Pop-Up Headlights
Casey:
So I should start the show by pointing out that it is 14 degrees outside here in the place that does not have winter.
John:
Are you still stuck on this, Casey?
Casey:
Right here.
Marco:
My thermometer is reading 13.8.
Marco:
So we are clearly colder than you.
Marco:
We have winter.
Marco:
You don't.
Marco:
I'm 12 here.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Those two cents of those 2.2 degrees, man.
Casey:
They're killer.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Now that I got that out of the way, do you want to do some follow up?
Casey:
That's what we do.
Casey:
Let's talk about SSL.
Casey:
So we have a couple of more pieces of interesting news slash feedback with regard to whether or not you really need SSL for just plain old websites that don't really do anything interactive.
Casey:
David Watkin wrote in and said, regarding SSL everywhere, mostly just an FYI, I'm the sysadmin for a decently sized charter school in California, and I can tell you from experience that HTTPS wreaks havoc with the content filters that we are required to have in place.
Casey:
I love the idea of cheap or free SSL certs and more security in general, but it's also going to make my life miserable trying to keep students from viewing content that they shouldn't.
Casey:
And that's
Casey:
Kind of unfortunate that schools have to filter everything, but I totally understand it.
Casey:
And that's actually an interesting point that I hadn't considered before.
John:
Well, they're just going to do the same thing that we discussed last week, to force everyone to have a certificate, do a man and middle attack on everybody on the school's internet.
John:
And, you know, it happens in corporate settings.
John:
It happens in schools all the time.
John:
And as we learned from many other people who sent this feedback, I didn't attach a name to it in the notes because so many people sent it.
John:
They were showing examples of GoGo's in-flight internet issuing its own certificates so that it can man in the middle of you.
John:
Because once your browser trusts its certificate, it acts as an SSL proxy, decrypts everything, sees all the traffic that goes through, and who knows what else it does.
John:
So this is definitely a thing.
John:
It happens in all sorts of places.
John:
It happens on plain Wi-Fi.
John:
It happens in academic settings.
John:
It happens in corporate settings.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So that's the wonders of SSL.
John:
It's not the fault of SSL, but it's like...
John:
People want to see your data.
John:
And if you try to use a cell to stop them from seeing your data, if you wander into an environment where they say, no, really, we need to see your data, they'll see your data.
John:
Yep.
Marco:
Well, and I think this is one of those cases where like, you know, you can't have it both ways.
Marco:
If you want to have complete control over what gets viewed over your network and you want to spy on people or filter it, you need control over those devices so that you can do things like install your own certificates, you know, via IT policy and, you know, group installation methods and stuff like that.
Marco:
where you can't have a coffee shop and say, all right, you can take your laptop in here, whatever you want, browse on it, whatever you want, and then be spying on that without their knowledge.
Marco:
That's no good.
Marco:
So I think this is actually a perfectly fine balance.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to cause trouble for schools everywhere to a degree that it's worth not doing it.
John:
Yeah, I mean, like the GoGo thing is doing, schools could do something similar.
John:
Basically, you try to foist the certificate on the people who are on your network and say, look, if you want to be on our network, the price is you have to use the certificate entrusted so we can see all your content.
John:
I'm not quite sure what the state of filtering in an academic setting is these days.
John:
I understand why it would be a thing that people want to do, but it just seems to me that it's...
John:
basically impossible to stop what they're trying to stop is students from seeing things inappropriate and what students are trying to do is see inappropriate things and the students are 100 the students are 100 going to win yep like you cannot stop them right but i understand that it's like well just because we can't stop them doesn't mean we shouldn't try because not trying so i don't know i don't know what the the correct solution there is but technically speaking it's one of those situations where uh you're not going to win
Marco:
Well, plus, I mean, not to get too creepy about it, but I think by the time a lot of kids are old enough to start seeking out bad things on the internet, there's a pretty good chance these days they probably have their own smartphone with a data plan.
John:
Yep, and Verizon, all it's doing is putting an ad tracker on all their HTTP requests, right?
Casey:
It's funny you guys bring up schools again, because when Aaron first started teaching...
Casey:
She wanted to be able to do something simple, like look at Gmail when she was at work.
Casey:
And at the time it was filtered.
Casey:
And I think when she had left at the end of this past school year, teachers were afforded more privileges than the students were.
Casey:
But when she first started, that wasn't the case.
Casey:
And so I vividly remember getting into a like several month long career.
Casey:
game of chicken where i set up i think it was like a socks proxy on a little linux server i had at the house and she was using that for a while and then that got blocked and so then i moved the socks proxy or whatever it was that doesn't really matter i moved the proxy on to like a standard port number like 25 or something like that it might have been the exchange port number whatever that was but then that eventually got blocked and that was around the time that that they would
Casey:
started giving the teachers more privileges but there were a few other steps that i don't remember in this process but we were definitely playing this like cat and mouse game me and well maybe it wasn't just me because i think our students were doing it too to john's point but um we were playing this cat and mouse game for for several months trying to get erin access to not just regular things like gmail these weren't nefarious things but uh eventually it ended up that the it overlords won and they just allowed the teachers to have a
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, anyone who's ever worked with one of these content filters and tried to get any work done has usually run into problems like this where, like, you know, ostensibly it's a good idea to help keep you working and keep you on track.
Marco:
And there are situations where that works and where that has been successful.
Marco:
But there's also...
Marco:
a lot of situations where like the filter is actually keeping people from not only doing harmless things like checking their gmail every once in a while at work but also actually keeping them from doing their jobs properly like if you have to be researching things on the internet as part of your job or you're looking up something for a paper and some of these so many sites are blocked and like it's it's there's so many situations where these content filters are actively harmful to what's trying to get done in the office uh that they're trying to protect
Casey:
Yeah, it's absolutely true.
Casey:
And in Erin's case, there were a lot of YouTube videos that she would use during classes about all sorts of various and different things.
Casey:
Erin was a high school biology teacher, and she couldn't even do that for the longest time because YouTube was carte blanche filtered entirely.
Casey:
And again, over time, the teacher's got more access and then she could do this again.
Casey:
But your point is absolutely right, Marco, that it's not always about nefarious things.
Casey:
It's not always about slacking off.
Casey:
Sometimes it's really justifiable use.
Casey:
But when the thing that's preventing you access is completely algorithmic and not like curated or whatever, that's what's going to happen.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, YouTube is a massive resource for teachers.
Marco:
Like, that cannot be overstated.
Marco:
Like, YouTube is an incredible resource for teachers.
Casey:
And moving on to other follow-up, I should sort of kind of apologize to you, Marco, in that I led you astray last episode with regard to your question about, well, could I just do my feed poller, which we'll hopefully talk about a little bit later later.
Casey:
Could I just do that in C-sharp?
Casey:
And I said, well, you're going to have to run all of IIS and all of ASP.NET and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And it's really not worth it.
Casey:
And Frank Krueger pointed out to me that I think it's called ASP.NET vNext or something like that.
Casey:
That's probably wrong too.
Casey:
Don't email me.
Casey:
But anyway, the upcoming or currently out, I guess, version of ASP.NET
Casey:
They actually have, I guess it's binaries for all sorts of different platforms.
Casey:
And so you wouldn't necessarily need to run the full stack on some VPS somewhere.
Casey:
And the other thing I didn't consider is you probably wouldn't need IIS anyway.
Casey:
You could just write a console app that in turn reaches out to the internet.
Casey:
But if you're calling it locally or via some endpoint locally, you may not even need IIS at all.
Casey:
And I know this is kind of irrelevant, but for the three ASP.NET developers that are listening, my apologies to you for leading Marco astray.
Casey:
And Marco, should you ever decide to give up on your beloved Go feed crawler, sinker, whatever guy, let me know and I'll set you up with some C-sharp stuff.
Marco:
No, see, now you missed your chance.
Marco:
This was your one window for this decade for me to learn a new language once a decade.
Marco:
And this is your one window that you could have gotten me to try a Microsoft language on.
Marco:
Nope, not going to do it.
Marco:
I know.
Casey:
It's all over.
Casey:
I quit.
Casey:
It's all your fault.
Casey:
I don't think that it was the right answer for you for this particular problem.
Casey:
But I stand by that if you ever, for whatever reason, had a chance to...
Casey:
Really learn C sharp.
Casey:
I really do think you'd like it a lot.
Casey:
But at this point, I honestly don't know why you would try it.
Casey:
Like, leave aside my own allegiances.
Casey:
I don't think it makes sense for you at all.
Casey:
But anyway, you could have if I hadn't failed you miserably.
Casey:
And that kind of segues into why don't you tell us a quick update on your feed, Polar?
Casey:
You had tweeted a day or two ago now.
Casey:
that you deployed the GoFeed Polar this morning, whatever that day was.
Casey:
A few hours later, I was able to confidently reduce the number of overcast VPSs from 13 to 5.
Casey:
That's incredible.
Marco:
Yep, that's right.
Marco:
And I think I can even get it down to 4, but it'd be cutting it a little bit close, so I'm probably not going to do it.
Marco:
But yeah, so last week, I believe my status last week was I had written like 10 lines of Go code, so I really didn't have anything going, right?
Marco:
Is that true?
Casey:
That's about right, if my memory is correct.
Marco:
So I've been trying it for about a week and I really like it.
Marco:
There's not much more to say.
Marco:
I'm using it right now.
Marco:
It is currently running on Overcast.
Marco:
It has replaced the PHP feed crawler.
Marco:
So it hasn't replaced all the PHP feed processing.
Marco:
It has only done like the front end stuff of now PHP is no longer making network requests.
Marco:
So it's no longer waiting around for network requests with all these processes of nothing to do.
Marco:
waiting around for curl so that is all now on go go is now fetching the pages every x seconds or whatever and you know depending on certain conditions depends on subscriber count latest error everything anyway fetches fetches all the feeds and then when it finds a changed feed it stuffs that feed into redis and a bunch of php worker processes crawl that and
Marco:
So before I said it was 240 PHP processes that were doing all the crawling.
Marco:
Now it is one Go process and eight PHP processes.
Marco:
And I probably don't even need those eight, but we'll see what happens there.
Marco:
I bet I can get away with four, but I'd probably just leave it at eight just to have some headroom if there's a burst of updates.
Marco:
And that's roughly it.
Marco:
So far, I like the language a lot.
Marco:
Now, neither of you two have done anything with it, right?
Marco:
I have not.
Marco:
Nope.
Nope.
Marco:
So, it does, I mean, obviously, I am not one to learn new languages frequently.
Marco:
Looking at the landscape today, the reason I chose Go after kind of running from Node, and by the way, we heard from a lot of people about Node trying to fix my memory leak.
Marco:
And there's a bunch of nuance to how you call setTimeout and what variables are in scope and whether you use a closure around it or a named function or whether you assign it to a variable.
Marco:
There's all these little nuances.
Marco:
I have no doubt that the right person could look at this code and fix it for me.
Marco:
But as I said last week, Node, it just doesn't fit me as well as something I really want to invest a lot of time into.
Marco:
It is not a good enough fit for me in other ways besides this way.
Marco:
So I lost interest in trying to fix this problem.
Marco:
Thank you, Node people.
Marco:
I appreciate the week of your support.
Marco:
But please stop emailing me corrections about it because I've already stopped using the language.
Marco:
I'm sure it's fine for you or Merlin, but that's it.
Marco:
Looking at everything else that's available, I consider other things like Java, Python.
Marco:
I was going to do ASP.NET until Casey talked me out of it last week.
Casey:
Is that really true?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
It was never under consideration.
Marco:
It might become in the future.
Marco:
You know, Microsoft, they're clearly investing very heavily in dev tools and trying to reach out to developers who are not right now on Microsoft platforms.
Marco:
And I'm curious to see what they do in those areas.
Marco:
Because one thing that almost all of these languages lack is a really nice IDE for Mac, or for anything, really.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure Eclipse qualifies for that statement.
Marco:
I've never used it, but from what I've seen of other people using it, it has never appeared as though I want to use it.
Yeah.
Marco:
You said no, Casey.
Marco:
Is that roughly accurate?
Casey:
I haven't used it in years, so I'm admittedly talking a little bit out of turn.
Casey:
But any exposure I've had to it and any exposure I've had to it by way of other people talking about it, I cannot remember a time anyone said anything positive about Eclipse.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
So anyway, I would like to have a nice IDE.
Marco:
I have one for Xcode for my native applications.
Marco:
I've never had one for web apps.
Marco:
Every web app I've ever written has been written in a text editor, either VI at first or TextMate later.
Marco:
So I've never had a nice IDE with code completion and inline error descriptions and everything.
Marco:
Never had that.
Marco:
I would love that.
Marco:
Never had that.
Marco:
Never had the luxury of a real debugger while writing web apps.
Marco:
That would also be nice.
Marco:
Never had it.
Marco:
And with all these new languages that I've been playing with or that I've been investigating, almost none of them offer that in a reasonable way.
Marco:
So all that being said, I might consider Microsoft stuff in the future depending on the direction they go with their tools.
Marco:
But right now it is not under consideration.
Marco:
I looked at Rust and I looked at Go and I read up, I didn't actually try writing any code in Rust.
Marco:
So, you know, that's a giant disclaimer at the beginning.
Marco:
I looked at both of those.
Marco:
Those seem like the two that everyone said or with the third option of Python where everyone says either do this in Python because it's good at this or do it in Rust or Go.
