161: Dark Mode Is Your Hat
18 Mar 2016Predictions for the Apple event, why we don’t have cellular MacBooks, and why John hates NATO watch straps.
Episode Description:
- Why don't we have cellular MacBooks?
- Could Photos.app's "UXKit" become AppKit's successor on the Mac?
- Marco might be a Mac developer shortly
- Overcast 2.5 released
- Apple Event on March 21
- Post-show: John suffers a loss
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Chapters
- Why no cellular Macs?
- Mac AppKit replacement: UXKit?
- Sponsor: DevMate
- Marco’s Twitter.app chaos monkey
- John should use TaskPaper
- Overcast 2.5, patronage change
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- Apple event predictions
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- iPhone 7 Smart Plus Pro
- Watch bands
- Ending theme
- Siracusa crime blotter
Why no cellular Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You ever gone back recently to a trackpad that actually has a button, like a separate button area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t just click the whole thing? You ever?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the one that we had that the non-unibody MacBook Pro, the button
⏹️ ▶️ John had been so filled with child filth that it would like it would like not click down or like it stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John down like physically would no longer. Yeah. So I guess that won’t happen with the four stretch. I guess that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just get it like an even crust of disgusting. The kids are gross, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should do a little bit of follow-up and one of you wants to talk about cellular service on Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of listeners Gave us we talked a lot about the Mac last show the viability of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac whether it’s gonna be replaced by the iPad if it’s a dead platform all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and multiple people Asked us about a topic that has come up on the show before
⏹️ ▶️ John but didn’t come up on the last episode It’s related to the question of another case. He maybe was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John this how You can go anywhere with an iPad and do anything because it’s got a cellular connection
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got Wi-Fi and it’s kind of all-in-one and yeah if you have a laptop you can tether it but then you also need your phone and you’re draining
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone’s battery and We didn’t take the next step and talk about the topic The evergreen
⏹️ ▶️ John topic of why do Macs not have cellular connections? What is it like
⏹️ ▶️ John because a lot of people think that would make? The Mac a stronger competitor to even the pro iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John especially now that the max is very small if you could have a MacBook one second-generation MacBook one with better battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life a faster CPU and a cellular connection that would
⏹️ ▶️ John surely give a An iPad Pro or run for its money as
⏹️ ▶️ John that single lightweight machine that you can take everywhere and work from anywhere with Why is it
⏹️ ▶️ John the max? They’re all this time don’t have cellular and I’ve seemed to recall last time we talked about it But
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t really, we had some vague ideas, but at this point, years later, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John most of our vague ideas are like, well, they want to reserve that for the phone. They think you should use your phone. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John now, now what’s the excuse?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think that the problem Apple has with putting a cellular modem in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a MacBook or MacBook Pro is twofold. One, it’s more things to take up space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually come to think of it battery life. You know, things have to get ever thinner or so we seem to think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. two, why would you not have an iPhone with you? You have an iPhone, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to tether it to your Mac. Why would you ever need an onboard connection on your Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, of course, this argument falls completely on its face when you point out, well, there’s iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with cellular connections. In fact, Casey, you have an iPad with a cellular connection and I have an iPad with a cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connections because I don’t want to have to tether to my phone anytime I want to get online outside of the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, not when I’m not in your wifi. So I don’t know that I would buy a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had a cellular connection, but it certainly is appealing and it certainly would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make me think twice about an iPad Pro if I was trying to like Decide between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPad Pro with cellular or say a MacBook one with cellular. I don’t Marco. How do you think about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love a MacBook with cellular I would absolutely love it But as we discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know years ago when we first covered this topic I think nothing has really changed in the way that the the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment on the Mac is designed in most cases most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are designed the system services are designed to Assume they are on Wi-Fi all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to assume they can use large amounts of bandwidth This is the system updater would you know that could download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an update? That’s hundreds of mechs iTunes They can background download new episodes of TV shows that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you buy and stuff like that and grant a lot of these things are things that are maybe fading out of favor, but they still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. You have all sorts of software updates happening all the time in the background automatically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not just from Apple. It could be Adobe’s updater and everything, too. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much stuff in the Mac environment that assumes that if it has a connection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can download large chunks of data in the hundreds of megs range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was change in the APIs, I think, with Mountain Lion. I think it was around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mountain lion time, when they moved to NSURL Session, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they unified the API between iOS and Mac, and NSURL Session has these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco global flags on sessions where you can say, you know, on any connection I run in this session, allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or don’t allow cellular access. So if the connection is cellular, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the app maker could kind of opt out of using it or opt into using it if you wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you could say, like, you know, if something is important, like if you open up a Twitter app and you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fetch the timeline, use cellular data for that because that’s probably what the user wants. But if you’re checking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a background update to see if there’s any updates to your app, if you’re Adobe, then maybe wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until Wi-Fi for that. So that system’s been there for a few years, but the reality is I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think any apps meaningfully are really using it, especially since there’s no reason for them to use it because there are no cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs. So, unfortunately, I just think the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment is so wasteful of data by default that I think it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just result in way too much data usage. And I think Apple probably noticed that too. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also on iOS, you have the App Store and App Review to enforce that and to monitor that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Review does monitor for excessive bandwidth usage. They have certain metrics, like you can’t use more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X megabytes and X minutes unless the user’s streaming media or something like that. There are certain limits that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they at least used to monitor for. They probably still do. Anyway, all that is to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, you don’t really have the software environment conducive to sipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data carefully when you’re on cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you bring that up. I agree with you, but have you used Trip Mode? Have you heard about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t. Is that some kind of like a little firewall thing, like a little snitch or what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sort of, kinda. I think that it might’ve been Jason Snell that turned me onto this. I forget exactly who it was, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tagline for this app is, your mobile data savior. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not only for the Mac, it also works on Windows. And what it basically does is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it detects that you’re tethered or on some other sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low bandwidth connection, it will flip into a different mode where it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will prevent every app from getting to the internet except the ones you whitelist. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll also keep track of how much data each of these apps is using. And so I have this installed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my laptop Because on the rare occasions that I do tether, I, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a crud load of data, way more than I would ever use in a month, I still want to be sure that I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing something like, I don’t know, downloading an episode of Mad Men, right, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t buy any of these excuses because we’re so much farther down the road. Like in the beginning when,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cellular was just coming to iPads and Apple’s first making iPhones. Sure. But as
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco pointed out, they added this, the beginnings of these APIs a long time ago. It’s a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to solve for sure. But it can be solved. Like, it’s all it takes is some new software.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, like, the trip mode thing is a great example of like, they’re not even the OS maker, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could implement something like that, or a new set of API’s or make it opt in or like this is their problem to solve. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with space in the case. Same thing with battery life. Like, we have the technology, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John rebuild it. Like this is this is a thing that we could actually do. And you say, Oh, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so hard, it’s gonna take a long time. Yeah, but it’s been a long time. And so it’s like, have you have you been working on this
⏹️ ▶️ John for three years? Are you just like, well, it’ll always be impossible. And we should never even try it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it just every time it comes up. We all say, you know, not that they all have to have cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But one model pick one model to be like, the bring this Mac everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John with you. And you will be able to get online everywhere. And we know most people aren’t going to buy it because who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to pay for just like people, most people don’t buy cellular iPads, because who wants to pay for another cell connection
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, right? But, you know, surely it has enough utility
⏹️ ▶️ John that if they were paying more attention to the Mac line, they would say, we can sell this.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a value-add feature. People will pay more for it. It will make the product more attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Would they sell more cellular Macs percentage-wise than they do cellular iPads? Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not. It would probably be less, and I bet the percentage of cellular iPads is super low anyway, but they keep making them because for the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who use them, They love them. Imagine if you said, you know what, iPads aren’t gonna have cellular anymore, just
⏹️ ▶️ John tethered to your phone. People would be pissed because they’re used to that feature. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it took a lot to get, you know, the cell phone feature on iPads and an iOS working on all these different
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs. I don’t know. I feel like after so many years, any excuse you had about how difficult it
⏹️ ▶️ John might be, it now changes into an excuse of like, I guess you just didn’t decide it was important
⏹️ ▶️ John because now enough time has passed that if you had decided it was important, we’d be three years into the transition period and we’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be well on our way to it being a thing. And when they did that, that new API, I thought, oh, this is the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a few more years and then, you know, they’ll have this rolled out. But I guess they just don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s enough of a market for it to justify, you know, the all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time and expense of changing the APIs and everything like that. I don’t know, it just seems like another missed opportunity on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, or if the Mac was selling much better and making them much more money or had more growth potential, or some combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of those, this would be an obvious thing. in the same way that larger iPads and a stylus were obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John in iPads, but Apple didn’t pull the trigger on that for many, many years. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, Apple certainly thinks the iPad has more growth potential than the Mac, it seems. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sad that there’s still no cellular Macs, although I don’t expect any at the upcoming Apple event, which we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and a real-time follow-up from the chat room, from the white box in the chat room. This person reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me of the photos of the prototype MacBook Pro with an integrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3G cellular modem. This is from MacRumors in 2011. And it’s really kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking. It looks like a MacBook Pro, but it has like an extendable antenna on the side of the screen. We’ll put a link in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I mean, I’ve been using tethering on laptops while traveling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 10 years now, literally. Like I was going through pictures earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to Tumblr tomorrow to kind of give a quick little talk about like the history. And I was going through pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And literally 10 years ago, I have a picture of me using a MacBook with a cellular modem plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the side of it, a little USB thing. And before that, I was using Bluetooth tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my old Motorola flip phone. And you know, tethering is awesome on laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, if you have a laptop, you probably want this if you ever use it out and about, if you ever use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while traveling, or if you work in coffee shops or whatever. You know, the dream of ubiquitous Wi-Fi never really came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. And everyone thought that, oh, cities would just be covered in Wi-Fi, and everywhere you went, there was Wi-Fi. And it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out maybe 20% of the places you go, there’s Wi-Fi. And it might suck, and it might be insecure, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big problem these days. And it might be slow, it might be metered. But the dream of this free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ubiquitous, everywhere coverage, and no security problems, and always fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi just never came true. There’s so many reasons to tether and to use your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own cellular connections. And as time goes on, those reasons just increase as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get more and more mobile. keep getting smaller and even more compelling to bring with you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going somewhere and you want to get something done on a laptop. Especially if you look at the MacBook One or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the upcoming Skylake MacBook Pros, which we’ll talk about soon. These things keep getting smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and better, and cellular connections keep getting faster. We do have data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caps these days, but we also have now these pooled data plans where you can add another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device for $20 a month. Back 10 years years ago I was paying 60 bucks a month just for that cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now you can get them for 20 bucks a month like just add it to your existing plan or whatever. So like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like this would be the time to do that if for some reason that time hasn’t come yet might as well do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now right but it just does seem like Apple doesn’t care and it seems like this is something they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they obviously did prototype it they obviously decided not to do it and you know John I think you’re right like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they if they wanted to do this on the Mac they could the The fact is, the software environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t there for it now, but yeah, they’ve had 10 years to work on it, and they pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much haven’t. So that does make me sad, and I will keep tethering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just feels like such a weird hack to tether, because tethering doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually work that well in practice. Once you plug in, it’s fine, but if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing anything besides a USB connection, it is always a little bit flaky. Plus, not to mention, then it drains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone battery. So there’s like so many reasons not to tether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to tether over cable only, which is clunky. So it does make me sad that we probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this from Macs, because I think if they can justify it for the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might as well do it for Macs too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, all those prototypes that they made, you know, the 2011 pictures or whatever, like what they learned from those first
⏹️ ▶️ John efforts is all the things we talked about, like, oh, it uses a lot of data, our environment is not set up for this,
⏹️ ▶️ John and drains our battery more and whatever. And all that does is let you know, how much is it,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it going to take to do this? And then they do the calculation, this is what it’s going to take, this is the potential upside,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just keep saying no. And you know, and again, like I said, if the max sold more, there was more of an upside, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like there was more demand, like a million combinations, because you could say, Oh, there was more demand, they would do it. But also, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they sold 20 times as many max, because that would increase the number of sell assuming the demand is proportional, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John then that would, you know, there’s just so many factors that are working against them doing it. But the longer
⏹️ ▶️ John time goes on, the more it kind of stands out to me as a weirdness, because eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you would hope the battery cost and the size cost or whatever of doing cellular would
⏹️ ▶️ John be, they’re decreasing as a proportion of the overall available, you know, I mean, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t decrease transmit cost that much because you got to reach the tower and everything, but all the other associated
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, how big is the chip you have to put in there? How much power does that chip take? How much room does it take?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much does it cost? all those other factors, time should be on your side. And eventually it should be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like when they added the FM radio to the iPod. You know what? What the hell? Throw it in there. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s a software part of it that they’re obviously behind on. But you know, the other thing that could help there is like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking about. What if the cost of cellular connections and data continues to go down
⏹️ ▶️ John and five, 10 years from now, unlimited data connections are standard and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pay a lot for them and it costs nothing to add. And it’s just like, seems like it’s got to happen eventually or the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John could just go away entirely. But anyway, I miss it and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy one. I totally don’t buy any argument that it’s a hardware limitation or that it would be too costly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hardware because the iPad is the biggest counter example. If you if they can offer it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad since 2010 for $130 premium, then certainly they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can offer it in the higher priced, larger and bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batteried MacBook Pro line. Like There’s no reason why, if it’s in the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can totally do it in the MacBooks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it stands to reason. I don’t know enough about the hardware, but it certainly stands to reason in my head that that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC manufacturers also offer this. Like, it’s not like no one’s ever done this before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you can buy a ThinkPad with a cell connection in it for also about 10 years, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, like, it can be done. They just have chosen not to do it. And that, I think, is unfortunate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I wish they offered that. and I think they could charge a good premium for it, maybe $200. I’d easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay $200 more. We’ll see. I don’t have high hopes for that, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Now moving on.
