18: Aluminum-Colored Aluminum
20 Jun 2013Casey’s fans at WWDC, Mac Pro followup, Xbox 180, revisiting larger-screen iPhones, predicting iOS 7 adoption, and pushing the boundaries of graphic design.
Episode Description:
- Casey's fans at WWDC.
- Mac Pro followup. (John's halo-car post)
- The Xbox 180.
- Revisiting the potential for a larger-screen iPhone after having seen iOS 7.
- Predicting iOS 7 adoption.
- Neven Mrgan on iOS 7's icon grid and a rebuttal.
- New Mac Pro appears in Geekbench
- parallelize.c/xargs parallel processing
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we do the accidental car podcast for a minute? Please. Sure. Pretty please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a big week last week. It was a good week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was, it was a huge week for, for everybody, for the show, for John Syracusa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for everybody who matters, it was a big week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was. I had such a great time at WWDC and I know I speak for both of you guys in saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And it was especially peculiar for me, having kind of been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that guy that hangs out with Marco and John for the last couple years and now getting recognized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally. It was the trippiest, most flattering, and an awesome thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know what to make of it. I’m still like processing it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I told you that would happen. When we started this podcast, I told Casey, look, just so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re on a podcast and people listen to it, next year at WWDC, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna know who you are. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. People were coming up. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, John and I, like, you know, people have known who we were at WWDC for a few years, a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, oh my god, he was the star. Everyone’s like, oh my god, I love you on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, everyone was so thrilled. Nobody gave a crap about us. Everyone was so thrilled to meet Casey Lis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a very flattering, bold-faced lie, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean, you were there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, everyone was excited, but I think it was like, oh, you’re Casey. Oh, you’re Marco, and you’re John. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all kidding aside, it was extremely flattering, and And many thanks for everyone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the chutzpah to say hi. I know we talked about it a couple shows ago, but it was still extremely cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to meet all of these people that I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet otherwise, because we would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both been just faces in the crowd. So many thanks for all you guys and gals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that said hi. And had nice things to say, no less. We only had a couple verbal complaints about Neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I consider that a moral victory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was impressed that anybody actually listened to neutral who came up to us at that conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we did have a few fans who really wanted to bring it back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which which was also weird and as a quick aside I drove an m3 today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which generation was that? E90 nice. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was it was really cool. It was like my car plus 10 15% It was fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know, we should do a podcast about cars sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe you think anyone would like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hell no, I I don’t think anyone will.
⏹️ ▶️ John Too bad the pricing on the M3 is not your car plus 15%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s not. No, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, I guess it’s in the ballpark. How much is an M3 these days?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a well-equipped one is something like 70 or 80, right? I mean, I think it’s like in the 70s, something like that. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never priced one out. I mean, my car plus 15% would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, you’re right. My car plus 15% was not even your 70. I’m dead wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, so we should probably talk about nerdy stuff. That’s not cars. What did you guys think of WWDC? Let’s start
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t we do a whole show about this last time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, but a lot has happened since then. Okay, fine We can we can ignore I
⏹️ ▶️ John things in the notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The notes actually I’ve been I’ve been pulling a Marco and largely ignoring the notes, but I do have them up So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t have chrome open. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have your chrome jail open And John, would you like to talk about any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pro details we’ve learned?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I got a little Mac Pro follow up. So we talked about it at length on the
⏹️ ▶️ John last show. And there are two things that I want to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John since then. The first one is about this article that I wrote a while ago called The
⏹️ ▶️ John Case for a True Mac Pro Successor. And it was me arguing the point before we knew what the fate
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac Pro was, that Apple should you to push the envelope in desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computer performance for all the same reasons that car manufacturers make these ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John cars that nobody buys, that are not
⏹️ ▶️ John practical, and that cost way too much money, and that lose money for the companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John all because they want to push the limits of car technology and performance. And in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John deep, deep down, because the people who work at those companies love cars. And that’s why they want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John super cars or Halo cars, as I call them. And so when the new Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John was announced last week, a lot of people, I thought I had addressed this on the last week’s show,
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently not clearly enough. A lot of people were asking me, so is this a true Mac Pro successor?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does this meet the criteria that you laid out in the case for a true
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro successor, or are you still disappointed? And the fact that on the last show, I was saying how this doesn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John look like it’s the machine for me, so on and so forth. I don’t see how this isn’t a true Mac Pro successor,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t it? Well, so to be clear and spell it out. Yes. This is definitely a true Mac Pro successor
⏹️ ▶️ John It completely fits the mold of you know, the supercar type things. It’s it’s ridiculous. It’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not look like a normal computer We don’t know the price yet But I assume it’s gonna be really expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly more expensive than the other things there It has compromises that most people Wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you know expect like the dual GPUs that are going to these big honking GPUs that maybe everybody doesn’t need but at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time, it doesn’t have any internal spinning disk storage, which is kind of like a supercar that has like 900
⏹️ ▶️ John horsepower but a trunk that fits one little tiny bag in it. And I’m hoping,
⏹️ ▶️ John or I’m assuming Apple hopes that they sell way more Mac Pros than people sell their top end supercars.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this computer, despite or perhaps because of the fact that it doesn’t satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the practical needs of various pro users and stuff, definitely fits
⏹️ ▶️ John the bill. So despite the fact that I was disappointed in it last week for various personal reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I thought I expressed in the last show, I’m happy that Apple continues to
⏹️ ▶️ John innovate to use Phil Schiller’s bird in this area and to continue to chase the high end.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing about the Mac Pro is that my opinion of it has softened a little bit from my own personal
⏹️ ▶️ John use since last week’s episode. And since then, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John learned or actually been reminded, I should have I don’t know why I didn’t think of this last week That
⏹️ ▶️ John the gaming performance the thing that that’s really been holding you back like I’m gonna spend all this money on this machine I’m gonna have all these compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John with no internal storage and everything and I’m gonna get a machine That’s not going to fill one of my main
⏹️ ▶️ John Criteria, which is to be able to play PC Mac games really really well because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got these pro GPUs in them and to people who aren’t familiar with the Pro-gpu
⏹️ ▶️ John market or maybe people who are familiar more familiar than I was. That sounds crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, well, these are super high-end GPUs. Isn’t that great for gaming? Aren’t these are going to be, you know, like they’re like $2,000
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs, and there shouldn’t you have awesome gaming performance on this?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you look at like Windows benchmarks and stuff for these pro GPUs that
⏹️ ▶️ John are used for like CAD and 3D programs, and they test Windows games on them, the gaming performance of these GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible. And you say, how can I spend $1,500 on a video card and get terrible gaming performance?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is the drivers. The drivers are made to run Maya or AutoCAD or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John other programs used for professional design. And those programs
⏹️ ▶️ John demand precision and repeatability and reliability. They don’t demand
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of the performance tricks that gaming GPUs use. So you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see a GPU that costs three times as much as another one not perform as well in a game. the PC side on Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you buy one of those high-end GPUs, you get these special, you know, certified OpenGL
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers to be used with whatever software you bought and it works. And when you buy just like a gaming video
⏹️ ▶️ John card, even a super high-end gaming video card, you get a totally different driver, and that one is
⏹️ ▶️ John optimized to make sure you get really high frame rates in Crysis 3 or whatever, because they tune the driver for that. And a lot of that tuning
