143: Capital F, Capital C
13 Nov 2015iPad Pro impressions, multitasking paradigms, and Marco actually played a game.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Menu button snap-back on the Apple TV remote
- John's children react to the remote
- Marco and Apple TV gaming
- iPad Pro
- Multitasking UI paradigms
- Post-show: Neutral
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Chapters
- Follow-up: Accidental seeking
- Kids using the Apple TV remote
- Apple TV: Badland
- Apple TV: Provenance
- Apple TV gaming outlook so far
- Sponsor: Casper
- iPad Pro retail issues
- Apple Pencil hands-on
- Sponsor: Lynda.com
- iPad Pro initial impressions
- Multitasking paradigms
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- iPad Pro: day-one verdict
- Post-show: Neutral
Follow-up: Accidental seeking
⏹️ ▶️ John of titles that make people not want to listen. You know what? You don’t want to listen? Fine. Capital F, capital C. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you get. It’s obscure. It’s for the connoisseur, man. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, first item of follow-up, the most followed up item
⏹️ ▶️ John from last week was both Marco’s description and my reinforcement of the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you lose the tiny little Apple remote in your couch cushions or it’s just dark and it’s somewhere on your couch
⏹️ ▶️ John or on the arm of your couch or on a coffee table and you go reaching for it and you feel around try to find it
⏹️ ▶️ John and you accidentally swipe your fingers across touchpad while you’re watching video that will move the playhead on the
⏹️ ▶️ John video. And many many people are going to tell us that if you hit the menu button it would just go
⏹️ ▶️ John back to where it was. When you move the playhead it doesn’t actually start playing again until you
⏹️ ▶️ John tell it to play but then you’re still kind of faced with the situation of, oh well how do I get the playhead back to where I want to put it? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think you even have to put it back first of all, but second of all if you accidentally do that, if you’re reaching to the remote
⏹️ ▶️ John and you swipe your hands across touchpad and it’s it’s you know moves the playhead somewhere just hit the menu button
⏹️ ▶️ John it will go back to where it was I think you can probably also just hit well maybe you can’t hit play anyway menu button
⏹️ ▶️ John the largest followed-up item I didn’t know that in my one hour of using it but
⏹️ ▶️ John since then I have used it and it works
⏹️ ▶️ John used Plex yet I haven’t I keep meaning to install that I haven’t installed it I and the thing that keeps me away
⏹️ ▶️ John from Plex I went through this big long painful experience to install on my ps4 and then was disappointed in the client
⏹️ ▶️ John and the main thing keeps me from installing it is my Plex server would be my Synology, but I use the DS video
⏹️ ▶️ John server instead, and the kids use the DS video server. Like, you can play video from it from my
⏹️ ▶️ John television and from 10 different places. And I think, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like to mess with that setup, because I think like by enabling Plex, there’s a potential that I could screw up my existing video
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, or maybe it’ll show up as two DLNA servers, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. It shows up as two DLNA servers, because my dad uses DLNA, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has Plex running, I believe hosted on the Synology of Memory serves. And there are two separate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal DLNA servers for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I’m always just afraid to touch what works, especially if it involves things that my kids are using, but I will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it really you should get yours first and try it and tell me about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, let’s, we’ll figure that out. At some point, maybe I’m sure I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get one. It’s just haven’t done it yet trying to hold out trying to wait for the for the holidays probably won’t work. We’ll
Kids using the Apple TV remote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did your kids say about the remote?
⏹️ ▶️ John This I thought was interesting because I’ve seen a lot of things on About the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV or about just technology in general where it’s like you we old people don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that and only the kids You know truly understand it and I thought one of my kids reaction to
⏹️ ▶️ John the new remote Was interesting They’re used
⏹️ ▶️ John to having lots of different remotes because I don’t have a you know, so universal remote I have a bunch of different modes they have learned
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less to navigate my Crazy television setup to get what they want on the television.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not really that into it They don’t want to know how it works. They just want to know the minimum possible to get it to work Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I said here is the new Apple TV and I showed it to him and we were watching some video and at some point They wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch a video by themselves And I said I’ll just use the new Apple TV and they didn’t know what the remote looked like because they used to the Tivo
⏹️ ▶️ John remote anyway, I gave him their mode and showed it to them and And immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my daughter, she was super angry that this remote did not work like the other one. She was
⏹️ ▶️ John just trying to navigate the grid of items, you know, go up and to the left. And I was like, all right, go over to Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why she was watching Netflix, and everyone knows she knows how to do it from the T02. But anyway, just moving the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of selection to the Netflix icon on the main screen using the touchpad
⏹️ ▶️ John was not immediately apparent how that worked, even though I kept showing her, swipe your thumb left or right or tap or whatever. And she got
⏹️ ▶️ John so angry, she’s like, why can’t it just be buttons? I just want to go up and left. And she was just so angry that it didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the way the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one did because she was competent with the other one. She knows how to go, again, it was a TiVo remote, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the little Apple thing. She knows how to go up, up, left, left, and then hit the button and it’ll select. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little remote was thwarting her. It had taken away her skill and made her back
⏹️ ▶️ John into a novice. And that is a phenomenon that we’re all very familiar with in the adult world or
⏹️ ▶️ John the world of people who aren’t in elementary school anyway, where
⏹️ ▶️ John a set of computer skills that have been built up over many years. And the the introduction
⏹️ ▶️ John of anything new, even if the new thing is better, is seen as a threat or as a bad thing, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it puts them back into the role of novice, they know how to use the old system, they know how to use,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a particular interface or a piece of hardware or a piece of software or whatever. And that expert they start
⏹️ ▶️ John that expertise starts to feel like they start to internalize that as like, I’m a competent person, I know how to do this job,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can whatever, whatever task I need to accomplish, I can accomplish it and I use it and any tool you give them even if the tool is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually better once you learn it, because it makes them feel like they can no longer do the task they could previously do that tool
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad. And it was amazing to me to see that happen in eight year old. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not we’re not that different you and I,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the old people and the young
⏹️ ▶️ John people, even an eight year olds can be super angry that her hard earned skills of using
⏹️ ▶️ John the directional pad and the select button on a keyboard remote can be erased in a moment by new technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, she’s used to it now it’s fine. Just like that. All is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well yeah I mean you know like she’s eight it takes three seconds you learn how to do it it’s like she was still angry about it for that day but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness It’s just.
Apple TV: Badland
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, any other follow-up or we already done that if we are done that is world record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up I’m very proud of us
⏹️ ▶️ John unless I think Margo has been doing more Apple TV gaming. Do you have anything more to add on it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah So so basically what happened between last show and this show is That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my family discovered that the Apple TV can in fact be a good gaming system Because we discovered the game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everybody else discovered two years ago Badland This is especially good because none of us had actually played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on iOS So it was all new to us. Badland is a fantastic game for the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s kind of like the art style, almost of limbo, but with color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s this kind of intricate, really fancied up version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the basic gameplay mechanic of Flappy Bird. And this is really minimizing its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodness. But it’s like, so you are this bird, and you push the button to go up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you let go of the button to fall, and you know, just like this kind of inertia based flying game and you just fly through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these side scrolling levels and there’s all sorts of different opticals and things that you, you know, things you pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change, the behavior of things and you multiply and divide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s crazy. It’s just a really, really good game and it is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good even on the Siri remote. We’ve actually, we tried it with the Gamepad and with the Siri remote and we actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find it’s better with the Siri remote and I can’t explain why. I don’t know why. Is it tap to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco click or is it click to click? You have to actually click the button in. It isn’t just tap. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why it’s better, but for some reason it just feels better. It feels right on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Siri remote. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t it feel weird to hold a traditional console style controller in two hands and the only thing you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John with it is pressing one button with one thumb?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, that might be it. So anyway, it really is a fantastic game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I highly recommend it for any Apple TV owner. It’s accessible, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kids can play it, adults can play it, non-gamers can play it. It is really a very nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well-done game. I think it’s like five bucks, who cares, just get it. Like, it’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By far the best Apple TV gaming experience that we’ve had so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting, this looks aesthetically just reading the, or excuse me, not reading, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching the little video on their website. This looks aesthetically a lot like World of Goo to me. Did either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s, yeah. And I honestly, I wouldn’t expect World of Goo to work because of the lack of a pointer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of in a similar art style, or maybe that was one of the influences on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certainly, it’s a gorgeous artistic design game. It’s really, really, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of funny, it’s kind of sick, like, it’s really good. Just get Badland.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There aren’t that many things you can do in the Apple TV that are really excellent right now, because we’re just waiting on a lot of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get ported or written for it. This is one of those things. this highly recommended Badland.
⏹️ ▶️ John another one of those one-button press games. Yes. Because, you know, again, designed for,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming this was designed for touch originally, but it lends itself well, because you are forced to go forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there is no move forward thing. Like, going forward, isn’t that like part of the gameplay itself? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that the screen moves on whether you’re ready or not. So if you have to backtrack or something to get around an obstacle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the screen is moving on, tough luck, right? Yeah, exactly. And so this is a type
⏹️ ▶️ John of game that I think traditional gamers who are used to having more control over their environment
⏹️ ▶️ John might find off-putting, but is ideal for the phone where you don’t want to make someone try to use a virtual D-pad,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now on the Apple TV where we actually have a real D-ish pad or whatever, if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you just wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John use the remote, hey, we already have a game already tuned for single button press, and now that button doesn’t even block any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen, so an ideal Apple TV port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s watchable by people, like it’s fun to watch someone playing it. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing about it that needs to be on a personal device that’s only in your hands. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it really is very much like a TV-friendly, family-friendly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general audience kind of game. It’s just really good.
Apple TV: Provenance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highly recommended. I also tried Provenance more this week. So the Provenance is that emulator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can’t actually get it on the App Store. It’s one of the relatively few apps, I think, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is published with the intention of everybody, it’s open source, and to install it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to download the source code, register for an Apple developer account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Xcode, build the game, and connect your TV via USB to your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have Xcode, install the game onto your Apple TV with provisioning profiles generated from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your developer account. My goodness. It is definitely not something that you can just like tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a non-developer to just go do this and expect them to figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might, but the chances are not great. So it is very much a cumbersome process. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know Flux, the F.lux, that I believe just came out with something similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iPhones and iPads where they had this open source version that they just say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here you can you can sideload this with with Xcode and a developer account if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this on your on your device without jailbreaking something like that so it’s a pretty cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process and then it’s nerdy then you have to like you have to like tell it to import your ROMs that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to play in the emulator and then it like creates a web interface and you have to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your Mac and upload them and so it’s you know it’s definitely a little bit cumbersome to get set up but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it is set up you have an emulator on your Apple TV and it covers all the popular 8 and 16 bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems it doesn’t go into like it doesn’t have n64 or anything more advanced it but I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stops at like Super Nintendo and Genesis level but it is really quite good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you know I’ve played better emulators if you have a computer with a gamepad on your computer you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot better because like provenance it lacks a lot of customizable control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of emulators have you can’t for example customize the controls so if you don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they how they map the buttons onto the gamepad tough luck oh I guess you have the source code I guess you could change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but I I am a developer and I wouldn’t bother doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they also don’t appear to have any of the really nice scaling mode so like you know all these old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games they were made for much lower resolution screens and if you run them on a modern emulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get all these like fancy like the 2x SAI and Super Eagle like all these fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scaling up modes to make the graphics look better on higher resolution larger screens that we have these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so that is not present on this so it you’re just looking at like you know a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixel quadrupled version of the game or whatever you know just scale up like in the dumb in the dumbest way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible scale it up to the big screen so it doesn’t look great but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks no worse than the original system did so overall it’s fun it’s a fun way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a whole bunch of games on an Apple TV if you have a gamepad don’t even bother if if you have the Siri remote, just don’t bother.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you have a game pad, check out Providence. Oh, if you have a game pad and an Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re a developer and you have a USB-C to USB cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you have a bunch of backups of your old video games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and if you have legally obtained backups from, I don’t even know what hardware that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to create those, if you have all of those, which are really small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s funny, like I loaded up every game I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Genesis, Super Nintendo, and NES, and even Sega Master System, and these games are like a few hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kilobytes each. Like I played through Sonic 1, which by the way, Sonic 1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a hard game. I used to be a lot better at Sonic than I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Wow, when it turns out we don’t play games for like a decade, it really impacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your ability to play them. I almost got a game over in Labyrinth Zone, that’s how bad it was. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco died in Marble Hill Zone, I mean this is how bad I’ve gotten. So I played through that and it’s like, you know, a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundred kilobytes. So it’s a quick, it’s a great way. If you are this geeky to set this kind of thing up, it is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cool thing to do for a little while at least.