Mac AppKit replacement: UXKit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a really interesting reminder from Atan Shulman,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wrote in to remind us that in February of 2015, it was discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the new Photos app contains something called UXKit. And we’ll put a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple links in the show notes, one to Jason Snell’s Six Colors and one to a friend of the show, Brent Simmons’ blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It appears that it’s basically a reimplementation of UIKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what’s used to build apps on the iPhone on top of AppKit, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what’s used to write apps on the Mac. And it’s an interesting thing to think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, well, as these platforms kind of crawl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever closer to one another, do we think maybe this will be a new thing that maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, at WWDC this year, maybe Apple will release UXKit and make it easier for people like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who don’t really write Mac apps to write an app on the Mac by using an API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s familiar to him.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we talked about this at the time. I think so. I think that time Brent’s post it also would come out and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the consensus then I still think is the same now, which is like when we all saw photos and these other apps that
⏹️ ▶️ John look so much like their iOS counterparts, it stands to reason it’s like, Oh, a lot of people would say, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John all they did was port the iOS applications to the Mac and sort of magnified them a little bit. And so many things in them were similar
⏹️ ▶️ John and UX kit is kind of like well we know they had a photos app on iOS and we know this
⏹️ ▶️ John one visually and structurally is very similar to that and so it stands to reason that if they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to make the development of the iPhoto replacement faster they
⏹️ ▶️ John could say is there some way that we can reuse uh if not the code directly
⏹️ ▶️ John then at the very least some of the structure of the application and some of the knowledge or whatever like is there
⏹️ ▶️ John a way that we can take an iOS application and you know even if you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John using the sort of big box diagram of how the pieces fit together and what the class names are and everything like that, can we
⏹️ ▶️ John do that? Well you could have this UXKit thing which is kind of like a UIKit like wrapper on top of AppKit so
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mac looks a little bit more like iOS from the perspective of this code you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ John but you would only do it if you were coming from that direction and Brent Simmons
⏹️ ▶️ John post is mostly skeptical about the idea that this would ever be a thing that they would throw out to developers. And it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell because very often Apple does dog food its own API’s first in its own
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, then like a year later, at WWDC, they’re like, Oh, here you go. And they don’t mention like, Oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been using this for a year or two years in our own applications to sort of work out the kinks. But they’ve done that with so many
⏹️ ▶️ John other technologies. But then again, there are other things that they use their applications, they never offer up like the
⏹️ ▶️ John pro kit framework, which they use for aperture back in the day and think Final Cut Pro like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird, small, dark colored widgets and like those things were all there was a pro kit framework. They would
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have those apps installed would occasionally get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates. We are very lucky they didn’t offer that for anybody else to use. Well, I mean, but I’m saying like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the last thing the world needs is more pro kit apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John They they didn’t just build one app on it. Like, oh, we have this weird code base into this thing. They built multiple apps
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, but it never graduated to the level which I assume that was also, you know, either a wrapper
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of app kit or its own weird thing, but it never came out into public. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think there is room, as Marco talked about last time, for Apple to introduce something
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it easier for people with UIKit either code or expertise
⏹️ ▶️ John or both to make Mac apps. But I don’t know if UXKit is it. Maybe UXKit
⏹️ ▶️ John is one attempt at what that might be like. And remember, the guys at Icon Factory did that chameleon
⏹️ ▶️ John framework, which was another sort of thing where it’s a reimplementation of the UIKit API
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of the Mac to help them because they had UI kit applications that they wanted to bring to the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John All those things are like that. They’re kind of technical marvels that they work at all. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when you start to suggest the idea that this would be like the one recommended way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make Mac apps, like Apple would say, Hey, you should use this to make Mac apps. Like I don’t think Apple wants to muddy the water. I think they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a clearer answer. And especially with Swift in the mix. Now, I’m not entirely sure that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is ready to to come out with something that will help iOS developers
⏹️ ▶️ John write Mac apps better whether they think it’s even again, it’s same thing with like investment, like, yeah, they could do it, they could do lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of different things here. But is it worth the investment, it would take a lot of developers, and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be difficult to do. And what would our payoff be? So obviously, for their own internal applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John they decided it was worth it. And so they got UX kit, and they’ll probably use it. And if that’s not already used
⏹️ ▶️ John in multiple places, it might be used in other places going forward, a way to make it cheaper for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring quote unquote new applications to the Mac you’re helping them take the you know expertise and maybe some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John code from iOS and bring it over to Mac apps, but I’m not sure they’re ready to offer that to the public.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, as as you were bringing up chameleon, I was about to bring it up myself. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went and dug up the GitHub page for it. Last commit was May 16 2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it comes to this kind of, you know, major platform development framework, I mean, this This is long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. These are things that last 10, 20 years. Apple’s a very patient company when it comes to things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. So, I mean, with lots of things, Apple’s very patient, honestly. But in this kind of scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transition to Swift, I think, is very, very important here. And also, we have to figure where is Mac OS X going? As we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussed last week, if they are planning on some major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next-generation Mac operating system that’s going to be a major departure from OS X, as we know it today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll just wait till they do that. Like, they’re not gonna make a new OS X framework now, they’ll just wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until that comes and do it on that. Same thing, like, if they’re gonna do something major with reconsidering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppKit or UIKit with Swift and with a more Swifty model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re going to be doing that anytime in the next five, ten years, they’ll wait for that. You know, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do something in the meantime that is, like, I can’t imagine them investing tons of time and effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a brand new Objective-C and Swift UI framework for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac today. I don’t see that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they want to do something more elegant, but they have to wait five more years to do it, they’ll just wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about something that’s awesome and celebrate a little bit. Alright, speaking of the Mac.
Sponsor: DevMate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you are a Mac developer and you want to sell outside the Mac App Store, our first sponsor today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is DevMate. DevMate lets you sell Mac apps outside of the Mac App Store and it integrates a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services so that you don’t, so it kind of gives you a lot of the benefits of selling in the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store as a Mac developer, but without having to actually be in the Mac App Store. So, you know, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I was looking at maybe making a little Mac App, not Overcast, but maybe making a little Mac App, a little utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, Casey. I was looking at it. And I honestly, I don’t want to have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with payment processing, and I don’t want to have to deal with building in an auto updater and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. Like, I just don’t want to deal with that stuff. There’s a reason why the App Store is compelling when it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, which might be never. But when it works, the promise of it is actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should work, and in theory it does work. Unfortunately, in reality, the Mac App Store doesn’t work. And fortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, I don’t need to make that decision for whatever this app isn’t gonna make, because it can’t be sandboxed, so I can’t put it in the Mac App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if I want to release it, I have to release it outside of the Mac App Store. And I’m looking at DevMate, honestly, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DevMate, so it’s made by a company called MacPaw, they do all sorts of stuff with the Mac. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a powerful tool set that has allowed all of us Mac developers, I can say us now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to overcome App Store limitations. So, they can sell your software outside of the Mac App Store, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliver updates easily to it with their platform, you can protect your apps with license management, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make trial versions, you can sell bundles, You can even run beta tests with automatic crash reporting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All these luxuries that you get if you’re totally in the App Store ecosystem. And you can get in-depth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analytics and marketing metrics, which is even usually better than what you can get in the App Store. So DevMate has collected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the tools and services they use into one pack, and they’ve created this amazing platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Mac developers. So you don’t have to do any kind of crazy licensing coding to make your own weird serial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number scheme or anything like that. You can use their tools to manage free trials and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different diverse license types. They offer the hosting, they offer the CDN, version management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update delivery, and an e-commerce solution for in-app purchase. All these things all available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get customer feedback, you can view a breakdown of your paid and trial customers with built-in trial support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this amazing stuff, all at DevMate. So all you have to do is worry about coding the app itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you leave the rest to DevMate. So Mac developers, check out DevMate today. Honestly, I am tempted by this, I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check it out. If I decide to release this app, that’s gonna be the first place I look, honestly. Anyway, thanks for sponsoring.
Marco’s Twitter.app chaos monkey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re not gonna tell us what the app is? Well, sure. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not it’s really nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like do you remember a few months ago? I posted a little like launch D Apple script
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to automatically quit Twitter every 10 minutes if it wasn’t active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you make a native app you can do that a lot better you can do things like You know instead of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every 10 minutes check if it’s active and if not quit it you can monitor the active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window in real time and so you can quit it like 10 minutes after I last used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you can do it or you can do things like only quit if it’s hidden and stuff like that you can you can do like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more advanced version of this more easily so I have a little prototype of that running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and right now it’s literally like this giant black square in my menu bar so that it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want to actually you know make it releasable there’s gonna be some work involved but it does work and it’s very it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice actually it’s really and I found that this has dramatically reduced my Twitter usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as measured by rescue time. And so I’m actually very happy with this approach. And it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turned Twitter into something that is always open on my Mac, like mail. It has turned it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s always open to something that is inherently incredibly unreliable. Because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to me like it crashes every 10 minutes. Which is really nice. It actually-
⏹️ ▶️ John created your own chaos monkey on your Mac. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That only targets one or two apps. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great because like I… It turns it into something that I have to like actively go and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco activate rather than something that’s always there in the corner ready for me to be distracted by it, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it actually… this approach actually does work really well for me. I don’t know if it’ll work for anybody else. I don’t know if anybody else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares. But it was worth me making the Mac version just to make it better. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s no longer these weird long-std scripts that I can’t turn off easily or can’t adjust easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so far I’m liking it. So I might release it. I don’t even know if I would charge money, I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I figure this could be a nice way for me to learn a little more about making Mac software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the market for Mac software and just kind of dip my toe in and get a little tutorial on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would you pay five bucks for
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing? I wouldn’t buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I can’t say I would. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy an application that quits apps from out from under you, no thanks. Yeah!
