catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

99: Pop-Up Headlights

Adventures in Go, Apple’s software-quality issues, Marco’s blogging issues, and the rumored 12-inch MacBook Air.

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I should start the show by pointing out that it is 14 degrees

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside here in the place that does not have winter.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are you still stuck on this, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right here, my thermometer is reading 13.8, so we are clearly colder than you. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have winter, you don’t. I’m 12 here. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey those two cents of, those 2.2 degrees, man, they’re killer. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, now that I got that out of the way, do you want to do some follow-up? It’s what we do. Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about SSL. So we have a couple of more pieces of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting news slash feedback with regard to whether or not you really need SSL for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just plain old websites that don’t really do anything interactive. David Watkin wrote in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, regarding SSL everywhere, mostly just an FYI, I’m the sysadmin for a decently sized charter school

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in California, and I can tell you from experience that HTTPS wreaks havoc with the content filters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we are required to have in place. I love the idea of cheaper, free SSL certs and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more security in general, but it’s also going to make my life miserable trying to keep students

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from viewing content that they shouldn’t. And that’s kind of unfortunate that schools have to filter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything, but I totally understand it. And that’s actually an interesting point that I hadn’t considered

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, they’re just going to do the same thing that we discussed last week to force everyone to have a certificate, do a man in the middle attack on

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody on the school’s internet. And, you know, that happens in corporate settings. that happens in schools all the

⏹️ ▶️ John time. And as we learned from many other people who sent this feedback, I didn’t attach a name to it in the notes because so many people sent it.

⏹️ ▶️ John They were showing examples of GoGo’s in-flight internet issuing its own certificates so

⏹️ ▶️ John that it can man in the middle of you. Because once your browser trusts its certificate, it acts as an SSL proxy,

⏹️ ▶️ John de-grips everything, sees all the traffic that goes through and who knows what else it does. So this is definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. It happens in all sorts of places. It happens on plain Wi-Fi,

⏹️ ▶️ John happens in academic settings, happens in corporate settings. Yeah, so that’s the wonders

⏹️ ▶️ John of SSL. It’s not the fault of SSL, but it’s like people want to

⏹️ ▶️ John see your data. And if you try to use SSL to stop them from seeing your data, if you wander into an environment where

⏹️ ▶️ John they say, no, really, we need to see your data, they’ll see your data. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think this is one of those cases where like, you know, you can’t have it both ways. If you want to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complete control over what gets viewed over your network, and you want to spy on people or filter it, need control

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over those devices so that you can do things like install your own certificates via IT

⏹️ ▶️ Marco policy and group installation methods and stuff like that, where you can’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a coffee shop and say, all right, you can take your laptop in here, whatever you want, browse on it, whatever you want,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then be spying on that without their knowledge. That’s no good. So I think this is actually a perfectly fine balance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’re going to cause trouble for schools everywhere to a degree that it’s worth not doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like the GoGo thing is doing, schools could do something similar. Basically, you

⏹️ ▶️ John try to foist the certificate on the people who are on your network and say, look, if you want to be on our network,

⏹️ ▶️ John the price is you have to use the certificate and trust it so we can see all your content. I’m not quite sure what the state of

⏹️ ▶️ John filtering in an academic setting is these days. I understand why it would be a thing that people want to do,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it just seems to me that it’s basically impossible to stop.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they’re trying to stop is students from seeing things inappropriate. And what students are trying to do is see inappropriate things. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John students are 100% going to win. You cannot stop them. But I understand that it’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John just because we can’t stop them doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, because not trying,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t know what the correct solution there is. But technically speaking, it’s one of the situations where

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to win.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, plus, I mean, not to get too creepy about it, but I think by the time a lot of kids are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old enough to start seeking out bad things on the internet, there’s a pretty good chance these days they probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have their own smartphone with a data plan.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and Verizon, all it’s doing is tracking the, putting an ad tracker on all their

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey HTTP requests, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you guys bring up schools again, because when Erin first started teaching,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she wanted to be able to do something simple, like look at Gmail when she was at work. And at the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was filtered. And I think when she had left at the end of this past school year,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey teachers were afforded more privileges than the students were. But when she

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first started, that wasn’t the case. And so I vividly remember getting into a like several month long

⏹️ ▶️ Casey game of chicken where I set up, I think it was like a socks proxy on a little Linux server

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had at the house and she was using that for awhile and then that got blocked. And so then I moved the socks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey proxy or whatever it was. That doesn’t really matter. I moved the proxy on to like a standard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey port number, like 25 or something like that. It might’ve been the exchange port number, whatever that was. But then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that eventually got blocked. And that was around the time that, that they started giving the teachers more privileges.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there were a few other steps that I don’t remember in this process, but we were definitely playing this like cat and mouse game, me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and well, maybe it wasn’t just me because I think our students were doing it too, to John’s point, but, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were playing this cat and mouse game for, for several months, trying to get Aaron access to not just regular things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Gmail. These weren’t nefarious things, but, uh, eventually it ended up that the IT

⏹️ ▶️ Casey overlords one, and they just allowed the teachers to have a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey access.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, anyone who’s ever worked with one of these content filters, and tried to get any work done,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has usually run into problems like this, where like, you know, ostensibly, it’s a good idea to help keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you working and keep you on track. And there are situations where that works and where that has been successful. But there’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of situations where like, the filter is actually keeping people from not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only doing harmless things like checking their Gmail every once in a while at work, but also actually keeping them from doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their jobs properly. Like if you have to be researching things on the internet as part of your job or you’re looking up something for a paper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so many sites are blocked. There’s so many situations where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these content filters are actively harmful to what’s trying to get done in the office that they’re trying to protect.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s absolutely true. In Erin’s case, there were a lot of YouTube videos that she would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use during classes about all sorts of various and different things. Erin was a high

⏹️ ▶️ Casey school biology teacher, and she couldn’t even do that for the longest time because YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was carte blanche filtered entirely. And again, over time, the teachers got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more access, and then she could do this again. But your point is absolutely right, Marco, that it’s not always

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about nefarious things. It’s not always about slacking off. Sometimes it’s really justifiable use.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when the thing that’s preventing you access is completely algorithmic and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like curated or whatever, that’s what’s going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, YouTube is a massive resource for teachers. Like that cannot be overstated. Like YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an incredible resource for teachers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And moving on to other follow up, I should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of kind of apologize to you, Marco, in that I led you astray last episode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to your question about, well, could I just do my feed poller, which we’ll hopefully talk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a little bit later. Uh, could I just do that and C sharp? And I said, well, you’re going to have to run all of IAS and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of ASP.net and blah, blah, blah, and it’s really not worth it. And, uh, Frank Krueger pointed out to me that I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called ASP.net V next or something like that. That’s probably wrong too. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey email me, but anyway, the upcoming or currently out, I guess, version of ASP.net.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They actually have, I guess it’s binaries for all sorts of different platforms. And so you wouldn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to run the full stack on some VPS somewhere. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other thing I didn’t consider is you probably wouldn’t need IIS anyway. You could just write a console

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that in turn reaches out to the internet. But if you’re calling it locally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or via some endpoint locally, you may not even need IIS at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. And I know this is kind of irrelevant, but for the three ASP.NET developers that are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening, my apologies to you for leading Marco astray. And Marco, should you ever decide to give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up on your beloved Go feed crawler, sinker, whatever guy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me know and I’ll set you up with some C Sharp stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so you missed your chance. This was your one window

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey for this decade. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. For me to learn a new language once a decade. And this is your one window that you could have gotten me to try a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft language. Nope, not going to do it. I know. It’s all over. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quit. It’s all your fault. I don’t think that it was the right answer for you for this particular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, but I stand by that if you ever, for whatever reason, had a chance to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really learn C-sharp, I really do think you’d like it a lot. But at this point, I honestly don’t know why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would try it. Leave aside my own allegiances. I don’t think it makes sense for you at all. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, you could have if I hadn’t failed you miserably. And that kind of segues

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into, why don’t you tell us a quick update on your feed poller? You had tweeted a day or two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago now that you deployed the Gofeed poller this morning, whatever that day was. A few hours

⏹️ ▶️ Casey later, I was able to confidently reduce the number of overcast VPSs from 13 to five.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible. Yep, that’s right. And I think I can even get it down to four, but it’d be cutting it a little bit close.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m probably not going to do it. But yeah, so last week, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my status last week was I had written like 10 lines of Go code. So I really didn’t have anything going right. Is that true?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about right if my memory is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve been trying it for about a week and I really like it. There’s not much more to say. I’m using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right now. It is currently running on Overcast. It has replaced the PHP feed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawler. So it hasn’t replaced all the PHP feed processing. It has only done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the front end stuff of now PHP is no longer making network requests.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s no longer waiting around for network requests with all these processes with nothing to do, waiting around for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco curl. So that is all now on Go. Go is now fetching the pages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every x seconds or whatever, and depending on certain conditions, depends on subscriber count,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco latest error, everything. Anyway, fetches all the feeds, and then when it finds a changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed, it stuffs that feed into Redis, and a bunch of PHP worker processes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawl that. So before I said it was 240 PHP processes that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were doing all the crawling. Now it is one go process and eight PHP processes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I probably don’t even need those eight, but we’ll see what happens there. I bet I can get away with four, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d probably just leave it at eight just to have some headroom if there’s a burst of updates. And that’s roughly it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, I like the language a lot. Now, neither of you two have done anything with it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not. Nope. So it does, I mean, obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not one to learn new languages frequently. Looking at the landscape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, the reason I chose Go after running from Node, and by the way, we heard from a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people about Node trying to fix my memory leak.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a bunch of nuance to how you call setTimeout and what variables are in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scope and whether you use a closure around it or a named function or whether you assign it to a variable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all these little nuances. I have no doubt that the right person

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could look at this code and fix it for me, but as I said last week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Node, it just doesn’t fit me as well as something I really want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco invest a lot of time into. It is not a good enough fit for me in other ways besides this way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I lost interest in trying to fix this problem. Thank you Node people, I appreciate the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week of your support, but please stop emailing me corrections about it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already stopped using the language. I’m sure it’s fine for you or Merlin, but that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Looking at everything else that’s available, I consider other things like, you know, Java, Python.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to do ASP.NET until Casey talked me out of it last week. Is that really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey true?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it was never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco under consideration. It might become in the future, you know, Microsoft, they’re clearly investing very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily in dev tools and trying to reach out to developers who are not right now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Microsoft platforms. And I’m curious to see what they do in those areas. Because one thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all these languages lack is a really nice IDE for Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or for anything really. I’m not entirely sure Eclipse qualifies for that statement.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never used it, but from what I’ve seen of other people using it, it has never appeared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as though I want to use it. You said no, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that roughly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco accurate?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t used it in years. So I’m admittedly talking a little bit out of turn. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any exposure I’ve had to it, and any exposure I’ve had to it by way of other people talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I cannot remember a time anyone said anything positive about Eclipse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So anyway, I would like to have a nice IDE. You know, like, I have one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Xcode. For my native applications. I’ve never had one for web apps. Every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web app I’ve ever written has been written in like a text editor, either VI at first or text mate later.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve never had a nice IDE with code completion and inline error descriptions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. Never had that. I would love that, never had that. Never had the luxury of a real debugger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while writing web apps. That would also be nice, never had it. And with all these new languages that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been playing with or that I’ve been investigating, almost none of them offer that in a reasonable way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all that being said, I might consider Microsoft stuff in the future depending on the direction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they go with their tools. But right now it is not under consideration. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked at Rust and I looked at Go. And I read up, I didn’t actually try writing any code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Rust. So that’s a giant disclaimer at the beginning. I looked at both of those.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those seem like the two that everyone said, or with the third option of Python, where everyone says either do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in Python because it’s good at this, or do it in Rust or Go. There’s a lot of debate between Rust

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people and Go people about which one is better, and a few people have tried both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have given more useful opinions. Not a lot have written about it. I haven’t found a whole lot of posts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. I think Rust in the long term will probably be more common.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It certainly has a long way to go. It’s still very much a beta and it shows in a lot of the documentation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the tools and everything. It will clearly be a lot better in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rust also seems very much, very close to Swift and C++ style

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of language preferences, which really is not my style. It might become my style later

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, but it currently isn’t. Just the whole, like Rust, it just seemed like it added quite a lot of complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that conflicted with what I actually wanted. There are a lot of things about it that I like. I like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of the mutability being part of the language. That’s a big one. I really, I would love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I like some of the type tricks you can do, most of them I wouldn’t need.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go is a lot more basic. It’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller of a language. And not to say it’s not advanced, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things the language will do for you are much more limited. Most of the time I fall on the side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way they did it, which is one of the reasons I chose to move forward with that language. Anyway, so far

