144: Digital Schmear

21 Nov 2015

Tiffany Arment joins us to talk iPad Pro and Apple Pencil after we lament the Mac App Store’s latest woes.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up: Apple TV vs. game consoles
• Mac App Store certificate problems
  • Apple's Apology
  • Sparkle
  • Michael Tsai: No One Minding The Store
  • Space Gremlin
  • Daisy Disk
  • Twitterrific
• iPad Pro, featuring special guest Tiffany Arment
  • Smart Cover
  • Pencil
  • Back to Work #247
  • Tiff's Signature
  • Adobe Sketch
  • Procreate
  • Tayasui Sketches
  • DisplayMate on iPad display quality
• USB3 speeds in the Lightning connector
• Post-show:
  • Mrs. Siracusa's new iMac 5K

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

Chapters

1. Pre-show: Butts, beer warmers, and Ohio
2. Will Apple TV surpass game consoles?
3. Sponsor: Squarespace
4. Mac App Store DRM failure
5. Sponsor: MailRoute
6. iPad Pro, Pencil with Tiff
7. Sponsor: Automatic
8. iPad Pro USB 3?
9. Post-show: Tina’s new iMac

Pre-show: Butts, beer warmers, and Ohio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, I don’t know how you’re going to edit the beginning of this show. Good luck. I’m just going to delete everything before right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, come on. What am I going to pull out of that? The cooley cozy koozy discussion was wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t want to have a whole show about butts and beer warmers. Oh, come on. Or Ohio. Sorry, sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ohio. It just doesn’t make the cut.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just let it be known. Marco’s the party pooper.

Will Apple TV surpass game consoles?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So John, would you like to tell us about Apple TV catching up on gaming consoles and power?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sure. We don’t have much follow up on Apple TV. It’s finally tailing off now. But one conversation I saw floating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around these past few weeks, I forget what prompted it. Otherwise, I would have put the link

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in here. But maybe it was just people talking about gaming and Apple TV in general. And some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people like, you know, the the Apple TV with an A8, it’s catching up to some gaming consoles and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power. And like, it’s more powerful than a PS3. maybe it’s not as powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as PS4 now but the PS4 isn’t going to change any time soon like the PS5 is not imminent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so if Apple keeps revising the Apple TV at some point the Apple TV could be more powerful than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all current generation gaming consoles and I think that’s crazy talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes there it’s it starts with a kernel of truth yes that the Apple TV the age

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is way faster than the old one and I’d even go so I haven’t looked into this deeply but just from looking at the games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could say yeah sure ps3 power maybe a little bit more probably that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a safe bet because ps3 is a really old console and again I agree that it’s not ps4 power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or Xbox one power but then they extrapolate and say but you know this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the a8 what if next year is the a9 and then the a10 and if that you know even if it’s just a year or two behind the top-end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone the idea is that iOS devices keep getting faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and game consoles have you know five to seven your lifespan, sometimes even longer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if there is no PS5 on the horizon, perhaps just before the PS5 arrives, the Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be more powerful, a more powerful gaming system. And the reason I think that’s bunk is not necessarily because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple couldn’t make hardware that is faster than the PS4, because they inevitably will, although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not perhaps in the timeframe before the PS5 comes, but just because the Apple TV isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPhone, it doesn’t get revised every year and even the iPhone, even the highest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end iOS device they make, the gigantic iPad Pro that we will talk about later, has only 4 gigs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of RAM and the PS4 has 8 gigs of RAM. And you would think, well, RAM doesn’t matter, the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the GPU will be just as fast. When it comes to making games, things like RAM and things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like hard disk space and stuff like that makes a difference. The PS4 I think has a 500 gig hard drive now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and 8 gigs of RAM. do you think it’s going to be that the Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has eight gigs of RAM? Eventually it will, right? But will it have eight gigs of RAM before the PS five is out? I find that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard to believe given how frequently Apple updates the Apple TV and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even just given I don’t even think the iPhone will have eight gigs of RAM by the time the PS five comes out at the current rate of RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boost. So and that stuff makes a difference for games with like large

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open world games with high resolution textures and all that other stuff. So anyone thinking that the Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will eventually be more powerful than the PS4. It will, but by that time the PS6 will probably be out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s also a pretty big difference in thermals between these kind of systems. As

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we see from modern CPU and GPU limitations and designs and progress and everything, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mainly limited by how much heat we will allow the chips to output or how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heat we can deal with them outputting. And that pretty much puts a limit on performance that we can get out of them at any given

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco moment or in any given year, like in whatever we can do that That is generally what we’re fighting against. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for things that are AC connected, you don’t really need to worry too much about current draw,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is related, but you can max out the current draw as much as you want when you’re plugged into a wall outlet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you still, in a little tiny box, it’s 100 bucks next to your TV, or 150 bucks next to your TV,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with no fan in this little tiny enclosure that’s not even made of metal, it’s gonna be pretty hard to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mega heat output out of that. Meanwhile, you look at a game console, and they had these big, hot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chips these big loud annoying fans especially in their first generation before they do any kind of process shrink

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so when the ps5 comes out they’re gonna be able to put in some giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big hot chip with a big loud fan on it and the Apple TV will still need to be this cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fanless box running year or two old iPhone guts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah and they’re and they’re offset from each other because like could you imagine when the ps3 first came out if you said someday there’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a little black puck with no fans in it that’s more powerful than the ps3 you’d like get out of here But here we are but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at the the time span gap. It’s huge gap between the ps3 and now so like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The fanless thing is always going to lag behind the thing with fans by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John At least a generation and and not like processing power as much as just capacity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for large You know games like it having all that RAM is important for putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the big console games on there for the for the big textures and all and all the other stuff and If you don’t have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ram if you have to wait like the ps3 didn’t have a lot of ram So you had to wedge a lot of crap in there? That’s part of the reason that the apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can match it these days is because the ps3 was very strange architecture and relatively Ram star

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the ps4 is not ram starved It’s got tons of ram and it’s got tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of hard drive space, which is not as fast as an SSD But when you’re you know preloading levels and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s fast enough to stream levels also anyway I Don’t I’m definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not looking for the Apple TV to catch up and pass the ps4 unless I guess there is no ps5 and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just wait around until we can get a ps4 and a little puck thing But I really think at this point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that probably will be a ps5 because the ps4 is doing pretty well for Sony all things considered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right any other follow-up On an infinite timescale the rate we’re going we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} not have follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at all I don’t even know what to make of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what a shame that would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could technically put a lot of the iPad Pro stuff in there, but it’s not really because we’re just going to talk more about the iPad Pro later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Any follow-out you’d like to do, John? I don’t know what that is. Fair enough. All right. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey awesome these days before we dig in?

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Mac App Store DRM failure

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steven Connelly So the Mac App Store had some issues in the last week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was a pretty big disaster. And I didn’t really know what was going on. I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really busy. And so I have been following Twitter as religiously as I usually do. And I saw that there were some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey issues. And I didn’t think a lot of it because everything seemed to to be working on my computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then all of a sudden I went to run 1Password and I was told I couldn’t. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey suddenly this thing I wasn’t paying attention to became a lot more real. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, why don’t you tell us what happened?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, so the stuff they run from the Mac App Store is DRM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John encumbered, let’s say, to some degree. There are receipts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the Mac App Store puts in the application. Apple’s advice for figuring out on the launch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your application whether your app is valid is to check those receipts. They have some code that they, you know, some code samples showing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you how to do that, but you can really do it any way you want. Some developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use open SSL library that they bundle into their application. Open a cell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an open source thing to check their certificates. And there are a couple problems related

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this. As with most disasters, it’s not just one thing goes wrong. One of the things that went wrong is that Apple updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their certificate for this receipt to use a better encryption of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a stronger encryption they had been using previously. And it just so happens that the open SSL library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that a lot of applications used to validate their receipts can’t handle this new encryption

⏹️ ▶️ ^John level, right? So that’s one class of things that went wrong. The second class of things that went

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong is the Mac App Store certificate expired and Apple replaced it with a new one. why they had the occasion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think to replace this with the new one that had the stronger encryption and there’s a bug in the Mac App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where even if a new certificate is issued after the old one has expired there’s some caching issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this is locally on the Macs that makes it not take the new the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new certificate even though the old one you know had expired

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so what people were getting was they would try to launch an application and not just one application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but some in some cases if they have the caching problem pretty much every application they’d got from the mac app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would end up getting these dialogue boxes that say this application is damaged please throw it in the trash basically the system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling you that it couldn’t validate the authenticity of this application this is kind of the system working as designed and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if some malware infected all your applications and like turn them into trojan horses and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would want to know uh hey don’t you know don’t run this application it’s messed up but the same dialogue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John appears if the validation machinery says, you know, like in this case, the certificate had expired. And even though Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had issued a new one, even though your application might have been able to use that new one to validate that everything was going on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the local operating system was telling it, no, you’re trying to use certificate that expired like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three days ago. So you’re out of luck. So Apple fix this by downgrading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their encryption to the old version that fixed all the applications that had the old version of SSL. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what they did to fix these expiring certificate other than to tell people like to reboot and stuff. I’m not entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure what they did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, they said they’re preparing a software update for OS X to prevent the caching issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the future, but… Yeah, it’s not going to help people who had this problem last week. Yeah, I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this was a disaster on so many levels. It’s kind of an embarrassment. I mean, so the official statement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they gave, which came pretty late,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly… Six days later, they made an official statement, and it wasn’t even… was it a public statement? I think they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emailed developers this thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, they emailed something to developers and they also gave a PR statement to sites like iMore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which we’ll link to in the show notes. Apple does a lot of things this way. They don’t put bad news

