132: Digital Hearth
26 Aug 2015iPad “Pro” challenges, which Mac to buy for home, mouse design, and what John’s doing this summer.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- John's 802.11ac device (via @_adamluther)
- John's Wi-Fi Routers
- What computer should Casey buy?
- Mouse design
- Overcast upgrades at Linode
- John's adventures with Safari pinned tab icons
- Challenges of an iPad "Pro"
- Cintiq
- Mark Gurman on iPad Pro
- iPad: A Consumption Device, After All? by Lukas Mathis
Sponsored by:
- Igloo: An intranet you'll actually like.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use code ATP15 for 15% off.
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Chapters
- Intro: Casey’s Tom Bihn review
- Follow-up: John’s router
- Sponsor: Fracture
- How to open CD cases
- 15-inch, Mac Mini, or iMac?
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Overcast’s Linode upgrade
- Cats and mice
- John’s summer adventures
- Sponsor: Igloo
- Challenges of an iPad “Pro”
- Post-show: Touch everything
Intro: Casey’s Tom Bihn review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so yeah, so I posted my mega review of my beloved Tom Bihn cadet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I’ve just put in the chat you may shower me and shower me with praise about how marvelous it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this one of those bags? It’s like that’s just covered in like Various like buckles and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straps and nylon things and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know There’s there’s plenty of pro level photography if by pro level photography. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm, how would Sean Blanc and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John take pictures of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this isn’t it because it’s just not but how would I take pictures of this when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretending to be Sean Blanc and Marco? Oh, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’ll work. These pictures are actually pretty good there I mean I can nitpick them if you’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them I didn’t have the Focus or the aperture was all wrong the one where the bag is open the big part of the bag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bits of it are out of focus. I should have the very last one. No, no, no No, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong with the very last one? No, no No I wasn’t all the way down
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the bad photos aren’t your fault cuz I was looking at these on my phone and the like the the fabric pattern
⏹️ ▶️ John that repeating a pattern thing when it’s shrunk to small sizes and it looks crazy I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t realize until I looked at it on my Mac here that it actually is a uniform color and it is not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that is it the more a how you pronounce that the more effect like when it when it scales it down I
⏹️ ▶️ John cleverly avoided trying to pronounce it waiting for any you suckers to fall on that sword
Follow-up: John’s router
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you want to do some follow-up, we should probably do some follow-up. We could start with Adam Luther,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wrote in to talk about 802.11ac. John, would you like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to correct the error in your ways?
⏹️ ▶️ John Last episode, I mentioned that I didn’t need to have 802.11ac in my house because I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any 802.11ac devices, but Adam Luther was the first person to point out that that’s not true. My iPhone 6
⏹️ ▶️ John does 802.11ac. So there you go. It was with me
⏹️ ▶️ John all along. Other than that though, I think I don’t have any because I don’t think the 5s had it right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think the iPhone 6 was the first one. Well also like how useful is that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically transferring large files to the iPhone is limited by a lot of factors including wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also including like this with the right speed of the flash. Can it really write any faster than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 802.11n speeds or is it more just more like well if you’re if you have crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range to the base station or if you have a crappy signal and you’ll get a little bit faster on AC than you would under
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I don’t even know if that’s true that’s speaking of I guess we could put this in the section
⏹️ ▶️ John of the follow-up of my Wi-Fi base station story the Wi-Fi base stations have
⏹️ ▶️ John started arriving I say multiple because Marco despite saying that he was going to get back to me on
⏹️ ▶️ John which exact base station he had he instead of getting back to me he just sent what he had yep you know you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John say no I wanted to get rid of it Right. And so it arrived. And so I’ve got that stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Apple’s current thing, right? Like yours is the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation. Did you enjoy the Nexus seven as well or whatever that is? God took so
⏹️ ▶️ John long to charge. The only charger we have that has that plug in it was like the Kindle charger,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and it must be not like
⏹️ ▶️ John not high voltage enough. So I left it plugged in for like a day and a half till it finally started up. I tried. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Nexus seven I tried out. I was using the YouTube app like maybe I can just use it to watch YouTube videos. It’s just another little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to toss around the house. but the YouTube app was like there’s an updated version of this app available and it was weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to be told that like inside the YouTube app in like in the I guess with the little web page it was rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John for the video So I was like, alright I’ll tap the thing that it wants me to go to and it took me to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Play Store or whatever it is Then it says this version of YouTube app is not compatible with your device and I said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John never mind So it was kind of disappointing. I got him. I got an email with it You forgot to delete all your
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts and I tried to delete them like swiping sideways on them and all my iOS gestures are not working
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how to use Android but it’s not bad for something to just maybe check your email
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I like the iOS Gmail app better than the Android one which surprised me maybe I just need to get used to it or this could be an ancient
⏹️ ▶️ John version but it plays YouTube videos so it will probably find some home in our house
⏹️ ▶️ John given to some child to watch YouTube on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t think that one’s 8 or 2 11 AC either so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey can you answer some my support email while you’re in there yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow and of course a bunch of other people who saw my tweets are
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping me their old flat like the flat uh airport extreme the ones that I
⏹️ ▶️ John like uh one of those arrived and I hooked it up and used it and I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John had to call Verizon to get that to release the IP because I didn’t feel like waiting a long time I just couldn’t like I used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to with the Verizon one get it to release before I disconnected uh and this time nothing I did
⏹️ ▶️ John would get it to release so I actually had to call them and it was pretty painless I didn’t I talked to one person they knew what I was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John knew what I was talking about immediately and they just did it and that was fine I mean it wasn’t you know wasn’t that painless
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to still wait for the on hold time of like five minutes or whatever and then
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway so the flat one this is the model 1408
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe a 1408 works better than my other one the signal travels farther I
⏹️ ▶️ John can you know because there’s some rooms in our house that we just couldn’t get the signal before and now we can so that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because that one had I think it had two revisions and they looked the same identically on the outside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the newer one there were some tests maybe on an on tech a long time ago and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I initially bought that one because they had shown that the range was dramatically improved in the later
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, mine was really, really old. So yeah, and these in general, Apple’s things were not known for having good range
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was a big deal when Apple started improving it was like finally the range is not horrendous. It’s merely like, you know, middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the back or the Apple, you know, the Mac oriented websites would review it
⏹️ ▶️ John in comparison to the old airports. And so compared to the old airports, it was a huge improvement. But compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John contemporary, even compared to just the Verizon router with a little, you know, that what seven year old router
⏹️ ▶️ John that they gave me, that one had better range than any of the airports. But anyway, the new flat airport work great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then eventually Marcos arrived. Remember Marcos, the reason I didn’t want it well, two reasons. One, it’s like that big vertical tower
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy, because it’s the same case that they use to put the hard drive in for the time capsule. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John only the, the plain old router one doesn’t have a hard drive in it, but it’s got the same case with the place where
⏹️ ▶️ John the hard drive would be with just nothing in it, which is just silly. I mean, it’s a, it’s economies of scale, so they don’t have to have two different,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, devices to manufacture. But anyway, uh, and it’s really tall and I like the place
⏹️ ▶️ John I have mine is, is, you know, I, I, I was envisioning it being kind of like the flat one, but gone up vertically.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually smaller than that the footprint. So the footprint is smaller, but it’s taller vertically. And the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John of course that this thing has a fan and that offends me you know I don’t want I don’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John fans I don’t like the idea that it needs a fan because it means that it gets so hot that passive cooling isn’t enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that it needs to have active cooling in and of course the design of the thing doesn’t have any holes on the top of the case so they had just made
⏹️ ▶️ John it a chimney case then passive cooling would have been fine never mind all the empty space in there where the hard drive is supposed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there’s a question do they even need the fan is the fan only there for the hard drive in a time capsule version and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no point in it to the other one could you stop the fan with the thing overheat, but of course the main thing is I don’t want anything that makes noise,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything else that makes noise around here, especially since when I’m playing Destiny, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John within non-outstretched arm’s reach. It’s like right next to the monitor that I play Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John on. So if it was gonna make any noise, I was gonna hear it. Well, let me tell you, the fan in this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing totally passes my 40-year-old year’s test of silent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am surprised. You could A, B test this thing behind a screen. Is it turned on, is it not? I could not tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could absolutely not tell you what it was. Now, maybe if you were a younger person and you had better hearing, you could tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like no one was home in my house, no cars on the road, complete silence. I put
⏹️ ▶️ John it on and moved like, you know, an arm’s length away from it. I can’t tell that it’s on. Put it right up to
⏹️ ▶️ John your ear, yeah, you can hear it. It does make noise. Like there is noise there, but from arm’s distance, I am now old
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that I can’t hear it. So getting old does have some benefits. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hearing slowly starts to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice. And so I was testing, I’m testing the signal strength between like the flat one and the tall one, and like
⏹️ ▶️ John AC and not AC and separate five gigahertz network and non-separate five, a non-five gigahertz network.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of a wash. Like it’s hard to, without real devices for testing or whatever, if you just go up
⏹️ ▶️ John and do like speed tests and signal strength tests going by the number of bars, there’s too many variables involved
⏹️ ▶️ John here for me to tell. I don’t know what it is. Is it the neighbors, what their wifi is doing? Is it some neighbor using a microwave oven?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like who knows? Both of them have much better signal than the previous one, but I can’t definitively say that
⏹️ ▶️ John the tall one in my house anyway is any better than the flat one. So anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to eventually decide on which one of these things I’m gonna keep. They all work with my printer, they all imported
⏹️ ▶️ John my router configuration just fine. Like they all work, and all the ones that I don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John I will just give away to someone else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can pack them all in a box with nothing between them and just make a big brick. And send it to Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Yeah, like Apple, even with this tall one, I still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple is like at the top of the class in terms of signal strength and distance and stuff. Because every time they do a test
⏹️ ▶️ John of just the entire world of third-party routers, there’s always some other model that gets
⏹️ ▶️ John better signal strength and better distance than the Apple ones. But what the Apple ones have going for them is I can use Apple’s apps to manage
⏹️ ▶️ John them, I can import my old configuration, and it works with my printer plugged in via USB.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will also like to point out, in the realm of very, very quiet fan technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Tiff got her 5K iMac last fall, In order to expand the storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we bought a little Thunderbolt SSD enclosure. It holds four SSDs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it had this really loud 40 or 60mm fan in it. I went online and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did some research. I used to be a quiet PC nerd. I have purchased Dynamat before, and it was not for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my car. Anyway, so I did some research on what is the quiet fan to buy today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I discovered Noctua fans. So all I did was I took out the old fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a standard fan, standard plug, put in one of these Noctua things in there and the sound difference is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible. Same airspeed really that I could tell, like you know roughly, I mean it is just incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how quiet fans are today when they’re designed to be quiet. And it’s kind of sad how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still aren’t designed to be quiet, like the one that came in this multi-hundred dollar Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosure for no reason at all is incredibly loud. Anyway, so yeah, Noctua
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another way speaking of bags and enclosures and I don’t know if I ever blogged
⏹️ ▶️ John about this I probably should but I’m sure I’ve talked about in the show One of the ways to build
⏹️ ▶️ John loyalty for any product that you’re selling that is a physical good
⏹️ ▶️ John Over the long term. It’s not a good way to like get your company off the ground maybe but over the long term is to
⏹️ ▶️ John Pick a few essential things about it that you won’t compromise on mostly having to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John durability So if you’re selling enclosures aside, we’re going to use the absolute most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John fans We could possibly find and we are just going to either raise our price by the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John that that hurts us in terms of you know how much extra that fan costs or take
⏹️ ▶️ John eat into our profit margins with it or like bags we are going to Find the world’s most reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John zippers and buckles and we’re gonna be like Volvo like every time one of our bags gets
⏹️ ▶️ John Damaged in some way we’re gonna replace it for free We’re gonna ask them to send us the the one that broke and we’re gonna look at the failure
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to figure it out And keep improving and improving so that eventually if your company stays in business And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know for a couple years you start getting a reputation of get blah blah blah enclosures there They’re solid
⏹️ ▶️ John their power supplies never fail. Their fans are silent get blah blah bags They the seams
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t rip the zippers don’t break all the buckles work And if they don’t they replace them like this
⏹️ ▶️ John could be say like oh, you’re just telling everybody be high-end It’s isn’t a great to be high and everyone needs to be snap on right you need to be the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John most expensive of whatever you’re going to be. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think you just have to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable reputation for quality. I mean, I think this does eventually push you up market, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like Weber grills or whatever, or eventually you’re kind of cashing in on your name and even
⏹️ ▶️ John though your product may be reasonably good, you just keep charging more and more for it. You have to try to stay in the middle, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say Craftsman tools, not the best quality tools in the world, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they gain their reputation for being, if you break our tool, you can bring it in and we’ll replace it
⏹️ ▶️ John for free forever, and we’ll make it reasonable quality, and I think they have a
⏹️ ▶️ John good reputation among customers. I’m trying to think of other brands that are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. L.L. Bean is very similar, I’d say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, again, it starts to push high end, but I’m trying to think of like, I mean, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is one example, but they’ve gone for something else. They’ve gone for aesthetics and that type
⏹️ ▶️ John of quality. They haven’t really gone for durability. Maybe, I don’t know, I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of that Sony Walkman that was yellow with the big rubber gaskets all
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that Sony ever had the reputation, but that particular thing had the reputation. Or I don’t think more of like
⏹️ ▶️ John power tools and stuff like that. But anyway, in the world of computers, I wish there were more manufacturers who,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, more successful manufacturers who differentiated themselves on durability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and I guess, I mean, it’s been tough in the PC industry at least where even the phone industry consolidation,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just been a cutthroat business. And just if there were companies that distinguish themselves in that way, they eventually got gobbled up because it
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t enough to sustain them. I’m hoping as the insides of electronic components become
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more a commodity that there will be somewhere room to differentiate on this
⏹️ ▶️ John on these axes like not in phone. Can you think of a phone with a reputation for durability? I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean the Samsung one that’s waterproof I think is an interesting thing. Samsung changes what it does every
⏹️ ▶️ John year like you know they’re they’re just very they’re they’re not there’s no coherent vision for
⏹️ ▶️ John uh the reputation they want to do except for reputation as we make good phones that you want to buy, please
⏹️ ▶️ John give us money. And Apple is so concentrated on thin and sleek and
⏹️ ▶️ John beautifully designed, which is fine, like that’s the reason we like all their stuff and everything, but they’re not kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the ruggedized, you know, craftsman L.L. Bean type of aesthetic.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no manufacturer that’s like that for electronics. I think there should be, because we’re kind of at
⏹️ ▶️ John that stage now where it’s like maybe some people want that. there is a manufacturer like that for
⏹️ ▶️ John camping supplies, for mountaineering equipment, right? For car repair tools, I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John Snap-on. Like, those manufacturers do exist in the more sort of rugged manly fields, but I think there’s a place
⏹️ ▶️ John for them in electronics because it’s such a quality of life issue. Like I said, you buy that multi-hundred dollar Thunderbolt enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have like a two cent fan in there or whatever. It’s like, please, just spend the extra $15 for
⏹️ ▶️ John the expensive fan and add it to the price. If it’s a multi-hundred dollar thing, like I’ll pay it. And if you keep doing that consistently,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say, hey, if you want to buy enclosure, same thing with power supplies. If you want to buy an enclosure, buy this enclosure because the
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid power supply brick, oh, that’s, speaking of power supply brick, doesn’t die. And speaking of that, my
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi router, just as I was about to open up my wifi router with my son, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that we do when electronics dies, tear them apart, I thought, you know, before I crack this thing open,
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t I try plugging it into one of the power supplies that came with one of the replacement ones
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to see if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John the power supply that died or the router that died. And it turns out it was the power supply that got fried,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the router. So. Aw,
