100: MacBook Shuffle
16 Jan 2015Our 100th Episode Spectacular!
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- 🎉 Episode 100 🎉
- Showbot woes (again)
- Follow-up:
- Anecdotal evidence of USB usage
- Context of the 12" Air discussion
- Thinness
- Powering a 12" Air
- Does the 12" Air compete with Chromebooks?
- Are Thunderbolt and Lightning dead? (via Oliver Agar)
- What can Apple do to fix reliability issues?
- Post-Show Neutral
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- Igloo: An intranet you'll actually like.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 100 episodes gentlemen, I’m proud of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if I had remembered we should have planned something better. But oh, well, we just had an episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s but that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the us thing to do. Yep. That totally is and that’s exactly what we did cuz we’re us
⏹️ ▶️ John But sometimes I like to think that we can be better than us but no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, that should be the pre-show right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set expectations exactly what you’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a fine show. It was a reasonable show. It was a regular show. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live. Hi, everybody. Oh, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very excited. Is that because this is episode 100? Oh, my God. I forgot about that. Now I’m excited. I thought about that like a week ago that we were coming up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on 100, but I didn’t remember it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so this shows we’re just a bunch of dudes who don’t remember important dates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We all forgot our own birthday. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey remembered. Just me and you, John. We forgot. Yeah, I guess. So hypercritical. I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John go ahead and say that. I’m going to say that. I’m going to say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m going to say that. forgot our own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco birthday. No, Casey remembered, just me and you, John. We forgot. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess. So, Hypercritical made it to 100 asterisk. What did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Build and Analyze get to? 108, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. So, if we make it to 101, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have unequivocally done better than Hypercritical, is that fair to say?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I should have said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a poor choice of words on my part. Thank you for keeping me honest. We have perhaps completed more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I get that from you John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that’s what it means when one number is bigger than another I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mean we technically have already completed more episodes because there was that one that was just like the promo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was for the movie thing And there was the one that me and Merlin did when John couldn’t do it, which isn’t really a real episode
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a real episode if it’s got a number and it’s got a title and it’s in the RSS feed That’s as real as real can be
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but it didn’t have you on it doesn’t matter. It was called hypercritical I had a number and a title
⏹️ ▶️ John it had a page that show notes that had everything that an episode has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Did think that was I mean I haven’t listened back, but at the time I was actually very happy with how that turned out It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t feel like hypercritical at all, but I was very happy with it. I I wish Merlin like had a tech show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and and maybe maybe we’re maybe it’s better for everyone including him that that he doesn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he instead just like makes parts of his other shows tech when he has something funny to say about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I like he is so good with the tech stuff so incredibly good and and provides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a voice for it and and opinions for it that we really don’t hear from other people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I always feel like like we’re missing that you know
⏹️ ▶️ John if by good you mean it makes me want to yell into the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best is when they do it on Roderick on the line. You hear the two of them together talking tech just makes me want to
⏹️ ▶️ John throttle them both.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I love it. I think it’s the best that one they did like three or four episodes ago where like the whole first half was about tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the show bodies semi broken, just like old times, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like old times jerk. you want to is this a clip show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our 100th episode spectacular. Would you like to wager a guess what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you not properly non retain the closure to set time out so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the memory leak all over the place?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s a good guess. But no, and I should say that I have not knowingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed any of the code with relation to the show about specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you now going to rewrite it in Go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but it is slightly tempting.
⏹️ ▶️ John probably should. It’s a fun exercise. If he rewrites it in Go, his site will pay him money for hosting. It
⏹️ ▶️ John will go negative instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free. That’s quite possible. No, that is not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here it was, I was thinking about making this big, grandiose speech about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it really isn’t so terrible relying on third-party code because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allows you to do things that are kind of cool. More specifically, earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, I decided that I was really tired of not being able to use markdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey footnotes in my site, because all the cool kids use markdown footnotes. I want to be a cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kid. The particular module or whatever that I was using was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Marked, and it’s an NPM module, or package I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the word I’m looking for. Anyway, and so I swapped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marked for markdownit, which is a different package that also parses markdown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was all excited with myself because now I had markdown footnotes. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem that I ran into then was now on my main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page, which is the only page that I can think of that has more than one complete post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a single page. What happens when I have two posts that both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have footnotes because they’re both generated in isolation. And so they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reuse the same anchors. And so then I had to go through a humongous song
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dance, which ended up being simple at, at the very end. But I tried like 34 different iterations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get to the simple answer of what to do and how to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unique each of these markdown footnote anchors. So I got that accomplished. Well, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think to do was check the show bot, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the page that’s hosted on my regular site that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handles the show bot and see what the ramifications of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey markdown parser switch would be. And it appears, for those of you who are not listening live, if this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually makes it in the show, it appears that somehow it is emitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey escaped HTML HTML only for the links section of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show bot page. So I’m seeing all the titles just fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the links are just the HTML header for the table and nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, oops, sorry everyone. All right, good talk. All right, that was our 100th episode spectacular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hope everyone was happy. Yep. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess the show’s over now because we can’t go past a hundred. Something like that. We are joking. The show is still going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relax. We’ve sold ads past 100. So we in fact, well past 100. So we have to keep doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good point. All right, so let’s do some follow up. And I’d like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start with some very quick anecdotal thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using USB ports. So we talked last episode about why is that so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny? And then we’re gonna watch paint dry. Oh, come on, give me a chance here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last episode, we talked about how on the potential, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad pro slash Mac book air, that there’s theoretically only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be one USB port. It’s USB type C port and. Whether or not that’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. And, and particularly John and I were going back and forth as to whether or not that’s a big deal. And so I thought to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, let me ask my family because they’re normal computer users and see, okay, does anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually use USB ports? Cause one of the things I was, I was thinking during the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hopefully explained during the show was, Hey, we have a lot of technologies now like airdrop, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that may, uh, obviate, I think that’s what I’m looking for that may obviate the use of USB keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a bunch of other examples, Bluetooth for mice and keyboards. So I asked my family,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you use your USB ports for? And Aaron and my mom both said, well, I charged my Fitbit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that way. Well, you know, that’s something you, you could find other means for doing that, but that’s a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer. And Aaron also has an iPod shuffle. And so she said, well, I also, you know, load things onto my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPod shuffle that way. And obviously that’s not a big deal for a phone, but for an iPod shuffle, you’re really out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of luck otherwise. My immediate younger brother, I have two younger brothers, my immediate younger brother, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a real adult and works in the video game industry actually, said that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he typically uses his USB ports for keyboard, mouse, iPhone, and USB key,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes, but not always simultaneously. And my youngest brother who is studying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in California, he’s doing a master’s, he said, and I’m quoting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have enough and I have three. So he was saying that he uses his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a mouse of his phone and oftentimes more than one USB key
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and additionally at least one external hard drive. So it appears that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my theory that really you don’t need USB ports, maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. Well, I think, you know, I think you’re seeing, I bet there’s like a big bifurcation of the market here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, uh, if I had to guess, I would guess that, that what you have here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty good representative sample actually. Um, you know, just by luck. I mean, I don’t think your family is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most average family ever made, but you know, I think, I think like if I had to guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it was, I would guess this is how it is which is that most people use very few of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the primary reason they use them is to charge things that charge over USB.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fitbits, some cameras, stuff like that. Like charging things over USB, I think is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big thing, especially in recent years when so many devices have become chargeable over USB.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for that, you don’t necessarily need to be using a port on your computer for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although it is convenient, because your computer is right there on your desk, and it has these ports and you don’t have to take out more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outlets so and you don’t have to bring so many adapters on trips so it is definitely convenient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although it isn’t strictly necessary and then you have the people like Brady your brother where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know three ports is not enough because he has lots of devices this this will apply to a lot of people you know who have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of peripherals who have a bunch of disks who have a big desk setup with like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external keyboard mouse disk maybe other stuff like you know if you have like a big setup where you’re parking the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time you’re gonna need more than that, in which case no number of ports on a laptop is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be enough and you’re gonna be using a hub. Now things that are attached via adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or hubs are inherently less reliable than built-in ports most of the time in my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as we move towards computers that have fewer and fewer internal devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ports I think this is gonna keep being a problem. Fortunately the need for many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things is also going away as this transition happens but like you know you might not need an Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port anymore because you just use wireless and especially on a laptop where that’s probably very frequently the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas like you know on a desktop you need some of these things now what I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want what I’m not looking forward to is a world in which you have this one port on the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you just have to plug in some random hub from Amazon from God knows what manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with God knows what whose chip inside of it. That will that has some weird cheapo power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply that’s going to flake out and get all and get all weird and start causing weird hard to diagnose errors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the things that are plugged into it or intermittent failures for things that are plugged into it. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to get to the point where I’m dependent on some cheap USB hub from Amazon and trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find like the best one that actually will work because like I have that now and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a certain subset of devices that I will only plug in directly to the computer ports because the hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just are never that reliable. And please don’t email me saying I bought this hub but it’s perfect. If you look at every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub I looked at all of them and and all of them have mostly reviews that say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is perfect and a bunch of reviews saying this flaked out on me and it’s like it seems like they’re all basically the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet the number of actual manufacturers of these things is probably pretty small. The number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of chipsets they use is probably even smaller. So like it’s just the kind of thing like being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dependent on like the random PC peripheral hardware market for your stuff to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco properly is not a good place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. So if Apple was going to do this thing where it’s like, oh, one port. And if you need more, you can always have
⏹️ ▶️ John a hub or break. I think like at the very least, you would think that Apple would have to sign itself up
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a high quality or one of these that works because I have problems with hubs
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, too. And in addition to like the things you just
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned, some things just plain not working, some things being flaky, the worst of course is if you have a drive
⏹️ ▶️ John attached to a hub because the last thing you want to be flaky is your connection to a drive, especially if it’s your backup drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and who knows what it’s doing over there. But then also like sleep-wake issues
⏹️ ▶️ John where it won’t go to sleep with the hub attached or won’t wake with the hub attached or the hub will wake it up because
⏹️ ▶️ John something will tickle it or it’ll fire off a little thing It will make the computer think you plug in a USB device
⏹️ ▶️ John when you haven’t actually so many problems. And the and the only way Apple can sort of defend
⏹️ ▶️ John against them is that we sell. I mean, I can’t believe I’m saying this because like the Thunderbolt display
⏹️ ▶️ John had all the problems I had were associated with the ports that were in it was effectively a big giant Apple made hub where
⏹️ ▶️ John you plug a Thunderbolt cable into your computer and the power thing is actually powering your computer, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And out of it, you get Ethernet, USB, firewall, like all these ports. And that was the problematic part of the display,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the display part. But yeah, if that’s if that’s going to be their solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should make one and they should test that one and make sure it works and make sure computers sleep and wake with it. And when I say
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I’m thinking they can’t even make sure their computer sleep and wake with nothing attached to them reliably. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John sleep wake problems are, you know, evergreen when it comes to all laptops and Apple laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, are the same as any other in that area. So, yeah, but aside from all the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John concerns, the I still come back to the convenience angle, which is like Like, why,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, why the whole point of the thing is supposed to be convenience and in the absence
⏹️ ▶️ John of some other reason, why not put another one on if it can fit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let’s talk about re-clarification of context for the 12
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the discussion we had, there’s a lot of feedback about it, a lot of tweets, and these aren’t all tweets that were happening while
⏹️ ▶️ John people live tweeting while they listen to the show. To clarify again
⏹️ ▶️ John how we were discussing the 12 inch air, we weren’t making any judgment about the validity
⏹️ ▶️ John of the rumors. We didn’t spend any time, and I don’t think we should spend any time discussing like how likely is it that
⏹️ ▶️ John these rumors are true, that Apple make this device, or whatever. We were just considering the rumored device
⏹️ ▶️ John as if it was real and saying if Apple made this would it be something that we would want. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing we did about validity, and I think it’s the main thing you should do about any rumors is like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it technically possible? And we covered that straight away in the last show. And that’s important because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the easiest way you can deal with rumors like obviously there’s you don’t know everything. But if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says that Apple is going to come out with like a Mac Pro, the size of a penny,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be ten times faster than the current model. And it’s coming out this year. You can dismiss it because, you know, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John technically feasible. Like and there’s a range. If a rumor has a date or a technology or
⏹️ ▶️ John both, you can, you know, like Apple is going to drive all of its ports over the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John jack. Well, we know that’s not possible. And, you know, barring some crazy thing that we’ve never heard of. And
⏹️ ▶️ John and if there’s a crazy thing we’ve never heard of, it’s probably bad because it would be proprietary and Apple only and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, everything else about it, we weren’t making guesses about. And then I was getting a couple of bits of angry
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback from people, mostly tweets. And when I listened back to the the show, I realized what they were all yelling at me
⏹️ ▶️ John about. Like I wasn’t responding to their tweets because I didn’t understand what they were angry about or like worked up about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was the part of the episode where I think Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John or Casey was like, what if the rumors are for like you know, an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and a 12 inch MacBook Air? And I said, these are not two separate devices. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was a reference to the iPhone keynote. But I said it like emphatically, like Steve Jobs says it in the keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are not three separate devices. This is one device.
