115: Empathy for the Machine
01 May 2015Photos follow-up, Apple Watch impressions, and this week’s Microsoft Build announcements.
Episode Description:
- ATP Shirt: Last chance, buy now! Available until Wednesday, 6 May.
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- Bad Seagate hard drives
- How Hard Disks Work (page 7)
- The MacBook Air survives... for now!
- Photos
- Background processes
- Hard links
- Shared album photo limit (via Lance Hildebrand)
- Performance
- Deleted photos
- Restoring from backups
- Apple Watch, one week in
- Microsoft Build
- Visual Studio Code
- Project Astoria & Project Islandwood
- WINE
- Dalvik
- GNUStep
- Microsoft Band
- Session video (posted after this episode was recorded)
- Post-show:
- Connected follow-out
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John Learned about the cat game.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more boring than I thought it was. I thought you get to play with the cats or something. I thought it was interactive in some way, but they just show up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s just like real cats. You don’t really interact with them. You just kind of feed them. Right, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just so excited that they exist and that you exist at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John cat! And that’s it. You don’t get to play with the cats. You don’t get to throw them toys. They don’t… It’s just they
⏹️ ▶️ John show up, leave you crap, and then leave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they don’t really care about you. They just care about your
⏹️ ▶️ John food. And you can’t even interact with them. Right. Just like real cats. Don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we talking about this Microsoft stuff at some point?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we should, even though in the grand tradition it’s like happened today and nobody knows about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever, we all read headlines, right? It’s all it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pundits. All we need is a headline. Well, this is pretty much all you guys because I was really not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco following any of this. I was using my Apple Watch all day, which you guys can’t say anything about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t know anything about the Microsoft stuff. So I think we have a lot of stuff to cover from subsets of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this will be we’ll be taking turns. We might as well start as we always start with John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking the turn of follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I thought we had a lot of follow up this week. But now that I read through it, it’s just long, but I don’t think it will take a long time because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all small items. Oh, famous last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everyone look at the timestamp.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I was right last time I said that we got through it quickly. I think we will today too. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first one is from John Tall, giving us more color, as they say in Apple Earnings
⏹️ ▶️ John calls, about the bad Seagate hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that we talked about. This is from 2011. He says it was
⏹️ ▶️ John actually a bug in their firmware. Specifically, it was a bug in a counter
⏹️ ▶️ John that kept track of how many times the drive had spun up. The counter would overflow and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John make the drive think that it was brand new, that it had never been spun up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason the firmware would use this count is apparently when it’s brand new, it spins up really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it gets older, it takes a little bit longer to spin up. And the reason the hard drive wants to know how long it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John to spin up is it wants to know when it’s safe to put the heads on top of the disk. If you, we should put a link to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Wikipedia hard drive page or maybe a How Stuff Works page or something. If you don’t know how hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ John work, they have these little heads that look kind of like the, what is it called in a
⏹️ ▶️ John phonographs case, tone arm or whatever. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stylus, something like that. Well, the stylus is the needle, but I think you are talking about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tone arm. I think I don’t even pay that much attention as much as I have this, this reputation for being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obsessed with vinyl. I’m not even sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, hard drives sound better than SSDs. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t know how hard drives works, trying to explain it as an analogy for records, which they
⏹️ ▶️ John probably might have never seen. And even I who grew up with records don’t know what the heck the parts are called. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John arm that goes over the disc and it’s got a little read head on it There’s usually top and bottom the disc. It’s got a little read
⏹️ ▶️ John head that that reads a little you know the Magnetic thing that reads a little
⏹️ ▶️ John blips on the disc of magnetic poles or whatever That head is really really close
⏹️ ▶️ John to the disc That head cannot touch the disc because if it touches the disc it ruins it because the
⏹️ ▶️ John disc is spinning very fast And it’s made of I don’t know some kind of you know metal glass whatever material and
⏹️ ▶️ John the head is actually pretty hard and if it touches it that’s a head crash that will put a big gouge in the disc and you basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s where the term crash in computers comes from
⏹️ ▶️ John is it where it comes from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s it’s it’s hard drive heads crashing into the bladders and therefore like killing the drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you lose your data and originally when you say my computer crashed that was what you meant
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if that’s true so listeners you can come in and tell us whether that’s crazy all I know about is the bug that was the moth that
⏹️ ▶️ John flew into the big machine caught in the trip is the original bug but anyway so it wants to know
⏹️ ▶️ John when is it safe to bring the heads onto the discs? Because when the disc is off, the heads are off on the side. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John over the discs at all. They’re parked. Exactly. So… In the parking lot. Why does it matter how fast
⏹️ ▶️ John the disc is spinning? Well, can’t you just bring the heads out whenever the heck you feel like it? No, because the thing that keeps the
⏹️ ▶️ John heads from touching the disc is a tiny cushion of air between the head and the disc. And it’s super tiny. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they always show the diagram that shows like a human hair next to the gap, and the human hair like dwarfs the gap
⏹️ ▶️ John between the heads and things. So they have to be really, really close but can’t touch. And so it’s really important
⏹️ ▶️ John that the disks be spinning fast enough for the heads to be able to safely move on to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if that counter overflows and the mechanism, the hard drive thinks that it’s a brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new disk and it’s probably spun up right away, it sends the heads out, they crash into the disk and it kills them. And so this is a firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John bug that causes a hardware failure that affected a lot of Seagate drives, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We will put a link to How Stuff Works that on page 95
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this slideshow, what page was that? On page, I think it’s seven of that slideshow, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show what John is describing. So we will have that in the show notes. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to jump in and do a very brief piece of follow-up. I am talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to everyone on Aaron’s MacBook Air, the one that went for a little swim last week. So this is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a short show? Yeah, it’s gonna be a real short show. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, knock on my glass desk, has been doing just fine. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not expecting that to continue on forever. I’m expecting it to just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I guess we lost Casey. I’m just kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on. But no, all kidding aside, it is fine. I’m surprised by that. I have heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several conflicting reports as to how much Apple would charge me to fix this if it does eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fry. I’ve heard a couple hundred dollars. I’ve heard, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a genius will take pity on you. I’ve heard $800 and anywhere in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between. So hopefully I’ll never have to find out. But as of tonight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Wednesday, what is it, the 28th, 29th or something like that? 29th. Of Wednesday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 29th of April, it is still working much to my surprise. So I’m very happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you made that website though, like the Deathwatch website, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I did. I did actually make a Deathwatch website. And what I did was I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found a site somewhere that would create a launch DP list for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that launch DP list would then just launch curl and tickle a URL on my website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s very unreliable. And so part of the reason I haven’t publicized this link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because it reports Aaron’s Mac as being broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dead way more often than it actually is broken and dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I went to it and I saw that it was dead too. I said, for a second I was upset and then I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, that’s probably just a monitoring failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And so the reason I haven’t given this to the internet is because as much as I know everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and I’m not being sarcastic, I mean that, I would be getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hourly if not minute by minute reports that Aaron’s computer is dead, I must check on it. Go look right now. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, it says it’s dead. When in reality, it’s probably user error with me and LaunchD.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one way or another, it’s just not a very reliable mechanism for monitoring the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there is a website for it. I will not be sharing the link because it’s not a very good link and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not worth paying attention to. But it is alive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And did you, you said that you went to a website to generate a LaunchD file?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? So I don’t know anything about LaunchD, and I was originally going to use Cron. I was going to set up a Cron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job, but I can never get Cron syntax right. And so I was figuring out, okay, well, what do I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available to me? Can I just do a scheduled task sort of thing? And maybe there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easier way of doing this that I just didn’t think of or stumble upon. But one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ended up going to this website that generated this just silly, humongous plist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for LaunchD. And again, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently what launchd does is you give it this plist and you say, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fifth minute of the zeroth hour, go run this command. On the 10th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute of the zeroth hour, go run this command. On the 15th minute of the zeroth hour, and this continues through all 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of the day. And so because of that, this plist was enormous. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not how it’s designed to be used. If it’s not, it doesn’t really matter. I to be honest, I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care but I tried to do that real quick and I thought it was working but not so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put a link in the show notes to an app that will make launch the PLS for you
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are much more verbose and Casey saying that he didn’t know cron syntax off the top of his head
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most windows developer thing I’ve ever heard him say. I know it and I yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so anyone who has ever done server side
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco development any platform
⏹️ ▶️ John other than Windows knows how to write cron.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi, John. Well, and I find launchd’s syntax completely inscrutable. Yeah, now that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like, yeah, I don’t think Casey’s crazy to get help doing that because it is like cron is easy. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, a bunch of items and like they’re in a weird order and you remember it and if you forget, you know, man five
⏹️ ▶️ John cron tab to refresh your memory, whatever to see if this version supports a slash five syntax or not or anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the launchd stuff is way more complicated. And I bet only the people who develop lunch to
⏹️ ▶️ John eat Apple have memorized all the options and all the different things you can add there. And even if you’re going to do it like quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote by hand, you’d use Apple’s P list editor because who writes P list by hand, right? Animals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, there’s the thing. It’s Lingen or whatever is named after the the barrier, the fruit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a version of it somewhere on here. Be careful because you can screw up your system with that. Like it lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you see, I think all the P lists for like the system wide things. And if you’re like, what is this? I don’t understand this. I can delete that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, be careful out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it taste like Ikea?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Nice. I will put the site I used in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. It’s launched.zerowith.com. And again, all it does is you say, when do you want this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to run? And it generates this humongously verbose launch DEP list.
