is again, in big floppy laptop territory, having the weight concentrated in that hinge down at the bottom,
John:
is good in terms of trying to balance the equation of the weird sort of reverse laptop where all the weight is in the quote-unquote screen because that's where the whole computer is and the keyboard is lighter so i think that could work out to aid stability again it's hard to tell without having used one of these things yeah so it being a laptop territory
John:
What they're trying to do is get most of the benefits of laptops, the sort of secure stability, the good keyboard, and now the trackpad, while still maintaining all the benefits of an iPad.
John:
And you mentioned that this is getting into laptop territory.
John:
It's getting there in terms of price.
John:
And I would once again make the point that it is faster than all of Apple's laptops.
Marco:
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Casey:
I am super amped about this keyboard, and I have pretty much decided I'm going to get one for my iPad.
Casey:
And yeah, it is worth noting, like Marco said, it does work with the 2018-era iPad Pros.
Casey:
Basically, any iPad Pro that does not have a home button, it'll work with that.
Casey:
I also wanted to quickly call out, you know, a lot of times we see or know that Apple has been planning something for a long time.
Casey:
And this is one of the occasions that it has been just so eminently obvious to me how far ahead of us Apple is.
Casey:
Because if you look at the smart connector on my iPad Pro, to the best of my knowledge, I have never, nor could I, put power into that connector up until today, or really in May when these keyboards ship, which is a bummer.
Casey:
I really wish I could get my hands on one immediately.
Marco:
That actually isn't entirely true.
Marco:
Logitech made some weird charging mount for it that almost nobody bought.
Marco:
It charged it very slowly, I think.
Marco:
And this actually might have the same issue.
Marco:
I don't know what the specs are for the smart connector charging input.
Marco:
but it might not be a very fast way to charge your iPad.
Marco:
It might just kind of keep it topped off, right?
Marco:
Or it might charge it very, very slowly.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe they've raised the wattage for the new iPad, but maybe if you use it on the one that you and I have, maybe it will be slow.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But it might not be a great charger, but it has always been a charger.
Marco:
Just almost no one ever used it.
John:
And speaking of Logitech, by the way, Logitech has a keyboard with a trackpad in it available announced today as well.
John:
So another one of those privileged partners that gets to announce similar products on the same day as Apple that surely worked with Apple on that product.
John:
And that's for the other iPads, the lesser iPads that Apple did not decide to make this product for.
John:
So if you've got an iPad with a home button and you want a keyboard for it that has a trackpad, Logitech may have a model for you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I think, Marco, you said this a minute ago.
Casey:
I think it was John that said this a minute ago.
Casey:
It is backlit, which is not something that I can say I've ever really wanted, but it's additive and it's not going to hurt anything.
Casey:
So why not?
Casey:
But I cannot stress enough how excited I am about the way in which you can tilt this thing to work at almost any angle.
Casey:
And Marco, you've said this.
Casey:
I think you said it a fair bit last week.
Casey:
I think you've said it tonight as well.
Casey:
having a physical keyboard attached to an iPad really dramatically changes.
Casey:
And in my personal opinion, increases its utility.
Casey:
It changes how you interact with and use the iPad.
Casey:
And it wasn't until I got this iPad Pro late 2018 that I realized, because this is the first one I had with a keyboard that was always attached.
Casey:
It wasn't until I got this one that I realized the profound difference having a
Casey:
And I can totally understand how the Jasons and Mikes of the world would end up in the bridge keyboard or what have you if they were going to be treating this more like a laptop.
Casey:
I think this is workable with the Smartfolio as a laptop-like thing.
Casey:
But this Magic Keyboard looks like it's going to be much, much better in that department.
Casey:
And the other thing that I'm still evaluating but is very intriguing and I never would have thought I wanted...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It has mouse support everywhere.
Casey:
It's not just an accessibility hack anymore.
Casey:
It is full, honest-to-goodness mouse support everywhere.
Casey:
And so I put it on my iPad Pro earlier today, and I connected it to a Magic Mouse.
Casey:
I have not tried it with a trackpad yet, but I connected it to a Magic Mouse.
Casey:
I think I like it.
Casey:
Like, I don't know that I'll use it a lot, but I think I like it.
Casey:
And I'm very disturbed by the fact that I think I like it.
Casey:
And one of the things that I find absolutely fascinating, but I'm not sure if I like, is when you're mousing around,
Casey:
Let's take Safari.
Casey:
So I have my mouse connected to my iPad right now, and I'm looking at Safari.
Casey:
And as I'm mousing across the toolbar, there's the bookmarks icon, which is like the little open book.
Casey:
As I mouse from left to right past the back and forward arrows, which are currently disabled because I'm on a blank page, and then I hit the book, and suddenly this circular mouse cursor goes away, because by the way, it's a circle, not an arrow.
Casey:
The circular mouse cursor goes away, and suddenly I've got...
Casey:
like this blob that's highlighting the book, the particular icon on the toolbar that I'm on.
Casey:
And then as I continue swiping from left to right, I eventually like leave that, that toolbar icon.