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with cheating, where they can say, yeah, the OpenGL spec where it says we’re supposed to do this and that in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John like line precision and anti-aliasing or occlusion or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we found that in this game we can detect when this game is running that some, I don’t know if they still do that, but in the old days they would detect which
⏹️ ▶️ John specific game is running and perform some optimization that they knew wouldn’t cause any noticeable graphical glitching in that
⏹️ ▶️ John game just to get more performance out of it. And that’s why I was disappointed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, pro GPUs, that means crappy game performance. It’s like the worst of both worlds. Expensive video hardware and crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John game performance. But on the Mac, that is not the case. On the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John historically, Apple has shipped, used the same driver for the Pro cards
⏹️ ▶️ John and the non-Pro cards. And in the past, that’s meant that Apple’s game performance sucked equally across
⏹️ ▶️ John all the GPUs because they always optimized the drivers for correctness. They would say, okay, let’s do exactly what the OpenGL specs
⏹️ ▶️ John does and correctness first and we’ll worry about speed later and we’ll try to tweak it and so on and so forth. But over the past several releases,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think starting in 10.7, Apple has really tuned their video drivers to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John get decent performance out of games by working with companies like Valve and stuff to sort of do all those cheaty little things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do to make game performance better. But at the same time those same drivers were also
⏹️ ▶️ John driving their high-end cards so it’s my expectation that when I get this new Mac Pro which I think I am going to
⏹️ ▶️ John get now it’s going to use the exact same drivers as a Mac Pro that had
⏹️ ▶️ John a high-end Radeon like a previous generation Mac Pro like it’s not going to be a special slow
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb high precision driver just for these things. It’s going to use the exact same driver as the gaming video card would use.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that means it should have pretty darn good gaming performance. At least as good as,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as it would have had a Mac gaming card. Now, it doesn’t quite help me that much unless Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John also does drivers for boot camp. So if I reboot into Windows, I don’t want to be forced to use like the Windows slow
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers for this Pro GPU or whatever. But just having decent Mac gaming performance
⏹️ ▶️ John on the thing makes me feel a lot better. So I think I’m definitely getting one of these machines now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have to ask, for your priorities as high performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also significant gaming, now that we know what the compromises are for the next Mac Pro, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least we know most of them I think, why not a high-end iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ John The video cards on those things are, I mean, they’re not desktop cards. Some of them might be,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t they use something that uses laptop GPUs?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually pretty good these days. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be like the equivalent of like a $400 desktop card, but I think they’re pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not powerful and they’re not replaceable. So I couldn’t even upgrade them. Not that the GPUs are
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Pro replaceable, but if I’m gonna buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John I always buy it with the very fastest GPU that’s in it so that I can use it for
⏹️ ▶️ John five years or whatever. And at the end of those five years, it’ll still be good. Like I bought what the highest end non-pro
⏹️ ▶️ John video card that I could get with my current Mac Pro. And to this day, I can still play modern games
⏹️ ▶️ John on it at the full resolution of my screen with the settings on normal or even up on high. So I just want to get mileage
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the card, you know? And that would be the 8800 GT? Yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John think of a game that came out recently. Well, not that Wadden did. I’m the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong person to ask. But I’m surprised that that, because the 8800 GT is now, like, what, five years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old? I’m surprised, given the pace of video card innovation, I’m surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can still do that with a five-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John card. Yeah, I mean, I can’t play the very latest games, But I’m not playing the very latest game so when portal 2 came out I
⏹️ ▶️ John could play it just fine full frame rate full resolution Anti-aliasing everything all right, and that was only a couple years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the most recent game. I played was walking dead, which is not a graphically intensive game, but it ran fine Diablo 3
⏹️ ▶️ John when that came out ran fine I mean this is all going to be impaired by what I hope will be
⏹️ ▶️ John my retina screen on my Mac Pro right so then that video card maybe won’t last quite as long
⏹️ ▶️ John because I I don’t know. I don’t know how how many games will take advantage of their retina resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John going forward But that’s what I want. I want to especially in a machine where it’s not replaceable I want to get the most mileage out of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I wouldn’t want to buy something That’s you know okay performance like it’s obvious anything I buy is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the mate 800 GT, right? But I wouldn’t want to buy an iMac With a sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of mediocre desktop GPU with not too much VRAM in it Does that probably last
⏹️ ▶️ John me three or four years and then? you know I would have to Not play
⏹️ ▶️ John PC games anymore think about upgrading it sooner than I wanted especially since if I bought an iMac the screen will probably last Me five
⏹️ ▶️ John years easy because I would probably hold out for a retina iMac, right? And I would be like, oh, I don’t want to get rid of the screen The only thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with this machine is that stupid GPU that I can’t replace, you know so better to get a machine where everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is maxed out to ridiculous degree and Then the whole machine will age sort of together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I had a thought about the displays and a lot of the scuttlebutt at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was geez they didn’t release a retina display for the Mac Pro. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made some hand-wavy talk of, oh, this supports 4K screens, blah, blah, three of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in fact, if I’m not mistaken. But they never announced an actual Apple display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things that occurred to me when the three of us were at dinner one night was if the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this black, I believe it’s aluminum, anodized aluminum, whatever it is, it’s black. if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release a retina display, if Apple releases a retina display, is that also going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be black? And is this the first time that we have not aluminum colored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aluminum or aluminum devices from Apple that are computers, I should say, in a long
⏹️ ▶️ John The displays are already black, though. Like the part you can see when you’re sitting in front of one. I guess the foot is silver, but like they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already changed the surface of the things to be black, like the frame around
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this way. Well, not all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. And it goes edge to edge now, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, not on my high-res MacBook Pros. I mean, your point is still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey absolutely fair. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the external monitors, like the external ones. They change the external monitors to be black when they’re facing
⏹️ ▶️ John you with the exception of the foot. And I think that still matches with the black computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that clashes. I think that’s… They’re neutral tones, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So why no displays then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t know. I mean, maybe they haven’t decided what they can do, haven’t decided pricing. I mean…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, and I don’t know, I forget whether I said this last week or not, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s interesting that Haswell is out for laptops, but they only mentioned the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Airs and they only updated the Airs. So my theory is sometime later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year, in quotes, probably alongside the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch, they will potentially also launch new Retina MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros with Haswell, with Thunderbolt 2, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And alongside those, they will launch Retina displays. And only then the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro and the new Haswell Retina MacBook Pros will be able to drive them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know if that’s a possibility? Haswell,
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and chipset, does it support Thunderbolt 2?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt 2, from what I know, which I’m, you know, I think the best person to ask for this would be Anand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lal Shimpy, but the, and I’m sorry for the pronunciation if I got that wrong which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably got at least some part of it wrong. I believe that the Thunderbolt 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip or chipset or whatever it is that does it is separate from the main motherboard chipset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then can be installed or integrated into any modern Intel board I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And therefore… JetRam says it
⏹️ ▶️ John does. I suppose that’s… I would have to know the dates on that. I vaguely remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the code names of those two different chipsets. I think I only remember the not the current one but the next next one, which is like Falcon
⏹️ ▶️ John Ridge or something. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco could be why. I believe Falcon Ridge is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Thunderbolt 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the next next one. The next one is something else Ridge. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a reasonable reason why those things could have been delayed, that they’re going to run Thunderbolt 2. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s weird that they didn’t get any mention at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John chips are ready, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. I mean, the other explanation is maybe that Intel can’t deliver those CPUs in volume yet. That’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s certainly a more boring explanation for the delay.