⏹️ ▶️ John My old one, I mean, I didn’t test it, test it, but my old one turns on, the light does, you know, like before
⏹️ ▶️ John the amber light wouldn’t come on at all. Now it starts up, eventually turns green. So I’m pretty sure it was the power supply. Which
⏹️ ▶️ John still means I would have been out of router because I was know I was gonna buy like a separate power supply for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we took apart the power brick, Apple’s power brick, you know, that looks like, that’s kind of like what
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like everything else they make, like a white. Rounded rectangle thing boy those
⏹️ ▶️ John are hard to open like I didn’t look at the I fix it guy I’m assuming it involved the heat gun, you know to loosen the adhesive, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a heat gun. All I have is Pliers screwdrivers and other blunt instruments
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was difficult to get open but inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Looked pretty nice and that thing lasted at
⏹️ ▶️ John least seven years probably longer before for power surge when not connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to a surge compressor killed it. So Apple usually makes pretty good power supplies. I’ve bought external hard drive enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ John that have gone through multiple of these power brick things. So those are usually the weak link.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah in fact like those power bricks are usually such cheap pieces of crap that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really have tried to avoid buying peripherals that use them. Like anything that can be bus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powered I will almost always pick that option now because power supplies like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either they die early or they start like they start a whine or a buzz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve had so many like cheap crappy power supplies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does well here like remember that article showing what it looked like inside Apple’s laptop power
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter and then inside like a knockoff it’s supposed to have made to look like and the knockoff they just showed all
⏹️ ▶️ John the components they were missing and and you know it’s just the knockoff basically ran wires from one end to the other
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple says fill with tons of like tiny surface mount resistors and trying to you know, like Apple does a good
⏹️ ▶️ John job with those things. Oh, I mean, they’re still, you know, get it, you can healthy Mart profit margins when you
⏹️ ▶️ John bought them from but that is that is a wise investment in money. They they look silly on the outside. They’re just these
⏹️ ▶️ John white, you know, rounded rectangle things with plugs and you think they’re all the same. And it could be argued that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaps out on the wires themselves because they have to be thin and beautiful and the strain relief isn’t there or whatever. But inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual brick parts of the power bricks, for the most part, Apple has done a good job with that over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be fair, one of the reasons why the Apple wires tend to die over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, part of it is they need more strain relief, really, and strain relief is ugly so they don’t do it. But also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it is they go on their environmental checklist and they want to be everything free. And some of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they’ve checked off the environmental checklist over the years are things that make really good long-lasting power cords, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might cause cancer or something. So, you know, they have actually had to change the materials over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to be things that maybe are more brittle, like some of the solid soft plastics and rubbers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like more brittle now and they’re a little stiffer and they crack and yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they change the material. Like when you’ve got a collection of Apple hardware, particularly the cords, power
⏹️ ▶️ John cords, USB cables, lightning cables, 30 pin connector cables, if you have been
⏹️ ▶️ John buying Apple devices for a long time and you actually save this stuff like I do, there’s two aspects
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. One, obviously some of them might age differently because something that is five, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years old, is like, was it always like this? Or did it just get like this because
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of dried out over time? So you can’t really tell. But two, even when relatively new things, the difference in
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the bendability, the surface texture, if it holds a kink, like something
⏹️ ▶️ John that always wrapped up in a tight little bundle in the package, when you unwrap it, how long does it take to get unkinked? I have some cables
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like a year old that are still kinked. Other ones curled right out into a smooth thing. Some of them feel smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them feel rough on the outside. Some of them are stiff. Some of them are floppy. They’re different thicknesses. I always wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s probably intentional, but it’s like you said, Marco, which part of this is we were removing
⏹️ ▶️ John harmful materials and this is the best we could do, and the next year we figured out we can do even better than that, still without the harmful
⏹️ ▶️ John materials. Which ones had the harmful materials in it? And so they were as nice as they could make them without the
⏹️ ▶️ John constraints of environmental correctness and everything. So large variety in cables
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple. I’m assuming the insides are similar. I was worried when they got rid of the lead
⏹️ ▶️ John the solder or whatever because the alternatives are known to not be as strong but so
⏹️ ▶️ John far so good on that front I guess.
Sponsor: Fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is Fracture. Go to fractureme.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use code ATP15 for 15% off your first order. Fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is vivid color prints of your photos printed directly on glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is really cool. So I have a bunch of these hanging around our house here. Fracture prints,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you know, they know, we take so many photos these days and your photos usually end up trapped somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down you know an Instagram or Facebook feed somewhere and you know they’re on the feed for two seconds and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they scroll past and then they’re gone and yeah you still have them but you never actually really look at them you never really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy them you never really show anyone else those pictures once they’re off the stream they’re gone and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fracture wants people to actually take some photos take some special photos or some non special ones doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter take some photos and get them printed and hang them up somewhere in your house or send them to loved ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as gifts and it is so easy to do their website is great you know you upload the photos the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preview everything you could scale or whatever crop whatever so easy to do and you get these beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prints now this is really vivid color photo prints printed directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on glass so here’s how this works there’s a very very thin piece of glass on the front the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos printed on the back side of it facing through facing the front so it can’t scratch off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the front is nice and glossy glass so it looks great and it’s so thin that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like the photo is printed on the top surface, you know, from any distance. It looks like the photo is printed on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because it’s so thin, it also is extremely lightweight. You don’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some giant heavy pane of glass ripping the nail out of your wall and crashing down on the floor. These things are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightweight for their size. And so behind the glass is a thin piece of like foam board.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that has like little holes in it so then you can hook picture hanging screws in that. They give you one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the box if you need it. Or you can go to the hardware store and get 10 for a buck or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things are nice, solid, lightweight pictures that hang on your wall and look great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time somebody’s in my office and they see my Fracture prints, they always compliment them and they always ask about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. These make great gifts. Fracture vivid color prints directly on glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use code ATP15 at FractureMe.com. Code ATP15 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15% off your first fracture order. Price will start at just $15 for the small ones. They’re
How to open CD cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five square it’s about the size of a little smaller than a CD case if anyone even knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what those are anymore do you guys remember the trick to open jewel cases properly you ever learn that their trick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah the three finger thing
⏹️ ▶️ John what you just open them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah no it’s on on the right edge so I have when you open a CD case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it like snap open after some force are you pulling from the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have this problem I just open them they hope they’re a hinge on the back they open like books right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no they they they snap open if you don’t do it right. So the way to do it right is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so take your left hand, take your middle finger straight up, thumb straight down, index finger kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So as if you’re making like a three, like a peace sign with your thumb out. Okay? Take your middle finger up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top, your thumb, you pull up the corners of the case lid from that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re pushing down on the case with your index finger. So you pull up the top and bottom while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re pushing down the center of the right edge. And then it swings right open. If you actually can find a jewel case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try this on. It’ll change your life if you still ever open jewel cases, but you probably don’t anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is unbelievably useful information for 15 year ago Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How did you not know this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I did know this and I think that is how I opened a jewel case, but I didn’t realize there was a right and wrong way. To John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, I just kind of opened it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a jewel case with me right here and either, like, I don’t see a wrong way to open
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t see what, like, I’m trying to open it in all sorts of wrong ways, like if I just take my finger and flick
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the set it opens every time like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most the way what most people will do is they will just take one finger at the index finger and try to pull up the center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the right edge and then it kind of like snaps open
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never I’ve never seen that technique I always have a fingers on on the top edge and fingers on the bottom edge and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John hand uh crosswise on it pressing in the middle thing does disengage the little hooks but if you don’t press in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just pull up with your fingers that way it comes off pretty much as easily like they’re not they’re not stiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway thanks a lot to fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
15-inch, Mac Mini, or iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we are in August and we are in the slump, the doldrums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of August, and we have little to nothing to talk about. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that in mind, we’re going to try to entice you to listen to the rest of this episode by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussing a couple of different things. And we thought we would start by me having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an existential crisis about what kind of computer I want to replace my personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15-inch high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro. And if you recall, I’ve just gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro for work, but I’ve been telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself that I am waiting for the Skylake 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refresh to get a new personal machine, but I was thinking about it recently and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started to wonder why. What I use my personal computer for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my personal Mac, is almost nothing. It is is unbelievably slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as compared to both the new work computer and even the work computer that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new one replaced, because my personal one is still using a platter hard drive, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusable. I don’t know how anyone does this anymore. It’s unusable. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reason I have both a work and a personal machine is because I like to tell myself that I’m keeping my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal files on my personal machine and my work files on my work machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they will never mix or anything like that. Do you want to guess how often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do a good job of keeping my personal files off my work computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not at all. Everything in my Dropbox is on there. One password is on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of my pictures are on there. All of my music is on there. Everything is intertwined. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m wondering if there’s, what is the point in insisting on having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 15 inch laptop for my personal machine. When really the only thing this machine consistently gets used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for is as a Plex server, which started me down the line of, do I even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really need a laptop? And if not, what do I get? I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want a Retina iMac for reasons I can’t put my finger on, but I just don’t think I want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still sell the non Retina one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, sure. But if I was going to get an iMac, I don’t want an iMac is what I should have said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do I want a Mac mini? Maybe you want a Mac Pro? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco God, that would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hysterical turn of events. But no, I do not want a Mac Pro. But I guess what I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at is like, what is the purpose in maintaining a personal machine that is portable that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could take places when I’m never, ever, ever going to take that machine places? Even if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a unbelievably awesome personal machine, in all likelihood, I’d probably take the work machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the slim chance that I have to do work when I’m on this phantom, you know, theoretical vacation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could do so. So why do I need a 15 inch laptop when really I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could probably save $2,000 and just get a Mac mini?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, you couldn’t because it is impossible to get a nicely configured Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for much under a thousand bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, we’re still looking at the, the, the work computer that, that work gave me was something like $3,100. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but the difference between the base model, which is 2000, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, you know, I wouldn’t say it’s 50% better. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter. So, number one, you know, you answered this already. Number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, are you sure you don’t need for it to be portable? And you said, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you’d just bring the work laptop, and that makes a lot of sense. What I recommend, if you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this works for you, I recommend whatever you get, consider that you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave if your job allows this leave your work computer at work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you bring your work computer at home, then you know obviously you’re blurring a line between home and work and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that’s as you said that’s something that’s not ideal you know you know ideologically if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a redundant phrase and you know obviously you know whether your job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expects you to be working on the side is that’s up to you and your job, but if you can leave your work computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at work most of the time, that’s worth considering because that gives you really good isolation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then. Then you can’t bring your work home with you. You can leave it connected to the monitor and stuff at work and have all your windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay in place, John, and you know it’s it’s really nice to have that separation, honestly, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to be frequently doing work at home. Then it’s different. But if that’s not a frequent occurrence, if you can usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do work at work only, then that can be really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think I could get away with it. I understand and completely agree with everything you just said, but I work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from home often enough, even like in the evenings or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally on the weekends or just to, you know, quickly, well I guess I was going to say quickly fire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off an email, but I could do that on any computer. That doesn’t require a full-bore work machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does the work that you occasionally have to do at home require that it be done on your work computer or can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you log into the stuff you need to log into on any computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say I suppose I could like, I was almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at RDP because I’m showing my Windows colors now. Nice. But I could, you know, VNC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a machine at work if I can punch a hole through the firewall. I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could put the work VPN on my home machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re supposed to be saying ARD if you want to get your Mac cred up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever. Apple Remote Desktop, right? The point is, I probably could do that, but in all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likelihood, if I have a work laptop, I would almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take it home in no small part because in this theoretical, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to have a laptop of my own, and I’m going to have either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMac or a Mac Mini, and so I’m going to want a laptop to use in the house, even for personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. So I would want to have the work computer at home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so then that’s the other question. So we know Aaron has a MacBook Air that is usually dry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you take your work computer out of your home office and work around the house with it? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes there are. That happens frequently?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for example, the blog post that we talked about earlier that may or may not have made it into the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was done sitting on the couch with next to Aaron on my work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop as long as you’re comfortable continuing to have the work laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this dual role of being the work computer and also your half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash even maybe primary home computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s something you want to continue then sure get a Mac mini for for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your home server if you actually and And consider running it headless. Because at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, it’s like, well, what are you really even doing with the Mac Mini? Like, I have a Mac Mini here running headless. It’s doing our live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stream. It serves my iSCSI giant share from the NAS, and then it runs Backblaze to back it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over iSCSI. It runs a couple other task-type things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It runs Plex, which I never use, because I hate it, because it turns out you’re the only person in the world who likes Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Please email Casey. No, I know. You are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to get so much email, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco truth is that I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t like it. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurate. But anyway, the Mac Mini is fine for that if you plan to run it headless, but it is not a good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Performance wise, a 15-inch comes very, very close to the performance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the iMacs and really the whole lineup. Like a 15-inch, even the base model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performs extremely well relative to the rest of the lineup. The Mac Mini is kind of the opposite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mac Mini, you pay… What is relatively speaking, you pay a lot and you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of get a little for it. It’s also very rarely updated. Obviously, the current model is very old. Even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s updated, it still doesn’t get to be a great deal. It just gets to be a less bad deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a couple of months. But it is never a good deal. You look at what it actually costs to spec one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to be reasonable. For instance, I don’t think you want a platter hard drive in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. Because this is not a fast computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what decade is this? You want this to be running 24-7? I would put an SSD in it. I did, I put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, I think it’s 256. I didn’t go crazy with it, because I didn’t need that much space on it. But your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mileage will vary with that. You have the NAS for your bulk storage anyway, so I don’t know how Plex deals with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but probably in a way that I hate. But if you want to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do work on this new computer at home, and really make it your home computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say either get an iMac or get another 15-inch the way you’ve been doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s the thing is that I just, I don’t know what it is. It’s some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mental hurdle that I can’t get over. But I think to myself, if I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy like a, if I’m going to buy an iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would always choose a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro over the iMac. And I wish I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explain why, but it’s just, The iMac for me seems so silly. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big and unwieldy. Maybe that’s why I’m landing on the Mac mini is because it’s not big. It’s not unwieldy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could run it headless if I so desired. Um, and I guess if I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get something that’s so that’s such a physically large machine, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to want it to be something I could take around the house and you can’t take an iMac around the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house. I’m sure everyone has had that story of seeing. Yeah. You, everyone has seen that guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at Starbucks. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for the purposes of this conversation you cannot move it around the house and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That I guess what we’re saying then and I’d like to hear John’s two cents in a moment, but I guess what we’re saying is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably go ahead and get the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Even if all it does is sit there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run Plex non-stop and do almost nothing else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if that really is the the main reason you need it just get a Mac Mini because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop is not always on. It is really, really nice having an always on Mac server for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles like that. If you’re really gonna keep your main personal use on your work computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re not gonna be like using this computer much at home, then get a cheap Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini and be done with it. But you have to decide, is that really what this is for? Because a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini is a better home Plex server than a 15-inch MacBook Pro. I guess maybe transcoding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s doing heavy transcoding it wouldn’t be but although it would be it would do that in silence and it has hardware Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port so keep that in mind but and you can even put it next to your TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use HDMI and use a bunch of crazy stuff on there if you want I wouldn’t but you can but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway you know Mac minis are great for home servers if what you really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a home server they’re not good deals you can never find good deals on them used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either because everybody wants a cheap Mac Mini, so the used pricing on them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much cheaper than getting them new. So it will never be a good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the role of a home server, it is really nice. Like, and mine, it is as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silent as the Mac Pro under load. It isn’t as fast. That’s one of the reasons why it can be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only has, mine only has dual core. I think they stopped selling the quad core ones. So these aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazingly fast machines, but they’re really small. You can put them anywhere. They have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they’re all hardware. It’s all hardware, ethernet, hardware, sound ports, hardware, HDMI, and everything. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have to have like a bunch of dongles or Thunderbolt adapters or anything. And it’ll just sit there in silence and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother you. Whereas a laptop, like running a laptop headless or in clamshell mode rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a great idea for long. I know people do it, I know, but it’s not a great idea for long. They don’t tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to last as long that way. And there’s lots of like, like they kind of fight you on it. They don’t really want to be run that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have to always kind of like work around, oh, is the screen actually on under there? Is the OS trying to fight me and keep the screen on or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did it not see that I put it to sleep? And it’s always kind of a mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get a 15-inch to run headless on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a Mac mini will always just do that for you. Like it will serve that role better if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you really want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and really quickly, I should point out, and the chat room is already giving me grief about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this justifiably. The right answer for a Plex server is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without a shadow of a doubt, a really cheap PC that’s just sitting there and doing nothing but serving Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you have to manage a PC. Honest to God, that’s exactly right. That is exactly why I do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want that. I’d have to manage the PC. I’d have to worry about it. I, yes, I know a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC fans are saying you have to do all those with a Mac. Well, you know what? You’re right, but I’m used to it. It’s just another one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have to think about. Whereas managing a PC, that would be the only PC in the house that’s actively being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used. It’s making me think about a bunch of things that I really just don’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to worry about. I’m already worrying about the El Capitan upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my machine, for my work machine, for Aaron’s MacBook Air. It’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurt me to worry about it for one more computer. So I understand that that is unquestionably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right answer on paper. It is not the right answer for me. John, how would you handle this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is your, where are your photos? Where’s your photo library?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Canonical photo library is on the 15 inch personal MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro on the spinning platter hard drive that never turns off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I don’t like laptops. I think this is, I think one of your things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you alluded to before is you don’t like the idea, and a lot of people I think
⏹️ ▶️ John who are not, especially people who aren’t tech nerds, don’t like the idea of a large
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of furniture basically in their house
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco being a computer. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you like the idea that the laptop, when you close it, it’s basically, you can’t even see it, it’s just a little flat thing on a
⏹️ ▶️ John desk, when it’s open, it’s not that big. You don’t want to dedicate, like most tech
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds don’t mind this. I mean, just look at Marco’s computer room or even mine for that matter. You don’t want the thing where the
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant piece of furniture in a room or on a desk or whatever is computer related. Like I’ve got my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tower on the floor,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got my monitor, I’ve got the speakers, Marco’s got monitors and stuff all over the place. That’s what some people like, but it sounds like you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So that’s why you’re kind of resistant to the idea of an iMac or something, because it’s physically imposing
⏹️ ▶️ John and that you can’t put it away when you’re not using your iMac. And it’s still, especially the big Retina one, still
⏹️ ▶️ John a big 27-inch screen that you just can’t get rid of and it’s just blocking your view out the window and you know, whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I would think of that for two things. I think every home, every tech nerd home anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to kind of have like a digital hearth, which is like the biggest, nicest screen where you can look at photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and movies and the family could gather around them if they wanted and look at them, that doesn’t move,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is like, sort of the main repository of the things that you care about in the home. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s constantly connected to both network and local backups. It’s got a really big screen. It’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the fastest computer. And that’s where you would, you know, do all that, you know, you’d go there
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I don’t know, like pay your bills, look at, sort through your photos, edit
⏹️ ▶️ John your photos, like look at a funny YouTube video with the family or the kids or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, watch a new movie trailer that comes out. I guess you could do this all in front of your TV if Apple got off its butt and made its TV
⏹️ ▶️ John products worth a damn, but anyway. I wouldn’t hold your breath on that. Yeah, but that’s what I’m thinking of like
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iMac. But you’re right that it is going to be a large imposing physical presence,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And then I think you should have a very small light laptop like an Air or the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John One that you use for,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hey, I don’t want to be stuck on my
⏹️ ▶️ John desk. I want to be able to run around the house. But on that small light laptop, you should not have your family photo collection. You shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have anything you really care about there. It should just be like your Dropbox and your other network connected stuff. And if you drop
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it cracks in half, it’s not a big deal because the stuff that you care about is more stationary. And then you should also have a Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that doing your data serving and a network attack. And it’s like, it starts getting expensive at that point, right? So what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to do is like, I don’t wanna have a big giant desktop and you’re with a big screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and a small light laptop and a little server. You’re just trying to find one machine that’s gonna do it. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as that’s concerned, if you don’t want a big imposing piece of furniture and yeah, the iMac is out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not do any personal stuff on your work computers. I would resist that urge because that just gets
⏹️ ▶️ John you into a bad pattern, I think. I don’t like the idea of a family photo library being
⏹️ ▶️ John on a portable machine because then I’m like, when are you gonna remember to hook it up to your local hard drive to back up?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably not as often as you want and network backups are kind of trickling and happening over time, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not careful, the machine could be asleep for a lot of the time or the lid closed or some other way where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just not backing up as much as you should be. And I don’t feel comfortable with like your entire family’s photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John your main local copy as of like two or three days ago being on this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could drop accidentally or something. But it sounds to me like that you basically kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of made up your mind and that you wanna be able to, you don’t want a big iMac sitting at a desk and you wanna be able to run around the house for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason with a giant 15 inch laptop instead of a small sleek light one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you gotta get. It just feels like a terrible compromise to me because it is a machine that is not really good
⏹️ ▶️ John at anything. Like you’re just wandering around your house with it. You’ve already got a portable laptop just like that to go to and from work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this one is just so you can wander around your house with it. I just feel like you would separate
⏹️ ▶️ John your concerns better if you had a big, mostly stationary computer that looks nicer and performs
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And then a really small, thin, light one that you could take to WLVC with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See that there’s no chance that I’m going to rock a three computer solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where one is work, One is an iMac and one is an Air. It’s just not happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you leave the work when it worked, like Margo said. Like I have no reason to bring that home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. That has nothing to do with moving things. It’s just, that’s stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no need for that. I would definitely choose a 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Retina MacBook Pro over a 27-inch iMac or whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a Air slash MacBook One. That being said, the more we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, the more I’m starting to come to grips with the idea that maybe an iMac is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m looking for, even if I don’t want to admit it to myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because here’s the thing, an iMac can serve all the same roles the Mac mini serves, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stationary, it’s always connected, it can be always on, or at least, you know, in the power nap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of weirdo thing, I don’t know, did anybody use that? It doesn’t matter. Mine’s always on, it just has the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turned off. So, you know, it can serve all those home server roles and also be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your digital hearth, as John said, because I love that, that’s a great analogy. Another thing to consider,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this could go either for or against it, depending on how you look at it, you have this, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at this computer to be purchased now, your kid is almost one, so you will probably have this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what, four years, let’s say four years. You’ll probably even have it for longer, honestly, if you’re looking at like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple desktop and just knowing that you’re not me, you’re probably gonna have it for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that means that whatever computer that you choose here, you’re probably gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your kid’s ages, you know, one through five or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you have to be like, when you have a three to five year old running around your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house, are you really gonna be getting a lot of work done on a laptop? Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doubt that severely. Like, I mean, I just know, John, you can tell us, because you have twice the experience, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just know from having my one kid him being three right now, I can never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get worked on on a laptop anywhere outside of my office. I have tried. It doesn’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not compatible with the reality of having kids at home. That’s not a good or bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. That’s just how it is. There’s nothing you can do to change that. So consider your next three to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years of the kind of work you’ll be doing in your house and where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your house you’ll be doing it. What kind of situations? Maybe you won’t want a laptop, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll recognize that you can’t really use a laptop with a kid running around and get much done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or maybe you’ll want a laptop because your home office that you would have a desktop in is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstairs, near your kid’s bedroom, and maybe you won’t want to be up there while your kid’s asleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re trying to get work done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, where you do things is a big factor, because if you’re kind of, especially if you have the habits sort of like honed
⏹️ ▶️ John over years of having laptop use, like where do you find yourself doing your desktop web browsing, if at all? The answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is sitting in my bed with my laptop on my lap. Well, the iMac’s not gonna help you there. Like, if you don’t have the habits
⏹️ ▶️ John to, think about where you use your laptop at home. Are you sitting on the couch? Are you sitting on your bed? Are you sitting in
⏹️ ▶️ John your favorite chair? And expecting to use a Mac in those locations, then those habits
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be very difficult to break. If you’ve always been a desktop person, you know when I wanna use my Sirius computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John I go sit down at like, you know, with Marco set up in my computer chair, in my computer room, at my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John desk to use my computer, and then everything else is iPads or phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if you happen to have a spare laptop around if you need it, that’s fine, but mostly the laptops for travel or whatever. But if your
⏹️ ▶️ John habits are the reverse of that, you’re gonna be sad if you get an iMac because you’re gonna be like, oh, I was so
⏹️ ▶️ John used to sitting down in front of the TV and watching football, but also noodling around with Node on my laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re not gonna be able to do that with an iMac, which is why you should also have an Air, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’re describing exactly the correct situation that I have only ever had laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since my like junior year of college, I think. And so because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, I’m used to sitting on the couch next to Aaron and maybe we’re watching TV, maybe we’re watching football,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe she’s not watching TV while I am, but I’m also fiddling with node, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, if, if I have a laptop, I can be around Aaron, even, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, after Aaron, after Declan goes to bed. Whereas if I have this iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m implicitly ignoring Erin because I’m up in the office doing whatever I want to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and she’s downstairs, maybe reading on the couch, maybe watching TV, maybe doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else entirely. But that’s probably where the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey falls down the most is that I would be implicitly ignoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron anytime I wanted to use the computer that I would want to use so very much because I’m sure that once I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I would know how beautiful it was and how much I enjoyed using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think it would end up – I would end up hating it because I would be ignoring Aaron so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can always do the setup I have here, which has had its bumps, but maybe it will
⏹️ ▶️ John get better going forward, which is a big, really nice Apple display hooked up to a really small,
⏹️ ▶️ John thin, light laptop. And so right now, my wife wanted to do stuff with her laptop, so she took
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of the room, and she’s working with it upstairs, but most of the time, she does her work in front of a big, giant
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. The iPhoto library is on her computer. That’s where we sort through all the photos on the big 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. Non-retina, but yeah, what can you do? But when she needs to,
⏹️ ▶️ John she can detach and have a thin light laptop to go into the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John and do stuff on the dining room table or go up in the bedroom where she is now and do whatever she’s doing with the laptop. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting sort of hybrid setup. I don’t know how, like the Thunderbolt display,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had some problems with flakiness and everything and it was a little bit annoying. The USB-C potential