Marco:
There's a lot of debate between Rust people and Go people about which one is better, and a few people have tried both and have given more useful opinions.
Marco:
Not a lot have written about it.
Marco:
I haven't found a whole lot of posts about this.
Marco:
I think Rust in the long term will probably be more common.
Marco:
It certainly has a long way to go.
Marco:
It's still very much a beta, and it shows in a lot of the documentation and the tools and everything.
Marco:
It will clearly be a lot better in the future.
Marco:
But Rust also seems very close to Swift and C++ style of language preferences, which really is not my style.
Marco:
It might become my style later on, but it currently isn't.
Marco:
Just the whole, like Rust, it just seemed like it added quite a lot of complexity that conflicted with what I actually wanted.
Marco:
There are a lot of things about it that I like.
Marco:
I like the idea of the mutability being part of the language.
Marco:
That's a big one.
Marco:
I really, I would love that.
Marco:
I like some of the type tricks you can do.
Marco:
Most of them I wouldn't need.
Marco:
Go is a lot more basic.
Marco:
It's a lot smaller of a language.
Marco:
And not to say it's not advanced, but the things the language will do for you are much more limited.
Marco:
Most of the time, I fall on the side of the way they did it, which is one of the reasons I chose to move forward with that language.
Marco:
anyway so far it is really nice uh there's there are parts about it that are weird it is not like a clear oh my god this is perfect forever language i can already tell i'm probably not going to want to be writing the whole web app in this um if i was writing a new web app from a scratch i would consider it but it is i don't think there's any reason for me to rewrite the whole overcast web app and go you know just i think i think it's a way for me to get rid of these hot spots and that's about it
John:
um but there's it's a there's a lot to like there i really like it i'm glad i'm trying it and uh i'm gonna keep going with it where it makes sense to so did you use uh go routines and channels and everything for your uh yep for your yeah what do you call it sort of event loop replacement type thing yeah it's it's entirely good routines and channels that's good i when i was talking about like what the kind of event libraries were in go i knew they had some weird concurrency thing but i couldn't remember what it was off the top of my head
John:
but that's i mean for a small language it's kind of odd that that well not odd but like it's this expresses the philosophy of go keep the language small it's kind of like c done better but they determined that the concurrency stuff was important enough to actually add to a language that is otherwise being kept very small and that says a lot about sort of the intended use of the language and why i think it's probably a good fit for you know google doing server-side stuff and for you doing the polar
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
I mean, I love the concurrency stuff.
Marco:
Somebody, I tweeted earlier, this is genius.
Marco:
Somebody else, somebody pointed, actually a number of people pointed out on Twitter earlier that this is not at all new.
Marco:
It's called, is it CSP?
Marco:
Concurrent sequential processes, I think.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
It's a concurrency model that Go uses communicating sequential processes.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Thank you, Mitchie, in the chat.
Marco:
So anyway, I like this model a lot.
Marco:
It is not perfect.
Marco:
It seems more complicated up front.
Marco:
Once you get into it, you realize, oh, this is actually really nice.
Marco:
There's a lot of concurrency baggage you usually have to worry about, like locking and threading that you just don't need to really worry about if you do it the way you're supposed to do it.
Marco:
And it's easy to do things like earlier I added... Ever since the very beginning, I had a limit on how many crawls can be running in parallel at any one time.
Marco:
And that's very easy to do with channels.
Marco:
just you know earlier tonight i added a second limit to how many uh per per host you can be running at once so i don't have because earlier i crawled all like all the feeds to a couple of big hosts and got blocked immediately from having like 2 000 connections open to one host at a time so uh so that went out the window but uh that was really easy to add too like just it's this quick little you know make make a channel for every host and oh here's an array of channels and
Marco:
When you start it, push one onto it, and when you end it, pop one off of it, and here's the buffer length, and that's it.
Marco:
For doing stuff like that, this concurrency model is really nice.
Marco:
And what I like about it is that it is very new.
Marco:
It is unlike any concurrency models I've worked with in the past, and so it is intellectually stimulating, it is educational, and for this task, it's really good.
Marco:
So you seem pleased.
Marco:
Overall, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, as I said, it does have weirdnesses to it.
Marco:
There are certain things about it that I'm just like, really?
Marco:
That's what I have to do?
Marco:
Or you don't support that?
Marco:
But part of this is just me getting used to the language.
Marco:
Ask me again in six months how I feel about this language.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on this or would you like to tell me about something cool?
Marco:
We are sponsored this week first by Casper.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I have bought high-end mattresses before.
Marco:
I can tell you that they generally cost about double that for anything reasonably great.
Marco:
And Casper is really good.
Marco:
So Casper understands buying a mattress online can have consumers wondering how this is possible.
Marco:
So it's completely risk-free.
Marco:
They deliver it to your house.
Marco:
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Marco:
So it's that simple.
Marco:
So if you're going to lie in a bed in the showroom for a few minutes at a mattress store, it's really hard to tell whether it's right for you.
Marco:
In fact, the last mattress I bought for our guest room, we totally bought the wrong mattress.
Marco:
And within one night of having it home, and we tested it out to make sure it was good, and we immediately knew, this isn't that great.
Marco:
We might have made a mistake.
Marco:
And we regret having bought that mattress now because we only tried it for a few minutes in the showroom.
Marco:
With Casper, they ship it to your door.
Marco:
You can try it for 100 days.
Marco:
And if you don't like it, they will arrange for delivery back to them.
Marco:
It's really quite good.
Marco:
So Casper is an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.
Marco:
It has just the right sink, just the right bounce.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
casper's mattresses are made in america also very unusual for this business and once again the prices are amazing starting at just 500 bucks for twin going up to 950 for king those are fantastic compared to things like memory foam and high-end spring mattresses
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
$50 off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Casper for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So, Marco, did anything happen this week?
Marco:
Nope.
Casey:
Are we really not talking about it?
Casey:
Because we don't have to.
Marco:
We can talk about it if you want.
Marco:
I mean, I don't have that much more to say on it.
Marco:
So I wrote this blog post called Apple Has Lost the Functional High Ground, a title I'm regretting.
Marco:
Actually, of all the complaints people had about the piece, I think the title was probably the least valid complaint about it, because I don't think the title was that far off the truth.
John:
Can you explain the title to me?
John:
Because that was the part that I was most confused about in your post.
Marco:
So the title was, you know, Apple has lost the functional high ground.
Marco:
So this is a play on the concept of the moral high ground.
Marco:
I don't have to explain that, do I?
John:
No, you don't.
John:
But explain the functional high ground.
Marco:
So Apple stuff, you know, it used to be that Apple stuff generally...
Marco:
by a pretty long shot, worked better than PC slash Android slash other alternatives.
Marco:
You know, people threw around the phrase, it just works.
Marco:
As I said in the article, that was never 100% true, but it was generally true.
Marco:
It was the general advantage that Apple stuff had over their competitors is that it just worked better the vast majority of the time.
Marco:
Certain things were more reliable, simpler, more robust, etc.,
Marco:
And so this gave this gave Apple this what I consider the functional high ground in the past of like Apple stuff just worked better.
Marco:
And and it worked so well that I think you could not necessarily hold it over PC people, but like you knew when you were using an Apple product like, yeah, I got a good one here.
Marco:
I got the thing that works best in this industry.
Marco:
I think their quality problems over the last few years, when taken together, have ruined this image to a degree.
Marco:
And so I don't necessarily mean that someone else has become better.
Marco:
And that's an argument Gruber had.
Marco:
That's an argument a few other people have brought up.
Marco:
I think you can lose like if you think about the moral high ground I think you can lose the moral high ground even if no one else takes it from you like losing the moral high ground is like you used to be you know really good morally have a really good image or have really reputation and you don't anymore and so when I said losing the functional high ground what I meant was in that sense of like they used to have a good reputation for this and now they don't so I think in that way I think the title was actually pretty fair what do you think
John:
I wouldn't have used the word functional because I think that was, was throwing me now hearing your explanation.
John:
I think my conception of it kept focusing more on the definition of functional.
John:
Maybe I would go with like, I don't know, reliability is not really what we're going for, but,
John:
But anyway, I probably wouldn't have made a high ground analogy title, but now that you've explained that, I understand what you were getting at.
John:
So you can go on to explaining the body of your thing, because I cut you off with the title part.
Marco:
Well, but no, that was important, because a lot of people argued about the title.
Marco:
And I do think the title was not really the bad part.
Marco:
The part that I regret was the overall...
Marco:
Maybe sensational, maybe alarmist.
Marco:
I don't know exactly how to say it.
Marco:
So the post was basically saying Apple stuff doesn't work very well anymore.
Marco:
I think the problem is... I said their hardware quality is fantastic recently, but their software quality is really not.
Marco:
And originally I said it's taken a nosedive.
Marco:
That's the word I regret the most because that suggests the wrong acceleration rate or trajectory of the decline.
Marco:
Like, I think Apple software is on a steady decline.
Marco:
And it's been going that way for a while.
Marco:
A nosedive is like a sudden drop, you know, precariously, you know, or precipitously, whatever the right word is.
Marco:
a sudden rapidly accelerating drop.
Marco:
I don't think that is what's happening.
Marco:
I think it's been a slow decline and, and there's no signs of it turning around really.
Marco:
Uh, definitely just like a slow decline of their software quality.
Marco:
And part of it is services quality worked in with that, but I,
Marco:
a lot of it really is just the software itself, like the local software running on the, on the, on the machines, which is really unfortunate.
Marco:
Um, and so, you know, a few of the words, like I said, I said, riddled with bugs.
Marco:
Uh, I don't think it's riddled with bugs.
Marco:
It has bugs.
Marco:
You know, like there are certain words that were more severe than they need to be.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But overall, I stand by the message that I was saying, which is this stuff is not working as well as it used to.
Marco:
Now we need to be very cautious when we install updates.
Marco:
And the fact is it used to be better.
Marco:
And that worries me.
Marco:
My theory is that marketing priorities, and again, it's important to point out the fine distinction here, not the marketing department as some sites quoted it as, which I never said.
Marco:
Marketing priorities at Apple.
Marco:
seem to be dictating that the software must keep pace with the annual hardware releases or that there must be an annual software release.
Marco:
That has marketing value.
Marco:
That helps the products with cross-marketing between the Macs and the iPhones and new iPhones come out.
Marco:
There's also all these new software capabilities that go along with brand new iOS X. And that was X meaning like integer, not mispronouncing 10 with OS X.
Marco:
Anyway, my opinion is that Apple quality has gone downhill in the last few years, and they shouldn't be keeping up with this, like, artificial annual release schedule for major OSs, because...
Marco:
That is just not, it's not producing good quality software.
Marco:
You know, it used to be like the 10.x.0 releases all the way up to like, you know, 10.x.3 or 4 were sometimes unstable or at least had some bugs.
Marco:
usually by the time you got to like 10.x.4 or 5 it was pretty rock solid you could pretty much depend on it and then you know they with some of the previous releases they would get all the way up to like you know 10.x.7 8 or 9 because they were just around for longer and so by the time like so there would be a couple of months of instability at the beginning of a new os release but then a few months in like you were fine and it was rock stable for like the next 18 months before there was really a new one
Marco:
And now it seems like we're always using a 1.0 or a 1.1.
Marco:
Like every release that we're using from Apple because the major updates are moving so quickly and get so many changes in each one.
Marco:
It's not like we're always using a beta, but it's close.
Marco:
It's like we're always using a 0.0 or a 0.1.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
You feel that in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And one of the errors I made was I didn't actually list any of those ways in this post.
Marco:
But it's almost like there's too many to list.
Marco:
Glenn Fleischman wrote a really good article today.
Marco:
He actually solicited people from Twitter to tell him, like, make me a list.
Marco:
Tell me all the things that are common problems for everybody.
Marco:
And he posted a good thing.
Marco:
I'll put it in the show notes.
Marco:
And it's hard...
Marco:
There isn't, like, one thing.
Marco:
You know, if somebody asked me, like, oh, what one thing do we need to be working on?
Marco:
Or, you know, what one thing needs to be improved here?
Marco:
There is no one thing.
Marco:
There are a million tiny things and a few big things that just don't work very well or have bugs sometimes.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
You can't tell.
Marco:
It's hard to tell if Apple thinks this is a problem or if they think the course they're on is okay.
John:
Well, I remember when I talked... Well, first of all, I'm going to say this has been an interesting demonstration between podcasting and blogging because we have all, the three of us,
John:
Talked about all these things for like, what is it, over a year now.
John:
Like, you know, it's not as if this was a sudden realization that Marco woke up one day and said, my God, I mean, but when Marco says it on a podcast or we say it on a podcast, nobody hears it.
John:
But when it gets written down, you know, part of it is just like luck of the draw of like having to catch on and go viral or whatever.