⏹️ ▶️ John For people who haven’t memorized every second of that keynote, it’s a thing that Steve Jobs said
⏹️ ▶️ John when the iPhone was introduced. And watch the video and it will make more sense. But it sounded
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you just listen back to it, it sounded like I was super emphatic that these are not two separate. I don’t know if they’re two separate. It’s just a stupid rumor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was making a joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even we got that, and we don’t get anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, if I’m going to make a reference that you’re going to get, it’s going to be the iPhone keynote right
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah pop culture so we didn’t even talk about I bet we’ve talked about iPad Pro in the past things wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John but because that story had had renderings of a mock-ups of this rumored product and that’s what we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John those renderings those mock-ups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those rumors right and the only reason I said that I was suspicious whether this was two separate devices is because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumors over the last few months have been all pointing towards two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 12-inch retina ultra portable devices from Apple coming at about the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and I thought you know that the same size display the same like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff like all these rumors all this all this smoke around this thing it’s probably fire behind it it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this really gonna be two different devices that are like the exact same size that are radically different from each other like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I was skeptical of that I remain a little skeptical of that except that I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from so many people who claim to have knowledge of this and it’s all you know secondhand here say all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so many people who claim to have heard authoritatively that no, this is really two separate devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, we just got to wait for the nine to five Mac store with mockups of the the iPad Pro and then we could talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about that too. It was like, I mean, there are rumors everywhere and like the reason we discussed the nine to five
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac one is because it was an interesting rumor at least. And nine to five Macs track record
⏹️ ▶️ John is reasonable enough that we’re not just like picking some random thing from some website and saying
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody said this. Let’s talk about it because you know, there are a lot. And again, because it was technically feasible because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a great rumor that takes advantage of like known technologies that we have like the USB three,
⏹️ ▶️ John the connector and what the bus can carry makes new hardware designs possible. So it’s inevitable that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will use that connector in interesting ways on its future Macs. And this rumor is one possible way that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is our friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show have probably built a website before somewhere else, like either through some kind of CMS or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building it from scratch, building your own CMS, whatever the case, building it statically using Microsoft Front Page 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, whatever the case—you probably made a website before. And you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, there’s a time and a place for making it yourself. But the percentage of times and places where that’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer for you keeps getting smaller and smaller because things like Squarespace exist and are very good. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we use Squarespace for this podcast site. I could make a podcast site CMS. It would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be terrible. It would be it would offer none of the features that Squarespace does and it would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the best use of my time. And there’s and I’ve wanted to make a podcast CMS for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I know I keep thinking like you know as much as I want to do that why should I do that because
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so john, would you like to tell us a little bit about hypercritical back in the day?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, another person reminded me of shows I did that I’ve forgotten. This is Jason Becker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, is hypercritical follow up carrying over to this show?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, more or less because people keep reminding me that like, hey, you talked about something on hypercritical that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant to what you’re talking about ATP and and resident hypercritical I was talking about is probably one of my blog
⏹️ ▶️ John posts that have recruited like co about things getting thinner. I think at the time it was about the iMac because people were upset that the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac was super thin or whatever. But it’s relevant to the rumored 12 inch air because
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole deal with 12 inch air is like they just keep making it thinner and Marco was talking about like why do you got why you got to taper it?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about this before, like if you don’t taper it, you can fit way more battery. And what does the taper give you?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another example of like, you know, give me the reason for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I would imagine for the taper is perception of thinness
⏹️ ▶️ John and possibly weight. Those are the two. Because the taper does make it feel like, wow, look at this razor edge type
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It feels thinner than a uniform and making it actually be thinner reduces
⏹️ ▶️ John the weight. Still maybe there’s room for a non tapered version to get more battery, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know what the battery life is of this fictional product anyway, so we have to wait to see what it’s like. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it always comes back to that question that we talked about with the phones. And I’ve always said that I even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it’s frustrating that they don’t expand the line to give a model that is a little bit thicker and a little bit heavier in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John for battery life, but just rely entirely on third party, you know, battery cases and stuff or, you know, third party
⏹️ ▶️ John recharge, extra battery packs and other stuff they sell for laptops that you plug into it on
⏹️ ▶️ John a long plane flight or whatever. Why do they keep making a thinner? Why and why do I support
⏹️ ▶️ John that idea? And one of the reasons that I support it is I think I’ll find I have to find this this post on my
⏹️ ▶️ John website and put in the show notes, um, that you don’t, if you just keep making them the same thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John and keep making the battery bigger and just keep finding things to do with the space available to you, like, Oh, we can use an even hotter
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU. And now the power of everything has gone down. We can, you know, we have so much extra power budget,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can make the battery life even longer. And you know, you could do a lot if you stayed within a similar size, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do that, you’re never going to learn how to make things really thin. And it’s not like, uh, you know, five
⏹️ ▶️ John years from now, someone’s is going to be ready with some new technology like wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John with that technology, we can make a laptop, you know, even thinner. And you just can’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t have the expertise to jump from your half inch thick laptop to the one that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John thickness of a credit card or whatever. It works better that analogy we talked about phones, but I think that was the analogy I was using is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John phones keep getting thinner. And it’s stupid soon they’re going to be you’re gonna be able to bend them like we got the you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John bending issues with the iPhone six and everything and they just they start becoming thin enough. like, geez, we’re going in the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John direction here, we just need to stop. You don’t need to stop, actually you need to just keep going and go
⏹️ ▶️ John through until your phone ends up the thickness and weight of a credit card, and then when you drop
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the ground, who cares? Because if you drop a credit card on the ground, nothing happens to it, right? It’s flexible, it’s thin,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s lighter, it’s more durable, but you’re not going to get to your phone that is so light and thin
⏹️ ▶️ John and durable that you don’t even care about it. You’re never going to get there if you keep making your phone the thickness of the original iPhone and just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John adding more CPU and RAM and battery to that thickness. So this I think is part of the march
⏹️ ▶️ John of progress and as it relates to the MacBook Air rumored 12 inch or even just any of the MacBook Airs that
⏹️ ▶️ John are out now, why do they keep making that thinner? What
⏹️ ▶️ John are they aiming for with that? I think part of it is weight because as Marco found out with the iPad Air, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John weight is like a who cares, a couple grams here, a couple grams there, for things that you either hold all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John like the iOS devices or carry around a lot, you know, from room to room or put in your backpack.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are little thresholds of weight. I think speaking of Merlin talking about tech, Merlin has discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John this on his podcast a few times, how once you pass a certain threshold of weight,
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t notice when that Apple hardware is in his backpack. Like he says he notices more when when if he brings his Leatherman
⏹️ ▶️ John with him, like you know, metal a metal tool, he notices when that’s in his backpack, but he can’t even tell us my payment
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. Or is it not and the MacBook Air could be getting to that thing where it’s not a factor of like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never used to be like, Oh, I’m gonna have a laptop in my backpack I don’t want to lug that big thing around. MacBook Air has
⏹️ ▶️ John already kind of crossed the threshold of like it’s not a big thing to lug around but you kind of know when it’s in there and if they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John going along this path and making it thinner and keeping with the taper and making it lighter they are they will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John run up into a durability issue because you can’t make aluminum that thin because it doesn’t spring back like say carbon fiber would
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they got the screen problem there especially if you use glass anywhere in it for flexibility but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John approaching a place where they’ll have to do some materials redesign so within the current materials they’re using. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just trying to keep going thinner to get the expertise of like how thin can we make this? How much can we remove? What is actually essential?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you gotta get Johnny Ive and his white world talking about this stuff. What is essential for a laptop? Do you need
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard and a screen? How about just a keyboard? No screen. The MacBook Shuffle.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m still thinking about these things, which is why I’m not digging them for so much for why do you got to make it so thin.
