Live Like Other People
John:
Let's get going.
Marco:
Oh, we are going.
Marco:
That was so good.
Marco:
I'm keeping that in.
Marco:
So I went to the mall today, and I had to pick up a new Apple TV and a replacement remote.
Marco:
First of all, I do want to talk a little bit about my TV.
Marco:
So we've had this back den slash family room slash playroom in our house since we bought the house.
Marco:
And we haven't had any furniture in it because we just haven't had any need for it yet.
Marco:
We have a living room.
Marco:
I have an office.
Marco:
We have separate rooms for these things.
Marco:
So this room, we always said, oh, it'll be like the kid's playroom.
Marco:
So we just started using this room finally now that we have the kid, and so we got a couch for it that was delivered this morning, and I got a TV for it, and a second Apple TV to plug into that TV, and...
Marco:
I thought it was interesting how, and John, of course, you're famous for your researched television purchase, but I thought it was interesting how for this TV, I literally, the only research I did was I searched Amazon for TVs in roughly this size range on my iPad mini in bed one night and just ordered it.
John:
That's how the rest of the world lives, Marco.
John:
Occasionally, I fantasize about purchasing something that way, but I can never actually pull the trigger.
John:
But it would just take five more minutes, just ten more minutes.
John:
Okay, maybe just one more hour.
John:
Okay, maybe three more hours.
John:
And just think, that three hours you invest now, you're going to have this thing for years.
John:
Isn't it foolish to just live like other people and just search for TV and find one that looks nice and click a buy?
John:
But that's what people do.
Casey:
So the reason you keep cars for seven eternities is because it takes you seven eternities to research the next car.
John:
I mean, like I'm reading car magazines, at least one car magazine a month.
John:
I'm continually researching what the next car is going to be.
John:
I'm always ready at a moment's notice to, you know...
John:
sift through the existing field and say, these are the potential cars I would get.
John:
I'm even making those things of like, hmm, well, do I really want... Do I want the S8 or should I wait for the new S-Class?
John:
None of these cars I can afford, but I'm already... In case, just in case, I'm ready to go on that front.
Marco:
Goodness gracious.
Marco:
And usually I'm like that too, which is why I was kind of amused by my own lack of interest in doing that for this purchase.
Marco:
The main reason why, I think, in my case this time, was...
Marco:
there weren't that many choices that I actually wanted.
Marco:
So I wasn't going to go to a store.
Marco:
I don't care because it's a secondary room in the house.
Marco:
Selfishly, I'm not going to often be watching it.
Marco:
Usually either the baby's watching it with Sesame Street or my wife is watching it while hanging out with the baby.
Marco:
And so it is very rare that I will be there watching it.
Marco:
Second of all, I know that, and it had to be smaller.
Marco:
The biggest we could get that would fit the spot it went in was 37 inches.
Marco:
I know, you know, by old standards, that's pretty big.
Marco:
But by today's standards, that's pretty small.
Marco:
So, or at least medium.
Marco:
So I'm not buying a high-end item because, John, as you told me, it's pretty hard to find small, high-end TV models.
Marco:
All small TVs are terrible.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's sad.
Marco:
And the other thing was I didn't really want to buy a Samsung because I just find Samsung so distasteful as a company overall that I'd rather not support them if I can avoid it.
Marco:
I mean, sure, if they had the only good option, I would have probably sucked it up and bought it.
Marco:
so anyway so i went and and the tv we have for our main tv which i bought about seven years ago now is a nice 42 inch panasonic plasma and i'm very happy with it it's a it's great tv 1080p um you know really really nice color and brightness and contrast dark levels are awesome it's the plasma i mean it's a fantastic tv and and i've always been very pleased with it so
Marco:
I basically looked on Amazon.
Marco:
All right, show me TVs that are, you know, this size, roughly.
Marco:
And, of course, that rules out all plasmas, which is unfortunate, because I do like plasma as a technology.
Marco:
It just looks so good in dark detail.
Marco:
But, so, okay, can't get a plasma.
Marco:
It's 37 inches.
Marco:
So, and rule out Samsung.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And rule out things that won't ship via Amazon Prime because I don't feel like paying some massive shipping charge for somebody to send me a TV.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And that left only like four models.
Marco:
And one of them was a Panasonic.
Marco:
And the Panasonic was the only one that was 1080p.
John:
Amazon has terrible television selection, by the way.
John:
But I'm not surprised that you narrowed it down to very few models because they do not – they simply – like they carry every possible brand of like, you know, I don't know –
John:
pen or paper towels or whatever, but TVs, your Best Buy has more selection in terms of models, which surprises me all the time.
John:
How could Amazon not have this, but whatever weird math they use to figure out what they carry seems to exclude a lot of models of TV.
Marco:
You would think it would be the opposite, because it's Amazon.
Marco:
They don't have...
Marco:
bunch of stores everywhere right yeah i don't i don't know what it is yeah so it was easy it was you know i could choose between some like weird discontinued sony model or some samsung thing or some like you know kobe piece of crap or a panasonic which i already like that looks very similar to my current one that had good good customer ratings on amazon and was the only one that was 1080p i mean it was a no-brainer so i was and it was like 550 bucks
Marco:
which i think is pretty cheap for for a good tv of that size um so i was like hey that's done the measurements fit perfectly done and it arrived today and it's awesome like i'm i'm really happy with it and i can't believe how little research i had to do to get a satisfactory purchase here i guess that if people that's why people buy without research because ignorance is bliss and if you don't do the research you don't know what it is you're missing and you just get what you want like the i i agonized over my small tv purchase because i had exactly the same problem i'd
John:
I quickly discovered that all the small TVs are terrible because there's no market for high-end small TVs.
John:
There's more of a market for high-end hatchbacks than there is for small TVs.
John:
And so I had to go through all of the models that all had some terrible fatal flaw that would prevent me from ever wanting to figure out which is the least terrible one.
John:
Uh, and in the, in the end, the one I chose, I chose because it was on sale for like a $200 off what you could find at like a, you know, a Best Buy type price.
John:
And it was on Amazon and it was, you know, prime shippable.
John:
And I said, okay, these all have something about them that makes me not able to buy them.
John:
But this one has, it's such a steep discount today.
John:
I have to get it.
John:
So, uh, that's what I ended up with, but I'm, you know,
John:
I still look at it, and I still am sad, but I'm like, well, I did save a lot of money on it.
John:
Like, mine was around $500, too, but it was a nicer television, probably, than Marco got.
John:
Are you sure?
Marco:
The one I have is pretty nice.
John:
Well, I mean, maybe not now, because I bought mine years ago, so technology marches on.
John:
But at the time, it was...
John:
It was also the highest rated of all the ones I was looking at.
John:
And I wish there was a site like DP Review for televisions.
John:
But as far as I can tell, there is not.
John:
There is AVS forums, which is kind of like DP Review, but exploded into a million pieces.
John:
So you have to troll through the forums to figure out what people say.
John:
But like, I just want a comprehensive, in-depth technical review of things the way DP Review does cameras.
John:
Image comparisons with comparable models, like the whole nine yards, right?
Yeah.
John:
And I could balance that with other stuff.
John:
But the only thing I found, like, this is what you should have done to... Well, this would have just led you to disappointment.
John:
But the way my parents wanted to get a television, I just told them to go to CNET's television reviews because they have a nice web interface.
John:
They review most televisions.
John:
They do a reasonable job.
John:
And you can just go, show me the best TVs for, you know, under $500, under this size, with this technology.
John:
And it will just show you with the star ratings.
John:
And you can...
John:
You get a short list of models.
John:
Then you go to Amazon and see that Amazon carries none of those models, and you'll be sad.
John:
But that's a good starting point.
John:
It's kind of like the wire cutter for TVs, but a little bit more comprehensive because they'll tell me, okay, I want a big TV.
John:
I want a small TV.
John:
I want LCD.
John:
I want plasma.
John:
I want LED backlight.
John:
I don't care about the backlight.
John:
By the way, what is the backlight on yours, Dino Marco?
Marco:
LED.
John:
Yeah, they're all LED now, but that used to be a big distinguishing characteristic.
Marco:
And it drives me crazy when people call them LED TVs.
John:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
Because that's so misleading.
John:
The magic of marketing.
John:
Is yours edglet?
John:
You know, I don't even know that.
John:
Yeah, I mean, don't research it.
John:
Just be happy with your television.
John:
Don't look into it.
Marco:
I like it, honestly.
Marco:
I think it's great.
Marco:
I mean, I've used it for an hour earlier today.
John:
That's the thing about television technology.
John:
Even though all these technologies have some horrible flaw about them, including plasma,
John:
Progress does march on.
John:
I think, you know, people have been talking about the latest crop of Panasonic plasmas.
John:
Panasonic is once again making noises about getting out of the plasma business.
John:
But they're like, okay, well, if you buy the sort of middle-of-the-road Panasonic plasma that everybody buys, it has better picture than their super-duper top-of-the-line from the last generation.
John:
Oops.
John:
You know?
John:
And so that...
John:
That's depressing if you have a television like me.
John:
I bought the top of the line five years ago, and now their bargain basement TV probably looks better.
John:
But it's heartening in that, oh, well, it's finally getting to the point where if you go out and buy a Panasonic Plasma today from their current crop of models, you're probably getting a better television than I have for a lot less money.
John:
And that's kind of the way technology is supposed to work.
Marco:
And I think one reason why I was willing to almost impulse buy a TV is because they're all so good now.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, within – you can – and especially you, but you, the general population, can find differences and identify them and nitpick them.
Marco:
But in reality, whatever TV you buy –
Marco:
chances are you'll be fine with it until it breaks, which is probably, you know, at least five years.
Marco:
I know I said on Twitter, 10 years, I know, uh, I got tons of responses saying that these components do not last that long and I might expect more like five to seven.
Marco:
Okay, fine.
Marco:
But, uh, you know, five to seven, okay, five to seven years, uh,
Marco:
That TV is going to work.
Marco:
For me, a TV is a monitor for an Apple TV and an occasional game system.
Marco:
I'm not asking that much from it.
Marco:
And so I knew that whatever I bought, unless it had some weird thing, like it made a weird noise, or the speakers fell out, barring some kind of catastrophic flaw...
Marco:
Almost anything would work just fine for my purposes here.
John:
I still think the distinction between LCD and plasma is significant enough that – especially if you're into watching movies.
John:
With all the motion compensation stuff, you either leave that on and everything looks weird or you turn it off and everything looks weird in a slightly different way.
John:
It used to be – I don't know if this is still the case because I haven't researched buying a new TV recently –
John:
But it used to be that it was difficult to find... Even among the plasmas, you had to be careful to make sure that you got one that could do, like, true 24 frames per second cadence for a Blu-ray player.
John:
Like, there's some standards of saying, like, oh, put the TV into a mode... Because 24 is not a nice multiple of, like, 60 or 30 or anything like that.
John:
And there are various Blu-ray players and TVs conspire to give you...
John:
the most accurate film-like representation of movies that were shot at 24 frames per second without any weird interpolation without any image processing delays and stuff like that and plasmas are are still the way to go for that because the lcds necessarily have to do some amount of that uh weird processing stuff and you know the input lag for games and stuff like that uh but you know for for watching television shows it's fine i mean that's our upstairs bedroom tv is a
Marco:
is an lcd and we watch tv shows on it and the kids watch movies on it it's not a big deal i will say also like i mean i haven't i haven't watched it at night yet um so i'll see you know how how good the dark detail is which is one area where plasmas have always really been better than lcds but i will say just looking at the tv and regular daytime usage uh you could have told me it was a plasma and i would have believed it it it really does look that good like lcd has come a long way and uh your eyesight may also be going yeah
Marco:
right but no i mean like it really i mean and granted i guess i'm comparing this to what i'm most familiar with which is a seven-year-old plasma um but my seven-year-old plasma is still pretty good by most standards today and uh you know so it's not like totally not it's not like one of the first generation ones that like is all dim and yeah just turn turn on all the lights in the room bring up the beginning of a movie that has a completely black screen with like the director's name and white text in the middle and then uh
John:
see what that looks like does it look like a giant glowing gray square with white light in the middle or you know does it does it look like a completely black square with white white text with a giant halo around it or that's that's where the you'll see the black levels is you know when all the lights go out in the room right how much how much light is actually emitted from your
Casey:
You know what's funny is ask me what kind of TV I have in our family room or living room or whatever you call it.