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or reactions to things on their own site. They’ll send the same PR statement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to known, friendly Apple sites and have them all basically report it and apologize on Apple’s behalf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for them, so that Apple doesn’t have to soil their site with any kind of negative PR. So the statement they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gave was, I think it was a lot of BS and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some truth. There was a planned event and most users experienced no issues.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco However some users experienced some issues during this change.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now because of the nature of this problem, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most users, that is complete BS. idea that most users experienced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no issues and only some people had only some problems. No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So how is there any way that Apple could know the actual answer to that? Because Apple’s not tracking, I’m assuming,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how often we launch applications and stuff. So I don’t think anyone really knows the scope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, I don’t know, honestly. But so the fact is, you know, this PR statement is trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to minimize the issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, but see, but if you don’t know and Apple doesn’t know, everyone is just guessing based on stories they’ve heard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s true. I mean, I suppose they could know, like, how many people hit the certificate server, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can estimate assuming they can estimate it from, like, support load, because you can do some math and say, if we get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X number of support calls for this issue, that means why people really have this issue. You know, just based on historically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speaking, how many people will go to the phones or go to email about a particular issue? You can kind of back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the envelope figure out based on previous problems that you did have better metrics on. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Who knows? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, we’re using is like, do you know somebody who had this problem with their computer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I mean, okay, I didn’t, I actually didn’t encounter this problem on any of my computers. But then again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I tend to avoid buying applications in the Mac App Store. But I do have some for example, slack I brought on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac App Store, and I use it every day and I had no problem with it. Is it because I’m always running it and if you’re like, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running it, and the certificate expires, I think there’s no problem. It’s only if you quit it and launch it. But I’m pretty sure I did quit it and launch it during that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John window and haven’t restarted. So anyway, I had zero problems. Casey had a problem. Some people had tons of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problems. I had many problems. Like stories where they show the dialogue boxes, like 500 dialogue boxes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John popping up on the screen saying that they can’t watch things. Anyway, the bottom line is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this was a problem that could have potentially affected every single user who has ever purchased anything from the Mac App Store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it probably affected a lot of them because who, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe I just got lucky, but like conceptually speaking, this is you don’t need a weird set of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John circumstances to trigger this problem. I don’t think you just need to have purchasing from the Mac App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to and to have your system cash the old certificate and then to launch them after the new one has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John issued.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tipster in the chat pointed at something pretty relevant here. Slack probably does not do receipt validation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on launch because it’s a free app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} They probably don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care. So the only apps that were doing receipt validation would would have had this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah I’m trying to think of the Mac App Store apps I have I guess I have Apple’s apps like you know the you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pages and all that stuff from the iWork suite and I tend not to buy in the Mac App Store and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the second factor in this which is things like this especially for people who have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no idea why the heck this happened make them feel worse about the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John App Store and people who have any clue about the details of the Mac App Store this will actually make them avoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it more than they did in the past like I’m avoiding it for a variety of reasons. Mostly because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re, you know, the applications I use, even when they were in the Mac App Store, like BB edit, I never bought the Mac App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version because it was crippled by sandboxing because of Apple’s rules. So if I have a choice between buying the crippled sandbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version and the non crippled version, and I know the non crippled version gives more money to the developer, I’ll buy the non crippled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version every time. So that’s what I’ve always done. If there’s any choice, the ones I’ve had in the Mac App Store, it’s always been like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John convenient, you know, I don’t care that much about it, it’s not a big deal or it’s free like slack or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s more convenient than going to direct download it. Like I would like to have the experience where I could just go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to one place and see all my apps and auto update them and all that stuff. Like I like those features of the Mac App Store, but for apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that really count, I’m definitely buying them outside. But for people who are more towards the Mac App Store, whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you know what the convenience is more important to me than then like giving more money to developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the applications I use don’t suffer from any sandboxing issues. And I really love auto update and all this other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nevermind the most Mac apps before the Mac App Store already using Sparkle or something like that. Anyway, anyway, for people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know about these details, this is going to make them think twice because they’re like before the trade off was worth it to me, I will buy from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac App Store because the convenience is worth it to me for the potential downsides. But now, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weighing that convenience versus like, you know, this day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when all your apps won’t launch and you got figure out what the heck the problem is and so this is not good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both short-term and long-term for the Mac App Store which was already not a particularly beloved institution as far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as developers and tech savvy users are concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the problem I mean it there’s there are so many reasons already why you might want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be hesitant about buying from the Mac App Store and why developers might want to be hesitant to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the Mac App Store and to just to add one more thing to the pile it’s just a really bad time for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that and it it It just seems like, you know, there was a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco post by, is it Michael Tsai? MJ Tsai? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} believe that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He made a good post, we’ll link to it in the show notes, called Nobody Minding the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Store or something like that. Do I have that right? Basically, like, you know, collecting all these quotes and everything and pointing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out just like, the Mac App Store is just so neglected and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has been since its introduction. The iOS App Store has its own set of problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the Mac App Store is so much worse in almost every way. The fact that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has a bug, a certificate validation bug, I mean, that’s like one of many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems with it. That’s only the most recent problem with it. The application itself, the Mac App Store application

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a disaster. The sandboxing issues have pushed out tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of good apps. Mac App Store developers, I really feel sorry for them. and if I were launching a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app, I’m not sure I would put it there. Like, if you would have asked me a year ago if I was launching a Mac app to put it in the App

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Store, I’d say, yeah, probably. You know, I don’t wanna deal with myself distributing it, so yeah, I’ll put it in the App Store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But today, I don’t think I would. It just seems like it’s not worth all of the downsides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and costs. Well, it really depends.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If I was developing a Mac app, I would say it really depends on what kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of app it is. Because if it’s a small app, or if it’s a free app, is an app that you think will never be impacted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by sandboxing. And you just don’t want to deal with, you know, incorporating sparkle and putting up your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own endpoint for that and making sure it’s up for the updates and doing the payment processing yourself and all that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff that you would have to do if you did the direct sales route because say you you don’t have an existing channel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for direct sales to software because you’re not an established software company or whatever. It is definitely convenient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use the Mac App Store. But if your app, you know, if I was doing an app that that wasn’t true for even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of those things, like could my app potentially be impacted by sandboxing don’t you know don’t go to the Mac App Store do I already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a way to accept money from people I don’t need the Mac App Store for that do I already know how to incorporate self

⏹️ ▶️ ^John auto update and have a robust framework for doing that and already have a website that I have to keep up and so I can put an endpoint

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it for updates then yeah just you know there’s no point if you feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those things don’t apply that’s you know I’m not actually a Mac developer so I don’t know but part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah part of this whole recent round of Mac app store stuff in the tech nerd circles was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers sort of reiterating, see guys, this is why I’m not in the Mac app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and users like the MJ side thing, writing up all the list of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, all the great Mac apps that are not in the Mac app store, like the Mac app store, even though many people think of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it as the only and best and single place to get Mac software.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A lot of the Mac software that the Mac users really love a lot of the best Mac software is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not on the Mac App Store. And obviously that’s not true on iOS because pretty much all the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on iOS is on the App Store. So yeah, Apple’s always been in an uncomfortable position with the Mac App Store because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is an alternative. And we all want there to be an alternative but that means the Mac App Store actually has to compete.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Kind of in the same way that the iTunes music store had to compete against piracy, the Mac App Store has to compete against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John direct sales and applications that can be more powerful and do more powerful things. And it’s currently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s losing that competition.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And even as a user, everything about the Mac App Store, from a user perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has gotten worse over time. First when they started adding sandboxing, that not only pushed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out a lot of apps that made us, oh, well now we have to exchange our license and go download the direct version and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that was a pain for people who bought in early to the App Store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then when sandboxing came in, now I hate sandboxed apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re a pain from user side to use. I have a couple apps. One of them is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco called Space Gremlin. It helps you find where all your disk space

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. It has to read your whole hard drive. The convoluted hoops that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps like this have to do is, like, okay, click this button, choose the root folder, and then every time you’ve got to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco redo it, and now it can’t look at files. It’s such a pain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco From a user perspective, I understand the security benefits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it, but if it’s a very rarely used opt-in system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those are pretty limited. I don’t think it’s worth it from the user

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco perspective. I really don’t. The way it’s implemented now, in its incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco half-baked and seemingly completely neglected way, I don’t want it as a user.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just one more thing. and then you add something like this receipt validation bug that made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all my apps just break all of a sudden. Like, that’s a big problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What reason do I have as a user to buy more apps from the Mac App Store after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the problems and things getting worse? I don’t see a good reason anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you still got the convenience reason, like the one place you can go for the updates and it’s easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy things there. I wish, the Mac App Store should also make it easier uninstalled, but they don’t really.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But beyond that, like all the pros are still there, but the cons just keeps stacking up and the cons don’t go away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the sandboxing thing really like the main problem with that, aside from all the bugs and all the other things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the poor Mac developers have to complain about how you know, iOS gets better tools for crash reports and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John debugging and betas and test flight and all that other stuff. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aside from all that, Mac App Store sandboxing, like iOS is sandboxing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everyone gets along with because the entire system, the entire operating system, the entire way of using the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone has from the beginning been built around the idea of sandboxing, which is, you know, problems for data

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sharing and silly like URL schemes to get around all these things like so that has its own problems, but it fits with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the system. On the Mac, sandboxing flies in the face of the entire history of the platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you put sandboxing in that environment, it doesn’t fit like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if your app happens to fit into a little nice sandbox thing, you’re fine. But there’s whole classes of applications, good, useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications that don’t fit within sandboxing. And it’s like, it’s almost like Apple saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we really wish really wish that you didn’t have to have apps like this on your Mac, we really, really wish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac was like iOS. And so they say, maybe if we make all the Mac apps be sandbox,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then the Mac will be just like the iPhone, but it’s not. And so like the app that Marco just mentioned, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John showing where all your disk spaces. Could they have like in system preferences,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a disk space usage thing that did the same thing that was part of the operating system like settings is on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iOS, they could but they don’t. And Mac users do have to manage their story storage and on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac because of the way it is, it’s difficult to tell where all that space is going because you have a lot of files and a lot of folders and all that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other stuff that, again, is not user visible in iOS. So there is a place for applications that do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of thing. Same thing for like disk duplicating things like super duper and stuff that’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t have to do with phones because they’ve always had like well they have the cloud backup now or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you back them up to iTunes which just pushes the problem onto your Mac or whatever you’re gonna do for the Mac we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need a way to back it up and doing disk clones is a useful thing to do and the disk cloning software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needs to read the entire disk of course and sandboxing makes it a pain it can be done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s a it’s a big super pain so you can’t Like you can’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac as safe as iOS by merely just saying applications have to be sandbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All you can do is say some applications will be sandbox and it’s good for them like it is a benefit to the user

