Disk Light Observer Effect
Marco:
Want me to put more bad music on?
John:
I have lots to choose from.
Casey:
Actually, I have nothing to complain about anymore.
Casey:
That music was fantastic.
John:
Oh, yeah?
John:
I have something to complain about.
John:
It was like turning on the radio, like top 40 radio in the 90s.
John:
That's not an attractive thing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So how about that iPad Pro?
John:
Yeah, I put that in there just to make a second run at this because after the last show where we talked about this in the after show and hearing it back, I'm not sure I successfully communicate what I was trying to say.
John:
It was when I listened to myself, I don't think if I didn't already know what I was thinking, I would have understood myself.
John:
So I thought I'd start by asking you two to see if you can summarize what I was trying to say about the iPad Pro.
John:
And then when you fail to say what is in my head, I will try to clarify.
Ha ha ha!
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Dude, that happened like a week ago.
Casey:
I don't remember what you said.
Casey:
Come on.
John:
I have some idea.
John:
Give it a shot.
John:
You were asking, why does anyone ever want an iPad Pro?
John:
And I tried to give you the reason why I think a larger, more capable iPad is an inevitable thing that will happen someday.
John:
I tried to explain why.
Marco:
I think your reasoning for why it had to be larger was that as the OS gets more advanced and allows more advanced types of usage, that you will have to at some point have some kind of multiple window kind of arrangement or the possibility for multiple windows, whether it's split or whether it's like a fixed setup or a flexible setup.
Marco:
It was mainly about...
Marco:
It has to get bigger because it will get more advanced and more advanced needs more window space.
Marco:
Was that the gist?
John:
That was like the secondary thing we ended up talking about.
John:
But the main thing, I think I'll take another shot at it here.
John:
The main thing I was trying to get at was what I have in the show notes here, but it's the better for people metric.
John:
And we got back to it.
John:
We circled around back to it a little bit at the end.
John:
But I was thinking of it in terms of like...
John:
In the days of the DOS days before the graphical user interface, when the graphical user interface came along, it was clear that GUIs are better for people.
John:
Meaning that, yeah, the command line with Unix and DOS and all the things that preceded it is good and powerful and you can get stuff done and a lot of people can use it.
John:
But overall, you look at the GUI, you look at the command line, you say...
John:
The GUI is better for people to use.
John:
More people are going to be able to successfully use a computer with the GUI.
John:
It's more pleasant to use.
John:
It's, like, easier.
John:
And maybe you guys didn't live through this because you don't remember the debates.
John:
But there were real debates about whether this whole GUI thing is a useful idea at all or whether it's just some silly diversion.
John:
What do you mean we didn't live through this?
John:
I lived through this.
John:
Well, you were very young.
John:
Maybe you were still fighting, though.
John:
We were alive.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
You were alive.
Marco:
We were also in preschool.
Casey:
Well, no, that's not true.
Casey:
I mean, well, 1984.
Casey:
Well, no, in 1984, we were barely human.
Casey:
But I mean, if you consider that both of us were were PC guys, you know, we were around or at least I was using computers before Windows had really become a thing.
Casey:
And I remember using Windows 3.1 and thinking it was a piece of crap because, well, it was a piece of crap.
Casey:
And I remember slinging auto exec bat files like you couldn't even imagine and config sys files to figure out for which game I needed a mouse and which didn't and so on and so forth.
Casey:
We don't need to turn this into another retro podcast.
Casey:
I'm just saying I was around for the transition in my own way, maybe not on a industry level, but on a personal level.
John:
When you were when you were that age, though, you probably weren't thinking about what the GUI means for the future of the industry, you know, like that on that type of level.
John:
The people who were writing articles and magazines about whether this was a good idea or not.
John:
But in hindsight, it's so clear.
John:
GUIs are better for people.
John:
Right.
John:
And there was a big debate about it and it took a long time.
John:
And eventually all computers, all computers are GUIs.
John:
No, no, they're not.
John:
I've got a command line on my Mac.
John:
It's like, no, the GUI, you know, the GUI took over because it's better for people to use.
John:
Right.
John:
ios i think of in relation to the regular windows mouse pointer menus wimp you know type interface i think of ios as not as big a step from a command line to the gui certainly not but as another sort of discontinuity in that type of thing ios and that type of touch interface is better for people than having a mouse and windows and menu bars and right clicking and docs and you know task bars and all the stuff that regular windows type interfaces or mac type interfaces uh use today uh
John:
iOS is better for people.
John:
And you see it yourself and like how much more willing people are to use iPads and iPhones and all these technology devices that people use that same people would be much more intimidated by like a quote unquote real computer with a GUI.
John:
And again, doesn't mean that the traditional Windows menu pointer interface is going away.
John:
Or that, you know, like we still have the command line today.
John:
We'll have GUIs, you know, for a similar period of time.
John:
But in general, the iOS interface, touch interfaces are better for people, right?
John:
And when I see that, that makes me think there's no fighting against the interface that's better for people.
John:
Like it will eventually become the most common way that people use computers, if it isn't already, if you can't like smartphones as computers and everything, right?
John:
And when I see that, I think...
John:
uh it can't be the thing that most people use for computing and remain as limited as it is now because otherwise you know how many people today continue to have to use computers because they can't get what they want to get done on this new thing
John:
And so my logic is the thing that's better for people to use is here.
John:
It's not quite good enough or capable enough to subsume enough of the functionality of other things.
John:
Just like when, you know, Windows 3.1 sucked, you couldn't do it, you know, anything, things that you can do on DOS or Unix command line were not even close to being possible on a GUI.
John:
But eventually the GUI became good enough and subsumed enough of the functionality of the command line that the command line was relegated to a very small window in the same operating system, you know.
John:
it's there it's here we can use it when we want to it's important for developers and stuff like that but a regular person who buys a mac does not use the command line and someday that'll be a true of ios a regular person who buys an ios device doesn't have to use a windows mouse pointer gui so it's just that simple logical progression if that's going to be the progression it's silly to think that this next thing that's better for people won't have to become more capable and take on the mantle of the thing that it's replacing in some respects
John:
That's what I was trying to get at.
John:
And you can disagree with it.
John:
You can say, well, I don't think iOS is better enough, or I don't think iOS is really better for people, or I think iOS will not have to take on any of the capabilities of the Mac, and the Mac will stay exactly the way it is, and iOS will just go off into the future, and it does enough for people as it is.
John:
But I see all the people who use a Mac every day, and I'm like, that's not – the number of people who use a command line every day is really small.
John:
The number of people who use a Mac every day is humongous.
John:
Those people will want to move to the thing that's better for people to the iOS style touch interface.
John:
Eventually, uh, if that device becomes capable enough for them to do their work on it, how many of those people can you bring along?
John:
How many people have to be stuck using a Mac?
John:
Well, it's probably similar to the proportion of people who are stuck using command line.
John:
I use a command line every day, certain professions.
John:
And, uh,
John:
context will require the use of a plain old GUI the same way they require the use of a command line today but there's tons and tons more people who use a Mac who never use a command line and those people will be using something like a tablet type form factor that's much bigger and more capable many years in the future when it becomes possible to do so so let me play devil's advocate for a second
Marco:
So everything you just said, which sounds reasonable, but everything you just said is based upon an implied or stated assumption that the way that we have touch interfaces and tablets now is better for people than the desktop and Windows and everything else.
Marco:
What if that's not the case?
Marco:
So here's some things to consider.
Marco:
So first of all, there's a few things about it that are worse.
Marco:
I think we can pretty much all look around regular people and us and we can see that text input is definitely worse on tablets than on laptops.
John:
I don't include that at all because there's no reason that you wouldn't have a hardware keyboard.
John:
What I'm talking about mainly is a menu bar, windows with little window widgets on, sliding them around on the screen, clicking and right-clicking, having a mouse instead of a finger.
John:
All of that is what I'm getting at.
John:
The text input is an artifact of the form factor.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like the small tablet that you expect to carry with you versus something that would sit at your desk.
John:
And I'm not saying people are going to have tablets and be walking around with them.
John:
If you are in design or some field where you're going to be using this future thing, I envision you having something as big as your monitor, but like laid down like on an architect's drafting table with like a keyboard in front of it or something so that you can get your work done in that context.
Marco:
Well, okay.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Let's say this comes true.
Marco:
Let's say you have a keyboard.
Marco:
The text input is solved for you.
Marco:
You have easy ways to reach the interface from the keyboard in some kind of relatively ergonomic way.
Marco:
So it wouldn't be like a tablet on a stand and having to reach your hand up and touch the screen constantly.
Marco:
So you have to address that somehow, some kind of precision pointing of some sort, more precision than a finger.
Marco:
Whether that's a pen, whether it's a mouse, whether it's a touchpad kind of thing, whether it's just a giant touch screen so the touch targets are small enough, relatively speaking, that they can be precise, who knows.
John:
It would have to be a stylus, I would imagine, because in creative fields, people are already using styluses, so that's not even that big of a change.
Marco:
And I actually enjoy the experience of using a pen, although I don't use one regularly because I enjoy a mouse more.
Marco:
But I think a stylus is a perfectly fine solution to that out of everything that we have.
Marco:
So let's say you've added all this.
Marco:
You have...
Marco:
advanced ways for people to get more work done.
Marco:
What if the reason why... There's this idea out there in people's heads that the iPad and everything is easier for people.
Marco:
What if the reason why is because it can't support all that stuff?
Marco:
It can't do complicated workflows and much multitasking to speak of and all this other stuff.
Marco:
And then what if the process of adding those things to enable people to, quote, get more work done on iOS...
Marco:
makes it more like traditional PCs and therefore removes that whole advantage that it supposedly had by being so much easier?
Marco:
And is it possible to add all those things without having that side effect?
Marco:
And I'm not sure it is.
John:
It's the closeness of, you know, I was saying the gap between the GUI and the Mac is huge, and the gap between the Mac and iOS is much smaller, but I still think it's significant enough.
John:
And in the case of the, you know, the command line to the GUI,
John:
it was almost not possible to bring over enough command line stuff to negate the advantage of the GUI.
John:
I mean, Windows tried by basing it on DOS and by having you boot into DOS and having, having so many things still involving DOS and having DOS underpin the thing for so long and having it in your face and exposed to you.
John:
Uh, but that wasn't enough to kill the GUI.
John:
Uh,
John:
If you wanted to kill iOS, you could do that by bringing over all the bad things from the Mac.
John:
But I think that you don't need to bring over too many complexities from the Mac to make iOS more capable.
John:
And I don't think anyone would make the crazy mistake of bringing over the worst things about the Mac.
John:
I don't think anyone would ever say, I've got an idea.
John:
Why don't we have a bunch of windows on our iPad screen with tiny little widgets in the corner?
John:
Because if you've ever seen anyone deal with a bunch of overlapping windows, it's just too much.
John:
Why don't we bring over the file system?
John:
Because we know how well people deal with navigating through folders and files.
John:
Why don't we just have a big file system that we expose on the iPad?
John:
Again, I don't think that would ruin it.
John:
You're right.
John:
But I don't think anyone would do that.
John:
Or at least I don't think Apple would do it.
John:
Maybe Android would do it.
John:
Maybe they already have it enough about Android.
John:
It's, it is possible to ruin it because it is close enough.
John:
It's a close enough neighbor.
John:
It's not some like a big, you know, or for example, bring over a mouse pointer and make you use a mouse pointer for everything.
John:
Like, and then all of a sudden things aren't responsive to touch controls.
John:
It's like, Oh, well it's hard to use this app because they expect you to have a mouse pointer to work with the little window widgets or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
I don't think that Apple, at least, would be dumb enough to bring over this.
John:
And if anything, Apple has been very reticent to bring over any of the more powerful things.
John:
And they're bringing over very, very slowly.
John:
And there's just no way they would bring over those horrible things.
John:
And then most of the horrible things I'm thinking about are things people don't want to deal with.
John:
I mean, installing printer drivers is like a thing from the ancient world.
John:
But Apple kind of already addressed that with AirPrint, saying we're not doing the printer driver thing anymore.
John:
It's your problem.
John:
We're going to tell you how we're going to speak.
John:
You better deal with it.
John:
which is one way to get rid of printer drivers.
John:
And the file system, I don't think Apple's going to be bringing that back.
John:
Dealing with apps the old way, I don't think that's coming back.
John:
I think the new way is better.
John:
Dealing with Windows, Apple has to come up with something, but I don't think they would bring over plain old Windows because that would be pretty stupid.
John:
So it's possible to ruin it, perhaps, unlike it is in the GUI's case, from the GUI command line, but I think it's unlikely that they'll ruin it.
John:
And as I said last show, the other alternative is rather than making
John:
iOS more capable, why don't you make the Mac simpler?
John:
And I think it's easier to make iOS more capable than it is to make the Mac simpler, especially since a lot of the complexities the Mac have to live on because some people will always need them the same way some people will always need the command line.
Casey:
Well, but they are making the Mac simpler.
Casey:
I mean, isn't that what things like Gatekeeper and Launch Center Pad thing, whatever you call it, isn't that what that's all about?
John:
But you can't get rid of the overlapping windows.