Apple TV gaming outlook so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, overall, I am… So now that I’ve had good game experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple TV, I am more optimistic for its future, but it’s going to depend a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how many people actually buy these game controllers, and then how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers can afford to make games for it. Certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s going to be games like Badland where you don’t need the game controller, and that’s good, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so limited because, you know, you see that… if you don’t have one of these yet, you look at that remote and you might think, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games can use six buttons or whatever. No, games can use basically, I think, two buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The D-pad simulator, or you know, they have the track pad, and the play pause button,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think that’s it. I think everything else is off limits to games because everything else has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meaning into the system that you aren’t allowed to override. And of course, there’s the accelerometer stuff. So you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could kind of do like Wii game kind of stuff, some of it, not even all of it, because some of it requires more buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more precision and everything. But you could do some of the kind of stuff we saw on the Wii, but it is pretty limited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I do hope we see more good games. I’m sure we will, and there’s probably even more out now that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t tried yet, but I do think it’s gonna be, I do think it has the potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a really fun gaming platform, and I just hope it pans out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was struck again by the stories this weekend about video game
⏹️ ▶️ John sales. like, thinking of the Apple TV and iPhone gaming and everything else as kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like gaming for the masses, where it’s like, yeah, I’m not that into games, but if you have a fun game to play, I’ll check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple TV, you buy it for other reasons. If it plays games, it’s cool. Uh, but you know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the general impression of the people who are not in the video game industry
⏹️ ▶️ John is that most people play phone games. You know, you got a phone, everyone’s got a smartphone, you can play games on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know anyone who has a smartphone who hasn’t had at least one game that they’ve played briefly like had a week
⏹️ ▶️ John where they were addicted to insert name of your favorite game here whatever that may be even if it’s just some random zinga
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or or flappy bird you mentioned before the idea that for the mass market
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re they’re you know what we used to call casual games like but there’s so many more of those people right and then there
⏹️ ▶️ John are the hardcore people who the weirdos who have actual game consoles and stuff like that but
⏹️ ▶️ John when you look look at it from the number side of it, it is flipped around. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there was this Call of Duty Black Ops three came out and sold like $550 million and you know, on the
⏹️ ▶️ John first weekend and it’s on track to earn a billion dollars. It’s almost as if,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you took it in the movie sense where people said, people have the impression, well, most people go to see
⏹️ ▶️ John these small independent movies because they’re just movie casuals and only Only the real hardcore people go to see
⏹️ ▶️ John Jurassic World. But no one has that impression. Everyone says, well, movies. Well, Jurassic World, that’s a smash
⏹️ ▶️ John hit. That’s for the masses. That’s for the mainstream. Gaming is so weird in that the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that everyone thinks is kind of like a dying industry of these
⏹️ ▶️ John hardcore gamers, there’s only a couple of tens or hundreds of millions of those as opposed to the billion people
⏹️ ▶️ John who play cell phone games. And yet that’s where all the money is.
⏹️ ▶️ John of Duty Black Ops is making more money than probably the entire top 10
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iOS, you know, gaming charts. And that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one game on this supposed platform that is dying PCs and and and consoles.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know how we’re going to square that circle. Like, I don’t think we can
⏹️ ▶️ John extrapolate and say, well, consoles are going away and PCs going away. And pretty soon,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mass market will take over and everyone just plays Badlands on their Apple TV and
⏹️ ▶️ John plays Flappy Bird and, you know, Candy Crush, and that is the gaming industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John When the money people are like, give me this year’s Call of Duty any day, because it is a money-making machine
⏹️ ▶️ John on the scale of a blockbuster movie. And as far as the money people are concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the mass market of gaming. So, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John handle on this, because as a gamer, I do see these other sort of, not lesser
⏹️ ▶️ John games, smaller games as
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that’s weird, and I see Call of Duty as exactly the same as Jurassic World. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing that doesn’t fit with that is the popular notion that console games and PC games are somehow going
⏹️ ▶️ John away to be wiped away by lesser devices like the
⏹️ ▶️ John smartphone and iPad games that kids play and Apple TV games and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first buncher this week is Casper. is an online retailer of premium mattresses for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fraction of the price.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are shipped right to your door. Now this is pretty cool. So what they do is they ship it in this
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco box and you open it up and it sucks all the air out of the room and inflates itself and there you have a mattress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you’re not going to get back in the box, but it’s pretty amazing. And they know
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were raving about how great the return process even was. That tells you how nice
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were to deal with, how great the return process was. This just sounds like a fantastic company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with, from everyone we’ve talked to who’s dealt with them. This is completely risk-free, free shipping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painless returns, made in America mattresses. And the prices for all this, you would think, this sounds like a premium
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iPad Pro retail issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Casper for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as we record big day today, biggest of all though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for our friend Federico Vatici. His dreams have come true. Today is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro day. I did not have the time to go and take a look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the store to see if they had any in stock. I did not pre-order one. I have no experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this whatsoever, but one of us does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually went, Tiff wanted an iPad Pro, and so we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided, like any Apple product, if you’re going to get it at all, get it when it’s out, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price is not gonna change between now, well actually, nevermind, the way Apple is these days, this’ll be for sale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next five years. And it will drop by 100 bucks next year. But anyway, so we decided, Tiff was interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a larger screen iPad, so this morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco woke up, ordered it for in-store pickup, because I was surprised. You know, they said it would be available for online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordering today in stores later this week. And they surprised everyone, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stores, based on the employees I talked to, by having it available in stores today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was great, so I went and ordered it like still in bed in the morning with the Apple Store app for the iPhone, which is the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to order things. Unfortunately, the pencil was already backordered at eight in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning, already backordered three to four weeks. And the stores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked around, and it sounds like most stores actually got zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencils to sell today. Like it’s not like they sold out, they actually just didn’t get any.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what makes you think the pencil was back ordered as opposed to nobody has been able to order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? The people in my store said that they think the big stores in Manhattan might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gotten a small number and I heard some people from maybe some stores in Europe that are really high profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they got a couple. So it does seem like they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming to some stores, stores. They came to some stores today, and the early orders this morning had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people said they got a one-to-two-week delay window, rather than my quoted three-to-four-weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they are coming, but I can’t help but feel like Apple keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco botching the releases of these things. In the same way that the Watch launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was totally botched. I mean, the Watch launch was a disaster. Where, yeah, it officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched on this day, but you couldn’t actually get one for like months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you wanted certain ones you waited even longer for things like the modern buckle or leather loop or the black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link that were very back order delayed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now with the iPad Pro it’s nice that it’s available today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was a nice surprise that we were able to pick one up today but two of its main selling features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smart keyboard, is that what it’s called? Smart keyboard? I believe that’s right. from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Pencil were both totally unavailable for most people who try to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it today. And who knows how long it’ll be. It does kind of put a damper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. Like Tiff was really excited about the Pencil and so was I honestly to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pencil. And it does put a damper on it to be like, okay now we finally get this device that by the way was announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two months ago. It’s not like this was announced last week and we’ve been really impatient. This was announced two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months ago and it just barely shipped, apparently, and they couldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the store stock with the really critical accessories? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just seems like a botched launch to me. And this, like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operations guy is running the company. How does this happen? I don’t know. I’m probably being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too critical of this, but it really does put a damper on it. When you go to the store, all happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get this new device that you can do this cool new thing with, And then it says, oh, you can’t get your pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for another month. You know, that’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a bummer for you, but what does that mean in terms of things that Apple cares about? Does it mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did see a number of people today, I tweeted early in the morning, like, you know, this is, this is kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did see a number of people responding saying that they were going to go pick up an iPad Pro today, but since they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t get a pencil, they’re just going to wait until they can. So they’re just delaying the sales, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re still gonna sell those probably, but they will just be delayed. But I have to imagine, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple really wants a big opening weekend. They want to be able to brag that they sold X million iPads in a weekend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do. So it’s gonna hurt them in that way, but also there is gonna be a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree of, right now there’s inertia, it’s day one, and people are really excited about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they wanna go get it. Maybe some people who were on the fence about whether they wanted to get it, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they now won’t get it, because maybe as this inertia dies down over the next three to four weeks before they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the accessories that they want, maybe in that time they’ll actually decide, you know what, maybe I don’t really need this anymore. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like, it’s probably not gonna be a massive portion of their sales, but I do think it will hurt them in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, how does that balance with the other side of which I think happened with the watch? There are positive aspects of
⏹️ ▶️ John things not being available. There is the perceived scarcity that essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that this product is playing hard to get and it makes you want it even more because you can’t get it. There is,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who weren’t even that interested in it, there is the meta story
⏹️ ▶️ John about people, I don’t wanna watch, but people who do want watches are not able to find them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the Cabbage Patch Doll phenomenon, like it becomes like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a frenzy, like
⏹️ ▶️ John wow, this must be really popular, because people really want it, and it’s sold out everywhere, and that creates a positive
⏹️ ▶️ John buzz about it. And then finally, as like, you know, someone finally got a modern buckle,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? As these products trickle out when they’re ready to ship or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get repeat stories. I know we already covered the Apple Watch seven times, but here’s the first person to have the Darth Vader link
⏹️ ▶️ John bracelet. Here’s the first person to have the modern buckle, so on and so forth. Not that I’m saying Apple is doing it on purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that it’s artificial scarcity. It totally seems like this is just, as soon as they’re able to manufacture them in volume, they ship
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But I would say, against the idea of someone being
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointed that they can’t get what they want, and then just saying, well, nevermind, and not coming back, balance that against
⏹️ ▶️ John the positive effects of the perceived desirability and value
⏹️ ▶️ John and the repeat press on the sort of the trickle of stuff coming out. So I have to think,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s bad for it not to launch all at once, mostly just because it reflects poorly
⏹️ ▶️ John on the company and might give someone a bad impression about Apple. But I think overall, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s actually hurting their sales as long as, I mean, obviously, as long as by the time the holidays come, as
⏹️ ▶️ John long as everybody who wants to get an iPad Pro with a pencil for the holidays can get one, they may cut that close because that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John you could actually get hurt in sales because things are seasonal like that. If they miss the holidays, obviously they’ve really messed up. But as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as they make the holidays with a reasonable amount of time, I think people not getting their pencils for a couple of weeks is not that
⏹️ ▶️ John big a deal. The main thing I’m annoyed about as a lazy person who stays at home all the time is I
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to remember in the old days that Apple would, if not favor online
⏹️ ▶️ John orders, then at the very least sort of give them equal footing where now with the Apple TV, I experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John this myself. I ordered an Apple TV and before my Apple TV arrived to me, they were already showing up in stores.
