154: A Rich Toddler’s Toy

29 Jan 2016

Why are iPad sales declining?

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Audiobus used MIDI SysEx, not loopback networking
    • Inter-App Audio on iOS offers Audio Unit extensibility
  • Could Apple make a universal Lightning-headphone replacement cable?
  • John's Destiny Heads-Up Display
    • HDR
    • Panasonic P55VT60
  • Pirate Eye Patches
    • Quirks & Quarks Podcast
    • Red lights & astronomy
  • VESA mount iMac serial numbers
• Apple Earnings
  • More graphs from Kieran Healy
  • iPod graph
  • Trucks vs. Cars
    • El Camino
    • Subaru Baja
    • Subaru Brat
  • All-product-lines performance graph (Posted after the show by Kieran Healy)
• Will the next iPhone be waterproof?
  • Craig Hockenberry on waterproofing in the Apple Watch
• Post-show: Inductive iPhone charging

Sponsored by:

• Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use promo code ATP10 for 10% off your first order.
• Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
• Harry's: An exceptional shave at a fraction of the price. Use code ATP for $5 off your first purchase.

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

Chapters

1. Intro
2. Follow-up: Audiobus
3. Lightning headphone-cable idea
4. John’s Destiny TV burn-in status
5. Follow-up: Pirate eye patches
6. Sponsor: Harry’s (code ATP)
7. Follow-up: VESA iMac serial numbers
8. Apple’s quarterly earnings
9. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
10. Why are iPad sales dropping?
11. Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)
12. Waterproof iPhone 7?
13. Ending theme
14. Post-show: Inductive charging

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hate looking at text manipulation in JavaScript. It just makes me sad. Of course. We got a for loop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with an iterator. That’s great. Good nice language. For var i equals zero,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i less than words dot length, i plus plus. Seriously?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s every C-based language, John. Come

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, wait, no, no, no. Not necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Iterating, even Objective-C has been iterating over collections without an explicit iterator

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for many, many years now. In fact, there’s been like seven different versions of iterating over collections. Even PHP

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has that. It’s just depressing. Every single JavaScript library implements their own each thing, you know, and all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ES6 and all the other, you know, maybe even the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John later versions of ES5 have stuff like this but then you gotta go back down to just the very bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco JavaScript is the new PHP. I’m saying it. Don’t forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use triple equals. Avoid those coercions.

Follow-up: Audiobus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We should probably do some follow-up. So Chris Adamson wrote in to tell us about audio bus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you want to talk to talk to us about that John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sure I think it was Marco who misled us in the last program. Yep About audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bus being a network thing Chris says the audio bus never relied on network loopback

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for interprocess communication There was a blog post by Michael Tyson who I think is one of the creators We’ll put a link

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the show notes and it explains that the earliest versions of autobus used MIDI the sys x messages,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which allow for arbitrary buffers of data to be sent across the MIDI bus later he migrated to mock ports. I know what those are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which Apple’s MIDI messaging is built on top of. So there’s audio bus audio bus who is getting a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad rap on the last episode. It is not as crazy as we made it sound.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And how about the inter app audio framework?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And so last episode, we were also talking about supported better supported API’s rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than not that the random third party thing is bad, necessarily, especially since it’s building on top of existing facilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the MIDI thing and mock ports which are part of the kernel that’s underneath the iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and iOS 10 and Apple TV OS and the watch OS and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well there is added an iOS 7 to the audio unit framework

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something called Interapp Audio, IAA, that enables the ability to send MIDI commands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stream audio between apps on the same device. And so if there are a bunch of applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that support this mechanism as I imagine there are after ios 7 things like you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Virtual effects pedals, you know for audio applications that you can send audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from one app to the other but of course as Marker pointed out last time Skype doesn’t support these type of things probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s never going to support these type of things So there’s still a place for and officially supported by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS way to route audio arbitrarily because all the audio is going through or the OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or being the OS is aware that it’s happening and the routing capabilities are probably in there which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is how tools like loopback and audio hijack work their magic but they’re the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fact that they’re using private API’s makes them a little bit dangerous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to to support over the long term so it would be better if Apple instead of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know instead of forcing every single application developer on an entire system to write to a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API, especially if those applications don’t consider themselves audio apps like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of these APIs are for people who are making music applications to work together. It would still be nice for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the OS to expose the mechanisms that are so clearly there to control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the audio routing at the OS level rather than just the individual app level

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cooperating with each other through the OS.

Lightning headphone-cable idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Marco, tell us about lightning-only headphones, as John Casey asked about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, this is not confusing at all. So John Casey asked about something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} John and Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I will be talking about it. So basically, he threw out an interesting idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regarding the future of the iPhone 7 not having a headphone jack, probably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a future in which headphones are lightning-only. He said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many headphones come with detachable and replaceable cables, any chance Apple might make a replacement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cable, not just an adapter dongle? So the idea there would be that Apple sells you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just a straight replacement cable for your legacy headphones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So one end has lightning, the other end has a little skinny thing that plugs into headphones at the top end, instead of just being this clunky adapter on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bottom. And of course, in the middle, they could put a really good clicker, which would be great. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is a great idea in theory. In practice, it would probably not work very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, because The problem is the end of the cable at the headphone, at the ear cup’s end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it, that end is not standard. Now usually it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either another 3 1⁄2 inch jack, just like the end by the phone, or it could be a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, the 2 1⁄2 inch version, or the 2 1⁄2 millimeter. And then around it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have a similar problem to the very, very first iPhone, where it had that big plastic surround

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you couldn’t fit every kind of headphone plug into it. sometimes the plug would be too wide, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the plastic around the plug would be too wide and it just wouldn’t fit around the housing or around the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco port. That problem exists big time on headphones with replaceable cables,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where so often, I’d say most of the time, a headphone can’t actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even a headphone that has a detachable cable usually can’t use another cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made for a different headphone. Usually something about it doesn’t fit or it doesn’t click in right, if there’s some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco locking mechanism or something like that. So in practice, the end of the headphone cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the headphone, on the ear cup, is not standardized enough, even among the ones with removable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cables, to make it possible for somebody to make a general purpose aftermarket replacement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that fits a lot of them. That being said, Apple could, of course, make one that works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for all Beats, or at least the most common. I mean, Beats doesn’t have that many popular models. They could cover those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and cover a large portion of the Apple headphone using population. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not saying it’s likely they would do this. I think the most likely answer is they wouldn’t address it at all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the answer would just be, well, buy new headphones. Or use our adapter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do all Beats have detachable cables?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, I don’t know enough about them to say if all do. I know many of them do. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco generally speaking, detachable cables are something I always hope that headphones have, and I always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ding them if they don’t in their review, because, especially for desk headphones, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as necessary because you tend not to wear those out. Portable headphones, they’re constantly being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrapped up and unwrapped and put in bags and taken out and everything, and so there’s a lot of stress on the cables, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually what makes headphones die, what makes headphones go bad or stop being usable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is usually one of two things. Usually either the wire frays near one of the ends,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually the phone end, but if it’s a permanent cable, it can also fray at the place where it meets the ear cup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or if they’re Beats, they literally break in half. Because the head, literally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because if you’re on, if you have a plastic headband, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you put headphones on, the headband has to stretch out a little bit, and so it’s constantly being stretched and unstretched,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stretched and unstretched. So the stress of that, if you have an all-plastic headband, very often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco results in the headband cracking right in the middle. That is usually how bad headphones break. Good headphones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually eventually break because the cables go bad somewhere along the way. Alright. Bye.

John’s Destiny TV burn-in status

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we have some super important follow-up. The internet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey possibly the country or maybe even the world would like to know, John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what’s going on with your Destiny HUD?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We talked about when I had to move my PlayStation 4 off of my Plasma television

⏹️ ▶️ ^John onto a separate gaming monitor because I was playing Destiny a lot and I noticed that the HUD that is up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the screen while playing Destiny was burning into my Plasma screen. So I had to evict the entire console from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John television, which was kind of a shame because it looked way better on my TV than it does in this terrible little monitor that I’m using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right now. But when I moved it away, I also set a calendar reminder for a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the future to say, reminding me to check

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether the Destiny HUD had finally worn off of my television. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what I had heard from people who had the same model as me is that, yes, image retention is a problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but in most cases it’s not actually permanent. It just takes forever to go away. So I said, fine, I’ll put a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a year. Some people say it took many months. Some people say it took multiple years. So I figured I’ll put a reminder for a year. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not like I’ve forgotten about it. I’ve been watching TV and I’ve been looking at it. In fact, I’m always looking at my television and I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noticing that the, you know, the Cartoon Network logo that I’ve complained about in past shows was burning in. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, this is the year anniversary. To the day, I think? Probably to the day. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I took a look at my television in the various ways that you can do, way you’re putting solid colors behind it and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pure white screen and stuff like that. And I can say that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from a normal sitting distance if I didn’t know where the HUD was supposed to be I wouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to see it. I think a normal person would not be able to see it. I can barely see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only the super bar the big bar that fills with with color as your super gets charged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and turns yellow when it’s fully charged. I can barely kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make out where that used to be no other part of the HUD invisible and that even like I got up really close

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to television like am I just imagining that it’s there because I remember where

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it was. Of course. I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love to see this. So it’s it is almost entirely gone. You can totally see the big C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a little bit of the N in Cartoon Network so that’s a good you know thing to compare it to like I can see the CN

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Cartoon Network has been banned from this television as well now. But so I say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the the Destiny HUD experiment Destiny’s not coming back to my TV my PS4 is not coming back to TV. I might move

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it back for an individual game or two, but I wouldn’t play Destiny over there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, it has faded substantially. So what looked like permanent image retention was not actually permanent. It just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took a really, really long time to go away. So I suppose I’ll put another calendar in for a year from now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revisit for a second year to see if it’s really, really gone. But at some point, I just want to replace this TV with a fancy OLED

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. So people need to start making better televisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco theme of every episode people need to start making better televisions they do John Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a bad time for TVs trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} to wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it out I bought I felt like I bought at the right time I bought the peak of the previous generation of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John televisions and now just got just endure this until we come with the other side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah it does seem like you bought probably the best 1080p plasma that will ever exist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and probably the best plasma that will ever exist and now you just kind of have to wait for like when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 4k gets non-stupid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well yeah they got to work out all the HDR stuff and work out their standards there and get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the OLED kinks worked out like there was a fancier model than the one I got but it had slightly lower brightness and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I sacrificed and it was also more money and I was like it’s very similar it’s really too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John close to call and I think the extra brightness will be what I wanted but yeah I bought pretty much at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the right time and I lucked out with the the fan noise and everything which I was afraid of. That turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out not to be an issue, especially compared to my previous television. But right now, I finally did read up on all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the TVs at CES and everything, and now it’s like just a battle over the high dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John range standards and all those different standards and which channels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are going to support what for broadcast and will Netflix support it and what things the Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HD Blu-rays are supporting and what television manufacturers And it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a big mess. I really want that to just be settled and then and then of course OLEDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have to make you have to make a few generations old before they get that all worked out So there’s a long way to go here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean a lot of the HDR standards are being supported by televisions that can actually display the entire range of the HDR stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet So yeah, two or three years probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now just to prevent us from getting a crud load of email. Would you mind reminding the listeners what TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you ended up buying?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, I don’t remember the name for its Panasonic VT-60? Excellent. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ZT-60 was the fancy, the slightly fancier one.

