90: Speculative Abandonware
07 Nov 2014Marco hasn’t seen it, Microsoft Band, iWork file formats, and the Retina iMac in reality.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Declan night one
- It's Andy Samberg that is part of Lonely Island, not "Adam Sandberg".
Many of the videos below contain explicit lyrics. - App store prevents too-expensive bundle purchases (via @walruscp)
- TRIM support and John's SSD
- Trim Enabler and a related Yosemite FAQ
- AHCI
- Ars on the rise of SSDs
- SandForce
- Source list opacity in Yosemite (1 2)
- This was also covered on John's recent appearance on The Talk Show
- Ancient GameCube controllers in modern times
- Microsoft Band
- _David Smith's thoughts on his blog and podcast
- Exploded diagram
- Ars Review
- Nice summary by Manton Reece
- WebOS
- Courier
- Kin
- Surface product placement goes wrong
- iWork file-format support
- Post-show:
- Wii U Pro Controller versus GameCube Controller
- John has a surprise
- iPhone 6/6 Plus sales ratio
- Tweetie
UIRefreshControl- RiMac First Impressions
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how’s it going so far?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, going well. Um, the, the prediction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you two had for night one at home, would you like to guess if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it went as you expected or not at all as you expected?
⏹️ ▶️ John I already heard an analog, right? You’d already, you already told the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I already tell the world?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Did that already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come? That didn’t come out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen live. Oh, okay. That doesn’t count. You’re cheating. Yeah, you absolutely cheated. Okay. So Marco, did it go as you expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say it went not swimmingly, or did Declan surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone and it went pretty much flawlessly? First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night home from the hospital? I’m saying it did not go flawlessly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s… It was a disaster. It’s simply unrealistic to expect otherwise. I mean, it’s not really his fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, you know, zero-year-olds are pretty rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes perfectly, you’d be worried that there’s something wrong with the baby and you’d be bringing him back to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the hospital.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. Get him inspected. Because you’d be like, this not failing to thrive is just too sleepy all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Yeah. Now, it’s actually funny you say that because we did mention the pediatrician Monday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he was really sleepy and, you know, we were letting him go something like four-ish hours overnight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because he really didn’t wake up to feed. And the pediatrician was like, uh-uh, no, not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That ain’t your thing yet. You got to wake that baby up. And so that’s what we’ve been doing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been, I mean, all in all, it’s actually, he’s been really good. The first night was a disaster because we hadn’t yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come to the conclusion that divide and conquer is the answer. And so, you know, here it is. I’m trying to be supportive of Aaron,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is, who is the only one who can actually feed Declan. And I’m waking up and just kind of staring at her while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s feeding him. Not and there’s no point in me being up, but I’d want to be supportive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took us until basically the end of that night where I think I said to her, listen, he’s pissed off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You haven’t slept in forever. You’re the one who actually needs sleep right now. You go to bed. just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entertain him for a couple hours. And that’s when kind of we had the epiphany that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey divide and conquer is really the way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is a purpose to you staying up at the same time. And that’s like to offer moral support
⏹️ ▶️ John if your wife is the type of person who would resent you if you were sleeping peacefully in the
⏹️ ▶️ John other room while she slept. But eventually, yes, you will both get over that because
⏹️ ▶️ John you will realize if either one of us ever wants to sleep, we have to get over the notion that all suffering must be shared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which one of us said Adam Sandberg? Was that me or John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did and then you confirmed it. We were trying to remember the name of some movie. I’m like, oh, that’s the thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John Adam Sandberg. And you said, yep, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know why I let that slide because I knew it was Andy Sandberg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but apparently I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John it was Andy Sandberg too. It just, you know, came out wrong. Anyway, in case you were wondering, the man’s name is Andy
⏹️ ▶️ John Sandberg. So everybody was wrong except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. You didn’t say anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. It didn’t make you right but you were you are correct in saying you are not wrong You
⏹️ ▶️ John should have you should have corrected me in real time. So we wouldn’t have had this follow-up You could have done real-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow-up. You assume I know who that is or what you were talking about You know
⏹️ ▶️ John who Andy Samberg is
⏹️ ▶️ John on you overestimate me You saw him you’d be like, oh, yeah, it’s that guy. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t know the name. Yeah That’s maybe also unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Think you would I mean if you heard if you’ve ever seen a recent Saturday Night Live not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now recent but within the last five, 10 years recent. If you’ve seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he’s been in a bunch of movies too, although they’re escaping me off the top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, I’m at zero for two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How about Lazy Sunday, which was a-
⏹️ ▶️ John Never heard of it. The original reference that you made was on a boat. He’s seen the on a boat thing. I’m on a boat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first time I saw that was when I recorded it to insert into the show last week. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard about it, so I knew roughly what you were talking about, but I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else about, like I had never heard the whole thing. Same thing with in a box, like when that came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, same people, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like two weeks earlier or something. Yeah, that was like, the entire world was obsessed with that and I didn’t hear it for like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was really funny, so Adam, God, I did it again. Andy Samberg is part of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a trio called Lonely Island. They’re the ones who did the I’m on a boat song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they came out with an album, I don’t know, two, three months ago, maybe a little more than that. And I read a review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, which is weird because I never read album reviews, but I read a review of it on like Rolling Stone or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pitchfork or something hipster. And the point that they made about the album was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s supposed to be satirical rap. And so it’s sort of kind of weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owlish, although weird owl is deliberately goofy, whereas they’re more satirical in my personal estimation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, they said that the problem with the Lonely Island album is that the music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good enough and the writing is good enough that it’s not really that satirical after all and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so they totally kind of escape or missed the point of the entire album which was to be satirical and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that they accidentally made an album that was just good enough to not be taken as a joke which was their intention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird. Should I be a little bit embarrassed that first of all I’d never heard T-Pain before but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while watching the On the Boat video I was like the only music I was actually enjoying was when T-Pain was singing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was actually singing and not just yelling. I’m so not a rap guy, clearly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean… Well, the comedy behind that, though, is that he was autotuned to death. Like that was T-Pain’s thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least as far as I knew, was he was like the first person to really embrace autotune.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s not fair. The first person that everyone realized really embraced autotune. I think you could argue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that many artists, such as maybe Britney Spears, had embraced autotune a long time before him. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that’s kind of his shtick. And, and yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either way, he was definitely the most musical part of that, which I was trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of musical enjoyment out of it because I’m like, well, I’m, if I’m going to listen to something called music, I might as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some, some enjoyment out of it. And that was the only source of any, any promise in that whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You didn’t like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lyrics at all? I think one verse was kind of funny, maybe, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole, I was sitting there like, this is still going? Like I couldn’t believe how long that like they I figured that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like a 45 second SNL skit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they had made an entire, you know, three or four minute or whatever song out of it No, it’s it’s it’s the real deal. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should have stayed as a 30-second skit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should there’s there’s a couple of other Couple other videos that they’ve done that are pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re a semicolon video I thought was pretty awesome and it’s all about using semicolons properly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which which I thought was enjoyable sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John incredible You’ve seen that one right Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good one put it in the show notes force Marco to watch it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have seen nothing you have you have to understand any any question that begins with you know surely you’ve seen blank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, you do all day. I
⏹️ ▶️ John start sending you more links Seriously, you assume I’m going to actually watch them make tiff press
⏹️ ▶️ John your little hand on the mouse button and click Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ll have to like manually switch into Chrome to make flash work to play it yeah, not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it Well, pause my music, open my Chrome ghetto. It’s just not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what do you mean, pause your music? You’re listening to fish. That’s not music. Pause your noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Open your Flash ghetto, etc. Anyway, what else is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did Walrus CP tell us, John? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Colin Peckrun. Tweeted to say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, last show I was talking about, they were using bundles for upgrades, a concept we discussed long ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ John last week’s show, we posted, I hope the link is in the show, it’s of a screenshot of this actually
⏹️ ▶️ John happening in the store. And I mentioned the scenario where it could actually be more expensive to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a second app as part of an upgrade bundle than it would be if you just bought the second app on its own. And Colin wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John in to say that apparently the store now forbids you from purchasing a bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John if it would be cheaper for you to buy the other apps individually. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess that’s one workaround to this problem with bundle pricing, but it still seems pretty weird to me
⏹️ ▶️ John and complicated. Like people, I don’t know what the message looks like because I didn’t test it. I didn’t have a scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John where I owned half of a bundle and I could try it out. But what does it say to you to let you understand why you can’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this bundle and what you should do instead? I don’t know. It’s very confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s very weird. Additionally, somebody had asked us for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to explain how you’re handling trim support with your newfound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baby SSD. Can you recap what trim is and then talk about what you’re doing about it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a common question when I mentioned that I got an SSD because people who have and it’s just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s a third party SSD and I’m sticking it into a Mac that never had it didn’t ship with an SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone wants to know about trim support, what am I doing with trim support, and it’s a bunch of wrinkles related to
⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite. So trim, I don’t even know what it stands for. But trim is a command
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets sent to an SSD that tells it that a bunch of blocks
⏹️ ▶️ John of data on it are no longer being used. So the SSD is free to sort of reclaim them for future use. And this sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. It’s like, why would you need this on an SSD? Why don’t you need a disk? And it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John do with the way disks are addressed by computers. We’re going to use the Unix parlance. It’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John block addressable device where it’s just, it’s this device hanging out there and you and you instead of addressing
⏹️ ▶️ John it in bytes, you can address it in blocks like, you know, whatever, 4k or whatever. Actually, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to get into blocks. Forget about the block thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just concentrated, yeah. Concentrate on that as a, well, you know, because there’s file system blocks and then there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John block address list. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, no, we’re gonna get into file system. So when you’re addressing
⏹️ ▶️ John a disk, you have to write a file system to it. And the file system is the structures that you put on it to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John track of where everything is. So you have a little index over here on the disk on a right, like a little tree or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. And this is where I’m gonna look up the files are and then you there’s a whole bunch of different techniques
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on the file system to find where are the pieces of this file are they big long continuous string probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John probably there’s a bunch of pieces and then a pointer to another bunch of pieces and a pointer to another bunch of pieces and you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John blocks that direct you to other blocks and you’ve got a doubly indirect blocks and triply indirect I mean this is all
⏹️ ▶️ John the realm of file system the file systems job is to put a bunch of things on disks that are structure so we can find the data
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you delete a file on most file systems, all you do is go to the little place where
⏹️ ▶️ John you would look up where all the stuff for the file is, and you just erase that entry. It’s like erasing an entry
⏹️ ▶️ John in like the index of a book, right? It doesn’t touch the actual data that belonged to the file.