John:
Is it or watch TV right now?
Casey:
I do watch TV.
Casey:
I have no idea what kind of TV it is.
Casey:
I think it's a Toshiba.
Casey:
Really don't know.
Casey:
It was a gift.
Casey:
Don't know.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
TVs are just one of those things I don't care enough.
Casey:
I really just don't care enough.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that you guys are wrong to care.
Casey:
And I kind of wish I cared.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I just really don't care.
Casey:
And for the longest time, we had a 32-inch TV above our fireplace, which everyone who comes into our house that actually cares about this stuff says, oh, my God, how could you have the TV that high off the ground?
Casey:
You're out of your mind.
Casey:
It's terrible, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
Why don't you have a bigger TV?
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
And it's just odd to me what some people care about and some people don't.
Casey:
And again, I'm not faulting either of you in any capacity for caring.
Casey:
I kind of wish I gave enough of a crap, but I just don't care.
John:
People don't care about retina screens either, which is the depressing reality of having taken various family members shopping for iOS devices.
John:
I have to take great pains to...
John:
to show them that there is actually a difference between retina and non-retina iPad screens.
John:
They cannot see it.
John:
They kind of see it when I show them, but it's the type of thing where if they can't see it just by looking at the screens, what do you then do to show it?
John:
So, like, I zoom in on text, or I try to say, do you see the jaggies around the curve of that thing?
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, everything will be Retina.
John:
Retina is better.
John:
They see that it's better, but it's not like, all right, but is it better enough?
John:
How much more does this one cost or whatever?
John:
I think that's why, you know, Panasonic's thinking of canning its plasma.
John:
This is because, like, plasma has superior picture quality and other characteristics to LCDs despite all the advances in LCDs.
John:
But is it better enough?
John:
And the other thing that kills me is, like, not only were...
John:
Is the image quality better?
John:
But they've been consistently cheaper as well on the high end, especially like if the super high end, you know, LCDs were more expensive for the same size as the plasma, but it's just not better enough.
John:
And like plasma got like bad rep for, you know, heat and power, some of which is true and burn and also some of which is true.
John:
And it's just like, oh, you know, most people buy kind of the middle-of-the-road LCD televisions, and there's just not enough people who care about image quality to get... I mean, Pioneer got out of the business after their Kuro models, which were like the best-looking televisions ever for years and years after they stopped making them.
John:
And some people say still had advantages over existing models, so I think it's a little bit nostalgia.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, like, if your difference is not distinct enough to capture the hearts and minds of people, it's very difficult to make a go of that business.
John:
So Panasonic's like, yeah, we are the current king of television image quality, except for, like, I guess those crazy OLED things or whatever.
John:
But not enough people care about that difference.
John:
They just go and buy LCDs, and we sell LCDs too, and we're just going to get out of this plasma thing.
John:
Because at a certain point, it becomes untenable to be, like, the only person making...
John:
plasma samsung makes plasma too other people do as well but uh i've been actually seriously considering buying whatever the very last high-end uh panasonic plasma is even though i did not plan to replace my television you just got it two years ago it wasn't it was a little bit longer than that but like yeah like i did i planned to keep it for many many years and it's perfectly fine but i'm like if i don't get this now i don't want to be in like five years or seven years forced to buy
John:
uh nlcd television because i don't think like oleds or you know any other technology will be superior at that point so i don't want it's like letting the kuro go like you could have bought a kuro but you didn't and pioneer stopped making them it's like stocking up on old keyboards yeah no i have
John:
I have.
John:
Actually, I was a big Apple Extended Keyboard 2 user, and so I have a bunch of spares.
John:
But then I switched.
John:
When the RSI kicked in, I wanted a keyboard that took less effort to press the keys on, despite the fact that I love the Apple Extended 2 and I used it all the way up through college.
John:
So now I have a backlog of Apple Extended 2s, and I guess I will just save them until I can sell them to Gruber for some tremendously high price.
Yeah.
John:
He'll come begging one day, one day when he can't find any more.
Marco:
Yeah, but he's only buying like one every ten years.
John:
Well, maybe he'll just start, maybe they'll start breaking at a higher rate.
John:
I've got some pretty good condition Apple Extended 2s up in the attic.
Casey:
Well, that's good to know.
Casey:
I'm glad you brought up the Retina thing just very quickly.
Casey:
My parents came down to visit this past weekend, and my dad has a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And he was asking me a few questions about it, and so I sat down in front of it, and instantly I was ruined again.
Casey:
And I have, I mentioned in the past, I believe, but I have a 15-inch Hi-Res Retina.
Casey:
anti-glare, non-retina MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I actually have two of them.
Casey:
And my eyes are actually terrible.
Casey:
I have to wear hard contacts because my eyes are so bad.
Casey:
But I was in front of his retina MacBook Pro for 30 seconds before I was ruined.
Casey:
And I got up and I said, God, that screen's so beautiful.
Casey:
And my mom said, you know, I just don't see it.
Casey:
I don't get it.
Casey:
I believe you.
Casey:
But I don't get it.
Casey:
And so, John, you're dead on about that.
John:
It's crazy.
John:
Do you think that's because, like, all right, so our parents are older and your vision gets worse as you get older.
John:
Is that just it, though, or is it something else?
Marco:
I don't think that's it.
Marco:
I don't either.
Marco:
I think it's a combination of attention to that kind of detail and also just caring about that particular type of thing.
Marco:
I agree.
John:
Well, and I would like to do, you know, an A-B test where, like, there's some sort of reward, you know, where, like, one of these is retina and one of these isn't.
John:
Try to guess correctly.
John:
Not that you care whether it's, you know, but literally just can you tell, right?
John:
And we can all tell, like, you know, blink tests.
John:
Put them up on the screen for half a second.
Yeah.
John:
But maybe if the same half a second is insufficient for them, if they have three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds, a minute to stare at them, can they shove their nose up to them?
John:
What does it take for you to see it?
John:
Because that's separate from, oh, I see, it's a little bit better, but it's not worth it to me, versus I literally cannot tell the difference.
Yeah.
Marco:
So going back to the 13-inch Retina for a sec.
Marco:
So I was in the Apple store today getting the second Apple TV for this new television that I had previously mentioned.
Marco:
And this was the first time I had seen in person the new 27-inch iMac and even the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, which is, what, like five months old now or something?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's been a while.
Marco:
I've been busy with family and baby and winter stuff.
Marco:
I haven't really had any reason to go into an Apple store and pay any attention to what was there until now.
Marco:
I think a couple things about this shocked me.
Marco:
First of all, the 27-inch iMac
Marco:
um the screen is awesome it is the first apple screen it is the first desktop apple screen i've seen in years that i would consider owning because it really is far less reflective than the previous generation of giant 27 inch pieces of glass they've shipped as cinema displays and iMacs before this and they're still shipping them as cinema displays
Marco:
So, you know, they talked about this new construction that they've had where they – it's similar to the Retina MacBook Pro.
Marco:
This new construction where they're, like, gluing the glass or fusing it in a certain way, using, like, one fewer glass layer than before.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
There's no air gap.
John:
There's no air gap for it.
John:
That's it.
John:
There's an extra, basically – I don't know if some scientific person will tell us, but, like, you know –
Marco:
extra barrier for refraction to take place so the angle the light changes and changes again so you get more internal reflection so it's a big difference so and like the previous generation of 15 inch MacBook Pro before the retinas I always hated those glary reflective screens they were miserable I owned one for a month and returned it and then got the anti-glare because it had just become an option but
Marco:
But with the Retina, with that same kind of construction, I think it's fine, and the reflectivity of it has never really been an issue for me.
Marco:
So yeah, I can definitely confirm that the 27-inch iMac has such dramatically reduced reflectivity from the previous one and from the cinema displays that not only would I buy one if I wanted an iMac, not only would I not hesitate at all about the reflectivity, but if Apple released a cinema display or, fingers crossed, a Retina display using that same construction, I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Marco:
um did you did you i haven't seen the new imax a person yet but did you think that it had the same oh my god the pixels are on the surface of the display look that the retina uh macbook pros have you know i didn't really get that from it but i was viewing it at a further distance because it's such a bigger screen so uh i'm not really sure that would matter as much at that distance or at least be as noticeable but i wasn't looking for that so i don't know yeah
John:
I feel like that is one of the most startling characteristics of the Retina MacBook Pro screens is not so much just the resolution, but that the color appears closer to the surface.
John:
And that, to me, is just as startling as the higher resolution.
John:
uh and you know fusing the glass obviously is going to literally make the color part closer to the surface i'm just not sure if it whatever i mean maybe the glass is just thinner on the laptops or whatever but that uh as they can approach that i mean it was it was kind of the same thing when they fused the glass on the iphone 4 or whatever it was very similar that brought it that brought it a little bit closer but i it's still like the first retina iphone did not give me the startling impression that the first retina macbook pro gave me of like the color being on the surface of it
John:
of it looking like some sort of mock-up that someone had made with layers of finely laid-down paint on the surface of the screen, but it's actual pixels.
Marco:
Yeah, and so speaking of, so I also saw a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And I've owned a 15-inch since last summer, so I'm not totally amazed easily by Retina stuff anymore because I have this awesome laptop.
Marco:
But the 13-inch, I looked at it and I thought, you know what?
Marco:
This is a fantastic computer.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I picked it up.
Marco:
It was light.
Marco:
It was small.
Marco:
I tried the higher resolution screen modes because one of the problems with the 13-inch screen is that its base mode is a doubled version of only 1280 by 800, which is a pretty terrible screen resolution for space on the screen.
Marco:
You really don't get much space with that.
Marco:
So I bumped it up and it goes to a simulated 1440 and a simulated 1680.
Marco:
And I found both of them surprisingly usable.
Marco:
And the 1680s, that's pretty impressive because that's how I run the 15 most of the time.
Casey:
You know, I'm glad you brought that up because I did the same thing and I did it very briefly.
Casey:
And granted, this was based on a sum total of five minutes of use.
Casey:
But I thought to myself, geez, I wonder if the high res mode is livable.
Casey:
And again, my eyes are pretty terrible.
Casey:
I can see my high res non-retina MacBook Pro, my 15 inch high res non-retina MacBook Pro pretty well.
Casey:
But if you get me more than, I don't know, two, three feet away, things are getting blurry and I can't read anything.
Casey:
And so I figured everything would be microscopic, but I had the exact same impression.
Casey:
And in fact, I would even go so far as to say that if I were to buy a computer tomorrow, after that five minute experience, what I would really consider doing is getting a 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro and just leaving it cranked up 90% of the time.
Marco:
It's certainly a very compelling option.
Marco:
And it struck me as I was there that here I was looking at these two models, the 27-inch iMac and the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, neither of which is particularly new at this point.
Marco:
I mean, the iMac is now three months old or four even.
Marco:
It came out December officially.
Marco:
so it's like it's like four months old the retina macbook pro 13 is like six months old um you know these things are not new at all and yet this was the first time i was seeing them and i was so blown away by how good both of them were i i really thought like similar you know i'm more of a 15 inch guy but that's unusual um just like i'm more of a mac pro guy and most people like iMacs um and seeing these two computers um
Marco:
thinking that both of them are such awesome choices.