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air doesn’t use the same thing. The MacBook Air uses the ultra-low power value
⏹️ ▶️ John this big honking package thing, which is totally different. And apparently, there’s enough of those to say, hey, the MacBook Airs are shipping today,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it’s not like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually, I would expect those would be like the better-binned parts, because those are the ones that can run at super low voltages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I mean, you would think if they can deliver those, they can probably deliver the big ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you would think so. I think the, what do you call it, the Thunderbolt 2 chipset thing
⏹️ ▶️ John could be the delay. Or it could be they just have excess inventory of the Retina MacBook Pros they wanna get rid of or something, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or they’re just holding it back until they can launch the Mac Pro, which is at least Q3, because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro CPUs aren’t out yet. And so if they can do like a big Pro launch where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfy all the Pros at once with a Mac Pro, new Retina MacBook Pros, and a Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display, that would be a nice little event. And maybe they coincide it with a minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update to Final Cut 10 or something like that. something like that, it would it would make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense to, to combine those timers and to, you know, to coalesce those timers into one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That whole that
⏹️ ▶️ John whole that whole Mac Pro announcement was just really weird. I mean, it was acknowledged
⏹️ ▶️ John to be weird in the keynote where they’re like, we normally don’t do this. Like, yeah, you normally don’t do this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John where you say we, this product is really off in the distance. But we know that people are gonna freak out if
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t say anything about it. You know, it’s almost as if like, last year, WWDC, they said, I I know you’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for Mac Pro announcement. And here’s these ones that aren’t really that new. But trust
⏹️ ▶️ John us, next year we’ll have a good one. Like, I mean, they kind of did that by having a public statement, or not a public statement,
⏹️ ▶️ John email response from Tim Cook saying, oh, yeah, I know, next year we’ll have something nice. But like, pre-announcing products,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just crazy. And I guess they did it for damage control, because if they didn’t, we all would have come out. I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why none of us expected a Mac Pro announcement. We were even joking about it, because like, we knew it couldn’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John be ready, because we knew what kind of CPUs it would have to use, and those weren’t ready. And sure enough, those aren’t ready, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple said, you know what? Screw it. We’re going to show it to you anyway. Here it is. You can’t buy it for a while. We won’t even tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John if we have monitors for it. We won’t tell you anything about pricing, but it’s here. It’s shaped like a garbage can. It’s coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a good point, too. QRS in the chat room said Aperture 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, is something to consider here. You know, the new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro has this pretty lopsided design where it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only one CPU socket, so it can get a good amount of CPU power in there, but then it has this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insane amount of GPU power. That seems, from the wording they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used and what’s on their site, it seems as though the dual GPU setup is not optional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like all the Mac Pros will come with the same GPU setup. And if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case, and obviously that’s going to have potential cost implications, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a really lopsided power balance of, you know, you get some CPU power, but what you really want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy this thing for is the GPUs. And what’s interesting, you know, I’ve seen a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few places report that only one of the GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be used to drive the displays, and that the other one is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be used exclusively for like OpenCL type computations. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s interesting that you’re gonna have this ridiculous amount of power that today only a few apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really make any good use of, right? I mean, I don’t think it’s very widely supported yet. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe Apple’s pro apps are gonna be substantially, you know, shifted over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put a lot of work into OpenCL, maybe, you know, more than they already are. And I think they’re already doing some.
⏹️ ▶️ John already uses the GPUs like crazy. And it’s not so much that one GPU is dedicated to OpenCL, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that only one GPU is connected up to the Thunderbolt ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in them for it?
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re both available for OpenCL. When you write an OpenCL program, you’ll see both of those GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John as available as whatever the, I forget what they call them, like computing resources. You see one CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and two GPUs. So you can use both of them. It’s just that only one of them has place where you can plug in a display.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the other one is never going to drive a display. But even when one is driving display,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could run OpenCL stuff on both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Okay. And then what’s interesting about that is that now you’ll have this, this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Mac Pro that for other reasons, it probably is going to be a pretty bad deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s probably not going to be a great value for the, for its CPU performance. It’s not going to be a great value for its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM ceiling. You know, there’s all these different things that, you know, I expect this thing to cost like three or 4,000 bucks base. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if pro users are using these certain software packages that make really great use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of OpenCL, then this machine is going to blow away the entire rest of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Think about what those people would have to pay before. During the lunchtime demo where the guy from Pixar at
⏹️ ▶️ John W2C was up there demoing that program and saying how great it was, if you wanted to get the equivalent GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John power in another like even just the current Mac Pro, it would probably cost him the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of a new Mac Pro just to buy the video cards. Because they’re so ridiculous, like $3,500 for the video card. And that’s another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac Pro. I was thinking about pricing. I think I tweeted this at Dr.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wave this week, where when we both came out of the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ John we both said like $2,999 was our guess for the base price
⏹️ ▶️ John for the thing. But now I think I’ve changed that. and I think they could hit 2500 for the lowest lowest end.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the way they could do that is the AMD Fire Pro GPU line
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in a lot of different sizes. And if they, if Apple decides to offer anything other than the
⏹️ ▶️ John super duper high-end one, they could reduce the price a lot because I think everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John in there is relatively cheap. Like there’s not as many moving parts, there’s just one Intel CPU that cuts like 500
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks off the price right there, which is nice. Apple’s going to have crazy margins on their stupid PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John Express SSD thing, I’m sure, whatever. The RAM middling. And if they can get the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote crappy Fire Pro GPUs in there with much, much less VRAM instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John the maximum. I think I read together
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the maximum is. I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe they’re 6 gigs each. Yeah, 6 gigs each. Not 6. I thought it was 6 gigs combined. So 6 gigs of VRAM each.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, gaming video cards at this point have 2 gigabytes of VRAM. Like the most expensive gaming cards you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get. These things have 6 gigs each.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s not going to ship with a base RAM of the whole machine of 12 gigs. You know, like the video cards are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have more RAM than the main machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the base might be 16 gigs. But anyway, if they cheap out on the GPUs, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could have an entry level model that no one wants to buy, including me, for $2,500.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like both of you guys are in for one, though?
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s going to buy one for every room in the house. Devil is a wastebasket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ll probably buy one, but I’m not I the big two questions about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know whether what the price is going to be and whether there will be retina displays like if this ends up being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the only machines that can drive a retina display and maybe the only one that can do it really well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when those eventually come out then I’ll buy one no question because I really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop sized retina display
⏹️ ▶️ John surely the only one that’s gonna be able to games on the display. I know how important that is to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, I don’t care about that at all. I would feel kind of like an idiot buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this computer that has these two ridiculous high-power GPUs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using them most of the time to display like TextMate and a web browser. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Xcode, that’s usually what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John asked on Twitter today, won’t text editor developers and the people who write Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John now change their applications to take advantage of those dual GPUs. Right, yeah, how?
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t, I’m having trouble thinking of a way that you can use that kind of GPU power in your text editor, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John all the text was like made 3D and flying through some kind of world as you typed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So we’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the matrix text editor. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. All right, so is that all on the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess for now. I mean, we really don’t know much about it yet. That’s the big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Until we know pricing and options, and possibly retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, I think it’s going to be hard to make any other really great statements about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because we don’t have it yet, and there’s so much we still don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. There’s another piece of follow-up that I think mostly John wanted to talk about, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can do a sponsor. So, John, tell me about the new Xbox that just came out today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the obvious joke. You know, sometimes you wonder, like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John these stories happen because there’s a perfect name for it, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just couldn’t resist. So the note, the show note, and the million headlines is Xbox 180,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the obvious headline for the story that Microsoft has reversed its decision on
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the DRM, digital rights management, used game, always online
⏹️ ▶️ John things about the Xbox One that everyone hated. And so to recap, things
⏹️ ▶️ John that people hated were the Xbox had to check in with Microsoft servers every 24 hours you were locked out
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. People hated that. People who were like, especially the military, or people who were going to be away from an internet connection
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, even just people who didn’t like the idea of having to check in. The fact that you couldn’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John game disks to people because the game disk was just a convenient way for you to get the bits onto your computer, and all
⏹️ ▶️ John the rights of the game had to do with the DRM. And so if you bought a game in a store and you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the disc, selling that disc to your friend was pointless, because if they put that disc into their machine, it would do nothing for them,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would say, oh, you don’t own this game, because you don’t have the rights to it according to our servers. And game companies were
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to not allow their games to be resold even in digital form. And so all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things pissed off gamers, and at E3, Sony hammered them in their presentations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony’s presentation was all about, look at how much better we are than Microsoft. And Sony was getting like standing
⏹️ ▶️ John ovations for standard features of game consoles for the past two decades.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh my god, it’s amazing. I can buy a disc in a store and then sell it to my friend. Woo! Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so Microsoft was really getting hammered. And I saw one online poll. It was maybe it was Amazon or some
⏹️ ▶️ John other site. It was like, hey, guys, who’s thinking about getting one of the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John consoles? And it was just PS4 versus Xbox One, because no one cares about the Wii U.
