Not an Accurate Representation of My Mousing Skills
that's how long it takes me to reboot so nine minutes yep although i think there might still be some spinners on some chrome tabs and some finder windows finder windows are usually the last things to get spinners off of them is are you talking are you referring to like those like wake from sleep spinners like what since uh mavericks or since lion whatever no the spinners that are in the upper right corner of a finder window when it's trying to just display the contents not the i here is a fake screenshot of a window and i'm going to put a giant spinner or not those
I've never even seen the ones you're talking about, I don't think.
I know, because you have SSDs.
I don't see them at work either.
You get spinning disks and about 4 million files on them, literally, and you get to see all sorts of spinners.
You get to see Chrome tabs die with the frowny face because they just assume the world is broken.
They give up.
You get to see dock icons stop bouncing in the dock.
Have you seen that lately?
No.
It's something most people don't even know about.
Like, it's so bogged down that they can't bounce?
No, so there's a certain, I don't know if it's a number of bounces or a number of time, but at a certain point, the OS gives up animating the bounce.
It's just like, you know, it doesn't mean the app is hung.
The app may eventually launch, but it's just like, look, this is just taking too long, and it just gives up bouncing.
There's still no light under it.
It's still in the process of launching.
Eventually, the little indicator light will appear under it.
I see it all the time.
That's amazing.
Part of the reason I haven't upgraded my machine is because it's so f***ing unusable because it has platter drives, and I just don't want to deal with it.
I've almost bought an SSD so many times.
So many.
Well, actually, if you want a good deal on a new Mac Pro... Oh, God, save it for the show.
I told you, $5.
That's a good deal.
Someday I will take that offer.
No, I won't want it then.
If you're willing to wait long enough on an infinite time scale.
Oh, Jesus, here we go.
That's not how that works.
Ha, ha, ha.
I X'd out all the items in follow-up except for one, because we do have a lot of follow-up, and I'm trying to trim it for today's show.
Good, good.
The one thing I wanted to follow up on was on last week's show, which was so long ago now because we delayed the show for the Apple event.
i was excited about the fact that the gamecube controller adapter for the wii u was going to let me use my gamecube controller for any game on the wii u that also supported the wii u pro controller and when i saw that on some random website i didn't believe it and i said i need confirmation of this and the the website linked back to nintendo's official website
That's owned by the company.
And right there on plain text on Nintendo's own website, it said that, yes, you can use your GameCube controller with this adapter for any Wii U game that supports the Wii U Pro controller.
And I was very excited and we recorded last week's podcast.
And then right after the podcast was over, or maybe it was like the next day, but shortly thereafter, Nintendo itself and all the articles that had cited Nintendo itself issued a correction, said, oh, no, just kidding.
Actually, you can only use it for Smash Brothers.
Sorry about that.
So I was sad.
Well, it makes me sad that you were sad.
I mean, like, that's just the worst ever.
You know, it's kind of like these rumors where you don't trust it until you see it.
It's like seeing something on Apple dot com saying, you know, you know, you can use the the new iMac as a retina display for your Mac Pro.
And you have like a day of that where you're super excited.
And then the next day, Apple says, oh, actually, no, you can't.
Sorry.
That was a mistake on our website.
Nice.
All right.
Do we want to talk about the event first or do we want to talk about your review first?
Come on, you missed the chance to say.
So, how's the review?
You're right.
You guys can pick.
I think we have enough time for both of them because we've only done that one item of follow-up.
So, you can pick which one you want to talk about first.
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All right.
So we are recording this on Friday night, the 17th of October.
And yesterday, there was another Apple event, this time talking about a lot of stuff we already knew about and then some new iPads.
And I think the first thing I should note is that the streaming for me, and I was streaming to my iPad mini that is now sort of but not really...
old no no it's new it's now the ipad mini 2 it got upgraded yeah that's true it is new yet the same um anyway so uh it's streaming to my ipad mini which is connected via the hdmi adapter to a tv in my office that worked pretty much flawlessly the entire time and that was a welcome change from the utter disaster that was the iphone keynote and i wanted to ask you guys do you think that's because nobody cared about the ipad keynote and there were a lot fewer um
viewers or do you think that apple actually got their stuff together or a little column a little column b oh i'd say it's definitely uh a lot of column a and maybe a little bit of column b i mean every year the iphone event is always by far the more important and the more um the more watched and listened to one like if you asked if you ask people who run the big sites who do live vlogs they'll tell you the same thing where like the the iphone event is is by far the bigger event of the year and uh
And, you know, people do care about the iPad and stuff, but it's a lot fewer non-nerds who will actually go to the trouble of watching the stream live.
Last time they had not just performance problems, but just even if there was only one person listening, they would have heard someone speaking in Chinese over half of the thing.
Right.
So that's not a performance problem.
That's a you don't have your wires crossed kind of problem.
Yeah.
So do have your wires crossed.
And so this was at the town hall.
And you got to think there's a home field advantage there where it's their database, their database, their network connection, their network people, all their own infrastructure and.
They're video guys where it seemed like there was a TV truck that perhaps was not affiliated with Apple that was involved in the iWatch event.
I can still call it the iWatch event because we called it that before we knew what the thing would be called.
So it's going to forever be the iWatch event.
Anyway, I don't know if that's the case, but it just seemed like when they're in the Flint Center and this other big venue, they don't have control over every part of the experience of broadcasting and it just fell apart.
Whereas when they do it in their little town hall thing or wherever they did the iPad event, they control everything.
So yeah, no problems with streaming here.
I had it running on two different streams.
Then the game I played was try to get a stream that's farther ahead because one stream would be like...
you know, seven seconds ahead of the other one and I'd reload it just for the hell of it to see if it would jump forward.
But other than that, no drops.
Yeah, you know, this time, this event and the iPhone event I watched in the office and this time what I did was I made sure that I had TweetBot always visible because I'm a really heavy user of, what is it, spaces where, you know, you have multiple virtual desktops.
And I made sure that TweetBot was always visible and I engaged the
pin the timeline to the top thing, or I forget, there's a better way of describing that.
But anyways, so basically, as all these tweets come in, the timeline is always automatically scrolling to the top.
And that was both the best and worst way to watch this keynote, because I felt like I was thoroughly entertained by...
Watching all these tweets go by with the exception of a thousand freaking dogs, which I was really bored of very quickly.
But then again, so were the dogs.
And and so it was almost more work watching the Twitter stream.
And I was almost more interested watching the Twitter stream than I was the event, which probably speaks to the quality of the event.
Well, when you saw them doing just like demo after demo of things we've seen before, let's go over the adoption numbers.
Let's show you what's in these different OSs and like not just mentioning them or putting up bullet points in a slide, but like here, let's show you iOS 8 again.
It's like, are you kidding me?
You knew there was not going to be a big, exciting one more thing at the end of this keynote.
It was just going to be...
This little dog and pony show and then all the stuff that we knew was coming, which is fine.
But like, I don't know why you need, I guess they feel like they have a captive audience, but why do you need to redemonstrate iOS 8 and Yosemite that long for this type of thing?
Just get in, get out, be done.
Anyway, it wasn't that bad.
I thought it was fine.
All right.
So they did all these demos.
I do think that Federici, and I've said this several times in the past, is my favorite presenter.
He pulls off the really dorky kind of dad jokes, I think, better than anyone else.
I think Q tries to, and it doesn't always land well, which is probably how it would be if I was presenting these jokes.
But nevertheless, I love Craig.
I think he does a wonderful job presenting.
I know I've said this a thousand times, but he's so much better now.
And I thought the call with Stephen Colbert as the silly ridiculous calls go was one of the better ones.
So who's obsessed with the celebrities?
Do we think it's Tim Cook is obsessed with the celebrities?
I don't know.
It's weird.
Someone is, because Steve Jobs was not, in general.
Steve Jobs liked to have a musical guest at the end, and he would schmooze with them and all that stuff.
That was his thing, but...
really limited amount of, you know, stunt casting in the keynote because, you know, Steve Jobs was a star of those.
He felt like he should be there.
But now it's like, you know, it's just you just come to expect it now.
And I thought the Colbert thing was fine.
Like the problem with having Colbert on is even over a phone, which I couldn't believe they did it over a phone.
He wasn't over.
It didn't sound like he was over a voice over IP because the quality was terrible.
Like he was on a POTS line, it sounded like.
really bad right uh but even over that you can see for the three or four little stilted lines he had to read it was like see guys this is what an actual performer is like i mean i don't blame their executives at apple like they're not actors they're not comedians which is probably why they shouldn't do comedy skits in the middle of these things like don't plan it out be spontaneously funny or pretend to be spontaneously funny don't go into a skit but colbert's line delivery even when reading this silly script was so much better than
the other side of the conversation.
So don't, don't bring real comedians on.
It just highlights how you are not a real comedian, but I thought it was fine.
All the people who were like Marco just went, Oh, I know a lot of people were cringing and couldn't handle the embarrassment of it.
It's like, whatever.
I mean, even, even the silly thing with Bono, like that, that was painful because both Tim and Bono are not natural in the environment of trying to whatever it's like exposition plus comedy, plus drama, plus whatever they're trying to do.
It is not their strengths.
Stephen Colbert was funny.
Greg was fine.
The little handshake thing I thought was funny.
You know, Eddie Q not being able to do it.
The two guys who did do the handshake were funny.
Oh, I forgot about that.
That was even worse.
I thought that was cute.
And like I said, like I tweeted when it was going on, showing the rumor site with the...
The spaceship campus taking off.
That was dumb, but I got I just was so excited to think about someone had to go to their graphics department and say, we need a fake rumor.
Make up a fake rumor and then make an awesome graphic where like the quality of that fake flying campus building rumor thing was so much higher than you.
He's like a lot of effort in town going into a throwaway gag.
uh that's that's an area where they could help like uh colbert and the daily show because those guys got to whip together some motion graphics or some little picture to be up to the right of the talking head in five minutes whereas apple some poor guy at apple probably sweated over that flying uh circular building but anyway i whatever i i don't get too hung up on uh that part of the thing and we didn't expect great things out of this presentation anyway and so we got what we got right
I would rather have a presentation that's 10 minutes shorter than have one that includes awkward and really painfully unfunny skits.
Because they don't need that.
You aren't amused a little bit by them?
If I was going to cut stuff, I would cut that intro video showing everybody happy to get iPhones.
Never do that again, as someone tweeted, and I agree.
Yeah, we've seen it too many times.
I would cut all the demos of things we've already seen demoed because this is a low... Not many people are watching this.
The people who are watching it already know what iOS 8 is about.
Don't re-demo that.
Maybe do a little recap of Yosemite.
Fine.
And then I would keep whatever the best segment was.
So maybe keep the Colbert thing in and then drop the other one.
But...
you know it's just that i just think someone has someone likes celebrities and i don't know if it's all the way at the top tim cook likes them or as individual vps like them or they just want to find excuses to talk to their favorite celebrities which i wouldn't blame them for hey you know what what advantages are there of being uh a senior vice president or ceo of apple well i can meet all my favorite celebrities all right go i
I figure it's got to be Tim Cook because you can see, like, when Tim is involved, you can see he's, like, giddy about, like, how incredibly happy he is and, like, no one else is nearly as excited as he is about what's happening, you know?
Like, I think it's definitely, like, you could tell, like, you know, Cook is the one who's really into celebrities and that's why they keep happening, but...
Man, I wish they wouldn't because it just doesn't work.
It's boring.
It's not funny.
It's painful.
And it detracts from the presentation.
It detracts from the whole reason we're there.
These are good presentations.
They have good things to announce.
There's no reason to bring them down in this weird, awkward way.
I don't know.
I don't see why it's worth it.
See, I disagree.
I'm more with John in that, although they were kind of silly and lame, at least it shows that Apple has a little bit of personality and it's not just a completely boring, stodgy, this is what we've come up with.
This is the new iPad.
This is the new iMac.
Hooray.
I don't know.
I felt like it at least added some color, probably got beaten to death, but
It's at least add some amount of entertainment and and Colbert's line about, you know what I see on my wrist or what I look at my wrist, my wrist get to work.
I thought that was hysterical.
It was.
But the problem, you know, like as John said, the problem is like the delivery overall of the whole thing.
is usually like too slow too forced too awkward and you know and whether that's the side of just the apple people or both sides varies on on the skit but they don't need it because it doesn't it see it doesn't seem to me like they're commuting they're communicating personality or adding personality to me it it seems forced to script because you know we know these things are very scripted we know they've rehearsed we know we know that they're almost every line is considered and written beforehand and
Well, that wrist line, I assume, was an ad lib.
Yeah.
Because Stephen Colbert said, I have to read this.
Like, they give him a script, and he looks at it and goes, oh, this is crap.
And then I'm assuming he made that line himself at the end.
Maybe, or maybe they approved it.
Whatever the case is, it's very clear these things are...
at least on the Apple side, extremely scripted and extremely rehearsed.
And they're read at an extremely slow pace, which is good when you're presenting details of a product that the press has to write down.
But when you're doing some kind of entertainment bit, it just feels really awkward and forced.
And it...
It doesn't feel genuine.
It feels like we thought this would get you excited, and we're kind of excited to do something with a celebrity, so we're doing it in this planned, artificial, forced way.
But it just does not feel genuine at all.
Well, it breaks up the flow of the presentation, which is the biggest downside for it.
But like in the absence of genuine enthusiasm by the presenter about the tech details or the product features, it's like this kind of, it was kind of filling the void.
And I don't think the filler is the problem.
It's the void.
That's the problem.
Like,
There was, I've said this many times, whenever Steve Jobs showed something, there was some aspect of it that he was obviously super excited about.
And sometimes that aspect was stupid, but his excitement was genuine.
And he was, whatever it was, he's excited about a volume button.
He's excited about, you know, the edge of something.
He's excited about a particular software feature.
He was super excited about it.
And his enthusiasm, despite whether you yourself were excited about it, was infectious.
You need something like that to drive the presentation.
And sometimes I get the idea that, like,
At this point, you know, Craig Federighi is no longer particularly excited about iOS 8 extensions because he's like he's done with them.
Like he was excited about doing them.
He did them.
He's talked about them on stage 10 times.
Now they're going to ship.
He's probably worried about, you know, bugs and iOS 8.1 and iOS 9 and whatever he's worried about.
He can't muster the enthusiasm to tell you how excited he is about iOS 8 extensions, what they mean for the iOS platform and stuff like that.
So to fill in that void of enthusiasm that's like, oh, now we'll have a celebrity skit because they are excited about talking to Stephen Colbert.
And that's that I think is the worst part of it.
Not the skits in themselves, but just that they seem to be filling in for something that's missing.
All right.
Let's talk about actual products.
How about that?
We certainly can.
So they retconned my beloved RetinaPad Mini, and now it's the iPad Mini 2.
Yeah, congratulations.
Yeah.
So now it will make Stephen Hackett even more upset when I call it the RetinaPad Mini, which that's kind of enjoyable, I suppose.
But yeah, so it's now the iPad Mini 2.