Follow-up: Pirate eye patches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Thank you very much. Now. Do you want to tell us about pirate eye patches because we got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a surprising amount of feedback about Pirate eye patches never in my life that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think we would be getting this serious about pirate eye patches on the accidental tech podcast But here we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I opened the door in the pirate eye patch. So I might as well finish closing in here so the first thing to point out which is not something we discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John last time is not whether or not the things we said about pirate eye

⏹️ ▶️ ^John patches helping you see in the dark or Or actual you know it was actually true Does it actually help you see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the dark because we did link to the Mythbusters episode about that, but the larger issue of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did lots of pirates have eyepatches? And the consensus on that seems to be probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not like there’s no evidence of that the only reason we think that is because you know Hollywood and Various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movies and stories and famous pirates and blackbeard and all that other business or whatever but historical records

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of pirates like for there a lot 101 odd pirates or all the pirates wearing eye patches so they could see better under decks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no evidence for that so that is basically probably completely apocryphal you know and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really uh basing anything but the other part that we were talking about is does that actually help

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you see under decks and this i think is a great example of what i would call testing versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explaining uh some somebody sent us a link to this other podcast that had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh it was i forget what it’s called but it’s a like a q&a type podcast where they ask questions they had an expert on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to answer and the question was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} hey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you put an eye patch over your eye would that help you see better because one eye will be adjusted to the dark or whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the person on this show said their answer contained all correct information but didn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lead to the correct conclusion and the idea was that you keep one eye under an eye patch um

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the other eye out of it it’s not as if the eye under the eye patch the pupil is going to dilate massively and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the eye that’s out of the eye patch that people’s not going to because in general, if one of your pupils is way bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the other, you probably just got hit in the head really hard and you should see a doctor like they they tend to be the same size

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fair was called a consensual response or whatever, like that your pupils are basically you’ve heard it on all the television shows,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, equal and reactive when they do the little night light thing in your eyes to make sure that a your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eyes respond to light by you know, your pupils getting smaller, and be that they’re equal. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of them stays open, they want you to go to the doctor really quickly, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so they said therefore the whole idea of a pirate eye patch is silly because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not as if the one under the eye patch is going to have a really dilated pupil just waiting for you to go under decks and flip up the eye patch, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now what the Mythbusters did instead was rather than trying to think of a theory of why it wouldn’t work, they said, well this is easy enough to test.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why don’t we just make a dark place and put an eye patch on someone’s eye and give them some silly task, like see how fast… I forget what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were doing in the episode, but but see how fast they can accomplish a bunch of tasks in this really dark room. And they tried it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without the eye patch, and the eye patch just crushed the non-eye patch one. It was an extremely efficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to see better in the dark. And so how do you square this circle?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Where the explaining thing went wrong is the idea that the size of your pupil

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the only thing that determines how well you see in the dark. That is one aspect of it. Your pupil opens up more to let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more light in. But the other aspect of it is how sensitive little things in the back of your eye are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And someone sent us a link to a thing about astronomy, red lights and astronomy, and why you want to use red lights when you’re, you know, looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up at the stars. And that contains another, another theory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what helps you see in the dark. And it’s the sensitivity of the rods at the back of your eye that help you see in the dark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John From this article, during daylight hours, your rods are overexposed, and so they’re less efficient. As light gets dimmer, a chemical change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allows them to become even more sensitive and your eyes become dark adapted. It only takes brief exposure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to bright light for the rods to overexpose. Once that happens, you have half an hour or more to regain dark sensitivity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you really want it to be under the eye patch, not to change the size of your pupil, but to get the rods in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eye, which are not consensual with the rods in the other eye, unlike your iris dilation, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get them to be more sensitive to light. And it’s important because if you expose them just for a short period of time, it’s going to take like half an hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for them to get back to that super dark sensitive way because it’s a chemical change in the eye and not just a physical change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, you know, essentially adjusting the aperture of your eyeball.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s ISO versus aperture, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So there you go. Everything you ever wanted to know about PirateApp, probably not, because people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still going to want to know why the hell do we think pirates have eye patches. I forget which particular pop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John culture thing caused us to think that. But regardless of whether or not they had eye patches, if they did,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they could use them just like they did in MythBusters, and it would help them see in the dark better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. And do you want to talk about how this relates to programming?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I don’t know how like the testing versus explaining I guess like one of my pet peeves as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an old cranky programmer is if you hear it whether it’s going on between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you and another programmer or you hear two other programmers sitting near you talking to each other about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh it’s usually some silly corner of the language thing because people love talking about language but even could be an API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever well if you do this it does that and well you know if you if you call

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it in in this way that will happen and this thing doesn’t have blah blah and they and let us go back and forth for what seems like a really long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time especially if they’re sitting near you and talking you’re trying to get work done and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} trying to come up seconds yeah trying to come up with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know explaining to each other no actually language works this way oh you’re not accounting for this blah blah where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no reason to have this discussion because in 20 seconds of typing you can find the answer definitively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you don’t have to speculate about what this language feature likes or is that a syntax error? Or how would you do the expression?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is this the correct way to do references or whatever? Don’t speculate. Don’t debate it for 10 minutes. Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type it in. There’s your answer. And then you can talk about why that’s the answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. But you don’t have to do Google search, you don’t do anything like especially if you’re in a language with a rebel, just just find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out. So it’s testing versus explaining, explaining and theorizing and thought experience are good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But when it’s really, really easy, or, you know, simple or very readily available to test it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just testing is faster and better and will lead you wrong in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its own type of ways if you do your testing badly but sometimes things are just very simple so the eyepatch thing is like we have a theory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we think eyepatches help you see better in the dark is that true so easy to test you can spend all day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking to you know doctors and neurologists and theorizing about it they’ll probably get the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer but if you get off on the wrong track and think about oh dilation that’s not you know that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not going to help you there it’s just so much easier to test it so i I don’t think Mythbusters knows or cares why it works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They just tested it and assuming their test is reasonably sound, they come to a useful conclusion in much less time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Before we do the last bit of incredibly, incredibly exciting follow-up, our first sponsor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this week, it’s Harry’s.

Sponsor: Harry’s (code ATP)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Go to Harrys.com and use promo code ATP to save $5 off your first purchase. Harry’s offers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of the big razor brands. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg. They make their own blades from their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco factory, an old blade factory in Germany that they actually bought. These are high quality, high performing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco German blades crafted by shaving experts, giving you a better shave that respects your face and your wallet. Harry’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offers factory direct pricing at a fraction of the big brand prices. They’re about half the price of what you’re used to paying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for big brand razor blades in the supermarket. Now the starter set is an amazing deal. For $15,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you get a razor, moisturizing shave cream or gel, and three razor blade cartridges. When you need more blades,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re just $2 each or less. So an 8-pack is just $15, a 16-pack is just $25. 16 blades for $25 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roughly half the price of what you would pay for the big brand that you’re probably thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that sells the expensive razor blades in the store, and I would say these are very comparable to those quality and performance-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco half the price. So with Harry’s, you get comfort, closeness, and convenience at the ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco low price of under $2 per blade. It’s also very tastefully designed. You get these nice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heavy, weighty handles, kind of like a modern Mad Men kind of aesthetic, really nice aesthetic,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high-quality stuff, feels good, looks good, comes in great packaging, the website’s nice and easy to use, and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shave quality is very good. Harry’s you get all of this all at the half the price of the big brands.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Get started today with a set that includes a handle, three blades, and shaving cream for just $15 including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free shipping right to your door.