⏹️ ▶️ John The data that belonged to the file is still sitting there. All you did was erase like the bookkeeping information that the structures
⏹️ ▶️ John in the file system that would tell you where to find that stuff. And that’s why you can undelete files. If people remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John undelete utilities back from the DOS days and everything like that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know when you delete something it doesn’t take as long as writing you don’t you don’t overwrite all the disks unless you do some kind of secure delete.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fine for spinning disks but for SSDs, SSDs are a little bit weird. Everything about memory chips is
⏹️ ▶️ John weird and I don’t know if this is true of all SSDs which is a point we’ll get to in a little bit but
⏹️ ▶️ John for in the early days of SSDs and probably still is the case for most of them, the way
⏹️ ▶️ John the memory is addressed in the little chips that make up the SSDs you can’t just grab
⏹️ ▶️ John one little sort of block-sized piece and read and write it. When you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John write something you have to write it in a large chunk, even if you’re just interested in one little piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And furthermore you can’t write to a bunch of memory
⏹️ ▶️ John that already has stuff in it. So what you have to do is read that entire gigantic chunk
⏹️ ▶️ John into into some other memory temporarily. Erase that entire gigantic chunk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Modify the little chunk you wanted to change in the copy that you made in memory before you erased it and then write the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing back which seems incredibly inefficient but that’s the way SSDs work for a variety of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John and that means that even if the space isn’t used like even if you erase the little entry
⏹️ ▶️ John and said oh that file is gone I deleted it I deleted that 5 gig movie and just erases the little tiny lookup table
⏹️ ▶️ John of where those 5 gigs were that 5 gigs of data is still in the chip so the next time you want to write something if it
⏹️ ▶️ John lands in one of those places where that 5 gig file was it can’t just go I’m gonna write that data there. It has to erase
⏹️ ▶️ John it first. You can’t, unlike a spinning disk where you can just write over any spot, like writing is just an
⏹️ ▶️ John operation where you say I don’t care where I’m writing, just start writing because it just, you know, flips the little magnetic poles in the disk and you’re all set.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to erase it before you write. But on an SSD, not only do you have to erase it before you write, but you have to erase this
⏹️ ▶️ John big gigantic block, modify the little bit in the copy that you got, and then put the copy back on.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the trim command is an optimization. The operating system, when it deletes a little file
⏹️ ▶️ John it says okay I’m going to delete this little entry from the file system but also I’m going to send this command to the disk
⏹️ ▶️ John that says by the way I deleted the entry for this for this file in the file system so you should go and find all the blocks
⏹️ ▶️ John that belong to that thing or it’ll tell you where those blocks are and say the mark these is being freed so it gives the SSD a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John to erase those blocks so that when something needs to be written later it doesn’t find itself stumbling on to
⏹️ ▶️ John where you know because here’s the thing about the SSD has no idea about the file system it is just a big
⏹️ ▶️ John addressable chunk of storage. The file system is all something that happens in the realm of the operating system, so the SSD has
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what’s a file, what’s not a deleted file, it just obeys commands. It’s just a stupid, you know, box for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part. So that’s why trim is useful, because it lets the operating system tell the SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ John I deleted a file, so all the blocks that belong to that file that were here, here, here, and here, they’re not used anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you get a chance, maybe in some idle time, erase those, because later when you need to write something, you’re gonna have some freshly
⏹️ ▶️ John erased spots. And this is, by the way one of the reasons the SSDs, especially the early ones, would slow down when they got
⏹️ ▶️ John full because that would mean that the number of places that you can write, like the places that are erased in an erase state,
⏹️ ▶️ John would go down because, you know, the SSD is almost full. So anytime I needed to write anything I would have to read the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John chunk back, erase the entire thing, modify a little bit, write it back. There wasn’t any fresh sort of green field to put stuff in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the thing with Trim. Apple, I believe, supports Trim on most of its SSDs that it builds
⏹️ ▶️ John in. Most all? I don’t know what the situation is now I think maybe all of them but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t support trim for third-party SSDs in general so I
⏹️ ▶️ John bought a third-party SSD if you go to the system information application in Yosemite you can
⏹️ ▶️ John you know select your little ATA bus or SATA bus or whatever your thing is on and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say trim support yes or no and mine says no so people are asking hey did you use this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John called trim enablers a whole bunch of little system extension type things it will force the operating system to enable
⏹️ ▶️ John the trim command even if your SSD is not once supplied by Apple. And that’s what people have been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John in past versions of the OS, but Yosemite will not load a kernel extension that has not
⏹️ ▶️ John been signed. And to sign a kernel extension you basically need to build it yourself, you need to sort of have the source code
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and compile it, but Apple does not release the source code to its, what is it called, AHCI,
⏹️ ▶️ John Advanced Host Something Interface, we should get that, where is that in the link? Yeah, Advanced Host Controller Interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t release the source code to those to that driver for OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X so third parties can’t make their own drivers and sign them and load them.
⏹️ ▶️ John All they can do is these hacks they were doing before but Yosemite will basically refuse to load a kernel extension
⏹️ ▶️ John that isn’t signed. So the only way to get TrimEnabler to work in Yosemite is to turn off the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that says I will only load signed kernel extensions. Which it’s not a great thing to do because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a good security feature in that like a virus or malware can’t throw a kernel extension
⏹️ ▶️ John into your system like even if it gets like temporary root access because it tricks you into entering your local password and it writes
⏹️ ▶️ John a kernel extension somewhere and then you know you root it or whatever the system will not load a kernel extension that isn’t signed
⏹️ ▶️ John that if they signed it presumably it’s signed with an Apple developer ID Apple has some contact information
⏹️ ▶️ John like they could find the responsible parties like if someone goes through the effort to make malware with a signed
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel extension at least Apple would have some recourse to find out who these people are because presumably that whatever authentication method is
⏹️ ▶️ John determining if you’re a real person and giving you a developer ID. And they can also revoke your certificate and validate that
⏹️ ▶️ John and do all sorts of other things having to do with it. So this is a very long-winded and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John technically slightly technically inaccurate way of getting to the question which was
⏹️ ▶️ John am I doing this thing? Am I using trim enabler and am I disabling
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel extension signing in Yosemite or checking for kernel extension signatures in Yosemite?” And the answer is no.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason I’m not doing it, one is that I don’t really like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of bypassing the security feature in Yosemite, even though it wasn’t there in previous ones. It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would I do that unless I have a reason? And that leads to the second reason, which is, until and unless I see
⏹️ ▶️ John performance problems with my SSD, and those performance problems are solved by
⏹️ ▶️ John enabling trim, I’m not going to even consider doing this. Like, in other words, I’m going to wait until
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a problem, And if suddenly I feel like, oh, this SSD used to be really fast, but now it’s getting slow. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that leads to the final nuance in that SSDs have on them, like, basically a little computer that manages
⏹️ ▶️ John the storage. It manages, like, the write leveling and all sorts of other things, because you can only read and write Flash a certain number of times
⏹️ ▶️ John before it wears out. And SSDs are over-provisioned, depending on if they’re, like, an enterprise SSD or
⏹️ ▶️ John a consumer SSD. They give you more storage than you think you have, because wear leveling will use up sections. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a complicated little computer in there managing the chips. And the complexity of what’s going on inside
⏹️ ▶️ John an SSD is increasingly divorced from the view of that SSD from the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John as just a simple box of bits that you can address. And so the assumptions about trim,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to tell the thing to trim because otherwise it’s going to be inefficient or whatever, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that the SSD knows where the deleted files are, but it’s more like what’s going on inside that
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD. It’s like the operating system can’t know better than the SSD when and how it needs to
⏹️ ▶️ John to do its work because in the grand scheme of things you’re gonna have to erase that that the blocks with
⏹️ ▶️ John that belong to that 5 gigabyte before you write to them anyway, and Maybe it’s better to do it soon rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than later like send a trim command And tell the SSD to get rid of it during like an idle
⏹️ ▶️ John period or whatever But the operating system can just send that as a suggestion as for all for all it knows The SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John reads the trim command and files it away in a queue somewhere and doesn’t do it for a long time Or maybe it doesn’t do it ever
⏹️ ▶️ John because actually it turns out there was another I operation that addresses same thing and it invalidates The trim and whatever so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know the intricate details that are what’s going on inside SSDs these days But I do know that the storage
⏹️ ▶️ John management in SSDs has been changing a lot, so I’m not entirely sure Whether trim
⏹️ ▶️ John is as necessary as it used to be I think it probably still is useful and most benchmarks bear
⏹️ ▶️ John out that if You don’t enable trim you have serious problems, especially when? and storage gets tight. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m doing is leaving Yosemite’s kernel extension signature checking the way it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I find that my SSD is getting slow, I will follow the instructions, which we will put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes, the very scary process of disabling kernel extension signature checking and
⏹️ ▶️ John using Trim Enabler.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve had, on my work MacBook Pro, I’ve had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third-party SSD since I received the machine in June of 2012.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? Yes, June of 2012. I did not knowingly do anything to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enable or disable trim support and the thing still screams.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s way faster than a spinning disk, right? Marco, have you ever enabled trim on any of your various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I always have just forgotten to do that. I mean, one thing I always, I mean this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now almost ancient history, but when SSDs were first getting to consumer stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were getting popular, the Sandforce controllers came out and became a big splash because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, this was actually I think before Trim existed as a command that you could send,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically certain SSDs would do things kind of the dumb way and would have to, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would fill up and then they would have that, have whatever it’s called, like the right slowdown whatever whatever that’s right degradation I think
⏹️ ▶️ John right amplification where we all you just wanted to write one little thing but it turns out what you have to do is erase a huge swath
⏹️ ▶️ John read a huge swath modify and then write a huge swath
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right so it’s like after the SSD was filled up once as you described earlier like after it was ever filled up then all rights over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time would then be slower than that initial batch anyway so Sandforce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it was a controller company they made those little computers on the SSDs to figure out where to put things and how to write things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they figured out various techniques and optimizations to basically avoid that problem and minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that problem without trim support. Just by like how they would spread the rights around and how they would buffer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and things like that. Various tricks, I don’t know all the details. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would always just buy Sandforce controller SSDs because I knew first trim didn’t even exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then when it was added, Max didn’t support it at all first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when Apple did finally add support for it in the OS, it would only work on these whitelisted disks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I didn’t have any of them. So for all of my third party SSDs, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought, I bought SSDs that didn’t really need trim support and just never, never bothered trying to hack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my way into enabling it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Why don’t you tell us about something that’s pretty cool though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gladly. We are sponsored this week. Can you guess? Is it Squarespace? It is
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this really advanced HTML interface where you can just drag stuff around. drag and drop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can adjust settings and colors and themes and positions and sizes and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can adjust everything to your heart’s content and it’s all live previews right on your site. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all WYSIWYG. It’s really amazing what they’ve managed to cram into a web browser is stunning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we use Squarespace, honestly. I mean we use it for our site, for the ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see for yourself. That is an almost completely the unmodified Squarespace template. And we actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we wanted to hack a couple of little things. And so they actually let you inject JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and HTML and CSS if you want to you can inject it directly into your template. And so you can customize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a bit through that if you’re if you’re a nerd like us, which you probably are if you’re listening to this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really recommend them. They’re great. There are so many classifications of like, you know, geeks like us. We’re like we could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a website for everything that we do. But it’s often not the best use of our time
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. And it’s just so easy, you can just put up a website in no time at all and then go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to focusing on your actual project that you’re making the website for, avoiding that whole distraction. So
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dr. Syracuse, could you tell us about the source list and opacity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Yosemite, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is old feedback from when we were complaining about Yosemite’s transparency stuff and the sidebars
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that. This is from Robert Cooper, and he was sending a note, maybe we even talked about this before, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that you can choose for the source list to be opaque, you know, programmatically if you’re writing an
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about this already? Sounds familiar. I don’t think we did. Anyway, we’re talking about it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he’s a developer for Skype because he says in one of his tweets, we’ve chosen to do that in Skype seven.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t operated Skype seven, so I haven’t seen it yet. But, uh, one of the things we’re saying is that they chose to make the sidebar opaque
⏹️ ▶️ John and Skype seven. Uh, this, I mean that you can programmatically do it. Yeah, of course. I mean you can
⏹️ ▶️ John programmatically do anything right here. You know, you don’t even have to use Apple source list. You could fake it if you wanted to. Uh, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to see the option. But the important thing about the transparency in Yosemite is what the
⏹️ ▶️ John defaults are. For applications that were compiled and built before Yosemite even shipped, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can end up with like, you know, like Outlook 2011, they can ship with, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll have translucent sidebars. They had no idea that we’re ever going to have a translucent sidebar and that here they are running on Yosemite with a translucent