⏹️ ▶️ John The port thing, I complain to them because if you think if you think you need any ports
⏹️ ▶️ John uh why would you have one of them and not two and so on so we’ll get to there’s another follow-up item about that
⏹️ ▶️ John but that i just wanted to follow that up uh because hey i talked about an ever critical and i
⏹️ ▶️ John actually blogged about it and it is relevant to the rumors of this fictional product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh there was a really good post in uh on six colors jason snell’s new website uh with with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco research help from our friend Stephen Hackett with about Apple solving for X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with battery life where and the the gist of the post is if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has clearly decided like what the right level of battery life is for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones and iPads and they’ve they’ve kept it fairly consistent or at least within a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range. iPads are like exactly the same and iPhones are very little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s it’s clear like you know Apple Apple has decided through whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through research or experimentation or just thinking you know whatever they think is best they’ve decided clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we don’t need more battery life than this in this device type and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any savings we get from advancements in technology or manufacturing we can apply to other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas like making it thinner and lighter and I think this it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so obvious when you look at this that okay of course that’s what they’re doing that’s what they have been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so And so, looking at this, I think it’s pretty obvious that the quote MacBook stealth or whatever this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing ends up being called, that’s probably not its name, but whatever this thing ends up being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called if it’s real, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not going to be a quantum leap forward in battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. It is most likely going to, they’re going to apply those savings towards thinness and weight. And I agree, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what you said about we do need to make progress in those areas over time. I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, like, I don’t know anybody who has an iPhone who is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfied with its battery life most of the time. You do
⏹️ ▶️ John now. I have an iPhone. I am extremely satisfied with its battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve had an iPhone for like a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John is how I… part of the reason I didn’t have an iPhone is because I don’t really, you know, need one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John now that I have one, I am completely satisfied with its battery life. Like, I can forget to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a day and I’m fine. I go two days with who you know who’s an iPhone who goes two days with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean that that it’s not appropriate, as I said before, for Apple to have a model
⏹️ ▶️ John of phone that does a different tradeoff for people or people who do use it heavily, who do barely get through the day on a
⏹️ ▶️ John charge. There should be a product for them, but the current battery life is fine. And I think in their
⏹️ ▶️ John little graph, they showed like an uptick for the I think it was for the six plus that had the big uptick. But I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, the six plus is the only big jump on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the six is up a little bit, too. I mean, we’ve talked over the past year many, many times about
⏹️ ▶️ John the same exact thing of like Of how they’re there
⏹️ ▶️ John hold the hold the battery life Constant and then make it thinner if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m you Margo you were saying that like they’ve decided decided That’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. I don’t think they’ve decided anything like that I think that’s just that’s the battery life they have and when they made a
⏹️ ▶️ John fall device there was a mandate, no regression on battery life, make it thinner if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that mandate wavered on the iPad three again, we’ve discussed this many times. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, so that that has been their mandate, but I don’t I wouldn’t wager too much on
⏹️ ▶️ John them deciding the same way that like they decided like, Oh, this size for the iPhone is exactly the right size. No, that’s just the size they
⏹️ ▶️ John made it seem like a good size at the time. Later, they tried to taller. That was all right, too. And then they made it bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John So right, like it’s up for grabs, right? And I think the battery life on
⏹️ ▶️ John all the products being held more or less constant is simply a matter of the follow-up product can’t be worse than the one that came
⏹️ ▶️ John before. But if you try to make it better, all the areas that you can make it better, battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life is like, seems like the last on the list. Like you’re not gonna regress, you gotta make it at least the same because the new phone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta be better than the one that replaces it, but we can make it better in CPU and GPU and screen, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in interface, you know, and cheapness to manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John durability, like all these different categories and battery life is like, just don’t regress. Like it seems to be pretty darn low on the list
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that prioritizing. And I think those are reasonable priorities again, for the reason I talked about with the thinness and also because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, faster CPUs and GPUs, cell phones more than battery life. You just need to make one model
⏹️ ▶️ John that has decent battery Apple. I guess maybe the six pluses that model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that’s pretty clear that that’s their answer. No, but I think, you know, similar to you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arguing about thinness where like we have to make progress gradually over time to eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like a major step forward in total. You can apply the same thing to battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have made incremental progress over time but it really has been fairly incremental and part of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just because battery technology changes so incredibly slowly and like we’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have. Compared to the silicon technology basically. Not that it changes that, I mean it changes the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John of sound, it’s just compared to almost every other component. You know what you can do with those ones
⏹️ ▶️ John the screens are just like twice as good twice three times the resolution in a lifetime Of the phone the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John have not gotten three times as good in the lifetime of the phone It’s just the different rates of technology change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right but like and and if you look at the laptops their battery lives have gone up Substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few years where it wasn’t that long ago that like a five-hour battery life was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Top of the line under the most ideal conditions only and now we’re up to you know seven eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly regularly Although I’ve never gotten that, but that’s could just be because I buy the big four core models. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know anyway with battery life Where where things get interesting where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get like, you know, really interesting Shifts and what this enables you to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when you have a really big change in battery life when all of a sudden like if your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if You don’t need to be plugging it in all day Like if you can actually work on battery all day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not worry like not have range anxiety not worry about bottoming out and having to go plug in. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can treat it, if your laptop genuinely has like 24 hour in use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with wifi battery life, then that enables uses, that enables freedoms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you might not have before or that you couldn’t really count on reliably before. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where things get interesting is when you can make jumps like that. And over time, eventually maybe we’ll get there, I hope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. But if you look at the way Apple does these jumps, it doesn’t look like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t look like getting there is a very high priority. Eventually they might get there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like accidentally, but it doesn’t seem like they’re pushing for that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s a lost opportunity. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumored 12-inch MacBook is an indication of how they might make the next
⏹️ ▶️ John step on that. Because, you know, as we said, when they have this extra capacity,
⏹️ ▶️ John the batteries aren’t getting better that much faster. What is happening is that every other component that’s in the laptop gets lower
⏹️ ▶️ John power. And that’s how we get like the current
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Airs that have, you know, better battery life than the old ones did. But for these,
⏹️ ▶️ John for this rumored thing, this could be a way they make sort of a larger step forward. Like, well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries aren’t really getting that much better. But let you know, some in the back of some designers,
⏹️ ▶️ John mine, hardware designer, Johnny Iver, both they have the idea of, well, our components keep getting, but you know, our screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we went to the retina 5k iMac screen is actually lower power than on the previous screen. Eventually they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get decent OLEDs in these things and you’ll have an even bigger drop, especially if they make their entire interface black.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of the components are going down in power usage, but somebody has in the back of their mind,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I just rip everything out of this freaking notebook and just have like a tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John two centimeter square that’s the whole laptop and then just fill the rest of it with battery? Like, what can
⏹️ ▶️ John I pull out of this laptop? Well, you gotta have a keyboard and you gotta have a screen. All right, what else can I remove? Can I remove everything
⏹️ ▶️ John except, can I remove all the ports? No, you can’t remove all the ports. We need some place for power to go in. We need something like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John about I remove every single interface except for one low power USB 3 thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can get rid of, you know, if they could have rid of, I think they got rid of audio in. I know they have like the hybrid cable
⏹️ ▶️ John that like the headphone jack is the input thing, but I’m still like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, those don’t offer audio in anymore. Sorry, I should clarify on most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware. The iMac does have audio in, the Mac mini has audio in, the laptops, as far as I know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops don’t have audio in anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, that’s not really probably a power savings, but maybe like with the chip set or whatever, like they just they want them to
⏹️ ▶️ John be like the phone where it’s mostly just a giant battery in a case with a screen. And then off to the side, there’s this tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing that is the entire computer. And if you look inside the MacBook Air as you watch the battery slowly eat the rest of the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John over the past few years, used to be like a board inside there. And then the board became like two
⏹️ ▶️ John little skinny things. And it’s just like it’s it’s running away from this giant battery that’s eating it. And one of the ways you get power
⏹️ ▶️ John savings back is just to be merciless about what you remove. I guess we should probably skip to that follow
⏹️ ▶️ John up item because it’s related to this. Troy Gall wrote him some reasons of like I kept asking for why. What do I get
⏹️ ▶️ John with one port that I don’t have with two? Why would they do this? Is there a reason that we can think
⏹️ ▶️ John of? And he’s got two guesses for reasons. One is related to power, but in a slightly different
⏹️ ▶️ John way that I was talking about. I’m like, well, maybe maybe two means you can’t have like maybe ripping out the port means ripping out
⏹️ ▶️ John the supporting chip set because the one port is like, I don’t know if there’s some large game that’s not just like
⏹️ ▶️ John incremental like it’s you know You don’t need supporting machinery behind it at two ports the one port wires directly
⏹️ ▶️ John into the thing without a control Who knows I don’t know what the details might be but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it isn’t about I it is almost certainly not about controller logic inside It’s about the amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of power that port could draw by its own spec So if you have like firewire devices, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could draw like 10 watts or something like that So and you know USB is I think I don’t know something So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, it’s like if you have multiple ports, you have to look. The laptop has to be able to supply the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power draw to each of those ports. So it has to have a power supply big enough. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that just shortens the battery life if you have something plugged in. Like, I don’t think they’re optimizing for the everything plugged in
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life. I think they’re optimizing for the battery life with nothing plugged in. Like, that’s the life they’re going to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever they show battery life, they’re not saying with a bunch of drive sucking power, self, you know, self-powered
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive, spinning hard drive, sucking power from all your ports. Like it’s always with nothing. So I’m thinking is there some passive
⏹️ ▶️ John power, you know, you need other components anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No I think it’s more like you know because if you have if you have the port that can that can potentially draw 10 watts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever then Every like the power supply circuitry has to be bigger the power brick has to be bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the total power draw and thermal Output of the laptop has to be best to be higher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well the peak power, but yeah, there could be some Passive loss to the larger supply or whatever, but his
⏹️ ▶️ John angle on it is that if you had two ports He thinks that they would both have to support charging like if you’re gonna charge through it
⏹️ ▶️ John And then maybe that would be more complicated electrically. And that would be the complication. I would imagine that if they have two
⏹️ ▶️ John ports, they would be perfectly fine so you can only charge through one of them. It would be the one with the little, like, chargey symbol
⏹️ ▶️ John silkscreened on it and laser-etched stuff that no human being could see without being two inches away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And his second thought was there’s no room for more ports because the keyboard goes edge to edge and you need space
