196: Roasting Your Own Beans
17 Nov 2016Apple’s art book, Surface Studio, and what happened when John tried to buy a PC monitor.
Episode Description:
- John's 4K display
- Invisibly wide colors
- Follow-up on Windows: Jordan's tweets 1 2 3 4 5
- Marco and laptops
- Apple's new art book, Designed by Apple in California
- Humanity and whimsy
- Microsoft Surface Studio
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Sal Soghoian leaves Apple
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Investing made better.
- Audible.com: With Audible, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Get a free 30-day trial.
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- John’s 4K displays 🖼️
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Do you notice wide color?
- Two more things on the monitors
- #marcowasright
- iMac vs. laptop
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Jony Ive’s design book
- Sponsor: Audible.com
- Microsoft Surface Studio
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Mac automation
John’s 4K displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything we need to talk about? You want to talk politics for a while? Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Syracuse, tell me about your 4K display or displays, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is not really related to the Mac Pro and Apple’s getting out of the display business
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that business, but it’s strangely connected. So I’ve got a PS4
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro now, and one of the features of the PS4 Pro is that it theoretically supports
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k for games for games that are updated to support it and actually do support it
⏹️ ▶️ John and I figure since I I’m keeping my old ps4 and it had a gaming monitor with it as well
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed a new monitor for the new one because neither one of these is getting hooked up to my TV for
⏹️ ▶️ John display burn-in reasons so when I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was gonna get a new monitor I should get a
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k one because hey this the PlayStation 4 Pro is supposed to be all you know 4k capable
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s what I should do so I shopped around for 4k monitor that supported HDR which is another feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the ps4 pro actually maybe they backported that to the plain old ps4 I don’t remember anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently it’s impossible to find an HDR capable 4k computer
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor you can find TVs obviously but I wasn’t looking for a TV and also the
⏹️ ▶️ John size inflation of TVs that happened maybe three years ago four years ago where
⏹️ ▶️ John any decent TV is now like at least 55 inches. I’m fearing the day that someday you
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be able to get one less than 65 inches. Like the minimum size for a decent TV has gone up. You’ll have to move.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can’t buy yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get a 27 inch 4k TV with HDR? The answer is no. No, you can’t. You
⏹️ ▶️ John want a 55 inch? Got one of those for you. Anyway, no HDR, but I did want to get 4k.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I shopped around a little bit. I hate doing this because I don’t, there’s like a million different products in the
⏹️ ▶️ John non-Apple world so much selection it’s overwhelming and then I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a view sonic great product names XG 2700
⏹️ ▶️ John is really nice I especially like the the stand it came with there’s like it’s like height adjustable it was very sturdy
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor itself was a little chunky and a little bit of gamery looking like it’s like a it was black but with like a red stripe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey My word, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only expensive, but you’re whining about the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display and the way that looks and this has frickin red trim on it? Are you serious, John
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are racing stripes that make you go faster. I mean, this is not my Mac, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Have you seen what the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 4 itself looks like? I don’t care. This is truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UltraFine is, it is not a pretty monitor. I’m not trying to say it’s pretty, but it’s positively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understated compared to this atrocity.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not that, I mean, if you look at it, it’s basically just completely black around the display and all you can see when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sitting in front of it is the two little red side things on the stand. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even see the red stripe on the on the vertical thing because it gets covered up at the height of the monitor. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, it was all
⏹️ ▶️ John right. All of these PC gaming monitors have, they have like on screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, adjustments on the device itself that had nothing to do with the thing that’s connected to it. So on the
⏹️ ▶️ John device itself, you can adjust like brightness and contrast, but also a million other settings,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of which are strange through what you can imagine to be like the worst on screen controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you know, when they put like grainy sort of bit mapped little menu thing and normally have like a, the view
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonic has like a one and two button, like the one brings up the menu, the two goes into it and there’s up and down
⏹️ ▶️ John arrows so bad it’s terrible interface. It’s kind of like going back in time to like
⏹️ ▶️ John when television first got on screen displays OSD they call them on screen
⏹️ ▶️ John display which doesn’t really make any sense that what it stands for on screen display anyway I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey believe that’s right
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t make it on where else with the display be off screen display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is real I’m still looking at this monitor I mean like I should point out like I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many tastefully designed PC monitors I like view sonic and views I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned multiple view sonic monitors they are really good usually. I like red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even. Red is one of my favorite colors for things to be in even though Trump ruined red hats forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I look at this monitor and I cannot even imagine buying this thing and having this on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should look at just look at the monitor part of it like not the stand but just the monitor from the front. It is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John a matte black rectangle with the word USONIC on the bottom. Like that’s pretty much as plain as you can get.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But you will see the stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re not seeing the red stripe on the back your monitor is probably too low.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well I mean I guess you can see a little tiny bit of it but you don’t notice it and and like the stand among
⏹️ ▶️ John stands you don’t know how how deep this thing goes go look at some of the stands of other PC and
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming monitors. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do me a favor do me a favor get get up get a VESA arm and have that hold this up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John instead. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John no I’m getting to that I’m getting to the VESA arm okay we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there. Is it VESA?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not VESA? All these years. I’m gonna say VESA and it’s definitely a move file and and you mispronounce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand how you besmirch the 5K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an atrocity that you would never be able to use, ever, and then you buy this piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John How is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John ever connect this to my Mac? What difference does it make? Oh, it makes a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John never connect this to my Mac. It doesn’t even get to be on the same desk as my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you have lower standards for the PC and gaming equipment. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course I do. Not only of course I do, I don’t disagree. But you really have no choice. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have… I have different standards anyway, but you have no choice. There is no like nice tasteful
⏹️ ▶️ John PC hardware for the most part. Even things like the HP Spectre are really,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I see they’re putting in an effort but it’s not to my taste. Anyway, let me continue my story here.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I got this thing and the adjustments on it are very strange. I’m trying to get it sort of calibrated
⏹️ ▶️ John to something reasonable, but they have all sorts of settings, most of which
⏹️ ▶️ John fly in the face of my television snob sensibilities, because the television
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to adjust like you’re trying, there is a goal there is like you can get reference images and say it should
⏹️ ▶️ John look like this, you know, because television content is produced with the expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that here’s the color range of your display, here is the, the brightness behavior, all sorts of other things
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Whereas for a gaming monitor specifically games
⏹️ ▶️ John are not produced with any sort of reference viewing environment
⏹️ ▶️ John right because there is no real standard for that games are produced I don’t know how they decide like
⏹️ ▶️ John how dark should the textures be and you know what color range should we use I I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they use but I can tell you that everybody’s PC monitors are not calibrated like
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote correctly and are all over the map and there is a setting that seems to pervasive on all pc monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with the gaming bed they call black stabilization have you ever even heard of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no what why why is black changing
⏹️ ▶️ John so in games uh a lot of games are made where there’ll be dark sections
⏹️ ▶️ John where you go like in a cave or something but if you’re playing a game especially a competitive game you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually want to quote-unquote faithfully reproduce the blacks because you won’t be able to see anything
⏹️ ▶️ John is it it is an advantage for you instead to have the monitor so that it kind of I’m assuming what it’s doing is like squashing
⏹️ ▶️ John everything down so like oh I can see the subtle difference between 100% black and 99% black and 98% black in this cave
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s important for me to see that so I can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John out the edges of the cave wall and find where the enemies are or whatever like if you ever seen anyone do like
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive first-person shooters and PC gaming they’re not trying to get visual fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ John as if it’s a movie or a television show what they’re trying to do is can I see everything clearly?
⏹️ ▶️ John So a lot of the monitors have settings that make the picture worse, like by
⏹️ ▶️ John reducing the dynamic range and making areas that would be black less
⏹️ ▶️ John black, which looks looks bad. It’s like a bad black level on your TV. And also all the settings that are involved
⏹️ ▶️ John like response time, because that’s the other big thing. A lot of gamers use TN panels, which nobody uses anymore because they
⏹️ ▶️ John look terrible, the viewing angles are terrible, but they have better response time. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John gone that far. I couldn’t get a TN display because that’s like, I mean, it’s like going back to the Mac book air. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I mean, you aren’t an animal, right? So get, I got an IPS display, which does, it has like a
⏹️ ▶️ John five times worse response time. But even on these displays, there’s a way you can change the response time to be
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as it can be doing what I assume is sacrificing, sacrificing visual quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to strike the right balance between don’t look terrible monitor, But also,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do feel there’s a benefit to not having everything be black when I’m doing the raid, one of the raids in Destiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a lot of dark areas, and if I’m doing some jumping puzzle in the dark to try to do something, I like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I do have it adjusted, quote-unquote, wrong, so I can, so the games play better.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I had a lot of trouble trying to get the ViewSonic set up that way, but the real problem was that, for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while, my PlayStation 4 Pro did not show me a 4K output option. It would just output 1080.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, well, that’s not what I want. I need you to output 4K. So I did a bunch of Googling.
⏹️ ▶️ John The PlayStation says, you know, count output 4K and it would say HDCP 2.2 not available.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know if you guys are familiar with HDCP, but it’s another one of those stupid things that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco makes your life worse for no good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this monitor apparently predates the HDCP 2.2. It only supports like, I forget what the earlier standard
⏹️ ▶️ John is, maybe 1.1 or 1.4, I don’t know. Anyway, I had a quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.0 cable and everything was good, but it didn’t work with it. And I did some Googling, you find people asking if
⏹️ ▶️ John you saw an icon Twitter, hey, does this monitor support HTTP 2.2? They say, sorry, no. So I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna have to return this thing and get a different monitor. And now it turns
⏹️ ▶️ John out, you can get it to games to display 4K on this. It has a bunch of HDMI ports in the back and like so many
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions and monitors before, only one of the ports is like the good one. So once I
⏹️ ▶️ John move the cable to the good port, the one and only good port, which isn’t labeled with anything that says, hey, this is the only
⏹️ ▶️ John one that does HDMI 2.0. Hey, this is the only one that does 4K, but it turns out there’s only one that does it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I could display games in 4K on this, but I still wanted to get another monitor because this one still doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John support HDTV 2.2, which probably isn’t a factor for playing games, but it does mean that like Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John and other stuff like that that wants to display video content won’t do it on 4K because this doesn’t do the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John intellectual property copy protection dance just the right way for stupid reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I returned this one in grand Marco fashion, although this was just
⏹️ ▶️ John plain old my fault of like, I didn’t even think to look for HTCP 2.0. I’m like, I just need a gaming monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of those, it has HDMI input. I should be good to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, I don’t usually return things. Usually I sell them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought about selling this because like the stupid restocking fee on this was gonna be a lot of money. I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can sell it for more than the restocking fee, then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, if there’s a restocking fee, I’ll return it for sure. It’s just an issue of like, I don’t wanna like, like I feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco returning things when I know someone else is going to be eating the cost. But if I’m definitely eating the cost, then I won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel bad about that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was just hoping, if I sold it to someone else, like a brand new monitor that had like barely even touched the little plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John films were still on the thing, you know, the peely plastic stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco protects it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was still on it. So this is brand new, but if I could have sold it for somebody for like maybe $80 less
⏹️ ▶️ John than I paid for it, then I still would have come out ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I returned that one and in its place I got Dun dun an LG
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k display. I don’t have an LG 5k display I now have an LG 4k display.