Follow-up: VESA iMac serial numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Harrys.com, use promo code ATP to save $5 off your first purchase. Thank you very much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Harrys. Now, the incredibly interesting follow-up that we’ve been holding off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this whole time… Steven

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is riveting and really important. Actually, I joke because it is kind of silly, but I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really interested to know where the crap is the serial code or the serial number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on a Visa Mount iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} It’s because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we discovered last week that the serial number for a regular iMac with the big foot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is on the bottom of the foot. And so the question was, if you get one with the VESA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mount, that custom monitor mount on the back, that doesn’t have the foot, doesn’t come with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the foot, where would they put the serial number?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. And so we figured, you know, probably would be somewhere on the mount or what have you because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where else would it be? And sure enough, James McCain has written in and included a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey picture, this is professional level follow-up right here, included a picture of exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where the serial number is on his Visamount iMac. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it turns out it is, if you flip the entire machine upside down, it’s kind of printed in there right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by the fan. Is that the exhaust or intake in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back? That is exhaust. The intake is the big ridge in the bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So anyway, so that’s where it is, as it turns out. I was waiting for Jason Snell to let us know, but apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he’s not caught up on the show. I’m very upset at him. But James McCain has saved the day. So thank you, James.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I remember back in the day, speaking of serial numbers, that if you got certain repairs done to, say, your laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, the serial number would change because they give you a full motherboard swap or whatever. And if that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still the case, especially that’s why I was asking if this was a sticker or etched onto the thing, you could end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up with if they replace the guts of your iMac with a machine that a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different serial number than the one that is actually etched into the metal on the device, which could be very confusing to all involved if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not aware of that. I think I remember we actually had a repair done like that maybe to a white iBook, maybe like my mom’s white

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iBook or something. We had some repair and they said just so you know your serial number will be changing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though they have the same external case. Anyway, I don’t know if that’s still an issue, but it always struck me as weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they would attach the serial number to the physical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John device, but it’s really connected to the innards So the device you could end up in these scenarios where things are wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they can also like I don’t know. I’m just another thing for geniuses consensus I think they used to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change the serial number of your motherboard by like flashing it back to the old value But I don’t know if that’s a thing that they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so a friend of the show Stephen Hackett in the chat is saying crap. I lost it Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they have to reserialize the boards and usually that comes with a sticker you put over the etch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey serial number. Also The tipster in the chat is saying when the serial is changed for laptops they will often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey swap the bottom cover with one that has no serial.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’d like to give you a sticker. Oh, the indignities. Yeah, we fixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your Mac. But by the way, here’s a sticker to put over the beautiful laser-etched in serial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number that’s there. No thanks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I would. I mean, the good thing is that there, I mean, on laptops, it’s a problem. On the desktops, at least they’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hidden away in places that you’d never see it. But if it’s on your laptop, like now with the modern ones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s on the outside on the bottom, like you would totally see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. Well, that’s why I’m giving a bottom thing that has no serial numbers Then you can be like Steve Jobs with no license plates on his car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off the grid Untracked by Apple serial number readers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m untraceable except every other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aspect Traceable except by all the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just love how deeply offended you guys are about the thought of having a sticker on your computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, look either you’re a sticker person or you’re not if you’re not the idea of any sticker on there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like is horrible The whole reason we buy Macs is so we wouldn’t have Intel inside, Nvidia powered,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these like… Powered by invention, by ASUS, like all this stupid stuff they put on their computers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On the PC world, and here we don’t have that. If you are a sticker person, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want better stickers than stupid Apple cereal number one.

Apple’s quarterly earnings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so moving out of follow-up, Apple earnings were as we record last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey night. It turns out they made a lot of money. Go figure. But there’s a couple of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I think are interesting. First of all, their guidance for iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sales is down a bit. So they haven’t said, if I understood things correctly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they haven’t said that they’ve sold less iPhones already, but they are expecting to sell less iPhones in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the next quarter. Is that accurate?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s compared to the year ago quarter, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last year there were a number of reasons. And last year there were some overflow from the holiday quarter that was very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco strong. So some of those happened in the next quarter. And so we’re not gonna have that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year. And then also last year there was tons of pent up demand for the bigger screen phones. And this year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has been alleviated. And then there’s currency fluctuations and economy fluctuations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything else. I don’t know, do we care? Does it matter?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, I don’t think we care about the details in the way that the people on the financial call do. Like, tell us exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why this quarter will be weaker than the other. But like, I’m looking at Jason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Stelzner’s Six Colors post with all the pretty graphs and everything. If you just look at the, you know, the four-quarter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John moving average graphs and try to get a shape of the lines of the various products and how they’re doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s still kind of hard to help because a lot of it is revenue instead of units in these graphs. but you can get a kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of idea of where the company is at with its various product lines. Are you guys looking at this page?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like look at Apple Revenue, four quarter moving average showing the total and the iPhone, iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the Mac. Right, so you get a picture of the company here. The total

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line shows you that the company is still going, you know, from the lower left to the upper right, more or less,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you’re gonna draw a trend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line. Growth, right, good. And then where’s that growth come from? you see this iPhone line that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is going up, but it’s starting to get a little hump at the top of it. Not, you know, it’s not going hockey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stick upwards. Now it’s starting to go more like, you know, a ski mogul.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A mump, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} don’t know, whatever you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to call it. It’s a mound, right? The slope is decreasing, right? Along the bottom you have the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which always on these graphs looks like just a flat line because the fluctuations, the Mac is so low below the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the fluctuations are barely visible. And then you’ve got the iPad, which like starts off around the same as the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes a tentative bid to go to the higher parts of the chart and then says, nah, nevermind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And actually dips below the Mac in the most recent year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, this was not a good report for the iPad. No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so look at the iPad one. Look at iPad units, four quarter moving average. Now it looks like it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s a hump. It’s an upside down U. It starts at the bottom, goes up to the top and starts going down again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now we’re getting like an actual proper hump. I think there’s a better one later on If you ever see like the iPod

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graph, have you ever seen a graph with the iPod on it too? The iPod just looks like it comes out of nowhere, makes this big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lump and goes back down to basically zero. It makes a nice mound in the graph. Like here I am in the iPod, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nevermind. I mean, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} had a good run.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s over the course of many, many years. But like, I wish I could find that graph. The thing that’s striking about looking at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPod is like that the iPod is like, its hump is even smaller than the iPad’s hump

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or similar size to the iPad’s hump. We thought the iPod was this whole big world-changing Apple is the iPod company kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of thing. It is nothing compared to the iPhone. The problem with all these graphs is as soon as you put the iPhone on the graph, it totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blows the Y-axis and you can’t read anything anymore because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the iPhone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so ridiculously huge, makes so much money, sells so many units, that everything else starts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to kind of even out. But anyway, the one thing I put in the show notes about this is I think the iPad is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the real story that I’m interested in at least,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John earnings results.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, well, and also one thing before I move on to the iPad is, obviously the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone is the company. You know, the iPhone is the most important thing in the company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by numbers and by many other metrics. By a long shot, it’s not even close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like it says down here on this chart, it’s the iPhone made 68% of the revenue in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco entire company. The average selling price of the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is incredibly important to the company’s financial outlook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I make predictions or try to explain things that use the iPhone average

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco selling price as a justification for why Apple did or might do something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This shows you why that might override decisions from Apple about things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like what’s actually best for the customer, or what actually might be the best product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything’s in balance with Apple, with any company. Everything’s in balance. No company is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pure good or pure evil. Everything’s always these contending factors that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to reach equilibrium, but there’s always this contention between them. I don’t know if contending

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a word, but it is now. Anyway, with Apple, they’re always fighting between what they can make,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what’s possible to make, what they can ship on time, what’s profitable, and what’s best for the customer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In the case of the iPhone average selling price, I think they are definitely willing to do moves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that will raise the average selling price by a substantial amount, even if it’s kind of crappy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the customer. And I think you can look at the 16GB base size of the phones as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the biggest examples of this. There is almost no other justification for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. You can look at almost every other reason people gave for that back when we all discussed it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two years ago or whatever, and you can rule almost all of them out by other supporting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasons. People say, well, we buy all these phones in our company and no one ever uses more than 16 gigs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, you could also say a lot of phones don’t use the earpods that are in the box, but they still include them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Your company doesn’t use necessarily 3D Touch, but that thing’s in every phone too. You can look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at any part of it and you can say, a lot of people don’t use this. That’s not necessarily a reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 16 gig thing has to be there and be sucking and be problematic for so many people. Anyway, so Apple is willing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and possibly, I wouldn’t say forced to, but there’s strong pressure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Apple to keep that iPhone ASP up and growing. And so for them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do things that will increase the average selling price by even a little bit, it matters enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there’s huge motivation for them to do it. at something like the headphone jack thing and we’re all saying Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always includes headphones in the box. What if this fall the iPhone 7 comes out with no headphone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco jack and they don’t include headphones in the box? Then a huge portion of iPhone buyers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are going to go spend 30 more dollars when they buy that phone. That’s gonna be an attachment sale that counts towards the average selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco price I think of the phone itself. Anyway however they however they count for that they’re gonna make a lot more money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they do that. You know you can look at this cynically and you can say you know you can say like Apple will do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for sure, because it’ll make them more money, and it sucks for us.” Or you can look at it the opposite way, and you can say, Apple always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wants to do what’s best for customers. They would never do that for that reason. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So we have to consider that when we look at what Apple does with the product line, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in regards to the iPhone, and how that impacts their profitability, even if it kind of sucks for us. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all this financial stuff that comes out every quarter is a perfect reason why they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very strong reasons to have some contention there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t feel like they’re so wed to average selling price because they’ve in the past they’ve done things that have hurt their average

⏹️ ▶️ ^John selling price on their products to you know, like the iPad mini is a great example, but margins I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of their those decisions are just as easily explained if not better explained by margins because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the 16 gig thing the average sales price selling price argument is this is going to push people up to the bigger model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they don’t feel like they can fit in 16 but could also just result in more people buying 16s you don’t quite know because Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John break it down like that for us, right? But surely one thing it does is increase margins because it’s like 64

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already had good margins. And by keeping the lower one and 16, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and keeping the price is basically the same, that 16 gigs that they’ve been including on their their phone for years and years, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just got to be getting cheaper for them. And yet the phone price hasn’t been dropping year over year over year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So their margins go up. And I think they’re really sensitive to their margins, their margins of things like 40%, or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John across the board on all their stuff. So even if they have to drop, the average selling price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by selling the iPad mini, I bet they’re very sensitive about what are the margins on the iPad mini. How can we bring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that down by putting crappier stuff in it? You know, that’s kind of always what they’re looking for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Can we sell you something with last year’s technology in it in some aspect, because it saves us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money, whether it’s like putting the credit your camera and the iPod touch that’s not subsidized and they have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have to maintain their margins or, you know, whatever they put in their low end phones or even on their their highest end phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will keep the prices more or less the same, but we’ll give you 16 gigs for years and years because every year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that gives us a little bit more on the margins and like you said Marco, anything to do whether it’s average selling price or margins