⏹️ ▶️ John And normally those polls, like on the dawn of a console generation launch are always like 50-50
⏹️ ▶️ John each because all the fanboys from both of the consoles go there and they all fill the ballot box and it’s like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty pretty much a dead heat and this was like not over 90% for the ps4 and like the rest for the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John one so it looks like a blowout and that’s just you know one random poll could have just been a bunch of Sony fans who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows but like you never I’ve never seen that in all the console launches that I’ve been through so things were looking bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for Microsoft and what they did which was kind of gutsy but also kind of lame
⏹️ ▶️ John and weird or whatever, was just reversed everything. It said never never mind it’s exactly like the Xbox 360. You go to the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy discs, and that’s it. You can sell the disc, it works exactly like the 360. And they also
⏹️ ▶️ John eliminated all the good features of the Xbox One where you know everyone in your family could play the game for free
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they didn’t live with you, like up to 10 people in your family could play the game. So if you bought it then like
⏹️ ▶️ John your brother at college automatically got the game for free. He didn’t have to buy it again, you don’t have to ship him a disc.
⏹️ ▶️ John And pure digital downloads now it’s just like the 360 where you can do a digital download but if you buy a physical
⏹️ ▶️ John disc this has to be in the drive while you’re playing the game which sucks and it’s stupid because why does the disc need to be there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh it’s because they you know they just completely reversed everything they said I don’t even know how they can do this at this late stage it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the deals involved with publishers and all the software involved is you know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John completely reversing course and most people are happy about it but they got rid of the always online thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John said you have to be online when you set up your Xbox One, but after that you can just be completely offline and
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as the game you’re using doesn’t need internet connectivity to run, then you’re fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of a mixed bag. It’s good in that they reversed their stupid decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bad in that they got rid of all the things that might have been cool, and I think it’s bad like long-term
⏹️ ▶️ John because as I think I said when we originally talked about the Xbox One, everything they were doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was done badly, but in broad strokes the idea that you don’t own a physical disc Instead you own
⏹️ ▶️ John rights to something online. That’s good for all the convenience reasons. They just need to get the particulars
⏹️ ▶️ John of it right. Like, once that’s the case, you don’t use that to then give the publishers
⏹️ ▶️ John more power and forbid people from reselling games and everything. Just make it… instead you should say, Okay, now it’s even easier for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to sell a game to your friend. Sell it through our online thing. You don’t have to bring the disc over to their house and you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to do any of the other stuff and it’s not tied to your account or whatever. You should be able to sell games, sell
⏹️ ▶️ John used games, resell them, and let Microsoft take a little cut, you know? I think Apple has shown that people are not opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that sort of the middleman gets some small cut
⏹️ ▶️ John from providing the convenience of buying and selling goods online.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of a shame that we’ve kind of hit the reset button because Microsoft’s policies were so boneheaded, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John overall idea that spinning plastic discs are stupid and should really just be an accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John way to download things for you and really the entire marketplace should be online. I mean Apple’s proven the entire marketplace
⏹️ ▶️ John being aligned for everything for their desktop operating systems, for the desktop software, for the handheld software. That model works,
⏹️ ▶️ John people like it, it’s great, and Apple’s taking 30%. I mean, Microsoft could take like 5%
⏹️ ▶️ John of used game sales and gamers would still love them for the convenience of being able to one-click sell their game to their friend
⏹️ ▶️ John and get, you know, 10 bucks back or whatever. So that’s the story.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of sad about it. I was never gonna buy an Xbox One anyway. It’s just kind of sad to see Microsoft backpedal like that when
⏹️ ▶️ John really what they could have done is just fixed everything and kept the good and just got rid of the bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So thumbs up on this. I mean, it sounds like you are not pleased with this, but you are pleased with where
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than what they had before. What they had before was just a terrible policy that everyone hated.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just threw out the baby with the bathwater. And, you know, I like them trying to make progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just went a little bit off in the wrong direction. and their correction was history eraser
⏹️ ▶️ John button. This never happened. This thing just behaves like the Xbox 360. Nevermind guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you want to talk to us about Squarespace?
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free, no credit card required. That’s really nice. You can you don’t have to give them a credit card to start
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to SquareSpace for sponsoring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean our site is run on SquareSpace and neutrals, and we’ve never had not one hiccup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great. Wait, does that work? Never had not one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I meant. I’m getting more and more southern with each passing day. It’s not terrible, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco different. Well, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offset us. Yeah, well, that’s true. So I want to talk about iOS 7 a little bit, and we have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things in our accidental show notes. show notes. And I want to go off the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rails a little bit and I want to actually go back to ATP episode one. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to do that is because ATP episode one, before it was really a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, was the three of us talking about an iPhone Plus. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were talking about how one could extrapolate and theorize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what size it would be, whether or not it would exist, etc. And one of the things that’s been bugging me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a good way about what we saw during the keynote was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gestures are a big deal in iOS 7. And specifically, there’s a gesture to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back a screen in iOS 7. And there’s been a lot of talk about gestures in iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the thing that struck me about the gesture to go back a screen is, if it’s very easy kind of system-wide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go back one level, it may not be so terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a back button that at least for right-handed people is too far away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in other words if you look at the iPhone 5 for most normal-sized people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back button is in normal-sized right-handed people the back button is way up into the left and is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of a stretch to reach. Well what if you didn’t have to reach that anymore? Then could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone would that be enough to make it not annoying to have a bigger phone? Does that make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well first of all I think that you it sounds like you’re saying that right-handed people have to hold their phone in their right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true and obviously, well, that was the assumption, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you’re already making a great point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s wrong? What?