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is really nice. There are parts about it that are weird. It is not like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a clear, oh my god, this is perfect forever language. I can already tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably not going to want to be writing the whole web app in this. If I was writing a new web app from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch, I would consider it, but it is, I don’t think there’s any reason for me to rewrite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole Overcast web app and go, you know, just, I think it’s a way for me to get rid of these hot spots, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s about it. But there’s a lot to like there. I really like it. I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and I’m going to keep going with it where it makes sense to. So

⏹️ ▶️ John did you use Go routines and channels and everything for your, uh, for your, yeah, what do you

⏹️ ▶️ John call it? Sort of event loop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacement type thing? Yeah, it’s, it’s entirely Go routines and channels. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John good. I, when I was, when I was talking about like what the kind of event libraries were in Go, I knew they had some weird concurrency thing, but I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John remember what it was off the top of my head. Uh, but that’s, I mean, for a small language, it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of odd that, that, well not odd, but like it’s, this expresses the philosophy of Go. If the language small,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like C done better, but they determined that the concurrency stuff was important enough

⏹️ ▶️ John to actually add to a language that is otherwise being kept very small and that says a lot about sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of the intended use of the language and why I think it’s probably a good fit for, you know, Google doing server-side stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and for you doing the polar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. I mean, I love the concurrency stuff. Somebody I tweeted earlier, this is genius, somebody else,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody pointed, actually a number of people pointed out on Twitter earlier that this is not at all new.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called, is it CSP? Concurrent Sequential Processes, I think. Something like that. It’s a concurrency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco model that Go uses, communicating sequential processes. That’s it, thank you, Mitchi, in the chat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I like this model a lot. It is not perfect. It seems more complicated up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco front. Once you get into it, you realize, oh, this is actually really nice. There’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco concurrency baggage you usually have to worry about, like locking and threading, that you just don’t need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really worry about if you do it the way you’re supposed to do And it’s really it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s easy to do things like earlier. I added you know I for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since the very beginning I had a limit on how many crawls can be running in parallel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at any one time and that’s very easy to do with channels just you know earlier tonight I added

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second limit to how many per per host you can be running at once so I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because earlier I crawled all like all the feeds to a couple of big hosts and got blocked immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having like 2,000 connections open to one host at a time. So that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco went out the window. But that was really easy to add too. Like just, it’s this quick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little, you know, make a channel for every host. And oh, here’s an array of channels. And when you start it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco push one onto it. And when you end it, pop one off of it. And here’s the buffer length and that’s it. Like it’s really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for doing stuff like that, this concurrency model is really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what I like about it is that it is very new. It is unlike any concurrency models I’ve worked with in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco past. And so it is intellectually stimulating, it is educational, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this task, it’s really good. So you seem pleased. Overall, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, as I said, it does have weirdnesses to it. Like, there are certain things about it that I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, really? Like, that’s what I have to do? Or you don’t support that? But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, part of this is just me getting used to the language. Ask me again in six months how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I feel about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey language.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. Anything else on this? Or would you like to tell me about something cool?

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco did anything happen this week?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we really not talking about it because we don’t have to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can talk about it if you want. I mean I don’t I don’t have that much more to say on it. So I wrote this blog post

⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Apple has lost the functional high ground a title I’m regretting because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually I of all the complaints people had about the piece I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco title was was probably the the least valid complaint about it because I don’t think the title was that far off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the truth

⏹️ ▶️ John can you explain the title to me because that was the part that I was most confused about in your post

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the title was you know the Apple has lost the functional high ground so this is a play on the concept of the moral high ground

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to explain that do I

⏹️ ▶️ John No, you don’t, but explain the functional high

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ground. So Apple stuff, you know, it used to be that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff generally, by a pretty long shot, worked better than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC slash Android slash other alternatives. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people threw around the phrase, it just works. As I said in the article, that was never 100% true,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was generally true. it was the general advantage that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff had over their competitors is that it just worked better the vast majority of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certain things were more reliable, simpler, more robust, etc.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this gave Apple this, what I consider the functional high ground in the past of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff just worked better. And it worked so well that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you could not necessarily hold it over PC people, but you knew when you were using an Apple product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah I got a good one here. I got the thing that works best in this industry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think their quality problems over the last few years,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when taken together, have ruined this image to a degree. And so I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily mean that someone else has become better. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an argument Gruber had, that’s an argument a few other people have brought up. I think you can lose, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about the moral high ground, I think you can lose the moral high ground even if no one else takes it from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Like losing the moral high ground is like, you used to be really good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco morally, have a really good image or have a really good reputation and you don’t anymore. And so when I said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing the functional high ground, what I meant was in that sense of like, they used to have a good reputation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this and now they don’t. So I think in that way, I think the title was actually pretty fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have used the word functional because I think that was throwing me now hearing your explanation, I think my conception of it

⏹️ ▶️ John kept focusing more on the definition of functional. Maybe I would go with like, I don’t know, reliability

⏹️ ▶️ John is not really what we’re going for. But anyway, I probably wouldn’t have made a high ground knowledge in title, but now that you’ve explained

⏹️ ▶️ John that, I understand what you were getting at. So you can go on to the explaining the body of your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, because I cut you off with the title part.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but no, that was important, because a lot of people argued about the title. And I do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the title was not really the bad part. You know, the part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I regret was the overall, maybe sensational,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe alarmist, I don’t know exactly how to say it. So the post was basically saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff doesn’t work very well anymore. I think the problem is, you know, I said their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware quality is fantastic recently, but their software quality is really not. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco originally I said it’s taken a nosedive. That’s the word I regret the most because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that suggests the wrong acceleration rate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or trajectory of the decline. I think Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is on a steady decline, and it’s been going that way for a while. A nosedive is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sudden drop, precariously or precipitously, whatever the right word is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sudden rapidly accelerating drop. I don’t think that is what’s happening. I think it’s been a slow decline,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s no signs of it turning around, really. Definitely just like a slow decline of their software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality. And part of it is services quality worked in with that, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it really is just the software itself, like the local software running on the machines, which is really unfortunate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, a few of the words, like I said, riddled with bugs. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s riddled with bugs. It has bugs. You know, like there are certain words that were more severe than they needed to be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, I stand by the message that I was saying, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff is not working as well as it used to. Now we need to be very cautious when we install

⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates. And the fact is it used to be better, and that worries me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My theory is that marketing priorities, and again, it’s important to point out the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine distinction here, not the marketing department, as some sites quoted it as, which I never said.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marketing priorities at Apple seem to be dictating that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software must keep pace with the annual hardware releases, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there must be an annual software release. That has marketing value. That helps the products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with cross-marketing between the Macs and the iPhones, and new iPhones come out, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also all these new software capabilities that go along with brand new iOS X, You know and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was X meaning like integer not not mispronouncing 10 with OS 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway my my opinion is that Apple quality has gone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco downhill in the last few years and They shouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping up with this like artificial annual release schedule for major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS’s because That is just not it’s not producing good quality software You know, it used to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the 10.x.0 releases, all the way up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like, you know, 10.x.3 or 4, were sometimes unstable or at least had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some bugs. Usually by the time you got to like 10.x.4 or 5, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty rock solid. You could pretty much depend on it. And then, you know, with some of the previous releases, they would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get all the way up to like, you know, 10.x.7, 8 or 9, because they were just around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for longer. And so by the time, so there would be a couple of months of instability at the beginning of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new OS release. But then a few months in, you were fine and it was rock stable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next 18 months before there was really a new one. And now it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like we’re always using a 1.0 or a 1.1. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every release that we’re using from Apple because the major updates are moving so quickly and get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many changes in each one. It’s not like we’re always using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a beta, but it’s close. It’s like we’re always using a.0 or a.1. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel that in a lot of ways. And one of the errors I made was I didn’t actually list any of those ways in this post,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s almost like there’s too many to list. Glenn Fleischman wrote a really good article today. He actually solicited

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people from Twitter to tell him, like, make me a list. Tell me all the things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are common problems for everybody. and he posted a good thing, I’ll put it in the show notes. And it’s hard,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there isn’t like one thing, you know, if somebody asked me like, oh, what one thing do we need to be working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, or you know, what one thing needs to be improved here, there is no one thing. There are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a million tiny things, and a few big things that just don’t work very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, or have bugs sometimes. And I don’t, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell, it’s hard to tell if Apple thinks this is a problem, Or if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the course they’re on is OK. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I remember when I talked about, first of all, I’m going to say this has been an interesting demonstration difference between

⏹️ ▶️ John podcasting and blogging, because we have all, the three of us, talked about all these things for like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is it, over a year now. Like it’s not as if this was a sudden realization that Marco woke up

⏹️ ▶️ John one day and said, my god, I mean. But when Marco says it on a podcast, or we say it on a podcast, nobody hears it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But when it gets written down, part of it just like luck of the draw of like it happening to catch on and go viral

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But it is interesting to me that like if someone is a regular listener to the show and reads

⏹️ ▶️ John that blog post, they’ll be like, yeah, I’ve heard Marco say that a million times. And so it’s not it’s not like a revelation,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then suddenly, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, that’s that’s the thing. I wasn’t saying anything that I thought was particularly noteworthy, like or original. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost

⏹️ ▶️ John like like the kind of thing like this goes two ways. Both of us do this. And well, back when I used to blogging Casey, like two

⏹️ ▶️ John ways where sometimes you’ll write something up on your site and then you’ll talk about it on the podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes we’ll talk about something on the podcast. And then after the podcast, you’ll sort of write up essentially a more coherent

⏹️ ▶️ John summary of what was discussed. And this definitely felt like, you know, after

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about this for weeks or months or whatever, you felt like it was time for a blog post about it. And you more or less summarized all

⏹️ ▶️ John the things that you’d said on past podcasts or whatever. And it just felt like that thing you do where like sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John it comes first in the podcast, some kind of source in the blog. Well, we’ll talk about the meta stuff later. But I just I just thought that was interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of podcasts, one of the things that a couple of people who read that reminded me that

⏹️ ▶️ John existed because I’m old and I forget now was hypercritical episode 55 region of pain, which was

⏹️ ▶️ John back around the mountain line, talking about a mountain line and maybe the announcement or talking about my review.

⏹️ ▶️ John The that title comes from the idea that Marco just articulated, which is with yearly releases

⏹️ ▶️ John of my what my worry on that show was, is the OS going to have enough time to mature?

⏹️ ▶️ John because the point is they’re always crap, right? And then the point one point two is like it takes a while to settle down.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And if you’re going to happen, if they’re going to happen every year, it does do yearly releases.

⏹️ ▶️ John Give the OS enough time to settle down. Or are we always going to be in what I call the region of

⏹️ ▶️ John pain because it’s always crap when the point comes out, like no matter how long they hold it, like you just you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s always some instability, sometimes long, sometimes short. That was in 2012, the

⏹️ ▶️ John beginning of 2012. At this point, I would say

⏹️ ▶️ John that we know for OS 10 that the OS does get out of the region of pain because we do reach

⏹️ ▶️ John the point four or point five. But what Marcos thing was talking about is, all

⏹️ ▶️ John right, we exit the region of pain. How long do we get in the nice part before it starts

⏹️ ▶️ John over?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not like

⏹️ ▶️ John they run into each other. It’s not like it’s just bug ridden because Mavericks was not just like a total disaster

⏹️ ▶️ John right before Yosemite came out, at least for most people. I mean, there are exceptions people are gonna rise and say, no, this

⏹️ ▶️ John feature X never worked on Mavericks or my GPU always kernel bank on Mavericks or whatever. Like that is true

⏹️ ▶️ John and that has always happened and that’s unfortunate. But for most people like Mavericks had settled

⏹️ ▶️ John down. But how long did you get with the settle down Mavericks? Was it the majority

⏹️ ▶️ John of the year? Definitely not, right? Was it less than half a year? Was it one month? Was it two month, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that I think when I’m looking at this, and we’ve talked about all these things before, The

⏹️ ▶️ John change fatigue, not just the bug fatigue, the bug fatigue is one thing, but also the change fatigue, as

⏹️ ▶️ John in even if everything works perfectly, I don’t know if I’m ready for everything to change how it works again. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John not everything, but you know, people don’t want the time to change. Like the change fatigue combined

⏹️ ▶️ John with the very short periods of stability and calm,

⏹️ ▶️ John that I think more than like the quality of the software or any kind of metric you could put on it,

⏹️ ▶️ John like number of bugs in the point releases or number of bugs in the final releases or severity of bugs or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that more than anything. Characterizes the dissatisfaction I’ve heard from

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people about Apple is that especially on the Mac, I don’t want to talk about I

⏹️ ▶️ John was separately, but the Mac is different because on the Mac, I think the third thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John comes into the into this equation of change, fatigue, not a long time and

⏹️ ▶️ John a period of stability. Also, the final question is, who are you chasing? Who are you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco chasing with

⏹️ ▶️ John yearly OS 10 updates? Like why? With iOS you feel like all right

⏹️ ▶️ John Android Samsung you got people breathing down your neck. It’s an exploding market. It’s super competitive

⏹️ ▶️ John You got to do what you got to do. And that’s that’s the marketing priorities that Marco was talking about it for the Mac though it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like Yearly releases if you can pull it off fine. I think they

⏹️ ▶️ John prove they can pull off We can make yearly releases each ones have interesting features They eventually settle down to stability like they

⏹️ ▶️ John can do it But the cost is like at least half the year

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re dealing with like a baby OS that has a bunch of bugs Then you get a period of stability and as soon as everything’s okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John here comes the new one and like they can do it They can get them out on time. They’re not more like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not like iOS tied to hardware Like they just basically well, you know, somebody’s not ready. We’re gonna ship that later Like it’s not like there’s a yearly

⏹️ ▶️ John update of Macs that they’re trying to sync with, you know So it’s not it’s not exactly tied to that. It’s just that

⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s almost like a corporate stunt like Like not, not like

⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, stunt like show up, but like saying our organization is so well oiled, we can revise

⏹️ ▶️ John and release yearly updates to a massive, you know, consumer operating system. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can. And you can get it done. And during the course of its life, it will settle down to stability,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it still may be too much. Like it still may be like, why, why do you think we need a new one of these every single year?