⏹️ ▶️ John So rather than, you know, like, And so now I bet if you were to order a pencil now, you would get
⏹️ ▶️ John it sometime within the delivery window, but then this weekend if you go into a big Apple store,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might be able to pick one up if you just happen to go in the morning. And so they’re definitely favoring retail,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems, over a mail order.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s, again, like the Apple TV, it was not a big botch, but I heard a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ton of stories like that from people who ordered online and then they had weird shipping issues, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship on time, and then, yeah, the stores got them first. Like that’s it just
⏹️ ▶️ John well that makes sense though. I’m like I’m saying this is what they do and annoys me because I stay at home. But people who order
⏹️ ▶️ John online, who are those people? They have, it’s better to put them in
⏹️ ▶️ John because most people are just like wandering through the mall and they see the Apple store and they wander in and they have no idea when a product
⏹️ ▶️ John launch or anything about it. It’s only us who like order the second it’s available online because we just want to, we want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the action that we think is going to give us the product as soon as possible because we’re tiny little children at heart, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s like, oh, it’s available for order. I’m gonna stay up at 3 a.m. and order, order, order. No one else is like that. No one knows when these things
⏹️ ▶️ John are. They just like, they go into the Apple store and they say, well, there’s a new iPhone. Are the new iPhones out? Oh, they’re not out. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I’ll check back next weekend. Oh, they are out. Oh, here’s the new Apple TV. They don’t know or care when things launch. So it’s much better
⏹️ ▶️ John to have them available in the store for sort of, not impulse purchases, but hey, let me wander into the Apple store and see what’s available,
⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to trying to cater to people who stay up till 3 a.m. to order a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. Just the whole thing, it just puts a damper on, you know? Like, it’s not that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t ruin things. It’s not gonna kill all their sales, but it just puts a damper on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enthusiasm. It’s like, oh, this is great, except, oh, no, bad news. You know, it’s- It
⏹️ ▶️ John puts a damper on your enthusiasm. The rest of the world doesn’t even know the iPad Pro exists yet. They’ll know when the ads start running on TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and when they wander, even when the ads run on TV, I think people are perfectly accepting of seeing an ad on TV
⏹️ ▶️ John for a cool Apple thing, then wandering into the Apple Store and saying, is that thing I saw an ad for on TV out yet? And having
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Store say, no, we don’t have those yet. And they’ll be like, oh, all right. And they’ll come back the next weekend. Like, that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the vast, vast majorities of Apple sales operate. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tiff just wants a pen, I understand.
Apple Pencil hands-on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All that being said, I was able to try the Pencil and Smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keyboard in the store, because they had a demo one that some of the staff were playing with out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the floor. And so I went up and I got to play with it too. They wouldn’t sell it to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I offered, but they were not allowed to sell it to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John One million dollars for one night with your iPad Pro. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, that’s a reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s a reference. Hey, we saw a movie together, yay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve actually never seen the movie, but I know what you’re referring. It isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. So, please email John. So I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, having now played with the pencil and keyboard very briefly, I mean this, I had about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five minutes with the pencil and about two minutes with the keyboard. I will say the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not as bad as I expected. I expected it to be terrible because I heard it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar key switches to the MacBook and possibly even worse key feel than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook One. I think it’s probably about the same, maybe a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even, I don’t know. It didn’t feel as horrible to me than the MacBook One, but it was very close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doesn’t matter, you know, it’s an iPad keyboard. It’s going to be a compromise in a lot of different ways. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine. I know there is a Logitech One, the Apple stores are even selling it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, they had that in stock. They were out of stock of every other iPad accessory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including the smart cover and the smart case, which are now two separate, like, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smart case is only the back part. Oh, that’s weird. And so if you want both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the back and the front covered, you have to buy both parts for a total of like $150. Yikes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s almost as expensive as just buying the keyboard, which covers both. you might as well just buy the keyboard at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. Anyway, the keyboard was very securely attached. It only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really holds the iPad in one angle though. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t sure if you could adjust it at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. It seemed like it was fixed to this one particular angle that it would hold it at. You could shove
⏹️ ▶️ John behind it because there’s no place else to put that pencil. So just pull the iPad forward, put
⏹️ ▶️ John the pencil in there, push it back. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is gonna be the kind of product where there’s a huge opportunity here for third parties to make way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better cases and keyboards than Apple did. Because you’re gonna want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a place to put the pencil and there isn’t one anywhere on the iPad, anywhere in any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s cases. You know, it’s similar to how the iPad 1 just kinda,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had that terrible gray wrap around case and the iPad 1 was just clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not designed with the case in mind at all and they just kinda threw it on. That’s how the pencil feels today, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s this awesome thing that almost everyone is, well not everyone, but a lot of people are going to want for this iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the iPad was seemingly designed with no regard to how this thing would actually be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept on or near or in the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John As Dan Morin pointed out today, it goes behind your ear. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too heavy for that, first of all, I think. Is it? So it is heavy. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uncomfortably heavy, it doesn’t feel like a lightweight pencil or a plastic stylus, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dense. it not too heavy but almost too heavy
⏹️ ▶️ John your ears can take it I have faith in them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it really does feel incredibly good to use that pencil I would say the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I if I were really into this thing myself which I’m probably not going to be but if I was really into this thing myself I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably skip the keyboard but I would definitely get a pencil because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not an artist of any kind I have no illustrative abilities at all I hardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever handwrite anything. This made me want to handwrite things and draw diagrams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and become some kind of artist even though I probably won’t ever be. The pencil is great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and combining it with palm rejection, other touch input, everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could not in my five minutes using it, like I never encountered an error in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking that a touch was the pencil or rejecting the palm properly. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was flawless and they were using the Adobe, oh god, it’s like an Adobe Sketch something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adobe Sketch is the app. Yeah, that’s what we were using to draw with and it worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. There is a little bit of lag still but it is the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stylus slash, you know, pen tablet thing for a computer. By far the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best I’ve ever seen. Not even close. Way better than the Wacom tablets that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen. Way better than any previous iPad or iPhone stylus that I’ve tried. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, completely different experience, far better. I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest my palm on it, flat on the table, and just write, just hand write. Like Gruber mentioned in his review, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very good, he mentioned that he tested by drawing his signature, and that when you draw your signature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on most touch devices or pen terminals in stores, it always looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible, crazy, nothing like your real signature. And he said on the iPad Pro, it looked like his real handwritten signature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In my very brief testing here, I tried handwriting things, like just handwriting a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few sentences, and it looked just like my handwriting on paper. It is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. I wish I had a reason to use it. And right now I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think I do. So it’s time for you to go look at the show notes, Marco, if you haven’t already. Because there are two videos related
⏹️ ▶️ John to this topic in the show notes. These were from tweets. One is from Steve Strezza saying he was
⏹️ ▶️ John not impressed with the pencil latency. So I think it’s an animated gif because Twitter is stupid. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John take a look at that tweet and look at his video. I don’t I can’t tell what app he’s using there. But the lag on
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that he’s doing is just horrendous. That is really rough,
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, now scroll down. And here’s Matt panzerino saying really because when I was using it, it was awesome. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John look at his video also have an iPad Pro presumably with a different app. And look at the lag there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like a different app. Yeah, it might be although they later in the discussion that like I was using Adobe Sketch and
⏹️ ▶️ John then Panzer says, Oh, I was using Adobe Sketch two. I don’t know if it’s in this picture. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I think what I think what this shows is that from
⏹️ ▶️ John application to application, there can be a big difference in latency and responsiveness.
⏹️ ▶️ John In other words, the hardware is capable, but depending on how the application is programmed,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could get the latency you see, because I don’t think these are broken iPads, I think you could get the latency you see in the first video,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is really, really bad. Or with the same exact hardware, you can get the latency you see in the second video, which is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. Yeah, I mean, it’s gonna depend entirely on good coding. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point, the hardware is going to be the limiting factor. But yeah, I mean, my experience matches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panzerinos video there of it just being, you know, it does, you can feel that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some latency, but it is really small. And it’s perfectly fine for handwriting,
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I saw the first video, I’m like, Oh, well, maybe that’s slow, because it’s trying to do like a brush type thing where it’s like pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive. and there’s like bristles you can see it’s trying to be like a brushed ink thing where the leading edge has things
⏹️ ▶️ John but then look at the Panzerino’s video and he’s doing like translucent smeared
⏹️ ▶️ John ink looking like he’s not just doing solid black lines either and what in whatever application he’s using it seems to be doing even fancier
⏹️ ▶️ John effects and this is yet another opportunity to link that Microsoft video showing the different
⏹️ ▶️ John latency things if you watch I always go back to that Microsoft video to calibrate my eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John to hard numbers because they tell you they have like the thing with adjustable latency here’s one millisecond here’s 10 years 100
⏹️ ▶️ John to my eyes the good video of the iPad Pro here is still not down to one millisecond
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s much better than 100 milliseconds so it’s somewhere in that range and
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that the application can affect what the latency is like
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that this is really just the dawning of the mass market perhaps I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hopes it is but perhaps the dawning of the mass market era of pen computing and so people say well that That
⏹️ ▶️ John started with Windows for pen or whatever or the grid pad or that started with the surface or whatever Really
⏹️ ▶️ John it remains to be seen if this will actually popularize the pen to any significant degree but in all
⏹️ ▶️ John cases I think pen input Is not yet
⏹️ ▶️ John at the level Has not crossed the threshold that the mouse did when the Mac was introduced because there were
⏹️ ▶️ John you know mouse type input devices Before and after the Mac, but one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mac has been excellent at from day one is when you move the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John the cursor on the screen moves. There’s no stuttering, there’s no lag, it’s a seemingly direct
⏹️ ▶️ John connection and that was very important at the dawning of the Mac to making a Mac feel like a Mac. It’s one of the reasons that like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know Windows always felt weird and different until they got their cursor stuff nailed down a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of years later. And on the Mac there was nothing you can do in a program to make that mouse cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John screw up. Like it’s not like well if you program your application badly the mouse cursor won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be responsive not drawing with the mouse because yeah you could screw that up because you know in the original Mac if you tried to draw with a fancy brush
⏹️ ▶️ John tool it would be all lagging gross and everything I’m talking about the mouse itself like just moving the cursor around
⏹️ ▶️ John that stayed solid like there’s nothing you could do an application to screw that up other than short of crashing or grinding a disc or
⏹️ ▶️ John something terrible like it but even even that they tended to even when the disc was grinding yet the mouse would still move smoothly all us have
⏹️ ▶️ John experienced a crash where the entire computer is frozen but the mouse cursor still works that’s an important part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of physical interface to computers with a mouse is the reliability of you
⏹️ ▶️ John move the mouse or you swipe on the trackpad and the cursor was also by the way why it’s so incredibly disconcerting
⏹️ ▶️ John when your mouse cursor freezes we’ve all had it happen many times many more times in the bad old days of
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS it almost feels like the world is broken for a second where you move your mouse and the cursor doesn’t move you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh no this is not right something it’s like you’ve been knocked off kilter or something it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a it violates this constraint of the world that you had believed in that when I move the mouse that the cursor moves
⏹️ ▶️ John well for pen computing or any kind of pen input to really become
⏹️ ▶️ John as sort of second nature and boring as mouse input is nowadays we have to eventually get past
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that the responsiveness will be different and it’s different with a pen because pens not a
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing device pen is a drawing device so why where I was giving the mouse to pass before and say oh well of course if you
⏹️ ▶️ John wiggle the mouse really fast and super paint with the spray can thing it would be all lagging gross and that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s because the mouse isn’t primarily a drawing thing it’s for moving things around and clicking and pointing but the pen
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a pointing device there is no cursor on the screen is entirely about drawing so I want
⏹️ ▶️ John all pen input to be you know like the second video or better and it’s clear that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite there yet which is kind of a shame but this is early days at least as far as Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned with pen input Although the Newton sitting on my desk right now might disagree, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that had a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So a couple of thoughts on this. First of all, to double down on what you were saying about the world being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely wrong when your mouse freezes, imagine how weird it is when not only is the mouse frozen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your mouse button doesn’t exist anymore because it’s a software fake button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like that has happened to me a handful of times on this MacBook Pro that I have for work and it is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you just press and the little vibratey thing doesn’t vibrate underneath it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. So it’s like pushing on a plate of glass. Nothing happens. And that’s when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is broken. On the plus side, you have a physical indicator that everything’s broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But on the downside, this thing that you forget is all software suddenly stops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working and it’s very weird. And the other thing I wanted to throw out is, I believe it was after the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro was announced, I’d remembered seeing something about advanced multi-touch or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I went back and watched the WWDC session on it and we’ll link it in the show notes. It’s a session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two 33, I believe. And it was really, really interesting. And they talked in the session.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember who gave it a lot about, you know, these infinitesimally small windows of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with which you have to process touch input and how they coalesce it and, and this and that and the other thing. And I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched it like a month or two ago, so I’m a little fuzzy on it now, but it was really, really interesting. And if you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time it’s worth watching and I bring this up because. It very well could be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re, if you’re, if both these videos are using the same Adobe app or whatever it is, if it’s the same app, then, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is irrelevant. But if it is different apps, it would not surprise me at all. If they’re very different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance characteristics between two different apps, because the way they handle it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change very, very dramatically depending on whether or not they’re good developers, whether or not they’re using the APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Fraser Spears says that he just to confirm that he says he’s used the iPad pro
⏹️ ▶️ John as well Latency seems very app dependent. He says the latency is undetectable in notes, meaning the Apple notes application,
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume, but very laggy and paper by 53. Uh, I don’t know which apps are
⏹️ ▶️ John used in this video, but I’m, but I’m totally willing to believe that it’s entirely app dependent, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that what we’re not seeing is like, Oh, bad or buggy hardware or something. It’s just, you know, it’s just software. Like, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey said, if you’re not pulling, you know, processing the events in a particular way or using whatever the fast
⏹️ ▶️ John path is for doing input. And like I said, this Panzerino video, that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John something that looks like a magic marker where it’s like smeary and thicker towards the edges, something that looks like grease paint
⏹️ ▶️ John something that looks like watercolors. So it’s not like it only works if you’re drawing a solid black line. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do anything fancy, it’s slow. So I really have no idea why the slow one is slow and why the fast
⏹️ ▶️ John one is fast other than you know, just maybe using the wrong API or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, anyway, regardless, we at least know that when properly handled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the software side, the pencil can be really great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a few apps already, it already is. And that, I mean, really, using this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blew my mind, like how good it is. Again, I wish I had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to hand write things. I’ve never even, I’ve never been like a notebook at my desk kind of person. Like a lot of people will sketch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things out on paper notebooks. I’ve never even done that. I never took notes in school. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, I do wish that I had a reason to use it, because it really is awesome. You
⏹️ ▶️ John just need to do a video Pictionary. Someone who needs to make a Pictionary application for iPad Pro people,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can do Pictionary with people across the country. Like draw something, basically?