⏹️ ▶️ John have that weird little head with the camera in it? It is not a 5 head Take a look
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what model is
⏹️ ▶️ John it the ridiculous? I just put the link in the show notes. It is not a 5 head it is
⏹️ ▶️ John more tame looking Um, whoa, there’s no edge. There is. It’s just, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a, it’s very thin, but it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you notice this one is smaller overall. It comes in a very small box. As Casey noted, um, the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John around that is very small. The panel is probably the same panel. That’s in like every LG 27 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k display that you can get right now. Cause they sell a whole bunch of them with different letter suffixes on them. The little stand
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s on is where the ViewSonic kicks its butt because the ViewSonic stand was
⏹️ ▶️ John big, chunky, height adjustable,
⏹️ ▶️ John and stable, right? And this monitor, if you take your finger and put it under the corner and tap upwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor bobbles this little bobblehead like it’s one of those little hula dolls that you put on a dashboard or one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John bobblehead figures, right? It is the worst design stand. It just connects with two screws that you screw
⏹️ ▶️ John in yourself to this little tiny, uh, you know, thing in the back of it. Terrible stand. It’s ugly too. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that little semicircular thing is ugly. It takes up more room on your desk width-wise than than that square
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that the ViewSonic had. No, there’s no red stripe, but it doesn’t perform adequately the
⏹️ ▶️ John function of keeping the monitor still. So if I bump my desk with my knee while I’m playing, I gotta watch a stupid bobblehead
⏹️ ▶️ John bobble in front of me. Now, it does have a VESA mount on the back, and so I said alright, well whatever, who cares about
⏹️ ▶️ John that stand? It’s got, you know, the 100 millimeter VESA mount on the back of the thing. All I have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is find a sturdy visa mount get rid of that stupid foot and use that
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t want an arm is that I want to clamp it to my desk because I have glass on top of my desk
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t want to clamp anything to it my desk isn’t that you know I just don’t want an arm it’s too much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John going on back there I just want to stand and every single visa stand I could find was uglier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah you’re not gonna not gonna have a good time there
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re terrible like the metal ones look like giant metal horseshoes the plastic ones look just
⏹️ ▶️ John as bad as this so I’m just gonna I’m just you know not
⏹️ ▶️ John hitting my desk and being careful and by the way the on-screen controls this one are better than the view sonic but still
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty grim this one has a tiny little joystick under the middle that you move around it’s like kind of like a five-way
⏹️ ▶️ John switch you know you get up down left right and press in but what a boy what a terrible interface and because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the bottom and you’re wiggling a joystick that’s like pointing down but you’re trying to move
⏹️ ▶️ John controls on the screen that are going you know in different plane up down left and right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway I think this one looks a little bit better for the Viewsonics panel quality wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t had more time to tweak it because the adjustments are not so painful to use in the menu.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it has all the same crap including a response time adjustment in which the value that you
⏹️ ▶️ John want is high. I don’t want high response time and but yet because of the way they name these features
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably the poor translation of the options I had to look up the manual and say which Which one do I want for the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where the response time number is a lower number of milliseconds? Oh, hi, that makes sense. Why would you
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be slower? I think it decreases, you know, the quality of the display.
⏹️ ▶️ John It decreases the, I don’t know, something. I’m assuming the color quality or something. It’s doing less processing on the
⏹️ ▶️ John display and probably, you know, it’s trying to not put as much
⏹️ ▶️ John computation between the signal and the screen. Same thing with, there’s like a sharpness thing that’ll apply a
⏹️ ▶️ John sharpness filter and especially when playing a game in 1080, like Destiny is still just 1080. The
⏹️ ▶️ John sharpness filter does help make the text look better, but it adds processing overhead. So if you really want the best response time, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John that the best option is to turn the sharpness all the way down, which is what I’ve done. Anyway, I was able to adjust this to
⏹️ ▶️ John get it look a little bit better to my eyes than the ViewSonic, and now I’m just patiently waiting for 4K games to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I do not have this exact same monitor, I was mistaken, for a couple of different reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One, I’m pretty sure it’s a different model. So you got the UD68-P. I got the UD58-B.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the Bezel on mine is considerably larger than the Bezel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on yours. Also, you chose poorly if this is ever going to get connected to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. If you’re ever gonna connect it to a computer, 4K is not enough DPI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 27 inches. You should have gotten 5K.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I’m never connecting this to a computer. What computer would I connect this to? My gaming PC?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you could connect it to your piece of garbage Mac in theory and then actually have a retina Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John would- this also is never going to be connected to a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that all of this trouble you’re going through, I mean this is all like this crazy stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going through and having this whole separate desk set up that of course this won’t go near your Mac and everything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having this PC monitor, all this and yet you won’t build a gaming PC. Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically doing you’re putting in all the effort that it would take to have a game
⏹️ ▶️ John way the PlayStation is way less effort than a gaming PC way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean once you get into all this crazy monitor twiddling that you’re doing I mean really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might like why is there not a gaming PC on this second second to your desk that you have
⏹️ ▶️ John Gaming PC would not do there’s no destiny for PC. Oh destiny to may be coming for PC fans But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, there’s no destiny for PC. There’s no less guardian for PC There’s no uncharted 4 for PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I need to have this. This is the thing that I need. Gaming PC does not replace this in any possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Especially since the only thing I do with my console is play like a handful of games that are essentially console
⏹️ ▶️ John exclusives. Even on my Nintendo consoles. There’s no gaming PC that’s gonna play the next Zelda game, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I buy these things for. So I would have to have a gaming PC in addition to this and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John room for it and it’s way more headache than this. This is, you know, I didn’t mind the 4k thing because I was excited to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k monitor and to play games at that resolution. I do have a few games that have had updates that came out, which
⏹️ ▶️ John really just makes things a little bit sharper because it’s not like they redid all the textures for the most part. I think Overwatch is 4k
⏹️ ▶️ John now, I haven’t looked at that yet, but anyway, there’s a bunch of games there and I haven’t, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the PlayStation VR yet, but I’m considering getting that. But no, I’m pretty happy with the setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m about the ps4 pro the only complaint I have about it, and I realized I should probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John Complain to Sony and get this fixed The one controller that the ps4 pro came with
⏹️ ▶️ John the left analog stick if you look at it like from the side Is tilted in the neutral position ever
⏹️ ▶️ John so slightly and I’m gonna have any of that so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m using my
⏹️ ▶️ John old. I’m using my old Dualshock because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they didn’t change the controller
⏹️ ▶️ John or any they just changed it like the buttons are Now like ugly gray instead of black and think maybe the triggers
⏹️ ▶️ John might be a little bit better But anyway, I’m gonna complain to Sony and say, hey look, I took this thing out of the box. I’ve never touched it.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the neutral position, all of these analog sticks should be straight up and down. This one is tilted to give me a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sure Sony will be happy to do that for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m sure. On the one side, John, I truly, genuinely admire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how perceptive you are and how you can notice these little things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you would notice it. It’s not like, oh, this is obscure. I’d only notice if I took it like out of level or a plumb
⏹️ ▶️ John bob, you’ve noticed it with your eyeballs. It is not subtle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But with that said, I am so glad that I am at worst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mildly critical and not hypercritical like you are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This whole conversation, I’m sitting here thinking, thank God this is one area I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about. Like I don’t care about gaming really at all. I’d like to, but I don’t. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely care about TVs. I barely care about TV adjustments and picture quality adjustments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. I am just, I certainly don’t care about analog sticks being slightly tilted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from neutral. I am just so happy that I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like there are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many areas that I care way too much about. At least here’s one that I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not carving my own analog sticks out of plastic. That’d be the equivalent of you roasting your own beans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, roasting your own beans is really not that hard. And it’s really good. I know, but I’m saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is one thing to be picky about the things that you buy, But at a certain point you say there’s nothing I can buy I must I must
⏹️ ▶️ John make it myself And that would be the equivalent of me carving my own Controllers and like a controller assembly kit and
⏹️ ▶️ John like making my own analog sticks and like assembling it from pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You try to find good coffee on this half of the county. I guarantee you can’t find it There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no good controllers either, but I just accept what they tell me I just I just wanted to be like, you know, correct
⏹️ ▶️ John as When it comes out of the box everything should be straight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you could make your own perfect controller for five dollars and twenty minutes wouldn’t you do it? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to drink it and it’s gone. I gotta do it all over again. That’s the analogy is breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down. All right. So anyway, um, this, this monitor that you bought John is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not HDR. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t that one of the, because that’s why you bought that God awful red racing stripe to view Sonic was to
⏹️ ▶️ John none of them are no, you can’t get as far as I remember. There are, there are none for sale. There is no, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming monitor. Like I said, you can get a TV with HDR. You can get a 4k TV with HDR support for your PS4 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as far as I was able to determine, there is no monitor, computer monitor that you can buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in a thing that’s 27 inches and not 55 that you put on a desk that has HDR support.