⏹️ ▶️ John future Apple display that supports all this stuff could be nicer or
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be Justice Lakey or it could be worse, but it’s an interesting way to get you both, to get you the
⏹️ ▶️ John big digital hearth, which I really think if you’re ever gonna spend any time like sorting through your photos or editing your photos, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John anything having to do with photos or movies, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know how you live in a laptop. Like I just feel like it would be doing everything inside a phone booth, right? Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John it probably feels the same way. It’s like you just feel like to do any real computer, I don’t even know how you do programming. I don’t do anything with
⏹️ ▶️ John Node. You gotta have the web browser and then your text editor and then everything else all cramped under this little 15 inch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to be able to spread your stuff out, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right, and that’s why if I’m doing serious work, I’m up in my office where I am now, where I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a, actually probably only 17, maybe 20 inch external display hooked up to my work computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so if I’m really getting serious about, you know, doing some node work or doing work work, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be upstairs in the office hooked up to an external display, a very unremarkable external display, but an external display nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I mean, when I was doing the blog post, that’s why, you know, command tab is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s why spaces are a thing. And I’m used to it. This is what I’m used to. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lack of real estate doesn’t bother me, but this is the same reason why I could never have a 13-inch laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever again, because 15 is the bare minimum amount of real estate I can have without getting frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I use Aaron’s computer for anything more serious than just light web browsing, I get very frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very quickly because the screen is so small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what, don’t get an iMac. Because, first of all, it’ll ruin you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everything, ever. Second of all, your camera, I believe, is 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megapixels, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right, yeah, off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will not fill the iMac screen at one to one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but you have a much more critical eye for that than I do, I think that’d be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want your computer to ruin your camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I certainly don’t wanna spend $34,000 on a camera like you just did, so maybe you’re right. And there’s nothing between 16 and 42 megapixels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, nothing at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a genuine question. I went to spec out the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac with Retina display just to see what it would come up to, and it’s about the same money as a 15 inch, the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would build it, it’s roughly the same money as a 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the different options they have, you choose your processor, choose memory, did you get 16 or 32, Marco? I got 32, but it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re probably gonna update them in the next few months. So whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options are now, you shouldn’t buy a Mac right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, no, I wouldn’t. I’m just, you know, I’m piddling for the fun of it. And what hard drive did you get?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went for the terabyte SSD. If you’re going to go iMac, I’d say go 100% SSD, don’t go Fusion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so then just buy whatever you’re willing to spend among the all SSD option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So anyway, so I’m bringing this up because I got down to number five, choose mouse and trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Magic Mouse, which is what I would choose, Magic Trackpad for crazy people. There’s a third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option. Apple Mouse. What the hell is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that the thing with the little ball in the middle? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think so. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was the Mighty Mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think that’s just what they call it now. It’s the white one with the little ball that gets gunked up on the top of it. I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they- who buys that? Yeah, I have no idea. I had no idea this was still a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The important thing is you want to get the Apple Extended Keyboard and not the stupid wireless one with the half-size arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intolerable. Yeah, this was the one that was originally called the mighty mouse right I thought so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that thing was miserable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I was gonna say I didn’t know anything about max back when this was a modern mouse and even I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew that it was a Terrible freaking mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. That’s that is horrendous Oh Sam the geek in the chat points out why you’d want this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need to use it somewhere where you can’t use Bluetooth That is interesting. That’s weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or security reasons. Yep. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a really good point
⏹️ ▶️ John governments they need to continue to have a wired mouse. It doesn’t work with Bluetooth and why not sell them this
⏹️ ▶️ John finger lint collecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like of all the of all the wired mice in the world of all the wired mice that I’ve used I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say this is worse than all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. Nope I use the puck mouse when I was in college
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was as bad as people said
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing with like you have the the mice be apples and mice before they had a thing on top
⏹️ ▶️ John for scrolling Those, those were like better because they didn’t have a crappy thing on top
⏹️ ▶️ John that got gunked up. But worse, of course, because you couldn’t scroll. So it’s like choose your poison. So the the puck
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse didn’t have a scroll wheel on it. So you didn’t have a scroll wheel. But then, you know, you couldn’t tell which way was orienting. But like the
⏹️ ▶️ John apology mouse, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco best looking, one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ John looking mice that Apple ever made, I think was one of their best mice, period,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was in the days before Macs anyway, and PCs have scroll wheels forever. But it’s in the days before
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac users were brought into the world of scroll wheels. And so you didn’t know what you were missing. And you’re like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, it’s beautiful to look at. It’s nicely shaped. It works
⏹️ ▶️ John very well. It matches the hardware. And it is not circular so I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell which direction is up. It was great. But yeah, once they got into the scroll wheels,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple never made a good scroll wheel until basically the magic mouse and they said, Well, we’re not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a wheel, we’re just going to have a swipey surface thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well honestly the Magic Mouse swipey surface is what convinced me to finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use an Apple mouse because before that I was using some I was using the Logitech MX Revolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many of Logitech’s high-end mice I think still have something like this but it had this cool feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it had a really like heavy like a flywheel kind of weighted scroll wheel and so if you flicked really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly it would unlatch and just spin freely rather than having little detents along the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and then you could like stop it and during that spinning it would do similar to when you swipe it have like you know to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the actual inertia of this weighty flywheel thing spinning around it was great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but now the magic mouse does that same thing with no moving parts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s easy to easy to find and buy anywhere and doesn’t have its own special proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charger and doesn’t have its own proprietary receiver and doesn’t have crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software that fails constantly under max so it’s better in every way to me so that’s why I switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back for a second to the to the formerly mighty mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did you guys ever use the squeeze side buttons remember that you could squeeze these side buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like a third mouse click
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah they were pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco terrible you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever actually I remember it I tried it a couple times when I use these and it was you had to squeeze really hard and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John it was too too awkward for me to use although something like that’s the problem I have with most PC mice is they They have
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons everywhere on them. You can’t grab them without touching a button. And that’s too many buttons for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t use the Magic Mouse because it’s too low. And that’s just a difference in mousing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trained on the mousing. Some people like a low mouse. The Puck Mouse was made for low mouse people too, which just was unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John circular. But there’s different ways that you can hold a mouse. And for better or for worse, my way
⏹️ ▶️ John of holding the mouse was trained on the original Macintosh mouse in 1984, which
⏹️ ▶️ John basically looked like a box. And the way my nine-year-old hands learn to use
⏹️ ▶️ John that mouse and all mice after it is I grab the sides of the mouse with my
⏹️ ▶️ John thumb and my ring finger. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing. And with a low mouse, I find myself, especially with the Magic Mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the sides are cut in a little bit, it’s narrower on the bottom than it is on the top,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s very low down. I feel like I’m kind of grabbing, it’s like kind of grabbing a dinner
⏹️ ▶️ John plate by the sides and there’s this big air gap where my hand, Like, my palm doesn’t rest
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on it. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. And I find it very uncomfortable. It’s a really nice mouse. Like, it’s high quality. The swiping
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, I see the people who love that. It’s just not the way I hold a mouse. So, I’m forced to buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using Logitech mice for years, and I have what I think is called the Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ John Wheel Mouse. It didn’t even have like an MX designation, like MX200, 300, or anything like that. It’s just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech Wheel Mouse. It has two buttons on top and a scroll wheel that you can also press as a third button,
⏹️ ▶️ John and no other buttons on it has flat vertical sides that I can grab. And every other mouse that I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John that shaped like a snail, that has buttons all over it, I just can’t find a nice way to grip
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I even bought like, I have a series of wireless mice that we use on my wife’s computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they have like grippy rubber edges on the side, but they all kind of like curve in or whatever, and just they don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John right in my hand. So that’s the thing about mice, they’re very, it’s difficult to say
⏹️ ▶️ John like what’s a good mouse and what’s a bad mouse, because it all depends on what your habits are. It’s difficult to break those habits. And if you try
⏹️ ▶️ John to use your mousing habits with a mouse that is not designed to work that way, it can be very
⏹️ ▶️ John uncomfortable. So a lot of these, the sort of snail ones, they want you to grip them in a particular way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s how you do hold a mouse, then that mouse fits your hand and it’s great. But if you fight against that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will not feel great. So if you try to grip one of these weird snail mice from the side, it’s just not the way it’s meant
⏹️ ▶️ John to be used. And if you try to use the magic mouse without, I don’t know, how do low mouse people use it? I guess they sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of rest their entire fingers, long fingers over the thing? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I have like an air gap. So I do hold, I hold the sides with my thumb and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ring finger, but then my index and middle finger kind of just like hover over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like almost an inch, like pretty high over the mouse. And it’s like, same way like how like when you’re taught to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piano, you’re taught not to rest your hands on the keys, you’re taught to kind of arch your hands up. Same kind of thing, like that kind of grip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like you’re kind of, you’re holding the mouse with those, you know, with the thumb and ring, but then your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first two fingers are really hovering pretty far above it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that’s not how that’s intended to be used. You should ask some of the low
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse men in yellow coats, another reference that Casey won’t get, how they use their mice. I think I’ve seen people doing it where
⏹️ ▶️ John they, even with the puck mouse, where it’s almost like they’re just resting their fingers on it, and their palm
⏹️ ▶️ John is not even, it’s behind the mouse. And so they’re just kind of resting, laying their hand on top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse and kind of moving it around. Maybe their palm is even on the ground. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John people, as I said last time, people have tweeted me pictures of it, People use mice in crazy ways, including the
⏹️ ▶️ John one where you use the mouse upside down and press the buttons with your palm. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John people, did you see all the things that people were tweeting me? Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John of Heather? Yeah. Yeah. There’s a large variety out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. For what it’s worth, I would kill everyone I knew except my family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if someone came out with a magic mouse that was more bulbous and had a place for like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my palm to rest. I use the Magic Mouse because I cannot survive without the two-finger flicks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side to side, to go between spaces. I’m a very heavy spaces user, and I am completely useless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a computer if I can’t flick between spaces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would literally die.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I literally can’t even. But anyway, I wish so desperately that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a more bulbous Magic Mouse, because I would buy that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instantly. So if anyone wants a Kickstarter idea, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Make some sort of god-awful, bulbous magic mouse that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t just completely disgusting to look at. Good luck. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will pay obscene amounts of money for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, did you see this picture that someone put in the chatroom of them trying to use the magic mouse like a traditional mouse, holding it from the side?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe this person has very large hands, but I’d forgotten just how darn small.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple Magic Mouse is a beautiful piece of industrial design. it looks like a piece of sushi, like a piece of fish
⏹️ ▶️ John laying on top of like a bed of rice or something. It is it is a beautiful sculpture. It is not shaped like
⏹️ ▶️ John a mouse that works with my hand. And I don’t think you’re supposed to grip it the way this person is gripping it. I don’t think you’re supposed to grip it the way you’re gripping
⏹️ ▶️ John it, Marco. I think that is an uncomfortable kind of keeping your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John just it just doesn’t look like the way I imagined them when they made this product. It’s supposed to be used. And I’ve seen people use them
⏹️ ▶️ John with the flat hand technique that looks more comfortable to me. I mean, you can get away with it. It doesn’t bother your hand doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bother your hand. It’s fine. and it just doesn’t seem ideal to me. It does bother my hand. Like I, having this sort of static contraction
⏹️ ▶️ John of having your muscles just sort of in that position for a long period of time, I need them to relax and I need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John something supporting my hand. And I need, and I definitely need to feel a secure grip on the sides.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of my mouse movement is, like for small movements, just moving my ring
⏹️ ▶️ John and thumb and having like the palm of my hand resting on the mouse or even partially on the table,
⏹️ ▶️ John moving fine adjustments on the mouse. with a little piece of sushi underneath my hands.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I don’t know. And plus that mouse is pretty darn heavy in the grand scheme of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the heaviness is not great, especially if you switch to rechargeable batteries. Nickel metal hard drive batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty dense compared to other kinds, so that’s no good. But, you know, one thing I find, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably just, it probably comes down to a lot of what you’re used to, because, you know, you’re citing what sound like ergonomic concerns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. And for me, I actually like the ergonomics of it because I can move it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my fingers. I’m not really moving my wrist as much. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing most of the movements with my whole arm almost all stationary. And I’m moving the mouse around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just with the thumb and the index finger kind of slide it back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was just describing. What I was doing with my mouse. It’s just that you don’t have any support for the rest of your hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John The mouse is doing nothing to support you. You are attacking the mouse with your fingers. You are gripping
⏹️ ▶️ John it and you are pressing it, but the mouse is not supporting any part of your body whatsoever. No part of your body is resting on the mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John you are merely manipulating with the sides. Whereas if you have something like Casio that’s more bulbous, you can rest the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, some part of your hand and some of the weight on the actual mouse and still have your fingers in that position
⏹️ ▶️ John to at a moment’s notice wiggle it back and forth with your ring and your thumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So real time followup, Jelly in the chat room has given us a link to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Magic Mouse Fixed, which is at mmfixed.com. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exact, it is fixing the exact problem I want fixed in the most hideous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John possible way. What the heck is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s apparently a piece of silicone that has a suction cup on the bottom that you just drop on top of your Magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mouse and then magically all your problems go away. It is fixing what I want fixed, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that just goes to show, I think the Magic Mouse was so clearly designed with a
⏹️ ▶️ John particular use case in mind. They wouldn’t have made it so low profile if they expected you to grip it from the side.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re coming at it trying to do the grip from the side, you’re fighting against the design as it was made. And if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John something bulbous to be resting in the palm of your hand, the Magic Mouse is not it. It’s not like they accidentally made it like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it is not made to be like other mice. Other mice are bulked up for a reason. There’s just air in there. There’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they needed room for the batteries or anything. This mouse is low profile. It’s meant to be used in a different way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure what way it is because I don’t use a mouse that way, but it’s not like a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John where they just made it a little bit too low. It’s super low with a purpose, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and the purpose is definitely, you know, aesthetics.
⏹️ ▶️ John be aesthetics, but it could also be mousing technique. Like, have you seen people use the puck where they would… Part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John fix for the puck would be that people would creep their fingers over the edge and rest their two fingers around
⏹️ ▶️ John the wire so they could tell which end was up on the thing. And that led to a kind of mousing with like
⏹️ ▶️ John a kind of a flat hand mousing technique with your entire hand draped. It wouldn’t work with the Magic Mouse because if your entire hand is draped
⏹️ ▶️ John over it, you have to pick your fingers up and get them over the swiping surface to do your gestures, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome these days? Can you tell it’s August?