⏹️ ▶️ John for the key travel. And they’re putting the port in the one place where it can be, where it doesn’t interfere with the keys going up and down because the thing’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so damn thin. That doesn’t explain why you can’t have one on one side and one on the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the headphone port, I feel like you could shove that from looking from these fake mockups
⏹️ ▶️ John of a product doesn’t actually exist. It seemed to me that there was there was room on both sides to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one USB on both sides and still find a place to wedge in the thing. But like but that’s like you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John constrained by a predefined case or a mockup rendering. You get to design the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re going to go keyboard edge to edge fine, like move it down an extra three millimeters to make room for the you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I don’t find any of these reasons particularly convincing, but they are at least new theories.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re going a little long on the follow up, but I want to try to trudge through all the 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Episode 100, all follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, it probably will be. And that would be fitting. So do you want to talk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is mostly aimed at John, do you want to talk about what Phil Compton said to us?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a couple people who talked about the rumored 12 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John air as he relates to Chromebooks. And you mentioned it, wasn’t it you, Casey, in the last show, talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromebooks? Anyway, the whole idea with Chromebooks, people don’t know, laptop that you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the network computer all over again. It’s a laptop where the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John itself doesn’t have anything important on it. Everything’s on the cloud. The laptop is just a local cache. And it’s super simple and super cheap. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they like them for education. And it’s like, Oh, if your Chromebook just falls off a cliff, whatever, get a new one, plug it
⏹️ ▶️ John in, sign in with your Google account, all your craps there. Again, it’s a really great idea that a lot of the videos that Google
⏹️ ▶️ John has shown when they presented it or whatever, like is essentially the future of computing and Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John Google is there first. And it’s lonely there because it’s it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ready yet. Right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So but there’s two angles in the Chromebook. People like the Chromebooks for the elimination
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the headaches that come with like owning and maintaining a computer to try to move it more towards being a disposable type thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which obviously is the opposite of the way Apple designs thing more or less. And the second aspect of it is they’re so damn
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap. Like, remember the netbooks from a long time ago. Everyone loves netbook. Everyone loves cheap things. Of course, everyone is like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to make cheap things to compete. But that’s not how Apple competes. And we were around in circles about that. But the network
⏹️ ▶️ John book and the Chromebook seems to be bringing the issue back again. I think the people who learned the lesson of
⏹️ ▶️ John the netbook error are fine. But now is a new crap of people who weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John either weren’t around during the network thing or have forgotten who are saying Apple needs to come out with
⏹️ ▶️ John a $300 laptop. If they don’t, the Chromebook is going to eat their lunch and education.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re going to take over the education market. because schools are cheap and they want cheap laptops. And the Chromebook
⏹️ ▶️ John is less expensive than iPads even, even if you’re buying iPad 2s and all this stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of angles for when you see a small, thin, light thing, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s gonna be Apple’s competition with the Chromebook. And every time someone tweeted that at me or
⏹️ ▶️ John sent feedback related to Chromebooks, all I could think was, Apple’s gonna compete with the Chromebook with a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s four times the price or maybe 10 times the price. Like, I don’t, we didn’t talk about pricing of the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumored fictional product here, but do any of us expect this laptop to be less than around $1,000?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started about $200, right? Right, so it says like it’s 5X the price. I’m guessing $1,500 starts. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the other thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be even more expensive, like, you know, because of the thinness. Like, that’s just not how Apple works. Like, nobody,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anybody thinks this rumored 12-inch Air is going to be some super duper cheap thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’ll be cheaper than the current air somehow, possibly because of all the crap they rip out of it. That’s conceivable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but is it going to be $200? No. And so it’s, it seems crazy to me to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John competing with Chromebooks with a product that’s not in its price range. Like that, no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ John you think about competition, it’s very like, there’s no sense in saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this, it’s like saying that my Honda Accord competes with the Ferrari. Like they don’t, there is no competition
⏹️ ▶️ John between them. You can’t entertain thoughts of competition between them. They’re in a different market. And no matter how much you think
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, Ferrari really needs to answer for the new Honda Accord, because the Honda Accord is gonna eat
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey up their market for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they don’t. They’re just, what do you mean answer with? Actually, the new Ferrari, I think that the new Ferrari is
⏹️ ▶️ John Ferrari’s answer to the new Honda Odyssey. How is it Ferrari’s answer to the new Honda Odyssey? Well, I know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, the pricing is, you know, multiples of each other, but I really do think that’s their answer. No, they’re not comparable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anytime I see the word Chromebook in relation to this thing, again, it’s a rumored thing. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it will cost $200. That’d be great. I’ll buy three of them. Right. But I really
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t really don’t think it will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You wouldn’t even buy one you complain about the laptops, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no there’s no way until there is at least a pricing rumor about this. I don’t think it’s important. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John think that Apple’s competition is the idea behind the Chromebook. And perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think this was Casey was perhaps like their answer to us. Yeah, you’re going on the whole thing of like, oh, we don’t need ports
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. need to remove complications, everything can be wireless or whatever. That is eventually the future. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not quite the present and people buy computers they want to use in the present. And so in the present, you can remove every single
⏹️ ▶️ John port from a laptop except for USB. We totally can do that. And by the way, someone just an hour ago tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John us a picture showing us USB type C with DisplayPort going over it. I don’t know how many times we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John reiterate this. Yes, it’s not. It’s not a made up crazy Apple thing. You can send DisplayPort over USB
⏹️ ▶️ John type C connectors. It’s part of the spec.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not. And it can power retina 5K. It has enough bandwidth for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Like, just look up the spec. We’ll probably put it in the show notes. They show you the pinouts, they show you what goes over those pins.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a crazy proprietary Appleism. This is an industry-wide spec. It is not speculation that we’re saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John is technically possible. It really is technically possible. It’s a thing. Soon you’ll be buying products with it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why people keep sending us these things to show us the display can go over. Yeah, we know. said so. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just it’s baffling to me. So I do think Apple has to eventually have
⏹️ ▶️ John an answer to the idea behind the Chromebook. But I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also for now it is trying to field products that fulfill needs that that you know, do the Apple thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re premium products, they charge a premium for them, they make a lot of money, they’re fancy, they’re nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware wise we’re all talking about here. And thus far Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John not shown any interest in trying to compete with the various other companies that sell
⏹️ ▶️ John similar devices for massively lower prices. And I don’t see anything in this rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes me think it’s gonna be massively lower. Again I can entertain the idea that the entry-level model could have a three-digit
⏹️ ▶️ John price. I can’t entertain the idea that it’ll be 200 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near that cheap. I think you’re both right that it’ll be around about $1000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s what we think it is, which, by the way, obviously it may be totally different. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s less than $1000, I will be stunned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also, you know, I saw a few people make the comment that Apple has to respond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chromebook style because Chromebooks are apparently selling well to education. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I think Apple’s answer to the Chromebook is the iPad, I don’t think it’s a cheap laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple holds the educational relationship as some kind of thing they cannot ever lose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers are, you know, just like big enterprise customers, there is…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of buyers out there that will buy stuff, but they’re extremely hard to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And education, it’s like enterprise but with no money. Like, there is money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in education, but not nearly as much as anybody wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t fleece them like IBM will do for its, you know, corporate customers by charging them insane
⏹️ ▶️ John fees because they know it may look crazy, but but they have so much money, they’ll pay it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and many of the biggest buyers are gonna be very high needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high maintenance customers that you’re gonna have to come to them on their terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make concessions to them because they have to buy a couple hundred or thousand of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then maintain them over time and justify that to all these different committees and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funders and work with them, the grants and everything. There’s so, so much complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that system and it’s so hard to get. and in the end, there’s not a whole lot of money to be made there. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple looks at that as something that they must keep. I think education should be looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at just like any other big enterprise customer, where they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be happy to serve them, but only on Apple’s terms, and they’re not that scared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lose them. And you can look at it and say, well, you wanna catch kids early, But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the era of kids having their primary computing experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at school is certainly not going away or probably will never totally go away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many demographics and kids. But I think the relevance of that is being greatly reduced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by personal devices, smartphones, iPod Touches, and iPads at home.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say, Apple doesn’t necessarily have to be too concerned with keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John the education market. It just has to be concerned with keeping the kids. I think it’s doing pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ John at keeping the kids because like you said, the kids have contact with computing devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, computing is everywhere now. It’s not just in the school or work. It’s just, it’s a part of life, right? So as long as
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple keeps the kids, you’re okay. Now there is a danger here because like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromebooks ever did become pervasive, which I don’t think they, you know, that Chromebooks are doing well, but I don’t think it’s like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wiping Apple out of education. But if they do become pervasive, It’s that’s Microsoft hates it because all the kids
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be doing all their work in Google Docs instead of Word. And Apple should hate it because kids will become acclimated
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Google ecosystem, which does not involve Apple and the Google ecosystem in terms of the cloud stuff is actually pretty damn
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Google, if your email, Google, if you share documents, like that’s Google’s thing. A bunch of web applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest common denominator works everywhere. All your crap synced. If kids get used to that, it’s a short
⏹️ ▶️ John jump from there to a Google phone where all your stuff is. Right. So, you know, keeping the
⏹️ ▶️ John kids, part of keeping the kids is keeping a toehold in education so far in sort of the jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John to error. It seems like Apple’s approach to education has been we in if you are
⏹️ ▶️ John a prestige school, if there’s going to be a news story about your school getting fancy stuff, we want to have our stuff in the prestige
⏹️ ▶️ John school and the prestige school is not necessarily the rich kids school, but it’s the school that’s story worthy. Is it a school
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s up and coming with doing much better now? Is it a school that got a big grant? Is it a you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like you want it to be a story? You want it to be like the important ones. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be significant. The kids in that school and teachers in that school should feel lucky to have Apple hardware because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fancy and shiny, nice and expensive. And that’s where Apple seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in education these days. It’s not so much bending over backwards with the possible exception of keeping the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John two around for a long time. But they’re not doing stuff like more than they used to do, the EMAC and the various Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John that were made just for education. Those were all pretty short lived, though. Well, but but they would do that. They would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to make a model of Mac that is only for education. and it’s going to make compromises that work for education. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ John those compromises are ways to make it cheaper. Sometimes it would be an education only version. I think they still have that on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Like they’re super cheap iMac and stuff. Right. Or keep around a model just for education. So there still are
