62: Journey Would Be Wasted On You
24 Apr 2014Developers learning new things, using OS X betas, Thunderbolt 3, what’s holding the iPad back, whether tablets will be marginalized by bigger phones and smaller laptops, and the Sega CD.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up on pCell and database scaling, including horizontal sharding schemes, tiered data layers, and taking a stand against the "premature optimization" tautology.
- When and why do developers learn something new, and why does Marco keep using PHP for everything?
- OS X Beta Program for End Users
- Casey and Marco make John proud (spoiler)
- New third-generation Thunderbolt details
- Overcast update
- Are iPad sales leveling off? Why?
- How we use our iPads today
- Limitations in modern iOS
- Are iPad apps stagnating?
- Jean-Louis Gassée's take
- Gruber's response
- Casey on T-Mobile's Free Internet (relevant T-Mobile info)
- Apps mentioned:
- Will tablets be marginalized by bigger phones and smaller laptops?
- After-show:
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John You think if we wait another decade, this 90s music will wrap around
⏹️ ▶️ John and become awesome like the 80s music did? Or will that just never happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John As I always do, I listened to the show last week and I kept waiting for myself to make a point that I meant to make
⏹️ ▶️ John during the show. And it’s conceivable that I stopped paying attention for three
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds and missed myself saying this. So if I’m repeating something I said in the very last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to be clear, you are following up with your theoretical past self.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t have notes or anything, but when we were talking about P Cell, I’m like, this is one of the major points I want to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s about scaling, which we also talked about in the last show. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how I could have possibly managed to miss it. But just in case, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the innovations that the company that makes the P Cell thing is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing to the table is the ability to solve this problem that we discussed in the last show,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just sort of solving for what signal needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be sent out by all the various towers so that the interference combines to
⏹️ ▶️ John make exactly the right signals in exactly the right place. So not just for one phone, but for two, 10, 5, 1,000, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every single one of those, all the towers that are transmitting that could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John be overlapping and interfering with each other, need to do so in such a way that every individual phone gets
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the signal that’s meant for it in exactly the spot that the phone is. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you can imagine, requires fast communication between all the nodes, but also a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of processing power. And the supposed innovation that the company is bringing, I think Artemis is the name of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the company is bringing is the ability to solve that problem. Hey, everybody, what signal do
⏹️ ▶️ John all these towers need to put out so exactly the right signals go in exactly the right places? To solve it in
⏹️ ▶️ John real time, scaling linearly with the number of phones. So instead of, oh, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can solve for two phones or three phones, but as we go up to 10 phones, then it becomes like 100 times harder to solve. And if we
⏹️ ▶️ John go up to 1,000 phones, it’s like a million times harder to solve, and there’s no way we could do it. Supposedly, they have a system where
⏹️ ▶️ John they can just add computers in a more or less linear fashion to support more
⏹️ ▶️ John phones within the cell area. And so that’s what allows
⏹️ ▶️ John this system to be possible. They’re saying, we have the computing capability to do this, we
⏹️ ▶️ John have the communication infrastructure to do it. And we have come up with a way to solve whatever this
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is, to solve for the output that all these
⏹️ ▶️ John towers need to put out to make constructive interference in just the right way. And we can do it linearly. So because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you couldn’t do it linearly, you can imagine that maybe it would work for a trade show or something. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire city with thousands upon thousands of cell phones, if it didn’t scale linearly, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got big problems in terms of computing power. And so that is one of perhaps the most important
⏹️ ▶️ John claim, and the ability to do with existing cell phones over existing LTE networks without requiring special hardware on the handsets.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those two things are the two things that make PSAIL possible, again, according to the claims.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see how it shakes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. And the next bit of follow up was actually for me for once. It doesn’t happen often,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does occasionally happen. Last episode at the end, I was discussing, or John and I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and occasionally Casey making vinyl references, were discussing scaling and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference between scaling and performance. In it I discussed how when I’m writing web apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use database joins. In fact I don’t use them in local apps either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s more because of my framework. Anyway, so I don’t use database joins and the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I don’t use database joins is for various scaling concerns and basically to keep my options open for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco splitting up that database in the future and also to shift as much work as possible onto the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy and cheap to scale web application servers and leave the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard and expensive to scale database server with as light of a workload as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got a bunch of feedback on that from a lot of people. A handful of people who agreed with me and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of people who disagreed. The people who agreed are typically people who had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it before, who had worked on large scale applications before, who had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen these exact problems and solved them in the same way. They would agree because they they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did it the same way themselves the biggest argument against my technique of not using joins was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that You we you know we’ve never needed that in our organization or on our project or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve personally never needed that on my projects So you might as well you know use database as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can and Well, you know when you need it, then you know then you cross that bridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to me I wrote a quick thing on my blog so I’m not gonna go too far into it But basically, I think that’s kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong angle to approach scaling questions from. Scaling is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly asking yourself, then what? So okay, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this, so far you have all these things on one server, because that one server is enough. But then what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s not enough? Then what? And scaling well and building scalable systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means trying to anticipate some of those then what scenarios and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent answer for it that’s not going to involve rewrite half your code and comb through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your whole code base and see and make sure you aren’t using joins anywhere anymore or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know rewrite because you know if you think about not only is that a ton of work and it could potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduce tons of bugs if you haven’t written this way from the beginning but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also you probably be doing that under incredible pressure and time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time constraints because you’re probably doing that because you hit an oh crap moment in your scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you realize oh wait a minute you know I’ve added the most RAM to this than I could possibly add and it’s not helping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this you know I’ve done everything I can with one box and it still isn’t enough what do I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you if you don’t plan for those and you know obviously this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all qualified with you know to an extent or within reason you know you don’t have to plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be the next Facebook because you probably won’t be and if you do become the next Facebook you can hire a bunch of smarter people that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to do all this as you get that big but even just going from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from tiny to small or from small to mid-size you’re gonna hit some of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions and you’re not gonna have a giant IT staff you’re not gonna have infinite money you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have infinite time and so it’s worth considering that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know and a lot of people would say oh this is about premature optimization and And premature optimization is wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period. Because you’ve heard that before and it sounds good. And the fact is that premature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimization is not always wrong or bad. It’s a trade-off. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most cases, you’re trading some complexity for some or a lot of performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, in the case of scaling, options in the future for better scaling or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier scaling or possible scaling. And so premature optimization and designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things to be scalable can be worthwhile if it’s relatively easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if there’s not a lot of major costs to it, you know, both in time and in, you know, maintenance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and limitations in the app and other things. Like if it’s relatively easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make better decisions that make your app more scalable the whole time you’re designing it, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it because it isn’t, you know, it’s like a best practice. It It isn’t that much more work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you might never need it, but when you do need it, you’ll be very glad you have it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that’s it on that topic for now. Do you guys have any other follow-up on scaling?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there were two other threads of feedback on the thing. One were the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who were saying that it sounded like you were using MySQL without using any
⏹️ ▶️ John relational features, so here are a bunch of non-relational data stores that you could use instead. So there was a couple people
⏹️ ▶️ John who had that. And then the other one was, I think maybe it was just one person, but I thought it was a good point
⏹️ ▶️ John that we didn’t get to, that depending on the nature of your application, if you have something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of non-interactive and trivially siloable, you could get away with, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t have to worry about this join type thing because all you would do is just sort of shard up by customer and
⏹️ ▶️ John one customer’s data would never mingle with another’s. And at that point, like there’s, you know, then you have
⏹️ ▶️ John your entire scale, your entire horizontal scaling strategy is entirely based on divvying users up into smaller and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John bins, and you just need some way to figure out where this user’s bin is. And that could be something super
⏹️ ▶️ John fast and easily scalable. And then just the bins, it’s like, well, if the bin is too slow, my
⏹️ ▶️ John solution is to cut the bin in half. And that point, if you do joins against the bins, it doesn’t matter. All it does
⏹️ ▶️ John is make you have to cut them into pieces sooner. Obviously, social applications are not like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have to, where there’s some sort of of global awareness or you’re following that person’s things and they’re following
⏹️ ▶️ John yours or whatever. And most systems are not this simple. But it was a good point that it really depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on the shape of your system. What does the state look like in your thing? What state are you tracking?
⏹️ ▶️ John How is the state related to the other state? And if you’re sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no interrelations, nor will there be in the future, you can get away with just sharding by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a very big if, though. I agree. If you have something like, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at something like Zendesk or FreshBooks, these hosted applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that create a little site or thing for you as the customer. And these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, by definition, very private things that none of their other customers need ever need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to access your data. In fact, it should not be possible for them to access your data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it makes sense when you have something that is that strictly divided by user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the the users will never have to interact with each other or their data. It makes sense to then do that kind of sharding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. But if you have any kind of consumer-facing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general-purpose service kind of thing, there are so many options for cross-data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco referencing. If you start out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system that’s sharded in that way, then first of all, that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big limitation you put on yourself and your development, and it does add complexity, and it does add management complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s the kind of thing that I would be very careful to decide. If you’re deciding that up front to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that from the beginning, I would be very careful of that decision, because that really will limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you later, and it might not be necessary, or it might not be right, or you might have to pivot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into something that has a little bit more data crossover.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even consumer-facing systems, though, I think real systems that are out there, a lot of the times they will
⏹️ ▶️ John take the part of their system that scales in this way and scale it in that way, and then use a different strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John for the interrelated. Because that’s what you have to end up doing when you scale things, is you’re going to end up breaking apart
⏹️ ▶️ John the functionality of your application, which is part of the reason why you’re not doing joins. But just in the grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe user information could be sharded up nicely by user, but then all the interrelated information has an
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely different back end with entirely different scaling strategy. Like you end up, it’s the whole service-oriented architecture thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John up with different pieces of your application scaling in different ways. Because very often, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John one master scaling solution for your entire app. You have to look at it in pieces. And the login flow is like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John session management is like this, user information is like this, relationship management is like this. I mean, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy examples, I remember I read a story a while back about how LinkedIn had a fairly standard
⏹️ ▶️ John looking back end, except for the part that handled all the relationships. And that had to be on a server where it was all in memory. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember reading that and feeling bad for them, You know, that’s like a built-in time bomb for scaling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’re racing more as law to see, will the amount of, will the relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John information in LinkedIn get big faster than we can buy machines, faster than the amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM we can stuff into a single machine? And so that’s kind of an unfortunate thing, but it’s obvious they didn’t use that same scaling
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy for the user information. It was just for the relationship information, which is another system. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John one more thing I missed, the then what question. One of the then what’s that you haven’t asked and
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to ask for a Tumblr, I guess, and probably will never have to ask for any of your applications. But I think a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about the then what’s should consider is the idea of making database
⏹️ ▶️ John accesses from essentially a web application, or any application for that
⏹️ ▶️ John matter. The code that is running your thing, it connects to a database. Very often in these
⏹️ ▶️ John large applications, they need to find somewhere to scale. They have to put a layer in between there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you want some kind of data access layer that does not connect to the database to get information.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you’re using something like, what is it, FC model or whatever you’re using, or any of these things that basically
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re putting SQL in your code somewhere, right? And you’re like, well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t see the SQL. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all abstracted away. But essentially, what you’re making is a front end to do SQL queries for you. Like, if I needed to, I could
⏹️ ▶️ John swap that out for something that didn’t talk directly to a database. But it would be kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of painful. And so if you make a data access layer that is agnostic to the destination, either you make it
⏹️ ▶️ John work over HTTP from the very start, and then have a web service back end that gets you that information.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, well, that seems like it’s going to be slower, and it seems like a waste of time, and I’m never going to need to do that. Maybe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But in my experience, a lot of applications, one of the first things they run into, even if they have perfect horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ John scalability in terms of sharding users, because it’s that type of thing. Say it’s like a B2B business, where
⏹️ ▶️ John your customers do want their things to be solid. Like, oh, it’s no problem. Well, eventually, you’ll run
⏹️ ▶️ John into the realization And most, especially if you’re using a relational database, most relational database products
⏹️ ▶️ John are not made to support the number of connections that are anything close to the scale of users on a website.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you have to conserve those database connections. You need some sort of, I mean, they have database connection pooling, all the other strategies.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in general, if you divorce your application as much as possible from where it’s getting its information,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if that information is in a database now, having some sort of transport layer in there, like even something that’s done with
⏹️ ▶️ John HTTP for some kind of, again, service-oriented architecture type thing, that seems terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John for performance, and often is much worse for performance. And that’s why people say, no, Casey’s probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John he was complaining about having to make a round trip to the database for multiple. Imagine if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John to make an HTTP request to something, and then that something would potentially go to a database. That’s even more overhead. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are sacrificing performance and complexity for a long an axis that you think
⏹️ ▶️ John you might need to, you know, you might need to, if that then what says,
⏹️ ▶️ John OK, well, we’re out of database connections, then what? Or having the application connect directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to databases, a security concern or a networking issue or whatever, then what? If you do everything
⏹️ ▶️ John as a service, then you could have multiple data centers and different,
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything over HTTP and do geographic load balancing and have all this. It gives you more flexibility. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a then what. That’s just one more then what that I’ve come across many times in my working career. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I’ve either designed or been working on an application that connects directly to a database, I’ve regretted
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But your mileage may vary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I agree. And I’m pretty sure, I don’t actually know this for sure, because when I left, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did leave. But I’m pretty sure at Tumblr, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the big things they did pretty soon after I left. Once they got a more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experienced staff in there who had worked on systems of that size, And it was, I mean, one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I left was that it was getting pretty far beyond my ability to scale it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s one of the first things they did was move to that kind of architecture. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does make sense. That is one of those things, again, where I’d like, I think you can go a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long way without doing that. And so again, it’s a premature optimization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you, you know, it might be worth it for you to do that. In my case, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost never is. And it never, well, never has been so far. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly, that is something that might be worth doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like that phrase, though. It’s like it built into it, premature optimization. Premature is saying you’re doing it sooner than you need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, these are optimizations. Because whenever one’s, that’s one of the vocabulary tools
⏹️ ▶️ John wielded by programmers and arguments. Like, well, that’s a premature optimization. It’s a tautology. Like, you are
⏹️ ▶️ John asserting that it is premature by calling it premature. Like, why is it premature? What is premature? Is it too early or
⏹️ ▶️ John is it not too early? That’s the whole argument that we’re supposed to be having. And you can’t win that argument by pulling out the term premature optimization.