John should use TaskPaper
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even like sudden termination or whatever the APIs they added that like when you have no open documents
⏹️ ▶️ John They kills the application. I don’t even like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t even noticed that ever hitting me Honestly, maybe I just don’t use apps that do
⏹️ ▶️ John it if you use text edit it happens like you close all the windows and text edits and you switch to some other app and then you look back at The dock
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, well put that dot go underneath text edit. Oh, it’s gone again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who would who would you
⏹️ ▶️ John use a text edit anymore? I find myself using it still occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John has the eyes to use it for as my poor man’s outliner Like if you do option tab, you know that whole thing don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like I’ll mail it like a better Don’t you have BB edit? Aren’t you like a better text editor person?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s not for outlining like Outlining you like having having indented levels and have being able
⏹️ ▶️ John to just keep typing and have it soft wrap the indented level You know like you said
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you know like you write long paragraphs and they stay at the level of
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re not hard wrapping it, right? You’re just typing and typing and typing and it is wrapping in a paragraph but that paragraph is indented
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the bullet point you put it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use the task paper.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the value for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? I think it’s Jesse Grosjean, the guy who makes folding text. I think that’s him. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, text edit is what I use for my podcast notes when I’m on podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John other than this one, like when it’s just notes for me as opposed to all three of us sharing a document, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you double-click documents, it owns.txt and I haven’t gone and changed the bindings for all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. So I find myself launching it. And then if I want to keep it open, I
⏹️ ▶️ John got to remember to keep one document open. Really, like the whole idea is you’re not supposed to care that it’s open. It’s excited launches so fast. I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care. But I do notice it quitting itself. Preview does the same thing, which annoys me more because I do use preview
⏹️ ▶️ John more to view images and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently, literally, Task Paper 3 was released today. Coincidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been testing it for a while and I really like it. I didn’t I didn’t realize it was released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Yeah, I like task paper a lot. We’ll put a link in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes. fun time.
Overcast 2.5, patronage change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of releasing things, Overcast 2.5, tell us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the things about it, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, geez, do I really have to? Yeah, so I did a 2.5 update, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list of features of which was typed in TaskPaper the whole time as I’ve been using it as my to-do list for all of my apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since Instapaper 1.0 maybe, or at least early versions of Instapaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so yeah, so 2.5 is basically what it sounds like. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half major release, if that makes sense. It still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks about the same for the most part. There’s not a whole lot of new headlining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features, but there are a few and there’s a whole bunch of big improvements everywhere, basically. Originally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was calling it 2.1, and I was like, as I kept adding more stuff, I’m like, you know what? This feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 2.5. So I’ll call it 2.5. And it’s about six months from 2.0, so that kind of made sense with a roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annual release cycle for the big stuff. So the big things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are a patron, so if you pay me a dollar a month basically, then you get a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark theme and you get the ability to have file uploads. So you can upload
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s not a real podcast or not a public podcast, like an audio book or if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a producer of a podcast, like a draft of an episode you’re working on, you can upload that into Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and play it in your player. It doesn’t become public for everybody to play. It just plays for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is actually a feature, I built this in version 1.0. I had this right at the beginning, and it was only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my account for all this time. And I would use it to play downloaded episodes of Howard Stern. I mean, personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recorded episodes of Howard Stern. Home Howard Stern recordings. And so I use it all this time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t want to launch it because these files are hosted on S3, and so I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really want to set myself up for somebody paying me five bucks once and then me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting like two gigs of S3 files for them for the next three years, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to sustain economically. And so I figured, you know, let me wait until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some kind of recurring revenue in place, or if it appears as though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app is doing so incredibly well with the in-app purchase up front that I can enable it for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe I’ll try it later. But anyway, whatever, I push it off till later. That was in mid-2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I kind of just forgot about it. I mean, people have been requesting this feature for a while, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were always features that were requested more that I had to do, you know, that were more important to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like streaming and stuff like that. So there was always kind of stuff ahead of it in the to-do list, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I finally got around to doing it, and which really just was just like polishing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the feature I already had, like making it look a little bit nicer, styling the website slightly around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the uploader, instead of just being like an unformatted progress bar and everything. And the technical side of it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty straightforward. I actually, if you look at this, if you view source on the uploads page, I actually am uploading the files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly to S3 and then the app downloads them directly from S3. So the files never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass through overcast servers, which helps me save on costs and it also helps them arrive faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to like wait for a double upload, like for my server, then upload it to S3, you don’t have to wait for that. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both a nice cost savings for me and also a speed improvement for you. And a weird technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool thing that most people don’t even know that you can generate a form to securely upload a file to S3, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. Then I did Dark Mode, which is also for patrons only. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a little bit of pushback on this, actually. I’d say I probably heard from about 100 people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little controversial. I’m curious what you guys think. It’s a little controversial because, so when I had version 1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1.x, like all the 1.x versions, it ran from mid-2014 to mid-2015, version 1 was a free app with a $5 in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to quote unlock everything and what I meant was unlock all the features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have right now like just unlock everything and then in 2.0 last October
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I switched to a full patronage model where everything was free and you could pay if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to for nothing like you just you get nothing for and I said like I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add features in the future for patrons that I can’t have for everybody for cost reasons or whatever and I was actually thinking about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upload feature when I wrote that so now when I wanted to add this new file upload and dark mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair I decided to make both now file uploads are easy to make patron only because you can say well that’s that cost money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everyone who uses it but there is a debate here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco among people who bother me on Twitter people who are like they’re literally arguing with each other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m not even involved in the argument there people like my people are arguing in my mentions with each other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about whether this should be a problem or not whether people who bought it who bought the 1.x
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock everything thing in 2014 whether they should have the dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode as well and what do you guys think about that because I figured the reason why I thought it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be okay this way the reason I made everything free with 2.0 and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided to go to patronage for nothing for a while was I I was tired of the basic version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app having like intrusive limitations that would make it suck so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a limit on like it would only show the top five entries in a playlist and you couldn’t adjust the speed or you could only do it for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes at a time and everything. So there were these limitations in the app that were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actively trying to make the app worse so that you would hit them and then you’d be encouraged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay the money to unlock everything. And so I decided that it would make most sense if I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do anything special for patrons. And first of all, I should preface this with, patronage wasn’t going that well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly. It was going well enough to sustain the basic cost of the app, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing well enough for me to really want to justify putting tons of time into it. It was doing okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I needed to do better than how it was doing. Otherwise, I’m going to have to move back to some other model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s paid up front or another in-app purchase, whatever. Patronage as it was going was not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well enough, so I had to change something. So I decided, let me give people some motivation to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay. But I didn’t want to make the app suck for everyone else. So I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, Dark Mode I decided was interesting to make patron only because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s something that doesn’t really, if you don’t have it, it doesn’t affect you at all really. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t, the absence of this feature does not make the app worse for everyone who doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s not like some kind of limit that you hit where it makes it worse. So I figured it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a nice perk to give patrons, it’s something that like, it kind of feels like a perk. It kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of feels like a special extra, you know, because it isn’t really like a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functional feature in the app. It’s just like a theme. It’s how it looks. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a cool dark mode and it looks cool and everyone likes dark modes now. So it looks cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it looks nice and it’s something new and different and kind of exclusive because it’s patron only. So I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was all fine. But I have now heard from, yeah, probably about 100 people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think differently. What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like well so for the patron thing if someone pays and they get the dark theme
⏹️ ▶️ John what is does the dark theme go away if they stop paying? Yes. So that I think that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John the place where it doesn’t seem like it fits because it seems more like an in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John basically like if you did it as an in-app purchase it would be like if you don’t want dark theme before 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ John came out you didn’t have dark theme anyway you didn’t even know dark theme existed, you were fine using overcast before. Now all of a sudden 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out and you see the shiny dark theme that you want, but you don’t want to pay for it because you just want to get it for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, if there’s a thing that you like, how about you give me some money and I’ll give you the dark theme.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that most people’s minds dark theme doesn’t seem like a thing that you should have to keep paying for. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you know, for for whatever reason, it seems like, like, like buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a downloadable content in the game. You know, you buy to get the fancy hat for your character, you get the fancy hat,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to keep paying every year to keep your fancy hat. I think it feels more like a one time
⏹️ ▶️ John in that purchase. And yeah, I think it’s the perfect kind of in that purchase or the perfect kind of monetary
⏹️ ▶️ John frill because it’s like, like I said, for the people, people may be upset about it. But you know, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using 1.0 and 2.0. And they didn’t have any dark theme, right? You before 2.5 that you
⏹️ ▶️ John were fine with it. But then suddenly, when you know there’s a dark theme, and now you have to pay money to get it all I want to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to get it for free. Also, if you don’t it’s worth the money, don’t pay for it, right? And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you suddenly don’t want to use the application, like, well, then just go back in time and pretend 2.5 was never released and then
⏹️ ▶️ John use whatever calculus you were using before to make you pay for it. Were you just holding on waiting for a dark theme? Anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying is I don’t think it seems like a recurring thing. Trying to bundle it all under the patron thing, when you’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ John really got two things at this point for the patrons, you’ve got the the uploads, which, like you said, makes total
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. Like you’re you’re costing money. Therefore, you must give money on a regular basis because you’re storing files
⏹️ ▶️ John on the the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right well it well it doesn’t it doesn’t make total sense to everybody who’s been angry at least half of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are demanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that too but that’s that’s that one easy for me to say I can’t do that for everybody sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I’m not gonna do that you know that makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John right you know like this is a money-losing proposition there it’s I will pay for storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and Amazon has three for you and you will give me nothing no it doesn’t you know anyway I think that makes more
⏹️ ▶️ John sense and if you have like 17 features that patrons got and one of them happen to be the bundle dark theme, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that would make sense to visit the patron is like the different the different class of people like oh, I pay a little bit extra zap
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can get and use for free and it does everything you want to do. But I pay a little bit extra for this one feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that has an ongoing recurring cost because I’m storing bits on the internet. And so the feature that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a little perk, I mean, in the end, it doesn’t really matter like all these logical arguments of what should or shouldn’t be all that matters
⏹️ ▶️ John is, do people find that are people willing to pay for it? I mean, you’ll find that with the sales number.