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t get to see their face, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, right, right. iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, you could put up on an easel.
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iPad Pro initial impressions
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to lynda.com for sponsoring our show once again. So iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software-wise. I got TIFF’s iPad Pro, wasn’t able to get anything else for it, so we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no case, no cover, no pencil, no keyboard, but we’re probably not going to get a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. Brought it home. So far, I would say based on my quick experience with it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really a mixed bag. Most of the reviews seem to back up what I’ve experienced so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, it is huge. And because it is so huge, certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aspects of things that you could do well on iPads before are actually worse, in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was definitely worse for reading, unless you’re reading things like comic books or magazines where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need as much space as possible. But just for reading regular column articles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or iBooks, it looked kind of ridiculous on it, to be honest. because you know ibix does not seem to offer
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna crank the font size up though like that’s that’s what it lets you do it lets you have keep the
⏹️ ▶️ John same number of words per line but make the text way bigger so it’s easier to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but then then you’re just holding it back further i mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John people who have your eyes will go eventually young man and you will appreciate it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no absolutely i mean you know if you if you actually need a a bigger size just to make it legible in general for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vision accessibility reasons, that’s a different story. But if you have vision within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the normal range and you don’t need it to be really huge, I would say in general that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other iPads are better reading devices for that reason. This is obviously better for video.
⏹️ ▶️ John for reading though, what if you want to have Twitter along the side while you read? That’s a terrible idea. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John would you want that? People do that. I’d do it. Or if you just want to have Twitter and Slack in the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John split each one gets a reasonable size column like you’re you’re still thinking as if the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that the application can fill in Apple hasn’t done much to dissuade you from that notion but they
⏹️ ▶️ John have at least cut the screen in half or thirds or whatever so I think you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John in considering software which granted I’m sure you get to this is not has not been updated very well for the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and sometimes looks ridiculous at the very least you can say all right well it may
⏹️ ▶️ John not be a good reading experience for this thing but that’s only because I’m letting it have the whole screen. Why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I divide the screen up, let something else have that thing, and now I have two good reading experiences at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the idea, but one of the things that made iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and e-readers so good for reading books compared to computers is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could only do that one thing on the screen. You could fill up the screen with one reading app, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody reads books on their computers, for the most part, because you have these giant screens that are filled with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these little windows of all these distractions, and it’s not a very good reading environment for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think that’s why people are not reading books on their computers? I think that’s one of the reasons. I think the main reason is that it’s uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John to sit at a desk staring at a screen that’s in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Okay, similarly, it’s uncomfortable to hold this iPad up for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time because it is not light or small. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, different reviewers have agreed and disagreed on this point that I’ve seen so far. Some of them say it’s okay, some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it’s heavy. You know, Tiff’s initial impression, My initial impression so far is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty heavy to hold up for more than a minute or two. You want to have it on some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of propped up case or desk or stand or something, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just holding it up in bed for a long time or anything like that. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things, if you’ve ever done anything on an iPad and the smallness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iPad screen has been a limiting factor for you, then this will be an improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not true for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Andy Anako had a good picture though, speaking of that, recently he tweeted a picture of, I think his tweet was, the text was,
⏹️ ▶️ John living the dream, and what he had was his iPad Pro showing a comic book
⏹️ ▶️ John and next to it a physical comic book, which you could see, you could take that physical comic book and basically
⏹️ ▶️ John place it on the screen and it was pretty much exactly the same size as the screen. So if you’re a comics reader and you’re tired of looking at comics
⏹️ ▶️ John either shrunken or cropped, you can’t get two pages side by side, but at least now you can get one
⏹️ ▶️ John full-size real-life comic book page at at a one-to-one ratio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and for people who mark up PDFs, this would be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them, because you want that to be life-size or close to it at least, and the 10-inch iPad was almost,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not quite the right size to do that. So stuff like that, there are things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are gonna be better on this for sure, and there’s probably gonna be a lot of those things, but all I’m saying is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not everything is better on it, And it’s important, if you’re thinking about one of these devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s important to know that going in. Just because certain things, there is such a thing as too big of a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for certain things. And you might hit that. But as you alluded to earlier, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the bigger challenges up front here is that iOS, while it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to have things like the split view and the slide over and everything, these features are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty basic so far. They still could, especially things like the slide over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app launching experience there. If you’re having to scroll through this giant long list of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are capable of doing this, like this interface, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who designed this interface because it should have been obvious to anybody that as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you have more than a handful of apps that support this feature, this does not work very well. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, there are affordances for the big screen and things that take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the big screen in iOS. But, the iPad has always kind of been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second class citizen of iOS. It has always gotten oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delayed hardware capabilities or less good hardware in certain ways. Like the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are never as good as the iPhone cameras. It got Touch ID late. The new one, even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pro, as the reviews have noted, doesn’t have the Touch ID sensor from the 6S, the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new one. It has the slower old one from the iPhone 5S and 6. And that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy. This is like a new flagship iOS device that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a substantially better Touch ID sensor that launched two months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the iPad Pro doesn’t have it. And you know, 3D Touch, it doesn’t have either. That might be because they couldn’t get it to work on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big screen. That’s a little more understandable, I think, because you can see the challenges involved there. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID sensor makes sense too, though, because…
⏹️ ▶️ John Volumes, because how many, like I don’t think there is an entire world of vendors making this
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID sensor. I think there’s a limited number of people who even can make it, it may be like patent encumbered or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John who has the ability to manufacture who has the expertise. And the iPhone is just so damn high volume, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to get every single one of those things so they can manufacture for the foreseeable future that I don’t know if that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is a plausible explanation as to why, why you wouldn’t you know what the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John would absorb everything because it has to be it is the most important product. And if there’s any part that is in limited supply,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone gets it. And don’t even bother, don’t even worry about the iPad, just give them the old sensor, it doesn’t even matter,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone is what matters. Because if you had to think of a part on the iPhone that is supply constrained, the Touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID sensor, especially the brand new one, is one of the top ones that I would pick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I think it’s equally likely that this was just an area where somebody decided, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people aren’t unlocking their iPad via Touch ID as often as they do it on their phone, so it’s not that important,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can save a dollar. It feels more like that. Is it cheaper?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the new one actually more expensive, though? Like, it might even just be the same, I don’t know. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems more like iPhone gets all the good stuff, all the best stuff first. It is the oldest favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John child. If anything is in short supply, iPhone gets the stuff first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so regardless of the reason of that, on the software side, unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s also true. And you see things like, even back forever ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the iPad launched with 3.2, iOS 3.2, Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 4 with multitasking came out for the iPhone, and it wasn’t until, oh wait, about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four months later, or maybe even six months later, in like 4.3 was when they unified it, where they brought all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features to the iPad. Look at when iOS 7 launched, and then in the early betas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wouldn’t even give you the iPad beta, because it was so unfinished, they wouldn’t even give you the developer betas at first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then later on in the iOS 7 developer process, they eventually released the iPad version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And I would say the iPad version has always, and still lags behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone version ever since the iOS 7 redesign. There are certain things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that just seem half-assed. You know, things like Control Center, things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that swipe over, app picker, API, UI, notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have always been kind of weird on it. There’s still, like as, I think as Gruber pointed out in his review, there’s still like no calculator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or weather apps. It just seems like in so many ways the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is trying to be this higher end device, and in many ways it’s achieving that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But on the software side, it’s being held back by these limitations. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did make great strides with the split view and with the slide over in iOS 8.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That does help a lot, but in general it just seems like it’s not getting a lot of attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its software. And, you know, so you get there, here we are, flagship product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is obviously very important to Apple to get the iPad sales, you know, boosted again, get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them going again, you know, keep the iPad alive, keep it going, so you have this flagship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product. It launches right before the holidays, peak time. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, yeah, no accessories available, right? Problem number one, but then second of all, hardly any apps are updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. So already you have this weird experience where like when you launch most iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, they come up in the blurry blown up way and it just looks terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks ridiculous. That’s a problem. And like just going through Tiff’s initial setup here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home, we’ve seen a lot of those apps. Almost every app she uses has not been updated. And that includes both games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and browsing apps and magazines and shopping apps. Like there’s so many apps that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not been updated. So that’s problem number one. But even just iOS, like Tiff’s first impression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when she saw the Springboard home screen, she was looking at how many icons you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get across the top. And the number of app icons has stayed the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In how many you get per row and column in Springboard hasn’t changed, even though the screen size got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost twice as big. So everything’s just this giant, spread out, weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrangement. And she immediately started looking for a setting to change it, because she assumed, of course there has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a setting. Of course this would not be the only way you would ship this thing. Nope, there’s no standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exchange yet. That is the only way it’s shipped. It just seems like there is just not enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources at Apple being devoted to making iOS better specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iPad. It’s hard enough for developers to justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting a lot of work into iPad apps a lot of the times. And that’s gonna be another problem this has because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, for the first time, I think in a while, with both now with Split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco View coming a few months ago and now with the iPad Pro having a whole new screen size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to mention if you wanted to take advantage of things like the pen and keyboard in significant ways, app developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to catch up. They need to do a lot of work to get their iPad apps to be really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, to keep them current, to keep them running well on the newest hardware, to keep them taking advantage of the newest hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone does this to us every year in some way, but the iPhone has a lot more people using it, and therefore it’s a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make money on the iPhone for a lot of kinds of apps. But the iPad, because it’s a smaller platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by install base, it’s always been a little bit harder for a lot of people to justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing work on it, doing work on iPad apps. And the problems in Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software ecosystem of app pricing, sustainability, over competition,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, all of those problems are magnified on the iPad side because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there isn’t as much, the install base isn’t as big, so you can’t just make it up in volume. It’s harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it on the iPad side. There’s less competition, I think, which helps, but it’s just harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at how many iPad apps have just been just totally abandoned and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting no meaningful updates because their developers just can’t afford to work on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is ultimately going to be what decides whether the iPad Pro succeeds or fails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is will developers, including Apple with iOS, will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers be able to justify investing a lot of resources into making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great software for the iPad Pro? Because it’s kind of a chicken and egg problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they don’t, then the iPad Pro will probably not do substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than the other iPads have done. And it’s not like they’re bombing, everyone always says, oh, well, it’s a bigger business than McDonald’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. You know, they’re doing okay, but it seems like the point of this product was to really juice the iPad line and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really give it a substantial boost. And unless the software comes, I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to happen. I also don’t see what in the software ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will meaningfully change that will suddenly make this a great platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is worth developers, both large and small, spending a lot of time creating and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintaining professional quality apps this platform.