⏹️ ▶️ John sidebar that they never planned on having. And those defaults show how dedicated Apple is. It’s not like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to have this new feature and if you want to use it, just, you know, flip this little bit in this API when you make this call
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll get a translucent sidebar. No, they opted everybody into it, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a bold move. And, you know, I don’t particularly like it because I think the apps that never
⏹️ ▶️ John meant to have transparency and sidebars will look all weird. And even the ones that want to have it sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t look great. But we’ve talked about that before. I’ve talked about it at length on this podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and the talk show. So reference those
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to hear more whining about transparency in Yosemite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Do we want to finally clear out this GameCube controller follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s been in our show notes for an eternity?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. This is from someone named Rich. Long ago, I was discussing the
⏹️ ▶️ John GameCube controller and the adapter that lets you use a GameCube controller with a Wii U. The adapter is
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can play Smash Bros. and I was excited that the adapter would also let you play any other game that used
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pro Controller for the Wii U, But that was not the case and I was sad about it and I was mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ John this because I thought it was Pretty damning evidence against the pro controller that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Wii U pro controller is the traditional looking controller with two analog sticks and buttons and triggers You
⏹️ ▶️ John know a typical looking controller that Nintendo made for the Wii U specifically and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John when Smash Brothers came out They offered this adapter for the GameCube controller And I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like if they if if the Wii U pro controller was really any good Nintendo would not have felt the need
⏹️ ▶️ John to make an adapter and Rich was writing in to
⏹️ ▶️ John clarify that the GameCube controller was there just because Smash Brothers players are addicted to it and because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wired instead of wireless if you’re not using the WaveBird and I know this but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worth it’s worth pointing out why I still think it’s evidence that the Wii U Pro controller
⏹️ ▶️ John is not fulfilling its job like if Nintendo is going to make a a new traditional looking controller.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should make something that is satisfactory to all but the hardest of hardcore
⏹️ ▶️ John Smash Bros. players. And this, you know, Apple’s not going to make an adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John just for people who compete in Smash Bros. tournaments. There’s just not enough of those people in the entire world. This adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John is for the wide range of people who play Smash Bros. and it’s basically Nintendo admitting that even if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not a professional Smash Bros. player, we understand that the Wii U Pro Controller
⏹️ ▶️ John is not better than the GameCube controller. So here you go, we’re actually gonna make a peripheral and advertise it and
⏹️ ▶️ John sell it to regular people and reissue the GameCube controller with a Smash Bros. logo on it. Again, this is not a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that is only for competitive Smash Bros. players. They’re gonna sell way more of them than just
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who compete in tournaments. Obviously for the people who compete in tournaments, yes, this product is for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want it wired, they need reaction times, they want to use the controller they’ve used for a long time, so on and so forth. But I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like if Nintendo had made the Wii U Pro Controller so that it was unequivocally,
⏹️ ▶️ John unassailably better than the GameCube controller, and was perceived as such
⏹️ ▶️ John by customers, it would not have felt the need to make a mass market product like this so that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John use your GameCube controller with Smash Bros. again. And I agree with them, and I agree with popular opinion that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Controller is very well made, but I think the layout and the shape
⏹️ ▶️ John are not as good as the GameCube controller, except of course the D-pad, which is ex-Grooval,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody hates. But that’s why the GameCube controller is not perfect. Is that the only reason?
⏹️ ▶️ John That and the triggers are not great. And of course the Z button that everybody hates. But you know, the Z,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they could, that’s part of the triggers. The Z button and the triggers are passable, you can get by with them, the triggers
⏹️ ▶️ John have something to recommend them, but they’re not that great. the main controls that you use in games,
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbstick, buttons, like that’s what you have your hand on. Your left thumb is on the thumbstick, your right thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John is hitting a bunch of buttons. The GameCube controller is the current peak of controller
⏹️ ▶️ John design from Nintendo, traditional controller design as far as I’m concerned.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, so I did it the last couple of years and I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to do it this year because my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life is so out of control at the moment. But all you have to do is not shave. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. So anyway, the idea is is you shave everything except
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hopefully money for men’s health issues, just anything men’s health related. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to trim everything but your stash, I would do it with a Harry’s razor.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we’re actually into main topics only 3035 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the show. This might be a record for us for the last couple months. I’m very proud of us. Well, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about this Microsoft band of which I have not had time to read anything about outside of listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore David Smith’s podcast about it, or a podcast episode about it, which we will put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. So one of you guys tell me what this is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not everyone at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John You haven’t seen it, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I haven’t actually. I only saw people talking about it, but I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it except that it looks like what appears to be a pretty decent wearable for an ecosystem that nobody’s going to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen it and played with it for a couple minutes. And so I can’t really talk about the usage of it, although Underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John had a good post about his usage of it, like why he bought one and what he thinks of it. And we will link that up in the show notes if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to get sort of a hands-on experience of using it. I’ve just sort of played with it and I was looking at it from a hardware perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s this great sort of exploded view diagram at
⏹️ ▶️ John microsoft.com slash Microsoft type in band. If you scroll to the very bottom of the page, this little animation
⏹️ ▶️ John that shows how it’s constructed. And it’s an interesting take on
⏹️ ▶️ John how to get all the hardware they want into a band type shape. So this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is aiming for, it’s kind of weird. Like it’s not going to be like a full-fledged
⏹️ ▶️ John little computer on your wrist to the same degree as an Apple Watch is in that they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect you to do much on the screen, much interacting in 2D. Like the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John very long and thin, so it’s kind of a one-dimensional device where you’re swiping right and left,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s not a lot of up and down. There’s not even a lot of like hitting the top button or the bottom button. There’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of like little sidebars and swiping to the sides and showing a little half of a little letter
⏹️ ▶️ John poking off the other side of the screen so you know there’s more over there so you know which direction, typical Windows Phone style
⏹️ ▶️ John Metro UI type thing. So in that respect, it’s not like the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch where you’ve got this 2D thing and you could have different sets of buttons and a dial and all those other things
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But unlike the Apple Watch, for example, this does have a GPS built in so you can go for a jog
⏹️ ▶️ John with it without having your phone with you to do the GPS part of like tracking where your route was
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. That is so smart. Yeah, especially since like, you know, who’s gonna have a Windows Phone to join
⏹️ ▶️ John it up with. It does have all the sensors, a lot of the same sensors as the band, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting thing where instead of the sensors for like your pulse and everything like that being underneath the sort of chunky
⏹️ ▶️ John top part of the watch, they’ve split that stuff up, so the sensors are sort of like inside
⏹️ ▶️ John your wrist, like where you’d take your pulse and the screen is on the outside of your wrist where you look at your watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is an interesting way to keep it thin on top because they don’t have to have the sensors there, but that means that the bottom of the watch, sort of the part
⏹️ ▶️ John where it clasps together, has a lump, there’s a lump at the bottom of the strap basically and that’s where the sensors are
⏹️ ▶️ John and then to find a place to smuggle I think these I can’t tell from the exploded diagram but I assume this is where they’re smuggling the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John they put the batteries in the sides of the band they have little stiff regions on the sides of the band left and right side
⏹️ ▶️ John of the band that are curved to curve plastic that doesn’t bend and inside there I’m assuming are a little
⏹️ ▶️ John battery packs or something because otherwise I don’t know where they’d be putting the battery what that means is the shape
⏹️ ▶️ John of this watch the shape of this band is kind of like a square. There’s a stiff
⏹️ ▶️ John rigid screen on the top, there’s a stiff rigid sensor bundle on the bottom, and on the left and right side
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s these sort of curved but still rigid regions, and in between that there’s a little bit of flexing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the the clasp that adjusts has like a little groove, about an inch long groove, that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of slide it along in the groove and whatever point in the groove you want to just release the thing and these two little claws grab underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John the groove. So there is some size adjustability and I think they offer the actual band in three sizes because this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like the Apple watch where it’s like a little computer and then a flexible
⏹️ ▶️ John band that you can adjust the length of right this computer is essentially all around your wrist this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very much more like what I was thinking although not quite as elegant but what I was thinking of in terms of you could
⏹️ ▶️ John take advantage of the band to let you have more room to put hardware but Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John made a very different choice here and I think the biggest dividing line between these products is not like oh Microsoft band has
⏹️ ▶️ John GPS or the Microsoft Band has to work with all sorts of other phones because it can’t just work with Windows Phone because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said, an ecosystem that no one is into. I think the big difference is that Microsoft Band is so clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John not going for anything having to do with fashion. And Apple Watch is so clearly focused
⏹️ ▶️ John on fashion. At least half of it’s, you know, the effort of that product is, of course we’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make it like all one color and computer-y looking and have lumps. We’re gonna make something that looks like jewelry
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re not gonna put anything in the band because that’s supposed to be decorative In fact, the device should be decorative, the band
⏹️ ▶️ John should be decorative, the entire thing has to be decorative because it’s a fashion accessory. Microsoft band is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John not a fashion accessory in any way. And in that way, maybe perhaps it plays more to Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John strengths, because they’ve never been known to be a particularly fashionable brand. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I think it’s a really interesting design and a really interesting choice from Microsoft. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John excited by the fact that this wasn’t like a demo, it like, you know, CES or something that
⏹️ ▶️ John never actually ships or doesn’t ship for a year. It’s a product that no one knew about, that they announced and said, here it is, you can go buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I give this product and the effort from Microsoft a big thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up, in the same way that I kind of did for like the whole Windows Metro thing and stuff. Where they’re kind of, they’re doing their own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not trying to copy Apple. They’re not being Samsung. And their own thing is actually pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hope this has more success in the market, let’s say, than the various
⏹️ ▶️ John devices like Windows Phone and the OS with the Metro interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I was into fitness, which is pretty far from the truth, then I would buy this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, no question. Because I’m not into fitness, I don’t have much of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use for it. But I kind of like some of the trade-offs they’ve made. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you say just because you’re not into fitness that this seems useless to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m not going to use Windows Phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does have integration with iOS, that’s what I’m saying. Read Underscore’s thing about it. Like it’s kind of a pre,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming he’s not using it with a Windows phone, but he was saying like, it’s like a one-way communication. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John two-way because it’s not completely platform integrated, but he’s getting the experience of being able to be
⏹️ ▶️ John notified on his wrist. Oh, it’ll show blizzard notifications? What he compared it to, he divided the fitness bands,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me just summarize this post here, it’s probably longer than just reading it out loud on the air, but he divided them into like
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that are just always with you and track information, like the Fitbits, and those necessarily, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ John focus on just long battery life, It’s just a sensor attached to you, but there’s not much interaction with it, right? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not flicking around a screen. And then there are the ones that have screens, but those have been like, I have to be sleepy all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. I can’t really do anything. Like the Pebble, where it’s like, wake me up when you wanna use me and use me through some
⏹️ ▶️ John limited interface because I take a lot of energy to do all this stuff and then I’ll go back to sleep. So they have an
⏹️ ▶️ John E Ink screen or a very limited screen or they’re not awake a lot of time. And this is in
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same category as like a combination of the two. All the fitness sensors are there. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery life this thing is by the way but all the fitness sensors are there and can do the persistence fitness things but it’s also like this other
⏹️ ▶️ John devices where you can use it as a little computer and I think it does communicate with your iOS device at least at one direction to show you notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff and what underscore said is basically this convinced him that he’ll really like the Apple watch because the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John watch will be two-way communication and I guess he won’t care the Apple watch doesn’t have GPS because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not again it was not into a fitness type thing the Apple watch will count your steps if that’s all you care about
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to map your route then you have to run with your iPhone, but I totally think the lack of GPS