⏹️ ▶️ John If have you made an offering that is attractive enough for people to part ways with their money on a regular basis to get them, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John find out. But if we had to try to like break it down, I think that’s the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John the two of the things that you’ve offered that that one of them just doesn’t seem like a recurring feature for
⏹️ ▶️ John for other people, they’re going to pay for the file uploads anyway. And for them, dark mode is just like a perk. Oh, and great, I get dark mode
⏹️ ▶️ John too. And they don’t feel like they’re paying x amount every month or year for dark mode, they feel like they’re paying
⏹️ ▶️ John for file uploads and getting dark mode as park. So I think that the sales numbers will bear it out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if people are having arguments about it, it’s clear there are disagreements about what is worth spending this money on
⏹️ ▶️ John or not. So I don’t I think it’s perfectly valid experiment. And I fully
⏹️ ▶️ John expect in six months or a year from now, are you to try more experiments because that’s just the way it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that I didn’t blink an eye over dark mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or file uploads being a patron only exclusive. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having heard John’s thoughts on it, I tend to agree with him that dark mode seems like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should have been an in-app purchase separate from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey patronage. But then that gets into a whole new wiggly discussion about, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you really want to have patronage and in-app purchases concurrently?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer is no, I really don’t. Like there’s so many reasons why I don’t want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Then I would say either you give dark mode out of the goodness of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heart and then potentially have some financial implications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thereof, which I don’t think is a terribly good option, or you deal with the people being grumpy. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what John’s saying, and I mostly agree with him, that it feels like the sort of thing that you should just pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once and that’s that. But on the other side of the coin, you need to be able to eat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say that most of the people, or I would think that most of the people that download this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app have enough of an understanding of kind of how the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store economy works, not necessarily to the level of those who listen to the show, but just a general understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, hey, the people who wrote this app or person that wrote this app needs to be able to eat, and so I need to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay that person. And so I don’t find it troubling for either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be in the patronage model at all, really. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy for me to say because I’m obviously going to support you regardless because you’re a close friend of mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely don’t see a problem with the file uploads being in patronage at all at all at all because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as John has said and as you’ve said, you need to be able to recoup that money somehow. LWJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way I look at the patronage model really is that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to find a way to be both the cheapest and the most expensive podcast app in the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m trying to find a way where this could be free for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost everybody, you know, and free up front. If anybody wants to try it, they can try for free. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I said, you know, on numerous other occasions, one of my goals with this app is to get a lot of users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of help me defend the openness of podcasting with diversity of clients. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very important for me that the app stay free up front. And so the question is like, how do I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where do I get the money? And I can do like ads somehow, but I don’t really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. I’ve thought of ways I could do it tastefully. I still would rather not do that if I don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see what happens there. Hopefully I won’t need to do that, but I might. To me, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this really as update pricing or upgrade pricing, like kind of baked in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if I didn’t do this, I would have to do some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of upgrade pricing model. So I would have to then hold back features for longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make these bigger, like I probably wouldn’t have released 2.5 right now. I probably would have waited a few more months and done a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big 3.0 update in the summer or something. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charged a whole separate purchase. Like had it be, all right, you know what, your 1.x and 2.x purchases don’t count for anything now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, brand new purchase for the 3.0 premium features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that also sucks in a lot of different ways. And I think that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anger people more. So the question is, I want to get, somehow I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get some kind of recurring revenue. And I think the software industry kind of bears that out now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of seeing like, you know, for an app to be sustainable, it needs something like that. You know, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily need to be done in one particular way, but somehow you need recurring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue to come in. You know, like with Instapaper, I didn’t have that for a long time. Instapaper, it was just five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks up front, and that was it. And that worked for a long time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the growth was so good. With Overcast, the growth isn’t that good. It grows, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growing at the kind of rate that Instapaper was, just because Instapaper had a really great growth curve. It was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early in the app store. It was in the right place at the right time, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that was a wider audience. Whereas now, with Overcast, the built-in podcast app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so popular. And even though it’s fairly mediocre,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s popular enough that it’s hard for people to make a dent in that. So I need some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to, I can’t rely on just growth for revenue purposes. I have to rely on some kind of recurring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue. So in the App Store, my options are, sell like coins and BS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but some kind of like consumable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s literally, they call it some kind of consumable in-app purchase. I don’t think that necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fits in a podcast client. I don’t see how that fits in a way that doesn’t just piss people off. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s option number one, not a very good option. Option number two would be what I mentioned, kind of like the upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing kind of straightforward way to do it, which is either make a whole separate app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year and have it be paid up front maybe, or have it be free with in-app purchase to unlock the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I did 1.0. Then I have a whole new app every year, and that has so many problems with people getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really angry if they bought it right before you updated it, and you have to, again, you have to kind of batch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your major updates together and hold back features for six months waiting for the big update and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that sucks too. Or you do what I’m doing now, which is like some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription, some kind of recurring payment for something. So the way I’m doing it now is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started out, you’re paying for nothing. Now you’re paying for almost nothing, except for these two features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re kind of paying for. I think it’s a pretty good happy medium where I’m basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging you $12 a year if you want the full experience, but most people won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s fine. So far, my subscription counts are up by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some big percentage, I think like 30% in like two days. I mean, they had a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump and we’ll see what happens. If they keep going up as more people get the update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or try the update. I’m not really promoting the update. Like when you launch it after the update, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop up a box saying, hey, here’s what’s new. Just nothing happens. Like so you’d have to like go to the settings screen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even notice necessarily that it’s been updated. So this could be like a slow growth over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it does seem so far as though this this one change of like giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you something that that you kind of want for 12 bucks a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does feel like that one change will be enough to push a lot more people into subscribing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that will probably make the difference between being able to keep this model long term or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if I didn’t do this as I said earlier if I didn’t add something compelling for patrons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and uploads aren’t compelling enough because most people don’t need that feature some Some people really like it, but most people don’t need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas dark mode could appeal to any user. It doesn’t necessarily… Not everybody cares that much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it will appeal to lots of people. So if I didn’t make a change like that, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got something for that unlock that was really nice, but that didn’t make the app super bad for everyone who didn’t have it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I wouldn’t be able to continue this model. So hey, we’ll see what happens. John’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. I will probably change this in six months, but I’m hoping not to have to, because if If I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep this, if this ends up working and being a great model for Overcast long term,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I don’t need to save up features for major releases anymore. I can release features whenever they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready. That is so much better for me. It’s better for users. It is just so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things that way. And I don’t have to deal with all this crazy, constantly changing purchase stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage. And it’s easier for the users. There’s no issue of if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the day before I have a major new update, then you feel like a jerk for having bought the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. There’s so many issues this avoids. Barring the absence of some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of new app store monetization method where if Apple would offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of easier paid upgrade system or something, then I might change my mind. But barring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like that, which I don’t foresee, this is probably a really great model as long as it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big question,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll see. So you’re going to have to come up with new hats soon though. Like the dark
⏹️ ▶️ John mode is your hat. Dark mode is that, you know, the games learn that the thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can make people pay for are actually the things that are meaningless in the scope of the game but give your character a funny hat
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. You know, like some cosmetic item that is desirable all out of proportion
⏹️ ▶️ John to the actual value because the number of people who legitimately need dark mode because the white screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is too blinding and they like to use it mounted on their car or whatever. Like this, everyone’s got an excuse why they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need a dark mode and they can’t turn their screen down or whatever. Right. But bottom line is people want dark mode because it looks nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are the perfect kind of usually, you know, in app purchase types things. I would love to know how many
⏹️ ▶️ John people signed up for patronage and 2.5 because of one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the two new features, which one was it like, or they had to weigh them like, like many people are just signing
⏹️ ▶️ John up just because they want to fund the app and have it be developed and blah, blah, the sort of high minded ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ John other people like oh there’s there’s two new features file uploads in dark mode which one were they really wanting to get
⏹️ ▶️ John did they were like them both equally or are they going mostly for dark mode and I would think most of them were going for dark mode
⏹️ ▶️ John even though that is like the the less valuable practically speaking in terms of doesn’t actually add any feature just makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the app look different so if that ends up working next year you’ll need
⏹️ ▶️ John something else of similar value for the people who paid for dark mode right too maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to keep paying because they’re bored with dark mode but what new hats do you have to give them for your podcast application?
⏹️ ▶️ John How about a podcast application construction kit like the calculator
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco construction kit? You get to
⏹️ ▶️ John design your own application, pick the font, pick the color. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll come up with something. What I’m hoping is
⏹️ ▶️ John though, as you go through these features, you’re saying like before you had these other features that were more important than file uploads,
⏹️ ▶️ John but eventually you did those and so you got down to file uploads. When are you going to get to how far down the list is my pet feature
⏹️ ▶️ John where whenever I add something to overcast, I want it to be added to the one playlist I use all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate adding it to Overcast and realizing I didn’t really add it to Overcast. I added it to a place where I’m never ever
⏹️ ▶️ John going to see it because I spent all my time in this one playlist and it’s 7,000 taps to pull things
⏹️ ▶️ John from not in the playlist to be into the playlist when they’re like individual episodes. Like if someone tweets,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this was a good podcast episode of a podcast that you probably don’t want to subscribe to, but just download this
⏹️ ▶️ John episode. And before it was like, oh, well now I got to subscribe and find the episode and then add it to my playlist.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now with uploads, I can just download the mp3 and upload it, but I still have to go add it to my playlist. I would love it if everything
⏹️ ▶️ John I added to Overcast always went into the playlist of my choice. And I realize that’s a super low priority feature, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, eventually you’ll get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is exactly how Overcast works for me. Because my like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlist is default inclusive. Yours is a whitelist based.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So right? Isn’t that the last time we talked about this? But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but that’s what I want. That’s what I want. I want it to be whitelist based because there are things on
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside that are large volume, things that I don’t want cluttering up my it just it seems like it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a simple anyway eventually you’ll be scraping the bottom of the barrel the features and you’ll get to mine
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just it’s just one top menu when adding things to overcast where should they be added by default I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even want a million options like what priority or just add to the bottom I don’t care or the top whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh boy well anyway maybe someday I’ll have to go ad supported but if I did
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Apple event predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One quick question for you, Marco. I don’t know very much at all about S3, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the uploaded files are in a bucket that you control slash own, right? Or maybe bucket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the right term. So have you looked into about how many files have been uploaded? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a gajillion? Is it just ten? You know, do you have any feeling for it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I haven’t looked since that day. Give me a second. Introduce the next topic and I’ll look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I do this? Can transmit count up for me?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, while you think about that for a second, and you can interrupt with some real-time follow-up, hopefully in a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is probably worthwhile for us to talk about what’s going on Monday. It is Monday, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Big Apple event? Something like that, yeah. I think it’s, yeah, it’s March 21st. So, yes, that’s Monday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is going to loop in the press on March 21st and talk about some new things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do we think it’s going to be? I presume it’ll be some sort of new Macintosh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware. It may be a new smaller iPhone, which I have extraordinarily conflicting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts about. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t really been keeping up with the typical Kremlinology of examining the invitation
⏹️ ▶️ John and seeing what it means. I mean, I did see it when it came out and I thought briefly about the looping you in and I saw a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John stories about, oh, it’s gonna be showing new colors of Milanese loops.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, the titles always mean something sometimes it’s something not exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s it does say something about what they choose to emphasize and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be really weird to me I think to have this event where we assume there’s gonna be at the very least new laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco will talk about when he’s done doing his research it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a spinner I’m not I’m not counting it myself but
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be really weird to me if they had this event and introduced all the things that think they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to introduce or at least some of them or whatever. But the loop us in thing ended up being about new Milanese loops,
⏹️ ▶️ John new colors like I don’t know I just it seems weird. So I’m hoping that’s not what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But But anyway, I’ve been treating this event kind of like the force awakens where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not trying to read too many spoilers about it because the past couple events I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really been bowled over by and I want to be pleasantly surprised by
⏹️ ▶️ John something so you know, it’s just managing expectations It’s like, all right, well, if you feel like you’re getting overhyped, then just don’t read as much
⏹️ ▶️ John hype and then whatever they announce, you’ll be more excited about. Can I spoil it for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, so the laptops, I’m probably not gonna be excited about anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I was just gonna tell you that they’re probably not going to release the Mac Pro with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming video card that you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, no, really? Thanks, I kind of figured that one out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t have to be gaming video card, but they released a new Mac Pro, period, yeah. I’m assuming if that’s going to come,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be WWDC or later. Um, I haven’t even been keeping up to know if,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, enough to know if this is the rumored event where they’re going to do the, uh, the new iPad, I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be October still, but like the new regular size iPad with the stylus and everything that I might
