155: Edit, Crop, Aspect, Original
05 Feb 2016Trying to find the functional high ground in a long, horizontally scrolling list.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Serial numbers on serviced Mac logic boards
- Long-distance wireless charging
- Shared iPad developer guidelines
- Walt Mossberg discovers the functional high ground
- Apple app design
- Photos.app UI design
- Apple TV UI design
- Why are we so critical of Apple?
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post show: The state of Apple hardware
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Chapters
- Follow-up: Mac serial numbers
- Follow-up: Wireless charging
- Follow-up: iPad multi-user
- Sponsor: Audible.com
- Walt Mossberg’s high ground
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- Backup pillows
- Photos.app UI design
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)
- Apple TV remote design
- Apple TV UI design
- Why we criticize Apple
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Apple hardware
Follow-up: Mac serial numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John What what’s happening? Why like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matthew Cox wrote in to tell us about serial numbers and logic boards We have actually gotten a considerable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of feedback about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But I guess so much feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess John that you felt that Matthew’s feedback was perhaps the best summary So would you like to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John Anytime we ask any question the Apple geniuses or the ex Apple geniuses all come out and this was about a serial numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John and motherboards and where the serial number being etched into metal on various Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John computers and what if you get parts replaced that the serial number is attached to. The only thing that the
⏹️ ▶️ John geniuses couldn’t tell us is facts from my past that I can’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m old. I have this vague memory of getting some part swapped in
⏹️ ▶️ John the distant past that none of these guys know about because they probably weren’t Apple geniuses then because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stores didn’t exist then or maybe I don’t know. The idea was that I got a computer back and
⏹️ ▶️ John then they were like oh just so you know your serial number We will be different now because we’ve replaced the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that determine that but anyway in this modern day and age in Some as of now
⏹️ ▶️ John and some indeterminate time in the past that I can’t remember back to All of the motherboards that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells are apparently able to be flashed with the serial number So when they give you one they just you know They put they put
⏹️ ▶️ John your old serial number into it So your serial number of your computer doesn’t change even if they replace the part that contains the serial
⏹️ ▶️ John number I put Matthew Cox’s thing in here because he had the interesting bit that
⏹️ ▶️ John Each part is factory repaired to reuse three times before being scrapped So you’re supposed to only flash
⏹️ ▶️ John three different serial numbers into there Although in theory there’s you could bypass that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to And what else did he have in here about
⏹️ ▶️ John the stickers the ideas you’re not supposed to be able to see the stickers sometimes There’ll be a part that’s replaced that has an etching on it
⏹️ ▶️ John in those cases This is the technician is supposed to use permanent marker to note the serial number. Obviously, this is not in a visible
⏹️ ▶️ John location. You wouldn’t see it. But some people send us screenshots of the permanent marker thing like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They need to write the actual serial number on the part if it’s not etched into it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John on the inside in some place that you won’t see they just in their little scroll handwriting right in this
⏹️ ▶️ John serial number and why I wouldn’t want to know that’s on my computer. So if it is, don’t tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those do you think are in your monitor? Your cinema
⏹️ ▶️ John display? I hope none because I well who knows I don’t even want to think about it. Anyway the
⏹️ ▶️ John external case on my monitor is the same I can tell because it’s got all the scratches they put into it every time it gets repaired.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey their fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John They always ask in that survey like how is the external appearance of your thing and it’s like it’s fine like a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John person won’t notice it but it’s literally impossible to handle things like this that are just like this
⏹️ ▶️ John perfect anodized aluminum Finish heavy things and
⏹️ ▶️ John like moving them around it’s impossible to not get scratches on it So they do every time it goes in and out
⏹️ ▶️ John Small ones that mostly you can’t see but anyway And the final bit I thought was interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple? Are starting to put serial numbers on other internal components?
⏹️ ▶️ John and He says this ensures that no three-way swaps are carried out For warranty scams and also that each part is reused
⏹️ ▶️ John three times these parts usually have tiny QR codes on them about half the size size of a small fingernail, which
⏹️ ▶️ John require expensive barcode scanners to scan and which are declared during the repair process for tracking purposes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John not just like big things like your motherboard or whatever, but even the little tiny parts, little, little tiny serial numbers and little,
⏹️ ▶️ John little tiny QR codes to keep track of them all and to make sure that they’re right. And they say that the
⏹️ ▶️ John technicians like it because it’s much easier just with the fancy barcode scanners to scan the tiny little QR codes
⏹️ ▶️ John than trying to read tiny little alphanumeric codes through a magnifying glass and copying them down because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the zeros look like 8s, you know, look like Bs and all these other problems on these tiny things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought this was interesting that the serial number proliferation and using all
⏹️ ▶️ John that with, you know, sort of modern techniques to track it to make sure that the parts are used three times and then trashed
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. So never fear, your serial number will not change. Although part of the process
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people wrote in about was like, the technicians are really supposed to give you your new serial number because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you get it and they don’t give it to you with your old serial number into it or with no serial number into it lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff won’t work like I message will be all cranky if you don’t have a serial number or any sort of thing that’s derived from the serial number
⏹️ ▶️ John and involving like authentication or you know like your hard drive and all your data will all be the same but the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS and the computer will be very angry if either they forgot to put a serial number on it flash
⏹️ ▶️ John it into the motherboard that they replace or they put a different one into it so
⏹️ ▶️ John this I forget someone was telling us that the techniques they used to make people remember it. But anyway, if everyone’s doing their
⏹️ ▶️ John job right, you shouldn’t have to worry about this issue at all. You’ll just have to think maybe a little bit about someone’s handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ John and permanent marker on the inside of your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. I just want to see your face if you open up your computer one day and see somebody’s chicken scratch in there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in Sharpie. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ John I only accept the etched in signatures of the original Macintosh team, which I do have on the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John of a couple of my computers in the attic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness, all right.
Follow-up: Wireless charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell us about long-distance wireless charging John
⏹️ ▶️ John that was at the end of the last episode I think talking about you asked about a Casey like inductive
⏹️ ▶️ John charging like what if there’s no lightning port What if you just have to put your phone on like a pad or a mat or some other thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s way the watch charges where you don’t plug something into it, but you just rest it on something
⏹️ ▶️ John and Marco was talking about how that’s maybe not such a great idea because you got to have all these pads and
⏹️ ▶️ John Even the watch is annoying with its little pad that comes in and you know And then I threw out
⏹️ ▶️ John like the idea of well What would be something that everyone could agree would be great is if you didn’t have to put it on a pad
⏹️ ▶️ John or plug it Into anything you just plug something into the wall in the room And then
⏹️ ▶️ John all the devices in the room get charged somehow it gets power wirelessly from that location specifically targeted
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And your liver yeah, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John threw that out there as a thing But apparently lots of companies are working on this tech will throw
⏹️ ▶️ John some links in the show notes This is an Ars Technica article that links to a Bloomberg article that talks about companies
⏹️ ▶️ John doing stuff like this. Of course, there are competing standards and they’re saying the current ones are much slower than
⏹️ ▶️ John plugging into wires, you might imagine. And the other link we’ll put in the show notes is to Artemis,
⏹️ ▶️ John that company with the P-Cell technology that we talked about a while ago. Oh, yeah. Is anything going on with them?
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole thing with them was like, besides the thing that they were promoting, they had that little teaser at the end of their intro
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, and there are other applications that we’re thinking about for this technology that we’re not ready to discuss. And everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who wrote about that story was like, we think probably what they’re talking about is power delivery because their cool
⏹️ ▶️ John technology was like that they could use computers essentially to calculate
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct interference pattern to exactly target the devices that are in range.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they would sort of manipulate all the big overlapping bouncing waveforms with like sort of a feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John loop until it would hone in on wherever your phone is. And it would track it
⏹️ ▶️ John like you could be you know They had a thing like you can go to carb once you go over 70 miles an hour It’s not fast enough to keep up with
⏹️ ▶️ John where you are anything like that But for people just walking around holding their phones it would use interference
⏹️ ▶️ John as an advantage instead of a disadvantage Using the power of computers to figure out this complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John math to exactly target. So what they’re basically doing is taking you know electromagnetic radiation and
⏹️ ▶️ John Concentrating it in a fairly small area. It’s just it’s just Wi-Fi, you know, it’s there or cell signals it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not radiation that’s going to do anything harmful. But once you have that ability to basically say I can
⏹️ ▶️ John take electromagnetic radiation and targeted a very small area that you can move wherever the hell you want, we’ll keep up with wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. Then if you crank up the power, you know, like, you know, some
⏹️ ▶️ John form of delivering energy through the air to charge a battery, you can’t really crank it
⏹️ ▶️ John up ambiently, because like then, you know, if you put all your your devices in a microwave and it that
⏹️ ▶️ John that bombards it with lots of high energy electromagnetic radiation but it does it uniformly
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t like everything in the microwave is hitting that you can’t make an entire room
⏹️ ▶️ John a microwave oven not that you’re saying I use microwave radiation but anyway you really need to target it because if you target it then
⏹️ ▶️ John you can crank up the power and everybody else in the room doesn’t get a huge amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John power thrown into them just the spot where you’re targeting it does you still have to stay within reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John safe limits which is why I keep talking about cooking your internal organs and if they’re off on where they aim it or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to target a small area is what gives you the ability to turn the power
⏹️ ▶️ John dial up even at all both practically speaking because you because you’re concentrating
⏹️ ▶️ John in a smaller area and also because if you start to get into the realm depending on what wavelength
⏹️ ▶️ John and signals are using start getting into the realm where they could actually affect the human body
⏹️ ▶️ John at at the very least, you’re not just, you know, doing it to every single person standing in the room. You just doing it maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John to the hand that’s holding the phone or whatever. So I imagine that the companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that are working on this tech are working on it at such low power that it’s not does not pose a harm
⏹️ ▶️ John to humans. Um, and it’s probably not as fancy as the peace self thing where it exactly targets
⏹️ ▶️ John with this constructive interference thing. It is probably much simpler and lower power than that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for a situation, the reason I was thinking about this even not just like oh you show up in the hotel room and you just
⏹️ ▶️ John plug this wall or and all your devices charge even for at home. Is it like
⏹️ ▶️ John plugging in your phone before you go to sleep? It’s got eight hours to charge doesn’t take eight hours to charge your phone takes way less
⏹️ ▶️ John than that. So if I could just not have to worry about plugging in my phone if whenever my phone was just on
⏹️ ▶️ John my nightstand anywhere on my nightstand not on a special pad or like even just anywhere in my bedroom.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I knew that if I put my phone anywhere in my bedroom and go to sleep when I wake up in the morning you’ll be fully charged and I have to do nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John I would buy that thing like because you don’t care how slow it charges you’re gonna be asleep for many hours and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John you know maybe it wouldn’t work for an iPad because sometimes it takes forever to charge but even just the very simple very
⏹️ ▶️ John low-power version of this that didn’t require me to remember to plug my phone in I’d buy that in a second so
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope these people working on this get it done sooner rather than later just watch where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you put your hand on your liver at night
⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be so low power though but it’s barely trickling and maybe you’ll keep me warm in these
⏹️ ▶️ John New England winters when it’s 60 degrees here today or whatever.