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Do you notice wide color?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate it, which is possible. Or is it just not that big a deal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re not like a designer like Marco, for example? Are you able to tell the difference when you just look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at an arbitrary photo on a wide color display versus a not wide color display?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not yet. I suspect as wide color displays become what I’m looking at every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, because like right now I do most of my computing on a 2014 5K iMac, which does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the high color display. And so I now have it on my phone and on my iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really I’m doing almost all of my, you know, looking at things on my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, it doesn’t matter where you look at them. It’s the source material. So Casey, if you have something you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at, if you look at the same picture that you took in a pre wide color world, of course
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to look the same because there’s no wide color information in it. You have to take the picture with a device capable of
⏹️ ▶️ John capturing that and then look at that same picture one on like your iPhone 7
⏹️ ▶️ John that you took it on that took a wide color picture and then the other one on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that’s what I did but but truth be told it was right when I first got the seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t have put it past me to accidentally have taken like an old picture and said oh I don’t see anything but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve seen like the sample images like where there’s like a big red blob and there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R hidden in there that you wouldn’t see unless it’s wide color you know and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, nevertheless, on a regular picture, I’ve not noticed a difference. And as a corollary question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my two-year-old Micro Four Thirds, I presume that’s not wide color. Is that fair to say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most cameras have, well, most cameras don’t have this option. Middle and high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras often will have an option to save the colors in Adobe RGB, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of like sRGB. But as far, I haven’t looked too much into this. As far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the conversion happens after RAW anyway, so you might be able to fix this with just a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAW conversion process. John, do you know
⏹️ ▶️ John about this? I was going to say what you said. There are other color profiles that are not called P3 that nevertheless have
⏹️ ▶️ John a larger range than sRGB. Yeah, like Adobe RGB is one of them. Yeah, I don’t know what the little envelopes
⏹️ ▶️ John look like in all of them, and especially if you capture RAW, then that’s all the information you’re going to get.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can pull more stuff out of it, I don’t know. Your best source for images with
⏹️ ▶️ John wide color is your iPhone 7 because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all connected
⏹️ ▶️ John up end to end there. I’m sure you’ve looked at Craig Hockenberry’s
⏹️ ▶️ John page where he has a bunch of sample images. If you really can’t tell a difference between the sample images because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John made to emphasize the areas where humans can perceive the P3 color difference
⏹️ ▶️ John more, those really emphasize and those are kind of artificial. But I have seen some other
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures where it’s just a picture of a park, grass and a a tree and some sky.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you see them side by side, like I do on my iPad pro and I go to that page like, all right, I mean, it’s not, it doesn’t jump out at you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you look, you’re like, like, is this really the same picture? It’s like, yes, this is literally the same picture. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John one is sRGB. And then the other one is showing the full white color and the full white color one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, it’s almost like contrast is turned down the other one. Like there’s not like the
⏹️ ▶️ John greens don’t look as green, like in this, you know, in the grass type situation, like, oh, that tree looks a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John pastel and washed out. Not not a lot, but you have to see them side by side to see it. I don’t think I could pick one out
⏹️ ▶️ John alone. But if you literally show me the same picture and why not wide you go, the wide looks a little better. That’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I’m not entirely crazy then because I’m looking at this link on WebKit, we’ll put it in the show notes. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, this is what I was thinking of. They have the WebKit logo, which is like this big red blob that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sRGB, you don’t see the logo. And then if you go into p3, you can see the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo. Well, if you scroll down on that same page, they have a yellow flower. And if you click, this is like what you were saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, if you click between the sRGB only and the P3, unequivocally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell that the P3 is much more vivid and looks more real. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I were to look at either of these images, like you said, John, without the other side-by-side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike say a retina screen versus a non-retina screen where it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably obvious, with these, I don’t think I would notice the difference unless they’re side-by-side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side. I mean that’s how I am with most of these too. You know, like the example things if I look at it like on my iPad Pro, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my currently my biggest P3 screen, these pictures look great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, like the big orangey sunsets, like yeah, they do look a little more saturated in those like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco orangey reddish tones, but you can look at a non-retina screen or a non-retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image or asset on a web page on a retina screen and you can tell that difference immediately. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey first thing you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that is non retina, if after you’re accustomed to retina, you notice that immediately. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I am scrolling through a webpage and I see a picture of an orange sunset that is not p3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after I’m used to p3, I don’t think I will notice because it could just look like it wasn’t as saturated of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture as it could have been. And so it’s not, you know, it’s a way smaller advance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everyday casual observing and for most people. It’s nice to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad they’re doing it. And it’s especially nice, you know, if you actually shoot a lot of pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of orangey sunsets and things. But it’s a very, you know, in general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, it’s the kind of thing you can very easily forget that you even have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly Okay. That was my experience as well. And I was curious because I feel like, and maybe it’s just because I follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people like Hockenberry and Mark Edwards, and, you know, they’re really revved up about it. But to me, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, man, I barely see the difference. And I’m glad to hear that that’s not necessarily unusual.
Two more things on the monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John So two more things on the monitors. First, Casey, when you get back to work you should tap the underside of one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John corners of your monitor and see if you’ve got a bobblehead too because I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think you have the same. Oh I definitely do. Oh yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like what a bad job. Like the stand has one simple function. Just put the monitor up off the desk off the
⏹️ ▶️ John ground and keep it still and it fails at that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is the one thing even though it’s LG monitors you know there’s not much to it like it is it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just black everywhere. It’s not matte, it’s not shiny, doesn’t have much of a frame around it, it’s not a five
⏹️ ▶️ John head, the part on on the bottom is the biggest part so like it’s proportioned the LG logo is small and subtle
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you go to that Amazon page for my thing and do the little zoomie thing you can you know zoom in and see the LG
⏹️ ▶️ John logo right move over to the right from the LG logo what do you see there lurking
⏹️ ▶️ John in the corner because this is a PC product it’s just got to be ugly in some stupid way what do you see there
⏹️ ▶️ John this stupid energy star and it’s small it’s not a big energy star badge and it’s black
⏹️ ▶️ John and white like it’s not colored and weird but it’s like the whole front of this thing has
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing on it i will accept the lg logo it is small and tasteful and centered why the hell is an energy
⏹️ ▶️ John source and so i’m like i’m just gonna peel that sticker off but it’s one of those stickers where
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m gonna have to think on it for a while because it is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not one of those ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes off easy you know the ones that are like made to come off like the metal one it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John metal it’s not plastic like here’s the here’s the math i have to do like I know I could get
⏹️ ▶️ John it off but after I get it off what’s left underneath the square where it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John well that look worse than the sticker because the sticker for all its ugliness looks like a sticker right
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the energy star logo if I peel it off and there’s a bunch of like sticky crap or I damaged the plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath it because it’s all just cheap plastic this
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple display or anything right if I damage it somehow or get sticky stuff in there that I can’t somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get off with you know careful application of skin so soft on it which by the way that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a secret for all you out there if you get sticky crap from stickers on them one of the many things that will remove it I know there are many products
⏹️ ▶️ John but the one of the ones that I’ve used for years is Avon skin so soft which I think was supposed to be a thing that softens
⏹️ ▶️ John your skin the only thing I’ve ever used it for is a takeoff sticker scum it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odor oh my god why I love the extent to which we will avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about the Microsoft Surface Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, we’ll get there. We’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Anyway, Energy Star sticker, it’s, you know, it’s got to be ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way. And I don’t like that that semicircular horseshoe stand. I don’t know who thought that was nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that Energy Star sticker that on your monitors on the bottom right, I have what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appeared to be an identical one. But if you look at the stand and you know how it’s kind of tilted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a sort of not a 45 degree angle, but like a 30 degree angle maybe. Well, mine was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way on the left on that stand. And I let it sit for a week or two before I even noticed it. And then I was like, oh, this is crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know what I did? I immediately ripped it off because I don’t worry about things like you do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was no residue or if there was residue, I like rubbed at it with my thumb for a second. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if there’s residue. You probably just that I don’t even see in the Amazon picture of your monitor. I don’t see the Energy Star sticker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re right. I don’t see it either. but it was there for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John might make a run at that sticker eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just rip it off, John. It’s like a bandaid. Just, just rip it off. Uh,
#marcowasright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Windows stuff, we got a series of tweets from Jordan, who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nerdiophage on Twitter. He tweeted five things. I’ll read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them in series. He says, I spent a week with a MacBook Pro Escape after two solid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decades of Windows use. I was of the opinion that Marco’s unabashed dislike of the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Windows, was equal parts adoptive culture slash fanboyism slash showmanship.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stand corrected and a little bit humbled. The Windows path from neophyte to power user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is shaped by registry edits, decoder rings, and secret knocks, which is arduous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS, by comparison, feels inviting, friendly, and intuitive, like a late-night conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a dinner party with good friends. So TLDR, this is still Jordan, Mac OS, holy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap, I get it. Transition costs will be very high, but seriously considering it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this echoes my experience in 2008 of switching from Windows to OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X at the time. There were two weeks where I doubted my life and thought I’d made a terrible, awful, horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice and then I’d never look back. I’m not saying that Jordan’s experience is true for everyone because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now we’re going to have all the Windows apologists writing in telling us how Windows is good and we’re a bunch of jerks and blah blah blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But- Do they still really listen to us? Some do because we still get emails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying that this is true for everyone. I’m not saying Windows isn’t better in some way or another. What I am saying is that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not the only ones that seem to think that there’s a better way. So just thought I’d share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those series of tweets from Jordan, so thank you, Jordan, for writing us.
iMac vs. laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had an interesting conversation in Slack, Marco, and I’d like to air a grievance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s back up to circa January, maybe December. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost a year ago now. And the two of you, but my recollection was that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly Marco, were saying, you know what, Casey, you should never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put personal crap on your laptop, on your work laptop, you should really have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nice powerful machine for home use. You probably shouldn’t be ignoring Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and using your laptop while you’re sitting next door on the couch. You know what you need? You need an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve tried the laptop dance, Casey. It’s no good. It’s no good, man. Get the iMac. Think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that 27 inch beautiful at 5k display with wide color, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you it’s the way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, there are some, I have some nitpicks with your summary already, but go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then fast forward to, I don’t know, a few days ago, when Marco is talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Slack, that private place that we really shouldn’t bring up publicly, but here I am because I’m annoyed, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is talking in Slack and saying, hmm, you know what? Maybe I’ll get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new MacBook Pro and a 5K display and I’ll be back to a one machine man again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I won’t even have to have a stupid desktop anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not, okay. Okay. So here’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey said. So basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at performance of everything and figuring a potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe even likely future that does not include the Mac Pro existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also includes standalone 5k retina displays that can plug into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops that have not matching but maybe 90% of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance of iMacs or 80% of the performance of iMacs. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always say the reason I buy the 15-inch laptops is because when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveling I either need almost nothing, in which case it doesn’t matter what I have, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop is mainly there to type emails faster or to browse Twitter, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing serious work whether it’s Xcode or Lightroom, photo raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco importing and stuff and editing. Either way, usually when I use a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during travel, I want a lot of screen space and I want a lot of horsepower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also now have an iMac as my main computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Looking at the specs of these computers these days, comparing the new MacBook Pros with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LG 5K display, assuming it’s good, which we don’t actually know yet, but we’ll assume it’s good because it probably is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparing that against the iMac you know basically I am maintaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and upgrading and paying for two different computers with overall fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar hardware and fairly similar performance and so I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what I probably should do but won’t and I bolded won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I said what I probably should do is stop having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two similarly specced Macs that I pay for and maintain and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just have a top of the line 15 inch MacBook Pro that I use, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people do, in clamshell mode, on my desk most of the time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when I travel I can just take that with me and have all the power of this maxed out computer with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. That is what I should do. It is not what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe in the future I will do that. know me I always change everything up because I’m never happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so maybe in the future I will do that I think I really want to wait and see what happens with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro next year first you know if it turns out the Mac Pro is really dead and that the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can ever hope for on desktops is iMac hardware that’s 10 or 20 percent faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the MacBook Pros of the day then that might make a lot of sense actually for me
⏹️ ▶️ John handle the fan noise I guarantee it you just think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac also has fan noise that’s the problem like when not as loud as a 15 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so again, I want to see the new 15 inches first. I want to have some experience with them, hopefully, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how are these machines. They really did reduce the fan noise noticeably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they moved from the old crappy symmetrical fan blades to the Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro in 2012, when Johnny first talked about the asymmetric fan blade, they showed the waveform.