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple Watch is like three generations away from being a moot point because they’ll add it in as soon as they can afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it with battery power. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason I’m picking on you, Marco, is because I think this is basically a pebble, but better done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and with a GPS. And I don’t view it, building on what Underscore and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were just saying, I don’t view it as just a Fitbit with a GPS. I view it more as a pebble with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a GPS. And my understanding of what I heard on Developing Perspective was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it uses the same sort of APIs that, for example, that iDrive uses in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car so that you can read your text messages on the iDrive screen if you set it up appropriately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So just like John was saying, it’s all one way. You know, all it’s doing is saying, hey, you just got a text message and here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the text message and there’s not much you can do to respond to it on the band, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost called it a watch. But nevertheless, at least you can see something there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe I’ll give it a try because I I am also curious Just to see like what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual real-life utility of such a device? But that being said I mean we’re gonna we’re gonna be getting watch kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this month supposedly So I think I think this might just be for iOS developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iOS fans This might just be a temporary distraction for the next five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months until we have a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John being his typical super industrious self is like he’s got to get this So he knows what the utility
⏹️ ▶️ John is so he can create his fleet of watch hours to understand how this man possibly, like, there
⏹️ ▶️ John may be more than one of him. Have you guys checked to see if like… I don’t know how he does as much
⏹️ ▶️ John Is he always the same guy? Because he could be like one of seven identical. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John he could be a clone. That’s what I’m saying. But this gives him a chance to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of applications would be good on this device. And he’s sort of using it so that when the Apple Watch comes along, he
⏹️ ▶️ John will know, He will have a top 10 list of the applications he’s going to make while Casey still thinks about upgrading
⏹️ ▶️ John his FastX for iOS 7. Why are
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying, if you’re going to feel shame about not updating FastX, don’t feel shame that Overcast beat you out. Feel shame that during the time that Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John was being developed, Underscore probably made seven apps. Yeah, he makes everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Oh, man, that’s really funny. And you’re right. I mean, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had just a pool of money to just sitting there for me to waste away on silly devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would absolutely buy one of these just to try it out. And it definitely looks, well, I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say looks cool. Its feature set seems very neat to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like you were saying, John, it’s not aesthetically the most pleasing thing in the world, but it certainly doesn’t look bad either. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to see what comes of it, but only time will tell. You know, it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad that because it’s Microsoft, everyone just kind of fluffs it off immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because as a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, was saying in the chat a minute ago, you know, this ain’t the old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft. This is kind of a new Microsoft that’s really trying, and John, you were talking about this earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really trying to do something different and unique. And a lot of times I think they hit the nail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really closer to the head than anyone gives them credit for. And so it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bummer to me that nobody’s really given them any credit from what I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s not really the problem. The problem isn’t credit. The problem is action. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing that happened with webOS. Same thing happened with Windows Phone. Well, webOS
⏹️ ▶️ John out of money. That’s not Microsoft’s problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, well, but the reason why, so the same thing happened where the geeks like us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe the tech press, you know, these things come out and everyone’s like, oh, you know what? This is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting. Everyone says, oh, it’s interesting. This is really progressive. Or, you know, some word that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means like, this is cool, but then the conclusion is, but I don’t want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this is great, I love this, but I’m not gonna buy this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of an iPhone. And so I think this is gonna have the same kind of problem, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you have this device from Microsoft right before this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably big hit device from Apple, so you have this device from Microsoft that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re all looking at now and saying, this is really interesting, this might be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting, they’re doing a good job. But how many people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say this are gonna be using one of these in a year instead of an Apple Watch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they have the same problem as Apple of old did, where at a certain point it becomes like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what Apple did, it was always like, yeah, but that’s just Apple, so like,
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares? Like, it’s exactly the same thing. Like, it’s interesting or whatever, but you know, come on, real computers
⏹️ ▶️ John use Windows. Like, it’s a sideshow, you’re not interested. And once you kind of get out of that position, once people start thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of you as not part of the mainstream, not part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the real thing, then it’s really difficult to ever
⏹️ ▶️ John jump back up into the previous position where to get people to say, I’m actually going to buy that. Because it starts to feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna buy a Mac, I’m a PC guy, Macs don’t run the programs that I want, I’m not familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ John how they work, it’s just everything builds on top of everything and it becomes insurmountable. And the only way Apple could dig itself out of it It was with
⏹️ ▶️ John these spectacular flashy products, initially flashy in ways that really weren’t that substantial,
⏹️ ▶️ John like using fashion. Again, why do people care about the iMac? It was just a computer. Like it was an okay computer, it wasn’t a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John computer, but the guts of the iMac were not all that impressive. It was because it was teal and translucent
⏹️ ▶️ John and cool looking. Like that’s why the iMac made it. And the iPod was them making a product that had already
⏹️ ▶️ John existed, but doing it so much better than the other ones. And so is this so much better than the Apple Watch? No, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not going to do that for them. but they must feel like, Microsoft must feel like Apple did,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, we’re making good stuff. Like, it’s not bad, it’s good. Arguably, sometimes it’s the best or
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s close. And yet, why is our reward not proportional to the quality of the product we’re making? If we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John something that’s like 80% as good as something, like, and we get no market share, it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not fair. And so I feel for them, but, you know, on the other hand, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, have a little bit of a glee about the fact that they’re in the position that Apple, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying not to hold a grudge. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in some respects, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John rooting for them, but then when I think about rooting for them, I’m like, you know what, if they got control, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John just start making products I don’t like again, and it would make me sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you said like, oh, if we make a product that’s 80% as good, then it should have to market share. And the problem is, like something like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most people are going to have one wrist wearable at most. Most people are already gonna have zero,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think that the most somebody will have is likely to be one. And so the question is, like, not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this good enough to buy, but is this good enough to buy instead of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch? And that’s the problem. Most people don’t carry two cell phones. Most people carry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, at least that they buy themselves. Most people carry one cell
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Most of us will go in and get a PC, but it was like a PC was like a $2,000 investment. You didn’t replace it every
⏹️ ▶️ John two years. These type of devices are small enough and there’s enough advancement in the field. They’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a lot of people would try the iPhone or try Android, but you’re like, well, my two-year contract stuff, like this isn’t subsidized
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything, but it just feels like it’s not as big of a commitment. But it does get back to what you said earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John about the ecosystem where you might feel like, what am I buying into here? Do I have faith that this
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be a supported product line for the future or is this gonna be like a one-off or what was that Courier
⏹️ ▶️ John project that they had? With like, remember that? It was like a tablet that opened up like a book and they canned that before it even
⏹️ ▶️ John got out the door. So it seems like Microsoft may not, maybe kind of a hostile environment
⏹️ ▶️ John to innovation at this point. Or the Kin, what was that other one they made?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the social smartphone platform that they made like two of.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was from the Sidekick guys, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they released
⏹️ ▶️ John that and then canned it. Like, Microsoft needs to work on their, not so much execution, because a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John the products are like, have something to recommend them, but just like, the decision about when to release
⏹️ ▶️ John it, when to announce it, and whether this is gonna be a thing you follow through with. And if it’s not gonna be a thing you follow through with,
⏹️ ▶️ John like don’t release the Kin line on the hopes of like, hey, who knows, maybe this will take off, but we probably
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it will, because it’s actually kind of a crappy product, and we really did a kind of a half-assed launch. And then when it doesn’t catch on, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, a week later, let’s just can the whole thing or a courier, which is show to people, people get excited about and then just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know what, let’s just get rid of that. You know, like I know a couple of people are excited, but we don’t really like it and don’t show
⏹️ ▶️ John it like all the things that Apple tries out internally and gets rid of. We never hear about those. That’s why you have to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You really they really have to pick what they’re going to do. Do it really well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put the company behind it and not do these things that either look technically interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re sad that they go away, or kind of tumble out the door half-heartedly and then are
⏹️ ▶️ John canceled. Like, when was the Kin canceled? Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it was like two months ago. Yeah, it was very
⏹️ ▶️ John soon. MTW chatroom says they didn’t show Courier that it just leaked. Oh, that’s also, I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the same problem. Whether you show it or whether it leaks, like, we need to not know about it. We need to not have pictures of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We need to not, you know, for all of the various, like, TV products and tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John products and all the watch prototypes that Apple made, like, we got, the first thing we got to see out of Apple that was like a watch
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing was the watch that they said they were going to make. We didn’t and we haven’t seen all whatever crazy TV stuff that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John tried and not released that we just assume is going on in there. Apple is much better about
⏹️ ▶️ John deciding which products are good enough to go out the door. And once a product does go out the door, giving it a fair
⏹️ ▶️ John shot and putting the full weight of the company behind it. And so we’ll see if band gets that from Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really quick aside, does well, I don’t know if either of you guys have seen much of this, But watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the NFL these days is just a series of face palms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because everywhere you see these bright blue Microsoft surface tablet-y
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so obvious that it’s like, product placement is one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. And I know it’s a thing. It happens everywhere. Hell, Apple does it constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know, maybe I am biased, but it just seems to me that it’s done in a much more subtle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. Like I’m thinking of house, for example, you would see max all over the place, but it was subtle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas with the NFL, it’s like, here’s the bright blue surface. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a row of bright blue surfaces on the commentators desks. And here it is on the sidelines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and on the Microsoft surface, they’re reviewing the play right now. And it’s just, oh, it’s so tacky to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. That’s a similar problem. And the most recent season on Netflix of parks and recreation, where like it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not a very good season actually. But anyway, they, like it’s, you know, they got some kind of big Microsoft sponsorship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so in previous seasons, everybody had iPhones and stuff. This season,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every computing device you see is a Microsoft device. So every character is carrying a Windows phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using it proudly, like holding it up constantly. And every computer that you see on the desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a Surface or at least running Windows 8. And it’s always like showing the Windows 8 home screen prominently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, you know, it’s something that you have all these like screens and you know Microsoft in your face and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good product placement should be both unnoticeable and plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah yeah exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know like what you’re saying with the NFL it’s like that also it violates both these things like you shouldn’t notice that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re beating you over the head with this one particular type of product it should just seem like oh I just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see people subconsciously and it seems like everyone’s using Apple products or Microsoft products and the cool people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are or something like that’s what it’s supposed to do and you’re not supposed to notice a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow they’re really beating me over the head with this one kind of product and b this is so unrealistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because in reality i know for a fact that these things are not good enough or popular enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all these people would naturally have them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep and uh the chat room is going berserk and we would
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to i want to take credit for this i didn’t for once i didn’t get something from the chat room i saw the story
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco later today and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was uh it was hilarious this is on cnn and same type deal they have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John product placement deal with Microsoft surfaces. And you can tell it’s a surface from the back because it sort of has that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, iconic kickstand that they have, you know, at the back of the surface looks like where a little thing folds out. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like a little easel. Right. And so what you see is a series of easels sitting in front of all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John commentators. But when they have camera shots from the side, what you can see is a lot of the commentators
⏹️ ▶️ John have an iPad that they’re sort of using behind the surface as like a shield, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t see that they’re using the iPad either. Either the iPad is resting against the surface like it actually literally is an easel
⏹️ ▶️ John or they just have an iPad in their hands. And that’s not good for Microsoft. It’s not good at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad. I don’t know. It’s just, you know, granted, I make my living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off of Microsoft technologies. And so there’s there’s always going to be a special soft spot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my heart for Microsoft. But so much of what Microsoft does is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheesy and and silly. And this is some of it. And it makes me sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fashion is not their strong suit as my as Steve Jobs said taste is not their strong suit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep How about what