Follow-up: iPad multi-user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us about the shared iPad development guidelines, which I didn’t even know was a thing until I saw this in the
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about last time was like the education.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. No, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John beds. Yeah the multi-user account thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure I just didn’t see the developer guidelines until tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is just a public URL So if you want to go to it, you can see like the guidelines for like say you’re gonna write an application
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be on one of these shared iPads in a classroom where you got 20 different students They could all quote-unquote log
⏹️ ▶️ John into your iPad at any time And it’s all the same things that we thought, just following
⏹️ ▶️ John up on this to put the URL in there. The guidelines are like, make sure you put all the data in the cloud. This is for app developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re writing an app that you want to be well-behaved, put all your data in the cloud, pull the data
⏹️ ▶️ John down when you need it. Every time someone does something to change the data, shove it back up into the cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the little things that you’re used to keeping locally, like first launch
⏹️ ▶️ John or progress flags, like have they launched this app before, what screen were they on, or whatever. stuff that you
⏹️ ▶️ John used to keep like in a little p list locally don’t you got to put that in the cloud to otherwise every time someone logs in it’ll be like they’re first
⏹️ ▶️ John launching it over and over again. And use all the API’s that Apple’s added
⏹️ ▶️ John over the past few years about marking your storage as purgeable by the OS so I can come
⏹️ ▶️ John through and say I’m allowed to delete that because the app has told me that it is available elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if I deleted it’s fine because again, you have 20 students, they can’t all fit their data on there. As multiple students
⏹️ ▶️ John log in, and new data gets pulled down from the cloud, it’s going to inevitably evict data from the like the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who used it five logins ago and they talk about you know
⏹️ ▶️ John using the various API’s for syncing stuff but and so these guidelines this
⏹️ ▶️ John is you know it’s for it’s for shared iPad which is their education thing but these
⏹️ ▶️ John same guidelines are very similar to the guidelines they’ve given to people on iOS and even
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 again with the the marking your data as purgeable and doing everything with the cloud and
⏹️ ▶️ John so that Less state is kept on a local machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s even closer to the Apple TV where the Apple TV from the start They even they specifically say you have no persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage only iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep And then you can and your app can’t even be that big so half your app has to be pulled down on demand as
⏹️ ▶️ John well So these are these are like guidelines many people pointed out like this is like slowly inch by inch
⏹️ ▶️ John Creeping up onto the Chromebook model, which is you know, of course, there’s nothing on this computer This computer is nothing this computer
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically a local cache of some stuff that lives elsewhere where nothing is ever canonically on this computer
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a great idea and Google just skipped everything and went right to there and your whole OS is a web browser and so on
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth Apple is slowly moving up to it very slowly but every little
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Walt Mossberg’s high ground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Audible for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So earlier today, Walt Mosberg discovered the functional high ground.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, this year, I don’t have to say anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year. Everyone’s doing it for me. Yeah, I know. You just planted the seed. You incepted the tech press. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco tense of inception. Anyway, so the point is. That sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross. I’m sorry, tech press. Whoops. So anyway, so Walt wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on The Verge an article about how he really feels like Apple software quality has gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downhill lately. And so there are a couple of quotes I wanted to pull out and read really quickly. Um, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Walt Mossberg again. Uh, in the last couple of years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple’s core apps on both the mobile iOS operating system and its Mac OS 10 platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John He doesn’t know what the name of the Mac operating system is. That’s fine. While we know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while pursues big new dreams like smart watches and cars, fast forward a little bit, but the exceptions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are increasing. And I hold Apple to its own higher, often proclaimed standard based on all these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, it just works quote claims of the oft repeated contention by Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jobs and his successor, Tim Cook, that Apple is in business to make quote, great products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, Apple’s advantage is that it designs and builds software together. So if the software is an excellent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does the superlative hardware a disservice. It was, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a pretty stern lashing that I thought that Walt gave, And he seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, from what I’ve read of Walt Mossberg, he seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally like Apple stuff quite a bit. And he said in this article, you know, I still think the iPhone is the best smartphone. I still love their hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But man, the software is, it’s getting a little crummy these days. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fascinating to me to see someone at the verge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which clearly has a readership that surpasses Marco dot org, you know, someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there saying, you know, guys, things are looking a little rough these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know if you guys have anything you’d like to add about this. But I mean, at what point and I feel like I’ve asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this question to you guys a thousand times. At what point does Apple recognize this and start to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John This article, like so many like so many articles that Walt Mossberg and those people used to writing like it’s necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John has to be like it’s almost as if he’s writing for a newspaper column inches that he can’t he’s not going to go
⏹️ ▶️ John on for just pages and pages as some people are known to do. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get in and out quickly, but it also means that he can’t really support his contention
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly well. Like it’s just kind of like, look, if you already agree with me, then you will enjoy my complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John session and I’ll cite a few small examples, but there’s no there’s no like systematic
⏹️ ▶️ John support for the thesis. No attempt to explain why it’s just like, you know what? Sometimes things don’t work for me and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John cranky about it. And immediately jumped to I think this is part of an overall trend, but by
⏹️ ▶️ John being just one more pebble in this little mountain or whatever, it doesn’t really matter what he says in this article.
⏹️ ▶️ John All that matters is that there’s an article on this topic, yet another
⏹️ ▶️ John article on this topic. Gruber wrote about it too. A lot of people have been reacting to it because he’s Walt Marsburg.
⏹️ ▶️ John Dow Ripple too. Yeah, because he’s Walt Marsburg and because the Verge is a big site or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the media, sometimes there are these fads where people get on a kick of like, you know, complaining about a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or harping on a particular topic. So there’s there’s that to look for it as well. And that like, once
⏹️ ▶️ John once a sort of a narrative gets out there, every publication wants to have a piece either about that
⏹️ ▶️ John topic, supporting it or you know, surrounding and that comes and goes. So we know how that works. But as Gruber points
⏹️ ▶️ John out at this point, you know, marker wrote his thing a long time ago. And he like was like last year or something. Yeah, 13 months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And and he wasn’t the first one to complain about Apple software quality. And he won’t be the last. But the fact is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’ve had these flare ups, but it’s not as if it just goes away and people go a year later, no one will even be
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about Apple software quality. Like I would feel like it’s multiple years at this point. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could say that, you know, part of the media narrative and the sort of feeding on itself that they’re getting more strident
⏹️ ▶️ John and urgent. But I even ignoring that, just saying like that, they’re not going away, that this, this story seems to now be evergreen,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could write the story, you know, every few months you could write the same story.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as Gruber points out, he sees a lot of people reading the Walt Mossberg thing and agreeing and doesn’t see a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people disagreeing. And in some respects, like you can say that makes sense, too, because, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s got complaints about their computers. It’s like, you know, complaining about work or traffic like everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, yeah, no, those are all bad things, right? That may be true. But especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for something like Apple, if it was a if it was a non story, you would have all the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who fill the traditional role of calling BS on people complaining about stuff that Apple does like Apple is,
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like anytime someone slams Apple for a reason that seems ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John or unfair or holding Apple to different standards than other companies or whatever, there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of press to fight back against that. But I just I just don’t see it for these type of stories where
⏹️ ▶️ John people like, you know what, that’s not fair. Apple stuff is actually really because everybody’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not living up to its own thing. That’s what Mossberg said that Gruber said that a lot of people said that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s Apple’s own standards that we’re holding them to. It’s not as if we’re demanding that they be different than other
⏹️ ▶️ John companies because just for the hell of it, their whole value proposition is we are better than the other guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John We make the hardware and software together. We make the best products in the world. And so the fact that this can still be a story,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the story, not the individual articles
⏹️ ▶️ John or the details of them or what people are cranky about or what anecdote each person puts in their thing, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that you can just keep writing these stories. And I feel like you couldn’t have written them,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, maybe like in a time, think of a time when Apple, where people
⏹️ ▶️ John would have said, no, that’s not true. I have a Windows 95 computer. It’s been nothing but problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I got this new Mac with iLife and I’m able to do all these amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And it is just so much better and nicer and so much more understandable. And I couldn’t make heads or tails
⏹️ ▶️ John on my other computer. So if you’re saying that Apple doesn’t know how to write software, you’re crazy because I think their software is great. Yeah, all software has
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. there are bugs, you know, that’s what you would have gotten if you had done
⏹️ ▶️ John this during one of the more you know, one of the the times in history when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John software was more unimpeachably good. But I think over the past, I don’t know, I’m gonna say five years or
⏹️ ▶️ John so, not that it’s like they’re going downhill, or it’s like they’re sliding off into oblivion. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been enough of an annoyance for enough people that you can write these stories. And people go,
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems about right. Like maybe your individual problems aren’t a big deal. haven’t had your individual problem, maybe you’re overblowing
⏹️ ▶️ John it for the sake of like getting, you know, views and being dramatic or whatever. But the general
⏹️ ▶️ John theme that Apple software quality doesn’t seem to live up to the standards
⏹️ ▶️ John it sets for itself people, I think people broadly agree with that. And, and as Casey points out, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Apple doesn’t broadly agree with that. But like, at this point, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the bit the Gruber had at the end that like, the fact that we’re still talking about it a year later, and that the consensus
⏹️ ▶️ John reaction is one of of agreement suggests that Apple probably does have a software problem and they definitely have a perception problem. Like whether
⏹️ ▶️ John their problem is real or not, I think even Apple has to admit even Apple, if you disagree as a company
⏹️ ▶️ John that all these articles are overblown and you have your own metrics that show your software quality is better than ever and blah, blah, blah. You
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely have a perception problem because I feel like all of us out here are just reading these articles and going,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah, that’s pretty much the case. It’s kind of a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, when I first read what much first article today, I was honestly a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disappointed in in that there that it wasn’t better backed up because I think the examples he chose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were not for the most part they were not like widespread it said it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were all kind of like weird things that happened just to him however when I thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it more and I started seeing everyone else articles the reality is like everybody has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own set of weird Apple bugs and stuff that happened to them
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t forget Walt Mossberg has this special concierge treatment where if he has any weird problem, weird
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that happen to him,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple people parachute out of the sky and help him debug his problems. That does not happen for regular, you go into the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John store and buy a device and you have something that you can’t figure out. No one from Apple calls you and has like the guy who
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote the software walk you through debugging procedures, right? Only Walt Mossberg gets that, which is totally skews his perception.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he has written in the past about, hey, I had some problems with this device, but Apple helped me out and blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, it’s great that you’re telling us this, but geez, like, don’t you realize that’s not going to happen for anybody else. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to be stranded, right? And so it’s like, oh, it’s just, yeah. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this, that’s why I tried to like underplay this particular article was just like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John old man yells at cloud, like my software doesn’t work sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and it’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John it but it’s like I said, it’s just one more little pebble, one more little pebble in the giant pile that everyone just chucks their own little pet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And the reality is, you know, some of this, you can look back at any part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s history and you can say, well, there were always problems. Some people think, oh, everything was better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Snow Leopard, but no, it wasn’t. There were always problems with every release and there’s always been bugs and shortcomings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all their stuff. Anytime you can point back in history, it was never perfect. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think my thesis from last year that blew up so badly that, yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never been perfect, but the list of asterisks just keeps getting longer and longer and longer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that has only continued now I I’m not personally having as many problems now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I did a year ago because the whole discovery D fiasco caused a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me but even that even simply happened back then a lot of people said well I don’t have that problem but I have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these other problems you know and so like everyone has different problems and I think the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone has enough problems to to be agreeing with these things the the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think this is not just a perception of an overall quality decline, this is a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall quality decline, is just that the world we live in now has so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, so many services, everything is constantly changing, everything’s in flux,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is harder now than it’s ever been to maintain high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality. And Apple’s simply not doing it. They aren’t maintaining high quality. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems pretty clear that they It isn’t that like they’re, you know, evil or stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just seems like they can’t maintain high quality. You know, actions speak louder than words. I mean, they told,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the quote they gave Walt Mossberg. In response to my inquiries about this, Apple said, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have dedicated software teams across multiple platforms. The effort is as strong there as it has ever been.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s probably true, but you know, you get an E for effort. That doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, see this, I, this is a pet peeve of mine. It drives me nuts. right here. Somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Tim Cook excuse something by saying the team’s working really hard on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know what? I don’t care how hard the team is working. That is your problem. That is the team’s problem. That is not my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is how you talk to yourself and your team internally. That is not how you talk to the public because the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t give a crap how hard the team is working. The public cares about results.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes they care that like it seems like you as an apple don’t care about this and sometimes part of the damage control is saying