⏹️ ▶️ John not louder, but the annoyingness of it, the asymmetrical
⏹️ ▶️ John really helped with the annoyingness. It turned
⏹️ ▶️ John into a white noise thing, but I think it’s still not a contest. I’m annoyed that I can hear the iMac at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m annoyed at what I hear when I hear a laptop going with, I haven’t heard the new ones obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the asymmetrical fan ones, they still, I don’t like the sound of a white noise generating machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, neither do I. But see, when my iMac fans spin up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I consider that something that, I either need to put headphones on right now and stop hearing this, or I need to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the process that is using all my CPU power and just kill it. Because I really do not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing fan noise while I work, it’s simple as that. So, a Mac Pro is silent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under load in most rooms, and that’s one of the reasons I love it, and that’s one of the things I will greatly miss if it is truly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dead forever. Which, again, I think it’s looking increasingly likely. We’ll see what happens next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. But anyway, so all I was saying was, it doesn’t make a lot of sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to maintain two different four core mid-range to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end machines from Apple when I occasionally need one on the road, but most of the time it’s at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desk, it would make more sense to consolidate that into one computer. And maybe even pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iMac slash CGP Grey and have two laptops. Maybe I have that crazy one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also a very small one, like either an Escape or a MacBook One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the travel needs during which I don’t need a lot of power and I just want to have the smallest thing possible and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would hardly ever get upgraded. But that is a world that I probably should go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, but currently I am not going to that world because currently I’m still waiting out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential Mac Pro of the future. So I will see. ATB Tester is pointing out in the chat room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I should not forget that six core chips will be coming to the iMac Consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Core i7 line, presumably in the near future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A six core iMac would be awesome. I would really prefer more. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m gonna upgrade from four, I want a big upgrade. I wanna go to eight or 12 even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even more if I can get it. So it’d be nice to have even more, but you know, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Again, this all depends on what the hardware brings over the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year or two, and whether Apple even makes computers that use these chips that are coming out. We don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that. So we’ll see, time will tell. But right now, I am not going all laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But all I was saying that if I were more sensible, it would probably be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better allocation of resources to just do that, which is probably the reason why so many people do exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right, I just wanted to grumble at you publicly for a moment, so I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better now. Thanks, everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anytime. We’re sponsored tonight by Betterment. Go to betterment.com
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Jony Ive’s design book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has released a new Mac book and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. There’s a new design book and half of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me thinks I really don’t see a problem with it and half of me thinks, my word,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have they lost all sense of reality? And I haven’t decided which one’s which.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a totally reasonable and to be expected thing for them to do. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised they don’t do more of it. I mean, they sell shirts with their things on
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They sell all sorts of merchandise that has Apple stuff on it. They
⏹️ ▶️ John love having giant posters of all their, you know, they’re proud of their design.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this particular thing as sort of a capper to Johnny Ives’ career at Apple, like it makes total sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s all that weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a few things that are different about it. I mean, first of all, the t-shirts and mugs and everything you can only buy at their company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store or at their conference. So you can’t just go into any Apple store or go online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and order an Apple t-shirt. That’s kind of a limited thing they keep only to their store.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming this will be limited too. How long do you think they’ll sell this? They’re not going to be selling it
⏹️ ▶️ John five years. Maybe Tim Cook says, you know, we can keep selling the same design book for 10 years and never have to lower the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. But the other stuff is more like a gift shop at a museum. It’s like, I went to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to either WBDC or to their campus, and so I got this expensive t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I went there. And that’s a little bit more justifiable if you have a problem with this. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t necessarily have a problem with this. I’m mostly indifferent on it. I mostly don’t care that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it exists. I do think it shows a few things worth considering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like possible giant retirement. Overall though, it seems poorly timed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At a time when Apple is being criticized for neglecting a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of their product line, and their new release is being criticized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for being an especially poor value for the money, and they appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have cut dongle prices in an effort to show maybe that they’re not just trying to get a whole bunch of extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money from accessory sales. So it is kind of an unfortunate time, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ignore the election, which I don’t think you should, but even if you ignore that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is kind of a weird time for Apple to release an incredibly self-congratulatory, highfalutin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $200-$300 book about themselves. It’s a little bit poorly timed, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even if you don’t agree with that, if you set that aside, I think it’s mostly fine. I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is one of many signs pointing to Johnny Ives’ probably not-that-far-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco departure or retirement from Apple. Or maybe he’ll just ascend further into the clouds of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bizarre titles that mean he doesn’t actually do any day-to-day work. That might be the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I’m not sure if I want one or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might be one of the ideal customers for it. I buy stupid expensive things all the time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like Apple stuff, usually a lot. As I was looking, though, at some of the pages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have on their sample site and everything, they just kind of make me sad because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show like, like on their store, the sample show the Mac mini case and like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big cutting wheel. I’m sorry, I don’t know the terms for these various manufacturing tools, but like some giant spiky wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that presumably carves out part of the inside of the Mac mini case. And it’s like, oh, that’s really nice that you care so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about the Mac mini that you’ll take this picture of the machine that makes its case. What about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product? That’s been pretty neglected pretty badly. Or it shows like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a picture of the bottom assembly with the lid popping off of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous generation non-retina MacBook Pros. Like it might even be the 101, exactly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it shows the MacBook Pro bottom lid taken off and you have the removable battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have the removable upgradable hard drive. And it’s like, oh yeah, I remember when laptops were upgradable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easily repaired. It’s like, I think this book would mostly just make me sad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, about either computers that Apple has neglected and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I am sad about, like the Mac Pro, which I assume is in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or features of computers that are no longer present, that have been cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the march of quote, progress, over the years, some of which is real progress, some of which is just cutting things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know how I feel about this for myself, but if other people want to have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco book and enjoy it, that’s fine really. Again, I do think the release is poorly timed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but other than that I don’t really have a problem with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I mostly agree, but I already have a copy. It’s just called Iconic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have Iconic somewhere, I think, too. I have the old Apple design book from the 90s.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s called the—let me check the timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco While you’re checking, there is one nitpick I do want to not forget about, though, and And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is—so Steve Jobs’ name is all over this book. His name’s all over the press release. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very prominently dedicate it to him and everything. I think enough people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have said that I don’t need to say too much about that it’s questionable whether Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have actually approved this project and used it. I will say, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of people keep saying that this project was started eight years ago, and therefore that was back when Jobs was alive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore he must have implicitly approved it. that’s not entirely clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Johnny Ive gave the interview to W something wallpaper whatever it was I forget I’m sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it mentioned that they started collecting the products to photograph eight years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t mean they started photographing for this specific project that was approved by Jobs eight years ago. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to make that clear that we don’t know that Jobs knew this at all and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I can’t imagine that he would have appreciated it but But you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always risky for tech people like us to say, well Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done this or wouldn’t have liked this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t really know him. The guy changed his mind a lot and he’s not here anymore to refute it. So it’s not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to rest on. But I do think plastering his name all over it is
⏹️ ▶️ John so great. They just dedicated it to him. It’s not like they’re trying to like, you know, build on
⏹️ ▶️ John his image to make, to sell this book. Like the book sells itself on its merits. It’s dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John to him. It’s in the memory of their friend. I think that’s fine. And if we can say one thing about this book,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is that Steve Jobs would like to have it in his house. Whether or not he thinks it’s a product Apple should sell,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guarantee you he would love to have this book. He would sit there on his couch with his bare
⏹️ ▶️ John feet and leaf through it and look at the great work that he’s done. Whether he thinks it’s the things Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should be selling is a whole other story. Whether he thinks Apple should have a museum of all their old stuff is a whole other story.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he so clearly took pride in all the products that are in this thing that he
⏹️ ▶️ John himself just personally would surely love to have the best possible photographs on
⏹️ ▶️ John the best possible paper made in Germany with a special gilding around the edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco book. This seems like a really cool thing to make for your employees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to maybe sell for a limited time at your campus store. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sell it as a whole product, I think that kind of raises the bar and raises the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of criticism a bit, a little bit unnecessarily maybe. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be a lot cooler if this was a thing for all the employees that they just all got for free. Which by the way, are they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even getting it for free? Probably not, they’re charging $2,300 for it. But imagine if they gave this to all the employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the handful of Apple collectors who really want it would have to go find it on eBay or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It would be so much cooler if you had one if that was the case. I don’t know, it just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might have been a better way to go here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I tend to agree. So I just reached out to the bookcase behind me and grabbed my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy of Iconic, and I started paging through it, and I landed on page 130
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Iconic. And it has a quote, which I will read to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you never change anything, then what you can really engineer is kind of incremental. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re willing to change things, then you kind of open up a whole new world of design. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Big Bob Mansfield at the launch of the 2012 MacBook Pro And the accompanying picture is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a MacBook Pro that has MagSafe, Ethernet, FireWire, Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two USB ports, an SD card slot, a line in, and a headphone jack. I just thought that was kind of funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s pretty cool. So yeah, so when you’re willing to change things and you open up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole new world of design, like fewer ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the book next to me is called Apple Design, all one word, capital A, capital D, colon The Work
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Apple Industrial Design Group. And it’s an older book, So it’s got the stuff from before you guys were
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac users. It’s like mostly the error. Well, I kind of expands the whole range, but anyway, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely earlier than the stuff that’s in this book. And I can say, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ John to own this book too. I would totally like to own this book, but I wouldn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to own it $300 worth at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. Cause, and here’s the thing, like it’s not that $300 for a really
⏹️ ▶️ John super high quality photo book is that big a deal. It’s just that for me personally with, you know, having just bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a monitor and a PlayStation 4 Pro and all sorts of other stuff. I would spend $300
⏹️ ▶️ John in this if it was like the making of the Star Wars books that I bought, which by the way weren’t $300. Like basically
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was lots more words. Not that I don’t like the pictures, I do, I want the pictures, but if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John the pictures, but also page upon page upon page of
⏹️ ▶️ John the designers, including Johnny himself, telling the story of how they came up with these designs in as
⏹️ ▶️ John much detail as they can possibly remember. again, like the making of the Star Wars books, which are not first person accounts, but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone researched and talked to all the people involved and tried to lay out. Here’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John each of the three original trilogy Star Wars movies was made from conception through to production and design,
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to all the people involved and getting quotes from them and putting it all together. That’s what I would like to read. And my impression
⏹️ ▶️ John of this book is either entirely or at least mostly pictures and not so much about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s going to tell you, you know how the sausage is made. I mean, I’m sure there’s lots of pictures of prototypes and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know like things with a tool that Marco talked about or whatever but it’s not really like tell us how did you come up
⏹️ ▶️ John with this because I would love to read that but that is not this and what I’m saying is basically if those if those words were in this book
⏹️ ▶️ John I would pay $300 for it in a second but just the photos I I have a longing to
⏹️ ▶️ John own this book but cannot bring myself to part with $300 for it quite yet
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco maybe maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John break down depends on how long they sell this maybe I’ll succumb to it at some point because I really do want
⏹️ ▶️ John this book. I mean, I have tons of books like this, but boy, $300, that’s tough. And no, I don’t want the small one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s another thing. Why are there two sizes? Like that’s such a Tim Cook thing, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John make it one. They
⏹️ ▶️ John should have called the big one the plus. Some people want a larger book. Obviously. The big one is huge though.