Multitasking paradigms
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like Apple’s been coasting on the, not coasting, but like benefiting from the inevitability
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPad that they apparently feel that I’ve always felt, even from like the original iPad launch. Remember when the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John was coming out, it was like Apple’s tablet. We didn’t know what the name of it was going to be. One of the topics of discussion around that time,
⏹️ ▶️ John although we didn’t have a lot of podcasts talk about it on was what is the, what is the home screen going to look like on
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple tablet? Uh, and the reason that was a discussion because it’s because the second thing someone, anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John would say in that conversation is, they can’t just do what they do on the phone and have just a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco grid of icons, because the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is massive. So what are they going to do? Like, yeah, it was it was fun to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the sort of the home experience, the the root level, the bottom level, the thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John see when you turn the thing on? What does that look like? When you have a tablet size device? And Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John answer was, it looks like a phone, we spread stuff out a little bit more, right? And as the iPod,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad change when it got smaller you know the icons were there now it’s gotten bigger the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John just spread out there’s a couple aspects of that one is
⏹️ ▶️ John if they actually did put things in at the same density they are on a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be an object of ridicule people like that big iPad you can’t tell where anything is because a million icons
⏹️ ▶️ John on the home screen so they can obviously not do them that they just you know that just goes to show that like the density that
⏹️ ▶️ John works well in a tiny thing in your hand you can’t use that same density when the thing is the size of an actual notebook piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of paper. But surely looking at the iPad Pro you could like, you can fit a few more in there can’t you? Like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John just huge white space between them. But it all gets back to the same root problem which is
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to figure out, which Apple has been trying to do and mostly failing for many many years
⏹️ ▶️ John now, how to take this computing device that Apple and I at least think
⏹️ ▶️ John is the future of computing, obvious as anything else, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to grow up and it has to start taking on more of the capabilities of desktop computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has to do that at the same time as it doesn’t take on all of their crap. The whole reason we see it as the future
⏹️ ▶️ John of computing and inevitability is that there’s some things you won’t be able to do on a phone, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have to call inevitable it’s already here, boom, done, right? Some things you can’t do on a phone because it’s too darn small
⏹️ ▶️ John and PCs are still too hard to use, including Macs. So here’s this thing that’s in between. It takes
⏹️ ▶️ John all the good stuff from your phone that everyone knows how to use and is comfortable with, gets rid of all the legacy corrupt, but how can you
⏹️ ▶️ John make it have more capabilities? And designing the home screen with the iPad was one of the first times that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was faced with that thing. Hmm, all right, what do you see when you turn on the iPad? We have this big screen. Can we
⏹️ ▶️ John do something different in this realm? And that realm is like the place where people go to launch their apps or to rearrange
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever. And they punted on it. They said, well, I don’t know, we didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John have any good ideas right now. So let’s just make a degree of icons. And they just continue to kick that down the road.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the while knowing that surely there’s something more they can do. But it’s like, but you don’t want to make it into what are you gonna have a finder
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad? No, no, we don’t want that crap. The whole reason people like the iPad is that it’s simple, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it has to be straightforward. And like, all right, yeah, we’re fine with that. But then now, now we’re getting to the
⏹️ ▶️ John point in the iPads evolution is like, but we have to make it more capable. So bigger, good, yes, thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always been a big fan of the iPad Pro. You have to make it bigger because there’s more stuff you can do. And then And what can we do with that real estate?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a harder problem. I’ve got this extra real estate. Apple’s like, well, we could split the screen and make it like
⏹️ ▶️ John a divider that you can kind of like, that’s better, better than nothing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it still shows that they haven’t figured out how to add capability without adding complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ John The beauty of the thing we all know, the Windows pointer mouse, you know, WIMP interface pioneered
⏹️ ▶️ John by the Mac or popularized by the Mac, is that evolved over time with a vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re all familiar with. Like, you know, it’s easy for us to think like, oh, Macs aren’t that hard or PCs aren’t that hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone knows how to use Windows and menu bars. And like, there’s a vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ John for dealing with Windows that, you know, that they have widgets on them that you can resize them from various edges. You can move them around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tabs are another vocabulary that was added and we all understand how tabs work. But that’s us, everyone else. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and same thing with the file system, file system and folders and, you know, navigating the hierarchy. A
⏹️ ▶️ John very simple, consistent vocabulary for people who are into computers. For everyone else, it might as well be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, inscrutable and just like some people just never fully grasp it. So that’s why we know
⏹️ ▶️ John that like the smartphone and the iPad are inevitably the future because history has
⏹️ ▶️ John shown over, you know, decades that just people, not enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John grok computers the way we grok them. This interface is, you know, is much better than what
⏹️ ▶️ John came before. The command line, even a small number of people grok. the GUI with the mouses and the scroll bars a larger
⏹️ ▶️ John reveal grok, but everybody gets the smartphone right and But there are those of us
⏹️ ▶️ John who use computers to do our job So they have to figure out a way to make these things more capable without making them
⏹️ ▶️ John more complicated And that is a really difficult job and that’s on Apple like individual developers They
⏹️ ▶️ John can make their applications to use the old parlance iPad Pro savvy and they need to all do all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff or whatever but it’s kind of on Apple to show how this can really
⏹️ ▶️ John be the future of computing and so far they’ve been timid about it because it’s safe to say
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll just do what we did on the phone and bigger because people already understand it and it works fine but you’re not gaining any new capabilities then
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they said well when you rotate mail sideways you get a new sidebar when you you know like even on the success
⏹️ ▶️ John plus like they did a couple different layouts and whatever this is so massively huge you can’t just say
⏹️ ▶️ John all right well now all our apps will have a little bit different layout
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you don’t even have anything to go over there inevitably you have to get to some solution that gives us what we do with Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in a simpler way. And the splitter is their first crack at that. And I haven’t used it, so I don’t know how successful it is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, I just I just feel like they have a long way to go in this area. And most of the complaints and surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John software on the iPad Pro, I don’t think it dooms the tablet as a platform, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to show that this is a hard problem. And it’s easy to take for granted the
⏹️ ▶️ John the breakthroughs and conventions that came with the Mac and with the original GUI that had so much time to evolve. Remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John we had two arrows on both ends of the scroll bars, and we had proportional scroll thumbs. And then we got rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll bars entirely. Like, even just something simple as moving windows around and scrolling.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of cracks at that, like what we have now is not what was first there. And we tried all sorts of different things
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to find something that was better. proportional scroll thumbs were a pretty big revolution. Apple didn’t invent
⏹️ ▶️ John those, obviously, and they were really late adopting them. But that was a significant enhancement
⏹️ ▶️ John over the original scroll thumb and the original max scroll bars significant enhancement over the weird ones on the Xerox
⏹️ ▶️ John systems that you had to like middle click or whatever to scroll So I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone to nail this in the first try but the the iteration time has definitely slowed down
⏹️ ▶️ John I think mostly because the smartphone and its interface became so iconic that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s like well worst case It’s just it’s like a phone but on a bigger screen everybody understands that and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine But we won’t make significant progress towards the future of computing capital F capital
⏹️ ▶️ John C that Tim Cook and I and several other people believe must
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean a lot of these problems people assume to be problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know like my old you know launch an app without a setting screen design problem where you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you assume oh well computers are too hard to use so the the way to make them easier to use is to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of all these files and windows and everything get rid of all these things people are confused about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. But if you look at it only in that way, that’s kind of a naive, 22-year-old smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person way to look at things. I’m like, well, this is all stupid. We’ll just get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you do, and you realize, oh, now we have a lot of problems to solve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the solutions that you build up end up being oftentimes more complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or worse, or at least no better than what was already there, because what was already there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually there for good reasons. And so a lot of these problems, I think, have to be backtracked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. For example, iCloud Drive, perfect example of this, where you have, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, there’s no more files. Each app just has its own content in the app. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, now we have a sync engine, and well, it’ll just sync the documents still in the app. And then, oh, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out having a folder that just syncs everywhere, like Dropbox, is really useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and makes a lot of things way easier than all these apps having their own little sandbox silos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also those little sandbox silos bring lots of other limitations and challenges to the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And oh, by the way, all this contributes very heavily to why a lot of people can’t get their work done on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you feel like it’s tempting to slide back to the old solutions? Yeah, I think that was, you know, sync sync is
⏹️ ▶️ John a great example where it’s like the new stuff is supposed to work but doesn’t and Dropbox use the old
⏹️ ▶️ John paradigm plus reliability to say, look, you guys, you guys haven’t figured it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this is an old paradigm that is confusing, it’s reliable. And at least at the very least, the people understand
⏹️ ▶️ John files and folders for understand Dropbox and the other people they’ll muddle along because we’ll be reliable enough. But it’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to go back to that. Apple doesn’t like to do that. That’s why the iPad Pro doesn’t come with
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of windows with widgets that you slide around on the screen, right? They totally could, it could you know, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John make like a touch an OS 10 designed for touch where all the window widgets are gigantic or whatever, but you have actual
⏹️ ▶️ John windows. Apple doesn’t want to do that. To its credit to its detriment
⏹️ ▶️ John or demerit or whatever word you want to insert there. They don’t seem to have quite an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what to do going forward. And they’ve been really cautious about like poking their way
⏹️ ▶️ John towards the edges of like I mean, when Microsoft has been much more daring and thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John the old paradigms are cruddy. We want to try something new. And they went hog
⏹️ ▶️ John wild with the whole Metro stuff. I don’t I don’t think that was successful either, but they certainly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John came, went forward much more boldly than Apple. Apple’s just been like, it’s, we’ll just use
⏹️ ▶️ John the smartphone stuff. Everyone likes that. All the compromises we made to a small screen, we will port to the big screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t complain that it can’t do anything more than a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, at this point, I would say the main thing that holds iOS back from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more pro adoption is the OS. It’s not that the screens weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big enough. You know, those things help, And things like the iPad Pro and the Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and finally a decent keyboard, those things will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all help. And they will all bring in certain portions of the workforce and population
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that couldn’t have done it before or didn’t want to do it before. But fundamentally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main reason why so many people say, I can’t get my work done on an iPad or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be very clunky for me to get my work done on an iPad, Fundamentally, that comes down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS and the structure of iOS, how things like files and documents and sandboxing and apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how those things are, and multitasking, like how these all work together, how things they can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things they can’t do. That is ultimately what it comes down to for a lot of people. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to change meaningfully without, as you said, you know, without just basically making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a Mac, like without redoing all these old complexities. now Apple is trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out which of those old complexities were actually not necessary and and which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are necessary to have a productive you know kind of pro work machine
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any of them are necessary the question is simply like because they’re all they are as a means to an end the end
⏹️ ▶️ John is I need to have a way to to use multiple to do multiple things at
⏹️ ▶️ John once we call it multiple application but there’s no reason that paradigm you need to stick a little Apple seems married to that you could have gone to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple could have on the open doc route where everything is inverted and the document is king and there’s no real applications
⏹️ ▶️ John and anyway, they didn’t point is they have applications. So we’re faced that basically the high level problem we’re faced with is how do I
⏹️ ▶️ John do more than one thing at one time even before these things start sharing with each other just simply how do I
⏹️ ▶️ John go you know, to a browser to my text editor to my email to my photo editor, you know, how do I do more than
⏹️ ▶️ John what Windows solves that problem, not capital W Windows for Microsoft, but like Windows is the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John that people came up with that there’s going to be application content, it’s in these little rectangles that we can change the size of when we
⏹️ ▶️ John change the size to small scroll bars are there to move around, they have a thing that you can drag them on, they have little buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can close and minimize and like we that’s that was the old solution to that old solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I’ve seen anybody use computers and Windows are not something that most
⏹️ ▶️ John people deal with well, and it has simply not gotten better. You can’t blame it all. It’s because old people didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John grow up with computers. There are many, many people who grew I grew up with computers who cannot manage Windows. I, as we all know, am
⏹️ ▶️ John an expert at managing Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because I grew up with it
⏹️ ▶️ John and because I have an aptitude for it. But, and it makes me keenly aware that pretty much everyone else I see
⏹️ ▶️ John has no idea what to do with Windows. Even young kids at work, like kids just out of college, I see how they use
⏹️ ▶️ John computers and they have these massive screens and they have like maybe two windows on them. That’s why people love
⏹️ ▶️ John tiling window managers and things like Windows 10, where you jam the window against the side of the screen, it fills the half. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John managing windows is, it is not easy to do, to have a bunch of windows all shuffling around. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John having 17 papers on your desk all overlapping with each other and trying to manage it. Right? That is, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John that people are gonna get better at that. So I’m not saying it’s a bankrupt paradigm. It’s way better than
⏹️ ▶️ John people managing the mental state required to deal with a command line. Right? Big advancement over that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can’t go back to it. But we still have the root problem of, what if I wanna do a bunch of stuff at once?