I got that right, I think.
And what did they drop the price?
$100?
Is that correct?
not even not even right it's 240 it's 249 right no that's that's that's the old one which is still for sale which is crazy that they are still for another year or at least for now they are still selling the a5 based ipad mini one which is based on the ipad 2 which came out in 2011 and the ipad the ipod touch is the same as the mini isn't it
uh yeah the a5 right it's still a5 based so i mean even though they didn't announce a new one they're still selling the old one i assume yeah yeah so this this as a developer that makes me nervous and a little frustrated because you know the a5 was a great chip when it came out in 2011 uh in early 2011 at that but it is now no longer a great chip it is it is you know if anybody who tries to run
iOS 8 on an original iPad mini, an iPad 3, which uses the same A5 CPU, just with bigger GPU.
So iPad mini, non-retina, iPad 3, any iPod Touch, and the iPhone 4S.
Those are all the A5 devices.
If you've tried to run iOS 8 on an A5 device, you know that that's not a great experience.
It works, but it's pretty rough.
And because they're now still selling devices that use that, that means that chances are... So iOS 8, obviously, we're stuck with this for the next year.
But what's going to happen next year when iOS 9 comes out is...
Is iOS 9 going to still need to support this because they're still going to be selling original iPad minis when it comes out?
It's constricting everybody.
It's especially bad for game developers or anybody who depends on a lot of GPU power.
The funny thing is they showed in the presentation that wonderful big hockey stick graph of the GPU power increase over the iPad's lifetime.
And the hilarious thing is that all these models that they're still selling...
The second dot on that graph, that's them.
That's the iPad 2.
They're still selling that today.
Is it the case that developers can't do anything with their apps to basically not make it work on the A5 devices?
That is correct.
Developers cannot exclude A5 devices.
they just there's there's no there's no mechanism to do it developers used to hack around this by like they'd figure out like some hardware feature that was added like they'll be like oh well this requires a gyroscope that didn't exist in like the iphone 3gs like they they would figure out ways like that but there are no more of those ways that would exclude only the a5 devices and it's also against the rules to do that anyway so if apple caught you doing that like excluding based on a hardware thing that you didn't really need to be excluding for they would ding you for that so
there's really no way and it's it sucks for game developers who rely on this because not only they have to either still support the a5 devices which is a huge burden on any kind of modern graphics and you know modern stuff like that or they have to like say in their description which many of them do warning do not buy this if you have devices x y and z and then deal with all the one star reviews and the angry people that you can't respond to because you don't know who they are yeah right and
Because nobody reads the descriptions.
So you get, like, you get every single person who buy.
And, you know, it sucks that if it's paid up front, then you can't refund it.
And, like, it's just, it's a bad situation for so many reasons.
This is why, like, I think, you know, we know in the industry the idea of the strategy tax.
And the strategy tax basically, like, you know, some part of a big tech company, like, their strategic needs are holding back some other part of the company's strategic needs.
you know we knew like in microsoft this was like you know office and windows fighting and having to like you know preserve windows everywhere holding back their mobile strategy and stuff like that i think with apple their their profit margins on their hardware and and their and someone's someone deciding that they need to keep pushing devices lower and lower and keeping them around longer and longer that is the apple strategy tax that we're seeing you know besides they're being massively over committed on on software needs but i
It doesn't have to be, though, because I think it's good for them to have a cheap product.
They're a big hang-up, and it doesn't fall out of their strategy of, we need to be at $249 for our iPads.
The problem is that, with the exception, I guess, maybe of the iPhone 5C, they just refuse to make a fresh, low price.
cost device.
They always just go with last year's.
And it's like, I've talked about this many times when the 5C was coming out that I thought they should do it.
And they kind of did it with the 5C, but not quite.
Like you can make a better product at that price point if you use modern technologies.
Like I know that you already have the factories up and going.
I know you've been making this.
I know there are economies of scale, blah, blah, blah.
But, and I guess maybe there's margins, like you said.
Give up a little bit of margins.
Make a new $249 device that, you know, has an A6 or A7 in it.
Figure out a way to do that.
Like, start from scratch and make an intentionally low-cost device.
So save money where you can.
Use a crappier camera, so on and so forth.
But don't just say, well, we have this device, and now we can make it for cheaper, so done and done.
We'll just keep it around.
Because things age out in that old hardware.
And, like...
The old USB 1, USB 2 example from the PC world from ages ago, eventually it becomes more expensive to put USB 1 in your PC because USB 2 is everywhere and you can't even find USB 1 anymore.
And there's no real equivalent of that for iOS devices.
But just if you take a clean sheet and say, with modern technology and modern prices on components...
Can I hit that price point, give up a little bit of margin, and just make a better product?
A better product because it gives a better impression to your customers.
Maybe put a little more RAM in it.
A better product because it makes your developers happy.
This keeping around of the exact old product for years and years, iPod Touch, is just not a good look, as they say.
Right.
Well, and it isn't just keeping around the old.
It's even the choices you get with the new.
So, for instance, the 16-64-128 split.
Yeah, we already went through that.
I mean, they did it again, but it's like, what did we expect them to do?
They're not going to turn... Like, that decision was made, you know, a year ago.
Well, and the reason they made that decision...
was not so they could make an extra $3 on the 16-gig one by not putting a 32-gig chip in it.
They're just trying to push you up to the middle model, right?
Exactly.
See, they did an amazing trick with the new iPhone pricing.
They have managed to increase their likely average selling price by $200.
So you figure so many people would have been okay with 32.
If 32 was the new baseline...
most people would have bought just the baseline.
That's why I don't know if this plan is going to work, though.
Do you think it's going to work?
Do you think it's going to push people up?
I know that's that seems like it's the aim.
It's a typical anchoring thing where you try to push people up.
But I just wonder if people are going to be like, I don't I don't know how how flexible people are to go up to the people who buy the bottom model.
Do they even know?
Do they know how much storage they're using?
Do they know 16 of what do they know how many of whatever those 16 things are that they're currently using?
I suspect most iPhone owners have run out of space before.
So I think people buying their very first iPhone might not be fooled or might be fooled into getting a 16.
But I think people who are buying their second or third or fourth iPhone are going to be way more likely to go for a bigger size than the base model because they've probably faced a storage issue before.
If only upgrading to iOS 8, right?
Yeah, exactly.
That's yet another big... And so here's the thing.
By continuing to sell these small devices... Oh, and the other half of that is... So they have this 1664 thing so that... Again, if 32 was the baseline, everybody would just buy 32.
They have kind of pushed a lot of people to go upmarket...
And to raise their average selling price that way.
Also, keep in mind, the iPhone 6 Plus is $100 more.
And they're selling a lot of those as well.
So the entire pricing of the iPhone line is, I think, very carefully designed to push that average selling price upwards.
And if you look at the new iPad lineup...
You can see that when the first mini came out, that certainly pushed the average selling price down.
And I don't think it has caught back up to where it used to be even now.
But if you look at the new lineup, so you have the old crappy iPad mini at $250.
Fine.
Wasn't it $280 before?
Is that roughly the same price?
$269?
I don't remember.
Something like that.
Retina iPad is now $300 instead of $400.
the ipad mini 3 which is just the retina mini but now also available in gold and with touch id no other changes gold gold option and touch id a hundred dollars more and then and then you have the ipad air the the old one which is still for sale at 400 also and then the ipad air 2 which is actually a substantial upgrade for 500 the original price of full-size ipads
All of this, and of course, the same 16, 64 on most of those models.
So all of this is clearly made to push people up the line.
This is very carefully designed for upselling.
It's very obvious.
Apple's whole product line, if you look at their pricing intervals, they're very, very carefully spaced out so that there's always something else that you or a salesperson can talk yourself into and
to go like oh just a little bit more we'll get you this like until you hit like the absolute most you can spend and that is on one side of apple the hardware profit margins side of it where they they need to maximize that then you look at what it does to developers now developers first of all have to write to all these old cpus forever
Keep in mind, not only is that affecting all of us who Apple could kind of not care less about, like, you know, if if life is a little bit harder for third party developers in some way like this, Apple doesn't care that much.
But Apple itself is one of the biggest iOS developers, if not the biggest iOS developer.
And so Apple has to deal with this, too.
When they're making all of their built in apps, when they're doing all of their own development, the development of the OS itself, what the OS can even do.
Apple is restricted by their own hardware margin needs on their development side.
And that affects lots of things.
It also affects the whole problem with iOS 8 upgrades and the very likely cause of it being a disk space issue.
that upgrading to ios 8 requires almost five gigs of free space and apple has been selling eight and 16 gig devices in mass for a long time uh and so it's like there's the percentage of people who who can't do it over and yes i know you can plug into itunes but no one knows that no one does that
The amount of people who have an iOS 7 device and would upgrade, except they don't have five gigs of free space, is substantial.
And so even that, that's the result of previous years, Apple skimping on memory to boost their margins and drive people to higher models.
Now that is affecting them this year.
That's affecting their development teams.
And so this is all related.
This is why it's a clear strategy tax.
The hardware margins side of Apple is...
and causing problems for the software side of Apple and the developer side of Apple.
You know, I think for the most part, I agree with what you said.
One thing I take a little bit of issue with, though, is your thought that a lot of regular people would get not the baseline phone, not get the 16 gig phone.
And I think in the same way, like you just said, that not a lot of people realize, oh, you can plug into iTunes and fix all these problems to do the iOS 8 upgrade.
I don't think a lot of people really get into the intricacies of which iPhone to buy.
And I haven't interrogated my coworkers, but certainly I've looked around the office over the last year as the 5C became a thing, as the 5S was a thing, and now as the 6 and 6 Plus are a thing.
Yeah.
I believe one of my coworkers got the exact same phone I did, the 6 with 64 gigs.
Another one just got a 6.
And because she is still on a family plan with her family, apparently her parents just went and picked up a phone for her.
She didn't even know what capacity it was.
Now, this is just one example, but it's an indicative example.
Additionally, there have been a handful of people that have shown up with 5Cs.
Now, I can't think of any developers that have, but- Manson has one.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
I just met in my office.
But yeah, but either way, these are typically like project managers or HR people, and a lot of them have ended up with 5Cs.
And these are people who work in a developing company.
We do software consulting.
And so if there was a quote-unquote regular person that would understand why you would want a bigger phone, these are the people that –
that would do that, but they don't get them.
And I wonder, again, I haven't asked, but I wonder if maybe it's because, you know, it's hard to justify getting a hundred or 200 or 300 or shoot $700 iPhone over this equally pretty looking Android phone.
That's like either free or a hundred bucks or whatever the case may be.
And heck, now that I'm thinking of it,
pretty much Aaron's entire family is all on Android.
Generally speaking, not exclusively, but generally speaking, because those phones were considerably cheaper than iPhones.
And I think that plays a much bigger role for your average consumer.
That being said, I agree with you that if somebody wanted to upgrade at all, or was at all privy to the fact that 16 gigs is not a lot, they are absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, going to get a 64 gig phone.
But the 5C is pretty awesome, though.
Like, not in terms... We know what's wrong with it, right?
But it comes in colors, which is just huge.
And it's really comfortable.
Like, the reason Manton got one, I assume, is because it's just... It's nicer to hold.
Like, it's... If they had made, for example, a new low-end iPad Mini plastic color back...
a6 or a7 instead of an a5 same price point that would just be a better product all around right because like you can't underestimate the the attractiveness if you if you don't make it incredibly crippled like give it eight gigabytes of something like the 5c uh
of you know that plastic is durable it's attractive it's comfortable it's cheap uh if you're going to give a little ipad to a kid it comes in colors these are all big selling points that are easy it's like right they're right in front of apple for it to grab and because the 5c didn't do as well as they hoped as far as we can tell like it was hobbled by other reasons by the fact that it was alongside the much more desirable what was the 5s that it came with um and so it was
Always the high-end model was going to win.
And they kind of crippled it by giving it not so great specs and not really improving it.
It was just like the 5 in a different case, maybe with a slightly bigger battery.
I just wish they would make dedicated products for lower price points instead of just having this cascade.
And the other thing with the storage, the RAM, like pick any spec you want that we complain about all the time.
this has been true of apple for so long for like you know since the 90s since even before steve jobs came back apple as a company will get it into its head that like some number is the correct number for some spec where there's going to be like every machine has four megabytes of ram like i'm going way back here and
It'll have four megabytes of RAM and it will be fine.
And then the next year, the bottom line will have four megabytes of RAM.
And you'll be looking around and go, well, everyone else doesn't have four megabytes of the bottom.
And the next year will come and the bottom line will have four megabytes of RAM.
You're like, OK, is Apple not looking at the rest of the world?
Nobody ships four megabytes of RAM anymore.
it goes through this and until until it just seems insane you're like surely this year they'll bump it and then finally they bump it and it's been that way you know with apple is actually in a good cycle with the ram now they're not really skimping they're getting they finally bumped everyone up to 16 but now it's a flash storage someone got it into their head that you know 16 gigs is perfectly good for the low-end model but just keep doing that year after year after year 16 16 16 the rest of the world is like are you kidding now first of all they all have sim slots and everything right now or not sim slots sd card slots
and stuff on the other side of the fence.
So at the very least, those people buy something, you just buy some cheap and probably slow and probably crappy and whatever, complain about your SD cards.
At least they have, you know, buy a faster SD card if they want to spend the money.
They have the option to at least upgrade it.
Apple's things are completely sealed up and they just keep going with 16.
And so now we're at like the tail end of the 16 cycle where it's just,
it's just crazy that they're doing this.
It's just, it's hurting everybody.
And if you want to pick out something to blame on the stereotypical Tim Cook, you know, character attributes, the fact that he's an operations guy and wants to like, you know, make all the numbers add up in the columns and, you know,
Make sure that he's getting the best price for the best parts and the most efficiencies and everything.
This would be something you could blame on that instinct, whether it's him or not, whether it's other people.
It's just like because, again, this type of thing has been going on Apple for a really long time.
It happened under Steve Jobs.
It happened before Steve Jobs came back.
But it is exactly in line with his, you know, sort of his expertise at keeping costs down and profit margins high.
But it's I think it's over the line.
And it's really it's like Marco said, it's hurting Apple, it's hurting customers.
It's not a good call.
Yeah, and again, 16 is not the minimum.
16 is the lowest that they do on new devices.
They will sell old devices with 8 still.
Yeah, I know, but I'm talking about the flagship product.
The fact that you can get the flagship product with 16, and you can get the flagship product with 16 last year, and you can get the flagship.
The world moves on.
Prices go down.
You're just hurting yourself.
Yeah, and it has to impact Tim's customer sat.
You have to imagine that the experience of using a memory-constrained Mac or a space-constrained iOS device, it is a worse experience.
It has to be causing increased load at the Genius Bar.
It is definitely causing worse experiences and people to have worse opinions of their Apple products when they run into constant disk space issues and stuff like that.
Yeah.
It is affecting them in other ways.
That's why I think this is long term.
I think it's a bad move.