⏹️ ▶️ John actually buy, but if they did announce that because I’ve been out of the loop, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco would be excited by it
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would probably buy one otherwise, I guess I’ll just look at the laptops from afar and we’ll talk about whether
⏹️ ▶️ John we think they’re good or bad laptops. but Marco can tell us about those now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, the rumors are pretty strong that this is the event where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 9.7-inch new iPad will be released.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, don’t spoil it for me. I could have been pleasantly surprised. How do you not know that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been trying to stay away from, you know, the million sites that will tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John the list of things that are likely to appear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, basically, everybody is reporting the same rumors, including ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tipster, reporting the same rumors that basically this is that event and we should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably expect that to happen like almost certainly I don’t think anyone is even doubting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any part of it anymore but basically that’s going to happen in all likelihood and it is 9.7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch iPad that’s kind of like a mini iPad Pro so it’ll have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart connector it’ll have those four speaker arrangement and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll be nice and fast and use some variant of the A9X. All right, oh and it supports the pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been wondering how how they’re gonna find space for the big speaker cavities Do they just mean they’ll have four speakers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the the rumor is that it will have this a similar four speaker arrangement as the new as the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro I think they could plausibly do it. I mean with the iPad their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their main limitation is weight It’s not necessarily size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weight is the big one And so like, they presumably, like, I don’t think every inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that case needs to be full of battery. You know, because, I mean, look at the iPad Pro. You know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the iPad Pro, it’s not. But the case is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much bigger there. I don’t know, they just make it thicker, obviously, but that’s so counter to what they always do. Like, all you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is make it a millimeter thicker, and then suddenly you gain back all the area that you want for the, or you could just make the cavity smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m sure they’ll work it out. I’m just curious about what it’ll look like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a real-time follow-up, the total amount of data stored on Overcast upload so far is 189 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s not bad for like three days after release.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is impressive and do you have any feel for how many files that is just ballpark?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This doesn’t tell me that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John tells me exactly how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bytes. Yeah no I’m not gonna do that. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Yeah a lot. 188 gigs. I mean I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limit of 500 megs per file so it’s probably or maybe you know I’ve raised it it’s a gig per file now so you know it’s it’s got to be at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least 188 anyway so I think this will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major iPad update because for one thing I think bringing the pencil to the 10-inch line is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really big deal and by all accounts that’s what they’re going to do that is gonna be huge because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so many people they really want the pencil but the iPad Pro is just too big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the iPad Pro like you really have to be like really into working on the iPad like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a table or at a desk like you have to be really into that kind of setup like like almost like a mini laptop really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to be using it that way for that to be comfortable for a lot of a lot of people the way most people use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads kind of like in one arm like kind of sitting like on a couch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like the way most people use iPads I think that the iPad Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not great for that you can do it but but it’s really not great for that. And in some cases, maybe you can’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think there’s a lot of people who would like the features of the iPad Pro, but just want it to be smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just for physical dimension reasons. So I think this will sell very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an iPad. I don’t think it’s going to revive the iPad and save it by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself. It might be part of a combination of things that revive the iPad, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this alone will do it. But I think it’s gonna be a really nice update is going to be a success, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I use my iPad more than zero times ever, I would totally get it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it looks like it’s going to be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, maybe I might get it. I mean, I had an idea for an app that uses the pencil, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’m probably not going to get to that idea any time soon. So I’ll probably wait on that and probably not get this version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the only thing that would make me get this version, I think, is if I decided to move forward with that app and I would get it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test on. But it’s probably not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really hoping for, even though I am not at all in the market for a laptop. I am really hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the new MacBook Pros or whatever else happens to be released has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keyboard mechanism from the Magic Keyboard. If you happen to follow me on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t shut up about how much I love the Magic Keyboard because guess what? I’m so amped for the thought of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that keyboard being on a MacBook Pro because now typing on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically brand new as I sit here today, 15-inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keys are just mushy by comparison to the Magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keyboard, and I want the Magic Keyboard in a MacBook Pro something fierce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I guess we’ll talk about the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Pro now. Was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the iPad? No, but there’s also the iPhone and the watch bands. Anyway. We’ll get there. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro. Intel released Skylake chips this past winter, like in CES or whatever timescale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was, or in that ballpark. Skylake is a big deal, basically. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new revision of the Intel CPUs that is dramatically lower battery life, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically less battery usage, and a pretty decent performance increase as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it ends up that if you, by switching to Skylake, if you keep the size of the thing the same,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get a nice long battery out of it. If you just wanna keep the battery life the same,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you can shrink the size of the laptop. You can make it thinner and lighter. So what we’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from ATP Tipster, quite a lot actually, but what we’ve heard is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this update or some update soon, like basically these laptops exist, we don’t know if they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released on Wednesday, but this update has happened internally and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, they’re ready to go. But with Intel you never know whether they can get enough chips and whether Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel’s a mess as a partner to depend on because Intel’s been holding back Mac releases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years now, because they just can’t advance their own stuff, they can’t get their process up, they can’t get yields up, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. But sometime very soon, and probably at this event, there’s going to be a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update to the MacBook Pro line, and also the MacBook One. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving them all to Skylake, basically. And of course what this allows them to do, as I said earlier, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can either increase the battery life, or you can make the thing thinner and lighter. So according to HP Tipster, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook One, the little skinny one-port thing with the crappy keyboard. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently getting Skylake, but with, you know, not really other meaningful changes. The USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port it has will become a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port, I think. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be a big deal, because, you know, that enables faster things and better monitor and stuff like that. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main thing is, with the MacBook One, it’ll get a decent performance increase. But again, keep in mind, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people are hoping for the MacBook One to somehow reach the level of, like, last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year’s MacBook Pro or something. It won’t. It can’t. The thermal difference is there. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fanless computer made to dissipate like 6 watts of heat or whatever. It can’t. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a CPU class that’s made for like a 25 watt enclosure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can’t dissipate enough heat. So the MacBook One CPUs are never going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fast relative to the ones you can get by going a little bit larger with a fan. They’re never going to be that fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s never even gonna be close. They just can’t be by just thermals of CPU design. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be probably, you know, a good, you know, 10 to 25 percent faster than it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now. Something like that. Like in that ballpark. And it’s also gonna probably have something like 10 to 30 percent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better battery life. Something like that. So it takes this computer that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty underpowered and had pretty mediocre battery life and it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things better. You know, not a hundred percent better, but decently better. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook One will get a little better. I would also speculate, I haven’t heard anything about this yet, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would also speculate on the invitation to the event, the invitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple’s event, I know we don’t want to look too much into it, however it is pretty obvious on the invitation that they have clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco featured the colors of the medals they’ve been offering on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have the space gray, the rose gold, the gold and the aluminum. They have all those colors like kind of forming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the logo on the invitation. So I have to imagine this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indicates they’re going to offer these colors on the new laptops. Notably, they don’t currently offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pink, or excuse me, rose gold. They don’t offer rose gold MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ones yet. And they don’t offer any colors on the MacBook Pros yet. It would be cool if they offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all four colors on all the MacBook Pros. And according to ATP Tifter, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be the case. So I’m looking forward if they do that, I would love to have those color options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more color options, but I would love to at least start with those. It would be great to just have something different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plain aluminum that we’ve seen for God knows how long, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly Oh, totally. I bought my first Mac when the polycarbonate MacBook was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing, and I remember wanting the what people called the Black Book, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a black plastic MacBook. I wanted that thing so badly. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I came from ThinkPads that were all black, but to this day, I still think it looks really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good, and I wanted it so bad. But it was like $150 or something like that. The only difference was the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it collects your fingerprints like crazy. Like that was – ______ Steven Connelly That I did not know. Douglas Goldstein
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neither – yeah. We had a couple of them in the Tumblr office. A few people had them and I got to see them like during that time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they never look good in person because – and neither – you know, the white ones would have the discoloring palm rests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it wasn’t actually from your hands necessarily. The plastic would discolor with heat. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would also discolor if you had your hands all over it and they were dirty. But I got my top case replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of having my white MacBook. With the replacement, I put one of those little stick-on protectors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, like a clear stick-on protector on it. So my hands never actually rested on it, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still discolored. And yeah, it turns out that as we learned with the white iPhone being delayed for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost a year, remember As we learned, making white plastic that ages well and stands up to heat is really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they just didn’t do it right, or they hadn’t figured it out yet. So yeah, the black one had a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finish. The white one had like a glossy, smooth finish. The black one was like this weird matte, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rubbery finish. And it just showed the slightest hint of finger oil, just from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like picking it up. You’d have these giant oily fingerprints visible on the case. It was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not good. It was unfortunate because like when it was perfectly immaculate it did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really nice but that lasted like a day and then that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The aluminum ones had the same problem back in the day. Like I have one of the later
⏹️ ▶️ John non-unibody before any unibody Apple portables came out aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John and that aluminum would get these weird smudges like they didn’t wipe off.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would end up like discoloring the aluminum from oils on your fingers or from just kids grossness
⏹️ ▶️ John like you couldn’t wash it off and it was it was not great and the new ones like on the macbook air i know Because
⏹️ ▶️ John my kids grimy hands are all over these things and now the kids have graduated up to or the computers have
⏹️ ▶️ John graduated Down to the kids like that now they’re using old macbook air and it just even though it’s the same color
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same Boring silver that it’s always been it stands up better to Finger
⏹️ ▶️ John grease and grime and i think the the current crop of uh, like the what is it the space gray
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the darker color one That one seems like it should hold up even better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve finally figured out how to make a surface, an aluminum surface that’s durable
⏹️ ▶️ John and doesn’t discolor and then different colors of it like the gold and the space gray
⏹️ ▶️ John only improve that because the hardest one to get is the one that’s like the lightest or the closest to white which is the plain old
⏹️ ▶️ John silver so even if I hadn’t seen rumors about this which I had I would have fully expected just because
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook one is available in those colors they’ll all be available in those colors because it’s all just aluminum and and they’re making a million
⏹️ ▶️ John things anodized in different ways, and I think they really got the anodizing and the surface treatment
⏹️ ▶️ John of this aluminum down at this point. So they totally should do that, and I don’t know if they’re gonna charge more for
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They didn’t with the MacBook Ones, and unlike the Black Book, which was whatever, you know, like I said, $150.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a way to make them more attractive machines, and if they have a pink
⏹️ ▶️ John one, that will definitely help, because that’s the first sort of non-boring color.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other ones are like, all right, Well, there are shades of gray and a gold that barely looks gold. Like, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ John a red one, a blue one, a yellow one. You know, we used to have multicolor iMacs and they were fun and we loved them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, you know, we’re still, we’re kind of timidly dipping our toe into colors that are not just