Marco:
I think the 27-inch iMac is by far the best all-in-one desktop I've ever seen in my life.
Marco:
Such a great choice.
Marco:
It's so fast.
Marco:
It's so capable.
Marco:
It's so good, especially with the Fusion Drive.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
and that screen is incredible.
Marco:
Everything's great about it.
Marco:
The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, very similar.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
It's so fast.
Marco:
It's small.
Marco:
It's light.
Marco:
I would much rather have that than a 13-inch MacBook Air, and I love the 13-inch MacBook Air, and I've owned two of them, but
John:
Yeah, the Air screens now are really looking not good.
John:
They were never good.
John:
The Air screens never had good viewing angle.
John:
They never had high contrast.
John:
But what do you want?
John:
It's a little skinny MacBook Air, but now they're just embarrassing.
Marco:
Yeah, and the weight difference isn't that big between the 13-inch models.
Marco:
Now, yeah, if you want an 11, sure, then your only option is the Air, and that's a very different size.
Marco:
But here I was looking at these two awesome computers,
Marco:
Very easily could you say that the iMac is the best desktop ever made and the 13-inch Retina is the best laptop ever made.
Marco:
Those are slightly arguable, but only slightly.
Marco:
These are two very awesome computers.
Marco:
And yet, I never even went to see them, which to me five years ago would sound insane.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And the press mostly glossed over them.
Marco:
They were news for about a day each, and then that was about it.
Marco:
And here we are with these awesome, amazing models of Macs, and we don't care.
Marco:
We're saying Apple isn't innovating, and what have they done for us lately?
Marco:
And we're complaining about iPhones not being big enough or having a new enough skin on the interface and all this crap.
Marco:
And they're making things that even as recently as...
Marco:
Three or four years ago, we would have cared so much more about how great these new Mac models are, and now we barely care at all.
John:
I still care.
Marco:
Well, yeah, we still care.
Marco:
But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, the press, the public, especially the tech press, which is just a disaster at this point with Apple.
Marco:
But, you know, they're making such amazing things.
Marco:
It's like the Louis CK, like everything's amazing and nobody's happy, that bit.
John:
You know, like on the MacBook Pros, people at work have, my work is finally buying Macs several years after I brought what I think is the first Mac into the company.
John:
And so it's one of the options for people to get, and some people are asking me for advice of which Macs they could buy.
John:
It's mostly laptops, right?
John:
And it comes down to, like, should I get a MacBook Pro or an Air?
John:
And you would think that's a no-brainer, but I've been hesitant to recommend the current generation MacBook Pro Retinas, because that's what they're all looking at.
John:
They're not looking at the standard-res ones.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
because of the for two factors one is that the gpu can barely handle that screen at the max res and that will just take care of itself with the next cpu and chips that we all know you know the integrated gpus right so like that makes me say okay that's a first generation thing you want to be the first guy on your blog to have a thing you get it but it's not like it's it can barely it's not you know it's not a deal breaker but it's like you are at the at the ragged edge of what that gpu can handle the integrated one uh
John:
So that's a reason to wait.
John:
And the second one is the guy who used to sit across from me got the 15 inch.
John:
And, you know, I saw firsthand the image retention issues that that screen had.
John:
And I also saw firsthand his frustration at like, well, if you take it to the Apple store, they put up the checkerboard pattern for 15 minutes.
John:
And if you don't see retention, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But like I saw it in daily use, like you could see his mail window in the background when it was no longer there and it would happen routinely.
John:
And in a way that would make me,
John:
tear my hair out and so for those two reasons i figured you know we know that the gpu one is going to be solved next gen so that's a reason to wait and i hope the next round maybe they even solved it for 13 inch i know but i hope the next round of displays they get will not have this intention issue because apple does have a policy on it like they have their little checkerboard test and if your thing fails it they'll give you a new screen but it's like it's not it's not a manufacturing defect it's just the nature of this screen and i think they've sort of constructed a test that like
John:
We'll replace the ones that exhibit it the worst, but they're all going to exhibit it to some degree.
John:
Have you seen this, Marco, on your screen?
Marco:
Back when everyone was discovering this last summer and fall, I actually made my own little tester for it on a web page anybody can go to, which I forget the URL.
Marco:
How helpful.
Marco:
And it's the same thing.
Marco:
It shows checkerboard for like five minutes, then turns off and goes to gray or whatever, and you can see.
Marco:
And so when I run this test on it, I can see the artifacts, the retention artifacts, but I've never seen them in any kind of regular use.
Marco:
So I feel like I have a pretty minor case of it.
Marco:
And so it's not worth it for me to go through the hassle of getting it repaired and going without it.
John:
Well, but the thing is, like, I don't think you would end up with a better screen.
John:
In fact, you could possibly end up with a worse one because I don't think it's – like I said, it's not a manufacturing defect.
John:
It's just the way this particular crop generation of screens is.
John:
And he had the worst where, like, the checkerboard wasn't the worst thing.
John:
The worst thing seemed to be –
John:
I don't know if it was just particular shades of gray or colors, but particular windows that were on screen for a long time, those would stick, and the checkerboards were just faintly visible, but you could clearly see the column view of some other window.
John:
Pure white and pure black may not be the thing that...
John:
that sets it off.
John:
I mean, you can see the checkerboard in his, too.
John:
But, like, all that makes me think, like, these are first-generation models in so many respects, and if you could possibly wait... What I told everybody is, like, here are the pros and cons.
John:
That screen is going to look way better than the Air screen.
John:
The Air is going to be way lighter than that 15-inch, you know, thing that you were considering.
John:
If you can possibly wait until the next round of pros, your decision might get easier.
Marco:
The 15 is also way faster.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And supports more RAM.
Marco:
Right.
John:
Like, there are many advantages, but, like...
John:
It's a toss-up because I really do – my wife's got the 13-inch air.
John:
I really do like the air despite the terrible screen.
John:
I really do – all the advantages of it, like it's a dead heat between should I buy Retina or should I buy not.
John:
So I feel like –
John:
i rarely recommend like totally don't buy the first generation but in many cases it's been true like if you had sworn somebody off the first generation tie book that was the right decision and i feel like warning people off the first generation at least the 15 inch i haven't seen the 13 but the first generation 15 inch macbook pro warning people off of that is the right call uh at this point i mean early adopters if they want it they get it fine but like
John:
I feel like it's too compromised, whereas the iMac, I don't think there's any reason to be warned off of that.
John:
I feel like it's a next iteration of a mature tech that doesn't have any of these drawbacks except for that weird-looking bulge in the back and is all thumbs up.
John:
So I'm patiently waiting for the next round because I'm sure the next round of MacBook Pros is going to be like, oh, that's the one to get.
John:
I just hope they solve the screen issue because I'm particularly sensitive to
John:
visual screen issues like i remember when i got my uh my 22 inch apple cinema display the one with the little clear feet on the side do you remember that one yep like the first big one dead pixels were a big thing on that one i was like please let me get a display that doesn't have any dead pixels or at least let me not see the dead pixels i hadn't yet honed my ability to not look for them because that's what you just i don't want to see them just don't tell me but i immediately saw my like two hot pixels and they were not within the range that apple would replace it and
Marco:
that made me sad because that monitor was really expensive that would drive me crazy I've been very lucky that I've never had a dead pixel in anything that I used actively so I'm very happy about that but yeah because that would drive me nuts or a stuck pixel it's pure white just as bad but you know I think I disagree with you about holding off on the current generation of retinas I mean now I guess timing wise you know these were released last June or the 15 was released in June the 13 was released what like in October or something like that um
Marco:
So now we're kind of mid-cycle, especially with the 15.
Marco:
It's almost a little late to be buying one now.
Marco:
And I guess, is it the Haswell update this coming summer slash fall that's probably going to be... That's the next CPU.
Marco:
That's probably going to be when we see the next updates.
Marco:
So Haswell does, from the tech news area, Haswell does sound like a pretty major update.
Marco:
And so it's probably going to be worth waiting for if you can.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Besides just cycle timing reasons, I don't think there are major reasons why I would recommend against the current generation retinas.
Marco:
I agree with you that the GPU is really, really at its boundary and...
Marco:
That can be occasionally bad, especially if you run at the upscale resolutions.
Marco:
On the 15, if you run at the simulated 1920 or the simulated 1680, you will see slow scrolling on certain things and stuff.
Marco:
You will see that.
John:
I feel like that's inexcusable, though.
John:
You're buying their top-of-the-line model.
John:
It should scroll like butter.
Marco:
Well, at native resolution, it is butter.
Marco:
I mean, at native resolution, it's great.
Marco:
It's only when you do the upscale.
Marco:
So I understand, okay, that's not ideal, but most people are going to run it at native resolution anyway.
Marco:
Most buyers are not going to change it.
Marco:
So I would not recommend against it solely for that.
Marco:
And so I don't know.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
I would still recommend the Air if you don't care about the screen, which most people don't.
Marco:
Because a year ago, I was saying the 13-inch Air is the best computer ever made, because it was at the time.
Marco:
And all these options are so good.
Marco:
There used to be, even as recently as three or four years ago, there used to be models in the lineup that you would say, oh, you really, really shouldn't buy that one.
Marco:
And now I feel like you can look at the lineup, and there's very few of those.
Marco:
I would say the only ones that I would recommend people definitely don't buy would be the cheapo 13-inch old model.
Marco:
The 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, which, from what I understand, is very popular, or at least was very popular before the Retina one.
Marco:
But I think it still is.
John:
It's got the option.
Marco:
optical drive right it has everything it's cheap it has an optical drive it has you know firewire like it has all the drives and ports and it's cheap and it has uh spinning disc hard drive so that keeps it cheap also so like it's a way to get a bunch of stuff for really very little money i think it was like 1200 bucks to start something like that so it is very very cheap and uh so it's hard for a lot of people to justify the premiums or the compromises from the other models and
Marco:
However, that model has the worst screen I've ever seen in a laptop in the last five years.
Marco:
And the fact that they're still shipping a 13-inch laptop with a 1280x800 screen, which is roughly the same pixel area as the 11-inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
It's a similar resolution, but not quite.
Marco:
The 11-inch is wider and shorter, but similar.
Marco:
That's inexcusable to me.
Marco:
It's just such a terrible resolution.
Marco:
Other than that, though, you can get pretty much any model and be fine.
Marco:
Even if you get that one and you don't care about the screen space, then you're fine, too.
Marco:
There aren't really any models that have dramatically too little RAM stock or some major flaw.
Marco:
The lineup is pretty solid.
John:
I would say the 13-inch non-retina CD-ROM thing, it's...
John:
5400 RPM spinning disk at this point is not like I that model is just on the borderline of hurting Apple's reputation.
John:
I'd be like because the the experience of using that and using even even the cheapest air you can get is like night and day just because of the SSD.
John:
like anything with spinning disks, especially a slow, I'm assuming they're all 5,400 RPM drives.
John:
That is not, that's not the experience that the rest of us are having with our Macs.
John:
And they would be like, they feel like they're left out of, you know, that's not what it's like when we use our computers.
John:
You know, you're stuck with waiting a million years and seeing the beach ball and apps take a million years to launch and stuff.
John:
And maybe that's acceptable to them, but it's a shame.
John:
Like it doesn't give people, because once you step up to that SSD experience, uh,
John:
There's no going back.
John:
And it really changes.
John:
If you were to go back, you'd say, what's wrong with this computer?
John:
Why is that icon bouncing in the dock so much?
John:
Why is relaunching Safari and opening its five windows taking a year and a day?
John:
Oh, spinning disk.
John:
That's why they don't know.
John:
They just know it's no good.
John:
So I really hope...
John:
Those things either get SSDs or leave the line ASAP.
Marco:
But what would you recommend somebody buy if they want a reasonably priced Apple laptop where value is a priority for them and also storage space is a priority for them?