⏹️ ▶️ John You do that? I hold my phone in my right hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hold my phone in my right hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s crazy talk. I mean, I don’t have a phone, but you know what I mean, I hold my iPod Touch in my right hand. I mean, I do it lefty too,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You guys are
⏹️ ▶️ John nuts. Well, think about the slide to open. How do you do that with your left hand? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey With my left thumb. That is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Much better when you’re pulling your thumb towards than when you’re extending your thumb out. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are nuts. Well, I think what’s interesting also, and I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might, I think I can safely say without violating the NDA,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think anyone’s going to complain if I say that auto layout has been heavily encouraged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you look at a few things. look at that they’re really pushing you to use auto layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re the new design of iOS 7 even and the and the designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re kind of encouraging by example in the apps of things like you know stripping away ornamentation and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big heavy textures and everything else the designs are probably pretty stretchable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more so than they used to be you know where it used to have it used to be back before the iPhone 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could design like the old the old Tappbots apps before Tweetbot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was like Convertbot and stuff like that, where you could basically design a 320 by 480
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, and that was it. That was your whole app. You can just design this one big bitmap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you only had one screen size to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like web development with tables, when you’d slice
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco up everything into images and make everything about tables. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And iOS 7 is responsive design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, yeah. iOS 7 is like the visual style they’re going for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First the iPhone 5 told everyone, oh crap, if your app is not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a scrolling view with bars on top and bottom, this is going to be non-trivial to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now I think the encouragement to use auto layout,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus this back gesture, plus the whole style of iOS 7 being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so flexible, I think, more easily and breaking fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things visually. I think that all is, if not pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to different iPhone screen sizes, I think it would at least pave the way to make that a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do if they chose to. And, you know, reading the tea leaves a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would not surprise me at all if they did a new iPhone this fall. That was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they do more than one, but, you know, we talked before, I think they need a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screened iPhone because, you know, whatever Tim Cook says about the displays, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are big Apple fans say about phone sizes, the fact is the market is demanding them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly. And Apple is losing a lot of the high-end market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the profitable market. They’re losing a lot of that high-end market by not having a larger screen phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw a monstrous phone today. I’m assuming it was a Samsung, and it was in the hands of a young child, and it just made
⏹️ ▶️ John it look even bigger. It was like, comically, I guess It had to be one of those note things, but it was ridiculous. It looked like
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad Mini. There’s a bunch of things in iOS 7 that lend itself to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even the lock screen with the gesture for swiping, where you don’t have to swipe in that one particular region to swipe anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John The icons in the home screen are bigger. So I mean, anything they make
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger, you’re like, oh, well, this will look more normal on a larger size. Even in the navigation bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John the text that’s in the buttons that would say the word back for the back button, that text
⏹️ ▶️ John is larger because the buttons don’t have borders around them. And anything that they make larger, you think, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, when this is on a larger phone, it will fit in better there. They’re not going to complete extremes, because they do
⏹️ ▶️ John have the adjustable text sizing. Did they show that in the keynote? I hope so, unless I just broke an NDA.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I thought they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John But whatever. The adjustable text sizing doesn’t actually alter the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of things like navigation elements, because that would force people to use auto layout.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You really use auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout. The bar metrics are all, I think, permanent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But like I said, the button text is bigger. So they’re trying to strike a balance. They don’t want everything to
⏹️ ▶️ John be bigger because then it would look wrong on the smaller phone. They don’t want everything to scale because that will make app development a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, auto layout combined with larger icons, combined with bigger text on the navigation, but with the same nav bar
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes and all that stuff. It’s like, I mean, as we were discussing in the first episode of ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t expect a humongously bigger phone, just a little bit bigger and bigger in two dimensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think iOS 7 is perfectly suited for an ever so slightly bigger iPhone that both has a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John higher resolution and also like a lower dot per inch because then you could, you know, those two factors combined,
⏹️ ▶️ John those two relatively small factors combined give you a phone that is bigger than the iPhone 5
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not comically large.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I, you know, before, when we were talking about this, whenever that was, like five months ago or whatever that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I had my theory about, well, they can keep the same resolution and just make everything a little bit bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone would be fine with that. Now, I’m not so sure that’s the case. You know, now, I think you’re right that they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just increase the resolution a little bit and just, you know, make the panel, you know, give us, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is it now? Four inches diagonal? You know, give us maybe like a five inch one, you know, or four, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four and a half inch would look substantially larger. And I think they could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and even just scale the resolution up proportionally if they really want to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think now they’re obviously preparing for non-fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution iPhones, if that makes sense. Or rather, for multiple sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iPhones. I think the pieces are in place now, the tea leaves are starting to line up to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is probably where they’re heading.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it still doesn’t quite address the Andy Anako issue that I think we discussed in that first episode, which is that the reason he loves
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phones with larger screens is not just that it’s larger, which I think is at least half of it. But there’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it is that Android phones, when running on larger screen or Android software running
⏹️ ▶️ John a larger screen phones, put up more UI and like a min and a miniature version of what iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John version of apps do. Because I put once you have the iPad version, I’ve got all the space, I can have a totally different UI, right? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly bigger phone, if it’s bigger enough, maybe you have room for a toolbar. And before you didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you have room for one more toolbar button, like, mate, there are things that you can do to actually give you an application that
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t doesn’t just give you more viewable area for your content, which is great and everything. It doesn’t just have larger text sizes and
⏹️ ▶️ John larger buttons, but also says, oh, there’s just room for a little bit more information. And maybe a feature that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fit on the phone can fit there. I don’t know if Apple’s phone will be bigger enough to even give you one more
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar icons for the space or one more toolbar word in the new world of iOS 7 where they like to use
⏹️ ▶️ John words sometimes instead of icons. But it’s possible. It’s possible that applications, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got Optimize for iPad, right? So it’s a completely different application, basically, even though under the covers it might be very similar. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI can be very different. And then you have your iPhone 5 size version of it, and then you have your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 6 Plus or whatever, where you get one more toolbar icon, or you didn’t have a toolbar before and now you do,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you have another little row of things on the right side or something like that. I would really be interested in seeing that, but that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John last piece of the puzzle. I don’t think that’s necessary. I think simply making a larger screen is plenty,
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger resolution, larger everything. People will still love that. But if it’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to optimize your app for it, the apps that do that to provide a little bit more UI features, I think that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be the icing on the cake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see what happens. I just thought it was interesting that all the signs are pointing more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey towards yes. And that gesture, I don’t know why, but for me, it really made me think, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? This iPhone Plus, or whatever they’re going to call it, that really could be a thing. The other thing that’s been noodling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at me all week since I left the keynote was their talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS version adoption. And the general gist of it is that, oh, everyone upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the latest version of iOS immediately. And you know, of course, immediately is defined as a few weeks or whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. But people upgrade to the latest version of iOS very quickly. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally true, especially on point releases. But what occurred to me was, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading David Smith’s iOS version stats and seeing that adoption of iOS 6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not that quick at all because everyone was freaking out about Apple Maps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, right? Well, I think that’s actually not supported by the data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a very, very common theory. But, like, so basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the theory was, okay, everyone’s holding back because they don’t want iOS 6 Maps, etc. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the theory was that once Google Maps app comes out, then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should see a big bump in 6 adoption. And you didn’t. Like, there was almost no change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the rate of adoption when the Google Maps app came out for iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it looks like that probably was not the reason. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, I think the biggest reason why iOS 6 adoption, you know, I think it climbed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a relatively normal rate. And then it just kind of peaked at like 92 or whatever percent that it is now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you look, iOS 5 adoption, like iOS 4 adoption has shrunk proportionally, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d expect. iOS 5 adoption has kind of hit a wall. And my theory there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all about the iPad 1. that, you know, granted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has sold a lot more devices that run everything else than the iPad one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there still are a lot of iPad ones in use. And because the iPad one was sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until like what two and a half years ago? Like it wasn’t it wasn’t that long ago that it was still sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people were buying this like $500 plus computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type device. And so the end and it’s not on a contract, it’s not subsidized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they expect that to last more than two years. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still a lot of iPad Ones in use that can’t run iOS 6 and I don’t know, you know, how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the percentage of people still on 5 that represents. Probably not, probably not even the majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, but I bet that’s like a big solid chunk in there that just is not going away anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know what, you’re probably right. I just know whether or not it was data it backed or not, maybe I made that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. But certainly anecdotally, I know a lot of my mildly nerdy friends had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, oh, I can’t get that new Apple Maps thing. It’s terrible. I won’t have it. And either way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I was just trying to build up to the question, not argument, of what do we think about iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adoption? Do we think it’ll be quick? Do we think it’ll be really, really slow by comparison to other versions of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS? My inclination is I feel like it will be kind of in the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, which is, of course, the worst hedging ever, but I really think it’ll be less quick than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the less remarkable major releases, but I think a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are going to really like it, and I think that it’ll be alright, but I’m curious to hear what you guys think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll probably be driven, like a lot of these things are, they’re driven and aided by the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple continues to sell more and more phones. Now, granted, the growth rate has leveled off a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John but assuming iOS 7 launches with a new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and the new phone’s gonna come with iOS 7, and people will very quickly stop buying the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one, and so you get this immediate boost from just like all the iPhone 5S or 6
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the heck it is, especially if it’s an iPhone 6. If they don’t do a 5S and it’s actually a different form factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if it’s like a bigger one or something, that will give iOS 7 a huge boost out of the gate
⏹️ ▶️ John and skew the statistics. I have to think that the adoption will probably be about the same as
⏹️ ▶️ John it was for 6. If only because, like, that thing where they push
⏹️ ▶️ John the updates at you. I mean, I know iOS 7 is going to have automatic updates, and same for Mavericks and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I think these are in the keynote. That will drive adoption
⏹️ ▶️ John going forward even more. But even just the current model where they’re like, hey, there’s a new version of iOS. Do you want to upgrade?