Casey:
Well, you can run an app full screen.
John:
Yeah, but that just adds complexity, as we talked about last time.
John:
Now you have yet another mode that you have to worry about.
John:
If you've seen people deal with Windows, adding full screen doesn't help them because now they're trapped in some mode they don't understand.
John:
It's very difficult to take away complexity from the Mac.
John:
to even get it close to the level of friendliness that iOS has.
John:
Whereas if you add capabilities to iOS, it can remain friendly to the people who don't want those advanced abilities in the same way that if you don't want to enable the multitasking gestures, that doesn't bother any people.
John:
If you don't know how to get to the multitasking switcher, you can just hit the home button and go back to the home screen every time.
John:
It still works for you in that simple mode.
John:
They've added capability without adding complexity.
John:
I'm thinking long-term.
John:
This gets tied up in... That's the other thing I think people... It gets tied up in, like, will Apple announce an iPad with Pro at the end of its name this year, and it'll be bigger?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Who cares?
John:
It's not what I'm talking about.
John:
I'm not talking about an upcoming imminent product or...
John:
Apple's plans for the next year or two or what iOS 8 is going to be.
John:
I'm thinking long term.
John:
And you're right, Marco.
John:
The entire thing is based on the premise that iOS is better for people.
John:
And it's inevitable that many, many more people who currently can't use iOS or anything like iOS to do their job will have to be served by this better thing.
John:
That's the tide that's coming because...
John:
If there's a thing out there that's better for people and people use it all the time, and I think most people would agree that using their phone or their iPad is better, they'll want to use that to do more stuff.
John:
And if they can't, they'll want more capability out of it.
Marco:
Another assumption that might be worth questioning is whether iOS's simplicity today is overall easier for people.
Marco:
Because, you know, as we discussed last episode with the storage limits and when people hit their storage limits and it's kind of crappy to figure out where that's going and how to recover from that...
Marco:
iOS's simplicity a lot of times will create the question in people's minds of, how do I do this?
Marco:
Or how do I fix this limitation?
Marco:
And a lot of times the answer is you can't.
Marco:
Or it's so complicated that it's not even worth doing.
Marco:
Like simple things that on a computer might be accomplished by drag and drop or by hitting the open button.
Marco:
dialogue button in an app to open a file from somewhere else from some other app.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
Attaching files to emails.
Marco:
Stuff that people generally know how to do on computers after not that much usage.
Marco:
A lot of those kinds of things are still...
Marco:
even more complicated on iOS than they are on a computer because of its design and because of its limitations.
John:
You think more people would be more successful at attaching a file to an email using a Mac than they would doing that same thing in iOS?
Marco:
Definitely.
Marco:
No question.
John:
No, I don't think that's the case.
Marco:
Because in iOS, you can't do it from the email.
John:
Yeah, but I don't know if that's the way people think about it.
John:
Like, just because that's the way it works in desktop mail application, we're used to it.
John:
You know, I think people are just as likely to, you know, holding down your finger on a picture is not great.
John:
But I think they're just as likely to figure out the holding down your finger on a picture or hitting the little share icon.
John:
I mean, there's still, it's not completely intuitive, but there, I think the dress is likely to come to it from that direction.
John:
And the main problem with attaching an email on the Mac is drag and drop, forget it.
John:
People doesn't even occur to people that you can drag a little picture onto the, I just, that's, I think that's outside the realm of most people's experience, but they do know how to click the little paperclip icon.
John:
And when they click the little paperclip icon in whatever their mail application is, they get an open save dialog box.
John:
And then you're just off in the weeds and it's like 50-50 whether anyone's going to know what the hell to do with that.
John:
And they'll just maybe hope that they know how to click on the thing that takes them to their desktop and they'll find the file on their desktop, which is where all their files are because it's the one place in the file system they can use.
John:
The running out of space, I think, is another thing where it's like there are limits.
John:
There are hardware limits to any piece of hardware.
John:
And when you run into those limits, at that point,
John:
you like that's when the reality of the computer smacks the user in the face and you can't do anything to protect them from you don't have infinite space on your device maybe some super clever cloud thing in the in the future could make it appear as if you have infinite space but you know you don't have infinite like it's kind of like how multitasking makes it seem like you have infinite memory they're trying to you know they're never going to say oh you're out of memory please quit some applications so you can launch some more well
John:
The combination of virtual memory and the expunging stuff is an iOS simplification that makes people not have to worry about whether an application is running or not, or at least try to worry less about it.
John:
When you run out of space, have you ever seen anyone run out of space on a Mac?
John:
First of all, the Mac OS X behaves very, very badly when you're out of disk space, extremely badly.
John:
Freaky things happen.
John:
It's very easy to get into a situation where the OS can't create another swap file and it seems like your entire OS is frozen.
John:
And you get those warning dialog boxes before that the OS will warn you, oh, we're running out of space.
John:
What do people do about that?
John:
Like best case scenario, they randomly start trying to drag things to the trash.
John:
That's best case.
John:
And if you've seen people, this library folder, I don't need that, do I?
John:
Like, that's the way they made it invisible.
John:
Like, God forbid they get into that library folder and start going to their preferences folder.
John:
Like, I don't understand what this is.
John:
I'm throwing that out.
John:
Application support?
John:
My applications don't need any support.
John:
uh that's that's best case at least ios protects them from doing that but you run those hardware limits that's that's one of the hardest problems what do i do when all of the space for stuff is filled with stuff whether that be memory or flash space or whatever
Casey:
You know, to go back a step, I almost think that the attachment thing is a example of the iPad or I guess I should say iOS in general getting a little more strong as a poor choice of words, a little better for power users.
Casey:
And that's because Marco had said, well, there's no way to attach something from an email.
Casey:
And you actually can.
Casey:
If you get the little context menu up – and there may be a different term for that on iOS – but the little black pop-up menu, if you go like 35 levels deep in that past bold italics underline and all that –
Casey:
You could actually insert picture or video, I believe is the terminology used.
Marco:
Wait, really?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
I know you could copy and paste, but there's actually like a button there to proactively do that?
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
I didn't know that.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And that only came in the last one or two versions of iOS.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly when it was.
John:
Don't you think people who grew up on smartphones, though, it's more natural for them to start from the picture that they want to send to somebody and then say, okay, send this picture to Sue instead of start from the email application, compose a message to Sue and then insert the picture?
John:
That's totally a desktop computer user's mindset, I think.
Casey:
It absolutely is.
Casey:
And as someone who grew up on a desktop computer, that is what – up until whenever it was in iOS that they added this feature –
Casey:
Every time I wanted to send a picture to someone, I'm just hardwired to start an email, send it to Aaron, let's say, and then, ah, crap, I got to start from photos.
Casey:
And then I got to leave my email, start from photos, and then I've lost my email that I've written unless I copy and paste, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And so once I discovered that you can actually kick off the picture and video chooser from within an email, that actually helped me a lot because I'm so hardwired.
Casey:
That's my internal mental workflow is to start the email and then go get the attachment.
John:
I think the most likely scenario for what I just described about the iPad Pro not coming to pass is that it turns out that for the people who are currently using Macs and Mac-like systems to get their work done, the advantages of iOS are not compelling enough to make them leave behind all the things that annoy them.
John:
that they would prefer to use iOS.
John:
They do prefer sitting on the couch with their iPad and browsing through the web in their off time or whatever.
John:
But all of the things that annoy them about the Mac and multiple windows and dealing with multiple applications and dealing with little fidgety things that you don't have to deal with in iOS don't annoy them enough to be willing to put up with what is the inevitable transition period when iOS is not quite capable enough.
John:
And there's going to be that middle period where
John:
Like, who's going to be the first person to try to get their work done in iOS?
John:
And you kind of see it now with the people bravely trying to use an iPad when they should just be using a MacBook Air just for the novelty factor of it.
John:
But that's on a very small scale.
John:
On a larger scale, you need to get the people who are using their computers, like they did for the GUI, people using their computers for real work.
John:
There were some people who had to say, I'm actually going to try this Windows thing or this Mac thing.
John:
even though I'm not even sure how I'm going to be able to get my job done because I do everything in, you know, VisiCalc and VisiCalc isn't available and I'll try this new Excel thing and maybe that'll work out.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
So that transition period could prevent iOS type interfaces from taking the mantle of the personal computer in our lifetime.
John:
That I think is the most likely scenario for not happening.
Casey:
You know, I can't help but wonder if the three of us are participating in one long troll of the TG in this topic.
John:
He's like an outlier, I would say.
John:
If you were like, make your living write about technology.
John:
Those are the people who keep trying to do it.
John:
Like, I'll see what it's like to do my work.
John:
Do I need a laptop?
John:
I'm going to leave the house without a laptop.
John:
and just take my iPad and see how it goes.
John:
And we're all trying that experiment to varying degrees.
John:
If you have a laptop and an iPad, sometimes you might just take the iPad to see how that goes and you learn whether it works for you or not and why it doesn't or does.
John:
But I'm thinking of all the people who just spend all day at work in front of a computer and that computer is not running iOS or Android.
John:
It's running Windows or OS X. Right.
Casey:
Hey, Marco, what's cool these days?
Marco:
We got some new ones this week.
Marco:
Our first sponsor is HelpSpot.
Marco:
Go to helpspot.com slash ATP.
Marco:
So if you're still using email clients for customer support, you're probably losing track of important tickets.
Marco:
Or you're trying to do these weird hacks like using Mark as unread to keep something new because you haven't responded to it yet.
Marco:
Or you're IMing your coworkers to see who's working on what message in the big inbox.
Marco:
This is all really, that doesn't scale very well.
Marco:
It's time for you to get organized with HelpSpot, of course.
Marco:
So most help desk apps try to be all things to all people.
Marco:
They pile on tons of features, tons of all these complicated things.
Marco:
HelpSpot is focused.
Marco:
It deals only with customer inquiries and self-serve knowledge bases.
Marco:
There's no crazy asset management systems or API integrations with your account systems or other unnecessary features to get in your way or require complex integrations.
Marco:
Helpdesk software is usually really expensive.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
You know, I have to say that somebody in the chat had already disappeared.
Casey:
Oh, that's Sulpene?
Casey:
I don't know, whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, they said Max will be armed within the next five years.
Casey:
It's logically next.
Casey:
And as someone who relies on a...
Casey:
windows vm in order to get their job done on a mac i surely hope not or i hope that i switch my career into a different into a different segment because if unless i'm missing something if max go arm that's going to make virtualizing x86 really stinky just like it used to be before max were intel
John:
Oh, ARM just came out with their new server platform, and they're sort of defining the platform for ARM in the data center and trying to make a common platform for ARM-style, you know, personal computers, more or less.
John:
I don't think that, you know, if you wait long enough, in theory, if the ARM...
John:
destroys everything comes to pass then the mac could be the last thing to switch to arm and by that point everything is running arm and the data says running arm and all your servers are running arm and personal computers running on then max running arm so then you'd be virtualizing like linux on arm and windows on arm inside your virtual machine on arm and everything would work out but yeah you don't want to be the first one to go there and have everybody else still on x86 and then you you lose your ability to do that virtualization right
John:
I mean, I think, well, what do I virtualize?
John:
Well, I virtualize Windows because I have to for stupid work things because they still use Windows.
John:
And that is actually a legitimate concern about the future of computing because Apple doesn't want that business, the business being selling your company their mail server and stuff.
John:
Google kind of wants it.
John:
They want them to use Google Apps, but it's such a difference between having your own software than doing everything through the cloud, especially Google's cloud.
John:
that i'm not even sure that's a good fit so if google isn't a good fit for that business and apple doesn't want that business who gets that business and if the answer is microsoft keeps it forever then yeah maybe we'll forever be stuck running windows in a vm so we can use our works mail thing because i don't know
Casey:
Yeah, but that would be so much slower, I've got to imagine.
Casey:
I remember, even as a non-Mac person, I remember many, many, many years ago that you could get some sort of card that was basically a PC on an expansion card, and you could virtualize within OS 7, 8, 9, I don't even know.
John:
uh by using this pc on an expansion card you would know more about this do you know what i'm thinking of yep they can't they're like a 486 on a card that you they have them for the mac lc even so you could run like windows software on your education computers inside your school yeah they i know the cards you're talking about the thing the better analogy for you is like virtual pc which was you would emulate x86 on the power pc and it would barely sort of run but it was super slow and that's that's why my lovely mac pro is the dream machine it runs everything natively yeah unix mac and windows
Marco:
One of the reasons why the Intel switch was so easy for Mac owners, for the most part, is because switching to Intel came with a massive performance boost also.
Marco:
And so when combined with the awesome emulation by Rosetta, it was almost penalty-free to emulate stuff on Intel that was made for PowerPC.
Marco:
If we went to ARM, though...
Marco:
We wouldn't have that kind of headroom in our likelihood.
Marco:
We would probably be taking a step down in CPU performance at that point.
Marco:
And so it would be really inconvenient to have an architecture change that did not come with a giant performance boost also, where you'd have to emulate this stuff to some degree if you wanted to run it, and it would not be pretty.
John:
If you wanted the big boost, the reason Apple got the big boost for going x86 is two things.