Marco:
Because that's the problem with the SSDs is that there is no way to get cheap, large SSD storage yet.
John:
I feel like the errors have crossed that threshold.
John:
It was reinforced to me when I had a neighbor come over here and she had an old laptop.
John:
It was like one of the...
John:
What was it?
John:
The old white.
John:
Yeah, the iBook.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or the white MacBook.
John:
Yeah, the white MacBook.
John:
And she was looking to get a new one, and I was telling her about the options.
John:
And you can get an Air, and they have SSDs, but they're smaller, and they're more expensive, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And you have no optical drive in the ports, the whole nine yards.
John:
And she was like, oh, I don't know.
John:
I checked the size of all my stuff or whatever.
John:
So I actually look at her machine and see how big her iPhoto library is, and it was 9 gigabytes.
John:
You can get this thing with a 256-gigabyte SSD for not that much money.
John:
In fact, is that about stock now?
John:
you're fine like that i think we've crossed we've crossed the threshold where the 13 inch air is still my go-to mac and i that's another machine i warn people off i say don't don't get the 13 inch non-retina get it get an air your stuff will fit you'll be fine and like i mean obviously i tell them all the limits to how much stuff do you actually have i'll check but i'm always amazed at how little stuff people have
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
And it's funny you bring up the SSD is worth a discussion because I remember, I don't know when it was, but Marco was one of the first people I knew that was going on humongous rants or happy rants and evangelizing SSDs.
Casey:
I would look at these prices and think, oh, my God, that can't be worth it.
Casey:
It can't be that much quicker.
Casey:
It's so little space for so much money.
Casey:
I don't want to do it.
Casey:
So I had and have a 15-inch high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro with a platter in it.
Casey:
And then work got me basically the exact same machine and then immediately put an SSD in it and put the platter in an external enclosure.
Casey:
And now that that's happened, I almost never use my personal machine with platter drive because it's unusable.
Casey:
It's exactly what you said, John.
Casey:
I can't use it.
Casey:
It's so slow.
Casey:
Nothing happens.
Casey:
If I'm using that computer, really what I'm doing is waiting for the computer and occasionally getting something useful done in the 10 seconds that the hard drive isn't seeking for something else to do.
Casey:
It's unusable.
Casey:
So if there's anyone listening that is as cheap as I am and doesn't think an SSD is worth it, I can assure you you're wrong and you should get one and it will change your world.
John:
People could be in my situation where I do have a lot of data, a lot of computer pack rat type things, you know, where you keep a lot of stuff, you have a lot of movies, a lot of photos, and it just doesn't fit on an SSD.
John:
I mean, the first SSD I bought was 480 gigabytes to tell you what my threshold was before SSDs became viable for me.
John:
Because forget about 128, 256.
John:
It's pointless for me to get that.
John:
This is all before Fusion Drive, right?
John:
But at this point...
John:
You know, for my next Mac, all my stuff won't fit on an SSD, and even if Fusion Drive didn't exist, I would still say, okay, for the next Mac, I've just got to go SSD and figure out how to do my own tiered storage thing, but with Fusion Drive, it's a no-brainer.
John:
I mean, you know, people don't have a choice.
John:
The spending lists are going away.
John:
But, like, we are past the point where even the most conservative person with the most data should have an SSD somewhere in the mix in whatever next machine they're buying.
John:
Like, we've cleared that hurdle.
John:
And for regular people, I think we cleared it much sooner than I had thought because I guess I just didn't realize how little data people have.
John:
Maybe they delete stuff, or maybe they... I was like, where are all the photos of your kids?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Nine gigabytes seems small for me.
John:
With my 100-plus gigabyte iPhoto library of my two kids over the course of eight years.
Marco:
Well, keep in mind also, a lot of people aren't shooting RAW.
Marco:
They're not shooting massive cameras.
Marco:
I'm not shooting RAW.
John:
I don't have a fancy camera.
John:
I'm shooting JPEGs from cruddy point-and-shoot cameras.
John:
I guess I just take too many.
John:
You had 100 gigs of JPEGs?
John:
Yes.
John:
That's impressive.
John:
That's really impressive.
John:
I don't delete enough pictures.
John:
I know.
John:
I have problems.
Marco:
On that note, this episode is sponsored.
Marco:
Our first sponsor here on ATP, sponsored by Squarespace, who I love so much because I keep sponsoring all of our shows.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You can make a website for your blog.
Marco:
You can make a store.
Marco:
You can sell stuff, digital or physical.
Marco:
You can make a portfolio.
Marco:
Whatever kind of website you want to make, if you don't want to have to host it yourself and build it yourself and get some designer, go to Squarespace.com.
Marco:
Plan to start at $10 a month.
Marco:
You have so many problems that everyone else has hosting a website.
Marco:
You don't have those problems anymore.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about patching your WordPress install for security updates and getting hacked and all that crap.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about coding all the HTML by hand because they have all these great templates, and they're designed by professional designers, and you can just pick one of those.
Marco:
Our site, ATP.fm, is hosted by Squarespace.
Marco:
You can go take a look.
Marco:
That's one of their default templates.
Marco:
And if you want to hack any of that stuff, you can.
Marco:
You can inject code yourself if you want to customize stuff.
Marco:
You can inject your own CSS and JavaScript.
Marco:
It's really fantastic.
Marco:
So check out Squarespace.
Marco:
If you use coupon code ATP3 for Accidental Tech Podcast, the month of three, so that's ATP3, you can save 10% off their already low-priced plans, which are at about $10 a month.
Marco:
Check out Squarespace at squarespace.com, and thanks to them for supporting our show.
John:
I didn't realize how awesome our sponsor coupon codes would be.
John:
It's three letters.
John:
I always wonder if people are going to misspell or mistype neutral or something.
John:
ATP.
John:
It's great.
John:
ATP 3.
John:
We got a three-letter domain with a two-letter extension.
Marco:
That surprised me.
Marco:
FM is pretty wide open because it's like $80 a year to register one.
Marco:
I'm not that surprised that it was available on FM.
Marco:
But still, it's only three letters.
Marco:
That is pretty good.
Marco:
We don't even need a link shortener.
Marco:
Link shorteners, I think, are so 2010, but we don't even need that anymore because we have ATP.fm.
Marco:
That's pretty great.
Marco:
One more thing I wanted to mention about my mall trip today before I move on.
Marco:
I also stopped down at the Microsoft store on the way out because, I mean, come on, you have to.
Marco:
Because you love that place so much.
Marco:
I have to be fair and balanced.
John:
They know you're there.
John:
Hey, that's Marco.
John:
We read what you said about our star.
Marco:
Fortunately, they didn't recognize me.
Marco:
They did, however.
Marco:
Remember how I had the picture of the Windows 8 letters on the floor, and they had to have a guy stationed there to tell people not to step over them?
Marco:
They have fixed that problem now by putting up big floor-to-ceiling glass strips that attach at the floor level to those letters.
Marco:
And so now it's like a big sign.
Marco:
And that was probably always the plan.
Marco:
They just wasn't done in time when I was there.
Marco:
So now they no longer have to have an employee stationed there to tell people not to step over them.
Marco:
So that's, hey, progress.
Marco:
That's, you know, Windows update.
Marco:
And one thing I noticed immediately about the store, first of all, is that it was empty.
Marco:
But that said, I was there on a Wednesday at like 1 o'clock in the afternoon.
Marco:
So I can't really fault them for that.
Marco:
That's not really a high mall traffic time as far as I know.
Marco:
But the mood in the store among the employees, because they were the only ones there, was so low-key.
Marco:
When I was there for the Surface RT launch, which was also, I believe, the store's grand opening or very close to it, the employees were really energized, and you could tell they had all been...
Marco:
jazzed up by some training exercise to be all high energy and high pressure and, hey, let me show you this cool thing the Surface RT can do, you know, all that stuff.
Marco:
Today there was none of that.
Marco:
It was like a funeral home in there.
Marco:
There were like eight employees standing around doing nothing.
Marco:
I don't know why the staff is that big.
Marco:
It probably shouldn't be.
Marco:
Although Microsoft is really good at wasting money.
Marco:
So maybe that's just they haven't figured out the retail thing quite yet.
Marco:
But it was way overstaffed.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
the salesman came over to me and like, you know, I guess the one guy who was assigned to the next walk-in as everyone else stood around, he came over and he was just like, can I help you with anything?
Marco:
Like the most boring, like drab, no energy.
Marco:
And I told him, I'm just looking around.
Marco:
Okay.
Okay.
Marco:
And he just kind of stood.
Marco:
He walked away.
Marco:
It was so different from the last time I was there.
Marco:
And so much less energy.
Marco:
And so I looked around.
Marco:
What I went in there to see was the Surface Pro because I hadn't seen that in person yet.
Marco:
And I was curious about it.
Marco:
And they don't make it easy to find.
Marco:
The store still had a lot of Surface RTs in the main middle.
Marco:
When you first walk in, the tables you see, those still have Surface RTs, but it was way fewer than before because they filled the rest of the store up with Windows phones and other laptops and other people's tablets, things like from Samsung and Toshiba, all their partners.
Marco:
They're filling up the store with their stuff.
Marco:
So the Surface...
Marco:
is actually being significantly de-emphasized in the store, which I thought was interesting.
Marco:
Probably the right move because it isn't selling that well, but interesting nonetheless and kind of a shame for them.
Marco:
And the big thing was the Surface Pro, there was no sign for it.
Marco:
There was no big demo of a Surface Pro being this cool laptop that is like a tablet.
Marco:
There was nothing like that.
Marco:
It was...
Marco:
There were two tables side-by-side of Surface RTs with four tablets on each of them.
Marco:
On one of them, one of those tablets was a Surface Pro.
Marco:
And the only way you could tell was to look at the little tag on each one, the little stand-up sign to see what each one was.
Marco:
And so there was no calling out of, hey, this thing is actually something kind of interesting that you might want to look at or you might want to know about relative to a regular laptop.
Marco:
Like, this is interesting.
Marco:
Nothing like that at all for the Surface Pro.
Marco:
And there was only one of them, as far as I could tell, in the whole store, at least one I could find.
Marco:
And so I thought it was weird that... It looks like Microsoft has already given up on the Surface, honestly.
Marco:
And maybe that's not true, but that's how it looked in the retail store.
John:
Well, the first-gen Surface Pro is...
John:
like a sacrificial lamb, because they know that the first gen Surface Pro, they don't, the power envelope for the processors they can fit in that thing, it's not great, the battery life's not great, it's under, like,
John:
That's like to get something out there.
John:
The second generation Surface Pro should be significantly more interesting as a complete product rather than just a curiosity.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
Really, because what the store looked like to me... The first time I went in there, it was very Surface RT heavy, and that was interesting.
Marco:
And I think if the Surface RT was a more successful product, then they could have kept the store that way, and that would have had a lot of long-term value for them.
Marco:
Now, though...
Marco:
the Microsoft store doesn't really have any value over a Best Buy.
Marco:
It's just a whole bunch of computers from different people all in a row, kind of haphazardly laid out, nothing really called attention to more than the others.
Marco:
So if you're a buyer walking in there who doesn't already know what you're looking for, there's not a lot of reason.
Marco:
It's not very welcoming.
Marco:
It isn't a very good cold first-time experience to go in there anymore because it's kind of confusing as to why exactly you should be in there instead of any other computer store.
John:
It still has far fewer products than a Best Buy, and that is advantageous because if someone goes into a Best Buy, you are assaulted on all sides by a million flashing blinking things, only some of which are tablet computers, only some of which are Microsoft's, right?
John:
You go into the Microsoft store, even though they carry all those other things –
John:
You're not going to look at the TVs.
John:
You're not going to look at the washing machines.
John:
You're not going to look through the racks of DVDs and Blu-rays or whatever.
John:
You're going to look at tablets, and there's going to be a variety of them, and they're emphasizing the fact that we have tablets that...