⏹️ ▶️ John The big one, I think, I’m thinking about if I had that in my house, how the hell would I even fit it on my shelves? I don’t think I even have any shelves.
⏹️ ▶️ John The making of Star Wars books are a little bit too big for my shelves too. But if it’s photos, come on, you got to get the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just got to say this iconic book I’d forgotten page through it in a long time. Man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this a nice book? It really honestly is. And it’s cheap. It’s like 50 bucks on Amazon right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. It’s definitely worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if I can get the business rep discount.
⏹️ ▶️ John 15% off your $300 book. So my my apple design book is right next to the art of Kiki’s
⏹️ ▶️ John delivery service, the complete works of Larry Elmore. What else do I have?
⏹️ ▶️ John Hyrule Historia Legend of Zelda book all of which are about the same size big kind of glossy photo
⏹️ ▶️ John book things, but none of which costs $300
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, it’s you know people who know more about art books
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know as you said John like I don’t think it’s outrageously priced for what it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it certainly doesn’t contribute or it certainly doesn’t help the the recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or possibly the forever reputation of Apple for for this like elitist company making expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that only for rich people like that’s this doesn’t really help that image at all the in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this really I don’t know again this is not a big deal I don’t feel that strongly about this book either way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might even buy one who knows but I do think it was a little poorly timed for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for image sake I think
⏹️ ▶️ John and see the weird thing about this book is it’s I like the idea that Apple itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one doing it because as great as iconic is in the Apple design books or whatever, Apple presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you would think they would have access to all this stuff, but apparently they didn’t have to go out and buy it or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John either way, like they, Apple’s really good at taking pictures of its products. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have the most experience of anybody in the entire world taking pictures of Apple products because that’s what they do. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they do it really, really well. And because they’re all obsessive, detailed people about like the
⏹️ ▶️ John printing and the color and the paper I bet it’s a really nice book right but
⏹️ ▶️ John the one thing that Apple can bring to this book above and beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John those two things that I just mentioned that nobody else can is that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the best access to the people who were involved in making these some of those people may be gone although supposedly there’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John little turnover and Johnny Ives little design group there that’s the value they can bring this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the whole angle you’re getting a mark was like Apple’s making a book by how great they It’s right. They’re making a book about themselves and
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we are awesome or just look at all these cool things that we made which I guess is okay But if you want to blunt
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s like don’t just make it look at these awesome things that we made Bring the value that only you have tell
⏹️ ▶️ John us the stories people who worked on these products Tell us about how you made them because no one else can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell us how they made them other people can take pictures of them Other people can make a big glossy photo book other people
⏹️ ▶️ John could probably Find the right kind of paper and do the cool printing and do all the things but nobody but you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys can tell us the story of how these products were made and they’re not doing that so they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John saying how great they are but like yeah I don’t want to tell you too much about it just look at this stuff we’re pretty great huh don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John never mind how it was made and that’s that definitely shades more into the that makes it less
⏹️ ▶️ John forgivable as an act of you know self congratulations because if you are describing
⏹️ ▶️ John how you did it you’re not just congratulating yourself even if the whole book is like we had these hard problems and we solve them because we were
⏹️ ▶️ John super smart you’re you’re passing on your knowledge you’re telling the rest of the world
⏹️ ▶️ John learn from our lessons which you can still do with a lot of ego and you know back padding
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think that would offset the look how great we are angle of it and
⏹️ ▶️ John and like you said and like how many people said like and like we talked about with the actual the the new MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John the past several shows it’s not so much the thing itself it’s the context into which is introduced and so
⏹️ ▶️ John like Margo said the timing is bad and at this point almost Just anything you introduce into the
⏹️ ▶️ John context of a certain set of grumpy Apple fans is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John looked upon with a very critical eye and people are generally
⏹️ ▶️ John in a bad mood for reasons that are some of which may be outside Apple’s control. Whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’ve been building towards this for eight years, fine, whatever, release it. Like holiday season,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good gift idea for the Apple nerd in your life.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t fault them. think is that big a deal. I just wish it wasn’t $300 because I really want this book.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, and one thing like I think you nailed it about like, you know, part of the second that rub people the wrong way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the fact that there is there are, you know, no words or as you said, like, you know, like they have access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the people they could have added a human, a more human touch and and it seems like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean we haven’t read the book yet, but from the few sample pages we’ve seen it really does seem like they didn’t you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no words in it. And I think if I had to summarize,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, the main disappointment I have with Apple recently, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of people feel but might not have put into words, is that it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just lack humanity recently. Like, and this might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a Steve to Tim thing, I don’t know, I haven’t given a ton of thought to this yet, it’s hard to put it into words,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but You know, Steve, even though we knew he could be like cold and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruthless to people when he had to be, his public persona, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really did reflect upon the whole company to the public, was really quite warm and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human. And with the transition to Tim Cook’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Johnny Ives’ Apple, which is, you know, that’s really what this is these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the public image that we get, even though most of the same people are still there, but the public image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is shown to us, what gets out is a lot more cold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The humanity has been stripped out of it. I think part of what bugged people about things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like removing the startup chime on the new MacBook Pros and removing the Light Up logo on the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that’s a little bit more of this humanity that’s just being pulled out of the products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t see warmth and humanity as much as we used do anymore. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a promo video showing what people are doing with the products is different. Do you think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. I do think it’s humanity. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, you don’t think whimsy is a better word? Because it’s a stronger case for whimsy because humanity,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think of like, Tim Cook is much more into, you know, the human
⏹️ ▶️ John aspects or social aspects of both the products and the company than Steve Jobs ever was.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Tim Cook in the Tim Cook era, he’s the one who’s constantly starting presentations with videos about
⏹️ ▶️ John accessibility and people who are being, you know, the human story of being empowered by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple products. I would call that human too, but whimsical is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John where like it is dorky. Maybe you know, whimsy
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like the little happy Mac and the chime and the little poof animation and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John things like that seem to not be to Johnny Ives taste
⏹️ ▶️ John because he’s not into the poof, right? He’s not into the happy Mac, the smile and the chime.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s into the iPhone that doesn’t even have a logo that you can see when you look at it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Tim Cook is deferring to Johnny Ive in that way. So I think you’re right to refer to it as the Tim Cook slash Johnny Ive Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there is definitely less sense of whimsy. And whimsy can be seen as warmth
⏹️ ▶️ John and his design aesthetic and we thought it was cold. But I think Tim Cook’s Apple and Tim Cook specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John are all about humanity, just not about dorkiness and whimsy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, it’s… Again, I’m not saying that the company… Because the same people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mostly there, right? Especially at the upper levels, not a lot has changed there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know that they do good. These are good people and they do good things for the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t come across the amount of warmth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe humanity might not be exactly the right word. I do think whimsy is part of it, but I don’t think whimsy covers all of
⏹️ ▶️ John What about the ads? A lot of their recent ads have been all about showing people using
⏹️ ▶️ John the product. Remember the one with the kid with his nose buried in his phone during the holidays, the Christmas thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end he’s made the video of them making the stuff? Or just like the people who with your watch, you get up and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s early in the morning, still dark out, you lace up your sneakers, you put on your watch, you go out running, or you’re running through the rain with
⏹️ ▶️ John your now water resistant phone. Like their ads, even more than they used to be, have been less
⏹️ ▶️ John about glorifying the objects as these beautiful totems of technology as like, look how smooth and sleek
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, which they still do in like the presentations to us. But on television, it’s all about the people. It’s all about,
⏹️ ▶️ John I am a runner. I like to take photographs. I’m on a family vacation. And you know, I’m by this
⏹️ ▶️ John device and your kid will be, uh, will look like a sulky teenager. Really? He will be a loving,
⏹️ ▶️ John wonderful, creative child, which is false advertising. But anyway, he’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John suck and won’t actually make a video for you. He’s just texting his friends all the time. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John ads seem to be focusing on, again, the humanity of, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not about the products, it’s about the people and what the products enable the people to do. So again, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple chooses what kind of ads it makes, like the advertising company makes them, but Apple can give them the direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is less like than, you know, in the Steve Jobs era, you had a series of commercials that were all about
⏹️ ▶️ John showing you the hardware, like the Lifesavers, IMAX flying across the screen. Look, they’re shiny and colored. And look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John when the IMAX SE came out, it’s all sleek and graphitey. Like, those were
⏹️ ▶️ John more obsessed with the objects because that was all about like, hey, hardware can be fashion
⏹️ ▶️ John and look at these things. And I think it started to shift with the iPod where it was like, yeah, there’s silhouettes dancing
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can see the iPod with the white cord, but all about people dancing and music and at this point they’re selling phones
⏹️ ▶️ John by showing you people jogging right so it is so far from I think it is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John a very human approach but again I would say that the product designs themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John and what things the company decides to do definitely seem less whimsical