⏹️ ▶️ John doing stuff for the market. But I think the days are gone where they design like the giant tooth, the big molar.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can look up what that is and put it in the show notes. A computer that only ever sold to education.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of those were terrible, by the way, but they existed. And Apple’s not doing that anymore. There’s not a there’s not a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with a different name. Like it’s not an iMac. It’s not a Mac mini or whatever, a different name that you can’t buy unless you’re an education.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple is out of that business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny. You mentioned education and Apple, because right around the time we moved to Richmond, one of the surrounding counties,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, they were using iBooks and issuing, I believe all middle schoolers and high schoolers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iBooks, and they decided it was cheaper and better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go with Dells. And they’ve been using Dells ever since. And you may have heard of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I did. This was the area in which we live. It made national news because they were selling these like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three, four year old iBooks for 50 bucks at the NASCAR track in downtown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richmond. And they were actually like stampedes trying to beat each other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to get to the front of the line so you could buy a $50 four year old iBook. And that was right around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we live. And now they’ve been using Dell’s for years and they’re pieces of crap. Although to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco fair, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iBooks, these iBooks are falling apart by the time they were done with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that’s like it’s like buying a used police car like there’s there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why used police cars usually just become the crappiest taxis for the crappiest taxi services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world like it is like these devices are in such constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy use for those four years like you do not want them afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although to be fair to the to those $50 iBooks can you imagine a stampede for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four-year-old PCs at any price? No, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John not. Yeah, because it’s not a fashion item. It doesn’t have the prestige associated. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John an out-of-date technology thing still has the fashion cache. So people are interested and they feel like it’s a good, it’s a steal
⏹️ ▶️ John of 50 bucks. You know, if you want to make the foreign listeners, the non-US listeners, feel
⏹️ ▶️ John even more that we live in a third world country, we can describe the other common phenomenon for technologies in schools,
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies, or you know tissues and paper towels, which is there’s no money in the budget for it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way your school is ever going to get any kind of technology or you know paper towels or tissues
⏹️ ▶️ John for the kids to use is the the parents themselves through the parent-teacher association
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other like you know organization thing will raise money and the parents will all pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the computers for their kids school and that only works where all the parents are rich so you can guess how many people schools
⏹️ ▶️ John have Macs in them it’s only the schools that are in districts where and even in the districts with rich people
⏹️ ▶️ John Even those districts can’t pass laws to raise taxes enough to pay for anything for their schools
⏹️ ▶️ John Barely can keep the buildings up, you know barely can pay the teachers their meager salaries can’t afford any computers
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t if you want your classroom to have paper towels napkins or tissues You also have to pay for those and do
⏹️ ▶️ John drives to put around this is in their rich neighborhoods That’s the state of education in our country.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s absolutely true When I went to high school It was in Fairfield County, Connecticut which at the time as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a county was the single most affluent county in the entire country because they had a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like silly rich superstars that instead of living in New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York, they’d live in Fairfield County. Now the particular town I lived in was, I mean, I guess reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affluent but nothing remarkable. And every spring without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fail, come about March or so, all of our Xerox paper, our copy machine paper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was perforated about two-thirds of the way down and then again in half.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at the bottom it said Danbury Hospital Radiology Department. Because despite the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we lived in the most affluent county in the entire country, all of the people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lived in the particular town we lived in didn’t want to pay enough money to the schools so that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had copy paper for the entire year. And we needed to accept donations of like crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leftover perforated copy paper from the local hospital. Oh my God, that’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sad. Oh goodness. All right. What other follow up do we have? One last note. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Oliver Agar. Apologies, Oliver. He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had tweeted at the three of us. It’s pretty clear now that both Thunderbolt and Lightning are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be the shortest live ports ever. I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible, but I don’t see lightning going away anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Thunderbolt is more likely to go away, but I’m still skeptical that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s going to be the case. What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Thunderbolt’s going to last just as long as FireWire did, just because it’ll be sticking out the back of that Mac Pro until Apple stops
⏹️ ▶️ John making that computer. It doesn’t mean it’s going to like… Thunderbolt, sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John totally go away from the MacBook Air if they want. it can go away from the MacBook Air because
⏹️ ▶️ John the innovation of Thunderbolt, that was a simplification. Hey, display, ethernet, USB, all over one port.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if USB 3 can do all that too, then right, Thunderbolt port gone,
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least from the small laptops, probably also from the big ones. Because it’s only for basically
⏹️ ▶️ John high speed storage. Like it’s kind of an aberration that Thunderbolt ended up being on sort of the low end laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was like, we’re not so much into the high speed storage part. We like the idea that there’s one connector that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John carry all the sorts of stuff over. You can carry the display over it. You can carry it, you can do an ethernet adapter. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John was kind of a shame that, you know, you could do each one of those things, but you had to swap your stupid adapters and crap like that. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John could plug it into the Thunderbolt display and get a full compliment of ports through one connector. I see
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason that USB 3 can’t usurp that. And so then the only reason left to have Thunderbolt is, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, well, actually it’s a super high speed thing. And of course the Mac Pro has a million Thunderbolt ports on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll continue to have them. The Thunderbolt spec will continue to get revised. I think there’ll still be
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt ports all over those things. So I don’t think Thunderbolt is going away and lightning I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think is going away because lightning is still smaller and more importantly thinner and I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially more durable than USB 3. I don’t think Apple’s gonna go through its entire iOS line
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, oh, USB 3 Type-C is here. We can get rid of the silly lightning thing and change it. Nope, lightning’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be with us for a long time, at least as long as I think the 30 pin connector was with us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I totally agree. I don’t see, Thunderbolt I think is just like FireWire 800
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s gonna be on the highest end pro products and that’s about it. It does have that advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you said, of because it is really just PCI Express over a cable, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer like direct full speed, like bus connected versions of the other ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without a big performance penalty or translation penalty or anything like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those other ports it’s offering are getting less relevant over time, and less necessary over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the biggest justification for Thunderbolt in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years is not even gonna be those PCI card case boxes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use an old PCI video card, video processing card, or anything. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it at all. I think Thunderbolt in two years is gonna be looked at only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the highest speed port for external SSD arrays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and disk arrays. Like that’s what it’s mainly for. And I think that’s probably mostly what it’s used for today even.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think that’s gonna be like its mainstay. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else is gonna go to wireless or USB 3.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Thunderbolt will have to keep scaling up because like, you know, I always imagine the Mac Pros with these
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt things having something to do with like video stuff. And like 4K video eventually becomes more
⏹️ ▶️ John common. Like you just cranked up your bandwidth requirements again. So like these giant arrays of super fast
⏹️ ▶️ John storage and the only way you can let that storage run at the full speed that it’s Capable of running at
⏹️ ▶️ John and get the data into your computer is either to have it inside your computer Which Apple doesn’t make any of those anymore or it’s got to
⏹️ ▶️ John be over the fastest possible external bus and right now that is even with USB 3 Thunderbolt is still
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and I imagine they’ll just keep making it faster and faster and it’ll become More and more confined to the people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John insane data rates that that are necessary to do like, you know uncompressed
⏹️ ▶️ John 5k video for Hollywood movies or God knows what they’re doing with these Mac Pros these days so right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and those enclosures cost more than a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah it’s not it’s not the the realm of regular people I’m trying to think is there any reason for a Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John to be to remain on like the 15-inch MacBook Pro or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it it is the highest-end laptop in the lineup and and there’s always going to be demand from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who try to do pro work on laptops on the go or on site or what I once said or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like there’s always gonna be demand whether they choose to address that demand is is not a guaranteed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing You know they might choose at some point You know what we’re done with that like you know just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many things died, but the 17-inch MacBook Pro I I think that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15-inch MacBook Pro is Definitely the retina the 15-inch right now my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro. I think is gonna be the last Apple laptop with Thunderbolt But I don’t know how soon it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna come if I had to guess I would say maybe two more years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it’s relegated to only a handful of models in the lineup?
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that they keep it around for at least a couple more years because I know we just finally got done with the transition
⏹️ ▶️ John at work where every conference room has a mini display board, aka, display port, aka
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt, to VGA connector so that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey every Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ John comes into the room can hook up to the Kredi projector that’s in the room. And it used to be that first
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone who had a Mac had one of the adapters and they’d write their names on them in a marker, but then they’d lose them. And then you’d leave one in the
⏹️ ▶️ John conference room. And now they’re like chained to the conference room. So every conference room in Hamilton has one. And if Apple drops
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt from their entire line, it’ll be like, well, we have, every conference room has an adapter that has no place to be plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the new Macs. And that will be sad because it seems like we haven’t had enough time where
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone with a Mac can go into any conference room and plug into the projector. Then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I feel like we need to have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John years before we have to redo all the adapters again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they could put it over USB 3.0 in DisplayPort mode, the alternate mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which we talked about a few minutes ago. And yeah, it’s just another $30 adapter at the Apple Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just this big daisy chain. If that going into a mini Thunderbolt, to the HDMI, or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DVI, to VGA, you’ll have like this five
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter long chain. Sometimes it’s VGA, sometimes it’s HDMI. That’s not the problem. It’s the end that connects
⏹️ ▶️ John into the Mac that’s the problem. So it’d be nice to have some stability in that for a little while longer. because that’s the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing Thunderbolt does. It’s like, well, Thunderbolt, I don’t need high speed stuff. I don’t care that I multiplex multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John things over it. Then if you don’t care about any of those things and you look at the Thunderbolt port, it’s like, oh, that’s just my external display