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos. Photos. Yep. This is from Andrew Woods. He is making sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that we know that Photos does a whole bunch of of stuff in the background even after it’s done importing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Said that Activity Monitor on his 2010 MacBook Pro showed it pegging all four
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, all four virtual cores, for a long time so his recommendation was to check Activity
⏹️ ▶️ John Monitor and wait until things have settled down and things really are idle before judging his performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I think I said in the last show, I did. Like I’m looking at Activity Monitor, I’m making sure that I don’t see the
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloud D process still grinding away or whatever. I let it, I really let it get
⏹️ ▶️ John into that steady state over the course of many days where I didn’t see anything in top or whatever and then just tried to,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I was judging it after it had gone to an idle state. It’s even worse of course if it’s in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ John doing face recognition or even uploading to iCloud or anything like that. But that’s something, if someone, if you are
⏹️ ▶️ John trying Photos for the first time and you’re not accustomed to launching Activity Monitor and
⏹️ ▶️ John sorting by CPU and seeing if anything is grinding away, there will be a period of time after the import
⏹️ ▶️ John is quote unquote done when things are still going on. So you should let it stew.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See if you ran iStat menus, you would know immediately whether
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco taking up all your CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John or not. No, because it doesn’t tell you which processes is hurting your CPU. For all you know, it could be kernel underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John task and then that doesn’t help you much, does it? You don’t see nothing about it. No, you just click on the thing and it shows you all
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just click on the dock icon and it shows me all the top processes too, including their names and
⏹️ ▶️ John I can sort them. And when I’m done looking at it, I quit the app so was not there updating every three seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John scanning the entire process table in the operating system acquiring and releasing kernel locks over and over and
⏹️ ▶️ John over again with nobody looking at it. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John called empathy for the computer. So you try to instill in a programmer should all
⏹️ ▶️ John have empathy for the machine because it makes you write code that isn’t stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re done. I don’t even know where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a real thing though, empathy for the computer. I keep saying that and people look at me like I’m crazy, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys feel that to some degree when you write code? That like, I don’t know, just something as simple as like hoisting
⏹️ ▶️ John an invariant out of a loop. Why are you doing that? You just do it like, because you have to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John put yourself in the position of the computer and of the different machinery and you just feel guilty about making some process
⏹️ ▶️ John be repeated over and over again when you know the result is going to be the same. It’s It’s like you’re just wasting
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody’s time. You’re just wasting battery. You’re wasting, I mean, it’s negligible, it’s stupid. It’s premature optimization,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. But if you have no empathy for the computer, then you just do everything in a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And your entire program is just one giant gray haze of, there’s no hotspot.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like a complete soup of super slowness. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John with the computer is an important skill that programmers should acquire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So why do you program in a scripting language?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because you have everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the computer, but you don’t want to be flipping toggle switches. You don’t want to be setting your bits and magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ John core memory by hand. It’s a balance, but no matter what level you’re programming at.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing between those two. Well, no, what I’m saying is it’s even more important when you’re in a higher level
⏹️ ▶️ John programming language. Now, it’s to some degree you don’t have control over some things, but if you know that, for example, if you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John a high level programming language and function calls are relatively expensive compared to how fast it is to say jump
⏹️ ▶️ John to an address an assembly program, you’re like, do I really need to
⏹️ ▶️ John get all the arguments into the right registers to put the address I want to jump into the right register to jump to that register
⏹️ ▶️ John to like do all the stuff for the return value, put that into the right place return, pop the stack, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John make a new stack frame do all this stuff to really need to do that. Or could I inline that here like that is empathy with the compiler and
⏹️ ▶️ John at every level that works. And in a higher level language, you have to know which things are slow in your high level language and which things which things
⏹️ ▶️ John can you avoid which things you can’t you and any language doesn’t matter what the language is high level low
⏹️ ▶️ John level media level there’s some things that just apply all the time like don’t do something over and over again when the result is going to be the same
⏹️ ▶️ John you know don’t make copies when you can pass around references if your language supports that concept
⏹️ ▶️ John like it doesn’t really matter how it’s implemented you could well I can make a copy but under the covers I know the language is smart
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to do copy on right and it’s really efficient or whatever but I don’t know I guess it comes down to somewhat knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John how your language is implemented but I think it’s more important when you get into higher level languages, not less, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because the higher level languages have the potential to put something innocuous that if you knew how the language is implemented,
⏹️ ▶️ John or know what is particularly slow in this language, you’d be like, Oh, man, really? Seriously, whereas when you’re down in assembly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might feel some empathy. But in general, almost everything you do as fast as very little, you can write a line at a time, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make things super slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, this took a turn I was not expecting.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. You will thank me someday when you need it. Trust me, it is so, so worth Backblaze. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So, John, tell us about HardLynx.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a little bit of confusion from people about HardLynx. I don’t think I did a good job of explaining it last time. I just assumed everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John knew. Did we put the HardLynx link in last week’s show notes? I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember doing so, but I’m not 100% sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, we’ll put it in this one. So, there’s a tweet for someone saying, you know, about that photos.app creating
⏹️ ▶️ John HardLynx instead of an entirely new library, and then sent me a screenshot showing the photos library
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to the iPhotos library saying yeah I thought you said it wasn’t gonna make a whole new library but look this here’s a whole new library I’m like yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John but like the other one is full of hard links and he said really it says each one is 45 gigabytes so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about hard links we’ll put the link put the link in the show notes you can read this long thing for one of my old OS 10 reviews about
⏹️ ▶️ John it from back in 2007 but the short version is if you’ve got a file on disk
⏹️ ▶️ John you can think of it as a blob of data that’s sitting on your disk somewhere and it has a name associated with it and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how you you can find that data you this name is you know you go through this name food
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever I don’t know food.txt it leads to these this set of bytes
⏹️ ▶️ John that name attached to that set of bytes can be said to be a link it’s how you get how do you get to those bytes on disk
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well I look them up by going food.txt right you can make another name
⏹️ ▶️ John that points that same set of bytes on disk called bar.txt bar.txt is one
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get to that same blob of bytes and food at Texas one way to get that same blob but still just one blob of bytes,
⏹️ ▶️ John two different names that point to it. Those are hard links. So now that set that set of data on disk
⏹️ ▶️ John has two hard links, every file can be said to have one hard link and conceptually in the Unix problems, not in the HFS
⏹️ ▶️ John plus implementation, which we don’t really want to talk about. But anyway, because conceptually, every file
⏹️ ▶️ John on disk has one hard link. And that’s like the name of the file. If you make a second hard link, we call that second one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s the hard link. The first one was just a file, right guys. But the second one is a hard link to the file, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Really, if you want to think of it correctly, conceptually, the first one is also
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard link. There’s a little number. If you type ls at the Unix command, a shell prompt, the ls
⏹️ ▶️ John command will show you a number of links to this thing. Most files have a one next to it. If you make a
⏹️ ▶️ John hard link to a file, it’ll go up and you’ll see two. That’s what this article shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And since they’re pointing to the same bucket of data, oh, this gets more complicated. If you use an editor
⏹️ ▶️ John that edits the file in place, that does not do what many editors do, which is make a complete copy of the file
⏹️ ▶️ John and then rename it on top of the file or do some other update. If you use an editor that actually edits the file in place,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you edit through either one of those names, you will be editing the same, like it’s just one bucket of bits.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you change it, and then you look at the contents of foo.txt and bar.txt, they still, they both point to the same
⏹️ ▶️ John blob of bits. If you edit it through bar.txt, it changes the same bits. You could edit bar dot text and then
⏹️ ▶️ John show the in the output of what’s inside food at text and it will show your edits Right, that’s how hard links work
⏹️ ▶️ John If you get info on any of those files if you list the file with LS if you get info in the finder They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John all say how big is it? They’ll say well how big is the big bucket of bits? Oh, it’s like it’s two megs It’s 25
⏹️ ▶️ John megs. It’s five gigs They’ll both say that the tricky part is that if you have say
⏹️ ▶️ John you had a hard drive that was like 100 megs and you had a 99 meg file in it you make 75 hard
⏹️ ▶️ John links that 99 meg file and every single one of those 75 files will say I’m 99 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m 99 meg it’s like how can you have this many 99 megabyte files the disk is only 100 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John how could they all fit it’s just one set of 95 megabytes each hard link does not add any data so
⏹️ ▶️ John when photos.app makes a new photos library and you see it right next to your iPhoto library
⏹️ ▶️ John inside both of those libraries are a bunch of you know one of them has the quote-unquote originals and in
⏹️ ▶️ John HFS plus it really is an implementation difference under the cover and the other one just has hard links but if you get info on both of them
⏹️ ▶️ John in the final they’ll both say that they’re the same size after they’re done roughly like oh I’m 45 gigs and so am I
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s only one set of 45 gigs worth of photo data on your disk now there are files that are private to the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos library like the metadata databases and so on and so forth but the photos themselves that’s what it’s making hard links to those
⏹️ ▶️ John are the things that take up the majority of the room so yes it is very confusing and if try to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John math, if you just get info on these libraries and try to do the math and say, okay so I’ve got a 45 gig library
⏹️ ▶️ John and a 45 gig library that means I’m using 90 gigs of space and my total drive space, like the math
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t add up, right? That’s just how hard links work. And to make things more complicated, as
⏹️ ▶️ John I said in the last show, as you edit files with the Photos app, it will take
⏹️ ▶️ John something that was a hard link and change it into a copy because it doesn’t want to mess with your iPhoto library. So if you make a modification
⏹️ ▶️ John to the actual photo file which I don’t even know if it happens maybe if you change the geotag data which as Casey said you can’t even do at
⏹️ ▶️ John this point but if you were to change that locally it will it will make a copy of it
⏹️ ▶️ John and they will slowly diverge from each other so they do that to keep them separate that’s not a property of hard links the application
⏹️ ▶️ John itself is doing that the application of course is itself is it free to do anything like that this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not has nothing to do with the nature of our links or anything as I said isn’t you see in the demo link if you have two
⏹️ ▶️ John hard links the same blob of data and you go through either one of them to edit that data they both see the changes the The photos
⏹️ ▶️ John application itself prevents that from happening sort of manually by making a copy when it needs to.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s confusing. Hard links. This talks about sim links to which are a different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos and creating confusion for people who now can’t tell how much free space they have on their desks anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So how about shared albums?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was a bummer. Lance T. Hildebrand said, even if you try to do that crazy system I said
⏹️ ▶️ John last time of like throwing all your photos into the family photo library that share with your whole family. you
⏹️ ▶️ John can only have 5000 photos in any shared album. So that wouldn’t have worked anyway. But it kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of makes sense like you shouldn’t be using shared albums as a way to share your whole library, there’s just be a way to share
⏹️ ▶️ John your whole library and have it read right, but there isn’t. And unless you have fewer than 5000 photos, you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t even like manually do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How about what goes on with a MacBook Air with 7800 photos? It
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about performance last time. And it was like, well, I’m using a 2011 MacBook Air, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just slow because I don’t have a lot of RAM or have a slower computer. So mucho
⏹️ ▶️ John Spanish says that he has a very small library on a 2012 MacBook Air, just 7800 photos. And
⏹️ ▶️ John keywording is still slow. And then our friend will Haynes says very slow for per photo operation
⏹️ ▶️ John operations, and he’s on a maxed out iMac 5k. Also, he couldn’t sync iCloud at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just am not really sold on why this is something I need in my life right now. Like the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being able to get to any of my pictures in the photo chooser in print, like especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iOS, that sounds appealing in principle, but hearing how much it slows down your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS device anytime you go to the photo chooser, that sounds freaking terrible. And just a lot of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying I’ll never use photos by any stretch of the imagination, but it just does not sound like it’s something I want in my life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It’s working great for me. The only problem I’m seeing with it is what many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have reported and John I think you said this too which is that the the photo picker takes a long time to come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for anything that uses that lists the photos so that the biggest time I see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is after I’ve taken a new picture on the iPhone when I want to tap on it to bring it up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view the picture I just took there’s like a five or ten second delay we’re just nothing happening you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the phone is frozen and then it comes up that that’s the time I’m really seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues besides that which is annoying but not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major of a problem it’s just a frequent annoyance besides that I’ve had no problems and that’s the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing that I would imagine and hope that they would be working on like they would notice that and work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that out in the next version of iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah these are just tweets talking about the slowness and like slow is not a measure of anything
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like it feels slow to them and I think especially with single photo operations or like doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something like keywording that you think I’m not asking you to run some crazy you know filter
⏹️ ▶️ John or blur you know there’s no image effects there’s not a massive amount of data it’s like please just associate
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyword with these three photos right these people are reporting that it is quote-unquote slow
⏹️ ▶️ John because they think that the thing that they’re doing shouldn’t take as long as it takes and I agree with them but we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any measures so you never know like Wilhane says it is very slow on per photo operations
⏹️ ▶️ John on a maxed out iMac 5k. Is that because he just expects it to be really fast on an iMac 5k?