Casey:
And now I'm back to a circle again.
Casey:
And then I hit the address bar and suddenly I'm not an eye bar, but I'm like a pipe.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
And it's so on and so forth.
Casey:
But the key is that your cursor can optionally change to highlight the particular thing that you're on.
Casey:
Whether or not you, you two, and you, the listener, enjoy this, I think it is just such an unbelievably clever and interesting way to adapt mousing to a touch-first device.
Casey:
And I just think it's extremely, extremely cool.
Casey:
Now, have either of you had any time to play with this?
Casey:
Mark, have you played with this at all?
John:
I've seen a video of it.
John:
Two things.
John:
One, that experience that you're experiencing there, that's a preference.
John:
You can change it so it doesn't do that so that the cursor is not subsumed.
John:
But two, the second thing that made me think about when I saw a demo video demonstrating this, I think Jason put it up on a Six Colors channel.
John:
It's on YouTube.
John:
We'll try to put a link for the show notes.
John:
It's not so much a cursor as a ghost finger.
John:
like that's that's like how i'm conceptualizing what i see right because we know in the world of the mac you have a cursor it's on the screen it's controlled by your mouse or your trackpad or whatever the default cursor is the typical little arrow from the early days of the gui and the mac uh and it changes based on where you are if you're in a text field it becomes a little insertion point i-beam thing if you're over a link it becomes a little mickey mouse hand with the
John:
Other applications have different cursors and different modes, but it's always a cursor.
John:
And on the iPad, in accessibility mode, before this new OS came out, it was like a circular blob.
John:
And you can conceptualize that circular blob as trying to say, look, iPad OS doesn't have a cursor per se, but here is a proxy for your finger, especially if it's an accessibility feature.
John:
It's like, well, if you can't use your finger, you can use this other device, and this is your virtual finger, right?
Right.
John:
This new mode where it's like, okay, we're adding cursor support.
John:
I think some people thought, oh, there's going to be a little macOS arrow on my screen.
John:
No.
John:
The default cursor is still the ghost finger blob, right?
John:
But it changes based on context.
John:
Does it change to an eye beam?
John:
Does it change to a finger with the hand pointing?
John:
It changes to different ghostly shapes for sure.
John:
Casey just talked about one of them that you'll see in the video.
John:
When you go across the buttons, it changes to the shape of the button.
John:
In fact, that interaction sort of subsumes your ghost finger to becoming a new thing if that preference is not set.
John:
The I-beam, it's vertical, but it's not really an I. It's more like a lowercase L or a capital I in a font with no serifs.
John:
It's a long, skinny lozenge.
John:
So it evokes the idea of an I-beam or a selection thing, but it is still a ghostly transparent blob, a thing that would be absolutely impossible on a one-bit computer screen when the Mac was introduced, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Can you tell me, Casey, if you go over a link in Safari, what kind of ghost finger you get?
Casey:
It is... Well, that's a button.
Casey:
Where's, like, a link?
Casey:
Of course, I choose a page that has, like, no traditional links on it.
Casey:
No, it's still just the ghost finger.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So in the, you know, 10-minute video I saw where Craig Fedirigi demonstrates all these various features, it always looked like a ghost finger to me.
John:
So that, I feel like, is the mental model that Apple is... The sort of aesthetic and semantic model for this interaction is...
John:
It's more precise than a finger because you can't make your finger into a vertical bar that can cleanly split words and select text.
John:
But the fact that it is dim and transparent, it's ghostly.
John:
It is fatter than the precise pointing devices on the Mac because the entire interface of the iPad...
John:
because of all our fat fingers, right?
John:
But they want to give you more precision without saying, the door is busted wide open.
John:
Feel free to make iPad apps that are absolutely impossible to use with your finger, right?
John:
And the sort of way to nudge...
John:
the world to say apple doesn't want you to do that is even the cursor is a little bit chunky like the default cursor is is the fat ghost finger the i-beam cursor is a is a lozenge of transparentness right so cursor support uh you know
John:
It looks like it's going to do all the things that you would expect it to do.
John:
You've got hover states.
John:
You've got all the different text selection, but it's not the same as on the Mac.
John:
When you select a thing, you can just click and drag the whole paragraph, which is not the traditional Mac paradigm for moving text around, because you can do it with your finger, and you can also do it with the mouse.
John:
So...
John:
Kind of like when all of the multitasking stuff was introduced to iOS or iPhone OS, like every time iOS has made an advancement, what Apple has done has made sense to me, like in terms of the paradigm that, you know, like, oh, within the world of iOS, this way of doing multitasking certainly makes sense.
John:
It fits in like it looks...
John:
It's not just taking what was done on the Mac and shoving it on their iOS devices.
John:
It is purpose-built for this context, and it looks like it fits in.
John:
The question is always, okay, it fits in and it's part of the model.
John:
How does it compare in terms of efficiency and performance?