⏹️ ▶️ John We would prefer to have an entire year of boringness instead of four months of boringness.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. And I wrote a small kind of response post to Marco’s post, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mostly irrelevant, except that a few people emailed me and one of them said, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have the email in front of me, something along the lines of, well, is it really the yearly thing that’s the problem or is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that there’s so much stuff in each release, new stuff in each release? And I think that’s a fair

⏹️ ▶️ Casey point that you could argue that you could just put less in each

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these releases, but potentially keep this super aggressive yearly cycle.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, it just seems to me that that’s not really the choice that Apple would make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just have like one marquee feature and then the rest of a new OS be otherwise unremarkable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, the other thing I’d like to point out is a friend of the show, Ben Thompson in the chat says, the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Apple needs to iterate faster on the cloud stuff and slower on the software, but by keeping them all linked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey together, they’re making both worst. Cloud is still too slow. Software is now too fast. And I think that’s a really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey astute point that we really could use a lot of help on the services side. Although, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we definitely need some help on the desktop side as well. And just keeping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the desktop and the mobile operating systems inextricably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey linked like Apple is, it just seems like it’s kind of tough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to keep everything moving effectively that way. Now, what I’d be curious to hear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your guys’ take on is a lot of people have said, well, yeah, okay, let’s assume that Apple says, well, the hell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with yearly releases, what happens for things like continuity that really are integrating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both the desktop and, and iOS. Wouldn’t you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want them to happen simultaneously? Now, the comedy of this question is that I believe pieces of continuity

⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not happen simultaneously and there were point releases to Yosemite to enable it. But I don’t like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t it kind of make sense to have everything packaged together at the same moment in time?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, for certain things, yes. Um, but. A, I don’t think those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things should really come up every year. I, you know, big things that require these massive coordination between all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OSs I don’t think should or will come up every year, uh, and B you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to ask at what cost. So, you know, would you drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a car that had really great features added to it every day but would occasionally explode? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certain things that just are not worth it, you know? And what I think has really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shaken a lot of my faith in Apple’s software quality recently is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, this button looks weird every so often. It’s It’s like basic stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I take for granted as like this always works, doesn’t work anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or works erratically. Like one of my biggest complaints with Yosemite is with networking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues, usually with network discovery of resources or connectivity to network resources, to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco local network resources. There’s something about the way they revert discovery data to enable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuity slash airdrop whatever it is, it has made it extremely unreliable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like network shares, printers stuff like that we would have made fun of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows people so badly if their network shares are disappeared you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know every so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco often and or they had 16 copies of the same computer on the network and like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are issues that we have on Yosemite every day that are widespread issues lots of people have these issues

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s like this is the basics the basics are messed up now you know the the OS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t crashing for most people like we’re not getting kernel panics fortunately but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know we are having a lot of weird little behaviors like that that just just things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem basic you know similar to like when iOS broke touch ID and phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco calls like you know seems basic right and whatever the cause of that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it was a you know delivery issue whatever I don’t I don’t care what the cause was the fact is like you can’t trust

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the basics anymore. Like that, that I think is, is scary. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it, that’s the kind of, that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about Apple losing reputation, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this is like, you know, nobody cares if things, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t quite look right or if some brand new feature doesn’t quite work immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like HealthKit launched it. Apparently, I don’t know much about it. I have, I didn’t try to use it, but apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the condition of HealthKit at launch was a complete disaster. I don’t know if it’s fixed since then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was like, it was, it basically launched like not working at all. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, didn’t Apple, I remember they had to reject all the apps for it and hold and delay them anyway. Big disaster with health

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit. That’s less of a, that’s embarrassing, certainly, but that’s less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco important than if you break a fundamental thing. It’s like if, if a new thing you promised isn’t quite here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, like the, the Mac photos app isn’t here yet that they promised. That’s not that big of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a deal. Like the stuff we’ve been using before will continue to work for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re not losing functionality by that being late. But if they ship the photos thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was horrible and all of a sudden it took over like the way I cloud drive, like migrates all your stuff over and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t go back and all of a sudden like every so often you just lose a random photo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like HFS plus thing. You can’t mess with the basics. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is that even the basics now get messed with on a high enough frequency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from these constant, relentless, big updates that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fundamentals are shaky now. And that’s really, that’s unsettling. See,

⏹️ ▶️ John and in actually assessing, I didn’t talk about this when I was discussing earlier, I said a lot of people feel that the

⏹️ ▶️ John quality has declined. But when I take my personal assessment of where the quality has declined,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it comes just from having a longer view and having lived through lots of different cycles and having lived through

⏹️ ▶️ John times when it was way, way worse, like before OS X, which you guys might not remember.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really think that things are worse now than they have ever been or that there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John actually been a decline.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not to say that I disagree with the sentiment of your post, because I think it is a good sentiment. I endorse

⏹️ ▶️ John the sentiment except for it doesn’t hinge on this being a new low.

⏹️ ▶️ John It merely hinges on the idea that you think the current situation is not acceptable, which I agree with.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not acceptable because the Apple today is not the Apple that it was before. The context is different. They have more platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have different platforms. They have platforms that are more widespread. We use computers more often, so on and so forth. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think the there has been a decline in quality

⏹️ ▶️ John or any of the things you said about basic features, not working and things like that, but I think it should change

⏹️ ▶️ John because the context in which Apple is running its business and deploying its products is

⏹️ ▶️ John very different today. And the one place where I would say things are slowly getting worse

⏹️ ▶️ John and overall, I don’t think they are, but I think Apple’s been doing better in lots of areas. But the one area where they’re definitely doing worse is

⏹️ ▶️ John as Apple. Again, this will be a repeat of anyone who’s listened to the show for any length of time has heard this a million times.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Here we go

⏹️ ▶️ John again. As Apple’s products integrate more and more network

⏹️ ▶️ John functionality, as that becomes a larger percentage of what you do with your phone, with your with, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John basically as iCloud becomes more integrated as as more of the network services stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John becomes part of Apple’s products. Apple has not been getting better at that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John fast enough, and it’s becoming a larger percentage of their product. Therefore, it’s dragging down the average because whatever, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever product or technology you have, does it involve cloud crap? Oh, well, now you know it’s like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the kid in class is bringing down the average with bad test grades, right? And every

⏹️ ▶️ John single one of their products now has either a small cloud component or a big cloud component or like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the whole freaking thing is a cloud component. So if that cloud part doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how good the people write the code on the client

⏹️ ▶️ John side, if the server side is falling over and, and this is the type of thing we can get you and you Oh my god, the basics

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t even working. So for example, earlier this week, my wife said my contacts aren’t syncing anymore, I added

⏹️ ▶️ John a contact on my new iPad air, I added it like a week ago, it’s still not on my Mac or on my iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ John And everything was set up correctly, all in the same iCloud account, nothing has changed, is all synced up, everyone’s all

⏹️ ▶️ John logged in, there’s no errors or anything. And I’m sitting there looking at here on the iPad, changed a

⏹️ ▶️ John street address here it is on the iPhone and the Mac. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ John changed. And you just stare at it. And you’re like, why? Why is this a problem? Is it because someone wrote buggy client software?

⏹️ ▶️ John Almost certainly not, right? It’s but then you perceive this as Oh my god, the basics

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t working anymore. Because cloud functionality is now a basic it’s something like you just expect

⏹️ ▶️ John like my contacts are all synchronized across everything. That’s the bar now. And Apple is really bad at that

⏹️ ▶️ John part of doing its products. And it’s really bad at making a situation where you can do. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what do I even do in that situation? I do the little dance that everybody does. You just like sign out of iCloud,

⏹️ ▶️ John turn contacts off, turn contacts back on, add a new contact, you know, just to see if it’s sinking,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like delete all iCloud data from account, sign, sign completely out of iCloud. And it deletes

⏹️ ▶️ John a million photos from my shared photo streams on my Mac. Turn it back on and watch it grind for three hours, loading

⏹️ ▶️ John those photos back in, you know, do eventually it starts sinking again. then you can, you know, like, it’s just this

⏹️ ▶️ John dance that you do. And that infuriates people. So that part of Apple’s products, I think, is

⏹️ ▶️ John getting better, only because the percentage of cloudy stuff in software has been going up and Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ability to do cloudy stuff. Well, it’s not not been going up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No question their services still need work. You know, they’ve always they’ve always been, you know, mediocre at most of the service

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, but they and they still need work. But most of the problems that I’m complaining about, and that I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been seen over the last couple years actually aren’t because of the services. Like even the local client side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is problematic in the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John few years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s basically better than it has been in recent years rather than worse. So all the things

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve complained about I think back to the disasters that were the earlier versions of Tiger and Leopard and I’m like you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know from not working networking, you don’t know from Beach

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Balls and The Finder,

⏹️ ▶️ John let me tell you it was you know it was dire and like and just forget about Classic Mac OS like that was a total mess

⏹️ ▶️ John in the later years of its life. So and a lot of the times there,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you could fault them for one of things they’ve done in recent releases, one place I would say you could fault them, for example, and I just saw

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Craig Hockenberry complaining about this today is where they do a feature

⏹️ ▶️ John that seems like it’s not like a marketing feature, but it’s a feature they can put on a box that is a perfectly good

⏹️ ▶️ John feature to do, but that almost nobody is willing to accept

⏹️ ▶️ John the refactoring needed to implement this feature. So one of the examples was like tags, which

⏹️ ▶️ John I detailed in whatever, what did that come out in? Like a mountain lion or something, talking about the implementation of tags

⏹️ ▶️ John and how it was this crazy hack based on the labels thing and all that stuff. It’s like, all right, fine. If you’re not gonna use tags, so what? It doesn’t look like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a big deal. It doesn’t seem like it would impact anything. It’s like, you’re just piggybacking on existing

⏹️ ▶️ John crazy HFS plus metadata and there’s all these weird bugs about it. But if I don’t use tags, it doesn’t affect me, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, apparently there’s something having to do network shares where it makes a tag query request or something

⏹️ ▶️ John and that hangs like it hangs the whole thing and you get a beach ball in the finder. Now all of a sudden people who don’t know and don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John about tags are getting a worse experience in the finder for a feature they didn’t even care about.

⏹️ ▶️ John That type of thing is like that’s an engineering thing where you have to decide it’s okay to have new features

⏹️ ▶️ John but we really have to balance like does this new feature require like oh and by the

⏹️ ▶️ John way now just every time we bring them network share we have to do this other thing and if it blocks like it’s a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how you that’s that’s that’s the type of thing where when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John planning the features for onus you really have to talk about and say this is a great feature we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted this for a long time I think it’ll be interesting we get it’s a good bullet point to add to the non-existent

⏹️ ▶️ John box we’ll do slides about it and and have a nice demo and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John oh and by the way does this potentially compromise any basic functionality that everybody needs And if the answer

⏹️ ▶️ John to that is yes, I really think we’re long and hard about the trade-offs there. That is

⏹️ ▶️ John the closest I think I can get to saying a sort of potentially marketing-driven decision

⏹️ ▶️ John that has led to sort of unacceptable instability in basic functionality. And a lot of the historic things

⏹️ ▶️ John have meant, like, we want to add some minor feature, but it means totally refactoring this subsystem.

⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes it’s like, oh, that’s bad because it’s going to cause bugs. But an example of the good is, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think in Yosemite, they totally redid icon services, and it desperately needed to be

⏹️ ▶️ John redone because for years there had been these icon services bugs that caused all my icons to be pixelated

⏹️ ▶️ John and there was no way out of it, and you just had to try to keep purging caches and restarting and eventually it would go away or maybe not.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the type of thing where it’s like, is it really important to fix that bug? Yeah, it’s cosmetic, it’s not a big deal, but to

⏹️ ▶️ John fix it we have to rewrite the entire icon services thing. Well, eventually you gotta get around to it, and I’m glad they did

⏹️ ▶️ John get around to it. So I don’t want them to be afraid to do that and to like treat it as like, oh, we can’t change anything, we can’t add anything, was that

⏹️ ▶️ John DiscoveryD, that would mean totally changing DiscoveryD to do continuity. I don’t think that in and of itself

⏹️ ▶️ John is a bad thing. But again, if that means for people who don’t even use continuity, because DiscoveryD

⏹️ ▶️ John does these other jobs as well, it could compromise them. You’ve got to be really careful about how you make those changes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’d like to go back a step, though. And you were saying, well, it was much worse early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. And gosh, classic Mac OS was ridiculous with stability. But the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have with what you’re saying, even though it’s surely correct, is that there’s so many new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac users. And I’ll even count myself in that category. I mean, I came to the Mac in 2006, 2008, something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember. But for me, even in my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey short, almost infinitesimally small tenure as a Mac user, as compared to you, John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that just my feeling of the quality of OS X releases

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is exactly what we’re, well, really all of us are saying is that with each, with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey each new release, I feel like it’s getting kind of not crummier, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more

⏹️ ▶️ John fragile. Don’t you think you guys, you two are just traveling the curve of your

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple usage. What do you mean? Like sort of like, you know, uh, curiosity, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John excitement, marriage, honeymoon period,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and then settling, you know, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? Like that, like, that’s what I was talking about a cycle, but if you’ve been around for a long time, you’ve gone through that cycle like seven

⏹️ ▶️ John times already. And I think collectively, because like the Mac used to be like this exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that not a lot of people had, and we all loved it. And it was great. And then that was the honeymoon period. And then things

⏹️ ▶️ John started to get a grim. And then it’s like, oh, maybe system seven brings us a new life. And then Windows 95 came and it was like,

⏹️ ▶️ John that was our hitting bottom. You know, it’s like, we’ve gone through these cycles a couple times, but it was small. But like the huge

⏹️ ▶️ John influx of Apple customers. Now, there’s a whole it’s kind of like the baby boom, there’s a whole generation of Apple users,

⏹️ ▶️ John most of of whom came on board either because of the iPhone or the iPod, who are getting into the Apple stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and who have gone through their excitement and their courtship and their marriage and their honeymoon period

⏹️ ▶️ John and are now kind of settling into bickering old middle age. And it’s not that this is,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that this is a cycle of Apple’s products and services, but it’s a cycle of a specific cohort

⏹️ ▶️ John of their customers because of the huge growth they’ve had in recent years. And that cohort

⏹️ ▶️ John is coming into there. You know, I’m no longer impressed more than I’m dissatisfied

⏹️ ▶️ John like that I’ve take everything that works I’ve taken for granted and anytime something that didn’t work starts did work starts

⏹️ ▶️ John to not work and I’d Perceive that as a declining quality and I’m angry and so again I don’t think like this perception

⏹️ ▶️ John is wrong and they should be talked out of it I think in the context of this massive customer base they have now Apple has to

⏹️ ▶️ John do better They absolutely have to they have to realize that these you know, you can’t rely on the honeymoon period You have to actually

⏹️ ▶️ John satisfy the customers that you have Congratulations. You got all these customers. You sold a lot of iPhones now you selling

⏹️ ▶️ John more Macs and iPads and stuff like that, this is their responsibility to fix it. So I’m not I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not saying this as a defense of the company and saying they need to change it. They absolutely do need to change it. But from my

⏹️ ▶️ John view, you know, with the long view, I think these the quality things go in cycles and there

⏹️ ▶️ John are aspects that need to be addressed. The cloud stuff, thinking hard about the release cycle and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m not convinced that empirically and anything that you could actually measure, you could say that the quality really

⏹️ ▶️ John is worse. Not I. Maybe that’s just an academic point. That’s why I haven’t bothered blogging about this, because it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John a point I want to argue, because it doesn’t in the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s worth all it matters is what the perception is of the customers

⏹️ ▶️ John that you have now. And if they’re all in the bickering middle age period, you got to deal with that. You got to make your products better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in the end, I think they should be better. Like, why shouldn’t they?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but the problem is that you’re you’re saying that we’re all in the bickering middle age period. And maybe Marco and I are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I mean, he beat me to the Mac by three or four years, I think. But but even new customers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I can’t I can’t think of a great example, but anecdotally, I know I have friends and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family members that have come to the MAC much more recently than I, only in the last couple of years, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even some that haven’t gotten MACs, but were thinking about it that are all,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eh, I don’t know about this anymore because I’ve heard some bad things and I’ve heard that things aren’t going so well.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but see, that’s like when the baby booms, like whatever the baby booms are into or want or what they

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like influences the larger society, because they are the largest group of people, Like they influence the other. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this huge group of existing Apple customers who is now becoming dissatisfied, influence all the people who might

⏹️ ▶️ John be interested because all they hear from all the people who they know who are in this, you’re likely to know a baby boomer because there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them. And you’re likely to know one of these Mac users or Apple users who’s kind of on the downswing and dissatisfaction.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what you’re gonna hear from them is like, oh, things are worse now, it’s crappy. I don’t like it. You know what I mean? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a network effect type of thing. Like I said, these things go in cycles and the cycles are not completely

⏹️ ▶️ John in lockstep, But it’s like waves of people and they influence other people and articles like this. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the cycle of the media and stuff like that. Again, I don’t think that that particularly matters, because the bottom line

⏹️ ▶️ John is they do have quality problems they do need to address, they do need to do better. Because if you have this many customers,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t rely on them all to be like, oh, gee, whiz, Apple stuff is so shiny. And I love it so much,

⏹️ ▶️ John because that that is not sustainable. Sustainable is you have to do the hard stuff and be reliable and be consistent

⏹️ ▶️ John and figure out how to give new features without compromising stability. out what your release schedule

⏹️ ▶️ John is and figure out how to do this cloud stuff more reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well so all right first of all let me go back a minute. I’ve been using the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem starting out with Macs first and then eventually iOS things for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually slightly longer than I ever use PCs. So we’re slightly past

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my 20 year mark of using computers and it’s basically like literally 10 years in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I switched so I’m about six months past my 20 year mark so I’ve been using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows I use Windows stuff full-time for 10 years and then I’m using Apple stuff full-time for ten and a half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years now and so I think I’m past the point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I mean I guess I can always get older but I think I’m past the point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this could just be like me having a bad memory of things I I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think one of the things that exacerbates this feeling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things getting worse is that there’s so much more that these devices do. First of all, there’s more devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big one. So let’s say 99.5% of the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things work the way they should, and 0.5% have some kind of bug or failure or crash or something goes wrong 0.5% of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco device usage that you have, like every time you take your phone out of your pocket to use it, you’re doing that like 100 times a day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? People measured it. It’s a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was the point I was making about the products that Apple sells and the customers that they have and the fact that we use the computers

⏹️ ▶️ John more like it is numerically more, but like percentage wise,

⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re not producing more bugs per line of code or you know, whatever. It’s just that there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John more code. People use it more often. And I should also emphasize I haven’t seen the chat room yet, but I realize I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John thinking in the back I’m talking almost entirely about the Mac here because we were talking about Yosemite and OS 10 in the release

⏹️ ▶️ John schedule. iOS, I will absolutely stipulate that iOS seven and eight were more worse

⏹️ ▶️ John quality wise than the preceding ones. Absolutely. I think that I don’t think anyone’s arguing that that’s the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m having a debate about the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I mean, I can tell you to like working with a lot of these new API’s that are added in seven and eight.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of bugs that are just API bugs, like they’re just bugs in the shipping version that your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app has to work around in a lot of the new features that get added and a lot of the old features that get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rebroken after they’ve been fixed.

⏹️ ▶️ John And OS bugs. Like, how many times that it just takes out the whole OS. Like, that was not

⏹️ ▶️ John an iOS experience in the past. Now, to give iOS some credit, like, the

⏹️ ▶️ John changes in 8 are perhaps the most significant changes to iOS in a long time. But for iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a much stronger argument that numerically I can show you that the quality of iOS 7 and 8 has been

⏹️ ▶️ John a decline. And I can show you that and I can strongly argue that

⏹️ ▶️ John the absolutely lockstep hardware and software release schedule of iOS is

⏹️ ▶️ John puts the software team in a very difficult position in terms of quality. If you’re going to try to do yearly

⏹️ ▶️ John releases and it has to come out with the ones you know what has to come out with the phones. Let me show you a pie chart of iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John device profits and Apple’s revenue like it’s that’s the entire freaking company. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac gets the luxury of not being quite as locked into that, although iOS and the are sort of moving

⏹️ ▶️ John ahead together now. But the Mac gets to be like, you go ahead, iPhone 6, yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, no, we don’t have to release, it’s fine. We’ll just release the Macs with the old version of the OS, it boots. Like, or we just hold the Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John back. Nobody cares, man, nobody cares about the iMac. It’ll come out when it’s ready. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I’m mostly focusing on the Mac. iOS, I would definitely stipulate. I mean, copy and paste still doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ John for me sometimes on iOS 8. And I know someone’s gonna tell me that doesn’t work for them on Yosemite as well. But like, there actually

⏹️ ▶️ John is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco longstanding pasteboard bug that I hit every so often that’s been in Mac OS X since I started using Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS X.

⏹️ ▶️ John So like on iOS though, like we’ve all used every version of iOS. Like we’ve all been there from the beginning and we

⏹️ ▶️ John can say, you know, there were bumps in the road but 7 and 8 is a definitely downward

⏹️ ▶️ John bump and that’s our recent history for the past two years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and it again it just it seems like see and this is what I was saying earlier like because everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much more complicated now and there’s so much more of it, those little 0.5%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco percent of things going wrong they don’t add they multiply like the chances

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you running into something going wrong wrong any given day is multiplied by all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those

⏹️ ▶️ John factors yeah and the cloud stuff is the cloud is a multiplying factor too yeah it’s behind everything and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s between them and like you know getting all the continuity and the airdrop stuff to work yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John throw in a watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and and the problem I see like right now today I can get my work done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s It’s usually not a problem, but the rate of failures does seem to be going up. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest problem I see is not, you know, everybody has a bad release every so often, even big companies like Apple. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to get everything perfect every time. That’s fine. But is there a sign of things getting better?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s where I’m really scared because I don’t see it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s more than that, right? It’s not only there’s no sign of things getting better, but the engineering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talent is getting spread even more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that now we have a watch coming. And that’s a whole other platform with a whole

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other series of APIs that somebody is going to have to write. And even if it turns

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that they’ve hired a bunch of engineers, well, are they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as good as the engineers that exist? Are they worse? It may even be better, but they certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t be as entrenched in the Apple way. So yeah, I think you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Marco, that we haven’t seen any indication it’ll get better, and we have plenty of ways that it could get worse. And I’d like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear what you two have to say about that, but we should really talk about something cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And just to close up my part of this, I think, you know, I posted the follow-up post

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying how much I regret publishing that post. I regret having published the post, not because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was complaining about Apple, but because I just didn’t do a very good job writing it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t regret complaining about Apple. I think these complaints were valid and needed to be made, and one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reasons why the post spread so incredibly quickly and far and wide is because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much agreement out there. And, you know, once it got to the major media, that was all sensationalism

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, but when it spread around the geek community first, which it did first, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was because people feel this. This is a thing. So I only regret

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having done a very good job writing it. and you know some poor word choices here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there. I don’t at all regret making the complaint.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco better that I wrote would have gotten that popular. That’s the regret, is like something I wrote got popular that isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to go meta, like, I wish I could remember this, but this is the problem with our show notes system, because I don’t think Google

⏹️ ▶️ John Docs like keeps history forever. Like, we delete stuff when we’re done with it rather than like making a new document or

⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. But anyway, there was an item in the show notes where you wrote a post many weeks ago, and I put

⏹️ ▶️ John it into the show notes because I wanted to talk about it and you put a note by it that you said I don’t think this is interesting I don’t want to talk about

⏹️ ▶️ John it eventually you deleted it from the notes. I don’t remember what it was but uh do you remember what I’m talking about Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That describes many things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway but it was about one of

⏹️ ▶️ John it was about one of your posts on marco.org and the reason I put it in the notes was not to talk about the content of the

⏹️ ▶️ John post but to talk about like this post is why people get angry at you Marco because it

⏹️ ▶️ John was a great example It was a great example of you posting something that me reading it. I knew exactly what