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiplied by the number of phones they sell is a tremendous amount of money and that’s a lot of what this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John call was about was like foreign exchange rates and you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John various other quote unquote headwinds, these fluctuations and how the dollar is valued against the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other currencies in the world has, uh, you know, it seems like it’s not that big a deal. It’s not like we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in some financial meltdown where the dollar is like worthless or worth 10 times more than all the currencies in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the world, right? But even minute movement in, in the foreign exchange rates multiplied

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by Apple’s revenue equals these tremendous numbers. So a lot of the things I saw getting thrown around on Twitter, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the amount of money Apple lost due to currency fluctuations is larger than the amount of money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Facebook made the entire year or something like that. Like Just the numbers are so mind-bogglingly huge that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any like the fluctuations in the chart look like nothing. You’re like, well, you know, it’s a few pixels lower or whatever, but like those pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are billions and billions and billions of dollars. So it’s, it’s, it’s mind-boggling to even consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this. And that’s why I’m so glad I’m not in the financial world because trying to judge Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a, from a financial perspective is just so, so weird because of the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things they value seem so out of whack with the things that like a regular person would value about a company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, they’re making a lot of money, they’re profitable, they have a lot of money in the bank, boy, that must be a good stock.” They’re like, no, where’s the growth?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, this is like when something like this happens, I am so happy that I no longer buy or sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco individual stocks. I have mutual funds that include some of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things, I’m sure, but I don’t manage that myself and I don’t buy and sell stock anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m so glad because I would think of things like the way you were, I would think of things like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s doing great, they have great prospects, they’re making a lot of money, why did their stock just take a dive? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would frustrate me like crazy. And of course, that isn’t how the market works at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everyone says the market is stupid and doesn’t understand Apple. No, the market is doing its own thing. It’s not stupid. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot to be said about it that’s bad, but it’s not stupid. There’s some stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Usually the stupid manifests

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the other way where companies are overvalued for… Because it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another form of gambling. Buy low, sell high. How do I know what’s low? Well, low is something that’s going to be high later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so people, a bunch of people will get together and say, look at that company, that’s going to be super high later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know, bid it up and have astronomical valuation, because it based on the potential, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could be really high later, boy, if everybody decides to buy this person’s thing, this will be great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you know, it’s just basically it’s speculation. What do you think is going to be high next year? Is it going to be Apple? Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple going to go up by 50% by next year? Or is this little company you never heard of? You can buy the stock for pennies, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, that’s, yeah, it’s not, it’s kind of a sucker’s bet. Not really, because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can, in theory, have some knowledge that will help you do better. Witness people like Warren Buffett and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are pretty sure not cheating. They’re just a little bit better at playing this particular game of poker than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other people. So there is a, it’s not all luck. There is a skill-based aspect, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the most part, like, I don’t get too mad about the way Apple is treated by the market, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have to think, like, I mean, this is what everyone’s been thinking for years and years. You’re like, well, there’s nowhere for them to go but down. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the top. If you had thought that five years ago and five years before that and five years before that, you just put them in wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s what all the analysts always point out. It’s like every time someone says that Apple’s at the top and they can only go down, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just wait five years and you make fun of those people. Right. But at some point they’ll be right because if not, Apple will have all the money in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we will literally have no money because Apple will have it all. And it’s just like Moore’s law. You can’t, you can’t keep doubling forever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because eventually you will have all the monies.

Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Our next sponsor this week is Squarespace. Start building your website today at Squarespace.com and enter offer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Squarespace build it beautiful. Now look, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco built many websites using Squarespace now and I’ve built many websites using other means and Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is by far the easiest way to do it and it is by far the least ongoing hassle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the easiest way to get a lot of advanced functionality up quickly. Start any website you make today at Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you have to make something, try it there first. And see how much you can get done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in an hour. And you will be shocked how far you get, how much functionality it has, and how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco little work you had to do to get there. If you’re building websites for other people, it’s even better. If someone’s asking you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco build a site for them, if you do it on Squarespace, not only can you hand it off to them and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, now you do it. You help yourself. Not only that, but if they need more help,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they need support, if they need any kind of hosting thing or any kind of technical support, they ask Squarespace,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not you. You don’t support it, Squarespace does. If that’s not a reason to do it, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco help you. If you’re making a website for somebody and you want to support it yourself every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something has to be changed, or something breaks, or they need help, but more power to you, that is not me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though. For me, I tell people to build their sites on Squarespace. They can usually do it themselves right from the start.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They just need a slight push from me to say, here, try this. So that’s what I advise all of you. Try making a site

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Squarespace. Next time you have to make a website, give it an hour, see how far you get, and I bet you will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stick with it and just leave it there, because then you’re done and you can move on to do anything else with your life. Check

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it out today. Squarespace.com to start your free trial site. There’s no credit card required to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do a free trial with Squarespace. Squarespace.com, start a free trial and make a site. If you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, please make sure to use the offer code ATP when you sign up to get 10% off your first purchase.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Once again, that’s code ATP at signup to get 10% off your first purchase.

Why are iPad sales dropping?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Squarespace, build it beautiful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What I found interesting about this is that the iPads

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are down and down fairly big, which in and of itself, I know we have already covered that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but having just gotten a new iPad and now being able to unlock,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you will, all the multitasking features in iOS 9, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have fallen in love with my iPad again. And I know that a lot of our friends,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even in ones like Mike Hurley, who were kind of aggressively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anti-iPad very recently, are now falling in love with their iPad Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what gives? Am I weird in that I really love my iPad Mini?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And is Mike weird in that he really loves his iPad Pro? What is going on that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apparently a lot of people have fallen out of love with the iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna answer the easy questions first. Yes, you’re both weird, but that’s not your, That is a separate thing entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was thinking about this and I think like now that we have a nice shape to this graph and now that we can clearly see that it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this enough time has passed we could be like it’s not replacement cycle. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some other thing that we like. It’s just basically like this. This is starting to take the shape of the other type of devices and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m although I still am totally signed signed up with the idea of the the interface that we all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know and love in our phones being eventually being the thing that supplants what we currently know is the PC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whether or not the iPad does it, I’m not sure. But what the way I’m conceptualizing the iPad now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I think kind of explains like your Casey, your attitude towards it and Mike’s and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that currently for now the iPad is a specific product, not like the tablet in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the iPad is a specific product I see is to feeling two main roles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John First, it is a rich toddler’s toy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I mean, and I’m lumping myself in that my kids have iPads. They’re they’re the kids of rich people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? In general, like most of the people I know who live in a similar place that I do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suburban lives, professional jobs. They have iPads, they give to their kids. Sometimes they’re handing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down iPads or whatever. But just like, I see a lot of iPads that are used by kids, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it is, and I say toddlers because once the kids get older, they want a phone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s, that’s obviously, you know, that’s everything. And the other thing the iPad is, uh, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use Steve Jobs parlance, it’s a truck. Uh, the iPad is the truck

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the world of, you know, iOS and touch devices or whatever. Most people don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a truck. Most people get away with the car, which is called their phone that does everything they could possibly need. But some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people, the weird people need a truck, not just the iPad pros, the truck, but the entire iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line is now revealing itself as a drug because everyone else is saying, you know what, the phone is fine. The phone is all I need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Phone does everything I want. And then in the other realm that you could say, if it’s not a rich toddler’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John toy, what about the non-rich toddlers? I think tablets still have a role for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, for everybody, for little kids in particular, because it’s a great, it’s like a, you know, a great little child’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John toy, but they just buy cheap Android tablets so they can watch YouTube. I think, like, if I replace my kids’ iPads with like $99

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Android tablets that just played YouTube, it would be mostly satisfied. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s mostly what they do with it is use it to watch YouTube. It doesn’t take too much to run YouTube. So in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current life of the iPad product line, they seem like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a product that is, has a much, much narrower appeal than the phone, and that’s what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really competing with, is the phone, not the laptop at this point or whatever. So in that light, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it’s a good move for Apple to have finally gotten off its butt and done the iPad Pro, which by the way, doesn’t factor at all into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these results, and I wouldn’t expect them to move, I mean, there are factors some, but the iPad Pro came at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the tail end of the results that we’re looking at right here. But that’s not a mainstream product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So anyway, if the iPad’s going to be a truck, make a better truck for crying out loud,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, in the original analogy, the PC or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer was the truck and the iOS devices were the cars. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the PC still is the truck and the iPad is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe the El Camino or like the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} whatever, what’s that Subaru

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco half

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey truck thing? Oh God, I know exactly what you’re thinking about and I can’t place

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it. The Baja, that’s it. The Subaru Baja.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like, it’s not even, it’s neither a great car nor a great truck. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of in the middle there. Maybe there’s a reason why the El Camino is not made anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the Subaru Baja is not the most popular car. It has nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks at the Subaru Baja and said this is the future of cars You know the same way like everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks at the iPad and says this is the future of computing But it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it is like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like yeah No, it totally is I mean we we have it born out when we when they say that they mean like Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thing that is not a PC because it’s totally not a PC, right? But you interact with mostly by touching and it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the future computing because that’s what everybody does But it’s also that they do it on their phone It’s like oh Oh, well, is the tablet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a separate thing for the phone? Or is it just the same exact thing as the phone at a bigger size? And it is, but it’s like, why would you need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that bigger size? Well, most people don’t. Most people, especially with their big honking phones, most people, that’s all they’re ever gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need. Like the PC is still this separate, separate thing. But if you just set aside the PC entirely and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just look at the computers that most people use for their personal computers are their smartphones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at this point. And why would you ever need one that’s bigger than your big phone? Well, that’s kind of like the truck