⏹️ ▶️ John That just explains what your position is. But then you still have to defend it. So all these optimizations, what you’re saying, Marco, is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not premature. This is, in fact, exactly the right time to do it because my expectation is x, y, and z. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’re arguing about, are we ever going to get big? As we scale, which thing will
⏹️ ▶️ John break first? You have to basically decide, what is our maximum possible size? What’s the first thing that’s going to fall over?
⏹️ ▶️ John How long can we go doing joins? how long can we go directly connected to the database
⏹️ ▶️ John and just map them out and have arguments about which one you think is going to come first. And then you live
⏹️ ▶️ John and learn, and applications change shape as you go. And inevitably, you make some bad choices. And maybe, oh, I thought we were going to grow
⏹️ ▶️ John in this way, but it turns out this feature ended up being much more popular. And we hit this thing before we hit that thing. So you’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to second guess what the future is. But the whole point is, don’t do any premature optimizations. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that you know are not premature. In fact, they’re exactly the right time to do them. And to
⏹️ ▶️ John know what that is, you have to just, You kind of have to guess, but you use your experience and your knowledge of
⏹️ ▶️ John building similar applications in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like maybe instead of thinking of them as premature, you think of them as whether they’re worthwhile or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, and the only other thing I would say about having that multi-tiered architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for whatever it’s worth, if database connections are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your problem, you’re in a weird situation I’ve never seen before. I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen a database be limited by its number of connections. Maybe that’s because I write my code to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disconnect when it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Connecting and disconnecting is another thing. A lot of, especially old school relations databases are not designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to handle connection storms. How many users can try to connect to your database at once? Say 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ John users want to connect at the same time. What does that do versus those 100,000 users being spread out
⏹️ ▶️ John over a minute, over 30 seconds, over one second? How does it handle that? And then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, we’ll have persistent connections. OK, but now you have people tying up connections. And now you have the number. I see it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fair enough. That’s probably more usage specific with whatever your application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually is, and however your layer actually treats the database connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John And how good your pooling solution is, because, again, relational databases, depending on their vintage, may or may not have robust
⏹️ ▶️ John pooling solutions. At Google scale, though, one of the fun things is you run out of port numbers. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. So when they do the web sockets, and they like, you know, what do you get? It’s like a 16-bit number. You get 65,000
⏹️ ▶️ John of them or whatever. And like, you run into, at Google scale, you run into limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John of the operating system. You’re like, well, this machine could support more connections, but we are literally out of port numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s insane. It makes sense, but that is not something I ever would think to be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that’s what Google’s for, to find those limits and to patch Linux to, you know, overcome
⏹️ ▶️ John them and figure something else out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the other thing. I never got into the level where I had to start tweaking kernel settings and things like that. we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would use the kernel’s stock. And again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know what Tumblr’s situation is now. They’re way bigger now, especially now that Yahoo bought them. They’re probably getting a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of help from Yahoo’s people and running on some of Yahoo’s infrastructure, who knows. But certainly at the time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left, that we never had to get into that. And yeah, anyway. We are sponsored
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a question for the both of you guys. And I think it applies to both of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m gonna start with you, Marco. So how do you how do you get outside of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comfort zone and learn something new? And what if you think about your history,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you wrote Tumblr in PHP, you wrote Instapaper in PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use MySQL for both the magazine PHP and MySQL now overcast PHP and MySQL,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even Second Crack, which was kind of a for fun pet project, was PHP and MySQL.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or well, I guess not MySQL, but PHP. How do you learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something new? How do you go about that? Do you not care? Does it not bother you? Do you just don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an issue right now and you’ll learn it when you need to? Because the only example that I can think of knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your history is when you learned iOS development for Instapaper. But what have you done since then? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what cued me off on this was everyone saying you should look at, you know, NoSQL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey databases and you basically said, well, I’ve got MySQL and it works fine for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s a combination of factors. I mean, one is certainly that I’m not very good at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making myself learn new things if I don’t have to. You know, that’s just a character flaw, I guess. That’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question, that’s one of the factors. But also, there’s two others.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is conservatism. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been on the cutting edge before. I have lived in the cutting edge world before. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of work. It’s a lot of maintenance and versions of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things running on your server that crash in the middle of the night and need attention, or hitting weird bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re running such a new version of things or such a new technology that hasn’t really had all the bugs ironed out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. That’s another big part of it, that I’m now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a point where I want to avoid those kind of costs if I can. That’s not always going to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. Sometimes it’s worth the cost. For instance, on Overcast servers, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided to run HHVM as the interpreter layer because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so much faster than PHP. What I’m probably going to do, I was setting up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my load balancing today, and I’m probably going to have two web frontend VMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start. One of them I’ll run HHVM and one of them I’ll run PHP. So if it crashes weirdly I’ll still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to take up the slack until I fix it. But for whatever it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally speaking I try to avoid those kind of like bleeding – the cost of being on the bleeding edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve decided it’s not worth it. You might have a different calculation on that for whatever your application might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. For me I’ve just decided it’s not worth being on the bleeding edge. Now that being said, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of things that I could learn besides PHP in MySQL and Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS development, there’s a lot of things I could learn that are mature and are far from being on the bleeding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge these days. And for most of those, I haven’t, simply because it hasn’t yet been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really necessary. Learning things has a big cost, and I have to weigh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s worth going through the learning period, going through the period of finding all of the intricate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details of the behavior and finding out the best ways to do things and learning the APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in enough depth to use them really well. And I’m at that point with the technologies I know now for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part. And for me to learn a whole new language or platform or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to be worth that learning curve. And I’ve decided that for what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing currently it’s not worth that. And part of that, obviously like on the on the iOS side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s anything I can learn that would be better than Objective C. I don’t think there are any any better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things really then for what I’m doing, I think I’m using the best things already.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the website, certainly you can do a lot better than PHP these days. I still would argue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that might not be the case for MySQL, but certainly you can do a lot better than PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main reason I haven’t gone there on the website is not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t really need to, like nothing’s forcing me, and not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I already know it and it’s very stable, But also, I just don’t care that much about the website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not that interested in running cutting-edge web stuff or even learning new web stuff that I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to learn, because the website, to me, is a supporting role. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not making a web app that happens to have an iOS client. I’m making an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that happens to have a web backend. And that’s where my focus is. I care so much more about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS thing. That’s why I want to be cutting-edge on the iOS side. I want to be doing everything right on the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, but the web side is really just serving a supporting role here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s more important for me, like I don’t care about new web stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very interested in learning new frameworks for iOS. Like, it’s not like when so much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this cool stuff that’s coming around, like Grand Central Dispatch and stuff like that, like so much of this cool stuff that’s coming around in iOS, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really into. I love that stuff, I find it very interesting. That’s a fair point. New web stuff, I just don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. I don’t care about web programming. I really don’t enjoy web programming anymore. I find it very boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I do it because I have to to build the products I want. So the primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal is I like client-side programming for iOS in C, in Objective-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I like the products that result from these things. And so the web code base is really just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a supporting role for that. So for me, my priority there is just get it done. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend a ton of time on it. just get it done so that it can do what I need it to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that doesn’t include like learn a bunch of new web languages when I’m not really being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco presented with clear motivations to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that makes sense. And I think the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprising use of PHP for me isn’t Overcast or Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Tumblr, it’s Second Crack. And granted, it makes perfect sense that you would use something you’re familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, especially for a project that’s not going to make any money and you’re just doing for the heck of it. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I write something outside of work and I do it for fun, I tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey force myself to use a different technology. For example, I wrote Fast Text, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iOS app. And I did that in Objective-C because I didn’t know Objective-C and I wanted to learn it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been dabbling with writing my own kind of second crack. Let’s call it third crack for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sake of a conversation. I’ve been using Node because I’ve I’ve heard a lot of great things about Node and I wanted to try it. I’ve actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really come to like it. And it’s just surprising to me, perhaps because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have a corporate stooge job, so you have a lot more control over your own destiny, but it’s surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that you don’t have this thirst to learn something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. When I don’t learn a new language in about a six-month to one-year window,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I start to get kind of crabby and angsty and anxious, and I really need to learn something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. And it seems like, for better or worse, that doesn’t seem to apply to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it does. And totally, I get that programmer itch, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally get that. But I satisfy it in different areas than the web language I use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Second Crack, for those who don’t know or care, Second Crack is my custom static blogging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine that I wrote. And it’s just a bunch of command line scripts, basically, and they’re all written in PHP. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably the only person in the universe using PHP to write command line scripts, and that’s fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, that totally would have been a great opportunity to try a new language. It was a small project with small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs that was not very pressing to get it done quickly and doesn’t need to scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. You’re right, that would have been great and maybe sometime I will rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that because it’s pretty crappy really. So maybe sometime I’ll rewrite that in something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. But part of the reason why, as you said, I have a day job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I wrote Second Crack, it was itself a procrastination from my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual apps. Like, that’s part of the problem when you work for yourself is that anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re able to do work like that, it’s potentially taking away from your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote work, like your official work that you’re actually getting paid for or trying to get done. And I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly which project I was procrastinating on when I wrote Second Crack. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was probably Instapaper, But I’m not positive on the timing on that. But either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, that was itself a procrastination. And so I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it. So that’s why I figured,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me just use PHP because I can get it done very quickly with PHP. I didn’t want it to be a big time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sink. Yeah, that makes sense. That being said though, I still learn tons. You know, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said, I try to keep up as much as I can with iOS APIs, especially low-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Like for instance, with Overcast, I don’t use AV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player or AV audio player and I’m not sure if I’ve said that publicly before I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I have so this shouldn’t be a big surprise but I’m playing audio files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m not using AV player and if you’ve ever worked on this stuff you should know therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that means I’m using raw core audio and that like this has been an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learning process and probably I didn’t need to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some reasons why I did it, but I probably didn’t need to. Chances are, you could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do… I could have used AVPlayer and saved myself a lot of time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted certain levels of control and I wanted to learn this stuff. So I made extensive use of things like the Accelerate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework, using all the VDSP functions. So these functions that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vectorize operations and use SIMD instructions and stuff like that to really make these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesomely fast if possible and I’m using that stuff all over the place in so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways and so like I’m learning things like that I’m learning various different concurrency strategies and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know doing things like the crazy ring buffer for the for the buffering of the samples and I’m reading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the files and everything like I that stuff I love that’s all really interesting to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is all you know that’s where I’ve been learning is is in overcast client side code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, the web stuff, I couldn’t possibly care less about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, what about you? Because your day job has been, as far as I know, pretty much forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Perl. Do you ever have that itch? What do you do to scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, with less time for fun programming projects, for all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve put on my own plate, essentially, besides my job over the years, whether it be writing for Ars Technica,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I used to do much more of, podcasting more recently. There’s not as much time for fun programming projects. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I wrote my own little static blogging engine thing. But that was kind of like Marcos and they
⏹️ ▶️ John were like, yeah, it’s supposed to be kind of a fun project, but really it was a practical thing. And my,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I just wanted to get it done quickly. And so I wrote it in Perl because I knew we could get it done quickly. And I intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped myself from making it good because it was like, because I, you know, this is something I would
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to do. I could make this thing have bells and whistles and be awesome and have this cool feature. And I was like, no, make it as dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible. Get done with it. Because at that point, I was trying to not distract myself from writing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m not distracting myself from writing anymore by making the engine, but I’m also not writing. But anyway, back then, it was like, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John spend time writing the engine. You do this all day. It’s stupid. Make the dumbest thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you can possibly do that works. And I did, and it’s super dumb. And it didn’t stop me from writing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing that I think has made me try new things and stuff or whatever is kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ John brutal nature of the tech job market starting in the mid to late 90s, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve had a lot of jobs. And how did I get to use
⏹️ ▶️ John MSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Informix, Postgres?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not going to get experience in all those databases probably in one place. Even if you’re there from the beginning when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s three guys, maybe you’ll touch on one or two of them. But how will you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John take an in-depth survey of all these different database products. Well, you do it by
⏹️ ▶️ John having seven different jobs. And the first place you work, there is no database. You get to pick something. And the second place maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John uses MySQL. And the third place, you decide to use Postgres, because you think that might be fine. When you make commitments like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John they tend to last for a long time. Or if you’re some big company that’s already using Oracle, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to come in there and go, you know what? I’d really like to try out Postgres. It’s like, well, we’re using Oracle, so
⏹️ ▶️ John get a different job. And language is the same way. If you’re a web developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, every place I’ve worked has used Perl in some fashion. But the proportion of my time spent
⏹️ ▶️ John writing Perl is very wildly. For example, the company where I use Postgres extensively, a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge amount of the code was in stored procedures in Postgres. And at various points, I was mostly a
⏹️ ▶️ John Postgres database designer slash stored procedure writer. And in FormX,
⏹️ ▶️ John we also use a lot of stored procedures. And if you’re writing an application that is mostly, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John a JavaScript application that just talks to a faceless back end, the faceless back end is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John boring. And the entire application lives on the client side. And so at that point, you’re writing a JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John application. It’s not Node where it’s server-side JavaScript, but client-side JavaScript with all the frameworks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, well, then what framework are you using? How did I get these all these different frameworks going from plain old DOM to like