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s also a lot of occasions in life where you need to make a website, or somebody you know needs to make a website,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you need to make a website for somebody you know, and writing it yourself is really not a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either you don’t have time, or they need a lot of features that you really can’t do that well, or it would take
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrapping the whole thing and writing my own CMS like I was originally planning to, or I can
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Overcast’s Linode upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so Marco, what did you do to the overcast database?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, nothing. I did a line on migration. I migrated to a bigger line node. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was. Oh, yeah. No, I so line node, they upgraded their their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hypervisor, whatever, whatever from God, whatever it was before Zen, maybe. Yeah, from Zen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to KVM. And I don’t follow any of this stuff. I don’t know what the differences are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s they say it’s faster by a lot. So I said, Okay, great. Upgrade for free. To upgrade it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just have to turn off the VPS, and then they have to migrate the disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images over to the new system. So you’re basically waiting on disk images to migrate, and they do it at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe 150 megs a second. So when you have a 200 gig database, it’s a pretty lengthy process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was down for 45 minutes or something. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I was doing. I was upgrading all my servers to KVM from Xen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and i was also uh… upgrading a couple of them to be higher capacity bps is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my own which also requires the same migration to happen that’s it so i took everything down upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of them that you know and i’ve been to have been a few over time but i’ll take anything down but this and of all the master
⏹️ ▶️ Marco database and i know believe me uh… i know more than you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably you can’t get more than a few explain right now i know how to make databases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can take on the master and the site is up I know. Please don’t tell me about those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schemes. I know. I even know that there are fancy new storage things where there is no master
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can just take anything down whenever you want and they’re eventually consistent and they usually work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they usually don’t need any maintenance and they usually perform well. Yeah, that’s nice too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please don’t tell me about those either. Yeah, so that’s what I was doing. Taking another master
⏹️ ▶️ Marco database, updating it to those things, making everything bigger and faster and then turning everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on. And with Linode this is literally like you click a few links in the web interface and you wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they tell you when they’re done. It’s really ridiculously easy. This is not an ad but it should be. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode so much. I have used so many other hosts and man,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will now… Everything that I can reasonably do on Linode I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And before, I forget when it was, like last… I think it was last year when they upgraded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe it was two years ago, when they upgraded to their next generation hardware. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically went to Xeon E5s, to really nice ones. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they did that, they still had the nicest, easiest control panel of everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they had just good hosting overall. They were still very good. But they weren’t a great deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that. They were an okay deal. Ever since that upgrade, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe a lot of this was prompted DigitalOcean because DigitalOcean is a very similar kind of service. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s as good. I think it’s still good, but Linode has a number of advanced features that DigitalOcean doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer, many of which I use and enjoy. DigitalOcean is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, you know, they’re young. I tried them in the past. They’re fine, but they’re young.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I tried them, they were going through some growing pains. I assume they’re more stable now because that was like a year and a half or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Linode right now, ever since they did that big SSD upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to match DigitalOcean’s performance and pricing, I would say Linode is the best deal in the hosting business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have always loved going and leasing dedicated servers from cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unmanaged server vendors so that, you know, please I don’t need your tech support, I don’t need you to install WordPress for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want a cheap server that I don’t have to manage the hardware for. You manage the hardware, I will do the entire software management, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Linode is now, for most things, even cheaper than going to a cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dedicated host. So something like Limestone Networks or High Velocity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode is actually even cheaper than those for what you get a lot of the time. It’s incredible. I still have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it’s so cheap, but it is. You know, it’s not perfect. No host is perfect. I’ve occasionally had network issues with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But of all the hosts I’ve tried over the years, they are the one I am by far most happy with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So because it’s August, this story that sounded like it would be so interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so salacious was I moved databases and I moved VPSs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was literally I clicked a few links in the web interface and waited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you’re not helping our August doldrums.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have been a lot bigger of a deal had I actually been on dedicated servers and not VPSs. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of the reasons why I use VPSs now. Yeah, the bad news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I was upgrading from 8 gigs of RAM to 16 on my database.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In dedicated server terms, unless you’re somewhere incredibly expensive like SoftLayer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Rackspace, if you’re somewhere reasonably priced for unmanaged servers, 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of RAM should not cost a lot of money. But for Lino, that’s a big deal, but it’s still only $160
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month for this VPS. And it’s like, well, if you look at what can you get for 160 bucks a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on dedicated host, you can’t get much closer to this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still can’t believe how much you get for your money with these Lino VPSs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, this is not an ad. They’ve never sponsored me. I have a referral link, I think, somewhere. Yeah, I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco referral link for Lino. I’ll put it in the show notes so that, I don’t know, we can make some money off of this giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-ad. But man, it is so good. I like it a lot. All right.
Cats and mice
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, I’m just looking for a little bit of real-time follow-up on the last topic about mice. In the Wirecutter’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse review, they have this graphic that’s from Razer actually, showing the contact patch
⏹️ ▶️ John of these little hand diagrams for three grips of the mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John one called the palm grip, then the claw grip, and then the fingertip grip. I wish they’d showed actual photos of
⏹️ ▶️ John hands doing it, but someone placed this link in the chat room. It’s worth checking out that
⏹️ ▶️ John this review at least acknowledges the different ways that people hold mice and I bet there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a much larger variety than just those three. This is, I think they’re just trying to capture the three most common, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it really influences how you shape the mouse, how you’re expecting people to hold it, and there’s just, there’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John one way. And that’s before you even get into things like hand size, like before you’re even considering variations in hand
⏹️ ▶️ John size. Just like within one hand size you can be holding it in very different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, that’s, and I’ve put in more links, Casey, for the different mice that I own
⏹️ ▶️ John and pictures of them and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so on this Razer thing, this mouse on the left, is that a number pad on the mouse? What the heck is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a gaming thing, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s like this little like 12-button grid of buttons in the thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area on this crazy gaming mouse. Oh my God, it’s a Jaguar controller.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m talking about. Like they have buttons everywhere. Like how can you even grab them without accidentally hitting a button, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when they put buttons on the side. Like that’s where I hold it. I don’t want to have buttons on the side. And then they have buttons, they have buttons on top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons. So you can’t even rest your finger on a button or else you accidentally hit another button. Oh my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. These people are crazy gamers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yo dog, I heard you like buttons with your buttons. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why I’ve never been able to get into the Razer mice. Some of it, like the first
⏹️ ▶️ John person shooter appeal for like the high resolution and like the whatever they’re trying to do with low latency and all this other stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just as a thing to grab and mouse around with. just never looked particularly comfortable for
⏹️ ▶️ John me. And whenever I go into the store and see them and spread my germs by going up into
⏹️ ▶️ John the huge display of mice and grabbing each one of them and clicking around, that just never,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing ever feels quite right to me. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Like my mouse at work died, this Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel mouse thing that we’ll put in the show notes like before they even had the MX numbering scheme. It died
⏹️ ▶️ John and I bought a new modern one that I thought looked like it and I used it for a couple of days and I just didn’t like it so I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John go on eBay and find it. You know, someone’s selling the exact old model of my
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse that I had before. And I got it and it works. And that’s what I’m using now at work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can always get people to send in their gross old used mice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know, but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a very specific model. But no, I bought it on eBay. It was like 20 bucks or something. I’m like, you know what? Let me just get that same
⏹️ ▶️ John that age where I mean, there’s probably a modern mouse out there that I would like, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried, like I tried my best, like I went to, you know, I like Logitech mice. I went to their website. I looked at
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of other things. I think I might even look this wire cutter review I tried a bunch of mice in person and I’m like, you know what? Let me get this
⏹️ ▶️ John one It’s so close to what I get now. It’s made by the same company I’m sure it’ll be just the same and it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just different enough to annoy me So I said I’ll just get the same mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did they include a an Android tablet when you bought from them?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but I’m always afraid of with I’m buying things in eBay I guess when people buy things in eBay, they’re afraid of like
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone you know, it’s a scam. They’re just gonna take my money not send me anything They’re gonna send me something It didn’t look like
⏹️ ▶️ John it did in the picture like all the things that you’re worried about when you do eBay, right? Are you afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John secret fans? Yeah, you know what I’m worried about when I do things in eBay
⏹️ ▶️ John That it’s going to be sent to me by someone who smokes Because then the box will smell like smoke and
⏹️ ▶️ John the item will smell like smoke forever and ever and ever and I just won’t be Able to use it because it will smell like an ashtray.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep That’s a in many online So I’ve I’ve recently been selling like some headphones stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of these online marketplaces you will see almost every ad say non-smoking household
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no pets. Smoking that’s a huge thing. I can always tell if like a box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in somewhere that smoked or somewhere with cats. Like I’m allergic to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cats. I don’t have cats. I am very sensitive to the smell of cat houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can always tell. It isn’t as strong as smoking but it’s there you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway no smoking no pets.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’ve ever had one with a pet smell because that I mean obviously if it’s something with fabric or something But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking like something that is like hard shiny plastic or electronics or something Maybe I guess if cat hair is
⏹️ ▶️ John sucked up into the thing I can remember uh someone I used to work with had uh it wasn’t the wind tunnel
⏹️ ▶️ John I think was the mirror drive door you guys don’t remember these names, but anyway one of the tower max
⏹️ ▶️ John That had like intake ports. It wasn’t like the cheese grater. It was pre cheese grater It was back when they had the four
⏹️ ▶️ John handles on the sides of the things He had an intake in the front that would blow air out the back And he opened up his
⏹️ ▶️ John computer to clean it out one day and like the intakes in the front all led into this big like wedge type thing and the wedge was just
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with a solid wedge of cat hair that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco he would just
⏹️ ▶️ John pull out and it was just like It was like a perfectly structured, it had like taken a mold of the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John of the intake vent So yeah, cat hair is everywhere I can imagine electronic smelling like cat like that but It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even like a mouse, like there’s no place you can go inside it, there’s no ball or anything I can imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John smelling like a cat But the thing about cigarette smoke is it just permeates, especially if there’s any kind of like rubber, even if there’s plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John it just It just never goes away. It’s bad. Even Lego can Smell like smoke if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been in a smoking
⏹️ ▶️ John Ugh, gross. But anyway, my mouse I bought for work, non-smoking It does not smell like anything
⏹️ ▶️ John and uh pretty much brand new like it wasn’t in the original blister pack but if it was used I couldn’t tell.
John’s summer adventures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, since you’re not doing your review this summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much to the sadness of all of us, what have you been spending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your time on for the last, I don’t know, two or three weeks?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, every once in a while I remember that I have El Capitan installed and I boot into it and then I wait 45
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes for the seven updates that I have installed to be installed, which by the way, Craig Hockenberry already filed the radar on this
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it’s kind of annoying too. Why is it that I can’t just jump right to the latest beta? do I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go through all the different updaters? It takes a really long time. If you are, if the current beta is beta 7
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have beta 4, then you have to install beta 5 and reboot, install beta 6 and reboot,
⏹️ ▶️ John install beta 7 and reboot. And each one of these betas is like a gig or more downloaded and you gotta wait for it to install.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t quite understand why they’re doing that this year. And I’m glad I don’t really have to deal with it. I mean, I guess if I was doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John review I would never have to do more than one update because I would be on the latest. But anyway, occasionally I reboot into
⏹️ ▶️ John it and fiddle around and one of the things that came to my attention, I think Jason
⏹️ ▶️ John Snell brought it up in one of the Slack channels, was like, you know Safari 9’s new pinned tab
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that they demoed in the keynotes where you can, same thing as like Chrome and the other things, where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John take a tab and then pin it and it becomes a tiny icon in the left hand side of your tab
⏹️ ▶️ John bar and it’s there all the time? When you do that, Apple has, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever crazy reason, a new way for you to to specify what your icon is. When it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pinned, they don’t just use your favicon thing. I don’t know why they don’t use it, they just don’t. What they want
⏹️ ▶️ John you to use is to put an SVG, and apparently it has to be an SVG,
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere on your site and then specify in this meta tag that there’s two different versions. I’ll put them both in the show. It says two different
⏹️ ▶️ John versions on Apple’s site. One of them is developer.apple.com slash library
⏹️ ▶️ John slash safari slash release notes. And the other one is developer.apple.com slash library slash pre-release
⏹️ ▶️ John slash Mac slash release notes. They disagree about what you’re supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John both of them in there. I think one of them does nothing, but whatever until they get their acts together. Put both of them
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And by the way, if you’re gonna try to do this yourself, people on Twitter have seen me complain about this. They’re having trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. Like anything, if you’ve dealt with Safari before, you would know this, but if you haven’t, it may be a surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari for fav icons or anything having to do with icons, once it downloads one
⏹️ ▶️ John or once it decides there is not one to download, you will not convince it that it needs to download
⏹️ ▶️ John it again. You have to go to tilde slash library slash safari slash template space icons and delete
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in that directory and then relaunch Safari If you don’t do that, you’ll spend an hour saying
⏹️ ▶️ John why isn’t it reading my SVG and keep reloading? It will never reload your SVG probably like 30 days
⏹️ ▶️ John from now or something Quit Safari delete everything that directory relaunch Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the way you have to do this. Anyway, I Don’t in my blog that I never update in hypercritical
⏹️ ▶️ John co My icon is this little pixelated original Mac that I drew way
⏹️ ▶️ John back when and I wanted that to be my little pin tab icon and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a problem because the format is SVG and my thing is pixel art and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John nowhere in its documentation Tells you even what size your SVG is going to be displayed at
⏹️ ▶️ John So first I had to get it working at all that took a little bit of noodling and everything and finding an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that can SVG. I downloaded a trial of Illustrator for this, which is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t it incredibly mediocre?
⏹️ ▶️ John I got I had Illustrator CSX. I have Photoshop CSX, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John like for the most part. Illustrator CSX I had a trial of no I was paying for it month by month.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember when Adobe let you do like one app per month like and you pay like $10 and use Illustrator for a
⏹️ ▶️ John month or whatever. Anyway, it said, Oh, your Illustrator CSX thing has expired. Go
⏹️ ▶️ John renew it or whatever I could not for the life of me figure out how to pay another pay Adobe another $10 to
⏹️ ▶️ John use Adobe Illustrator CS6 for a month I just couldn’t figure it out all I could leave me to
⏹️ ▶️ John was signing up for some crazy subscription thing or just downloading a trial
⏹️ ▶️ John of Illustrator CC which is what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you do exactly what Adobe wants you to do even if you say okay I will sign up for the subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so incredibly difficult to navigate navigate Adobe’s site and their store and the whole creative cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suite mess. Even if you do everything right, it’s still miserable and confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whoever designed all of that should really go back and rethink it because it’s just a disaster. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mention, if you do want to do anything besides the ideal thing of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signing up for everything, if you want one of these smaller subscriptions where it’s only one app or it’s one of the little bundles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s even worse. I can’t even imagine what you were trying to do, which is one app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old version of that app, no less, trying to get a one month subscription. Yeah, you didn’t stand a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, see, here’s the worst thing. The stupid Adobe CC menu bar icon that nags you
⏹️ ▶️ John about the stuff, like it shows you the big thing, you sign in, it shows you all your apps
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Inside that thing, it said Illustrator CS6, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like renew, need to renew or whatever. Like it had a link on it that was saying, Click this link to go
⏹️ ▶️ John and pay us more money But if you click the link it didn’t take you any place to get cs6 It took you like through three redirects
⏹️ ▶️ John to some illustrator page where you could try to get illustrator cc so it’s like That your little menu bar thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to tell me that I can somehow give you more money to keep using illustrator cs6 But when I click through the link that it provides
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, it takes me to your website It makes it seem like it’s not there and I search for a while. And anyway That that’s a tangent
⏹️ ▶️ John adobe stuff is weird. That’s one of the reasons I got cs6 It was like the last non-creative cloud version
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just plain old software that you can install it still phones home to check its authentication or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway Happy happy with Photoshop. Not really happy with Illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John And really I’m drawing a little icon here. So I had my My outline
⏹️ ▶️ John image is the other thing they’re gonna get into more of how terrible I am with the graphics apps My outline image that I used for my t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John if you bought a hyper critical t-shirt back in the day This is the little Mac logo that’s on top of it So I did
⏹️ ▶️ John was take my t-shirt graphic which was you know a vector image I’ve deleted the text and I’m just left with the icon
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it and I thought I was all set but apparently those vectors are weird and
⏹️ ▶️ John SVG like when I saved as SVG and illustrator I looked at the source because it’s just an XML file I could see it was doing all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of strange things and I was like this this SVG is much more complicated than needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be I’m not quite sure what illustrator is doing. But apparently this outline that I used for the t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John is much more complicated than it needs to be. And honestly, like the entire image is made
⏹️ ▶️ John of, it’s a pixel image, it’s made of squares basically, or if you want rectangles. That’s all the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is. So I’m like, I just need to set up a grid. I can redraw this by hand. I can draw this icon on graph paper
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Like I know how many dots are in every dimension. There’s a certain number of dots. I know exactly where they are. Give me a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of graph paper and I can color it in for you. So I’m like, that should be easy to do. But Illustrator is really not made for that type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing. I am absolutely sure that you could do it in Illustrator. I’m sure an illustrator expert, but it’s seven keystrokes, have the grid
⏹️ ▶️ John set up the way, you know, and then just go down, do, do, do, do, do, oh, done, done, done. I’m not an illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John expert. The app was imperative for me. Last time I understood Illustrator was Illustrator 88.