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the phone world. Like if you pretend PCs don’t exist, which basically as far as my kids are concerned, they might as well not exist. Like so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many kids, like your parents have a computer, but why would you, like, I’m waiting to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if my kids will ever ask to have their own computer. They asked to have their own iOS devices and phones without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any prompting very, very early. None of them have even said, hey, I’d like to have my own computer. Because the computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is something that your parents use. So it’s categorically different. So that’s why I’m refocusing and saying, now, forget about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that crap that your parents use that you don’t understand that’s in some other room has this thing attached to it with a with or without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a wire. And think about your world of computing which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a bunch of these screens. Most of them are like I just want a phone I can talk to my friends I can I can watch YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^John videos I can listen to music I’m good to go right and maybe I’ll go into my parents room to type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the papers or whatever but sometimes they might want something bigger to do more truck like things and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not entirely sure that this upcoming generation it’s going to occur to them immediately to say oh now I need a PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Rather, they might say, I have weird needs, so I want one of those big, fancy iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, the Subaru is the Baja. I thought it was the Brad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re both true. The Brad is the very old one, which is actually what I was thinking of. And the Baja is the newer one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was actually called the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Brad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yes. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had it written on the side of it. It was great. Wow. And the little, like, C-pillar equivalent on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the pickup truck hybrid thing. Can’t imagine why they changed it. Yeah. Like, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason that I think is apt is because we all recognize that the iPad is not a great truck. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Pro is a step in the right direction to say, give us an even bigger screen, give us a stylus,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make more room for the multitasking stuff that you’ve added, right? That’s a baby step in the right direction to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really being like, if you’re going to go truck, go all the way. But even if they succeed in that endeavor, even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they say, oh, now the iPad is the truck of the new family of computing devices, because this entire family collectively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the future of computing and some people need to do fancy stuff like say run Xcode on their iPad or whatever the hell they’re going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing 10 years from now, right? Does that suddenly mean that this iPad sales curve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we see making a big hump and going to how and how it’s going to reverse? No, because most people don’t need trucks like nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nothing can save the truck from being the truck. Nothing can save the computer that most people don’t need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nothing is ever going to make the Mac Pro like sell like the iPhone. Nothing is ever going to hockey stick any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of these things up. And so for now, for the iPad product

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} specifically, You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just used hockey stick as a verb. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right, I did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a well-established verb on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} show. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John God. Yeah. Nothing is going to change the inherent nature of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And even the PC, it’s like, well, what if iPads replace all the PCs? Go look at the PC trend lines. Those aren’t great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either. The only thing that has been going upward, like a hockey stick, has been the phone. And even the phone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leveling off a little bit. At a certain point, and the reason the phone is leveling off, I feel like, not with Apple specifically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but eventually with everybody, eventually there’s only a certain number of phones you can sell in the world. Once every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single human, every single human alive, babies, adults, everybody has a smartphone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you’re just fighting over how many, then you’re just fighting of who gets to sell them. So you can have 100% market share,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I sell a phone to every single human alive on the planet, but you’re never gonna get more than that. So eventually all these curves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to level off. And smartphone really is the type of product that can have that kind of penetration. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I look at the iPad curve and I see it going down and I see the phone leveling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off, the phone is like, well, Apple, you gotta compete with the other phones that are out there to make sure you maintain your market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John share. And the iPad, I just feel like it is slowly growing into its destiny as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the truck of the new world of computing. But I just think it should be a better truck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I agree with some of what you’ve just said, but I see a better future for the PC than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think you do, and then a lot of people do. And again, I think you’re right. it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not gonna really go up from where it has been. I think it’s gonna go down a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then just kind of level off at some point where the PC really is the general utility

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computing device and that is incredibly powerful. And there are so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that, we can all call them edge cases. We can say, you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at so much of what iOS devices can’t do what iOS devices can’t do, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many of them seem like, well, almost no one needs that, and that’s true. But, almost everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs one of those things. And it’s kind of like, the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people who need computing tasks or abilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the iOS devices and that world view of computing can’t address

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a pretty big group of people. So I think the computer will always be relevant, same way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like Microsoft has always been relevant. They used to be dominant and the only game in town

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and now Microsoft is this kind of like mostly ignored boring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company that no one talks about but that still has a great business and is still you know very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful to a lot of people. No one really talks about Microsoft but their stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still very very popular, it’s financially seemingly okay and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a lot of people rely on their stuff to get their work done. And I think that the PC in general, whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s Windows or Mac, I don’t make that distinction right now, like the PC in general is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so general-purpose, it is so capable, it is so unbounded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by so many of the restrictions that modern mobile devices have, both physical and software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco restrictions. There is always going to be a market for a more customizable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more open architecture, more hardware diversity kind of platform, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s always going to be edge cases. And as these mobile devices get smaller, simpler,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more locked down, fewer ports, everybody, come on, all the stuff that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco celebrate as consumers as like, oh, wow, this is great. It’s getting thinner and lighter, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything’s even more locked down than it was before. Thanks a lot. All of that is very powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in certain ways. And if you’re making something that’s going to sell as many units as possible to as many people in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as possible, that is a good way to do it, and that’s going to keep working. I always say, never bet against a smartphone, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very powerful. But I don’t think that has to come at the expense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the entire PC business. It will come at the expense of some of the PC business, but again, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t think… Not a lot of people are saying, you know what, I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need a computer anymore, I’m just going to use my phone for everything. Some people say that with the iPad, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPad is certainly more of a threat than the phone is. But I think it’s much more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco likely that like the people who are still using PCs today, even when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good tablets are available, I don’t see a whole ton of them making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that jump if they haven’t already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, but those people all die. I guess that’s the way it works. Those people all die and the people who were formerly using PCs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what we’re waiting for, maybe not the iPad specifically, but tablets in general. The idea that something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without the paradigms and the complexities that we currently associated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with personal computers that tablets can eventually replace them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that maybe eventually the things that we think of as tablets now will eventually be called PCs to distinguish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them from the phones but they won’t because they won’t be running Windows they’re not running OS 10 they won’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they won’t have like disks that you mount and volumes and expose file systems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all the things that we associate with personal computing now like that’s why I’m I’m talking it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John important to differentiate between the iPad as a product, which Apple may never get their act together on right and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tablet as a whole, the idea that a future computing device should be more appliance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like and probably also mobile, because again, with the Morse law stuff, like having lots of headroom to put powerful,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heat hungry things in there is fine. But at a certain point, you can’t like a certain point, we need a another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technological breakthrough to increase compute. And if we can’t do that, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you You just basically say, well, the fastest CPU in the entire world fits in a battery-powered device and we haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figured out how to make it faster because we haven’t figured out how to do quantum computers or optical computing or anything yet. So in the meantime,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enjoy your quote-unquote PC, which is basically a big honking tablet because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what two generations of children know how to use and they have no idea what the hell you’re doing with that freaking mouse. They just want to touch the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen, right? So whether Apple is the one that does that or somebody else, long-term after we’re all dead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the the total market for people who need to do computing besides using the appliances in their home and their phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will probably be about the similar size of the quote-unquote PC market today but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would expect tablets to slowly cannibalize that. Well maybe the whole line on the graph stays about the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John while above it floats all the other mass-market devices but that’s that’s where the tablets are battling down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there with the PCs. Who is going to Who is going to get these people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need more than a phone to do their job? Who is going to serve them? And right now it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac versus Windows computers versus a whole panoply of tablets versus Surface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versus Chromebooks versus, you know, all these things that are like PCs and post PCs battling it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just have to give the edge to the ones with less legacy crap that are more understandable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for people to use even if right now they’re just not powerful enough as we talked about the last show to actually replace those.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I think I think we’ll all be gone by the time it happens, but I just look at my kids and my kids kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Having a television is gonna be I can’t even think of a good analogy But it’s just it’s gonna seem like having like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a plow in your backyard to till the fields. I don’t know It seems it’s gonna seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What you know? I agree with you John more than I do Marco that I think that the PC as we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know it again Like Marco said Mac or PC the the personal computers We know it is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey terribly long for this world for almost everyone one. And I agree, John, that the future is going to be touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the futures or, you know, something after touch or VR, right. Or, or VR. Well, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the future is not the, this beautiful new iMac that I just bought myself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, but what I’m, where I’m having trouble is why then is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad so sharply down? Like, I understand what you’re saying. It’s not powerful enough. It’s not doing enough right now, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey geez, if the iPad really is the futures truck, Don’t you think it would at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maintain or not have such a stark downward slope?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, because I think they misfired on the iPad. I think they thought things were further along

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than they were. And so there was the initial burst of like, hey, this is the future. Everyone’s going to love it. And then everyone realized,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know what? I can do all the same stuff on my phone, especially when the phones got bigger and more powerful. Then it was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, well, never mind. Just give those ones to the kids. Like it’s like a burst of enthusiasm followed by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John realization that it does not provide enough additional value. And so that’s why I feel like it’s tapering off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I think there’s a number of factors here. First of all, I think that the value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a tablet in general, if you use it for productivity tasks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then the iPad is very competitive. But I think what most people use tablets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for is entertainment. And I’m not saying you can’t do work on an iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I think the market bears that out that a lot of people use their tablets primarily for entertainment purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you’re doing that, there’s a lot less reason to get specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an iPad over any other tablet out there. And there’s tablets, you know, that cost nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tablets are cheaper than like gas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you can play Flappy Bird and you can watch YouTube videos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, yeah, cover, you know, you can play a couple of really simple games and watch YouTube. As far as my kids are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John concerned, it would be like indistinguishable from an iPad because they are not using any of the iPad in us of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPad they’re just literally watching YouTube forever and then playing a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco games exactly so that’s problem number one the iPad has is that like in phones I think what people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tend to use phones for kids are a different story and and I I do want to separately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco address that you know John you you and and many other people make predictions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the future of PCs being dead because their kids don’t ever want to use a PC, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of people are making that assumption based on kids who are, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think, too young to make that determination. Because if you think about the kind of things that an iPad is really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at, and the kind of things a computer is really good at, that an iPad isn’t very good at, the overlap between what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most kids used to use computers for, which is a lot of entertainment stuff, and some very light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco browsing and light work, that kind of stuff you can do on an iPad much better. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not to say, what if your kid starts wanting to like be productive in different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in like multitasking kind of ways thing things that you can do on the iPad but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s easier or better on a computer or if they develop a hobby of like you know what I want to try programming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s hard to do on an iPad again not impossible but hard and some kinds aren’t possible so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far but you know there there are things that like as kids get older if they want to type