John:
One, their past CPU vendor stopped making them good CPUs.
John:
So they were stuck with the GeForce and the PowerBooks because IBM wouldn't make anything better to go in there.
John:
And even on the G5, IBM's...
John:
you know what well steve said they were going to give us three gigahertz in a year or whatever whether ibm said that or not they sure as hell didn't and we were stuck with uh the g5 for way too long and it wasn't improving better so you have to have the cpu you're on stagnate and it doesn't seem like that's going to happen if we stay on x86 that like that will there be a period when x86 stagnates um doesn't seem like that's anywhere in near future and the second thing is not only did the cpu apples on stagnate the cpu they moved to
John:
got out of a rut because the cpu they were going to move to was like in the netburst architecture that was crap and apple was sold on x86 by by intel showing them look here's the core architecture and trust us it's going to be awesome and lo and behold the core architecture was awesome so that's a combination of two factors that almost certainly is not going to exist again where the cpu apple is using stagnates and gets crappy and the cpu they're going to jump to makes a huge leap over where it was because
John:
Because it's not like Apple switched from the awesome newly introduced PowerPC G5 to the Pentium 4.
John:
That would not have given them a giant boost in performance.
John:
The G5 was reasonably competitive with its contemporaries.
John:
But when they did make the switch, you're right, they were able to hide the Rosetta thing underneath the carpet of this two-sided advantage to make it so that they could do PowerPC software emulated at a reasonable speed.
Casey:
So let me ask you both, and I have a feeling that this is you two are a poor audience for this question, but would you trade a somewhat significant hit in performance, especially when virtualized?
Casey:
Let's assume that non-virtualized performance is roughly on par, but virtualized performance is crummy.
Casey:
Would you trade that in favor of dramatically improved battery life?
Casey:
And I'm making this up, but ARM tends to be a little bit more power frugal.
Casey:
So let's say that a phantom MacBook Air that runs on ARM has twice the battery life of whatever the modern Intel MacBook Air's battery life is.
John:
So 30 hours instead of 15?
Casey:
Well, no, seriously.
Casey:
I mean, let's just suppose as a fun thought experiment, would you make that trade even if Windows virtualization or anything, you know, x86 virtualization is crummy?
Casey:
I mean, let's start with you, John.
John:
I don't think that – that's a hypothetical scenario that would never come to pass because I don't believe that ARM can equal the performance of Intel and offer double the power efficiency.
Casey:
And that's fair.
John:
And even if ARM was fabbed by Intel, I don't think it would do that.
John:
It's not as if Intel has an easy doubling of –
John:
you know it's like x86 is worth uh it's killing your performance so you get twice the performance the overhead of x86 as crummy as it is is not you know a 50 reduction so i don't think that would ever happen uh and i also think that intel is already good enough that like once you get your battery life into the long enough to last for the entire waking time of a human 15 hour battery life on a macbook air granted they're not retina yet and it's going to take a hit when they grow retina but
John:
uh i think intel is already in the ballpark so i don't think they can that that will ever be offered and if they did offer it i personally wouldn't take it because i would my calculus would be battery life is already all day long enough and it's only going to get better by small increments i give me the speed please you know what i'm like speed and i want the fastest thing so i would not personally take that and i also don't think they could ever offer that and that's fair what about you marco
Marco:
Well, first, I think it's hilarious that you're asking this to two people who not only want speed but hardly ever use laptops.
Casey:
That's exactly why I knew this audience was not the right audience.
Casey:
But nevertheless, indulge me.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So, I mean, for me, I mostly agree with John.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
I wouldn't be that excited about such a product because I'm not currently having battery life laptop issues.
Marco:
The modern laptops, especially if I'm going to go buy a new one, the new ones have even better battery life than the ones I've had before.
Marco:
Even the new Intel ones...
Marco:
are really just awesome, and they're just only going to get better as we go through more process shrinks and more circuit shut-off technology steps and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's only going to get better.
Marco:
It's not really a problem that I have.
Marco:
Already, I have...
Marco:
an awesome laptop that's two years old or a year and a half old that is awesome and has great battery life and it's never a problem for me.
Marco:
I never have not enough battery life on my laptop for what I need when I am using it full time.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That's not really for me.
Marco:
I think you can maybe judge the market for such a thing by how many people are walking around all day with dead MacBook Air batteries, basically.
Marco:
Because the MacBook Air, especially the 11-inch, where there's not nearly enough room in there for a big battery, so...
Marco:
I think if you're walking around with an 11-inch MacBook Air and your battery is always at 5% and dying and you've got to stop using your computer to plug it in for a while, then you're the market for this sort of thing because you actually really need that.
Marco:
You're pushing the boundaries.
Marco:
But as the boundary keeps getting expanded to have 6-hour battery life, 8-hour battery life, 12-hour battery life, we keep pushing this forward by pretty impressive margins over the last few years.
Marco:
So I think the need...
Marco:
for making a dramatic battery life improvement on a laptop is shrinking.
Marco:
Certainly you can imagine some uses for it, but I don't think it's a mass market use anymore.
John:
For the 11-inch air, I think if you had Broadwell and a low-temperature polysilicon or whatever that is, the more energy-efficient LCD, Broadwell plus a better LCD would give you acceptable battery life.
John:
You'd be up to the point where I don't think many people will be walking around with a dead battery in their 11-inch air anymore.
John:
And that's like next generation, you know.
John:
a year or two from now it's not like way over the horizon so the window for when arm would make any sort of sense for battery purposes seems to be closing but so we should ask you casey you're the laptop guy would you make the trade you just offered uh it depends on whether or not i'm still using windows almost exclusively for my job and
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My work MacBook Pro, like I said, other than moving it to and from home, I generally speaking just treat it as a desktop.
Casey:
And so it's kind of hypocritical of me to say that, yes, I'd love tremendously more battery life, but also consider that this is a pre-Retina 2011 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
So I only get three, maybe four hours tops of battery life as it is.
Casey:
And it has dual GPUs.
Casey:
So anytime I have VMware Fusion running,
Casey:
That absolutely toasts my battery.
Casey:
So I'm coming from a place of soreness, if that makes sense.
Casey:
But I would make that trade if I didn't need to worry about virtualization and the performance penalty was not absolutely egregious.
Casey:
I would love to have a laptop wherein I didn't need to worry about the battery ever.
John:
You just need to buy a new laptop and you'll have that.
Marco:
The current, especially like the retinas, have insane battery life.
Casey:
I know they do, and we're issuing those at work now, but we're on a three-year cycle, I think, and I'm on year one and a half.
Marco:
Oh, who cares?
Marco:
You're famous.
Marco:
You can get one, but you can get one faster than that.
Marco:
You are Casey Liss.
Marco:
Uh-huh, something like that.
John:
I've heard that our work is on an 18-month cycle, and my Mac on my desk is like five years old.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Can you maybe trade that credit for Casey?
John:
No, I'm saving that credit to trade up to a fancy iMac when the time comes, but I'm not ready to give it up yet.
Casey:
Yeah, but it's funny because I upgraded my iPad situation from a third-gen Retina full-size iPad to a Retina iPad Mini.
Casey:
And I don't know if I – I wouldn't say I have a lemon, but I don't know if it's just my particular iPad Mini.
Casey:
But I feel like the battery life is not nearly as good as the Retina iPad and certainly not as good as my original iPad.
Casey:
And I find that to be really frustrating.
Casey:
And this is the world's biggest first-person problem – or first-world problem.
Casey:
First-world problem.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like I'm charging my iPad a lot more these days.
Casey:
And it kind of puts this fear in me.
Casey:
It's the same reason I don't put the battery percentage on my phone because I know if I see it drop 2%, I'm going to start stressing about it.
Casey:
Come to think of it, I should turn it off on my iPad.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I feel like I'm getting to the same point with my iPad as I do with my computer where if I'm without an outlet for more than a couple hours, I start freaking out.
Casey:
And I bring this up because even what is probably a very small difference in battery life in this new iPad is
Casey:
has created an unreasonable amount of stress in my world, which probably says a lot about me as a person.
Casey:
But having a lot more battery life in my laptop, it would be really tremendous.
Casey:
And I think you guys are completely right that perhaps just a brand new laptop today would be enough.
Casey:
But I don't know, the thought of an ARM laptop that would run for two days straight...
Casey:
Yeah, that's enticing.
Marco:
Because also, the massive gain that we had with Haswell in the last cycle, that was not part of a die shrink.
Marco:
So when they do a process shrink with Broadwell this coming fall or whenever that's supposed to happen, it keeps getting delayed, but probably late this year, there's going to be the Broadwell shrink.
Marco:
That's going to be even better.
Marco:
I mean, that might add another hour.
Marco:
If you have a 13, 14-hour battery, do you think that would relieve your stress?
Marco:
And this isn't like the BS battery specs that we used to hear back in the day.
Marco:
All the tests back this up, and real-world usage back this up.
Marco:
If they say you'll get 12 hours, under regular usage, you probably at least get 10.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
Marco:
It's pretty close to what they say.
Marco:
Do you think... How...
Marco:
How far do you think it would need to go for you to have that stress relieved?
Marco:
Or will you always have that stress because you grew up with very scarce battery, like a laptop battery depression?
Casey:
No, you're absolutely right.
Casey:
And I think to some degree I will always –
Casey:
I will always have that stress.
Casey:
But I think, and this is going to take all the wind out of my own sails, but I think if I had complete confidence that under whatever you define as regular use, whatever I define as regular use, I could go an entire workday, like an eight to 10 hour workday without even thinking about whether or not I need to plug in, that would be enough for
Casey:
to make me happy and and the way it is right now i absolutely cannot do that even without vmware fusion running and kicking on the uh the discrete cpu i would probably only be able to get half a day ish and so to be able to go a whole entire work day without even blinking an eye and if i leave my power adapter at home oh well that would be that would be very liberating it
John:
You should wait for Broadwell then, because even with the current crop, you could make it through most of a work day if you're nice to VMware.
John:
But if you include 12 hours, you're not going to make it working hard.
John:
It'll come close, and you'll have much less stress if you just plug it in when you're back at your desk.
John:
But you'll have to wait for Broadwell to get you into that type of thing where you can not have a charger at work, not bring your charger from home, and still be comfortable that you can do your work without worrying about, like, oh, am I hammering on VMware too much?
Marco:
Have you considered solving this problem by spending $80 on a second power adapter and just leaving it at work?
Casey:
Oh, I do.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
I absolutely do.
Casey:
I have one power adapter at my desk at home and one at work.
Casey:
And the real secret to happiness is having an additional one in my laptop bag so I never have to move the one at work or the one at home.
Casey:
But I don't transport the power adapter to and from work.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I don't know.
Casey:
I wish I didn't have to even think about it.
Casey:
And to go back just one quick second, a lot of people in the chat are saying, well, the reason your Retina iPad's battery life sucks is because you're using it more.
Casey:
And that very well could be, but I feel like the battery percentage drops quicker than I remember it having done in other iPads.
John:
They should have made the Retina Mini thickerer.
John:
They did make it thicker by some tiny amount.
John:
I forget how much, but it's like imperceptibly thicker.
John:
But the iPad 3 was perceptibly thicker than the iPad 2.
John:
And so when the Mini went retina, in order to maintain battery life, they probably should have made the Mini larger than it currently is to fit more battery in.
John:
And then I think you would have been a little bit happier with it.
John:
I would also check – you also got it around the same time as iOS 7 and background apps.
John:
So I would check if there's some background app doing something stupid that you're not aware of and also turn off Bluetooth.
Casey:
Bluetooth is off.
Casey:
I will say that.
Casey:
But you could be right about background apps.
Casey:
I don't think – off the top of my head, I don't think there are any that are on there that would be running other than –
Casey:
ios just kicking on uh apps in general what i mean is it's not like uh pod wranglers sitting there downloading podcasts constantly or anything like that but nevertheless you very well could be right
Casey:
All right, that went to a place I did not expect, but that's okay.
Casey:
It was accidental.
Marco:
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Marco:
Oh, burn.
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Thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring the show once again.
Casey:
So really quick, I have to confess that the first time I actually used Squarespace myself personally was a week or two ago when I was fiddling with a side project that may or may not ever come to be.
Casey:
And it really is that darn good.
Casey:
It really truly is.
Casey:
And we've been using it, and by we I mean MARCO has been using it since Neutral.
Casey:
But it is so easy to do everything.
Casey:
And I won't extend this ad read for another 20 minutes, even though I could extolling all the great things about Squarespace.
Casey:
But even if you know what you're doing, if you don't want to, Squarespace is the right answer.
Casey:
If you don't know what you're doing, Squarespace is the right answer.
Casey:
So thanks to them.
Casey:
I was asking a minute ago, did you guys get me anything gold today?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I ask because this is our 50th episode, is it not?
Marco:
Now, wait, which which anniversary gift calendar is gold on 50?
Marco:
Because aren't there like three competing gift calendars for that sort of thing?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And I'm looking at Hallmarks and it says gold is the 50th anniversary.
Casey:
I can get you some gold slager.
Casey:
I would be happy with that, actually.