⏹️ ▶️ John And anything after that, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was just kind of like- As in 1988? Yes. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that was me- I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was six. Was me just poking around
⏹️ ▶️ John and not knowing how to use it. But anyway, I got the job done eventually on Illustrator. Got the SVG to something that was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it worked. Um, put it up on the site, rebooted in Dell cap,
⏹️ ▶️ John launched Safari, pin my tab and saw the world’s blurriest, disgusting looking, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like nothing on a pixel edge boundary, just a terrible blurry blob.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I was like, all right, well, do I really care if it’s blurry? All I really care about is if it’s clear in retina mode, even though I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no retina max, I know most people who are going to be, uh, you know, pinning and no one’s going to pin my set.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, this is the absurdity of all this. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco site never gets updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one’s going to pin the tab because why would you? I just, you know, it’s a diversion, something I wanted to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to switch into retina mode, but high DPI mode wasn’t available. And the quartz debug
⏹️ ▶️ John thing also was not available. And the old version of quartz debug didn’t work. So I had to find the P list key to enable
⏹️ ▶️ John the high DPI setting. Anyway, eventually did that, turned on high DPI mode, put monitor into that mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John launched Safari, look at the pin tab and it was blurry in retina too. So I was like, oh, I’m just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I gave up for a while. This was several weeks ago. I was like, all right, well, I’ve got the icon for it. Doesn’t look great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason said it looked good in his Retina iMac, but I think he’s an old person with bad vision. I’m like, seriously? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like nothing is on a pixel edge. It does not look good. Maybe when it’s Retina you can’t tell as much, like on a real Retina
⏹️ ▶️ John screen instead of my 2X mode on my regular non-Retina screen. You can really see how blurry it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this weekend I took another run at it, inspired by a couple things. First of all, I was inspired by
⏹️ ▶️ John the release of Acorn 5, which is Gus Mueller’s new version of his
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing application which is way friendlier than Illustrator and like it was really easy for me to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John my icon that’s one of my tests now like of drawing apps can I draw my icon really quickly because it’s the easiest thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world to do just set up a grid take a bunch of rectangles with a fill in no stroke
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how many dots are supposed to be this should be really easy to do make that make the canvas the size I want it is really easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John draw an acorn unfortunately acorn doesn’t have SVG export which made me sad so I had my I drew it in like two seconds, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was all excited. No SVG export. I think I complained about it on Twitter. It’s the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of Twitter. I got a bunch of suggestions. Someone suggested Affinity Designer, which I’d never heard of before. Have you guys ever heard of this app?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Really impressive app. Like I’ve never heard of this developer, this company,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s clear that they mostly understand the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re trying to be very Mac-like, but at the same time, they do a lot of custom UI. And you can say, how could that be the
⏹️ ▶️ John same? How can you be trying to be like all Yosemite and Mac-like but also use custom UI for all your
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets, like pop-up menus and everything? It’s kind of the same way. I mean, you’ve all used Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John and Illustrator, or at least Margo has, but you know how Adobe’s got their own UI for their pop-up menus and their text
⏹️ ▶️ John fields and all this other stuff, and you can even change it to different sizes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re all terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and it’s like, it’s kind of, they’re trying to be cross-platform, so it looks the same everywhere, but there’s a history
⏹️ ▶️ John of them doing their own widget toolkits, and you could change color of the UI to be black or gray
⏹️ ▶️ John or like light color you know how they added that option I think around CS6 they started adding that option you could change the color of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. Affinity is like that but their custom
⏹️ ▶️ John UI looks much better than Adobe’s first of all. Doesn’t quite look like native UI but it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s kind of like Final Cut but the ProKit if you use Final Cut Pro they have Apple has its own custom widget
⏹️ ▶️ John toolkit that it used to use for Final Cut Pro which also didn’t look like the system widgets but looked kind of like them.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like that. But anyway, affinity designer, incredibly full featured application, super confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not as confusing as Illustrator. So it’s like this acorn, which is super friendly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you should get if you just want to draw something and be done and you don’t need to export from SVG, I just want to use acorn if I could have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John away with it. There’s Illustrator, which defeats me because I’m not a professional designer. And then affinity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Professional designers were tweeting me and saying I use this instead of Illustrator, I do my work in it. So I I think it has the capability
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a full-fledged professional design app, but it is much more complicated and has lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John floating pallets and windows with tons and tons of options. But the thing is, I know which options I want. I just need to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to find them. And in Affinity Designer, I could pull up the giant, they have a snapping manager and a separate grid manager.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, yes, snap to pixel edges. No, don’t snap the shapes. Yes, snap, like every
⏹️ ▶️ John option that I could think of was there, click, click, click, click, click, click. Could draw my icon and then key, snap
⏹️ ▶️ John to pixel edges. And they have a mode where you can show the pixels are going to look like and flip back and forth really easily between
⏹️ ▶️ John the vector and what the pixels are going to look like. So there I could draw my icon and export
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that it was stuck on pixel edges. And the only thing I needed to know from there was how big is the actual display size
⏹️ ▶️ John in pixels. And I tried making an entirely black SVG
⏹️ ▶️ John image to use as my little icon but for whatever reason Safari wouldn’t display it. I think I was still fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John with the markup at that point with the two different versions. But I just, you know, went into Pixie which is another
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Pixie comes with the Mac you guys know about Pixie no maybe it’s in the graphics tools
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to Apple’s developer tool section and look for the graphics tools download it comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John Pixie and a bunch of other things anyway just gives you a zoomed in version of the screen and I just manually count the pixels and it was 16 by 16 or 32
⏹️ ▶️ John by 32 and right now so I saved my SVG at 32 by 32
⏹️ ▶️ John aligned on pixel edges exported and And voila, I tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John the screenshot earlier. I now have a exact pixel perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John SVG image of an icon as my pin tab icon in Safari 9, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I surely will break and become blurry in Safari 10 and probably won’t look right in iOS either. But for this brief
⏹️ ▶️ John moment in time, I have defeated the pinned icon beast and I discovered a cool new application, Affinity Designer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I got to play with some of the new features Acorn 5 which is really cool too.
Sponsor: Igloo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our final sponsor this week is igloo. Go to igloosoftware.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco igloo is an intranet you will actually like. Now anybody who has worked in a corporate environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, John, knows how painful intranets can be. The content is stale, the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ugly, usually doesn’t work right on your phone or your mobile devices. igloo is an intranet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’ll actually like because it is built by modern human beings who who have good skills
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using modern technologies, and it’s designed for the users. Igloo gives you the flexibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get your work done how you want to, where you want to, and on whatever device you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. Igloo is truly building a product meant for 2015, not 1997.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With an Igloo intranet you can share news, organize your files, coordinate calendars, and manage projects all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one place. And everything can be social, with comments and like buttons, and anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can add content based on their permissions of course with drag-and-drop widgets and a WYSIWYG which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you see is what you get. Am I the only one who says WYSIWYG like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You pronounce it slightly odd to me it’s WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. It’s also a cool whip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh god you’re one of those? The whip?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a reference Marco just move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco along. Okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well anyway it’s a WYSIWYG editor and it makes use of responsive web design so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff works on all your devices it looks great on all your devices. And even they have incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology here to do things like preview and annotate common office document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formats, all in HTML5. And that’s all responsive. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do things like annotate office documents on a BlackBerry. And it just works. And it works with every other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device you have. It’s fantastic. Sign up today. Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a free trial. In fact, if you have 10 or fewer people in your company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or group, it’s free for you. So for 10 or fewer people, for God’s sake,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use igloo. It’s free. And above that, it is very reasonably priced. Check it out today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is so hard to find a good intranet today. Basically, if you’re not using igloo, you don’t have a good intranet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very simple, actually. Either you’re using igloo or your intranet sucks. So check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out igloo today, igloosoftware.com slash ATP for a free trial and get started
Challenges of an iPad “Pro”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m out of stuff to talk about. What else is going on? iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you sad about the iPad Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s because it just, it does nothing for me and thus on board, just like the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that it does nothing for you. You should, we talked about this before. We should all be interested in the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, even if it’s not like the specific iPad Pro. I guess if, unless you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t buy into the whole idea that tablet computing is
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the future of computer. It’s the premise I talked about when we talked about the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago. It’s basically the idea that people can deal with tablets better than they can deal with PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think we all agree on that. Like if you just throw a random person in front of a PC and ask them to do something useful
⏹️ ▶️ John versus throwing any kind of tablet in their hand and ask them to do something useful. Maybe unless it’s a Microsoft Surface, sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft. that the tablet is less intimidating. Like, that you can get things
⏹️ ▶️ John done, that people can just poke their fingers on a screen and figure out with either Android or iOS applications
⏹️ ▶️ John how to do stuff. From installing an application, to watching a video,
⏹️ ▶️ John to even like, you know, sending a text message or writing an email or whatever. Whereas if you throw someone in front of a
⏹️ ▶️ John PC or a Mac and say, send someone an email, I mean, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John higher barrier to entry. So I really believe that that usability difference in tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John versus PCs exists and I believe that a lot of people can do everything they need to do on their
⏹️ ▶️ John phone for that matter but also on the tablets. And if you kind of buy into that then what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John and looking at the tablet space is saying will they ever be able to compete with the phone? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is no. But will they ever be able to replace more of the things we do with PCs?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the answer there has to be yes because there’s still just such a huge gap in
⏹️ ▶️ John friendliness and reliability and usability between personal computers and
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets. So I’m always looking for when we’re going to take the next step towards
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets eating into a little bit more of the PC market. And here I guess Microsoft can come back in and say, hey, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John over here with the service. What do you think we’re doing over here? But they’re kind of doing it in a weird way where they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John the tablet have all the same abilities and compromises as the PC, not all the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John but close to it. Like hey it can work as a PC and as a tablet. I’m looking more towards
⏹️ ▶️ John can you make something that is like a tablet but allow you to
⏹️ ▶️ John do one or two of the things that you could previously only do comfortably on a personal computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think iOS 9 with the multitasking is kind of creeping into that area but I think you also need a bigger screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably also need a stylus and And that’s basically the iPad Pro rumors, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John A bigger screen iPad, maybe with a little more computing grunt, maybe possibly with an officially
⏹️ ▶️ John supported stylus. Why does that make you sad, Casey? You should be excited about the future of computing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it does make me excited as an exercise in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to develop and discover the future. But as something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would want or use, It doesn’t strike me as something I would ever desire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I don’t even think I would want a full-size iPad anymore, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone one that’s even larger than that. Although if you could, as you know, strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a keyboard to it, maybe this is the answer to my computing problems that we were talking about earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but I don’t know it, it, I have nothing against using the iPad as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a means to get work done. And obviously we’re all familiar with the ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that Federico Vittici has convinced his iPad to do and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous things he’s able to accomplish with his iPad. But for me, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m doing anything, even marginally, marginally complex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to put my iPad down and I love my iPad. I’m going to put my iPad down and I’m going to go reach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my Mac because Even if I could accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thing, whatever the thing is, on the iPad, nine times out of 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is way faster and way easier to do on the
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how I feel about using a desktop computer with a real screen compared to your 15 inch little cramp thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John it done on the laptop, but jeez, I gotta use a track pad and a tiny cramp keyboard and this tiny screen. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way easier to use with a real mouse, full-size keyboard and a gigantic screen in front. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, yes, I see your point. But like, it’s not particularly for your use case. But I always think like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John use cases can the tablet pull from the Mac? I think the tablet already
⏹️ ▶️ John has pulled web browsing. I think it pretty much does that fine, especially with like Flash going away,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And with the advent of content blockers, let’s call them on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I think so web browsing, I think it’s pretty solidly the tablet said, hey, do you want to browse a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of web pages? Tablet’s got you covered there. And it’s probably better because you can sit in your comfortable chair, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could pick it up and put it down like a magazine, it’s good. Reading Twitter and
⏹️ ▶️ John emails, yeah, you could probably use your phone for that as well. Probably okay there. Sending emails,
⏹️ ▶️ John now we’re borderline because now you’re like, oh, I gotta type something. And this is probably what you were thinking of, Casey, when you say, oh, it’s so much easier to do
⏹️ ▶️ John on a computer. It’s either if it uses multiple windows, then forget it, obviously, on a tablet, or if you have to type anything
⏹️ ▶️ John of significant length. I wonder about the typing. For the generation of kids brought up typing on glass, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not gonna seem like such a big deal for them, but in the end I think that’s still gonna be an issue. But where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking of pulling is, once you can get something approaching, multiple things going on in the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, I don’t know if Apple’s split screen thing is the answer with picture in picture and the two slidey things, like maybe that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John really the answer, but at least we’re moving in that direction. I’m thinking of graphics artists, because if you think of it
⏹️ ▶️ John as the world’s most awesome Cintiq, right? Where it’s the whole thing, you don’t even have a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you are basically like, for art purposes, having a really good pressure sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John stylus and multi-touch and a big screen and enough power to do graphical stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and not being tethered to a large computer that you have to be near or whatever, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a device that you could say is the most efficient way for you to do
⏹️ ▶️ John fine arts related things because it’s a natural interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to like drawing on the screen with a stylus or whatever. And you could be moving things around and making
⏹️ ▶️ John fine adjustments and using multi-touch gestures to zoom and rotate and do other stuff like that. And there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John much text entry. A lot of the stuff is using sliders and with
⏹️ ▶️ John the stylus, I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re at the point where it can pull from that, but I know a lot of digital artists
⏹️ ▶️ John that spend most of their time messing around with their stylus. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they also have one other hand on the keyboard doing all the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop, so maybe we’re not quite there yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the first thing I think for professionals that it’s gonna pull from are things like that, There’s not a lot of typing maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ John auto it audio editing where you can imagine Multi-touch in a stylus being
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge advantage over a mouse and a keyboard offsetting the the detrimental
⏹️ ▶️ John effects of having less power obviously because it’s not gonna be a big honking CPU and your little tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John and Having less screen real estate because you’re not gonna have a 27 inch tablet or whatever But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John firmly in the camp that I want to see larger and more powerful tablets to advance that form factor And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it kind of gets us out of the tablet doldrums where it’s like everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John has decided that there’s no point in an iPad when you have your iPhone 6 Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John or your big phone. Like the phone is just, you have to have your phone anyway. And if I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have my phone anyway, I can pretty much do everything that I could do on the iPad on the phone. And so the iPad is just a luxury for rich
⏹️ ▶️ John people so they can read their magazine, their glossy digital magazine articles and see bigger images. And that’s the only purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John it serves. And so everyone else has a phone. Few rich people have a big thing. Like the only way you’re gonna differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ John and say what is the point of the tablet is show me something I can do on the tablet that I can’t do on my phone. And you absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot do big graphical work on your phone, you just can’t. The screen is too small, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a stylus. That’s a way I could differentiate. The other way I could differentiate is like the Surface where it’s like, hey, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually your laptop too and you slap a keyboard on and it clamshells and it’s weird and awkward because the heavy part is up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I think the Apple’s approaching that from the other direction
⏹️ ▶️ John with the MacBook One of saying we’re just gonna keep making the computer slow and slow. But in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really want an iPad Pro. Apple should make one, Badij should buy one, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Graphic Artists should tell us whether Apple’s as yet unreleased hypothetical really