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a type of paper for school or whatever like you yes you can do it on an iPad but in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many ways it’s easier on a computer and you haven’t met

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any kids who prefer using the keyboard on the screen than a physical one have you met those kids yet because they exist

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah no I know they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exist but they’re terrifying what I’m saying is I don’t think we can make the call to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kids these days aren’t gonna ever use computers because I think kids these days are too young to know that every these computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and for us to know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well I mean it takes it takes multiple generations let’s say we just say like it takes multiple generations for it to turn over like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said we’re all gonna be dead maybe our kids will be dead because it’s the same way that like you still do things that your parents do just because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your parents did them like it takes a while to turn over but the options

⏹️ ▶️ ^John available like you said the options available to them let like my kids are all in a house with plenty of Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and plenty of iOS devices and the only reason they ever touch the Macs is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John play Minecraft on a bigger screen and maybe that’s a valid use case it’s like well see they like they like the big screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if I had my PlayStation attached to the television they’d probably play it there with the controller I don’t know anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we can see from the iPad curve, I think the current crop of tablets, iPad and all others included,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are not yet up to the task of doing things that the kids do. So when the kids have to type papers, they do end up using it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or like using Chromebooks in school or something like that. And the Microsoft service is another take on this. It’s like, hey, we’re both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things at one. We’re the old computer and the new computer at the same time. That definitely seems like a transitional fossil to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what I’m looking at long term is like, we’re not there yet, but that seems the direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things are going. And it only takes a couple of generations of people dying before all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John concerns that we have. When someone listens to this podcast like a hundred years from now, it will seem ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we’re even debating this in the same way that it would seem ridiculous if you were listening to people debate about whether,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, people will actually be able to use a computer with a mouse to do real work. I mean, I was alive for that debate and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was fierce and people were like, you hit it on the same thing. It’s like, well, my kid’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been born into a world with mice and they’re going to only use mice. Like, wow, when they get a job, have to use a computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without a mouse to do actual work because the only computers that have mice are toy computers. That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way things go. Like so it maybe it’s a it’s a pointless thing to even talk about because if we’re all dead do we really care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that much but um i think it’s interesting in light of this ipad graph because it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the it’s the future that we think is coming but the graph shows that it’s not here yet and what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the graph may also show is that apple may not be the company to to nail it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this was their shot and either they were too early or they just they just fumbled the ball and didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know didn’t didn’t hit the mark with their first attempt at this type of product and you know as we keep saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re basically you know totally outplayed by their star

⏹️ ▶️ ^John product the iPhone which everyone has basically voted with their wallets and their feet to say this is what we want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right now iPads you know convince later maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, well because at the same time that the iPad has been going along and getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know improving every generation, the iPhone has gotten better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and bigger and the Mac has gotten smaller and lighter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so it really is being squeezed on both ends. If you’re willing to carry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something now, especially with the MacBook One, only a little bit bigger than an iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then if you need keyboard and touch input and a PC-style OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the MacBook One is going to be better for you than an iPad, even an iPad Pro, at that kind of task.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On the small end, if you need a portable entertainment and consumption

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and communication kind of device, an iPhone is now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to take a lot of that, especially with the 6 Plus line. taking even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more of it potentially, because that has the benefit of it’s always in your pocket, it’s always with you, and you probably paid less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it up front than you would have for an iPad, and all these different benefits. So it’s being squeezed on both sides.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Then it’s being squeezed from the low end, because all these cheaper tablets that also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can play YouTube and play some games and browse the web, all those cheaper tablets are coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and eating the whole bottom end of it. So it’s being attacked on so many fronts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the good thing is, two of those fronts are owned by Apple. And so, you know, it’s being cannibalized by other parts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple, so it’s not necessarily a horrible thing for Apple. But I think I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see a way out of this for the iPad anytime soon. Maybe long term. Maybe you’re right. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be right long term. I’ll give you that. But in the near term, the things that tend to improve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quickly, relatively, in computing is like, you know, the basic hardware specs, the speed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the, you know, the quality of like the screen and stuff like that. that stuff improves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the short term. The biggest challenges to the iPad I think are pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deeply rooted software architecture and software limitations and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco input. Both of which are not solved so quickly and easily. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think you know like you talk about like how how iOS could get better for productivity use and this it’s things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it’s it’s things like rethink multitasking and files and that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those are big things those take years to to possibly develop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to to to to realize that you need to rethink if you do that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a very slow-moving thing and then input is oftentimes not solvable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like there just isn’t a way to make like a 9-inch laptop with a keyboard that humans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can use comfortably you know like there’s like there’s like there’s limitations like that where you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fighting physics and, you know, the physical world and you just can’t win those fights a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of times. And tablets certainly are challenging in regards to how to fix input, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make input that is good for both casual lean back on the couch use and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also productivity use. And that is a very hard problem. It might not be possible to solve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s the kind of thing where progress is made very slowly, if at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now you’re talking about cannibalization and that’s enough. That’s a, but the other takeaway of this thing is like when you look at these little lines, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you look at that, I iPod hump, that’s like, here comes the iPod and then it arcs over and then you look at the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I forget, I tried to find this graph, I think someone tweeted and I can’t find it, but it was like a graph over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many, many years, not just like the last five or 10 years, but like from the nineties all the way up to the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. And you look at the products and it’s like a little fireworks, like the iPod launches up into the sky, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too high, then it’s the ground again. Right. Launches up into the sky and is arcing over to starting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be on its way down again You know look at the phone and the iPhone goes like into the stratosphere But then eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John starts leveling off right and so you can’t see the other side of that things are the only line on the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Graph that is basically has any kind of you know Uphill slope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the entire length of it is the Mac and it’s like way down at the bottom kind of blending with With

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the x-axis you can barely see it But you can see it is a little bit higher it does go up over your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John view a tiny little bit and it’s insignificant or whatever. But it’s interesting that that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trend line because because it started off as like the loser in the PC market. So it never had a lot of markets never had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a high height to come down from. And it has been steadily gaining on you know, it has been gaining market share while Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loses it or whatever. So it does have a good graph, you know, an uphill climb, even though it’s insignificant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But when you look at all those other things, what what Apple is hoping for when you mentioned is, alright, so Apple makes products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that make these little arcs, Every product has a lifetime the iPhone arc doesn’t seem like it’s even half over or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it’s exactly half over right If you would extend that graph out however optimistic and pessimistic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to be about the iPhone arc You draw that what you need is another lump you need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another big arch in that thing So what is the new product that is going to come like the watch isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even visible because it’s too new so who knows what? that’s going to be like but Apple’s whole thing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What is the next big thing? What is the next line? That’s going to be on our graph? Maybe the line will never go up as high as the phone or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. Maybe it will maybe there’s some VR thing out there. Maybe it’s the car if you want to do revenue because a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people have cars and they cost a lot more than a Mac or a phone. So the ASP is really good on cars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the margins are much lower, you know, so I don’t know what it is. But like, that’s, that’s one of the reasons that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John investors are cranky about Apple because they look at all these lines. And they see all these little arcs. And they’re like, Alright,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, I think we’ve played this out. And we feel pessimistically that the iPhone is at its peak, and now it’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to to go down. So where is the next arc Apple? And right now there is no convincing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer. And it’s Apple’s job to come up with that. Like and I agree with you that the iPad Pro is not going to turn the iPad thing around. Because even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if professionals love the iPad Pro, there’s not a lot of them, right? So you have to either let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPad arc follow its course down to the baseline and then start again with another tablet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ish product or you need to somehow transform the Mac into a tablet ish product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how you do that. just you know semantically how you could ever get there that’s why I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still feel like the iPad must rise again in a new form at some point in the future or if not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then maybe Apple loses that and someone else does it right maybe you know who knows what ends

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up winning in this but I just feel confident that the PC is the past and we are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the last great PC generation is already alive of people I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well it also you know a lot of a lot of people like in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our in our world walk of life here, and by that I mean geeks like us. A lot of geeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just deny the the role of fashion and trends in things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you know we try to make everything more logical, we try to justify things, and we don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fashions or fads, really. What if tablets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have been a fad? I know this is crazy, I know this sounds like the the champion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the computer trying to optimistically say that, oh, tablets are just a fad and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers are gonna come back, you know? So I know this sounds crazy and I’m not even saying I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, but I think it’s worth thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you’re not saying computers are gonna come back, though. You’re just saying tablets are a fad. It’s two separate things, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. So I think it’s worth considering, though, what if the entire idea of tablets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had their peak already and that, you know, in in the future,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the kind of casual, the future of computing was already here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco earlier than that. It’s the mobile phone, it’s the smartphone. And that, what if that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is really the future? And that tablets were just kind of this thing that, for a brief time, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole world was kind of in love with, it kind of infatuated with, but it was actually just a fad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And now we’re kind of realizing, eh, you know what? I think I’d rather just have a good phone and then maybe a good laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, I’ve considered it and I reject it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fair, but I think a lot of people are not considering that as a possibility, but I think the data