John:
discoverability and ease of use and all the things that we've talked about that can you know that you can judge an interface by like this gives me a little bit more power but how how easy is it to use if i learn this set of rules about the ghost finger can i apply them across the entire operating system and that will give me a leg up in every application or is it custom for each and the same questions we can ask about any aspect of a gui um
John:
Again, looking at a five minute video on the day that it was announced, I think the ghost finger is probably going to be more widely applicable and more pleasing to use than, let's say, iPad multitasking, which has already had a couple of revisions and is not...
John:
really where it should be as we've discussed on past shows um but uh more importantly it is not just the mac cursor shoved on your ipad which i think is smart uh and i mean i'm gonna say it's limiting what they can do because you
John:
you know you can they can do whatever they want to do but like initially it seems like they are intentionally limiting the functionality to things that are reasonable to imagine might be part of a touch interface as opposed to saying the door is wide open for you to make pixel precise interfaces on ipad os
Casey:
This clearly has had a lot of thought and I'm not saying it's perfect.
Casey:
I'm sure there's problems, but it's had a lot of thought.
Casey:
And again, as I was just sitting on the couch using my iPad with a mouse, quote unquote, attached to it, paired with it, I don't know that I would choose to do this.
Casey:
Me personally, I don't know that I would choose to do it very often.
Casey:
But if I was someone like a Jason or a Federico or a Mike,
Casey:
This would change my frigging life, man.
Casey:
I mean, if I was using an iPad as my computer, as my professional device, having a trackpad or mouse either paired or attached in the case of the magic keyboard would absolutely change my relationship with the iPad.
Casey:
Now, for me, that just uses it as a recreational device for the most part.
Casey:
I think it would be cool to have the trackpad for when you need it.
Casey:
I can't say that I expect myself to be mousing around the iPad often, but I do think this is a very welcome development, and I'm glad that we didn't just get a pointer and we got the ghost finger, as you said, John.
Casey:
It seems, at a glance, having used it for just about an hour, it seems extremely well thought out and very well done, and I'm stoked.
Casey:
super excited to see what apps do with this over time.
Casey:
Something I've noticed, and perhaps it's user error, perhaps I'd need a trackpad for it, but there doesn't seem to be any way to swipe through the three panes of the left-hand pane of Slack.
Casey:
So you know how in Slack you have leftmost is your different workspaces, and the center is the different channels in your workspace, and the right is direct messages.
Casey:
Well, using the mouse anyway, maybe you can with the trackpad, there's currently no way to swipe...
Casey:
at all on that left-hand pane, which really kind of makes Slack impossible to use.
Casey:
But in Slack's defense, these APIs either aren't out or just came out today.
Casey:
So there wasn't really a whole lot they could do about it.
Casey:
But even with that aside, this just is incredibly, incredibly well done.
Casey:
And I am very excited to see what comes of it.
John:
Yeah, it's more than just the pointing of things if you watch the demo.
John:
Like, they added all the expected shortcuts.
John:
Like, well, what about this thing where you swipe from the edge?
John:
How am I supposed to do that with the cursor?
John:
Well, there's an equivalent shortcut.
John:
Well, how do I get control center?
John:
Well, actually, you can click on the thing.
John:
It's all powered by the amazing technology known as...
John:
hover state like when you have a finger it's one thing that with our current touch technology there is no hover state the ipad has no idea if your finger is hovering over a button as in not touching the screen but right above it it has no idea now it could you know it's an
John:
an accident in history slash a design decision there are lots of touch technologies that have the ability to know when your finger is hovering but apple didn't use one in either of the industry and it's probably for the best because they were all kind of janky right but when you have a cursor you absolutely have hover because the cursor can be positioned on the screen but you haven't yet clicked on it or whatever and because of that
John:
Pulling control center is, oh, you just bring the cursor up and hover it over, like, the time in the upper right, and it highlights to let you know, hey, this is a thing that you can click on.
John:
I can tell you're hovering over it.
John:
I haven't pulled control center down yet, but when you want it, just click on it.
John:
Same thing with the edges.
John:
You can just slam the cursor against the edge.
John:
A lot of people are saying they should have done corners where you can slam the cursor into the corner and make it do things.
John:
I don't think they did that.
John:
But...
John:
hover state and so for slack they didn't previously have any way to know if a thing like a cursor is hovering over them so how could they implement that feature now the whole door is open to things we take for granted on the mac which is like hey i can take my mouse and slide it over a window that's in the background and scroll and it knows to scroll that window instead of the window that's in the foreground because i just put my cursor over it and i'm hovering over it it's a thing you know whereas on the ipad
John:
there was no focus and no hover state and so it was like oh if i do a gesture i have to kind of make the gesture fit in the in the region where the thing is and it will know that i mean the gesture for that but if it's in a slide over thing i gotta do the little gesture on the little tiny bar on the bottom anyway hover state it's good and it will improve everyone's life on ipad
Casey:
Real-time follow-up.
Casey:
It does appear that if you use the paging indicator on the bottom of that left-hand pane, if you get it just right, you can actually get between the different panes, but it's very, very fiddly.
Casey:
And again, in Slack's defense, this app was never designed to be used with a mouse cursor of any sort.