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, we really do care like as if you can speak for the whole company, but I believe they really do care. Like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Gruber cited his interview with Phil Schiller where he talked about these issues again a whole year ago. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like, you know, it’s keeps coming around and around. And I think a lot of things in that, that interview,
⏹️ ▶️ John like all we have, there’s only inside I haven’t like what the hell’s actually going on on Apple. But the image I have in my head of what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on is explained by the, the, the venues that I think they’re doing badly. And one which I talked about at length
⏹️ ▶️ John is the whole cloud services thing, which they’ve always been weak at and that more and more things are cloud service based. And so if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John bad at cloud services, the badness spreads more. So let’s set that aside for a second. The other thing that the thread
⏹️ ▶️ John that both Gruber and Walt Mossberg are talking about in this round and not so much what you were talking about last year is
⏹️ ▶️ John not really like uh, the OS or like something
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with the software in, in the sense that, that, uh, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it bugs and stuff like that. Just like application design, like your application.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, they don’t seem to be as good as they used to be. They’re not as simple. They’re not as understandable. They do weird things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber’s thing was that like photos told him that five photos couldn’t be uploaded, but he couldn’t figure out how to tell which
⏹️ ▶️ John five photos like application design decisions. And the reason I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this goes back to the Phil Schiller interview. The reason I think Apple probably is less inclined to agree with this is that the metrics
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve chosen seems to me the metrics they’ve chosen to put on their
⏹️ ▶️ John software efforts is one, they don’t have a lot of good metrics on how well things interact with the cloud because obviously it works in
⏹️ ▶️ John test and it works when we connect to our test server and it works from in blah blah blah but then if it doesn’t work for people out in the field oh
⏹️ ▶️ John well internet demons we don’t know what’s going on right but
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to me that apple has really concentrated and i hear this from apple engineers on like
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s a crasher if something that crashes the application that needs to get fixed and i think apple software over
⏹️ ▶️ John the past few years has crashed way less than it has in the past i can’t even remember the last time I had like an Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, application on either iOS on the Mac, like a crash at all, let
⏹️ ▶️ John alone a repeatable crash, like every time I do this, the whole app crashes, like I really think they have really reduced crashes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you think that’s great. Isn’t that great that they reduce crashes, right? But maybe concentrating
⏹️ ▶️ John on that has taken their eye off of the other balls, which is one application design, which I want to talk about a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more later. I have this item in the show. And it’s about photos, right? About about like how you make the application
⏹️ ▶️ John and to cloud services, which doesn’t show up as a crash, it just shows up this data that doesn’t sink. And as cloud infects
⏹️ ▶️ John every single application we have, that becomes maddening. So, Margot, you’re talking about the functional high ground with stuff like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the naming service just plain doesn’t work. And that’s not really a crasher either. Even if the demon was crashing behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes, you wouldn’t see it, but it’s just stuff doesn’t work. But I really feel like Apple’s OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and their applications have way fewer crashers than they did back in like, I keep going back to like the leopard days and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But I think the crash all the time, it’s like, you know, and or even the classic Mac way is going back farther,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that they’ve made such progress that they must feel really good about themselves internally, or their metrics must be all looking
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but they don’t realize that crap discipline doesn’t work to perform the desired function, either because the app is designed wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John or because it’s trying to connect to some cloud service and doing the wrong thing. And people just have no recourse other than to stare at their screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and hope their note will appear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is it was very clear to me last year, I kept hearing from from people here and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondhand. I kept hearing that internally Apple was caught by surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that article was getting traction because they thought everything was fine. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by their metrics, everything was better than it’s ever been. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great if your metrics cover everything, but nobody’s metrics cover everything. That’s impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so in reality, you’ve optimized for the metrics. You know, and I see Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this a lot recently. I don’t know if that’s a Tim thing or if that started before, you know, before Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in charge, but it seems like Apple’s really heavily, you know, into data-driven decision-making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And I think there’s so many flaws with that. And number one starts with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what is the data you’re basing these decisions on? And is that telling the whole story? Is it accurate? Is it being gamed?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, things like that, as these problems are very challenging in any kind of organization that tries to measure anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think we’re just seeing the the the ways that falls down you know and and one of the ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco falls down is like if they’re measuring quality by number of crashes well there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bugs that don’t cause crashes and it doesn’t seem like we’re reducing those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in fact we seem to be increasing them and as you mentioned with services like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of the bugs that I see now and now that discovery D is is fixed as far as I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the bugs I see now are interactions with Apple’s services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. Whether it’s the Apple TV trying to play media from iTunes and failing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for God knows why, or showing a bunch of weird password dialogues on the phone for store purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything like that, weird stuff like that. It seems like it’s the interaction with the services that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is falling down so badly. We will definitely talk about design flaws, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a separate category. But the actual failures and bugs so often are service-related that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are actually hitting here that I don’t think Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measuring the right things. If they don’t think there’s a problem, then their metrics are a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the seat of the pants thing, like the way that we would imagine in the fantasy scenarios like how does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John have such great quality? Well, it’s because Steve Jobs uses the products and if anything goes wrong for him,
⏹️ ▶️ John he comes back and yells at people and they fix it, right? That’s the silly fairy tale of how quality was maintained
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the Steve Jobs days. But the reason that fairy tale works for us is because we can picture in our mind
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s the thing everyone asks ourselves like, don’t these guys at Apple actually use their products again? I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to contact syncing, which is you would think the simplest possible thing, very small,
⏹️ ▶️ John very bounded data set, not complicated data. It’s basically all text, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you just want to have the same contact. You want to enter contact on your phone and have it show up on your Mac. you want to enter content on
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac and have it show up on your phone, you just want them to be in sync with each other. Like and maybe you have an iPad in it, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like it should be a problem that is so incredibly boring and licked that it just works every time. And yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much once every 1.5 years, my wife comes to me and says, I entered some contact
⏹️ ▶️ John here and it’s not showing up there. And then I have to do a bunch of rain dances to make that work. And I’m like, seriously,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing this again? This is happening again? It’s contact syncing. And you’re like, and you think, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook have contacts in his phone? he like when he’s on his phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John enter someone’s contact information and then come back and go on his iPad at work and
⏹️ ▶️ John be pissed that that contact information isn’t there. Like that’s not a crasher, but that should
⏹️ ▶️ John show up as hey, contacts doesn’t work for the job that it’s supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course, he has no recourse because you just sit there and you stare at it like maybe the contact will show up
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually should I try signing out of iCloud and deleting all my local data off the device. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John What should I just you know, first you got to do all the stuff of like, backing up all your car like I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John this so many times I know all the steps, but there’s no way in hell regular person’s gonna do all these things. And you just, you just sit there and
⏹️ ▶️ John you stare at it and that stuff like that with services. What How do you put a metric on that? The only metric
⏹️ ▶️ John is Steve Jobs tried to enter a contact and got mad and came in and yelled at people like, I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John you like, cloud services company need to measure that and they need to get good at measuring that but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem to like it when problems like that happen for a
⏹️ ▶️ John for a problem domain that I think should have been solved like decades ago. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes me lose faith in everything else. I can’t get contacts right? Like forget about the complicated stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that just they should just spend the next five years saying contacts will
⏹️ ▶️ John always work right? I don’t I’m not even talking about like little things complicated scenarios simultaneous use.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying like, you enter it on your phone, you come back five hours later, you look on your Mac and it’s not there and
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know why and you wait two days and it still doesn’t show up and you just scratch in your head and that makes me want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny because my contacts thing to my knowledge has always worked perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never run into the iMessage problems that so many people run into. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier today I was trying to airplay something to our brand new Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I cannot think of a device in the house that isn’t on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey latest and greatest version of iOS or, or OS 10. And I go to airplay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Apple TV and I see family room, space, peren for print. Oh, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house has been infected. Clearly, the only option is to burn it down and start a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, did the airplay
⏹️ ▶️ John work, though? That is the real
⏹️ ▶️ John consider yourself lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Exactly. I don’t know. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you guys have said is my experience as well. Like it used to be that I would have almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no glitches or random errors or issues. I mean, it would happen from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time, but very rarely. And I feel like and I don’t have a list in front of me or anything like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’m just allowing myself to be influenced by what, you know, the press is saying, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do feel like I’m seeing a lot more small issues these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sometimes big issues like the IMAC, the first IMAC. I’m just seeing these issues from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time that I never used to see before. And Erin and my parents are coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me and saying, oh, this isn’t working right, what can I do? And my answer has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a very sad shrug a lot more often lately than it ever was in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because because what can you do like that’s that’s the thing with these with these sync issues and to bring up another
⏹️ ▶️ John one I heard recently on a podcast I think it was the talk show I don’t remember someone was talking about like oh I just use the Apple bundled notes
⏹️ ▶️ John app which has improved tremendously in capability you know like you can do all the drawings in the notes app and you can do like rich text
⏹️ ▶️ John and pictures and all this stuff and it doesn’t use IMAP as a storage back and it’s like a modern full-fledged notes application
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m using it so much more I practically I practically use it as they were saying I practically use it as a
⏹️ ▶️ John like as a replacement for like paste bot or like those copy and paste things where you will essentially copy something on your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to be able to see to paste it on your Mac, so they’ll just enter it in notes, and then, you know, put
⏹️ ▶️ John down their phone half a second later launch notes on their Mac, and the note they just put on their phone is on their Mac. And they’re all amazed
⏹️ ▶️ John at how fast it syncs. And that’s a success story. That’s the way it should be for all these things, because hey, it’s not a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John data, I just pasted like a URL, for instance, in notes on my phone. And then I’m going to open notes on my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that URL will be sitting there. Well, I also have a notes document in the Apple official notes application, which I do use,
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s just a bunch of URLs that I frequently tweeted people because they’ll ask like, hey, where is Casey’s blog post on all the toasters
⏹️ ▶️ John you reviewed or something? And I don’t have to find the URL again. So I go to the notes thing. And I added that URL
⏹️ ▶️ John note. I don’t remember a couple weeks ago I added it. And then several days later, I went to my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and you know, someone asked a question about something I was going to tweet a reply with URL and I open notes on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and the URLs note wasn’t there. And so I picked up my phone on my desk where I had added the note like several
⏹️ ▶️ John days earlier. I looked at it on my phone. There’s a URL note there. Did I add it to the local only one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I know there’s the cloud and local ones. Nope, it’s in the cloud one. I put the phone down. Then I look
⏹️ ▶️ John back at the notes application on the Mac. And then I went to the iCloud system preferences. Yeah, notes is checked. You know, it’s syncing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And then I quit notes and I forgot about it. The next day I came back again,
⏹️ ▶️ John launched notes to get a URL. The URL note wasn’t there. There’s no like refresh button to click.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing to be done except for I could have signed out to iCloud or unchecked and rechecked the notes thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m like, what does a regular person do in this scenario? And I thought about something
⏹️ ▶️ John like Dropbox, where when I launched Dropbox on my Mac, a bunch of little spinners
⏹️ ▶️ John run, a bunch of little badges appear on icons. And at a certain point, it’s synced. Like I know when I launch it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John syncs everything in my Dropbox. When the little badge is gone from the Dropbox icon on your bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some faith based on years of experience that Dropbox is satisfied that it has successfully synced everything
⏹️ ▶️ John to my computer. Were I to quit Dropbox and relaunch it, I know that on launch it would say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John better make sure everything in the Dropbox is up to date, and then we’ll show a little spinner, and then it will go away. And yet with Notes
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac, when I launch it, if the note I expect to be there isn’t there, like Casey said, I don’t know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John shrug my shoulders. And so I just quit it, I quit Notes, and then I came back a couple days later
⏹️ ▶️ John and I launched it, and my URL note was there. Like, that’s not a success.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t, there’s no crashes. Apple’s metrics must look great on that, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s happening, why? Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey maddening because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like and especially for something you hear other people, you know, saying great things about like
⏹️ ▶️ John when it works, you’re just like this is awesome because you’re excited the same way that people like I want it to be boring like Dropbox where
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s not the most efficient and fanciest thing in the world. But over years of use, you know, and Dropbox has its
⏹️ ▶️ John weird corners where it saves your conflicted copy with this weird parenthetical name and it can get confused and complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John scenarios. All I want is the easy scenarios to be so boring that I never think about them. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t launch Dropbox with trepidation, wondering if the data that I expect to be there will be there. Even when
⏹️ ▶️ John I run out of my quota or whatever, it puts a little red badge icon, and all I have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is free up a little bit of space, and it notices that I freed up space, and it resyncs things. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should just be boring, right? It shouldn’t be this mysterious roll of the dice, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then when it does work, you have no idea why it started working. Because literally, I didn’t even try to debug this. I didn’t try to change it. I went like
⏹️ ▶️ John a week, a week and a half with that, that one note that I added on my phone, not appearing on my Mac and eventually it appeared
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have no idea why. And so that’s why, like, you know, like Casey, one of my relatives asked me questions. I’m like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, I’ll take it to the Apple genius. Like I don’t want to do the rain dance for them. There’s no obvious solution. They’re not doing anything wrong as
⏹️ ▶️ John users. It’s just, it’s just a constant source of frustration for things that should be boring at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. And I, and I give Apple a total pass at the edge of the envelope where they’re pushing the envelope, doing complicated things.