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome stylus is actually all it’s cracked up to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, so you want it for yourself, or you just want it to exist in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for someone? I
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to exist. I might buy one because I like the big iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on how big it is, because too big would be kind of ridiculous for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I was attracted to the Kindle DX to give you the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mindset I’m in. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because I like to read magazines. I still get paper magazines. I still get Edge
⏹️ ▶️ John magazine and Car and Driver magazine. I mean, Car and Driver and Edge at this point are probably not much bigger than my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, but Edge used to be really big. I like something that big when I’m reading sort of magazine-y style articles, even
⏹️ ▶️ John just looking at photos and stuff, especially if it’s thin and light. That’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John like. I think I would try it with the stylus. Like, I don’t know, maybe I would noodle around with something there. It just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John an obvious evolution of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think what’s gonna be interesting is I think Apple is at its best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it is a little threatened and a little hungry and maybe a little bit desperate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that usually is when Apple does its best work. And with a lot of iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, you know, it’s on top of the world with the iPhone. And, you know, the iPhone is fine. you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s doing very well and they’ve they’ve all been pretty good but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of the decisions Apple makes with the iPhone are out of complacency and or or hubris
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently and the Mac I can say the same thing about but the iPad is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of under is under attack the iPad is being threatened and not by competition but by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apathy you know like everyone’s saying oh we don’t know how long the upgrade cycle is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the fact is if you’re there somebody else who made this I think it was Lucas Mathis I have to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that look this up but the idea is like if you’re relying on upgrade cycle already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a product that only came out five years ago that that is a really bad sign for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growth that is suggesting that everybody who could use or want an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already has one and that’s that’s really not a good place to be so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s gonna be interesting here is that Apple is is now getting desperate with the iPad. They’re going to start trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy things and that’s why I think we’re seeing that’s why I think we saw the mini a couple years ago when that first came out and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re seeing now that they’re going to be making this this big iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly with a stylus possibly with God knows what else that’s one of the reasons why the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new cool keyboard cursor movement stuff in iOS 9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though we saw in beta one it was enabled on the phone and then in later betas it was disabled on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone because they’re going to probably keep it for iPad only because they’re desperate. They need to push people to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger iPads. One of the reasons why they’re not going to allow split-screen on any of the old ones hit the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air too is to drive new sales of iPads. This is all going to be part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of these, a lot of those things like the split-screen restriction, that’s also partly because of RAM, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’re going to start seeing these moves of Apple trying to revive iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales by doing kind of desperate things. And that isn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. My theory is that that’s actually good, because we’re going to see them do things they wouldn’t have otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. Things like a big iPad. Things like a stylus, maybe. We’re going to see these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that, had the iPad continued on its initial trajectory of getting really big and becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as big as the iPhone someday, maybe, had it continued on that path, I don’t think they would have been doing this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of experimentation. I think they would have just kept doing what they were doing. So we’re going to see interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. That said, they’re really going to be bumping up against limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not only the form factor but of iOS. Those are both huge considerations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re looking at the iPad as quote, getting work done, the big thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input methods. This has always been the issue. I think if you’re going through the trouble, which I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people do, of attaching some kind of keyboard or keyboard case to an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you could make a very, very good argument that you should probably be using a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point. Yes you can do a lot of things on an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it seems like so many people who end up doing their work on an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of them are fighting the iPad to get it to do that. They’re kind of fighting what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is or trying to make it something it’s not, either out of desire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or necessity. They have to do those things. And that is, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me there are lots of things the iPad is good for, but general purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work at a computer, especially content creation work, I don’t think is one of those things. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need a keyboard for a lot of stuff that people do, and you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what computer pointing devices do, which is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high precision and fast pointing devices. with trackpads and mice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even little track points they all offer fast highly precise cursor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input and touch is not that you don’t think a stylus is precise a stylus is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll see how that actually works in practice because like you know we’ve seen tablet PCs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen the surface we’ve seen devices that use a stylus to control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop interface and at that point it is like a Cintiq it is just basically you know moving a mouse cursor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a pen on screen. That’s fine. That’s not how iOS is going to work though. iOS is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system designed for big sloppy fingers and you know so it the stylus will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help in certain content creation things like drawing and things like that but you still like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so so often you need more precision than you know you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the keyboard commands you need like the
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. That’s what I’m thinking about the keyboard thing when you see people using a Cintiq or any other
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of tablet type thing on a desktop, very, very often you see one hand on the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John like they have their setup so they can they can reach the keyboard to all the modifiers and stuff and that I think is like kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ John vestige of the desktop age because it’s not as if you need a keyboard in fact it’s very awkward to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the tablet and also the keyboard because the keyboard is so wide but you only need to like get at the modifiers
⏹️ ▶️ John and people make these special key setups so they only need like one half of the keyboard like it’s very awkward and
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way you’re going to get yourself out of that is to have an a piece of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that is more purpose-built to let you, you know, use your primary
⏹️ ▶️ John interface, which is the stylus. You still need all these modifiers and to do all those other things, but they don’t have to be done through a
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, right? If you had an application made for a fictional iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John with a really good stylus and everything that used on-screen touch
⏹️ ▶️ John elements or gestures to do all the same things that modifiers do, it would take a while to, you know, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John decades of graphics application on the Mac, like, oh, I always know hold down that the option means the
⏹️ ▶️ John shape is going to go from the center, option shift is going to constrain to a perfect square or circle, like all these things that we just know
⏹️ ▶️ John from like decades of use of graphics applications. We don’t have that that interface language
⏹️ ▶️ John for tablet based applications yet, but we can develop it. And I think if we do develop
⏹️ ▶️ John it a couple generations from now, people are going to have the same kind of intuitive multi
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-hand gesture, like one hand is the stylus, the other hand is doing all sorts of weird things in the corner,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would look just as alien to us today as, I bet if a non-designer
⏹️ ▶️ John saw an actual designer working in Photoshop or Illustrator with a tablet with all the shortcuts, they would be like, what are you typing?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you even doing there? Or even just like Final Cut Pro with all the colored keyboards with different keys. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John very strange to the person that’s not accustomed to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s strange, it makes me believe that you can make an equally strange and perhaps even more
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient interface that just uses two hands on a big giant touchscreen. One is
⏹️ ▶️ John holding a stylus, the other one is doing who knows what in whatever corner of the screen. And that can actually be more efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John because the freeform nature of the things you can do with multiple fingers and
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple hands and a stylus on the screen, opens up much more natural gestures for doing graphical
⏹️ ▶️ John manipulations than knowing that if you hold down option and shift, you get a perfect circle from the center,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like that makes sense in our minds only because they’ve been warped by decades of using desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing applications, but I really want there to be a different language for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John creative things on a screen with a stylus. And the only way we’re going to get that is by having hardware and people
⏹️ ▶️ John making software for it. And maybe it’s not going to be Adobe, maybe it’s not going to be Illustrator, maybe it’s going to be companies like Affinity or whatever that don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, a history behind them that just say, oh, well, I’m just going to make a iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John native graphics environment. I’m not gonna make up my own conventions and maybe the first three people do
⏹️ ▶️ John that make dumb conventions but eventually everyone sort of hones in on Things that they agree are efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John and useful to use and the old people who are used to Illustrator never leave Illustrator They just retire
⏹️ ▶️ John and go off into the woods and the young kids who grew up Doing everything on iPads and you can that’s the one place to see iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John kids using them like crazy kids who grew up with that when you try to tell them what modifiers to hold down to do
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of different things and and what key combos to press to switch the background and foreground
⏹️ ▶️ John and to do all these other things, they’re gonna be like, well, isn’t there some touch screen thing I can use to do? Like, it’ll just seem
⏹️ ▶️ John unnatural to them. So I am very, whatever the thing is where you’re optimistic,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s bullish, right? Yeah, I am very bullish about the future of large tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John for use in creative fields and the sooner we start making the mistakes that we have
⏹️ ▶️ John to make to figure out what works there, the better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I’m a skeptic. I think that… You’ll be retired, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think tablets have a serious input problem and a serious problem of ergonomics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while doing a lot of this kind of work. And yes, there are lots of things where they are good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t see them ever even coming close to the general purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usefulness of either a phone or a computer. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give up too much on both ends. They’re not portable enough to replace where we like our phones so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much because they’re not always on our person. Our phones are always with us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re always within reach. They’re usually in our pockets or our bags. They’re always with us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your tablet is not because it can’t fit in your pocket or many bags.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your tablet is not always with you for most people. Your computer is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same portability class. Your computer is also not always with you, but if you’re going to sit down and do a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work, most people can get way more work done on a computer than they can on a tablet. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, I know, but I think most people. And what you’re saying, John, it makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re saying a lot of this is generational. You’re right. But I don’t think all of it is. I think there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain realities of, well, this device doesn’t have room for physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard and mouse and stuff, or whatever the case may be, trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, even that, if you keep spooling that out, as you’re trying to think of your things, well, you have to have a keyboard and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I start to think of more of a form factor that looks like like a 27 inch iMac laid down like a drafting table
⏹️ ▶️ John with a keyboard in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And that’s an ergonomic nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco really. People work
⏹️ ▶️ John on drafting tables all the time. Like it’s a touch screen. It’s a touch screen with the stylus. Ask them about their neck and shoulder issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you could raise them up. It’s not it’s not any more of an ergonomic nightmare than sitting in front of computers. Are they all you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have an ergonomic setup in either way. The whole point is I’m saying like a touch screen that is not completely
⏹️ ▶️ John vertical so you don’t get arm strained. Like, before the computers existed, people did drafting
⏹️ ▶️ John and architecture on monks and scribes and stuff. And yes, they had RSI issues then
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, but I think we had more RSI issues with computers with vertical screens and keyboards and mice. Anyway, I think those
⏹️ ▶️ John things are all surmountable problems. But what you have there is you don’t have any compromises.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a really big screen, you have a precision input device, you can have a mouse if you wanted, you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John a stylus, you can have a keyboard, but the primary interface is this big, giant canvas that you have
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of it that you can use all five of your fingers on and both of your hands. And when you need to type, you can type on a keyboard. When
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to do voice recognition, you can talk when you do video conferencing, the camera can see you. When you need to use a mouse for something
⏹️ ▶️ John you can although I’m not sure if you would we’re going to use a stylus like that’s the end game where it’s like, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John new like is the replacement for the PC. Somehow we bridge the gap between here and there. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s anything you can you can’t do on that setup that you can do on a PC today because it would be it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be plugged in you don’t have power constraints you could have like it’s just it basically is a new PC
⏹️ ▶️ John all it is is a different PC right but you got there by coming from the tablet realm and you started out as something that looks like a big phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just kept getting creeping slowly and slowly towards the things that a PC can do and you start pulling over more and more until eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wanted to use a clunky old PC and everyone wanted to use those things we’re far from that now but I think that’s direction it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John go for the reasons you said because the phone is always going to be the phone and the phones are already pretty big so it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even bother going in that direction what are you even gonna do there that was like the original iPad it was as simple as an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and as limited as an iPhone but not an iPhone so like that’s a dead end don’t go in that direction you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go in the other direction so turn your attention to PCs see all the things that they can do better and
⏹️ ▶️ John see if you can knock them down one by one and we really need to start that process split-screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John the most timid possible move in that direction but I think it’s a good idea to be timid because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just go full Microsoft servers like hey here’s a start menu. Boom. Like, just
⏹️ ▶️ John all you’re doing then is just abdicating. You’re saying, see I can be like you now I’m a PC and I’m a tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you’re kind of neither one. You have you have to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John absorb the you have to become the preferred platform people want to do this thing on without bringing over
⏹️ ▶️ John the PC baggage and that’s really really hard to do and it’s gonna take a long time but let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s start the process now. And in the meantime it’s kind of lucky that
⏹️ ▶️ John companies like Apple are doing it because Apple can afford to noodle it I mean how they can afford to noodle around the stupid Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John for years and years they can afford to noodle around with the iPad it has a lot of economies of scale
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of the CPUs GPUs the operating system like it’s not that’s the whole reason you
⏹️ ▶️ John know they’ve been getting away with coasting so long it’s like well we’ll make an iPad version of everything too it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like an iPhone a little bit different as they start to differentiate you have to invest in it more they can afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that on the other end of the spectrum and all the stories about the iPad has been like little
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets for kids to watch YouTube on. Um, $99 Android tablets that
⏹️ ▶️ John are basically just like portable TV screens you hold in your hands that have wifi. That’s fine too. That market will continue to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s probably not interested in it, but that I think it’s worth mentioning. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t go towards phones. Apple should go towards PCs and then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be a market that I don’t think Apple is interested in for basically a really flat wifi connected
⏹️ ▶️ John TV screen with a web browser that will also continue to exist and become so cheap that you know our Grandchildren
⏹️ ▶️ John will like they’ll come in cereal boxes and with seven inch OLED roll-up tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you can use to watch future YouTube and play Plants vs. Zombies 9000
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple better be well out of that area and it better have figured out a way to turn the tablet into the next Mac by Then
⏹️ ▶️ John because if it hasn’t it will surely be completely out of the tablet market because Apple does not want to sell you $79 7-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet to play Angry Birds on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So before we finish this topic, I also want to mention the software. I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one I was thinking of earlier was, it was indeed by Lucas Mathis. I put the link in the show notes at ignorethecode.net
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think Gert went into it last week, so most of you probably saw it. But the idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the title is I’ve had a consumption device after all and he goes through a lot of these challenges and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including the upgrade thing. But he also has this great section about iOS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is itself a major limiting factor in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to quote get work done on an iPad or an iPhone. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s more of a glaring issue on an iPad as you’re looking at like different ways that you want to expand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this market as you want people to quote get more work done on it. How does this work within iOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is, while it’s doing things like the window management, as you said, that is kind of a baby step,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are still so many issues, much around things like file and document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management and data sharing between apps and everything. These things are still really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either still too walled off and too limited, or there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a procedure now, or the extension system. There is now a solution to some of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, but it is itself limited or cumbersome or unintuitive, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has other problems that makes it just harder to get a lot of kinds of work done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS than it would be on a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t read this article, but rather than listing iOS, don’t you think the App Store specifically is