Casey:
The other thing I'm noticing as I'm listening to you and goofing off with this thing, when you click the mouse, it kind of shrinks the ghost finger.
Casey:
So it almost looks as though it's getting smaller, as though it's getting further away from you.
John:
It should make it get bigger.
John:
It should be squish state.
John:
Well, that's true.
John:
Your fat finger is squishing against the screen.
Casey:
Yeah, I know what you're saying, but it does feel like this is the correct action for it to take.
Casey:
Again, I take your point.
Casey:
Interestingly, when I slam it against the right-hand side of the screen, I get a little peek of the slide over app that was most recently up.
Casey:
And then if I continue to mouse over without having clicked anything, slide over then pops open.
Casey:
So in my case, unsurprisingly, I have GIF wrapped that I most recently used in slide over.
Casey:
So if I mouse all the way to the right side, I see a little bit of GIF wrap peek out.
Casey:
And then as I continue to mouse, it comes on as the slide over app.
Casey:
It's just so much of this is so very, very well done.
Casey:
And I'm so impressed by it.
Casey:
And I'm really interested to see what comes of it.
Casey:
The only thing I will say is that I'm not in love with not having more gestures with the magic mouse.
Casey:
So like...
Casey:
It feels a little weird slamming the mouse into the bottom of the screen in order to get the dock up.
Casey:
I wish there was a – and maybe there isn't.
Casey:
I just don't know it.
Casey:
But I wish there was a way to do like something on – a swipe or something on the top of the mouse to get it to come up.
Casey:
Or like two – I was instinctively doing two-finger swipes left and right to go between active multitasking panes, and that doesn't seem to work.
Casey:
Maybe there's a different combination that I'm not aware of.
Casey:
I believe on a trackpad there are some of these things, so maybe it's a limitation of the fact that I'm using a physical mouse, not a trackpad.
Casey:
But nevertheless, even with these gripes, this is still incredibly impressive, and I'm really excited to see what comes of it.
John:
One of the limitations is the size of that little trackpad.
John:
There's only so much room for fingers on there.
John:
By modern Apple standards, it is a tiny, tiny trackpad because there's just not a lot of room there.
John:
So if there's any sort of three or even, you know, heaven forbid, four-finger...
John:
gestures just you know not really that much room for all your fingers to be on there um yeah again we'll put the link in the show it's this this video this video looks like kind of the thing they would demonstrate in the keynote but it's just craig federighi in what i believe is 60 frames per second in this very sort of uncanny valley uh
John:
video maybe shot we shot an iphone in 4k 60 anyway they show him demonstrating all these features you get to see what happens on the screen when he does it and you get to see his fingers as you get to see him take three of his fingers and try to fit them on the thing and then swipe them in a particular direction without running out of room to make all these shortcuts happen i'm not sure he demonstrates all the shortcuts but he demonstrates a lot of them so this will be a fun thing for people to discover unfortunately and you know this brings me back to my uh
John:
My love of the Mac.
John:
This type of advancement.
John:
Hey, you have a cursor and hover state and regions of the screen that you can go to and multitasking, yada, yada.
John:
On the Mac, it's always been possible for a developer to see some feature added to the operating system and say, oh, I think it would be cool if the corners of the screen did this thing.
John:
And they can write an app for the Mac that makes the corners of your screen hot.
John:
Let's say Apple didn't add that feature.
John:
It wasn't there yet.
John:
And when you put your cursor in the corner of the screen, this app would activate and do a thing.
John:
I mean, arguably, my dinky little apps do something similar on the Mac.
John:
They tried to provide what could be thought of as OS level features through a small, simple application because the APIs exist to do that.
John:
As far as I'm aware, there are no APIs available on iPadOS that would let a third-party developer make an application that says, hey, when you jam your cursor into the lower left corner, even though it normally does nothing, because you have my app, what it'll do is bring up the multitasking switcher or bring up a custom window from my application to let you choose from frequently used folders in the files app or, you know, whatever.
John:
Those sort of system extension applications, the lack of any of those being possible in general on the iPad, I think slows down the pace of evolution of the iPad interface.
John:
We just have to sit around and mostly wait for Apple to do things.
John:
With a few exceptions, like shortcuts being plucked out of the third-party world and share extensions and everything showing areas where people want some functionality, even if it's awkward, they're willing to deal with it going through the share icon or something.
John:
We don't have the sort of rich ecosystem that used to exist on the Mac where if there's some way of using this hardware device with a software thing that is sort of spans applications, it's not like I'm in an app and doing a thing.
John:
It's like I want to make these corners hotter.
John:
I want to add a new gesture.
John:
I want to add, you know.
John:
Just think of like Quicksilver or LaunchBar or the sort of command space launcher switcher things.
John:
Like those existed all over the place before Apple bothered to add one officially.
John:
And even then, the third-party ones are much more powerful, right?
John:
I feel like we're still missing that on iPadOS.
John:
I know maybe the iPad users – well, I was going to say the iPad users would say, oh, I don't want that complexity.
John:
It's too much like the Mac.
John:
But they wouldn't say that.