⏹️ ▶️ John port. Like I think, I imagine most of the people in my company who have Macs, consider that their display port.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this is where I hook up external monitors. Not knowing all the other things that that one port can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And Apple’s answer might be like, for a big part of the line, it might just be, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use AirPlay and have an Apple TV, which of course is comical.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s lots of airplay enabled projectors.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I actually have a, I think four of them on their way. I copied your idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But instead of apps, I did it with the shows that I’ve been on that I’ve been on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regularly. And then I got that picture of Aaron and Declan from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hospital that I really like printed. And so they are on their way and I’m very excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So definitely check them out. No feed icons? No feed icons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, the funny thing is, as you were doing that read, it occurred to me, I don’t know why I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put that in that order, put fast text in that order. Like that probably speaks poorly to what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think about fast text these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, that’s sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know. That is sad. Actually, I’m a little upset with myself. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TP15 to go order one now. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s be done with follow up. And let’s try to answer the question, what can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple do to fix the reliability? What did you call it, Marco? Nosedive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, God. We were still talking
⏹️ ▶️ John we please stop talking about this? We talked about the issue last time, but we didn’t get to. Like, OK, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we agree that this is an issue. We may disagree about whether things are worse now than they’ve ever been or
⏹️ ▶️ John have been in the past x number of years, whatever value you want to pay for x’s. But I think we all agreed that regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of the history and whether the trend and what the direction the trend is, the current state
⏹️ ▶️ John of things is not satisfactory for the products and customers that Apple currently has, that the customers
⏹️ ▶️ John are dissatisfied. They have a lot of products. They all interoperate with each other. Mark was like multiplying factor of like
⏹️ ▶️ John your problem, multiply the probability of problem here, multiply by the probability of problem there. The probability you have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere goes up. It’s not just additive because of the way they all interact.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I’m not clear on that math. That might it might actually be exponential or factorial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m not 100% confident on that math. Good.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not additive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, it’s not a linear additive progression. It is some kind of curve.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can do the probability things. I’m just like if you have one thing and you have a certain probability, it’s up 50% of the time. You have 50% reliability,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We have two things. They’re both a 50% of the time. Now you need them both to be up and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John you can figure it out with marbles and jars and all that other stuff and it’s not anyway, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worse. But so we all agree that they have a reliability problem. They need to address it. I don’t. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we talked all last show, but come arguing about whether this is a new problem and all problem, whatever. But so the question is, how
⏹️ ▶️ John does Apple improve its reliability? You say, how does it fix its problem? It sounds like there’s something and then someday there’s going to be a fix
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. I think a better way to phrase it is how does Apple improve the reliability of its products, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John the software reliability, because the hardware does have issues, but whenever hardware has an issue, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John always wonder if it’s like a driver issue or, you know, sometimes it’s actually a hardware issue where something’s overheating or some
⏹️ ▶️ John solder joints are bad or, you know, something like, but then sometimes I think the vast majority of time, it’s like a driver issue
⏹️ ▶️ John or they just never quite get it working right over. So what, what can Apple do to improve
⏹️ ▶️ John it? The reliability of its products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talked a little about this last step, whatever episode it was in that they could either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space out the releases between OSs, which I think we all pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree is is never going to happen or just bite off less each time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t agree that it’s never going to happen because I could totally see them, uh, taking longer between,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, iOS releases or any, or any iOS releases, not significantly longer, not like two years, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see the Mac going to 18 months and, and iOS going to like 14 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ John and slowly drifting through the year, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but they, they’ve set such a precedent and which they’ve broken precedents in the past, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve set such a set, such a precedent of having a new version of iOS every fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was a time not long ago when I think people, both nerds and non-nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got really excited about that every fall. Now, to be fair, they may not be so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we may not be so excited about that anymore. And so maybe now is the time to break that precedent, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m, I’m very skeptical. They would do it on iOS and I’m fairly skeptical. They would,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would go less frequently than every year on iOS 10. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s certainly one answer or just biting off less each time, doing less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new things and keeping yourself at a year release. I mean, that’s another option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the obvious option is sitting in the notes is the one that’s been suggested by many people that I believe we talked about in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past many times is to go to what originally Intel dubbed the tick tock cadence
⏹️ ▶️ John and which Apple has more or less de facto dubbed the
⏹️ ▶️ John blank blank s cadence. So you get the 4, the 4S, the 5, the 5S, and then who knows what they can do with the 6.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the idea is you have, uh, you do, you do a release. That’s your big release
⏹️ ▶️ John with all your fancy crap in it. And then the next one is pretty much the same as the previous one, just modified in
⏹️ ▶️ John some way. So after the 4, you have the 4S, the same hardware design. You tweak it, you move the antennas around, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not a, it’s not an entire redesign. Uh, and in OSX, Apple did the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Leopard. That was their big release. And then Snow Leopard is like, well, it’s like Leopard, but we just
⏹️ ▶️ John improved crap. And then they had, what was it? Lion, which is a big release. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John they had Mountain Lion, which was supposed to be the, oh, it’s like Lion, but we just improved some stuff. They’re off of that train
⏹️ ▶️ John in OS X because Mavericks and Yosemite are not related to each other in that way. I mean, Yosemite is radically
⏹️ ▶️ John different than Mavericks was. You could just say Mavericks was an in-between release. And after Yosemite, they’ll have one that’s like Yosemite,
⏹️ ▶️ John but tweaked. But it’s very difficult to tell because without, I mean, the names
⏹️ ▶️ John made it clear with Leopard Snow Leopard Lion Mountain Lion. But then you could argue like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John did the contents of those releases reflect the naming? Only with Snow Leopard did Apple come out
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, this is like the no new features release, all we’re doing is frying stuff. And even that was a lie because they added
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of internal crap. And so- Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a huge under the hood change, just like it didn’t look the different to users.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and like the big thing is if you don’t add user facing features, even if you make tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John under the hood changes, you can you can lie to people and say no new features by basically saying no new user
⏹️ ▶️ John facing features. And if there’s no new user facing features, your expectation is that all they did was
⏹️ ▶️ John improve the the functionality of the existing using feature like people weren’t distracted
⏹️ ▶️ John by saying, never mind about making whatever work, make this new thing, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John or work better or whatever. That is mostly I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John a perception issue. But I think trying to achieve that
⏹️ ▶️ John perception from the customer base influences the way the engineering
⏹️ ▶️ John operate organization operates. Like in the same way that if you’re trying to impress people with GWS features,
⏹️ ▶️ John it influences how you assess like risk reliability or whatever. If you said straight
⏹️ ▶️ John out that like, Oh, this is going to be a no new feature release that gives the engineering organization the freedom to make
⏹️ ▶️ John different trade-offs internally, because there’s no pressure to make the whizzy new feature. That’s going to be impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John in a demo because you’ve already said like the public message was no new features. So you don’t have to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can make, when you make decisions about what are we gonna refactor? What are we gonna rip out? What giant
⏹️ ▶️ John new internal frameworks like GCD we’re gonna add? You can make all those decisions without the pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John of having to serve the external need to be impressive. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of weird that the phone hardware has been on that cadence for so long, but the phone software has definitely not been on that cadence, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would argue the hardware, that’s kind of a red herring. Like, if you look at the three S releases of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones we’ve had so far, the 3GS, the 4S, and the 5S, those were all major hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases. The S, like minor revision designation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really only cosmetic in all three of those cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not cosmetic because like, yeah, it is cosmetic, but it’s like the cosmetics
⏹️ ▶️ John are a huge part of the hardware design because it’s manufacturing lines, it’s the tooling,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the materials, it’s all that part of it is a huge part of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John We think the product is like the tech specs of the CPU and you’re right. They made they made s things. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire guts of this phone are different. How is this like a minor revision? There’s like no shared part with the previous one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s just the guts, right? The big part of these phones is how do you make a million little glass
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum rectangle thingies to the to the quality control that Apple wants? And they put a huge investment
⏹️ ▶️ John into making the production lines and the tools and everything that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the materials and the expertise to assemble these phones. And they want to get their bang for the buck out of that. They say we’re going to make two years
⏹️ ▶️ John worth of phones that use the same materials assembled in more or less the same way with only possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John minor external changes to you know, like again, moving the antennas and the breakpoints of the whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, construction techniques like whatever they’re using, whatever they want to get two years of value
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the silicon I think is easier because that’s like look, silicon revs when it revs, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a separate thing. physical part of it is such a big part of, you know, physical products
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s where they want to get the thing. And like the fabs, like they don’t have to make a new fab, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John except when they do die shrinks and stuff. But it’s like once you have the fail off and running, if you give it a different design,
⏹️ ▶️ John then it just is a different design. Right. And if someone gets a new fit, like it’s not part of it’s not so much part of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the production line for a particular phone, I think is more built for that phone than a
⏹️ ▶️ John production line for particular CPU is built for that CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But where they’re having problems is not, you know, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my 5S, you know, the parts don’t fit right together. Where they’re having problems is in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software and the low-level component interactions and the services and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But do you think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware related? Like even the 64-bit transition, like I know there was problems with going from 32 to 64
⏹️ ▶️ John and the 64-bit versions were buggy and stuff like that, but I have to imagine, like, you have to pay that transition
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime. They wanted to be the first out of the gate. I think they’ve reaped benefits of being the first, but other than that, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think any other silicon based transition has been particularly killer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, I’m just saying that, like, that the idea that the iPhone hardware is on this tick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tock cadence, I would say is mostly wrong, that it’s it is very it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on that tick tock cadence and only the like physical shell way. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the parts inside seem to change just as rapidly with every version of the iPhone, regardless of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what letters after its name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I agree on that. But I think the physical shell part is a huge percentage of
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware product. And so that’s why I don’t think you can dismiss it as just cosmetics or just the visual thing. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John when you think about the physical hardware product, it’s almost as if the silicon part is like, might as well be a separate thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a certain allotted amount of space that you have to fit in, but really, the product designers of the iPhone are designing a
⏹️ ▶️ John physical thing. And by the way, this little silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John sliver goes in whatever is left over when we put the battery in. I mean, I don’t know. Obviously, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John done that way or whatever. But if you look at the parts inside there, the phone is all everything else. And then this little
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny thing that’s the actual phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I just see that
⏹️ ▶️ John as a separate cadence. And that cadence has not so much been on the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think they just change everything every year. From year to year, they change who’s going to sell us
⏹️ ▶️ John our radio chip this year. Like, forget about the stuff. Who’s going to sell the display controller this year battery
⏹️ ▶️ John controller, like from year to year, it’s just like whoever has the best chips with the best specs or if Apple needs to do custom designs