I think they'll learn from this.
This was in the notes for a couple of weeks now, but we didn't talk about the iOS 8 adoption.
And so they had to have, speaking of this presentation that we've kind of wandered off from here, they had the slide up and they had, oh, look at iOS 8 adoption.
And to make the typical super impressive slide, they had to combine iOS 8 and iOS 7.
and compare it you know what i mean like to the so they could show a big number because ios 8 adoption is slower and granted the decision to go with the 16s was probably made a year or two ago like it's ancient history now but the one ramification that i think apple can clearly see uh is ios 8 adoption is slower is it is it because of the bugs yeah part of it's because of the bugs is storage part of it like in their big meeting where they talk about why is ios 8 adoption slow one of the points that has to come up is the storage thing and one solution is that oh we need a smarter install it takes up less room
But the other solution is stop shipping 16 gigs as the low end storage size for years and years.
So hopefully Apple, being the learning machine that we think it is, will come out of this and say we have made a misjudgment when we're planning for the iPhone 8.
We need to not be ridiculous with the with with the flash sizes.
All right, so we wandered off a bit, but let's get a summary of the iPad minis and iPads mini, whatever, and then let's talk iPad Airs.
So it seems clear to me that unless you are in dire need of Touch ID on all your devices, I see no point in spending an extra $100 in getting an iPad mini 3.
I just, I just agree with that.
I know the pricing is ridiculous.
I know that it is a ridiculous premium for, you know, for what, for like, if you want to look like how much does it cost up a touch ID sensor or whatever, but it's just, it's no more ridiculous than paying an extra a hundred dollars for an extra 16 gigs of flash in terms of like the physics and the, the, the cost of materials type thing.
It's exactly as ridiculous, right?
But touch ID is,
is a tangible benefit once you have a device with touch id you don't want one without it and having a mixed household with some touch or miss a mixed personal repertoire of devices that mostly have touch id but then the ipad doesn't this is this is a case where i think much more so than the storage they are charging 100 for a benefit that they think is worth 100 to some people and i think they're closer to being right that this benefit is worth 100 than an extra 16 gigs of flash or something
They also had to overcome the problem they introduced last year when the iPad Air and Retina Mini came out, which was that the Retina Air and the Mini, the Air is supposed to be the higher-end device, but they were very, very similar because they both had the A7.
They both had the same system on a chip.
The Air was something like 5% faster, but otherwise, you know, it was minimal.
And so the Mini became just as high-end of a device as the Air did.
That was the fluke last year, where suddenly the Mini became high-end.
That last year's Mini was a good deal, relatively speaking.
Exactly.
And so this year, they basically upgraded the Air and not the Mini to create that gap again.
Again, it's all about ASP.
It's all about the average selling price.
They want to push people who want the best to not say, well, the iPad Mini is just as good and it's smaller, so I want that and it's cheaper.
No, if you want the best, Apple wants you to go all the way to the top of the line and spend that money with that profit margin.
I can't blame them.
I mean, that's business.
I'm not saying they're evil for doing this,
Yeah, I mean, but what I'm saying, like, I think of the Mini with Touch ID, whatever the hell number that is, three.
It's not a bad product.
Like, relatively speaking, we're like, oh, they just added this tiny thing and they added the price.
That's true.
But at least this one gives you, like, a real tangible benefit.
Like, that's what they charge money for, essentially.
And it's something you can – I think it's something that people appreciate more.
It's not worth $100.
Here's the deal.
If you were talking to somebody and they were trying to decide which iPad mini they should get, you basically just go right for their budget.
Say, can you afford an extra $100 to have this touch thing?
And if they're like, well, it looks neat, but I don't know.
Then obviously you go for the cheaper model.
But if $100 here or there is not going to break the bank,
and they're willing to spend that amount of money, I'm not going to say, even though you can afford it, even though you've got the money in your pocket right now and can buy that one, you shouldn't because it's not worth it because a Touch ID sensor is not worth $100.
Well, neither is 16 gigs of RAM or Flash, but you tell people do it anyways, like it will just make your life easier.
And if you can afford it, then go for it.
Okay, so I can get behind that assessment.
The reason, though, that I'm hemming and hawing about, or I guess even saying no, is for me, and I love my iPad Mini 2.
I had to think about that really hard.
I love my iPad Mini 2, and it does not have Touch ID.
And honestly, the only time I really miss Touch ID isn't when I'm unlocking the device, but is instead when I'm using 1Password, because I have a reasonably long password, and typing that constantly is a real pain in the butt.
And so I agree with what you said that, hey, if you can afford that $100, heck yes, absolutely go ahead and spend it.
But to me, I don't view it as a do or die feature like, say, a retina screen was.
Well, it depends on how you use your mini.
If you're using it kind of like a phablet where you're carrying it around with you, then like because, you know, for the unlocking and unlocking, obviously with a phone, you do it all the time.
You want to have the passcode.
You want to have the security.
Yeah.
Uh, but if your iPad never leaves your house, maybe you don't even need it locked.
And then it comes down to like touch ID, which I was going to bring it before.
Like, yeah, iOS eight suddenly makes touch ID a much more useful thing than it was with iOS seven, because now, you know, one password and type, even if you never leave your house with it, that can be useful.
Um, someone on Twitter has just mentioned that, and a lot of people have brought this up.
I think I saw it on, uh, during fireballs, but like, well, Apple is, uh, you know, is using such a huge portion of the world's, uh, whatever it is, uh, whether it's the flash memory or Ram or whatever.
And that's why, you know, the iPhone six only has one gig of Ram or that's why they only put 16 gigs of flash or whatever.
Um,
And I think that's mostly BS because supply and demand are in a relationship with each other.
Apple plans years and years ahead.
They pay for the capacity they need.
They pay for people to, you know, build factories to add tooling.
Like if you if you someone is there to buy it.
It will all work it out.
It's economics.
It's not like someone's picking coconuts.
It's like, well, we're all out of coconuts and we can't plant anymore.
If there's a demand, someone will...
provide the supply and apple in this case and in all his cases is so willing to sink huge amounts of capital up front to get the capacity to manufacture whatever it is they need at the volumes they need so i don't believe that supply is the problem because as far as i know there is no like natural resource or climate related issue or whatever that is like capping the amount of available uh you know nand uh capacity in the world other than the thing that's capping it is
how what the orders were put in you know two three or four years ago whenever the the current you know what i mean like there's a lead time and everything but there are inputs into the system and apple is such a huge input that if it wanted to plan for say you know three years from now all of our devices are going to have double the flash ram they would start spending the money now it would show up on their balance sheet and eventually the supply would be there for them so i still feel like this is a decision apple makes about what they want
It's not like, well, we'd love to put more Flash in there, but it's just not available for us.
That's a cop-out.
Yeah.
All right.
Marco, why don't you tell us about something else that's really cool?
I would love to.
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All right, so we should probably talk about the iPad Air 2.
And as someone who converted from a large iPad to a mini iPad, to be honest, I didn't find this that terribly exciting.
However, the thing I thought most interesting, or the two things I thought most interesting, were the loss of the rotation lock, or I guess it could also be a mute switch, and
And the Apple SIM, which wasn't even brought up during the keynote.
And I actually think that's the most intriguing to me.
As it turns out, and I've talked about a lot in the past, you know, I have a T-Mobile SIM for my iPad Mini 2.
And it's actually, it came with a Verizon SIM.
And I flip SIMs back and forth on a surprising regular basis for a device that I very rarely pay for cellular data on.
And
I really like being able to do that.
Now, unfortunately, in this case, Verizon isn't part of this Apple SIM agreement, and it is fairly US-centric.
I think, what is it, EE that has it in the UK, I believe?
It's pronounced E. So yeah, so EE has it in e.co.uk.
But anyway, so... Hover.
I think it's a clever, clever, clever idea, and I really like the idea of it just as much as I dislike the idea of losing the rotation lock because I use that constantly on my iPad.
All right, good talk.
Glad everyone agrees.
Honestly, I hardly ever use my iPad anymore, so I have no opinion of this at all.
I'm not going to get any of these.
I see why people like the iPad, but I don't.
So there you go.
John?
I like the big one.
I'm due to replace my iPad three.
Eventually.
It's not really, I have so many other issues, the hardware issues that I'm not like dying to get one, but, uh, yeah, like it looks good.
And, you know, we've talked in past shows that like about Apple being, uh,
I'm more convinced than ever that Apple is tied to numbers for things like battery life.
Like, why did they make it a millimeter thinner and give me more battery life?
It's like they have a target battery life and they want it to be thinner.
And if they could reach the target battery life while also making it thinner, then that's what they do.
And that is basically their very simple rule set.
So what's the target battery life for an iPad?
10 hours.
Can you hit 10 hours and make it thinner?
Yes, we can.
Done.
Like, I don't think there's a lot of hemming and hawing.
Well, we can get 12 hours if we keep it the same thickness.
No.
The rule is hit the target, make it thinner.
Can you do both?
You can.
Good job.
Bonuses all around.
So 10 hours.
I guess it's fine.
I can't even imagine how thin that thing is compared to my iPad 3.
So I have to go to the store.
I'm trying not to touch them.
I'm still kind of annoyed by the...
You know, the iPad Air's border being thinner because I always feel that's one of the reasons I hate the Mini.
I hate the thumb rejection crap.
And I always feel like my finger, I always feel like I can't get a secure grip on it without accidentally touching the screen.
And they made the borders thinner with the Air and they're still thinner.
And I just, I think it will make the device a little bit less comfortable for me.
But anyway, eventually I'll get one.
It's going to be awesomely faster than my iPad 3.
Screen's better, lower glare, thumbs up, I'm totally going to get one.
Unless by the time I buy one, they introduce an iPad Pro or something.
All right, so quick follow-on question to that.
Rick, do you know if you will get another LTE iPad, and does that relate to whether or not you're going to be getting an iPhone?
I will get another LTE one.
All my iPads have been cellular and I use that capacity and I like it.
So yes, I will pay whatever the insane, ridiculous prices that they charge for the super duper top of the line LTE.
Like that's the reason, you know, keep this iPad three.
I paid, I can't remember how much I paid, but it was a lot.
$900.
Whatever it was, it was like a computer's worth.
And so I'll get my money's worth out of it.
But yeah, I always buy it with cellular because I use it when I'm on vacation.
Like I basically, I don't bring computers on vacation.
I bring a, you know, cellular iPad.
Yeah, this is my first cellular, my third iPad, but my first cellular one.
And I always thought people were crazy when they said, oh, get the cellular one.
But oh my goodness, I'm so glad I did.
Now, part of that probably relates to me not being able to tether to my phone because I'm still grandfathered on the AT&T Unlimited plan.
But I still love having an LTE iPad.
And I suspect even if I could tether, I would still get one.
All right.
Anything else on the iPad hardware?
I don't think so.
I mean, they did spend a lot of time in the presentation kind of overdoing the thinness thing.
But again, I think that is kind of their big marketing point for the iPad Air 2 because there aren't that many more changes that would be very marketable to a mass audience.
yeah and i don't i don't oppose that strategy like i did that post on hypercritical a while back about the thinness thing like i it's a reasonable strategy but it's just it's so clear now that like i mean and i think it's so much more reasonable with the ipad than the phone even because like the ipad battery life no one is like oh my ipad my full-size ipad is constantly running out of battery like 10 hours is a reasonable target to hit and it's an honest 10 hours and it's fine you know whereas the iphone you're like oh you know
the iphone battery life is so incredibly variable like if you're an area with low signal the thing is constantly searching and everything it just kills your battery life and then you do not want to be stranded without a phone whereas the ipad 10 hours has real solid 10 hours you're not using it as your lifeline to communicate with people and it's probably fine so i actually i approve of the strategy it's just that like every time they bring up that 10 hours things keep re-emphasizing it it's so clear that that's what their requirements are
Yeah.
The other thing I wanted to briefly mention before we give Marco his two hours in the sun to talk about his stupid new computer.
Did you guys feel like Schiller was phoning it in or was it just me?
You know, other people said that.
I rewatched it.
I didn't think it was anything wrong.
I mean, Schiller's always a little bit low key.
That's what he's like.
That's Schiller.
Yeah, I think he was the way he always is.
All right.
I mean, I felt like he was, he's always reserved.
You're absolutely right about that.
But I felt like he was a little kind of going through the motions.
Sometimes he seems distracted because, but it's like, I don't know what he's distracted by.
You used to think he'd be distracted by fear of Steve jobs, laser eyes off stage, staring at the back of his head if he's doing something wrong.
But these days, Tim is all having a cup of coffee probably.
So fair enough.
All right.
Let's knock out one more sponsor and then let's have Marco go on for two hours.
That sounds great.
I'm not sure it sounds great.
Honestly, I'm probably not going to go.
I'm not going to talk that much about it anyway.
I'm going to review to get to.
Exactly.
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So I completely forgot.
I asked you, John, and then you effectively dodged.
There was no iPod Touch at this event.
We have no indication that an iPod Touch is coming.
Oh, yeah, the iPod exists.
So yeah, the iPod is still a thing.
So what is your plan with regard to smaller than iPad mobile devices from here on out?
Yeah, probably going to get an iPhone.
I've had a loaner iPhone for a little while.
Apple sent one because they took a lot of the functionality, like the phone integration with Yosemite.
They took that out of the iOS 8 builds that were out there.
So if you wanted to test it with...
If you had iOS 8 GM and you couldn't use a lot of these features, you needed 8.1.
So they sent me an iPhone 6 with 8.1 and I was using that.
And as soon as I got it, I've been using it as my main actual phone.
So it's giving me a feel for what it's going to be like.
You know, like I said, I'll probably eventually get one.
There's no iPod.
What choice do I have?
There's nothing.
There's no other choice for me to get.
I can't use that iPod Touch anymore.
And I know you guys went through all this stuff with your iPhone 6 a while ago.
There's one thing that I would add into the mix of all the things you talked about, about the screen size and all that stuff, is that the thing that surprised me most, even after hearing all your issues with the iPhone 6,
was how much heavier it feels than my iPod Touch.
I know it is heavier.
I don't know how much heavier it is.
It can't be that much heavier.
I mean, they're both really light devices.
And I think my RSI is a factor here as well, so I'm super sensitive to changes in effort required from fingers and tendons and stuff like that.
But boy, it just feels like a brick.
No case.
I've been using it with no case since I've had it.
It just feels so damn heavy.
But yeah, I'm going to have to get one.
I wonder if maybe, honestly, maybe you should get a 5S.
I hate that thing.
Wow.
Do you feel like the iPhone has demonstrably changed the way you go about your day?
And I'm not patronizing you.
I'm honestly asking because when I got my 3GS, which admittedly was a kind of different time –
it dramatically changed everything.
Because if I didn't know where something was, I could look at a map on my phone.
If I didn't know something's phone number, I could look it up.
What did you keep calling it in the keynote lines?
Your information phone or whatever it is.
And so having an information phone just completely changed my world.
Do you find that that's the case or do you find like it's whatever?
Yeah.