John:
But it is interesting to me that like,
John:
if someone is a regular listener to the show and reads that blog post they'll be like yeah i've heard marco say that a million times and so it's not it's not like a revelation but then suddenly you know anyway that's that's the thing i wasn't saying anything that i thought was particularly noteworthy like or original it was almost like like the kind of thing like this goes two ways both of us do this and well back when i used to blog in casey like two ways where sometimes you'll write something up on your site and then you'll talk about it on the podcast and sometimes we'll talk about something on the podcast then after the podcast you'll sort of write up essentially a a
John:
more coherent summary of what was discussed and this definitely felt like you know after talking about this for weeks or months or whatever you felt like it was time for a blog post about it and you more or less summarize all the things that you'd said on past podcasts or whatever and it just felt like that thing you do where like sometimes it comes first in the podcast sometimes first in the blog we'll talk about the meta stuff later but I just thought that was interesting
John:
And speaking of podcasts, one of the things that a couple people who read that reminded me that existed because I'm old and I forget now was Hypercritical Episode 55, Region of Pain, which was back around the mountain lion, talking about a mountain lion and maybe the announcement or talking about my review.
John:
That title comes from the idea that Marco just articulated, which is,
John:
With yearly releases, my worry on that show was, is the OS going to have enough time to mature?
John:
Because the .0s are always crap, right?
John:
And then the .1, .2 is like it takes a while to settle down.
John:
Right.
John:
And if they're going to happen every year...
John:
It does do yearly releases, give the OS enough time to settle down.
John:
Or are we always going to be in what I call the region of pain?
John:
Because it's always crap when the point L comes out, like no matter how long they hold it, like you just, you know, it's and there's always some instability, sometimes long, sometimes short.
John:
That was in 2012.
John:
The beginning of 2012.
John:
At this point, I would say that we know for OS X that the OS does get out of the region of pain because we do reach the point four or point five.
John:
But what Marco's thing was talking about is, all right, we exit the region of pain.
John:
How long do we get in the nice part?
John:
before it starts over like it's not like they run into each other it's not like it's just bug ridden because mavericks was not just like a total disaster right before yosemite came out at least for most people i mean there are exceptions people are going to write us and say no this feature x never worked on mavericks or my gpu always kernel panicked on mavericks or whatever like
John:
that is true and that has always happened and that's unfortunate but uh for most people like mavericks had settled down uh but how long did you get with the settled down mavericks was it was it the majority of the year definitely not right was it less than half a year was it one month was it two months right um and that i think when i'm looking at this and we've talked about all these things before the
John:
The change fatigue, not just the bug fatigue, the bug fatigue is one thing, but also the change fatigue.
John:
As in, even if everything works perfectly, I don't know if I'm ready for everything to change how it works again.
John:
Like not everything, but you know, people don't want the time to change.
John:
Like the change fatigue combined with the very short periods of stability and calm.
John:
that i think more than like the quality of the software or any kind of metric you could put on it uh like number of bugs in the point releases or number of bugs in the final releases or severity of bugs or anything like that uh i think that more than anything characterizes the dissatisfaction i've heard from a lot of people about uh apple is that especially on the mac i don't want to talk about ios separately but the mac is different because on the mac i think the the the third thing that comes into the the into this equation of
John:
change fatigue not a long time in a period of stability also the final question is who are you chasing who are you chasing with yearly os 10 updates like why with ios you feel like all right android samsung you got people breathing down your neck it's an exploding market it's super competitive you got to do what you got to do and that's that's the marketing priorities that marco was talking about it for the mac though it's like
John:
Yearly releases, if you can pull it off, fine.
John:
And I think they prove they can pull off.
John:
We can make yearly releases.
John:
Each one's have interesting features.
John:
They eventually settle down to stability like they can do it.
John:
But the cost is like at least half the year you're dealing with like a baby OS that has a bunch of bugs.
John:
then you get a period of stability and as soon as everything's okay here comes the new one and like they can do it they can get them out on time they're not more or less they're not like ios tied to hardware like they just basically well yosemite's not ready we're going to ship that later like it's not like there's a yearly update of max that they're trying to sync with you know so it's not it's not exactly tied to that it's just that like it's almost like a corporate stunt like uh not not like a you know stunt like sure but like saying
John:
our organization is so well oiled we can revise and release yearly updates to a massive you know consumer operating system yes you can and you can get it done and during the course of its life it will settle down to stability but it still may be too much like it still may be like why why do you think we need a new one of these every single year we would prefer to have an entire year of boringness instead of four months of boringness
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
And I wrote a small kind of response post to Marco's post, which is mostly irrelevant, except that a few people emailed me and one of them said, and I don't have the email in front of me, something along the lines of, well, is it really the yearly thing that's the problem?
Casey:
Or is it that there's so much stuff in each release, new stuff in each release?
Casey:
And I think that's a fair point that you could argue that you could just put less in each of these releases, but potentially...
Casey:
keep this super aggressive yearly cycle.
Casey:
But I don't know, it just seems to me that that's not really the choice that Apple would make is just have like one marquee feature and then the rest of a new OS be otherwise unremarkable.
Casey:
And the other thing I'd like to point out is a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, in the chat says, the problem is that Apple needs to iterate faster on the cloud stuff and slower on the software.
Casey:
But by keeping them all linked together, they're making both worse.
Casey:
Cloud is still too slow.
Casey:
Software is now too fast.
Casey:
And I think that's a really astute point, that we really could use a lot of help on the services side.
Casey:
Although, again, we definitely need some help on the desktop side as well.
Casey:
And just keeping the desktop and the mobile operating systems inextricably linked like Apple is, it just seems like it's kind of tough to keep everything moving effectively that way.
Casey:
Now, what I'd be curious to hear your guys' take on is a lot of people have said, well, yeah, okay, let's assume that Apple says, well, the hell with yearly releases.
Casey:
What happens for things like continuity that really are integrating both the desktop and iOS?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Wouldn't she want them to happen simultaneously?
Casey:
Now, the comedy of this question is that I believe pieces of continuity did not happen simultaneously and there were point releases to Yosemite to enable it.
Casey:
But I don't like doesn't it kind of make sense to have everything packaged together at the same moment in time?
Marco:
Well, for certain things, yes.
Marco:
But A, I don't think those things should really come up every year.
Marco:
You know, big things that require this massive coordination between all the OSes I don't think should or will come up every year.
Marco:
And B, you have to ask at what cost.
Marco:
So, you know, would you drive a car that had really great features added to it every day but would occasionally explode?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like there's certain things that just like are not worth it, you know, and what what I think has has really shaken a lot of my faith in Apple software quality recently is is not like, oh, this button looks weird every so often.
Marco:
It's like basic stuff that I that I take for granted as like this always works, doesn't work anymore or works erratically.
Marco:
Like one of my biggest complaints with Yosemite is with networking issues, usually with network discovery of resources or connectivity to network resources, to local network resources.
Marco:
There's something about the way they revert discovery data to enable continuity slash airdrop, whatever it is.
Marco:
It has made it extremely unreliable for things like network shares, network printers, stuff like that.
Marco:
We would have made fun of Windows people so badly if their network shares just disappeared every so often or they had 16 copies of the same computer on the network.
Marco:
And these are issues that we have on Yosemite every day that are widespread issues.
Marco:
Lots of people have these issues.
Marco:
And it's like this is the basics.
Marco:
The basics are messed up now.
Marco:
The OS isn't crashing for most people.
Marco:
We're not getting kernel panics, fortunately.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But, you know, we are having a lot of weird little behaviors like that.
Marco:
Just things that seem basic.
Marco:
Similar to when iOS broke Touch ID and phone calls.
Marco:
Seems basic, right?
Marco:
And whatever the cause of that was, whether it was a delivery issue, I don't care what the cause was.
Marco:
The fact is, you can't trust the basics anymore.
Marco:
That, I think, is scary.
Marco:
And it...
Marco:
That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about Apple losing reputation from this.
Marco:
Nobody cares if things don't quite look right or if some brand new feature doesn't quite work immediately.
Marco:
Like, HealthKit launched.
Marco:
It apparently, I don't know much about it, I haven't tried to use it, but apparently the condition of HealthKit at launch was a complete disaster.
Marco:
I don't know if it's fixed since then, but it basically launched not working at all.
Marco:
Yeah, didn't Apple?
Marco:
I remember they had to reject all the apps for it and delay them.
Marco:
Anyway, big disaster with HealthKit.
Marco:
That's less of it.
Marco:
That's embarrassing, certainly.
Marco:
But that's less important than if you break a fundamental thing.
Marco:
It's like if a new thing you promised isn't quite here yet, like the Mac Photos app isn't here yet that they promised.
Marco:
that's not that big of a deal like the the stuff we've been using before will continue to work for a while like it we're not losing functionality by that being late but if they ship the photos thing and it was horrible and and all of a sudden and it took over like the way the way iCloud drive like migrates all your stuff over and you can't go back and all of a sudden like every so often you just lose a random photo like hfs plus ding
Marco:
you can't mess with the basics and the problem is that even the basics now get messed with on a high enough frequency from these constant relentless big updates that the fundamentals are shaky now and that's really that's unsettling see and in actually assessing i didn't talk about this when i was discussing earlier i said a lot of people feel that the quality has declined but when i take my personal assessment of where the quality has declined
John:
I think it comes just from having a longer view and having lived through lots of different cycles and having lived through times when it was way, way worse, like before OS X, which you guys might not remember.
John:
I don't really think that things are worse now.
John:
than they have ever been, or that there's actually been a decline.
John:
And it's not to say that I disagree with the sentiment of your post, because I think it is a good sentence.
John:
I, you know, I endorse the sentiment except for like, it doesn't hinge on this being a new low.
John:
It merely, it merely hinges on the idea that you think that the current situation is not acceptable, which I agree with.
John:
And it's not acceptable because the Apple today is not the Apple that it was before.
John:
The context is different.
John:
They have more platforms.
John:
They have different platforms.
John:
They have platforms that are more widespread.
John:
We use computers more often, so on and so forth.
John:
So I,
John:
I don't think there has been a decline in quality or any of the things you said about basic features not working or anything like that.
John:
But I think it should change because the context in which Apple is running its business and deploying its products is very different today.
John:
And the one place where I would say things are slowly getting worse, overall, I don't think they are, but I think Apple's been doing better in lots of areas.
John:
But the one area where they're definitely doing worse is
John:
As Apple, again, this will be a repeat of anyone who's listened to the show for any length of time.
John:
I've heard this a million times.
John:
Here we go again.
John:
As Apple's products integrate more and more network functionality, as that becomes a larger percentage of what you do with your phone, basically as iCloud becomes more integrated, as more of network services stuff becomes part of Apple's products,
John:
Apple has not been getting better at that stuff fast enough, and it's becoming a larger percentage of their product.
John:
Therefore, it's dragging down the average.
John:
Because whatever product or technology you have, does it involve cloud crap?
John:
Well, now you know it's the kid in class who's bringing down the average with bad test grades, right?
John:
And every single one of their products now has either a small cloud component or a big cloud component or like it's the whole freaking thing is a cloud component.
John:
So if that cloud part doesn't work, it doesn't matter how good the people write the code on the client side.
John:
If the server side is falling over and and this is the type of thing that can get you.
John:
Oh, my God, the basics aren't even working.
John:
So, for example, earlier this week, my wife said my contacts aren't syncing anymore.
John:
I added a contact on my new iPad Air.
John:
I did it like a week ago.
John:
It's still not on my Mac or on my iPhone.
John:
And everything was set up correctly, all in the same iCloud account.
John:
Nothing has changed.
John:
Everything is all synced up.
John:
Everyone's all logged in.
John:
There's no errors or anything.
John:
And I'm sitting there looking at it here on the iPad, changed a street address.
John:
Here it is on the iPhone and the Mac.
John:
It's not changed.
John:
And you just stare at it and you're like, why is this a problem?
John:
Is it because someone wrote buggy client software?
John:
Almost certainly not, right?
John:
it's but then you perceive this as oh my god the basics aren't working anymore because cloud functionality is now a basic it's something like you just expect like my contacts are all synchronized across everything that's the bar now and apple's really bad at that part of doing its products and it's really bad at making a situation where you can debug like what do i even do in that situation you know i do the little dance that everybody does you just like
John:
Sign out of iCloud, turn contacts off, turn contacts back on, add a new contact, you know, just to see if it's syncing, you know, like delete all iCloud data from account.
John:
Sign completely out of iCloud and it deletes a million photos from my shared photo streams on Mac.
John:
Turn it back on and watch it grind for three hours loading those photos back in, you know, eventually it starts syncing again.
John:
Then you can, you know, like it's just this dance that you do.
John:
And that infuriates people.
John:
So that part of Apple's products, I think, is getting better only because the percentage of cloudy stuff in software has been going up and Apple's ability to do cloudy stuff well has not been going up.
Marco:
No question their services still need work.
Marco:
They've always been mediocre at most of the service stuff, and they still need work.
Marco:
But most of the problems that I'm complaining about and that I've been seeing over the last couple of years actually aren't because of the services.
Marco:
Even the local client-side software is problematic in the last few years.
John:
But I think that's...
John:
basically better than it has been in recent years rather than worse so all the things you've complained about i think back to the disasters that were the early versions of tiger and leopard and i'm like you don't know from not working networking you don't know from beach balls and the finder let me tell you it was you know it was dire and like and just forget about classic macOS like that was a total mess in the later years of its life
John:
So and a lot of the times there, if you could fault them for one of the things they've done in recent releases, one place I would say you could fault them, for example, and I just saw, I think, Craig Hockenberry complaining about this today is where they do a feature that seems like it's not like a marketing feature, but it's a feature they can put on a box that is a perfectly good feature to do.