⏹️ ▶️ John And people hit a button, and then it does it. That’s what’s driving all this adoption. like the you know that
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeff Atwood post from I guess it’s years ago at this point of the infinite version Google Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best one of the pioneers in this where you don’t do anything you don’t have to make any
⏹️ ▶️ John choices you use it and if you don’t if you don’t know anything about it if you use it and quit that program and relaunch
⏹️ ▶️ John it it is updating itself unbeknownst to you like they’ll put a little colored arrow or whatever in the toolbar and if you
⏹️ ▶️ John notice that you can go oh I can update Google Chrome now or whatever like it used to be more intrusive now it’s just like look we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John update you Google Chrome. There’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, maybe there is some way to stop it. But the defaults are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to get updated. What version of Google Chrome you’re using? Who knows? The latest. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the idea that you don’t have versions of software that you get comfortable with, where you buy a 2002 car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry about the cars again. And you’re like, oh, I’m happy with this car. If you went out in your driveway and it was replaced with a 2003 model, you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but I like the 2002 one. I like the way the shifter worked, and the seat fabric was nicer, and the radio
⏹️ ▶️ John controls were better. You just get used to what you have. Software in the past has been like that, where you get
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop version 3.0, and you’re like, oh, wow, layers,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is awesome. And this program is great. And then 4.0 comes out, and you’re like, oh, that’s just weird. I don’t like it. Actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should have done 2.5 to 3, because you could say maybe you like channel operations and not layers. But anyway, you get used to a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John software, and you say, OK, well, this is the software. And it continues to work, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it. Why would I ever want it to change? And if it changed underneath, you’re like, whoa, what’s this? The menus
⏹️ ▶️ John change, and the keyboard shortcuts change. and they change all sorts of things about this program. What happened to my old program? I want that
⏹️ ▶️ John one back. Because you think of software as this one thing that you get, like a physical
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like a car. Whereas with Chrome, you’ve shown that people can be trained not to think
⏹️ ▶️ John of software that way. If you use Chrome, the program that you’re using now is not like the one you were using several
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. And you didn’t do anything about that. You could have just never touched any button, never said yes to any updates, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just updates itself. And you come in and like, oh, Chrome is different today. And for the most part, it’s different,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster, better, it’s more stable, has more features. But also it changes stuff like oh the menus are different
⏹️ ▶️ John and the preferences are different on the Mac version things kept moving into the into browser tabs and
⏹️ ▶️ John out of like real UI as they tried to make everything web-based and that kind of annoyed me. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the future of software and that’s what’s driving this adoption more
⏹️ ▶️ John than people saying oh iOS 6 I want to get it. It’s because every single iOS device that can upgrade to
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 6 showed a prompt that says do you want to upgrade to iOS 6 and it showed it again. And like, I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John persistent it is, but people eventually hit the button. Android has eight bazillion ancient versions because those phones
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even run. Like, you know, it’s up to the carriers to upgrade them. And like, ah, screw it, we’re not doing anything. If all those phones
⏹️ ▶️ John had little prompts, they’d all be running the latest version of Android too, but they can’t and they don’t have those prompts, so they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, I mean, one of the biggest things which you touched on earlier, one of the biggest things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving iOS adoption is that all new iOS devices are always sold with the latest OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because the sales of iOS devices tend to still be growing quarter by quarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or year by year, every year there’s way more iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added into the pool of actively used devices. And everything added past an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS’s release date has the newest OS. Whereas Android, you still have phones that are sold today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are running not the current version of the OS. And sometimes they’re running versions that are like six months or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year or even more old. So, you know, iOS, as long as sales of iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay strong and you remain not able to downgrade them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re always gonna see very, very strong version adoption.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple had some stat that I can’t remember. It was something like, you know, the number of iOS devices sold in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John year is more than the number of iOS devices sold in all of history before that, or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve claimed that a lot, like, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John many years, that is the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, I mean, growth has leveled off so maybe they won’t be able to claim that next year. But that gives their, that combined
⏹️ ▶️ John with the fact that they can upgrade, and like you said, all the new versions, all the new hardware comes with the newest version.
⏹️ ▶️ John That drives adoption. And so they use it as a point like, our adoption is great because people,
⏹️ ▶️ John because users really love our latest version of the OS. And I don’t really think it’s the case. Not that it matters,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like iOS 7 will freak people out. But they’re going to upgrade it anyway, because the buttons are going to come on the screen, and they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to press it, and they can’t downgrade. And it’s going to come on their new, when their contract expires,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s to come on the new iPhone. So guess what 90% adoption.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I have more to say on that. But first, let me break for a minute to talk about our second sponsor for today.
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⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sad I can’t go to that this year. I tried to get Finnegal work into paying for me to go, but no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh well, maybe next time. So back to iOS 7 for a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know, WBDC happened, we did our show, and we all gave our opinion of it. Then I went home, and I showed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my wife the beta on my iPhone 4S. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her immediate reaction was, ew, this looks really cheap. You know, looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the home screen, looking at those often terrible icons, like, she really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very turned off by the appearance of the home screen. And I think it was mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the crappy icons. And her initial experience was, I don’t really want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep using this. Like, I don’t really want to play with this. This is kind of gross and I’m a little scared of where they’re going here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, she played with it for another couple of minutes at my urging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, later on that evening, she’s using her regular iPhone with iOS 6 on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and she’s like, you know what? This looks old. And she’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I actually, I want the new one, and I want a white iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the current one’s black. The worst part of iOS 7 is it encourages people to buy white iOS devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. First of all, actually, I have a white iPad mini, because the new style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have a black iPhone 5, but I think, ultimately, I think the black aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not aging well. You know, the edges get the scratches and you can start seeing the color underneath,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know, I’m not crazy about the way the black ones look in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, I think this is gonna probably reflect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people’s opinion of iOS 7, because when you first see it, you’re kinda like, huh, that home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen is kind of ugly looking. But then, you know, once the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS sinks in, and once you start to use it, you start to realize, okay, well, there’s, you know, some of those home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen decisions are pretty bad. But overall, this really does look very modern. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it starts to really show you how dated the old iOS appearance has become.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So did Tiff get deeper than than just looking at the home screen? Like did she actually play with a few apps?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I open up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like calendar and mail and stuff like that. Like I didn’t have any, you know, third party apps really installed on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in stuff and she was poking around with that a little bit. It was not a very long interaction, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give you that, but just having seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, only having seen that for a few minutes, she was then able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to recognize, oh crap, my old iPhone looks, or my current iPhone looks old by comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so she wanted the new one, just because, you know, it really is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new and fresh and modern. And I think, I really think that’s going to be a very common
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and I know Tiff pretty well, and she doesn’t strike me as the, ooh, shiny kind of person, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that going to be the reaction from, you know, your average Joe or Susie, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just new and shiny? Or do you think it’s deeper than that? I happen to think it’s deeper than that, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nerd. And so that’s not unexpected.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s going to be shocking to people who aren’t paying attention. They’re going to be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John whoa, this doesn’t look like my iOS. But at that point, they will have no choice. And they will use
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a week and get used to it. And three or four things will continue to annoy them, just like three or four things annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John them about the old one. But they’ll get used to it. Like, it’s going to be a differentiator.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s the most important feature of this change from the regular person’s perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it is unmistakably different than the previous one. And as I said in the past podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple needed to make a change. This is a change. That is an essential feature of this, that customers