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s talk about I work 2013. Wait, what? We’re talking about this? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay. What else we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked about? What did news happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think this is a topic. I mean, it’s not news news, but it’s, it’s one of those things that people complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about and I keep seeing it and the complaints don’t go away. And the more I think about it, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John it reveals to me something that Apple like something that Apple is doing that just doesn’t make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John And coincidentally for the people who are upset about us bashing Microsoft, it’s something that Microsoft does much
⏹️ ▶️ John better than Apple. And I don’t really understand why Apple is doing what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. So have you, do either one of you have the new version of iWork? Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I don’t think I have it on the Mac. I think I probably have it on iOS. Isn’t it like free on iOS or it comes free with your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that? I think it’s free everywhere now. Yeah. Anyway, it’s not about the specific
⏹️ ▶️ John programs which have their problems, right? and the file formats are weird, but it’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re handling backward compatibility. And I grabbed this quote from an InfoWorld
⏹️ ▶️ John article, I’m assuming it’s reasonably accurate, but if it’s not, the gist of it is right, if not the details.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the details as listed here is basically, if you get the new version of iWork, you can’t open files
⏹️ ▶️ John created with any version of iWork earlier than iWork 09. If you try to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John iWork detects that you’re trying to open a document from something earlier than iWork 09
⏹️ ▶️ John and says, Oh, you should find a copy of iWorker in 09 and open the file with that instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is sort of leaving behind your own file format from not that long
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, like less than a decade certainly, probably less than five years ago, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. Those documents can’t be opened by the new version.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of the time when Apple sort of races forward, leaving behind legacy things, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ditching everything except for USB on the original iMac or dropping support
⏹️ ▶️ John for an API or some hardware thing or whatever, like there’s a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John It helps them to make, it helps them get ahead of their competition because they’re not encumbered by legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And so they can go and make the new shiny thing without worrying about
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging along this baggage of backward compatibility because the baggage just gets bigger and bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you have a successful product in your past. Eventually all your time is spent trying to like support the
⏹️ ▶️ John past instead of worrying about the future so you can never make anything great. But I don’t see how that philosophy
⏹️ ▶️ John can be or should be applied to file formats because it’s not as if we’re asking that these old file formats
⏹️ ▶️ John be supported forever in their current form. All I think most reasonable people are asking
⏹️ ▶️ John is if I create a bunch of documents with iWork over the years and I get the latest version of iWork
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to be able to open them and I don’t care that much that if I open them it converts them to the new format
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as if it does the conversion it’s not lossy like this looked fine in the old version of iWork. But when I converted
⏹️ ▶️ John to the new version, all my fonts were screwed up and everything like broken or whatever. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John for file format capability, but compatibility making new file formats, for example, one of the reasons that speculated
⏹️ ▶️ John that made these new file formats that are like zip archives and stuff is for better compatibility with iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they wanted to unify the code base is fine. That’s a perfectly valid reason to change your file format, and to rev the program.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe you can argue if it’s a a good reason to dumb down the feature set to the common set of functionality that
⏹️ ▶️ John can work on work on iOS on the web and on the Mac but anyway whatever they’re gonna do that that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John but by not reading the old file formats it shows a lack of respect for the
⏹️ ▶️ John work that people have done with previous versions of this program especially since probably the pre iWork 09 versions are gonna stop
⏹️ ▶️ John working on modern Macs pretty soon but that’s the thing that Apple does which I think that does have a reason but you have to support
⏹️ ▶️ John the old file formats because if you don’t what you’re signaling to people and Apple signals this to people
⏹️ ▶️ John in iWork and also in pretty much everything that’s ever done on the web. Do not trust us with
⏹️ ▶️ John your data. Make a bunch of picture galleries in like, you know, dot Mac. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, those are going to be gone when we switch over to the mobile me galleries. Make a bunch of mobile me websites with iWeb.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, iWeb is not supported anymore. Hope you didn’t hope you didn’t write too much in your little blog that you made. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John converting over to this thing. And by the way, there’s no way to get that content back out. Make a bunch of documents with iWork.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well five years are going to pass and you can’t open them up. I hope you save a version of iWorker09, which by the way, won’t run on the computer that you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy three years from now. It’s telling everybody, do not trust Apple with your data
⏹️ ▶️ John because we will abandon it. We will race ahead. We will leave behind, like, I feel so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad for people who, like, we put a lot of work into iWeb websites. That tool, what it did was basically
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a native Mac application, like let people who know nothing about the web make web pages, and it put them up
⏹️ ▶️ John on a little hosting that was part of your service that you bought. It was not a very good program. The results were not very nice. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is people dragged in little pictures and type lots of words and made a series of posts. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was just like, well, sorry, that’s going away. Hope you have some way to pull that down and back it up or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember that year that I was going around to people in my family and trying to find a way to like pull
⏹️ ▶️ John down the file and modify the links so they will still work locally so they can just have a local copy because people
⏹️ ▶️ John invested time in that. And Apple has no respect for the time that people spent on that. And with file formats, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has no respect for the work that people put in making word processing documents. So the lesson they’re teaching everybody is
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use our programs or our web services if you care about being able to open this thing or view this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in five or 10 years. And I think Apple is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John with I work and what is done with the web properties, probably the worst of the big companies like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or whatever, in breaking compatibility with no way forward with no sort of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John import or export option or anything like that. I don’t know, I’m angry about it and I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John use iWork. And by the way, I don’t use iWork for this and many other reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, part of the problem, you know, you’re definitely right. I agree with everything you just said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of the problem is bigger than just, oh, this was a bad decision on iWork. I mean, one of the biggest parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the problem is that iWork doesn’t get a lot of attention from Apple. There’s a reason, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was literally no new update from 2009 until 2013. and the 2013 versions were not written
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during that whole time. They were written at the last minute and rushed out the door. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they spent a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do the sync up between, there’s an iOS version, there’s a web version, there’s the Mac version,
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to make them all work on the same thing and all work together. Like that seems like what they put the effort into. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not, you’re right, a multi-year effort like that, but who knows? I don’t know what their schedules are like internally, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the result was a program that didn’t satisfy people because that synchronization between all the platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of dumbed down the applications to the common subset of functionality that will work across all of them and people
⏹️ ▶️ John are angry about that and the execution wasn’t great, but
⏹️ ▶️ John on I just I don’t I don’t think it’s because they didn’t put enough effort into it because it seems like they did put
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot Of resources into it. They just they just put them towards the wrong things I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I mean the I work file formats have always been kind of a disaster So like the first versions of I work before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco o9 They saved everything as a Mac bundle, which for those of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who don’t know, a bundle or a package, whatever it’s called, a package is just a directory with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is it, John? Is it like a special flag set to make it into a package? How does that work?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the finder is the thing that interprets the bundle bit of set. No, that’s classic Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. I believe it’s the finder that interprets them as something other than a directory, because if you look at them
⏹️ ▶️ John anyplace else other than the finder, it looks like exactly what it is, a directory with a bunch of files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. So the first versions of iWork, their file format was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these fake files which are actually directories full of other files. And that causes a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever that file has to leave the Mac. Biggest thing is email attachments.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Secondarily you also can’t put them in upload forms on websites, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file input type, because those expect single files and these are actually directories. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can imagine that was pretty annoying when you couldn’t really email these things around very easily through most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email servers or email programs, and certainly not through Windows at all, if it had to bounce through Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You couldn’t email these files around from this office suite of applications. That was a pretty stupid move,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. And so then in the later version, I think in the 09 version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they moved to, I believe it was just like a zip file. It was basically like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was either an SQL file or a zip file that was just all that data shoved into this container, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a much better way to do it. And then with the new versions, I think they didn’t they move back?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think with the new versions, there were some kind of, we’ll have to look this up and write this up and link to it. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were some kind of move. It was a, it was a move like a step backwards because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the justification was this is going to be easier to sync between iOS and iCloud documents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac and everything because it’s because the structure they’ve picked. Regardless, the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formats have always kind of been a disaster. They’ve always changed dramatically and many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have had very weird decisions. And again, it just seems like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the iWork team is not getting the resources it needs or that it is not a high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough priority for iWork to ever be truly great. And I use iWork. I don’t use Microsoft Office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I hardly ever need office programs, so it’s not worth me buying office you know I just use iWork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and get away with it just fine and I’ve used it I’ve used iWork as my only office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suite for I don’t know at least six or seven years now so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use this you know not not every day but I use it regularly and I know these programs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty well now and they’re just they’re always like 75%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way there they could be so good but But it just seems like they don’t get attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple. And I think what you’re saying is true. It’s very fair what you’re saying, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about things like the MobileMe photo galleries and stuff like that. Like all the photo stuff, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very valid. I think with iWork, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s mostly just an issue of these apps getting no love from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and secondarily, them not caring about dropping compatibility. But like it wouldn’t surprise me at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they were going to write in support for the for the new apps to read the old formats and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just got cut because they don’t have enough time because they didn’t give this project enough resources from the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, they have that thing where they put out a version that dropped a huge number of features and then kind of backfilled apologetically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Yeah, that’s the that’s the 2013 version, which is still I think worse
⏹️ ▶️ John and not and like I don’t use all these things regularly, but I follow people who do and it’s like even keynote which used to be like the one
⏹️ ▶️ John the best program in that suite is like everyone loves keynote is like been getting worse over time not better and that’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John that Microsoft has always done so well one support backwards of compatibility support for their file formats
⏹️ ▶️ John like forever basically like they are the masters of that and you know if you go to that extreme but you should be
⏹️ ▶️ John good at it at least and it’s not like Microsoft didn’t change their formats they went to you know a zip file
⏹️ ▶️ John full of XML stuff and you know they doc X and XLSX and all that stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John they advanced but when they advanced they tried to be compatible because like that’s their big selling
⏹️ ▶️ John point if you make documents in Microsoft Office Microsoft Office will up with them I remember when like office 97 came out and
⏹️ ▶️ John like there was a split in format between 97 95 and people were freaking out or whatever I don’t remember the exact details
⏹️ ▶️ John of the year so I’m sorry if I got it wrong but that you know they
⏹️ ▶️ John conditioned their user base to accept the format will change and feel safe that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the documents are going to become unreadable and Apple is doing the opposite they’re conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ John all the users to fear these applications and not trust any important data to it and
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing Microsoft has done with a few bumps in the road like you know word 6 for the Mac and all that terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff they tend to make their programs better with time the programs get faster
⏹️ ▶️ John documents open faster they have more features they wouldn’t like if one version of a program had really
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting typography controls, the next version of the program would not drop all those features because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not possible in iOS or can’t be done on the web or something. They would never do that. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John major regression in functionality without some good reason, like, oh, we’re deprecating the access
⏹️ ▶️ John database, so forget about that whole integration, but just like, hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing adds a new ability to tweak the kerning on text, and the next version
⏹️ ▶️ John says, yeah, you know all that kerning stuff? We pulled it out. It’s gone. And if you open
⏹️ ▶️ John document that had custom kerning, we’re just going to show it a different way. Like, that’s not progress. Over
⏹️ ▶️ John time, the reason we all love software is it gets better, faster, stronger. It does not
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of stumble along. Occasionally, features that you used and relied on disappear with no explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ John File formats get abandoned.