⏹️ ▶️ John give them a pass on things like Siri, that’s really hard to do. Natural language, like just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, make easy things easy, make hard things possible to throw out more, you know, pearl catchphrases,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Easy things are not easy. A lot of the time, uh, even when
⏹️ ▶️ John hard things are possible, it seems to be no connection between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. My favorite, uh, persistent bug that was around for a long time and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolved itself and is now come back rearing its ugly head, crippling my ability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to respond quickly and easily with emoji is the keyboard text replacement that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built into the system. That’s all synced via iCloud as far as I’m aware. So this is in, if you’re on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system preferences, keyboard, and then the text tab. I use these to quickly type emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I use constantly. And when I got the new iMac, none of them synced. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still, as far as I can tell, syncing between my iOS devices. They used to sync between my iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices and my Mac, but now they’re not syncing with my Mac. and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no course of action to diagnose. I have no way to figure it out. There’s nothing I can do to fix this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all you’ve got are the rain dances, because you know what the rain dances are. You know, sign out of iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John disable that syncing, delete and recreate your account. Like all these things, you’re trying to basically kick the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John into gear to say, go do that thing that you think you need to do where you synchronize data, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the sneaking suspicion that it thinks it’s synchronized, but you know it’s not because you can’t see your emoji shortcuts, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks it’s done. You think it thinks there’s nothing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, that’s exactly right. Well, and also like the rain dances that, you know, like, you know, John, you said, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you send people to the genius, like the geniuses can’t do anything really.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I want them to walk through. Yeah, I want them to walk through the steps. I don’t want to be the one walking through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and those steps are horrible. Like if anything involves either like restoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone or even like signing in and out of iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with modern computers and modern devices, If you’ve bought into Apple’s ecosystem, if you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos, if you use music, signing out of iCloud is an incredibly destructive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action. You should never, ever, ever have to do that unless you’re like selling a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then sign out of iCloud and format the whole thing. Signing out of an iCloud on a modern Mac, if you have stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in photos and music and everything, and if you’re using all the sync and everything, that is risky. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated. It is time-consuming. It can possibly waste a ton of bandwidth. You might lose data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t do it right. And it won’t necessarily work. Yes. And although the sad part is, unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how often it does actually solve the
⏹️ ▶️ John But… Although when it does solve it, I always feel like, so I’ll see you guys here in a month when
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t work again. Because it’s not like you’ve actually solved the problem. You’ve just restarted the counter
⏹️ ▶️ John on when things will go awry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so to me, if anybody at Apple is considering it a success when you can solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem by signing out and signing back in, like, no, that is not a success. That That is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you saved your butt on that particular instance of that bug by putting people through a really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invasive process. But that should not be standard operating procedure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should not have people not only having to do this, having to sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into iCloud and delete all the crap and then re-sign back in and re-download all the crap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have to restore your phone, which is even worse than all that. You shouldn’t have people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this on a routine basis to solve seemingly random and somewhat frequent problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because a that’s really destructive now and be once people get into that habit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like quitting all the apps in the app switcher once you get into that habit years from now people are going to still be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this thinking it’s going to solve all their problems that like that’s going to be like what what annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power users tell their relatives oh you just got to restore your phone oh you just got sign out of my club and sign back in.”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That causes damage for years to come in people’s superstitions way beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time when you’ve stopped needing these horrible solutions. So it really is a long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damage being done here in so many ways, with the quality issues and with the remedies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. I just get the feeling, and I hope I’m wrong. I hope this is just Apple putting on a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face because they don’t really share a lot. But I just get the a feeling that Apple is either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oblivious or in denial to these problems and also that they’re defensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I hear from Apple people, they’re usually very defensive about how well they’re doing and they think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a lot better than I think they’re doing. Maybe I’m just the least lucky person in the world, but it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like everybody has these stories about random stuff that just doesn’t work right for them or has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failed for them or has has done bad things like this is a big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I won’t I won’t be the you know the I won’t hedge my bets and say well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either it’s real or there’s a perception problem no no it’s a real problem like this is a this is obviously like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is way too big and widespread to be just a perception problem you know I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier I write a blog post I forget I’m sorry I forget where it was but somebody was saying like you know modern Microsoft stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no better for them it’s a huge mess for them too or like you can look at other makers you can at Microsoft, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at Google, you know, you can say, oh, well, everybody has problems. That is also not a defense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, yeah, everybody has problems. You know what? Everybody else makes crappy PCs. It doesn’t mean the Mac can be crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like, that’s not how Apple works. That’s not why any of us use Apple stuff. So, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there are examples of things that are better. Like, it’s not like you’re saying, oh, nobody is better. That’s not true. I just named
⏹️ ▶️ John one, Dropbox. Dropbox is better at syncing files. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. You know, so like, it seems like Apple, from what they project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the outside world, again, whether this reflects their internal thinking or not, I don’t know, but what they project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the outside world is, everything’s fine, we’re working really hard on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything’s fine. Like, that’s, that is like, that is what we hear from Apple. And the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that everything’s not fine. And I just, I really, really hope that they see that, because all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hear from them usually is defensiveness.
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Backup pillows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to have her for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ John with her and i have a look at the tidbits i think probably they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in the future and read because they sent uh… they said you guys to i’m assuming uh…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yet she’s going to look at the sheets and the pillow and
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m assuming is going to be some and read in the future it’s been a call to me tell you about the casper is not all but i’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already got the pill and i’ve been sleeping sleeping with it and i gotta tell you i’m very impressed by this bill like
⏹️ ▶️ John i i read all little people piece of paper that comes with the pillow about how the design a idea at what i was a
⏹️ ▶️ John super picky about close and I was in the market
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for you. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was very impressed by this bill, like the stuff they put in that little card like,
⏹️ ▶️ John he specially designed it to be supportive and you can sleep in any position. And if you’re just like, Yeah, blah, blah, blah, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John pillow, right? I gotta tell you, this is a hell of a pillow. We’ll probably talk about it in some future ad read.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m thinking of ordering a second one just so when this one wears out, if Casper like doesn’t make this pillow anymore, I’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John a backup. You gotta have a backup pillow. I do you have to I’ve done this. I’ve made the mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John before with my stupid slippers that I’m wearing now. I didn’t buy two pair and it wore
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out and now I can’t get them again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, two is one and one is none.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, maybe I should buy three. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a closet with two pairs of shoes in it that are replacements for the pair of shoes I wear every day because in case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doc Martin stops making them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, you joke, but the Skechers shoes that Matt Alexander loves to make fun of me for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are not making them anymore probably because Matt called in a favor so I wouldn’t wear them anymore and I had one backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pair but now I’m out of backup pairs and I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s terrible. the worst.