⏹️ ▶️ John So how do you let me do a bunch of stuff at once without asking me to manage Windows. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so far we don’t have a good answer to that. The iOS multitasking switcher, splitting the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of those things, like we recognize all those things are better than nothing, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John not as capable as Windows. Even to people who aren’t good at managing Windows and don’t like to have a lot of Windows, if you’re at
⏹️ ▶️ John all used to Windows, you’re like, I wish I could just have Windows on this thing, but then you realize it doesn’t work with the finger or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s just one root problem. How do I give something that’s the equivalent of
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows? Like, I don’t wanna say it that way, but how do I let people use this computing device
⏹️ ▶️ John to do more than one thing at the same time and move between those tasks in a nice way? So set that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have a good solution. The other one you were talking about, Marco, how do I deal with the data?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do I take some piece of data, how do I synthesize like pictures from here, text from there, a link
⏹️ ▶️ John from here? How do I move stuff between applications, keep track of where things are saved
⏹️ ▶️ John things have have, you know, like, and the old solution that was files and folders in a file system, you had images, you had text
⏹️ ▶️ John documents, you know, that was the old paradigm. And as we all know, people aren’t good at the old paradigm, files and folders,
⏹️ ▶️ John people make a big giant mess, they can’t keep track of where they are. Lots of people can deal with it. But lots of people just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t. And again, we’ve had computers long enough not to say like, Oh, we just gotta wait for the old people to die. Young people will
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to deal with files and folders. Nope, we ran that experiment human beings are not changing that fast. files
⏹️ ▶️ John and folders, a lot of people can use it, but a lot of people can’t. It’s much easier when there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John saving, you open the notes app, you type a bunch of notes in with your thumbs on your iPhone, you close the notes app, no one no one is begging
⏹️ ▶️ John for a save button on the notes application. I’ve said this a million times. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just goes to show that like, those are complexities that we don’t need. But when you want to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John that would traditionally be done with files and folders in a file system, what is the solution for that? So Apple should really
⏹️ ▶️ John probably have like teams of 50 really smart people, multiple ones of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John working on all these problems. Because right now they’re either not solving them at all or making the
⏹️ ▶️ John most timid move in the direction of solving them. And then just kind of being like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like it’s a little bit more complicated than the iPhone, but it’s not as good as a Mac. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys think of that? And it’s just not the same as the bold vision of the Mac of saying the command line is crap, forget about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John What we’re doing has nothing to do with the command line. here are, you know, we’ve seen the future
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is GUIs and we’re gonna, this is the direction we’re gonna take. And it’s way better than everything came before it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so far, we haven’t had that moment for the post, you know, the post-wimp world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So two questions for you, John. First of all, on an infinite timescale, would we get good at using Windows?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so. Because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s any, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s any evolutionary pressure, like there’s, there’s nothing about being good
⏹️ ▶️ John at windows that makes your genes more likely to be passed on. So in the absence
⏹️ ▶️ John of that pressure, I don’t see how the genetic makeup of humans would change over
⏹️ ▶️ John any period of time to become better at managing multiple traditional windows. And the second reason, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that we will come up with different interfaces that are better than windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John simpler and better suited to us. So it’s not, There’s nothing holding Windows steady of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John I demand that Windows, as they currently exist, stay there for the next 3 billion years to wait and
⏹️ ▶️ John see if human evolution will make us better at handling them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You took that question way too seriously. I gave you the answer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And we expected nothing less. Exactly. The other question I had, and I am being serious now, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you seem really disappointed with the multitasking paradigm in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have this iPad mini, the first one with the retina display, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t support, God, I always get the terminology wrong. So it does do slide over, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do split view. I’m pretty sure I got that right. That’s right. And so I’ve only had limited experience with the multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an iPad, but I feel like I really like it. I will say that the multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switcher, when you’re switching between apps in the slide over or what have you, is stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I agree with you there, that’s dumb. but the general premise behind it, I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad. I’m not saying there couldn’t be better, but I mean, I think it’s a pretty solid first step. Do you not
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Like, it’s easy to see that it’s not as capable as multiple windows, right? Because two,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s better than one, but not as good as three. And what if you’ve got four and so on and so forth? 60. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t help you with, it doesn’t help you yet with
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, sharing from one thing to the other, dragging and dropping across that line
⏹️ ▶️ John or somehow because things are visually next to each other. All the same things we do in the desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like drag and drop is again, not saying drag and drop is what they should bring over because it’s the old thing that worked, but they need something
⏹️ ▶️ John that fills the same role as drag and drop in that like, you know, I have something over here, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to drag it over there and I’m going to chuck it into this thing. And now this image I dragged out of photos
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the desktop, I dragged from the desktop into photos. That’s not a particular efficient move, but it’s using a vocabulary that
⏹️ ▶️ John we understand do that. The reason I’m mostly disappointed in it as… not disappointed, like it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John than nothing, but it’s so clearly still less capable
⏹️ ▶️ John than than a desktop computer, but I feel like almost as hard to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain to people who aren’t familiar. Like I just tried to show my daughter today. For
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever reason she decided to use the laptop to write something instead of writing
⏹️ ▶️ John it on a piece of paper. I don’t think she writes on her iPod. But anyway, she She decided to use a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John and she asked me how to make the window cover the whole screen because that’s just a user. She’s grown up on iOS. So I showed her the full
⏹️ ▶️ John screen thing. She’s in full screen mode and then she wanted to look something up in Safari and I wanted to show her
⏹️ ▶️ John you can actually see the text editor in Safari at the same time. But then I realized
⏹️ ▶️ John to show her that I have to show all you have to do again. All you have to do is arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John the windows. Arrange the windows. She doesn’t know how windows move. She doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know windows can be resized. I resized the window and she asked me how I did it. How did you change the size of the window? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s something, you know, like, so trying to show someone how to use Windows, obviously very
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated, trying to show her how to use Split View on the iPad, would, it results in
⏹️ ▶️ John almost the same conversations. Like it’s already, already too complicated, I feel like. That people
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t gonna figure it out on their own. And I think it suffers in comparison to Windows in that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really give you a, a sort of functional vocabulary that you can apply repeatedly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because once you figure out how a window works, you still may not be good at arranging windows because
⏹️ ▶️ John just knowing how a window works is like I know how to form all the letters. It’s not the same as knowing how to write, you know what I mean? Or knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John how to hit one piano key is not the same as knowing how to play a piano. But you know that any key on the keyboard, if you hit it with
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger, will make a noise. You’ve figured out the function of vocabulary, the basic functional vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ John of a piano. Once you figure out how windows work, you can drag them by the title bar, you can resize them, you can close them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can move them around, you learn the parameters, can I move it all off the screen? No, I can’t kind of get the title bar up and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath the menu bar not unless there’s like a bug in the OS Which happens sometimes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is is it really that much easier now don’t think about the split for you as like? Oh, it’s pretty cool I kind of like is you know how to use
⏹️ ▶️ John a desktop computers think about it as if you had to show somebody Who had only ever used a smartphone?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you split view with their eyes glazed over and they would be like I don’t get it and then secondarily Could
⏹️ ▶️ John they transfer those skills like if you say you show them how to use split view when they figure it out? Could they all those skills useful
⏹️ ▶️ John for anything else? So they say now I can split view any two applications or would you have to show them again? Okay well
⏹️ ▶️ John this is how you do a split view but what if you want to like when you come back to it will the same two things Be in the split view or what if you want to put
⏹️ ▶️ John something different in the split view? what if you want to have multiple like I think it’s already too complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and Still less capable now. I’m not entirely sure about that But I’m that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my sense of it so far is that it’s not like it’s on its way to being as good as the Mac I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not not as capable as the map and not really easier to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John than Windows. So I feel like it’s a bad solution at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’ve been talking before, like there seems to be a certain baseline level of required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity. And that’s not to say that for things like multitasking, that we have Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or slide over or everything’s full screen, like that’s not to say that these things cannot be improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon, but I do think there is a certain ceiling that we cannot surpass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, how simple can we make this? Because the fundamental fact is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are advanced concepts. They’re going to have some inherent level of minimum complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we’re going to have multiple things that are separate, that are running on the screen at once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s going to be some way to divide the screen space between them, and you’re gonna have to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pick out which ones to open somehow, figure out if you want to open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them one at a time or if you want to add multiple ones to the screen in some way, then figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch between them, how to close certain ones or all of them. There’s going to be some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco baseline level of complexity to this no matter how it’s designed, no matter what system it is. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to therefore be some kind of basic learning curve, no matter how easy you make it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, this isn’t to say that we can’t improve systems we have now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think people are assuming that there is some end game here that we should be going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for where anybody can just pick it up and all of a sudden it’s perfect. And we’re never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to reach that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re mistaking intuitiveness in the old parlance for just a better UI
⏹️ ▶️ John because you could say all the same things back before the GUI existed. Like there’s some inheriting complexity in a
⏹️ ▶️ John time-sharing system where multiple programs are running at the computer at same time and we’re never going to make that easier because
⏹️ ▶️ John this you know like and then the GUI came along and it’s like oh well I guess if you totally rethink
⏹️ ▶️ John things then I guess you can make it massively easier for a huge number of people still too complicated for
⏹️ ▶️ John all people but so much better you know like you really there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s any limitation um and you know the end game obviously would be like you know some crazy neural interface
⏹️ ▶️ John where you just think stuff and imagine what happens or or or the end game is all the extinction of human
⏹️ ▶️ John life and the and the computers take over. Anyway, there’s definitely an end game, you might not like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for things like interfaces, I think they’re absolutely, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that kind of thinking that is just like, there’s a certain amount of complexity and there’s no way we’re gonna make it simple,
⏹️ ▶️ John is just absolutely the wrong way to look at this because having lived through the GUI revolution and having
⏹️ ▶️ John seen how, that’s why the original GUI in the Mac was so brilliant, that it did
⏹️ ▶️ John find a way. Lots of people tried to find ways to do it And then the Mac finally did find a way,
⏹️ ▶️ John through the use of metaphor and through what I maintain is one of the best interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John ever, the spatial finder, giving people an interface that
⏹️ ▶️ John played to the strengths of the knowledge that they have from living
⏹️ ▶️ John in the actual world and let them use those skills to manage the virtual world of
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer in a way that wasn’t possible before. And it made them much
⏹️ ▶️ John more capable. didn’t just make the capabilities easier, it made them, it added new capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what we need is the next one of those revolutions. Arguably the smartphone was the next one of those revolutions, it just happened to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in a constrained environment where the thing has to fit in your hand and you carry it around with you, which let
⏹️ ▶️ John us avoid a lot of the more difficult problems. It was a very difficult problem in itself. Like that was the second revolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John the smartphone, right? Making computing, making people be able to do stuff with computers, people who couldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John use computers, or making you not even think of it as a computer. But in the larger realm, we still have these other computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that have changed into this incredibly capable general purpose thing we have that we still think is too complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is the next frontier. So I’m not as fatalistic as you are about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, there is some inherent complexity and people aren’t going to change, but I really truly believe there
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely is a way to leverage what humans are good at to let them do
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things they do with desktop computers in an easier way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a step, it is absolutely insane to me, John, that you would take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows as the introduction to multiple things happening at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. To me, the iPad multitasking interface is so much easier to understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and makes so much more sense. Yeah, it’s a little bit weirder in that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot of visual cues as to what to do, but in every other measurable way, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so much easier. And for your daughter to be confused by Windows, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not terribly surprising to me. But I think if you had done the reverse and started her on the iPad and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said to her, all right, well, this is kind of like the iPad, but you can have more than just two and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have to do some weird gesture to slide them around. You just have to grab it and move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I feel like that would have made a lot more sense to her. To me, I think you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the iPad interface as a dumbing down of windowing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas I see, even though this obviously is chronologically the reverse, I feel like windowing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an extension of the more simple iPad interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s a much easier paradigm to understand. And yes, it’s not discoverable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but once you’ve discovered it, it is so simple to use. And it seems like it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the problems that people have with windowing systems. I don’t think they would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them with the iPad. I mean, this is all guessing. I have no evidence. I’ve never asked, you know, my parents, hey, how do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, two apps open at the same time on the iPad? This is all supposition, but it just seems so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much more logical to me than, than the far more inscrutable task of managing windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re getting hung up again on the learnability and intuitiveness. It doesn’t really matter how confused they are at first. What
⏹️ ▶️ John matters is after you’ve shown them how to do it, does this translate into sort of a new paradigm?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it give them skills and vocabulary that they can then use to manage complexity in their life?