John:
The most heavy iPad users would love features like this.
John:
It's just that –
John:
Thus far, Apple has not dedicated the resources required to allow that functionality to exist in a safe and secure way.
John:
But they eventually got around to third-party keyboards, which is an incredible safety and security, you know, bees nest.
John:
So I still hope that somewhere inside Apple, someone is thinking about how do we enable third-party developers to extend iPadOS in the same ways that macOS has been extended.
John:
That, you know, I don't know if iPad OS 14, that's going to happen.
John:
But if not, put it on the schedule for 15.
Casey:
We all know that you're just trying to get your Mac apps onto the iPad.
Casey:
You can just fess up.
Casey:
I know what this diatribe is about.
John:
I don't want these specific ones, but it would be cool to make a similar kind.
John:
I don't have any designs to do that.
John:
By the way, speaking of big floppy laptops and this whole iPad revolution, as many people have pointed out, the Apple logo on the back of this new keyboard...
Marco:
is right side up when the computer is in laptop mode so it's sideways normally and can i say finally like the the ipad pro like i understand that apple considers the ipad a portrait device in many contexts so
Marco:
uh i i think the ipad pro especially you know once they realize oh the keyboard's kind of a big deal and people like it and we seem to be selling a lot of them the ipad pro should always have been presented as a landscape device the fact that you know the firmware still considers it like when you when you boot it up the orientation of the boot up apple logo is still portrait um at least on on the models up till today i don't know if the new ones have that yet uh but
Marco:
it always seemed weird and and on the on the last generation of keyboard cases there just wasn't an apple logo and they were just this like giant expanse of flat black or flat dark gray vinyl they look terrible so to have this kind of have what appears to be like a leathery kind of texture uh or maybe it is just that flat vinyl it's kind of it's kind of hard to tell from the product shots but i know it is i guess it is just flat vinyl
Marco:
But to at least have an Apple logo there in the correct orientation, that's nice.
Marco:
It is about time.
John:
Is it upside down?
John:
No, it's correct.
Marco:
It looks like an Apple laptop now.
Marco:
The vertical centering is a little bit odd compared to a laptop just because of the way the case folds, but it is laptop-like.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
Going back to the trackpad for a second, when I first read about Apple including this, I was initially not excited.
Marco:
I'm like, I'm never going to use that.
Marco:
I don't need a trackpad on my iPad.
Marco:
But I've learned when it comes to the iPad to try pretty much everything.
Marco:
Because I never know what is going to stick with me and what's not.
Marco:
You know, even the external keyboard, I thought was kind of a lark.
Marco:
Like when I first bought that, I was like, I don't know if I'll actually use this.
Marco:
The Apple Pencil, I thought, you know, I'm not an artist.
Marco:
I will almost never use this thing.
Marco:
I probably shouldn't spend $120 or whatever it is to buy one.
Marco:
But you know what?
Marco:
I bought it, and I don't use it very often.
Marco:
But when I do use it, it's really cool, and I'm glad I have it.
Casey:
Yeah, agreed 100%.
Marco:
And I think the trackpad might prove similar.
Marco:
You know, if I actually spring for one of these things, which, I mean, it's me.
Marco:
I probably will, let's be honest.
Marco:
If I actually get one of these things, I am concerned about things like the depth.
Marco:
I am concerned about things like crumb entry into the keyboard.
Marco:
But I also, I haven't been tempted in theory because, like, well, I don't know if I'd use a trackpad.
Marco:
But then I also think like, you know, there are a lot of times when I'm like editing text on my iPad and some of those trackpad gestures would be really nice because even though the keyboard is great for inputting text, editing text on the iPad still sucks.
Marco:
This seems like it would probably improve that quite a bit.
Marco:
And so, hey, maybe I would actually use that.
Marco:
Maybe I get some value out of that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So I think it's the kind of thing like almost every iPad hardware advancement.
Marco:
We've said when it first came out,
Marco:
eh, is that really necessary?
Marco:
Or, oh, that just makes it a little laptop.
Marco:
Turns out, laptops are great.
Marco:
Little laptops are awesome.
Marco:
Making the iPad more laptop-like over time has been great, and many people have enjoyed that, myself included, despite initial skepticism.
Marco:
Despite our own initial skepticism.
Marco:
So this is something that I am right now, right at this moment, not very excited about.
Marco:
But I think if I tried it, I think I would actually get used to it.
Marco:
And I think I would actually really enjoy having it.
Marco:
Even if I only needed it occasionally, I think I would, first of all, I think I would probably end up using it more than I think because of things like text editing shortcuts.
Marco:
And I think I would end up enjoying it more than I expect to.
John:
I don't know why you're even questioning it.
John:
You use your iPad like a laptop already anyway.
John:
You totally want that.
John:
Again, assuming the hinge is fine and stable, doesn't tip over and doesn't have any weird things, assuming it works in the stability realm the same as the other one, you're going to use this trackpad like crazy.
John:
That's my prediction.
Marco:
You might be right.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I should probably buy it and find out.