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have applications that Can’t get outside their little pen and that if they somehow get exploited

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or broken or there’s a bug in them or whatever They can do less damage But that other class of applications is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never going to go away So long as the Mac still is like it is so long as the Mac is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an old style PC operating system. So I don’t see what they can do about the tension other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than to make a tiered system and say, sandbox if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can, we’ll give you a special label in the app store for your sandbox and a label if you’re not. But instead they’re just stubbornly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying, everything has to be sandboxed and if you can’t work in the sandbox, we don’t want your kind of application on our platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And at least the tech savvy users are saying, you may not want that kind of application on the platform, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want that application because it does useful things for me. And so either you make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no longer useful, like you will never need to clone a disk again because all your data is magically backed up using quantum entanglement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something, right? Or you make it like iOS and with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no local backup option, everything is a cloud backup, or you gotta give me some way to do all these things that I need to do. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even just something as simple as BBEdit where the text editor wants to be able to have like a file browser

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without throwing a stupid open save dialog box in your face to the power box thing to let you convince the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system that you’re allowed to access these files. Like, you know, a programmer style text editor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you browse the whole file system is a useful thing to have because the Mac is a system that lets you have files and folders

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and expose the whole file system. And you can’t, BBEdit is not useful if you confine it to like a sandbox-like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John environment. All you’re doing is pushing that annoyance onto the user who has to do silly things in the UI to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John convince the system that yes, please let BBEdit edit these text files no matter where they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, John, a minute ago you said, Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if Apple had included

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like Space Gremlin or my preferred app, Daisy Disk? Have you not seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about this Mac and then the storage tab, which is super useful and is telling me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the three quarters of a terabyte I have full, about half of it is other?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The usage in iOS is not very granular, but it’s granular on the level that iOS works,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it tells you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John per apps, because you don’t have direct access to managing the storage. It’s like all you can do about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is delete an app and all its data goes with it. Maybe some apps you can go into the app and like delete videos or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, but the granularity of the information provided by the settings thing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS matches the granularity of the way you use iOS more or less,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the granularity of the Mac for good or for ill is files and folders. So you, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John letting it tell you how much is music, how much is video and how much is a giant yellow bar for all of other, which I always wonder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how it comes up with that. A is not even as useful as iOS and B, just is not, it’s not the way the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac works. I need to know, like, I use it all the time, especially back before I upgraded my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer. She had a 256 gig SSD, and I would need to like hunt down,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, some episode of My Little Pony that I didn’t know had auto downloaded by iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to dig it out of the iTunes folder and delete the damn thing, you know? And you can do that sometimes from within iTunes, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even just the sad discovery that many people make that the virtual memory sleep image

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can push you over your disk space limit. Right? Because when you get a machine with a lot of RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a small SSD, you start really asking hard questions like, do I really need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Hibernate functionality or can I just disable that and just use old style sleep and just really hope that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t run out of battery while it’s asleep?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s really ugly. And I don’t know, when I saw that one password, which just so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happened to be the first thing that reared its ugly head, when I saw that that was broken

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or, well, not broken, but I saw that it had been broken by the Mac App Store. I realized what was happening very quickly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but that was only because I had seen some passing references to it on Twitter or RSS or what have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you. If I remember right, the dialogue though said something like, oh, this is all broke,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go re-download it and so on. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t even, it says this application is damaged and you should move it to the trash.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so the solution is, re-download this from the Mac App Store. The process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of doing that is so like, they couldn’t have made it more obtuse and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco manual if they tried. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s the thing is that, you know, I kind of know what I’m doing when it comes to using a computer. I can’t imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey someone who doesn’t follow this stuff. I mean, it’s not that hard to go to the applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey folder and drag it to the trash and then go back to the Mac App Store. But that dialogue to your point, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t really make it clear what the correct order of operations or correct

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey task list was to fix this issue. And it’s just, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like one of you said, it was just disaster from top to bottom. It was a disaster all the way down. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it’s a little frustrating that the most Apple did was say, yeah, well, you know, screwed up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but, but it will fix it. Don’t worry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. The thing is they have all the info that dialogue box. They have all the information on the system to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fix that in one button press. If the system thinks that the application and damage and it should be thrown in the trash.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There could be one button that says, would you like me to redownload this? Cause I know exactly which damn application it is and I know that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John purchased it and I can put it in the trash and I can redownload it for you because I know everything about like, there’s the gimmies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. The same thing with uninstall. Like if the uninstall process really is, drag it to the trash. Why is there not a big honking uninstall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button in the Mac App Store app? So anyway, a lot of it is neglect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of just like things they could do and they don’t do. Speaking of neglect, our tipster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the chat room insist loudly and has been since this time this happened that this bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the certificate caching has already been reported. There’s already a radar for it and it’s been around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John since OS 10 10.6.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s uncomfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and has not been fixed. Again, it’s tips or information. So take with a grain of salt whether it’s true or not, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s it’s the you know, it feels bad when your platform is not getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attention and at various times Apple has ignored the Mac and then said that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, we really care about the Mac. We’re paying a lot of attention to it and done lots of important significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things to the Mac. But there’s still areas, particularly around the Mac App Store, especially as it compares to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John regular App Store, that just feels neglected.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and you know, how many people do you think are actually tasked with working on this kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of thing at Apple right now? Like, you know, Apple’s teams are always a lot smaller than you think they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And Apple also has this very frequent habit that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from what I hear, is worse than ever, where engineers get pulled off of things all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the time to go work on some new project that needs more engineering resources, that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a newer thing or more important to the current direction of the company or current business

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goals. So people get moved around all the time, and there’s usually either nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco left working on boring stuff like the Mac App Store or a surprisingly small staff. It might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a handful of people doing some of this stuff. Some things have one person working on them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A bug like that, it’s not that the Mac App Store staff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is so big that they’re working on other stuff. It’s more likely that almost no one’s working on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple keeps having problems like this where the boring old stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets these kind of like either gets you know ignored forever and bugs like this sit around for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years or it gets like these drive-by updates like it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somebody comes in rewrites the whole thing like Discovery D is a perfect example of this from what we hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the L cap USB stack might be something like this certainly we’re hearing that the L cap disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco utility is probably something like this where it’s you know you get kind of drive-by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco update where somebody is finally allowed to work on it and told to like you know revamp it or clean it up or rewrite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it or something and you get like one pass at it and what comes out is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 75% functional and then that person is gone and sent to go work on something else and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this this is not the recipe for quality at all like it’s the complete opposite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of what you should be doing and it is not even an efficient way to run an engineering organization

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They should get some of the hundred developers at Instagram who don’t have time to make an iPad app. You know, like it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before it before Twitter cut its staff, which is sad for all the people who lost their jobs, but they had and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still do have a very large number of people. I mean, to some degree, I can kind of explain it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Twitter and Instagram to say, look, they’ve got a server side components. Everyone, when everyone throws out big developer numbers for these companies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they envision all of these people working on the iOS app when surely perhaps the majority of them are working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on back end stuff. But the number of developers in these large VC funded companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they hire lots of really smart people to work on one or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two flagship mobile applications. And then you compare them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the like one or two person independent shops writing competing third party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications. applications. And you’re like, how, how is Twitter have like literally 100

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS, uh, developers making their, their iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter client and Twitterific has two people and you look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two applications and you think they’re peers, like they seem about the same, right? One of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them is made by the company that makes the thing and the other one is made by two guys. And so like, you know, this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mythical man month at a certain point, adding more people doesn’t help. And then, you know, this, you know, committee syndrome

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and people are, you know, you can’t actually make any change, which is why Twitter to its credit has been saying that they’re trying to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, become more efficient or whatever. But Apple seems to have the opposite problem where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Marco said, every story we hear is, you know, there’s actually one guy who’s responsible for these three applications.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And within a given release, he does two minor updates to each one, fix some bugs, and that’s about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, crashers first and everything else if there’s time. And there’s got to be something in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John middle there where you have a reasonable number of people empowered to make good decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not just make a product, but to continue to make it better year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after year after year, like the hardware team surely have is I mean, it’s not like they took the you know, the iPhone four

⏹️ ▶️ ^John s and just said every year, we’ll just make minor tweaks to it because we don’t have time to do anything except for to fix the broken home button, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, they make a whole new phone and they go, you know, the hardware gets better and better and better. The software,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John depending on what it is, can spend years without really moving. And so yeah, the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does have a lot of applications, and some of them don’t really change much year after year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even when we feel like they should. Maybe it’s okay that the terminal application doesn’t change too radically from year

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iPad Pro, Pencil with Tiff

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ok so the long national nightmare is over you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have acquired an apple pencil

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have yes we we have the iPad pro and we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the the front smart cover only cuz I couldn’t I couldn’t bring myself to spend a hundred and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forty dollars to cover the back as well but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I could bring myself to spend $100 buying a pencil. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we now have iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love using the Apple Pencil, however, I am not much of an artist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wish I had more reasons to use it. Fortunately, my wife

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is an artist and does use it, and she’s had a lot of experience with it, so please welcome