No, well, you know, so I've had a surrogate information phone.
Like anytime I go anywhere with my wife, I have her look things up on her information phone.
We use her phone for navigation in the car for, you know, like so I've had that for a while.
And if we're if we're somewhere and we're just waiting around and we're bored, she'll let me use her phone to read Twitter like her, her Twitter and her thing assigned into my account because she doesn't have a Twitter account.
So she just reads my Twitter.
So I read my Twitter on her.
And so having this, I don't know how long have I had this, like a week or I don't know, long enough.
I think it's only been maybe three times when I've used it in that capacity.
Once was when I was dropping my kids off one of their activities on the day the Yosemite review was published.
And I wanted to catch up, wanted to not fall farther behind on my Twitter.
So while I was like in the waiting area, dropping them off and picking them up and stuff.
And then this place doesn't have Wi-Fi.
Some of their activities have Wi-Fi.
In fact, a lot of their activities do have Wi-Fi.
So I would use my iPod Touch.
But here I'm like, oh, I can.
Since I have my phone with me because I used it in the car ride over to listen to podcasts, I can use it to read Twitter while I wait and wait for the kids to come.
Right.
And once at a dinner with some friends, I looked up something on it.
But if I hadn't, I couldn't.
My wife was there, too.
I could have had her look something up on it as well.
That's about it.
I mean, like it's all stuff I've done before.
It's not it's not as mind blowing as your experience because you were like, I was never able to do this before.
And now I'm able to, whereas now it's like it's slightly more convenient.
I'm mostly the most of the experience to me is getting coming to grips with this just gigantic device.
I know it's not even that big, but like this big, heavy device and the weirdness of how it feels.
And the caselessness is a thing, too, because I guess I've always had cases on my iOS, my small iOS devices.
I will have a case on one, but I'm using this one without a case just because what am I going to do?
Buy a case for a loaner.
That would be silly.
Um, but I really love touch ID.
I'm such a total convert on touch ID.
Oh, it's the best.
I've been using it on my wife's phone.
Obviously all my fingers are on her phone anyway.
Uh, but having it on your own device, like I never had a lock on my iPod touches and I put a lock on this as soon as I got it.
I just use touch ID and it's just, it's amazing.
So, uh, yeah, I'll probably get an iPhone six.
Why don't you buy a case now?
You can return it within 14 days if you've decided after that point that you will not own an iPhone 6.
No, I'm probably going to get one.
It's just a matter of just getting everything out of the way and going through the whole thing and getting my number ported over from my old crappy phone.
That's going to be a hassle because, you know, whatever.
I don't need to get it.
I want to see what the cases are like.
I don't even know which one I want yet, so I'll get it sorted out.
You want the Apple Leather one?
Yep.
Have you used your information pod at all since you've had the recording?
review information phone.
I've been intentionally avoiding it because I don't want to switch back and forth.
I just want to say, nope, you've got to use the big one.
There's only, like, I think one or two times that once I needed to use the Google Authenticator app, which can only be on, like, one of your iOS devices or some crazy rule or whatever.
Whoa, slow down.
You're not using Authy?
No, I use the Google One.
Should I be using Authy?
You should be using Authy.
But anyway, carry on.
What's better about it?
You can have it on more than one device.
I think that it may optionally push some of the stuff server side, which you may take issue with.
But I really like it.
And it's much prettier than the Google One was as of a year ago.
I haven't looked back since then.
so i had to use it once for that and then i had to pick it up once for something else related to oh ebook testing because when you load up ibooks on the iphone 6 it like i have my my media queries treated differently for for sizing so i needed an actual five uh portrait style thing so i needed to test that briefly but for the most part i've been trying not to touch it because i want to be like immerse myself in the six and then go back to my little thing and see how it feels
Fair enough.
All right.
So sorry for that quick aside.
I just wanted to find out.
It's going to be a short show.
Yeah, it's going to be a super short show.
So before we get to the review, which is what everyone's actually waiting for, Marco, why don't you tell me about your computer that you're going to get that I'm so enthusiastic about?
Yeah, desktop retina have and then I'm getting it.
Well, actually, that was pretty quick.
That makes me more enthusiastic.
All kidding aside, is there anything you have to add?
Because you have been, and I've seen you, I've seen Sean Blanc, I've seen Jason Snell, all hemming and hawing about, oh, should I get the upgrade for this?
Should I not get the upgrade for that?
Is there anything you'd like to add about your strategy?
Did you order yet?
And if so, what did you end up ordering?
i have i've mostly ordered through i'm ordering through the business rep um for the local apple store because you end up getting a couple hundred bucks off uh the big reason is that uh because it's being used for primarily software development in the state of new york it is tax-free uh so that saves a few hundred more dollars so the total savings is something like 500 bucks doing it this way um or even more actually so anyway
Yeah, I got it decked out, top of the line, everything, because it basically is as good as the Mac Pro or better for almost everything I do.
With the one exception of handbrake video encodes, it is 15% slower.
However, for everything else, it's 25% faster.
So it's like anything single-threaded, it's actually substantially faster.
You know, this is definitely wasteful.
I'm going to lose...
probably as much as i'm saving on the sales tax on the new one i'm going to lose that in value when i resell my current mac pro but i i said when i when i was buying this mac pro uh almost a year ago i said when desktop retina is possible i will do whatever it takes to get it and that's how important it is to me a lot of people it isn't that important to them and that's fine or a lot of people you know like they'll they'll like it but they're willing to wait until they buy their next computer two or three years from now and that's fine
A lot of people are like Syracuse and won't buy a Generation 1 Apple product, and there are some benefits to that.
What are you talking about?
I bought the very first Power Mac G5, the highest-end model.
recently well this mac pro was i guess it's not the first generation but it's the first generation to have this specific cpu in it i mean they didn't change well they're all that every every apple computer is the top i bought the top of the line blue and white g3 when it came out too i have no problem buying the the first generation top of the line thing i mean i'm wary about it like everybody else but it's not like i have a religion against it
All right, well, anyway.
So I said I would do whatever it takes to get Retina on the desktop because it is that important to me.
I thought when I bought this Mac Pro that it would be able to drive a Retina monitor.
And it can drive 4K monitors.
And you can get the Dell 24-inch 4K monitor and have it be roughly the right DPI to do true 2X.
You can do all of those things with it, but it's not great.
You have a desk covered in Dell monitors, which themselves are not amazing.
And also, from what I hear, very buggy and inconsistent in this usage.
You can...
I can do it with the Mac Pro, but what I really wanted was a giant 27 to 30 inch monitor, like that size class.
And 4K to do that is either everything is too big or you do software rendering and artificial scaling and that reduces quality.
And you might not notice it.
I don't think you'd notice it on a 5K panel if you simulate a different mode.
On a 4K panel at 27 inches, you might notice it.
We talked about this before, so I'm not going to go further into it.
I was assuming a 5K monitor was not going to exist for the next couple of years.
That turned out to be wrong.
I was also assuming that any desktop retina monitor I would want would be available in some kind of external form factor, and that would plug into my Mac Pro with no problems, and it would work just fine.
That has been wrong so far.
There's the Dell 5K one coming out this winter.
That might do it, but we don't know yet.
And the Dell 4K ones had some issues for a while with running on certain computers, including the Mac Pro.
Various things like enabling the MST thing.
It's complicated the way it works.
It's kind of a hack.
5K is even more of a hack because it needs even more bandwidth.
It has to use two different Thunderbolt or DisplayPort cables, and the GPU has to be able to properly multiplex those together into one signal for one panel.
There's enough moving parts or things that are kind of on the edge of standards or not very well-supported standards that
There's enough moving parts here that I think the chances of the Dell 5K panel working without weird issues on a Mac Pro are low.
So this came out, and the combination of both 5K being available when I thought it wouldn't be for years, plus the much faster CPU speed for single-threaded use, which is what I'm usually limited by, that pushed me over the edge, where I really did not expect...
to buy a mac pro and then want to sell it 10 months later but that's what's happening fun well that was actually a lot less painful than i thought yeah i mean honestly it's what what's most interesting about it is how relatively boring it is like they there's no like weird tricks to how this exists
well it's kind of weird two two display port connections inside this thing so it's it's weird enough that i'm glad that you're going to take one for the team and a bunch of people are going to find out what are the weird issues i'm i'm excited by by the fact that they they tout a power reduction which means that it's you know so there's other technologies involved with the screen yeah i don't know what they're doing to get the power reduction i don't know the details over but at least it means it's not going to be like like the water cool being a power mac g5 like that
like the water cool, the computer is just like at the hairy edge of what's possible, but it is kind of at the hairy edge of what's possible, just not in terms of power and heat.
It seems like they've got that more or less under control, but I really just don't know what it's gonna be like for, you know, for just day-to-day use, for gaming, for anything like that.
So I really need, you know, I would never buy one of these sight unseen.
You'll probably be okay considering the amount of time something spends in your house is low because something new and shiny comes along.
But considering I'm sitting here next to a 2008 Mac Pro, I really want to know what I'm getting before I get it.
And, you know, my recent not-so-great experience with the Thunderbolt display, which is bought relatively early in the life of that product, although not, you know, sight unseen, I'd seen them before.
Like, I just, I'd like other people to sort this out.
So you'll tell me all about it when you get one.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
And, you know, I see a lot of our friends on Twitter.
Gruber said he ordered one and he buys a computer like every 10 years.
Yeah, we were all waiting for desktop retina.
I mean, what have we been talking about this whole life of the show?
Marco and I were like, you know, we just need a machine that can run desktop retina.
We hope to be the Mac Pro and it wasn't.
But Marco bought one anyway because he's Marco.
But like everyone, all the nerds in our circle are like...
Totally.
I mean, Gruber is using, I think, the 20-inch version of the screen that I have in front of me, the aluminum display with white plastic things on the side.
I have the 23-inch.
He had the 20-inch one connected.
He's been staring at ancient technology.
So he's going to have the world's biggest upgrade in terms of what he's looking at all day.
And those are the best kind of upgrades.
But it's just like the iPhone 4, you're like, wow, this is a whole other world we're in here.
Yeah.
And John, you're definitely looking to upgrade your Mac Pro, and this is definitely at least in the running.
It's in the running.
Again, I was talking about before we started recording, or before we went live anyway, that every time my poor Mac Pro is just super slow because of the spinning disks and everything, I almost buy an SSD.
So many times I'm on that Amazon page and I'm pricing things out.
I'm looking at reports.
I'm just almost buying it because if I got an SSD, it would seriously extend the life of this machine.
Because I have a very similar machine one year or newer at work that's all SSD and it's fine.
But my home one is so painful.
I'm like, why don't you just get an SSD?
They're not that expensive.
And I say, no, no.
What I should do is take that money that I'm about to spend on an SSD and put it towards whatever my next computer is, whether that's a Mac Pro or an iMac or whatever.
So...
looking at the specs that iMac it is not ideal i like something that's good for gaming i worry that even the high-end gpu with that kind of resolution is not going to be great for gaming i already know like we're looking at the specs it looks like it's maybe a little bit weaker than one of the good gpus in the mac pro and if you're going to do the mac pro for gaming you can you know use them in crossfire mode so you know at best it's half as fast as the mac pro for gaming uh and driving more pixels than the mac pro has to drive obviously you wouldn't run games in that resolution anyway but
Anyway, I want to see some benchmarks first because, you know, you can't replace it.
It's all sealed into one big thing.
There's not going to be any upgrading of it.
Like I upgraded the GPU on my Mac Pro.
It is now still a vaguely viable gaming machine only because I upgraded the GPU.
I can't upgrade the GPU in that iMac.
So if I spend four grand on an iMac, the screen's going to look awesome.
But how long will it last as my gaming machine?
So...
I'm still, you know, it's like, well, if I don't buy this iMac, am I just going to wait another year for, you know, for the new Mac Pros that can drive the hopeful eventual external version of this display?
Well, I think it might be two years for that, actually.
If you look at the roadmap and what we're waiting for is DisplayPort 1.3 and Thunderbolt 3, which will most likely come together.
And that's not slated to go into Xeon chipsets for quite a while.
It's not even slated to go into consumer chipsets until at least a year from now, possibly longer if Intel delays anything, which happens a lot.
So I think you might be waiting.
That's why I said in my article about the iMac stuff, I said I would guess, if I had to guess when Apple would chip an external version of this monitor, I'd say 2016.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, if I have to wait that long, then I would just have to get an SSD, and then I'd be like, okay, well, this is an SSD.
The thing that almost gets me to click the button in the SSD is I'm not going to throw it away.
If I got a new computer, I would use the SSD as a backup drive or something.
It's not like I wouldn't, like, oh, that was a waste of money because I would use it, but I'm just trying to save because I don't know what to do.
But the pricing is just so ridiculous.
It's similar pricing to the Mac Pro, but you get a free gigantic monitor with it.
And, you know, the server versus consumer gap is just embarrassing.
But the other thing is that especially with huge amounts of RAM, I really seem silly.
And, you know, Marco said as well in your thing, like we both have this feeling based on nothing, which is probably false.
But it's like that ECC RAM with huge amounts of RAM is a benefit.
And Marco, you attributed like, well, you know, I don't sometimes have these weird kernel, but who knows if that's even what is true.
I just feel better.
This is what it comes down to.
I feel better with server class components and ECC RAM.
I just do.
And I don't know if it's completely in my head or it's a placebo effect or I'm being a sucker or if really that ECC is correcting one bit errors all day long and saving me from kernel panics because.
I cannot remember the last time I had a kernel panic on this Mac Pro.
This thing is like a champion.
It just, other than its stupid spinning disks, which I hate with a bloody passion, it's not the Mac Pro's fault.
They spin, you know, it's spinning rust, whatever.
Everything else about this machine, 100% reliable.
And I like that.
And so I would have more faith in the reliability of a second or third generation device
boom tube mac pro who's calls it the boom tube is that wave saying that or is it you anyway i would i would have more faith in that machine just because it's all server class components and just the cooling system is so incredibly efficient and probably quieter and all these other things but it's ridiculously expensive and not that good at games which is why i don't have the current one so i don't know no decision on desktop yet for me
Man, but this might be the year of John Syracuse, as it turns out, because you're going to have a phone.
You're going to have a new iPad.
You might have a new computer.
You have a new car.
It's the year of Casey.
You're going to be a dad.
I don't know if you've ever said this on the show, but you talk about someone who is good at doing dad jokes.
You are already such a dad.
You are just like, all you're missing is the kid.
The terrible humor.
You are already a dad.
I'm glad you approve.
Man, what's going to happen to your jokes after the kid's born?
They'll actually be funny?
No, he's been living the dad life for so long now that he just didn't have the kid.
All he needs is this young person to be embarrassed by him and the system is complete.
Oh my goodness.
All right.
So Marco, you are going to order a maxed out, um, I Mac almost said iPad.
Yes.
Okay.
I think that that's what underscore did as well.
If I understood a developing perspective correctly.
Um, and that seems to be the trend these days.
So enjoy your new computer.