Marco:
And one thing, to kind of close my thoughts on the iPad for now, even though this appears that the iPad itself doesn't appear to be a significant hardware upgrade for most, the AR camera, that's great.
Marco:
I still am not an AR person.
Marco:
I still have no use for it, almost ever.
Marco:
It continues to be a technology that I think is...
Marco:
potentially maybe cool in the future but i have yet to see any any good use for it today that's actually like mainstream and common uh but fine this is clearly like the ar ipad camera wise and everything that's great that's not anything i care about uh but the rest of it i feel like and i said i said something similar last year i believe when you look at the mac lineup especially you know the laptop specifically the laptop lineup is
Marco:
almost seems punitive a lot of the time of like, let's give people the least we possibly can give them, charge them the most we can possibly charge them, and over time, make everything worse and make it do less and take away even more from our users.
Marco:
That's how the laptop lineup has felt for a while.
Marco:
Over time, you're just getting less and it costs more and there's more downsides to it.
Marco:
The iPad is going in the opposite direction.
Marco:
Where the Mac feels kind of punitive on the laptop side,
Marco:
ipads as laptop replacements feel like this glorious christmas day every time they're updated like everything is just better you look at this model there is nothing about this that's worse than the last model everything about it is either the same or better the keyboard probably we don't know yet but probably is going to be better in most ways we again we don't know i'm still concerned about weight but it's probably going to be great
Marco:
iPad OS, yeah, the multitasking is a mess still.
Marco:
And that's going to be a mess for some time, I think, because I think Apple still hasn't figured out how to do it.
Marco:
But the hardware-wise and a lot about the iPad software is really great.
Marco:
And as they push it forward, it just gets better.
Marco:
And it seems like it gets better faster than the Mac does in both hardware and software.
Marco:
It's just such a pleasure to have this device to quickly grab it, hit the power button or tap the screen.
Marco:
It's on.
Marco:
It recognizes you.
Marco:
Camera covered up.
Marco:
Now it recognizes you.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And you have cellular optionally.
Marco:
I love a cellular iPad.
Marco:
When I'm traveling somewhere for the day, I'll just throw that in a bag.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
it is such a pleasure to be in the ipad ecosystem not all the time certainly but it seems like it is the place to be it is where all the excitement is happening it is where things are moving forward and on the mac it doesn't feel that way a lot of the time especially in laptops but even you know mac os too it doesn't feel recently frequently on the mac that
Marco:
everything's great we're moving forward it's a party yay like that's that's how the ipad feels like it almost feels like you know like you're at the mac party and like your neighbors the ipad party you look and you can see everyone there's like having fun bouncing around people all look pretty cool and you're looking at your party everyone's kind of like you know standing around looking at each other kind of upset like no one looks cool
John:
That's because you got Mac laptops.
John:
You should be looking over at my Mac party.
Marco:
What's happening over here?
John:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
Yeah, John's like in the skyscraper.
John:
I get what you're coming from, especially on the laptop side.
John:
I do feel like it's more of a trend line thing than absolute value.
John:
So the iPads are exciting because every time they come out with new iPads and new stuff, they're adding input methods, the pencil, the trackpad.
John:
They're adding ports instead of taking them away, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the ports they have, they're making more capable.
John:
Lightning replaced with USB-C, a standardized port that can do more, so on and so forth.
John:
We don't see that happening in laptops.
John:
Laptops, they're not adding input devices.
John:
They're not adding ports.
John:
They're taking them away or maintaining a status quo.
John:
But in absolute numbers, the iPad is still not caught up with
John:
the most fanciest of laptops so apple's high-end pro laptops do not have two ports one of which you can only charge through they have four ports all of which you can do all sorts of crazy stuff through right so i do wonder that you know as the ipad matures and becomes an ever more capable floppy laptop running ipad os
John:
does it stop when it hits the number of i mean it's already past the number of input methods right so that's what argument to say no they're not going to stop they're just going to plow ahead right because you can touch you can use the pencil you can use the keyboard you can use a trackpad that's already more than the pro max so you can't touch those guys and you can't use a pencil on them right but port wise
John:
you know you mentioned about this this being a portrait orientation device by default you know as evidenced by the boot screen a lot and it does make me wonder why they can't add some super special hardware to have an accelerometer and show the boot logo in the right orientation i know that would be tricky uh you know given how long it takes to anyway i anyway that'd be cool um but for this thing to be if it's going to be horizontal the case has the apple logo facing that way and everything
John:
You start to look at it and say, why is that USB-C port in the center bottom of the portrait mode orientation of the thing?
John:
If you're going to add more ports to this and say, this new iPad Pro has two or three or even four USB-C ports, or maybe one of them is Thunderbolt.
John:
Where do they go on the device?
John:
How does that, you know, when do we stop thinking of the iPad as the original portrait mode thing with a button on the bottom of it and start thinking of it as a Microsoft Surface running a weird OS, right?
John:
And we're getting there by inches.
John:
I do wonder...
John:
Like, where does this meet?
John:
Where does it meet in the middle?
John:
Where do we see sort of complexity parity between the iPad and the MacBook Pro in terms of hardware, if not software?