⏹️ ▶️ John His operations may be five times as fast as mine, but he has greater expectations because he’s got a brand new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m willing to accept some slowness. But bottom line is, perception wise, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it feels slow and some other people seem to agree and I’m depressed that even people with small libraries
⏹️ ▶️ John and even people with much newer fancier computers than me also are feeling that operations feel slow
⏹️ ▶️ John that shouldn’t be slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe somebody didn’t have enough empathy for the computer when designing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t. It didn’t like it. Well, that’s the type of that’s kind of a design thing. Was like, why might it be slow? Well, I can tell you from
⏹️ ▶️ John experience that once you get into large number of items in a SQLite database, SQLite
⏹️ ▶️ John SQLites performance characteristics, especially for like inserts into like a database
⏹️ ▶️ John or a table that has thousands or millions of records like you can just run that experiment yourself. Make a new SQLite
⏹️ ▶️ John database with a simple scheme start inserting stuff and see and do a timer and say how many rows can
⏹️ ▶️ John I insert per second and watch that performance slowly slowly get worse. So as you get into the millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of rows, things get pretty grim. There are things you can do to help with that. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if photos is using SQL databases anywhere in its implementation, which I can imagine it is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if that has anything to do with keywords, which I can imagine it might, that might explain some of the slowness in
⏹️ ▶️ John large libraries. I don’t know, I’m just guessing. And so the empathy with the computer is, you know, You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t write SQLite, and SQLite is a great database, but am I using the right tool for this job? Would it be better to add them
⏹️ ▶️ John as extended attributes or as individual plist files, or you know, I don’t know. That’s more of a design thing, the empathy
⏹️ ▶️ John with the computer at the micro level.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s macro level empathy. Not Marco level empathy, macro. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, what happens when you delete a photo, John, in the new photos app?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, that’s the thing. So, yeah, last time I was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the prospects of using iCloud sync as a backup strategy. And it’s like, well, if everything’s all synced, if something ever
⏹️ ▶️ John goes wrong, that wrongness could also sync all over the place and then your backups are host because they’re not really
⏹️ ▶️ John backups. It’s like RAID where it’s just, you just have a second copy of whatever is currently in the thing. So whatever is currently
⏹️ ▶️ John in the library is screwed up. Whatever is currently in all your automatically synchronized copies can also be screwed
⏹️ ▶️ John up. So many people pointed out that if you delete a photo in the photos app, it doesn’t get deleted immediately, it goes
⏹️ ▶️ John into kind of like a trash type holding area. And I think it’s kept there for like 30 days before it’s purged or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is good. But mostly what I was afraid of was the app going crazy and suddenly thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John these photos never existed. Let me just get, you know, not as if it thinks I deleted them by dragging them
⏹️ ▶️ John to the trash or hitting the delete button. But if it starts thinking because of some weird syncing thing that photos in my library just
⏹️ ▶️ John never existed. And it says, oh, I need to rectify. I need to synchronize and rectify my state
⏹️ ▶️ John of the world with what the state it’s supposed to be in. Rather than it thinking that it saw
⏹️ ▶️ John a delete operation synchronizing that just thinking that all these photos here I don’t know where the hell these came from but I have no idea what
⏹️ ▶️ John they are like that’s what I’m afraid of not so much the manually deleting things whatever but it is good to know there’s a holding
⏹️ ▶️ John area where you can recover from mistakes where you delete because when you delete them it says are you sure you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete this from the cloud and every single one of your devices it tries to tell you like this is not just deleting locally this is deleting
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere and even if you do that it still holds on to it in this deleted items area to give you an out which is nice
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m still a little bit afraid of it and I would never use it as a backup strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of backups, God forbid something happened. What do you do to restore your photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey library from a backup?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know because they haven’t tried that. But I thought about it like restoring like your iPhoto library for backup,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just a bunch of files on disks. If your thing gets hosed, just you know, throw
⏹️ ▶️ John out your iPhoto library, go to your time machine backup, your super duper backup, your backblaze backup or whatever, and just like
⏹️ ▶️ John find a previous version of your iPhoto library, which appears to be one file on disk, which really is just a pack
⏹️ ▶️ John a bundle with a folder with a bunch of stuff in it and you drag it back and you’re back in business, right? What happens
⏹️ ▶️ John if your photos library that you have iCloud synced, like something gets wrong with it or it gets hosed
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, can you just say, okay, well, I’m just gonna throw that library out and drag a new one from a backup
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it in place and launch it? What happens? It would work fine locally. I’m sure that would work locally, but what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John when you launch it in iCloud? Like, is it aware that you just did that? Or is it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John whoa, whoa, this library and this does not match what I expected to do? Does it forcibly
⏹️ ▶️ John make it like the old broken one was or the one with the missing data? How do you recover from
⏹️ ▶️ John a backup in that scenario? And when I was thinking about this, one more item, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me if you guys remember this. Do you remember when iPhoto and Time Machine, the integration between them was first shown, and maybe when
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine was first announced in a keynote and they tried to show you you use Time Machine from within iPhoto? Am I just imagining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember that being a thing where you could use Time Machine specifically within certain apps, but I don’t remember anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about iPhoto specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, whatever happened to that? Like using iPhoto specifically from within certain apps? That’s not a thing, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You mean Time Machine within certain apps? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s probably some kind of API that nobody ever uses. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a public API. I think they showed it, like you could do it within photos, you could do it with an address book. There was a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of apps that they showed that you could do it within. And the reason I’m thinking of that is like, I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to think what would be a safe way to take a photos library
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had iCloud synced that is hosed in some way, it’s damaged, it’s corrupt, you accidentally deleted stuff and you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna say, actually I wanna go back to the state things were a week ago and you go pull your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John library from your backup, which you have, it’s just a bunch of files on disk, you put it back in the same place the other one was
⏹️ ▶️ John and you launch photos and then what happens? And I don’t know what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would imagine it’s just like the import process. When I imported my 25,000 photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically had an empty iCloud library and I dragged them all into this app from my previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrangement of files, and it slowly imported them and uploaded them all. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would imagine, as long as your cloud photo library state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be cleared, which I don’t know if it’s as easy as going to the all photos view and hitting Command A, Command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delete, I have no idea, but. But do you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that before you pull the backup? Like what if you can’t even launch photos because the library’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so corrupted? Like how do you get it to understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it to launch and accept the on-disk library that you pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John from backup as the current state of things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly I have no idea but the files are all there. The library is laid out very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similarly to an iPhoto library.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah you do have the out of just finding all the JPEGs, pulling them all out, making a new
⏹️ ▶️ John empty library. I think what you’d have to do, and I’ve done this before with address books, that’s why why I thought of it like
⏹️ ▶️ John a few times address book has gotten hosed in some way and I’ve been like look I have all these backed up because address book
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if people know this but in the not address book is called context now sorry in the context application that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple provides they provide a way to make a complete backup of your entire context library and please everybody do this at
⏹️ ▶️ John least once a year because contacts cloud sync is not that reliable and you’ll be happy to have it so I got
⏹️ ▶️ John into a state where contacts were hosed wasn’t actually my contacts it was my wife so it was more dire than
⏹️ ▶️ John you would imagine might be. And I needed to fix it. And what I wanted to happen was
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a backup and I wanted to say, look, I cloud just forget everything. Just just start
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to I’m going to import from a library and I want you to believe that you have zero contacts everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was super, super hard to do because every time I thought I’d done it, I’d tell it to import the library
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it would do this crazy merge with what thought was still in the cloud and hose everything again. Took me so long to beat this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John into submission to say you have nothing start from zero. Anyway, that’s what I’m afraid of with the photos library. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what the I don’t know what the restoration plan is. Even in this scenario where you say like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just going to extract all the JPEGs. And then just have to convince photos that it has nothing like
⏹️ ▶️ John just really because you can be fooled like the contacts would be like, Yep, no contact zero contact zero contacts everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s fine. Okay, import and then it would do this crazy thing. And I couldn’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so real time follow up from underscore s underscore. There’s a I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a KBase, but anyway, there’s a page on Apple’s website. How do I remove all iCloud Photo Library content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my iCloud account and devices? On OS X, go to System Prefs, iCloud Manage, select
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Photo Library, then select Disable and Delete. Once you turn off your iCloud Photo Library, you’ll have 30 days to download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your library to at least one device, and blah, blah, blah. So that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s good that there’s a button, because that was always the problem with Apple’s things, it was like, oh, there’s no button, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John place to go, it just works, it’s magical, but sometimes you just want like people always want I want a button that
⏹️ ▶️ John says no, please synchronize now. And this button is the, I want a button that says just forget everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John just start over from zero. Uh, and my, my past experience with like back when they had sync
⏹️ ▶️ John services and everything that trying to get it to start from zero was like
⏹️ ▶️ John basically not possible for a regular person. Sometimes you needed like a special application that like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple internal people would use that like, because it wasn’t just on your machine. Like you could delete everything off your machine. if you
⏹️ ▶️ John could find all the secret hidden files and everything, but there was stuff on server somewhere and you had to convince those servers to dump all
⏹️ ▶️ John their information and you had to know like, you know, what what requests to make to what service of authentication
⏹️ ▶️ John to convince it to really really reset things. So I’m glad that Apple is learning and making this easier
⏹️ ▶️ John by putting in an actual GUI and having a you know, a knowledge base article about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our second sponsor this week is Casper. Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, very much so. I do not care for memory foam. I think it feels weird and it’s way too soft.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of sponsors, how are the shirts doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I haven’t checked today, but they’re doing well. We have, at this point, yesterday we had already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matched and slightly surpassed our goals for our sales from last year. So thanks, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we have now sold, what, five or six white shirts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think six, right? Six, double the number from last week. Woo!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thank you, everybody. You’re running out of time if you want to buy one of these shirts. I think you have what, like six days left or something like that? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time you hear this podcast, most likely we will not be talking about it on
⏹️ ▶️ John the next podcast because the sale will be over. So if you want a shirt, now is the time to go to the website
⏹️ ▶️ John and get it atp.fm.com. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s talk about Apple Watch experiences, starting with the grooves.