⏹️ ▶️ John application changes its looks in ways that seem like lateral moves. Items
⏹️ ▶️ John move around the interface for no discernible reason. that is a web version you don’t care about. Like, are
⏹️ ▶️ John there any like rabid iWork fans with the possible exception of Keynote, which I think did have rabid fans and may still
⏹️ ▶️ John have them. The rest of iWork is just like, meh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, what’s funny is, especially listening to what Marco had said about how iWork is, you know, 80%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the way there. I feel like so many of the things you just said about iWork, you could make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reasonable substitution of say iCloud or any number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other Apple software products. Heck, uh, even iOS eight, a lot of people, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I, I think I was eight is fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I think it’s not fair for iOS eight and iCloud. Like, like iOS eight
⏹️ ▶️ John is not worse than iOS seven. And it adds a bunch of things that you, that I was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you felt like you would be happy if you had them like iOS seven didn’t have extensions, which is a big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. Sure. No, no. I’m on a different point. You know, my, my point was when, when Marco was saying, you know, oh, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so close, but it’s not quite there. And iCloud has gotten better, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like you could say that about a lot of things. Like, so a great example is an iOS 8, the, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ordering of the extensions and the share sheets, or I think that’s what it is, wherever the one password icon lives,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you could at least put one, you, you could have a one password extension. Yet when you tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reorder what the order of those extensions were, the order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got reset constantly. Now, I believe that’s been fixed in the latest beta, but that’s a great example of, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were so close, but then there’s this one really annoying thing that you didn’t quite get right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s much closer than iWork. Even iCloud, which has had its stumbles, on the long term,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to say iCloud Drive versus basically everything else they’ve ever done with documents. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive is better than that. Cloud Kit versus everything else they’ve done in the same realm. Cloud Kit is better. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not there, but you just want to see forward progress. When you have a long running program like iWork, or a long running
⏹️ ▶️ John suite like iWork, that is around for a long time, is not updated
⏹️ ▶️ John on sort of on a regular basis, such that you just often wonder like, is the product dead? Or they’re just not gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John it anymore? Like iLife was the same way, where they were doing iLife with years in the name, and then all of a sudden a year would come and go and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’d be no new iLife, and you’re like, so is iLife still a thing? And then they release a point
⏹️ ▶️ John update to keep the old version working, and you’re like, well, there’s someone, it’s gotta be someone over there working on it, because they’re doing some work
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure it works with the new OS, versus Microsoft Office back in its heyday, especially it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, regular updates, you know they’re gonna keep trying to make it better, maybe you’ll disagree
⏹️ ▶️ John with something they’ve done or some weird interface or they implemented new crazy menus in Office because
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft has organized like a crazy, I don’t know what the right
⏹️ ▶️ John word is, Tower of Babel and one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, but anyway, they always
⏹️ ▶️ John looked like they were developing it And so many things with Apple are sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John speculative abandoned ware, just like Marco was doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you say. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is anyone working on this? Probably, like I guess, but maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you just, I don’t, I mean, the Mac Pro is speculative abandoned ware hardware for the longest time. But in
⏹️ ▶️ John software, this seems like a lot of that. And you have, it has to be said at some point, that like, maybe it has
⏹️ ▶️ John something to do with the fact that Apple feels like It shouldn’t or can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell the software anymore that everything has to be free that even the stuff that used to be $400 has to be $79 now You
⏹️ ▶️ John know like if if I work could be priced at something other than
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys were saying it’s free I haven’t even looked at it, but like price did some it’s some price that is closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to sustainable Maybe it wouldn’t really fund all this development, but just something But if they feel like they just have to give it
⏹️ ▶️ John away for free as a perk to try to make their hardware more valuable I don’t see how a bunch of mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ John mediocre to crappy programs make their hardware more valuable. You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s not, you’re not adding value. No one is going, oh and if you get an iOS, it used to be, remember how it used to be like that with
⏹️ ▶️ John iLife? It was like, if you want to get iLife you have to get a Mac. That was practically a system seller to use game
⏹️ ▶️ John console parlance, right? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, people would play with GarageBand in the store and be like, oh my god, if I got a Mac I could make music.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, does iLife, do they have iLife for Windows? No, you have to have a Mac. Like it was a system seller. It was like all these things
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, I know I have a computer and And people tell me I can use it to make movies, to make music,
⏹️ ▶️ John to burn CDs. But I know I personally can’t use it to do those things because it’s way too complicated. I wouldn’t know where to begin. And iLife
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, hey, we will make you successful at doing these things that you know are possible with a computer, but you still
⏹️ ▶️ John feel are beyond your ability. And iWork is not a system seller. Nobody is buying Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John or iPads or doing anything involving Apple to say, oh no, goodie, now I get to use iWork. I could never do
⏹️ ▶️ John word processing before. It’s not a system seller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think you’re right. I mean, I don’t think it’s a pricing issue at all. I don’t think they ever sold high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough volumes of iWork to make the price of it matter much to their bottom line at all. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very important to push this, to push the usefulness of their platforms. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only from like an independence perspective, like it’s an insurance policy against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft ever stopping making Office for Macs, first of all. And it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to serve their iOS interests to say, look at how useful, especially the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, which really needs some help right now, look at how useful the iPad can be for work. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IBM can go and sell it for them, they can sell and they can say, look, it runs all these Office apps. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Microsoft Office, well for a while Microsoft Office didn’t exist on the iPad, now it does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but who knows if it always will and how good it will always be. Now Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can go around and say, look, you can get for this one low price of this iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be three years old, A5, for this one price you can get this iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all this free software on it that’s awesome. And you should really buy this iPad because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And you’ll be able to get all this work done. And the problem is that, you know, so that’s like, again, the strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tax, like that’s, well, not really, but that’s their goal is to make their hardware sell more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco units, because that’s where they make most of their money. But if the software is mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or absent, it makes it very hard to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the weird thing is that with iOS 8 now, they’ve essentially given Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John all the tools needed to do the thing that previously you would say, well, only Apple would do this. Like only Apple’s are gonna ever bother
⏹️ ▶️ John to make an Office type suite of programs that work on the web, on iOS, on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same file format, all sharing between, all synchronized. But now with the advent of iCloud Drive, Yosemite,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 8, extensions, it’s like Microsoft, there’s no reason Microsoft can’t unify its
⏹️ ▶️ John Office suite across all of its platforms using OneDrive or whatever their service is and having that integrated into iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and having that available on Macs. And you know, like not only Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can do this now. And I wonder if Apple would be like relieved if someone else picked up the mantle
⏹️ ▶️ John of, because that’s what Apple wants to sell is like, we have a way for you to do word processing and it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John where you do it. If you do it on your Mac, if you do it on a website, if you do it on your iOS device, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the same documents, it’s all the same program. It, you know, it looks and works kind of roughly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere with a native interface in each one of those things, with a feature set that’s the same across all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, so on and so forth. Like, that’s what they’re selling. But if you do it with a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John mediocre applications, the sort of unification they’re going for, like, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is as attractive if they say, oh, well, especially in an established market like
⏹️ ▶️ John Word. I know how to do that in Word. I know how to make pivot tables in Excel. I don’t know anything about numbers. I don’t know what this pages thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And it’s weird and it’s kind of buggy. And I use the old version now. I can’t open those documents anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, like that’s why Office is still popular because Microsoft for all its weirdness and all its troubles,
⏹️ ▶️ John still has held to the contract of Office like as a standard, you know, that like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you make your documents miss, you’ll be able to open them, we’ll do a good job with compatibility, we’ll try to make them look the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, there’s been stumbles with that too, with like, if you open it on the Windows version of Office, it looks different
⏹️ ▶️ John than on the Mac version, there’s font differences, there’s that whole thing about the Mac’s epoch being,
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it, January 1904 or something like that, which is different than the Windows epoch, so all your dates and your PowerPoints
⏹️ ▶️ John would be offset. And like, there are always problems. But Apple is not even a contender.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’re defeating themselves. Like, it’s, you know, stop hitting yourself, Apple. Like, they’re punching themselves in
⏹️ ▶️ John the face with the high work. They’re just not a contender in this race.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to play devil’s advocate for a second here, all of the characteristics that make Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good and reliable at being an office software supplier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also make them very boring and unable to compete in a lot of consumer space because all those values like you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need the opposite characteristics to make a lot of these to make a lot of great products in the spaces that we care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more about these days. But that being said, you know, a lot of Apple’s problems are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco botched execution or bad decisions. Similar, you know, the people in the chat were pointing out earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you can make a lot of these same arguments about Final Cut Pro X when that came out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was Apple clearly like moving the ball forward way too aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cutting way too much out and starting over and angering every user of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these of this software basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Final Cut Pro X is more defensible because they were moving
⏹️ ▶️ John forward they felt like that I think they miscalculated their power maybe like they they thought
⏹️ ▶️ John they could make this great leap and they would leave some people behind but that this future destination is better
⏹️ ▶️ John and that in the end it would work out they could bring they could bring their market you know they could bring everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead with them there would be stragglers people would grumble about kind of like OS 10 where it was kind of a mess in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John people grumbled but in the end the greatness of it like compelled everyone to move along and
⏹️ ▶️ John plus it got the other audience of people who would never interested in the Mac because hey this has Unix underneath and it has a nice GUI like that strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John work with them for OS 10 they did essentially the same thing with Final Cut Pro. It was also
⏹️ ▶️ John combined with like the crazy price drop thing like forget about I work being like you know that was never sustaining itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not enough things were sold. I think the pro apps were much closer to sustaining themselves as
⏹️ ▶️ John as you know, marketable products in their own right. But even those got the axe and say like no, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be $300 anymore, you got to be 79 bucks. I was like this the max will charge and so now you know they’re not sustainable
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they get less updates and the Final Cut Pro 10 thing didn’t work out the way they wanted it to. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a series of miscalculations and the pro apps are not are not things that are trying to help themselves are
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware right it’s not that there’s just too small of a market they were they were for apples for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John in the business of selling software to pros and they seem to have sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way the last interest selling the excerpt of an extra rate and everything seemed to have lost interest in pro software
⏹️ ▶️ John canceling programs that are they cancel shake or something like that uh i found a pro 10
⏹️ ▶️ John i still think that pro 10 was a good idea, it just didn’t quite work out as well for them as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well exactly, and that’s, you know, this is the problem. The Apple hardware is like firing on all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cylinders. The hardware these days is great. The last few years you can see like almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware product Apple has made in the last three to five years has just been awesome. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been very few exceptions to that. And yet on the software side they’re just crumbling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on so many different fronts so frequently. I really worry about them because it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they moved much more slowly and were much smaller, but they had a solid reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reliability and ease of use and stability. And all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, that’s what carried their brand for so long. That’s why people would buy Apple products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it would quote just work because they would be better. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be more stable. They would be more intuitive, that everything would work better than in the PC world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the last few years this has crumbled so far that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t necessarily think we, I mean unless PCs have gotten really bad, I don’t know I haven’t used them in a while, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Apple platform no longer has that that high ground nearly as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it used to if it still has it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not in the application space, in the OS space like, I mean I know a lot of people complain about you somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know like I said in my review and this is the truth like I upgrade all my machines sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John and sooner like I just I just upgrade everything and it’s just been remarkably