⏹️ ▶️ John and less dorky and I could see that as being set more cold and less warm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ads you know you’re right the ads are fine but their ads their commercials you know I’m referring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mostly the products and then some also of the presentations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the actual humans on stage at the events. So again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to not make this about Steve because Steve was really good at really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being personable up there on stage and whether it was rehearsed or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fake or real or whatever, I don’t know. It didn’t matter. It really did come across as genuine and real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and warm. And that’s what I miss, both on stage, I don’t care about the videos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the use of more and more videos actually, to me, feels colder. It feels more artificial. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s beside the point for now. All I’m saying is I miss this level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of warmth that we used to get from them in these presentations. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the whimsy in the product is part of that. That showed in the products. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Modern Apple is all about really editing that out as part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a march towards quote simplifying or quote progress. But we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing a lot of that and we don’t seem to be gaining it in many areas anymore. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the company just moved on past that and it’s just now a lot more like cold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and almost robotic. So this book coming out with all pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Johnny Ives’ robotic tools in stark white backgrounds with no words,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is kind of like a culmination of that cold process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what kind of what rubs me the wrong way about the book and about Apple today, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to summarize it down. Again, I’m sorry if I’m not expressing this well. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really still a very, you know, squishy thought in my head, but I’m trying to put into words a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complex feeling that I’ve been feeling over a while. But I just miss that warmth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we used to get, whether it was real or not, from both Steve and the products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think we’re really missing a lot of that recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you were to get this book, and if it was chronological, which I’m not sure that it is, but if it is chronological, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John flip through it and watch the whimsy slowly drain out of the products. As you
⏹️ ▶️ John with Tangerine IMAX and all these brightly colored things that it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the toilet seat iBooks and all these things that just look so
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting and Dr. too see and slowly but surely everything turns silver and glass
⏹️ ▶️ John and uniform and not shiny and not matte and just in-betweeny
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know just it smooths out which I you know I
⏹️ ▶️ John like both those aesthetics that’s why I think like this book is this book highlights some of Apple’s best work
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of industrial design because it does include all the way from, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the the the vibrancy of the original IMAX and even like the the one with a big
⏹️ ▶️ John neck and all the other stuff all the way up to the modern era of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John being sleek and clean. Those are both great aesthetics, but chronologically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can see the trend. I could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read the book backwards and make myself feel really happy. He could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Benjamin Button it. I think I agree with you, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t shake this feeling that Apple is reluctantly moving closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and closer to being the IBM that they fought so hard against
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you and I were really little.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. Well, no, I don’t think they’re there, but if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the IBM of the early to mid-80s, probably even late eighties, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not boring, but certainly it did not have whimsy. And I would not say that Apple’s products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today are boring by any stretch of the imagination, but I agree that they’ve lost some of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually think humanity is a good word for it if a bit overblown,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t come up with a better one. And I think I like humanity more than whimsy, but anyway, It just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t feel as happy-go-lucky as it used to. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of that is no longer being the underdog and is now being king of the hill, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’s our perception. Maybe it’s that because we perceive them as king of the hill,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we perceive them as boring and they’re anything but. But I don’t know. I don’t think that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I agree with you. And it’s funny because on the one side, I love the look of the new MacBook Pro, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in photographs. I haven’t seen one in person yet. But in photographs, it looks phenomenal. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it. I think it looks really great. And I think that’s in part because, you know, a very black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aesthetic appeals to me, but yet I, I miss the fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all these different colored iMacs, you know, the computers that I saw running around campus when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in school in the early two thousands, they just looked fun and I wouldn’t say a new MacBook pro looks fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looks really damn good. It looks more aesthetically good, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, than perhaps any other laptop on the market today. And in fact, I’ve said before and I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say again, this iPhone 7 I’m holding in my hands right now, this matte black iPhone 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is the best looking iPhone I’ve seen yet. However, I wouldn’t say it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks fun despite it looking really good. And I miss that kind of fun aspect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m not saying the products are bad or like the products are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways better than ever now. You know, like by most measures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the products are better than ever. They’re still good products. In many ways, they’re still great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products. But again, it’s just like, it’s this feeling that I’m missing that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to have here. And maybe I’m just old and jaded and boring. I don’t know. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just mad about the Mac Pro still. I don’t know. But it just feels like I’m missing this feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not, well, I am old and jaded, but I’m not jaded about the Mac Pro specifically. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not jaded about the MacBook Pro specifically. And I do largely agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that it just, it’s not as fun as it once was. And again, maybe is that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by virtue of them being no longer the underdog? So, you know, it’s fun to root
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the underdog. It’s not fun to root for the king of the hill. So maybe it’s misplaced. Maybe the problem is us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I agree with you nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the design trend that I just described from the the more whimsical computers that
⏹️ ▶️ John varied more widely in shape and color and texture and everything about them to the current design is
⏹️ ▶️ John a natural consequence of the advance of the technology because as We
⏹️ ▶️ John acquire the technology to to to make the products that we have now that you know in the case of iDevices
⏹️ ▶️ John are essentially rectangles that are screens that get increasingly thinner and for the case of laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John a a screen rectangle and then a rectangle with a keyboard and an increasingly large trackpad your options
⏹️ ▶️ John for industrial design Start to be in conflict with the advances
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re you know reaping the benefits of actually be able to make it smaller like if you look at the size of the
⏹️ ▶️ John The plastic that surrounds the screen on the toilet seat iMacs It is vast
⏹️ ▶️ John Right and that allows you to make this cool-looking strange oblong kind of purse like design and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives you the room to make those big scoops in colors and contrasts, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no there’s no more room for that in a world where it’s basically a screen with the margins slowly shrinking around
⏹️ ▶️ John it or like the laptops you know getting thinner and thinner and smaller and tighter and tighter and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know why fight that the correct direction is aesthetically speaking to say embrace that
⏹️ ▶️ John and embrace an aesthetic that can work with increasingly svelte
⏹️ ▶️ John devices and that is Yet another reason to add to the list of why the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro would be great because the Mac Pro Does not have a screen on it You do have the freedom to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it they can make it shaped like a soccer ball It could be shaped like a spiral apparently it could be shaped like a garbage can it could be shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John like a cheese grater It actually gives them the most options in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of industrial design because they are no longer constrained by the fact that you have to carry It and that Making it smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinner and lighter is such a benefit in the long run that they can’t afford to put a giant plastic handle on it and a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John three inch border around the entire screen because that’s ridiculous like no one wants that anymore it’s it looks old and it
⏹️ ▶️ John is old and it’s bad but when it says on your desk or under your desk a lot more options open
⏹️ ▶️ John up and so it’s just another reason that it would be a shame if they totally gave up that form factor or if they said
⏹️ ▶️ John even in that form factor you want it to be as small and and minimal as possible and so that’s how you get the current Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Apple TV which are just the most you know it’s and it’s not appropriate I think for those things to
⏹️ ▶️ John be well maybe the Apple TV because that should be boring because you don’t even see it but the Mac Mini you can have a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more fun with that maybe put some vents and strakes on it make it look like a Ferrari I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason for it to be as boring as it is but there are reasons for the phone to be as boring as it is and for the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John be it’s not as boring but like for them to look like they do I think there are very good reasons from to do that I think have they if they
⏹️ ▶️ John had tried to keep the old aesthetic while going along with the march of technology that allows you to make them thinner and
⏹️ ▶️ John lighter it would be a bad tension between those two things. You can’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John a modern laptop that looks like the toilet seat iBook. You just can’t. It would it’s not the right design approach.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back then it was, now it’s not. Now you could take the current ones and make them in candy apple red
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same form factor. Make it like polished glossy candy apple red and that would be fun but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still you know like color and texture is basically all they have left to play with because shape-wise
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like they’re gonna be adding fins and strakes you know tail fins on the next iPad Pro or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. Like, why couldn’t we have all the colors of the 5C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 7? You know, because those were fun, I thought. And I think they appealed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a lot of people that perhaps weren’t as, you know, technically minded in terms of stats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like having to have the latest and greatest. I still see 5Cs floating around from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So why not have that color range on the top of the line phone? Well, because it’s not proper?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know. I just, I do kind of miss that. Even though, even though on the one side, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever pick any of those, I guess this is my halo car. Like I don’t really see the need for a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not trying to open up that conversation again. But to me, I don’t see the need for a Mac Pro, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I would notice a array of colors on the iPhone 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be pleased that they exist, even though there was no freaking way I would choose anything but matte black or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the naked robotic car again. It’s like you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in real life
⏹️ ▶️ John you see phones that are all sorts of colors. That’s just not the color of the phone It’s the color of people’s cases. I see phone
⏹️ ▶️ John huge range of colors textures sizes features ones that you can put your credit card into ones that have a place for a
⏹️ ▶️ John stylus to Go into like there’s a few things with mirrors on the back of them They just think clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ John ones ones with the covers, you know, just huge range, but that’s Apple’s not doing any of that They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you the NIC or robotic core
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Microsoft Surface Studio
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve been putting off for a long time talking about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft Surface Studio and I think that we should probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about the Nintendo switch We don’t actually have to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John We should do the surface studio first