John:
Do you have a gold hypercritical T-shirt?
Casey:
No, I do have a hypocritical t-shirt, but it is blue.
John:
Oh, well.
John:
That was my gift for you.
John:
I put up for sale a gold t-shirt that you did not buy.
Casey:
Thanks, John.
John:
So your gift was the opportunity to buy a special shirt.
John:
You would think it's a gift for the number of people who email me and say, are those shirts still available?
John:
The answer is no.
Casey:
Missed out.
Casey:
Speaking of hypocritical, you wrote a post about the 30th anniversary of the Mac.
John:
Yeah, I should have put that in my calendar.
John:
I knew it was coming up like three or four days ahead of time.
John:
Like, oh, I should write something about that.
John:
And I tried to write something.
John:
But when I started writing it, it ended up being exactly the same thing as what I wrote when Steve Jobs died.
John:
Because I guess the two things are linked in my life, Steve Jobs and the Mac, much more so than I think most people who came to Apple stuff later.
Yeah.
John:
So yeah, we'll put the link in the show.
John:
It's just not that exciting.
John:
But the reason I put it in there was because Macworld was doing a podcast where they were collecting short five-minute remembrances from people who used the Mac.
John:
But it wasn't a live podcast with other people.
John:
They wanted us to pre-record stuff, and I'm terrible at pre-recording things.
John:
And so I had to bail, and I couldn't do it.
John:
But I did think of something I wanted to say about the original Mac.
John:
And after hearing...
John:
Marco professes Mac newbie-ness on the talk show, I figured.
Marco:
That was the most epic troll to you.
John:
No one else will care.
John:
No, there's lots of people.
John:
Lots of people will care.
Casey:
Actually, a friend of the show, Guy English, was not happy.
John:
Yeah, and he's like your age.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe he isn't.
John:
No one knows how old he really is.
John:
It's very difficult to tell with Canadians.
John:
it's the beard you just can't see yeah what is he hiding anyway so here's my here's my brief little remembrance thing that i was going to do for macworld but didn't about the original mac and i think it will be good for young people and noops as well and the thing i was going to say that i remembered about the mac and i had the original mac in 1984 was what it was like to walk up to the computer and turn it on which sounds weird but
John:
Hear me out.
John:
I think it has some foundation or not.
John:
We'll find out.
John:
So the power button on the Mac was on the back and used your left hand to reach the back of the computer and flick it.
John:
And it was a rocker switch that tilted up and down.
John:
And the Mac itself was very upright enough.
John:
People must know what the original Mac looks like.
John:
It's kind of like a vertical rectangle in front of you.
John:
with a little square screen near the top.
John:
So you had to reach around the back left side and flick the switch.
John:
And it was a big mechanical flicky switch that you would see on a 70s mixing board or something.
John:
This was not some tiny little button or a circle with a little power symbol on it that depresses three millimeters in.
John:
This was a big switch that made a noise.
John:
You flick that switch, the CRT came on, and the thing made a beeping noise, the startup beep.
John:
Pretty loud, not like cool chord music, but a beeping noise.
John:
And the reason this motion of walking up to this vertical computer, reaching around behind and flicking the switch and sitting down in the chair at the same time,
John:
sticks in my mind is because you did it so often you didn't put the computer to sleep there was no sleep for the computer you didn't leave it on all the time because that would be crazy it would be like leaving your tv on all the time or a light on all the time when you wanted to use the computer you walked up to it you turned it on and you used it and it would boot up and it would take forever to boot up off the floppy disk and you know you do whatever you're going to do with the computer and
John:
And the second reason that power switch sticks in my mind was because when you're done using the computer, you reach around the back of it and you turn the power switch off.
John:
Right in the middle of what you... There was no shutdown command at the bottom of what was then the special menu.
John:
No shutdown, no nothing.
John:
When you were done using the computer, you turned it off.
John:
And we like to think that...
John:
Yeah.
John:
But the incredible distance between that and now is represented by how we treated the computer.
John:
We treat it like you treat the television set.
John:
When you want to use it, you turn it on.
John:
When you want to use it, you turn it off.
John:
There was no software interconnect telling you when it was safe to turn it off or preventing you from turning it off at any time.
John:
Now, you can turn it off a Mac any time you want now.
John:
I got to hold down the power button for 10 seconds.
John:
like if it gets hard frozen or whatever but clearly that power button is not a mechanical interconnect that you know the computer had no control like when you flick that switch electricity stopped flowing to the computer that was it and when you turn it on you know electricity started flowing and so that is my one of my lasting memories of the computer that i think most people who are not around back then using computers can't relate to because maybe they're like oh i turned on my commodore 64 that way that's how i use my tari that's how i use my nes and i think a lot of people i think like to think
John:
That's how they're using their current PlayStation stuff, not knowing that those buttons are software buttons that just tell the thing to shut down because you can't turn off a real game console like that without consequences most of the time.
John:
But back then, it was a gooey computer that looks like what we have today, but it behaved like a toaster.
John:
You'd flick the switch on, you'd flick the switch off.
Casey:
I did not know that, and that seems really wild to me.
John:
Oh, and also, there were no lights, no indicator lights telling you the drive activity.
John:
Because PCs, for a long time, PCs were still like that.
John:
And you're like, how do I know when I can push the eject button to get the disk out?
John:
Oh, wait for the light to stop blinking.
John:
Is it done?
John:
Wait, no, one more blink.
John:
Wait, no, okay, now it's not one more blink.
John:
That was crazy making as well.
John:
No light on the front of the Mac.
John:
So how did you know?
John:
What if it was in the middle of writing data to a floppy disk and you turned it off?
John:
Well, you probably just hosed yourself if that was the case.
John:
But like,
John:
There was no light, I guess, because they wouldn't want to have some stupid blinking light.
John:
There was no eject button because they wanted the computer to control that.
John:
You still had to unmount a disk by dragging it to the trash or hitting eject or whatever, and it would safely eject and unmount the disk.
John:
But when you were done using the computer, presumably you're not in the middle of saving and don't have any outstanding stuff.
John:
You would just reach behind and hit the switch.
Marco:
See, that was the best thing about the original Mac is that wonderful, unintuitive design right from the start of, oh, to eject a disk, you do the same thing you do when you want to delete data.
John:
Well, here was the best thing about that.
John:
Well, so first of all, that was a shortcut.
John:
Like the way you were supposed to do it the same way you would do anything.
John:
You select it and then select an item from the menu.
John:
It's like that you would select the noun and select the verb from the menu.
John:
So there was an eject thing.
John:
You could get a discount.
John:
But the best was since it was only one floppy drive and you couldn't get much done with one 400K floppy.
John:
you could eject the system disk that you booted from, and it would remain on the desktop as a grayed-out floppy disk icon, and then you would put in, say, your Mac Paint disk, which application on a separate disk, put that in, and then the Mac Paint floppy disk would appear on your desktop as a little floppy disk icon, but not grayed-out.
John:
And you could, you know, launch Mac Paint, and sometimes it would ask you to swap disks back and forth.
John:
Eventually, you get to the point where the system disk is back in, and you've got a grayed-out icon of the Mac Paint floppy disk on there.
John:
and the mac paint floppy disk is in your hand right then you would drag the ghostly image of the mac paint floppy disk to the trash and nothing would eject because you've already got the disk out the disk would just the ghost disk would just disappear it was a very strange metaphor for what am i throwing out here i'm not ejecting a disk because it's in my hand but i'm throwing out this little image and the image does disappear did i erase everything on the disk but how could i have erased everything just gets in my hand but nothing ejected so i wasn't injecting
John:
Very, very confusing.
John:
Of course, it made totally intuitive sense to, you know, an eight-year-old, nine-year-old me because, like, anything you learn, of course, that's the way it works.
John:
Don't you know how ghost images work for disks?
John:
You know.
John:
Like, things make sense to kids that you don't question, but it was very strange.
Marco:
And the terribleness of the disk and virtual disk and ghost disk and disk image kind of metaphor continues to this day when you still have Mac software being distributed in DMGs.
John:
Yeah, at least those don't get grayed out.
John:
But yeah, you're like, where is the disc?
John:
What I'm saying is an image of a disc, not disc image, which is an entirely different thing.
John:
That's what you're talking about.
Marco:
But still, it's like that whole thing with kind of complicating the disc metaphor.
Marco:
Yeah, it's...
Marco:
It's always one of the weirdest things about the Mac.
Marco:
Thank God they've mostly dodged it now at the App Store by pushing people to do that as the installation method.
Marco:
But for decades, years at least... Well, I guess OS X introduced disk images, right?
Marco:
So for a decade...
Marco:
The way to install software on a Mac that you'd have to tell your parents was, all right, you download this disk image.
Marco:
It mounts it.
Marco:
It's a virtual disk.
Marco:
It's not a real disk.
Marco:
You have to look for where the disks are on your computer and find this fake disk that you just downloaded.
Marco:
Don't run it from there, though.
Marco:
You've got to move it to your real disk, then eject the fake disk.
Marco:
Nothing will actually eject from your computer.
Marco:
And then you've got to delete this file that presents that fake disk when it's not mounted.
John:
Disk images existed before OS X, but before OS X, the way most software was distributed was in StuffIt or StuffIt.hqx because StuffIt files had resource forks for a short period of time or any other compressed file format.
John:
And what you would get when you decompressed it is if you were lucky, you would get an application.
John:
If you're unlucky, you would get an installer.
John:
And there was a series of bad installers doing that.
John:
their installer thing.
John:
But yeah, the root problem with disk images is not so much that it's the concept of a virtual disk image, but the entire concept of mounting and unmounting disks, whether they're virtual disks, real disks or not.
John:
Mounting and unmounting is beyond the can of regular people.
Casey:
Well, you say that, but it's actually beyond a lot of people.
Casey:
So this past Friday, I was at a work meeting and it was all of the developers at my office, which is only 10 or 15 of us, I'd say.
Casey:
And a developer that doesn't typically use a Mac ended up using my boss's Mac in order to do a quick PowerPoint presentation and
Casey:
And that also involved using Safari or Chrome or whatever his browser of choice was in order to show a few things that he had worked on.
Casey:
And firstly, he had a really hard time figuring out how to scroll because there was no scroll bar, which in and of itself I thought was kind of funny, but made sense.
Casey:
I mean, I can't fault him for that.
Casey:
Secondly, he fell under the same trap that Erin falls under anytime she tries to use my Mac, which is
Casey:
For most power users, I have to assume that they have hot corners and they have gestures set up.
Casey:
And if you're not familiar and used to that, it's very off-putting because you feel like you haven't touched anything and then suddenly random crap happens that makes no sense.
Casey:
Well, anyways, the reason I bring this up is because he had had his presentation on a USB key.
Casey:
And when he was all done, what did he do?
Casey:
Do you want to take a guess, John?
John:
Just yanked out like they do in the movies.
Casey:
Just like they do with Windows and just like they do in the movies.
Casey:
And so he just yanked that bad boy out.
Casey:
And of course, instantly, my boss's Mac goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
You didn't unmount that bad boy.
Casey:
I don't even know what's going on with that thing.
Casey:
And it was interesting to me because all jokes aside, here's someone who writes code for a living and he knows what he's doing.
Casey:
But because he's not familiar with OS X, it didn't even cross his mind to unmount the USB key.
Casey:
Why would you?
Casey:
You just yank the thing out like you do on Windows, right?
Casey:
And so it was just interesting to me.
John:
Well, even on Windows, like you have to do the blinking light dance, which is why so many USB keys have little lights on them, because you can yank it on a Windows.
John:
But if you can get out in the middle when the little light is blinking, your USB keys now has garbage on it.
John:
So congratulations.
Casey:
Which, by the way, when I first got my Mac, my first Mac, and I think it was 2010.
Casey:
one of the things that I found extremely disconcerting was there were no hard drive lights or anything like that.
Casey:
And to this day, I still have iStat menus running constantly.
Casey:
And I don't have it showing hard drive activity, but I do have it showing throughput through my network card and CPU load.
John:
Because I just, I can't, I don't know why, but I feel... See, you're one of those people who would have bought in the back in the day, there was a program for the Mac called DiskLight.
John:
That would put a little blinking black and white thing in your little black and white menu bar to make people like you feel comfortable.
Casey:
Well, and again, it's not actually about disk usage, but it bothers me if something is happening slowly, which to be fair, on my work MacBook Pro with its SSD is not terribly often.
Casey:
But if something's happening slowly or if my jet plane – I mean my fans are spinning, I want to know why.
Casey:
And so I run iStatMenus, which is absolutely the best $30 or so I've spent in a long time.
Casey:
I look at my little menu widget, whatever that thing is called, and I see my CPU usage right there.
Casey:
And if I click on it, I can see the top five most expensive processes.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
It just freaks me out not having that there.
Casey:
And I keep telling myself to get rid of it.
Casey:
And like, for example, I've gotten rid of – No, don't.
Casey:
Well, and I've gotten rid of my memory meter, but I still have CPU and I still have internet throughput.