Photos.app UI design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. You guys alluded to app design and you had some thoughts about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me prime the pump a little bit and ask, what the crap is the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in photos? Because I’m not, I added all of my pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to photos, which I hadn’t used in at least a couple of years, if not more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And outside of much easier access to shared photo streams, which actually I should point out very quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work flawlessly for me. And I have zero complaints about them. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is photos really doing for me? Like there, there doesn’t appear to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to look at pictures by location. There’s the faces thing, which I never really trust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got photo stream access. You can, okay. Yay. But, and, and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see all my selfies that I take all the time, I guess. So what is the point in photos?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is it doing for you that makes it worthwhile?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you can perhaps spring from that to why is photos a piece of crap?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think photos is a great starting point because I can answer your questions. And I buy at the same time
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about the app design issues because they’re both related to photos. I guess I’ll talk about this but my specific
⏹️ ▶️ John photo complaints in a future thing. But just addressing your concerns like what is what am I supposed to be using photos
⏹️ ▶️ John for? This is an app design philosophy that really is kind of separate from the like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do things work is my data sinking, you know, measuring, uh, crash or metric instead of something
⏹️ ▶️ John else. But it’s kind of related in a lot of the time people are complaining about Apple software quality. Sometimes they’re complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about things don’t work. Sometimes they’re complaining about cloud stuff, but sometimes they’re complaining like even when everything’s working exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John as it’s supposed to be, as it appears to be for you and photos, people still don’t feel the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are as useful or as interesting or has fun or like they’re not giving them enough value.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I trace a lot of that back to the design philosophy that started many years ago on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically. I mean, I guess you could talk about an iOS a little bit, but on the Mac, I really feel it where
⏹️ ▶️ John someone somewhere, I’m not going to say it was Johnny Ive, but it is in keeping with his his hardware ethos,
⏹️ ▶️ John but who knows, decided that complexity is the is the enemy
⏹️ ▶️ John in software design. And that’s basically true. a lot of Apple’s great software designs have been like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s simplify this application. Let’s you know, Steve Jobs, whole big thing. Can we, can I just have one window
⏹️ ▶️ John that like I just drag a thing onto it and makes me a DVD. Like I just want one window. I don’t want a million buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want a million pallets and toolbars and all that other stuff. And you remember like those old pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Microsoft word, uh, what version was it on the PC? Was it, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John office 95 the one where like you can, if you put every, uh, bar and word out
⏹️ ▶️ John on a 640 by 480 screen, you had like one line of text left where you where you could type stuff in like that
⏹️ ▶️ John was, you know, and Apple’s reacting against that to simplify, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it really kicked into high gear, I think maybe around Lion or something where they took applications, but even
⏹️ ▶️ John back when it’s just iPhoto, it’s like iPhoto, which had been, you know, they’ve been iterating on it. They’ve been making new versions of
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhoto. They’ve been adding features and and doing all sorts of stuff. And then someone said, you know, we got too much crap an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, there’s too many toolbar buttons, there’s too many like, you know, options, the whole customized toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And then we have buttons in the bottom. And then we have a sidebar. And then there’s regions in the sidebar and groups and subgroups.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we have a floating panel for keywords. And it’s just there’s too much stuff, we need to clear all this crap out
⏹️ ▶️ John of iPhoto. Again, this is before photos. And so they, they went through and they like said, like this big top
⏹️ ▶️ John bar and photos, get rid of pretty much all those buttons, the bottom bar, get rid of the bottom bar entirely the sidebar, what can
⏹️ ▶️ John we remove from their floating palettes? How many of those can we get rid of? What things do we not need in the menu commands? Options
⏹️ ▶️ John for showing the keywords underneath photos? Nobody uses that except for Syracuse. So get rid of that feature and never bring it back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just removing, removing and simplifying. And that instinct of simplifying, I think is admirable
⏹️ ▶️ John and the correct one. But you know, as whatever that I forget it was that designer
⏹️ ▶️ John whose name I can’t remember is like everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. They
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve crossed that line. And what it has led to like, you know, going through iPhoto and then going to photos, photos is even
⏹️ ▶️ John more like remove everything don’t have any buttons or
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets or things like have just like the minimum number of things you can possibly see on the screen as if as
⏹️ ▶️ John if visual clutter is the number one enemy a visual clutter isn’t enemy and conceptual clutter
⏹️ ▶️ John and complexity those are enemies but at a certain point you have someone like Casey was like I launched photos and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like an unadorned window with a bunch of my photos in it and I’m like what does this do for me? What can
⏹️ ▶️ John I do? Like, the silly field they used to have that had like
⏹️ ▶️ John the star ratings in iPhoto, you would look at that and if you’re familiar with like iTunes you were like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John what does this do? It’s got these little empty white stars and as you click on them you could click on one, two, or three and you would see the contents
⏹️ ▶️ John of the window get filtered. Like, oh when I click this thing up it’s like a dedicated field for quickly filtering by star rating,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s maybe like a UI too far but at least you could very quickly say, oh that’s the way I can do things,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you would lead from there to the little menu that would pop up from the bottom bar that would let you do more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John filtering on the view so you could view by location and stuff like that. All of these things that used
⏹️ ▶️ John to have toolbar buttons that have either been removed entirely from the application or
⏹️ ▶️ John hidden away under some other little button or menu item, it’s like what do you think we want to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John the application? Do we just want to go there and see our pictures and scroll through them? Then maybe Photos is a good application. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John the application is capable of doing anything else, say I want to organize my photos, I I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort through them into piles and make little albums. Maybe I’m going to make a calendar at Snapfish and I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to find all the good photos of the kids for the past year by season and I want to sort of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, or I want to edit my photos. Are all the editing tools hidden behind a sidebar in a mode that like are
⏹️ ▶️ John not visible or whatever? And it’s all the more galling when I do it on a gigantic, you know, 5K iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John huge 27 inch screen with these massive toolbars going along the top and bottom and these
⏹️ ▶️ John sidebars and there’s nothing in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s no buttons. is buried, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is buried under seven clicks that I have to get to. It’s like, what are you saving the space for? That empty space in
⏹️ ▶️ John the toolbar is making Casey not understand what the hell this app is even good for, and making me, that I know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John app is good for, have to click seven times to get to the features I wanted. Like it should be as simple as possible,
⏹️ ▶️ John but no simpler. People want to feel like the application is there to help them do things,
⏹️ ▶️ John not wipe the entire slate clean and like, oh, everything should be like, whatever, deferring to your content,
⏹️ ▶️ John like your content should be the star. people want to do stuff with their content, let them have buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John easily accessible to do the most common operations. And yeah, maybe the old way of like, oh, we’ll give you a customized toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ John with a million toolbar buttons. And you can decide what you need use most often. And you got to design your own application basically by direct like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s the wrong answer to but they’ve gone way too far on the Mac specifically made applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that just make a mockery of the massive screen that I have. And it makes people feel like makes people feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like the applications are yes, less useful. And I feel like they are less usable either because people won’t discover the
⏹️ ▶️ John things they can do because they’re too hidden or they they’ll know the things they can do
⏹️ ▶️ John and get frustrated like I am having to click through 17 different buttons every time they do an operation they do all the time I want to crop
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to you know straighten I want to adjust some white levels and I don’t want to click a million times
⏹️ ▶️ John like I do that over and over and over again every time I do it I have to reveal these layers of UI
⏹️ ▶️ John that are hidden underneath the you know the magic cloth of don’t clutter my UI that’s not clutter that’s what I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the application for. I need, you know, so they need to strike that balance and they’re they’re not currently doing it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I think a lot of people use Apple’s applications and just feel like something is missing. Like the excitement
⏹️ ▶️ John of like using the original iLife suite of like, wow look at all these things I can do. And yeah it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated. I’ve never done it before but like there’s like three or four or five buttons and once I learn what they do it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like you do this, you do this, then you do this, and you drag that over there and you get a thing and you get a movie and you and you can play music
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can burn a CD. Like the old versions of these applications had had way more visual clutter
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. But people could use them to figure out what is this app good for? And then how do I use
⏹️ ▶️ John it to do that thing? Right? And at some point, the solution to everything was,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t show people butts anymore. Don’t show people pains, don’t show people windows, hide everything under as few things
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible. And that’s the solution. I feel like that is that is sort of part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfaction, like getting back to Gruber’s complaint was like, he was in photos, and the little tiny text was like the only
⏹️ ▶️ John friggin thing in the entire gigantic bottom bar my 27 inch monitor was like a little text message that
⏹️ ▶️ John tells you like you have X number of items in your library accounting for Y number of megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John and he had a little message that said like failed to upload five items and his his reasonable question
⏹️ ▶️ John was what five items what what you know so so what did he do in that there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John there he clicked on the text the completely featureless text like like ios 7 and on has taught him
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a slim chance that if you click on that text, like just plain text, not even like embossed, really just like
⏹️ ▶️ John plain text. Maybe if I click on the text, it will tell me Nope, like five items failed to upload. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying they’re staring at you like taunting you like five items failed to upload. And you’re looking around
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re looking around the bar. And then you just start going to the menu bar and go like, tell me what items failed
⏹️ ▶️ John to upload show a log window like no, no chance is going to be a log window. Are you crazy? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just no, you know, nothing that can tell him how he’s supposed to fix this problem. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s for it, which is a bad sign because if someone using your application Apple and it’s telling you something in their recourse to eventually go to Google and
⏹️ ▶️ John he found like a support discussion, they said, Oh, if you make a smart folder and you make the smart folder filter on items
⏹️ ▶️ John that have failed to upload, no user is going to figure that out. And then it will show you the reason the things failed upload and you’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John divine the reasons they failed to upload on your own, which he eventually did and solved this problem. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John all in the name of minimalism, it’s like I don’t want anything on that bottom bar except for text. Should the text be clickable? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be. If something goes wrong, What should we do? No dialogues, don’t pop dialogue up in people’s faces. Don’t have a status
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. Don’t have an activity window. Don’t put all those confusing things. And most of those things things are right, but their solutions,
⏹️ ▶️ John their solutions are wrong. It’s making an application that is less useful, more frustrating to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I guess I guess it doesn’t crash, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, I use the photos app, you know, Casey, honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it a lot. However, the reason I like it a lot is because I don’t do any editing in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing any of the editing drives me nuts just like what John was saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what are you doing with it? Because I’m not, maybe I’m just having a dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment, but I don’t see anything that this does for me other than maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making a gazillion albums and doing a whole lot of manual management that I have zero interest in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What it does for me, and who knows what it does for everyone else, what it does for me is a few things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, it is one unified place where I can have all of my photos synced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be visible not only from my main computer where I’m like working on them and storing the full res versions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also to be synced onto my phone, my iPad if I ever take it out of the drawer, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my laptop when I take it on vacation. And so I have access to all my photos everywhere. And I know there are other solutions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can do this as well. However, I like this one because it’s built into everything and syncs really, really, really fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. So that just having all your photos available everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least for basic viewing. I love that. That’s number one. Number two is it’s another backup. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a safety because I do the iCloud photo library thing, of course. So it’s kind of another backup for just my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos that in case everything else goes wrong, you know, maybe someday I’ll need that. We also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the sharing thing like in between like between like our family and friends. We do often do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shared photo albums like if we go on like if we have, you know, if we go on a trip or something or we have friends over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or we see we go visit some relatives, we’ll make a shared photo album for that and we’ll send everyone the link afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so for all these things it does work fairly well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The share photo album thing, the UI for how you invite people on the Mac is horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does overall, the functionality does work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you love that little pop down thing from the toolbar, this tiny constrained window that you can’t resize that it
⏹️ ▶️ John is deadly. Like there are so many clicks you can do. You can do clicks in that window that the entire content disappear and since
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no like save button you’re like did it just auto save my deletion of every person from this shared photo I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done that like three times accidentally to my entire family and said I have to invite you all again click on the thing in the email
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use Gmail you can’t click on your iOS device forward it to your mail address that’s an Apple mail
⏹️ ▶️ John like all these Byzantine instructions and and that UI that frustrates me so much that little tiny UI like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got this huge screen and I’m only inviting like 15 people in my family to this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you’ve got this huge screen and yet I’m forced to to edit it in a buggy view,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a capsule view, you know, like in Mail, where it shows everything in little capsules or whatever, a buggy capsule view that
⏹️ ▶️ John periodically erases everything with no sort of save functionality. You just need to hide the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and assume that it is autosave or something. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco worst. It’s the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a lot of UI problems in photos. And I agree, John. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree that overall, it It does seem like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a similar way that if you wanted to make a criticism of their hardware designs, my criticism for their hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designs recently has basically been like basically everything, just getting like, make it as thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible and it seems like they don’t have a lot of other ideas. And that isn’t always true, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the overall like, if you had to pick one dysfunction that they have, that seems to be the most common one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In that same way, in the software design, the main way the software design fails or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fails most often is that they oversimplify something to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are favoring the way it looks. And so it can make great screenshots or it can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great ads or great presentations or something, but when you actually have to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, the way it looks is getting in the way. The way it looks is making them make decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make it harder to use or more confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s actually a metric based support for that too, because a lot of what they’re doing is removing features like they’re not just