John:
are kind of like PCs, but kind of like tablets.
John:
And so at the very least, until their leases are up on those stores, they get some benefit of making people aware that Microsoft has created this product that's like an iPad, but you can use it like a Windows computer.
John:
And the recent thing that's brought it up on my radar, I don't know if it's come up on any of your radars, is the...
John:
This Penny Arcade guy picked up a Surface Pro and tried using it for sketching, and he wrote this little review of it on his site.
John:
And that's an application that, again, like the car makers and automatic, not doing what a third party had to do.
John:
Why didn't Microsoft emphasize that?
John:
Why did their ads show people dancing and clicking the stupid keyboard to the thing?
John:
Not that artists are like a big market and like, oh, finally, we're going to get the artist thing, but...
John:
He was interested in it because he heard it has a stylus and it's a Windows computer and it's a pressure sensitive stylus and it's portable and you can draw on it.
John:
And unlike the iPad, you don't have to use like a capacitive, you know, stylus type thing.
John:
And so as an artist, he's like, huh, you know, because he tried sketching on the iPad and it wasn't.
John:
It wasn't what he wanted because he's used to like a Wacom tablet or Wacom, or however the hell you pronounce it, the Cintiqs, which is a different experience than using those weird stubby capacitive things, and especially with pressure sensitivity and everything.
John:
So he said, okay, well, I'll try this thing.
John:
So you could sketch with it.
John:
It was small and portable, right?
John:
So some software issues because Photoshop doesn't support it yet with the pressure sensitivity and stuff like that, but it was a viable thing there.
John:
He drew a bunch of comics with it.
John:
And the second thing was, since he's a gamer, because it's comics about gaming,
John:
you can play windows games on it because it's a windows computer.
John:
And so you install steam, download a bunch of games, play games that also use it for sketching.
John:
And there has never been any device like that where you could do those two things or even, you know, one of those things.
John:
Can you play a PC games on something that's so small, doesn't even have a keyboard, like, you know, just a tiny little touchscreen.
John:
And can you use something sketching like a tablet with a stylus, uh,
John:
That's an interesting angle.
John:
It's not a mainstream angle.
John:
They're not going to sell a million of them like that.
John:
But why wasn't there even one ad emphasizing that?
John:
Because just in this one, you know, semi-famous person's post about this and it getting passed around Reddit and Hacker News and stuff like that, it has produced buzz about the Surface Pro, the terribly compromised, poor battery life, really thick, fan blows hot air on your hand.
John:
you know, first generation device that Microsoft couldn't seem to figure out what was interesting or unique about.
John:
And here's one, just one thing.
John:
I'm sure there are other things that are interesting and unique about it too.
John:
They're just...
John:
It's kind of a shame that Microsoft is not on its game on this.
Marco:
Yeah, because you're right.
Marco:
That's something that... Apple is not going to address that, as far as we can tell.
Marco:
They're not going to address pressure-sensitive, resistant touch screens anytime soon, if ever.
Marco:
And that's a major market where that actually matters a lot.
Marco:
If you want to sketch on an iPad...
Marco:
it's going to be way, way better on a Surface because of that screen and the kind of stylus.
Marco:
Obviously, that's a major difference.
Marco:
And yeah, you're right.
Marco:
They don't know what to do with that.
Marco:
They instead ignore that in their marketing.
Marco:
And granted, obviously not everybody wants to sketch, but I feel like there are enough things about the Surface Pro that make it different from an iPad that Microsoft could be showing in their ads and could be pushing the marketing, and they're just not.
Marco:
They're trying to make it cool and hip, and I can't imagine it ever will be.
John:
They picked one.
John:
They picked the attachable keyboard, and that is a distinctive thing, but there are other distinctive things about it.
John:
They have a product.
John:
They did so well in differentiating it.
John:
It really is a differentiated product.
John:
It's not a wannabe iPad.
John:
It's not like the Nexus 7 or something.
John:
I was like, well, it's like an iPad, but not as good.
John:
like it's it's really differentiated like and maybe they did too much like well you got a stylus and it runs windows and it's got the desktop and you can attach a keyboard maybe that's too much but those are sure those are things that you can hang your hat on in an ad campaign and yet they you know they picked one of them and kind of they didn't really explain it they just kind of oh it clicks on there's a clicky thing and like i don't know if this is a multi-stage campaign and it's going to kick in with the other benefits later or they didn't know why people will want to use them still waiting for that second stage to kick in
John:
or third or fourth yeah i mean they have software problems too windows 8 is kind of a hodgepodge and you know like it they don't have the total package but i i think there's enough there that i will be really sad if that if that whole effort of this type of product goes away because i really think there is definitely a place for this type of product and i'm really i was i was proud of microsoft that they didn't do what google did and just make like a wannabe ipad you know
Marco:
Yeah, they really did do something different.
Marco:
With Windows Phone people have said that, and with Windows 8 people, it really is different.
Marco:
It doesn't look like a total rip-off of something else the way Android does, honestly.
Marco:
I know we're going to hear from Android people, but Android looks... Yes, it has done some original things, but it has ripped off so much
Marco:
from other operating systems, mostly iOS, that you kind of feel that the whole way through, like this is kind of a cheap ripoff, whereas Windows Phone actually feels dramatically different in most ways, in certainly more ways than Android does.
Marco:
And there's a lot of good, there's also a lot of bad.
Marco:
I mean, so I want to talk about also...
Marco:
While I was there, they have devoted a lot of their store space now to Windows Phone, which is probably wise because Windows Phone has a pretty poor retail presence otherwise outside of Microsoft stores.
Marco:
That's always a problem.
Marco:
If you go into a Verizon store and you ask to see a Windows Phone, they're going to try to talk you out of it, and they're going to try to talk you into an Android phone.
Marco:
Because it's better for Verizon if you buy an Android phone for a few reasons.
Marco:
So Windows has always had issues at cell phone retail with Windows 8.
Marco:
And so now... Microsoft has had issues, not Windows, sorry.
Marco:
So Microsoft is using their stores now to push Windows Phone aggressively, and that's wise.
Marco:
So I got a chance to use them and look at them.
Marco:
And first of all, I think it's worth mentioning that...
Marco:
every Windows phone they had in the store had at least what looked like a four and a half inch diagonal screen.
Marco:
It was huge.
Marco:
Every Windows phone looked massive.
Marco:
And most of them were the Nokia 920.
Marco:
And there were a few, there was like the HTC 8 or something like that.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
People who know Windows phones would know these models.
Marco:
And there were some Samsung things and some miscellaneous Windows phone objects.
Marco:
And mostly the Nokia one, though.
Marco:
And
Marco:
All of them were huge.
Marco:
And I feel like in our previous discussions about a potentially large iPhone in the future, I feel like more than ever, Apple needs to do this.
Marco:
Because you look at any other lineup of smartphones,
Marco:
in any other store, in a Verizon store, in a Microsoft store, if you can actually find one of those.
Marco:
But any cell phone store, you look at the lineup, and the iPhone looks really small, and not necessarily in a good way.
Marco:
It looks really small by comparison.
Marco:
And while we can look at them, we nerds, a lot of times at least, we can look at them and say, oh, it's great, it fits in my pocket better.
Marco:
I don't want a phone that big.
Marco:
The fact is, those other phones look like they're better in a store.
Marco:
And it's similar, you know, we talked about TVs earlier.
Marco:
To have TVs, as John, you've frequently rented about, they always have these ridiculous settings in the stores to attract people in the store, even though in real life they're better off not having that kind of setting and they're better off having something else or different priorities or different levels of things.
Marco:
That doesn't matter in sales.
Marco:
You know, like...
Marco:
If people are seeing all these phones that are a little bit too big for their pockets,
Marco:
They don't really realize that necessarily at the time they're buying it.
Marco:
They see a nice big screen and it looks really good.
Marco:
And it's got to be really hard for Apple to keep competing with when it's the smallest phone there.
Marco:
And it has the smallest screen there.
Marco:
There are going to be some people who are going to buy it for that because it's small and sleek and thin and light in your pocket.
Marco:
But I feel like that number is really small compared to the number of people who are going to be swayed towards these larger phone devices just because they look nicer in the store.
Casey:
I really, to be honest, I don't have anything to add on that because I just don't have any interest in a bigger phone.
Casey:
And maybe ask me again.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
And that's the thing is anytime I say I don't have interest in something, I end up getting it months or years later.
John:
You're going to get it like you may have no interest in it.
John:
But if all the phones are like that, what choice do you have?
John:
Like, that's just what happens.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, typically, the more negative my reaction is to something, the more I end up falling in love with it later.
Casey:
Take Macs, take my iPhone, take my BMW.
Casey:
I mean, these are all things that I poo-pooed in years past and now couldn't imagine living without.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My SSD, another great example.
Casey:
So the fact that I'm saying me is probably a good sign that in a few months or because I am due to upgrade this year.
Casey:
So in a few months when the seven inch iPhone comes out and I'm forced to get it because it's the only one.
Casey:
And then I get it and I say to you guys, holy God, you will not believe how awesome the seven inch iPhone is.
Casey:
I can't put it in my pocket.
Casey:
It looks like a brick when I'm actually talking on the phone.
Casey:
But oh, man, I can get so much done on that screen.
John:
It's not going to be as big as the 920.
John:
So don't worry.
Marco:
I mean, the 920 looked ridiculously large, but it looked nice.
Marco:
In a store, it looked nice.
Marco:
And I picked it up, and I held it in my hand with the giant security cable hanging off the back.
Marco:
But still, I picked it up, and I was like, you know, this is... It's too big for me, but not by a massive amount.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
It could be a little bit smaller than that and still be substantially larger than the iPhone 5, and it would be fine for my pocket.
Marco:
And a lot of us in tech will say dismissive things like, oh, well, I don't want an iMac.
Marco:
I want a Mac Pro.
Marco:
But for other people, the iMac is fine.
Marco:
It's always about the other people.
Marco:
And it's generally not a great attitude to have if you don't really understand what about something is great, and you kind of dismiss it as, well, somebody will find a use for this.
Marco:
But
Marco:
With the bigger phones, I think, honestly, I would probably get a bigger iPhone if they had it.
Marco:
I like the bigger screen on the iPhone 5.
Marco:
And if they could make one even bigger than that while still maintaining a reasonable pocket size for the phone... And I do think there's a lot of middle ground between the iPhone 5 and the 920.
Marco:
There's a lot of middle ground there.
Marco:
And if Apple made a bigger phone, I'm not just saying that I think it would sell well.
Marco:
I'm saying I might pick that one, even if it had the same resolution.
Marco:
as the iPhone 5, and they just made the pixels bigger.
Marco:
Even then, I would still probably pick the bigger one.
John:
I've been asking nerd friends that same question I've been saying.
John:
So Apple comes out with a slightly bigger phone, and they keep selling the iPhone 5 size one.
John:
Which one would you get?
John:
And then the modifier question is, okay, what if the resolution is the same, and what if the resolution is different?
John:
Does that change your calculus?
John:
And I've been getting about 50-50 with people saying that they would stick with the iPhone 5 size and they would get the bigger one.
John:
You don't know what people are actually going to do.
John:
And I think at this point, the super Apple nerds that I'm talking to are, if anything, biased towards sticking with the iPhone 5 they have because they really like it.
John:
And I'm giving them a hypothetical of a product that doesn't exist.
John:
But I think the outlook for sales of the larger phone, even among us super tech nerds, look pretty bright.
Marco:
Yeah, definitely.
Marco:
I would say the same thing.
Marco:
I mean I haven't been asking anybody because I'm not that much of a nerd, John, but I really do think – I can see – not only do I see this as I guess somebody might want that, but I see this as I would actually want that to a degree.
Marco:
It depends on how they do it, of course, but –
Marco:
I don't think it being the same resolution or not would really matter that much in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
I don't think it really matters.