John:
You should get rid of it because it's kind of the quantum, whatever, uncertainty principle of computer performance that by observing it, you are necessarily –
John:
altering the behavior and i always wonder how much am i altering it by observing it i don't leave activity monitor open i don't leave top running in a terminal window and i don't run the istat menu things unless i'm curious if i'm curious about something it's like turning on all the instruments or running you know running instruments in xcode sometimes you want to fire all that stuff up to c but people who run it all day every day oh okay well i'll tell you what um let's suppose you're buying a new mac pro what cpu do you get
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm talking about laptops.
Marco:
Who cares about desktops?
Marco:
You burn all the power you want.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
Laptops.
Marco:
Do you get a 13 inch with only a dual core or do you go 15 inch with a quad core?
John:
I don't know what I would get with laptop, but what are you getting at?
John:
That I would want a more powerful computer?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So I've been running iStat menus also forever.
Marco:
I ran... There was some other thing that did the same thing before that, and it was worse.
Marco:
So I switched to iStat menus.
Marco:
And probably, I don't know, probably four or five years ago by now.
Marco:
And I've been running it for a while.
Marco:
And just like Casey, I used to have the hard drive indicator on there.
Marco:
Once I switched to SSDs, I removed it because it was pointless at that point.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I still have the CPU and the network ones up.
Marco:
So the network ones, first of all, are very useful if you want to see, like, am I currently uploading tons of stuff while I'm podcasting?
Marco:
That's bad.
Marco:
Then you can go check.
Marco:
All right, check Dropbox, check Backblaze, you know, all this stuff.
Marco:
And then the CPU meter is great because...
Marco:
It gives you an idea of how much CPU power you're actually using with the work you do and where you're hitting bottlenecks and what kind of bottlenecks you're hitting so that you can make intelligent decisions about what to upgrade and then what to buy for your next computer.
John:
I still think that's an activity you can do when you're curious about that.
John:
When your computer is feeling slow, take a look at why it's slow.
John:
When you're interested in whether this application takes advantage of how many cores, fire it up.
John:
But I don't think you need to run it all day because you're not looking at it all day.
John:
It's mostly just in the corner animating, distracting your eye, and you're not looking at it to gain information from it during that time.
John:
I glance at it a lot.
John:
Yep.
John:
That's another reason you should get rid of it.
John:
It's like the thing you always have to keep looking at.
John:
It's like looking at the time on the clock on a wall.
John:
Got to keep looking up.
John:
Got to keep looking up.
John:
Just take the clock away, concentrate on what you're doing, and you'll spend less time looking at the clock.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think basically whenever I'm being made to wait for something at all on my computer, usually I will glance at that to see, am I maxing out a CPU?
Marco:
Before, it would be like, am I maxing out a disk?
Marco:
It helps a lot to know...
Marco:
what your performance needs are, generally speaking.
Marco:
So I know now how much of my stuff is going to benefit from having more cores and how much of it isn't.
Marco:
And how much of it is going to benefit from having one super fast core rather than more cores that are slower.
Marco:
I have a good idea of what I need because I've been running this for years and because it's always running and so I can always just kind of glance up there.
Marco:
So I...
Marco:
I know how my stuff behaves and what my needs actually are.
Marco:
Whereas if you don't do this kind of thing, you're kind of buying blind or your computer's slow and you might think, okay, I guess I'll add some RAM or something.
Marco:
But you don't really know, like, is it slow because of X, Y, or Z?
Marco:
And you're just kind of guessing.
John:
I don't know how many conclusions you can get from just looking at that.
John:
When my computer is slow, I mostly go to the command line because I'm going to run SC usage, FS usage to see who's hitting the file systems because for me and my non-SSD systems, that's usually the big one.
John:
But I don't want to just know, oh, there's a lot of IO going on.
John:
How many IOPS are there in activity monitor?
John:
What is the data throughput?
John:
I want to know who is using the file system and what are they doing with it?
John:
What files are they modifying?
John:
So that's why I want like the, you know, FSC usage with the wide output for the file system type to get that information.
John:
You're not going to get that from my statement.
Marco:
I think you do actually.
John:
I think the main reason both of you are running iStatMenu is probably the only reason you should run iStatMenu is because you like blinking lights and pretty things.
John:
And that's a reasonably legitimate reason.
John:
A lot of people run, for example, transparent terminal windows, which make things in their terminal windows harder to read.
John:
But they like it because it looks cool.
Casey:
See, I disagree.
Casey:
I really do think that I – everything Marco said, I was shaking my head yes in that if there's any delay on my computer, particularly my SSD MacBook Pro, I'm looking at that CPU meter to see what's going on.
Casey:
And if there's a spike that I don't expect –
Casey:
then darn it, I'm going to click on that CPU meter to see what the top processes are.
Casey:
And if airmail or if crash plan is going berserk, then I need to investigate why that is.
Casey:
And additionally, that's why to go back in the episode, that's why I said I would probably trade a less powerful Mac for a MacBook for one that has a much better battery.
John:
If you want to get better battery life, why not just turn that off?
Casey:
Actually, when Mavericks came out, I did crank back the update frequency from like one second to like five or something like that.
Casey:
But anyway, the reason I'm so willing to make that trade is because I know generally speaking, my CPU usage really isn't that much.
Casey:
Now, when I have VMware running, okay, then it's not too awesome in that I'm using probably a third of my CPU all the time.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Except when VMware is running, most of the crap I do on my computer, I really don't need a very powerful CPU for.
Casey:
So that's why I think I would be willing to make that trade.
Casey:
And that's why I think Marco was on to something with it gives you some kind of passive feedback on where your bottlenecks are.
Marco:
And if you're burning power unnecessarily.
Marco:
Like, if you have a four-core machine and you got some runaway process burning 100% all the time because it's stuck on something, you might not notice that for days because it's not really affecting you at all.
Marco:
And all that time then, your battery life's getting worse, your system's running a little bit too warm, or the fans are running a little bit too fast.
Marco:
If it's a process that's writing log files, like, I have this weird problem a lot of times, I don't know if it's because of the hijacking setup with this live stream, I had this problem recently where iTunes agent, some kind of iTunes airport agent, crashes repeatedly in the background, and it burns up a CPU for a while, and as it's doing this,
Marco:
it's dumping tons of crap to the console log, like hundreds of megabytes of text to the console log.
Marco:
And the only way I can really tell is either by looking up there and seeing, oh, there's that core that's been running for a while.
Marco:
I wonder what it's doing.
Marco:
And clicking the icon and it shows me what it's doing.
Marco:
Or my terminal windows start taking forever to reach the login prompt.
Marco:
And then you have to go purge out the directory and find the Mac hint that does that.
Marco:
But if you don't see...
Marco:
If you can't see those kind of indicators, like if I didn't launch Terminal for a while, that would take days and I wouldn't notice it.
Marco:
I'd be sitting here burning power and running too hot and filling up my disk with all this crap and not even noticing.
Casey:
But the difference between you and I, Marco, and John, is that we are not one with our machine like he is.
Marco:
He can feel the menu meters.
John:
That's what it was called, menu meters.
John:
If you don't notice that something is taking an entire core and you don't notice that something is dumping 100 megs to your thing, then it's probably actually not a problem.
John:
I know it's a problem and that you shouldn't be doing that, but like...
John:
i i'm mostly content to wait until my machine is not performing the way i think it is and investigate why that is versus if something like that happened and like it cured itself or i just never noticed it like again i'm not using a laptop i'm plugged in i don't notice the fans going up i don't notice you know maybe i'm using slightly more power or whatever but like i think for me if something was dumping 100 megs i would notice that and i would go and you know investigate it like that uh you don't have an ssd yet
John:
no yeah that's right i would definitely notice it hell i would hear the hard drive going tick tick tick uh but things there are many things that that go off and you don't notice and i'm perfectly content to let them let them be below my notice if the only reason i would notice them is because of this the stat you know some kind of stat counter thing then that's like drawing my attention unnecessarily right like
John:
Intellectually, yes, I would like to know that thing is crashing and see if I can investigate it and do something about it.
John:
But practically speaking, if I would not notice if it was not for the stat stuff, I'd just as soon not notice it.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Because you don't run a laptop.
Marco:
That's very true.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But again, with a laptop, I would say at least just like...
John:
decrease the upgrade frequency like every one second is too much and i really hope that people who make istat menus get religion about the the mavericks power saving stuff because if you're going to make an app that's like that there are probably a lot of things you can do to your app itself to make it more power efficient even if even with the same update frequency you know
Casey:
Yeah, and usually – is it Django?
Casey:
It's B-J-A-N-G-O, I believe.
Casey:
I'm probably mispronouncing it.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
But they're usually pretty on the ball with getting the latest – I don't want to say trends.
Casey:
That sounds dismissive.
Casey:
But getting those newest features supported.
Marco:
Yeah, they're pretty good citizens on the platforms.
Casey:
That's a much better way of phrasing it.
Casey:
Hey, do we have any other new sponsors this week by chance?
Marco:
We have one more new sponsor this week.
Marco:
It is our friends at Cards Against Humanity.
Marco:
Wait, wait, wait.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Yeah, Cards Against Humanity, that awesome game that you and I have played, and it's fantastic.
Marco:
It's sponsored by Cards Against Humanity, but they asked us not to read an ad and to just enjoy the show.
Marco:
That was it?
Marco:
That's it?
Casey:
That's the whole thing?
Casey:
Isn't that great?
Casey:
I'm not at all surprised by this, but that's ridiculous.
Casey:
Those guys are the best.
Marco:
Anyway, they didn't ask us to tell you, but it's CardsAgainstHumanity.com because they're just awesome.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity.
Casey:
That was our big moment.
Casey:
I've been so excited for them to maybe possibly one day sponsor our show, and that's what they decided to do.
Casey:
I'm both a little sad and overwhelmed with happiness.
Casey:
It's pretty awesome.
Casey:
Well, thanks, guys.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We should play that.
Casey:
We should do that on air sometime.
Marco:
Well, we might lose our clean rating if we don't.
Casey:
We just might.
Casey:
Well, I feel like we're dishonoring the motive there, so we should just move on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's get back to it.
Casey:
Lenovo bought some things recently.
Casey:
Do we care about that?
Casey:
Do we have time to care about that?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do we?
Casey:
Are we done?
Marco:
Is that a hint?
Marco:
Only our show could spend the first almost hour and a half today of all days.
Marco:
All this stuff in the news happened today, and we haven't talked about any of it.
Marco:
Not even a bit.
John:
But is it news?
John:
Is there anything that we really care about?
John:
If you don't care about the metagame of company versus company and who owns what and stuff like that, I don't know if there's much about the industry that any of these particular deals change other than continuing existing trends that everyone already is familiar with.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
It seems like Lenovo is basically just becoming IBM's hardware.
Casey:
And I know IBM still does big, big hardware, big server hardware.
Casey:
But, you know, they took the PC business and I don't know, I'm very hipster about all this, but they killed the ThinkPad and now they're taking the x86 server business and apparently Motorola as well.
John:
Well, they're in an economy that's up and coming in a way that the U.S.
John:
economy is not.
John:
They are us many, many years in the past.
John:
It kind of makes sense that businesses that are not interesting or profitable or profitable enough or have enough growth potential for us could have enough growth potential for them, be more profitable for them, more interesting for them.
John:
So they would like to make a phone.
John:
They would like to sell PCs.
John:
They'll happily sell devices.
John:
pc class server hardware i mean i don't know they were there's the low-end server hardware low-end just means x86 which is basically like the server hardware that almost everybody buys not a bad business i mean like i know you're you're upset about them what they did to your beautiful think pad but for the most part lenovo took ibm's pc business and didn't screw it up at the very least can you give them that they didn't screw it up
Marco:
Yeah, they have a pretty good record of that, of not screwing up the things they've bought too badly.
Marco:
I mean, I think even most people who are ThinkPad fans would agree that the Lenovo transition really didn't change much.
John:
Hmm.
John:
Well, compare it to Google buying Motorola.
John:
Well, did they screw up Motorola?
John:
Motorola came pretty screwed up, so that's not fair.
John:
But a lot of times, you acquire a company and you won't be able to figure out how to make any money with it and the products will be worse under you and it will just fizzle in.
John:
people might say that Lenovo's products are worse in some ways than IBM or lost some of the specialness they had with IBM or aren't as interesting as they were under IBM, but it's still an ongoing business.
John:
And like, that was my fear when they bought them because who had ever heard of Lenovo when they took, you know,
John:
IBM's PC business, that in two years, you won't be able to buy a Lenovo PC because they'll not be able to make a go of this.
John:
It'll just fizzle out, and they just won't be successful.
John:
But you can still buy Lenovo PCs and laptops, and maybe they're not as special as a ThinkPad with a butterfly keyboard.
Casey:
you know they're they're reasonable pcs like what would you rather have lenovo laptop or a dell lenovo or an hp laptop uh i don't know slim pickings there but is none an option exactly right again get a mac please but uh yeah i mean a fun fact my dad has worked for ibm for i don't know probably about 30-ish years and i vividly vividly remember seeing think pads floating around the house when i was really little and
Casey:
Because the ThinkPad, in case you didn't know, is named after these pads that they used to hand out to the employees.
Casey:
It just said the word Think on the front, and that was it.