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and in fact it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been so long since the Surface Studio event, whatever the heck that was, that I think we need the
⏹️ ▶️ John Chief Summarizer and Chiefs to remind everyone what the hell the Microsoft Surface Studio is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if the Chief Summarizer and Chief doesn’t remember anymore? No, I can wig it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was, I don’t recall exactly what it was, but it was a few weeks ago that Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had some sort of product demo where they debuted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Surface Studio, which at first appeared to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMac. In many ways, it just seemed like an iMac. An iMac, but well, I guess I should say an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac and a Mac mini, right? Because it’s the screen of an iMac, it appeared,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s 28 inches. And this, and the computer bits are in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base that looks very much like a Mac mini. It’s all black and aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least aluminum colored. And it all looks very snazzy. And I don’t mean that sarcastically. He really honestly does look good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at first it was like, okay, great, you’re doing an iMac. But then they mentioned that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, this is a touch screen, a 28-inch touch screen. And suddenly people start to go, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, tell me more. And then the real party trick happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was Microsoft explained why there are two arms going from the Mac mini to the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And those arms allow you, from what they showed, allow you to very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effortlessly turn this iMac into kind of an easel. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s at a very, very shallow angle such that you could use it as though it’s a writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surface and it has with it their equivalent of an Apple pencil. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more importantly, it has, or maybe not more importantly, but differently, it also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a surface dial. And so what this is, is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey puck sort of thing. It’s actually not dissimilar from the puck mouse that everyone hated, but much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taller. And you can sit that on your desk and you can spin it in order to, I don’t know, change volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or get different, you know, tools as you’re using the pen, but where it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even cooler still, and you have to understand that this hinge that they have genuinely is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neat. It looks really, really clever. But what’s cooler still about the Surface Dial, this puck, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can drop this thing right on the display and the display recognizes that it’s there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where it is and allows you to treat that as another control surface. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the way that the naked robotic core is the like most pure realization of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody would want for a computing device, you know, the, the, the, what Apple would want for an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think not that this is a naked robotic core, but I feel like this is the most pure realization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what Microsoft hopes for, for this world that to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little bizarro, where you have a touch-based or touch-permitted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if nothing else, desktop OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Microsoft’s strategy for many years now with its Windows thing, especially as the Windows phone
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff has been fading, has been to have a single OS for
⏹️ ▶️ John all their platforms. And because that single OS has part of its family tree is
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and tablet type devices that of course it supports touch, which is why you can do touch in Windows with
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows eight that started and they’re up to Windows 10 now. And so they’ve been changing Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an interface that you can use with a mouse and keyboard you can use with a pen you can use with your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ve been doing this for a long time and to varying results. I know some people have
⏹️ ▶️ John the Microsoft Surface their tablet product that is basically like You can use it like a PC with a keyboard attached to it because it’s got a hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. You can use it kind of like a tablet. If you’re using it like a laptop, you can also just poke your finger at the screen, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure we’ve all seen this. Many people just expect to be able to do that, especially younger people, or anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who even just uses a touch device for a long time. They’ll switch from an environment where they’re using a tablet or a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to a laptop and instinctively touch the screen. I know I used to do it with Kindles before the touchscreen Kindles,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I spent so much time with iPads. I would touch the screen to try to do something on a Kindle and of course nothing would happen because
⏹️ ▶️ John they were totally inert. like there was no this is before the touch sensitive ones. It is natural to get into that habit
⏹️ ▶️ John and Microsoft has built an entire interface strategy around the idea that all
⏹️ ▶️ John forms of input are welcome that it should be supported. They’ve been changing. They’ve been changing windows
⏹️ ▶️ John to not require a perfectly precise mouse pointer or even a stylus to do things to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to make bigger, chunkier controls and gestures and stuff like that. And this surface studio
⏹️ ▶️ John is the biggest this has gotten because previously was like, you You get tablets and you got these convertible laptop-y
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are like a tablet with a keyboard and yeah, of course you can touch the screen and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the pen input and all that stuff. But this is, like 28 inches is like, this is not a big
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet. This is a full-size, bigger than most people have, because most people do not have 28 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John screens on their PCs, full-size, personal computer, running Windows, doesn’t pretend to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a tablet, you can’t take it off and carry it like a tablet, it’s not a big phone. it is a personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computer that has all the normal input modes you would want including
⏹️ ▶️ John a pen but then also accepts not just touch but like
⏹️ ▶️ John stop thinking of it as like I’m touching the screen but more like removing indirection
⏹️ ▶️ John because the mouse and the keyboard are indirect input devices and they’re they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wonderful input devices and they’re very precise and especially the mouse I feel like is the least
⏹️ ▶️ John indirect of indirect-imposed devices because if you’ve used a mouse for any appreciable amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of time the indirection disappears very quickly. You don’t feel like you’re driving the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John versus like say you had a joystick. If you had a joystick you would feel like you’re driving the mouse cursor around the screen like it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John car to get to the things you want. But if you have a mouse you just basically feel like you’re grabbing things on the screen. And yes
⏹️ ▶️ John it is indirect, you’re not touching it. It’s not as direct as touching the screen as anyone who uses an iPad or an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone no it’s not that kind of direct but it is like really good video game controls in that
⏹️ ▶️ John very quickly it disappears and you stop thinking about the control and just start thinking about the task
⏹️ ▶️ John but the ultimate direct input is like literal direct input as in you see something on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John you manipulate it on the screen with your hands and your fingers or your pen like the same way you would in
⏹️ ▶️ John the pre-computer age if you’re doing something that involves putting marks on a piece of paper
⏹️ ▶️ John or shuffling things around put marks on the piece of paper or shuffle things around like do it don’t move
⏹️ ▶️ John something that moves another thing on a screen that represents the things you’re moving around just get right on that screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing tilting down to like a drafting table type you know angle
⏹️ ▶️ John saying like if you’re not doing text input you’re not writing a program but instead you’re doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with visual arts or anything like that turn it down set aside your
⏹️ ▶️ John your keyboard and your mouse for now and just get right on there on that screen it’s a huge screen just get right on there you
⏹️ ▶️ John got a pen you got your fingers you got the little dialy thing I can imagine them adding more types of tools to that
⏹️ ▶️ John that to me is the culmination of their strategy of allowing all
⏹️ ▶️ John forms of input by saying here’s a form of input not only do we accept all forms in booze like oh
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t decide you should concentrate on one it’s kind of weird to type and then use a mouse but also touch the screen make her mind am I clicking the button
⏹️ ▶️ John with the mouse cursor I’m touching it with my finger my drum of the pen what am I doing there are many tasks
⏹️ ▶️ John in which directly interacting with a gigantic screen is the best interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John The task where you put aside all those other tools and say I just want to get right to it and obviously they
⏹️ ▶️ John you know showing like art and stuff like that’s the most obvious one and this is their first crack at this so maybe it’s not as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as it could be people said that there’s too much parallax because your pen is too far away from like where the pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John are and that there’s lag in some of the applications but I really feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost inevitably the the future of of digital art, whether Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be the future of digital art, I don’t know. But like we’ve gone through the whole thing of using, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John using mice to using, you know, tablets that are an indirect input device to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way comes Cintiq, which is like a tablet that’s also the screen. It’s like, just just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John going because people love all those tools and they get used to those tools. But direct input, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can raise a generation with the expectation that you do your artwork on a giant 28 inch monitor by directly
⏹️ ▶️ John manipulating it, that’s going to win in the end, whether it’s Microsoft or somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John else. And Microsoft getting there first is, it’s nice to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if this is a product that is not great, and it should be worrying to Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have anything to compete with this, like at all. And I don’t think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can say, we really believe that the future of doing digital art is using a Cintiq, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Because Apple doesn’t make those either. We really believe the future of art is using a mouse or doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you know, they have iPads. All right, so where’s your 28-inch iPad that doesn’t, that you need to plug into the wall?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like whatever Apple’s going to do, I’m not saying they have to make Macs touchscreen or anything, but if they care at all, which maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, about the creative arts that involve drawing things, even things from like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine CAD or architectural drawings, not just fine arts and illustration and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They need to be doing something about this. And I was so excited when I came up with the iPad Pro, because like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I was talking about. You need a really big iPad. And if you go back to listen to all those shows from years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, I think at some point I did talk about the whole drafting table thing. I think we talked about it on this very
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast, but also on the Hypercritical. This is it. Microsoft made it before Apple did. Apple did make
⏹️ ▶️ John their iPad bigger, but they took a long time to do it, and they didn’t make it bigger, bigger. And the idea of an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t take off your desk, I remember being laughed at perhaps on this show, perhaps on other ones, like, well, what the hell’s the point of an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t move it anywhere? This, this is the point. This is the thing. So I am super proud of Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John for making this. I hope they keep at it. I hope they don’t say, well, not a lot of people bought these because
⏹️ ▶️ John I guarantee you now that people are going to buy this because it’s really expensive and it’s like the first generation product. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John truth be told, most people don’t do fine arts in their computer, right? But I think this is the right idea
⏹️ ▶️ John for that class of problems. And if Apple cares about that class of problems, if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple cares about keeping those creatives, And I think they totally think they should because they are
⏹️ ▶️ John another branch of sort of the founding bedrock of Apple’s products like creative professionals.