John:
And with the pace the iPad is going, it's like three or four more generations, and we're going to be at the point where we start doing capability comparisons on the hardware side and say...
John:
This Pro iPad has more capable hardware in all possible ways than the Mac, and that'll be, if they don't hurry up and make touchscreen Macs before then, that'll be an interesting time.
Casey:
And the other thing about it is, and granted I have a very chapped bottom when it comes to OSs and stuff on my computer, but...
Casey:
Catalina has not been great.
Casey:
And I feel like the very, very beginnings of iOS 13 notwithstanding, iPadOS seems to be doing a lot of really great, interesting, and innovative things and doing them even in point releases.
Casey:
This isn't iOS 14.
Casey:
This is iOS 13.4.
Casey:
And so I really feel like...
Casey:
There's a lot more positive energy in the iPad world right now than there is basically anywhere else.
Casey:
Well, maybe not the phone.
Casey:
That's not fair.
Casey:
There's a lot of positive energy in the phone.
Casey:
But compared to other computer-like devices, this is where a lot of the action is, like you guys are saying.
Casey:
And even on the software side, and I'm really excited for June, whatever date in June it may be, that we get to see what's happening for iPadOS 14 because I have a feeling whatever it is, it's going to be really, really exciting and really, really interesting.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and ExpressVPN.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
I have some post-show stuff that you two will surely be interested in.
John:
All right.
John:
Tell me.
John:
It's a thing you could know if you looked at the document.
John:
But you don't, so it'll be a surprise.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Game consoles are a thing that exists, and I'm excited about them.
John:
And there have been a bunch of announcements this week about game consoles.
John:
They're cool.
John:
All right.
John:
So I was going to bring them up in context when we were talking about the other stuff.
John:
But I saved it for the post show for all of you.
John:
When we were talking about the clock speeds on the – what was it?
John:
The first one, the MacBook Air.
John:
I was like, oh, it's so slow.
John:
It's 1.2 gigahertz.
John:
But then like a turbo is up to 3.8.
John:
And when is it turbo?
John:
And, you know, how fast is it?
John:
And sort of the modern processors of, you know, if you have lots of cores, you can't have them all running at the max speed all the time.
John:
But if you just have one running, maybe you can turbo boost off briefly to 3.8.
John:
And, you know, the way modern CPUs work that we're kind of used to.
John:
uh, Microsoft made an interesting choice when it comes to their next generation console, which is actually very interesting from a hardware perspective.
John:
Uh, they have a, you know, AMD CPU, GPU combo with a whole bunch of cores and blah, blah, blah, like all standard stuff that you would imagine.
John:
Um,
John:
But they made the interesting choice to run all of their cores locked at a pretty high frequency.
John:
There is no turboing up and there is no turboing down.
John:
They run at whatever the frequency is, I forget.
John:
But it's not like 1.2 gigahertz.
John:
It is a high frequency, you know, a PC level or sort of like, really?
John:
You're going to run at that frequency all the time?
John:
Yep.
John:
That's it locked.
John:
And so they committed to cooling that.
John:
And their argument was that on a game console, they don't want performance variability, you know, in response to temperature, which makes sense because consoles are in a very hostile environment as compared to PCs.
John:
Often they're in an entertainment center under a TV cooped up with a bunch of other hot things.
John:
and they produce a lot of heat and if you had something that thermal throttled or just turbo boosted up it would be very difficult to get consistent performance out of it so they are you know bucking the modern trend and have pegged the cpu speed of i think they're all their cpu cars maybe also all their gpu cars to fairly high frequencies which is very impressive
John:
Did either one of you see any of the videos in your travels of what the new Xbox looks like, what the hardware looks like?
John:
Because they allowed a bunch of people to go out to Microsoft and take the thing apart and put it together.
John:
Did any of you see those videos?
John:
No, of course not.
Casey:
Yeah, of course not.
Casey:
But I did see a photograph of somebody sitting next to the new Xbox, and it looked like a humongous version of the final Airport Express, you know, like the cylinder.
Casey:
It actually looked like the way I envisioned the Mighty Black Stump.
John:
yeah like uh it's like vertical it's like a vertical shoebox or a vertical you know two two cute as people said two game cubes stacked on top of each other if you can envision that i thought you might have seen it because uh mike hurley's new co-host for one of his new podcasts it was one of the people who got to go to microsoft austin evans got to go there they did microsoft did a cool thing pr wise it would be really cool if apple ever did this so you know this is way early to be showing this stuff but microsoft like look we're going to show you the hardware it's not final hardware this thing is coming out six months from now or whatever but it's
John:
basically final and here are all the pieces and we'll have all the hardware people explain to you here's where we did the cooling this way it's like a chimney cooler pulls in air from the bottom it shoves it out the top very much like the uh the trash can uh macros only got one fan and one big honking fan at the top again much like the trash can mac pro a lot of similarities there only the only difference is they don't need to shove any different internals to this case they can make a totally new case when they make a new console but anyway they had all the parts there and they wanted everyone who got to go through this thing to get the feel of how it goes together
John:
Actually, it goes together with fasteners of some kind, I'm assuming.