Marco:
It would matter to a few geeks.
John:
I think it definitely matters, but it's not a deal breaker, I don't think.
John:
But it's one of those things where it's going to be one of those that can't go back things where it's annoying.
John:
You're going to hate it because you're going to have to redo your layouts for your apps and everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But then once you get that thing and see how much more stuff you can see, even if it's just like one extra little sliver of stuff, it will make a difference once developers update their apps to actually use that space as long as they don't stretch it.
John:
And then you go back to the – it's like when you go back to the iPhone 4-size screen now and you feel like where did the rest of the screen go.
John:
And it's not that big of a difference.
John:
It's like a one-centimeter little strip at the bottom.
John:
It's one table row.
John:
It is not that big of a difference, but when it's not there, it just feels like your world has been truncated.
John:
I think it will be the same effect, even if we just get an extra sliver of pixels there.
John:
Maybe 1080p is the inevitable...
John:
that like there's no fighting that resolution because it's such a convenient matchup with television screens which is basically meaningless who cares if it's a matchup with tv screens but just it's like one of those things like stock markets around numbers it may just be that that's ballpark of how you get a reasonable size iphone it's not gigantic but not too small and you get around you know 400 something dpi can you fit a 1080 well just just go to 1080 um
John:
I don't think Apple will go to 1080p, but that's what all the Android phones are doing.
John:
And you can see the attraction to it.
John:
That slots into maybe a little bit higher.
John:
Maybe you'd have to go like 500 dpi.
John:
Maybe that's crazy.
John:
Maybe it doesn't work out.
John:
But that seems to be the sweet spot for the super high-end Android phones.
John:
Apple's going to be smaller than that, and maybe not even this generation.
John:
But that's...
John:
That's where I think things are going.
Marco:
I don't think the resolution of these Android phones matters that much, honestly.
Marco:
As we said earlier, people don't really see Retina that much.
Marco:
On average, most people don't really notice that difference, as far as we can tell.
Marco:
At least a lot of people don't.
Marco:
I think whether your screen is 300 dpi or 500 dpi, there's going to be almost nobody who will tell the difference.
Marco:
The big advantage there is definitely in marketing and spec comparison and things like that, certainly that helps.
Marco:
But with Android...
Marco:
As we're seeing with the market, most people don't buy on spec comparisons with Android.
Marco:
They buy on how it looks in the store, what kind of deal they can get at retail.
Marco:
There are some people who buy the specs, but not most.
John:
Yeah, I mean, like, they're still using, you know, a lot of them are using the OLED screen still, and some of them are still – I think people are still using that pen tile thing where you don't even have real pixels.
Marco:
Oh, I hope not.
John:
That was a terrible hack.
John:
Right.
John:
Like, all these things are cost-saving things because that's the other advantage they have is, like, they'll compete on price by giving you a lower-quality screen.
John:
And that is – talk about selling against retina, how hard it is to sell retina to regular people.
John:
Trying to sell people on, like, color saturation –
John:
And contrast and viewing angles, that is, you know, and we nerds all appreciate that Apple cares about those things and its displays and its monitors and its, you know, handheld devices.
John:
Other people do not.
John:
Oh, yeah, definitely.
John:
And so, like, I...
John:
I hope Apple holds the line on that, but that's one of the boat anchors that they have to drag behind them as they attempt to compete.
John:
We will continue to hold our screens.
John:
Our screens aren't bigger, but they're better.
John:
That's why they keep saying this is the best screen and blah, blah, blah.
John:
It really is a really nice screen.
John:
But now you have to drag that behind you as you try to compete on price, on power, on resolution, on all those other things that you want to compete on while still not sinking to their level in terms of, well, just give me high DPI, high resolution, and it's good enough.
Casey:
So I had a topic I wanted to ask you guys about if neither of you have something more.
Casey:
Go for it.
Casey:
Impressing.
Casey:
It may end up that this is a 30-second thing, but I'm really intrigued by the GarageBand release today.
Casey:
And it's support for... What is it?
Casey:
Audiobus, I believe.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So for those of you who may not know what this is about, so Apple obviously has a GarageBand app for iOS.
Casey:
And a few months ago, I don't remember exactly when, some group of people came up with this app called Audiobus.
Casey:
And the general premise of it was you can chain audio sources together...
Casey:
Such that different apps on your iPad or iPhone, one can feed audio into another, which can filter it and can feed audio into something else.
Casey:
Or at least that's my understanding of the premise.
Casey:
And this was really interesting because it's inter-app communication in a way that really shouldn't be allowed.
Casey:
uh and i think my understanding and guys feel free to interrupt me my understanding of how this works is it's a combination of background audio api the the apps allowing audio to be mixed so if you think about like when you have uh navigation on and music on you know you can still hear the navigation while the music is on and additionally apparently it's a local network uh protocol as well as far as i understood is that at least reasonably accurate at a high level
Marco:
Honestly, I don't even know how they're doing it.
Marco:
I mean, I assume background audio is involved to let them run indefinitely.
Marco:
But, I mean, they're not using URL schemes, that's for sure.
Casey:
Actually, I think they are in part, but not as the driving... Not to transfer audio.
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
So anyway, so the latest version of GarageBand actually works with Audiobus and has included – they use the Audiobus SDK to do it.
Casey:
And this to me is extremely interesting for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
Firstly, it's Apple getting on board with a community – well, maybe not community, but a third-party –
Casey:
framework, for lack of a better term.
Casey:
And I think that's very interesting.
Casey:
And I'm hoping that between you guys, you can point me to other examples of where this has happened.
Casey:
The only one I could think of is their kind of bastardized version of pull to refresh.
Casey:
But otherwise, I couldn't personally think of any examples of this.
Casey:
And I'll give you a chance in a second to correct me.
Casey:
And I thought that was interesting.
Casey:
But the other thing I thought was interesting is here's another sort of tacit admission that interprocess communication is a need in iOS.
Casey:
And it's something they need and something that we are all going to want going forward.
Casey:
And I know we've talked in the past about, what was it, remote view controllers, I believe, is what people had discovered a few months ago in iOS 6.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And this both excites me in the sense that Apple's getting more on board with interprocess communication, but it also scares me a little that it seems to me if they had a really awesome fix for this problem coming in iOS 7, wouldn't they have held this GarageBand update to leverage that new thing?
John:
No.
John:
I don't think they would have held it because I think it's something entirely different.
John:
But actually, I had an interesting idea when I'm hearing you talk about this, and I did a little bit of research on it before the show.
John:
But I don't know if any of you have ever seen this, but apparently there exists, I am told, stereo equipment like –
John:
I guess presumably high-end stereo equipment, that has firmware.
John:
And to update the firmware on the stereo equipment, you put in a special CD that the manufacturer gives you, and you play the audio CD, and then it interprets the sounds as code that's going to update the firmware and update itself.
John:
That's not dangerous.
John:
This audio bus thing, we don't have true inter-app communication.
John:
But once everyone can listen on the audio bus, if you can encode the data that you want to transfer between applications as audio and decode it on the other end, there is no reason why you can't pass arbitrary structures, including, you know, in-memory objects or anything else you could possibly want to do for inter-app communication entirely through audio, provided you could mute the speakers.
John:
for it.
John:
And I'm sure Apple would love to try to approve your application if you choose to do inter-app communication with this.
John:
The reason I don't think it's like they hold this is because this is not really inter-app communication.
John:
This is really shared access to audio resources.
John:
It's more like
John:
It's more like IO or multiple applications sharing the proximity sensor.
John:
Once sound goes out of your application into the audio system, the fact that another application can pick up that sound, intercept it, and before it gets through the rest of the audio system using the background audio APIs and stuff, that is barely inter-application communication.
John:
It's more like...
John:
It's more like existing background APIs where some small part of your application can still be running and see what's going on in the system.
John:
And one of the things that's going on in the system is another thing is putting audio input into the audio subsystem, and we'll let you get it before it goes out to the speaker.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
But that is a far cry from, hey, let me put up a UI when I'm not running.
Marco:
Well, now, Casey, you said that you looked at it briefly, and it sounds like the way it works is via local network communication, right?
Marco:
It isn't over audio buses itself.
Marco:
Isn't it over local network?
Marco:
Is that what you said?
Casey:
Again, I read into it very briefly, and candidly, I'm probably getting this totally wrong.
Casey:
And that's why this is also a casual podcast.
Casey:
But I believe that somebody had said that there was a network component.
Casey:
I'll see if I can get this link back up when you guys are talking.
Marco:
I'm going to start talking, so look it up.
Marco:
So I think there's three things about this that are really interesting, that make this announcement interesting.
Marco:
One is that it's technically possible at all with iOS today.
Marco:
Because the problem with iOS, you can do anything you want in an app running in the background for 10 minutes, and then you hit your time limit, and then you're killed or suspended.
John:
You'll be killed way before then if someone launches a game anyway.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
And when Apple introduced multitasking with iOS 4, they announced these five or six...
Marco:
you know officially sanctioned and technically allowed methods to keep running in the background indefinitely or be woken up periodically and and one of those is background audio and so it's kind of a fluke that okay so we have a need for apps to work together for more than 10 minutes in the audio business that's just they just kind of lucked out that audio happens to be one of the permitted things on ios to run for longer than that um
Marco:
And then the other thing that makes it impressive is that it's technically possible at all to share a substantial amount of data between apps without switching back and forth URL schemes, which themselves would have issues with lots and lots of data flowing through them.
Marco:
So, Casey, do you know yet whether it's shared core audio buses or network buses?
Casey:
Sort of.
Casey:
Let me read you a couple of very brief things.
Casey:
The first, which is less reliable, is a post on Stack Overflow, which is the accepted answer to the question of basically how does this work.
Casey:
Well, then it's true.
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
And I'm quoting now, my guess is that they use some sort of audio over network because I've seen log statements when our app gets started even on a different device.
Casey:
Don't really know about the details of the implementation, but this could be a way of staying in the sandbox constraint.
Marco:
Yeah, because I don't know... Basically, with Core Audio, I know a little bit about Core Audio, and as far as I know, I don't think you can create any kind of shared communication between apps using the audio frameworks on iOS, because you'd have to create a virtual device.
Marco:
It wouldn't be an issue of being piped through the speaker.
Marco:
It would be an issue of you even having access to any other apps-created audio devices.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
So if it's not core audio-based, which it probably isn't, if it is based on local networking, then that's interesting too because I don't think people have really, besides this, I don't think people have really explored inter-app communication potential of just opening up a local web server or a local socket and communicating over a local host to some other app.
Marco:
I don't think we've really ever discussed that.
Marco:
And I would...
Marco:
I would never have assumed that would even be possible.
Marco:
I would have assumed there were some kind of per-app firewall going on there, but I guess there probably isn't.
Marco:
That would probably be pretty hard to do, and there would probably be some problems with it, so maybe there isn't any kind of protection against local network communication between apps.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let me read you a couple of other very brief things.
Casey:
On the same Stack Overflow post, this is a comment now to a different answer.
Casey:
This is Sebastian Dittman.
Casey:
I'm part of the Audiobus team.
Casey:
We developed our own SDK for this.
Casey:
And as has been mentioned before, it's basically a network protocol.
Casey:
And then let me go to the Audiobus developer docs.
Casey:
And it says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
This process involves...
Casey:
Setting up your project, enabling background audio, creating a launch URL and registering your app, making sure audio session mixing is enabled, which is where we were talking earlier.
Casey:
John was talking earlier about having everyone on the same audio bus.
Casey:
Getting access to your app's audio unit.
Casey:
Handedly, I'm not really sure what that means.
Casey:
And then creating instances of the audio bus controller, input and or output ports, and the audio unit wrapper from your app delegate.
Casey:
Easy peasy.