John:
but that almost nobody is willing to uh accept the the refactoring needed to implement this feature so one of the examples was uh was like tags which i detailed in whatever what did that come out in like a mountain lion or something talking about the implementation of tags and how is this crazy hack based on the labels thing and all that stuff it's like all right fine if you're not gonna use tags so what it doesn't look like it's a big deal it doesn't seem like it would impact anything it's like you're just you piggybacking on existing crazy hfs plus metadata and there's all these weird bugs about it but if i don't use tags it doesn't affect me right
John:
Well, apparently there's something having to do with network shares where it makes a tag query request or something.
John:
And that hangs like it hangs the whole thing and you get a beach ball in the finder.
John:
Now, all of a sudden, people who don't know and don't care about tags are getting a worse experience in the finder for a feature they didn't even care about.
John:
That type of thing is like that's an engineering thing where you have to decide it's OK to have new features.
John:
but we really have to balance like does this new feature require like oh and by the way now just every time we bring them network share we have to do this other thing and if it blocks like it's a problem um i don't know uh how that's that's that's the type of thing where when you're planning the features for oness you really have to talk about and say this is a great feature uh we've wanted this for a long time i think it'll be interesting we get it's a good bullet point to add to the non-existent box we'll we'll do slides about it and and
John:
and have a nice demo and stuff.
John:
Oh, and by the way, does this potentially compromise any basic functionality that everybody needs?
John:
And if the answer to that is yes, really think we're long and hard about the trade-offs there.
John:
That is the closest I think I can get to saying like a sort of potentially marketing-driven decision
John:
that has led to sort of unacceptable instability and basic functionality and a lot of the historic things have meant like we want to add some minor feature but it means totally refactoring this this subsystem and sometimes that's like oh that's bad because it's going to cause bugs but an example of the good is like i think in yosemite they totally redid icon services uh and it desperately needed to be redone because for years that had been these
John:
icon services bugs that caused all my icons to be pixelated and there was no way out of it and you just had to try to keep purging caches and restarting and eventually it would go away or maybe not that's the type of thing where it's like is it really important to fix that bug yeah it's cosmetic it's not a big deal but to fix it we have to rewrite the entire icon services thing well eventually you gotta eventually you gotta get around to it and i'm glad they did get around to it so i don't want them to be afraid to do that and to like treat it as like oh we can't change anything we can't anything because that were you know discovery d that would mean totally changing discovery to do continuity
John:
I don't think that in and of itself is a bad thing.
John:
But again, if that means for people who don't even use continuity because Discovery D does these other jobs as well, it can compromise them.
John:
You got to be really careful about how you make those changes.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I'd like to go back a step, though, and you were saying, well, it was much worse early on, you know, and gosh, classic macOS was ridiculous with stability.
Casey:
But the problem I have with what you're saying, even though it's surely correct, is that there's so many new Mac users, and I'll even count myself in that category.
Casey:
I mean, I came to the Mac in 2006, 2008, something like that, I don't even remember.
Casey:
But
Casey:
For me, even in my short, almost infinitesimally small tenure as a Mac user, as compared to you, John, I can tell you that just my feeling of the quality of OS X releases is exactly what we're, well, really all of us are saying, is that with each new release, I feel like it's getting, not crummier, but more fragile.
John:
Don't you think you guys, you two are just traveling around?
John:
the the curve of your apple usage what do you mean like sort of like you know uh curiosity uh excitement marriage honeymoon period and then settling you know you know i mean like that like that's what i was talking about a cycle because if you've been around for a long time you've gone through that cycle like seven times already and i think collectively i
John:
Because like the Mac used to be like this exclusive thing that not a lot of people had and we all loved it.
John:
It was great.
John:
And then that was the honeymoon period.
John:
And then things started to get a grim.
John:
And then it's like, oh, maybe System 7 brings us a new life.
John:
And then Windows 95 came and it was like that was our hitting bottom.
John:
You know, it's like we've gone through these cycles a couple times that it was small.
John:
But like the huge influx of Apple customers now, there's a whole it's kind of like the baby boom.
John:
There's a whole generation of Apple users, most of whom came on board either because of the iPhone or the iPod.
John:
who are getting into the Apple stuff and who have gone through their excitement and their courtship and their marriage and their honeymoon period and are now kind of settling into bickering old middle age.
John:
And it's not that this is a cycle of Apple's products and services, but it's a cycle of a specific cohort of their customers because of the huge growth they've had in recent years.
John:
And that cohort is...
John:
coming into there, you know, I'm no longer impressed more than I'm dissatisfied.
John:
Like that I've taken everything that works, I've taken for granted.
John:
And anytime something that didn't work starts, did work, starts to not work.
John:
And I perceive that as a decline in quality and I'm angry.
John:
And so again, I don't think like this perception is wrong and they should be talked out of it.
John:
I think in the context of this massive customer base they have now, Apple has to do better.
John:
They absolutely have to.
John:
They have to realize that these, you know, you can't rely on the honeymoon period.
John:
You have to actually satisfy the customers that you have.
John:
Congratulations.
John:
You got all these customers.
John:
You sold a lot of iPhones.
John:
Now you're selling more Macs and iPads and stuff like that.
John:
This is their responsibility to fix it.
John:
So I'm not saying this as a defense of the company and saying they need to change it.
John:
They absolutely do need to change it.
John:
But from my view, you know, with the long view, I think the quality things go in cycles and there are aspects that need to be addressed.
John:
The cloud stuff, thinking hard about the release cycle and stuff like that.
John:
But I'm not convinced that empirically in anything that you could actually measure, you could say that the quality really is worse.
John:
Not maybe that's just an academic point.
John:
Like, that's why I haven't bothered blogging about this, because it's not like a point I want to argue because it doesn't in the end, it doesn't matter if it's worth all.
John:
It matters is what the perception is of the customers that you have now.
John:
And if they're all in the bickering middle age period, you got to deal with that.
John:
You got to make your products better.
John:
And in the end, I think they should be better.
John:
Like, why shouldn't they?
Casey:
Yeah, but the problem is that you're saying that we're all in the bickering middle age period, and maybe Marco and I are, because, I mean, he beat me to the Mac by three or four years, I think.
Casey:
But even new customers, and I can't think of a great example, but anecdotally, I know I have friends and family members that have come to the Mac much more recently than I, only in the last couple of years.
John:
and there and even some that haven't gotten max but we're thinking about it that are all i don't know about this anymore because i've heard some bad things and i've heard that things aren't going so well well let's see that that's like when the baby booms like whatever the baby booms are into or want or what they feel like influences the larger society because they are the largest group of people like they influence the others so this huge group of existing apple customers who is now becoming dissatisfied influence all the people who are it might be interested because all they hear from all the people who they know who are in this you know
John:
you're likely to know a baby boomer because there's a lot of them and you're likely to know one of these mac users or apple users who's kind of on the downswing and dissatisfaction and what you're going to hear from them is like oh things are worse now it's crappy i don't like it you know i mean like it's a it's a network effect type of thing like like i said these things go in cycles and the cycles are not completely in lockstep but it's like waves of people and they influence other people in articles like this and
John:
you know the the cycle of the media and stuff like that again i don't think that that particularly matters because the bottom line is they do have quality problems they do need to address they do need to do better because if you have this many customers you can't rely on them all to be like oh gee whiz apple stuff is so shiny and i love it so much because that that is not sustainable sustainable is you have to do the hard stuff and be reliable and be consistent and figure out how to give new features without compromising stability figure out what your release schedule is and figure out how to do this cloud stuff more reliably
Marco:
Well, so, all right.
Marco:
First of all, let me go back a minute.
Marco:
I've been using the Apple ecosystem, starting out with Macs first and then eventually iOS things, for actually slightly longer than I ever used PCs.
Marco:
So we're slightly past my 20-year mark of using computers, and it's basically, like, literally 10 years in, I switched.
Marco:
um so i'm about six months past my 20 year mark so i've been using uh windows i use windows stuff full-time for 10 years and then i'm using apple stuff full-time for 10 and a half years now and so i i think i'm past the point or i mean i guess i can always get older but i think i'm past the point where uh this could just be like me having a bad memory of things i don't know but
Marco:
I think one of the things that exacerbates this feeling of things getting worse is that there's so much more that these devices do.
Marco:
First of all, there's more devices.
Marco:
That's a big one.
Marco:
So let's say 99.5% of the time things work the way they should.
Marco:
and 0.5% have some kind of bug or failure or crash or something goes wrong 0.5% of the time.
Marco:
Every device usage that you have, like every time you take your phone out of your pocket to use it, you're doing that like 100 times a day, right?
Marco:
People measure that it's a lot.
John:
That was the point I was making about the products that Apple sells and the customers that they have and the fact that we use the computers more.
John:
It is numerically more, but percentage-wise, they're not producing more bugs per line of code or...
John:
you know whatever it's just that there's more code people use it more often and i should also emphasize i haven't seen this chat room yet but i realize i'm thinking in the back of my head i'm talking almost entirely about the mac here because we were talking about yosemite and os 10 in the release schedule ios i will absolutely stipulate that ios 7 and 8 were were worse quality wise than the preceding ones absolutely i think that i don't think anyone's arguing that that's the reason i'm having a debate about the mac
Marco:
Yeah, and I can tell you too, working with a lot of these new APIs that are added in 7 and 8, there's a lot of bugs that are just API bugs.
Marco:
They're just bugs in the shipping version that your app has to work around in a lot of the new features that get added and a lot of the old features that get rebroken after they've been fixed.
John:
And OS bugs, like how many times that like it just takes out the whole OS like that isn't that was not an iOS experience in the past.
John:
Now, to give iOS some credit, like the changes in eight are perhaps the most significant changes to iOS in a long time.
John:
But for iOS, you have a much stronger argument that numerically I can show you that the quality of iOS seven and eight has been a decline.
John:
And I can strongly argue that the absolutely lockstep hardware and software release schedule of iOS puts the software team in a very difficult position in terms of quality.
John:
If you're going to try to do yearly releases and it has to come out with the phones, you know what has to come out with the phones?
John:
Let me show you a pie chart of iOS device profits and Apple's revenue.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's that's the entire freaking company now the mac gets the luxury of not being quite as locked into that although ios and the mac are sort of moving ahead together now but the mac gets to be like you you go ahead iphone 6 yeah i'll be i'll be there in a minute like no we don't have to release it's fine you we'll just release the max with the old version of the os it boots like or we just hold the max back nobody cares man nobody cares about the iMac it'll come out when it's ready and so that's why i'm mostly focusing on the mac ios i would definitely stipulate i mean
John:
copy and paste still doesn't work for me sometimes in ios 8 and i know someone's going to tell me that doesn't work for them on yosemite as well but like there actually is a long-standing pasteboard bug that i hit every so often that's been in mac os 10 since i started using mac os 10 so like on ios though like we've all used every version of ios like we've all been there from the beginning and we can say you know there there were bumps in the road but 7 and 8 is a definitely downward bump and that's our recent history for the past two years
Marco:
Yeah, and again, it seems like... See, and this is what I was saying earlier.
Marco:
Because everything is so much more complicated now and there's so much more of it, those little 0.5% of things going wrong, they don't add, they multiply.
Marco:
The chances of you running into something going wrong any given day...
Marco:
is multiplied by all those factors.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the cloud stuff is the cloud is a multiplying factor too.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
It's behind everything and it's between them and like, you know, getting all the continuity and the airdrop stuff to work.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Throw in a watch.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the problem I see, like right now today, I can get my work done.
Marco:
It's usually not a problem.
Marco:
But the rate of failures does seem to be going up.
Marco:
And the biggest problem I see is not, you know, everybody has a bad release every so often.
Marco:
Even big companies like Apple.
Marco:
They're not going to get everything perfect every time.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But is there a sign of things getting better?
Marco:
And that's where I'm really scared because I don't see it.
Casey:
Well, it's more than that, right?
Casey:
It's not only there's no sign of things getting better, but the engineering talent is getting spread even more thin in that now we have a watch coming.
Casey:
And that's a whole other platform with a whole other series of APIs that somebody is going to have to write.
Casey:
And even if it turns out that they've hired a bunch of engineers, well,
Casey:
are they as good as the engineers that exist?
Casey:
Are they worse?
Casey:
They may even be better, but they certainly won't be as entrenched in the Apple way.
Casey:
So yeah, I think you're right, Marco, that we haven't seen any indication it'll get better and we have plenty of ways that it could get worse.
Casey:
And I'd like to hear what you two have to say about that, but we should really talk about something cool.
Marco:
Yeah, and just to close up my part of this, I think, I posted the follow-up post saying how much I regret publishing that post.
Marco:
I regret having published the post not because it was complaining about Apple, but because I just didn't do a very good job writing it.
Marco:
I don't regret complaining about Apple.
Marco:
I think these complaints were valid and needed to be made, and one of the reasons why the post spread so incredibly quickly and far and wide is because there's so much agreement out there.
Marco:
And, you know, once it got to the major media, that was all sensationalism for the most part.
Marco:
But when it spread around the geek community first, which it did first, that was because people feel this.
Marco:
This is a thing.
Marco:
So I only regret not having done a very good job writing it and, you know, some poor word choices here and there.
Marco:
I don't at all regret making the complaint.
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
Speaking of things I do badly.
Casey:
I'm not going to pile on.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I wish something better that I wrote would have gotten that popular.
Marco:
That's the regret.
Marco:
It's like something I wrote got popular that isn't very good.
John:
If you want to go meta, I wish I could remember this, but this is the problem with our show notes system because I don't think Google Docs keeps history forever.