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually, like if you look at this iPad sales graph, that looks exactly like what’s going on. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just the iPad, that’s why I keep differentiating. Like there’s the iPad, which maybe Apple blew it on, and then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the concept of a screen about the size of a piece of paper or bigger that you hold in your hands. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would even include in tablets a screen that’s much bigger than a piece of paper, like the iPad Pro that you hold in your hand, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even a bigger thing that sits on your desk. I would say it’s basically a big piece of glass that you touch that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extends down to the portable range, but as I’ve always said, I can imagine a desktop replacement that is more like a drafting table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And just the utility of essentially having a magic piece of paper that can show anything that’s a piece of paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size. Like once that becomes like 99 cents, like the computing part of that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so, you know, again, as the price of compute drops to zero, of course people are gonna wanna add that because people wanna hold things in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their hand and read them and look at them and watch a video. And maybe that won’t be an iPad anymore. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll be something that comes in your cereal box that you unroll and it’s like, there’s no, and you can say, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not a tablet. It is though. It’s like basically a screen that you hold in your hand that is way bigger than a phone. And that is absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not gonna die. Whether Apple has any role at all in that product line remains to be seen, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I say the iPad is an open question. But there’s a reason everyone was all gaga. Like the fad part that I think you’re sensing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about tablets was like, oh, this is like those science fiction books I read. This is like those movies I saw. It’s like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John future. Like how many movies had, oh, you just hold this magic, even before, you know, flat screens existed when everything was all CRTs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every science fiction story, you know, back hundreds of years, like, oh, I just hold something that looks like a piece of paper, but I can show any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John image anywhere and I can see anywhere in the world and I can watch moving pictures on it. That idea is never going away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it has an amazing utility for people like us who have eyeballs in the front of our head and hands that we can hold things up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with. Like it’s, you know, unless VR, retinal imaging, or any sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interior mind type thing happens or strapped to your eyes thing, until that comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and wipes all of this away, having something big that you hold in your hand that is a screen, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea will never die because it has such amazing utility. It just could be that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not the company that either brings that to us, benefits from it, or like it gets it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right. Because if you just play out current trends, eventually what will it take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have something to give your toddler to watch whatever the equivalent of YouTube is, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe that’ll be $1.99 in a drugstore that’s a rolled up piece of plastic that the kid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can just do anything they want to and when it gets destroyed, you just throw it away, right? Because seriously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the electronics, the cost of the electronics and everything to sort of get internet access and play video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff, that’s going to, in our lifetimes, be so incredibly trivial that it’ll be nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, I was going to ask you, John, what would make the iPad, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cross that hump and be the thing, or any tablet, but, and I think you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey covered it in a lot of ways, but I was thinking, you know, when I got my first iPad mini, so this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is two years ago now, the iPad mini with retina display, I had given Erin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my iPad 3, so the first full-size iPad with a retina display,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I had given it to her and I had set it up with her iCloud account and iMessage account and some of the apps I thought she would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use a lot. And I gave it to her. And I think in those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two years, she has used that iPad five or 10 times because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it always ends up that she’s either, well, she starts with her phone almost always.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Everything she does is on her phone. And then if for some reason, something she’s working on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is easier or just better suited for the truck for her Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then she’ll go to her MacBook Air and do that thing there. But generally speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for Erin, it’s her phone and the iPad isn’t even a thought. In fact, most of the last two years, the battery has been dead because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey neither of us ever touches it. And granted, this is only one data point and that doesn’t exactly make a line

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly bears

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what Apple’s results are seeing, which is that the iPhone is going crazy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mac isn’t doing bad, and the iPad is just not even there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I mean, like, but you know, by, to be fair, by like unit sales, the iPad and the Mac are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of neck and neck right now. But the trend line is very clear that the iPad is on its way down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while the Mac is still on its way up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Barely on its way up. I went, I, Kieran Healy in the chat tried to give a bunch of charts, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the one I was thinking of. It showed all the lines together, all different colors and you just saw the only one that was like steadily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John climbing uphill like a snail over the course of decades was the Mac and it was just like hugging the bottom of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graph totally insignificant volumes compared to the other firecracker products but it’s like we’re still here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re still clawing our way up like you know that’s that’s both sad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and heartening at the same time but yeah I when I think about the car and there were some rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the car this this week everything I think like is that the next thing that’s going to I try to imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what a car line would look like on this draft. Like, imagine they do as well as Tesla, and they sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some piddling amount of really expensive cars to people with a lot of money. And the self-driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff doesn’t work yet because it’s not ready. But cars are really expensive, and so the revenues will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be high, but the margins will necessarily be lower. And it’s like, what does that line look like? Does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the car line look like the iPod line? It certainly doesn’t look like the iPhone line. Does it look like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac line, where it claws its way up? Or do they just can the car and it’s a bad idea and they should really concentrate on something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else? Like, and then the lines we can’t even think of, though, VR is the current question mark in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the world of like, is this a thing people are gonna wanna do? Because at this point, the number of people who have done VR stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just a bunch of gaming enthusiasts, and that will be the case for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what the next big thing, I remember several years ago when we were talking on the show, like, maybe the watch is the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big thing? Maybe it is, but if it is, it’s definitely got a slower ramp up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} as far as we can tell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you know, like at this point it’s still early, right? But-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The watch is the next iPod. In the sense that, not in the sense of the iPod, like it was gone now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but in the sense that like it’s an accessory. It’s something that serves a narrow range of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roles very well but that not everybody needs a device to serve that narrow range of roles. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also that is not going to replace your phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, like, or maybe just wearables in general. Like it’s just, it’s very difficult to think of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something that is ever going to be like the next iPhone, because the great thing about a phone is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John literally every adult in the world probably could conceivably use one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And that’s a big market. How many products can you say that about? Maybe cars, not really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because most people don’t have cars in the world. They have bicycles and motorcycles if they’re lucky, you know, whatever. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re just trying to think of something that everybody could find some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John utility for, for some values of everybody, and it’s very difficult to think of that. Watch is one, like, well, sure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something you hold on your wrist that tells you the time. That seems like a broadly useful thing you could sell a lot of, but you can’t sell them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that much money. And I don’t know if you’re ever gonna be able to sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everybody in the world a $691, which I think was their ASP on iPhone, $691 watch to everyone in the world. No, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so maybe they’ll just get the high end of the watch market, just like they have the high end of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone market. I don’t know. I don’t know what the next thing for Apple is, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I look at these graphs, If I was to continue the X-axis and go from 2016

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and extend that out for another 50 years and let me just continue drawing the lines

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all their current product lines, I see, like, how optimistic can you be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the iPhone line? Like, if you were to continue to draw the iPhone line, you know what it looks like. It’s a big thing, goes up, up, up, and the slope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John starts to level off. How do you draw that line? Do you just draw a straight line out into the future and say, well, smartphones will continue for the next 50

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years pretty much as is? Or do you make it go up more? Or do you make it slowly go down like the rest of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, I don’t know. We are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also sponsored this week by Fracture.

Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Fracture prints photos in vivid color directly on glass. Go to fractureme.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and use code ATP10 to get 10% off. Now, Fracture prints look amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They are these nice little squares or rectangles, or big if you wanna go big, go big or go home.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These nice little or big squares or rectangles. They offer a lot of options. And these prints look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great. They’re modern, they’re clean, they go edge to edge, they don’t need a frame or anything, they are their own self-contained

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing. They replace the need for a frame. It just looks like a nice, modern photo presentation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can hang it on a wall, or you can stand it up on a desk. They make fantastic gifts, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have them all around the house. We’ve given many of them as gifts as well. People love these things. They always compliment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them. We always hear about people, how much people love them, and you can do everything, of course, online, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s great if you need a last-minute gift for somebody. Do it all online, have it sent to them, and you’re all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco set. It’s a perfect way to celebrate holidays, fun, whatever else, you know, Valentine’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Day is coming up, you could do it for that. I really recommend checking out Fracture for these beautiful photo prints

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in vivid color directly on glass. And they’re all assembled by hand by their small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco team in Gainesville, Florida. So there’s quality checking and everything, and this is a very, very nice human, you know, small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company here that you’re dealing with, so good people over there. You can get 10% off with code ATP10.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Just go to fractureme.com to check it out. Thanks a lot to Fracture. Once again, code ATP10 to get 10%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off.

Waterproof iPhone 7?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, Marco, is the iPhone 7 going to be waterproof? We’re running a bit long, so let’s keep it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to just that question. Is it going to be waterproof?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Why? I mean, why are we talking about this now? I mean, I think the answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is probably, it’ll probably be very close. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, just like the iPhone 6s is very water resistant. It is not waterproof.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But if it happens to get wet, by most people’s estimations and some little tests here and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, it seems to fare better than the other ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It gives water a stern talking to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has extra seals, it has these extra little seals all over all the things on the board

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything. And so it is certainly water resistant to some degree. It’s unadvertised

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this way, but that is how they seem to do it. If they drop the headphone jack,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that might be a reason to make waterproofness a headlining feature because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that might help tame some of the anger that will result from losing the headphone jack from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customers. So I think it’s possible. I think the 6S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the Watch both show that Apple… The Watch, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a more interesting example of this because the Watch has openings. It has a speaker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It has a microphone. As the crown, too. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And actually, in traditional watches, the crown is usually the hardest part to waterproof. It’s opening with a moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part in it and everything. Anyway, so you have, they clearly have the ability to make things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are very water resistant, possibly waterproof. The only question, I think, is how waterproof will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it be, and whether they will advertise this as a feature, or whether it will just be quietly water resistant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way the 6S is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, that was the question. So what’s your answer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To which one of those? Like the advertising or the fact that it will actually be?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say it is very likely that it will be more water resistant than the 6S, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already pretty good. So I’d say the chances of it getting more water resistant are very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. The chances of them advertising that, I would give it maybe like a 60% chance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They probably will advertise it, but not necessarily. But I do think if they do actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco delete the headphone jack, then that would make it more likely that they would advertise that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a feature because that would help justify that decision.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think I mostly agree. The reason I put this in there is because electronic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices don’t become more water resistant by accident. So in the past, phones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have been… Apple seems to have been making more of an effort to seal them up. Again, totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not advertised as. You probably shouldn’t put your phone in water. people kill their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones by putting them in water, right? But some part of the engineering process for these phones is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if it’s not about water, maybe it’s just about dust or whatever, like they’re making an effort to seal these phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up tighter. I don’t see any reason that effort trend would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John diminish, especially since many of their competitors do try to advertise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their phones as waterproof. And Apple knows better than anybody how many people drop their phones in the toilet and come into the store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and are sad about it and and all the whole water resistance for their warranties. They have this info, they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to make their phones more water resistant. So I think the only question is, do they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start advertising, have they crossed the threshold at which they can start advertising? Because obviously they know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not gonna advertise it until they can be very sure they are with the watch, to spec it out and say, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how we think it will perform and blah, blah, blah. By