Marco:
okay so it's using core audio in the audio unit but then it's taking the inputs and outputs of it and and uh you know basically pulling them out of the core audio framework it's a side channel it's like the audio unit is probably there just so we can oh you want these the samples here they are and oh by the way i'm going to take them it's like t it's teeing them off into whatever it's yeah exactly it's network thing so yeah so it is definitely working over network than it sounds like because i i don't think they would do any kind of core i don't think they can do any kind of cardio thing
Marco:
So anyway, there's three things about this that I think are really interesting.
Marco:
There's the fact that it's technically possible at all, which, okay, we got that.
Marco:
The second is that it's been permitted so far in the App Store, that Apple hasn't removed these apps from the store, told them they can't do this anymore, rejected them outright.
Marco:
I mean, that is very interesting that Apple has kind of looked the other way on this.
Marco:
Because
Marco:
you could argue that it's probably misuse of the background audio API because each one of those apps, like the background audio API is made for or is intended for one app to be playing something you're listening to like Pandora or a podcast app.
Marco:
That's what these are for is something that's playing a continuous audio thing that is not the built-in music app.
Marco:
That's what it's for.
Marco:
So the fact that you have multiple apps all doing background audio, working together to make one combined stream to pipe into something else, that is clearly against the spirit of what this is for.
Marco:
So it is surprising that Apple allows it.
Marco:
And now the third interesting part about this is that not only is it technically possible, and they've permitted it so far, but now somebody on the GarageBand team actually got them to let them add support for it in GarageBand.
Marco:
So it's kind of an implied endorsement of this method.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Granted, Apple is a company with more than one person, so it's possible this was one thing that slipped through that doesn't really fit with the overall strategy of iOS, but this one person on this one team was allowed to add it and nobody noticed.
Marco:
It's possible, but...
Marco:
it also is possible that they want to encourage this.
Marco:
And part of it, you know, Apple has always, culturally, especially with Steve Jobs, they have a soft spot for music and musicians.
Marco:
And, you know, that's why GarageBand was one of the first major iPad apps they made that launched with the iPad 2.
Marco:
And they were so proud.
Marco:
You know, music is great, and
Marco:
In our culture, it's well-respected.
Marco:
People love musicians.
Marco:
It's very fulfilling to a lot of people in a very basic way.
Marco:
It's really hard to explain, but music is very powerful.
Marco:
Apple's always had a soft spot for it.
Marco:
Maybe...
Marco:
This is Apple just kind of saying, okay, we'll let this happen for this group of musicians and music people who are making these things because we like music a lot, and that's fine.
Marco:
Because I can't imagine... Also, I guess another reason they would allow this would be that if they do something in iOS 7 or in any future iOS, something involving inter-app communication that's better, something like sharing with contracts or intents like Android and Windows Phone 7 or Windows Metro, whatever, if they do something like that,
Marco:
I don't see anything like that being able to replace this.
Marco:
You know, like the way they would architect something like that probably couldn't be a stream of constant high bandwidth network communication, high bandwidth, low latency with a bunch of apps hanging out in the background.
Marco:
I can't see that happening.
John:
Well, it's not that high bandwidth.
John:
It's actually low bandwidth.
John:
I guess why they get away with it.
John:
Uh,
John:
I think it all comes down to this being audio, and not so much in the musical sense of how they want to do that, although that is part of that.
John:
I think they want to encourage the ecosystem of applications that cooperate and make it a more interesting musical device.
John:
But because...
John:
Perhaps, I mean, perhaps they're wrong about this and they'll find out and have a harsh lesson, but you're not reaching into someone else's application root directory and screwing with it.
John:
You are not calling into another application and executing arbitrary code.
John:
Audio is seen as inert and...
John:
It cannot cause arbitrary execution of code elsewhere.
John:
It doesn't do any of the things that they want to keep people separated for.
John:
And they already have an API that lets you do audio stuff in the background.
John:
This is audio stuff.
John:
It seems safe.
John:
It's not a security thing.
John:
Presumably that no one is actually crazy enough to do the thing I was joking about before, but actually encoding all of your inter application communication as an audio stream, because that would be crazy, but I think it would be awesome.
John:
So anyone out there wants to try that, I give you a thumbs up.
John:
Uh,
John:
And like you said, so they come out with something different.
John:
They would still keep this.
John:
I think the most interesting thing about it is they didn't do the Apple thing, which is so there's these Audiobus guys out there and they have this idea.
John:
Either buy them or make something of our own that's exactly like it and, you know, crush them.
John:
Maybe Audiobus got out front.
John:
Maybe they are planning to buy them.
John:
Maybe waiting for the other shoe to drop.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, this is so weird for the modern app.
John:
I was like, we totally expect them to either buy the company just to get the employees, buy the protocol, or just simply say, oh, yeah, that's a good idea.
John:
Can we do that?
John:
Yeah, do that.
John:
And then just do something that does the exact same thing, possibly a little better, possibly a little worse.
John:
but completely in-house.
John:
I mean, maybe this got out in front of them.
John:
I'm not in the music scene, but it could be that, you know, audio bus looked like it was getting traction among people developing applications and Apple just wanted to join in.
John:
But it's like, I like that activity of them looking into the third party market, seeing someone who's come up with something and not just attempting to buy them outright, not attempting to crush them with their own implementation, you know, dashboard style or whatever, but just say,
John:
all right well you guys are going with that we'll join into your thing because it makes the it makes the ios devices more compelling for people who are interested in music to have this ecosystem like you know as if it wasn't compelling enough to have all these great music apps now they can cooperate with each other they could be the first people to get the benefit of what we've all been talking about of like geez if you could just get rid of these silos that are separating at the ipad could become much more useful device maybe they're the first people out of the gate who are able to do that the musicians
Casey:
So I have a hypothetical question for you guys.
Casey:
In hearing, John, you talk about encoding everything as audio, and I know you say that kind of jokingly, and I also know you say it kind of seriously.
Marco:
And I still maintain that's probably not possible to transfer between apps, but go ahead.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
So let me take you on a meandering journey that hopefully will end up at a decent point.
Casey:
When Pastebot came out, which was, to my knowledge, the first Tapbots app that really people started paying attention to, and maybe that was their first app, I don't recall,
Casey:
But I believe it was Pacebot that tried to run silence in the background in order to stay in open and in sync constantly.
Casey:
Because, you know, obviously there's only a couple of reasons you can background your app for more than 10 minutes.
Casey:
So they thought, oh, we'll just play silence forever.
Casey:
Use this audio mixing, not unlike Audiobus, so you can still hear other things at the same time.
Casey:
And Apple ended up saying, nice try, but that ain't happening.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So you can't leave an app running constantly.
Casey:
And so Marco, this also was cued by what you said a moment ago.
Casey:
And so I wonder if it would be possible to do something like have your app have some sort of server component just locally.
Casey:
And so let's say you wanted to transfer an 80 gig file, an 80 meg file between two apps, whatever that may be, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
So what if app one is,
Casey:
says, hey, I'm about to background this task and starts up a server locally on the phone or the iPad or whatever, does a call, a URL scheme into some other app that it's aware of, like an X callback URL or something along those lines.
Casey:
And that second app, app two, then...
Casey:
gets onto AppOne's server component, or whatever you'd like to call it, downloads that thing, that 80-meg file, in the span of under 10 minutes, because why wouldn't it?
Casey:
It's on the same device.
Casey:
And then suddenly you have a way of doing file transfer between apps as long as it takes less than 10 minutes.
Casey:
Does that even make sense?
Casey:
Would that theoretically work?
Casey:
It does.
Marco:
I mean, I think...
Marco:
These are all such ridiculous hacks that I think it would be more wise, unless you had a really pressing need to make an app that did this kind of stuff right now, I think it would be more wise to just kind of wait and see what iOS does to address this.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
Obviously, I think with Forrestal being out now, it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing major new directions with iOS.
Marco:
We probably won't see it with iOS 7 because it's just too soon since he's been out.
Marco:
But I think we can look at...
Marco:
We can look at Apple under Tim Cook, and we can see things are being shaken up gradually.
Marco:
It's not totally transformed overnight to a different company, but things are being shaken up, and we're seeing things that were previously very attributable to Steve Jobs, which had a lot of overlap with things that were attributable to Scott Forstall, because Forstall very much made himself in Jobs' image, or even vice versa, I don't really know.
Marco:
Things like everything being so strictly sandboxed and so strictly separated, it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing relaxation of that as the platform matures, as competition gets more strong and addresses all those areas way more robustly than Apple does.
Marco:
I think we'll start seeing development here.
Marco:
You mentioned remote view controllers and iOS 6 being behind the scenes for a few things.
Marco:
That is something to watch.
Marco:
If you think about how Apple would implement something like remote view controllers for general purpose use,
Marco:
an app would kind of have to have almost like a low-power state where it's in the background, it's not rendering an interface.
Marco:
Ideally, if you only have to load up a sharing sheet for your app or something, and then it goes away and your app was never launched recently, ideally it could only load a small amount of the app and not even instantiate the whole view hierarchy, even if it's not being displayed.
Marco:
Ideally, your app would have some kind of fast-loading, low-needs mode where it could interact with other apps like this, and iOS could still maintain its great battery life and only loading apps when they needed to be loaded and suspending them for all their times.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I feel like there are a lot of technical hairy details about that, about how you would do that from a developer point of view, from an architecture point of view.
Marco:
There's a lot of ways to do it that would suck in some major way for somebody, whether it's a developer or whether it's iOS or the user.
Marco:
But I feel like that area, the entire tech world has been pressuring Apple so hard, especially this past year,
Marco:
to address that particular area.
Marco:
And the remote view controller thing and UI activity looks like baby steps towards something better there, that I feel like investing any kind of major time or effort or development or product, investing heavily into the old ways that you can do things, right now is probably bad timing.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
iOS 7 is going to be announced in a few months in all likelihood, probably at WWDC.
Marco:
And I feel like we are right on the verge of a change that is very likely to affect this particular area of iOS dramatically.
Marco:
So I wouldn't put much into it right now.
Marco:
The very long way of saying that is what I just said.
Marco:
The short version is I don't think it's the right time to invest heavily in weird workarounds for iOS's lack of good inter-app communication.
John:
No, but it would definitely be cool.
John:
I mean, I was joking.
John:
It's a silly thing to do, but if someone did that, that would be a story that would get passed around, because it's a hack.
John:
It's interesting, and it's novel, and I'm sure we could find some sort of technology or protocol for perhaps...
Marco:
modulating and demodulating audio to transfer data i don't know i'm just oh sure i mean you could just you could just like do like one bit per sample where you just move you know have like a sample of one to zero to negative one does it like you know you can modulate into just a very very tiny waveform that is so small that you would not hear it on any kind of speakers or headphones that you would have put into an iphone and uh and you know encode the data that way well that's the question is if you can mute it or not like during
Marco:
That's the problem.
John:
I was trying to think of who would, given the ridiculousness of this and why shouldn't you just wait for iOS 7, who would actually have the resources and poor judgment to attempt something like this?
John:
The only people I could think of have no reason to do it because they already have server-side components, and those would be like the Zyngas of the world.
John:
They would use it as a backdoor to share information between their annoying applications, but they don't need to do that because they've got a server, and they'll just do what they do now and transfer all your information to the servers.
John:
When you launch another game by the same manufacturer, they know all about what you played here and can promote this game or buy this.
John:
So they don't need this.
John:
Their inter-application communication for that crowd is called a server.
John:
It works that way for a lot of people, too.
John:
What we really want it for is stop stranding my stupid text documents and the umpteen text editors I have.
John:
That's what we all want.
John:
In those cases, it's not because you want three games from the same maker to be able to know about each other and know about your scores and activities.
John:
I want documents created in applications not made by the same vendor to not be in these stupid silos, and that's what we're all waiting for.