⏹️ ▶️ John hiding them, but they’re they’re flat out removing them. For example, your options of how to sort the main view and photos
⏹️ ▶️ John are drastically reduced from iPhoto, right? Fewer features means
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer possibilities for testing means fewer bugs, right? So there is actually a metric based motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John for this is, do we need to have all those features? How many people do show keywords under the photos? What if they have too many keywords,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it busts our layout when we use this new, you know, iOS collection, iOS ported collection view,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have an unlimited number, like, I’m just, you know, harping on my pet features. But like, the fewer features you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John the less stuff that can go wrong in your application, the fewer crashes you have, the fewer scenarios you have to test, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a metric that is appealing, internally to Apple, if your goal is let’s write more bug
⏹️ ▶️ John free software, make your software simpler, it benefits the user a certain point, because like most people don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you should simplify it. And if they want a more powerful one, they should get the pro feature, whatever. And it also benefits Apple in that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are making more reliable software by removing features, but they just go too damn far.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you get to the point where Casey’s like, so this is just a generic window frame with my photos in them? What the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is that? What do I get? What is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And the Photos app is… Everything is so buried in… And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what I refer to, I’ve referred to it before as the junk drawer philosophy of design, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still have complex products. You still have complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality. Having one app that stores every photo you’ve ever taken on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of your devices and cameras and that can do all these edits and all this sharing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this management. I think you can still order books from it, right? Maybe. Like all the features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are still part of this that they haven’t killed, that is a complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of features. And so there is going to be some minimum level of just required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity in any app that encompasses all of those features. And it seems like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple considers great design is, as you said, basically just like delete everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great design is to have an app with no buttons anywhere until you enter modes. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is bad design. That is great visual design for marketing screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is horrible design for actual And Apple has, you know, they’ve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was not like a post Steve Jobs thing or Johnny Ive in power thing. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started earlier, this started way before that. This started with Steve and earlier. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time now been a little bit out of whack in prioritizing visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appeal a little bit too much over usability. And you can see this going all the way back like, you know, like when they get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visible scroll bars and windows and stuff like that. There’s so many examples of this in OS X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in iOS. And of course, iOS 7, I think, went really far in that direction, and probably a little bit too far in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the way to manage complexity in the interface is not to just hide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all behind drawers and modes. Like, there are better ways to design apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sometimes, it will make for a screenshot that has a few objects in it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t your content. That’s fine. That’s software. This is, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what this is useful for. If that makes it useful, like, right now I have a photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app where editing it looks so pretty that I never do it because you have to enter like three different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modes to get through the controls that I wanna use every time. Like, even rotating a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo. Oh, I took this with my phone held in a weird way and I wanna rotate it 90 degrees. It’s like four clicks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tap the crop icon, right, because you wanna rotate that. Sounds like crop, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John crop thing, there’s a rotate thing. and just keep tapping until it’s rotated the right direction and
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy the animations between each one of those mode switches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it just seems like all of their design now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way too heavily focused on visual and marketing appeal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like not only have they not cared about making it harder to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in favor of that, but it seems like they don’t even know how anymore to make it easy to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like whatever talent existed at Apple that was able to make things easy to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no longer in power or is no longer there or something. It just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that group is gone. That is fundamentally what frustrates me so much because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the ability to make such great stuff. They have so many smart people who work there. They’ve done it before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They used to be so much better at prioritizing usability. Again, it was never perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were always examples of them prioritizing looks over usability, but I think they’re worse in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. I think they’re worse now than ever in a way that looks are taking too much precedent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over usability and I do think that lies right at Johnny Ives feet because I think that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate at which that has accelerated coincides exactly with Johnny Ive being made head of all software
⏹️ ▶️ John Not exactly, but did he get changed? I really think 10.7 is where it started to happen on the Mac because that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John I really saw it like where applications that they’ve been year over year and always tend to come bundle like contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John and address book or whatever, that they just got features just ripped out of them. And I think that was before
⏹️ ▶️ John johnny I’ve came over like, again, the simplicity motive like, it’s, it’s positive, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, that’s usually the right move. A lot of the guidelines that Apple talks about in their UI guidelines are telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John to simplify only, you know, but like, you just have to know, like, you can go too far, it is, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John really possible to go too far, both with removing features, which again, is very attractive to everybody involved
⏹️ ▶️ John and with hiding features. And it’s just it’s like I was just had a brief glimpse when you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the possible Apple car you I which I’m sure will be much smarter about the car you I than this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the equivalent of my iPhone of frustration is if the Apple car came out, and every time you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John indicate a turn, you would press on a touchpad to the turn indication function and then and then you’d press on the
⏹️ ▶️ John touchpad which direction you want the indicator to go and then it would reset to the it would reset to the main menu each time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, you know what, One of the controls that you use a lot when you’re driving a car is the turn signal. It
⏹️ ▶️ John should not be two button presses away on the touchscreen that you have to glance at. And so what, you know, you said
⏹️ ▶️ John what you use photos for, what I use it for, Casey, is basically what Marco said. It’s, you know, I do iCloud backup and my photos
⏹️ ▶️ John are everywhere and so on and so forth. This is actually my wife’s photo library because she’s got the big library and they don’t understand how families
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Separate issue. Um, but also I do all of my editing there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t do any fancy editing, but pretty much all the time I am cropping, rotating, adjusting the lighting
⏹️ ▶️ John before I throw it into a shared library. I also go through and I do my favorite. So basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John the photos go in there. I have to like manually import the ones from my phone anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I go through them all and I favorite the ones I think are good. And at that point I might also
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust them. And then if I’m doing something with them like oh I want to throw these into a shared stream or we want to make a calendar or I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to you know do something with the photos. I do the editing there and
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I always want to crop, I probably want to rotate isn’t really bad at holding cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John perpendicular to the you know, parallel to the horizon or whatever. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John really crappy at that. Anyway, I always want to do those things and all of them like nine clicks away. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is one click away in this application? Nothing is do it. Can I quickly filter the images based on writing? Nope, that’s not one click away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I do like a quick smart like nothing is one click away. Everything is like two, three clicks away and
⏹️ ▶️ John cropping cropping is the worst. I just want to kill the person who made this feature. Edit, edit, crop, aspect,
⏹️ ▶️ John original, edit, crop, aspect, original, crop, aspect, original, edit, crop, aspect, original. How many?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you just remember that I always want original is the default, even if you’re gonna make me click 700 times to get to the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t even remember the aspect that I want. And then you get to drag and they changed the way dragging works in photos. And it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit weird. But oh, it’s like, what? What do you think? And I asked the same question, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think people use this app for? There are features there. Why is every single one of of them Barry. Surely there’s one. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the controller where all the buttons are the same size. Surely there is one or two features that you think are the most commonly
⏹️ ▶️ John used. Make them super obvious. In Overcast, there’s a big honking freaking play button because most people play audio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco had put the play button under three menus that you had to go through and students straight across now had to play
⏹️ ▶️ John this podcast. Go to options, go to playback and hit the play button. No, it’s like a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John play button in the middle of the screen. You can’t miss it. It’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s assume for a second, because I spend almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no time editing and no time categorizing my photos, which is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s assume for a second I want to go to a photo from when Marco and Tiffany and I were in Germany.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How the hell do I do that? I guess I search like, but if I know the date, I just have to fart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around with the scroll bar until I know the, until I land on the right date. Like it’s just, it’s insane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that there’s no like jump to date or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhoto world I would go to the lower left and right next to that little rating thing there would be a
⏹️ ▶️ John little pop-up that you click into a pop-up a calendar widget and you could just click on a date and it would immediately filter it would immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John filter the main pane view to that date like because like you said that’s a common thing
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I quickly go to a date there should be a always visible button that you can click that pops
⏹️ ▶️ John up a calendar thing to let you pick a date from it like if that’s a common task and I think it is a common task
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ve got literally two feet of gray put something there like
⏹️ ▶️ John that much this was like a centimeter worth of space it was like a little field that you can click in for the rating and like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John like a gear menu or a pop-up thing like it was it was even a little bit too hidden back then but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you what are you saving all the space for like what do you get in the end of the person with the most unused gray pixels wins
⏹️ ▶️ John well this is what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like this is this is bad design this like this It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that this looks prettier or this is clunkier to use. Design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not about how it looks. It’s about how it works. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why Steve Jobs said that and everyone always quotes him on it. Modern day Apple, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, has forgotten that or has deprioritized that too much. Now it is all about how it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we hope it kind of works well. And there is no better example of this, in my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a lot of the UI on the Apple TV and we have to also include Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Now hold on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco there, which we should. We should do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sponsor break first, that’s going to be long too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only should we do that, but I would also like to compliment photos because as John was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking and I was lamenting, how do I go to like, you know, our trip, I did a search for Nürburgring,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not type the umlaut on the first U, and sure enough, it came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. So kudos to photos. I still would prefer to have an easy way, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s just a keystroke, to jump to a specific date. But I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to type out Nürburgring and because all of these were taken with an iPhone and they’re all geotagged and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, it did find, if not all of the pictures, then darn near all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures almost immediately. So points for photos on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s why they can convince themselves that it’s okay to remove all this stuff. They say, well, regular people don’t want to deal with all these buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be better if there was just a search field that everyone can use that would just do the right thing. But we know that Apple still
⏹️ ▶️ John lags behind Google in general in the, hey, here’s a box where you can write random text and we’ll figure out what you mean. Google does that
⏹️ ▶️ John amazingly well. Apple does it less well, but is getting better at it. But the bottom line is sometimes, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re doing that quickly, that’s fine. But say you were going to, you know, pick three pictures to
⏹️ ▶️ John make fractures of from the Nürburgring thing. You want to make sure that you are seeing all the pictures you
⏹️ ▶️ John have from the Nürburgring. So the merely the search wouldn’t be good, but you’re like, well, maybe some of them came from someone else’s camera and they weren’t geotagged
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d want to you know date wise when you were there right so you would inevitably eventually say
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I just really want to see all the photos from date x to date y and so you would be forced to figure out how to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the ui and like it’s great that the search box is there for quick things like that but the next level
⏹️ ▶️ John down of like I just want to do a specific date search the job of good software is to
⏹️ ▶️ John make that task simple enough that people can figuring it out people can figure it out like that they
⏹️ ▶️ John they can figure out without making like a a smart album and using some UI to set Boolean expressions and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John there should be a simple friendly UI that regular people can figure out, like an obvious way they
⏹️ ▶️ John would say that they would just learn through the language of using the application. If I want to see things by date range,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s this calendar widget, it pops up, I can pick a start date and an end date, and it filters the window. And that’s very modal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it means I can’t do anything else in the main view or whatever. But it’s simple enough that people can use it. But and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing you’re asking to do is just one step more complicated than And let me just type random search and hope the
⏹️ ▶️ John application figure out what I want to do. But still, I think is within the realm of functionality that an application like photo
⏹️ ▶️ John should do. It’s not, you know, aperture or light room, or it’s not like a pro level application.
⏹️ ▶️ John But regular consumers have to do these kind of tasks too. And the job of the application
⏹️ ▶️ John is to make them able to do them, not to say regular consumers will never figure out how to click
⏹️ ▶️ John on a calendar widget. I’m just have to let them figure out that they can type in a text box.