⏹️ ▶️ John you meant. And it’s stuff again, stuff that you had said a million times in the podcast. And it’s just like, this is not shocking

⏹️ ▶️ John or revolutionary to anybody who listens to the show or knows you or both. And yet, if I came to that

⏹️ ▶️ John post like, you know, just blank without knowing it, without having any context,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would have read it and gotten angry. And then it’s all about just like word choice and tone

⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. And you talked about those in your thing. It’s like you regret using a particular word or using a particular phrase and you don’t feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to write everything where you’re you’re writing and you’re constantly thinking what people are going to

⏹️ ▶️ John say and they’re like, you’re writing defensively and you’re second guessing yourself and all that other stuff. And that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to talk about back when we did that post. And maybe if we did that, maybe you would just ignore being written this post anyway, or maybe you would have

⏹️ ▶️ John thought about it when you’re writing this thing. And because that’s like I don’t the negative part is the part I

⏹️ ▶️ John think you’ve articulated well, and a lot of people have talked about. It’s like you don’t want that feeling where

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re either afraid to write something or when you’re writing it you’re like defending

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re defending things like you’re you’re defending yourself from imagined attackers

⏹️ ▶️ John as you’re writing right because that doesn’t feel like good and you should be like let me just say what i’m gonna say right but

⏹️ ▶️ John i think the the flip side of that and something that you get if you if you care deeply about these

⏹️ ▶️ John things which you clearly do uh you know like you if you care at all about what you write

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know know, bettering yourself and becoming a better writer. And you know, that stuff is not some people

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t some people just write sensational sensational BS and you feel like they sleep like a baby. And they don’t care that they just like

⏹️ ▶️ John riled a bunch of people up. I can tell you quite a few of them right now. You were not like that at all. Right. And

⏹️ ▶️ John neither am I. And so for all like for all the years of writing OS, tender use and everything, especially in the beginning, when

⏹️ ▶️ John people thought I was a lousy PC user didn’t know anything about max, maybe I just tried to Mac once I wouldn’t hate them so much.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, like it trains you, like the, the, the less sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of light side of that defensiveness is you get very good at reading a sentence

⏹️ ▶️ John as it exists, not as you want it to be and making sure that your specific word choices

⏹️ ▶️ John are, that you can defend them if challenged because you picked exactly the right word for what you meant.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second level of that, Oh, can I pick a word that will help me? It’ll help me to not be misunderstood.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes that’s harder to do. like, you know what? I use the correct word. If they can’t figure it out, I’ll explain it to them after this. But I

⏹️ ▶️ John always like what I always wanted to do with my old OS 10 reviews and my current ones for that matter is

⏹️ ▶️ John if someone hasn’t complained about something, I want to be able to answer them by merely copying

⏹️ ▶️ John and pasting the sentence from the thing I wrote to say, read the sentence again, because it contains the words

⏹️ ▶️ John in the correct order to express the answer to your question. And yet you seem to have glossed over it, right? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John where they read what they wanted to hear. And you get into trouble when you pick a word that expresses

⏹️ ▶️ John your feeling at the time. But if you were to read the sentence, you’re like, you know what, I would actually like the nosedive thing, you would choose

⏹️ ▶️ John a different word. But when you wrote it, like, oh, that’s that’s the word for how I’m feeling now. But if you if you

⏹️ ▶️ John take, you would never take that that sentence back and paste it to somebody and say, as a defense, in fact, you would look

⏹️ ▶️ John at it and say, Oh, actually, that’s not there. That’s not precisely what I meant. And that’s sort of some people call like

⏹️ ▶️ John lawyerly like word choice or whatever. Like it sounds boring and it sounds crappy, but it’s actually something I kind of savor

⏹️ ▶️ John in writing my things, in that I want every sentence that I write to be at least defensible to me. Like I should be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to explain myself. It should express whatever I think. And if it doesn’t express exactly what I think,

⏹️ ▶️ John I should pick a word that gets closer to expressing what I think. And that practice, some people, again, some people find that practice

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of horrible. And it’s like, you know what, screw those people, I’m writing what I want, which I think is perfectly fine. But for me, I get all paranoid

⏹️ ▶️ John about it when I can’t, when I, when people can use my own words against me, I have chosen the wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John words because they’re not really like, that’s not what I meant. I never want to say, Oh, no, no, that’s not what I meant. I want to say no, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what I meant. And maybe I can diagram the sentence for you to explain how it’s what I meant

⏹️ ▶️ John is not what you’re saying. Because there’s, you’re never gonna get around that. People are always going to read what you actually wrote and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think what you’re saying here is that Apple is doomed. Like that are right that Apple was doomed? No, but it seems like you’re it

⏹️ ▶️ John seems like really, you know, like, we can have that debate. But I don’t want people to put the word that you’re saying

⏹️ ▶️ John here that Apple’s quality is taking nosedive I never said oh Jim I did say nosedive that’s not really what I meant right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right that’s the frustration that’s what hurts is that I feel embarrassed and guilty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I made a bad word choice not like I can be angry if somebody misquotes me or or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know take something out of context or whatever yeah but

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s only so much you can do about that right but you don’t want them to be able to actually quote you in context

⏹️ ▶️ John and you feel bad about it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly that’s the problem is like when I know I was wrong and I did something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad or stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then your thing gets magnified. Because you write a million things, like everybody does, especially if you are a frequent blogger. You write a million things where

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t pick the precise. I had the luxury of picking the precise word over like one thing a year and just pour it over like an insane

⏹️ ▶️ John person, right? But if you’re blogging every day, like you’re, you know, but and then you get caught by surprises. Like most

⏹️ ▶️ John of my stuff gets read by X number of people. This got read by X times 100,000. And that’s kind of like an unfair

⏹️ ▶️ John lens to focus on. Again, what you probably thought was like, there’s another one of those posts where I summarize what I’ve been saying in ATP for the past

⏹️ ▶️ John two months. You bang it out, you’re done. You go to sleep, like no big deal, right? And then you wake up and it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, why this one? And not when I talked about closed headphones. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. And I think the answer to why this one, though, like people have picked up on this, is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else because this has been in the air. Like this is an actual thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you can argue about justification or whatever. I’m saying like the current crop of Apple customers are in a cycle

⏹️ ▶️ John now where we are not satisfied with the quality of the products we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John getting. And we expect more than we’re getting. Our expectations may be up.

⏹️ ▶️ John Our usage may be up. The quality may be down, some combination. But we’re not happy. And so it’s been bouncing around with

⏹️ ▶️ John app review, with software colleagues, and bouncing around in circles for just, I think at this point, for over a

⏹️ ▶️ John year. And this just happened to catch because it was the right person at the right time

⏹️ ▶️ John expressing the things that he’s saying, what we’re all thinking, right? And, or, you know, their misquote

⏹️ ▶️ John of him is what I’m thinking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the funny thing is, I was digging through the show notes while you guys were talking, trying to find that link. And I’m not sure that this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the one you were looking for, John. But I did stumble upon the products Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have time to improve dated December 29 2013. Very last paragraph. This is on Marcos website.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey While most of the press demands new hardware categories, I’d be perfectly happy if Apple never made a TV or a watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a unicorn and instead devoted the next five years to polishing the software and services for their existing product lines.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey December 29, 2013. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t the one I was thinking of in terms of the one I was going to complain about how

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco wrote it and not what he wrote. It was like, it was, it was like not a, I don’t even know if it was tech related.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was just something random.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. My, my point is just that over a year ago, we were all complaining

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about software quality.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, we’re always complaining. I mean, that’s all I do. All I do is complain about software quality. I haven’t complained about software quality since 1999. Like, we

⏹️ ▶️ John We all complain. It’s just like, when does it reach a critical mass? When does it gain traction in a larger

⏹️ ▶️ John thing? When does it become? And it’s almost kind of sad that it becomes a story, because then it itself begins

⏹️ ▶️ John a cycle that we know will eventually end, where this becomes a thing, and then we talk about it, and then it bounces around, and then we

⏹️ ▶️ John forget. And it’s kind of a shame that that goes. Because that’s a cycle, too, right? The media cycle about this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the media cycle will terminate long before there’s any satisfactory resolution

⏹️ ▶️ John to the actual problem. the media cycle has a life of its own that is not concerned with the substance of the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s reporting on. Like once the story goes away, it’s like, oh, I remember that story a couple years

⏹️ ▶️ John ago that I bought some software, but I guess that’s fixed now because I don’t hear of it anymore. No, probably not. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the reality continues to lurch along. Right. And so, you know, just like app review, like app review comes

⏹️ ▶️ John and goes in cycles in between. Then is it solved? Nope, no, not at all. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think that’s That’s the problem. Like that’s all we talk about in the show is like systemic problems with Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John products and how they might solve them. And the option Marco put out there, like is the fantasy we have,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, just keep polishing your products for a few years. That is more viable on the Mac, because

⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, who are they chasing at this point? Like it’s not an active battleground. It’s more

⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, borders have been drawn and OS 10 is kind of gently encroaching on Windows, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John like a burgeoning market. But on the phone, they really do have to be racing forward.

⏹️ ▶️ John They also need to get their quality under control and they need to balance those two things. I think the good thing going for

⏹️ ▶️ John them is that as a lot of people said, it’s like, I think I saw someone say, I was with iOS, iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John is basically feature complete now, right? You know, you know, the end of history illusion, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, oh, yeah, that’s all there.

⏹️ ▶️ John But, but in some respects, it’s like, I always say brought a lot of long standing things that we wanted for

⏹️ ▶️ John a long time. And you do have now a window of time where you can polish those because it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John like like there’s some major feature that we’re like, Oh my God, I always totally needs like background processing

⏹️ ▶️ John or multitasking or, you know, better interapp communication or better way to share files. Like at this

⏹️ ▶️ John point, it’s basically an app store problem with the whole iCloud thing. Like the basics are there if only they worked

⏹️ ▶️ John now. I mean, that was kind of like so many features in leopard were like, all these things you add in leopard sound great. I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be really excited when they work, you know, and then we got like two years until snow leopard came out and it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, now all that stuff kind of works and that’s kind of good but yeah nothing’s ever future complete but they

⏹️ ▶️ John do go in cycles and I’m hoping that iOS 9 and then the OS 10 that comes out

⏹️ ▶️ John after it will be a cycle where they don’t feel the needs that you know that neither OS is desperately

⏹️ ▶️ John missing some feature and they can do a polishing release.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t necessarily agree with the assumption they need to be racing ahead with software and iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I mean look they just took a big chunk out of Android sales not because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 8 supports extensions, but because they made bigger screen phones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the hardware is sad they need to be raising for their chip, but wouldn’t you agree the features they added in iOS 8, many

⏹️ ▶️ John of them are sort of long overdue?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would agree that they were overdue, but I don’t think that is going to give them massive market share over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android. Or rather, I don’t think that’s going to cause a lot of Android people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to switch. Like, it’ll cause

⏹️ ▶️ John some. That’s where the bar is now, though. They were behind, and they needed to catch up.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s not like you suddenly get more users. This is just the ante

⏹️ ▶️ John to get in the game. And the ante keeps being raised. This is terrible. I don’t know anything about gambling. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, that analogy. I like the

⏹️ ▶️ John bar better than the bar. The bar is something I can, yeah. The bar is being raised, and they have to

⏹️ ▶️ John keep up. And Android had raised the bar in so many areas that iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John was unwilling or unable to chase. And there were several releases where it was essentially let’s catch up

⏹️ ▶️ John to where Android already is, simply because that is like that is the standard

⏹️ ▶️ John these days. And if you don’t have these features, people are going to ding you for it. Having them doesn’t mean people switch. It just means you get to be

⏹️ ▶️ John in the conversation and nobody gets to throw in your face. No third party keyboards, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things, I really don’t think a lot of those things were mattering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the marketplace as much as geeks like to think they were.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I don’t know. I mean, it’s difficult to say, but like what I was saying before is like because the because

⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS and basically because the iPhone is such a huge part of Apple’s business, you know, it’s the majority of their business,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, at this point. And it’s super important. It’s the market that’s growing the most. That’s the one that has

⏹️ ▶️ John the most kind of. And it has an active competitor, like not a sleeping one and not like a fossilized one, but

⏹️ ▶️ John several active competitors that are weird because one guy’s got, you know, Google’s got the OS and the platform, but Samsung’s

⏹️ ▶️ John making the money and you don’t know who is going to come out of China with some crazy phones that are based on their

⏹️ ▶️ John own Android variant. Like it’s it’s kind of a malevolent twisting enemy

⏹️ ▶️ John that you that you’re not quite sure how to defeat and you’re just trying to do like, we just need to do our best and race forward as fast

⏹️ ▶️ John as we can. Like, I understand the sentiment. They could have they may have gone too fast. In some respects, they may have gone too slow, holding back on

⏹️ ▶️ John all the features that are iOS eight and then putting them all out in one big bang release. Right. But I understand

⏹️ ▶️ John that they felt like, you know, that the wolf was chasing them. But this is like an analogy show. The

⏹️ ▶️ John metaphor show me the wolf was chasing them. and they felt like they had to race. Whereas on OS X, it’s like, where

⏹️ ▶️ John are you going? Desktop Linux is not coming

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in 2015.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, Windows is kind of, it’s resting at the very least. And they

⏹️ ▶️ John already won that market, and it’s not growing. And just like, slow and steady wins the race.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Do we want to talk about family sharing, or is that going to take another

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John two hours?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, we don’t want to talk about family sharing. Our choices, I think, now are to talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about the MacBook Air rumors or to listen to me drone on more about Marco’s thing, because I think I can go

⏹️ ▶️ John on much longer about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about the MacBook Air rumors. But I’m not saying that I don’t want to hear your other thoughts on Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey post at some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco point.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the after show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fine. All right, so where did this start from? 9 to 5 Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah Mark Gurman got got if it’s true a pretty good scoop about this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alleged 12-inch retina MacBook Air and there have been rumors about a 12-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pro and a 12-inch retina MacBook Air and So far the rumor people seem to think those are two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate devices. These are not

⏹️ ▶️ John two separate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right yeah exactly So You know I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll believe them for now I tweeted earlier on Twitter that I suspect that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a good chance this is actually just one device that and and immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are saying well then it would be like the Surface it’ll suck that’s not what I was saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta choose my words carefully.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of the Surface my son’s I guess school

⏹️ ▶️ John thing he did something at school where they went to a Microsoft store and I know this because he came home to me and said

⏹️ ▶️ John why do we have separate iPad in a laptop. The

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Surface is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh god. I was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no, they got to you.