⏹️ ▶️ John know if that’s where we’re gonna start. Marcus is not looking at the notes, so he has no idea what we’re talking about. But I wanted, this item is here
⏹️ ▶️ John because, Uh, you know, one of us has an Apple watch and we wanted to hear about it, but I put
⏹️ ▶️ John a sub item in there because someone tweeted at me that after wearing Apple watch for three days, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a groove starting to show up on their wrist, right? Where the little heartbeat monitor thing presses
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I think this person may have their watch on a little bit tight. Uh, oh goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say so. I remember back when I wore watches that I would get sometimes marks from the band
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Uh, I don’t think this is an Apple watch problem. I think this is a a watch band
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly too tight problem But it did remind me that Marco had said that he wasn’t sure he was all that
⏹️ ▶️ John Excited about the little dome on the bottom like feeling that rubbing into his wrist So I guess we could start
⏹️ ▶️ John there because Marco actually does have a watch unlike me and unlike Kate yours hasn’t come yet Right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey. No mine is I don’t remember when I the shipping update happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is now due to arrive anytime between the very very very end of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey May and the Thursday I’m in San Francisco. Nice. Which is the most first of first world problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ve just taken off my watch, which I already have because I’m luckier than Casey and woke up earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve just taken it off after 14 hours of wearing it so far today, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely no sign of any dimple on top of my wrist where the thing pushes in. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no markings from the band or anything. So yeah, I think Luca Soldany
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably just wearing it too tightly. Maybe you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong band for you. Most likely it’s just set too tightly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wrist shape problems too. Look at that. It’s a little bone bump on his wrist there. Possibly another
⏹️ ▶️ John Italian like me with weird wrist shape wrists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also appears that he’s wearing it on his right hand. I don’t know if that makes any difference. Probably not because the dome is centered in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. So probably is not the issue. One thing I did find with the tightness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the bands, I ordered it initially in order get it on day one. The only configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could get on day one at the time that the store showed up for me was the Milanese Loop, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was interested in it, but I wasn’t planning on ordering it on day one. But anyway, I got that, and so I had that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few days. Since then, I actually met up with a nice guy in Connecticut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wanted the Milanese Loop and had the one I wanted, which was the black leather classic buckle, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that just looks like every other leather watch strap ever made. I traded with him for that. So I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now had a couple days with each of those. So a couple days with Milanese, a couple days with Classic Buckle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like them both a lot, first of all. They’re both really nice bands. The Classic Buckle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is extremely lightweight and probably the softest in the lineup besides maybe the sport bands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is just a very comfortable band. Milanese is a lot better than I thought it would be when I ordered it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is extremely nice. It really kind of splits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference between formal and informal. is not too formal or too blingy or too flashy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is extremely nice. I was very happy with the Milanese. It does not pinch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your arm hair, what a lot of people think that link bracelets do. The Milanese does not. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing you got to be careful of when you’re putting it on is the part that overlaps back on itself, so it’s like sandwiched together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get arm hairs pinched in that when you put it on. So just be careful of that and you’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Milanese also I think is the coolest on you because like the air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can flow through it and it’s not leather sticking to you or the fluorolestomer sticking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you the way that does. So I would say it’s the coolest. The reason I didn’t want to keep it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because I was getting some some skin irritation late in the day after wearing it for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time and some people mentioned this is an issue with metal for them a lot and I don’t think it’s a nickel allergy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on some quick research but just some skin irritation I was getting, it would just itch a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot like crazy at the end of the day and that doesn’t happen with leather. So I’m glad I switched but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both really nice bands. I would have been very happy with the Milanese if not for that issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So overall I can recommend it. I will say though I have had an issue with both of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how tightly I wear it because if you wear it super tight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t find that very comfortable. If you wear it a little bit loose on yourself, not so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like rolling around, but just so it’s more comfortable. It makes it harder to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel the taptic taps. And I’ve had that issue a lot where I just miss the tap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does tap me and I just don’t feel it. And then later on, I look down and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my little dot and I say, oh, I missed a notification. And I know that there’s been an issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the WSJ reported earlier today, there’s been an issue with faulty Taptic engines that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be the reason why there was a short stock in the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch. I don’t think mine is faulty. It seems to work just fine. It just isn’t extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong. It’s like moderate strength. And so to fix that problem, and I have it on the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strength setting, it’s still not that strong. There’s a setting that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically plays like a strong vibration before any Taptic alert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it like vibrate and then tap tap. I’ve enabled that for most of the time I’ve had it and that has helped a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That makes me feel it every time. But without that I will frequently miss them. And I think that’s because I’m wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a little bit looser than I’m supposed to be because I don’t like the feeling of it digging into my wrist so strongly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t seem unreasonably loose. Again, like it’s not it can’t get misaligned. It can’t roll back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the sides of my wrist. Like it’s not that loose. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Have you done your like the your heart rate or whatever? Like because that’s that’s the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people want to have it on tightly is they want accurate readings from the biometric
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors and if you’re not ever looking at that then you don’t really care how those is except for feeling of vibrations but have you ever looked at your
⏹️ ▶️ John heart rate and seen if it’s like reasonable or crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not but it is tracking my activity a lot and it does register
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exercise time so it has in its built-in rings of activity it has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the it has you know calories which are related to steps I think and the standing and then it has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle ring, which is the one I always fail to get. The middle ring is time spent exercising
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is like you know time at an elevated heartbeat and that seems to be measuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual realized time I’m spending at an elevated heartbeat. It seems to be measuring that fairly accurately for me throughout the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. I don’t actually use the workout app to measure like my heart rate as I work out because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t work out. So I’m not a good person to ask about that but it seems like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not wearing it so loosely that that would be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the lump thing isn’t bothering you, but basically you are intentionally making it a little bit looser so that so it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m wearing it at the looseness level I’m wearing it at not because the lump thing but because just the entire strap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the lump thing is not the limiting factor in the comfort here for me. I thought I thought it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that you don’t you don’t want to feel the strap like squeezing your wrist basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Yeah, that’s all it is. And and I so I found with the classic buckle there are two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes that work for me. Oh God, that’s to be a terrible title. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them is like the really snug one and one of them. Oh, God, I’ll just stop talking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Come now. We are adults. We can talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the watch. Okay. So anyway, yeah. So I found one that works for me. Oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Milanese is also really nice because you could make smaller adjustments than any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band in the lineup. So if you want to be like a little bit tighter, a little bit looser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can align it to any of those rows of the woven links. You can just like slide it over by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one row. So you can really…
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like the toaster dials. You never know. How do I get it exactly how it was last time? Oh, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the rows look the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assumed before having it that that would annoy the crap out of me, and I did fidget with it throughout the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would frequently change it. I like make a little micro adjustment throughout the day, like to tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a little bit. I didn’t feel like that was annoying to me as much as I would have thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love about the classic buckle, I don’t love how, you know, just like any other watch, you kind of need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like set it down to put it on, you gotta like hold your hand against the table to put it on, right, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hold it against your leg or something like that. Like you can’t quite do it freehand very well in midair,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Milanese does not have that problem. I also don’t like with the classic buckle that, you know, just like any other watch strap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the little like loop that holds the tail, like the excess tail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that holds it on the band, I keep slipping out of that and it keeps catching on things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not crazy about that. So I might end up giving the leather loop another try at some point in the future. But so far, I’m very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this overall. How many times have you taken it on and off a day? The Milanese,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had that first, I was a little more paranoid. I was taking it off whenever I’d go wash the dishes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything like that. Now that I’ve had the leather one for a a couple days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little more confident in it, a little more familiar with it. So now I’m just keeping it on all day. I took it off just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, just so I could look at my dent or lack thereof on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist from the follow-up. But yeah, I’m just leaving it on all day now. So it’s not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John So how is it affecting your life, if at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, I had not before this, I had not worn a watch since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high school. I, like so many people, especially among among geeks like us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so many people, I thought what do I need a watch for? I have I have my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my pocket that always tells the time. Turns out having a watch to tell time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually really nice. I know the watch people are all like, oh god we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been trying to tell you that for years, you know, but yeah that was news to most of us geeks who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been you know brutally pragmatic and like, well we have this clock in our pockets all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it turns out the the move from pocket watches to wristwatches a million years ago, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good reason behind that. It’s actually more convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I’ve ever looked at my phone to see what time it is, at least not during the day, because like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the geek, I think the the geek groove for
⏹️ ▶️ John people to tell the time is you look slightly to the upper right of your field of vision
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s in the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, right. Staring
⏹️ ▶️ John at all day is a screen with the times in the menu bar. I cannot think of a time that I have looked at my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John when I, you know, during work or, you know, during home, like, cause basically any place I’m sitting in my house, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a, uh, a clock and my sight lines intentionally so I know what time it is. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I’m sitting at my computer, there was a clock in my sight lines all the time. And none of those scenarios do I ever reach for
⏹️ ▶️ John my iOS device, which is also probably in reach to check the time. But many people on the go, like when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John outside, you don’t have a clock in your sight line. They do use their phones. And I think Serenity Caldwell tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier that someone had asked her what time it was and she fished out her phone to check the time while wearing the watch. So
⏹️ ▶️ John old habits die hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing is I was just about to say that even though I am more often than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in front of either an iOS device or a computer, no matter what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing, if I need to look at the time, my first gut reaction is to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my wrist. And of course, there are times Sometimes I’ll look at my iOS device, I’ll look at the upper right-hand corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen, but generally speaking, or maybe the cable box, like you were saying, John, but generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first place I look to find the time is my wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ John The cable box, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I forgot with whom I’m speaking. But yeah, so I stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wearing a watch for a few years. I’d worn one pretty much all my life. And then after I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got an iPhone, I was like, you know what, this is redundant and silly and I don’t need to worry about this. And then I think like the battery in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch died or something like that. And so it wasn’t worth fixing it. And so I just use my phone. And then about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year or two ago, I started wearing a cheap watch again. And I’m glad because I like having the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my wrist. And I’m excited probably after WWDC to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than just the time on my wrist. So we’ll see what happens. But I am feeling quite smug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco’s decided that this watch thing isn’t so bad because I do believe I tried to tell you, Marco, that having something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dangling on your wrist really is not the end of the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder how easy it is to rewire these things like for the people who have the ingrained habits of going
⏹️ ▶️ John for their their their phone in their pockets just the time how long will it take them to retrain for like the look of
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrist and I’m also thinking like for the wrist move for Apple watch wearers
⏹️ ▶️ John you have I imagine a lot of them will become accustomed to a slightly exaggerated motion to really
⏹️ ▶️ John ensure that the watch activates because you know sometimes the worst is if you bring it up and it doesn’t activate so
⏹️ ▶️ John like they may be training themselves into that habit and the reason I think about these habits and how easy they are to change is I know
⏹️ ▶️ John basically since for half my life at this point when I am wearing my contact
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses I often take my finger and push my glasses up the bridge of my nose when there
⏹️ ▶️ John are no glasses there. Basically I’m poking myself between my eyes with my finger and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had contact lenses since I guess middle school basically as young as I could possibly get
⏹️ ▶️ John them so I am not new to the experience of not wearing glasses. Nevertheless, every time I am wearing my contact