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Apple TV remote design
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Apple TV. Oh boy, you know, the Apple TV makes me so sad. It really does. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, the Apple TV is kind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of exemplifies all the problems I’ve been talking about tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, because I like most things with the new Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John The remote, I would say, is in keeping with what we’ve been talking about tonight, But I have to admit that the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that it has the Plex app on it and that I’ve been using it more and that most of the other apps that I do play video when I hit the button
⏹️ ▶️ John is really giving me a more positive attitude towards the Apple TV lately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree that the remote is a little rough and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John still think- A little of the remote is a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I still think that the up, down, left, right buttons work better for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the silly mini touchpad. But all in all, I really do like my Apple TV. So Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laid on us, what’s wrong with the Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we should just briefly go over the remote, you know, just for the sake of completeness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, we’ve talked about it before, but I think this remote is like the hockey puck mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it is something that was designed only for visual appeal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and such at the expense of usability and just basic ergonomics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The remote is just, it’s a design disaster. That’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it is, I am not going to say it’s nicely designed because it looks nice, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not nicely designed. I will say it looks kind of nice, but that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not mean it’s well designed. And the fact that that came out of a design division at Apple, they should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at that and feel sorry they put that out there and make a better one for the next generation, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not good design. If so many people have trouble with this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just me, it isn’t just you guys, I don’t know a single person who has an Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has not had some kind of problem with that remote design, whether it’s picking it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upside down and accidentally inputting things into the touchpad, not knowing which way is up in the dark, not knowing which button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is which, which button is where, what the buttons actually do, which one is kind of the home button. Like, that is a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design failure. And that is the primary input method for this device. So that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small deal. This is a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what let’s assume for a second that the touchpad was okay, which it isn’t but let’s go with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What on God’s green earth made them use? menu for back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that’s basically what it does is go back and the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For home why not use the little rounded rack that’s been on all these iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until touch ID became a thing Why not use the rounded rack for the TV button?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the round and rec doesn’t make sense because the icons aren’t little rounded things like they are on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John You know like that’s that’s the mnemonic for that and menu I give them a pass on menu because on every TV
⏹️ ▶️ John connected remote like menu basically means back like there I think they’re they’re going in line with the terminology
⏹️ ▶️ John for menu. They’re going in line with the terminology Precedent set by every other AV remote for
⏹️ ▶️ John the past 20 decades or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is kind of bad though that most of the time when you hit menu what you see is not a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but that’s but that’s true. That’s true in every TV remote like menu always means back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, since when does Apple pay attention to the consumer electronics industry standards for design?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that’s what they’re doing the the TV one the home one is is I mean really it should have been a house But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t like to do that, right? Because at least that would make some sense But that would that would be again falling in line with the television thing
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is where they made looks like a television set and not an application
⏹️ ▶️ John So if anything you would imagine that would be the power button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, really, the problem with the home button is the placement. You know, like I know Renee Richie did this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little mock-up. We’ll finally link again. But if you put the home button centered below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other buttons, like in a place where a home button on iOS devices, it makes a lot more sense. All the different shortcuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you can double tap it and go to a multitasking switcher and kill unresponsive apps. Most people will never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that. They will never find that. If it was where a home button is on iOS, they might get that. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances would be higher. It’s still not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not a touch screen like if they just need to start over with remote like again They have yes realize that it’s like a device that
⏹️ ▶️ John sits on couches that gets wedged between couch cushions that held that’s held by entire Hands that that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know I mean I’m gonna harp on the Tevo remote, but like they just need to start over with that But the worst thing about you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John the hockey puck mouse I think it’s worse than the hockey puck mouse because the hot using the hockey bats mouse could be Frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John when like you’d push the mouse up and the the cursor would go up on an angle and you realize you don’t have it aligned
⏹️ ▶️ John and you do some little finger feel to feel where the cord is and or feel the little dent that they put in later versions or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John but i never felt sort of like timid using the hockey puck mouse i never felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John i need to approach it gingerly that something will go wrong and yet this stupid remote i have
⏹️ ▶️ John to place it gingerly to make sure it’s not on a surface where it will slide down into a crack because it’s so freaking small and skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John right i need to when i pick it up i need to pick it up carefully both because i want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure i got the orientation right which i I have done a million times the wrong way. I have not succumbed to putting a rubber band
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, but I’m getting really close.
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have to be careful not to touch the touch sensitive top half of the thing because something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because it will take my touch input and do something with it. Even if it’s always on, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always hot. Even if the thing it does is non-destructive merely by bringing up like the progress
⏹️ ▶️ John bar at the bottom. I don’t want to accidentally bring the progress bar up if I’m just moving the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the way to make room for like a snack or something. I don’t want to suddenly put a giant bar in the middle of the show that
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of people are watching even if it goes away on its own like I don’t have to do anything it’s non-destructive but it’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I feel like I’m playing a game of operation which is an old board game kids you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco old ad for it on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I use this thing I don’t feel that way when I touch any of my other remotes and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John my favorite one t-ball remote like everything’s fine about in fact the only thing the t-ball remote I could daint for is that when
⏹️ ▶️ John it became when I got a TV remote with Bluetooth support, now I can’t blindly mash it
⏹️ ▶️ John with as long as I know it’s not pointing the TV. Because now, if you mash a Bluetooth remote, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter if it’s pointing the TV, which is a great feature and I love it, but it does make me have to be slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John careful not to just pick it up like a barbarian and just squish the whole thing. But I feel like I am
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you know, I’m walking on, I don’t know what the expression is. Eggshells?
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go, that’s it. That’s what I’m walking on.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shells when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid little remote. Right, because it’s always waiting for you to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch this area that is not a button that actually does things. And that is unlike every other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote that has ever existed, and there’s a reason for that.
Apple TV UI design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I don’t want to beat it too much on the remote because I think that we could take a whole episode on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and most people have probably agreed that yeah, it’s not good. But just the entire Apple TV interface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are parts of it that work fine, but the main content browsing interfaces, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a big thing that you do a lot on this thing, like we buy Top Chef. We have bought every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season of Top Chef from iTunes since season five. We’re currently on season, I believe, 13.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When a new episode comes out every week, We go to the top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we click on the Top Chef, because it’s new, and it loads, after a very long wait time, the Top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chef section of the iTunes Store. And in the bottom half of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a horizontally scrolling line of episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This includes every episode from every season we’ve bought. So from season
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five through season 13, every single episode is in that list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somewhere along the way, Apple forgot that we had watched seasons 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through like 10. So those are all marked as unwatched for some reason. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time we open this up, it opens up to the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unwatched episode in the list, which is the very first episode in the list of season 5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delightful! We’re in season 13. Now there is no entry here that says, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch switch to a different season or anything. No, the way you have to switch is by scrolling to the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through, I don’t know, 70 episodes or something? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paging through this giant long horizontally scrolling list of episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which are squares, you know, this massive line of episodes from season 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, all the way till you get to the end of season 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we actually are and then hit play on that. I don’t know if there’s any way for me to mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six seasons of a show as play without actually opening up every single one of them, seeking to the end, letting it stop. Like, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t matter. And of course, you know, we hope the episode’s actually there when we look, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes says it was there. And if you click more on iTunes, it’ll be there. But that problem is just on the old Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Just mark them all as viewed in the web interface or in the Mac version of this app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, sure, yeah. That’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John idea. So yeah. That does exist, right? Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course. I’m sure desktop iTunes will work perfectly. So, you know, it’s every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of this interaction is a failure in some way. So, A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why were those markets unplayed? We watched them all, we bought them all years ago. So, A, something went wrong on the service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end at some point. Of course, it’s Apple’s services. It’s iTunes. It’s the iTunes store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, something went wrong. So, that’s problem number one. Problem number two, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this every single season in one giant list? Have they did was this designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way where they ever tested it loading a show that had more than one season? I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am asking this question. Did any of the designers at any point test this interface with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a show that had, you know, seven seasons, 10 seasons like there are many shows like
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it had one season, that’s too much to scroll horizontally. Yes, the idea the idea that horizontal scroll. No one wants to scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John horizontally. We learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horizontal scrolling is always wrong. Like the old Apple TV put this in hierarchical vertically scrolling lists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So every season had its own entry. Perfect, right? Because usually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing seasons is kind of a big navigational step. You don’t like accidentally cross over between seasons very often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you do that intentionally. So like that can be its own stage in the tree. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so a there’s the failure of like why were these episodes all marked as unplayed be why are they all on the same list?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C. When I play one in season 13 and then we come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back a week later when there’s a new episode in season 13 right after the one that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just played, why does it start again at season 5? Every part of this is a failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the reason why this is designed this way is either A. Incompetence that they didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test whether this would work with a show that had more than one season, or B,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was more important for them to have this big, glamorous, pretty-looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen that has this big promo art in the background and it doesn’t have the clutter or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugliness of actual text that describes what you’re looking at or a vertical list that’s easy to navigate. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either way, this is a massive failure. I’m just picking on one screen here, but it’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common screen you see on the Apple TV and this just to me represents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of the pattern of design failure that we keep seeing out of Apple recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple Music is very similar and I haven’t I honestly have not spent a ton of time without music because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so bad and for me it not only is badly designed for me it actually doesn’t work like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I the whatever their local CDN node is that serves me very often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a song will just end before like it’ll end prematurely and just go to the next song. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that’s some kind of streaming failure, but I don’t know why. It sucks. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infuriating, honestly, because I would like to use Apple Music, and I’m still paying for it. I keep forgetting to go cancel it, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep thinking, oh, maybe it’ll work better. I would love to discover new music, but Apple Music just sucks so bad I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. It literally just doesn’t work well for me. But also, just the design of that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design of the new iOS Music app that followed from that. It is so much in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same design failure pattern of, we’re going to make it look like a magazine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to make it look like this fancy rich content experience, but in fact it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to both use and to figure out what the heck is going on, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are, what’s going to happen when this song ends. It is so hard to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out anything. This is not good design. This is not how you design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. And it is not only, you know, bad ideologically, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad, like, in actual use. Like, it’s one thing if you say, well, you know, you should really always have white space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around X, like, for good practices. This goes beyond good practices. It is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if they had only looked at Plex, which gets this whole season thing right, I know you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John tired of hearing…
⏹️ ▶️ John No, Plex doesn’t quite get it right either. Oh, please. All right, so Plex is trying to present
⏹️ ▶️ John me with the next episode in the series that I want to watch, but I never trust that it has picked the right
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So to make sure, I have to go all the way back out, and then I have to pick all instead of just the browse. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick all so I can see the thing, and then I click into it, and then I see the seasons list, and then I have to click into the season, and then I see the episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John in a horizontally scrolling list, and then I scroll over to the episode that I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you’re looking at an episode on the Apple TV, you’re looking at an episode, and there’s three or four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buttons on there on that screen, And one of them is go to season.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like starting from the top, I launched the Plex app. It brings me to thing it says discover, which I never want to see. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John all and I have to go to because if I do want to discover like in the upper left, it has a thing but it shows like the icon of the show that I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch. But if I click it, I’m not sure it’s going to resume me at the right spot. Maybe I should just trust
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like I think like Netflix does a better job where it very quickly presents me the thing it says you watch this, you watch
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you watch this, you’re in the middle of this or the next one is this where with Plex that stuff’s buried in Plex still
⏹️ ▶️ John does horizontal scrolling for the episodes within a season.