John:
It's like,
John:
You know, popping up UIs is one thing, and the other thing is the file system or whatever.
John:
And, you know, maybe iCloud is the solution to that, but not really because they're still siloing that off as well.
John:
So that's what I think we're looking for in, you know, inter-app communication is shared UIs type of thing, loadable bundles with UIs that you can put in where your application isn't really running, but some code that's part of your application is running, and some solution to how can we use multiple applications to work on the same project
John:
you know, with multiple applications from different vendors.
John:
I mean, the audio bus is...
John:
almost not the really solution that's more like a bunch of guitar pedals that you hook up in sequence to a layer effects on but like i feel like it's the same type of thing what if you want to do audio audio creation and you have audio boss you'd be like geez i wish i could use these seven apps to collaborate to create this instead one kind of has to be the master app that actually gets to record the resulting audio and then everything else is just a bunch of effects boxes and pedals that you're you're putting in a chain to modify things so they're they're creeping up on it but you know
John:
they they still have a long way to go and as as for your speculation about the forestall jobs thing like do you have any actual information about like everyone likes to attribute to whatever thing they don't like now that forestall's gone it will stop happening and the good thing will happen like i don't know if he's the one who was insisting on silos he's like why why is his departure make you think that this good thing that we want will now finally happen like as if he was the barrier to it i don't and maybe you have information i don't but i have no information about it i don't i i don't see that
John:
like i mean it's it's conceivable but i without any actual connection to information i'm saying like oh yeah forestall was totally and because i have heard some things about things that he was gung-ho for that i disagree with but this was not among them but you know i like i'm i'm hesitant to pin my hopes on on the magic departure of scott forestall
Marco:
Yeah, you're probably right about that, honestly.
Marco:
I mean, I don't have any information to support that either.
Marco:
It was just a hunch.
Marco:
It's probably wrong.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
I mean, like, we know they need this anyway, but, like, they need lots of things, and they tend, you know, they'll get there eventually.
Marco:
This is going to be the year of desktop Linux.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, no, we actually do get it eventually, though.
John:
We got copy.
John:
That's true.
John:
We got notification center, such as it is, eventually.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it's funny because as you guys were talking, I was thinking back, you know, you said, well, one thing we want is to be able to pop up a view or some sort of view controller in another app from within my own app.
Casey:
And it occurred to me that when I was...
Casey:
you know, spitballing about transferring this Phantom 80 meg file, we can already do that.
Casey:
The thing is we can't do it locally.
Casey:
We do it via Dropbox.
Casey:
And so I kind of wonder if in addition to being able to throw up something small in somebody else's app, I wonder if really what I've been asking for this entire show is just Dropbox but local, you know, something that serves the same purpose that Dropbox does today.
John:
It's called the file system, Casey, and they don't want you to.
Marco:
What's interesting is that iCloud does not address that at all.
John:
They chose to silo it.
John:
There's no reason iCloud couldn't work exactly like Dropbox except that Apple doesn't want it to.
Marco:
I think history will show that that particular detail of iCloud is a big mistake.
Marco:
I think if you look at something like the photo library on iOS, that's a really good example of how to do something like this better.
Marco:
Certainly, it's not perfect, but there's a lot of apps that can interact with the same photo library, and it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, again, it could be better, but it's way better than if you have some other type of document already.
Marco:
or some other type of data that you want multiple apps to be able to interact with, there's just no good option for that, except Dropbox, which obviously that's not great for Apple.
Marco:
I really do think if iCloud could be broadened to basically have different containers for any given MIME type, say...
John:
or any given set of mime types you're just bargaining now because it's like well i'm working on a project that has some images and some text documents and some audio and some movies and now they're in they're in silos by type like i mean this there's a reason that the the file systems exist the way it does it's because it's like you can't predict ahead of time what what uh what would you call it what facet you're going to use to organize things what you know what
John:
what is the word i'm looking for what axis or whatever right how are you going to categorize things is it by type is it by date is it by like oh well if you just make a file system you can do all those things and we also have another thing which is like a hierarchy with like by location by path and i mean it could be by project you know like i have like i have photos that i have to work with for the magazine that i'm that are not in my photo library for myself because they're not my personal photos like there's like there's all sorts of everyone has these kind of exceptions inside the
John:
project folder maybe you'll divide it up by type underneath the project folder or maybe you'll divide it up by a secondary category and then by type but like i think the decision not to have a real file system in icloud is the right one they just like that i admire them for sticking with it i hope they don't cave because they could implement dropbox they could have implemented dropbox a long time ago but they didn't because they said yeah we understand that yeah just give us a shared hierarchy file system that's on the network that syncs everywhere
John:
Dropbox does that.
John:
Apple could do that.
John:
They've chosen not to because they know how untenable the file system is for human beings, period, like non-nerd people.
John:
And so they're holding the line and saying, no, we are not going to give you an arbitrary hierarchy that you can enforce the way you want because people have proven they can't make that work.
John:
And they just haven't figured out.
John:
a workable alternative yet.
John:
But I'm proud of them for not caving and not saying, well, you know iCloud documents in the cloud?
John:
Well, now it's just an arbitrary file system, just like Dropbox and go nuts.
John:
Because everyone would cheer that and be like, yay, this is great.
John:
Apple's finally done what we wanted.
John:
But I'm totally convinced that people in general cannot grok that concept.
John:
And it's not a question of education and time, because now we're several generations into the computer age.
John:
It's just...
John:
It's not something people grasp.
John:
It's something that we have no problem with and subset of geeks have no problem with.
John:
But, you know, the simpler things like you talk about the photo sharing, people can kind of kind of grasp that.
John:
People can kind of grasp the stupid limited silos that we all hate.
John:
There's got there's got to be something that doesn't expose the full file system that gives us some of the benefits.
John:
And, you know, Apple hasn't found it yet.
John:
And I feel bad for them and I feel bad for us.
John:
But.
John:
I am proud of them for not making Dropbox.
John:
I'll be proud of them right up to the point where my frustration just overflows.
John:
As long as Dropbox is still around for the nerds, that also kind of mitigates this thing.
John:
It's like, okay, well, you keep working on that, Apple, but in the meantime, all the nerds are just using Dropbox to get their work done.
Marco:
I kind of feel like the...
Marco:
Obviously, there's been a lot of discussion in the last few years about moving away from exposing the file system to users.
Marco:
And I feel like it's one of those simplifications that the problem is way more complicated than that simple solution can properly address.
Marco:
And the reason why files have lasted as long as they have as the metaphor for storage management for people...
Marco:
is that this is a complicated problem, and files are a very simple and extremely powerful way to address it at the cost of user complexity, especially for people who just don't think that way or who are so new to it they need time to adjust.
Marco:
And we see, obviously, we see so many failures of, like, quote, normal people or people who are really new to computers or just don't care that much.
Marco:
We see so many failures of them just not getting the concepts of file storage and files and moving them and where they're located on the computer and stuff like that.
Marco:
But I feel like...
Marco:
Where Apple has gone with iCloud, with the tremendous, very strict siloing per app and pretty much no file system, everything's just kind of a collection of documents in each app, I feel like that's going too far in the other direction.
John:
It's too much of an extreme...
John:
It doesn't cover the problem space.
John:
It just doesn't.
John:
We all recognize.
John:
It doesn't even cover the problem space for casual people.
John:
It solves like there's nobody for whom that solution is adequate, I found.
John:
Because even just like my parents, like once they can't find their stuff and I explain the siloing, they're like, oh.
John:
Well, that's, that's dumb.
John:
How do I do that?
John:
And I'm like, I don't have a good answer for them.
John:
Like there's, I'm not gonna say nobody, but there's so few people, you know?
John:
And so is that, is that the first step and they have a master plan?
John:
Did they want to try that and say, Hey, maybe this is adequate, you know, because they don't care.
John:
Like what we nerds will just use apps that work with Dropbox.
John:
Right.
John:
But,
John:
Like, they haven't figured it out yet.
John:
They have not even come close to covering the problem space.
John:
And you're talking about, like, the simple, small, simple, but powerful tools.
John:
Like, that's the continuum.
John:
It's like, you know, Unix were, you know, the ideal of Unix.
John:
You have a bunch of tiny single-purpose tools that you can chain together to do amazing things, but nobody can figure that out, right?
John:
And at the other end, you have, like, a big red button that you press, and it just pops out.
Marco:
On the other end, you have Microsoft Excel.
John:
Well, no.
John:
Excel is actually a good example of a small, simple tool that you can assemble.
John:
Because they're simple tools.
John:
We have a grid.
John:
And there's a few simple things that regular people know how to do with the grid.
John:
And people are amazing at taking Excel.
John:
It's like, oh, a two-dimensional grid.
John:
I can solve any problem with that.
John:
Because it's like Lego blocks.
John:
It's a terrible solution, but they can understand this one simple tool.
John:
Right?
John:
Well, Unix, you know, these series of simple tools, you can make up your solution.
John:
But the other end of the spectrum is there is no small reusable part.
John:
There is no Lego brick.
John:
There is no thing that you can snap together to make a solution.
John:
There's just one big shiny red button and you press it and it does whatever the hell we say this thing's going to do.
John:
And that is inadequate to cover the things that people need to do.
John:
And there's, you know, that's documents in the cloud at this point.
John:
There's a huge gap between those extremes, and there's got to be something in the middle that can work for us.
John:
And it would be a failure on Apple's part to ever surrender and say, fine, it's a file system.
John:
So they've got work to do, but I hope they don't just give in.
Marco:
I think it would be an equally significant failure on their part to say, we've solved it.
Marco:
It's done.
Marco:
This is it.
Marco:
We're done.
John:
It's fine.
John:
You just got to get used to it.
John:
They realized that.
John:
I don't think anyone thinks that anywhere who's ever used documents in the cloud.
Marco:
All right, we should wrap it up.
Marco:
You want to have some kind of outro?
Marco:
People have been asking for an outro to the show so you know when it's ending.
Marco:
So you can look at our website, atp.fm for Accidental Tech Podcast.
Marco:
Follow us on Twitter.
Marco:
We have Syracusa, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A.
Marco:
Casey Liss.
Marco:
C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
And me, Marco Arment, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
And that's about it.
Marco:
Go rate us on iTunes so that we can get more people and stuff.
Marco:
And I don't know.
Marco:
Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring.
Marco:
What do people usually put in these outros?
Marco:
I thought you were going to sing a song.
Marco:
You're not going to sing a song?
Marco:
I don't think.
Marco:
I'm not really in the mood to sing tonight.
Marco:
Maybe we'll record one when I'm in the shower one time, then I'll sing to you.
Marco:
Looking forward to it.
John:
I think Twitter handles are good and website URLs.
John:
You probably just don't have to spell them.
John:
That'll make them go by faster.
Marco:
Yeah, because we all have long spellable names.
John:
My last name, Cadence, it's 323.
John:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A.
John:
That's the Cadence.
John:
Just so you know.
John:
Oh, I've been doing twos.
John:
Oh, no, it's threes because that's how you have to do it.
John:
That's what drives me nuts about the stupid Google Authenticator things.
John:
Do you use that for the two-factor?
John:
No, I don't.
John:
So they've got a Google Authenticator app, which is great.
John:
It integrates with Dropbox, and I have three of them on there now.
John:
It's one app, Google Authenticator, that gives you just the number.
John:
It's your second factor, right?
John:
And it's six digits, and they shove them all together.
John:
I'm like, come on, guys.
John:
What planet are you on?
John:
Like, it's two sets of three.
John:
Like, everybody knows you don't put six digits together, so your eyes go crazy in the middle, and it's repeated digits, and you screw it up.
John:
That's just unbelievable to me that they didn't put a freaking space or a hyphen or something.
John:
It's two sets of three.
Casey:
Please put that as a lead in, for the love of Christ, please.
Marco:
That's definitely going somewhere.