⏹️ ▶️ John I listened to his argument for the Surface.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s lost. Start over.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. No, he doesn’t know anything about computers anyway. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so yeah, I mean my theory was that there were rumors about one device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was either a MacBook or an iPad. But anyway, regardless, it sounds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the room people are insisting it’s actually two different devices and they know more than I do, obviously. I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything except from them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so anyway, supposedly it’s two devices, fine. And this, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in particular was the 12 inch Retina MacBook Air. And it makes a number of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty substantial, if, again, if this is correct, which that’s a big if.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think we need, the reason I put this in the notes is I don’t think we need to care whether it’s true or not. I think we can just

⏹️ ▶️ John discuss the rumor as in like, is this something that Apple would make? And if they did

⏹️ ▶️ John make it, would you like it? Why and why not?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough. I might like it. So my portable needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have always been best served by a 15-inch. However in recent times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have come to realize that I always think I will get a lot more work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco done when I’m traveling with my laptop than I actually do. I always think, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll bring my laptop and then I can finally add this feature to the app even though I’ll be offline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time or have limited connectivity or I’ll be upstate with a DSL connection

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like from 19 to 75. So I always think I’ll get a lot of work done. In practice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually just do basic web and email stuff because I am waiting to get back to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my big fast computer with my big fast internet connection at home. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might try it simply because I am due for a new laptop this year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And actually, I currently have a first gen Retina 15. So it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost three years, like two and a half years old now. So this coming summer it will be three years old. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no reason really to replace it except that it does have screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco image retention issues pretty badly now. And my father-in-law needs a new computer, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has pretty bad image retention, I don’t really feel comfortable selling it to somebody. So I figure I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it to him. He really needs a computer basically now. So I figure as soon as something new with Broadwalk comes out that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want, I will buy it and do the swap. There have been many occasions where I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some kind of travel situation, usually flying where a 15-inch is way too big to take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and use. And so I think I would use something that’s small. who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fly a lot always talk about the 11 inch air and I’ve never liked the 11 inch because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen is just so damn small on it like it well isn’t it it’s isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it 1366 across

⏹️ ▶️ John something like that or it’s not only is a low-res but it’s also physically small like there’s wasted

⏹️ ▶️ John the borders on it seem way too wide like you’re the thing is already small and you can you couldn’t stretch though the screen to

⏹️ ▶️ John the edges apparently not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah exactly so anyway so this rumor thing looks really nice in that it appears to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a dramatically reduced screen bezel width, which is nice, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you would say, bezel. I will never forget that.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have distinctive looks. They have, you know, plastic bezels on the front of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the keyboard goes edge to edge. One thing in the report said that the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys are actually narrower. I’m a little worried about that because they haven’t changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size of the keyboard keys in a very long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on. Was it that the keys were narrower or the borders between the keys were narrower?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it doesn’t matter. It does though because in the picture in the diagram again, this is all could just be fantasy stuff in the diagram

⏹️ ▶️ John The plastic keycaps are the same size They’re merely placed closer together and that is different from making

⏹️ ▶️ John the keys bigger So the gaps between they were in small but having a center points in the same place This seems to be implying that the center points were

⏹️ ▶️ John in different places. So that the keys were actually closer together I imagine if the spacing

⏹️ ▶️ John is as shown if you are a crappy typist like me me, you’d probably be okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it is, it is a compromise that it’s like, if you made the thing an extra

⏹️ ▶️ John centimeter wider, would that have been a deal breaker to have a standard keyboard like it’s, it’s an interesting design trade

⏹️ ▶️ John off, if true, if the product was as conceptualized, and we’re gonna get to more of the supposed, you know, if this product

⏹️ ▶️ John was real, what about this design trade off, but the keyboard one, it’s one of the minor ones, but it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a line in the sand where it’s like previously was like, nope, full size keys everywhere. spacing it for all we know,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I haven’t actually measured center to center, but I’m assuming that the keyboard spacing has not changed in the modern era of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. And this would be a change. I don’t I don’t think I would notice it and I don’t know you

⏹️ ▶️ John guys both touch typists.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Next, like I’m like, you know, a little bit sloppy with it. Oh God,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t title that.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you were to use this keyboard, Casey, would you feel would you say oh, like it was obviously if you use one of those logic

⏹️ ▶️ John tech keyboard covers for an iPad, you’re like, Oh, this is like a Fisher price keyboard. It’s crazy. I can’t type on it, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an extreme. But with this spacing difference, do you think you would feel it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so. I will say that the rare occasions that I used Macs many,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many years ago, and the little nubbins were on the D and what,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which, what was the other key? D and K keys, back before they moved them to the PC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey position of F and J, that threw me off constantly. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could barely type on a Mac back then. But that was, I would argue, a much bigger difference. I think if I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just have to get used to the keys being slightly together, or slightly close together,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that would make a very big difference at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you have really big sausage fingers. I find with laptops, it’s more of a thing getting used to

⏹️ ▶️ John the keys that they move, like the fact that control’s not in the corner. This one, they move escape out of the corner, and that would probably screw

⏹️ ▶️ John me up, and maybe screw up people who are like Emacs users, or the people who might hit the escape key more than you might

⏹️ ▶️ John expect. One exciting thing about this mock-up of a keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John here is that the left and right arrow keys are full size, which is like one baby step towards the sanity

⏹️ ▶️ John of full-size arrow keys. But now I won’t break the border of the keyboard yet, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a baby step, isn’t it? In fact, actually, this may not be a baby step. This may be a regression, because it might’ve been driving him

⏹️ ▶️ John crazy to have half-height left and right keys because they broke the symmetry of every key cap being the same size, except for the

⏹️ ▶️ John modifier keys and stuff. So I don’t know, but anyway, I endorse that rumored change as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the big rumor change which has all of us talking about this in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular is allegedly all of the ports are gone except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a headphone jack and a USB 3 type C the new reversible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB connector including the power can’t you like so the so if this is true

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the power and all device connections except headphones will have to run through a single

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB type C connector. Alright, so

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the first thing we can say about this is is this technically possible to do?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and from people who have been following the spec more closely than us, apparently the answer is yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The USB type C connector has a lot of capability.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know the fine details of it, but people are saying that it was designed to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry up to 100 watts of power into the computer if necessary,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as be able to kind of multiplex other device,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other port types over that physical plug. And it can do displays as well. Yes, exactly. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like it is possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that I think, I don’t know if it was emphasized enough in this article, I mean, they mentioned it here, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason we can have this discussion is because plus or minus,

⏹️ ▶️ John minor things about like, well, it won’t charge as fast, or will you be limited in monitors, or will it compromise the speed

⏹️ ▶️ John of the bus? Technically from the specs, it seems like, yes, this is a thing you could do. You can make

⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop with a headphone port and a single USB type C port.

⏹️ ▶️ John All

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, it still might be a bad idea, but it does seem like it’s possible technically.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, if Apple did this and made this device, regardless of whether we think they’re going to or not, would you want to buy

⏹️ ▶️ John one? Would it change your opinion of like, of you were saying you might want to get this

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s nice to get a laptop replacement, you like having a laptop, it’d be cool to be a small one. Would this change your decision

⏹️ ▶️ John about getting one?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not, simply because it wouldn’t affect the way I use it, but I also recognize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I use my laptop as a secondary and pretty occasional computer, really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not how most people use their laptops. Most people use their laptops as their only computer and are using it frequently, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time, it’s on a desk plugged in to other stuff. So for that kind of use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, we’ll have to see. This is all, we could be totally wrong. This port could be totally awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we might be able to shove everything through it and have a little base station or adapter or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not willing to say that it would be totally awesome because like the big one is they’re saying MagSafe has

⏹️ ▶️ John gone too. And MagSafe isn’t just like, oh, it’s just coming up with another port. USB can technically carry the power,

⏹️ ▶️ John why wouldn’t you do it? Well, the same reason MagSafe exists in the first place because you don’t want a plug that goes inside

⏹️ ▶️ John your computer to be the power cord that people trip over. Like that’s why MagSafe was invented. We did that before. Like we had

⏹️ ▶️ John laptops where there was a connector that went into there and we all broke them off at a certain point, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John not to say MagSafe is perfect, and MagSafe 2 has been arguably a regression, and maybe this thing is so thin that they can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to get a MagSafe, maybe they should switch to like the iWatch type little, you know, magnetic inductance

⏹️ ▶️ John suction cuppy looking thing, or I don’t know what they have to do, but I don’t wanna go back to a world where

⏹️ ▶️ John people can’t trip over the power cord to a laptop. And so if this thing came out, it’s not just that it has one port,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if it didn’t even have a power port, this would make me strongly consider not only not buying it for myself,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t really like laptops, but not even recommending it to other people, because I think MagSafe is one of the best features they’ve ever added

⏹️ ▶️ John to the laptop line. And if they take it away in favor of this little USB Type-C connector, I would

⏹️ ▶️ John take a wait and see approach. And I would basically have to see, is the connector so tiny? Like, is it practically the

⏹️ ▶️ John size of a lightning connector? You know, is it so tiny that it basically acts like MagSafe and that you can trip over it a million

⏹️ ▶️ John times and it won’t break off and it won’t yank your computer down just because it’s so small? Like it’s not like a big full-size

⏹️ ▶️ John USB connector. Or is it really the issue that I think it’s going to be in that, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s, it’s not as good as MagSafe and we’re back to the old days.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what about the, um, Xbox style midway through the cable breakaway thing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t do anything Xbox style. It should have expected that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Come on. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, like, that’s like, you know, any big giant thing in the middle of your cable. No. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if it wasn’t so big and giant, but it still served the same purpose? then

⏹️ ▶️ John you got to use the special cable all the time. I mean, so let’s get to the other compromises of having a single port. Ignore

⏹️ ▶️ John the MagSafe thing entirely. Pretend that the power thing is not an issue. Why would you have just one of them? Unless

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re making some sort of philosophical statement, like, is there a technical reason why we think we’d have just one? Some people have argued power,

⏹️ ▶️ John because the second port would require power. And I can maybe kind of buy that, but I don’t know enough about the specs of the, what

⏹️ ▶️ John is it, the Core M line of processors. Right, right. I don’t know if there’s something about

⏹️ ▶️ John adding another port that is a significant power drain. It seems like in this mock-up there’s space

⏹️ ▶️ John on the side of it where you could put another port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it is teardrop shaped still though So it does taper into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a into a narrower shape as you go down closer to the person sitting so There might not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as much room for more of them as you think

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s again. If this is I think this is all just a Photoshop job here

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s a render based on based on rumored information and things that were told by sources

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s there’s technically a room but like in the aesthetic design if you don’t want to sort of compromise

⏹️ ▶️ John that because there’s there’s the The region that is perpendicular to the surface of the table and that region is smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John than the width of the thing So with wise there’s plenty of room, but is there room in the perpendicular area? I feel like there’s nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John room at the very least you could Do it, you know one on one side of one on the other or something like that

⏹️ ▶️ John but two ports is so much better than one because because two ports gives the

⏹️ ▶️ John average person the ability to do something reasonable without engaging the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John squid or octopus of cables that it has to snake out of it because it was like, oh, I have one thing plugged

⏹️ ▶️ John in and I have to do some other thing quick. I just have to put it in a little thumb drive or thumb drives don’t even have USB type C connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right. Well, something, something really common, power and an

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. Or like a mouse. How about a mouse and something else? Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and you know, a lot of people have argued, yeah, there’s a lot of wireless mice out there. And yes, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John true.

⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth mice and some of them have the RF dongles.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, exactly. And but I mean, just the simplest thing when like when I’m when I’m traveling somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I always have devices plugged into the USB ports on my laptop. And usually it’s charging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I mean, if I just I just don’t understand,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t quite understand the philosophical statement that would be made. I understand the philosophical statement that would be made

⏹️ ▶️ John by only having USB type-c ports and by having it be fanless and having to use the core m and like

⏹️ ▶️ John I understand the statement of this machine right but only having one of them I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John understand the extra thing you would be getting from you know the this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a thin super lightweight machine it’s almost as thin as an iPad it’s very simple there’s no fans and it isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John that amazing like even if they went with like we’re not gonna have a retina screen because we can’t because because we wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John to go with this low power fanless design I would even be okay with that because like that is totally what this machine is about

⏹️ ▶️ John but nothing about having only one USB port again putting aside MagSafe nothing about only have one USB port

⏹️ ▶️ John makes a statement to me that I find that has any value aesthetically practically speaking

⏹️ ▶️ John or in any other way unless it was like we couldn’t do two because of power constraints but I don’t think that’s the case because I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ John other laptops with the you know the same what we think is the same chipset that might be in something like

⏹️ ▶️ John this and they aren’t as compromised so I am baffled by the single port rumor

⏹️ ▶️ John and I hope it is is just a misunderstanding. It’s all a big misunderstanding.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I agree with you that I think throwing away MagSafe is a very dubious

⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice. But let’s just assume that they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make that choice. And it really is what this render shows, which is just one lightning-esque connector,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the way, I’m not entirely sure why they wouldn’t use lightning, I guess because of all the power and all the other things that this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C can do.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, but they need to carry display over it and all that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. But regardless, so we only have this one USB type C in headphone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep trying to think about, and I haven’t had the time to come up with a good answer, but I keep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to think about, what has Apple done lately that would enable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this computer to exist? So for example, airdrop between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers, That hypothetically, if it ever freaking worked, Hey Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you ever talked about things not working anyway? If it ever worked, airdrop could be the solution

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that makes USB keys obsolete. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just one very silly example. Let’s take another, you, you guys mentioned Bluetooth, uh, specifically for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mice. You know, I use a Bluetooth mouse, and so I don’t need to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug in one of those little RF dongles. Although pretty much everyone at work does exactly that plug in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an RF dongle. So if you leave aside a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey secondary display, which admittedly in a lot of contexts is very important.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if, if you assume that we can do basic USB key style things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with airdrop or equivalent, what do you really need a bunch of USB ports for? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging is a great example to Marco’s point, but that’s kind of, it’s really a rhetorical question.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I’m driving at is if you think of this more like an iPad that happens

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a keyboard and maybe even runs OS 10, then you do a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional computer, what do you really need those ports for?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s more, it’s not so much like, what do you need them for? Like that you desperately want them. It’s that

⏹️ ▶️ John taking it, it shouldn’t be taken away unless there’s a reason. And there’s lots of reasons we’ve already gone through,

⏹️ ▶️ John which may be true. like, you know, it could be a power issue. And it’s like, well, you know, is that

⏹️ ▶️ John the smallness, the fanlessness, you know, the lightness of this machine is a reason to say we couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John make this machine the way it is about the board. That would be a reason I don’t think it’s a it’s actually true in this case, but that would be one reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the other could be some aesthetic or philosophical statement that you’re making, which I don’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in the absence of any good reason to not have it, you’re like, just put it on there. Because it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John can you know, one is just it’s just too few. Like, Why just why not just have none at that point?

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Because not that you need to all the time, although a lot of people do need to all the time, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to have the one that you’re using and the extra one for the, for the other thing that you want to do, because

⏹️ ▶️ John the statement of the machine, ultra portability, convenience, and everything is massively compromised by having

⏹️ ▶️ John to carry a satchel with, with, uh, uh, you know, a rat’s nest of cables in it. Like that, that hurts the message

⏹️ ▶️ John of the machine doesn’t help it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you plugging in? That’s what I don’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we already mentioned like USB key type things or off dongles already. Those, you know, if you have an RF dongle and

⏹️ ▶️ John USB key, you’ve got two ports filled just to do your

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But but you’ve already you’ve already failed. My point is, if you’re using an RF dongle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if you’re using a USB key, this is already not the computer for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, I think those things that people will be doing. I have a portable mouse, you know, and it has a stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John RF dongle and it’s not Bluetooth. Right. And I have a USB key and I want to use my

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse to do my work. And part of my work involves taking this USB key from work and shoving it in and pulling up files on it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if I can’t do that without unplugging my mouse, it’s like, well, the why I’m even bothering to use a mouse and maybe I should get a weird dongle adapter

⏹️ ▶️ John type thing like that is not a crazy scenario. People who use use the laptop, use mice with their laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John and dirt, you know, because the mouse is basically like that becomes like that port is taken all the time because I always use the mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John even when on my little trade table, use mouse because I hit the trackpad or something. And by the way, I have a USB key sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s already two ports. And you haven’t done anything exotic like plugged in a portable hard drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, plugged in an optical thing or something like it. Like, unless you’re saying that

⏹️ ▶️ John this can’t be a person’s primary Mac, which would definitely be a first for any laptop that Apple has ever made. They’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John always said, you know, there may be compromises for this, but this can be your only Mac, because you can get everything

⏹️ ▶️ John done that you want to get done. And without a spaghetti’s nest and a hub coming off of this thing with

⏹️ ▶️ John one port, I think that hurts the intended message of the machine as

⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny, convenient little thing, because it’s not convenient anymore when it has to come along with a bunch of accessories.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, but I disagree. I think what it is is that you’re viewing this against a traditional computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the same problem I had when I first saw it. But the more I think about it, the more I think this is really a,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you want the best of the best mobile computing experience, when you define best as thinnest,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightest, et cetera, maybe this is even ARM for all we know, who knows. But one way or another,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to buy all in on the fact that these are the compromises that you’re going to have to deal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. You’re going to have to trade in that RF mouse for a USB mouse. I mean, for a Bluetooth mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John But why do, but why do you have to deal with that? Why do you have to say you’re going to have to, I will

⏹️ ▶️ John accept it if I have to. But why do I have to, there needs to be a reason. Would it not?

⏹️ ▶️ John Could it not have been this thin if it had two ports? Like that’s the question I want to answer. It seems to me based

⏹️ ▶️ John on the smock of this fake product, that may not even be real, that it could be that thin with two ports. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s a power issue. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think you’re right, but it’s I, the only, analogy I can come back to is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the time that Macs started dropping optical drives. I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a Mac user when when they dropped floppy drives but around the time they dropped optical drives and and let me be clear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two Macs that I that I own both have optical drives when that happened when they started dropping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them I thought they were out of their damn minds in the same way that I think a lot of people said that about floppy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives but as it turns out outside of getting the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey crappy quality pictures of Declan when he came, when he was born from the hospital photographer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t really used an optical drive in ages. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve used it with that one exception.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it really turns out that we don’t really need optical drives anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m wondering that maybe we don’t really need USB ports

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a regular basis anymore. And you know what, if you really want to stick with that RF mouse when you’re at work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you really want to throw USB keys into your computer at work, then you know what, John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. You’re going to have to have that ugly ass USB hub sitting there with all its little things falling out of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, because that that’s what you’re going to have to deal with.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the optical drive and the floppy drive, and I would add sealed in batteries are great examples

⏹️ ▶️ John to support my point because all those things had a reason. Optical drive, like I was totally

⏹️ ▶️ John in support of that going away. because it’s like, look what you, maybe not necessarily for the iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John because you could argue that it could have hung out there a little bit longer, but for laptops, hell yes, because you look at what you can do when you get rid

⏹️ ▶️ John of that. It was this giant, it was taking up like a huge percentage of the case. Yes, please get that out of there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Floppy drives, it’s like, nobody likes floppy drives. USB keys replace them. Like the message of the iMac was like, nope, it’s all

⏹️ ▶️ John USB. There’s no ADB stuff. Like that was a philosophical message expressed by sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ John the paring down of the variety of ports. No more like printer port and serial port all this stuff is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John old style interface has gone new style here, but they didn’t just include one of them, right? When there’s a reason, the thinner,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the, the incorporated batteries, again, making the unibody, not having the battery

⏹️ ▶️ John door, not doing all that stuff. Like you got something in exchange for your compromise. And a lot of people are angry about

⏹️ ▶️ John those things. I really wasn’t because I saw what I was getting for it with one port. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John understand what I’m getting for it. And that’s my complaint about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not, I’m not saying you’re wrong. Really what I’m what I’m thinking is what if this is as you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said a philosophical statement that you shouldn’t need USB anymore We’re beyond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that now and I know that sounds kind of insane because even I think it sounds kind of insane

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John then why not put zero like that would be a statement because you need some sort of charge Well, I had put zero

⏹️ ▶️ John on it and people were upset about that and that was definitely a statement This is not a device that you’re going to connect peripherals to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it’s a fair. It’s a fair point I don’t Marco. Where do you come down on all this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if you think about when the very first MacBook Air came out in 2008, was it? I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was around 2008. It had a lot of these limitations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of limitations that no computer, even by Apple, had had at that point yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was… I mean, and I had one, and it was pretty clunky. It was pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frustrating to use. It had one USB port, and one display,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one headphone, and one power. But you know, display I never used, headphone, so you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had one USB port. And that was so annoying. I hit limitations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that constantly. These days it’s different. These days, one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest differences is that wireless networking is a lot faster. That I believe came with 802.11G,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the port on it, like I had one of the little wired Ethernet dongles for it, but the port was only USB 2,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Ethernet dongle was only 10.100. And of course the disk in it. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have the SSD because it was way too expensive. That whole

⏹️ ▶️ John machine was a mess. The CPU would throttle down and everything too because it got too hot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, yep. And the disk I had, or the 1.8 inch hard drive was so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly slow. And so like transferring files to and from it was excruciating.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It took so long, whether it was wired or wireless, it barely even mattered.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just took forever. And having only that one USB port, even back then in 2008, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I only had an iPhone when there were no iPads yet. And I wasn’t like, you know, cause these days you can also like, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a camera, most cameras will charge over USB now. So like there’s so many devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that charge over USB. And this was before a lot of external hard drives were very common. I mean, like these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, you know, in some ways you need fewer ports, in some ways you need more ports. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I remember how incredibly frustrating that was back then. There’s a reason why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next generation of MacBook Air added, I believe they have two ports, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at one right now. It has one on the left, one on the right.

⏹️ ▶️ John But most importantly, the port does not double as the power connector underneath those,

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously. So that’s a secondary issue, which we did put aside. But I would bring it back when it comes to the reality

⏹️ ▶️ John of this thing. It’s like one port is one thing, but one port that’s also power, I really need to be convinced

⏹️ ▶️ John that it is able to fill the role that MagSafe does in terms of tripping over the power cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So having owned that first air, it was extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limiting and frustrating. in a lot of ways. That being said, it was amazing because of how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly thin and light it was for the time. And it was a giant leap forward for that time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And eventually once the new one came out, I think in 2010 when they made the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unibody, the good one, well, their first one was unibody too, anyway, when they revised it and made the good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that we all know now is the MacBook Air, that generation, they fixed a lot of it. And one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the biggest things they fixed was they all had SSDs and they were all really fast. So anyway, if this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a major leap forward in some way or in some ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then we’re going to overlook the one port thing if that’s real. We’re going to overlook that, we’re going to tolerate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But the first MacBook Air, to achieve that wow factor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these couple areas, that also probably shouldn’t have been anybody’s only computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. They don’t do it often, but this isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time they’ve done it.