⏹️ ▶️ John prototype, Dojo, jQuery, Angular, Ember,
⏹️ ▶️ John Backbone, Underscore? How do you get to use all those? You’re not going to get to use all of them at one place. Because once you start building
⏹️ ▶️ John an application on top of one of those, you’re probably going to keep building it that way. And then you say, oh, well, jQuery
⏹️ ▶️ John is really popular now. So we really picked the wrong horse when we decided to do everything with prototype.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rails did that a little bit to some degree as well. It’s like, well, how many thousands of lines are in this
⏹️ ▶️ John application now? Do you want to rewrite it with jQuery? Or do we just continue plowing bravely onward? And so,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, changing jobs, usually not voluntarily, but more like when the company starts to
⏹️ ▶️ John go down the tubes or have layoffs or changes direction or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a new job, that’s a new opportunity to learn a lot of new things. Even if the whole time, like, I’m just a web developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John What does web developer mean? Web developer means being multilingual, learning, and even like, even CSS,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, I’ve got no CSS, I’ve got no HTML, I’ve got to keep all the specs, but there’s all the languages on top of CSS, like Lesson, Sass, and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. You will find yourself learning new languages all the time just to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the constant amazing churn in web technologies. And you will build
⏹️ ▶️ John products on whatever the web technologies are at the time that your company chooses or you choose or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you go to the next job, there’ll be a different set of technologies. Not that I enjoy moving jobs. I don’t. I wish I could stay in one job for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t like switching jobs. I find it stressful. But the plain fact is that I have switched jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John many times. And I think that has forced me more than anything to learn new technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That makes sense. I’m a little surprised that neither of you seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicate the time outside of work to do this. But let’s also not lose sight of the fact that you have children and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not. So that probably relates more than just a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I read a lot about it. Like, I mean, how do I, you know, I’ve never written a significant
⏹️ ▶️ John program in Objective-C, but I feel like I know the language. I don’t, you know, and I’ve never written anything with any of these frameworks, but I know a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about them. And it’s like, yes, it’s kind of like a dilettante. It’s kind of like, well, I just read a lot of books about it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true. I just read, I read a lot of articles, read a lot of books, read a lot of Ruby, Python code, read a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of Node.js code, read headers from Cocoa things to see what it’s like. I’m not coding in those, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like by surveying them, I don’t know if it’s the same thing as like, it’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John not the same thing as doing a real project in it, but you kind of get a sense for what’s out there. And so it’s not entirely alien to like, why am
⏹️ ▶️ John I reading these big, long Rust tutorials? Why did I read all that documentation about Go? Because I have a project
⏹️ ▶️ John in mind, because I’m going to use them? Probably not, but I have an academic interest in that type of thing. And I think reading
⏹️ ▶️ John through it gives you an idea what it might be like to program in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough. Actually, I did look at Go recently because everyone kept telling me I should. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really interesting. And I think if I were to go through the trouble of learning a whole new web language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be the one I would go to because it seems like it’s made with my sensibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty well aligned. So anyway, this would be a great opportunity to talk about
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their videos on logic and audio engineering and it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You got to see this. Casey was telling us last time, you got to see how they have the video and then they They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to it, they have a transcript and it tracks and the transcript shows you, it highlights where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, what’s being said, so you can, and then you can scroll through the transcript to jump to any point in the video. So you can like skim through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see, oh, I want to, I want to hear about this topic right here in the transcript. Click on that, it goes to that point in the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really well done. You can watch them on your iPad and everything. It’s fantastic. They don’t need Flash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any stupid stuff like that. Now relative to our recent discussions, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have language, they have courses in web development. instance that you can learn node.js
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can learn angular.js or CoffeeScript or as many people would tell me to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no SQL databases they have all these things you can also there’s a whole course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they recently added called programming for iOS 7 for non programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can learn how to make an app if you’re not a programmer there actually are about two or three of you out there who listen to the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who can tolerate us and yet who aren’t programmers you you three people can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally learn how to program if you want to. Programming for non-programmers for iOS 7 is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great course on Lynda.com. You can even, they recently, so recently Adobe launched Lightroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for mobile, Lightroom for iPad basically, and they have a course on that so you can learn how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edit your photos and manage them on the go. So this is all really fantastic stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s high quality stuff made by people at the top of their fields. These are not like the little homemade YouTube
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I you know, I’ve used this myself, you know, we also because it uses ourselves, I really can’t recommend them enough. Fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thanks a lot to lynda.com lynda.com. If you go to lynda.com
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco lynda.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot to Linda for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple did something a little on Apple like today, and they’ve announced an OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beta program for regular people, for non-developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is surprising to me. What did you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t so old I could remember definitively what the details of the old
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple free developer program were because Apple’s developer program has had changed over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years and right now Now it’s like $99 for the iOS dev program, $99 for the OS X dev program.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those prices were a step down from the old program, which was like, you could be
⏹️ ▶️ John a select developer for like $500 a year. You could be a premier developer for like 1200
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was no iOS. So I don’t know, or maybe there was earlier at the tail end of that. But anyway, there
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t separate programs for iOS and OS X. But there was also a free tier where you could be a
⏹️ ▶️ John developer at the free tier. the things I can’t remember at the free tier, whether you got
⏹️ ▶️ John early seeds of the early OS 10 betas or not. Yeah, so someone can write and tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact details of what the free programs were like. But anyway, this is kind of a return to the free thing. It’s like, hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can be a registered developer, kind of, sort of, not really at Apple. But it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re just interested in getting the pre release software, sign up for free, you don’t have to pay $99 because
⏹️ ▶️ John I assuming we’re not going to you’re not going to write your own applications, you just want to get the early versions of the US, which a lot of people did back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, you’ve got to be part of the dev program if you want early releases. So even if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to make your own application, which is essentially why I’m always a dev, a member of the Mac developer program. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John writing Mac applications, but I’ve been a member of the Mac developer program,
⏹️ ▶️ John a paying member for just years and years now. Because that’s how you get the early releases. And this is an example of
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to get the early release, and I assume nothing else except for just the early releases. No
⏹️ ▶️ John developer technical support incidents, no ability to sign apps and upload them to the app store and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff. But anyway, for regular people, so you do need an Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John you do need to agree to a confidentiality thing where you’re not going to talk about, you know, the features that you see and
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth. You do agree to let Apple like collect diagnostics from your computer and all the other normal
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that you might imagine agreeing to if you’ve decided to run beta software
⏹️ ▶️ John to help out Apple and in return you get to see an early peek at things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Are you surprised by this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not really, because first of all, these people are not going to, I assume,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to get the same seeds that developers get. Probably Apple is going to take their time and release
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, you know, developers maybe get five or six seeds. And of those, Apple will pick like, here’s one seed that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John gets. And then there’ll be a bunch of dev seeds. And then one seed that everybody gets. Then a bunch of dev seeds. But nobody’s getting anything
⏹️ ▶️ John until someone goes on stage at WWDC and shows the new features and stuff. It’s not as if
⏹️ ▶️ John you will be seeing some secret thing before everyone else. Everyone’s going to see it on stage at WWDC. There’s going to be a build
⏹️ ▶️ John at WWDC. And at that point, it’s like, well, who cares? If you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the WWDC build, you get to build a couple of weeks after that, like the cat’s out of the bag. So don’t think that by
⏹️ ▶️ John signing up for this, wow, I don’t have to pay any money and I get to know all of Apple’s secrets. You’re not going to know any secrets. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to go to the rumor sites if you want to see fuzzy screenshots of supposed unreleased things.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is merely a way to let you, you know, it’s basically Apple is doing this because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they want wider testability of their OS. And they’re trying it out on the Mac because that’s probably seems like a
⏹️ ▶️ John safer bet. They just want more people to try this stuff out. So they’re not surprised when they release something
⏹️ ▶️ John to the public because there’s a very small number of developers. And they have probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a less diverse set of hardware than the market at large. And so Apple would prefer, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get wider testing of its OS. And not right away, and just certain builds. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we think maybe two or three releases leading up to it, these are the ones that we want to test widely to check
⏹️ ▶️ John for driver compatibility issues, or hardware issues, or whatever. That’s why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing this, because Apple thinks it will benefit to them and make their software more robust. It’s not them doing you
⏹️ ▶️ John a favor to let you see pre-release software. It is entirely, hey, we really
⏹️ ▶️ John need a wider testing base. At a certain point in the development of our OS, it comes to the point where we say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know all we can know with our small set of internal testing in QA and our
⏹️ ▶️ John small set of developers who are using this. If anyone wants to sign up for a wider beta,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would love to know if something’s crashing on some obscure configuration that we don’t have here, and then we can collect the data
⏹️ ▶️ John and figure it out. And maybe they’ll consider doing that with iOS eventually as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think the Mac is a safe place to try out this type of program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I tend to agree. I thought that there were a couple of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that came from this. Firstly, something that occurred to me was it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving, or it’s Apple participating in a little bit more outreach and a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey community involvement. I know, especially after Microsoft Build, there’s been a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comparison between Microsoft’s approach to developers and Apple’s approach to developers. Now, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this isn’t a developer specific program, and that’s kind of of what I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at is that you would think if Apple was going to reach out into the public at all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any capacity, that perhaps it would be to be a little more friendly to developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with what you said, John, that this is really about Apple doing what’s good for Apple as Apple always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does, but it just seems kind of unfortunate that they’re reaching out to the wrong group.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thing I was thinking about was what if they’ve learned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from iOS 7 and iOS And even though a lot of the nerds knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was going to look really different and really flat, and that’s really how you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describe it, but you know what I mean. But it has depth. Right, it has depth, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco course. And clarity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And chamfered edges. Oh, wait. But anyway, what if Craig Hockenberry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is right? He wrote a really great post. I think it was a post. Maybe it was a series of tweets. But either way, he wrote something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently saying, hey, there’s a lot of indication that OS 10 is going to look pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different in the next version. And his point was, developers, you should really start testing with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the fonts we expect them to use and so on and so forth. Well, what if this is queuing up or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting up for, is a better way of phrasing it, a little bit more outreach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the public at large? So at WWDC, we see the new OS 10, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks really, really different. And rather than nobody getting to see it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody getting to play with it, that accept developers or those willing to pay the $100. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re trying to reach out to some of the super Apple nerds, or maybe even like self-appointed evangelists,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, and say, hey, you try it out and you spread the word that this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad. I’m standing on a whole bunch of theory here, but I don’t know, it makes sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not so much that they want them to be evangelists for them. I think it’s more like, to use an example
⏹️ ▶️ John from OS X instead of the iOS 7 thing, it’s kind of like their attempts to handle autosave and getting rid of the save
⏹️ ▶️ John command. By sending out what’s probably going to be a fairly significant UI overall
⏹️ ▶️ John of the OS to a wider group of people, they hope to find out earlier rather than later that, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody hates the new autosave and people want save as to be back, and they wanted to have a command key. That’s the type of thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John could have found out in a wider early beta, and that they
⏹️ ▶️ John only found out after the release and had to patch up in Mountain Lion. You know what I mean? Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s serving apples, not just, hey, see if your thing crashes or whatever. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ John if people flip out, because when you when all those people who are looking at rumors, screenshots, see something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, they may have trepidation about it, but Apple has no way to get feedback from them. And really, like, well, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of them will think, well, I got to try and see what it’s like when I use it. But if all those people who are so enthusiastic that are reading a rumor site,
⏹️ ▶️ John had the actual pre release of the OS and got to try it and said, Oh, I can’t even I can’t tell what’s what, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for example, these buttons without borders, I can’t tell other buttons that just look like text or you know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS equivalent. But like if there’s some big UI change that they’re they’re they’re not so sure
⏹️ ▶️ John about if they put it out to a wider audience they will get a they’ll get informed feedback instead of like I saw a
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot that looks like it’s going to be terrible and be presumably through the mechanisms that they’re going to distribute there
⏹️ ▶️ John will be official channels to which to send that feedback not just complaining on Twitter or posting and web
⏹️ ▶️ John forums or whatever but actual feedback directly to Apple where people can write 20 paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John missives about why they don’t like the new look and how they can’t tell which window is in the front anymore or whatever they’re gonna say, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that makes sense. I don’t know, Marco, any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m less excited about it than most people. I mean, first of all, it’s mostly because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero interest in running a beta version of OS X on my Mac. Zero. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only time I ever installed a beta was when Reading List was first added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. And I was tipped off that this was a thing in the betas I should see, because at the time I still owned Instapaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I signed up with the developer program, paid the hundred bucks to see this reading list thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see how worried I had to be, basically. And even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed it on a laptop that I didn’t care that much about, because I’m like, it’s so important to me that my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work perfectly as much as possible. And whenever my computer does not work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly as much as possible, it’s very disruptive, And it’s potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very costly to me. And so I always want to make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m okay in that regard. And so it’s just not worth me running the betas for the most part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever. I do it on iPhone because the iPhone is not that important to me. If my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone reboots twice a day, that’s annoying. But oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And it’s more important for me on iOS because my software runs on iOS. It’s more important for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get into that as early as possible and to have my software running on my main phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When something like iOS 7 comes out that changes a whole bunch about the entire paradigm of the UI, the entire style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good to start getting that ingrained in me earlier so I can develop for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it well. Things like that. But because it doesn’t apply to me on the OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X side, I just don’t care at all. Maybe the problem was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not enough people were testing things on the iOS 10 side to make the testing really worthwhile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple or to accomplish their goals. Because you know, do you see them doing this for iOS? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure as hell don’t. Because the iOS beta is like everyone who wants the iOS beta gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They find some developer to get them to add it to their account and add their device to their account and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the beta. Or everyone pulls together money and buys a slot on someone’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all these weird things people do to get iOS betas these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason they don’t really need to do it there, and they probably won’t do it there, is because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this demand to run iOS betas. All that demand probably isn’t really there for the OS X betas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of that’s because Macs aren’t as interesting as iPhones. There are a lot fewer people who have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And part of that’s just because OS X doesn’t change that much. Maybe this next beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be so different, maybe 10.10 will be so different that everyone will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it. Who knows? But I’m guessing they weren’t getting enough people testing, and that’s why you had things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the crazy Gmail problems in Mavericks. Why wasn’t that caught in a beta?