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses, I will at least once push my glasses up the bridge of my nose that are not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s understandable. And when I went from being a not watch wearer back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a watch wearer, it only took me a few days, maybe a week to start looking at my wrist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again to find the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I thought this would be a longer adjustment for me so far. And so far, it really hasn’t been a long adjustment. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, yeah, a couple days that now I’m looking at my wrist for the time and I’m enjoying it. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist detection thing, where it tries to detect when you move your wrist up and turns the screen on, I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mixed success with that. That still needs some work. Overall, it works for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about three quarters of the time, but that’s like 25% failure rate is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not good. So that could still use some improvement. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it certainly exacerbates the issue that the screen has to turn off so quickly. Oftentimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will try to do the motion who show the time and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like it’s misinterpreting it as first it thinks I flip my wrist and then it thinks I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so the screens on for a split second that turns back off again because it’s like it like cancels it you’re looking at it wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah exactly yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I I don’t that part it could use some work but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall I really do like it a lot I I like the way it looks I like the way the watch face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks I’ve looked at other watches ever Ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since Apple announced they were going to make a watch, I’ve been looking around at what other people think are really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches. Every time I pass a watch store in the mall or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll look in the window and just kind of look at the watches there, look in the airport stores that are all crazy and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I look at other watches, I have never really seen anything that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really good looking. I know there are some out there. I’m sure everyone’s gonna then send me their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the picture of the watch they think is good-looking and say oh you didn’t see this one and yeah I mean you might be right but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never looked at any other watch and and said really I really want that and this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look at this on my wrist the way I’ve set up I use the the utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face with with a fairly minimal set of complications on it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the way this looks to me is really nice like I really enjoy just the way to watch face looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just as a timepiece. I enjoy it and the other the other functions it does are really great too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even just that part I’m extremely satisfied with because I I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like it for whatever reason I just like it I will often look at the time just just to enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the watch face looks I will say there the complications which are the little features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can add to show like the temperature or your calendar events or whatever in various areas of of the faces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I share a similar opinion as I believe Jason Snell who wrote about this and Casey used it as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The complications are a mixed bag. I think many of them are very useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of them I would have some design tweak to. In general, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 90% satisfied with the watch face availability that I have, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last 10% is kind of a killer. If I prefer a digital watch face,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’d be a little bit less satisfied because the digital options are not that great. One of my favorite concepts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the watch face is the solar one, which shows the big arc of the sun throughout the day. I like knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much sunlight I have left so I know when the latest I can walk my dog and be in the daylight basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That watch face is frustrating because there’s no complication. If you want to also show the temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on screen or also show anything else on screen, with that face you can’t do it there’s no there’s no customization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that face furthermore if you’re on that face and I think one or two others like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solar system anyway if you’re on that face if you hit if you scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wheel slightly on the digital crown while you’re trying to hit it to go to the home screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any slight scroll is interpreted as you’re moving the Sun around in that watch face and it cancels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the button push and so you’re like stuck in the watch face and And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found that very error prone when I was using that face where I kept accidentally scrolling slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I touch the wheel and not being able to go immediately the home screen that I wanted. So that was frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part once I found what I wanted which was the utility face I’m very happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with it as a watch. It is really quite nice again you know like you like you Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like Jason I would I would make some small changes to the complications like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like the empty state for things like the timer or when there’s an event where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calendar thing when there’s when you have nothing for the day it says no events in these big letters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why can’t it just be blank you know stuff like that like the the blank states of these things could use some help I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine set with a with a timer at the bottom so I frequently will start a timer for like brewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tea or cooking something and the timer when when nothing is set it has a little timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon next to it it has the word word set which is dumb just have the timer icon. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I need the word set? I know that when it’s empty you tap it and it brings the timer that’s great. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need that? So I do like having these things on the watch face. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommend if you’re getting if you’re getting the watch if you’re setting it up I do recommend keeping it simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe that could just be personal preference but I I find that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happier the less stuff is on my watch face and the fewer glances I’m using. And the advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, there’s information density reasons, there’s stress reasons, but just like there’s also battery reasons, not have all the stuff updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. And it’s also easier to navigate when you only have a few things that you really care about. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to see, it’s easier to scroll, there’s fewer things to scroll through. So I recommend keeping your watch setup very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple. But you know, people will figure that out for themselves, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. How about repairability? Because iFixit has had a teardown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it It was, I felt like it was fairly surprising, even knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full well that this thing was not large and was going to be jam packed. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunned by how much stuff is crammed into that little tiny case, especially since my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recollection of trying on the watches is that they were not terribly heavy. I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link bracelet weighed quite a bit, but the watches, the watch watches themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were not terribly heavy and gosh, there’s a lot of stuff in there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do we think that the S1 is going to be upgradable in the future?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this teardown thing to remember the iFixit teardowns is everything is zoomed way in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no matter how large the devices, they fill the frame with the thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like, you know, because I finally, by the way, I finally saw an Apple Watch in person,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually on somebody instead of in a store still haven’t gone to a try on. But anyway, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John much smaller than I thought they would be. Like all of Apple’s pictures, they look huge. Many people have bought the 42
⏹️ ▶️ John and thought they’ve mistakenly got the smaller size, the 38 or whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re smaller than you think they are. And so in these iFixit pictures, you’re like, wow, look at all that stuff in there. The key
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is not look at all that stuff. The key thing is look how small that stuff is, because if they zoomed out to a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John length, you’d realize how microscopic those things are, because they’re zoomed way in to make the entire watch fill
⏹️ ▶️ John the frame. So that’s the thing that strikes me that it seems like a lot of stuff is like, oh, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you know, it’s like a little TV dinner. You have component A and component being component C, but those components like the
⏹️ ▶️ John size of like pinheads, you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco microscopic.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s an amazing feat of miniaturization. But yeah, looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote I pulled out into the show notes, you’re looking at the S one module, the little sort of, oh, the S one, and they keep showing it
⏹️ ▶️ John as a little component. It could be replaceable. Here’s what I fix it had to say when they got the s1 module out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch pulling this mess out is a destructive Procedure, but after ripping out some soldered connectors We got our first
⏹️ ▶️ John real look at the s1 Despite rumors and hopes of an upgradeable product the difficulty of removing the s1 alone
⏹️ ▶️ John cast serious doubt in the idea of simply swapping out the internals I Fix it is usually pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John about like sort of doing surgery on apple devices and getting them apart and getting the pieces out and They’re saying basically
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the s1 out you have to just rip off a bunch of things like it is destructive process
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose you could just rip out all the guts like just you know Shuck it like an oyster and pull everything
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it and just put entirely new guts inside it But even that it looks like the type of thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to be done With precision tools in a factory by people who you know people or
⏹️ ▶️ John machines that do the same operations, you know hundreds of times a day rather than just having someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the back room scrape this stuff out because What would it even look like to reseat all these things and re
⏹️ ▶️ John glue and seal all these things and reconnect all these connectors? It does not even if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wanted to have internal swaps It does not look good like I would feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John if they offered that service. I would be like thanks, but no, thanks I really don’t want the guts of this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled out and tried to be replaced because it would just never be the same again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean it’s like if you get like a laptop repair And it’s not quite repaired right and it’s like something like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seam doesn’t quite line up it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco? Yeah? Good luck with
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but no like That was the pre-unibody days. That was a real problem because I’ve opened up
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-unibody laptops and they never go back together the right way. Like the unibody ones are more sturdy
⏹️ ▶️ John in that regard but this definitely looks like one of those things where it’s like it’s a one-way operation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Assemble, seal, it’s your thing. Maybe they could do the battery because that’s kind of on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John but I even get worried about like because you see how they take the screen part off like it’s not there’s no visible screws
⏹️ ▶️ John that hold the screen on it’s just I guess it’s just glued and they just kind of like heat up the glue and pry the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John off and you’re like really? I mean it’s the same way that the windshield is stuck onto your car just you know
⏹️ ▶️ John much much much smaller I suppose so I guess it’s I don’t know I just feel nervous about things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are connected with adhesive. I trust the factory sort of the factory seal
⏹️ ▶️ John of putting you know even for windshields like the windshield was put on my car in a factory under controlled
⏹️ ▶️ John conditions under hopefully ideal conditions and yes if you get a crack in your windshield
⏹️ ▶️ John you can hire someone to come and take it off and put it on a new one and they’ll do it you know while you’re at work inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John parking garage that’s not ideal conditions are they heating up the adhesive to the right temperature is everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John just it bothers me as an anal redemptive person but anyway looking at this i fix it thing
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m thinking this was not designed to have the internal swapped and even if it could be done
⏹️ ▶️ John i would not want it done to my watch yeah i mean if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like basically all of the components are are on top of the S1. Like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S1 is at the bottom. And in order to take it out, you have to basically take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything out of the watch. It’s like a Porsche Boxster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. You gotta change the oil, you gotta pull the whole engine out of the car. That isn’t true, is it? No, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not. But I’m waiting for the Porsche people to come and yell at me. But no, for mid-engine cars, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John just much harder to get at the parts of the engine you need to get at, so the labor costs for doing stuff like that is much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I would not, based on based on how the watch is laid out internally and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different parts you have to disconnect and move and go around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to pull the S1 out. I’m with you John. I think this is clearly designed to be a one-way operation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think anything is going to be offered for upgrading these to the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the S2 or whatever. I don’t see that even for the editions. I don’t see it happening and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s solution is going to be just like their solution for everything else they make which is this is today’s model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then eventually we’re going to have a new model and if you want you can recycle your old one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but we were talking about the chances of Apple offering upgradeability specifically with respect to the addition
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s so darn expensive and who’s going to spend all that money only to spend all that money again in three years, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be the highest chance of having upgradeability. We talked about all the reasons they wouldn’t because it’s just not the Apple way
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you can afford one 10 to $20,000 watch, you can certainly afford to, right? You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John these reasons. One of the reasons we didn’t discuss was that these things are going to be so darn small and Apple’s going to want
⏹️ ▶️ John to wedge everything in that it possibly can. And if it came down to a decision
⏹️ ▶️ John between we could make it a little bit smaller, but it would make it
⏹️ ▶️ John much, much harder or impossible to do a component swap. Apple would always say make it a little bit smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re never optimizing for like, just look at go through the I fix it guide. So the past
⏹️ ▶️ John five or 10 years or however long I fix it’s been around probably not 10 years look at how much sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John empty space and extra stuff that used to be inside Apple’s laptops for instance and compare it to the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John one tear down where I don’t know if they have one of those yet I think they do but they do that there’s like nothing in there there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no like the number of pieces like they just want to get everything else out any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of framing mechanism or like cage or guard or whatever it’s that they just want to
⏹️ ▶️ John get everything out of there and just squish it down till all there is is like aluminum battery motherboard, like everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not essential has been removed, including key travel on the keyboard. So that attitude
⏹️ ▶️ John of like it would if it comes down to it, can we wedge more stuff in? Yes, by sacrificing
⏹️ ▶️ John the ease of repair, totally do it. And so that is that’s kind of what we were talking about. Like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to do this, but this is another aspect of why this is not the Apple way. Like I said, they still could on the addition say,
⏹️ ▶️ John give us your addition. We’ll just yank out all the insides and put in all new guts. They could do that like in the same way that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s MacBook Air could be sent away to what do they call the depot repair center
⏹️ ▶️ John the magical fairy land where the Grinch takes your Christmas tree to repair it. Like you can send your computer there too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then like something will happen. It always feels better to like, Oh, we’re gonna send it out for repair.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can always imagine that that repair facility is much nicer and cleaner and staffed by precision
⏹️ ▶️ John nano machines and robots and like, but it’s not it’s just a different people in a different room. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John try to think about it. Um, for your I still say Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John within the realm of reason say, by all means, bring us back your $17,000 watch. We
⏹️ ▶️ John will take the insides out and put in the insides of the Apple Watch two, which happens to have the same external case. They could,