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the show, our return guest, Tiffany Armand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I’m not an artist. Yes you are. I’m a dabbler.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John She’s the artist formerly known as Tiff. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I assure you, you’re a much better artist than I, and I know John has dabbled in the past as well, so I won’t speak for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey him on that one, but certainly better than me, and I think it’s safe to say better than Marco. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re as near as we got for now, anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I don’t know, Marco’s drawings are pretty amazing. Like his stick figures are totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John killer. XKCD caliber.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I was gonna say, giving Randall Munroe a run for his money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not that good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} You made that awesome little decaf sign with that sad coffee mug. That was super funny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can occasionally make one decent drawing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I love his drawings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think we have to get rid of the idea that you have to pass some skill threshold to have a reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use any sort of artistic implement. I agree. No matter what it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you’re doing, there’s not like nothing bad will happen to you if you quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t draw and you start doodling with a stylist. Like we all doodle like in the margins

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or in notebooks and everything. Just if it’s fun to do and you find it relaxing and meditative, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure someone that they haven’t already will make the adult coloring book application for the iPad pro and Tiff will get it and she

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will love it. And like, there’s no, there’s no like you don’t have to. I know Marco’s looking for like something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John useful. He wants to feel like he’s doing something useful or productive, but if it’s just relaxing and fun to do, you can try it. And if you actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have any interest, you can get better at it by practicing and learning about it. Like it’s just like any other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skill.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Exactly. for the longest time I didn’t even start doing anything because I was afraid to be bad and everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} bad at first so it was kind of a stupid fear but that’s what kept me from even trying to draw anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} ever and so recently I decided you know what I’m like 32 years old I’m tired of being afraid

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} of being bad at something that I don’t even know how to do so anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco For more on this by the way listen to this week’s Back to Work which is basically entirely on that topic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Is it really? Yeah. All right all right so we’re talking about some pencils that that I’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey broken. I was about to say, you took the words right out of my mouth. So how long did the pencil last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from the time you had opened the cover of the box to its actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey initial breakage? Probably about five

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} seconds, literally. Like I opened the box and I was looking at the little card because it comes with this card

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} that also has inserts in it, which is on top of the pencil. So I opened that up and first

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I was pulling out what the card was, the box flipped over, the pencil fell out of the box,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it fell onto our floor and the cap popped off, this little silver ring popped

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} off of the cap and there were pieces everywhere. So, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey turned out that it was functional, it’s just the body of it was broken,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that fair to say? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} the little tiny cap has this little tiny silver ring that goes inside of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it and it seems to be held on by nothing but like a dot of glue. So it just probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} fell the worst way possible because it’s not very tight in the case and in the box

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} when it comes. so it just kind of flipped out and then that little tiny ring popped off and Marco has since super glued it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} back on and but I don’t know it still feels funny to me. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean the whole the whole pencil even with the ring in place the cap does not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fit tightly like I mean in so many ways this pencil was like not designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for practicality which is a shame because it feels really good like in use it works incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well which we’ll get to but you know like I I expressed concern earlier, even when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they first announced it, that there’s nowhere to put it, for one thing. There’s no way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco attach it to or put it into any kind of cover for the iPad that exists so far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Which is so frustrating, because where else are you gonna use this pencil? Nowhere, nowhere else

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} is this pencil gonna be used, anywhere besides with the iPad Pro. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} why not attach it, you crazy people?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and the cap, so if you wanna charge this thing, we also express concern when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they first showed this off two months ago or whenever, we also express concern that when you put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it in the end of the and you put in the lightning port that is just asking to be broken off like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is so precarious and looks weird first of all but just so ridiculous and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it seems like possibly last minute they added this like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco double female lightning adapter that’s in the box so you can you can use it to reverse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the orientation or to reverse the gender of the lightning plug on it so that you you can charge it from a lightning cable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is way more sane. And I understand why they did it the way they did, where you can charge it from an iPad, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that way, if you only have the iPad and the pencil with you, and you need a quick charge, you can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one quickly just from the iPad. So it’s nice to have that ability, I guess, but that also shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be the primary way to charge it. And so I guess maybe they recognized that last second, and it isn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So then the problem is, when you’re charging it, if you plug it in overnight sometime, if you’re charging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where do you put the cap? You can magnetically attach the cap to one of the smart covers. You know, the smart covers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have magnets in them. You can stick the little cap onto

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} the… It’s kind of wobbly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It really is designed to be in Johnny Ives’ white world. And it doesn’t seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like… If it rolls around in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} white world, he won’t find it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, yeah, you don’t have to worry about it rolling off the desk because it is weighted, so it won’t roll off the desk. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seems like it’s just made at every opportunity to break or get lost. Even when it’s in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad to charge, it’s lightning connector is extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco long and it fits fairly loosely in it. Just everything about it is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loose and just waiting to either break or get lost.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Well, the cap already almost went into the vacuum and the air conditioner bent in our house about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} two hours after I broke it. So, I mean, I’m doing really great right

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} now with this pencil.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what I’m hearing is since they’re so plentiful, you should just jump on down to the local

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple store and get a couple of backups, because nobody’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking for them. Buy a dozen and keep them in a big jar. So you lose one pencil, whatever, just get another one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} They should come in a box like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crayons. I mean, they’re cheap, they’re plentiful, no problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, they’re gonna sell so many of these things because people, if you actually use it regularly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would guess you have to buy a new one probably once a year or so. So at least, maybe even more,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depending on how careless you are with your things or if you lose things a lot, because it really is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you couldn’t have designed it to be less practical for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forgetfulness or clumsiness, if that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} First of all, I’m not that clumsy, or I never lose things. I know where everything is in the house, down

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} to the little tiniest piece of anything, I know where it is, and losing, I can’t believe how,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} like comedy of errors happened yesterday when we got a hold of this pencil.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so we actually, so I had pre-ordered, or I ordered one online that has a ship date

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like mid-December and I wanted it sooner so I kept going into the stores until they had it and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was able to get it there. But I’m not gonna cancel that pre-order for the one I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ordered because I think we need a spare. And it’s gonna be good to just have it in the house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Plus you can find out if you can draw on the screen with two pencils at once. That’s true. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so now that you have a slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey damaged but otherwise functional pencil. What is it like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use? And if you wouldn’t mind, can you set the stage as to, can you self-describe what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you would normally do that’s artistic with a pen or pencil? Are you drawing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your own Rembrandts or are you just drawing stick figures? I presume it’s somewhere in between.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Well, I’m not very good at sketching, which I think the pencil, I feel like it really excels at if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I’m, I actually developed a new signature, if anyone has seen it on Twitter recently, which is what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I decided to do first with my pencil is the most important thing, develop your signature for your iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} art.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’ve been writing checks from you all day. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like naming your band in high school before you’ve actually practiced once or gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Tiff Arment} together and played anything. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} totally naming my art band. So I got my art band name, so that was actually really fun to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} on the pencil. And from what I’ve tested three programs now, and what I’ve found is it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} dependent on the program and your level of skill with using these type of programs on how

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} great the pencil feels. I do a lot of watercolor in real life, not digitally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} And so trying to replicate that in a lot of programs is a little bit iffy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} obviously, because you’re dealing with ink flowing and pigment and water

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and dilution and transparency. So that’s a little tricky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} But the pencil actually makes it really fun to play with on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} And with some medium, like trying to replicate a medium that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} more solid, the pencil really, really excels and it feels extremely fluid. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} doesn’t detect your hand at all, which is really amazing. And-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, Slydia, when you say it doesn’t detect your hand, you mean if your hand is on there, it’s not also drawing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s smart enough to throw away the hand portion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Tiff Arment} Yeah. Is that fair to say?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Yeah, it will detect a fingertip if you accidentally move a fingertip around,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} but with most of these programs there’s, you know, like a race and back. So it’s not like you’re ruining anything. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} with, when the palm detection is really like you can rest your hand on the iPad pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and draw and it doesn’t, it doesn’t detect it. It doesn’t smear anything. It doesn’t, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} digitally smear, I don’t know, smear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment, Marco} Um, so something else,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I don’t know. I’m from Long Island. So, um, you should know this. I do know what it means. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} so yeah, So I think it’s really, really enjoyable. And so far I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} done a number of sketches with it and I keep wanting to do more. I almost fell asleep with

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it last night, like cradled next to me, which is pretty intimate. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I’m really enjoying it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So of the apps that you’ve used with it, what would you say is your favorite? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey corollary to that, is that the best app for the pencil

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or do you just like the experience with that app the most?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Well, Marco put two new ones on today, and before that I was using Adobe Sketch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} is that what I was using? And then today you put on, what did you put on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I put on Procreate and, oh geez, there’s this Japanese name that I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of another very popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Tiff Arment} sketch. Is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} the Nico Sketch one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, we’ll put it in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Anyway, so I was just recently just drawing with those just before the show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and they have more of a learning curve, I think, because they’re really involved for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} artists that know what they’re doing. The Adobe Sketch one was pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it was easy to master right away, being a newbie, using the pencil,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} newbie to art. You felt like you were accomplishing a real

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} work, you know, like you’re not just a little sketch that you’re just gonna delete and it doesn’t matter. You really felt like you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} do it. The other ones, they have so many changes and buttons and flows

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and this and that. And the interface is a little bit trickier to navigate if you don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} what you’re doing. But I feel like that those other programs are the programs that you would move

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} on to after you kind of mastered how to manipulate the pencil

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} with the different art mediums that are available in a lot of these programs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the name I was forgetting before was Taiyasui Sketches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I actually went to the Apple store this past weekend and spent maybe a minute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a half, two minutes using the pencil. Um, I did ask one of the employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if they had any in stock and they basically laughed in my face. I mean, they were much nicer about it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than that, but that was the message was, yeah, no, um, but I did play with it briefly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I only used the notes app and I mean, again, I’m no artist, but I thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool. I thought the tilting the pencil on its side to like shade was kind of neat. Um, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know why, but the thing that just blew my freaking mind was when I I got the Notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app out and I put on the on-screen ruler. Have you played with this, Tiff?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I haven’t. So in the Notes app, you can bring up an on-screen ruler and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it behaves like you have a ruler on the page. It’s not perfect because there’s no physical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey barrier to keep you from flinging the pencil across your iPad, but it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a really darn good mimic of what a ruler is like. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stupid and I don’t know why I found that so impressive, but I just thought it was really, really, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool. So you mean like it keeps the line straight? Correct. Right. So you can draw up against the ruler