⏹️ ▶️ John a barrier to these things just as much as the OS?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s a third thing. Not only do you have issues with what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is even possible to do on the OS, what limitations exist, what is really clunky. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was thinking earlier, one of my ideal pet projects would be to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logic, the audio editing app that is designed for making music and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that many podcasters, myself included, use to edit podcasts, even though it is so painfully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not made for that task and it never lets you forget that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably not even the best tool for even that job. The fact is a lot of us use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logic. I would love to replace it. I was thinking, I think I could do it on an iPad. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could make something that would do what I need Logic to do of editing podcasts. I could make that on an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hardware is definitely fast enough to do it now. I know Core Audio very well. I know UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. I could definitely make it on an iPad. But then I started thinking, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you get the files onto the iPad? How do you get the source files of what you recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the iPad to edit? What document format do you save? Where do you save that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco document? When you’re done with a document, you want to export it out. Where do you put this? Where do you put these files?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are answers to all those things, but they’re all so clunky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I could make it save to Dropbox, maybe, but then everyone has to use Dropbox. And then these files are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big sometimes, and you’ve got to blow all your Dropbox space on that. you got to deal with sync and getting the files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, exactly right. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s so many, like the answers to those questions are so often on iOS so cumbersome. You
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think of how you’re going to make money without being able to get upgrades? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s step two. So step two is suppose I actually could make a good app like that. Like this is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use of an iPad physically because this is the kind of task where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do tons of scrolling, pinch to zoom to change the scroll scale, and tons of side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to side scrolling I could so easily make a great touch interface that would basically be a giant scroll view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you would use your finger to tap on regions that you wanted to move around and you could move them around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The interface to it would almost write itself. It would be so much, it would be not only so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straightforward for the kind of use I have in mind, but it would be better than on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be easier to do it on touch than it would be on the Mac. However, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose I actually get a useful app, but that also has all these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hindrances brought on by the OS and the data and file and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco document model of the OS, then I have to go sell it in the app store. Now it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is hard enough to make money on the iPhone. I think it’s even harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad for most kinds of apps. I mean, some kinds of apps do better on the iPad, but the iPad market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much smaller the iPhone market. And so many iPads are used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in roles like what you were just saying, like the kid YouTube thing. I think a lot of iPads are used in roles where people aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying a lot of new apps, if I had to take a guess. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to price it like a pro app. Like that’s what I was getting at. Like you how many people edit
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts very few. So you I mean, that’s the reason logic is like 200 bucks. It’s a pro app, you’re pricing like a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John app. But then you’re dead in the water after you sell the first version because you’re like, Oh, now I have
⏹️ ▶️ John like pro apps are sustained by having an initial high price and then having
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrades. And if you can’t have upgrades and you have to buy a new, like, then you’re gonna release version two of your application as an
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely new app that’s also for $200, but then the pro people want support. Like, I don’t know how you
⏹️ ▶️ John sell pro apps in iOS. Maybe enterprise apps where they don’t care that you just charge
⏹️ ▶️ John them again and again. Maybe you make them free and have subscription recurring. I just, the business model
⏹️ ▶️ John for pro apps in iOS, forget about iPad, in iOS period, just doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to exist or work. And Apple, does Apple have any pro level iOS applications?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s the other thing. So I don’t think I think upgrade pricing is a red herring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think upgrade pricing is not a major part of the problem. Pricing is a major part of the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general. But I upgrade pricing, I think is a really small part, if any, because Apple has already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown that when what they’re doing with their modern pro apps is they cut the prices from where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be. Lodges used to be hundreds, many hundreds of dollars, now it’s 200. Final Cut used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over a thousand, now it’s I think also 200 or 300, something like that. Apple’s model is simply,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna make the price lower up front, and then we’re just not gonna have upgrade pricing, because we can’t get EDQ’s team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think that’s how most pro apps work. Like, that’s how Apple’s pro apps work, but that’s not how, I mean, Photoshop has gone
⏹️ ▶️ John to subscription, which is one way to do it. It’s like sustainable recurring revenue, Office, the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, unless it’s not really like a pro app, but it’s an enterprise-y type app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say these days it is a pro app, but that’s a separate discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ John But things like Pro Tools are, you know, I mean Logic is the example because it’s an Apple’s camp, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John or Avid, stuff like that, they cost a lot of money, and a lot of them have upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing, and a lot of them have kind of like support expectations, where you’re gonna do bug fixes
⏹️ ▶️ John up until this, and then you have to pay more to get the next major version. Like maybe you can just come up with different business models related to it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seems difficult to me when your only option is you either get everything that I give you for free
⏹️ ▶️ John or you buy a whole new version. And maybe upgrade pricing is the old model, maybe Apple’s right
⏹️ ▶️ John that the new model should be just lower your price and then make them pay that every year, but then you’re just creeping up on subscriptions in a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John way. It just, I don’t know. The point is that is an unknown. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to stop people from, the unknown, you know, the uncertainty about it
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to stop people from even trying to do that. Whereas at least on the Mac, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is an established history which may be kind of archaic, but at least they know, well, this model kind of works and I can kind of roll
⏹️ ▶️ John with it as it evolves. But on iOS, I don’t think there is any obvious example
⏹️ ▶️ John other than Apple’s. And in Apple’s case, you don’t even know if they make money doing that. Does Logic make money on its own for $200?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did Aperture make money on any of its price points? You really have no idea whether that is even
⏹️ ▶️ John profitable. So if you’re an independent software maker, considering making a pro app for iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what examples you have to go off of to say if we do this in this kind of model we’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John make money if it costs this much to make it and year after year we’ll be able to sustain our business on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s it’s a serious problem like I I don’t think I would tackle this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no like seeing seeing the way the App Store is now especially on the iPad where it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like iPad economics are even less healthy than iPhone economics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because of the market size difference. I really don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple could do to get really serious pro apps on the iPad more than,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for more than just the big companies like Adobe and Microsoft that can do these little off-shoot versions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even good versions and just roll it into a subscription. But how you get something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s more narrowly targeted. Like, you have Pixelmator on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like five bucks because they can’t sell it at more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see how that goes. You
⏹️ ▶️ John remember there was Adobe Photoshop for iOS, you remember that? Briefly, right? Right, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was an application that you could download from Adobe, whose name I believe was actually Photoshop. That’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John where the similarity between actual Photoshop and that ended. I think it’s kind of a chicken
⏹️ ▶️ John egg where no one wants to go first, there’s uncertainty or whatever. Serendipity could help
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Apple could introduce pro hardware with the stylus, then some small, naive
⏹️ ▶️ John developer could develop an application that really catches on in the same way that like VisiCalc did, the
⏹️ ▶️ John old, the classic killer app or tractor app, right? That is just like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to get an Apple II because you can run the VisiCalc, or you have to get a Mac because you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do desktop publishing with, you know, PageMaker, whatever. Like, that just becomes the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That developer makes tons of money. everybody buys the hardware to get the software and
⏹️ ▶️ John buys the software because that’s the software you buy to do the thing and they’re the first one to do it and it’s a breakout hit
⏹️ ▶️ John and hopefully that would let them work out what the business model is going to be riding on their giant
⏹️ ▶️ John success in time for other people who are going to be less successful to join in but without
⏹️ ▶️ John some huge breakout success and I don’t even know what that would be like Photoshop was a breakout success Photoshop was a
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenon for people bought computers so you could have a thing to run Photoshop on and they didn’t care what computer was
⏹️ ▶️ John when Photoshop for the Mac was crappy or behind they bought Windows computers but I don’t care I need a machine to run Photoshop because
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop is what I do for a living and I need to do to use it where is the
⏹️ ▶️ John VisiCalc QuarkXPress Pagemaker Photoshop for
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Pro that could help sort of break the break the tie break the logjam
⏹️ ▶️ John here and get that platform moving forward but I don’t think Apple should be counting on that and certainly Apple doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to be doing anything on its own to make its own pro-level software and show that it can have a sustainable business
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can never tell because they have so much money that they could basically do things a lot of things like
⏹️ ▶️ John I work basically for free that other companies can’t do but the first step is I guess Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has to make the hardware so at least we’re going in the right direction sort of if any of these rumors are to be believed which by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way these are all rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well so even the hardware is and even beyond like my theories about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input methods and everything there’s even other problems that are more boring in nature, but that are problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like, you know, there’s no USB ports, or, you know, network ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or there’s only one port at the bottom to plug in anything in. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you- There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no more room for any more ports, you know, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John has to be exactly that size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, yeah, you can always, yeah. But the thing is, like, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the philosophical or physical decisions that Apple has made about no ports, or restricting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expansion, or whatever, over the years, that also restricts this kind of usefulness for the pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use like this. That is a problem. Like, there are a lot of potential things you could do with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices, but they don’t have some kind of hardware feature you need, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no good way to add it. Like, what my Mac mini does for the live stream,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you saw the crazy setups I’ve had in the past to try to get iOS devices to do live streaming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was a huge pain. The iOS devices had plenty of processing power to do what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed. I didn’t need a full-blown PC-type computer to do these things, but I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a computer with an audio interface and power that was reliable and maybe an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet jack. There’s always gonna be something like that where there’s so many possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses where iOS would be perfectly sufficient as an OS and the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be perfectly sufficient like CPU power-wise, RAM-wise, but there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the iOS device hardware, like the rest of it, that is restricted in some way or lacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some feature that could make this kind of use case a lot better. And there’s so many use cases where that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, Apple has said no to so many things over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most of that is what makes their product so good for general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumer consumption, if that’s not redundant. Like, what makes the iPad and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone so good for browsing the web and reading Twitter and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is its simplicity and these nice, you know, thin, light devices that last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half of the day and you can browse a lot on them. A lot of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve said no to are things that we actually did need for ProUse. That’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Fracture, Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Igloo, and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪ Now the show is over ♪ ♪ They didn’t even mean to begin ♪ Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter You can follow them Follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S That’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean to Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech Podcasts, so long
Post-show: Touch everything
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s totally gonna get that’s what you’re gonna get instead of a mini or an iMac iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll solve all your problems it’ll stop you from playing with note because you won’t be able to type anything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco actually can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run Plex. Well the client but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s funny you bring that up because co-worker I haven’t seen him around the office in a long time and I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a client site on and off for a long time. But a co-worker was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered a new machine and rather than getting the other new standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue Dell or whatever, which by the way, if you want a good laugh, take a look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power brick for one of those Dells that’s wide enough to have a numeric keypad on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The power brick alone is like half the size of my laptop. It’s unbelievable. If you You had described
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in perfect detail. I wouldn’t believe you that a power brick is that big,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I assure you it’s that big. Anyway, he chose, instead of getting one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid Dells with the ridiculous power bricks, or presumably he could have asked for a Mac, his work computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to be a Surface, which to me struck me as the most insane, dumb thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve ever heard in my life, in no small part because for the next three years he will be using a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has eight gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see the appeal of the Surface for people who already know how to use a PC. If you’re comfortable with a PC, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you mostly just want a tablet except for those times you need a little bit of PC-ish, that’s what the Surface is for.
⏹️ ▶️ John It still seems very awkward to me and weird, but I see people using it at work too.
⏹️ ▶️ John For a certain use case, it seems to be okay. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care about the compromises, and they know what they’re getting into. It’s like, I know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John use a PC laptop. I’m not intimidated or put off by any of the complexities that the surface reveals
⏹️ ▶️ John about because it basically is a PC laptop. But also a lot of times I just want to kind of a tablet thing and I want to be able to touch the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. All right, here you go. Here’s your Frankenstein monster. It’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s the same thing I described in that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it was my first macro column I described something that was basically like a MacBook Air that could fold back on itself and become
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad. Only my idea was when it’s an iPad mode, it’s an iPad. And when it’s in Mac mode, it’s a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the two are only rated insofar as maybe they share like iCloud Drive together. Otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just basically like, hey, I don’t have to bring two devices, I can just bring one and it’s basically two devices. And you could do that
⏹️ ▶️ John today, you could totally do that right now. With with current technology would still be a Frankenstein product that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think anybody would like. But I was thinking about then, how do you cross this divide, because sometimes people mostly just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a tablet. And it would be like, you know, I can see my email account from either one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can see it in Apple Mail, or I can see it in the iOS mail application, still the same It’s not like I’m splitting
⏹️ ▶️ John my data, like, because so much of your data is in the cloud. But then you’re like, then you have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with the PC when it’s in PC mode. And all the things that entails, and you’re not really making any progress, all you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is let yourself carry one cleverly hinged device instead of one conventionally
⏹️ ▶️ John hinged device and one unhinged device.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what the Surface is, one slightly cleverly hinged device that’s really awkward and difficult to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, basically. I don’t know. All my, uh, all my developer friends who have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used Windows 10 swear that it’s the best thing ever. I haven’t barely touched it, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you like Windows PCs, you can get a Windows PC and this other tablet-y thing all in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still think the iPad Pro is just the MacBook One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tend to agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t touch the screen! Give a MacBook One to a kid and watch them put their little grubby puzzle over your screen and they’ll say, This is not an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is useless to me. What is this blank square here with no writing on the bottom anyway? I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John what that is at all. And the screen doesn’t work. I touch it and nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if you want a computer that’s like small, ultra portable, slow, and hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to type on, it’s a MacBook One. Can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John touch the screen. Screens you can’t touch are broken. What did I do recently? I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure that I either pinched a zoom or swiped something in car and driver when I was reading
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Nice. I do that all the time. Like, I had a recent one and I’m like, I hadn’t done it, I had
⏹️ ▶️ John to go on like a two month run where I hadn’t tried to move a piece of paper to scroll it,
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is a lot of the times when I’m reading a magazine, I’m sitting in the same place as I would be
⏹️ ▶️ John reading something on the iPad. Only when it’s a paper magazine, you can’t zoom. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I tapped the link once too. That’s why people are dumb.