And I am so
This is exactly what happened when you guys weren't in the Mac community back then, I don't think.
So there's the Yosemite, speaking of Yosemite, G3, and there's the G4s and the wind tunnel and the Quicksilvers and the crazy liquid-cooled thing and all that stuff.
And the front-side bus on Macs was just ridiculous compared to the CPU speed, and we just...
It was it was so sad.
It was like, what's going on here?
We don't.
It was I forget.
It was like 133 megahertz front side bus with like a gigahertz and a half CPU, whatever it was.
It was obscene.
It was like it was just a completely unbalanced machine.
And we all hated it.
And everybody was just delaying their purchases like there's no way in hell I'm buying that piece of crap.
You know, whatever comes out.
You could tell it is just not a good machine.
And so as soon as the Power Mac G5 came out, we all just bought the top end one.
Everybody, like everybody I knew had the top of the line dual two gigahertz Power Mac G5 cheese grater.
We just all bought them because it's pent up demand amongst our little circle of nerds.
So this is pent up demand for desktop retina.
And so now I see everybody I know obviously had been saving their pennies, waiting patiently.
And as soon as this thing dropped, like, boom, that's it.
That's what I want.
You know, quad 27 inch displays.
I don't care about anything else.
I don't care.
This is an iMac.
Must have it now.
So, yeah, you guys are going to all be great test drivers for this machine.
Lovely.
Yeah, I mean, and honestly, like, looking at it, I don't... I looked over it, and I was writing an article about, like, you know, does anybody still need to buy the Mac Pro, basically?
And I was partly writing it, talking to myself about this problem.
Looking at this, I was trying to think, like, alright, what's the catch?
I was trying to find the catch.
And I thought it might be heat and fan noise, and it turns out the total system power usage is almost exactly the same as the old one.
Whereas the CPU, if you get the big CPU, which I definitely recommend the i7 upgrade, if you get that, it's like two more watts than the old one.
It's not that big of a difference.
The GPU, from what I've been told, is slightly more power-hungry, but because the display is 30% less power-hungry, it balances that out.
And so the total system heat and power needs are pretty similar to the old one.
And the internal design looks exactly the same.
It's the same cooling, the same structure.
And that's why it's actually a pretty mature system.
This is the same iMac they've been chipping for years, just with a crazy display on the front.
But the rest of the internals, they're not doing anything new and crazy with that.
So I don't actually foresee major problems, except that, you know, if there's a problem with the panels, you know, if there's a problem with image retention or... Yeah, that's what it comes down to, this screen or the, you know, the whole dealing with basically two DisplayPort things coming into one and integrating them all.
If there's any kind of weird lag, like maybe you wouldn't care for like for game purposes, but is there any lag introduced with the synchronization?
Does it, you know...
Think about the dual GPU MacBook Pros and stuff when that first came out with the GPU switching, how that was kind of wonky with software.
Will there be a similar issue like this?
Like, you never know.
Yeah, well, but it isn't.
See, the way they've done this panel with the single controller being treated as a single panel.
Yeah, no, I understand.
Like, I'm not saying it's the exact same problem.
It's just like when Apple does something for the first time.
Yeah.
Like they hadn't done this before.
Like they'd never they'd never driven a display this way before.
They'd never done GPU switching before.
There's a lot of moving parts to it.
And even though they control the whole stack, you never know if it's going to become one of those things.
It's like wonky and it gets worked out in the next generation product.
But, you know, no question.
Next year, when they update these with with, you know, desktop Broadway, if that's coming out next fall, whenever the case like.
desktop broadwell will come out it'll get faster it'll it'll run a little bit cooler it'll run a little bit faster broadwell on the desktop is looking like it's going to be something like a 10 or 15 improvement these are roughly a 10 or 15 speed improvement over the ones from last year like this that's just like you know that's what you get with desktops and so if you really want this right now
I don't think there's a huge reason to wait for next year's because it's no different than any other one-year generational gap in desktops.
Every year, it's going to get a little bit better, a little bit faster.
I know, but the second year they do this screen in this way, you figure they'll have more of the kinks worked out.
If there are any kinks, if there are no kinks, then fine, there are no kinks.
But the second year they do this screen, even just like you said, the image retention on the MacBook Pros, that was an issue.
They think they got their suppliers sorting out.
Now it's not as bad as it was.
Yeah, exactly.
And honestly, the first generation Retina MacBook Pro, the image retention, which only affected some of the screens, and I happened to get one, which is annoying, but the image retention didn't affect all of them.
And that was the only problem.
The hardware in the first generation Retina MacBook Pro was fine otherwise.
Everything else about it, I've had zero problems with.
Yep, these could be fine.
We'll see.
The other thing is that I think, I feel like there's, this is the wrong term, but there's more margin of error in gigantic machines than there is in these little tiny precious devices.
Like, I've always been down on laptops because everything's just jammed in there and there's no margin for error.
Whereas the iMac, even though it's all stupidly thin on the edge and stuff, there's room enough to breathe where you're like, I don't feel like they're, like, if they're trying to wedge things and don't have room, they're just doing it to themselves.
It's not, you know, so that...
I feel like they have a better I mean so far like the Mac Pros Well, actually I have heard stuff with the Mac Pros.
Here's the things I've heard with the Mac Pros like dropping network connections What is the other one?
That's one other thing that I've heard Mac Pros like wonkiness with with the hardware with the first generation boom tube Mac Pros
Oh, yeah.
I totally forgot I've been using a first-generation Mac Pro.
It's fine.
I've had zero problems.
Yeah, no, yours is fine, but I've heard other people have a couple weird things here and there if they're using more demanding Thunderbolt-type scenarios or whatever.
Yours has been fine, too.
I bought a first-generation Power Mac G5, and that machine was fine, too.
It's a crapshoot.
It's not like I've said never buy one.
Just let everyone else buy one, see how it is for a month or two, and then patience is rewarded.
oh yeah well although i was i was worried with this that it might get into back order uh because i i suspect it's going to be amazing and because it is the computer that all of us have been waiting for or many of us have been waiting for uh i suspect it's gonna if there's if there's any supply constraints we're going to see that pretty soon it was like the mac pro like that was so hard to get one of those and it's not because they were selling a bazillion of it's just because it's so weird and exotic it's just not a lot of you know exactly so uh how's the review
I always forget every year like you think it's going to come and you're going to be so relieved that it's done.
But then I forget it doesn't.
That's not how it goes.
Like you publish it and there's no like a moment of triumph or relief because as soon as it's published, you just, you know, it's I mean, Marco must.
I was like releasing software.
Then you're just inundated with like the bug reports and worrying about, you know, how the launch is going and server capacity or whatever.
And like, and that just still kind of like fades away.
Like eventually, like it's this big rush of crap that you have to deal with.
And it's just a pain in the butt.
And you run around like a chicken with your head cut off and you're worrying about this and you're worrying about that.
And you're fixing things and dealing with ebook stores and going back and forth and, you know, responding to comments and Twitter and going through and just, and that just, that just slowly, very gradually tapers.
And then eventually just peters off and then you're just left like, so it's not, it's not as exciting.
Like I feel like it'd be more exciting if you're like a movie director and you work really hard in this movie for a long time.
And then you go to like the opening night and it's like, there's nothing you can do about it then.
Like you're not even responsible for making sure the projector doesn't break.
It's like, well, the movie is done.
People are going to see it.
It's completely out of my hands.
Nothing I can do about it unless I decide to grow a really big neck beard and wait 16 years and ruin the winter.
But, uh,
you know so it's not like that for it's not like that for software it's certainly not like that for web services or anything having to you know public facing uh websites and stuff like that it's not really like that for my review either because it's not like i get it all put to bed publish it and then just wash my hands of it nope i'm running around like crazy fixing things and that's never is fun it doesn't feel good but anyway done so is this the last review
Probably.
No, this is the worst possible time to ask you that question, though.
I know.
That's why I'm not committing to it.
People keep asking me.
I'm not going to give you a firm commitment, but I'm going to tell you realistically that right now I'm thinking, yes, definitely.
But I'm not going to make the decision until later, until I can make the decision clear of this, you know, this haze.
And, you know, whatever.
Fair enough.
What was different about this review in terms of the creation process?
It's about the same as the past couple.
Every year, I'm always worried about what things I'm going to get wrong.
What I've been trying to do is steer myself towards the places that I can add value in the review because realistically speaking, I have to have this thing done, edited, copyedited, e-books generated and sent to the e-book store basically before the final version of the OS is done.
So if, you know, one of the things I can't, one of the, you know, one of the values that I cannot bring is I can tell you intimate details about how the final retail installer binary works.
Because I don't even have the final retail installer binary until you're already reading the review, right?
Like my thing goes live the second Apple pushes the button to publish the thing.
And in fact, my thing went live before people could actually get Yosemite.
So I have no idea how the retail installer from the Mac App Store works.
I have no idea what it's going to do.
I just have to go based on what the latest GM candidate I had at the time I made the things were.
So there's whole categories of things that have to do with specific details of the final bits that people are going to get that I just simply can't address.
Unfortunately, you have to kind of try to address some of them and hope you get it right.
And then that's the frustrating part of like...
oh, actually, they did change this in the very latest GM that I didn't have a chance to test with.
Oh, this is actually different than the retail version, the version that I never actually saw until you already read my review.
And so, you know, someone who reads my review six months from now is going to be like, huh, that doesn't happen to me when I do it.
It's like, yeah, you're right, it doesn't.
But I had to go with the information I had at the time.
And of course, by then, you know, 10.10.3 will be out, which could behave differently anyway.
So there's whole categories of things that I just can't
can't address in a reasonable manner and then even the things i can address like tiny little details those are the things that change at the last minute so you can't spend you know three pages and then have it edited and copy edited talking about some minute feature that changes three times in the last three developer builds like when you just wasted all your time writing and if you're a full-time writer maybe you can dedicate those last three or four days to just working like mad but my per day time that i can allocate to this is fixed and very small because i have a full-time job
uh so yeah that's that that's a frustrating part of doing this so i try to basically steer the review towards the parts but i can address is like broad strokes what does this os mean for the platform what are the important features and how do they impact what the mac is like to use and how the mac fits in with apple's other platforms and blah blah blah so that's where i spent almost all my time and the last few reviews have been moving towards that but the process of writing it
It has just been the same as I think the past three or four reviews, especially since the past three or four have also had eBooks.
I've kind of been in this silly thing of writing and dealing with the production process and dealing with the eBook stores and dealing with eBook formatting.
And every year it's some different thing.
And,
I think I more or less have it down now.
It's just disappointing.
Like, I have video and I entertain thoughts that perhaps I would have the video inside the e-books.
This is the first year I was going to have inline video while also doing an e-book.
But inline video in e-books is so insane.
You can do it.
It can be done in iBooks.
But if you look at what the requirements are for inline video...
Like I stopped when I hit requirement number one, requirement number one, dictated aspect ratio.
I'm like, no, I have this cute little movie of this window.
You've seen the little movie of the, you know, showing the controls animated.
That's the aspect ratio.
I made the window.
I, Oh, you know, one story about the production processes book.
And I want to go too far into it because it's inside baseball and nobody cares, but this is the one that drove me nuts in this one.
So there's a little movie, there's a little inline movie showing animated controls with this little silly mockup.
I made an interface builder, just, you know, with a bunch of checkboxes so I can check them and stuff.
And I wanted to make the movie a similar aspect ratio to this window.
And so I can't do it in iBooks right away.
It wants an aspect ratio.
That's like, I don't remember 16 by nine or four by three or whatever it was.
It wasn't my aspect ratios.
I'm like, well, screw you.
I'm not making a ridiculous video like that.
My thing is skinny.
I'll just link it, which, which works fine.
It just doesn't, it's just not in line, but to, to make that movie.
it's on a retina screen right and i need to record the movie but i have so little knowledge about video production and so little software having anything to do with video production like i probably could have done this ffmpeg which i have installed but i have no idea what i'm doing right so my only tool at my disposal is like you know rocks and and sticks here is to use quicktime screen capture and
and quick time screen capture lets you capture a portion of the screen by dragging out a little rectangle i have to drag out a rectangle that's exactly 1280 pixels wide by whatever on a retina screen so it has to be 12 video retina pixels
you know, whatever it is, 960 points, right?
And when you drag it out like that in QuickTime Player with the exact pitchfile dimensions, you have to go through the motions of me, like clicking the things and tabbing from fields to fields and unchecking the checkboxes.
You have to do that first.
Get like a nice sequence, save the movie, and then look at the movie you saved and see if you got the dimensions right.
You know how many times I took that movie?
You know how many times I've checked those checkboxes?
Oh, and by the way, Apple changed the look of the controls and the control animations like three times.
I've made that movie so many freaking times.
The system I had for trying to get like an exact, you know, movie, some people think it's Snaps Pro.
I have Snaps Pro, but like I don't like to install third-party things, especially if they involve Kecks on Yosemite systems or on the system that I'm testing because I don't want to take third-party software, which may or may not be, you know, sort of validated for Yosemite because then I can say, oh, this is a buggy and it's kernel panicking.
Maybe it was Snaps Pro doing it.
I just want to use Apple software.
So my technique was to use Xscope.
the icon factory is great utility that has a million tools for making like retina hairline guides and stuff like that and i had like wires all over my screen exactly framing the part that i wanted to do and then i would use the accessibility zoom when making the rectangle it's just it was insanity anyway that was the most ridiculous crazy part of doing this for for a thing that nobody cares about it's not even an important part of the review but i sunk a lot of time into it so there that there's something that's different i had to make an inline movie this time
For whatever it's worth, that was a great movie.
It actually really helped a lot.
I really enjoyed watching it.
That was like the worst performance of like, because I had hooked up an external mouse because I'm so bad with a touchpad.
The one that's in the review is a touchpad.
And I hate how it looks like I'm like a handicapped person moving that mouse around.
I didn't get that impression.
Limited mobility.
And I feel like it was not an accurate representation of my mousing skills.
But at that point, I was so tired.
At that point, I was so tired of like, I just have one mouse and I have to disconnect it from my own computer.
I don't have a spare mouse.
And I was so tired of doing that.
I just did the last 17 runs to get that thing right with the touchpad.
And I'm like, you know what?
It's the right dimensions.
It came out okay.
The background was correctly framed.
I don't care that the mouse looks a little stuttery.
I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on not an accurate representation of my mouse.
I think everyone who uses the trackpad is, I think the trackpad, I think we've gone through this before, is an inferior input method in terms of speed and accuracy.
Oh, completely agree.
But like, yeah, if you just look, if all you could see was a screen capture of cursor movement, I feel like I can tell if it's someone using a touchpad versus a mouse.
I agree.
The people who use the Magic Trackpad, I believe that's what it's called, I don't understand how they do it.
They're more interested in comfort, which is fine.
It's a reasonable tradeoff.
I don't care about accuracy.
It's not a race.
I'm more interested in the comfort of my hands, and they're more comfortable swiping their fingers across the surface.