⏹️ ▶️ John not the computer complexity, but the complexity of whatever whatever thing it is that they’re using the computer to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to, you know, there’s always going to be some, you know, again, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the saying from the old GUI days, the only thing that’s actually intuitive is the nipple. Everything else is learned.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so intuitiveness is totally a red herring, right? All you want is something that
⏹️ ▶️ John most people can learn in a reasonable amount of time. And that after they learn it, it gives them a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John set because it defines a sort of understandable world that lets them use those skills
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve problems. So you can totally see how the GUI, the Mac GUI in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John gave people that vocabulary. All applications work the same. The menu bar is always at the top. All the windows work the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Scroll bars work the same. The mouse works the same. There’s a simple vocabulary for single click, double click, and then adding the right
⏹️ ▶️ John click and everything like that. That was a tool set. I don’t think the split view thing, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John vocabulary that works in that way because it doesn’t create, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there is an easily sort of, there’s no user model, there’s no mental model
⏹️ ▶️ John that people can latch onto for that. Mostly because there’s kind of not really an analog in the physical world, but because they’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, because the paradigm for iOS thus far has been the thing is the app, the app is the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is totally a thing, a paradigm that people can hang onto. You wanna go
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the place where all the other things are, you hit the home button, and then when the thing goes, it is the device. That’s a simple
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but that is a very solid paradigm. has what is power the the smartphone revolution, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John this this incredibly good iPhone user interface paradigm split view, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John does not fit with the old paradigm and doesn’t give the user a vocabulary or a mental model
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can they can then parlay into. Now I can I can solve any problem because I know
⏹️ ▶️ John how split views work. They’re just more like a weird feature that has been added on top of the old system. Like it’s again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have to do with learnability or having to explain it. It’s just that it just seems like it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not of a piece with the rest of the interface. It is a tacked on kind of thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think represents a new interface paradigm and therefore they haven’t actually solved the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you know, I think that where we fundamentally disagree is to me, the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you should be able to accomplish by understanding and grokking split view on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is being able to put two arbitrary apps next to each other. That is it. I don’t care if that lets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you leap into new worlds and go out into the great unknown and apply this knowledge. All I care about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is can can your daughter have Safari and notes next to each other? And then later on? Can she have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube and and tweet bot next to each other? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John she has to understand why they’re no longer next to each other or why something else is next to something else or how long they’re expected
⏹️ ▶️ John to be next to each other. Like, you know what I mean? There’s there’s so many questions surrounding that in terms of like, what, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John paradigm? What is the user model? What is the mental model? How does this work? Just because you can? I know
⏹️ ▶️ John how if I’m using this application, I can make another appear. If there’s no actual understanding or there really
⏹️ ▶️ John is no solid paradigm underneath it, then every time you use some other application you’re faced with, why is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John not next to it now? Well I’ll just go through that same motion I knew before to put the thing next to it. Why is this next to that
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Well I know how to get rid of the thing next to it and it becomes, it’s like you’re fighting with the computer instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John it helping you. You’re not using it as a tool to help you solve a problem. It’s just like every time you
⏹️ ▶️ John know this is capability but when it doesn’t work the way you expect it to work because you have a different model
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the persistence or the or how the interaction between the different applications is when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not that way you can stab at the screen a few times to make it be that way but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as like it’s not as straightforward as the the Windows model which again people aren’t good at but at least is
⏹️ ▶️ John an understandable model you make the windows the sizes you want that you put them to where you want on at face value
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s you know it’s enough rope to hang yourself because if you don’t know what size they should be aware you should put them an old Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John jobs thing, you have to be the janitor, you have to put things where you want them, we don’t want you to have to be the janitor. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you’re the janitor or not, everyone can understand the model of Windows, it’s just that the model doesn’t help them manage
⏹️ ▶️ John their complexity, if they’re not good at managing Windows, which is why windows are generally a failure. But I just don’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the split view gives any kind of understandable model, it gives a little bit more capability, not
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as multiple windows, but does not give you a new model for managing complexity going forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I still disagree with you, but I don’t know either of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be right on this
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find the way we’ll find out is as you see people using iPads that are increasingly capable of split
⏹️ ▶️ John view See how many people you see using split view or using it confidently?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, see I think that’s two very different discussions right using split view as I said, it’s not terribly discoverable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s one thing now using it confidently That’s where I think that’s that is what will differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which one of us is right because if somebody stumbles upon it and it’s like oh god, what has happened and then is trying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is obviously trying to switch what app is there or what have you and it’s not working, okay, then you’re absolutely right. It’s completely inscrutable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if someone has discovered split view and without too much effort is now using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it confidently, then I think then that indicates that I’m right and that it really is useful and it really is a paradigm that they’ve learned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to help them get work done.
⏹️ ▶️ John It may still be useful, but like we all agree that it is less capable than multiple windows, if only because it’s only two things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the confidence of saying is like, if you see someone using it, you see see someone doing their work in a cafe or in the same way you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John see them using a Mac now whether they’re using full screen and they’re swiping between which by the way I’ve seen a lot of the younger people
⏹️ ▶️ John who I work with, they’re very confident in that because they’re the smartphone generation, I guess like they do full screen
⏹️ ▶️ John everything on their Mac laptops, they do do the multi finger swipe between the applications, which I see is incredibly inefficient. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re basically doing is turning the Mac into a paradigm that they understand because Windows are too difficult to manage.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for split view, you’d want to see somebody like doing
⏹️ ▶️ John like doing their task using split views to help make their task more efficient, not just one split
⏹️ ▶️ John view that they keep permanently and their whole thing is like, I need to have slack and Twitter next to each other forever and ever and ever and
⏹️ ▶️ John amen, I wish I could tell the OS to never launch them separately and to launch them as a single application. That I would say is a super
⏹️ ▶️ John degenerate case of using split view. But just to say that they’re they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrarily putting applications next to each other as is appropriate for the task they’re doing. If it’s too difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to rearrange to put this thing next to that thing, and that’s the next to this thing, then people won’t do it. And they’ll be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too it’s too onerous to constantly the same way that people find it too onerous to constantly rearrange
⏹️ ▶️ John windows is too onerous to constantly rearrange split views for whatever reason. So therefore, I’m just gonna have one split view and everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John is non split view. And I would say that’s not a confident use of things. And anyway, even if they’re using split views
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, even if they’re using them to always put the two most convenient applications next to each other, they need any moment of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have no problem doing it and it’s second nature, and they don’t have to think about it. And it’s very intuitive. That’s still only two things
⏹️ ▶️ John at once. And so it’s still worse than Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but it’s worse by your metric of how many thousands of things can I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distracted by at once?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, it’s worse because we know people need to do more than one thing at once. And Windows are a failure because people can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use them to do more than some people can’t use that. I keep saying people, you know, we’re trying to talk in aggregates.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re obviously obviously all of us can use Windows to do more than two things at once. We do it all the time. But
⏹️ ▶️ John most people when they deal with computers, are not successful with that, which means Windows is successful for the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are good at using computers in the old way of like, he knows computers, but worse for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else. Smartphones, I would say, pretty much 100% of the population is successful
⏹️ ▶️ John at both using and installing applications. I pretty much think we’ve solved that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not that they can’t continue to improve. But we’ve hit the mainstream and that Oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John are you good at using smartphones? Do you know smartphones? Very few people say that unless they mean like developing for it or
⏹️ ▶️ John hacking them or something like that. Everybody knows how to launch the Facebook app. Everyone knows how to send text messages. Like we have
⏹️ ▶️ John crossed the effectively 100% barrier there. We have not even come close to crossing that
⏹️ ▶️ John at the, can I use a general purpose computing device to do arbitrary things? And so we’re still struggling to
⏹️ ▶️ John get larger adoption than we have with the world of PCs and Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I agree with you that the smartphone full screen everything model is pretty close to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideally usable for a lot of people. But I think the windowing model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing a lot better in practice than you’re giving it credit for. I think a lot more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you seem to be suggesting have figured it out well enough to get stuff done. And maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideally, you know, I’m sure you look at everyone’s window setups and it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you cringe. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would look at my setup and it would make you cringe. But I think people figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out. been figuring it out for decades. Most people who use a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis are able to figure out windowing enough to do what they want to do. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get by with anything. I mean, you can figure out, like the upsides is that if you muddle through, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John what we see, we all know the things that are bad about Windows. Like the reason people use the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John so much and their desktop is filled with icons and that they feel not confident navigating the file
⏹️ ▶️ John system. My desktop is filled with icons. Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the reason everybody found smartphones to be such a breath of fresh air. It’s because all
⏹️ ▶️ John that crap that they have been sort of muddling through on their PCs at work or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ John not there on the smartphone. There are no files and folders. There’s no save button.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no desktop. It was just, it got rid of all that stuff. And so even though
⏹️ ▶️ John they could, you know, manage with PCs, that’s why I’m calling the PC interface not like a failure
⏹️ ▶️ John in the sense of like, it was terrible, and nobody could use it. But like, to understand how much better
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, compare it to people’s reactions to smartphones, like smartphones aren’t even considered computers, like it is is,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a discontinuity, they have transcended the idea of a general purpose computer. So you’re right that people do get by
⏹️ ▶️ John zooming all their windows to full screen, and playing Minesweeper and clicking around in their web browser. And the web is another
⏹️ ▶️ John paradigm, like a little miniature paradigm of like clicking on underlying words and stuff. That was another simple enough one that I think was more successful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, it’s not like the PC or Mac is a dead end. But we’ve clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John pushed the limit of how many people are going to feel comfortable using that interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John not to its fullest, but just even in a merely competent way. Like I think there are people who use like a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John every day for multiple decades, who still have no idea where the hell anything is in their disk and can’t navigate the file system
⏹️ ▶️ John and are terrified by an open save dialogue box and just definitely want everything to be either in that one place they know how to get to or
⏹️ ▶️ John on the desktop or something and that shows that interface is not succeeding because that’s not the way it’s supposed to work whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John people are using smartphones essentially the way they’re supposed to work under the sort of very simplified
⏹️ ▶️ John ios paradigm of a big grid of icons that you swipe between and you launch and they fill the screen like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not using the phones in the degenerate case they’re using the phones the way they were designed whereas the macs and windows i think people are
⏹️ ▶️ John muddling through Not everybody, not the people that we know, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire mass of humanity, like thinking everybody’s a hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I could see that. I think I’m mostly with you on that. All right, our final sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week is MailRoute.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco the internet and you as your email host or the servers you run, anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, I use Fastmail. It’s an IMAP post, and a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this in front of their own servers if they run servers for their business, or if you’re enough of a geek to even run your own
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I’ve been using Fastmail for a while, I’ve tried spam filtering through their settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen other people doing it with Gmail. I’ve tried, once a long time ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did run my own mail server and tried doing Spam Assassin and stuff like that. I tried doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco junk mail filtering in Apple Mail. None of these things have been nearly as effective as MailRoute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. I’m saying this honestly, this is my direct experience with this. MailRoute has kicked their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butts in every possible way. It filters out way more spam, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of it. It is very rare that I get a spam message anymore. most days I get zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not like one, not five, zero. And it is extremely rare for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legitimate messages to get caught in their filters as spam. So I just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t tell you enough. They sponsor us a lot, and I try to drill this into everyone’s heads every time because it is so