Why we criticize Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Then the final note, I guess, to cap this thing off is sort of the meta discussion we’ve had many times
⏹️ ▶️ John about negativity towards Apple and, uh, you know, complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ John things and stuff like that. And the fact that the show isn’t called hypercritical, even though it’s got one of the people from that show on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, two aspects of this one is, uh, although
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re complaining about a lot of things here, I, at the end of last year, I listed photos as one of my favorite things that Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ John done that year. And that’s still true because the main functionality that photos provides having my photos
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere and having them backed up to the cloud and stuff like that one of them was so long and it actually does that job so far for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it doesn’t do it, I have no recourse because I don’t know how to make it do what it’s supposed to do. But so far it’s been good for me. So I still give
⏹️ ▶️ John that a thumbs up. And like I said about the Apple TV, which has all sorts of problems. In the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John if video plays when I press a button, that is a big step up from the previous one, which would just show me spinners
⏹️ ▶️ John and strange error messages and numbers inside parentheses and make me
⏹️ ▶️ John sign into my iTunes account and stuff. So progress, good progress there. But the broader
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I think on the negativity is I don’t think anyone who is listening to this and is
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining, can say, listen to the complaining and not liking it, can say that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John just us at this point. Like I feel like this is a broader thing. Now you can still believe that it’s a broader
⏹️ ▶️ John narrative about a drop in quality that is not founded that it is somehow like feeding on
⏹️ ▶️ John itself and that is a manufactured thing of the media and of people all talking to each other and like
⏹️ ▶️ John that again that is an aspect of the media and we are a small part of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so much time has passed and so many people with so much experience so much diverse backgrounds like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not all the people saying this aren’t like all jilted lovers who idealize some point in the past where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was great. Some of these people are people who are recently switched to the Mac. Some people have been Mac users forever. people are
⏹️ ▶️ John not Mac users at all, we’re just looking in from the outside, like, it’s so diverse. And there’s so many different opinions
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. And all of them are kind of concentrating on it’s not the end of the world, the company is not doomed, we still like
⏹️ ▶️ John it better than everybody else for the most part. Like, it’s just, it’s a trend. It’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you want to just you know, like Marco, it wasn’t willing to backpedal as far as you’re gonna say, maybe it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a perception, right? But whatever it is, there’s something there. And we are not manufacturing that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we are not like, I feel like we’re not blowing it out of proportion. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we all have a proportional idea of like in the grand scheme of things, we’re all still using these products. We all still like them. They all
⏹️ ▶️ John are better than their predecessors in important ways. But we’re seeing things fall down in
⏹️ ▶️ John ways that we had historically expected Apple to do better at. And we can see obvious problems that Apple seems like they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John and that it persists and it goes on and on. And you know, like we talked about not having crashes is great. Like I really
⏹️ ▶️ John do feel that over many years that their software has gotten more reliable. It’s not like you can only have one or the other. like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re saying, come bring back the crashers and put a million toolbar buttons in our applications and stuff, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re looking, you know, we want them to keep that good stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but bring back some of the old skills that they had, like like Margo said, whoever was designing those other applications that
⏹️ ▶️ John are not there and they’re not in charge, they need to be because, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s a regression, it’s small regression, but it’s a it’s a trend and it’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think we are not the source of that trend. And I I think none of us are saying anything
⏹️ ▶️ John as dire as the emails we get from people who just can’t hear can’t bear to hear us say anything
⏹️ ▶️ John bad about Apple. Like I don’t when the sky is not falling. We don’t hate Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not a bad company. Apple is not doomed. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is a thing like I you know I feel like this is a thing and this is not a thing that we have manufactured.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco didn’t make this happen by writing a blog post last year like that didn’t start with him, it’s not going to end with him, and it is ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ John from people who have no idea who any of us are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree. And you know, looking at the devices that I’ve bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last year or so, I love the crap out of my iPad mini 4.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I can’t off the top of my head think of any complaints I have about it. This 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac that I had no business buying because I don’t do desktop computers, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my thing. love this computer after, you know, I got my second one because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first one didn’t work, but that’s neither here nor there. But I really like my 6S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t think of any particular complaints I have about that. I mean, I would like things to be a little different in a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of departments, but I don’t have any actual complaints. And I actually really like my new Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was wishy-washy on getting it and it ended up being a holiday gift. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s here, I use that thing constantly. And it was getting to the point that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost never used our old Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m using my Apple TV way more than I use the old one as well. Like, that’s the real proof. Like, as annoying as that remote is, the
⏹️ ▶️ John old app, he was getting almost no use. And now this one gets a ton more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, the reason why the Apple TV’s problems drive me crazy is that we use the Apple TV every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. Like this is like and I could go on a much longer rant about how much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the both the the Amazon Fire TV and the Roku, whatever, or whatever that I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year ago or whatever, both of those are now sitting collecting dust because I hated them both even more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the fact is, as you said, this drives us nuts because we do use this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in some cases, we don’t want the alternatives because they’re worse for us in some way, or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t solve our needs or whatever. But the reason why this stuff matters, what am I gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do? If macOS takes another dive towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad reliability and stuff, what am I gonna do, switch to Windows? That’s worse, that’s way worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why we care so much about this and we harp about this is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t wanna go to the alternatives or the alternatives are actually worse. And so this is all we have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If Apple starts getting mediocre and crappy, well, almost everyone else in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry is mediocre and crappy. So it’s not like we are holding on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dear life because we want Apple specifically to be great. It’s that we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody to be great. And the rest of the industry keeps showing over and over again for decades that they can mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just manage mediocre. Like that’s about as good as they can do most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John And the places where things are better, like just to go back to the example where you mentioned Dropbox before, like I haven’t used Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything produced by Apple for email in ages. Because Gmail just always works for me. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of things you just use year after year after year after year on different computers and different browsers, different versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of Gmail, they’ve changed their UI blah, blah, it just does my email. It just does it never
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work. It just works like Gmail, like I just never look back. And Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m still using that and like Dropbox has problems. We’re gonna email people like Oh, Dropbox deleted all
⏹️ ▶️ John my stuff and didn’t save my old versions. Like everything has problems. But over the many, many, many years that we
⏹️ ▶️ John use these products, like, that’s why, you know, Apple’s been cut out of those I’ve chosen the better competitors product,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be done like I gmail for email Dropbox for doing my file syncing, I you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John both those things could be better in certain ways, but they have to get the basics right. And so you know, like, we’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think we’re blindly tied to Apple. But by the same token, I think Marco is choosing to use the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV over those other boxes, because he tried all those other boxes. And just because Apple is the best one doesn’t mean they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not making what we view as like silly mistakes that should have been clear to them from all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time that they’ve been holding this thing, waiting for the streaming deals or whatever, that there were problems with this product
⏹️ ▶️ John that should have been obvious to them. And they shipped it anyway, design problems with it, if not in this case, reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John problems or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, audible.com, Casper and fracture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Check the podcast,
Post-show: Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t really talk about the hardware side of it. That’s a big angle on Gruber’s thing was like Oh everyone agrees their
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware is doing better I know Marco has been upset about their hardware a little bit more than
⏹️ ▶️ John than I’ve heard other people But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, but honestly the hardware is really good Like they I I harp on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on two main problems number one That I wish battery life was longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and number two that even though we seem to have more entries in the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line than ever, I think we actually have less choice. We have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options that have among them less diversity, if that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like every laptop Apple sells is a thin and light. Like they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any big honking laptops that have like three-day battery life. That just doesn’t exist. Every phone they sell is a thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and light. You know, like every Every laptop they sell now, except for the 101,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have user-replaceable disk or memory in most of them either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s stuff like that. No computer they sell, no desktop they sell anymore has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internal disk bays that are actually accessible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you may be living a little bit in the past with a lot of those requests, but I understand where you’re coming from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of those, yes, but if you look at the roles that were served by the old Mac Pro. Yes, I got the Mac Pro in this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the roles that were served by that, that could handle a lot of edge cases. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really want a Mac that has X, Y, or Z hardware capability, the Mac Pro is oftentimes the answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And then the new Mac Pro they replaced it with knocks out the vast majority of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just removes them from possibility. Similar with laptops. If you wanted a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with four terabytes of storage, you could do that before. And now you can’t. There’s a pretty big list of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that used to be possible or configurable with Mac hardware that is no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible in the current lineup, or is only possible in the 101, the non-retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13x or whatever. There’s a pretty long list of those things. And the list of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things we used to be able to do or get or configure that we can’t do now seems to be getting longer over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And not all those things are just outdated old technology. Some of those things are actually, wow, that would still be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I could do that, or I need to do that and now I can’t. So that’s my main criticism of Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we are actually getting less real choice than ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s kind of a luxury to be able to complain about things at that level, though, because what we’re not saying is that in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with the mobile hardware year after year, the hardware gets better in measurable ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that are meaningful to people. The CPUs get faster and you feel that speed. The cameras get better and you see the
⏹️ ▶️ John results of that, right? They add features, they change the
⏹️ ▶️ John size of those, make a bigger screen, add features like the stylus, like the products are just, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware is progressing. And then we can have quibbles about the directions like it’s basically what you’re coming to is like, how do you design
⏹️ ▶️ John your product line? What products do you choose to feel? What direction do you want the overall product line to go in? But in general, the individual
⏹️ ▶️ John products, like I think about my iPhone six, I love this phone, it’s great, I’m jealous
⏹️ ▶️ John of the success, because it’s a little bit faster and has better cameras off, you know, I mean, like that, the, the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is still doing what we expected to do. It’s not as the equivalent in the hardware realm and
⏹️ ▶️ John the software room would be as if when the success comes out after the six, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole bunch of things that used to be able to do on the six are buried under a bunch of different screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they remove they have done it with removing the mute switch, but they remove like all the buttons from the entire thing. And it’s harder to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the camera. And like say there was like a cover that you had to slide down from the camera every time you wanted to take a picture because
⏹️ ▶️ John they wanted the outside surface to be like, why did you put a cover over the camera, you know, like, that’s the type of crap we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John around the software world. So I feel like in the hardware world, we have luxury of saying, Yeah, yeah, Apple’s doing the basic stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John general design, reliability, the things
⏹️ ▶️ John look nice, they feel nice that they seem to be more cognizant of the aspects of it having to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John being held in the hand, even if the things are slippery, they try to make it less slippery in the next generation, their cases are kind of grippy,
⏹️ ▶️ John they take a shake that might have been slippery, and they get put a case on it and improves it and they learn from that. CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting faster. It’s like being back in the 90s on the desktop is they’re still going through that whole chain of things. They
⏹️ ▶️ John add more memory eventually, you know, maybe they’ll go past 16 gigs. Like in general, we just
⏹️ ▶️ John take for granted all the standard Apple is doing good hardware stuff. And that I think is why
⏹️ ▶️ John when people talk about the like Apple hardware is doing great in the software, there’s more of a problem like that. I think that that is
⏹️ ▶️ John also a general perception that is not just us that like that if you had to rate Apple like when Jason Snell did that big
⏹️ ▶️ John survey, and again, maybe he’s all echo chamber, and just serving a bunch of like, tech reporters, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, tech, you can’t, you know, it’s not as if you can discount the opinion of all tech reporters. So they’re too inside of it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we just ask people who don’t know about the tech industry, I guess, anyway, we do that big survey. And you look at the little bar charts
⏹️ ▶️ John of how is Apple doing with like, you know, grades from like, a to F or whatever. hardware, they got
⏹️ ▶️ John a way higher grade than they got software, like just broadly speaking, whatever you think about, they’re just doing better
⏹️ ▶️ John with the hardware than software. And the quibbles you get to have about hardware are so much
⏹️ ▶️ John more, uh, you know, specific and minor than like the basic stuff we’re talking about on the
⏹️ ▶️ John software, like, you know, going to a television show and wanting to watch the next episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John the television show that you’ve purchased in the apple ecosystem, or that’s like a common task and making that
⏹️ ▶️ John task frustrating is, is like, it’s just falling down on the basics. Right. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so again, the overall trends, I think it’s like, it’s not us being negative Nelly’s. an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John thing out there about that, whether it’s a real thing or not, it is out there. And I think everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John can agree, even no matter how much you love Apple, if you had to say, is it they doing better on hardware or software lately,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably have complaints about both. But you have to say they’re doing better on hardware, because the software, the
⏹️ ▶️ John unforced errors they’re making on software are just so inexplicable and such a regression, whereas at the very least, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if they make a slight mistake on hardware, and making like the six slippery, when they make the success, they try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it less slippery, right? We give the past night like you’re making progress they’ll be you know you fold
⏹️ ▶️ John it but like they’re making it better and is the 6s faster yes it is and does it have a better camera yes it does and
⏹️ ▶️ John does it have you know cool 3d touch and some and the haptic engine all it’s like it’s cooler it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better i wish i had one instead of my 6 but i don’t wish i had the version of iphoto
⏹️ ▶️ John that removed all the toolbar buttons i wish i had the previous one because i like those buttons and i don’t wish i
⏹️ ▶️ John you know photos is great because it brings these great features with the cloud syncing but all the the other stuff I do with it