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably won’t. Well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even Apple, when like when they do these deeper repairs and everything, a lot of the times like the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I fix it will do to like try to remove a battery that’s glued to the case. For instance, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. They just replace the whole whole case section.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does not take extreme measures in their repair departments to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disassemble things like that that are super glued in there and you’re never going to get it out. They don’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. They’re just replacing more of it and charging you for it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially batteries because if you bend it or poke it or puncture it, the batteries become
⏹️ ▶️ John big flaming things very quickly. So batteries they’re very careful with. But for For other things, they
⏹️ ▶️ John do have, I seem to recall someone telling me, for taking the iMac screens
⏹️ ▶️ John off and not getting dust behind them, they have rigs to take the screen off easily
⏹️ ▶️ John and repeatedly and blow out all the dust and do all these other things. Things
⏹️ ▶️ John that may be beyond what a regular person can do, the repair depots
⏹️ ▶️ John or the back of the Apple Store may be better equipped to do because they have special purpose tools just for this thing. reaches
⏹️ ▶️ John a limit where they say well it’s actually we since we’re the repair depot we don’t need to carefully remove item A
⏹️ ▶️ John from item B we just take the entire like top case thing and we get you a new top case or bottom case
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the heck you know what I mean and that’s that is much more straightforward that’s why I think for the edition watches if they were gonna do it
⏹️ ▶️ John they would take everything out of the edition except for the gold empty case and take entirely new insides with entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John new screen entirely new sapphire crystal everything is go slap it in there it’s just like one sealed edge
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is still possible given the I fix it tear down but not likely for all the other reasons we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about in the past about Apple just wants you to buy a new one so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will right I mean I think at best we would see something that is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a recycling program maybe with a better name maybe with better rates for that for maybe just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additions so maybe they’d have some kind of trade in thing but I don’t think you’re gonna get back the same watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you trade in with new stuff inside I think you might get back a brand new watch and you might get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some token rebate for the old one that you traded in. And even that, if they never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did that, I wouldn’t be surprised, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. But if they’re going to do anything like that for the addition customers, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the form it would take. It wouldn’t be you get back the same case with new stuff inside.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Microsoft had their first day of or I think it was the first day of their build conference,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is kind of the Microsoft WWDC coincidentally, it takes place in Moscone West.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were a couple of big announcements I was interested in. The first one was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visual Studio Code. Now, despite the fact that this has Visual Studio in the name,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of ways, it is not the traditional Visual Studio. But what’s interesting about it is one way or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another, regardless of the name, it is cross-platform. It will run on OS X, it will run on Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will run on Windows. Visual Studio Code, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a glance, looks like Atom, the editor that we talked about quite a long time ago that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey written by GitHub. It looks like Atom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with a little bit of Microsoft Flair on it. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, one of the really appealing things to it is it has really good IntelliSense. And in case you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what IntelliSense is, it’s the code completion and the little tool tip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that pops up that helps you complete code. And as someone who’s worked on Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit and makes his living working in Visual Studio, I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that IntelliSense is light years better than anything Xcode has to offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I haven’t used Eclipse for years and years and years, thank goodness, but I don’t remember Eclipse being any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. Well, anyway, so at a glance, it looks just like Atom. Well, come to find out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actually is Atom in some way, shape, or form. I haven’t really dug into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mechanism by which all this is held together, but there is at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a part of Atom included in the package, that is Visual Studio Code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did try Visual Studio Code. I tried it shortly after it came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things it promised is really, really good Node support, which as you guys well know, I’ve been really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in lately, and that’s what my blog is running on is Node.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to download it. I downloaded it, no problem. I ran it, no problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I opened up my project, my Camel project,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and one of the first things I did was try to run. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried to run it, and I got a message saying, well, you can’t because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have Mono installed. Okay. Well, in case you’re not familiar, Mono
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the cross-platform C-sharp compiler that will compile to OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X, it’ll compile to Linux, et cetera, et cetera. And all the libraries associated with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s cross-platform.net. So does it just make you tired for a month? And it also makes you tired for a month, and you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it by kissing people. Right. So it says, oh, well, you don’t have mono installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, okay, fine. So I brew install mono, and I get, I forget what version it is that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got, but I tried to run again, debug again, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it said, no, no, no, really, you don’t have mono installed. So I was tweeting in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also tweeting at code, which is the Twitter handle that Microsoft somehow got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how they landed that, but I tweeted at code and said, you know, I was saying, oh, this is weird. It’s not working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. right. Well, within an hour or two, the guy that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the introductory video, I think it’s Chris Dais. I probably pronounced that wrong and I’m sorry, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the guy who was in the intro video is tweeting at me saying, Hey, Hey, have you tried this? Have you tried that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? Like, can you imagine walking out of an Apple WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presentation, hell the keynote and trying something, and then Federico
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is tweeting at you saying, Oh, did you try this thing or the other thing? What? What?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what that means? That means Microsoft is hungry. It does. No, you’re absolutely right. Microsoft is showing hustle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take a lesson, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s so true. So anyway, so come to find out that Chris had a couple of really good pointers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it turns out that I had two copies of Mono on my computer. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure when or how I installed the first one, but Package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John management. One way or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another, I had. So I uninstalled the brew version of the homebrew version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I uninstalled the other one, reinstalled the homebrew version and sure enough, debugging worked immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had put a post on my website a while back about node debug, which is a kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sort of hacky, but still really nice debugger that works with the Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web inspection tools. I had tried that in the past and I’d really liked it. This is so much better though, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is, even though it is in no way actually Visual Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except in name, it felt kind of similar to Visual Studio. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hit F5, which by the way, I have mapped to the keyboard brightness. I don’t have it mapped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be X or excuse me, F5. And sure enough, it figured it out and said, okay, I’m going to go debug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it worked really well. And I’ve only played with it for a few minutes, but I’ve, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really impressed. It has get integration right there. It has Markdown preview and somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted at Gruber earlier today. I want to say it was Rich Siegel, but somebody tweeted at Gruber saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, did you ever think 10 years ago that Microsoft would ship a free editor, a free kind of sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of IDE for the Mac that does Markdown preview? And Gruber was like, of course not, no way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s true. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s really impressive. It’s a really impressive app, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of Ajita getting it going, but in the grand scheme of things, I really like it. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone loves their own text editor. I’m not saying it’s better than any other. This is not a vinyl is better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of situation. I’m just saying it’s worth checking out. And Marco, I tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at you earlier tonight, although I don’t know if you saw it, that they even have a PHP syntax highlighting and all that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which may or may not be very exciting. But I was impressed that it was that supportive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all flavors of programming languages rather than strictly speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Microsoft stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is clearly like, you know, part of the new Microsoft and realizing like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the fights that they can and should be fighting, the fights that they have already lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and where they can still have great value and where they can hustle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems like a pretty good move overall. I mean, my main question here is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will this stay a thing? Will this be followed through on and will it stay a thing? Because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Microsoft has recently not done that well and not even that recently, like, you know, in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10 years has had a hard time like following through on stuff and well, they’d fall.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’d fall through of the things they did succeeded in gain traction. You know what I mean? That’s been the problem. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like if one of those things caught fire, you sure bet they’d fall through. They would love to fall through, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re being kind of ruthless and like if it doesn’t catch on, okay, let’s try something
⏹️ ▶️ John else. Like all All of these things are not moves that are done from someone in a position of strength. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Apple. They’re not as bad as Apple was in the 90s, obviously, but um, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in a corner and when you’re behind, you can’t afford to do the old Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John way of like, you know, not invented here syndrome. We’re going to do everything ourselves. So why are they using
⏹️ ▶️ John electron, which is the framework that, that get help spun out of their atom project to say, uh, Adam is built
⏹️ ▶️ John on electron. It’s all anyway, but we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Like why are we using this web-based framework that uses
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s web browser engine under the covers to make quote unquote native applications
⏹️ ▶️ John using a web rendering engine technology? Like why don’t we write our own editor? We have, don’t we have
⏹️ ▶️ John our own editor? We wrote Visual Studio. Like, cause you can’t, you don’t have time. You need, if you want to do this thing, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John an idea, we have the strategy. We’re going to talk about it in a bit. It’s going to let us do all this cross-platform stuff. And we want to have an editor. We
⏹️ ▶️ John want people to let people develop on the Mac. Can we make a new Mac editor from scratch? No, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have time. like, how fast can we get to market and the old Microsoft was too proud,
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, too stubborn to, to do what they’re doing now, which is like, well, we can get to
⏹️ ▶️ John market pretty quickly. If we use this open source engine that GitHub used to make it editor, that gives us
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge head start. And maybe it’s not as nice as the real Visual Studio editor, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re going to port that to the Mac. And even if we did, it would be kind of cruddy. So let’s do what it takes to get off the ground.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just like Apple was like, can we make a modern operating system? We tried like three times and
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t work. Can we just buy somebody? And that’s what they did. Can we can we use the Windows NT kernel? Can we buy B?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we buy next? They made the right move there. But this is not something
⏹️ ▶️ John that that you do when you’re in the driver’s seat or anything. This is something you do when you’re behind. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s smart, and it’s expedient. But it’s also I’m not going to say it smells
⏹️ ▶️ John of panic but it’s it’s kind of sad to see like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that made Microsoft great was like they thought we can do everything ourselves and they they really could do everything themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John usually a reasonably good job of it the new Microsoft doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John time to do everything itself which is probably a good thing but you know
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t make Atom, GitHub made Atom, they didn’t make Electrum, GitHub did, they didn’t make the Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John engine, you know, Google did and Apple made WebKit and like the value they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John adding there. You’re right, Marco, they’re trying to add value where they can, but they’re standing on the shoulders of all
⏹️ ▶️ John the other companies that used to that they used to be the giants. And now they’re standing on the shoulders of all these other companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John some which didn’t even exist when Microsoft ruled the roost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s very true. But yeah, this Visual Studio Code thing, I really dig it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very brief amount of time I’ve spent with it. And it is far and away the best node debugger I’ve tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m a very amateur node programmer, so there may be some other package or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey product out there I’m just not aware of. But
⏹️ ▶️ John is there a comma in that name? No comma debugger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know where to go from here. So that was Visual Studio Code. You should definitely try it out. It’s free download.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s it’s worth at least checking out. The other really interesting thing that they talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, which unfortunately we haven’t heard a lot of technical details about yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is two different projects. One of them is called Islandwood and the other Astoria. Let me cover those in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reverse. Project Astoria is to allow Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps to run on, I believe it was Windows Phone only, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaguely similar to what BlackBerry did way back when. And basically any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey APK, so any Android app that’s been built, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t use any of the proprietary Google stuff. So my understanding of Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that there’s the Android open source project, and then as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of, is it superset or subset of that? I don’t know. As an addition to that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Google mobile services, which has things like Google Maps and things of that nature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If your app strictly stays within the APIs that are part of the open source Android,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you can take your APK, drop it in Windows, and it will run supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no problem. The thing that I haven’t been made clear, though, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is this working from a technical perspective? And I don’t know if this is like a wine kind of situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was a backer name for wine? Like something is not Windows or something like that? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, Wine is the app that allowed you to run Win32 apps on Linux.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And did that ever work on OS X? Was that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? Wine is not an emulator? That’s going to be my guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I was thinking of. Thank you. That’s what I was thinking of. Anyway, so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if this is like a Wine sort of thing or not. I’m not sure what the mechanism is for this working under the hood. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposedly you’ll be able to run certain APKs in Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without any modification whatsoever. So any thoughts on that before I move on to Islandwood?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this is another one of those days where an announcement is made on the day that we record, so none of us have
⏹️ ▶️ John really had time to read about this stuff or watch the thing. But my understanding from watching tweets from people who I think