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that. Because I’m guessing most people who run the OSX betas probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the same priorities I do in that they probably don’t want to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them on their main work machines. So they probably are developers who make Mac apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who want to make sure their Mac apps work. So they probably run them in a VM or on some other hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not their primary stuff. And then they just test their app. So if that’s what most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the testers are doing, it’s in Apple’s best interest to try to broaden that tester base. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I don’t see this as that big of a deal. I don’t see how many people who are not developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or who were unwilling to pay for the developer account before. I don’t see how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to really get who are going to be dying to install what’s probably going to be a boring beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a boring OS on boring products because they’re all pretty mature at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, speaking of the Gmail thing, like that’s one aspect of, you know, even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John do install the betas like I have to do, of course, for writing my review, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s something that you do, whether you’re a developer, whether you’re writing a review or whatever, whatever you’re doing with the betas,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re if you’re one of the people who has an account, for a reason now because you’re part of the press or because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a developer, you almost never use it against your real data. So you’re not going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John your real email account or your real contacts. And with good reason, because if you had done that, you would learn eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John that some early beta version of an OS scramble your contacts and now you’re set. You always have usually multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John test accounts, multiple test iCloud accounts, multiple game center accounts, multiple everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, dummy email accounts, dummy contacts, like you don’t put it on your real data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so are you going to notice that the Gmail bug if all you’re doing is just like you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually sending and receiving email, you’re not actually keeping track of what you’re marking red and what you haven’t. And so you wouldn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ John these bugs because you’re like, yeah, mail, like, why would you even go to the mail app unless you just wanted to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John the new features are, whatever. If you don’t use it for your real email every day, like, huh, didn’t I mark that messages on Reddit? It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of test messages. Maybe you wouldn’t notice at all. And I think this is actually will go to a
⏹️ ▶️ John different pool of people, pool of enthusiasts who want to use it and who are going to use it with their real data. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say at this point, if you find this program exciting and you want to use these betas, keep in mind that, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, he doesn’t use it on his main machine. I never install beta versions of OS X on my machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. Like I have a complete separation because I and even when it’s like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the golden master, like, oh, have you installed the ultimate? No, I wait until I can get it from these days from
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store. And didn’t they have a thing this this most recent release for like the build number change to
⏹️ ▶️ John the last minute or whatever, I never ever ever install anything from ADC on my real computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always get it, I used to, you know, I would always get it from the actual CD that would come in the mail, you know, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John retail CD or DVD, or these days, the actual one from the Mac App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I won’t even usually install the.0 release. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, occasionally I’ll be worried about that, but in the past few releases, they’ve been pretty good. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re thinking of doing this, Apple has all these crazy warnings and everything and have it backed up or whatever, Like, by all means,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re an enthusiast, you know what you’re getting into. But realize, like, it could erase your entire hard drive. Like, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John scramble all your contacts in iCloud. You’re like, oh, don’t worry, I got backups. What if it scrambles all your contacts in iCloud? Where are those backups?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, how are you going to restore that? iCloud is very opaque, and it’s difficult to wrangle it back into shape. So be
⏹️ ▶️ John aware of what you’re getting into. I imagine that since this is free, a lot of people are going to be like, oh, awesome, I’m going to try the beta, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then it will host them in some way. They’ll be like, wah, the beta host. It’s like, that’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s, You knew what you were getting into, but you don’t know. Like your enthusiasm kind of outran. And that’s part of the experience. I did the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing back in the day with like, you know, Mecha was a betas and stuff where they were just
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible and data destroying. And it’s, that’s, I guess it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. I’m trying not to generalize and say, it’s going to be like a bunch of enthusiastic teenagers destroying their
⏹️ ▶️ John parents’ Macs with beta versions of it. But like, I was that teenager, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, why not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why, why shouldn’t it be? Like, I think that’s kind of a rite of passage, but so yeah. Basically what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying is I would recommend nobody join this program, but I think that people will. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who do join the program will be providing a different kind of testing than the existing people who pay $99 a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week. I feel good about the sponsor reads this week because I printed on card stock. Let’s see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, thanks, Merlin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because of a printer loading error. So I have nice, thick sponsor reads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week. PC load letter. Exactly, what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Hey, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Is that both of us? Yeah. All right. It’s first time for everything, kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. New Relic is an all-in-one web application performance management tool, APM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It lets you see performance from the end user experience down through your servers and down to each line of your server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side code. Our friends at New Relic asked us to take a minute and say a big thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all your data nerds out there building all this great stuff that we all know and love. They’re sending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shout out to the developers, the software geeks, the code jockeys, to those brave few who see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things differently. High fives to all you rule breakers and disruptors. Here’s to working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nights, to wearing oversized concentration enhancing headphones upon your furrowed brows. New Relic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks you. Nowadays, if you’re in any business, you’re in the software business.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even know what half these things are, but they sound awesome. If I was actually up to date with web development,
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We learned today about some new Thunderbolt information about third generation Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not really that excited about it, mostly because I don’t plan on getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new computer anytime soon. But Marco, do you want to tell us about this? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not a whole lot known yet. So there’s not really much to discuss. I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well just save it for, you know, three years from now when these ports actually come out. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel, there was some leaked Intel roadmap document that showed details on the next Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version Thunderbolt three, it’ll probably be called. And, and And basically, we’ll put the link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the show notes on MacRumors, basically doubling the bandwidth of up to 40 gigabits per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second. And they’re going to actually change the connector, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be interesting. They’re going to make a smaller connector that also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently will be able to charge up to 100 watts. Yeah, that’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Underscore Kyle Cronin in the chat room just asked a really good question. Which direction does the power go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here? the peripheral power the computer or vice versa.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you asked that on Twitter already because you were saying you could almost power a display. Didn’t you tweet that today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah that’s interesting though that that yeah I didn’t think about it that direction. All this says is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enables system charging up to 100 watts. Yeah that actually… ADC
⏹️ ▶️ John did it already. Speaking of ADC, the other ADC, Apple Display Connector, powered the 22-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Cinema display. There was one one cabling and other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no this is this is the other way. This is the other way though. This is saying that your thunder like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt display could could charge your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John right without the little dangly magsafe thing like we have now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody pointed out on Twitter also that this is the proposed the code name Alpine Ridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller from Intel and this is apparently like it’s still three generations away or something it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty far off so we’re probably not seeing it soon it’s probably you know a year or two at least
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it might be sooner than we think because like that’s it’s maybe not across
⏹️ ▶️ John the line, but soon enough that I think the change in connector is a little bit upsetting because it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know we didn’t want Apple to wait any longer to do what it’s, you know, to really want it to be longer for the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if it’s like a one, a one and a half to three year gap, like you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John change a Thunderbolt connector already. We just got Thunderbolt ports on our Mac Pro or like, and then you’re going to change them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the difference is 1.5 millimeters in height. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned on Twitter that I had been staring at the edges of various retina MacBook Pros in meetings at work,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s what you do in boring meetings, thinking about which one of those connectors is going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner next. Because if you look at the sides, what we have is kind of a menagerie of MacBook and MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pros around the office, depending on who got their hardware when. So you can see them slowly getting skinnier,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you could see like, oh, the ethernet port disappears. Oh, the MagSafe gets squished. Oh, now it looks like the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John is practically edge to edge. And you can see them squeezing and squeezing. And There’s headroom there, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John way Apple designs their laptops, there is a curve section that sort of gives you a place for you to hook your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath. And then there’s a flat section that’s perpendicular to the table, and that’s where the ports go.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they squeeze that thing down, like MagSafe, USB, and Thunderbolt are squeezed
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty tightly in the flat section now. And it’s like, if you want to make the laptop thinner, you could start giving up the little lip
⏹️ ▶️ John that you tuck your fingers under, but you don’t want to make something that’s like as thin as just a flat section and flat on a table.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wouldn’t be able to pick it up. trying to get your fingernails underneath it to try to pull it up off the table. So
⏹️ ▶️ John things have to get thinner. And Thunderbolt is probably, USB is probably the first one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we already know, we talked about it in the past show, the new USB 3 connector that’ll be skinnier. So that takes care of the USB ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John That leaves Thunderbolt as potentially the thickest thing besides MagSafe. And MagSafe, I think, is due to be
⏹️ ▶️ John revised as well because MagSafe 2, everyone seems to hate. But due to
⏹️ ▶️ John the design, it’s like, well, it’s a big magnetic surface and people hate MagSafe 2 because it’s not as secure as the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one because they made it, you know, they made it skinnier. If you make it skinnier still, won’t it be even worse? And maybe it’s time for
⏹️ ▶️ John a new magnetic power connector that, I mean, I don’t think they want it to insert because the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point is it’s supposed to come off easily, but I think they could use a design revision as well. But Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems kind of early for them to be making the thing thinner, and I’m a little bit worried about that. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I hope this bus comes sooner rather than later. I hope actually 2015 that we would see this sometime in calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John year 2015. if only for the retina angle, you know, because then we’ll finally, we
⏹️ ▶️ John finally in theory would have bandwidth to do my desired quad 27 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John retina resolution display. It’s still depend on like the new display port specs and everything else, but this lists a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of acronyms that could in theory provide this. Like, I don’t know what HDMI 2 encompasses. I don’t even know what TBT
⏹️ ▶️ John is. So maybe one of those, maybe one of those things would, could power a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John at the resolution that I want. But changing the connectors, They mentioned there’d be an adapter an adapter you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get it’s like two years after Thunderbolt appears in our already does adapters I guess I guess it’s nice magsafe
⏹️ ▶️ John one and two all over again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and to be fair I mean how many people really have Thunderbolt devices so far like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this isn’t it’s not gonna be a massive problem to Have all these people buy a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know $30 adapters are probably even less than that I mean, it’s you know the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with Thunderbolt is that no one’s
⏹️ ▶️ John using it Yeah Yeah, the stagnation of the market is an advantage, because it’s like, well, if I had anything to plug in, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need an adapter. But since I have nothing to plug in anyway, well, I mean, I guess even Apple’s monitors. Even like, you know, for the people like
⏹️ ▶️ John doing what I do with the MacBook Air and the Thunderbolt display, I bet a lot of people do that setup, where you have Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged into your laptop, you know, so you don’t have, it’s the equivalent of, so we don’t have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a dock, you know, those stupid docks they have for PC laptops, so you snap the thing in and 800 connectors connect. We can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it all through Thunderbolt, right? Well, now you need, like, the poor Thunderbolt display, First, it came with
⏹️ ▶️ John the MagSafe 1 to 2 adapter, like you used to get that with a display, so you could attach the charging
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy to the laptops. And now it will also come with a Thunderbolt 1 to 2 adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, though, ever since the Thunderbolt display came out, I have lusted after it. And I’m way too cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy one. But the thought of not having to have, I don’t know, four,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, or six cables to plug in every time I plug in my computer when I get home, and only have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, just sounds awesome. and to bring this down to just one, if we’re reading this right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the power would flow from display into laptop, I mean, that sounds great. It genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is that one connector is probably gonna be crappy, because I can tell you, we don’t disconnect our laptop a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot, but I’ve done it enough that every time I do it, like, it does not feel like a robust, oh, you can connect and disconnect
⏹️ ▶️ John this 8,000 times, and it’ll be fine. Every time I’m doing it, I’m like, I’m so conscious of like the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John number of connects and disconnects this cable has in it, because there’s a little chip in that thing, It’s like a long stiff thing sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the side of your laptop. It’s not as, you know, you feel like I can plug and unplug
⏹️ ▶️ John the lightning port in my iPhone forever, and I feel fine about it until maybe the cable will fray, but whatever, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get a new one. The Thunderbolt thing going to the side of especially a MacBook Air feels pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John perilous, and I have little faith that the 1.5 millimeter thinner version will feel any less perilous, unless they invert
⏹️ ▶️ John it and do like a lightning style connector, but I’m not holding my breath.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ve read somewhere, maybe this is just somebody’s reaction to this but I did read somewhere that you know maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons they were redesigning the connector is that the new one really isn’t that great that it does fall out easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or becomes slightly pulled easily and and you know there’s really like there’s no part of its design that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high friction or no like little locking ball bearings like the lightning has or anything like that so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never felt that Thunderbolt things were secure I mean I mostly just use it like for Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precarious right but yeah exactly exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right this is a little bit random but I keep meaning to ask you when we were asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter what’s the overcast update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m almost in beta that’s basically it which is probably what I said last time but I’m way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer this time today I was writing the directory to give you some idea you know making the ad podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing work more than just search that’s what I’m doing right now. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting close. The login thing is done. You know, all that all the account stuff is done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, getting there. That’s about it. That’s it. Isn’t that interesting right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. I just don’t think we talked about in a while. That’s quick and easy. Our iPad sales leveling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leveling off. There’s been a little bit of chatter about this lately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this I wanted to talk about So there’s there was this post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go ahead John save Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please Jean-louis Gasset. Thank you so much. All right, so He wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post Which will link to in the show notes basically saying or suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that iPad sales have or about to be revealed to have leveled off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And then Gruber linked to it and added his own commentary as well. And you know so the theory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is that you know maybe iPad and overall tablet sales are not doing as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not growing as well as everyone expected. And you know maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe tablets have been overestimated and maybe maybe the expectations of tablets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been too high. So I wanted to talk about this because like I’ve I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have really had trouble like making my iPad useful to me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard so many people who that’s not the case for. So many people are finding incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting, creative ways to use their iPad, to get all their work done, or just bring their iPad when they go on trips and not bring a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. And I have not had that experience at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. I mean, and part of that’s just because of the work I do, you know, being a lot of programming and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even things that aren’t programming, I find myself, when I’m on the iPad, I find myself like saving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for when I go back to my Mac because it’ll just be so much faster and easier to do it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, the limitations of iOS work on a phone. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitations of how apps are so incredibly isolated from each other, and so multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very limited. There is no like, the document model of iOS where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have your files, you just have each app and it has its own little silo of data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff makes it very hard for me to work the way I want to work. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have not found the iPad to be very useful and in fact I hardly ever use mine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have stopped buying every version of it even for developer testing purposes. You know now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have the Retina Mini and my wife has the iPad Air I really can’t see us buying the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next ones that come out either because these are gonna be fine for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I’ll remind you of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like you need an iPad Pro, Margo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wonder, how many people is this the case for? For me, what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found, and this is why I think the iPhone lineup might make this more interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve found that there’s things that a phone does well, and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does most of those things well, but the things that the phone does poorly, the iPad doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot of them much better. And the iPad is worse than the phone in a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major ways. Number one, it is not always with you. Your phone is always in your pocket. Your iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might not have it with you. In my case, I almost never have it with me. Because it doesn’t fit in clothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or jacket pockets and I don’t carry bags big enough for it most of the places I go. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is always with you. And your phone always has a data connection for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads, yes, you can get them with data connections, but it’s not the common case, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you have data connection, like I feel kind of bad paying 20 bucks a month for this data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connection that I hardly ever use, but my iPad becomes even less useful if I don’t have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m not happy about that. Most people just don’t get data connections or data plans for their iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, that major difference between always being with you and always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a data connection, that actually makes the iPad even less useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me than it normally is. And so I have to wonder, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s wise to ever bet against the smartphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the smartphone is an amazing ideal, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like the intersection of the best of so many things, and it’s so good, and it’s so useful, and there’s so much potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the smartphone. For me, if the smartphone had a little bit bigger screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it’s probably about to, which in the non-Apple world, that’s old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news, and they’ve had big screens for years, I really don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna have a use for an iPad at all, even today. If my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad got stolen today, please don’t come steal it, but if it got stolen today, I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure I would not replace it. And so, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if my, like my phone, the combination of a phone and a computer is so great for me, and I’m wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whether the iPad is really necessary long-term as a product category and whether it’s succeeding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term as a product category or whether it will become more of a more of a narrow niche product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as most people realize that a phone and maybe a computer is good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would like to argue with everything you just said. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had an iPad 1, I had an iPad 3rd gen, so the first retina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, and now I have what I like to call the RetinaPad Mini, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives Stephen Hackett nuts, which makes me want to call it that even more. And I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the RetinaPad Mini with LTE for the first time. I’d always had Wi-Fi only iPads and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one I got with LTE. I got a Verizon RetinaPad Mini and then right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the time I got it, T-Mobile started doing that crazy thing where you can buy a SIM for $10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one time and then they’ll give you 200 megs of data for free every single month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the idea is – or I presume the idea is that it’s a gateway drug to get you to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T-Mobile for data. Well, what I found is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the combination of moving from big iPad to iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as paired with this T-Mobile plan that really quite honestly gives me enough data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for pretty much any usage I would want away from a Wi-Fi hotspot like a friend’s house or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family member’s house or at home or work. The combination of having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an LTE iPad with just a little bit of data every single month and having it be an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad mini made me fall in love with this iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much more than I did my prior iPads, which I kind of went in and out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love with. I would use them a lot, then I wouldn’t use them at all. Then I would use them a lot, not at all. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love my iPad mini. And I wonder if,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if the, by virtue of it having LTE and either if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could tether against my iPhone, which I can’t because I’m still on the AT&T unlimited plan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if I had a plan wherein I could share my data with my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for very little extra per month, you know, any of these combinations or the T-Mobile thing that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done makes me absolutely adore my iPad. And generally speaking, when I travel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t bring a computer with me unless I’m traveling for work. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were traveling all of last week, and the only reason I had a computer with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was because I had to record the podcast while we were on the road. And if it wasn’t for that, I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left the computer at home. So it’s funny because everything you just said, it makes sense to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but I like my my iPad for all the reasons you don’t like your iPad. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, John, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the thing that’s holding the iPad back is two aspects. One is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in past shows when I was talking about the iPad Pro, if the iPad wants to take
⏹️ ▶️ John over more of the functionality currently occupied by PCs, it has to expand its ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the things that PCs can do in some vague as yet unspecified way, possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John having a larger screen, possibly better multitasking, possibly better document management, better inter-application
⏹️ ▶️ John communication, all the things we discussed, right? So that is, it’s like, okay, well, what can you do with that? Well, the PC market is
⏹️ ▶️ John not as big as the phone market. Phone markets growing PC market, I think is either growing slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John or possibly shrinking. So say the iPad takes over some portion of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that still doesn’t get you the kind of growth that people are expecting from it. Like that’s still like gangbusters, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one area where it probably has to move if if it wants to get some growth. And the other area is it’s got to come
⏹️ ▶️ John way, way down in price. Because what it’s competing against is psychologically, if not
⏹️ ▶️ John in actuality, it’s competing against cell phones which are free. They’re not free
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, they cost thousands of dollars a year for your cell phone plans. An iPhone is incredibly expensive. All of that is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John But psychologically speaking, cell phones are practically free because most people
⏹️ ▶️ John in first world countries feel like they need to have a cell phone. And eventually, all cell phones will be what we currently call smartphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, you know, it’s not free because it costs a lot of money, but people’s like, well, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like the tablet is competing against nothing. Like if you don’t buy a tablet, you will just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will spend zero because you, like, no one’s gonna say, oh, you know what, I’m gonna replace my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the phablet phenomenon, right? But yeah, but what they’re competing against
⏹️ ▶️ John is, like, they consider a phone as like, I have to pay for that, that’s a sunk cost. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s basically free. And now you’re telling me I gotta pay more. And the thing is, if they have some task
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to do that is just not convenient or possible to do on even a very large phone, their choice
⏹️ ▶️ John is a PC or a tablet, and PCs are traditionally more expensive, but tablets, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s tablets, are still pretty darn expensive. If Apple could, say the Retina iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini was $99, just throw out some fantasy scenario there, there’s no doubt that
⏹️ ▶️ John that would move the needle on sales. And even if you think, well I’m not sure how I’m going to use this
⏹️ ▶️ John and like I’m not I’m not sure how that would shake out but I just think like the the idea that every
⏹️ ▶️ John single home that has a smartphone would also have an iPad just hanging around just
⏹️ ▶️ John to be that thing that like the modern the future world equivalent of a magazine I’m just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John sit on the couch and read a magazine well you’re not gonna read a magazine you’re gonna look at web pages on your iPad or I’m just gonna go up to my room
⏹️ ▶️ John and watch some Netflix or stream something from my DVR or whatever like the idea that just
⏹️ ▶️ John having a flat screen even if it never leaves the house. Just it’s just a convenient thing to have around the house and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the uses of it are fine but when it costs $700 you’re like do I need a few one of those future world things $700
⏹️ ▶️ John worth? No I don’t even $500 like that you know and I think they’ll sell a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ John than if they go down in price and you know I guess it’s three things the final thing is that many people have mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just a little bit too they’re just a little bit too good so far I know so many people who are using iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John ones and see no reason to upgrade that is the price again the convenience the phone where there’s many reasons to upgrade great
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the subsidies and all the other things or whatever. Like it’s tough. You know, first of all, they don’t feel like they should because they
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well, I spent five hundred dollars on an iPad. I’m keeping it for years. And the second thing is, well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I guess unless games stop working or they don’t care, they don’t run Iowa seven. Like I guess they do kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle down to the kids and let them use it. But it’s just they are incredibly long lasting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, surprisingly durable for a five hundred dollar piece of glass. You think they’d all be like destroyed by now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen so many go through the grubby paws of kids And just they survive in a home environment. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John things survive for a long period of time. And so if there were ninety nine dollars, you’d be like every year to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a new one of these flat things, because it’s what we use to like, you know, it’s it’s what we use to like read stuff and read,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, read web pages is better than reading it on my phone. I won’t drain my phone’s battery and I use it to watch video because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit bigger screen. And if you could get the price way down and if you could get a little bit more capable,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would make sure that there’s an iPad in everybody’s home. And that would also make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John when people go on trips, they’re like, maybe I don’t need to buy a laptop and I can eat into the PC market by just saying, I can take this
⏹️ ▶️ John with me because I can do more or less everything I need to do. And you would say, when do you reach your limit? Can developers
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything they need to do? Probably not, but can, you know, you keep going down. Can people do regular word processing work? I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still pretty annoying. Like that’s where the iPad Pro comes in. So it’s not like Apple needs to like, hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to sell your iPads at a loss right now. But I think just the natural, if you look at the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, It took a while for the Apple TV to get down to $99. The iPad is going to take
⏹️ ▶️ John even longer because that screen is tough to really push down much farther. But give it five,
⏹️ ▶️ John seven years, and when Apple has tablet things that span the same
⏹️ ▶️ John range as iPods do, I think there is a legitimate reason for every house that has
⏹️ ▶️ John a smartphone to have a tablet device. And if Apple can get its price point down, it could be that device. So I think that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John the growth potential is for tablets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that makes sense. The thing that I think about is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is really holding the iPad especially, but the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just iOS in general, what’s holding it back? And we’ve talked in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the past around this time last year about what’s the low-hanging fruit for iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess maybe low-hanging fruit is a poor way of phrasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but what’s the thing that bothers everyone the most? And copy-paste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the seminal example from years back that it infuriated everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to not have copy-paste. Obviously, that had to show up quickly. Well, interapp communication, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we’re getting to the point that we’re really going to need to crap or get off the pot, or Apple is really going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to. I don’t want to get into a WWDC prediction episode, but is this the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is is that enough to make iOS a little bit more powerful?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Internet communication itself is, it’s a phrase we threw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, it’s a concept we threw around that we think, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all assume that iOS 8 will improve this somehow, because there’s a lot of, you can see that there’s a lot of the groundwork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already laid in six and seven for this. You have things like remote view controllers, things like the UI activity system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can tell that like they’ve, they’re taking steps towards allowing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the problem is that internet communication itself does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really solve the problem. It makes some things a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Suppose iOS does something very similar to the contracts you’re intense on Windows Phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android which is what most developers are asking them to do, myself included, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be great. But I think a big part of the problem is the document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model, the file system model. How, where you store your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data, how you access your stored data, where things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco divided, and where things are not accessible from. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all this simplicity on these devices of not having to manage your files, not having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out where things are, not having to go to your parents’ house and see everything is on the desktop, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that their hard drive is quote full because they’re out of space for their icons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You avoid all those problems, but the amount of power that that removes from usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty dramatic. And I think that more than anything is what limits iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from being used in more productivity type roles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple’s still holding the line on that. And I think most people
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with the sentiment and we just hope that like, Well, presumably Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has thought of this and has some solution. Like, the geeks just say, oh, just show us the file system. And they just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to reproduce all the same problems. And like, yeah, that would solve it for geeks, right? But modulo sandboxing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. But for everybody else, it’s like, well, siloed per app is simple, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John has all these problems. And we’re all hoping for a solution that does not give up all
⏹️ ▶️ John the simplicity and go all the way back to just raw access to the file system, again, if only for security concerns,
⏹️ ▶️ John but has the benefits of being able to like, you know, work seed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even normal people seem to grasp Dropbox, because Dropbox essentially took the file system problem and narrowed it down
⏹️ ▶️ John to a single place, kind of like the desktop, which was the old place that everyone, you mentioned your iConsoling desktop. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ John one place that people felt comfortable just put everything in desktop. And then what people would do is like, well, I have all my crap on
⏹️ ▶️ John my desktop because that’s the one place I know how to find. And I make folders on my desktop for sub projects. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like training wheels for the real file system. And Dropbox is like that as well. And it’s like, it’s the same as the file
⏹️ ▶️ John system. It’s just narrowed. Like your Dropbox is equivalent to the desktop. But once you start making folders in your Dropbox, it’s like the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who finally starts making folders on the desktop, it’s lots of stuff. And they start organizing things. And like, you just want to say, just
⏹️ ▶️ John go a little bit farther. Like the whole file system is your oyster. It’s not just the desktop. New folder, one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can put folders
⏹️ ▶️ John so I hope that Apple doesn’t give up. But at
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain point, like, It’s kind of like that give up and use tables CSS joke site from
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. It’s like at a certain point, it’s like, well, Apple, you’ve been thinking about this for years. And if you really can’t think of something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s better, at a certain point, you need to just say, we failed in our ability to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you something that’s both simpler and equally powerful or close to as powerful, and just give us back to freaking file system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do not want them to do that. I think that would be not only an admission of failure, but an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John failure. So I really keep hoping that they come up some scheme that
⏹️ ▶️ John has the security benefits of sandboxing, but that lets applications easily work, multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John applications work on the same document. I mean, that’s part of my whole vague, cloudy iPad Pro vision is the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of using multiple applications to make a sort of composite document or work on a project
⏹️ ▶️ John that has some images and some text files and some this and some that, like you would do on your Mac when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing any sort of remotely complicated project without it being,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, oh, I just do everything in one app. Like even Xcode’s going that direction. Xcode is like, we, yes, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of different things. You’ve got images, you’ve got header files, you’ve got source code, you’ve got interface
⏹️ ▶️ John builder documents, you’ve got all this stuff, but like, it’s all in Xcode. I guess, except for the image editor. Once
⏹️ ▶️ John they embed an image editor in Xcode, we’ll know they’ve really just given
⏹️ ▶️ John then they can just port Xcode 7 right to the iPad Pro, and it’s like, hey, you don’t need to launch a separate app.