But I'm very interested in efficiency, and I grew up with the mouse, so mouse forever.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
All right.
Do you want to go through... I do have some questions to ask about bits and pieces of the review.
Are there any general thoughts that you have before I ask you these?
I have tons of general thoughts, but I wrote most of them down in a conveniently consumable form.
So, yeah, you can just... I'm sure I'll bring up you so many stuff later.
I'm sure I will talk more about why I think this will be my last one in some future show.
But one of the aspects of it is that...
I just have so much pent up things to say about this.
And it pains me so much in the world, wherever there's public betas that everyone gets to talk about it.
And like, you know, this thing is in that review that I wrote like a week after WWDC.
And then I just have to sit there with gritted teeth for three months while everyone else has these same discussions.
And then, you know, hope that I don't end up saying all exactly the same things.
And I can't be like, well, I totally wrote that a week after WWDC.
It is just anyway, I have had a lot of things to say about it.
Yosemite, and a lot of them have already been said by other smart people, which is a shame, but what can you do?
Fair enough.
I'd like to start my dissection of your review by asking you if the reference on page 15, the caption on page 15, which I believe is a movie reference, this is the picture of your family.
Is that a reference to The Godfather?
Because if so, I would like to celebrate that victory quietly by myself.
You're embarrassing yourself by asking that question, Casey.
No.
You shouldn't have to ask.
You should proudly say that, hey, did you know that I got the reference under this picture or whatever?
And I would say they're a good case.
But the thing is, I've only seen like 10 minutes of that movie.
I've just heard the quote a thousand times.
Don't tell me that.
That's not a lie.
Watch Godfather 1 and 2.
They're great movies.
Actually, I was just listening to Snell and Mike talk about how Godfather 3 doesn't exist.
They're more or less right.
But like I said, you'll have plenty of time late at night as you pace back and forth in front of the television television holding your child.
You can watch the entire movie many times over.
Also, PH15 included my favorite line of the review, which is, in Yosemite, as in life, think carefully before starting a family.
Oh, yes!
That is the most popular line of the review, and I don't like that line at all.
I almost didn't put it in because I thought it was terrible.
Oh, it's so good.
I actually wrote that down and I almost skipped right over.
So I'm glad, Marco, that you remembered.
I give that line a thumbs down.
Everyone else likes it.
Oh, double, double thumbs up for sure.
You're reviewing your own review.
I think I deleted it like three times.
I'm like, you know, whatever.
It's not good.
John, I love you.
Oh, my God.
On page 19, you talked about SMS and messages.
And I have a couple of thoughts on that.
First of all, I think that's huge because I spend an inordinate amount of time in front of my computer, particularly during the workday.
And although I don't exchange that many traditional SMSs with that many people, being able to fire one off – well, receiving one and, more importantly, being able to fire one off by using the keyboard on my Mac –
that strikes me as awesome.
But one of the things I wanted to ask you, which you may or may not know the answer is, does that piece of continuity, does that require BTLE as well, or is that just Wi-Fi?
I don't know the answer to that, actually.
I think it just requires plain old Bluetooth and might work over Wi-Fi, but no, I do not know the answer to that.
With these things that require iPhone integration,
A lot of these didn't work in a reasonable way until very late, and then they stopped working entirely and then worked again with the 8.1 beta, so I did not have a lot of time to go into these.
I just basically had enough time to do them, to see that they work, to see what it was like to do them, to try to use them with these little fake conversations with my wife in various places.
This, by the way, was an advantage of me having my non-smartphone.
I can send SMSs.
Not easily, because I've got to type them in on a number pad, but...
I had a device ready at hand that could not use iMessage.
And so I was sending myself SMSs and stuff like that.
You could have just turned iMessage off on that phone, but whatever.
Yeah, I mean, this is like, like I said in the review, this is kind of like a, it should have always been this way.
Like, there should have always been this symmetry between, you know, if the iPhone can do it, why can't the Mac?
Once you have messages on the Mac, it's like, well, but of course you can't get SMS because it's tied to blah, blah, blah.
Like...
You just need if you've got the phone and you've got the messages and the phone can be like, these are all things.
This is a lot of the stuff in Yosemite is like it's almost like the iPhone and the Mac were made by two different companies for the amount of integration.
I said in the review, in retrospect, it's shocking how little integration there was between these two platforms.
for no no good reason like the technologies were there it's not like apple suddenly invented bluetooth and wi-fi like this these things could have been talking to each other could have been cooperating could have been on the same page for so long so now it's almost like sms i don't know if it's going away uh it's hard you know if you're in a circle with everyone who uses iphones and your whole family uses iphone you're like oh yeah sms is dead but in reality it's everywhere right but i see the the rise of
these messaging services like line and whatever those other, you know, like non SMS messaging services that are very popular throughout the world.
And I just have to feel like, and I hate SMS with a passion.
I have to feel like that technology, not the idea of sending people text messages, but that tech, that particular technology for doing so, I'll be glad when that's gone.
Uh, but if it ends up hanging around for a much longer time, it's good that it's integrated and everything.
But like, I, I still worry about, uh,
reliability issues, not so much of the software, but of the server component of, you know, messages and SMS and the gateway and all of that.
So now it's just, now you've got one more thing that can be out of sync or only in one place or inexplicably out of order or whatever, but you know, better late than never.
I think also, I really enjoyed what came, I think, right after this, which was the unification of the phone calls thing.
I thought you made some very good points there.
And I'm looking forward to this world of, like, I can... You know, if somebody calls me and I'm sitting at my computer with my headphones on, I can just swing the mic over and pick it up and start talking to them.
Like, that... I didn't quite appreciate...
Until I read that part of your review, I didn't quite appreciate how that will change the world of being a human being in front of a computer most of the day in this subtle and quickly forgettable way.
But that's substantial, I think.
Yeah, I don't know how much time you spend on the phone, but I don't spend a lot of time on the phone.
But I totally expected that phone feature to be wonky or weird.
And there's a potential, just like a lot of the iCloud stuff, for it to be wonky or weird.
Because if it is wonky or weird, like so many iCloud features, you have no place to go to check for it.
Right.
But, you know, I didn't put this in the review because I refused.
But it more or less just worked.
And it's just worked for a long time.
Like the betas and everything.
I never had a problem with it.
It did what it's supposed to do.
Like you call and the thing appears and you can answer it there.
Yeah.
like if they add all sorts of little nice feature like your ring your ringtones and everything are there and i think someone said i didn't try this but someone said like if you if you do if that ui is up and you do the numeric keypad on your keyboard it makes the little beepy sound like the tone sounds if you're using a touch tone you know menu system like i can imagine doing it for example like i've always you know you have to be like on hold with amazon for a year and a day or some or you're more likely on home with like a cable company or something and like
To be able to do that while farting around on your computer without having to keep your phone on speakerphone on your desk with the sound bouncing off of your desk, like, to just have it all integrated into the computer thing.
Or even if you just want to record a call, like, sometimes use Google, you know, Google Voice or Grand Central, wherever that is, you know, the company, you know, where you can...
uh do calling from your web browser and you know it's just it's just nice to have everything integrated and again this technology was there it's not rocket science it's just audio uh it's a nice the integration is nice and uh as long as it doesn't fall down which i didn't see it fall down it's just like oh yeah we should always have done that why were we not doing that it's just you know it's just it they could they could have done that with the ipad with the iphone one practically like if they did over wi-fi like it's not you know telephone voice it's nothing
Well, I think they're doing it over Bluetooth for, I assume, because, you know, the whole handoff thing, it has the ability to create an ad hoc Wi-Fi connection for higher bandwidth stuff like file transfers, which is what AirDrop does.
But this could plausibly work entirely over Bluetooth's bandwidth.
Oh, yeah, certainly.
I mean, you're also will be shocked at how bad again, how bad phone sound quality is.
Yeah.
My wife calling your other parts of the house like it sounds terrible because phones sound terrible, like plain, plain old regular phones, not, you know.
Yeah, but it's it's cute.
The interface is nice.
Like, yeah, good job, Apple.
This will make phone calls less disruptive.
When you're at a computer and you get a phone call, you've got to get the phone out of your pocket.
You've got to take your headphones off if you were wearing headphones.
See who it is.
This makes that so much less disruptive.
It would be easier to screen your calls without having to dig stuff.
Yeah.
i mean i have the same thing at work even with my non-smartphone when i hear my non-smartphone ringing i have to pull it out of whatever drawer or like pocket or backpack it's in to see is it my wife calling or is it you know someone with the wrong number speaking to me in spanish and it's like 50 50 and i would much rather just look at the upper right corner of my screen and tap a little button to ignore when i know it's not you know
See, but this is evidence that Marco works out of the house, because if I get a phone call, my first reaction is to grab my phone and run away from the team area that I'm sitting in so I can be prepared to answer the phone.
And half the time when it's the person who doesn't know me speaking Spanish, I don't realize that until I'm already like 10 steps away from my desk area out of earshot of all of my coworkers.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, that's like, you know, even if you're going to answer it on your phone, merely just using it as a caller ID type of thing.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I completely agree.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, which is a feature I had with Blue Phone Elite in 2005.
Yeah.
And then as soon as the iPhone came out, that stopped working.
But it was when I had it for that one year on my dumb phone.
It was amazing.
Yeah, like I said, it's almost like these platforms made by two different companies for the incredible lack of integration they have, which is supposed to be like Apple's big advantage.
Like, oh, one company makes everything and it can all work together.
But there was this crazy separation between the Mac and the iPhone that now is finally coming down in a meaningful way.
yeah and i i think i think your your point was very apt that like you know until until now apple's internal like org chart division was showing up too much in the products and i think this is as you said this is like an important like tearing down of that wall
Yeah, and really, like, I made the introduction and conclusion very similar, as they always are.
But I really felt this with using this OS and writing this review.
Like, it now feels like, it can't include the watch in this, because who knows what the hell is going on there.
But iOS and the Mac, at least, feel like one sort of unified platform being worked on by one team.
Like, and that every idea they come up with,
it'll be like how does this idea apply to both platforms like extensions and they could have just done ios 8 extensions and be like well ios needs some way to extend it because it's been this super locked down platform we totally don't need those on the mac right because the mac you can already do all sorts of crazy stuff said no we're going to make an extension thing and we're going to bring it to the max like why would you why would you want to bring extensions to mac you can already do all sorts of crazy stuff with the mac the mac doesn't need it ios needs it don't waste your time on that it's like we are making this extension mechanism we think is the best extension mechanism we've ever made in terms of safety and and you know
an API that we can support and blah, blah, blah.
And why wouldn't we bring this to every one of our platforms?
Why would we say, and the Mac can continue just to have loadable bundles that will, you know, crash system UI server and make everybody sad.
Like, no, they bring it to both of them and they bring it to both of them in a way that like you can actually share code between them.
And I know it's not exactly the same and no, you don't have to make the Mac use UI kit, but there's enough sharing between them.
Like it's being, it's being addressed as a holistic thing.
And I don't know if I went into this too much in the conclusion.
I would have liked to hammer on it more, but like,
The idea that Apple is viewing its customers as people who use multiple devices in their lives rather than viewing their devices as targets for software that they make, right?
Where it stopped thinking about the iPhone is a piece of hardware and we want to write awesome software for it to make it a great product.
And the iPad is a piece of hardware.
We want to write awesome software for it to make a great product.
And the Mac, blah, blah, blah.
Like that is, you're looking at hardware and then you're writing software for it.
And then you see this product and you're like done.
Whereas what they should be looking at is people who buy our stuff are individual people.
One person.
And that one person, if they're a good Apple customer, has an iPhone, has a Mac, maybe has an iPad.
And that one person does not divide themselves up between those three devices.
It's just one person.
They have one set of stuff.
They have one set of people that they know.
It's all like the cloud stuff comes into and the Google stuff as well.
But like...
We should be addressing that person's need and that person's needs have nothing to do with what we think in the abstract we should make.
This is the best phone we can make.
This is the best Mac we can make.
And that person says, but I'm just one person.
I don't care that that phone is awesome over there.
The Mac is awesome over there.
How can you make them both awesome for me?
So I really like the fact that it seems like Apple's platforms are now being addressed as a sort of
you know one thing you know we want you as the customer to be able to use our stuff and it's all one big thing and you know if we can blur distinctions between these if you can move from one to the next and your stuff comes with you and we can you know make them not look the same but like have a similar feel it's another big thing i might not have gone into as much as i really wanted to like
how yosemite does not look like ios 7 but you could there's a family resemblance like it's not like we have to make it pixel for pixels act like ios 7 but they look similar enough and so you feel like you're you feel like you're going from room to room in a big house but you own the whole house and all your stuff is everywhere this is fine right that's a bad analogy
Oh, goodness.
The other thing I wanted to mention on page 19 was this one line is a great example of what I love about reading your reviews, because your reviews are very approachable, even for someone who doesn't have the background that, say, all of us have.
And the best part is they have this tone and character to them that's very serious.
And then there's these little drops like what Marco brought up a minute ago with the quote from the other page about think carefully before starting a family.
And here on page 19, also, that dog totally looks like Harrison Ford.
Yeah.
That's so random and so delightful.
It's not random.
No, that was a meme.
I've seen that before.
Yeah, it was a meme.
Oh, I didn't even know that.
There's a lot of references you don't get, Casey.
Just assume that.
I think I've said it before on the show.
People always ask, are you going to make a compendium of old e-books?
And that's going to be a huge amount of work.
And I have no idea if I'm ever going to do that.
But one thing I always fantasize about doing, which I probably also won't do, is just going back through all my old reviews and annotating all the references.
which i don't know who that would be for other than me maybe it has an audience of one but i guarantee nobody who's not me no god every single because they're super obscure like they're practically from my own private life like oh this is a reference to a friend i had in kindergarten like you know with it it's from that all up to things that everybody should know right um
But they're everywhere.
It's how I entertain myself while I write stuff.
So anyway, the Harrison Ford dog, that was a meme, and everyone sent it to me, and I thought it was awesome, and I thought I'd send it to you, but apparently I didn't send it to Casey.
But it's super small in the review, so if you don't know that meme, you might still squint at the dog and go, that tiny squinty dog does kind of look like Harris.
That's exactly what I did.
Super looks like Harris.
Go Google for the meme.
All right.
Good to know.
On the next page, you made an extremely bold claim or maybe I shouldn't say claim statement that was just in the middle of or actually it was the very end of the page.
Apple's cloud services may finally be on the right track.
I'm going to ask you the stupid leading question.
Do you really mean that?
I do.
Didn't you remember when I came out of the CloudKit WWC session?
I was like, I think everybody who came out of the session was like, oh, geez, find it.
If you have any experience either implementing web services yourself or being a customer of other people's web services, you know what's out there.
If you've used Azure or the Amazon things or you've written services yourself, you kind of know what everybody's doing in the web space.
And then over here, it was like Core Data, which was just a mutant alien.
There was nothing like any of the other services.
And CloudKit was like,
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's more or less what we've all been doing that.
And now you're doing that and you're doing a good job at it.