⏹️ ▶️ John They beat everybody with the MacBook Air though, because they had Intel make that special, I think it was a die shrink

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it was, some special chip made for them that meant they were the first one in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. It wasn’t even a die shrink, it was literally like a smaller package around the same chip. Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John well whatever it was, they were able to come out with a machine that other people didn’t have. There was the first unibody,

⏹️ ▶️ John which other people didn’t have, and it was also the first laptop that you could make this ridiculously thin, putting in the

⏹️ ▶️ John envelope and everything, because they had the special chip and all that. not the case with this has already, you know, PC

⏹️ ▶️ John notebooks out that use the same chipsets that are available today that are not as elegant and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re they’re similarly reaping the same advantages that Apple is going to get here because they’re already

⏹️ ▶️ John on the market with the same chipsets that Apple is going to use, or at least being reviewed because I’ve read reviews of them on site, so they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t quite have the same. They don’t have the opportunity to do what they did with the air,

⏹️ ▶️ John or even I would say with the iMac at this point, because this rumor design is a simple evolution of what they have. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John thinner, it’s lighter, it’s everything, so on and so forth. But it’s not going to be the first to market. And I don’t think they have a

⏹️ ▶️ John special. Maybe they have a special ship set in terms of the GPU if it ends up being retina. And maybe it’ll be the first retina one on

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, which is another wild card because this article doesn’t say anything about whether the room is supposed to be retina. But I understand

⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re saying. But I would I would not hold up the first MacBook Air as a model to be repeated because I think

⏹️ ▶️ John in the end that machine was not really a failure, but it was bad enough that will

⏹️ ▶️ John always be remembered as one of those machines. You’re like, oh, I got one of those and it was kind of neat. But boy, like everyone just has

⏹️ ▶️ John their stories about like, what the story is basically the next one. That was the one that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was actually good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, and I think that I think that machine was a failure, like I would be harder on it. Having owned one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was a failure. I really like that machine. We had an extremely love hate relationship. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but you know, these days, the technology is better in a few really important ways. Number one being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSDs are now very cheap. And you know, relatively speaking, that now SSDs can be in all of them so they can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fast and wireless is faster so that alleviates a lot of the I O bottleneck in and out of that machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bothered me so much so this if this machine is real I think this could be good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of my biggest concerns though is once again it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re prioritizing thinness to an unnecessary degree at the likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expense of battery life so looking at this machine if these if these specs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are even close to true it is extremely thin and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it allegedly still maintains the teardrop tapered shape which means we’re gonna be very little room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for much battery in there and if they’re going for lightweight again not a lot of weight budget for battery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either so even even with a very low power chip you still have a big screen and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco radios

⏹️ ▶️ John they might have got some space back because again This fantasy machine and this rumors they’re saying that the trackpad

⏹️ ▶️ John is not a mechanical click down I don’t understand what it is though, but but if it doesn’t go down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s like the stupid tap to click that all trackpads have that we all turn

⏹️ ▶️ John off Is it or is it like pressure sense? Anyway, whatever they’re saying it seems like they’re saying that narrow there may be a sliver of extra

⏹️ ▶️ John room under the trackpad that wasn’t there before because you don’t need an empty space for the trackpad to pivot down into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Were they saying about that about the trackpad or the keyboard? I thought they might have been saying it about the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s it said the trackpad doesn’t click down anymore like you like and presumably you just have to tap it

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was wondering if it was pressure sensitive or something, but yeah, so I mean I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly on board with this machine but my two big things are magsafe or no magsafe and

⏹️ ▶️ John And give me a reason why there’s not more than one port That’s not a philosophical reason

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean that’s another thing I thought would be the benefit of the USB type-c connector They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John smaller and you can now you can fit more of them like they’re not monstrous things where it’s like because you could

⏹️ ▶️ John on the original air they have it wasn’t like the fold down little thing because they couldn’t even fit one on like Johnny’s nice curve shape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah there’s like a little like flap door that would flap open it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and

⏹️ ▶️ John they get they got over that it’s like it’s it’s like pop-up headlights yeah exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John like I was you know there was a thing in the 80s people said you know what just like once they have a technology to make a decent lights

⏹️ ▶️ John and not have them pop up they did it and so like yeah anyway what else about the team that space gray

⏹️ ▶️ John coming in colors or something I’m all on board with that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I would love a space great Apple laptop I think that would be awesome. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall I think it’s gonna be… I think it’s gonna be really interesting. I think though

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am definitely concerned not about all these other factors, not about the port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much. I am mostly concerned about battery life. That they have prioritized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinness too much and that there won’t be very good battery life in this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you know, just the existing 11 inch MacBook Air does not have very good battery life. It is much better on the 13 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s more space for battery. I think if you take this machine and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just don’t give it a teardrop shape, just make it uniform thickness the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way the Retina 13 and 15s are, even if it’s thinner, if it’s just uniform across the whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, that leaves a surprisingly large amount of volume for batteries in there. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they do that, but I bet they won’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven So I have a quick thought and then a question. My quick thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, what if the brick that is plugging into this one USB port has USB

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports on it?

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco help

⏹️ ▶️ John you because it’s under your desk.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and yes, we know about the plug bug, please stop emailing us. Stop right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Let me stop

⏹️ ▶️ John your email right there. That’s not what people do, though. The plug is not like when you’re in a hotel, who knows

⏹️ ▶️ John where the plug is. When you’re at your desk, the plug is not always up. It’s a different place. People will end up

⏹️ ▶️ John using, people will be more likely to use a powered hub.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s possible. Now, the other question I have is, could this be the first ARM Mac?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a good question. I think if you look at the iPad Air 2 CPU, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A8X, and you look at the the benchmarks from the new fanless Core M

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips that that would be presumably the chip that would be using this thing, they’re pretty close,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. Like they’re they’re similar in performance. They you know, they’re I think the Intel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, the Intel one is faster, single threaded, but not by a massive amount. You know they’re in the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ballpark. The big question to me is Why would they go arm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so no question they could if they wanted to they could ship an arm Mac they could compile everything from Arm, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could require developers to cross compile for the Mac App Store and everything

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t chalk point out I think was Huckamberry today as well like if there was gonna be arm

⏹️ ▶️ John They would have to have something like the you know the Intel developer program where they shipped

⏹️ ▶️ John out like you know g5 I’ve power my cases with pentium force inside them to let people,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like any CPU transition needs developers on board. So if that is the case, you would expect

⏹️ ▶️ John that transition to proceed the release of the machines in the scheduling. If this leak is

⏹️ ▶️ John in any way real and we and we expect this machine this year, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John when are you going to tell the developers, by the way, you’re going to cross compile arm and all the crap you have to do. The timing seems wrong to me

⏹️ ▶️ John for that to be the case. But anyway, go on with the feasibility.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, I mean, but again, like, well, I think it would be less work this time, because, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, developers have already been dragged through one transition. We are not only already familiar with ARM from iOS, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, developers like by going through the first transition, a lot of developers move their code to more portable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. And so they I think I think it would be a much less involved transition for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers. And I think the the days of Apple, having some kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pre release developer hardware program, I think those are gone pretty, pretty far gone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the way they would do this would be the same way when they when they have like, you know, new iPads and with the same way they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do the watch like they didn’t ship a watch to everyone for watch kit. Like, that’s not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they’re just gonna, they’re gonna let you submit apps two weeks ahead of time before this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing goes

⏹️ ▶️ John on sale. But you have all you have existing software, though, like in the case of those things, you didn’t like you have all

⏹️ ▶️ John these existing Mac apps, you have to decide if you can do like a fat binary thing. And if you are, everyone has to

⏹️ ▶️ John recompile their things as fat binaries and you have to decide whether this is going to be a transition or a constant parallel thing because as good

⏹️ ▶️ John as ARM may be for this machine, ARM still can’t compete with the high-end machine. So at the very least you’re going to still have this giant tube

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro that’s not going to have an ARM processor in it and then you’re just going to have two processors forever and like,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s, there’s, I think they could definitely make a machine with an ARM processor that does this and

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be reasonably satisfactory, but all the ancillary bookkeeping and strategic things don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John quite yet make sense to me. I don’t understand what they would come out on stage and say is the reason they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John this unless they try to say it Because it can be super low power. It’s like It would be lower

⏹️ ▶️ John power, but it wouldn’t suddenly become an iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? You wouldn’t suddenly get 24 hour battery life where you were you were with with the same Intel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip You would have gotten you know five or seven like it’s not gonna be that big of a difference

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean for me the biggest thing is I have no question. They could do this I have no question they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could give developers very little notice and we would all just jump and just do it Well, not we I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac developer But they would all jump and just do it because it wouldn’t be that much work for most of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my big thing is Same thing as you said with the ports why? Because there would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a substantial cost to it in During the transition first of all couldn’t run boot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco camp anymore, and you couldn’t virtualize Windows anymore That’s that’s a big problem for a lot of people once again

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, going back to the earlier discussion, this couldn’t be your only Mac if you need to use Windows apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, maybe it could be your travel Mac or maybe for a lot of us, myself included, who don’t ever run Windows apps,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can do it. But there are certainly a lot of people who need Windows, so it would lose the support of all of them. For

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transition period, however long it is, before most of the apps or all the apps you use are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compiled for ARM, how do you run Intel apps? Is there some kind of Rosetta layer? because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is like when you went from PowerPC to Intel, there was also a massive performance jump.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like that you said that we’ve been through one transition before.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know you’ve been through many. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, but you’re right. This runs to your point. Every time there’s been a transition, there’s been some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John band-aid to like, A, it’s a clear transition, this is old, that’s new, which would not be the case

⏹️ ▶️ John with ARM because you’d be like, what the hell? What’s your story for the Mac Pro? You’re gonna come up with a crazy 12-core ARM processor?

⏹️ ▶️ John Where is that? Anyway, so it wouldn’t even be a transition. And B, every time there has been a transition, There’s been some way for

⏹️ ▶️ John you to keep using your crap in the short term.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was usable because the transition came with a big performance boost. Whereas in this case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going from Intel to ARM, it’s actually getting a little bit slower.

⏹️ ▶️ John And possibly a little hotter, because it’s not 14 nanometer unless Intel’s having it for you. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re not gonna have extremely good enough, you’re not gonna have good enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco emulation speed or translation speed of an Intel binary running on an ARM laptop. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna suck and be either not available at all, or be pretty slow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably unusable for a lot of people. So I don’t see why it makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense to have this B arm as long as Intel’s chips can get close enough in power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage. And I think with the Core M, I think we’re seeing they pretty much can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not that ARM is lagging hugely behind, but the transition costs of switching,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no clear reason right now why they need to make that transition. There’s no massive gain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be had on the other side that we can see right now. Long term, there might be, and they might choose to make that transition at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other time. But, and for instance, one of the biggest gains could be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet Apple’s pretty sore with Intel right now because of the Broadwell delays having delayed Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire product line.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not so much that they’re sore with them, it’s just like the long term strategic advantage would be because Apple wants to own and

⏹️ ▶️ John control all the major technologies, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like that whole thing. Like that’s why,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because- But they can make that switch anytime

⏹️ ▶️ John they want. I mean, you have to start sometime, but like, if they, like, if they did, if they came

⏹️ ▶️ John up with an ARM machine, I think the message would be that this may be a longer transition,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it will be a transition. And eventually every single piece of hardware Apple sells will have an ARM CPU designed

⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple and fabbed by whoever Apple can get to fab it for them. Like that would be the long term vision. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John short term, this is going to suck for you because for all the reasons Marco just said, it’s not going to be able to emulate your stuff. It’s not going to be a huge

⏹️ ▶️ John increase in performance. In fact, it might be a dip, but long term, it’s important for Apple as a company to to own and control

⏹️ ▶️ John all the major technologies that contribute to its products and blah, blah, blah. And that’s a crappy message, but you’re like, I don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s long-term strategy, I just want good products now. Right, and so, and it’s not like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to do this to save itself from destruction. Like, well, I understand you gotta do what you gotta do, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still, I would still be like, I would still be working with

⏹️ ▶️ John Intel, working on Intel, maybe buy Intel if you have to, like whatever, you got a lot of money. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco work something

⏹️ ▶️ John out, because switching to ARM would be short

⏹️ ▶️ John term, as in like the next few years, not so great for Apple’s customers. And

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe this is not the best time to be doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Hover, and Automatic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over ♪ ♪ They didn’t even mean to begin ♪ Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental Oh, it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter You can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that’s Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to to accidental tech podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think to hire an editor or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Weren’t you an editor? Weren’t you an editor for a while? Isn’t that how that worked?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t be your own editor. I know. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying. I was an editor for like five minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could be your own editor. You can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could be your own editor.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John can. That’s part of the experience of being a blogger, is you don’t have a staff. You don’t have people

⏹️ ▶️ John doing all the stuff for you. You are you’re doing it all you’re writing your conceptualized new thing. You’re assigning it to yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re writing it. You’re editing your copy, editing it. You’re putting it in the CMS. You’re running the website like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing the whole thing. So I feel like I mean, you can’t do as good a job as if I was an entire

⏹️ ▶️ John staff, but you don’t want to have an entire staff. That’s part of the whole blogging thing. So, I mean, you

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s if you look at the things you have written recently and go back to things you wrote before, you’re already editing yourself to be different

⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s not… the system is working

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco as

⏹️ ▶️ John designed.