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re talking about is that the iOS compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ John is you take your source code and you compile it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re only talking about Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I’m comparing and contrasting. You take your source code and you compile it and the Android
⏹️ ▶️ John one is you take your Android app and you run it. And that’s different. Like even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have the source to your Android app, I don’t think that’s how it works. I don’t think they say, Oh, take the source to your Android app and compile it like
⏹️ ▶️ John so that that makes that that that’s a big difference in how they’re going to implement things. If you’re not recompiling it,
⏹️ ▶️ John that means binary compatibility. But of course, the Android apps are written on the Dalvik VM
⏹️ ▶️ John written against the Dalvik VM, which is their don’t call it Java, Java VM. So there’s byte code
⏹️ ▶️ John involved. So why would they need to recompile it if they’ve got byte code, they can run it. The JVM spec
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably the Dalvik spec are something that they can reverse engineer or read documentation for.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s much more straightforward. And it’s not like wine because it’s not native code to begin with. It’s you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s this the Java bytecode stuff. Oh, interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. So that’s I think that’s how they’re getting away with. You don’t have to recompile. It’s It’s not source compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not like a wine where they’re like stubbing out a bunch of things. It’s like they’re they’re just implementing
⏹️ ▶️ John the Java virtual machine and the APIs that it links against, I guess. But you don’t have to. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John take your binary and run it. This is again from from not having watched the presentation and just seeing people’s tweets. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is my understanding. And yes, if I let the cat out of the bag about the iOS thing, which everybody knows by now, they’re doing that entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John differently that you have to have your source code and then you compile it against a bunch of their
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries, which are not Apple’s libraries, but hopefully have all the same APIs and are compatible and good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So that’s the Islandwood thing. And just like John said, you can take an Xcode project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and suck it into Visual Studio and then recompile it against a quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey middleware layer quote. And apparently magic happens. And then you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a Windows app. And not only is it a Windows app, but it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey universal Windows app. So presumably it can run on the desktop, it can run on a tablet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can run on the phone, it can run just about anywhere that’s Windows. What I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really interested to see is what exactly is doing all of this. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth pointing out this is Objective-C only as well. What is this middleware layer? How is this held together?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is really going on here? But I did read in Ars Technica, and we’ll link this in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes, or I think I I read it on Ars Technica, but somewhere I have read, that not only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does this Islandwood support just general kind of sort of cross
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compilation, but it even supports UIKit, and even more importantly than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey core animation. And if you’ve never written iOS code before, core animation is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phenomenal. And it’s an amazingly easy way to say, yeah, make that thing just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dance over to that side of the screen. And it takes very little code to make really, really fluid,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really impressive animations happen. And that’s in part why so many iOS apps look so darn good is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a developer, even, even one who has no visual chops like myself, you can make really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent animations really, really easily. And the fact that core animation got ported or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever is pretty impressive to me. So I’ve been told on Twitter that the session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they talk about the mechanisms behind all of this will be happening tomorrow afternoon, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thursday afternoon as we record this. Um, I don’t know if I’ll have the time to watch it anytime soon, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life has been a little busy lately, but I hope at some point that I’ll be able to check it out and report back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, on how this is all held together. Because this certainly sounds extremely impressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although we’ll see if it’s actually, uh, really particularly functional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in over the next few weeks. I suppose that being said, Candy Crush Saga, the bastion of excellent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey programming has already been running on this project Island would.
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds like they kind of pulled a new step. Do you guys remember a new step? I’ve certainly heard the name but it’s still be out there
⏹️ ▶️ John like so if you have Apple doesn’t give you the source code like all of Coco and all of UI kit
⏹️ ▶️ John like some of the Darwin source code includes some you know, I think it’s some core foundation stuff is in there whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, most of the stuff is not open source, but they do publish you know the documentation and you can get the header files
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the objectives these stuff like the API’s are designed are defined. And what they do is roughly defined. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you could just look at the APIs and the headers, and the documentation and use an actual Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out how things work. And you can make a work alike library for your platform. And that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of what GNU step is, it was trying to take the OpenStep stuff, which also wasn’t open source, I don’t know if it ever
⏹️ ▶️ John was, and say, we would like to be able to write programs with lots of square brackets on Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ John too. But they’re not going to give us their code. So can we just sort of reverse engineering and
⏹️ ▶️ John make a set of libraries with exactly the same functions take exactly the same arguments to behave in exactly the same way,
⏹️ ▶️ John but ours will be all open source. And that effort, you know, it’s like any sort of open source volunteer led effort.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very difficult to keep pace with with like Apple and all their engineers adding changes to
⏹️ ▶️ John Cocoa and everything. So I don’t know how far new step is, as kept up. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this effort seems like that I’ll be able to, you know, funded by Microsoft and a lot more people, if you’re going to compile my
⏹️ ▶️ John UI kit application source code, without having Apple’s code for the UI kit frameworks,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will have to have frameworks with the same names with the same functions in them to link against otherwise nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to work. And where are you going to get those from, you’re going to have to write them yourselves and make sure they behave in the same way as
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s do. And that is a humongous job. And that is so unlike Microsoft, because now you’re sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John signing up to try to keep pace with Apple’s rapid development of their libraries. And you’re telling
⏹️ ▶️ John people to, you know, not even port their applications, bring your source code over and it will compile
⏹️ ▶️ John on our platform as a way to get more applications for your platform. But like you don’t even have your own platform
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point, all you have is another place where you know, people are writing it’s Apple’s platform. And they can also,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, reuse that work to sort of go on your platform as an afterthought, but you don’t even own your platform at that point. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with the Android apps. Like, is why does? Why does Microsoft even bother
⏹️ ▶️ John having an API? If you know, I understand what they’re trying to oh, we need more apps on our platform, we can get
⏹️ ▶️ John more apps by saying, Hey, it’s really easy for you to take your existing Android or iOS app and bring it to our platform. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then do you even have a platform at that point? Who in the world is ever going to write against your API? Are you really going to put a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of effort into improving your API, you’re going to be spending all your time chasing these other API’s that you don’t even control,
⏹️ ▶️ John that can be changed in ways that intentionally or accidentally break your compatibility. Both of
⏹️ ▶️ John these companies could decide to sue you probably not Google because Oracle’s already suing them over the the Java stuff, but Apple could get cranky
⏹️ ▶️ John and be like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, like the Cocoa API is copyrighted, and you can’t blow up because that’s the whole Oracle
⏹️ ▶️ John Java suit, right. So depending on that shakes out, Microsoft might not be on strong legal footing.
⏹️ ▶️ John This it I’m interested in the technical details as well. But strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, like I see the benefits we were desperate, we need to get more apps on
⏹️ ▶️ John our platform, this is might be way to do it. And usually like file format wise, this is an approach that has worked for Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past of like, we can read WordPerfect format. I don’t know if that’s a good example because I don’t remember if
⏹️ ▶️ John they did that, but like the way to get, if you’re at a market and there’s an entrenched leader, you need your application to, you need
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it so that using your application is as easy as possible for the people who use your competing application. Like, oh, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a big deal. We can read your old files, we’ll import them. We can save in your old format. Like everything is great, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like sort of just be a smooth upgrade path because you’re not in a position to say, drop everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and come to our platform. tried that it didn’t work out. Now they’re trying to say it’s not a big deal. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you got an iOS app, but like you might want to make a Windows version of it too. It’s really easy. You can just bring your source
⏹️ ▶️ John code over, recompile it, a couple little tweaks here and there. Hey, why not? Right, guys? That is not a strong
⏹️ ▶️ John pitch. But that is, you know, that’s the thin edge of the wedge if you’re lucky. But if you’re not lucky, all you’re doing is just
⏹️ ▶️ John further dooming your own platform to never be a real platform that you control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I don’t think this really solves the problem of why there aren’t more apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Windows Phone and Windows, all the more modern Windows platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is really not that we were waiting for being able to share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same code, because you said, as you said, there’s tons of problems with that, tons of problems. As a developer, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would trust that to be a stable, long-term way to do it, first of all. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I come out there and if I, let’s say I move all my code into this thing and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compile it and it actually does work and I can chip overcast for Windows Phone using this crazy setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to then tell people this, I’m going to announce this, and then I’m going to get customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are on Windows phones who are paying for the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all based on this crazy setup continuing to work into the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s something that I would not want to rest my customer trust on and my reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. And it would definitely become yet another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I would have to maintain separately, yet another thing that would have separate support issues, separate bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would have all the downsides of a new platform in addition to just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive liability of this of this compatibility layer that it would all depend on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t trust that and the reason why there aren’t more developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making apps for the Windows phone system and all the, you know, the artists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably known as Metro and all this stuff. The reason why there aren’t more of these is not because we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting for our code to cross compile. It’s because a none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us use these platforms basically. You know there are some but it’s effectively zero relative to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. So none of the developers who are making the kinds of apps that people want to be in these platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are using them themselves and there just aren’t that many people in marketplace of buying these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms, especially the kind of people who would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing and able to install the kind of apps that we make. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big limitation right there. That rules out most enterprise customers. That rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a whole lot of Windows usage. So, you know, people who would actually buy these apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of apps that iOS programmers make and Android programmers make, people who would actually buy them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them, whether there’s any market there, that’s a very big question and they just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the unit sales to support that in the mobile platform and on the PC platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s usually not used that way. So there really is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason for developers to spend a whole lot of time on Windows Phone right now and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might change in the future but right now that’s it’s it’s just there is not justified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this isn’t going to change that anything they do on the code side is not going to change that they need to they need to change the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The market of their devices and of their platforms. That’s what has to change. I don’t know how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go about changing that, but there’s no amount of bribing developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or making things easier for developers that’s going to really solve that problem on a big scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you can see that the company that makes Candy Crush, what is that, King something? I forget what their name is, is not
⏹️ ▶️ John bothered by the sort of of reputation and support concerns that you are
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re like, it’s shovelware. That’s a term in the game industry for a reason. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can make a Windows version really easily. Why not? Sure, we’ll do that. Like, whatever, especially with games where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like not much native UI anyway. They either have the manpower to chase
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird bugs that happen on that, or they just see it as a small amount of incremental income for not much extra money.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is going to get more applications on their platform, but I don’t know if it’s a net win for them. And as for like
⏹️ ▶️ John addressing it, like, well, if you sold more phones, you have more software. And if you had more software, you might sell more phones. Like they’re trying it from every
⏹️ ▶️ John possible angle. Again, not that they’re in the same position Apple was in the 90s, but I get a similar vibe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like back when Apple was desperate, much more desperate than Microsoft, hope will probably ever be,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were willing to try all those ideas that people had been telling them for years they should do. Like, you know, try licensing
⏹️ ▶️ John your OS, try making a TV, try making x86 compatible things, Try selling your computers
⏹️ ▶️ John in Sears. You know, like they were doing everything that anyone had ever told
⏹️ ▶️ John them that you might wanna try. And all of them, you know, like there was reasons they hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John done them in the past. Right? The clones one is the worst one. It’s like, this is the thing that everyone would tell them, you should license your operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system. You should, and it’s like, with Microsoft, it’s like, you shouldn’t be so stubborn and try to invent everything yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use things that other people have. Allow iOS apps to run on your things. Allow Android apps to run on Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Make Windows free. Make Windows open source. like just all the list of like as we go on the
⏹️ ▶️ John list of the things that people have said Microsoft should try as it slowly tries them you realize they
⏹️ ▶️ John were always bad ideas or it’s too late or both so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know I’m I kind of like the new Microsoft and they’re doing exciting things but
⏹️ ▶️ John they I feel like they’re losing control of their platform I feel like they had a good platform and a potential
⏹️ ▶️ John growth path and just through a series of bad mistakes they’ve they’re are no longer masters
⏹️ ▶️ John of their own destiny in so many ways that it’s depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I agree with that. But man, is it interesting to watch, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so fun to watch what they’re doing. Even if they’re making more missteps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m not saying, I don’t know that they’re making missteps, but they are definitely desperate, like you said. But gosh, is
⏹️ ▶️ John And they do fail fast for the most part. Like, they’re trying lots of things. If they don’t stick, they move on. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John one respect, that makes you not trustworthy as a company, because people don’t want to buy your product, because they’re like, do
⏹️ ▶️ John I really want to buy that? Because if it doesn’t succeed really well, it’s going to be a dead end. On the
⏹️ ▶️ John other hand, they do need to find something that works. And so it’s better than picking a strategy that’s going to save the company
⏹️ ▶️ John and sticking with it for five years, stubbornly refusing to see that your strategy is not working.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they are, you know, like what was that? The Microsoft wristband thing? What is that called?