It looks at a totally plausible like it's the way someone implementing it, you know, way someone like well versed in the art who is not Apple would implement something like that is kind of like that.
And it's the way people who write Mac apps have been writing their own little services to, you know, when they had to sort of roll their own.
Everyone was making stuff like that.
And now Apple's making one and it's a really good one and it's well thought out and has all the advantages that Apple had.
And it's like, oh, geez, finally, like.
no more web objects nobody no more porting a local only api to suddenly be cloud-based no you know it's just no more weird impedance mismatches no more being doing doing things differently based on weird technologies that apple really loves but no one else likes it was just straightforward simple you know good kind of like scene kit was too where it's like it's not like they're bringing people from the outside world and and don't force them to do it like the quote-unquote apple way and just say
You know, use current best practices to do a really good job and then leverage Apple's expertise and infrastructure to do that.
And that's what cloud could look like.
And like I said in the review, if it's not, Apple is screwed, too, because they're building everything on it.
There's still the server back end to worry about.
There's still reliability concerns.
There's still, you know, still plenty of ways they can screw this up.
But it seems like it's on the right track, because if you're trying to build something weird and it's buggy, you're like, look, first of all, you're building some weird thing.
No one else is doing it like that.
Are you sure this is the right way?
And second of all, it's full of bugs.
If you're building something more straightforward or more in line with best practices and then it's buggy, you're like, well, you're building the right thing.
You just got to get better at it.
Like, I feel like you're halfway there, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not arguing.
It was a bold statement.
I'm impressed.
I mean, I don't think I said that when iCloud came around.
MobileMe going, that was a good move to can that.
It was a good idea to clean house and pick a new name, but that wasn't a big turnaround.
But CloudKit, that WWC session really convinced me that there are at least some people there who know what the right thing to do is and are being allowed to do it.
Which is definitely an improvement.
The next page is page 21, and it's the beginning of the Swift section.
And I should point out to begin with that Chris Lattner actually linked to this review saying, hey, the Swift section was really good.
And I thought that was tremendous.
So congratulations for that.
Genuinely, I think that's extremely awesome.
Everyone should follow him because he's the ideal person to follow in that he is, you know, interesting and famous and smart and does not tweet a lot.
So you just follow him.
You forget you even follow him.
And then one day he'll tweet something and you'll be the first one to know because no one else follows him.
So everyone follow Chris Latner.
Yeah, it was, I'm trying to find it and I can't, so I'll just move along.
But it was a really short tweet, but a really nice tweet.
And that to me is a pretty big stamp of approval.
So you should be proud of that.
The Swift section was great.
I also liked the end of the first page of the Swift section, which again is page 21, wherein you said, print line, are you not entertained?
That would be Gladiator, just FYI.
I think that predates Gladiator.
I know that's where everyone knows it from.
That's basically where I know it from.
Are you really taking my moment away from me right now?
I don't know.
Don't you think like... God, you are the worst.
Yeah, but seriously though, when I found out you could do that, which was at WWDC, at least we didn't know anything when Switch was announced.
Like, you know...
Pound bang user bin Swift and just start typing.
I'm like, what?
And then you say, oh, you're not entertained?
Huh?
Come on.
I almost used an intero bang.
You almost used an intero bang.
Oh, my lord.
It's impressive.
If you didn't have a handle on what Swift was, you come out of the keynote, you're like, I don't know what this crazy Swift thing is, but it's crazy.
I don't know what's up here.
And then you find out that, it's like...
it's what I tried to lay out in the, in the Swift thing.
It's so much of the Swift discussion on the web has been not ignorant enough because everybody knows this, but focusing on whatever they wanted to focus on and not focus on like Swift's obviously,
very publicly right in front of your face, stated goal.
And the goal sounds crazy and stupid.
And maybe it is like I went into that.
Maybe that's the problem.
Like their goal is crazy and stupid, but their goal is to make this language that goes right from these little, you just start typing, you put a little line at the top of your thing.
You just start typing the file.
You just run it.
Do you go from that all the way up to, Oh, you can write a whole OS in this.
And that sounds ridiculous.
And maybe, you know, maybe it is ridiculous.
And maybe that is the root problem with the language.
But people will be like, I don't understand why Swift is doing this thing.
It's like it's in the goal.
Like if someone gave you this project and said, I want you to make a language that can go scale from scripts all the way up to writing an operating system.
That would inform everything you did about language design.
And when people complain about features, they're like, oh, I don't like this.
You could have done this.
It's like, yes, but then the language wouldn't have been able to span this ridiculous range.
And so I feel like what people should be disagreeing with is the mission of the language.
That's where people should be focusing the anger and say, it's stupid to make a language that spans this range.
What you should be doing is just making a really good Objective-C replacement.
And, you know, I'm...
I like the idea of the ambition of this.
It's easy for me to say because I'm not an iOS developer or a Mac developer who's going to be forced to deal with this transition, which is going to be bumpy.
But as an outside observer, I like the guts of someone trying to do that, saying that's what they're going to do, not keeping it a secret, but saying this is what we want to make and we think it's possible and this is how we think we can do it.
And that just incredible clarifying lens for everything having to do with Swift, things you like, the things you don't like,
the directions you might think it will go in the future you have to look at that mission and it could be they changed that mission they said that mission was dumb it unnecessarily hamstrung us we're dropping one end of the other of it and we're changing language but uh you know if you were to look back at what objective c looked like in 1989 or whenever when it first came out and compare it to objective c today i'm gonna say like it's time to at least give swift
It is so incredibly new.
It is going to look so amazingly different and hopefully much better if it's given a couple of years to cook, especially at the rate Apple has been improving its dev tools over the past, you know, say five, 10 years.
Objective C did not get that much better until Apple sort of took it and ran with it in the last decade or so.
One of the things that was interesting to me about the review, specifically about Swift, was that there was a lot of very subtle, I don't know, like get on board guys kind of tone to it.
And I agree.
I mean, I haven't really played with Swift much because I've barely had time for anything lately, but everything I've seen is really impressive.
And your review just...
made it even more impressive being able to see exactly how a lot of this stuff is held together.
And so I agree with you.
I mean, for all the curmudgeons out there, I don't think that's really necessary.
I really think this is going somewhere good.
That's what I was most interested in.
Like I was coming at it from my perspective.
I'm using high level languages all day.
I'm using Perl, JavaScript, stuff like that.
But it's so far from like
so far from dealing directly with memory or so far from being efficient.
Basically, I'm dealing with incredibly slow languages from the perspective of someone dealing with C, Objective, C, or C++, right?
But it's great because you don't have to worry about all these, you know, concerns that people dealing with lower-level languages have to deal with.
It's just so much more efficient and productive.
And Swift, the promise of Swift, was like, we're going to be, you know, it's a...
It's a low-level language with a high-level syntax.
We're going to span this huge range, and when you use it, it's going to feel, like, so nice.
You don't have to worry about all these little details.
We'll take care of it for you, whatever.
When you run it, it's going to be fast like those other languages that you had to spend all day writing type names a million times and using funny syntax and worrying about memory and pointers and all sorts of other stuff.
Like, that's the promise of the language.
And what I was interested in is, from the perspective as a high-level language programmer,
How can you possibly make that fast?
Because all these other high level languages you've uses, even when huge amounts of money and time and effort and brain power has been put towards them, it's really hard to make them fast.
And JavaScript is the best example that it has had just like millions and millions, probably billions of dollars and some of the smartest programmers in the entire world focusing on trying to make this terrible language that someone made a long time ago
fast because everywhere because you have to it's in the web browser right and then lesser languages like pearl or ruby or python have far fewer brains and far less money also trying to make them fast because they're running on servers you know and then you've got java which is a whole other thing but like the nice high level languages that people really love uh trying to trying to make that language fast and it's easy to make a low level language fast
It's straightforward.
Like C, you can say, like, I can totally, you know, I can see.
If you look at C, you can see the assembly.
It's like portable assembly.
I can see exactly what that goes into, like all the dots connected or whatever.
But if you're going to have a high-level language like Java, it's so much harder to be efficient because you have to, like,
to make things fast you have to tie things down but if you tie things down it's a pain in the butt to use and so i wanted to know is uh you know in a language like swift where even the what we think of as the basic types like integers and strings are defined in a library how can you possibly get that to be fast how can you how can you sort of bolt that infrastructure all the way down into the compiler and it's not easy like if swift had been invented in a vacuum
Right, so it just, this is the syntax, it looks like this, but all I'm doing is typing.
And then you just handed that language spec off to somebody and said, now make this really fast.
There are so many different approaches you can take.
If you are not, you know, Chris Ladner and his team, or someone who has written LLVM and Clang and everything, you could take the approach that for example, Perl or Python or Ruby have taken and they have changed their approaches over the years.
There are lots of different, or JavaScript for that matter, there are lots of different ways to make engines for high level languages.
the way they made this engine for a high-level language.
For example, in Perl or JavaScript or Ruby and stuff, well, I don't know enough about Ruby to say this, but in Perl or JavaScript, the basic types that you use
are not defined in a library whose source code you can see.
Like, they're part of the language.
And even in C, like, integer is part of the language or, you know, short or float.
Like, that's part of the language.
That's not a library that you can plug in.
And in Swift, they made it all, everything a library and then just found this clever way to bolt that library to what they knew would be the implementation of the language.
So that I found fascinating.
What I tried to pick was the easiest possible example and it still expanded into like, you know, thousands of words of annotated source dumps or whatever.
But that's more or less as simple as I can get it.
But I think the implementation is fascinating.
I think the language, like I'm a high level language type of guy and I hate all of these static typing stuff that everyone complains about about Swift.
Like I hate that stuff too.
I don't want to deal with types at all.
I want everything to be dynamic.
I don't want anything to be tied down.
uh so in that respect swift is totally against my personal taste in this i don't think static typing is necessary to make good code i link to a lot of things that people you know there's a lot of things on the web on both sides of this argument i link to some of the better known pieces in the swift section about how dealing with type system is bs and it just it gets in your way and i don't want to deal with that crap at all and the errors that you think it's saving it's all just voodoo and really if you just had a dynamic language everybody be better and happier and more productive and that's what really matters and blah blah blah we can all have that debate but
Bottom line is Swift is not that kind of language.
Swift is trying to be the button-down, tied-down, static-everything language that I really hate, but trying to make it palatable.
And it's super interesting in that respect.
So if you came away from that thing, I think Swift is awesome.
Swift is not the language that I would design.
It doesn't match my tastes at all.
But it does match its creator's tastes, and it is a good fit for the mission that the creator set out for the language.
What it doesn't match up with so much is if you really, really like Objective-C and you love dynamic dispatch and you love, you know, calling, you know, selectors, making selectors out of strings and then calling them and doing all that good stuff, which, again, I'm with you.
I'm using even higher level languages.
I'm doing all sorts of crazy stuff.
I'm doing string avows.
You don't even know what's going on in JavaScript and Perl these days, right?
Yeah.
i'm totally with you right but that's not the language swift is and that is the source of tension and that's i don't know how they're going to do that and plus swift has to deal with all the objective c integration which is such a pain in the butt that's putting warts all over like why is this warden swift why the hell is this here why does this work this way what's this special case rule it's all because it's got to work with existing objective c libraries in a semi-idiomatic way and it's all you know that it's not afraid to have warts and it's got plenty of them uh but i just hope five years from now this experiment goes uh
goes well and that all the people who are cranky about it i guess will join the people who are cranky about dot syntax i guess it's probably the same people you know people are it's just like you know time marches on and some new kid coming up five years from now hopefully will start learning his ios development in swift and think it's perfectly fine and natural and if he ever sees objective c it'll be like oh god what were you guys doing you know i think i i hope it will be okay i think it'll be okay uh
There's smart people behind it, so I'm optimistic.
It's funny how many people I've talked to, developer friends of mine, usually in the Microsoft world, but nevertheless, developers I've spoken to over the last few years who have said, oh, yeah, you know, I'd really like to mess around with writing an iPhone app, but oh, God, that Objective-C syntax, I can't even look at it.
It's so bad.
Those people are never going to write an app anyway.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The square brackets is the least of them.
But I'm just saying, if you come from another mobile platform and you're like,
what i have to dereference pointers why are all these stars on your declarations like have you seen c it's like what are you guys doing i don't have to deal with any of that stuff i don't you know so like that in that respect and i've gotten people complaining to me that swift is not a higher level language than objective c which i think is crazy like that's why i put that whole section in there which is a reference that casey doesn't get the title of
um to show look it looks like a high level language right guys like if you use python if you use pearl or ruby or javascript like this on if you know if you just have a passing familiar look high level language look no pointers ma look native native quote unquote native strings i can just do basic things i have collection classes it's just there it's just all that stuff that we've been adding to objective c with like literals and everyone's happy it's like no regular language just have that
it is a convincing high-level language at a glance before you know what what's going on with and everything and yet some people are saying swift's not really a high-level language because it is static dispatch and i need to make my selector names out of strings and call them and if i can't do that it sucks inherit from ns object use the objective c runtime uh you can still kind of do it but anyway that's that that that chasm will be solved by uh old people retiring oh
Oh, my God.
I love you, John.
All right.
So on page 22, a couple of quick notes.
First, there is a link, the first of actually what ended up being many links to MSDN, which made my C-sharp developing heart smile.
And additionally, I wanted to ask you, was all of the work figuring out
this glue between swift and the x86 opcode was that all your work by yourself did you have help with that how did that come to be
Well, I have help with all these things.
Like, I lean on these smart people that I have contact with to ask questions and to help me run experiments or whatever.
But, I mean, the good thing is that, like, you only need, like, a little shove in the right direction by smart people.
Like, they don't need to hold your hand through everything.
Because I have all the tools at my disposal.
Like, all these – this is one – you know, the developer tools, even though Swift has changed a million times –
It's, I mean, maybe it's just because it's an environment I feel natural in, like I'm programming all day.
That's my job, right?
All you got to do is point me in the right direction.
I have the command line tools.
I can write code.
I can, you know, I can figure out flags to commands.
I can, you know, write a little test programs, you know.
i can figure it out i just need to be like say you know you should look over here and think about this and that's why i picked a super simple example because i'm not particularly familiar with x8664 assembly so i like i can't just look at this and know what it is i had to look up all that you know the stupid things and that's why it's like what's the simplest thing adding two numbers together i can handle that like i don't want to get fancy it's gonna be hard enough for me to figure out the adding two numbers together but i just had questions i just didn't know how it worked i wanted to i wanted to figure it out and so
Yeah, I had a lot of help with this, but mostly in terms of like...
here's what you want to look at.
Here's what you want to do.
You know, some, you know, this, this example will be instructive for this thing because I would have questions about, well, what about this and that or whatever?
And it'd be like, actually, if you're interested in that concept, this example is different.
And so even some of my examples I was led to was like, the example you're, you're trying to do will never explain that concept to you.
Use this example instead.
So, I mean, it's true with all these things.