⏹️ ▶️ John different shades of silver or brown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also, you know, just like, the actual design of the MacBooks has changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so little, you know, in the last 10 years. It really, like, going through the unibody transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then going from unibody to retina, it still just kind of looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the same laptop, just thinner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still looks very similar. And I think they look good. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current design does look good, but it’s pretty boring by now. It’s everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as Apple has gotten more popular, this issue’s even gotten worse, because I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like I want some room for individuality. and I know I’m not gonna get a huge amount of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially if I buy a Space Gray one and show it to an Apple conference. Like I know I’m not gonna get that much individuality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, but I would like just something to push us a little in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, if ATB Tipster’s right, there’s also substantial updates to the MacBook Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, to me, is more interesting, because the MacBook One we’ve already seen, I’ve already decided it’s not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of people have decided that, or that it is for them, and the update to the MacBook One is probably gonna be a fairly minor one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the update to the MacBook Pro is, if he’s right, rumored to be substantial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is going to be a significant design update because Skylake has enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop to become thinner and lighter because they’re gonna shave off the, quote, excess battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the concept of that, but I’m pretty sure that’s how they look at it. And you could argue whether it is or isn’t excess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure I will argue that eventually again. But I expect, based on the information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I expect that the new MacBook Pro will look like the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One. Just not that small, obviously, but it’ll have similar styling. So, also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offered in the colored metals, a thinner design, probably not tapered, but a thinner design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Skylake chips. I would expect roughly the 13-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be effectively a replacement for the 13-inch Air at this point. When they introduced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook One, fans of the Air were very disappointed because it seemed as though they were probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to ever touch the air again and that the long-wished-for Retina Air was probably not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen, that the MacBook One is the Retina Air. And that seems, you know, so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems to probably be correct. But the new MacBook Pro, the 13-inch, if you shave off, you know, 20% of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weight of a 13-inch or whatever, or, you know, if you shave off a significant chunk of that weight then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it a little bit thinner, then the 13-inch MacBook Pro is very close to the size and weight of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13-inch Air and it’s Retina and it’s newer and more modern and so you know supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds really good like if that’s all true and and the rumor is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it retains the same port so it’s not like gonna lose you know tons of ports gonna retain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ports and just trade in the Thunderbolts for the for new USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt 3 ports if that’s true that’s great that sounds like a great laptop like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the 15 or the 13, they’re both, you know, Tipster says they’re both gonna be like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love either of those, honestly. The 13 would be a fantastic replacement for the MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least the 13 inch version of the MacBook Air. 11 inch Air fans, I’m sorry, you’re screwed. You gotta deal with the MacBook One,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re a fan of the 13 inch Air, I think the 13 inch Pro then, you know, if this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true, that will be awesome. Like that’ll be a fantastic all-around laptop. It’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be thin and light and powerful and will have a retina screen and tons of ports for usefulness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds great. The 15-inch will also become even more compelling. You know, if this all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works out, then the 15-inch, you know, kind of like drops itself by like half a weight class basically. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it becomes even thinner and lighter and you know, and it’s already, you know, the current 15 is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good for a 15-inch. This becomes even thinner and lighter. I really hope this is all true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to see this come out next week. If If not, we’ll probably have it at WBC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, or sometime between now and then. But if you look at what’s in this event, you have the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, and then you have what we haven’t talked about yet, which is the new four-inch iPhone. Those are both kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like mid-grade to low-end products. Oh, and also new watch bands,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not even, and possibly a minor update to the watch, but probably not even that. You kind of have like all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of low-end, low-profile products. I’m hoping the MacBooks are what makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the event kind of complete then. You know, the MacBooks and the MacBook Pros would be like, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just all boring low end stuff, it’s also, hey, here’s some new stuff for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops that you’re all using. You know, here’s significant new versions of these laptops. I hope that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on here. Now, about that four inch iPhone. What do you guys think about that? John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you used a four inch device for so long, would you get a four inch iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t go back now, I think. I’ve been thinking about it, and like, and we have enough little iPod Touches around the house. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways I miss the portability, but I’m just so used to the big screen now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I can go back. The iPhone 6 does still feel a little bit unwieldy in my pocket, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, if I went to a store and I would think, my two years was up and I needed a new phone, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d pick the 6 size. So I am a convert, but I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that they are going to offer the smaller phone and that the smaller phone will be cheaper in keeping with the trend
⏹️ ▶️ John that the plus is more expensive than the 6, the smaller phone will be less expensive than the
⏹️ ▶️ John six size devices probably out of proportion to the cost savings that
⏹️ ▶️ John they get from using a smaller screen right because they do get some cost savings from using a smaller screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and a smaller battery and like all that stuff does cost less but not
⏹️ ▶️ John you know not that much less i think i think that this will be the lowest end
⏹️ ▶️ John of the current generation of iphones which is kind of a shame for the people who are hoping for
⏹️ ▶️ John the best that Apple could pack into a small package, but I think they’re going to be disappointed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. It’s funny because I definitely wanted all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new insides when I got the 6 last year, I guess two years ago now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I really didn’t want a bigger phone. And to this day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone doesn’t feel bad in my hand, but we use a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5S as like a noise maker when Declan is sleeping. So I handle a 5S at least once a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh man, does that feel so much better in my hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect in my hand. It really does. And I think that’s 95%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size and a little bit the edges, but mostly it’s the size.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The problem, though, is that I don’t know if I can go back from a phone that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got this much screen real estate. And so I think, like John, I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am a permanent convert. I mean, I’m not a maniac. I’m not going to go plus club, but I think I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey permanent convert in the six-size category.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But gosh, I’m going to have a real crisis of decision-making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they show us something that looks really pretty but is the same size as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have high hopes for this phone, even though I don’t plan to get one. I’m glad that it’s even rumored, that it looks like it’s very likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. I’m glad that they care about the four-inch size. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sizes are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for a lot of people, but not everyone. And to totally abandon the four-inch line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think would have been a mistake, and would have really made life a little less convenient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people. So I’m really glad they’re doing this. I’m very happy that we’re gonna have these options in the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again for people who do want them. And I’m glad that the option isn’t just gonna be like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can choose either a new giant phone or an old piece of crap. Because it seems like the gap between,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the rumored specs are correct, it’s gonna basically be a mini 6S with maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit lower clock speed for thermal reasons. But it seems like it’s going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current generation hardware for the most part. You know, we’ll see, I don’t think we know really what the camera’s gonna be yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It probably won’t be as good as the 6 just for size or cost reasons, but it’s probably going to be close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think it’s going to be a really nice product for a lot of people, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad Apple’s going to have it in the lineup. I do think, John, you talked about this a little bit, I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of unfortunate that Apple charges by size. So by pricing, they are going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this the lowest specced phone in addition to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smallest one in the lineup. It does kind of suck that people who get the small phone are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to have the best hardware, but it’ll be better than using two year old, three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old hardware. So overall, pretty good. I’m looking forward to it. Design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise, I’m totally with you guys. I really don’t care for the 6 physical design at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. I think, and the 6s made it slightly better by making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the finish on the case slightly less slippery, but not enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really do not like the little slippery bar of soap design. I don’t like that I have to use a case now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use Apple’s leather case now just to give it grip. I don’t like cases. I don’t like having all the dust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collect around the edge. I don’t like the extra bulk that they add. I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spending another 40 bucks every time I buy a new phone. Cases are a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inelegant solution, and I know lots of people use them, and that’s fine. But surely it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you design a phone that doesn’t need a case for so many people. Some people are gonna use a case regardless. A lot of people are gonna use a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless. I didn’t use a case for any of my phones before this and it was fine. And the 6 and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 6s, I need a case to hold them securely. And that kind of sucks. I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iPhone 7 design this fall, I’m hoping that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it improves the real world holdability somehow. I’m honestly not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hopeful that it will. I’m not as
⏹️ ▶️ John down on the 6 shape. In fact, I kind of wish I could use it without a case because it’s so nice
⏹️ ▶️ John to have the curved glass and the case messes that up for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco edge swipes and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the other hand, I really like my leather case. I like the fact that it is protected by this thin layer of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that can get nicked up and that I can replace, and that is grippy because the leather is way more grippy than anything
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum is ever gonna be. And I like that. That’s why I always use silicone cases for such a long time. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like the grippiness. But if a seven is like this, because I’ll be getting a seven. my six will,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, my two years with my six will be up, and I’ll end up getting a seven, and if it’s more or less like
⏹️ ▶️ John the six, but improved insides, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine with it. So, important question to go back to the four-inch phone. Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or does it not have a camera bulge? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna think no, right? You gotta not have one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it depends. So, the reason I bring up the seven also now is so we have this release that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally halfway between the 6S and the 7 design releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This phone, obviously, they’re gonna want it to be in the lineup for a while. They’re not gonna make it look outdated in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months, ideally. So I’m guessing, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure, will the design of the new 4-inch phone more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closely resemble the 6S or the 7? Or the 5S? Yeah, that was one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the early rumors. I don’t see that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the 5s didn’t have a bulge. So that’s what makes me think that if they’re making a new four inch phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason you need the bulge is we need to have the best camera and the best camera is just too big to fit. If it’s too big
⏹️ ▶️ John to fit, they just won’t give you the best camera. And they’re gonna have a non-bulging camera on the 7, it seems like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they could even put that in there if they wanna have the good camera. It just seems like their non-bulge
⏹️ ▶️ John options are so many. Including actually making the thing a little bit thicker because
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, this isn’t the fanciest one. It’s a little bit thicker. It could still be thinner than the 5S and still not have a bulge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, I feel like the bulge days for this class are probably over, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason the iPod Touch still has it is because no one cares about the iPod Touch and because the iPod Touch is insanely thin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I hope it doesn’t have a bulge. But yeah, so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really curious to see, like, will the design of the new 4-inch phone give us any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hints towards the design of the 7, basically? Like, you know, will it indicate kind of where they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is it just you know gonna look old or the sixth design I think is is ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly I think it has it has very little personality you know if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every previous iPhone except maybe the 3G if you look at all the other ones I think they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more distinct look if you look at the six I think it looks like every Android phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of that’s because Android’s been copying Apple like crazy but but you know part of that is also just like there’s a less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s less about the six that is visually distinctive. Whereas like you know the five and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5s like these were like these beautiful pretty unique looking objects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and the four before that again like you know that’s really like unique like double glass kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These were like really distinctive looking objects. The six just isn’t distinctive it just looks like a blob and it feels like a blob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and the back I think is ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the six look better than the five I never liked the five design it just seemed like a boring tub of aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John chamfered edge was not enough to redeem it for me, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just aesthetically. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the 6 was not the first phone to use curved glass at the edge. Many other phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John including Android phones, did that first. But I think Apple was wise to pick that up. The reason I think the 6
⏹️ ▶️ John looks better is because I like that, I like both the appearance and the feel of the glass
⏹️ ▶️ John curving into the rest of the case. And the back of it doesn’t look that impressive, but I don’t think it has to. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasingly smooth. I think they did an admirable job of blending in those weird antenna lines
⏹️ ▶️ John like that that looks expensive and fancy to me Even if it aesthetically it doesn’t look
⏹️ ▶️ John Particularly nice if this if this case is to be believed they’ve changed that antenna line to look a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more Swoopy and a little bit less utilitarian, but we don’t know what the front of it looks like I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks the same but yeah, I think you can change the look of the front by
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean adjusting chin sizes or or you know, you could do much more interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John things with the front of the iPhone than they’re currently doing now. And the back of it, they’re anodizing in various colors,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of which are very subtle. I would say the same thing. I mean, I’ve been saying this for years that, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the five C, I like the fact that they offered it in a bunch of rainbow colors. Why can’t you do
⏹️ ▶️ John that for the expensive phones? Why do you have to choose between the fastest insides or the fun colors
⏹️ ▶️ John there? You know, we all know one or two people who ended up getting a five C, at least partially because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a more fun color. And sometimes they would sacrifice they would say well I know it’s not as fast and I would really like
⏹️ ▶️ John the faster one but I really want to have a yellow phone because it looks cool like the f5c was its own case
⏹️ ▶️ John and I thought that was interesting and fun and the top end phones still don’t do that so I think there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of room to visually differentiate but if this one just ends up being a nicer six I will
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine with that and I think the market will be fine with it too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Yeah, I feel like I’m between you guys in that I definitely think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the 5 looked great and is probably my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all the iPhone designs, but the 6 looks really good. And I made the tragic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistake of taking my 6S out of my case as you guys were talking, and now I’m holding it naked in my hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And don’t spill water on it. I will attempt not to. This phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does. I mean, I like the leather case a lot. I’ve had Apple leather cases since I can remember, pretty much since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were offered. But this phone without a case on it does feel really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the hand in that it’s both more and less comfortable, right? Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more comfortable in that the edges are a little easier on the hand, but it’s less comfortable in that it’s bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, it’s a little too big if I’m trying to reach with my right hand from the bottom right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where my thumb is all the way up to the upper left. And the, I don’t even remember what it’s called, little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode where everything kind of drops down a little bit where you double… Reachability! Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right, that’s right. That is just such a hack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, it’s tough because I both love and wish for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less in the 6, but I don’t think I could go back to a smaller screen. I really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think I could either. I mean, it’s like when you move up monitor sizes on your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really hard to ever move down. I think same thing with the phone, if not even more so, because just how often you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a phone. I think once you move up to a big screen size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think moving back down would, you could probably get used to it after like a week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but during that week, you’d be regretting every single minute getting that phone. And you might return it, or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I don’t know. I think moving back would be difficult, but not impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, the fact is, I’m actually thinking about getting the Plus in the next generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re an animal because my as I said Mike might have been right. This is how we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get you into an iPad. Your phone is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco until you realize you’re holding you’re holding a 15 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro and you’re like boy this phone seems really big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah well let me let me explain my my possible plus lust in a minute but first our final sponsor this week.