⏹️ ▶️ John problem-free. iOS 8 not so much which is weird because that’s their like more
⏹️ ▶️ John important platform. I always say it was super buggy for me I still occasionally can’t copy a URL
⏹️ ▶️ John and paste it into another application I have no idea why I’m on 8.1 now drives me
⏹️ ▶️ John insane and no I don’t have one password installed and no I don’t have any custom keywords installed. It’s mysterious.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think they’re they’re OS, you know, OS 10, at least those
⏹️ ▶️ John guys are doing a good job. I mean, you can still argue about whether they want to yearly releases and stuff. But then if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at their application software, that’s not part of the OS, any application software that’s not part of the US like I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this came up on one of our podcasts in the past, it was like, name an Apple application that
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re like would win an ADA that that is it is an example and Apple to Apple design award
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t know. There is a shining example of what it’s like to be an awesome Mac application. Name
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s not bundled with the OS. And that used to be pretty easy to do. Like the whole iLight suite was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. It’s like, you know, the original version of iPhone, that would win an ADA. This is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John application. Now I don’t think anyone would say that about iPhone. No one would say about anything in the iWork suite.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t think Apple is leading in software by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were awesome. These are the kind of Mac apps you would make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Harry’s and Lynda.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin because it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was accidental. John didn’t do any research. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental and you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse. It’s accidental. It’s accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcasting so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to snore some more now, Casey. I didn’t want to put this in the controller part because I thought we’d spend enough time on it. But every time I talk about controller
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, The Wii U Pro Controller people keep coming out and saying, what’s what’s wrong with the Wii U Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Controller? Why do you keep saying bad things about the Wii U Pro Controller? And I how many times have I talked about what I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John about it? Like you two have heard it before, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm. I’m sure I have, but I don’t remember, which now I’m giving you giving you the excuse to tell me more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember because I say it and immediately I put links in the chat room so people can look at them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of the Wii U Pro Controller and the GameCube controller. Like I said, the Wii U Pro Controller, if you looked at it in your hand, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, like any Nintendo peripheral, they make solid hardware in that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say it’s indestructible, but it’s pretty darn tough. Like it feels like a solid thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can abuse it. It does not fall apart. In general, Nintendo is really good at making
⏹️ ▶️ John solid hardware. So this feels like a solid product, but the problems with it are, the same, I mean, if you listen to my
⏹️ ▶️ John Hypercritical, I know we talked about this, because we linked the Hypercritical episodes a couple of times, two Hypercritical episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about video game controllers. The main problem with the Wii U Pro controller
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the right thumbstick is
⏹️ ▶️ John the place where the button should be. Sort of the primary control location. Oh yes, yes. You have talked about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they’re just in reverse. Now if you use two stick shooters, maybe, but even then
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the octagonal surrounds for the sticks and they have round surrounds. I don’t like having uniform buttons that are
⏹️ ▶️ John all the same size laid out in a diamond pattern because not every button is equally important, and games most have a main
⏹️ ▶️ John button, a secondary button, tertiary buttons, and it doesn’t feel as comfortable. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, in almost every way the controller can be inferior to the GameCube controller,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, except the D-pad, which is much better, and the triggers are probably better too. And the build quality is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, it looks a little bit higher end because of the glossy finish on top or whatever. And of course it’s wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John and USB chargeable and all that modern technology type stuff, but no, that’s why I don’t like the Wii U Pro Controller,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s why nobody likes the Wii U Pro Controller. That’s right. Nobody in the entire universe. What I’m saying is there’s not a single
⏹️ ▶️ John person in the world who likes the Wii U Pro Controller. Even its designer doesn’t like it. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John The mother of the designer doesn’t like it. Email John. Please email John. Every time I say that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like it, it’s like, wait a second. Are you saying that nobody likes that controller? I like it. I had the pony. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got that reference, Casey? No. Nope. That’s okay. I got a, I got a silver GameCube
⏹️ ▶️ John controller. I forgot if I told you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you tweeted a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Mint in box well it’s in box anyway the box is not meant but anyway point is
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t been opened hmm how much does that cost
⏹️ ▶️ John paid $200 for it speaking of things that cost $200 i ordered my phone what
⏹️ ▶️ John of course there’s a wait you know which what’d you get what’d you get the gold one no
⏹️ ▶️ John i got the phone that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets. 64 black? Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Space gray please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah right yeah. Are you gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do a case? I already got the case is already here the phone is not but the case is here. I got the black leather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have exactly my phone then or will have exactly my phone. And mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I considered getting a red one but I just I don’t know I couldn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The uh case the colored cases do not wear gracefully.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely love the case like I definitely think you’re making the right move getting a case. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I question whether you’re making the right move getting a six, but Oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John what instead of instead of a six plus instead of a five s? Oh, no, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, you think I’m gonna finally buy an iPhone after like, you know, six years, I’m gonna buy a generation old one
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna happen. I had one for a week. I know what I’m getting into. It’s not gonna be surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, that’s fair. So Marco, if you were to buy a new phone tomorrow, the 6s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is out and you can get it in in 4 or 4 point whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches 7 What are you buying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would so does the smaller one have the same camera as the bigger one sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s identical in every way Except that it’s physically smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery life We’ll call it equivalent because the screen is so much smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I go smaller. I think of it is is that I I still just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drastically prefer the feel in the hand of the 5S, but golly I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am getting used to the new screen and I am liking it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh I like it when I’m using it unless I’m using it one-handed like while walking around doing something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately that’s a pretty major role of a phone for most people. So I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, it’s like getting a 17-inch MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like a good idea if you park it at a desk most of the time and don’t bring it with you most of the time, but if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carrying it with you back and forth to work in a backpack every single day, you might regret that decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That might not be the best choice for you. With a phone, you have to consider how it’s actually used. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger screen is nicer while it’s being used. In two-handed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s stationary. It is indeed nicer, but is it worth the trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in portability in the sense that it makes it harder to use while portable for a lot of people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously that’s an individual decision. For people who are going back to the 5s or who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still using the 5s and not upgrading, I totally get that decision. I totally respect that decision and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve almost made that decision. I think I will ultimately stick with the 6 but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve come very close to going back to the 5s because every time I pick it up I think not only does it look way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better but it just feels so much much better to use. And yes, it does look tiny, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything I do is a million times faster, my grip is more secure, I can reach everything, it’s less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frustrating. Because the fact is, as I’ve said earlier, iOS and iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still largely designed with the assumption that you can always reach all four corners. So many important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons are up on the upper corners that are hard to reach on the 6, and that, maybe over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that changes. we’re not there yet, both in the OS and all the apps, and it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. So I think in the future, this might be easier to use a larger phone because like the software will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be will will be more, you know, finger local in a lot of ways, like it will it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that you’re only holding the bottom two thirds of the phone. But until that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, and that point is not here yet. This, you know, it and again, and when the watch comes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when when your phone is less often needed to be used one handed. You know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do certain things in the watch that would you’d previously take your phone into your pocket to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while walking somewhere while doing something, then again, that will also help. But we’re not there yet either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think for this year, it makes sense for a lot of people who are sensitive to this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not upgrade at the six. And then maybe next year, we’ll see what happens, you know, as as the environment around it changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we get the watch as we get different software considerations, we’ll see what happens. But as of today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a tough call.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, consider the rumored mix of 6 and 6+. I don’t know if this is rumored or announced, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen numbers thrown around that make the mix of 6 and 6 plus look way closer to 50-50 than I
⏹️ ▶️ John ever thought it would be. Do you know any sources of authoritative numbers or have heard similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors? I haven’t seen anybody with any credibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I forget where I saw it. I mean, I’m assuming it started from like maybe a SimCo or maybe some
⏹️ ▶️ John related thing, I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll ever tell us the mix, but
⏹️ ▶️ John what I can pretty confidently say is that I think we would have heard a story if it turned out that the
⏹️ ▶️ John 5S was selling massively. Like the people weren’t getting the 6, that all the hardcore
⏹️ ▶️ John people were buying 5Ss and it was just a crazy, I mean, and the thing against the 5S now is
⏹️ ▶️ John not so much just that it’s older and slower, but also no Apple Pay, right, no
⏹️ ▶️ John NFC. And so if Apple does continue to make a smaller line, which is still up for grabs if they do,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they gave it feature parity, then it would be like the iPads were last year, just pick the size. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had three sizes to pick from, they would have really covered pretty much every base that you can imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and the Apple Pay again, that’s another thing where you have to look and say, well, it’s, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pay just launched, it is still not supported widely yet. And in a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from now, then a lot of, like a lot of American places will have replaced their terminals with the new touchless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminals and everything, so you’ll have more of that. I feel like over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the usefulness of the larger phones will grow, but today it’s more of a tough call. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also being said, all of this is not to say they won’t sell well or that they aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling well. It’s just like the TV in the store bright picture problem. People are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy these things in large numbers, regardless of whether they’re actually easy or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better to use than the smaller ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you think this is pent up demand for people who knew they wanted a bigger phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. You know, like they knew, like it wasn’t like they were speculating, they’re like, I think I might like a bigger phone. They’re like, maybe they were coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from a bigger phone and they’re just like, I would buy the iPhone except it’s too small. Like it’s the whole reason they needed a bigger phone. So I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and the number that I probably read, MDW in the chat room said the T-Mobile CEO said it was close to
⏹️ ▶️ John 50-50. Obviously he can only report on his own sales, but if that’s true, we
⏹️ ▶️ John could try to find a link to it. That is at least one data point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, who knows what the truth is? I think you’re right that we’ll probably never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think it would be interesting if large apps with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analytics packages, they could start tracking things. Or large analytics companies, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can start publishing numbers. Like, what does Flurry say? What percentage that they’re installed on is this versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this model? Like that we can definitely, we’ll have that information if we don’t already have it. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, again, I think they’re gonna do fine with this and that’s fine and in the future might be better to use them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t make it, that doesn’t make these large phones a great solution today for a lot of priorities. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, a lot of people are very happy with them. A lot of people love these things. I was even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the people saying, I want a bigger phone and I jumped to get one as soon as I could, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe there’s a better point between 4.0 and 4.7. 4.0 and 4.7. That’s a pretty big range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like maybe a 4.3 would be great. You know, you get a little bit more space. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John 4.7 is the compromise side. Like, you know, you’re just shaving inches. You’re gonna be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just need bigger hands. That’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll just upgrade them next year when I’m off contract with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John With my week with the 6, like I said, I think what happened was that I just upgraded my hand motions.