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iPad Pro: day-one verdict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to MailRoute for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So any other thoughts about this new iPad Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to talk about hardware, but I think we should save it for next week. I think there’s a lot to talk about on the iPad Pro hardware, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think it’s worth giving us more time to use it first. I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my very, very early impression as an overview of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is whether you should buy one, whether I want one. For me, the question is no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff, I think, will probably keep this, although even she’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit unsure right now because it is so big and the software is so not taking advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it yet. These things will change over time. I mean, the bigness won’t, but over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software will take more advantage of it. I would say if you’re not in a huge hurry, getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next years is probably going to be a bigger improvement than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most single year improvements would be for these things, simply because not only will the hardware probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a little bit better, maybe it’ll add some cool stuff like force touch and better touch ID, but the bigger thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we need a year for both Apple and third party developers to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good software for this thing because it isn’t there yet. There’s some right now, but it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while and it’s going to be a while before everybody can actually afford to take advantage of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the only exception I would make to that would be if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are already a heavy iPad user, somebody like Federico Faticci, if you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are able to do a ton of your work or all of your work on an iPad, and you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing things like using third-party keyboards with it and doing multitasking and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need more screen space, if you already are using styluses to do artistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work or note-taking or annotations. So if you are already an iPad Power user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then by all means consider this now. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about the iPad have prevented you from getting into it as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serious productivity device for your work, I don’t think this will change that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least not yet. And maybe down the road it will once the software gets there, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s going to be there for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ John And hopefully by next year they’ll have the iPad Air sized device with a pen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that could change everything. I mean right now if you want this awesome pencil input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to get the giant iPad. And so like for me if I were to ever get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencil stuff I would much rather have the iPad Air sized one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art snacks with TIFF. But you don’t need an iPad. They send you actual like paint brushes and
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but the equivalent of like just having a small task that someone else sends you to do to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John something for the day You know I’d rather just play Pictionary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, actually I actually I have kind of a fun idea for a game that I might want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it would require the pencil and it would also require me to develop a game, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is unlikely But that’s the only thing I could really see doing on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s probably not going to happen. A combination of flight control and worms. Go. Sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of fun, actually. No, but you actually found two games
⏹️ ▶️ John You would draw the paths that the projectiles take, and the other person can set up barriers, and you’d have to quickly draw between them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Game writes itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Lynda.com, and MailRoute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week. That game probably already exists too. Oh I’m sure there’s like 10 of them!
⏹️ ▶️ 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, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John Check my cast so long
Post-show: Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, in other news, I got my car back a couple hours ago. Is it still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white? It’s still white. The fender is repaired. All is right in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw that picture of your car thing and I really, and people were tweeting like, oh, if that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to John’s car, it would have burned to the ground. People don’t understand how much damage to my car
⏹️ ▶️ John I am both willing to tolerate and I’m forced to tolerate.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have so many things
⏹️ ▶️ John on my car that are worse than that thing that you just spent $1,000 to get repaired. The reason I don’t get them to repair it is
⏹️ ▶️ John because I know it will cost an unseemly amount of money and I say, you know what? I’m just going to live with
⏹️ ▶️ John that giant white paint streak that was added to my car by someone who parked next to me the second week I got it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m just going
⏹️ ▶️ John to live with the huge gouge in my bumper from the person who re-entered me because my deductible won’t cover
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s like, just, that’s why I think about getting a nice car. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John just never be able to drive it. Like just the world, the world that I drive around in is just filled with
⏹️ ▶️ John too many hazards. I mean, hell, my brand new car, I dented the rim of my fancy alloy
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels like in the first month that I got it from hitting a pothole. I had to get a new wheel for $650.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I couldn’t believe that you, this is the thing that only people in the South or people who live in the desert
⏹️ ▶️ John do, like, oh, I have a tiny ding to my car, my perfect car that is preserved as if it’s in a
⏹️ ▶️ John museum because we have no weather to speak of and no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, you have the humidity. Oh, God,
⏹️ ▶️ John this again. And it just, I don’t know, how can you be spending $1,000 to repair a quarter-sized nicked your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because it was down to the metal. And for me, it was $100. Who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the size of a quarter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it was really obvious if you had seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know that picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not that impressive, but I assure you it was obvious.
⏹️ ▶️ John states’ money and $100 of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. Who cares? Your deductible is only $100? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s pretty good. That’s fancy insurance. Yeah, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have done it for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I probably am paying too much for said insurance, but nevertheless. No, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem that you have, John, is that you drive in an area that doesn’t believe in roads that make sense, roads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that function, or drivers that know how to drive. They’re not called mad fools because they’re good at driving.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. Now, the roads are my enemy, other cars are my enemy, and I swear, more damage has been done to my
⏹️ ▶️ John car while parked than anything else. Because the parking garage at work has the spots, you know, when they paint the lines on
⏹️ ▶️ John the spots, they look like they’re made for like motorcycles, because they can fit more spots in the parking garage that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the court is not a big car. It’s a full size car, but it’s not humongous. And I swear every
⏹️ ▶️ John time I park, I am making decisions about how many inches on either side I have to you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John judge because you want like you have to think most people are driving or single drivers, so they’re not going to open their
⏹️ ▶️ John passenger door. So I want to get closer. But what if the guy backs in then I got to figure out if he’s a backing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a Casey person, then his driver side is on my side. So I have to like, figure out where in
⏹️ ▶️ John between the lines I want to be just perfectly and And then looking at the type of car, if I’m parking between two cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John how likely is this person to be one of those people who doesn’t even look and just swings their car door open and jams it into mine? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has their things they want to be perfect. And I admit I kind of did it with my mirror. That was my fault where I clipped the mirror
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out of my garage, which is also sized for a motorcycle or a horse carriage or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got that repaired. But that wasn’t $1,000. And that damage was way more noticeable than your little neck.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all this is to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that you are obviously care very deeply about the particulars of how your car
⏹️ ▶️ John looks. And I would like to care very deeply about how my car looks, but I just cannot bear the amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John money it would take to do that. And time, frankly, to keep bringing the car in to get fixed and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, one of them was the mechanical issue, which was a week, and then this was three days for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the body issue. However, I’m not the only one who is ogling white cars today, am I, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I drove a white car. I wouldn’t say I was ogling. Is it ogling? Ogling? However you pronounce that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say I was doing that to it. It just so happened that the test drivable model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was white. Just like all of your cars just happen to be white when they fall into your lap and you buy them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, yeah, I agree. I totally understand what you’re going with here. I really do. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole family went for this test drive, though, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah, so ever since I tested over the P85D last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco February, I think it was, I was very impressed by it. But I also, at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said that the P85D is so fast, I actually found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it unpleasant. I was like, I would probably never do this from a stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flooring it like that, it hits you in the face so hard with inertia that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t really want to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then, I’ve been thinking more about it, doing more research. I am almost certainly going to get a Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next. I mean, I’m basically ready to place the order. Because my lease up in late March
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s like a two-month lead time on them so I have to decide pretty soon what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today I went up to test drive to first of all see a bunch of like colors and stuff in person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also to test drive the non-P version. This was a 90D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s just like the 85 but with a little bit more little bit more battery so slightly heavier probably but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know no speed difference really. So overall I think I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that one. I think I’m gonna get Really? Yeah, in Tesla’s mind it’s not the slow one, it’s like the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. None of them are really slow. I mean, the slowest one I think is roughly the speed of your car, Casey, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I believe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so none of them would be called slow by anybody, really. But it’s all relative. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle one, I would say, in general, the 90D is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as fast as the M5 at the M5’s peak power. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M5, when you get that massive kick in the butt of turbocharged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco torque, it is stronger feeling and faster feeling than the 90D.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the 90D, it’s available right from zero. And the M5, if you floor the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a stop, you’ll just spin the wheels. It doesn’t have any traction, and it’s only rear-wheel drive. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 90D is all-wheel drive with a really, really good all-wheel drive system, and you have all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power right from the start, and it actually can put it down. actually can use it. Overall I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t feel like I was really missing anything in this in the middle version other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that extra big kick from from like really flooring it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that uglier wheels? No, all the wheel options are all the same. Now I am torn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on which wheels to get and I’m sure you have opinions. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have any great wheel options. I agree I
⏹️ ▶️ John think all the wheels are middle-of-the-road too ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would I would agree with that. The base ones that Johnson in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture, they kind of look like the M5’s winter wheels. Like, it’s a very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design. In person, it just it kind of looks cheap. Like, they don’t they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t look like premium quality wheels. None of them do really, but I think the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model looks the least good of all of them the the 19-inch silver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cyclone is kind of a halfway point between everything now the bigger ones do look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially larger and more aggressive in person and so the question is like you know how aggressive and sporty do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want your car to look also I’m not quite sure I can pull off thin 21-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wheels on New York roads which are only marginally better than John’s roads
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah you’re gonna dent you’re gonna dent the rims you should test drive the 21s because like a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John car makers are doing this now like offering you obscenely large wheels because they look cool and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they just turn the wheels into rubber bands and you can’t drive on railroads with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So I think I’m probably gonna go with the 19 sliver Cyclone. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s probably what I’m gonna do. The red looks really awesome in person. The black doesn’t look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as bad as I thought, so I’m kind of torn between those two, leaning towards red. Otherwise, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much sold. I think I’m almost certainly gonna do it. What does Tiff say about the color? We
⏹️ ▶️ John never hear what her color choices are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If she were buying a car for herself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The teal, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the blue is a very nice blue. I just don’t care for blue cars for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff really is being very supportive of me getting the red because,
⏹️ ▶️ John Of all your midlife crises, a red car is
⏹️ ▶️ John good, this is a good, go with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. You know, like the black is fine. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to be subtle, to be mostly subtle, or to maximize the subtlety of this car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the black would be the right approach to that. But I’ve been getting black cars for so long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re ready for something different, unlike Casey, who always gets white.
⏹️ ▶️ John So should we start reading the manual for you now? Yes. Yes. Casey will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just download a PDF. Yeah, I’ll send it to you as soon as I find it.