⏹️ ▶️ John All your stuff is in one place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it seem like the iPad app library is stagnating?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it seems that way to me, but because I’m not that into using my iPad, that could just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, because I use TweetBot and it hasn’t been updated yet or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean by that? Like which kinds of apps are you talking about specifically?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems to me that, you know, again, anecdotally, so whatever this is worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not seeing a lot of iPad apps come out anymore that are interesting or exciting. And a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the previously good apps still either haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been updated to iOS 7 and sort of very dated, or are just, you know, on really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow update cycles. So they’re seemingly abandoned, or some of them actually have been abandoned. Some of them have been updated, but been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made worse. Like, it seems like the iPad was a priority for app developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about two and a half years. and now it’s just not. And I could point to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of, you know, if this is the case, beyond just what I’m seeing, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of lots of reasons why that might be the case. I’ve been meaning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write a blog post about this, but I keep forgetting to do it. But, you know, one of the biggest would be, you know, the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store pricing model and the top list model and how that encourages the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco race to the bottom in pricing and very low prices made up at very large volume. All of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that depends on there being very large volume. But if the iPad is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being used that much to buy a bunch of apps and if instead most of them are being used to watch videos and browse the web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we know they don’t sell nearly as well as iPhones do already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that’s a big problem. I mean it’s certainly it seems to me like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to me one of the reasons why I’m not using the iPad is because like the Twitter app is better on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The RSS app is better on my phone. Like the half of things I do on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iOS devices, like the iPhone, the apps I have on my iPhone are better than any I can find on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this just me or is this a broader thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the sales numbers definitely are an influence because there’s way more iPhones. But I think there’s a bifurcation of applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like in the beginning, it was like, well, everyone’s going to make all their apps everywhere. And then eventually people learned which apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are better suited to which environment. So to So to give an example, these days, if a new game comes out, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John fear that there’s not going to be an iPad version. And if there’s anything that has to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John reading experience, a magazine app, a comic reader, something for watching video,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no concern that it’s not going to have an iPad version. Or even anything for
⏹️ ▶️ John a controlling application, like the TiVo application. I’m not concerned that’s not going to. Anything that’s not sort of on the go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because on the go style apps, like Twitter clients and stuff like that, I don’t expect to find them on the iPad, because those
⏹️ ▶️ John are clearly focused on the phone. Anything that is clearly something you’d want to use, like a mobile type application,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be phone first or phone only. Whereas any application that benefits from having a larger screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be iPad only or iPad first. And so I definitely do see that split.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have the same frustration, and it’s like, well, I know most of the time I’m not reading
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter on my iPad, but I would like to have a universal version of whatever my favorite Twitter client is. As a matter of fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do, because I use Twitterific. But those type of applications, like Glassboard, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no iPad version of that. And it frustrates me. It kind of makes sense. But on the other hand, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a mobile on-the-go app, but it’s like, when I’m on my iPad, I have to run that
⏹️ ▶️ John 2x thing. I just feel bad. So I just think it’s kind of the application splitting and going to where they need to go. And unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of that split is, if you need x number of sales to be profitable, forget the iPad, because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that many iPads out there. But I think a lot of it is just appropriateness of screen size?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and to answer your question, Marco, I’m going to kind of ask myself and then answer it with a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question, which is what have I been excited about? What have I been excited about on the iPad lately? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really excited that the one password iOS 7 update just came out. That’s universal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m waiting with bated breath for a tweet bot update for iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And fantastic health two came out and I’m really pumped about that. That’s about it. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey threes came out for the iPad. I was excited about that too. But do you see what I’m saying? Like, to your point, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot that’s been brand new. That has happened on the iPad. Fantastic Owl is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good example, though, that I’ve been really, really, really excited about. That’s happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shooting months, if not around a year now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, there’s games like if you’re into playing games, I mean, there’s a pretty, pretty regular cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John of exciting new games that are available for the iPad that come out. I mean, it’s It’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not, there are tons of the games that come out and most of them are crappy, but I’m talking about like the good games, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John current one is like Monument Valley and before that was threes and then you had things like The Room and Year Walk
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, there’s always lots of great software out there, games that take advantage of a large screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think a lot of, again, I think a lot of the iPad stuff, thinking of it as like the thing you have around the house. Yeah, it’s gonna be a video app
⏹️ ▶️ John and through it, you’re gonna consume stuff or it’s gonna be a comic reader through which you’re going to get, spend a continual stream
⏹️ ▶️ John of money on comics. I mean, just ask Merlin, Like, is he excited that there’s a new version of Comixology? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just like it’s a fixture. It becomes part of that appliance. And it’s an appliance through which you funnel money. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s not money to be made there. Because if you have that app and use it to buy things, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even just magazine subscriptions, it’s a continual faucet of money versus just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can sell you one app for $1.99 if I’m lucky. It’s like, no, you’ll spend $50, $100 a month
⏹️ ▶️ John on comics through this one app that we will continually update and develop. But it’s not exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like there’s amazing new apps coming out. But I think there’s less of that on the phone, with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly of music streaming services that you pay a subscription for. The phone is less of a venue
⏹️ ▶️ John for, I’m going to download this one app, and yeah, the app will be updated. But for the next year, two years, or
⏹️ ▶️ John my entire life, I will continue to funnel money through this application because it’s the way I get my video,
⏹️ ▶️ John my comics, or my games, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it also depends on, for whatever app you’re talking about, how hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it? How much work is it to maintain a separate iPad interface or a separate iPad app entirely?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for certain types of things like video type apps, it’s a lot less work than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like a word processor would be. You know, like games, it’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, some work in the interface layout and stuff, but for the most part, you’re getting that fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily. There’s, you know, there’s all these, all these productivity apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, it’s a lot more work. Like, you know, I’m not even making Overcast for iPad when I launch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe I’ll add it later, but I’m launching without any iPad interface, even though I could just say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the plist, yeah, I work on the iPad, sure, and just let the interface scale itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, but it would look terrible. I’d rather not do that, and so I’m not doing that. I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it well or not at all. So right now I’m going to choose not at all, and then maybe I’ll address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well later. But I wonder for how many developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to make that call and say, you know what, it’s probably not worth it. Almost every other podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on the store that’s popular at all has a dedicated iPad version because all of them were written like two to three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago when that was a thing you all did. You had to have an iPad version two or three years ago because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was the hotness. But now for so many types of apps, and a lot of apps are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine on the iPad, things Things that are, you know, you had games, probably fine, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as an iOS game could be doing fine. You know, so they’re probably fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reading apps, things like Comixology, you know, reading apps are fine because reading is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially better on the iPad. But other kinds of things, utilities, you know, things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, it’s just… Well, I mean, what about, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned word processors. Things like Comicology and, like, Microsoft Word or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, there’s no iPhone version of the office apps, is there? I don’t know, I didn’t even look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, I mean, comiXology, again, I don’t know if that’s universal either, but really, who wants to try to read comics on their phone screen? Like, there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ John applications where the big screen is not only, like, desirable, but it’s like, well, I’m not going to bother making, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John even for games, depending on what your interface is, sometimes the games just don’t make sense on the phone. I mean, obviously, games are
⏹️ ▶️ John highly motivated to get on the platform that has, you know, more users. But there are classes of applications, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think kind of like office style applications and stuff like that, it doesn’t make sense to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone version. because you have a certain UI in mind, and that UI only works minimum on the iPad mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s just not feasible. It’s like, why even bother on the phone? And I think the reverse is also
⏹️ ▶️ John true for things like with the podcast app. Maybe you’ll find out you’re mistaken, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why even bother? Who’s carrying around their iPad to listen to podcasts while they walk their dog, right? It’s not a scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John you have in mind. Oh, believe me, I’m going to hear from all of
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you will. You will. It could be that there is an actual usage scenario where having
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad version is useful. It might not just be that those people made it back when it was the thing to do. You’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John out, I guess, with the feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I can think of one. What if I’m at home, and I want to broadcast via AirPlay or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t want to use my phone for whatever reason? It doesn’t matter why. I’m at home, and I want to beam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to something else over AirPlay. I would reach for my iPad before I’d reach for my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you could just run the iPhone version to 2X like I did with Glassboard. You know what I mean? It’s not like you’re being prevented from it. What
⏹️ ▶️ John is it about a podcast application that you would want a
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad-specific version? Because for podcast apps, you’re not spending your time manipulating the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re spending your time with the screen turned off listening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, but I’m going to want something that looks good on the iPad. So to Marco’s point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I can absolutely get away with a 2X version of the iPhone version of Overcast, hypothetically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I wouldn’t want it. I wouldn’t be happy about it. And that may make me come back to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, which granted, This is a huge first world problem. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, I can absolutely tell you that if I could listen to a podcast on my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would in a lot of cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned Twitter apps before. And I was kind of speaking to the general case where Twitter apps imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John are much more popular when you’re on the go on your phones. But I do read Twitter actually a lot from my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, mostly because what I’m doing when I’m reading Twitter is following links. And when I’m following links, oh, all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m browsing the web. And I would much rather browse a web page, A, not get the crazy iPhone mobile version
⏹️ ▶️ John if they have some crappy iPhone mobile version. And B, just get the much bigger screen to read things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even if I’m going to Instapaper them from the Twitter application, like browsing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the tweets themselves that, oh, you need an iPad screen to see a tweet. Tweets look fine on my iPod. But
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the time, what I’m using Twitter for is following links that people put in. It’s kind of my
⏹️ ▶️ John on-demand replacement for RSS. And yeah, I want to read those links on the big screen or want to watch those videos on the big
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. someone links to a new Godzilla trailer, I’m much happier to watch that Godzilla trailer on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad than to try to look at the tiny thing on my iPod Touch and have to
⏹️ ▶️ John turn off the rotation lock so I could rotate it so the image isn’t microscopic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much does this change if there’s a five-inch phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ll see, I guess. I mean, none of us have used a five-inch phone, right? So we don’t know, does
⏹️ ▶️ John it make a difference? Does it make a significant difference? Do all of a sudden I feel comfortable watching the Godzilla trailer, do I still
⏹️ ▶️ John wish I had it on my iPad? Like, I guess we’ll all find out. Or people who are using Android phones now already know the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John for themselves. But for the people in the Apple camp, I presume when we get these phones, we’ll find out
⏹️ ▶️ John how much it really makes a difference in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I think it’ll make a big difference for non-power users, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to call them normal people, but non-geeks. And I can’t cite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a specific example, but I know a lot of friends and family who either have been saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, man, I really help there’s a bigger iPhone or I left iOS because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I left the iPhone because it never got bigger and I wanted something bigger. Now some of these people carry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phablets, which personally I think look ridiculous and I would not want to try to stuff in a pant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket but that’s just me and typically everything I poopoo I end up coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around and liking like Apple like Macs like iPhones like BMWs, etc,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who recommended all these things to you? Yeah, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The point is, I think, Marco, you’re right, that for a lot of people, having a much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bigger phone will prevent the need for an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although with that said, I think John was right in saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a bigger screen and not hitting the mobile version of websites is really, really refreshing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because in my experience, a lot of times if there’s a responsive site, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will either be considerably better at iPad sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the iPad will just see the full board desktop version. And I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see if a 5-inch or maybe even 6-inch iPhone comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out this year, what will happen with responsive sites? Will they just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stretch the current 4.3 inch version of their site a little bit? Will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that be a different breakpoint? And as silly as that sounds, I think that would make a big difference to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think everything’s coming up iPad Pro again, because this whole larger phone, what it does is it
⏹️ ▶️ John pushes the iPad to be like, okay, differentiate yourself now. Now the difference in size
⏹️ ▶️ John between the mini and whatever phone Apple comes out with, that gap is narrowed. What is it that you’re good at, iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, well, I’ve got a bigger screen. Like, well, how much bigger? Like, again, do people want to read comiXology on their
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger phone? No, maybe not. But maybe it encroaches, starts to encroach on some things that people thought they needed an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini for. And they’re like, well, I can actually get away with that on my thing. So like, to make a spot for itself
⏹️ ▶️ John in that in-between area that the article is talking about, find a home between the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and the laptop, maybe it has to continue to move upscale and to continue to encroach on PC territory
⏹️ ▶️ John and to take things away from there and to go with bigger screens. or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini gets scaled up and the other one becomes the pro and it gets even bigger. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s inevitable with phones getting larger. I mean, I guess it depends on how large they get. If it gets just a little bit larger,
⏹️ ▶️ John then not a big deal. But some of these phones that I see, it’s like, is that a phone or is that an iPad mini?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s really close. And at that point, what place is there for an iPad mini in your life? All it is
⏹️ ▶️ John is a slightly larger phone that doesn’t work as a phone. And so then if you’re gonna get something at all, going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is this tablet uniquely good at? It’s uniquely good at reading magazines. I don’t want to read a magazine
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone because it’s still too small. It’s uniquely good at reading comics, uniquely good at having video, because I don’t want to watch a video on this
⏹️ ▶️ John little tiny thing. And it’s uniquely good at being a multifunction word processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John email handling app, blah, blah, blah, within an extendable keyboard. And it becomes a Microsoft Surface and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like there’s a potential for it to be pushed upmarket in terms of capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not arguing that the iPad is going to go away or that it’s bad at everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My position, which I think you agree with because I think you said this, is that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are things the iPad is better at, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s no longer going to be assumed that everyone who has the means to buy an iPad should buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of been the assumption. If you’re into this kind of stuff at all and you have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money to afford an iPad, you You should buy an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll be, like I said, I think it’ll be more assumed as we go on because it’ll just as the price comes down,
⏹️ ▶️ John every household, if you have a smartphone, it’ll be assumed you also have a tablet to do the things you do on
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets, a big tablet, not a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Yeah, maybe. And I do think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re positioning it as like the thing you have in your home and just keep around the house. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it has a better future for than being traveling productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see I couldn’t disagree with you more, but I think we’re both right is the thing It depends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what you’re after and typically if I’m on the road I just want to browse Twitter like John was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey catch up on RSS do You know the things that people always say are content consumption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s all I need when I’m on the road and I prefer to do that on an iPad and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Think it would be great. I would continue to have an iPad for travel if for no other reason
⏹️ ▶️ John people do want to leave their laptops at home. Like there still is that people want to whether they’re ready to or not. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. But like I know I like going places with just my iPad and many cases I can pull it off and
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a desire to do that. It’s just a question of does does the iPad yet
⏹️ ▶️ John fulfill that does it live up to the way you want to use it and sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t that’s again if
⏹️ ▶️ John you start to push up market a little bit people still won’t want to bring their full-fledged laptop, especially if it’s there like work laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John or they associated with work, but the want to have a powerful tablet with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I think that the distinction of this idea of people that don’t want to bring their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops with them, there’s two sides of this. One is that if it’s their work laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not like they’re not self-employed, or they are self-employed, but they hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves, like a lot of people don’t want to bring their work with them because they don’t like their work. And that’s fine. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the work laptop has this emotional baggage of being your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, that you’re on vacation, You don’t want to bring this. But, you know, so that’s one side of that. You know, you’re never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get over that. Eventually, you’ll have a work tablet if this goes the way that everyone thinks it will. And you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to bring that either because that’s your work tablet. So whatever. That, I think, we can safely disregard it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a thing because, you know, eventually that will be merged. But the other side of it is people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who say, I don’t want to bring this whole laptop with me. Laptops in the last couple years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gotten so much thinner and lighter and smaller and battery life is going through the roof.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting so awesome that a lot of people who say that, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a two or three year old laptop. Well, it turns out modern laptops are a lot better than that. The last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years have been amazing in laptops. If half of the rumors are true about what Apple’s lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to have in the laptops in the near future, it’s going to be even better. They’re talking about this supposed 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch Retina Air that might not even have fans and maybe it might even run on ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip, who knows? Laptops are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really good. And there’s a reason why laptops have taken over the world as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer of choice for almost everybody who can make that choice. Laptops are awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they keep getting more and more and more awesome. They keep getting smaller, thinner, lighter, better battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life, better displays, everything about, and the OSes are, well, Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now you’re getting to it, it’s not just the size and everything. It’s like the reason people feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t want to bring my laptop isn’t just because it’s my work thing. It isn’t just because it’s heavier because I have an old laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also because the experience of using an iPad, because it runs iOS and it’s so simplified,
⏹️ ▶️ John is more relaxing for a vacation-type atmosphere. And again, that gap could narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. That’s what Apple’s trying to do. They’re trying to simplify Mac OS X. They’re trying to shave off the edges.