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and have a perfectly straight line. And you can, you know, spin the ruler around and as you spin it, I believe it shows what angle it’s at.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it was just very, very neat. Again, I don’t know why I personally would ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey need to do that, but I just thought it was so well implemented and so well done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I also went to the store recently and got to play with the pencil. I was the first thing I was struck by was in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple store the pencil is not attached with anything Like it’s not attached with the little bankers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know little metal beaded chain thing It is just loose in a little cradle thingy So I have to imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those things are walking out the door like crazy at Apple Especially when they were rare, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did get to try it Although the first thing that confused me was I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t working It was paired

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the one like they have the pencil in the middle of two iPad pros It was paired with the other one so I just plugged it into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my thing and repaired it, which is nice, that repairing feature is cool and comes in handy, I didn’t have to go to the stupid Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to pair it. Using it, I experienced all the same things we talked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about in past shows, varies widely by app, some of them are slow, some of them are fast, the Notes app was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fastest one that I tried because they had a bunch of different apps installed on it. It was fun, it was interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Notes app, the pencil tool that’s supposed to look like a pencil, they keep showing like, oh, you can tilt to do shading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff like that, that is the one part the notice app that felt the least like real media to me and my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my bias is that I have habits in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my you know my hands and you know my mind and my body from using real pencils

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff for many many years when I was a kid and every time I use anything that involves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like drawing on a tablet or on a screen or whatever it’s almost as if if it was farther away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the real thing I would feel more comfortable because then I wouldn’t be trying to use the you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the motions and gestures that I’m used to from the real physical world of art media

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the pencil is close enough to real media that I expected to look work more like a pencil and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tilt shading thing Just does not work anything like an actual pencil and so I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continually frustrated by the fact that I had to stop myself from doing what I would do with an actual pencil

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Start doing what this pencil demands in particular I found that a lot of the lines that I draw

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I I draw with the pencil tilted at such an angle that the accelerometers in the pencil think I want to do shading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But in reality with a real physical pencil on paper I’m still just using the tip and I found that very frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it made me have to change how I was doing everything to be more directly into the into the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make sure it does a thin line if I could disable the shading thing or Change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the ratio of like don’t even start shading thing until I’m super tilted over Yeah, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that really bothered me a lot. But that’s just I think that is more of a barrier of like, people who are good at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using computers to draw. It is actually I think, a different enough skill from people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are good at using, you know, pencils or pen or paints or any other media like the media really, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that you’re using the medium really does change how you use things. So if I got one of these, and I was actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using it to draw, I think I would have to I would have a learning curve to learn how to use this tool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to draw in the same way that you learn how to use and like oil pastels versus oil paints versus acrylics or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything like that. But bottom line is I feel like this could this could could be used to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very easily be used by someone to do their work as an artist

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it is so close to in terms of responsiveness, you know, a real

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pencil. It’s so much closer than all the things I’ve used in the past. And from what I’ve heard from actual artists,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even the people who are using the top of the current generation tablet type things, that it’s pretty good. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either better than or at the very least, at least as good as the existing tablet technology. So good job for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on its first try. All right, it’s first try not counting the Newton. Once again, poor Newton on my desk here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feels bad when I say this. First try not counting the Newton of doing really good pen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John input for artists.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} But, and also the pencil feels really nice. Like it doesn’t cramp your hand while you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} using it, which is great. It is very comfortable. And before, when I was using the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Pro, I felt the weight of the iPad Pro all the time without

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} the pencil. So I was sitting with it, we were watching movies, I tried to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} read with it. Some people think that that’s awesome. The reading experience is really great. I found it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} awful on the iPad Pro. It is way too big. But when I was sketching

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} with the pencil, the weight just kind of disappeared and I kind of didn’t notice it and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} felt so natural and great to have this really big screen. So my experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} with the iPad Pro itself without the pencil was a disaster and I kinda wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} sure I even wanted it to keep it. And I didn’t, I played with it for a few hours and then I kinda

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} left it on the table. You know, I didn’t, I wasn’t interested in using it any further than that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} because it felt just too heavy, too big, too much stuff going on or too little stuff with the home screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} icons. And, but as soon as I got the pencil, It has been in my lap every free

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} moment that I could possibly find.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you not subscribe to any magazines? Like digital or otherwise, like big magazines and like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I was subscribed to Martha Stewart’s magazine actually, but she filled it all up with ads like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} her real

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment, John} magazine and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} now it’s horrible to read and the ads move on the digital one. So that was worthless, so I ditched that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} So no, I don’t subscribe to any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John magazines. I’ve tried reading some digital magazines. My iPad is really slow, so I tend to prefer the paper ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My wife reads some magazines on her iPad. She used to, I think she used to read them on her mini too, but now she’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a full-size one. And I can imagine the best application inside of like comic books and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff like that for a big, gigantic iPad would be magazines with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big illustrations or photos, like a photography magazine, a nature magazine, a fashion magazine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even a car magazine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Yeah, I could see those being amazing, but I mean, when I read romance novels, I really don’t want that very large

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and visible to everyone in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment, John} world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I mean, the way you can think about it for the iPad Pro for reading is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you would could imagine yourself comfortably reading a paper book of that size,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then the iPad Pro is great for that. So the magazines that paper magazines are as big as iPad Pro, especially the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John large ones like Edge magazine before they shrunk it and made it crappy. But anyway, or you know, I don’t know how big Vogue is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these days. But like there are magazines that are very large and you say, sure, I can do that. But novels are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John paperback size usually, even hard covers are not as big as the iPad Pro in most cases.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Most of the paperbacks I have on my shelf, even the biggest ones I have up here, are more or less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Air 2 size, not iPad Pro size. So it is a little oversized. But as I said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John last week, the whole idea is, maybe not for reading novels or anything, you can have other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the screen at the same time. So you can bounce back and forth between Twitter and flipping through the latest issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, you know, car and driver or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s kind of like a general theme that we’ve found so far with the iPad Pro is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really good for certain things, but it doesn’t overlap completely with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what the smaller iPads are really good at. Like, you would think that what the iPad Pro would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be great at would be like a strict superset, where it would include everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the small ones are good at, plus also some new stuff. And I don’t think that’s actually the case, and that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, in the same way that a 17-inch MacBook Pro, may it rest in peace,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not great at everything you want a laptop to be for. You know, like if you want to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using it on a plane, or if you want to be carrying it around all the time, a 17-inch MacBook Pro is not that great for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That doesn’t mean that the entire MacBook Pro line has to be small, thin, and light.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, so I think now we’re reaching that point with the iPad lineup that it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco substantial differentiation between the models now, and that’s okay. You can’t just be sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that if you like one of the iPads, you can’t be sure that the next one up will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be better in every way for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Tiff, if you were to go to your parents’ house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for a few days, would you bring it with you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} That’s a really good question. Probably not, because I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} have time to sit and sketch or draw or paint anything. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I never brought my painting supplies there, even though I have travel ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} So probably not. But I would bring my regular size iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} because sometimes I do like to read when I’m there, like during naps or evening or I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} know. But so, so no, I probably wouldn’t because it’s really big too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} And the internet connection’s not so great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a different issue. I’m assuming since you wouldn’t bring it to mom and dad’s that you probably wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bring it on like a trip or something like that. Like let’s say, you know, Tesla does European delivery, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I understand makes no sense. And you guys and maybe all of us go again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Would you bring this on that sort of a trip?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I’m not a digital artist. I’m just now learning and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} getting interested in trying to do it because it is just like like John was saying, it’s very different

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} holding a stylus to a screen and trying to get it to mimic paint moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} or a brush with bristles that are dynamic and move and swirl. Translating

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} that, if that’s what you want to do is you want to paint something, satisfying that doesn’t happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} on the iPad. But if you want to do something, create a digital piece of art,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} which I find is just like another medium. until you know you have paint, you have pencil, you have digital

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} art like it’s just another way to do it and there it’s another set of skills that you need to learn and develop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} So if I got into that then yeah I would see myself carrying this with me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} accomplish that task if I wanted to create a digital journal of a trip I was going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} on. But as of right now, no because I’m just not enough. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} skilled enough but I can definitely see a place for it for other people. But for me it’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} just too big.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, speaking of digital journals like that, that is a thing that Apple should aspire to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the iPad Pro into a good tool for like in terms of people some people do this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some people don’t like to like while you’re on the trip, so you’re going on a trip to Europe while you’re there, like at the end of each

⏹️ ▶️ ^John day that you take the photos off your camera, put them right into your iPad Pro with the USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^John port that we’ll talk about in a little bit maybe use the various applications available on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Pro to compose either a cool looking web page or a slideshow or a movie

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something that you can share with everybody else. And at the end of each day, you would send out to your family or whoever’s interested. Here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how our you know, second day in Italy was right, or just even just to be working on it. So that by the time you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come home from the trip, you have everything sort of assembled together into whatever form that you decide you want to share