John:
We delete stuff when we're done with it rather than making a new document or something like that.
John:
But anyway, there was an item in the show notes where you wrote a post...
John:
many weeks ago and i put it i put it into the show notes because i wanted to talk about it and you put a note by it that you said i don't think this is interesting i don't want to talk about it eventually you deleted it from the notes i don't remember what it was but uh do you remember what i'm talking about marco that describes many things so anyway but it was about one of it was about one of your posts on marco.org and the reason that i had put it in the notes was not to talk about the content of the post but to talk about like this post is why people get angry at you marco
John:
because it was a great example it was a great example of you posting something that me reading it i knew exactly what you meant and it's stuff again stuff that you had said a million times in the podcast and it's just like this is not shocking or revolutionary to anybody who listens to the show or knows you were both uh and yet if i came to that post like you know just
John:
blank without knowing any without having any context i would have read it and gotten angry uh and then it's it's all about just like word choice and tone and stuff like that and you talked about those in your thing it's like you regret using a particular word or using a particular phrase and you don't feel like you want to write everything where you're
John:
you're writing and you're constantly thinking what people are going to say and they're like you're writing defensively and you're second guessing yourself and all that other stuff and that's what i wanted to talk about back when we did that post and maybe if we did that maybe you would just ignore me writing this post anyway or maybe you would have thought about it when you were writing this thing and because that's like i don't the negative part is the part i think you've articulated well and a lot of people have talked about it's like you don't want that feeling where you you're either afraid to write something or when you're writing it you're like
John:
defending you're defending things like you're you're defending yourself from imagined attackers as you're writing right because that doesn't feel like good and you should feel like let me just say what i'm gonna say right but i think the the flip side of that and something that you get if you if you care deeply about these things which you clearly do uh you know like if you care at all about what you write and you know
John:
bettering yourself and becoming a better writer and you know that stuff is not some people don't some people just write sensation sensational bs and you feel like they sleep like a baby and they don't care that they just like riled a bunch of people up right i can tell you quite a few of them right now you are not like that at all right um and neither am i and so for all like for all the years of writing os 10 reviews and everything especially in the beginning when people thought i was a lousy pc user who didn't know anything about max maybe if i just tried a mac once i wouldn't hate them so much
John:
um like it trains you like the the less sort of light side of that defensiveness is you get very good at reading the sentence as it exists not as you want it to be and making sure that your specific word choices are that you can defend them if challenged because you picked exactly the right word for what you meant and
John:
The second level of that, oh, can I pick a word that will help me to not be misunderstood?
John:
Sometimes that's harder to do, and sometimes I'm like, you know what, I use the correct word.
John:
If they can't figure it out, I'll explain it to them after this.
John:
But I always like, what I always wanted to do with my old OS X reviews, and my current ones for that matter, is if someone hasn't complained about something, I want to be able to answer them by merely copying and pasting the sentence from the thing I wrote.
John:
To say...
John:
Read the sentence again, because it contains the words in the correct order to express the answer to your question.
John:
And yet you seem to have glossed over it, right?
John:
Like where they read what they wanted to hear.
John:
And you get into trouble when you pick a word that expresses your feeling at the time.
John:
But if you were to reread the sentence, you're like, you know what?
John:
I would actually like the nosedive thing.
John:
You would choose a different word.
John:
But when you wrote it, like, oh, that's that's the word for how I'm feeling now.
John:
But if you if you take you would never take that sentence back and paste it to somebody and say, as a defense, in fact, you would look at it and say, oh, actually, that's not there.
John:
That's not precisely what I meant.
John:
And that's sort of.
John:
Some people call it like lawyerly like word choice or whatever.
John:
Like it sounds boring and it sounds crappy, but it's actually something I kind of savor in writing my things and that I want every sentence that I write to be at least defensible to me.
John:
Like I should be able to explain myself.
John:
It should express whatever I think.
John:
And if it doesn't express exactly what I think,
John:
i should pick a word that gets close to expressing what i think and that practice some people again some people find that practice kind of important it's like you know what screw those people and writing what i want which i think is perfectly fine but for me i get all paranoid about it when i can't when i when people can use my own words against me i have chosen the wrong words because they're not really like that's not what i meant i never want to say oh no no that's not what i meant i want to say no that's exactly what i meant
John:
And maybe I can diagram the sentence for you to explain how it's what I meant is not what you're saying, because you're never going to get around that.
John:
People are always going to read what you actually wrote and say, I think what you're saying here is that Apple is doomed.
John:
Like, did I write that Apple was doomed?
John:
No, but it seems like it seems like really, you know, like we can have that debate.
John:
But I don't want people to put the word say you're saying here that Apple's quality is taking nosedive.
John:
I never said, oh, Jim, I did say nosedive.
John:
That's not really what I meant.
John:
All right.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That's the frustration.
Marco:
That's what hurts is that I feel embarrassed and guilty that I made a bad word choice.
Marco:
Not like I can be angry if somebody misquotes me or, you know, take something out of context or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But there's only so much you can do about that.
John:
But you don't want them to be able to actually quote you in context and you feel bad about it.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
That's the problem is like when I know I was wrong and I did something bad or stupid.
John:
And then your thing gets magnified because you write a million things like everybody does, especially if you are a frequent blogger.
John:
You write a million things where you don't pick the precise.
John:
I had the luxury of taking the precise word over like one thing a year and just pour it over like an insane person.
John:
Right.
John:
But if you're blogging every day like you, you know, but and then you get caught by surprises like most of my stuff gets read by X number of people.
John:
This got read by X times 100,000.
John:
And that's kind of like an unfair lens to focus on.
John:
Again, what you probably thought was like, there's another one of those posts where I summarize what I've been saying in ATP for the past two months.
John:
You bang it out, you're done.
John:
You go to sleep like no big deal.
John:
Right.
John:
And then you wake up and it's like, oh, why?
John:
Why this one?
John:
And not when I talked about like closed headphones.
John:
And I think I think the answer to why this one, though, like people have picked up on this is like if it wasn't you, it would have been someone else because this has been in the air.
John:
Like this is this is an actual thing.
John:
You know, you argue about justification or whatever.
John:
I'm saying like the current crop of Apple customers are in a cycle now where.
John:
we are not satisfied with the quality of the products we're getting.
John:
And, you know, we expect more than we're getting.
John:
Our expectations may be up.
John:
Our usage may be up.
John:
The quality may be down some combination, but we're not happy.
John:
And so it's been bouncing around with app review, with software colleagues and bouncing around in circles for just, I think at this point for, you know, over a year.
John:
And this just happened to catch because it was the right person at the right time.
Casey:
expressing the things that you know he's saying what we're all thinking right and or you know their misquote of him is what i'm thinking well the funny thing is i was digging through the show notes while you guys were talking trying to find that link and i'm not sure that this is the one you were looking for uh john but i did stumble upon the products apple doesn't have time to improve dated december 29 2013 very last paragraph this is on marco's website
Casey:
While most of the press demands new hardware categories, I'd be perfectly happy if Apple never made a TV or a watch or a unicorn and instead devoted the next five years to polishing the software and services for their existing product lines.
Casey:
December 29, 2013.
John:
Now, that wasn't the one I was thinking of in terms of the one I was going to complain about how Marco wrote it and not what he wrote.
John:
It was like it was it was like not a I don't even know if it's tech related.
John:
It was just something random.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
My point is just that over a year ago, we were all complaining about software quality.
John:
Yeah, I mean, we're always complaining.
John:
I mean, that's all I do.
John:
All I do is complain about software quality.
John:
I've never complained about software quality since 1999.
John:
We all complain.
John:
It's just like, when does it reach your critical mass?
John:
When does it gain traction in the larger thing?
John:
When does it become... And it's almost kind of sad that it becomes a story because then it itself begins a cycle that we know will eventually end where this becomes a thing and then we talk about it and then it bounces around and then we forget.
John:
And it's kind of a shame that that...
John:
go because that's a cycle too right the the media cycle about this thing and the media cycle will terminate long before there's any satisfactual satisfactory resolution to the actual problem because the media cycle has a life of its own that is not concerned with the substance of the thing that it's reporting on like once the story goes away it's like oh i remember that story a couple years ago that but i guess that's fixed now because i don't hear of it anymore no probably not like it's you know the the reality continues to lurch along right and so
John:
you know just like app review like app review comes and goes in cycles in between then is it solved nope no not at all like and and i think that's that's the problem like that's all we talk about in the show is like systemic problems with apple's products and how they might solve them uh and you're the option marco put out there like it's the fantasy we have like oh just keep polishing your products for a few years um
John:
That is more viable on the Mac because, like I said, who are they chasing at this point?
John:
Like, it's not an active battleground.
John:
It's more of, you know, borders have been drawn and OS X is kind of gently encroaching on Windows, but it's not like a burgeoning market.
John:
Yeah.
John:
On the phone, they really do have to be racing forward.
John:
They also need to get their quality under control and they need to balance those two things.
John:
I think the good thing going for them is that, as a lot of people have said, it's like, I think I saw someone say, with iOS 8, iOS is basically feature complete now, right?
John:
You know, the end of history illusion, right?
John:
Oh, yeah, that's all there.
John:
But in some respects, it's like iOS 8 brought a lot of longstanding things that we wanted for a long time.
John:
And you do have now a window of time where you can polish those because it's not like
John:
there's some major feature they're all like oh my god ios totally needs like background processing or multitasking or you know better inter-app communication or better way to share files like at this point it's basically an app store problem with the whole icloud thing like the basics are there if only they worked now i mean that was kind of like so many features in leopard were like all these things you add in leopard sound great i'll be really excited when they work and
John:
you know and then we got like two years until snow leopard came out and it's like oh now all that stuff kind of works and that's kind of good but yeah nothing's ever feature complete but they do go in cycles and i'm hoping that ios 9 and and the os 10 that comes out after it will be a cycle where they don't feel the needs that you know that neither os is desperately missing some feature and they can do a polishing release
Marco:
I don't necessarily agree with the assumption they need to be racing ahead with software and iOS because, I mean, look, they just took a big chunk out of Android sales, not because iOS 8 supports extensions, but because they made bigger screen phones.
John:
The hardware is sad they need to be raising forward there too, but wouldn't you agree the features they added in iOS 8, many of them are sort of long overdue?
Marco:
I would agree that they were overdue, but I don't think that is going to give them massive market share over Android.
Marco:
Or rather, I don't think that's going to cause a lot of Android people to switch.
Marco:
Like, it'll cause some.
John:
That's where the bar is now, though.
John:
Like, they were behind, and they needed to catch up, right?
John:
And so...
John:
It's not like you suddenly get more users.
John:
This is just the ante to get in the game.
John:
And, you know, the ante keeps being raised.
John:
This is terrible.
John:
I don't know anything about gambling.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Anyway, that analogy.
John:
I like the bar better.
John:
We're so surprised.
John:
The bar is something I can... Yeah.
John:
The bar is being raised and they have to keep up.
John:
And Android had...
John:
had you know raised the bar in so many areas that ios was unwilling or unable to to chase and there were several releases where it was essentially let's keep up catch up to where android already is simply because that is like that is the standard these days and if you don't have these features people are going to ding you for it having them doesn't mean people switch it just means you get to be in the conversation and nobody gets to throw in your face no third-party keyboards right
John:
yeah but in the grand scheme of things i really don't think a lot of those things were mattering in the marketplace as much as geeks like to think they were no i don't know i mean it's difficult to say but like what i was saying before is like because the because the ios and basically because the iphone is such a huge part of apple's business and you know it's the majority of their business i think at this point and it's super important it's the market that's growing the most that's the one that has the most kind of and it has an active competitor like not a sleeping one and not like a fossilized one but it
John:
several active competitors that are weird because one guy's got you know google's got the os in the platform but samsung's making the money and you don't know who's going to come out of china with some crazy phones that are based on their own android variant like it's it's kind of a malevolent twisting enemy that you that you're not quite sure how to defeat and you're just trying to do like we just need to do our best and race forward as fast as we can like understand the sentiment they could have they may have gone too fast in some respects they may have gone too slow holding back on all the features that are ios 8 and then putting them all out in one big bang release right but
John:
I understand that they felt like the, you know, that the wolf was chasing them, but this is like an analogy show.
John:
The metaphor show me the wolf was chasing them and they felt like they had to race.
John:
Whereas on OS 10, it's like, who's, where are you going?
John:
Desktop Linux is not coming in 2015.
John:
Like windows is kind of, it's, you know, it's resting at the very least.
John:
And they already won that market and it's not growing.
John:
And just like slow and steady wins the race.
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Automatic, it plugs into the, oh man, every time I got to think about this.
Marco:
obd the obd2 port it plugs into that on your car it's compatible with almost every car out there uh made and made since i started using computers go check it out automatic.com slash atp you can save hundreds of dollars on gas you can diagnose your check engine light codes uh it interfaces with your phone so the internet has this awesome you know pretty app like all these trendy things do these days because it's awesome and trendy
Marco:
And you can see all the graphs of your fuel economy.
Marco:
You can see if you've been driving inefficiently, how you've been driving inefficiency, if you're accelerating too hard or braking too hard.
Marco:
It'll tell you all that.
Marco:
It can track all that data for you.
Marco:
And it also does a couple cool things.
Marco:
There's a parking locator because it knows where you park because your phone was in your car when you parked.