⏹️ ▶️ John itself, it just changes all the time on the phones. And that hasn’t been a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular source of problems. I think if it is, we don’t have enough insight to know like, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John one phone had problems because of some flaky chip and you didn’t know about it. But next year, Apple picked a different
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturer and ironed out those problems. Or, you know, OS 10 or iOS was working around this problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John this buggy chip set and you didn’t know it, but it took a lot of engineering effort from Apple. But for us, 10 Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Mac lines change much more slowly in a much more predictable way
⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, we kind of know is going into them with the Intel chipsets. We know it’s available for them to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John go into. And I think for the OSN cadence, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is just again, you know, chasing itself, chasing its own tail of
⏹️ ▶️ John or as someone said, like I was asking who they’re chasing, so they’re chasing iOS. It’s like, well, that’s just chasing yourself because
⏹️ ▶️ John they are iOS as well. They can make the decision of how to move along with the two things in cadence
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other. But I think that type of cadence formalized that type of cadence formalized. And the reason you have to formalize it
⏹️ ▶️ John is like perception PR. Like if you formalize it, like Intel did, Intel formalized
⏹️ ▶️ John it, too, because they recognize that if you just do this internally, kind of sort of secretly, then
⏹️ ▶️ John the marketing PR organization still has to come up with some reason why everything is awesome every single year. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if you if you announce this, this is our new strategy for the foreseeable future, then
⏹️ ▶️ John only every other year do you have to impress and everyone just gets used to, oh, this is this is the year where they just make stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John work better. And that becomes a story in itself. And people like that. Like customers like it. And you don’t get the
⏹️ ▶️ John bad stories about, well, it was WBC, but Apple didn’t have any new features. You just know this is a talk here or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which one is the friggin ticker. The talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I never I always forget that every time. You know what I mean? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s always it’s the opposite of what you think. Like the tick. I think the tick is The minor one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the talk is like the loud one because it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, a tick tock cadence Apple has has considered
⏹️ ▶️ John and sort of played around with in the past and continues to play around with arguably
⏹️ ▶️ John on the non silicon part of the hardware side. I think that has
⏹️ ▶️ John the best sort of, you know, the best features of any solution I can think up other
⏹️ ▶️ John than the silly solution. People will say, just be more careful and do stuff better. Like that’s not a solution, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, because of the external effects of this, because it is a thing that you announced to the
⏹️ ▶️ John world and that announcement frees up things
⏹️ ▶️ John inside your organization to act in a way that they wouldn’t be able to if you try to do it only as an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I read something earlier today that I thought was really fascinating for a bunch of reasons, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s relevant here. On Objective-CIO, they had an interview with Andy Matuszak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope I pronounced that right. I’m so sorry if I didn’t. Anyway, he used to work on UIKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if memory serves. And they had an interview with him. And the question that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked was, what effect do you think Swift will have on Apple’s framework APIs? Do you expect something here in the short
⏹️ ▶️ Casey term? And his answer is very interesting and relevant. I don’t actually have insider knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, so this is just speculation, but I think it will be a long process. At least when I was there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the team spent the majority of their time not maintaining and improving frameworks, but really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supporting market features like new screen sizes or support for new hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what takes most of the time. So it will take a conscious decision to do anything non-trivial, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see that forthcoming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that actually mirrors what we heard when somebody who works on iWork wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us a couple of, maybe a month or two ago now, who wrote in because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were talking about how we were talking, we were complaining about iWork and how like there seems to be nobody working on it for years and all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets rushed together and this person who wrote in basically said that’s not the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that instead the team is constantly working on it but that iWork always has to show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the latest and greatest OS features and directions of the company’s sharing and cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms and everything and so they’re constantly having to keep up with the new marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features and the new directions of things like iCloud instead of working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the core product functionality. So it’s actually very… it sounds like this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly infecting many parts of Apple and their market features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are moving so quickly and are so aggressive that the rest of the engineering department
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is maybe not able to keep up with things like quality and long-term feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintenance. Is that fair, based on what we’ve heard so far? It certainly sounds right to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing that gives me hope here, I mentioned this on the talk show so I’ll be quick, but the watch is going to be where Apple focuses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of their PR for the next little while. And you know, we’ll see how it goes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long that lasts. Maybe the watch is going to be the primary focus of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing for the next year or two or three. I don’t know. But I think that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might help take some of the marketing burden off of the other products. And so maybe by focusing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much on the watch and first watch kit stuff and then later on the native SDK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the second generation of the watch hardware, maybe that will be such the focus of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing that just like the Mac was kind of playing second fiddle when the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, maybe the watch will then make the iPhone and iPad and the Mac now, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give them like a break for a little while from being in the spotlight and give them a chance to stabilize.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the whole idea of like having to support new
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware factors or new APIs, new APIs you have a little more control over because you can just lay off on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But new hardware features that kind of gets back to what kind of company Apple is. They’re trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make entire products that have hardware and software integrated and trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to improve both aspects of that. And it seems like, you know, hardware is like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to make a nicer phone, a cooler laptop, like want to make a better product or whatever. And that thing I was just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John know, changing the chipsets to use for your radios or the manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John for your power controller, your display controller inside the phone, just changing that all the time, because you want to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that has the best features, the lowest power, the best contract deal for parts and all these other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that change year over year. I can imagine lots of time being spent
⏹️ ▶️ John supporting that. It’s like, can’t you guys just pick one manufacturer for like the, you know, whatever IO controller
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS devices and keep it for one or two years in a row so that we can do something else or
⏹️ ▶️ John display controller, you know, like that would make their lives easier, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it would mean, well, but the new one is slightly lower power and it has this extra little feature
⏹️ ▶️ John and we can combine these two things into one chip. And it’s like, if we don’t do that, if we try to make it easier for the software
⏹️ ▶️ John guys by trying to make a stable, like a more stable platform, kind of like the Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, motherboard, Intel-based motherboards and chipsets are, whatever, like a little bit more stable, then
⏹️ ▶️ John the other guys will have a better phone than us. And we, every year we have to be, we have to be better, better battery life, better
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. Like, I think the screen size changes, that is a big hassle for them to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John part of that is like, they’re paying the price for their expedience in doing the original version
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS. It’s like, let’s just get it working on this one phone. Like, they didn’t do what Android did, which was was
⏹️ ▶️ John forced to do, which is let’s make a generic. Let’s try at least to make a generic framework for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John UI on variable screen sizes. And the Apple was like, we’re at the edge of what is even possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just make it work on the original iPhone. That is the mandate no matter what you have to do. And so they’ve paid the price
⏹️ ▶️ John in like, you know, they reap the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey being the first person
⏹️ ▶️ John out with the iPhone that no one else could even think was possible. And then the price is the engineering compromises you had to do to
⏹️ ▶️ John get there, meaning you have a long road ahead of you to be able to support arbitrary resolutions, arbitrary screen sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and so that how many years has it taken to get to where we are now with like multiple screen sizes and auto layout
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the scaling and the high res screens, like it was very much unlike OS 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John where in the beginning of OS 10, they had this model of what the future of the display system is going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the hardware wasn’t there to support it. And it was terrible. And they’re just like, we just got to hold on for like
⏹️ ▶️ John six more years. And this crap will work right. And even then they had to
⏹️ ▶️ John do some fairly large architectural changes to get stuff off the CPU and onto the GPU. So
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in engineering, software hardware engineering, is a trade-off. And I just think what we see now and this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea of the UI kept people spending their time treading water and doing marketing features is the result of
⏹️ ▶️ John engineering trade-offs made many, many years earlier just coming home to roost now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, Igloo, and Fracture, and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter You can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N-t Marco Armin S-i-r-a-c-u-s-a Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to accidental, accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John tech broadcast so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A hundred episodes in the bag. God, we’re getting old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how about the Detroit Auto Show?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did anything happen to the Detroit Auto Show other than the Ford GT? The NSX?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, but everyone knew about that. Everyone saw pictures. Like, what was new that we learned about the NSX? I haven’t looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at any of the news, so I’m asking you. What was new that we learned about the NSX at the Detroit Auto Show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We learned it’s a twin turbo V6. We learned it’s a twin turbo V6. We didn’t know that already? I don’t keep up with Honda
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don’t drive a Honda. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know for sure it would be mid-engined, although it’s a safe assumption. And it is mid-engined.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean you didn’t know it would be mid-engined? We’ve seen final pictures of the NSX for what seems like a year
⏹️ ▶️ John now. You can just look at the car. Where do you think they put in the engine? Really? Have we seen it? Yeah. No, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like more or less the the complete NSX like maybe with like camouflage
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever But like we’ve known what what this car is gonna look like for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No fair enough Well, I guess I just don’t follow Honda as closely as you do John
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t follow it at all But I’ve you know when it was like it was like a year ago and he said this is the new NSX and they were still
⏹️ ▶️ John Like drawings and you get to see the one with the camouflage paint all over it And I guess now this is the first time we’re seeing the one like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know painted and presented the way Honda wants to do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I think it’s kind of ugly. You know what I did like is on their intro video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which to my eye looked 100% CGI. I mean, it was good CGI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it looked like, to me anyway, it looked like it was completely CGI. On the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this CGI video of the NSX driving around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it said, professional driver close course. And it was a completely fabricated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video or if it wasn’t it was very poorly recorded because it
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at Yeah, watch the video. It didn’t look CG. Is that a moment the little kid playing with the toy old? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John no look it could be real to me. I mean maybe modified after the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just thought that was funny if new Ford GT looks good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not that excited about the NSX the GT It usually makes me uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t like the idea of nostalgia-driven
⏹️ ▶️ John styling to the degree that has been practiced by US automakers over the past, say,
⏹️ ▶️ John decade or two, where they make, like, oh, make the new Mustang and make it look like
⏹️ ▶️ John a modernized version of a particular model of old Mustang.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, which usually makes it look worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, see, I think they all look good. Hey, you live in the South. But I agree with you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole idea is getting pretty played now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s OK to be inspired by cars of the past, but you have to know what the difference between inspired
⏹️ ▶️ John is and a style parody.