⏹️ ▶️ John can identify at a glance that is different. Because that’s what iOS needs at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. It needs a clean break with the past and something new. And as long as it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John completely unusable or just seen as horrendously ugly, it’ll be fine. Think about Windows 8, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John has some horrendously ugly parts of it. But that’s not what annoyed people. People weren’t annoyed that Windows 8 was ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were annoyed they couldn’t find anything and nothing worked and stuff like that. So as long as Apple gets the functionality part of it right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they’re on the right track there, the individual decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John about aesthetics are not as important as the fact that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John just immediately identifiable as a different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that’s right. And the fact is, it still does work roughly the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. There are a few little tweaks here and there. And there’s slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated or more modern things like the back gesture, more updated navigation structure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. But it all still works pretty much the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for people who have never seen the multitasking bar in iOS 6, they will continue
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco see it in iOS 7. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t notice that it’s any different. So we look at every single thing that’s different because we know every nook and cranny of iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I even wonder about, I mean, it kind of explains why Apple put that little upward-facing
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow to say, hey guys, control center is down here. And it’s a convenient way for you to change stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another one of those features. Well, maybe it’s like notification center, where the first time most people activate
⏹️ ▶️ John notification center, it’s probably an accident. They’re like, what’s this thing? I was in this app and this little thing peaked
⏹️ ▶️ John down from the top for a second. And then I went back to using it. What is that? And I did another app, and this thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John up there. Eventually, people will discover this thing down there. But unlike probably Notification Center, once people
⏹️ ▶️ John discover Control Center, they’ll be like, oh, fast way to turn Wi-Fi on and off, things that people can understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John or change the volume, or whatever. I’m hoping that that will be a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that people will latch onto. Again, for the people who don’t know that you can open the multitasking tray and
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the left, and there’s stuff over there that’s useful, Control Center is the much
⏹️ ▶️ John larger, nicer version of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean, we… so I got my mother-in-law for this past Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She has this nice radio, this nice, you know, little radio thing in their living room, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’s been using the iPad, and she was getting into Pandora. So I got her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Airport Express, so that she could then airplay the Pandora to the little radio in the living room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And having to describe to a relatively non-technical person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the steps involved in turning on it because of course Pandora on the iPad doesn’t have an airplay button because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their apps are extraordinarily mediocre. But trying to explain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a regular person how to go to the multitasking tray, swipe over, find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the airplay button, tap that, tap the room. Like now, it’s swipe up, tap airplay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s three fewer steps than there were before and it’s way more clear. There’s going to be so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many interactions like that that are just so much easier with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I wanted to note was if you look at Apple’s iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page, there’s the big image of a white iPhone 5 with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home screen. There’s a couple paragraphs of text and then there’s, what is this, three, six, nine, 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey images of all the familiar apps. Well, they’re not images actually, I think they’re little videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they’re all the familiar apps that they’re showing. And the headline is, see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 7 in action. So it’s clear that they’re trying to, shop isn’t the right word, but familiarize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people with what’s coming. So whenever the time comes that iOS 7 is out, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it won’t be so jarring. And I think Apple’s a little nervous about it, and I think they should be, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in all, it won’t be bad. Anyway, do we want to talk about Nevin Mergen’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I do, I do. Sure. Because I put it in the notes, that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re preparing a little too much, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one sentence and a link, and then it’s not even a sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Getting a little nervous.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not long. All right, so Nevin’s post is another in a long series of
⏹️ ▶️ John people with design backgrounds and not commenting on iOS 7 about what they like, what they don’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to to divine the philosophy behind it and reconcile what Apple has said with the reality of
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS and all that stuff. And Nevin’s post was very focused. And it’s clear that he has
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of chewed on this design in his head for a long time and finally decided that some
⏹️ ▶️ John of it just looks wrong to him. And he focused on the icons showing, I think he showed the App Store icon, the
⏹️ ▶️ John little circle, and the A conforms to the grid that Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ive and his team has fully laid out for iOS icons to make them all look the same, They have concentric
⏹️ ▶️ John circles and boxes. And they made a point of showing how, even though all the home screen icons look different,
⏹️ ▶️ John they all sort of touch on important points in this grid and conform to it in the right way. And he was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the grid is wrong. Look at that circle in the app store. If I was designing this, it would be smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it should be smaller because it looks wrong when it’s bigger. And I read that post, and I thought there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of really obvious RDE design type replies to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I found one of them. I was glad to see someone tackle a lot of it. This is from Ari Warner. We’ll have his links in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. This is up on Medium, a site which I don’t really like the URLs from because you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read them. But anyway, he responded to Nevin’s post explaining how wrongness is not really applicable
⏹️ ▶️ John in cases of design because you need to talk about it in context and whether it fulfills the role. It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of art. It’s not just supposed to be pleasing to the eye. It has a functional aspect and so on and so forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so both those notes will be in the links will be in the show notes. The my main reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John to Nevin’s thing was and I think I think people I’m not gonna call myself an artist But I did
⏹️ ▶️ John do a lot of art related things early in my life and still sort of have that bent Believe it or not as a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of the things I always found myself doing when I was doing, you know visual artwork and even
⏹️ ▶️ John visual design stuff is trying to prevent myself from
⏹️ ▶️ John giving in to the feeling that Nevin has which is when you make something
⏹️ ▶️ John and and you’re sort of artistically inclined, you can look at it and see that it’s not quite right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have a little bit more experience and a little bit more skill, you can see that it’s not quite right and know what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with it and fix it. So that’s what he did with the app store icon. He said, this doesn’t look right to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And actually I can go further than that. I know why it doesn’t look right. It’s because the space
⏹️ ▶️ John around the circle is not quite right. If I change the circle to this size, now it’s more pleasing to me. And it’s sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John an intuitive sense that you have. That’s the word that Nevin used. made another tweet about intuition being a data-driven
⏹️ ▶️ John process running on a machine with thousands of years of evolution behind it or something to that effect. But you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it and you just feel that’s wrong. And so what you can do if you’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of art is just keep changing it until you feel happy with it. Oh, that doesn’t look quite right. Oh, that doesn’t look…
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you know what it is about it that’s wrong, you can keep moving it more and more towards that idea until you look away and you’re like, now
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. That looks beautiful, right? And some Some people just don’t have that. They can look at one logo and another
⏹️ ▶️ John logo, like, yeah, they’re about the same. Another person, one logo with a circle that’s 5% bigger can look
⏹️ ▶️ John totally wrong, and the other one is like, oh, that’s the one, right? But if you give in to that feeling when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making something, if every single aspect of it you just use
⏹️ ▶️ John your intuition to say, okay, that’s not right, I’m going to make it better, that’s not right, I’m going to make it better, what you end up doing is sort of painting the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire design with a sort of sameness, where, especially like in web design,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even just when you’re doing, you know, drawing a picture or something, then you step away from it and you’re like, oh, now I
⏹️ ▶️ John have made this entire thing pleasing to the eye in all aspects and it looks bland
⏹️ ▶️ John and boring. And so one of the first impulses I can remember having when I was taking art
⏹️ ▶️ John lessons as a kid is that sometimes when you’re drawing something or designing something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you take some aspect of it and you intentionally make it look quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote wrong. wrong in the sense of ugly or anything, but you push the
⏹️ ▶️ John limit of, you say, this would look perfect and right and nice and beautiful and, you know, be like the golden ratio
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would look like a beautiful woman and it would look like nature and it would look like a fractal and it would just be so pleasing to the eye.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I want to push it slightly more along one axis because it creates a kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of visual and emotional tension. You can’t do that with all aspects because then you just make something that’s ugly, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you take one aspect of it and you press it a little bit, sometimes with the purpose but sometimes just
⏹️ ▶️ John because you like you know what this will be more interesting if I make this one aspect of it
⏹️ ▶️ John not conform to this ideal of beauty that I have my head and you’re knowingly doing that and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that’s what iOS 7 is doing but when I look at it I think there are parts of this
⏹️ ▶️ John design that is that’s unsettling or some would say ugly colors are usually easier to be ugly but like the circles
⏹️ ▶️ John like this I saw them and they look too big to me as well but I thought like look they know that these circles
⏹️ ▶️ John seem too big perhaps Perhaps it’s for readability, the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon needs to be readable instead of just visually pleasing because if you made it smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t look quite as nice. But it also could be that a design where everything is made to conform
⏹️ ▶️ John to that beautiful ideal is more boring and lacks character.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m willing to believe that some aspects of iOS 7’s design were done with