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iPhone 7 Smart Plus Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So 7 plus or pro whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumor the rumors keeps swirling that it might be called iPhone pro or might be another model called iPod iPhone pro
⏹️ ▶️ John what what’s pro about it though I guess the cameras are better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s big I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had they’re gonna confuse what that means but the reason I’m tempted to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll see what I mean obviously we don’t know anything about this product yet except that it probably will exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that it might contain a cool dual camera system that the smaller phone won’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that’s all true and if it doesn’t really suck for some other way, some other reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m tempted to get it because A. I don’t use an iPad. B. I use my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so much. Like my phone is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main computer for so much of the day, for so many parts of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco While I’m traveling, while I’m just running errands around town while I’m just in different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of my house and not in my office. My phone is my computer for so much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day. I do so much on my phone. And there are often times when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish for a little more screen space. There are frequently times when I wish for more battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are frequently times where I wish I could type a little bit more accurately. And I’ve found in my brief
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times using a 6 Plus, like on a couple trips I’ve taken it on, I have found that I can type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more accurately because the keys are larger on that phone. It seems like my iPhone typing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scales up in accuracy with size, where like, when I tried using a 5S the other day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for testing, for when I was doing overcast testing, and I was a mess on that keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t know how I ever typed on those keyboards before. And on the 6, I’m okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But on the 6 Plus, I’m way more accurate. So I think it just kind of fits the way I thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type better. So I think I could actually do a lot more while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m away from my computer if I use the 6 Plus, or if I use the Plus size phone instead of the regular size phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, when I have used it, I’ve been very happy with those benefits. My only reservations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are that also when I’ve used it, I’ve been really turned off by how big it is in my pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s something I would have to consider. But I don’t know, you guys sound like you’re pretty set on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going the Plus size.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, can we just back up? So you’re saying that you really, really, really love the feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a four-inch phone, but you’re probably going to get the 17-inch phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your next phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just needs to have all three. And so depending
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on his mood at the moment, he just
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to get those tactical pants with the really big pockets in them so he can have all three. And depending on, do
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like typing more efficiently? Do I want to have a little worry stone that I rub in my hand? I’ll pull out the four-inch phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I want to have the in-between size? I’ll pull out the six. That’s the only solution for you, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness. I do not want to hear Mike’s feedback for this episode. I’m already dreading it.
⏹️ ▶️ John What would you think if the 7 Plus had a smart connector on it? I don’t buy that for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I’m not saying that I think that’s gonna happen, but what would you think of that product? Is that product
⏹️ ▶️ John more valuable to you, less valuable to you, or the same and you think it’s just silly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what the smart connector does so far. So the rumor of the new iPad is that it will also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the new 10-inch iPad will allegedly have pencil support, iPad Pro-class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU, although probably not quite as high-clocked, and smart connector for the, currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only things that can use the smart connector are smart keyboards from Apple and Logitech. And four gigs of RAM, please, four gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully. We still don’t know what the smart connector will be for on the 10-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. We can assume it will probably be for a smart keyboard, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the benefit of the smart keyboard, I’d say probably the biggest benefit of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it functions as a regular iPad cover, a bigger, bulkier one, but still a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad cover so that it has to actually remain the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the iPad for it to keep that benefit. So I’m assuming there would also be a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the Apple Smart Keyboard that would be smaller and would fit that size. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes sense. I mean, have you guys ever used an iPad keyboard cover for the 10-inch iPad from Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I don’t think I have, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re pretty good. I mean, like, you know, they’re cramped, but they’re usable. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not good to type on. They’re good in that they, when you close them, they’re the same size as your iPod, but as soon as you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco open it up, they’re a terrible keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I would say they’re okay. I mean, you know, for, as much as you can make a usable keyboard that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, you know, nine inches or whatever wide, it’s, they’re not bad. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible to make one that’s usable. However, it’s not possible, in my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make one that’s usable for the iPad mini. They’ve tried, there have been companies have tried. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you can use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ones for the mini are really, really, I think that has crossed a threshold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s just not possible to comfortably touch type on something that size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think obviously there is a limitation here of how small can you make a keyboard cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the same size as the device that it’s covering and have it still be a usable physical
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t accept that limitation though, is why I brought it up for the 7 plus. Because obviously in the 7 plus, the smart
⏹️ ▶️ John connector on the hypothetical smart connector on the side, thought exercise, you wouldn’t be for a keyboard that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John same size as the 7 plus. You would have to break out of that and be more like the old palm things where
⏹️ ▶️ John you have this little tiny screen, but say you’re on a plane and you have stashed in
⏹️ ▶️ John your backpack a full size keyboard with a smart connector. Like an unfold? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’d be like, oh, I have to do some serious emailing here. I don’t want to thumb type it even on my 7 plus
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it sideway smart connector shove it into the little keyboard put it On your tray table pop up and then the keyboard goes away
⏹️ ▶️ John like that the keyboard You don’t no longer have to tie the keyboard to the size of the device Then that
⏹️ ▶️ John would let you sort of you know, what would be your sort of on your road thing? I don’t need to bring my MacBook one All I
⏹️ ▶️ John got to bring is my iPhone 7 plus and my folded up smart connector Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John slash stand for the 7 plus if I need to do serious typing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you can also do that with a Bluetooth keyboard, right? Though,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, I know but the smart connectors like you don’t have to have an extra battery that you have to do And it could be thinner it could be parried from
⏹️ ▶️ John the the phone in the 7 plus which you’re hoping has enough to power the you know the light demands of a keyboard and it
⏹️ ▶️ John can be magnetic and it can fold up and be the cloth thing like And you don’t have to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth because in my experience The the tenuous connection between any device and its Bluetooth accessories
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a fun thing to have to manage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never have problems with my keyboard and mouse, but I mean teach their own
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the keyboard and mouse that you have right in front of your computer. My experiences are all WWC because it’s the only time I
⏹️ ▶️ John ever do use any Bluetooth accessories. Constantly my iPad losing the Bluetooth connection to the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and my iPad losing the tethering connection to my phone. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other problem with a smart keyboard also is that the smart keyboard, at least as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it so far, the smart connected devices are powered by the host iOS device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In theory, this smart connector on an iPhone would have to use the iPhone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery to power the keyboard. Now, keyboards, any kind of wireless or otherwise keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they use very little power. They really don’t take much. But do you really want something else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco draining power from the phone? Like yet another thing draining power from the phone? I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming the keyboard is, the power demands are so incredibly light, like that you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even care. That it would be like, it would be less power than turning Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. It might be, I don’t know, but it’s yet one more thing to consider. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know Apple will say no to a lot of things that they just think would be clunky or would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have enough sat or whatever. I don’t see them doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t see them thinking that enough people want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use external keyboards on their iPhones that it would be worth making this. I mean, does
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone, the phone was just a mental exercise. But the more concrete one is is the 9.7 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John have a smart connector. And now I’m saying, what have you had a 9.7 inch iPad? Do you have to have a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the size of the 9.7? Or can you actually use a larger full size keyboard with that? Why would you not want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it? Like, do you have to do it have to be a keyboard slash also the thing that covers up my iPad? Why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John those be two distinct things? Or why can’t you have one without the other? Because that size, I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John starts to make make more sense. The phone is the more extreme example. And because, you know, I’m thinking of these
⏹️ ▶️ John phones getting bigger and more powerful, and you graduating up to the moving your way up to the iPad. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is just to sort of ring out whether this is a product that might be useful,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we you know, not that we know, but we’re pretty sure there’s going to be a smart connector there. And I’ve used those small
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards, and I don’t think they’re great. And once you have the smart connector on that one, I feel like you know, if I was again
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to assemble a WWDC bag and I wasn’t allowed to use an Apple laptop for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would choose a smart connector keyboard and a 9.7 inch iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro over a Bluetooth keyboard and that same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I would too, certainly. But, you know, we’ll see what options we end up having. But, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspect that, you know, if they do this, you know, if there is new iPad, and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a smart connector and if they release an appropriately sized version of the smart keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to plug into it, it’s probably gonna be decent. You know, it’s probably not gonna be like an amazing keyboard. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current smart keyboard isn’t an amazing keyboard, it’s okay. You know, most people who use it say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly similar, if not slightly better, than the MacBook One keyboard. And yeah, if I was, like, the reason I have tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad keyboard case covers before is because that combo, having an iPad on a keyboard cover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really nice on airplane tray tables. It is awesome for that because it fits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on any of them. And if you don’t already have a tiny laptop, that can be your airplane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. You know, not for doing tons of stuff if you’re not usually accustomed to an iPad workflow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it can be pretty cool for a flight, you know? So if they do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a good way for the 10-inch iPad, that’s great. They’re gonna sell a good number of them probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it’ll be good. Again, I probably won’t have any reason to ever buy one myself, but that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really nice. So, good on them. So I think if you look at this event in general.
Watch bands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we haven’t talked about watch bands yet. Gotta talk about watch bands. That’s the last thing in the event, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not even wearing your Apple Watch anymore. What do you care, Mr. Mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch? It’s over there on top of my thing on my desk. Hmm. Next to Tiff’s, who’s also not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing hers anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, not all of us are too cool for them. And so I’m curious to see what the bands are that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have in this particular event. But I don’t feel like I’m in the market for one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am fine with my sport band. I only have the one band for the Apple Watch. and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t yearn for another, but I’m curious to see what they come up with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the rumors are that, it’s almost a given there, that if they’re going to make new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands at all, they’re almost certainly going to have new colors of the sport band, because that’s easy. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t take a major rethinking of everything, and that’s easy to change out with seasonal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and annual fashion changes. So they’re probably going to do that. But also a very strong rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve heard a number of times is that they might do a NATO style strap, which I think would be a smart move because those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very much in fashion right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, what does that mean? I don’t know what that is. No one knows what that is but you, Margo. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t personally care for them, so I’ll probably explain them poorly. N-A-T-O? Yeah, yeah, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organization. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John American Treaty Organization. No, North Atlantic? What the hell is it? Oh no. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John North Atlantic, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. And they’re like a woven fabric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they often have a stripe. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably destroying this for people who love these things because, again, I don’t really care for them, so I don’t know much about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I know they’re very much in fashion. So yeah, if you go search for NATO strap, you’ll see what I’m talking about. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if you do this image search, you see they always have this weird little double loop attachment mechanism.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of bulky but that because they’re a woven nylon mesh usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re usually very comfortable just a little bit large for my taste but people like them a lot they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much in fashion
⏹️ ▶️ John watch fashion is like I would like a miniature version of the Manhattan skyline on my wrist because that shows that I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ John city person and I love Manhattan okay like this NATO straps like it’s not it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like you till it is meant to evoke it seems like the type of straps used
⏹️ ▶️ John to attach equipment for people in the military and those type of sort of rugged outdoor mountaineering
⏹️ ▶️ John type stuff. But it isn’t one it is not attaching something that needs to be like all those loops
⏹️ ▶️ John are there. You know, it’s like a it’s like a tiny it’s like an art installation
⏹️ ▶️ John is on your wrist like, you know, it is a it
⏹️ ▶️ John is an imitation of another thing and you’re confused by the fact well it is a strap right it does actually hold it to my wrist? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does hold it to your wrist, but all the crap on there is from another strap
⏹️ ▶️ John that does a job, not the job that this thing is doing. I just, I can’t imagine. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t imagine adding additional metal things to a strap that’s going to be around
⏹️ ▶️ John my wrist that are non-functional. No, I don’t, that’s why the, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John call it? The plastic-y floor lastimer, the sport straps appeal to me because for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part, they’d say, well, it’s just a thing that goes on your wrist. Let’s make it as squishy and as comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible. They kind of go weird with the with the classroom mechanism. But suffice it to say, I’m obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John not in the market for a new strap. Although what I would call it $30 from what I would buy for $30 from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is a slightly smaller version of the little leather band
⏹️ ▶️ John that holds the you know that on the classic buckle or whatever the leather strap is that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John that holds the little tongue, you know, the excess tongue that sticks out that little band that’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to hold it needs to be slightly smaller because the little tongue slips out too easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens with every leather watch band I’ve ever used
⏹️ ▶️ John but you just kind of make it a little bit smaller not a lot smaller just a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well or they could just put in a dupe a deployant or something but that’s too fancy they probably won’t do that no one knows what that is but you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your version of destiny it’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of weird words that seem like they mean nothing but there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree I thank God that John actually understands the pain we go through when he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets riffing on destiny stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John the destiny is real watch bands are just made up stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? So what did you call it a deployment a deployant? Oh that makes even more sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a type of clasp So normally you have like the little you know You put you normally you loop the thing through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buckle and you loop it up and down, you know so it kind of tightens that way a Deployant is something where like you you you kind of attach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to one of the holes and then you can open and close it with this metal opening and closing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class mechanism. So you kind of fix the size to where you want it, and then it’s always at that size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, until you readjust it. And it holds it flatter, and it’s quicker to put on and off. So it’s considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a slightly better enclosure, usually it’s higher end. But, you know, I mean, Apple could offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for like 30 bucks more. Apple could do a good job with it if they wanted to. Because Apple, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s bands are awesome. Like the band, the quality of Apple’s bands,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The construction of them, the looks of them, the practicality and the comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s bands is just worlds beyond, not all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most of what you can find in the fancy watch world. Apple’s bands are great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they should really be commended on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For that being their very first time they ever tried making a watch, and they make these amazing bands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this awesome, you know, quick detach swap mechanism. Like, the rest of the watch world has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing on that. Like, they’re so good. But there are things that they could borrow from the watch world to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few slightly nicer ones. And one of those would be a decent leather with a deployant. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I’m not holding my breath on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man, you really went.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. The advantage, John, if you… The reason I brought this up is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deployants usually don’t have that problem with the leather bands with the ends slipping out. because the way it’s held,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of held in a more fixed way. It doesn’t usually happen that way. I don’t actually own any of these, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John I doubt I would buy one at the prices they are. Like I haven’t even been able to bring myself to buy a sport one just because it feels like it’s not worth 50
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks for a piece of plastic or whatever they charge. And honestly, the leather strap is fine. The only annoyance is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t believe how deep into the dark side, into the deep end or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you went on this watch stuff. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know how I do things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew it was bad, but woof. That’s right up his alley. Yeah, but wow. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we need an intervention at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s fine. Everyone needs a hobby. This is a pretty benign hobby as far as hobbies.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s into jewelry, essentially, or jewelry, as people say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, it’s jewelry. I like it. Thanks a lot for our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, MailRoute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and DevMate. and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at 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, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental, tech podcasts so long.