⏹️ ▶️ John These things are on a collision course, but it’s still debatable which one will get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the critical point first, especially with pricing, because if a tablet can be $99 and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John best MacBook Air is still $599 in some distant future, the tablets are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to win just based on price. So it used to be definitely a size thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to be lugging this Bing thing with me. As the size issue becomes less, then you get down to, OK, now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s down to price, and now it’s down to OS simplicity. And OS simplicity, the
⏹️ ▶️ John PC has a fighting chance. If we look at what Microsoft’s trying to do with Windows 8 and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple trying to simplify its OS on the price front, I don’t know. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a closer. I was going to say I would give the edge to the tablet. But now that I think about it, especially if they go to an ARM-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, that might be a reasonably fair fight too. Because in the end, what’s the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John an ARM-based MacBook Air and a Microsoft Surface and an iPad with a keyboard in terms of pricing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that could be close too. I don’t know, this is too close to call this race.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the funny thing is, if you think about, you know, what people want out of a quote iPad Pro. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people who try to get productivity work on their iPads either use or at some point have tried keyboards for their iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you think about, okay, what do you do about the keyboard? If you’ve ever used a keyboard on an iPad, you realize how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pointing device situation sucks because you have to keep using the keyboard on the bottom and then reaching up to touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen to, you know, move things around the screen, that sucks. know it seems like what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want out of an iPad Pro is to make it more like a laptop and what if this 12-inch thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty much the iPad airs hardware with a keyboard running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ported version of OS 10 that would solve multitasking it would solve document management it would solve you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would solve all of the quote productivity needs
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t solve solve like because people like people don’t like OS 10 compared to iOS like it’s more relaxing
⏹️ ▶️ John to use iOS like They’re trying to like it. I know geeks do, but you know, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the appeal of tablets is broad ranging in terms not just the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of it. It’s also the software parts, the same software parts that we’re complaining against that like the limitations like that’s the line
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is trying to walk. How do I make the iPad more capable without making it crappy? Or how do I make
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac less annoying to use without removing its capabilities?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I see. And I come back to what John has been saying, which is Part of the reason I ditch the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because it’s old and heavy and doesn’t have a great battery, but partly because for the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do when I’m traveling, which is basically just catch up on Twitter and RSS and email and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, I’ll just bring the iPad. Maybe if I’m feeling really exotic, I’ll bring my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Bluetooth keyboard and throw it in a suitcase and use it in situations where I’m sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down at the desk in the hotel or whatever and cranking out a few emails. But I’d much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer that over a small Mac, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find using iOS more enjoyable in that situation. I don’t know, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we also forgot the input method. Like Marco mentioned, the terrible keyboard support in iOS, which really is
⏹️ ▶️ John grim, especially like cursor control and really doing cursor control with touch is also grim. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for all other applications, like people like just being able to touch the screen and move stuff around.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re using Apple or Google Maps to do nav on your iPad, and you want to move the thing around. There’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John direct manipulation as part of the relaxation. You’re not swiping on a trackpad. You just can touch the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, Apple can do something. They can make some kind of convertible MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John that the keyboard folds around the back on it, and then you can touch the screen. And there are ways out of this, but then it’s like how to use
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS X with touch and blah, blah, blah. The attractiveness and the relaxation
⏹️ ▶️ John factor of the iPad is about the whole product. It’s about the interaction. It’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John the size. It’s about the OS. It’s about the simplicity. It’s about the applications. It’s about the history, the lack of baggage.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is a lot to it in the same way that there’s a lot to what’s stopping it from being a
⏹️ ▶️ John PC replacement. There’s a huge laundry list of things there as well. It’s not just one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s difficult to say who’s going to be able to make moves
⏹️ ▶️ John the best and the fastest? If we fast forward seven years, what does the,
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of how many tablets are sold versus how many PCs are sold, what do those ratios look like? Is it like 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets and 20% PC? Is it 50-50? We’ll know
⏹️ ▶️ John who got to the sweet spot first by looking at those ratios in a decade or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think it’s going to end up shaking out with basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect we’re gonna see the category, which ironically Microsoft started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these pretty much like laptop tablets, tablets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, they’re basically just really small laptops, running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop type OS’s, laptop type software, whether they’re convertible or not, I don’t think is that relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re gonna see the market split as it matures into, you know, phones are going to keep getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger until they’re all pretty much as big as they can be and still fit in most people’s pockets. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these big phones that’ll cut out a lot of the tablet use cases or a lot of the tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rationality at least. Then we’re gonna have the, you know, tablet for consumption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who like things like big screens or who need to draw on them or do things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people could do on a phone but are better on something with a bigger screen. And those might be used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home a lot or whatever. then we’re going to have people who want to do productivity type tasks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are really going to want these lap tablets, like the surface type things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that’s what this 12 inch thing is, you know, that kind of thing. I think that’s going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to split into the more casual or, you know, non traditional productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use cases will keep the current tablet form factor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as their best thing where they run best. But I think people who keep trying to put their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads in these big folio cases and attach a keyboard at the bottom and all these kind of iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bolt-ons trying to make it more like a computer, I think we’re going to see that usage merge into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just really compact laptops that whether they run whether they run Intel chips or not, whether they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run OS X, I’m guessing it would be really small laptops running OS X or Windows Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, really small computers running regular PC operating systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with tablet-like hardware but with a keyboard. With touchscreens? No. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe touchscreens optionally, but probably not. Probably just… What I’m really talking about is really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad Air hardware running an ARM port of OS X, as I said earlier. I really think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the productivity use is going to be so much better on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just a laptop, though. I mean, that’s not a lap-tab. I mean, Microsoft’s really taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the bullet on this one, because they’re trying to do the thing we’re describing and not doing well at it for
⏹️ ▶️ John a variety of reasons, not all of which have to do with the design of their product. A lot of them is just like market timing and issues with
⏹️ ▶️ John their OS and all sorts of other issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’re basically being the Sega CD of this generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the bottom line is they haven’t figured out to ignore all the software, ignore all the market things,
⏹️ ▶️ John ignore all the timing things. They just haven’t figured out the hardware, like kickstand, floppy keyboard, hinge,
⏹️ ▶️ John no hinge. I mean, everything they’ve done, it’s like an 11-inch MacBook Air does all
⏹️ ▶️ John those things better in terms of it’s got the stiff hinge. That’s why I keep thinking of stiff hinge,
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard that folds all the way on the back, and then a touch screen, and then an OS that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John actually use with touch. Those are the ingredients they’re missing so far. And I think Microsoft will keep trying
⏹️ ▶️ John with Surface. Hopefully, they will eventually find the correct combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of physical attributes. And then who knows if they’ll ever get the timing right or their software right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s still an opportunity for Apple to figure that out before them if they decide to. So I guess we’ll be watching for
⏹️ ▶️ John this 12-inch Retin-Air. Is it just another Air that happens to be a different size? Or are they
⏹️ ▶️ John going to try to do something special there? I think Apple does not have an appetite
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make a hybrid device of the type that I described many, many years ago in a back page
⏹️ ▶️ John column in Macworld. I think I was saying dual OS. And certainly, Apple’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do that. But I’m not sure they’re even trying to find a solution. I think they’re happy to allow things
⏹️ ▶️ John to evolve independently and just let them duke it out in the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. Again, I’m more skeptical. I think it’s really just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that phones getting larger screens will eat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the tablet use from the bottom, I think laptops getting a lot smaller, thinner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter, and having better battery lives will eat a lot of the top end of the market. So like I really don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so many of the people who are using tablets for productivity are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very satisfied in a few years with a really small laptop that has a lot of the benefits of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablet hardware while not having a lot of the limitations of tablet software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, we tried the netbook thing. It didn’t work out. Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Well, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. spot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linza.com and New Relic and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm and if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John twitter you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m, E-n-t, Marco Arment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-i-r-a-c-u-s-a Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to. Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tech podcasts so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I need to explain my Sega CD reference, because the chat room’s getting it all wrong, saying that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I meant the 32X or the CDX even. I think that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the Jupiter Project became? It looked like a toilet, and it was like a Genesis with a Sega CD combo. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even think that even came out, but if it did, oh well, no one bought it. The reason I said Sega CD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not 32X is because I was using the reference just to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Sega was infamous for putting out technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long before it could be good, or at least trying to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sega CD was, you know, it was one of the first widespread CD-ROM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming systems, if not the first widespread one. And it was just awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it was a 1X drive and load times were insane. The graphics really weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much better than any Genesis games. And it didn’t really add much hardware-wise to the Genesis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just very expensive. The games were terrible. They were mostly like FMV adventure games. Like the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game worth getting really was Sonic CD. Almost every game besides that was terrible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why I made that reference in relation to the Surface was like, surface, I think, was Microsoft having this interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware idea of doing it like a generation too early, basically, before it could really be…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it was going to be good, I think they did it too early to be good. So that’s why I suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sega CD, because that was like… They did it like a generation before the other CD-ROM gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems. And the other ones were way better than Hit because they had the benefit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having better technology available to them, whereas the Sega CD was just like way too early, way before its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and pretty bad as a result and that’s why the 32x is not an appropriate reference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the 32x failed for lots of reasons that had nothing to do with its technology. The technology is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good but it failed for lots of other reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was a Nintendo kid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As you can tell I was a Sega person.