Marco:
Automatic now also works with the Nest Learning Thermostat.
Marco:
If you have a Nest Thermostat, Automatic can signal to your thermostat when you leave work to automatically warm your house up or cool your house down so that when you get home, it is the right temperature.
Marco:
That's a pretty cool feature.
Marco:
There's this awesome thing that could really help you out in a serious situation.
Marco:
it can automatically signal for help in a crash because the car can sense when it's been in an accident and the automatic peripheral has a Bluetooth connection to your phone.
Marco:
And so it can dial your phone through the app and signal to the app, which can signal to emergency services that you've crashed in an emergency.
Marco:
And so if you're too slow or unable to call for help, it will do it for you.
Marco:
And that's really serious.
Marco:
That could really be helpful.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
this is good stuff uh iphone and android are both supported um now automatic there's no subscription fees there's no monthly fee there's no service fee you just buy the buy the automatic device up front it plugs into your car and that's it normally it's 100 bucks which is already a fantastic deal but uh using our coupon code or by just by going to automatic.com slash atp you get 20 off bringing it down just to 80 bucks
Marco:
Again, no monthly fees.
Marco:
You just pay the 80 bucks up front and it'll just work.
Marco:
There's no monthly fees.
Marco:
45-day return policy, free shipping both ways, ships in two business days.
Marco:
All this is great stuff.
Marco:
So try it out.
Marco:
80 bucks, 45-day return policy, free shipping.
Marco:
You can't go wrong.
Marco:
So go to automatic.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about family sharing or is that going to take another two hours?
John:
No, we don't want to talk about family sharing.
John:
Our choices I think now are to talk about the MacBook Air rumors or to listen to me drone on more about Marco's thing because I think I can go on much longer about it.
Casey:
Let's talk about the MacBook Air rumors, but I'm not saying that I don't want to hear your other thoughts on Marco's post at some point.
Casey:
Maybe the after show.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fine.
Casey:
All right, so where did this start from?
Casey:
9to5Mac, is that right?
Marco:
Yeah, Mark Gurman got, if it's true, a pretty good scoop about this...
Marco:
The alleged 12-inch Retina MacBook Air.
Marco:
And there have been rumors about a 12-inch iPad Pro and a 12-inch Retina MacBook Air.
Marco:
And so far, the rumor people seem to think those are two separate devices.
John:
These are not two separate devices.
Marco:
I know, right.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So, you know, I guess I'll believe them for now.
Marco:
I tweeted earlier on Twitter that I suspect that there's a good chance this is actually just one device.
Marco:
And immediately people are saying, well, then it would be like the Surface.
Marco:
It'll suck.
Marco:
That's not what I was saying.
Marco:
I got to choose my words carefully.
John:
Speaking of the Surface, my son's...
John:
I guess, school thing.
John:
He did something at school where they went to a Microsoft store.
John:
And I know this because he came home to me and said, why do we have a separate iPad and a laptop?
John:
The Surface is like both in one.
John:
I was like, no, they got to you.
John:
I listened to his argument for the Surface.
Marco:
he's lost start over yeah no he doesn't know anything about computers anyway it's fine so uh anyway so yeah i mean my theory was that there were rumors about one device that was either a macbook or an ipad um but anyway regardless it sounds all the room people are insisting it's actually two different devices and they know more than i do obviously i don't i haven't heard anything except from them
Marco:
so so anyway supposedly it's two devices fine uh and this this one in particular was the 12 inch uh retina macbook air and it makes a number of pretty substantial if again if this is correct which that's a big if well i don't think we need the reason i put this in notes is i don't think we need to care whether it's true or not i think we can just discuss the rumor as in like is this something that apple would make and if they did make it would you like it why and why not
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
I might like it.
Marco:
So my portable needs have always been best served by a 15 inch.
Marco:
However, in recent times, I have come to realize that I always think I will get a lot more work done when I'm traveling with my laptop than I actually do.
Marco:
I always think, oh, I'll bring my laptop and I can finally have this feature to the app, even though I'll be offline most of the time or have limited connectivity or I'll be upstate with a DSL connection that's like from 19 to 75.
Marco:
So I always think I'll get a lot of work done.
Marco:
In practice, I usually just do basic web and email stuff because I am waiting to get back to my big fast computer with my big fast internet connection at home.
Marco:
So I might try it simply because I am due for a new laptop this year.
Marco:
And actually, and the one, so I currently have a first gen Retina 15.
Marco:
So it is almost three years, like two and a half years old now.
Marco:
So this coming summer, it'll be three years old.
Marco:
That it's like, I have no reason really to replace it except that,
Marco:
It does have screen image retention issues pretty badly now.
Marco:
And my father-in-law needs a new computer.
Marco:
And because it has pretty bad image retention, I don't really feel comfortable selling it to somebody.
Marco:
So I figure I'd just give it to him.
Marco:
He really needs a computer basically now.
Marco:
So I figure as soon as something new with Broadwell comes out that I want, I will buy it and do the swap.
Marco:
There have been many occasions where I've been in some kind of travel situation, usually flying, where a 15 inch is way too big to take out and use.
Marco:
and so i i think i would use something that's small the people who fly a lot always talk about the 11 inch air and i've never liked the 11 inch because the screen is just so damn small on it like it well isn't it it's isn't it 1366 across something like that or it's not only is the low res but it's also physically small like there's wasted the borders on it seem way too wide like you're the thing is already small and you and you couldn't stretch the screen to the edges apparently not
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, so this rumor thing looks really nice in that it appears to have a dramatically reduced screen bezel width, which is nice.
Marco:
Or as you would say, bezel.
Marco:
I will never forget that.
Marco:
They have distinctive looks.
Marco:
They have, you know, plastic bezels in the front of them and...
Marco:
And the keyboard goes edge to edge.
Marco:
One thing in the report said that the keyboard keys are actually narrower.
Marco:
And I'm a little worried about that because they haven't changed the size of the keyboard keys in a very long time.
Casey:
Well, hold on.
Casey:
Was it that the keys were narrower or the borders between the keys were narrower?
John:
Well, it doesn't matter.
John:
It does, though, because in the picture, in the diagram, again, this is all could just be fantasy stuff.
John:
In the diagram, the plastic keycaps are the same size.
John:
They're merely placed closer together.
John:
And that is different from making the keys bigger so the gaps between them are in small but having the center points in the same place.
John:
This seemed to be implying that the center points were in different places so that the keys were actually closer together.
John:
I imagine if the spacing is as shown, if you are a crappy typist like me, you'd probably be okay.
John:
But it is a compromise that it's like,
John:
If you made the thing an extra centimeter wider, would that have been a deal breaker to have a standard keyboard?
John:
It's an interesting design trade-off, if true.
John:
If the product was as conceptualized and we're going to get to more of the supposed... If this product was real, what about this design trade-off?
John:
But the keyboard one, it's one of the minor ones, but it's a line in the sand where it's like previously was like, nope, full-size keys everywhere.
John:
Uh, spacing for all we know, like I haven't actually measured center to center, but I'm assuming that the keyboard spacing has not changed in the modern era of Apple hardware.
John:
Uh, and this would be a change.
John:
Uh, but I don't, I don't think I would notice it.
John:
And I don't know.
John:
You guys both touch typists.
John:
yep mixed like i'm like you know a little bit sloppy with it oh god don't title that if you were to use this keyboard casey would you feel would you say oh like yeah because obviously if you use one of those logitech keyboard covers for an ipad you're like oh this is like a fisher price keyboard it's crazy i can't type on it right and that's an extreme with this spacing difference do you think you would feel it
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
I will say that the rare occasions that I used Macs many, many years ago, and the little nubbins were on the D and what?
Casey:
Which was the other key?
Casey:
D and K keys.
Casey:
Back before they moved them to the PC position of F and J, that threw me off constantly.
Casey:
And I could barely type on a Mac back then.
Casey:
But that was, I would argue, a much bigger difference.
Casey:
I think if I just have to get used to the keys being slightly together...
John:
or slightly close together i don't think that would make a very big difference at all now unless you have really big sausage fingers i think i find with laptops it's more of a thing getting used to the keys that they move like the fact the control is not in the corner this one they move escape out of the corner and that would probably screw screw me up and maybe screw up people who are like emacs users or the people who might hit the escape key more than you might expect
John:
uh the one exciting thing about this this uh mock-up of a keyboard here is that the left and right arrow keys are full size which is like one baby step towards the sanity of full-size arrow keys but now i won't break the won't break the border of the keyboard yet but this is a baby step isn't it in fact actually this may be not be baby step this may be regression because it might have been driving him crazy to have half height left and right keys because they broke the symmetry of every key cap being the same size except for the you know modifier keys and stuff
John:
So I don't know.
John:
But anyway, I endorse that rumored change as well.
Marco:
So the big rumored change, which has all of us talking about this in particular, is allegedly all of the ports are gone except a headphone jack and a USB 3 Type-C, the new reversible USB connector.
Marco:
including the power connector like so the so if this is true the power and all device connections except headphones will have to run through a single usb type c connector all right so i think the first thing we can say about this is this technically possible to do
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And from people who have been following the spec more closely than us, apparently the answer is yes.
Marco:
The USB Type-C connector has a lot of capability.
Marco:
And I don't know the fine details of it, but people are saying that it was designed to carry up to 100 watts of power into the computer, if necessary, as well as be able to kind of multiplex other port types over that physical plug.
John:
And it can do displays as well.
Marco:
Yes, exactly.
John:
So it does seem like it is possible.
John:
Yeah, so that I think, I don't know if it was emphasized enough historically.
John:
I mean, they mentioned it here, but the reason we can have this discussion is because...
John:
Plus, there are minor things about, like, well, it won't charge as fast, or will you be limited in monitors, or will it compromise the speed of the bus?
John:
Technically, from the specs, it seems like, yes, this is a thing you could do.
John:
You can pick a laptop with a headphone port and a single USB Type-C port.
John:
It still might be a bad idea, but it does seem like it's possible, technically.
John:
Now, if Apple did this and made this device, regardless of whether we think they're going to or not, would you want to buy one?
John:
Would it change your opinion of, like, of...
John:
You were saying you might want to get this because it's nice to get a laptop replacement.
John:
You like having a laptop.
John:
It would be cool to be a small one.
John:
Would this change your decision about getting one?
Marco:
Probably not, simply because it wouldn't affect the way I use it.
Marco:
But I also recognize the way I use my laptop as a secondary and pretty occasional computer, really.
Marco:
That's not how most people use their laptops.
Marco:
Most people use their laptops as their only computer and are using it frequently.
Marco:
And most of the time, it's on a desk plugged in to other stuff.
John:
so for that kind of use again we will have to see this is all we could be totally wrong this port could be totally awesome and we might might be able to shove everything through it and have a little base station or adapter or whatever i'm not willing to say that it would be totally awesome because like the big one is they're saying magsafe is gone too and magsafe isn't just like oh it's just scumming it up with another port usb can technically carry the power why wouldn't you do it well the same reason magsafe exists in the first place because you don't want a plug that goes inside your computer to be the power cord that people trip over like
John:
That's why MagSafe was invented.
John:
We did that before.
John:
We had laptops where there was a connector that went into there and we all broke them off at a certain point.
John:
Not to say MagSafe is perfect and MagSafe 2 has been arguably a regression and maybe this thing is so thin that they can't figure out how to get a MagSafe.
John:
Maybe they should switch to the iWatch type little magnetic inducted suction cuppy looking thing.
John:
I don't know what they have to do, but
John:
I don't want to go back to a world where people can't trip over the power cord to a laptop.
John:
And so if this thing came out, it's not just that it has one port, but if it didn't even have a power port, this would make me strongly consider not only not buying it for myself, because I don't really like laptops, but not even recommending it to other people, because I think MagSafe is one of the best features they've ever added to the laptop line.
John:
And if they take it away in favor of this little USB Type-C connector, I would take a wait-and-see approach.
John:
And I would basically have to see...
John:
Is the connector so tiny because it's practically the size of a lightning connector?
John:
Is it so tiny that it basically acts like MagSafe and that you can trip over it a million times and it won't break off and it won't yank your computer down just because it's so small?
John:
It's not like a big full-size USB connector?
John:
Or is it really the issue that I think it's going to be in that it's not as good as MagSafe and we're back to the old days?
Casey:
Well, what about the Xbox style midway through the cable breakaway thing?
Casey:
Don't do anything Xbox style.
Casey:
I should have expected that.
John:
Come on.
John:
I mean, that's like any big giant thing in the middle of your cable.
John:
No.
Casey:
Well, what if it wasn't so big and giant, but it still served the same purpose?
John:
Then you got to use the special cable all the time.
John:
I mean, so let's get to the other compromises of having a single port.
John:
Ignore the MagSafe thing entirely.
John:
Pretend that the power thing is not an issue.
John:
why would you have just one of them unless you're making some sort of philosophical statement like is there a technical reason why we think we'd have just one some people have argued power because the second port would require power and i can maybe kind of buy that but i don't know enough about the specs of the the what is it the core m line of processors right right i don't i don't know if there's something about adding another port that it that is a significant uh power drain it seems like in this mock-up there's space on the side of it where you could put another port
Marco:
Well, it is teardrop shaped still, though.
Marco:
So it does taper into a narrower shape as you go down closer to the person sitting.
Marco:
So there might not be as much room for more of them as you think.