Like arc was the other one was in a similar vein of like,
You know, Arc was explained fairly well, but there's, like, a lot of questions about, like, how exactly does it work inside and how does it relate to it?
And, like, and, you know, even just, like, the why.
It's, like, getting to talk to people who are involved in the process and they're, like, why Arc and not garbage collection?
Like, why specifically?
Let's get into the... Like, the Swift section was most similar, I think, to the Arc section.
It's no coincidence that it's, you know, both developer technologies, both, you know, in sort of the same vein and the same kind of team doing stuff, so...
No, I thought the section was extremely interesting.
And I haven't worried about assembly in a long time.
And getting pretty much all the way down to that level was a fun adventure into things I've long forgotten.
So I really enjoyed it.
and like p and people who like actually know this stuff and and use like like mike ash or something like they could there's nothing groundbreaking this and anyone who cared could have figured all this out and probably did right you know all the people are actually writing swift like if you go to what is uh mike ash's thing friday q a or whatever like there is some amazing like those guys actually know what they don't need any help from apple to food apple should hire them if they're not like i was probably tried to hire them anytime like right you know what i mean like
I, that's, that's a whole other category of thing.
I'm just like pecking on the outside here, getting help from those type of people.
So there is no groundbreaking stuff here.
It's just, you know, this is what I is, which is why I think I try to explain it to people even farther outside.
Like if I can, if I can have it explained to me and figure it out, I feel like I might be able to explain it to someone else.
So that's why I like,
Even though that section seems like it's impenetrable, I feel like anybody, even if you know almost nothing about computers, can be led through it and you get the gist of it.
You're not going to know all the little details.
I don't know all the little details.
Like a lot of it is just output from the, you know, the compiler that I can sort of
figure out more or less what it's doing again because the thing is so simple and i can you know say this is that inline why is this that inline because i can look it's the same stuff but it's put over there and i can i can figure out the you know i know enough about assembly i can figure out well some things are different because the arguments are in different places but i can you know if you know the concepts is like how do you return from a function like they're basic concepts that everybody would learn in like a cs class
armed with even just that you can more or less make heads or tails of this type of thing.
So I, I'm sort of an ambassador to people who know slightly less than I do.
And I know way less than the people who actually know what the heck they're doing.
Fair enough.
Um, the next thing I wanted to comment on, uh, was the, what's SIL stand for swift intermediate language.
Is that right?
Intermediate or intermediary.
Yeah.
One of those two words.
All right.
Well, either way, you had written at some point, and I believe it was on page 23, although I don't know if that's correct.
It's possible that the larger purpose of SIL has not yet been revealed.
Do you have any particular thoughts about what that might mean?
Do you have any thoughts as to what SIL would be used for?
No, if I had it, I would have put it in there.
So in those diagrams, this is not a minor thing, right?
Adding an entirely new intermediate representation and language that essentially no one writes things in, right?
That is a significant step.
And is that it's just like, well, we needed to do that because LLVM IR doesn't have doesn't retain enough information about the source language for us to perform certain optimizations.
Yes, that's totally true.
That's that's like why it's there.
Right.
And it is interesting, but that's a long way to go.
So I have maybe that's all there is to it.
Like, I don't have any inside information.
I'm not hinting anything.
If I had a theory, I'd be telling it to you now.
All it is is like.
It just seems like another big box in the diagram and another language to support for the people building these tools.
They must have thought it was important enough to, you know, because they could have like left that left that phase out and just tried to bridge the gap between, you know, LVM IR and the source code with a, you know, with a smarter component.
I mean, it's like what Clang does for C and C++.
They didn't make a new intermediate language.
Those things like we can we can more or less draw a line from those languages, even though they're fairly complicated, especially C++.
we don't need a whole other third representation in the middle there, but for, for Swift, they did.
And, you know, I assume they have reason, you know, it's again, it's so young.
This, this may be a future-proofing thing.
Like so much of Swift, when I look at it, I say like, this has nothing to do with where Swift is today, but they're like three years from now, like there's an end game in mind.
Like,
This is the, these are the type of optimizations I would like to be able to do three years from now.
They're barely a glimmer in my eye now.
There's no way in hell we can do those optimizations now, but I am going to do everything in my power not to preclude them later.
So maybe still has something to do with like leaving those doors open and saying, if I'm going to do that optimization, what I'm going to need is a thing like this.
And so make a thing like this now for these reasons.
And later on, we hope it will be useful for these reasons.
There's a lot of, that's kind of like a programming anti-pattern, like a Yagni ain't going to need it.
Uh, they need it now.
They need still now to do the optimizations that I talked about for the generics and, and the, but they don't need, but it's useful for that purpose.
You know, as I said in the review, the optimization I showed in similar ones, you know, would be, it could be awkward or impossible.
Like, would it be impossible, impossible?
No, you can always do it.
I mean, you can always like write whatever you want when you're writing the compiler for this thing, but it's certainly a lot easier with SIL, which, which is much closer to the source than LLVM IR, which is much closer to assembly.
So no, nothing specific there.
All right.
I'm a little disappointed, but I was hoping you were being coy, but that's all right.
All right.
So I only have two more quick points or questions, I guess, more points that I wanted to make on that same page, which is 23.
In the shape of the future section, you made passing reference to Pearl having too many funny characters, which made me extremely happy because
I forget that you actually do acknowledge that Pearl is not the best thing that's ever been conceived.
All I was acknowledging was that other people think it has too many.
Oh, God, never mind.
I think that's a ridiculous thing to say because funny.
It's like saying English has funny characters.
What's all this punctuation?
It's pointless and it's noisy.
It would be so much nicer if it was just all a series of lowercase letters, which is how a lot of people write online because it's like this weird affectation.
But no, punctuation and capital letters serve a purpose.
What's the point of all these types?
They're just noisy.
Well, that's bad Huffman coding because it is frequently typed and really super long.
If you're going to distinguish between arrays, dictionaries, and scalars, having a single character to denote each of them is much better than doing some crazy Hungarian notation, which is also much better than having no distinction and just having to remember.
So I do not agree that Perl has a bunch of line lines.
I think all the punctuation in Perl, with the exception of the global variables, which are just silly nonsense left over from shell awk hangover from years ago, but dollar sign at percent sign, Swift should have them, and it doesn't.
But I didn't design Swift, so there you go.
All right.
And then my final point, which I wanted to make was from the very last page, page 25.
And it might have even been the very last line.
Let me see.
No, it's not.
But you had said, and I'm quoting, Apple has shown that it wants to succeed more than it fears being seen as a follower.
And I thought that was extraordinarily astute and a really, really, really good summary of Apple today.
And I just wanted to congratulate you on that.
Well, that's like, you know, the other part that's in a similar vein, I think on that same page was like, uh, the list of things Apple will never do is slowly turning into the list of things that Apple has done.
Right.
All like with, with the absence of Steve jobs and Tim Cook coming on and like all, you know, and, and Scott Forrest all leaving or whatever, like the rule set has changed mostly for the better.
Uh, and I cloud drive was what I was thinking of with the, you know, with the, uh, the, what do you call it?
With, uh,
Apple being more afraid of of not having a good product than they were like, say, well, aren't you just copying Dropbox?
Like what's worse?
Someone say you're copying Dropbox or not having a feature like Dropbox that people have proven that they love.
So iCloud Drive is like, you know, isn't an admission of defeat.
that's that's what stops him from doing it like we can't do that we've had all this time we've saying we're not going to show people the file system it's like well we can do folders but we'll do them like an ios where you got to drag things on top of each other you know like it was in a mountain lion and stuff like just what are you are you afraid of people saying you're copying dropbox or you're afraid of having a crappy product well for the past couple years you've had a crappier product than you needed to because of this you know dropbox is a feature not a product it's like the
and i don't even know if it was the right move like maybe the right move would be to stick to your guns and actually do come up with something better but if you can't do that going with the thing that you know people like is better than sticking with something super crappy so it's a spectrum i don't think this is the the biggest move but it shows that apple's willing shows that apple's willing to do it and you know again i don't even know if i'm going to use icloud drive i've been i like everybody else who's a nerdy person probably listening to the show we've all been using dropbox right
I have some complaints about Dropbox, but it still has some advantages over iCloud Drive.
I'm wigged out by not knowing whether everything's all synced to iCloud Drive.
I'm used to looking at my little menu bar icon and seeing a little green checkmark to know that everything is synced, not just an individual file.
So I don't know.
But yeah, I'm glad.
This is the new Apple doing things that they normally don't do.
Talking to the press more, being more open with developers, having a Swift blog that actually has more than one post on it.
It's a brave new world.
It is indeed.
Any closing thoughts?
I don't know.
You just read the conclusion of my review out loud and then we'll close the podcast.
I think we're done.
I think we're done.
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
I forgot who they even were.
been so long i mesmerized you mandrill squarespace and igloo and i'll see we and we'll see you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
They didn't mean it.
Oh, man, I'm tired.
You know what?
Do you want to give any more references that you got in the review?
Or is that it?
That's all you said.
In terms of movies, that was it.
It's pretty bad.
Thanks.
I was a trap for you.
I'm sorry, Casey.
But I feel like, all right, that's fine.
Oh, that's cool.
I know I'll never be good enough for you, John.
It's cool.
I go to a lot of therapy for this.
Again, how low do we have to make the bar?
Oh, God!
You are such a jerk!
Is there any pop culture reference that you would feel like if another person didn't know it, you would be surprised?
Another person who lives in the same country as you, similar age...
similar sort of like income like similar life experience and you would just be shocked if they did not get this reference like is it what is is there anything something from uh super troopers space balls no i'm saying like go go deeper than that go to like mickey mouse how about that someone who's never heard of mickey mouse has no idea who mickey mouse is what mickey mouse looks like is is you know is it a mouse that like crawls around the ground does it have heard nothing would you be like oh my god how can you not know mickey mouse like is that what we have to go to
do you really want an answer to this question you're like super troopers like that is pretty i'm saying like you know because for me well in my generation which granted you guys are maybe a little bit younger star wars is the one like start like have you heard of star wars maybe you haven't seen it i don't even care if you've seen it but you know star wars is a thing maybe you've heard of lightsabers maybe you know what darth vader looks like that's all i'm asking
Right.
And so and then as you go close, like that's my sort of baseline.
As you go up, like if I'm going to make a Star Wars reference, like a well-known, like if I say may the force be with you, like what the hell are you talking about?
What do you mean by force?
Then I'm going to, you know, and if you're the same age as me and have similar life experience to me, I'm going to be surprised.
And so you always shock me with the things that you don't know.
And in this review, I had references to things on the caliber of and sometimes identical to Star Wars that apparently you didn't see.
Such as?
I mean, I'll tell you if I didn't get it.
No, you didn't get it.
Well, I mean, maybe I did, and I just didn't think it was remarkable.
They're not remarkable.
Sometimes they're just so obvious.
They're like, yeah, yeah, whatever, Star Wars, Force, whatever.
It's not remarkable.
It doesn't come off across as clever.
Anyway.
Sorry to disappoint you, Daddy.
It's all right.
I just have to adjust my expectations.
It doesn't make you a bad person.
What do you mean you have to adjust?
I thought I firmly placed your expectations of me so far down the crapper that they can't even be found anymore.
But sometimes you surprise me, and then I move you up a few notches, and then you just don't get an obvious Star Wars reference.
And then it was like, well, I don't know what I'm dealing with here.
Wow.
How come I'm the one who's getting dragged through the mud?
You know, Marco's still here.
I think Marco has seen Star Wars.
I have seen Star Wars.
It's been a little while.
I have too.
But I've seen it a number of times, like most human beings.
Yep.
I've seen all six of them several times.
Well, when Adam is old enough to start watching Star Wars, maybe Marco will see it a few more times.
Yeah, I will say I've only seen the episodes two and three.
I think I've only seen those once each.
Don't worry about those.
You're not going to you will not be quizzing that test.
I figured.
Have you even seen them more than once?
Yes, unfortunately.
I'm curious.
You mentioned earlier that you you refuse to write the phrase.
It just works in the review.
Yep.
What is your full list of like banned phrases that you won't use?
I don't know.
But like, you know what I mean?
It's like you just don't you don't want to write cliches.
Like and if you if you're writing about Apple and you're going to make an it just works comment, whether snarkily or sincerely, just if you can say it in some other way and try to do it, you know, we've read that too many times.
So, you know, we write about the same if you write the same company's products for a long enough time.
You will find yourself inevitably saying exact same things that not only other people have said, but that you have said in the past.
There's a constant struggle for me not to write the exact same sentence I wrote three years ago.
And it happens all the time.
I will write something and I will go back out because I'll go back like, you know, to the 10.6 review and I'll see like the exact paragraph because I'm the same person more or less.
And if you give me the same inputs, I tend to produce the same outputs.
And I will almost word for word write a sentence I wrote three years ago.
And I was like, oh.
You know, and if it's not me, then something someone else wrote.
And so it's a constant struggle to try to say the same things in a fresh and interesting way that lends new insight and doesn't just, you know, it's that you're snapped a grid with Marco type thing.
It doesn't just snap to grid and like people mentally scan.
It just works and it snaps to a grid point and they don't even read the words.
And it's like they're not paying attention anymore.
So I'm always trying to find some better way to say things.
maybe failing maybe it's like i'm not doing it it's not a stunt it's not like you know it's not like i have a silly list and it's just like when i'm writing i feel like is that what you want to go with really you want to go with it just works it's just you know after whatever 15 years of doing this i feel like i i don't i don't want to have that crutch that's fair all right i'll give you that
Titles?
I'm a big fan of Raw Out of Coconuts.
Yeah, that's barely part of it.
You just, like, miss the capital O on O. Because I wrote it.
Yeah.
Surrogate Information Phone is also very good.
That I also like a lot.
Those were also tangential.
I don't know.
Well, all the good titles are tangential, but that doesn't mean they're not good.
Well, sometimes they're on, like, whatever the...
spent a lot of time talking about the apple event and yosemite were the two big topics and those were about like neither well if we if we add up all the variations the masking skills one is a clear winner i don't like coconuts but i'm happy with the other two actually that's true i do i really don't like coconut neither do i but i like the title you don't like coconut coconut's terrible yep no no way and the worst the worst is when you have unexpected coconut in things
Is it a texture thing?
Like it tastes like paper to you?
It just doesn't taste good.
Oh, you got toasted coconut on the outside of a donut?
Ew.
Coconut shrimp is good.
You don't like mounds?
No.
Cheap.
Well, it's not a great candy, but I like coconut.
No, unexpected coconut, when you bite into a candy or when it's on some kind of cake, that's the worst.
Or if it's in cookies, that's the worst.
I think it's a texture thing.
Do you like coconut drinks if the texture was removed?
No.
you're crazy i mean the texture is terrible but so is the taste they're both terrible yep the texture definitely takes some getting used to but most people again most people born here get used the same way we get used to peanut butter which grosses out the rest of the world if most people who are around here get used to coconut which has a weird texture i totally admit but i like the flavor have it with your sprite coconut sprite as a drink