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Band, I believe. Yeah. So that I thought that was a reasonable product.
⏹️ ▶️ John But did it sell in big enough numbers that they’re going to make a Microsoft Band two and three and four? If you bought a Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John Band, are you going to be kind of sore that like, you know, I kind of like my Microsoft Band and they just not
⏹️ ▶️ John making one because it wasn’t a hit or because the Apple Watch came out and it couldn’t compete. Like, I don’t, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the balance is there. Should they abandon Microsoft Band because it didn’t work out? Or should they say you know what, it was a pretty decent
⏹️ ▶️ John version one product is differentiated from the Apple Watch. And interesting way, let’s make a version two into version three into version
⏹️ ▶️ John four. Um, I don’t, I don’t quite know what the right thing to do there. I think Microsoft is on much
⏹️ ▶️ John stronger footing with its Azure stuff because that is, they are the master of their own destiny there.
⏹️ ▶️ John That platform is different than Amazon web services and EC two and whatever the hell Google is doing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, it is a contemporary, it is in the running with all the other things that are out there. It has a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John good reports. It’s not the great things about that are all the good things about the new Microsoft. Don’t tie it to windows only.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t make it a Trojan horse to try to get our technology into other people’s things, be open, use JSON, accept other languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John be really good at what you do. That I think still is their flagship. That and obviously Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John are two flagship non embarrassing, no excuses. No stupid Microsoft vs for
⏹️ ▶️ John the most part except a little bit on the Xbox one products, but Windows at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything involved with Windows, and Windows on phones and Windows on computers and Windows on tablets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I don’t know. It’s, it’s interesting to watch and, and I am, I am very surprised by some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moves they’re making, but we’ll see. And I’m, I’m definitely going to try to watch the session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow afternoon and see what the technical, um, explanation is behind all this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t think it’s really going to solve anything for them for all, for all the reasons that both of you guys expressed on top of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, even if I could cross compile, say fast text for the sake of argument, I could cross compile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast text. It’s going to be on an operating system that has a wildly different paradigm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than iOS. And so it’s going to feel out of place. Like this, this has a ton of issues that associated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. What am I testing it on? Am I going to go buy a Lumia just to test for fast techs? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many problems here, but I think they are trying to cover all the bases and they want to be able to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you know what, this, this Windows phone thing didn’t really work out, but we did everything we could. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even cross compiled objective C. That’s how serious we were about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know what it just it just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Yeah, how did that team? How must that team have felt when Swift was announced?
⏹️ ▶️ John To have this objective see cross compiling all this stuff and then they announced like Seriously, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if maybe they didn’t even start this project until after but I had to assume that it’s so much Work that it was happening then
⏹️ ▶️ John and like that’s what everyone said. It’s like Well, you know, you’re kind of skating to where the puck
⏹️ ▶️ John was on the whole objective see cross compiling thing there at least it seems that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yep all right thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week backblaze Casper and Harry’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ John now the show is over they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin because it was accidental it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm, and if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s, so that’s Casey Liss, m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental They didn’t mean to Accidental Tech podcast So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there anything else we have to talk about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you more about the watch I mean So on this week’s Connected I haven’t listened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet Okay well I’m gonna spoil one part of it Is this a nose spoiler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a nose spoiler so Mike Mike was saying that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch is really not a two is really not a one-handed device like you know the hand that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s being worn on can’t interact with the screen unless you have some crazy hand that I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen before, but for the most part most human hands won’t be able to interact with it from the hand that’s wearing the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to use your other hand to actually touch the screen or the buttons. So really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a two-handed device. It’s not like a phone you can use entirely within one hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the same hand holding it can be using it unless you get a 6 plus. Watches are not that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Mike was saying that he is already on many occasions used his nose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to touch the screen on the watch even going as far as to hit buttons with his nose to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reply to text messages which is Awesome, and they all made fun of him unconnected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for saying this however I’m here to say that I have done that too I have not gone as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing buttons But I have used my nose to Wake up the screen to show me the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the wrist thing is failing and I need to see the time for
⏹️ ▶️ John something May I offer my gross suggestion? Absolutely my gross suggestion and also
⏹️ ▶️ John my suggestion is someone with a very large nose is that your tongue is probably a more precise device. Pointing device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a gross suggestion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t want to get my screen all wet
⏹️ ▶️ John or lick it. That’s true. I said it was gross. I’m just throwing that out there. If accuracy is your concern and
⏹️ ▶️ John germs are not, or you want to strengthen your immune system by taking in lots of foreign germs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As someone who is blessed with a particularly large schnoz from…
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you talking about? You do not have a big nose. I do have a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m half Italian and half Jewish. How do I not have a big nose? You don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a big nose. You have you have an average nose. Oh, whatever. Well, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental nose podcast. We can all compare our nose sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo’s nose is the only boring small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John anyway. Thanks being here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s so many jokes I can make here, but I’m gonna let it go anyway. So I use my schnauz, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in bed to hit the back button. Oh God, hit the back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button on my iPhone. I don’t know why I do that all the time, but I do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a watch to try it
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Wait, wait, wait, wait, why to hit the back button like in a web browser?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like the the upper left hand corner of the screen, because my hand isn’t big enough to reach the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upper left hand corner of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. Why don’t you just do a hand shimmy? Why are you using your nose? You’re over there using your tongue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not. No, I’m not using my tongue. I have I can use I can hit everything with one hand on my phone. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a watch. I’m just saying for the people who find themselves like carrying a bag of groceries and having the watch and they need to hit a specific
⏹️ ▶️ John button for Mike specifically, I don’t feel like I could hit it with my nose. I feel like my nose touches the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire screen or none of the screen. It’s just not a precision pointing device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, either way, it’s so much quicker than the hand shimmy to just smack the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn phone with my nose and so much easier. So
⏹️ ▶️ John have you injured yourself doing this? Because that That would be a tough injury to explain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but the amount of times I’ve dropped my phone onto my face, unrelated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to using my nose as a pointing device, is immeasurable. I’ve done that so many times,
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Are you like laying on your back and have it propped on your chest?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, typically I’m holding it up, and maybe it’s like wintertime and I only have one hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the covers because I’m cold. And so rather than doing the shimmy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or pulling my extremely comfortably warm hand out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey covers, I’ll just smack with the nose. Does your
⏹️ ▶️ John wife see you do this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah. Oh, she’s stuck. We’re married. She’s stuck. There’s nothing she can do now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just saying, if I saw somebody do that, I would take a second look. I’d be like, what is going
⏹️ ▶️ John on? And I think if I saw someone do the watch with their nose, especially, again, if they were like struggling
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bag of groceries, I would like understand. But if an able-bodied person with two free hands
⏹️ ▶️ John is hitting things on the phone with their nose, I’d be like, that just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read right to me. I feel like there are better options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that someday I get to see somebody else out in the world in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real life hit their smartwatch with their nose. I’m trying to think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just said that I’ve done this, but I don’t think I’ve done it in public. I think I’ve done it in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house. I don’t think I would do it in public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think I would be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embarrassed by that than I would be by like picking my nose in public.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, it’s like it’s no worse. It’s probably actually better than the thing that I’ve done myself. Like when
⏹️ ▶️ John when coming into the house carrying a bunch of things like putting something in your mouth so you can get like
⏹️ ▶️ John putting you know, I’m not your phone but like holding something in your mouth so you can get a free hand to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something, you know, like when you’re carrying a lot of things using your mouth as a third hand
⏹️ ▶️ John to hold something And usually what you’re holding is just as gross or grosser than
⏹️ ▶️ John your watch might be. You know what I mean? I don’t do that. That’s gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, you don’t carry a lot of things, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I carry them in my hands.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but when you have a lot of stuff and you know, or even if it’s like someone calls you on the phone and you want to answer the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you have your keys and you have something else, you put your keys in your mouth, pick up the phone, you know, you see it in movies all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know I’ve done it myself. And you do that sort of lip curl under things. not actually like touching
⏹️ ▶️ John your mouth mouth to the thing you’re holding. It’s just as bad. Yeah, probably. Anyway, I think the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John germaphobe thing of like I don’t want to put anything in my mouth that might have germs on it. Like if you do that, that
⏹️ ▶️ John will not lead to a strong immune system. You should be taking dirt filled with animal poop and shoving
⏹️ ▶️ John it into your mouth when you’re an infant and blah, blah, blah. Oh, wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, man. And rest assured that your toddler either is or will be in both of your cases doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, so they are strengthening their immune system, lay off the antibiotic soap.