John:
I think this is all just a Photoshop job here.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
It's a render based on rumored information and things that were told by sources.
John:
I think there's technically a room, but in the aesthetic design, if you don't want to compromise... There's the region that is perpendicular to the surface of the table, and that region is smaller than the width of the thing.
John:
So width-wise, there's plenty of room, but is there room in the perpendicular area?
John:
I feel like there's definitely room.
John:
At the very least, you could...
John:
Do it, you know, one on one side and one on the other or something like that.
John:
But two ports is so much better than one because two ports gives the average person the ability to do something reasonable without engaging the sort of squid or octopus of cables that has to snake out of it because it was like, oh, I have one thing plugged in.
John:
And I have to do some other thing quick.
John:
I just have to put it in a little thumb drive.
John:
Well, thumb drives don't even have USB Type-C connectors.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, something really common, power and an iPhone.
John:
Or like a mouse.
John:
How about a mouse and something else?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, and a lot of people have argued, yeah, there's a lot of wireless mice out there.
Marco:
And yes, that's true.
John:
Yeah, it's Bluetooth mice.
John:
And some of them have the RF dongles.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
But I mean, just the simplest thing, like when I'm traveling somewhere, I always have devices plugged into the USB ports on my laptop.
Marco:
And usually it's charging iOS devices.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, I mean, I just don't understand.
John:
I don't quite understand the philosophical statement that would be made.
John:
I understand the philosophical statement that would be made by only having USB Type-C ports and by having it be fanless and having it use the Core-M.
John:
I understand the statement of this machine, right?
John:
But only having one of them, I don't understand the extra thing you would be getting from...
John:
you know the this is a a thin super lightweight machine it's almost as thin as an ipad it's very simple there's no fans and it isn't that amazing like even if they went with like we're not going to have a retina screen because we can't because because we wanted to go with this low power phalanx design i would even be okay with that because like that is totally what this machine is about but nothing about having only one usb cord again putting aside magsafe
John:
nothing about only have one usb port makes a statement to me that i find that has any value aesthetically practically speaking or in any other way unless it was like we couldn't do two because of power constraints but i don't think that's the case because i've seen other laptops with the the you know the same what we think is the same chipset that might be in something like this and they aren't as compromised so i am baffled by this single port rumor and i hope it is just a misunderstanding it's all a big misunderstanding
Casey:
So I agree with you that I think throwing away MagSafe is a very dubious choice.
Casey:
But let's just assume that they make that choice.
Casey:
And it really is what this render shows, which is just one lightning-esque connector, which, by the way, I'm not entirely sure why they wouldn't use lightning, I guess because of all the power and all the other things that this USB-C can do.
John:
They need to carry display over it and all that stuff.
Casey:
But regardless, so we only have this one USB Type-C in headphone.
Casey:
I keep trying to think about, and I haven't had the time to come up with a good answer, but I keep trying to think about what has Apple done lately that would enable this computer to exist?
Casey:
So for example, airdrop between computers, that hypothetically, if it ever freaking worked, hey, Marco, have you ever talked about things not working?
Casey:
Anyway, if it ever worked, airdrop could be the solution that makes USB keys
Casey:
And that's just one very silly example.
Casey:
Let's take another.
Casey:
You guys mentioned Bluetooth, specifically for mice.
Casey:
You know, I use a Bluetooth mouse, and so I don't need to plug in one of those little RF dongles, although pretty much everyone at work does exactly that, plug in an RF dongle.
Casey:
So if you leave aside a secondary display, which admittedly in a lot of contexts is very important,
Casey:
And if you assume that we can do basic USB key style things with AirDrop or equivalent, what do you really need a bunch of USB ports for?
Casey:
I mean, charging is a great example, to Marco's point, but it's really a rhetorical question.
Casey:
What I'm driving at is, if you think of this more like an iPad that happens to have a keyboard and maybe even runs OS X,
Casey:
Then you do a traditional computer.
Casey:
What do you really need those ports for?
John:
I think it's more... It's not so much like, what do you need them for, like that you desperately want them.
John:
It's that taking it... It shouldn't be taken away unless there's a reason.
John:
And there's lots of reasons we've already gone through, which may be true.
John:
Like, you know, it could be a power issue.
John:
And it's like, well, you know, is that...
John:
The smallness, the fanlessness, the lightness of this machine is a reason to say we couldn't make this machine the way it is without the port.
John:
That would be a reason.
John:
I don't think it's actually true in this case, but that would be one reason.
John:
And the other could be some aesthetic or philosophical statement that you're making, which I don't understand.
John:
But in the absence of any good reason to not have it, you're like, just put it on there because it's so... One is just too few.
John:
Why not just have none at that point?
John:
Because...
John:
Not that you need two all the time, although a lot of people do need two all the time, but you want to have the one that you're using and the extra one for the other thing that you want to do.
John:
Because the statement of the machine, ultra portability, convenience, and everything is massively compromised by having to carry a satchel with a rat's nest of cables in it.
John:
That hurts the message of the machine, doesn't help it.
John:
But what are you plugging in?
John:
That's what I don't understand.
John:
Well, we already mentioned USB key type things or RF dongles.
John:
Already those, you know, if you have an RF dongle and a USB key, you've got two ports filled just to do your work.
Casey:
But you've already failed.
Casey:
My point is if you're using an RF dongle or if you're using a USB key, this is already not the computer for you.
John:
But, I mean, I think those things would people be doing.
John:
I have a portable mouse, you know, and it has a stupid RF dongle on it.
John:
It's not Bluetooth, right?
Right.
John:
and i have a usb key and i want to use my mouse to do my work and part of my work involves taking this usb key from work and shoving it in and pulling up files on it and if i can't do that without unplugging my mouse it's like well then why am i even bothering to use the mouse and maybe i should get a weird dongle adapter type thing like that is not a crazy scenario people who use use the laptop use mice with their laptops and during you know because the mouse is basically like that becomes like that port is taken all the time because i always use the mouse even when on my little trade table i use the mouse because i hate the trackpad or something
John:
And by the way, I have a USB key sometimes.
John:
That's already two ports.
John:
And you haven't done anything exotic like plugged in a portable hard drive or, you know, plugged in an optical thing or something like it.
John:
Like, unless you're saying that this can't be a person's primary Mac, which would definitely be a first for any laptop that Apple has ever made.
John:
They've always said, you know, there may be compromises for this, but this can be your only Mac because you can get everything done that you want to get done.
John:
And without a spaghetti's nest and a hub coming off of this thing with one port, I
John:
I think that hurts the intended message of the machine as a tiny, convenient little thing because it's not convenient anymore when it has to come along with a bunch of accessories.
Casey:
Yeah, see, but I disagree.
Casey:
I think what it is is that you're viewing this against a traditional computer, which is the same problem I had when I first saw it.
Casey:
But the more I think about it, the more I think this is really a – if you want the best of the best mobile computing experience, when you define best as thinnest, lightest, et cetera –
Casey:
Maybe this is even ARM for all we know.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But one way or another, you have to buy all in on the fact that these are the compromises that you're going to have to deal with.
Casey:
You're going to have to trade in that RF mouse for a USB mouse.
Casey:
I mean, for a Bluetooth mouse.
John:
But why do you have to deal with that?
John:
Why do you have to?
John:
So you're going to have to.
John:
I will accept it if I have to.
John:
But why do I have to?
John:
There needs to be a reason.
John:
Could it not have been this thin if it had two ports?
John:
That's the question I want to answer.
John:
It seems to me, based on this mock-up of this fake product that may not even be real, that it could be that thin with two ports.
John:
And I don't think it's a power issue.
Casey:
And I think you're right.
Casey:
The only analogy I can come back to is around the time that Macs started dropping optical drives...
Casey:
I was not a Mac user when they dropped floppy drives.
Casey:
But around the time they dropped optical drives, and let me be clear, the two Macs that I own both have optical drives.
Casey:
When that happened, when they started dropping them, I thought they were out of their damn minds in the same way that I think a lot of people said that about floppy drives.
Casey:
But as it turns out,
Casey:
Outside of getting the crappy quality pictures of Declan when he was born from the hospital photographer, I haven't really used an optical drive in ages.
Casey:
I can't even remember the last time I've used it with that one exception.
Casey:
So it really turns out that we don't really need optical drives anymore.
Casey:
And I'm wondering...
Casey:
that maybe we don't really need USB ports on a regular basis anymore.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
If you really want to stick with that RF mouse when you're at work, and if you really want to throw USB keys into your computer at work, then you know what, John?
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
You're going to have to have that ugly-ass USB hub sitting there with all its little things falling out of it, because that's what you're going to have to deal with.
John:
I think the optical drive and the floppy drive and I would add sealed in batteries are great examples to support my point because all those things had a reason.
John:
Optical drive, like I was totally in support of that going away because it's like, look what you maybe not necessarily for the iMac.
John:
It was you could argue that it could have hung out there a little bit longer.
John:
But for laptops, hell yes, because you look at what you can do when you get rid of that.
John:
It was this giant that was taken up like a huge percentage of the case.
John:
Yes, please get that out of there.
John:
floppy drives it's like nobody likes floppy drives usb keys replaced and like the message of the iMac was like nope it's all usb there's no adb stuff like that was a philosophical message expressed by sort of like the paring down of the variety of ports no more like printer port and serial port and all this stuff is like
John:
old style interface has gone new style here but they didn't just include one of them right when there's a reason the thinner you know the the incorporated batteries again you making the unibody not having the battery door not doing all that stuff like you got something in exchange for your compromise and a lot of people were angry about those things i really wasn't because i saw what i was getting for it with one port i don't understand what i'm getting for it and that's my complaint about it
Casey:
And I'm not saying you're wrong.
Casey:
Really, what I'm thinking is what if this is, as you said, a philosophical statement that you shouldn't need USB anymore.
Casey:
We're beyond that now.
Casey:
And I know that sounds kind of insane because even I think it sounds kind of insane.
John:
Well, then why not put zero?
John:
Like that would be a statement.
John:
Well, because you need some sort of charging.
John:
Well, iPad put zero on it and people were upset about that.
John:
And that was definitely a statement.
John:
This is not a device that you're going to connect peripherals to.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a fair point.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, where do you come down on all this?
Marco:
You know, if you think about when the very first MacBook Air came out in 2008, was it?
Marco:
I think it was around 2008.
Marco:
It had a lot of these limitations, like a lot of limitations that no computer, even by Apple, had had at that point yet.
Marco:
and it was i mean i and i had one and it was uh it was pretty clunky there were it was pretty frustrating to use um it had one usb port and one display and one headphone and one power but you know display i never used headphone so you basically you had one usb port and that was so annoying i hit i hit limitations on that constantly and
Marco:
you know these days it's different these days one of the biggest differences is that wireless networking is a lot faster you know that i believe came with 802.11g um and the port on it like i have one of the little wired ethernet dongles for it but the port was only usb2 and the wire the ethernet was only 10 100 and and of course the disc in it i didn't have the ssd because it was way too expensive that whole machine was a mess the cpu would throttle down and everything too because it got too hot
Marco:
Yep, yep.
Marco:
And the 1.8-inch hard drive was so incredibly slow.
Marco:
And so transferring files to and from it was excruciating.
Marco:
It took so long.
Marco:
Whether it was wired or wireless, it barely even mattered.
Marco:
It just took forever.
Marco:
and having only that one usb port even back then in 2008 even when i only had an iphone when there were no ipads yet and i wasn't like you know because these days you can also like if you if you have a camera most cameras will charge over usb now um so like there's so many devices now charge over usb and and this was before a lot of external hard drives were very common i mean like these days you know in some ways you need fewer ports in some ways you need more ports um
John:
and i just i remember how incredibly frustrating that was back then there's a reason why the next generation of macbook air added i believe they have two ports right i'm looking at one right now it has one on the left one on the right but most importantly the the port does not double as the power connector on any of those obviously so that's that's that's the secondary issue which we did put aside but i would bring it back when it comes to like the reality of this thing it's like one port
Marco:
is one thing but one part that's also power i really need to be convinced that it is able to fill the role that magsafe does in terms of tripping over the power cable you know so having owned that first air um it was extremely limiting and frustrating in a lot of ways that being said it was amazing because of how incredibly thin and light it was for the time and it was a giant leap forward for that time
Marco:
And eventually, once the new one came out, I think in 2010, when they made the Unibody the good one.
Marco:
Well, their first one was Unibody 2.
Marco:
Anyway, when they revised it and made the good one that we all know now is the MacBook Air, that generation, they fixed a lot of it.
Marco:
And one of the biggest things they fixed was they all had SSDs and they were all really fast.
Marco:
And so anyway...
Marco:
if this is a major leap forward in some way or in some ways, then we're going to overlook the one port thing if that's real.
Marco:
We're going to overlook that.
Marco:
We're going to tolerate it.
Marco:
But the first MacBook Air, to achieve that wow factor in these couple areas, that also probably shouldn't have been anybody's only computer.
Marco:
And so this isn't the first time they've done this.
Marco:
They don't do it often, but this isn't the first time they've done it.
John:
Well, they beat everybody with the MacBook Air, though, because they had Intel make that special.
John:
I think it was a die shrink or whatever it was.
John:
Some special chip made for them that meant they were the first one.
Marco:
It wasn't even die shrink.