John:
But what they did was they embedded these tiny, powerful magnets in every part of the thing so that the people who were there could actually, quote, unquote, assemble it, take the two logic board things and connect them to this internal metal thing, take the heat sink and put it on top, take the power supply and put it in, take it, you know.
John:
And all the pieces would magnet together, much like Apple's smart cases and all that other stuff.
John:
Like, so it's impossible to put it in the wrong place, but you also don't have to use fasteners.
John:
Such a clever idea.
John:
Everybody, you know, I saw videos from lots of people in my various YouTube subscriptions who went through this process.
John:
And it was great.
John:
People got to build the new Xbox themselves.
John:
Half of them didn't seem to even know or realize that the thing doesn't actually magnetically stick together.
John:
They're going to use screws in the real thing, right?
John:
This is just for you so that you can't...
John:
So that you can't mess it up and you can't put it on the wrong way and it'll just snap into place.
John:
Very clever hardware design.
John:
Yeah, it is a big vertical thing.
John:
And there were some questions of like, how do you fit this under your TV?
John:
Well, the first answer is you can lay it on its side.
John:
But even laying on its side, it's a very tall console.
John:
It's more like two consoles stacking top of each other.
John:
They did some cool stuff where they...
John:
made it exactly the same height to the millimeter as the previous Xbox standing on its edge.
John:
So if you put them right next to each other, they have the same texture of plastic, they're the same color, and they're exactly the same height, which is very nice.
John:
It's a good family resemblance there.
John:
It has an optical drive in it.
John:
This is a thing we already knew.
John:
But anyway, seeing the design, you're like, wow, we're really using a lot of space for that optical drive whose sole purpose is to get the bits off of it and shove it in there.
John:
As we all do already, talked about this with the PS5,
John:
uh solid state storage for everything the new xbox has a one terabyte ssd which is pretty impressive a fast one terabyte ssd uh and it also has an expansion slot in the back of this proprietary uh thing where you can shove in another one terabyte ssd and a little card it's some proprietary connector which people are angry about and i kind of understand that and who knows how much they'll cost but
John:
If you want a second terabyte, you can just shove this little cartridge in the back.
John:
And of course, I'm sure they'll have two terabyte ones or three terabyte ones if they need them or if they can stand the expense.
John:
They partnered with Seagate to do that.
John:
It's just like a little metal card that is very hefty and the metal is for like a partial heat sink.
John:
So yeah, SSDs for everything.
John:
The PS5 had a tech presentation today.
John:
I didn't get to see all of it.
John:
I got to see most of it.
John:
It's more in-depth, and they didn't invite a bunch of people to come take the thing apart.
John:
In fact, I'm pretty sure no one still knows what the PS5 looks like.
John:
If they show it at the end of the video, I haven't seen it yet, so no spoilers, but by the time you listen to this, I will have seen the rest of the video.
John:
Sony's already had a bunch of presentations touting the speed of their SSD.
John:
This was a much more in-depth one explaining exactly how
John:
They've tailored the system for games.
John:
But forget about all the game stuff aside.
John:
Their SSD, they're saying it gets five and a half gigabytes per second, which is faster than the SSD in my Mac Pro, which is not that impressive because you can buy like an aftermarket SSD and shove it in here.
John:
And it's also faster than the SSD in my Mac Pro.
John:
But still, five and a half gigabytes per second is fast.
John:
uh sony i was gonna say cheaped out but they had this whole explanation a very apple like explanation of the exact sizes of their ssd given the speed that they wanted to get and the chips available to them it turns out that 825 gigabytes or whatever was the right size for the ssd basically they had to explain why isn't a terabyte xbox has a terabyte why don't you have a terabyte and it's like look this is how the chips worked out uh and the xbox does some weird stuff with chips as well like they have some high speed ram and some slow speed ram and
John:
They divvy it up.
John:
Anyway, I find the architecture of these machines endlessly fascinating because they're so much more interesting and exotic and do weird, clever things for the purposes of running games.
John:
If anyone looks at these things and says, oh, it's just like a PC in a weird case.
John:
Not at all.
John:
I would encourage everybody to... I guess we'll link to the Austin Evans thing on the Xbox and we'll link to the Sony presentation on the PS5 if you are at all interested in
John:
this kind of hardware nerdery even if you don't know or care anything about game consoles you should check these things out because it's super cool aren't you glad you know all that now i feel so much better
Marco:
Oh, crap.
Marco:
We never mentioned the price.
Marco:
It's $300.
Marco:
What's $300?
Marco:
Oh, the keyboard.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, $350 for the big one, right?
Casey:
Or something like that.
John:
That cracks me up.
John:
It's so much bigger.
John:
It's $50 more, obviously.
John:
Duh.
John:
Yeah, I love that.
Marco:
It's $50 more.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Because it is.
Marco:
Bigger.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There's no reason why.
Marco:
Just because it is.
Marco:
You pay by square inch.
Marco:
Everyone knows that.