Siracusa crime blotter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what the hell happened to your iPod Touch?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was stolen out of my car. People have broken into our cars while
⏹️ ▶️ John they sat in our driveways many times over the years that we’ve lived here. Apparently this is a thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ John do. They just wander through the neighborhood. At your
⏹️ ▶️ John they just wander through the neighborhood at night while everyone is asleep and check for open cars. And when they find one, they take any valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would you not lock your car?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always lock my car. I obsessively lock my car. I lock my car when I go into the elementary
⏹️ ▶️ John school to pick up my daughter for the three seconds. It’s out there always Why was
⏹️ ▶️ John the car apparently unlocked? It could be the UI on the key fob
⏹️ ▶️ John where it used to be three separate buttons one of which was locked It was a different size and than the other ones and was centrally
⏹️ ▶️ John located and now that we talked about this when I got my new Accord it is just like sort of like a single rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ John region divided in thirds and and the bottom one is lock.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as bad as I thought it was when I first talked about my Accord Key fob. I’m pretty good at finding the buttons but it’s conceivable
⏹️ ▶️ John that I could mash the wrong one absentmindedly. It’s also conceivable that someone else in the house
⏹️ ▶️ John could grab some set of keys the wrong way and accidentally unlock the car because the signal can reach you know
⏹️ ▶️ John from inside of the house. Anyway I probably just forgot the scary thing about it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I am so obsessive about locking my car it basically means that every single night
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone is checking all the cars right because you what are the odds that the one day? I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John to lock it is the one day gets stolen cuz like literally I’m really good about like I locked the house I like the car. I lock
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. I’m from New York. It’s like what I do, right? So it has to be like that the one time
⏹️ ▶️ John I slipped up in some way The other option is they could be breaking in and that’s the past things in my wife never locks her car
⏹️ ▶️ John So she’s had her car broke into a million times. I took all the quarters out of the things They probably go in there all the time and be like up still
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing good in this car car. But she used to have a lot of change in there for parking meters and that all got taken out a couple years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then one time we came out and found like in the winter, the window rolled down on my car,
⏹️ ▶️ John or on a car that I had driven last and anyone who’s ever driven we knows I do not roll down the windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t I don’t like when the cars I would never rolled in the winter and I’m always cold. Forget it. Right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t roll down the window on purpose. Don’t think I did it accidentally. Maybe in the course of trying to break into
⏹️ ▶️ John the car, they somehow triggered the window rolling down. I have no freaking idea. But anyway, this is over
⏹️ ▶️ John the course of many years. And this time they went in and they took my it was I think it was like second
⏹️ ▶️ John generation iPod touch. It was some really old iPod touch that was useless. Like, you couldn’t even give it to a kid. The whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point of it is like, great, this is what you do with old iPod touches. You fill it up with music and you stick it in your car. It’s your permanent, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, music collection in the car. And yeah, I use Bluetooth on my phone for the car listen to podcasts. But every once in a
⏹️ ▶️ John while I switch to the iPod source, you get like the display of the the songs and everything. It’s just nice to have a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John bucket for music and playlists and stuff like that. So they took that they took the case that it was
⏹️ ▶️ John in, which was this little cute cloth case with a something from Etsy. I think they took the
⏹️ ▶️ John wire. They did not take the Garmin GPS, the ancient dedicated Garmin GPS
⏹️ ▶️ John from the pre iPhone days. They just couldn’t even be bothered that even they recognize this is a worthless
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of technology. Yeah, so that was pretty annoying. So all I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done is pulled yet another iPod. I did go through the exercise of find my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and of course it’s not online anymore. And I set the thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John auto lock if it ever connects to the internet because of course it didn’t have lock on. I don’t think there was anything on it because I think I had erased everything
⏹️ ▶️ John off of it except for just a music collection that I… This iPod Touch was too old to even use iCloud stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had synced with iTunes my music onto it. So I think all they’ve got is
⏹️ ▶️ John my collection of mostly DRM-free music. If they ever do connect it to the internet, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John automatically lock itself. Yeah, it’s just kind of depressing, kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to, I was thinking getting, look, if they’re coming every night, I should get one of those little cameras that I hear advertised on other podcasts and
⏹️ ▶️ John just point it at my car and just see them on their nightly visit. Because really, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing to me that like, if I forgot to unlock my car one night and And that’s not how it gets broken into, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really very, very sure that I lock the car all the time. It is a thing I do obsessively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever it’s worth, like, I mean, first of all, that sucks. Second of all, regarding like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having some kind of camera thing. So we got a couple of like minor vandalism incidents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at our house over the last couple of years. And fortunately, they weren’t major, but they were vandalism and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really angered me. And the second time it happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the most recent time it happened, I actually reported it to the local police. I’m like, this is stupid. They should at least know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. And I didn’t think they’d actually do anything. And they couldn’t. But I asked the officer who came by,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was the middle of the day, he had nothing to do with suburbs. And I asked him, I’m like, do you think there’s any, is there any value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in me putting up cameras? If I had the cameras and I had video of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever teenager was doing this, could you actually do anything with that? Or is it just a waste of time? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he talked to me for a good 10 minutes, and he basically said, yeah, there’s not much they can do. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you get, even if you know exactly which kid in town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did it, which is not a given, but even if you knew exactly who did it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the kids who do this kind of stuff are minors, and there’s not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can do in that case. You might get your stuff back, or if the kid vandalizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your house, You might be able to try to get them to pay for it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco removed or cleaned up or whatever, but it’s not like… There’s not much you can do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking, once you go down the security camera route, you kind of have to become one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those paranoid security people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You have to. You have to. You kind of have to go all in. You have to
⏹️ ▶️ John because the only way you get into anything, I wouldn’t have to. The only reason I would do it is, well, first of all, as for reporting it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m considering doing that too. Not because I expect anything to happen, just because I want to affect the crime statistics of my neighborhood
⏹️ ▶️ John to let people know that, hey, this is a thing. I want to be a number on a spreadsheet somewhere at the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the year when they tally up, you know, silly petty theft and in my town. Right. And then the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John would just be just because I’m curious, like, basically, it’s the divide. Is it kids or is it adults?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Because if it’s kids, these kids, it was the same group of kids has been doing over the course of like five years,
⏹️ ▶️ John that spans the time there. Maybe it’s even more than that. Like, can’t be the same kids because they would have aged out of it. Or is it
⏹️ ▶️ John things passed on from kid to kid? Like kids just know when you reach a certain age they learned from their older siblings that you
⏹️ ▶️ John go down the neighborhood at 3 a.m. and check every single car to see if it’s open because there might be valuable stuff in there
⏹️ ▶️ John or is it adults I don’t know anyway I would just be doing it to satisfy my curiosity and if it was kid what
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do with that information is tell their parents find them bring this if I knew like oh I know that
⏹️ ▶️ John kid he’s down the block I would bring the video to the parents and said your son in the night is stealing crap out of my car by the way give me my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John back or my iPod back that’s worth 50 bucks yeah it’s worth less now is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the principal you know kids kids you can get in trouble with their parents and you know hoping that they have parents who
⏹️ ▶️ John would care about this or whatever gonna be uh… ever vigilant and and honestly like seriously i’ve done fascinated
⏹️ ▶️ John by the idea that uh… it’s such an incredibly frequent
⏹️ ▶️ John interval people just trying every single car like in the whole neighbors they’re not just trying my one house
⏹️ ▶️ John right like a good they’ve got to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on i mean chances are i think you probably got unlucky that they probably aren’t going through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that frequently. I’m guessing this just happened to be the day that you unlocked the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. It’s possible this could be going on every night, but I think it’s unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when I talked about it on Slack, other people from, you know, I think people, someone from Seattle
⏹️ ▶️ John and some people from the West Coast were saying, this is a thing that like people go through neighborhoods and check for
⏹️ ▶️ John open car doors. Like it is a common, low level, easy way to get free
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff without actually committing a real crime you’re not actually breaking anything you’re not actually you know
⏹️ ▶️ John so it seems like i think that is still theft you know what i mean but it’s not like it’s not like you’re breaking the window
⏹️ ▶️ John with a with a rock and then stealing the radios out of the car or you know like uh
⏹️ ▶️ John some people have their their transmission gouged out of their car in an attempt to like hot wire it or whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and even my brother when he lived in uh in the more downtown areas had his
⏹️ ▶️ John car broken into a few times where they would actually break things on the car so I’m you know thankful that like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like the most polite thief’s other oh the car is locked you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like storm troopers in a new hope doors locked move on to the next one not really good at trying to find things because
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously you were just locked the door if you were hiding there anyway much yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want them if they broke my window I would be super pissed right if they just gently opened the
⏹️ ▶️ John the door they didn’t close they left all the bins open so I could tell what they had rummage through so they didn’t even like clean
⏹️ ▶️ John up after themselves but I’m mostly just curious, like morbidly curious,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what who is doing this? I mean it would make me feel better if it was kids, but on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other hand I would be like, all right kid you need to get in trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah but the reality, yeah like the reality is like the kind of kid who would go around doing that like chances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are even if you told their parents the chances that their parents would A.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe you even if you show them a video, B. care, and C. not just get pissed at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I think are pretty low.
⏹️ ▶️ John No I think they’re pretty high in the neighborhood I’m in because it doesn’t mean that the kids are doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do it to get money or anything it’s just like a prank you know just like a fun thing to do I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t I don’t think these kids need and really seriously like if they knew anything about it they should have looked at this iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John and thrown it back just like they didn’t take the garment it’s a piece of crap it’s useless right seriously they’re gonna and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I had upgraded to like the latest supported OS so it was like incredibly slow you’re not gonna be happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with that thing you just stole. Trust me. You’re going to find it back on the hood of my car eventually, like, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is useless. You can have it back. Keep it with your Garmin. **Matt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stauffer laughs** You should actually, you should have like a honeypot, uh, something, something like, maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it look just like an iPod Touch, but it’s actually like an Android, like, you know, Nexus 4 or whatever. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loaded with all sorts of garbage or, or, oh, you know what? I got it. Make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, make it the real iPod Touch, but have it only contain the U2 album.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I could just take one of your Kindles each day and put it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in there as a little bakey.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ll leave the Kindle too, so they’ll be like, this isn’t an iPad. Look at this, the screen isn’t even color.