Marco:
It was literally like a smaller package or on the same chip.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Well, whatever it was like, they were able to come out with a machine that other people didn't have.
John:
There was the first unibody, which other people didn't have.
John:
And it was also, you know, the first laptop that you could make this ridiculously thin, putting in the envelope and everything because they had the special chip and all that stuff.
John:
That's not the case with this.
John:
There's already, you know, PC notebooks out that use these same chipsets that are available today that are not as elegant and everything.
John:
But they're similarly reaping the same advantages that Apple is going to get here because they're already on the market with the same chipsets that Apple is going to use or at least being reviewed because I've read reviews of them on site.
John:
So they don't quite have the same.
John:
They don't have the opportunity to do what they did with the AirPods.
John:
or even I would say with the iMac at this point, because this rumored design is a simple evolution of what they have.
John:
It's thinner, it's lighter, it's everything, so on and so forth, but it's not going to be the first to market.
John:
And I don't think they have a special... Maybe they have a special chipset in terms of the GPU if it ends up being Retina, and maybe it'll be the first Retina one on the screen, which is another wild card, because this article doesn't say anything about whether the rumored thing is supposed to be Retina.
John:
But I understand what you're saying, but I would not hold up the first MacBook Air as a model to be repeated, because I think in the end that machine was...
John:
Not really a failure, but it was bad enough that we'll always be remembered as one of those machines.
John:
You're like, oh, yeah, I got one of those.
John:
And it was kind of neat.
John:
But boy, like everyone just has their stories about like what the story is basically the next one.
John:
That was the one that was actually good.
Marco:
No, I mean, and I think that I think that machine was a failure.
Marco:
Like I would be harder on it having owned one.
Marco:
I think it was a failure.
Marco:
I really like that machine.
Marco:
We had an extremely love hate relationship.
Marco:
But these days, the technology is better in a few really important ways.
Marco:
Number one being SSDs are now very cheap and relatively speaking.
Marco:
Now SSDs can be in all of them, so they can be fast.
Marco:
And wireless is faster, so that alleviates a lot of the IO bottleneck in and out of that machine.
Marco:
That bothered me so much.
Marco:
So if this machine is real, I think this could be good.
Marco:
One of my biggest concerns, though, is once again, it seems like they're prioritizing thinness
Marco:
to an unnecessary degree, at the likely expense of battery life.
Marco:
So looking at this machine, if these specs are even close to true, it is extremely thin, and it allegedly still maintains the teardrop-tapered shape, which means there's going to be very little room for much battery in there.
Marco:
And if they're going for lightweight, again, not a lot of weight budget for battery either.
Marco:
So even even with a very low power chip, you still have a big screen and radios.
John:
They might have got some space back because, again, in this fantasy machine and this rumors, they're saying that the trackpad is not a mechanical click down.
John:
I don't understand what it is, though.
Marco:
But if it doesn't go down, it's like the stupid tap to click that all trackpads have that we all turn off.
John:
Is it or is it like pressure?
John:
Anyway, whatever they're saying, it seems like they're saying that now there may be a sliver of extra room under the trackpad that wasn't there before because you don't need empty space for the trackpad to pivot down into.
John:
were they saying about that about the trackpad or the keyboard i thought they might have been saying it about the keyboard no it's it said the trackpad doesn't click down anymore like you like and presumably you just have to tap it yeah i was wondering if it was pressure sensitive or something but yeah so i mean i'm mostly on board with this machine but my two big things are magsafe or no magsafe and uh
John:
and give me a reason why there's not more than one port that's not a philosophical reason because i mean that's another thing i thought would be the benefit of the usb type c connector they're smaller and you can now you can fit more of them like they're not monstrous things where it's like because you could on the original air they had it wasn't like the fold down little thing because they couldn't even fit one on like johnny's nice curve shape yeah there's like a little like flap door that would flap open it was and they get they got over that it's like it's it's like pop-up headlights yeah exactly
John:
Like it was, you know, it was a thing in the 80s.
John:
People said, you know what, just like once they have the technology to make decent lights and not have them pop up, they did it.
John:
And so like, yeah.
John:
Anyway, what else about the space gray coming in colors or something?
John:
I'm all on board with that.
Marco:
Yeah, I would love a space gray Apple laptop.
Marco:
I think that would be awesome.
Marco:
um but yeah overall i i think it's going to be i think it's really interesting i i think though uh i am definitely concerned not about all these other factors not about the the port as much i am mostly concerned about battery life that they have prioritized thinness too much and that there won't be very good battery life in this because you know just the existing 11 inch macbook air does not have very good battery life it is much better on the 13 inch because there's more space for battery
Marco:
I think if you take this machine and you just don't give it a teardrop shape, just make it uniform thickness the way the Retina 13 and 15s are, even if it's thinner, if it's just uniform across the whole thing, that leaves a surprisingly large amount of volume for batteries in there.
Marco:
And I hope they do that, but I bet they won't.
Casey:
you know so i have a quick thought and then a question my quick thought is what if the brick that is plugging into this one usb port has usb ports on it doesn't help you because it's under your desk yeah i mean and yes we know about the plug bug please stop emailing us stop right there let me stop your email right there that's not what people do though like the plug is not like when you're in a hotel who knows where the plug is when you're at your desk the plug is not always up like
Marco:
it's a different place yeah people will end up using you know people will be more likely to use a powered hub i mean it's possible now the other question i have is could this be the first arm mac so that's a good question i i think if you look at the ipad air 2 cpu the the a8x
Marco:
And you look at the benchmarks from the new fanless Core M chips, that would be presumably the chip that would be used in this thing.
Marco:
They're pretty close, actually.
Marco:
They're similar in performance.
Marco:
I think the Intel one is faster single-threaded, but not by a massive amount.
Marco:
They're in the same ballpark.
Marco:
The big question to me is why would they go ARM?
Marco:
So no question they could if they wanted to.
Marco:
They could ship an ARM Mac.
Marco:
They could compile everything from ARM, and they could require developers to cross-compile for the Mac App Store and everything.
John:
Didn't Chalk point out, I think it was Hockenberry today as well, like,
John:
if there was going to be arm they would have to have something like the you know the intel developer program where they shipped out like you know g5 uh power mac cases with pentium force inside them to let people you know like any cpu transition needs developers on board so if that is the case you would expect that transition to precede the release of the machines and the scheduling if this leak is in any way real it and and we and we expect this machine this year it's
John:
When are you going to tell developers, by the way, you're going to have to cross-compile for ARM and heal all the crap you have to do?
John:
The timing seems wrong to me for that to be the case.
John:
But anyway, go on with the feasibility.
Marco:
Yeah, well, I mean, but again, like, well, I think it would be less work this time because, like, you know, developers have already been dragged through one transition.
Marco:
We are not only already familiar with ARM from iOS, but these days developers, like, by going through the first transition, a lot of developers move their code to more portable settings.
Marco:
code and and so they i think i think it would be a much less involved transition for developers and and i think the the days of apple having some kind of pre-release developer hardware program i think those are gone pretty pretty far gone and i think the way they would do this would be the same way when they when they have like you know new ipads and the same way they're gonna do the watch like they didn't ship a watch to everyone for watch kit like they
John:
that's not going to happen uh you know they're just gonna they're gonna let you submit apps two weeks ahead of time before this thing goes on sale but you have all you have existing software though like in the case of those things you didn't like you have all these existing mac apps you have to decide if you're gonna do like a fat binary thing and if you are everyone has to to recompile their things as fat binaries and you have to decide whether this is going to be a transition or a constant parallel thing because as good as arm may be for this machine
John:
arm still can't compete with the high end machine so at the very least you're going to still have this giant tube mac pro that's not going to have an arm processor in it and then you're just going to have two processors forever and like yeah there's there's i think they could definitely make a machine with an arm processor that does this and it would be reasonably satisfactory but all the ancillary bookkeeping and strategic things don't quite yet make sense to me i don't understand what they would come out on stage and say is the reason they're doing this unless they try to say it because it can be super low power it's like
John:
it would be lower power, but it wouldn't suddenly become an iPad.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
You wouldn't suddenly get 24-hour battery life where you were with the same Intel chip, you would have gotten five or seven.
Marco:
It's not going to be that big of a difference.
Marco:
But for me, the biggest thing is I have no question they could do this.
Marco:
I have no question they could give developers very little notice and we would all just jump and just do it.
Marco:
Well, not we.
Marco:
I'm not a Mac developer, but they would all jump and just do it because it wouldn't be that much work for most of them.
Marco:
uh my big thing is same thing as you said with the ports why uh because there would be a substantial cost to it in during the transition first of all couldn't run boot camp anymore and you couldn't virtualize windows anymore that's a big problem for a lot of people
Marco:
Once again, I think, you know, going back to the earlier discussion, this couldn't be your only Mac if you need to use Windows apps.
Marco:
But, you know, maybe it could be your travel Mac or maybe for a lot of us, myself included, who don't ever run Windows apps, they can do it.
Marco:
But there's certainly a lot of people need Windows so that it would lose the support of all of them.
Marco:
For the transition period, however long it is, before most of the apps or all the apps you use are compiled for ARM, how do you run Intel apps?
Marco:
Is there some kind of Rosetta layer?
Marco:
Because the problem is, like, when you went from PowerPC to Intel, there was also a massive performance jump.
Marco:
I like that you said that we've been through one transition before.
John:
I know you've been through many.
John:
Yes.
John:
But you're right.
John:
This runs to your point.
John:
Every time there's been a transition, there's been some kind of band-aid to, like...
John:
A, it's a clear transition.
John:
This is old.
John:
That's new, which would not be the case with ARM because you'd be like, what the hell?
John:
What's your story for the Mac Pro?
John:
Are you going to come out with a crazy 12 core ARM processor?
John:
Where is that?
John:
Anyway, so it wouldn't even be a transition.
John:
And B, every time there has been a transition, there's been some way for you to keep using your crap in the short term.
Marco:
And it was usable because the transition came with a big performance boost.
Marco:
Whereas in this case, if you're going from Intel to ARM, it's actually getting a little bit slower.
Marco:
And possibly a little hotter because it's not 14 nanometer unless Intel's having it for you.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So you're not going to have extremely good enough.
Marco:
You're not going to have good enough emulation speed or translation speed of an Intel binary running on an ARM laptop.
Marco:
That's going to suck.
Marco:
and be either not available at all or be pretty slow and probably unusable for a lot of people.
Marco:
So I don't see why it makes sense to have this B-Arm as long as Intel's chips can get close enough in power usage.
Marco:
And I think with the Core M, I think we're seeing they pretty much can.
Marco:
Not that ARM is lagging hugely behind, but the transition costs of switching...
Marco:
There's no clear reason right now why they need to make that transition.
Marco:
There's no massive gain to be had on the other side that we can see right now.
Marco:
Long term, there might be, and they might choose to make that transition at some other time.
Marco:
For instance, one of the biggest gains could be, I bet Apple's pretty sore with Intel right now because of the Broadwell delays having delayed Apple's entire product line.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's not so much that they're sore with them, it's just like the long-term strategic advantage would be because Apple wants to own and control all the major technologies, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like that whole thing.
John:
Like that's why.
John:
But they can make that switch anytime they want.
John:
I mean, you have to start sometime, but like if they came out with an ARM machine, I think the message would be that
John:
This may be a longer transition, but it will be a transition.
John:
And eventually every single piece of hardware Apple sells will have an ARM CPU designed by Apple and fabbed by whoever Apple can get to fab it for them.
John:
Like that would be the long term vision.
John:
It's like short term is going to suck for you because for all the reasons Marco just said, it's not going to be able to emulate your stuff.
John:
It's not going to be a huge increase in performance.
John:
In fact, it might be a dip.
John:
But long term, it's important for Apple as a company to own and control all the major technologies that contribute to its products and blah, blah.
John:
And that's a crappy message.
John:
But you're like, I don't care about Apple's long term strategy.
John:
I just want good products now.
John:
Right.
John:
And so and it's not like Apple needs to do this to save itself from destruction.
John:
Like, well, I understand you got to do what you got to do, Apple.
John:
i still i would still be like i would still be working with intel working on intel maybe buy intel if you have to like whatever you got a lot of money uh like work something out because uh switching to arm would be short term as in like the next few years not so great for apple's customers and as maybe this is not the best time to be doing that
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Hover, and Automatic, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Casey:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I need to hire an editor or something.
Casey:
Weren't you an editor?
Casey:
Weren't you an editor for a while?
Casey:
Isn't that how that worked?
Marco:
You can't be your own editor.
Marco:
I know, I'm just... I was an editor for like five minutes.
John:
You could be your own editor.
John:
You can.
John:
You could be your own editor.
John:
Everybody can.
John:
That's part of the experience of being a blogger is you don't have a staff.
John:
You don't have people doing all this stuff for you.
John:
You're doing it all.
John:
You're writing.
John:
You're conceptualizing the thing.
John:
You're assigning it to yourself.
John:
You're writing it.
John:
You're editing.
John:
You're copy editing it.
John:
You're putting it in the CMS.
John:
You're running the website.
John:
You're doing the whole thing.
John:
So I feel like I mean, you can't do as good a job as someone who has an entire staff, but you don't want to have an entire staff.
John:
That's part of the whole blogging thing.
John:
So, I mean, you it's if you look at the things you have written recently and go back to things you wrote before, you're already editing yourself to be different.
John:
So it's not the system is working as designed.