Casey:
And I vividly remember seeing those all over the place.
Casey:
And so I grew up on ThinkPads, and I grew up using a trackpoint pointing device.
Casey:
And if you've never seen the XKCD about this, go Google it and check it out.
Casey:
But I still miss that.
Casey:
I genuinely do.
Casey:
And Apple trackpads are –
Casey:
are as good as they get, or touchpads, whatever they're called.
Casey:
They're as good as those sorts of things get, but I still miss and prefer the track point.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I'm the only one.
Casey:
Which actually, I meant to ask you guys, do either of you guys use the Magic trackpad?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No, what are you, crazy?
Casey:
Okay, that's what I thought too, but a lot of people I know are starting to get really excited about the trackpad.
John:
I'm always suspicious of somebody when they tell me they prefer a trackpad to a mouse.
Casey:
I tend to agree.
John:
Any kind of trackpad.
John:
I know people who use that.
John:
I know people who use trackpads at their desk with their desktop computer.
John:
And I also know people who prefer the centered trackpad underneath their keyboard on their laptop to using a mouse on their desktop.
John:
And those people should be eyed with great suspicion.
John:
all right so we don't really care about them buying motorola and google unloading motorola i mean it's like a a terrible failed i don't know what i mean they got the patents they're keeping the patents uh when they bought motorola the only interesting thing about that acquisition like the the a store is okay they're just gonna they're bought a motorola for the patents like no but i think they might be buying them because they're gonna make their own phones and motorola makes harm and so that turned out not to be the case thing you know
John:
They admitted as much in their thing.
John:
We originally bought them for the past.
John:
I guess there was a chance that if Motorola's new phones took off, Google would say, hey, wait a second.
John:
We can sell the OS to other people, but then compete with them by making our own hardware that sells in huge numbers instead of the Nexus, which sell in smaller numbers, I would imagine.
John:
But it turns out no one wants a Motorola phone either.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
It's a shame because the most recent Motorola phones are pretty decent.
John:
They're interesting.
John:
They're nice looking.
John:
They work pretty well for Android phones.
John:
They're not terrible phones.
John:
I'm sure Lenovo will continue to make not terrible phones out of them.
John:
Who knows?
John:
They're well positioned to do well in China.
John:
So if that business starts picking up, they're going to be right there, ready to sell cheap Android phones to all of China.
Marco:
Do you think it has anything to do with a possible Google-Samsung future partnership of some sort?
Marco:
Like getting Motorola out of the way?
Marco:
You know, like Google couldn't buy Samsung.
Marco:
They're too big, as far as I know.
Marco:
But do you think that –
Marco:
The news came out today also that Google has apparently pressured Samsung to stop doing their incredibly different interface on their tablets that they were working on and possibly on their phones as well.
Marco:
I don't know all the details of it.
Marco:
But clearly Google is kind of...
Marco:
pressuring Samsung to work more closely with them?
Marco:
What if getting Motorola out of the way, besides being financially wise, because they kept losing even more money on it every year that they kept it, what if that kind of helped that too?
Marco:
I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
It sounds like a stretch, but you never know.
Marco:
Honestly, all of this makes me think that the way they bought Motorola kind of out of the blue...
John:
and then spent way too much on it even back then everyone said that was way too much supposedly it was maybe for patents but the patents turned out to not really be worth anything and i think that the patents are worth something not the crazy billion dollar numbers they're giving there but they're definitely worth something they're they're not worth it in that you're going to be able to sue everybody else for violating your patents but i think having that big staple it's like it's
John:
sows enough uncertainty in your in the people who are going to come at you with their stupid patents they're like well we have a lot of stupid patents too and you're not sure and maybe the few they've used have lost in court but it's a hell of a lot of patents and they're really stupid so i think it serves its purchase as as the mutually assured destruction sort of black bag of crap you know they've massive massively overpaid for that but it's it's better than not having it at all you know so
John:
I don't know.
John:
And as for like the pressuring, like Samsung saying, all right, if you want us to do more stock Android appearance, you need to get rid of that Motorola.
John:
I don't think Samsung was threatened by Motorola selling the piddling number of crappy phones that they were selling.
John:
And I don't think Samsung was in a position to bargain like that, or at least they shouldn't have been.
John:
If Google, if they made that threat and Google believed it and acted based on that threat being an actual thing, they should be scared of.
John:
That was stupid because that's an insane threat.
John:
Like the threat would be basically, uh,
John:
We'll do your default Android appearance thing, but you have to do this thing for us.
John:
And Google will say, why do we have to do that thing for you?
John:
Well, if you don't, we're not going to make our phones use the stock Google appearance.
John:
And we don't need your stinking maps.
John:
And we don't need your stinking Gmail.
John:
We'll do everything ourself.
John:
And Google should have said, okay, good luck with that.
John:
because i don't think samsung is in a position i mean how apple was barely in a position to not use google maps i'm not sure samsung is in a position to do away with with all the things that google gives them they're an android vendor for crying out loud you know it's hard they could do like the kindle route where you're like amazon's like we don't really need anything from you google except for your os thanks uh
John:
I don't think that's a viable strategy for Samsung.
John:
It's possible that Samsung is deluded enough that they think that's a viable strategy for them, that they don't need, we don't need you, Google, at any second.
John:
We could go off on our own and we'll be just as successful without you.
John:
I think that strategy would work for like a year and then Samsung would realize they're not Google.
John:
Uh, so I'm not sure, but I hope Google didn't give any credence to that.
John:
Uh, but I think getting rid of Motorola is the right move because if you're not going to use Motorola as your hardware wing and become like an Apple style, like we make the hardware and the software, if you're not going to do that, what the hell point is there in having a phone maker?
John:
All it's going to do is make your relationships with all the people you license your OS to more fraught with angst than it needs to be.
John:
Uh, and yeah, you paid 12 and a half billion dollars for it, but you know, cut your losses.
Casey:
So who has the real leverage between Samsung and Google?
Casey:
Do you still think it's Google?
Casey:
And I ask because it seems to me like most of the phones that I see that are Android phones, and I won't even wager guesses to the percentage, but it seems like well over half are Samsung phones.
Casey:
So is Google getting to the point that they're getting beholden to Samsung?
Casey:
I mean, what you just said made me think no, but...
Casey:
But do you think so?
John:
No, because like Samsung is making all the money in the Android market and Google hates that.
John:
And so, but they're not beholden to Google.
John:
They just want Samsung.
John:
They just want to, A, Google needs to figure out a way to make money from Android.
John:
And B, the power of Samsung is making that more difficult.
John:
Like they're making the money.
John:
And so that's Google leaning on them to say you have to have a more of a default Android experience is them trying to say what we want is
John:
is an undifferentiated sea of people shipping on our OS on commodity hardware.
John:
They want to go back in time and pretend like they're Microsoft and selling Windows to every PC vendor.
John:
And Samsung doesn't want to be every PC vendor, they want to differentiate.
John:
But it's not as if Samsung, like if Google's already not making most of the money in the Android ecosystem,
John:
what is Samsung taking away?
John:
Samsung's already reaping all the profits from Android, right?
John:
They've already done that to Google.
John:
So I don't see how Samsung has any leverage over Google to say, well, we'll just change everything to Windows Phone and stop using Android.
John:
It's like, fine, we weren't making any money off you using Android anyway.
John:
So their relationship is not, they're not two happy campers next to each other.
John:
And I don't know, Google at least has a stopgap of like, well, this whole Android thing was silly.
John:
We're going to switch to Chrome OS for everything.
Marco:
I think it's even... You can look at the relationship between Apple and Samsung, not with the lawsuits and stuff, but just with the hardware manufacturing deals that they have, where Apple still needs Samsung for so much of their component manufacturing, especially the more complicated processors and stuff.
Marco:
And it doesn't look like they're...
Marco:
going to stop needing Samsung in the next few years.
Marco:
Maybe they'll slowly work towards that by bringing up different fabs and stuff, but they're going to keep using Samsung as a manufacturing partner for a while, or a component partner for a while.
Marco:
Samsung and Apple, you could tell they don't really like each other, but they keep working together because Samsung will take the money because it's a lot of money, and Apple needs their capacity and their chip manufacturing.
Marco:
I think similarly, Google and Samsung kind of need each other too.
Marco:
By having Android, Samsung is making a killing.
Marco:
And Samsung, personality-wise, it's pretty hard to get a read on them in much detail, but it does seem like...
Marco:
personality-wise, they're not a stubborn, principled company.
Marco:
If there's a way to make money doing something, they're just going to do it.
Marco:
They don't really care what it is.
Marco:
They're not going to hold a grudge against Google and say, oh, well, you're kicking us around, so we're going to stop using Android.
Marco:
No, they won't.
Marco:
They might make their own additional line of phones with something else on it, but they're not going to stop selling Android phones.
Marco:
They don't care.
Marco:
If they can make money selling Android phones, they'll keep selling Android phones and keep making a lot of money.
Marco:
And Google needs them because, yeah, as you said, there's not really a lot of other people making Android stuff that serves Google well.
Marco:
Amazon's selling a good amount of it, but that's not really helping Google very much.
Marco:
And there's other manufacturers, mostly regional ones.
Marco:
In China and India, there's manufacturers that also make a ton of Android stuff, but that doesn't help Google very much because it doesn't run a lot of their services or any of their services.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Samsung is probably the only company making a good amount of Google-serviced connected Android things and actually selling them worldwide.
Marco:
And so they kind of can't afford to have animosity towards each other.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Marco:
Google wanted, with Android, I think they expected there to be all these manufacturers with a diverse ecosystem providing healthy competition.
Marco:
And in reality...
Marco:
Everyone else has died because Samsung was really good at it and everyone else was really bad at it.
Marco:
And so there's – it totally is dysfunctional to have like one giant manufacturer making the majority of your stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And not just the number of manufacturers, they expected, well, we're going to make the software part and the margins on software are massive.
John:
So we're going to make huge margins on the software we sell.
John:
And those poor suckers making the hardware are going to make tiny little hardware margins, where as it turns out, Samsung's making the bulk of the profit in what you would define as the Android market, because they make way more profit on the phones they sell than Google makes on the licensing of the OS to Samsung.
John:
And so that's, that's the imbalance there that like all the money in the, you know, the vast majority of the money in the Android ecosystem is being made by a hardware manufacturer.
John:
And Google has got to be like, but doesn't software have higher margins?
John:
How are we not making money?
John:
You know?
John:
And so I think Google is trying to go back to his bread and butter and saying, it seems like no matter who's out there, uh,
John:
Even if there were 15 hardware makers, the accumulated profit made by those 15 hardware makers that evenly divided the market would still dwarf the license fees that we get.
John:
It doesn't seem like that we're going to make money because they get the magic of subsidized phones in the U.S.
John:
and getting all that money for...
John:
giving you a subscriber for a long period of time, and the hardware itself has reasonable margins, and they're not making enough money off Android itself.
John:
So I think they want to go back to their old style, which is, all right, we're going to make money by people using Google services.
John:
And that's why they switched to, never mind all the profit stuff, let's just make sure that the people who are selling Android phones continue to, they continue to be a gateway to get people into our Google services so we can show them our Google ads and get information about them in Google Plus and all the googly things we do.
Casey:
I think we're done.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, HelpSpot, Squarespace, and Cards Against Humanity, and we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin, because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they did it
Casey:
So long.
John:
I seem to recall maybe hearing about this somewhere on the internet.
John:
It might have been apocryphal.
John:
Some people saying, we'll get the email about this if you put it in the show, people who prefer to play first-person shooters with a trackpad instead of a mouse.
Casey:
What?
John:
What?
John:
That's the same reaction I have to people who prefer to play first-person shooters with a thumbstick instead of a mouse, but that's a whole other thing.
John:
But I'm pretty sure I've heard at least one person who prefer to play first-person shooters with a trackpad.
John:
It's just, like, people who grow up with trackpads, I don't, there's something wrong with them.
John:
I don't know.
Ha ha!
John:
Kids these days with their input methods.
John:
It would be fine if it was actually better.
John:
If you could make a challenge where there was a series of dots on the screen.
John:
You ever see those challenges where a dot will appear in a random location, you have to click on it, and as soon as you click on it, another dot appears?
John:
There are objective ways to measure how efficient you are with your input device.
John:
Go ahead, trackpad people.
John:
Bring it on against a mouse person.
John:
Same thing with first-person shooters.
John:
Auto Aim has bred an entire generation of people who think that they're better with a thumbstick than with a mouse, when in reality it's the game drawing their fire to the enemy because they happen to be somewhere near where they are.
Casey:
Pear Apps is swearing in the chat that he or she is much better with a trackpad, which means he or she is crazy.
Marco:
Or using auto-aim and not realizing it or not wanting to admit it.
John:
If you're playing with a PC game, a Mac game, it doesn't know you're using a trackpad.
John:
I don't think it's auto-aiming because you're using a trackpad.
John:
Maybe just people don't know how to use a mouse?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe it's like grade inflation.
Marco:
You want to just make everyone feel better, like they did better, even though they still suck.
Marco:
And they're like, oh, well, hey, you hit them.
Marco:
We'll call that a hit.