⏹️ ▶️ John What happened to you both?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah what happened to me was the was the Sega CD and 32X and then stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey being a Sega person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might have told the story on the podcast, I don’t recall, but when I was in high school and for the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of college when I was at home, I worked at a Babbage’s, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a subsidiary of GameStop. And I remember vividly peddling the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dreamcast like you couldn’t even imagine before it came out. Oh, it’s going to be so much better. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be awesome. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be so much better. It’s going to be awesome. is so much better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would argue. Although I’m not going to stand on this one like I did the vinyl argument. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point being, it came out, like three people bought it, and then it disappeared and Sega all but folded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that was the problem was that by all accounts, I never had a Dreamcast, but I played one a few times here and there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By all accounts, the Dreamcast was a good system. The problem was the Dreamcast followed the Sega
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CD, 32x and the Saturn, all of which were terrible game systems and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Sega’s fan base was pretty burned by that point and there were other factors involved as well that made the Dreamcast kind of fail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but you know the biggest problem with the Dreamcast had nothing to do with its hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hardware was actually really good. Yeah agreed. So John out of curiosity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what what should we have been talking about besides the Sega CD and Casey’s Nintendo fanboyism?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was the proper answer to what game systems we used in the early 90s. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying what happened to you, you were both enthusiastic gamers as kids and then fell off the wagon
⏹️ ▶️ John or onto the wagon, I don’t know, whichever analogy is the one that’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m never straight on that actually. I mean for me personally it was getting into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like personal side projects and like side programming projects and making and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working for myself and writing and podcasting like all this other stuff I’m doing with my free time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I just don’t like there’s never a time during the day when I think I would like to spend the next hour playing a video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game. I used to have those moments and now I just don’t. There are other ways I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather spend that time now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, same here. When I was younger, the Nintendo 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out and I was still hugely into that. I blew so many hours on Goldeneye and Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kart, I can’t even tell you. And then I just kind of stopped playing games.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I might have found girls around that point, or more appropriately, I might have actually started to have some modicum of success
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with girls. But, but I remember vividly buying a PlayStation, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original PlayStation with my own money, and getting Metal Gear Solid and one of the Final
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fantasies and playing the crap out of those. And then I never really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked back at games ever again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here’s what you two are missing right now. For the same reason that I assume you both like to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John television and movies, like you still both do that, and it’s a thing that you enjoy. The experience
⏹️ ▶️ John afforded by the best modern games is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the best movie you’ve ever seen combined with the best TV you’ve ever seen multiplied by 20. For people who are into games and who
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, fluent in the interface and vocabulary of gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John a great game, I think all gamers would agree, is a superior experience to a great
⏹️ ▶️ John movie to these to them because they’re gamers, right? And so even if you’re not that into games, I would think that
⏹️ ▶️ John a really great game could give you the equivalent experience of a really great movie
⏹️ ▶️ John or a really great TV show. And just like movies and TV, there’s gonna be a lot of crap, there’s gonna be a lot of stuff you’re not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in, there’s gonna be stuff that’s disappointing, but that’s why I continue to find time in my schedule
⏹️ ▶️ John to play these games. I like to follow the industry, so it’s just a hobby, you know, just reading
⏹️ ▶️ John about it or whatever. But what games do I play? I don’t have a lot of time to play games But I make time to play
⏹️ ▶️ John the games that I think are going to be great and I enjoy them Immensely and I’m glad I carve out that time
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that I carve out time to watch Game of Thrones or in The past the wire or the Sopranos or all
⏹️ ▶️ John those other things that you find time in your schedule I’m not gonna watch every TV show TV is mostly crap But the Sopranos
⏹️ ▶️ John is great and I’m gonna watch it and I feel the same way about you know Playing the last of us or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly journey or anything like that So it’s not like you know, I’m not saying you both have to be I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying you both have to be gamers or whatever, but I think that it isn’t it’s reasonable to assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that were you to pursue Gaming there would be games that you would enjoy as much as you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John your favorite television programs or movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but let’s consider that I tend to have terrible taste in music television and movies.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, like you like what you like, like there’s a bazillion games, there’s a bazillion movies and TV shows. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John like to watch, you know, Supernatural, then that’s the kind of show you want. There are gaming equivalents
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. Like I’m saying, it’s at this point, it’s a genre as rich as television or movies or books
⏹️ ▶️ John for that matter. Well, maybe not as rich as those things, but moving in that direction. But certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John in mass market appeal, there’s probably something that you could find that would appeal to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem I think for people who aren’t into it is like, well, how do I know what to pick? Like to me, it’s just one big giant blob
⏹️ ▶️ John of games. And if you’re not following the game industry and reading game magazines, reading gaming news sites and following gaming people
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter, you don’t know which thing to pick. And if you just go into the store, like, I’ll just try this game, you’ll try it, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be crap, you’ll be annoyed. And you’re like, see, this is why I don’t play games. They’re stupid. Right? So there is that barrier.
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to come into, but I think that there’s nothing about the two of you, including your age
⏹️ ▶️ John or maturity level, that is preventing you, that is making you incapable of enjoying modern gaming. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John for a reasonable approximation, everybody enjoys modern gaming. Everybody’s a gamer to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ John or another. And if anything, you two are standing out as oddities in that you used to be gamers and
⏹️ ▶️ John now as adults just sort of cut them out of your life entirely and that’s becoming increasingly rare. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John you think this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so yeah I’m with Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John go go look at the numbers on go look at the numbers on the gaming industry go look at the average age of a gamer you
⏹️ ▶️ John are not in the majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re saying that it’s unusual for people to play games when they’re younger and then not play games when they’re like in their
⏹️ ▶️ John yep what do you think the average age of a gamer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I know it’s going up but that doesn’t necessarily mean what you just said
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah but just look at the distribution look at how many people how big is the gaming industry how many copies do games sell? How many people
⏹️ ▶️ John say they play games at all? Like, it’s massive. It is mass market. Most people
⏹️ ▶️ John play games. Certainly most people who have any kind of computing device do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m with Marco on this. I have no facts to back me up, but, well, that never stopped me before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, me neither. But that just doesn’t pass the smell test for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what’s interesting is, wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John You sound like my parents. I’ll let the readers write in and tell you all this. It doesn’t and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re still playing games? You haven’t grown out of those? The equivalent I always used to give my parents, which they’d found
⏹️ ▶️ John non-convincing at all, and you will also find non-convincing, but I will do it again. It’s kind of like if my grandparents’
⏹️ ▶️ John parents said to them, if my grandparents’ parents could see them at 85 years old and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you guys are still playing Pinochle? You didn’t grow out of cards? How can you be playing? It’s like, they played it
⏹️ ▶️ John their whole life. They played card games when they were kids. They played it till the day they died. They played, it’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was their version of games is these card games. They didn’t grow out of them. And in the same way, anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s actually a gamer, of course, never grows out of them. But at this point, anyone who
⏹️ ▶️ John grew up with games continues to play them their whole life. They don’t stop playing them in the same way that my grandparents never stopped playing Pinochle.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, you know, it’s not something you grow out of. It’s not like a child’s toy.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no such thing as adults would never want to do it. Games are not like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s like saying, you still watch movies? Isn’t that a kid thing? You still read books? Isn’t that just something for kids?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to suggest that games are juvenile, because that’s not at all what I mean, and that’s not why I stopped playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for the most part. It’s literally just like there are many different ways to entertain yourself these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have chosen to not play very many games anymore, to hardly play any at all anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because all of the alternatives to amusing myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to spending time, things like browsing the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or socializing online or watching TV series on Netflix. I’ve chosen to do all of those things instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s not true because you and Tiff both love board games. And yes, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not video games, but it’s games. And if we’re broadening the – if I’m moving the goalpost,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to me counts. And similarly, I don’t really play games anymore. But if I’m in a group setting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love to play a game of Cards Against Humanity or I enjoyed, what was it, Puerto Rico
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we played in South Carolina, Marco, and what was it we played just this past weekend? I already forgotten.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quirkle. Thank you. Games like that I really enjoy. And the other thing I’ve found that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fill my free time with, if I’m not just farting around on the internet, is I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really back into reading novels again, which I used to do a lot as well as a kid, and now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve gotten back into that. And so, realizing that the local library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of the best inventions of the world, I’ve pretty much had a book with me almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the last six months to a year.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, now you’re back in the minority again because most Americans anyway don’t read. You ever
⏹️ ▶️ John see those scary statistics about how many people don’t read a novel after they graduate from high school? That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t want to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But gaming is much more mass market than reading novels. Yeah, that’s probably true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and really, you guys too game a little bit. You’re saying, if I’m not playing Grand Theft Auto, I’m not gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean like letterpress counts you know like playing playing total annihilation or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re playing with your friends that you know Your friends wedding like that counts like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it didn’t happen by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John well Failing to play
⏹️ ▶️ John annihilation. That’s PC. That’s PC gaming PC gaming is attempting to get a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I know but even console like I I have a ps3 the only game. I have for it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is the wipeout version that was a download game? I bought it thinking I’d get more gaming out of it But I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just wanted a blu-ray player and at the time it was about the same price as a blu-ray player So oh, yeah, I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ps3 and and yeah never use it as a gaming console
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, that’s not true either Is it because I thought you bet you had something to learn the Nürburgring on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that the ps3 or the Xbox? I forget which one I chose if you know that might have been the ps3 I forget but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use that for like three nights Total so okay. I might have two games for
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem for getting into these type triple-a type games games is that if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it for a long time, again, you’re lacking in the literacy of the current gaming conventions
⏹️ ▶️ John and genres. And so yeah, you can fire up a driving game, because driving games are driving games. But were
⏹️ ▶️ John you to, I mean, that’s why I don’t spend my time encouraging you too much to play Journey, because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you played it, it would be lost on you, and that you’re missing the context to appreciate that game fully. And it’s almost like- You have
⏹️ ▶️ John spent so much time encouraging me to play Journey. I know. But it’s clear that you’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And so now it’s like, now I’m almost like, I’d rather you not play it. I’d rather you have a bunch of warm up games if
⏹️ ▶️ John you ever got to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d play it and you’d be like, no, it’s all right. It’s kind of boring. The game would be lost on you. And the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with like, you have a PS3. Should you play The Last of Us? No. If you haven’t played a AAA video game in
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years, The Last of Us is not going to work for you the way it works for the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John still sort of in the AAA gaming thing. You were definitely,
⏹️ ▶️ John both of you, in the more of the casual gaming space. I would say, yeah, get Monument Valley. It’s fun. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s all right. It’s not amazing. I think it’s a little bit too easy and a little bit too short.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not even as, I think Year Walk was a much better game, for example. I think Ridiculous Fishing is a better game, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example. But those are the type of games where you don’t need a lot of context. You can just dive right into them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, for example, both of you would probably enjoy Ridiculous Fishing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I played Ridiculous Fishing for about 10 minutes and didn’t see the appeal. And I know everyone loved it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I assume, what happens is I I will try these games that everyone says are amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re being big hits. I’ll try them and most of them, I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got into threes and letterpress and dots, I get into some iOS casual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games but most of these games that people just totally obsess over, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find them that fun. And so I assume there’s something wrong with me that I’m just not a gamer because I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what everyone else likes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you are, you made your own units for whatever that was. Was that total annihilation? I mean, like when I was 16,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But those you still had the instinct to want to play it. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still inside you. It’s just that now all of your all of your touchstones are now out of date. So when you try to
⏹️ ▶️ John play something modern doesn’t work that casually and so ridiculous fishing when I first tried it to I thought like, yeah, whatever but like
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a there is a hook in the game. And if you’re allowed to go maybe you need to be a little bit more of a gamer to for that hook to
⏹️ ▶️ John find purchase Monument Valley is simpler, but I think it’s it’s more of a trifle
⏹️ ▶️ John year walk is probably you would not you need to be gamer to play that I’m just trying to think like threes
⏹️ ▶️ John and letterpress you guys both have no problem getting to that you want it because it’s more like a board game which Marco does play actively
⏹️ ▶️ John like and then you’re like oh I understand what this is about more or less it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way by actively like I’ll play it we’ll play board games meanwhile if we play board games with with like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends who are over sometimes it I would say we probably play board games for maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an hour and a half every two months like we’re not talking about a frequent hobby I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play more of them because I do enjoy them. But yeah, I don’t get the chance that often.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s I think more of a time investment from my perspective than a video game,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you gotta get all the stuff out, and you gotta get to multiple people, and they all have to be there. Whereas a video game,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can steal time to play more conveniently than you can steal because you can’t play one of these complicated German
⏹️ ▶️ John board games that requires five people, and they all have to know the rules already, otherwise you’re gonna be there for an hour. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is not something you can steal time and just to grab a quick game of or even put in an extra hour of like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John did I play the last of us? I played it when the kids were asleep, when my wife was out of town in a series of, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, one or two hour sittings. And I could not play that if I
⏹️ ▶️ John had a board game that I was interested in, I would be like you and waiting around to have time to gather a bunch of people who also want to play
⏹️ ▶️ John a board game who also know the rules to play the board game. So I think that’s it’s harder to find time to do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you managed to do it like, and it’s fine. I’m just saying Like I think there there is enjoyment to be had there
⏹️ ▶️ John is nothing in you that’s making that’s making you like Oh, I’m just not a gamer I guess I don’t love these games that everybody loves
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of times you’re just missing the context for it And I think there are games out there that you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m sure there are but I think you’re right that it that I’m I’m not willing to put in a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time investment to Try to find these things. I’m not willing to to say like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, oh, yeah, I’m gonna I’m gonna spend this whole Saturday afternoon like if my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wife’s out of town and my kids asleep the thing I would most want to do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to my computer and write or program I love doing those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would rather do that then go to the TV and play a game
⏹️ ▶️ John someday you’ll be ready for a journey Marco maybe maybe Adam will do it for you because Adam will want to play games probably
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re fun thing to do and kids have nothing to do but you know they have nothing but free time right so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John he’ll help you get you into them but Someday, when you’re ready, Journey will be there for you, presumably with the PS5
⏹️ ▶️ John remastered version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and if that happens, like if my kid ends up liking games, yeah, and I agree, that’s likely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If he ends up liking games and I’ll play with him, that’s a whole different story. Then I would, because then I’m spending time with my kid and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interacting with him while playing these games, that makes sense. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, then you’ll suck and you’ll be the dad who can’t play games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that how it always has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be? You probably suck too, you just don’t realize it. No, not my family.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will tell you the day when any of my kids can beat me in any video game and I am determined that day will never come.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, now it’s time for titles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love, so let’s see what we’ve covered in this episode so far. We’ve had OS X reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file systems, yep, file systems. We had it earlier. We have seriously hit the John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse, like, quadfecta.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not Not even close, we didn’t even mention TiVo, like so many things that we didn’t