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way, even the watch, they barely advertise that it’s water

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} resistant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But there’s expectations with the watch. They under-promise and over-deliver the watch is like you totally shouldn’t put this in the water

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but realistically speaking it’s like I mean Craig Hockenberry swimming in the ocean with his like every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single week for god knows how long like if when he tells us that his watch has been killed by the water

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then we’ll maybe know that the what the limits are but seriously like it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know waterproof enough but they don’t say like you’re right they don’t say much about it because like they have the specs and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s like watch specs you can go and you can see what the little numbers are and they have all these standards or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the phone, they don’t say anything about that. Like, do not bring your phone near water in any way, right? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at some point, they’ll be able to say something about the phone with respect to water. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that is coming. I just don’t know if it’s the iPhone 7 or 8 or 9 or whatever. And if I had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put a percentage on it for the 7, I would say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John God, I so, the reason I put it in is I so want this to be an advertised feature of the iPhone 7, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just feel like that even if they did the headphone port, they need one more generation to really go full waterproof, but I hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m wrong. So I’m going to put it at slightly under 50%, but I hope I’m wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So even if they ditch the headphone port, there’s still a lightning port, right? Unless we go full inductive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, like this, there’s always going to be openings. I don’t think the headphone I, that’s what Marco said. Like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not so much to getting rid of the headphone, something makes it possible to be waterproof. It’s that it’s a nice, it’s a nice thing to be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say when telling people that you took away their headphone port.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because there are ways to waterproof certain ports and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the design of the port can make it easier or harder. I’m sure Lightning was probably designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with that in mind, with in mind to have future devices be more water resistant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to make it easier to do it. All that being said, one thing that I find promising about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is that one of my common criticisms of Apple design, especially recently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I think seems to be getting worse, honestly, It seems like the newer products that come out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oftentimes seem to ignore what customers actually need, like the problems that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco face in the real world and what we actually want in our devices, and instead give us things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we weren’t really asking for, even though they might be nice, but just things we weren’t really asking for, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco increased thinness and lightness is one of the most common things. So you get things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the MacBook One with its really controversial keyboard. I’ll be nice to it tonight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well a really controversial keyboard that was made in the name of thinness. It’s like, well we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need it to be that thin necessarily. Things like the iPhone, the best example that I can give on the phone is battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco life, where so many people would love for their phone to get better battery life and most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people don’t say I wish my phone was thinner. In general I see this happening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at Apple and I’m a little saddened by some of this. However, if you look at what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else people really want out of their iPhones, very high on the list is resistance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to damage. And the two kinds of damage that happen most to phones is water damage and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dropping damage. And so if they can make it more more durable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and more more resistant to shattering or scratching or cracking of the glass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surfaces, and if they can make it more water resistant, that will seriously benefit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a large number of customers. That is very promising in that that Apple is clearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying not only to make things super thin so John Neive can be proud of them because it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like they don’t really know what else to do with the physical designs, but they can also at least solve real

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customer problems. Things that were really big, it really affect a lot of people. So that I think is great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if they’re doing stuff like this, if they’re improving waterproofness and shockproofness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all, those will pay off big time and an actual customer benefit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So Casey, what’s your answer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that if the headphone port goes, absolutely. I think it might even be so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as, hey, we made it waterproof, but oops, we had to make the headphone port go away. It’s just the way it had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be. I think it’s probably going to be, I don’t know if it’ll be advertised as full-on waterproof,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I do think we will hear something advertised about significantly increased

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey water protection, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, or water resistance, I guess. I’m having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trouble wrapping my mind around how this would work while still having a lightning port

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I can’t help but wonder, you know, could we do not only inductive charging but inductive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey data? I believe that’s called Wi-Fi. Well, touche. Fair point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but like I don’t think you’d I think they’re gonna still have a lighting port and I think lighting port

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably because it’s their own port and they can do whatever the hell they want with it and it has always been kind of like a non-traditional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of software controlled port where it’s not as if you’re making a spec for the whole world to build and you tell them what the pin outs are and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have no control of what’s at the other end of those pins because they’re all like hardwired pins for different voltage levels or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever like it is entirely up with Apple so I feel like the lightning port is the least of their concerns like probably the trickiest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parts are like the baffles around the speakers and microphones and stuff because I mean they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done it on the watch already but to do that and still have a reasonably high quality speaker and microphone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assembly which they seem to be concentrating on and recent iOS devices it all seems within their own possibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s why I think like in the past the past few years of devices They’ve been slowly but surely gaining expertise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in how to do this all the while not telling you any about it at all and the only reason we’re finding out about it is because People

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on YouTube are dropping their phones into water and then filming it and seeing what happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco At least they finally stop blending them. I think I think that that phase is probably over Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you hear all the things like the best the best? Waterproof electronics things they just use distilled water or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without any like free ions or whatever so they can’t conduct electricity you can put basically any electronics in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or so the theory goes whereas if you use tap water or something with minerals or impurities or whatever that’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John short out your phone uh-huh yeah do not put your phone in water it’s the lesson

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like even when if they make this water resistant one don’t make it i think marco was now we’re trying to keep this just a waterproof

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like uh smart to bring up the the dropping thing because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apple is kind of stuck on that one until some kind of materials

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change because they pick glass for a reason and they try to keep making tougher glass the glass that is that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more resistant to breaking and bending like that super gorilla whatever glass and trying stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the bottom line is if they just put plastic on it would be super durable but it would be terrible like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you think Johnny Ive can’t handle things now with the camera protruding although I don’t entirely agree with that but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh forget it they they want glass because it is it feels nice it feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive it doesn’t get all scratched up and gross like all of the great qualities of glass that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love the reason why glass is the right choice for the foam the one thing it has against it is does tend to shatter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you drop it on to asphalt just the right way so I don’t know how they get out of that bind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if the whole if the goal was make it so I can take this phone and throw it on the ground like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m spiking a football and it survives

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} make the whole thing out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Fisher-Price plastic like it’s not as if there’s a hard drive disk head to crash inside there is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John durable all except for the fact that it would feel terrible if we made it Out of Fisher-Price plastic and it would get scratched up and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would look gross and it would be a worse product So at least waterproof is something they can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John With with dropping not quite sure what they can do there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and instead we all just cover our phones in cases that look like big Fisher-Price plastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, some people do I mean my case is not saving my phone Did I tell you that my wife dropped her

⏹️ ▶️ ^John her big plus? No Oh, that was a while ago. It was like a week after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she got it, and it just like slipped out of her pocket or whatever, from basically waist height onto

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the cement sidewalk, completely shattered. Ugh. That’s why you get AppleCare Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, in her defense, the Plus is really easy to drop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, it was her first, like she was getting used to. It was in the silicone case, but that didn’t save it. But yeah, no, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shattered, we all see shattered phones all the time. I just feel like there’s no way out of that other than to keep leaning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your glass manufacturers to make it stronger and better. but the, you know, until we get transparent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aluminum, I guess, from the Star Trek movie. Wow. Would that be worth something to you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we’re done. All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harry’s, Squarespace, and Fracture. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show 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 So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Syracuse, it’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t mean to Too accidental, Tech Podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long

Post-show: Inductive charging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Why do we still have a lightning port? Why not go inductive charging and just say the hell with it to having a port

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My friend has one of those things I forget what it’s called like the key charger or something Q I or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He uses it with his iOS devices It’s a case that you basically put on your phone and it plugs into your lighting port and it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very thin case because all really Has to do is have a big like sort of inductive contact thing and you just put it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on he likes it You just put it on these little stands and it charges it. I would assume slightly slower

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Than the other things but yeah, why did they not have that? I don’t know. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely sure it is a clean win. You think, isn’t that better in all ways than a wire?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Setting aside performance entirely, is it better? I don’t think it’s better in all ways than a wire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the charging thing takes up more room.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because imagine if you’re traveling with your phone, you go to plug it in in a hotel or something, look at what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is with the watch today and imagine it like the watch but bigger basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Bringing the watch with you is kind of a pain in the butt because that big cable and it like doesn’t really stick very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well to it and like when you’re like traveling somewhere that kind of sucks whereas the phone like you plug in this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it holds you can like you can swing the phone around like like a rope from the cord

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it holds it I mean you shouldn’t but you probably can and it will probably hold like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a cords are just really really practical in the real world even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are totally unsexy and they they offend the sensibilities of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco geeks like us for like why can’t everything be wireless? But the reality is, in practice, they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just really good, really simple, really cheap, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they suffer from very few of the downsides of inductive charging. I know speed is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a big issue. How much current you can get through an inductive charger at once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco safely in that kind of situation, I’m pretty sure that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the court still wins at a pretty big margin and looking forward to the future, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be ideal if our phones charged even faster, especially if the batteries keep getting smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It would be ideal if they could charge faster, which means more current, which means the cable will still win.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So it- Super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capacitors, that’s all you need. We haven’t talked about that. Super capacitors, that’s the current five to 10 year technology that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna make our phones charge in 15 seconds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well you still need to get all that current across though. But you were mostly addressing inductive, but I think the other thing out there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole try not to cook the people in the room by carefully directing microwaves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to exactly where your phone is sitting in that case you would go to the hotel you would have all your devices with you and all you do is plug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one wall or into the wall and it would charge every device in the room at the same time hopefully not cooking your insides

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it does it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah I need to be sleeping five inches away from one of them yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know like technically you can do that kind of sort of I don’t know if that would be legal but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I’m trying to think of things that like I’m trying to think of things that would be with that would be a clean win because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think we would all agree that if that could work and not cook people you know using whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technology you want to make up about some future technology that would be a win because it’s better than plugging things in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t have to have a bunch of pads with you it does all of them at once and it’s just it’s fire and forget like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same way that Wi-Fi is like oh now you know for most people I don’t have to wire my whole house up I just put this one thing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the corner of my house and then internet is everywhere if you put what put this one thing in the corner of my house and charging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is everywhere that would be cool I would buy that if it didn’t cook me.