⏹️ ▶️ John even a style parody, you’re taking the Ford GT is a great example. Like the previous Ford
⏹️ ▶️ John GT, the GT40 thing, right? It’s like the same freaking car
⏹️ ▶️ John as the old one. It’s just puffed up into modern. they’re taking the same design. It’s not inspired
⏹️ ▶️ John by it’s the same design. And this new one is more different. But still, I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if we have enough Carloses. I know someone right now is writing an angry email that mentions
⏹️ ▶️ John the word 9-11 in it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John understand 9-11. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Volkswagen Beetle, for that matter. But like, I feel like the 9-11 has come by that honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John by never moving away from that. The 9-11 is a Volkswagen
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but you know what I mean? Like it, it has it has not. Every year they
⏹️ ▶️ John just change it a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And yeah, they all look the same and it’s all kind of the same family resemblance. But it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John like the difference in the 9-11, the beetle is great because the beetle was the beetle. And then there was a large gap of time. Then
⏹️ ▶️ John they made the new beetle, which was exactly the same. You know, it’s like, let’s make a modern version of
⏹️ ▶️ John the old beetle. Right. And then they have the newer revision of that or whatever. Right. The 9-11, every single
⏹️ ▶️ John revision was just like a little change, a little change, a little change. You just never drifted too far, right? I feel like that is more
⏹️ ▶️ John honest than waiting for a huge gap of time and then making a new car that looks like an Old car. I don’t like new cars that
⏹️ ▶️ John that are modern versions of old cars all the way down to it. That aren’t even a mix of like well this this
⏹️ ▶️ John grille is reminiscent of the grille on the blah blah blah and this tail is reminiscent of this and this is new like that is
⏹️ ▶️ John More appropriate. Don’t just make me a new version of the old one, but I have to say the new GT Moves
⏹️ ▶️ John farther away from the old ones You can still kind of see the GT40
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the predecessors under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I think what is what’s the pillar right behind the door? The B pillar. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From the B pillar to the front, it looks almost identical. But from the B pillar to the back, it looks totally different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And let’s see. The thing is, it’s a nice looking car. All versions that the original one, the the GT40
⏹️ ▶️ John from like a decade ago or whatever, and the new crazy looking one. These are all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve got that backwards. It’s the GT from a decade ago and the GT40 from the 60s or 70s or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was. Do you think these are good looking cars?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well I thought when they did the revision one it was called the GT, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the name. So the one that Clarkson had that was from like the early 2000s. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was just called the GT as well?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s just the Ford GT. The original one that started it all in the 60s or 70s or whatever it was, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the GT40. I’m pretty sure about this. These are hideous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is hideous, I think the NSX is hideous. The NSX, the new NSX or the old one? The new one. The old one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks, I think, very nice. And I think the design of the old one actually ages fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well for a car that’s designed, that was designed as long ago as it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’m not excited. I mean, I was never a huge NSX person. You know, I never got that into high-end cars back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then. So, you know, I don’t really have any nostalgia either way. But like, to me, you know, the GT is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least like continuing what it has been more recently. The NSX is like, this car was gone for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now we’re bringing it back. But to me, this is kind of like bringing it back to tech for a second. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me out of this terrible car conversation because these cars are cars I don’t care about. But, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of like the new Star Wars movie. Where like, I am not excited about the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Star Wars movie because, like inherently, because it is Star Wars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, can I make some popcorn? You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited about the old Star Wars movies either. No, I like them. I was never that obsessed with them, but I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. But to me, calling this an NSX, and calling the new Star
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wars movie Star Wars, is really just like, it’s like licensing the name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John branding thing. It is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s totally different people working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on it. What are you talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about? Yes, of course, but the people who work on the new Mustang have nothing to do with the people who work on the old Mustang. You
⏹️ ▶️ John still use the Mustang name. It’s a franchise, but every Mustang doesn’t have to look like a particular past model. There
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wasn’t a time. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I’m not talking about appearance. I’m talking more about spirit and continuity. So like, making a new Star
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wars movie today, versus making a new Star Wars movie in 50 years when everyone who made the first one is dead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there any different really? Like, you’re just taking the name. Everyone who made the NSX is not dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but it’s been gone for long enough and the market has moved on in so many ways, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure the people at Honda have changed staff a little bit since then. I think it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re talking about brand names the way that companies want you to talk about brand names,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if they have some kind of major significance with what the product will actually be like. And the fact is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a nameplate on this. It’s just a nameplate on Star Wars. It doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how cars have always worked. Ignore movies for a second. That’s how cars have always worked. There is no relation between
⏹️ ▶️ John the 911 today and the 911. Yes, you just keep calling it 911. You keep calling it the Mustang. Keep calling it the
⏹️ ▶️ John Camaro. You keep calling it the Corvette. That’s how car labels work. It’s just not an aberration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, the M5 is an abomination compared to the M1 that originally started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole M moniker.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even just M5 compared to M5s. Compare this M5 to three generations ago. What did they share? Just the M5. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a way to, like, that’s how car naming works. So I don’t begrudge that at all. What I complain about is when you make, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the styling specifically, when you pick a particular old car and you say, make a modern version of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you don’t even mix elements of other cars, but it’s just like a, you know, a complete facsimile. And the Mustang
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and I think they’ve done a little bit with the new Dodge Charger. Like, I don’t like that. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, we made a good looking car once in the 60s or 70s. We can’t figure out how to make a good looking
⏹️ ▶️ John car again. So just make us a modern version of that car that we made that was good looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, normally, I totally agree with you that that is what it is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally I would say in this conversation, wow, look at how ugly the American
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car is. But honestly, I cannot imagine what Acura’s been thinking with their styling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last decade or so either. Like to me, these are both hideous
⏹️ ▶️ John cars. Yeah, Acura has lost its way with the styling. I’m kind of disappointed that there aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John more cues from the old NSX than the new one. Like I don’t think you need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a modernized version, but just take some cues. Like the same way that the kidneys are a cue. Like you can do so much with the kidneys in BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t say because a car has kidneys, it looks exactly like, you know, a BMW from two
⏹️ ▶️ John decades ago or something. Like just styling elements. There should be some commonality in styling elements. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, the modern Cadillac takes that too far, where the cars don’t look like each other exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the styling elements are so dominant and they’re so repeated everywhere that there’s a sameness to them that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boring. Although that CTS-V, what is it, 600 and change horsepower?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Speaking of ugly cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, they’ve always been ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John got the ATS if you don’t want the fat one, but they look too similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you guys seen the new Lexus M3? No. Oh, it’s rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, Lexus has been rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but like, you know, Lexus’s styling was always very comfortable if you wanted to drive like an upscale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marshmallow for old people. And there’s, that’s a perfectly valid market and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done very well there and that’s well deserved. But with their new like sport
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F line or whatever it is, like they’re trying to get in on the BMW territory of like the sport sedans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and oh my God, they’re hideous in person. I hope you get a chance to see one sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon. Oh my goodness, they are rough. It’s so,
⏹️ ▶️ John What model of car are you talking about? I don’t even recognize it. Lexus M3?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, it’s Lexus’ answer to the M3. So I think it’s the ISF. It’s one of the, it’s like the F-Sport
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the RCF. You’re talking about the RCF, that big, giant, fat car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s a sedan. It might be the ISF. No, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John RCF. Do a Google for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, you’re right, you’re right. It’s the RCF now. It used to be the ISF.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, okay. It’s fat because it’s heavy, not because, yeah. All the reviews I’ve read
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is just like, too much weight, can’t get out of its own way. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a really bad iteration of the GT-R.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is what I’m talking about. Yep, I’m seeing it. And also, I believe, am I wrong? I think they also have added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F-Sport trim levels to a lot of the other models. They have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t sound like anything I’m familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I mean, it’s the same thing. I mean, it’s the same BS that BMW pulls.
⏹️ ▶️ John think every luxury car maker should have this thing. whether it’s the AMG model
⏹️ ▶️ John or like in Mercedes,
⏹️ ▶️ John to have two. So it had the AMG model, but also the black, you know? So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey multiple layers of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John M Sport and M. Yeah, and BMW had to have the M. And they said, you know what, we can apply that to M, maybe we’ll get the M Sport. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John Lexus, and same thing with Infiniti, these other companies, have taken too long to figure out what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do. And I think Lexus is finally settling on the F. Audi has the RS and the
⏹️ ▶️ John S model, and then the RS model. So you do need these levels. This is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that luxury car makers do these days. And I’m glad Lexus has found one. I’m sad that whenever they add F to their models, it makes them
⏹️ ▶️ John uglier and crappier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you also see that BMW had a pretty big presence at CES, actually?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was interesting. They showed off not only their version of CarPlay, like all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other, but also their gesture interface, their backseat Samsung tablets, and all sorts of weird stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What annoyed me most about what they showed off there is that almost none of it is anything I would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want and much of it I think was a step backwards like the the the big like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the key fob with the screen on it at the touchscreen like thank you know BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank God that will always be like a thousand dollar option because I’m never buying that option because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last thing you want is your key fob to get bigger and it they’re already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big like they’re already so chunky in your pocket I mean you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to look at it either like why would you want to look at it you want to be able to do it in your pocket just you know Like is there anything you need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with it at all? If it’s a proximity key there shouldn’t be anything, but what if you want to open the trunk? So you should be able to reach in and press the little thing that opens the trunk You
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t have to look at the screen like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and why would you want your key fob to have another battery draining feature on it? That’s a terrible idea. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just so many bad ideas about
⏹️ ▶️ John that You’ll be able to get a new battery for it for you get the battery replace of the dealer for $700 So it’ll be fine That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. John. What was the name of the memory stick for the Dreamcast that had a little display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it? VMU visual memory unit. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what it reminds me of
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’d have a color screen though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, that’s true. The VMU had one of those god awful original Game Boy style screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And unfortunately, the BMW is probably going to sell them a lot more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that’s also true. But yeah, I don’t know. I just thought it was interesting seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that BMW took CES so seriously. I don’t, I still don’t totally understand, well, I shouldn’t even say totally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don’t understand the laser headlights. I don’t, I mean, I’ve read that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more directional, so they can leave a gap for like people in other cars on the road.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re lasers, Casey. What more do you need to know? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, LEDs aren’t cool enough anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, are you kidding? Marketing people, once marketing people even find out that it’s possible to use lasers for lights
⏹️ ▶️ John like do that, I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care if they’re worse in every possible way. Laser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lights. That’s true. But I did see also that they have OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tail lamps now or they’re they’re trying them, which I thought was very peculiar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I’m not really sure why one would want that, but I’m sure there’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason I’m not thinking of. You can make them
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner for more light output, maybe. And obviously they’re a little bit lower power, but I don’t think it’s a big deal for
⏹️ ▶️ John brake lights. But yeah, I don’t know. I’m looking at the NSX here. It’s not too terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that has the schnoz problem that Acura’s have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheese grater knows. and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s a beak. It’s more of it’s not a cheese grater, but like from from the it’s only like head-on Right, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of cars have a little bit of a nose problem lately, too But it’s fairly restrained like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the headlights aren’t bad the little scoops on the side are okay The back is ugly. I think this is resister
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, well compared to compare
⏹️ ▶️ John it to the compared to the the new Ford GT if it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like well, yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s ridiculous or even just the Corvette, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but compared to good taste. None of these are good examples including the new Corvette by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now the Ferrari looks like a car from Knight Rider. It’s supposed to look like it. I guess I know Knight Rider was not a Corvette.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new Corvette is probably, of all the cars you’ve mentioned so far, I think the new Corvette is by far the best looking one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ugh, the back of the Corvette is worse than the back of all these cars. Mm, that’s probably true. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve seen one in the parking lot, it’s like, it’s just terrible. It’s like, it’s like the unibrow of, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big, just ugly, yeah. The NSX is, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine. I just feel like it’s a little bit puffy, and there’s not enough of the old NSX in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the GT is like a mutant amphibian fish version of
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous GT, which was a puffed up version of the original GT. And none of these cars
⏹️ ▶️ John look as nice as any Ferrari, probably, except for the weird four-wheel drive one. The Ferrari, LaFerrari?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. The one with four-wheel drive that looks like a shoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t that the FF?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That four-wheel drive was weird, though. Did you see how that worked? Did we talk about that at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John point? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is weird. Didn’t it suck?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. Do you think anyone’s ever driven one in the snow yet? That’s true. No, but didn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a second driveshaft coming out the front of the motor or something along those lines?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was a really weird layout.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, like I said, even that one, if you just don’t look at the back of the car, even
⏹️ ▶️ John the front of that car is much nicer. But I think they’re making, like I said in the past show, they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John a regular shaped version of a non-hatchback or whatever you want to call the thing. So it’s basically, so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have two 12 cylinder front engine Ferraris. Why are they different? Well, this one
⏹️ ▶️ John is four wheel drive and it used to be really ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John get an ugly version if you like ugly cars. I don’t. Whatever.