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your trip with, whether it’s a series of pictures or a slideshow or a movie, or a web page with a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pictures and blog posts, all the type of things that We all know that we can do with computers and websites.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the existing image of the iPad in most people’s mind and in the reality for most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other than maybe Vatici is that the best way to synthesize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all those different things, photos, video, text, web stuff, you know, emailing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people, compiling all that information, the best way to do that is still on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac. And I see no reason that the iPad Pro can’t be as good or better at almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all those things, especially with the stylus. And but if you wanted to annotate pictures, like can you imagine arranging pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a lot like an application that lets you sort of build a vacation album where you could hand write underneath the things little captions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t that be a lot more personal, if you assume you have legible handwriting, then typing in captions for things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, you know, being able to touch things and drag things around as if they were actually photos in a real scrapbook and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Pro would be perfect for that, but that’s only promise at this point. I’m sure there are applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that do this, but like bringing it all together, touch, stylus, photography,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John importing multiple applications, working on a single thing and then sharing it out to everybody. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t think we’re there yet, but I totally think we could be and the iPad Pro would be the perfect device for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Yeah, there’s no doubt that the iPad Pro will make that experience way better for anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} who really likes doing that and is already kind of doing that on a laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} So you will, I feel like the people who are committed to doing that kind of thing that work

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} on the go, vacation journaling, or, you know, scrapbooking and sending

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it out to family, it’s going to open up to a lot more people with the iPad because it becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} way more accessible. But it’s again, it’s another, it’s a thing you have to be into doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I feel like, you know, for me in the end of, you know, in the evening and stuff when I’m on vacation and I’m doing stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I kind of just want to like read Twitter, put my one photo on Instagram and move on, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} like committing to all of that work while on vacation, I think takes

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} a certain type of person. And that’s the person that’s going to really grab hold of this kind of device

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and run with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the best kind of technology actually changes habits a little bit. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of us were not the type of people who made family movies of anything. But when iMovie came

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out and it made it simple and fun to make a quick little movie,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} even if it didn’t turn- Don’t tell me about iMovie. It is not simple and it is not fun. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Every Christmas is like iMovie stress hell in this household.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I make a Christmas movie every year with a stop motion video of us unwrapping gifts and stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it is hell every time. And I’m also very upset that there aren’t any new themes ever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} ever, ever, ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, my point is that that those applications, the I life applications made people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who would never even considered doing that. Try it at least once a whole bunch of people tried it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and were more or less successful at some percentage ratio 50% or whatever. People who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did not suddenly become people who make videos for every occasion in their life, but they did it maybe once maybe twice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Because the application suddenly made it possible. It wasn’t like, well, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a video of my family. All I can do is shoot the video and record it to my little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John VHS or mini-DV or whatever, and then we can all watch it from start to end and it’s interminable, but I’m never going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to edit this video because I’m not a video editor. And the early days of the iLife Suite made it so that regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who would never consider themselves video editors suddenly had a tool in their house that they could use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to edit together a little video. And they tried it and found it was really difficult and you make crappy videos, but they did it once or twice. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like the iPad Pro with stylus input and everything could take people who would never in a million years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go through all the work to do it on a laptop and know how to synthesize all that stuff and make it. And if there’s one or two good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications on the iPad Pro with stylus support, maybe someone who isn’t one of those people who makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John albums at the end of every vacation day, brings their iPad Pro with them and tries it once and sends out a nice thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that’s all I’m talking about. It’s like it’s small stakes, but technology can sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lower the barrier to entry to the point where people who are never going to be serious about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it still will like dabble for a second or two and find out Yeah, this still isn’t for me. But hey, I made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this cool thing out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} And that’s the way exactly I feel now about the digital art before I never even considered

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} ever ever, ever trying to do anything digital. And because this thing kind of appeared,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and Marco buys everything, so things appear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} So it all of a sudden piqued my interest into trying this medium that I’ve never would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} have tried before because I’m not going to go out and purchase a tablet and purchase you know this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} even though I do have a tablet we have one of those because we have everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment, Marco} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve had a Wacom tablet sitting in the closet for about five years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Well I tried it for photo editing it was awful so for me but so and I’m not going to go out

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and get a program and learn it and but with this it just feels so accessible

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} and attainable to learn how to do at least a base level

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} of this kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So iPad Pro ultimate at-home iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Yes, at-home iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would even say also, I said a little bit of this last week too, but my further

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time playing with it just reinforces this. I think it’s the kind of thing where if you were already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using an iPad for productivity kind of work, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this will probably be even better for you. If you were already doing email

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and documents and spreadsheets and stuff like that on an iPad before, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this will probably be an improvement. But it is kind of like a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that way. If it has replaced your laptop, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if it has almost replaced your laptop already, before you had an iPad Pro, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, this is probably the device for you. Or if you have some of these nice creative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uses, if you plan to use the pencil, if you could make use of such a thing, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also going to be amazing for you. If you are currently using an iPad with a keyboard and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want a better, larger keyboard, this will probably be amazing for you as well. Although we don’t have the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so we can’t really say how good they are. Many people have covered that already. But if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using your iPad primarily for content consumption, or if you’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me and you can’t quite figure out when to use your iPad for the most part, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s more of a mixed bag. It’s not a guarantee that this will be better for you and it isn’t a guarantee that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you would be happy with it if you got it. So that is still up in the air but I will say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the things it is good at, like that pen input, it is so good that for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me as a long time iPad skeptic and just kind of not having much use for my iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want a reason to use it. I actually am motivated to try to use it and to try to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into it because using the pencil is just so damn fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I want to ask that to Casey because if you’re the guy here who says he does not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} do art stuff, right? Am I correct? You said John does a little bit. I know Marco does a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} He’s a liar. And you know I do but for you does

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} this intrigue you to start possibly playing around and seeing if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} want to learn how to draw and to start that learning on the iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think so. I mean, to be fair, I’ve only played with the pencil, like I said, for like a minute or two. It was not very much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at all. And I thought it was neat, but it struck me as the sort of thing that I would think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is really neat for a week or two, and then I’d probably never look at it again. Now, who knows, maybe in that week or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two, I would get bit by the art bug, if you will, and then I would never put it down. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my guess is I would think, ooh, shiny, ooh, neat for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a week, maybe two, and then I would just never look back. I wish I could do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Someone in the chat asked about Tiff, how about photography work? And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is worth touching on briefly. Would you use it for photography? If so, why? If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not, why not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I guess right now not because the way I edit my photos, it’s very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} heavy in Photoshop and the, I feel like just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} the power and the, the, the hardware that’s needed

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} to run the Photoshop that I like to run when I edit my photos is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} not there on the iPad. I could see it because if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it ended up, if they ended up translating that onto the iPad with the touch interface, it might

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} be interesting to do, but I don’t know the precision of some of the Photoshop actions

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} that I do really probably would not translate that great. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} for me, I have to edit photos. If anyone else is out there who is, um, a photographer or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} edits photos, you know that if you use a different screen for editing your

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} photos, not a screen that you have calibrated with a printer that you use or that you’re used to working

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} with, you can move photos from one device to another and the colors will be all wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} that you have worked on. So you could sit and you could work on a picture for, you know, 20

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} minutes if you’re dibble dabbling it all over the place and putting filters on and taking them off

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} like I do like an insane person because I’m crazy. But if you do that, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} would have it on one device and you put it on another and then all of a sudden it’s not what you wanted it to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Which that frustration exists when I give photos to clients and they don’t have the right color but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment, John} found a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} to fix that anyway. But it just it’s not right now. Right now it’s not accessible

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} on the the level that I’m I’m playing with here and I think that a lot of other people feel that too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} But if you’re just doing you know you’re moving some sliders around which the majority of our family photos that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} all that it needs then it is pretty accessible. But I don’t like having my photos in two places.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We actually have something in the show notes about that. There was this thing in Macworld about the display quality,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the color accuracy of the iPad pro versus the Surface Pro four

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and other things. And I’ve ever didn’t come out that well in this test. Not that there’s no bad screens here. These

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are all good screens, but the Surface Pro four edged it out. And I forget what the company is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that does this. The test, all the displays

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} display mate, I believe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And historically, Apple has been weird with the with the displays because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s you know they always say all their displays this is the most beautiful display you’ve ever put in a blah blah blah like they always say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re great they don’t tend to differentiate but whenever anyone does any actual testing with the color meter some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John models of device have super accurate displays and some have not so accurate ones and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow any particular lines like I think they were saying like the best screen Apple had ever put on was like on one of the minis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something yeah the most recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad many the mini 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah so they’re all pretty good but you know but there there’s enough variance that what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tip is saying is surely it’s not just like that you know even screens that are all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John equally good they can be different from each other if they’re not calibrated but then some cases it’s just like this screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t display the same range of colors that that screen can so no amount of calibration is ever going to make them look the same same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s also interesting that that they have the nice DCI p3 10-bit screens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the on the new iMacs, but that has that didn’t make it into the iPad Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wonder and as far as I know, I don’t think iOS even supports 10 bit colors. I mean, that’s probably one of the reasons why,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’d be interesting to see like, if and when that gets added to iOS, because that could really help as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s not the iMac Pro, but it’s got the good screen, but the iPad Pro not so much. I mean, obviously, there’s different constraints

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a handheld device, like who knows what the requirements are, you know, that extra little bit of color accuracy and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 10 bit range and everything, maybe it’s just not feasible at all in a handheld battery-powered device yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The extra gamut would be nice though, but anyway. All right, any other questions for Tiff on iPad Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just in general, it sounds like thumbs up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Yeah, yeah, I really like it, and I think that I’m going to develop liking it even more because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} as I get better at doing the digital art thing, that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it’s gonna become more and more useful as another tool

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} of hobby, I think. It’s not my profession at all, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} it’s very much a hobby tool, but it’s a pretty darn fun one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Awesome, well thanks for coming on and sharing with us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Tiff Arment} Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so there’s more about the iPad Pro, I believe, or no?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, we can talk about the USB thing, but that can stay until next week if we get more info about it. Bottom line is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPad Pro is definitely the device where you want to have a speedy way to shove stuff into it, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has said that you’re gonna be able to do that with USB 3 speeds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is there really a lot of motion behind tethered over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cable transfer of files to iOS devices these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John days? I imagine it’s all cameras, right? Like if you could connect your camera directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to your, well I guess you could do it wirelessly if you wanted, but if you could connect your camera or some other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John card reader or thing directly to your iPad, then you could go on the road with just the iPad and the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and do some useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photography work. That’s true, that actually, and you know, I might use it for that. I mean, there are some trips