Good job.
Marco:
Everyone's a winner here.
Casey:
One thing we should talk about at some point is what will we reflect on in 20 or 30 years as being the clear sore spot today?
Casey:
in computers today and in before spinning discs i was going to say exactly that so let's let's assume that we've already that spinning discs are already in the past and we can't use that as an answer what would it be because we are we all have you know gigs and gigs and gigs of ram we generally speaking have big enough hard drives that you could make an argument that
Casey:
the ssds being considerably smaller because they're they're much too expensive otherwise i i would allow that as an answer but if not if not those then what what's the what's the bottleneck non-retina screens are you going to also put that in the past
Casey:
No, I would allow that.
Casey:
I think that would be fair.
Marco:
I would say having very short laptop battery lives.
Marco:
It depends on what time we're talking about it.
Marco:
If we're talking about this year, then maybe not.
Marco:
But even just three years ago, in that era where almost everyone at that point was buying laptops if they were a normal person.
Marco:
Hardly anybody bought desktops even as of five years ago.
Marco:
So laptops really took over in the last decade so strongly.
Marco:
But they weren't very good.
Marco:
So I think having laptops being very hot and with short battery lives, and maybe big and heavy also, but that fixed itself towards the end of the decade.
Marco:
I think that might be it.
Marco:
Because remember, we're talking about moving from desktops in the 90s to laptops in the 2000s.
John:
yeah if you're already fast forwarding us past ssds and retina screens which i think is kind of fair because if you just start from like the best of modern computers and say that's the status quo going forward like a baby is born and they never see a spinning disc or whatever that's not what they're going to ding us for so i think the baby's born today will probably ding us for phones that break when you drop drop them if we're lucky oh good call you know because like i mean that that's a tough call because you're not sure if there's going to be material science breakthroughs that lead to that but
John:
All of us now know that you drop your phone on cement.
John:
You're like, maybe it's going to break.
John:
Maybe it's not.
John:
Maybe it'll just get dinged.
John:
But it's weird.
John:
If there's a material science breakthrough that allows that not to be something we have to worry about so much, it will look ridiculous that we have these things that were so fragile that cost so much money.
John:
that we carried around with us and it's like well if you dropped it on cement it was over and it's like it's like saying to someone today if you drop your keys on cement when you're fumbling through them to to you know to get into your car never mind it won't need keys to get into cars in that way because they'll all be marco's proximity key but anyway the idea that if you drop your uh drop your keys on the ground your keys are still fine right well our phones if you drop them on the ground they're not fine anymore and i feel like it's possible in our lifetime that it could be a material science breakthrough that makes that seem ridiculous
Casey:
In the same way that there could be a battery breakthrough.
Marco:
And that also is worth pointing out, too, that in the same ways that it's kind of irrelevant to us what happens with mainframes these days, I think our kids are not going to really care what computers were like in today's era.
Marco:
They're going to be talking about what mobile phones were like in today's era.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so from that point of view, maybe battery life is the thing because battery life on laptops, as we said earlier, is getting pretty solid to the point where most people don't really run into issues that often anymore with the newest models.
Marco:
And it's probably going to keep going in that direction.
Marco:
Whereas with phones, it seems like we're kind of at this standstill where the industry is still so competitive with moving the hardware forward, making everything more powerful, making the screens bigger and brighter and higher density and all this stuff.
Marco:
So we're kind of at battery stagnation where – and sometimes it even gets worse where as everything gets more complicated and more advanced and more powerful and bigger, we're still getting like about a day of casual use and less than a day of heavy use.
Marco:
And we've kind of been there for a while now.
Marco:
hopefully by the time our our kids at least at least my kid by the time he's old enough to care john your kids probably already care but by the time my kids old enough to care maybe uh you know maybe having a multiple day battery life on a phone will be the the common case phone batteries are tough because you have to transmit that's the killer i think on phones like you can make the phone you can make the phone consume zero energy for its screen and cpu and
John:
You have to transmit so that some tower, I guess, I guess, you know, if they come up with whatever a successor to LTE is able to use even less power.
John:
But I worry that that's the limiting factor.
John:
It's like you are a physical distance and you must, you must send, unless we have quantum entanglement where we can just, you know, convey information without transmitting radio waves.
Marco:
Well, but look at how cell phones have progressed over time.
Marco:
Over time, cell phone towers have gotten more dense, so you have to transmit less distance.
Marco:
They have gotten more crowded and noisy as well.
Marco:
It's a separate issue, but they've gotten closer to you most of the time.
Marco:
And we've switched to lower power and faster protocols.
Marco:
Like the old analog phones had to use a ton of power to reach some tower that was 30 miles away because there weren't a whole lot of them.
Marco:
These days, we have these nice, fast digital networks that are much, much lower power on the transmit side.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
As the networks get faster, it's like the race to sleep thing on CPUs.
Marco:
You can keep the radio on for a shorter time, transmit more data, and then be done and go back into sleep.
John:
Yeah, but what I'm thinking of is that eventually it will become the limiting factor because the other parts can progress at sort of the pace of technology.
John:
but the radio parts can only progress at the, at the rate of infrastructure.
John:
You know, like how long does it take to build out new towers, to convert the networks, to do all that, that moves so much more slowly.
John:
And if things, if current trends continue, that will become the dominant factor in power use.
John:
Whereas right now it's not the dominant fact.
John:
The dominant factor now is if you have some app that's running in the background all the time, it will kill your phone before it gets a chance to waste all its energy on cell phone, talking to cell phone towers, right.
John:
To get data.
John:
Uh, but I think by the time our, you know, our kids were up that, uh,
John:
especially given the way infrastructure that's the glacial pasted infrastructure changes over in the us that talking to the cell network will be the dominant power source if we're lucky i guess i mean i guess i guess they could continue to do what you were just saying which is like well they never spend their energy on better battery life they always spend it on better features and cpu speed and stuff and just maintain parity in battery life
John:
And thinking about that with my dumb phone, I almost think that multi-day battery life is a little bit of a curse as well as a blessing.
John:
Because I forget to charge my phone because it lasts like six and a half days on a charge, right?
John:
And if you have to charge your phone every day, if you have 18 or 20 hour battery life, you're probably okay.
John:
But once you get like 50 hour battery life, now you forget to charge your phone.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true, actually.
Marco:
That's how I was with Kindles when I used them more.
Marco:
I would not charge my Kindle ever.
Marco:
And most of the time, it wasn't a problem.
Marco:
One day every two months, maybe, I'd go to read and I couldn't because it was dead.
Marco:
So I'd plug it in.
Marco:
And then I wouldn't care for two more months.
John:
yeah i mean that's that's the extreme case i think that is acceptable but with my phone my wife was always complaining because my phone's not charged and why is it not charged because there's no i don't need to charge it every day or every other day every three days like seriously like maybe once a week i need to charge it but i need to like remember oh you know it's not once a week it's like every five and a half days or something so
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's interesting to me trying to pick out what is the obvious downfall of stuff today.
Casey:
And the other thing that we haven't really mentioned that I wonder is, will home broadband still be a thing?
Casey:
And I'm not sure.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, as I've said numerous times on this show, LTE, even in
Casey:
reasonable speeds is quicker than my broadband at home five years ago and granted five years is a long time but you know lte at burst like ridiculously awesome speeds is almost as quick if not in some rare cases as quick as my five my beloved files today and granted marco you have the super baller files but
Casey:
For us regular humans, you know, it's almost on par.
Casey:
And if it wasn't for bandwidth limits, then there's an argument that maybe we wouldn't need home Internet.
Casey:
And I keep thinking back to like AOL and back when back when.
Casey:
you would have a limited amount of minutes.
Casey:
You actually, you were talking about this on the talk show when you had a limited amount of minutes and it was like $3,000 a minute to be online.
Casey:
And then eventually everything became unlimited because even ISPs had that, if memory serves, or a lot of ISPs took that approach of it's timed and you only get so much time a month and so on.
Casey:
But eventually it was a race to, I don't know if the bottom's the right way of phrasing it, but it was a race to unlimited.
Casey:
And I wonder if the
Casey:
The cell phone companies will eventually race to unlimited, kind of like what Sprint is supposedly doing.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, there are places where that won't work, of course, where you're in the middle of nowhere.
Casey:
But actually, I have some friends at work that do live in the middle of nowhere.
Casey:
And the quickest internet they can get is a Verizon MiFi or perhaps just make their phone a hotspot.
Casey:
Because the only other option they have is DSL.
Casey:
So sometimes in some certain circumstances, being in the middle of nowhere, that makes broadband – I'm sorry, cellular internet the best option.
John:
I think that's in the even more distant future because anyone who writes a sci-fi book doesn't involve like wires going to people's houses.
John:
The sci-fi book, like the super fast network that connects all the computers on the super advanced planet is always wireless, right?
John:
And I think the main thing that will make that happen for us is the inability of us to do infrastructure projects in this country in a reasonable amount of time because running wires to everybody's house, it seems beyond the capabilities of any private company or government or the combination thereof because it's some big combination of
John:
eminent domain for the wires and the people owning the existing things and stuff like that so given that incredible screwed up in this uh it's right for someone for wireless to get good enough and say we don't need to do that stuff we don't need to dig trenches and run wires and deal with the government and stuff we just need to i guess they still need to deal with the government for the spectrum
John:
But assuming they can make use of the spectrum that's already available that they already have, that's definitely ready for it to happen.
John:
And it seems more sci-fi-like.
John:
But I think if it wasn't for our complete inability to run wires to people's houses in a reasonable fashion, that the wired would still maintain its hold because as fast as wireless is ever going to get,
John:
Again, unless you go with some crazy quantum entanglement, you know, super advanced sci-fi thing.
John:
If you have the technology to do that, think of the technology you have for the wireless.
John:
And even though you can't think of a use for 100 times faster than LTE now or 1,000 times faster, if you had it, you would come up with the uses for it.
John:
Like, it's not going to be 8K television.
John:
Who knows?
John:
It would be like holograms or neural imprint.
John:
We're talking far future or whatever.
Casey:
You know, maybe.
John:
I think wireless is inevitable.
John:
For us, because of our inability to run wires, but I think if everything was on an even keel and you could get the wires to people's houses, that would continue to be a thing just because it's so much more capable.
Marco:
Well, but wireless has a pretty big problem where it has the ceiling at which it slams into limitations of spectrum and space and density, where wires...
Marco:
Wires can run in a very, very dense area, in a very dense arrangement, and it doesn't really affect them.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter that much.
Marco:
They have some challenges at some of the big bottleneck piping points of the backhaul, but not major problems.
Marco:
And most of the time, that can also be solved by just running more wires.
Marco:
Whereas if you're in a dense city area, and the radio spectrum is just jammed full, and it's still not enough capacity...
Marco:
There's no more spectrum to be had that's available in the area for a while or ever.
Marco:
That's a problem.
Marco:
You hit this hard ceiling with wireless.
John:
Wireless is a wired system.
John:
In cities, wireless is a wired system.
John:
All you're getting rid of is the last mile they call up in an apartment building.
John:
It's that last 200 feet because your cell tower...
John:
it could be connected by a fiber optic cable to some backbone or whatever.
John:
It's just that your house isn't connected to the cell tower by any kind of cable.
John:
You connect to the cell tower, the cell, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, especially in cities where your building would have some, you know, some kind of cell tower in it, but your building would be wired to the backbone.
John:
So it's,
John:
It's just getting rid of that last mile.
John:
But what it means is that you don't have to have some wire to your house that you pay for, that you're paying for this amorphous service that exists everywhere in the air.
John:
I think that's what Casey's getting at.
John:
Like when he says broadband goes away, you mean a thing I pay for that goes to my house.
John:
Instead, you're just going to pay for access to the air over the entire country.
John:
And
John:
you're not paying for that one wire in your house.
John:
But the wires are all still going to be there.
John:
It's just a question of how dense can you get the towers and stuff like that.
John:
And what Marco was saying about the limitations, yeah, that's why having a wire going to your house, not a wire, but like a fiber optic thing or whatever, it's always going to win.
John:
It's better to not have to send signals through the air, right?
John:
You'll have much more capacity there.
John:
Just the question is...
John:
Is the difficulty of running those wires to people's houses going to make it so that wireless just comes in and disrupts them old-fashioned disruption?
John:
Like, while you guys are busy over there arguing about cable packages and fiber optic and last-mile crap, we're just going to offer this for everybody for free.
John:
They're already paying for it, and we're going to say, hey, it's good enough to be your broadband, ditch everything, and we win.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think it matters more in rural areas where you already have issues getting high-speed cable and high-speed DSL and certainly fiber is out of the question in rural areas where wireless covers them way more easily
Marco:
by area.
Marco:
So it's going to be, I think, a lot like having well water from the city pumped to you versus having to pump your own water or having natural gas pipeline to your house rather than having to use liquid propane.
Marco:
There's going to be the city hookups, the main infrastructure hookups are probably always going to be better if you can get them.