⏹️ ▶️ John that in mind. a design that is beautiful in all aspects and perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John conforms to our ideal of beauty is boring and I like it to push the envelope in some
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect because that’s more interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh the alternative there is that maybe Johnny Ive isn’t that good a graphical design which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John He didn’t drill his icons himself. That’s true. There are more boring explanations that they made them bigger so
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re more readable and they’re gonna refine them and the colors are harder to go by But it’s the same kind of thing in color. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you just, especially if you’ve done art for a really long time, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you get burned out on just everything being beautiful and perfect. And like sometimes you make something intentionally unsettling.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think there’s a tension in that kind of design that tickles
⏹️ ▶️ John the brain nether regions of artists who look at it. And they find that nicer. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you end up with something that’s polarizing. And regular people probably don’t care, except maybe about the colors, which people will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John interpret as ugly. But I think these icons and everything else about it will be refined over time. But I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t do a lot of the revisions that you see. Like, oh, I’ve redesigned iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John See how it’s better this way? And there’s just this sameness to them of just making everything boring and
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful in conventional ways, or desaturating the colors and making it all
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful and low contrast and pale and grayscale, and lots of other designery tendencies
⏹️ ▶️ John that, if applied en masse to an entire OS, make the whole thing boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s too early to say whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just bad at this right now or whether this is intentionally along one side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think time will tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m certainly interested to see what the fallout is from all the complaining about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icons. Are they going to do a Microsoft Xbox 180 or are they just going to plow forward and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John them back. I mean, like, Microsoft’s design of Windows 8 was kind of, we have this bold direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John but try to, like, in terms of shapes, I guess, if not in terms of colors, try to
⏹️ ▶️ John make things reasonable. Like, there are no equivalents of those icons with the two big circles in Windows 8
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve seen, right? They fit things inside the boxes with correct spacing and margins,
⏹️ ▶️ John and nothing is uncomfortably too big or too small within the borders, Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John some of those icons, like the grid itself, I mean, that outer circle is just too darn close to the edges
⏹️ ▶️ John of that round rack. And it’s uncomfortably close for people with design sensibilities. And surely,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone inside Apple who has any design sensibilities knows what Nevin put in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John That that isn’t the most pleasing visual arrangement. But I can think
⏹️ ▶️ John of lots of reasons why they would intentionally do that. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, thanks a lot to our two sponsors for this week, Squarespace and Unevent Apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I guess we’ll see you next week!
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, D-N-T,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the live listeners, we should specify that the second show this week will be an early recording. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know you kind of implied this, but it’s an early recording because John’s traveling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re recording next week’s episode this Friday, so in two days from now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully Apple will not buy Nintendo on Monday.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey made you think of that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking of a story that it would kill me not to be able to talk about in a timely manner,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we’d publish the show for next week, and it would not be about Apple buying Nintendo. People
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like, what the hell is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, Marco, has your Tumblr money come in? Why don’t you just buy Nintendo yourself?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Nintendo yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey then you can sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, I’ve gotten good at that. You guys see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Mac Pro benchmark that was leaked like an hour, like 15 minutes after we stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking with the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. I clicked on it but we had moved on by then. I didn’t I didn’t get to read it. Show me the number. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was so annoyed about. Yeah, here they’re doing it again. Don’t compare the new Mac Pro to the old Mac Pro. We all agree the old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro sucks we want to compare it to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well there’s a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are interesting about this benchmark first of all it is the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time we’ve seen as far as I know it’s the first time we’ve seen any benchmarks of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xeon e5 v2 series right does it I mean this is I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t been keeping up it’s possible I don’t even think I think this is the first time that a particular Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco E5 model has even been leaked so now if this is correct now we know there will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a model called the E5 2697 it’ll be 2.7 gigahertz and it’ll have 12 cores that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know that’s all new information but beyond that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I think the performance here is really impressive it’s obviously very impressive to get a geekbench overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco score of almost 24,000 out of one socket I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John testing like less than 1 3rd of the transistors in this thing well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well There were there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old there were multi-core tests and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John no But I mean like the GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the most right you power and that devices in the GPUs I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know benches is stressing us. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it does any GPU or maybe it has a different mode for I don’t know But yeah, this doesn’t mention GPUs at all, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing. It’s all it’s only a CPU benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of like it’s like weird. It’s like you know come up with a good car analogy, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m Benchmarking benchmarking the the gas
⏹️ ▶️ John mileage of the Veyron It’s an interesting benchmark But maybe not what that car is designed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John and so this machine comes right like it’s basically a bunch of GPUs RAM and SSD You know by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way a CPU attached to the thing to run it all In terms of like transistor count
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe and like as mark pointed out perhaps in terms of RAM count as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the sad part is like what they’ve been able to pull off this really great score
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with one socket blows away the previous 12 core by something like 10 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percent that did with two sockets but imagine if they made a two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco socket version of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John then you could have 45,000 geekbench score well is do you can you find software
⏹️ ▶️ John uses 24 cores that’s pretty difficult to find video encoding scaling yeah video
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey about your magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey script that you wrote way back when? I remember seeing that flyby during your Tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you were trying to encode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Parallelize? Yeah, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey script that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just… I mean, and there’s like… I think there’s now an argument for XARGs or something that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly the same thing. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John make minus J, you know, 25.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what annoys me when I edit this show is that MP3 encoding is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well parallelizable. Because there’s like this bit reservoir or something. I don’t know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason. I was looking I was looking into it Why like the lame encoder is not? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you know it’s any any compression scheme the the data depends on the data that
⏹️ ▶️ John comes both before it and after it So it’s not easy to break it up into chunks because the chunks. You know are
⏹️ ▶️ John related to each other
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encoders are so insanely CPU intensive that I would imagine they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were designed from the very beginning to be more parallel
⏹️ ▶️ John But they have the same thing like video codecs have the thing where like the current frame depends on the past frame and the future
⏹️ ▶️ John frame and so like obviously these are parallelizable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But there’s blocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like the B frame or something and then there’s like a block and you can like you can pass one block to a different thread.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like it’s parallelizable But it’s not as simple as something like you know just chop the data up
⏹️ ▶️ John into pieces have those pieces process independently reassemble the results Which would be like strict linear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right exactly? But yeah, I don’t know I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What concerns me about this this 12 core is that let me see I wonder I wonder if we can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me pull up a comparison between the like the single threaded tests of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus my current 3.33 gigahertz two generations old Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might be slower in some in certain things because I just have that raw clock speed advantage you know anyway I’ll do that after the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John subs this is very
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting or clock speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is very interesting though like that this tells us this tells us quite a lot of new information that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people like oh good the new Mac Pro is faster but if you look this this announces details about the Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it confirms you know, certain percentage improvements over the previous Xeons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is very interesting to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on a wildly unrelated note, Sam the Geek in the chat was asking how you and Marco, you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I met and then I said it’s a long and mostly uninteresting story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Simon Cowell, I said, and John Syracuse will tear apart why the friendship is not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that great. Which I thought was pretty awesome. I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we should tell the story because I think I’d rather watch all our friends in the chat just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably more interesting than the real story.