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where I bring my laptop now, like if I’m going to a conference, I bring my laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I really don’t usually need it for any kind of laptop-y function that I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco serve just as well by my phone or an iPad. So I can see the value in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having that. They’ve had, ever since the first iPad, they’ve sold the camera connection kit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which has either been able to be an SD card reader or a USB port, which you can use to plug in all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sorts of crazy stuff you don’t even think about. a lot of surprising amount of driverless USB peripherals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work on iPads with the camera connection kit and some even work on iPhones. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I could see that being being possible but because the camera connection kit is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a fairly rarely sold accessory as far as I know, they’ve never seemed to put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a whole lot of effort into the the process and the capabilities of importing photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off a camera card into the Photos app on iPads. So I don’t know how well it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work in practice. I have one, so I guess I could try it. Maybe I’ll report back next week on how it works. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also wouldn’t expect it to do very well on my 42 megapixel RAW files, but we’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about that. Oh, that’s why USB 3 speeds, because that’s the big thing. Lightning port was previously not at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those speeds, and it’s kind of a pain if you have gigantic files, and now with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Pro, this port is capable. I don’t know if the adapters are out yet if they’re not yet but anyway will be capable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of USB 3 speeds and so that will really help

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean generally when it comes to like processing raw photos on something like an iPad the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco card is the limit no I think the processing power of the device is the limit because when you’re processing raw

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco files you have to do the the reading and the JPEG conversion on device

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it isn’t already done for you and the cameras all have these really specialized image processors to do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a highly parallel optimized way, the computers are doing it generally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the CPU entirely, or maybe with some light GPU help, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a pretty slow process to do large RAW imports. So I’m guessing that would be much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more useful for JPEG shooters, or even the RAW plus JPEG weirdos like I was briefly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But for people shooting RAW who want to do a couple of quick imports to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show somebody or preview or post it to a social network. It probably won’t be useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that, but I’d love to try and be proven wrong. So maybe I’ll try it, I’ll let you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. Well, I mean, there’s two things. There’s the file transfer, and then there’s the raw conversion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even just for display purposes. So if you can make the part where it just copies the raw data directly off of the card and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John onto the iPad faster, then it gives you more time to spend with your slower CPU doing the raw conversion for display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, even if it’s not just for photography, the idea, the lighting, this was an open question. is why I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this link in there back when the lighting part was made it’s like lightning how fast will it go why did they not use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB why did they not change it to USB C is it even possible to do USB 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speeds over lightning oh no you can’t cuz it doesn’t have enough pins because the USB 3 connector has more pins than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the contacts that are on the lightning connector and this link in the show notes was from someone who did a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of you know investigation into the lighting port back when I was introduced it was this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Rainer Brockerhoff’s blog and He has come back to talk about the lack of pins and the decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he came down to is that You don’t need all the pins of a real USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing Because they have dedicated pins for the USB 2 speeds and lighting doesn’t have to do that because it can multiply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I could say look I’m not doing USB 2 speeds use those two pins for something else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But we’ll see I think people who are doing teardowns on the iPad Pro said they found two new what looked like two new connectors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Inside there, so maybe the adapters will have extra contacts. I don’t know how it’ll work We’ll have to wait till these adapters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are introduced and if they’re already out. I just haven’t seen them yet So there’s some fallout for next week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Squarespace mail route and automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we’ll see you next week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental Accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, The Anti-Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Armen, S-I-R, A-C, USA Syracuse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ah, it’s accidental, They didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, accidental, Mad catastrophe

Post-show: Tina’s new iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do very much want to talk Disney, but I think we’re better off tonight talking about the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I know that’s that’s totally a different after show. All right So I Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not my computer to be clear. This is not replacing my Mac Pro my good old 2008 Mac Pro is still here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m speaking into it right now. This is a replacement for my wife’s 2011 ish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Air which was Getting long in the truth and our photos couldn’t fit on it anymore So we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had an external SSD but it was only fire right hundred and that was part of the reason I thought photos might have been slow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and anyway got a big fancy new iMac after hearing Marco report good things about his 27

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inch retina iMac and this is the new newer fancier model with the even nicer screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and she had always said that she just wanted an iMac at home anyway even as she continually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took the MacBook Air out of the room when I podcasted so she could still use her computer without being here

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} but anyway she

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can still do that because we still have the MacBook Air, it’s just moved over to the other desk, but she’s using the iMac and liking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. A few things for me to report. I never really spent any time with Marcos. I saw it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the ones in the store that I’ve seen them, but I haven’t really spent a lot of time with them. For mine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I decided to not max out the RAM. I didn’t do too much research into this, but I just saw in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the store configurator it said 16 gigs for like two DIMMs and 32 gigs for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John four, so I picked 16, figuring, can’t I just buy two more dims and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up at the 32 later if that’s not true don’t tell me until four years from now when I find out I just don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know but I assume it’s true but anyway 16 gigs should probably be fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got the biggest fastest GPU because whatever like I was convinced by that YouTube video fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crossed that this will actually not be silly thing to do my kids can now play kids are finally now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seeing Minecraft at non disgusting frame rates and I think I’m more impressed than they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I think at the same time they’re never going to choose to play it on the MacBook Air ever again. I don’t blame them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Um, and I got the big terabyte SSD because I really want to fit everything on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing instead of on my external drive, which I still have, but it’s in an enclosure that takes firewire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 800. So I also had to, by the way, buy a lightning to a lightning thunderbolt to firewire 800 adapter so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I could connect my chain of firewire 800 drives and enclosures and everything, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is fine. I also have a USB three hard drive that I can finally connect to an actual USB 3 port

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that was one of the first things I noticed about this was I have a bus powered 1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terabyte like 2.5 inch USB 3 drive I’ve had for a while and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decided I’m gonna use this I was gonna I’ll use this as the clone drive for this you know one of my super duper clones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I kept finding that when the Mac would go to sleep and wake back up it would say you know this disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was not ejected properly blah blah blah blah blah like it was unmounting itself somewhere along

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the line and that usually means that like it’s being underpowered by the bus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s just you know not able to maintain the connection but then it comes back I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understand that because it’s not connected to a hub it’s directly connected to the computer and I haven’t ever had that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem in any other computers I’ve connected this to but then again I haven’t had it connected to other computers for really long periods of time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I don’t know if I have a broken drive if the ports in the back of the new iMac can’t supply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough power for this thing. Whatever it is, that kind of annoyed me, but I’m willing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chalk that up to the flakiness of external peripherals. And right now I only connect it when I wanna do a clone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is a reasonable solution, I suppose. Although I have a whole other drive at the end of the Firewire 800 chain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do a clone to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you want, I have an enclosure that I bought like three of them now. It’s something like $12. It’s a USB 3 single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disc 2.5 inch enclosure. and it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had, one of them would do that exact same thing when it was on a really flaky USB hub that I used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have. And, but so far, this enclosure, two of them that I bought have been perfect,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and for $12, it’s been just as good as like, the expensive ones I’ve gotten from like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OWC and stuff in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s why I had direct connected. I never considered connecting to a hub, because I knew that wouldn’t work. But even direct connected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the iMac was flaky, so I don’t know. Anyway, that’s a peripheral issue. The main thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I noticed about this iMac, off the bat, is that the fan, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all states, is slightly noisier than I thought it would be. Of course. Really? Even in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most idle, like nothing is happening on the computer, I downloaded the utilities, it shows me the fan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RPM, like the lowest possible RPM, I can still hear it, more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I could hear the fan on the MacBook Air. For two reasons. One, the MacBook Air was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back a little bit farther, like it was kind of behind the the monitor and to the left. And two, when the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air fan is like doing nothing, it is really quiet. Now, the flip side of that is that you do anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the MacBook Air, the fan goes up to super, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Tiff Arment} as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast as it can possibly go and sounds like a terrible, angry hair dryer, right? So on the iMac, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do way more before the fan starts spinning up. So overall, it’s probably a benefit, but every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time I sit in front of the computer, I keep thinking, did I leave one of the hard drives on? Because I have so many frigging hard drives connected to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing for all my different backups, and I don’t leave them on all the time. I actually unmount them and turn them off and you know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a hard drive that’s on and spinning make some noise a mechanical Hard drive I keep thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that why I left one of the drives on but no it’s just a stupid fan of this thing anyway It’s not my computer. It’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s probably still quieter than my 2008 Mac Pro although Maybe not because my Mac Pro is on the ground that I don’t really hear it But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway that that is my one mild disappointment everything else about it is great screen looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great I don’t even mind the weird thin edge. I think it looks actually kind of cool because I do see it from the edge sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For a while I kept thinking that the hinge was loose because it kept being tilted down but that’s just my wife she keeps tilting it down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then I use the computer I tilt it up and she

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} uses it and she tilts it down. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re kind of fighting over what the correct position is for the screen but we’re obviously different heights there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Photos is faster it is much faster than it was when I was on my FireHire 800 drive. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still slow and it’s still weird and buggy. When I when I brought the library over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know I had to copy it off my external drive. That took forever. And photos was really weird about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I copied every single file over and photos was like, I have 65,000 files