⏹️ ▶️ John I upgraded my little hand gymnastics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you hold the phone differently than everybody else in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John I well, you know like the moves you do to to get to the parts that you have to it Because like you said the software just
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t updated I’m using apps that were made for at best the iPhone 5 screen and at worst, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the smaller 3.5 inch and I I upgraded my my hand moves
⏹️ ▶️ John so much so that it went back to the smaller one I would find myself starting to do the hand move that I need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John to hit the done button in Twitter if I can Realize oh, I don’t need to do that move. I can go back to my other move to do, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know I think that will mostly take care of itself though. And like, the reason I think I’m not bothered by it is
⏹️ ▶️ John because once I sort of upgrade all my, you know, my hands move set,
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s fine. Like the only, I think the only persistent bothersome thing about the iPhone 6 for me was how
⏹️ ▶️ John much room it took out, took in whatever pocket I had it in. Because that didn’t go away. It always felt like it was bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was more, it was taking up more, if I put it in my front jeans pocket, it was more likely to feel it under stress. If I sat
⏹️ ▶️ John down and I’m all paranoid about bending it, in my coat pocket it pokes out a little bit farther than the other one did but
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think will get over because I really do use mine more like a little mini tablet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think there will ever come a time that if you think back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Tweedy days, Polar Refresh wasn’t a thing and then Lauren Bricktor did it with Tweedy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it became a thing. It literally became a system level thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think there may come a time where iOS transitions to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a back button at the bottom of the screen kind of layout, be it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some popular app like Tweety does it and everyone embraces it, or perhaps because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the SDK changes and suddenly tab bars are at the top Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style and back buttons are at the bottom. Do you think that would ever happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re going for the, you know, the system back gesture, like that’s their attempt
⏹️ ▶️ John new paradigm for navigation instead of having a toolbar that you have to reach back button that’s really hard to find.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do the system swipe but I think that swipe is I know I almost never do it. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious even if you show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey someone really they don’t go I do it
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Yeah, I pretty much almost never do it. And I don’t think it’s type of thing that if you show somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will do all the time because it’s not reliable. It depends on which application you’re using, whether it works or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s it is a fairly precise gesture. It’s not there’s not a lot of slop on it because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just do a swipe sideways, that may do something, but it’s not the back one that has to involve
⏹️ ▶️ John the edge. And like, I think there’s too much nuance to it. So I think what you were saying, Casey is more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John that application developers will, especially if the six plus ends up being
⏹️ ▶️ John like super popular, they’ll have to redesign their applications to be inside
⏹️ ▶️ John like the thumb, you know, the thumb hot zone, like where you can reach where you know, put everything that’s important within
⏹️ ▶️ John reach. And then suddenly, the phone doesn’t feel as big anymore because the apps are designed not to have you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whatever paradigm it is that that does that, whether it’s moving everything to the bottom or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the solution is. Reachability is definitely not it. That’s like a hack that I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John a few people might use, but that’s not the best solution. But yeah, I am hoping that the U.I. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John redid on themselves and we standardize on even it was not Apple doing it, even it’s just like, you know, the hamburger
⏹️ ▶️ John button thing, which Apple is not popularizing that. And like you said, the pull to refresh, you know, come out of
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party world and have there be some kind of consensus and have all the applications start to look the same and
⏹️ ▶️ John then have Apple roll it in. That’s plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Now in other news, Marco, have you played with your Retina iMac at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Oh, and? Yeah, I’ve been using it full-time for about two days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I didn’t realize. And things are amazing or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, it’s amazing. Oh, good. Oh my God. It’s, yeah, it’s amazing. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s actually a few things that I’m that I’ve had to change as a result of going to retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that are very very boring so I’m going to tell you about them. So the first thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s fair so as as John knows with Yosemite stuff this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was also my upgrade to Yosemite. So as John has pointed out Yosemite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes cues from the desktop wallpaper to do most of its blurriness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So please email John with the details of how I got that wrong. So the problem is before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years I’ve used just like a static like medium gray background and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a whole bunch of crap on my desktop and all you know I save everything the desktop and everything’s all it’s John’s disaster scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like everything is saved in the desktop. In Yosemite if you have a solid color desktop that is some drab dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color many windows will pick that up in some little way and just look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. You know you just have these awful. I mean John you saw this right in your testing and stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah like my background at work I said has pumpkins. Pumpkins are nice and beautiful and orange but they make
⏹️ ▶️ John everything look terribly sick and rusty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well yeah but even like like you can’t just do a solid color a flat color background even that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the flat color backgrounds now will make many things in Yosemite look terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to if you want to get away from this effect use a background that has enough light
⏹️ ▶️ John colors in it like if it has like blue sky with fluffy white clouds, your menu bar will
⏹️ ▶️ John look sane and most of your windows and menus won’t look that crazy. Maybe maybe they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John look it’ll look like the color temperature on your monitor is off because it’ll be a little bit blue. Because that’s what that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I have here at home. I have a desktop background that has a white sky with fluffy clouds moving up to top
⏹️ ▶️ John it and my menu bar looks okay and the menus I pulled down from it look a little blue
⏹️ ▶️ John but like there’s something about anything that’s like brown or green it just it just makes the whole interface look sick
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s like sick house syndrome but for your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny that you mentioned that so basically I I have I tried a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few different things and what I’ve come to is I started using the wallpaper I’ve been using on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retina MacBook Pro since I got it in 2012 which is a bright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sky blue photo I took in New Zealand of the bright sunlit sky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a bright blue ocean and so it’s this nice like sunny bright blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture and it’s crisp and it looks amazing on the retina resolution it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic for this purpose because it is like it works with everything as you said it would like you know a light blue color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is great for this I also then had to declutter my desktop because it looked terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John like when they change the iTunes icon of course they also change the file like if you have an mp3
⏹️ ▶️ John It gets the iTunes file icon. So all of a sudden, everything, it used to have a blue dot on it. It has this big
⏹️ ▶️ John shining red dot. It looks like a Japanese flag all over your desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I clean up my desktop. That had to change also, because that was part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, my Monospace font had to change, because I was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Monaco holdout. All these years, I was doing Monaco, non-anti-aliased, on my desktop. Got it in Consolata?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t tried that yet. Right now I’m on Menlo because I basically inherited what I’ve been doing on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Retina laptop since that existed. So I went from Monaco 10 to Menlo 11. I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go up a size also. Part of that is because I think it just looks better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Retina. Part of that is because I went from a 30-inch screen to a 27. So I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a decrease in the size of elements on screen because it’s the same point width
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but 3 inches smaller diagonal. So it actually is like everything is noticeably a little bit smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But other so I’m actually like I’m fitting less per line and Xcode I have to like go change my line wrap settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and adjust my standards and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John same point width is your 30 inch is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Yeah 2560. Really? Yep. It’s a little bit shorter vertically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but horizontal is the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I’ve been I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to go to because I’m also a bitmap
⏹️ ▶️ John Monaco holdout. I’m still on bitmap Monaco 9 but obviously once I go retina that is not tenable anymore so I’ll have to pick a different font.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nine wow I was always 10
⏹️ ▶️ John Monaco yeah Monaco 9 has been my phone hardcore since the since the old days when lowercase l and capital
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked exactly the same hardcore Monaco 9 users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s been the biggest difference like so like you know now I’m basically using like this this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean wallpapered beach scene computer with all these big smooth fonts on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to my old like super geek Monaco pixel font but I got used to it very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then so So Tiff’s iMac arrived today and I’ve been back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with her computer setting it up and going from her old computer to her new one, I keep having to briefly use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her 27-inch Thunderbolt display, which of course is a non-retina. Same size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar finish, the iMac though is less glossy, but it’s still reflective, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less so. Same size, same pixel dimensions, and the 27-inch Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no slouch. It’s a very good-looking monitor. My old big 30 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HP mediocre monitor always had far more drab colors and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse contrast and everything than this awesome little 27 inch that TIFF always had. Well now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was using the Retina for one day and I go to see TIFF’s monitor and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just looks like complete garbage. Like you see every pixel, it looks like you’re going back to DOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t believe how much worse it looks. Once every screen you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all day is retina, when you see a non-retina one, it is shocking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a big, big difference. So yeah, that’s how it’s going. I’m loving it. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is fan noise, not in most workloads, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stress the CPUs for more than about a minute or so, like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using handbrake to encode a video or something like that, you max out all the CPUs for more than about a minute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will hear the fan spin up and I would say the overall noise level is similar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the retina MacBook Pro when it’s spun up so it’s like a nice kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium it sounds more like white noise than the old fans like Casey’s fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like white noise it has like you know like the the asymmetrical blades I assume to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but and it is it is not I would not call it loud but you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely hear it and it is yeah I would say it’s very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the to the 15 inch right in my pro under full load so it’s fine I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll see in practice over time if that ends up being a problem while recording this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast I have been monitoring the fan speed and it has not gone above its idle speed during this entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time so I’m not worried about things like this being a problem. We’ll see what happens you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I have to encode a bunch of video or something but that it’s… the reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need CPU speed but I usually need it in short bursts like compiling an Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or encoding the mp3 for the show like I need it in short bursts and so I don’t think the fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise is ever really gonna be a huge problem for me but I’ll see what happens like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might be the factor that in two years makes me want the new Mac Pro that can drive the new 5k standalone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display but we’ll see for now I’m very very happy with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good I’m X for everyone yeah something like that titles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I really do start snoring how are you still awake I’m dying I am absolutely dying if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be less of a hardship for you because day and night just cease to have all meaning and this should be
⏹️ ▶️ John just like if we were doing it like 11 a.m. in the morning.