Marco:
But the advantage is that you don't have to get them in a lot of places.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Wireless has started covering rural areas much more slowly than cities, but it's covering them more slowly than you can get LTE in Manhattan, but a lot faster than you can get Fios in the rural areas.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Although I want to go back a step, you know, John, you had made mention that there will be some new thing like 4K TV or maybe even holograms that will necessitate a really fat pipe coming into your house.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, I remember vividly trying to download an MP3 from some weirdo FTP site that was surely installing a thousand viruses on my Windows PC.
Casey:
And I remember doing this over dial up and thinking to myself, I can tell even as, you know, a
Casey:
teenager at the time, I can tell that this is not going to be as painful in the future.
Casey:
And then once it got to the point that I could download an MP3 with some modicum of a quickness, then I would try to download a video and I could tell, you know what, this is going to get a lot better in the future.
Casey:
And I think that maybe you're right, that maybe there'll be a hologram or something like that.
Casey:
But I don't know.
John:
I was saying that that's silly.
John:
It's not going to be increasingly high-resolution video.
John:
That's a silly extrapolation of what we have now.
John:
But if you want to take something that we have now...
John:
that will get worse in the future that will already needs more capacities and we talk about it all the time uh it's backups and not from a backup perspective but just like we if you produce all this digital content in your life those video you create the pictures you take that's only going to get bigger up to a point you know because it's the point where getting if you're taking 4k videos on your cell phone it probably doesn't need to be much better than that maybe twice as good or whatever
John:
But over a lifetime, you will build up a lot of that.
John:
And I still think it's ridiculous to make people accept that that stuff could go away at any time and you don't really own it and it just disappears.
John:
So if there was some way to sort of like, again, I get back to the transporter ad.
John:
if there was sort of this series of little devices at home, at work, at all your friend's house, and your data could be pushed among it so that when your house burned down, you know you wouldn't lose all your data.
John:
Like, that's the ultimate extension of the internet.
John:
But to do that, you need massive bandwidth between all these nodes.
John:
So, like, how is it feasible to move a lifetime worth of information amongst these nodes in real time?
John:
Like, can I move video as fast as I can grab it on my phone?
John:
Of course you can't.
John:
Ah, but if you have these gigantic pipes coming to and from your house, many interesting things are happening.
John:
That's why I think, like...
John:
We don't need 10,000 times the bandwidth we have.
John:
But if you go to someone, okay, picture that you have 10,000 times the bandwidth.
John:
Can you think of something you knew you can do with that?
John:
Those type of numbers, like water magnitude increases, open up things to the realm of possibility that we're not even a twinkle in anyone's eye.
John:
But you're like, okay, boom, you have it.
John:
Now what can you do?
John:
And like that's, you know, downloading video over the internet to watch movies and high def.
John:
If you had proposed that to someone in 1962, they would have probably thought of that.
John:
They would have said, wow, if I have that kind of bandwidth, I can send moving pictures.
John:
And lo and behold, you can.
John:
And like, how did we get from point A to point B?
John:
It's not like you need to build this network because we can send movies.
John:
And it's not like, well, we need to send movies.
John:
You need to build this network.
John:
They kind of go hand in hand.
John:
But data backup and moving all your personal data amongst this big cloud, that would require massive bandwidth.
John:
We'll have to rethink cities.
Yeah.
Casey:
That to me is the best example.
John:
And if we all had segues, that would be – I got that reference, Marco.
Casey:
No, I think that makes the most sense.
Casey:
The backups makes the most sense because that's something that you're right.
Casey:
I can tell today that that's too slow and it shouldn't be that slow and it probably won't be.
John:
But we wouldn't call it backups like that.
John:
It would not be a backup.
John:
That would be the up.
John:
It would be the up that we're backing.
John:
You know, like there is no backup.
John:
It's just like, of course, of course, all our information is just there.
John:
And of course, it is redundant and separated and travels with us and synchronized between these things.
John:
And whether it's because we buy these little, you know, thumb-sized transport type things and spread them around or whether there's some sort of cloud storage solution that somebody does, like...
John:
this wad of data that we already make we already each make this wad of data it's too big for us to do anything with we can barely we can barely have one primary location and then one like backup that we put it to let alone having it instantly synchronized everywhere it's just there's not enough bandwidth for that and we've talked about it many times before and that's just with current generation video and current stuff and i you know algorithms will increase but then i think solo resolution will increase a little bit more uh and think of people who have a lifetime of this stuff versus people who started taking high def video in 2007
John:
How about people who start taking video, high def video in 2007 and they're eight years old and they do it for their entire life.
John:
How much data are they going to have by the end of it?
John:
Maybe they don't want to keep it all, but it seems like you're going to want to keep some of it somehow.
Casey:
Yeah, that makes sense.
John:
Oh, and before we leave this topic, I want to get back to the easy one that none of us picked for Casey Singh.
John:
What's going to look weird to our kids?
John:
The easy one that I don't know if it's not worth even mentioning is that, of course, all our crap is going to look humongous and ridiculous.
John:
Like, of course it is.
John:
The same way when you look at, like, full-height hard drives or your full-height tower PC case or, like, even our Mac Pro cheese graders eventually when we get used to these Mac Pros, everything's going to look gigantic.
John:
It's like, you carry this around?
John:
Like, I have a Newton on my desk now.
John:
My Newton looks ridiculous next to my iPod Touch, right?
John:
Of course that's going to happen with everything.
John:
Laptops, phones.
John:
Well, will it?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm not so sure.
Marco:
Laptops and phones have both reached the point, and not even recently, they've both reached the point where they're pretty much as small as they can be and still have the screen size that they have.
Marco:
And in the case of laptops, still have the keyboard size that they have.
Marco:
There's not a whole lot of room to make them a lot smaller and still keep those keyboards.
John:
If your iPhone 5 looked exactly like it does, but it was the thickness and weight of a credit card, your current iPhone 5 would look ridiculous compared to it.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
But we're talking about such a small scale.
Marco:
The differences are so much smaller.
Marco:
And some parts of computing have gotten bigger.
Marco:
I mean, look how small that original Mac looks.
Marco:
It turns out things that are good to get bigger, we've gotten bigger.
John:
Well, that's like screen size.
John:
Even if you just look at the thickness of my 23-inch Apple Cinema display in front of me now compared to the thickness of an iMac, which has a whole computer behind it, that is thinner than my monitor.
John:
I mean, it doesn't have to be that big of a deal.
John:
If I compare my current iPod Touch to the first-generation iPod Touch, that looks ridiculous.
John:
And the difference is like 2 millimeters.
John:
But you put it in your hand, you're like, oh, how did you ever use this iPod Touch?
John:
It's like...
John:
Twice the thickness.
John:
It's not that big of a difference, but that tends to be glaring to people in retrospect how big and thick and heavy things were.
Casey:
No, I think that's a good point, but I think that Marco's also right that in terms of width and height, I'm not sure that most devices are going to get that much smaller.
Casey:
I think you're absolutely right that in terms of depth, they will get smaller.
John:
Well, I mean, look at the Newton MessagePad.
John:
It's probably similar screen size to an iPad Mini, but way thicker and heavier.
John:
And so that's what stands out.
John:
It's not so much that the width and height, it's different proportions than an iPad Mini, but the area is similar.
John:
But because it's like a brick, then you feel like, oh, well, you know...
Casey:
this it feels old you know and it's funny this this is a bit of a tangent but from our tangent of a tangent of a tangent of a tangent but on this show yeah exactly um i got for christmas the apple leather case a black one for my iphone 5s
Casey:
and I didn't typically... I had a bumper on my 4S for a long, long, long time.
Casey:
At least half the time I had the 4S.
Casey:
And I liked it, but I mean, it wasn't my favorite.
Casey:
But I didn't trust myself not to have a case at all, which I don't really argue is the better way to go.
Casey:
And I wanted to try the leather case for the 5S because I felt like it would be a really nice compromise.
Casey:
It didn't seem to add that much thickness, and it...
Casey:
And it seemed to be pretty nice.
Casey:
And I've had it since Christmas, like I said.
Casey:
And I actually really, really like it a lot.
Casey:
And it's the first real case I've ever had.
Casey:
Not a bumper or anything like that.
Casey:
And I really, really, really like it.
Casey:
I got the black one.
Casey:
So as it fades...
Casey:
If it's faded, I can't tell.
Casey:
But it doesn't add that much thickness, which is what made me think of it.
Casey:
Or I don't feel like it adds that much thickness.
Casey:
Having come from a 4S not that long ago, it doesn't add enough thickness to make it feel like it's ruined the phone.
Casey:
And I really, really like mine.
Casey:
I'm not saying that a case is right for you, Marco.
Casey:
And I know, John, you don't believe in iPhones for yourself.
Casey:
But I do really like it.
Marco:
I often wonder why it seems... I mean, is it just me, and saying this as somebody who doesn't buy a lot of cases, is it just me, or is there basically no competition for Apple's cases for the iPhone and iPad in how...
Marco:
how small and thin and light they tend to be and also how high quality they tend to feel and look like it seems like every other case i've seen the height there are high quality ones but they're substantially bulkier uh and and all the ones that are super small and thin are like you know silicones that crappy things that feels like crap it looks like crap
Casey:
Marco, how quickly we forget the iPad 1 case.
John:
Oh, yeah, that was a disaster.
John:
Or the current non-leather wrap around the back of the iPad cases.
John:
Those are not good either.
Casey:
I have one.
Casey:
And actually, I don't particularly care for the one on the iPad Mini.
Casey:
In fact, I take it off quite often just while I'm using the iPad because the damn magnet that holds it to the back of the iPad is nowhere near strong enough.
Casey:
I feel like, John, you've said this in the past.
Casey:
Somebody has said this in the past, but...
John:
Having the cases be minimal, though, I'm not sure if there's much competition, for example, for the leather one.
John:
And I think a lot of that is because I think people like big, like they want to feel like they're spending money on something like a big case.
John:
Like it seems like if you're going to get a case, you want to feel a case.
John:
And if you buy something and it's barely there.
John:
then you don't feel like you're getting anything.
John:
So maybe that's why in the third party, is there more of a market that, but I mean, you've remember you've seen my iPod touch case, right?
John:
And everyone who sees the iPod touch case takes a double cake to think, does this have a case on it yet?
John:
Or is this what the back of the iPod touch is like?
John:
And it's just a, you know, a run of the mill Belkin plastic case.
John:
Uh,
John:
But because the iPod Touch is so incredibly thin, with the case on, it feels almost like there's no case there.
John:
And it's very tightly fitting.
John:
And, you know, it's not made of some loosey-goosey material and stretchy around the edges and everything.
John:
And the buttons, you know, line up with all the things and feel nice when you're pressing them.
John:
In that way, like the leather case.
John:
It made me think of it.
John:
My wife's got the red leather case for her 5S.
John:
In the same way where you're like, well, you're pushing buttons through the case or whatever.
John:
It can be done well, reasonably well.
John:
And I think there are case makers who do sort of compete in that realm, if only on the iPod Touch in this case.
John:
But I bet there's something out there for the 5S as well.
John:
But mostly when I see people with cases, they are comical and huge and people love them.
John:
They love them.
Casey:
Although I will say very quickly, the Achilles heel of this case is absolutely the lock button.
Casey:
The lock button feels considerably more mushy than it did when it was caseless.
John:
You mean the silent, the ring silent button?
Casey:
Yeah, the one at the top.
Casey:
The sleep-wake button.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
It feels a lot mushier.
Casey:
And I was told, and I think it's true, that it would get better over time, and it has gotten somewhat better over the last month or so, but...
Casey:
It's still not as crisp as I would like.
John:
Oh, you mean the power button?
John:
The sleep-wake button?
John:
Whatever.
Casey:
The one on the top.
Casey:
The one on the top.
John:
I'm thinking of the one on the – because the one on the side, they have a cutout for it.
John:
You stick your fingernail in there and you switch it to ring.
John:
That's what I was talking about.
John:
That one is actually they don't cover up because I guess they couldn't.
John:
It wouldn't make any sense.
John:
Right.
John:
The squishiness of the button on top, you're right.
John:
In that case, I think my cheap Belkin case from iPod Touch feels better because it's more of a positive kind of click because it's a material with less squishiness than leather.
John:
Leather itself is going to give, so it's harder for them.
John:
That's why I think they should have made a leather case with metal through buttons.
John:
That would have been really nice and high quality, right?
Casey:
I agree.
John:
Then it would have cost $80.
John:
Probably.
John:
Or $90.
John:
I don't even know how much it would cost.
John:
I don't want to know.
Casey:
The leather case, it was a gift, but I want to say it was $40 or $50, I think.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
It was expensive enough that I didn't want to buy it for myself.
Casey:
And to me, that's the perfect gift.
Casey:
It's where it's something that you want, but you don't really think you want to spend your own money on it.
Casey:
And of course, you could take this as a terrible thing.
Casey:
Oh, well, why don't you buy it for me instead?
Casey:
But it's like, that's the perfect gift because it's something you know you want, but it's not something you necessarily want to buy for yourself.
Casey:
But man, if somebody else buys it for you, that's awesome.
John:
Well, the best thing would be if your wife buys it for you with your shared pool of money.
John:
Because then what have you done?
John:
Nothing.
John:
You're just like this crazy mental game you're playing with yourself.