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to import. I’m like, No, you don’t. They’re all there. And so I had to wait for like three days for it to convince itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it had all the files. Oh, and then at some point, it was like, you don’t have enough disk space. I’m like, hell, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have enough disk space. I have, you know, I have plenty of this space. I’m not even like a quarter filled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this terabyte drive. So photos is weird, and does weird things and scares me sometimes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but in the end, I just let it stew for a long time, it was fine. I still haven’t removed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my most recent backup of my old photo library, so if this thing is lying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me, I still have everything as of when I got the new iMac. But that was a little bit freaky,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and boy, copying the photo library in the Finder, that took so long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and was so terrifying, because there are so many files involved with that, and the Finder gives you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little bit of information. First of all, the Finder spends like a long time, like maybe it was an hour, maybe it was more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than an hour, preparing to copy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Tiff Arment} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to copy, it’s preparing to copy. It’s gotta count all the files and I don’t know what it’s doing and maybe it’s pre-flighting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make sure the space is available. It’s like, I should have just used the CP command. Just start copying things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What do you, like should use R-Sync for crying out loud, you know, because Apple has flags on all these things that can make you copy all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John metadata. But I’m like, no, I have no idea what Apple’s doing with their photo library. Let me use the Finder to do it. It eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did work. I’m copying from SSD to SSD here, so it’s you know it’s far as far or 800 to internal SSD It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not as if I’m waiting for a spinning disk to send the heads all over the place seeking all over anyway That was terrifying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it eventually did work So yeah so far so good. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know the final thing I didn’t put this in here. I spent like three days Fighting with this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John damn computer. I felt like I was going back in time to OS 10 Time machine and spotlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were just not happy time machine seemed happy in the beginning and because it’s like oh Oh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I named my computer the same as it was before I did migration. It’s like, I told to use this disk for time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John machine. It’s like, do you want me to inherit the backups from the previous thing? And I did because like, basically, that was, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copied the whole hard drive over there. Yes, please inherit the backup. So I don’t lose all my previous versions. And so it starts backing up to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. And I told you to do that. And I noticed that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, spotlight and time machine, we’re just not ever finishing what they’re supposed to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing. Spotlight was always, you know, seemingly indexing and the console was filling up with tons of like MD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worker errors and stuff like that. And time machine would never actually complete a backup ever, ever, ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John After several days of this, I spent a long time staring at the console and Googling for things and finding all these weird obscure errors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And people were like, Oh, just nuke your spotlight store. And you know, I did all the things you can imagine doing with MDU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John till like, totally removing the thing disabling spotlight, trying to let spotlight go first trying to let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time machine go first. I don’t know what their problem was but they were totally wedged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and neither one of them spotlight indexing were not complete and time machine were not complete and that was very frustrating because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really can’t basically sign off on the computer is ready for use until time machine is running I don’t really care that much about spotlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I spent many days fighting with that and googling and eventually got the thing to go through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the hell was I don’t even remember what the problem was is one of those things where it’s not like there was no aha moment I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know if you like Google for all these error messages, you find a million hits on Apple’s discussion boards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people with the same problem. Sometimes they’re benign. Sometimes people say, Oh, this totally fixed it for me. Nothing I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John found helped me fix it. Eventually I just had to go to the old school kind of debugging where I’m using like LSOF

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff to figure out who the hell has these files open and are they files that I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either delete or recopy. One of the solutions involved me deleting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my old user account that I had in that machine because Spotlight isn’t just indexing the files of the logged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in user, it’s indexing the files owned by all the different users at the same time, and some of the console errors you’re seeing are not actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the account you’re logged into, and like one of the solutions is like, oh make sure you log into every account, update the iCloud stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I did that and it didn’t help. Like, boy, it was one of those debugging problems where every solution you find you get excited

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this is going to be the thing to fix it, and it doesn’t. But I did them all. But anyway, I deleted my account from there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which took with it a lot of files that apparently of the various Spotlight Metadata demon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John import things like MD work and MDS were choking on badly and that let it progress and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually Spotlight indexed and one spotlight in the next time machine worked and I just made me think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that like there’s no way in hell that anybody could have successfully fixed this if they didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the If they weren’t the type person who’s willing to spend literally three days just googling and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cursing and googling and cursing Nice and part of it is probably because like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know This is I’ve used migration assistant, and it’s like an old account that maybe like had a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird crufty things in it from a long time ago, but You know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are gonna say yeah, see you should have just done a clean install This is the first time migration assist assistant has steered me wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And really I just blame either spotlight or time machine or both for just not being more robust fine There are files in the file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system that are weird that you can’t import that are causing MD worker to crash Just just move on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just you know power through it like then don’t index those But if and I don’t even understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why spotlight and time machines seem to wed each other in this way because time machine should work without Spotlight and vice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versa, but apparently they did so that was a bad sort of first couple of days experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But eventually we did get into a steady state and now I have my umpteen backup so I had to finally expand my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backups on my sonology, which by the way was a Nice and easy because I just got to add you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They don’t have it’s not like drawbar where you can just add another drive to the thing but I just converted from raid 1 to raid 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so from 2 discs to 3 and so got more space and that all worked out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So for the fan noise thing, going back to that for a second because I my iMac is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is almost inaudible and and TIFFs are the same. It’s almost inaudible when it’s when it’s not doing that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and really under any load except a sustained heavy load like if I you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco open up Handbrake or if TIFF has a game running then you will hear the fans. But at every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other time, I don’t hear the fans at all. So I’m curious, now of course, if you had something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like iStat Menus installed. Well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did, I installed the thing to see the RPM. It was like at 1200 RPM, I can hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay, that’s because I was gonna say, mine is idling at 1200. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not loud, it’s not a loud fan, it’s just not inaudible, you know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m surprised though, I mean in a room that includes a Mac Pro, because one thing we noticed, like Tiff and I went from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two Mac Pros to two iMacs. And when you would turn off the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac, or the Mac Pro, leaving the iMac behind, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clear as day. Like when we had one-on-one for like a day or two, the difference was clear as day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like that the Mac Pro was so, which we always thought was quiet, relatively speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it so easily would mask the noise of the iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well my Mac Pro is asleep most of the time. It does, the closest thing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iMac is the PS4, that’s also asleep unless someone’s playing it. But really, I can only hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’m like when I’m sitting in front of it, but that’s when it annoys me like what does that sound? Oh, it’s the stupid. I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get not loud at all. But I just feel like it should be like the MacBook Air was literally inaudible when the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer was idle. And if you could hear it at all, then it was like crash plan was grinding into the background or doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something like that. And this is close to an audible but not. And so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that big of a deal. But it’d be nice if it just like they just need to, you know, put an even bigger,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lower RPM fan in there it’s not like you don’t have room plenty of space to spread out big lazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fan blades turning it like you know 100 rpm go for it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nope you can’t have it because you just said that you like the thin edge because you see it from the side sometimes that’s what that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} why we can’t have nice things John that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why we can’t have big quiet fans even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the thin edge there’s enough room for like a Frisbee in there it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Tiff Arment} it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get thin this is a big honk at screen oh yeah and speaking of that so like her computer was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always the one that we had not sleeping because it was plugged into AC all the time and I always wanted to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one computer that’s awake all the time. The Synology took over a lot of that role, but her computer was always awake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And with the iMac, it was weird to see an OS 10. I don’t know if this is a new development because I haven’t had iMacs for a while,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like with a built in screen computer. There is not separate settings for display, sleep and computer sleep. There’s one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setting that says, do you want me to prevent the computer from going to sleep when the display sleeps?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there’s one slider that says, when should the display go to sleep? I would like to say display go to sleep 10 minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer go to sleep one hour like you used to back in the olden days and how I can on my Mac or my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Pro rather, but you can’t all you got is the checkbox and I need to just look into the P

⏹️ ▶️ ^John list settings and just change this the way I want it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can also you can set a hot corner to do immediate display sleep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, yeah. And then you just have the dial to I know it’s just like, I’m used to the sliders the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way they used to be. And I’ve also noticed some spooky behavior where occasionally like you leave the computer, no one’s touching and no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one’s doing anything. and the display will go off. And whether it’s sleeping or not, you’ll come back a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit later and the display will be on. And I’ve been sitting in the room when it’s happened. I’ve been like playing Destiny. I look over and the screen turns on. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Tiff Arment} why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you turning on? And you know, wake for network access is off. No weird USB hubs are attached. The console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t say anything about what the thing is. It’s like, did you wake up or did the screen? And sometimes the screen just won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go, you know, the interval will go by, 15 minutes will go by and the screen won’t go off. So I’ve got my eye on it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on sleep issues. Like I don’t care because it’s basically on all the time anyway. But I don’t know what’s going on over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for whatever it’s worth I know the issue you’re talking about I’ve seen that in the past on other computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I have never seen that on either of our iMacs so it I don’t think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a it’s an issue with the iMac I think it’s an issue with probably something you know maybe it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weird USB device that you know maybe it’s maybe it’s a flaky enclosure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the plug is that thing is unplugged now so that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Tiff Arment} a factor anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it’s the firewire now the firewire stuff’s powered off I don’t know anyway I got to figure out how to to make this thing happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I haven’t seen it happen too much. It’s happened once or twice. I think one morning my wife came down and said, why was the computer screen on? So maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was on all night. Anyway, it’s behaving now. It’s full of windows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll see if it just… that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} her computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It can’t sleep. It’s like when you eat a bunch of chili and go to bed when you’re like 35. Your computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has so many windows, it just keeps… can’t go to sleep. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not my computer. It’s her computer. It doesn’t have that many things on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So only 50? She

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uses some windows. What else? There’s one other thing we should with the iMac that I can’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, this is when it came time to order this. And I was going through the order configuration thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I asked my wife if she wanted, which mouse she wanted, or if she wanted to try the Magic Trackpad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And to my surprise, she said she wanted to try the Magic Trackpad because she already had a mouse that she liked. And we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got the extended keyboard, which is still in the box because she likes that keyboard and she’s just using her old one, so we have an extra now. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, she picked the Magic Trackpad and not for me still, like as magic as it may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be, I still use the mouse. I’m just not going to be a trackpad person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So far it remains to be seen if she will make the transition. She’s been trying it and messing around with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but I think if I look over there now, I think the mouse is still next to the keyboard. So I think she like pulls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, the magic trackpad down and uses it and I don’t know. I could tell when she uses it cause I can hear that talk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk, talk of the, of the magic trackpad that sounds different than the mouse. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s one in the house now, and she was curious enough to try it, but I don’t know it’ll stick.