⏹️ ▶️ John They need to start putting the air pump into those iPads and cranking up pronto
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they don’t, someone else is going to get there first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any idea how much I wanted Reebok pumps as a kid? My goodness, I wanted this so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t know. I really admire this, like you said, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also think that this solves a class of problems that I just don’t have, which, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, you kind of said as well, but I have a Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team that I’m in that’s a handful of people that are either current or former employees of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my last employer, the consulting gig. And we were actually, I feel like we have very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cyclical conversations, and one of them is, oh, are touchscreen devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid or not? And since most of these people are Windows developers, most of them have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touchscreen Windows laptops, and all of them swear, oh my God, Casey, you have no idea, it’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that very well could be the case. Maybe it is that good. But having used a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of touchscreen laptops, admittedly, very, very briefly, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet to really have it click. I’ve yet to say, oh, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this does make sense. And maybe given a fair shot, maybe it would, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like I want a touchscreen computer to begin with. And now you’re saying, well, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t you, well, you know, why not have a touchscreen iMac? If I was an artist, heck yes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as me, meh, no thanks. It’s a cool thing to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you don’t want a touchscreen laptop, like when you phrase it that way, like, no, no, no. Who wants a touchscreen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying people find themselves compelled to touch a screen, but no, like those things, the Surface, I would say, is not a touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop. It is a tablet with a keyboard. Apple makes one of those already. It’s called the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPad is not a touchscreen laptop. It is a tablet that comes with a keyboard. And you say, what’s the difference?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re both basically the same in use. Like they’re open at the same angle. There’s a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John horizontally and a screen kind of vertically. And yes, you can touch the screen, but you use them in such
⏹️ ▶️ John different ways. Like, oh, well, when I’m just using it with my hands, it’s just an iPad. But then when I’m typing, I use the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t know what you want to call that, but phrasing it as a laptop or the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like, oh, I don’t want to be poking my finger. It’s not comfortable, as Apple’s pointed out a million times, to poke at a vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. It’s better to use the indirect input devices. But I think it’s looking at it the wrong way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s taking the old thing and saying, I’m taking the old thing and modifying it by adding a touchscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we take the new thing, which is a tablet, and modify it by adding back a keyboard, everyone’s okay with it, and it’s basically the same result.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this thing, the Surface Studio, I think is like, this is not a touchscreen laptop. This is also
⏹️ ▶️ John not a touchscreen iMac. Because an iMac doesn’t lay down on the table for you. Like, there’s no way in hell you want a touchscreen iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t draw on an iMac. The thing only tilts like 15 degrees, and most of them are, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John close to straight up and down the whole time. That is not the Surface Studio. The key feature of the Surface Studio says,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you want to do the thing, like just like an iPad, when you just want to use it like an iPad, you don’t need the keyboard. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John Surface Studio is like, when you want to do stuff that doesn’t involve text input at all, like you’re drawing a picture and doing architectural
⏹️ ▶️ John drawings, or like manipulating lines or things in space or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to use the keyboard, lay the whole thing down. I think like in the pictures, they have it like laying down on top of
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard. Like you don’t even have to see the keyboard. It’s not there anymore. It’s like, it’s the same way the keyboard goes away
⏹️ ▶️ John when you use your iPad. Like I’m not using the keyboard part of my iPad now, I’m just using the iPad part of it. And that’s in a
⏹️ ▶️ John portable context. This is the, just simply the desktop equivalent of that. So I’m not sure what you want to call it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it is weird that Apple’s most likely response to this have to be an iOS device and not a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is strange, because as we’ve talked about in the past, Apple’s thus far their inability to really get
⏹️ ▶️ John pro level applications to flourish on iOS devices, whereas they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of doing okay on the Mac. Like that’s Apple’s challenge to solve. But I’m just saying like, writ large,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’ve always, you know, the future of computing, direct manipulation for tasks that require it on a big, gigantic,
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome screen. screen. The only way that’s not going to happen is if a VR and AR
⏹️ ▶️ John advance to the point where this approach never has its chance to be in, you know, never has his day in the
⏹️ ▶️ John sun because AR and VR, if they get good enough, make having a big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that lights up in front of you like archaic. But I feel like there will be a time before AR and
⏹️ ▶️ John VR get good, where it will be the time of the gigantic touch screens that lay down in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m super old and I’m you know doing computing stuff that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John involve typing I would like to have a big gigantic gorgeous screen lay down in front of me so that I can do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and also have a keyboard for when I do text input and also have speech recognition also have a bunch of things like pens
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff I could do on it I’m ready for the Microsoft Surface Studio with 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years in advancement probably also not made by Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know one One thing you mentioned briefly earlier, John, is if they stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this. That’s because Microsoft throws a lot of spaghetti at the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They change strategies often, and they change desktop initiatives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often. This product line, like many other things Microsoft has tried in recent years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not be good enough for them. It might not sell well enough, or it might not get enough software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support. it won’t sell well
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. But like, don’t you see this as a like the trend, like they’ve spent all these years
⏹️ ▶️ John making a single OS that accepts all these kinds of input. Like that’s not like a fluke. That’s not like like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they’ve been doing. And that’s what gives them the option to do things like this. I feel like this, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the culmination of years and years and years of work. You can’t make this on day one, you have to do all
⏹️ ▶️ John the work to make the unified windows that does all the kinds of input to change the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John UI to even be usable with touch to make the device that has a pen that you know that looks like a laptop or the touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to do years and years of that before you can make this thing so I feel like it’s not a fluke sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John with it merely means maybe they will retreat from making their own PCs like maybe they will retreat back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the surface or retreat back to a tablet or phone size things or get out of that business entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John and just do Microsoft Azure and then license Windows to clone makers we don’t know but I don’t I
⏹️ ▶️ John I I don’t think like they’re going to say, Oh, actually, touching the screen is not a big deal, because they’ve just spent so long
⏹️ ▶️ John coming to this point, like that, I feel like they worked hard to be able to produce a machine like this. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John one won’t sell well enough to be significant. But I think I really think they will take a second or third
⏹️ ▶️ John crack of it. And when I think of the best of Microsoft, I think of pains me to say
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I think of the company that made the Xbox, which was a gigantic, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly piece of crap, but they stuck with it. And every new new Xbox they’ve made has been better than the previous one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, that first Xbox was a really good system. But no, I mean, like, so Xbox is huge. Lol. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think just because they’ve built in all this, all this capability for things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like touch and pen input, you know, if you would have looked at the TV market five years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, you would have thought that 3D TVs were just what everybody wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were taking off like crazy. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John obviously, nobody ever thought that. Obviously, the future of TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was gonna be 3D, because if you looked at every TV, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end to even mid-range TV you could buy in a store, they were all 3D-supported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TVs. But in practice, the reason that feature was being put there was because a stagnant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry was trying to add more hardware things to make people upgrade because they weren’t upgrading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their TVs fast enough. So Microsoft, in putting in all this crazy capability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff into the service line, all these different input methods and everything else, it doesn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean that everyone’s using them or that this will be how people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will use their Microsoft computers in the future. It might turn out that way, but just because the capability’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, just because Microsoft is building all this support, and everything is building this hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t mean that PC users are going to meaningfully adopt this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, they might, but that’s not a foregone conclusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not PC users that are buying this. that is creative professional specifically, which is a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John market, and out of those people, they’re not gonna buy it because this is like, this is like you trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John enter a market that another company owns, or like, there is already a way, a set way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things, and you have a totally different way to do it. Some people are gonna try it, but professionals are the
⏹️ ▶️ John least likely to change their ways. Even if they’re already using a Microsoft Windows PC running Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John with a tablet, whether it’s a Cintiq or just a plain old tablet, even those people aren’t gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the Surface Studio except for on a lark or to be curious about it because they’re set in their ways using
⏹️ ▶️ John their Microsoft Windows PC running Adobe Photoshop with a tablet and they’ve been doing that their whole
⏹️ ▶️ John career and that’s what they like and maybe they’re curious about this but it’s not a big deal but the thing about the future
⏹️ ▶️ John is this is if they stick with it and keep selling this even though they’re not making money on
⏹️ ▶️ John it because not enough people buy it eventually I think the market will come around to it because
⏹️ ▶️ John people who start out new might be interested in it and try it out and they never got used to using a
⏹️ ▶️ John non light up tablet or the people who use Cintiqs might view this as a better Cintiq until they try it and realize
⏹️ ▶️ John I can Cintiq is a little bit better because it’s got all these buttons on it. They’re used to and so on and so forth. Like it’s going to be a long road
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other X factor is that people don’t like Windows or Marco doesn’t like it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Some people don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows believe it or not. And so those people who don’t like Windows are going to be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is looks great and all, but I don’t like Windows. So I’m not going to do that. All the professionals are using Macs. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John I use Photoshop on a Mac with the Wacom tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Like, I’m just talking to seeing the tweets from Dr. Wave on
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter. Like, isn’t this perfect for Pixar? It’s like, well, actually, at Pixar, people who have these giant tablets to draw
⏹️ ▶️ John on to do their 3D work, they’re on like articulated arms. And so it’s a nonstarter for this thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John just be on a simple hinge that goes on a desk like that. This is just one product and that it doesn’t it’s not as flexible as the
⏹️ ▶️ John products they’re already using. And they already have a system that works. And so this may be novel and interesting, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work for Pixar, right? But this is this is early days. This is a single product
⏹️ ▶️ John from a single company with lots of caveats that are associated with it. So I’m not I’m not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that this is going to make Microsoft the king of the creative professionals. But they do have
⏹️ ▶️ John a head start on people. And if they keep iterating on this product, and this idea and this concept for years and years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years and keep going with this whole OS strategy with touch, and maybe make Windows a little bit nicer in the process.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no one else does anything, because who else is is there. It’s not like Linux is going to take over the credit professional market, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s them and Apple basically at this point. And if Apple doesn’t move, it gives Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John time to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail over and over again. And eventually they’ll get pretty decent and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll basically win by default if Apple never makes an iPad bigger than 12.5 inches and never
⏹️ ▶️ John makes a Mac like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks for our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Audible and Squarespace and we will see you next
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
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check the podcast so long
Post-show: Mac automation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want to talk about Sal Seguin? I’m sorry if that’s not how you pronounce it. I haven’t had time to research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This news broke a couple hours before we started recording that Sal Seguin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who He was he was the probably the product manager the head
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Mac OS automation technologies, so that would include things like Apple script
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple events automator And apparently he has he has been let go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple his position has been eliminated So, basically, it sure seems like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no longer going to have a head of automation of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on macOS. And a lot of longtime Mac users are taking this news to be possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty bad sign. Do we want to talk about this? I mean, we haven’t really had time to look into it much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked into it, and I know Sal from my reputation and by all the WWDC sessions
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen with him, and I’ve met him in person a couple of times, although I’m sure he doesn’t remember me. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I have, too. very familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he’s one of those people you recognize. Um, there are a couple aspects of one is that Sal
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a very nice, gregarious, charismatic, smart person. He’s got charisma.
⏹️ ▶️ John You see him and especially if you’re a nerd and you’re like attracted to smart people, right, who are interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John and dynamic and have have opinions and can express them well. Um, that’s out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So people who are a long time Apple fans and who have, you know, known him
⏹️ ▶️ John professionally or by reputation or by his products or presentations are sad to see somebody that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John liked, uh, not be at the company anymore. Right? That’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s an unquestionable aspect of this entire thing, because if he was a jerk that everybody hated, this would not
⏹️ ▶️ John be as big a story. Right? And then the other part is what you just said about automation,
⏹️ ▶️ John automation on the Mac, which people just shortened to say like, Oh, Sal, he’s that Apple script guy. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable summary of him. If you want to go there, but there’s much more to it than that. You can read all the stuff on his website. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John put a link in the show notes. It’s not just Apple script is also shell scripting and Apple events that Apple scripting is
⏹️ ▶️ John based on. You can do it all sorts of different languages. And there’s the tooling involved
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. Even as recently as like last year, the year before that, they finally had like library slash framework
⏹️ ▶️ John support for Apple scripts. You could write Apple script libraries and use them like Apple script was kind of stuck in amber for a
⏹️ ▶️ John long time, not really getting any better, but not really getting any worse, but was still an essential part of so many professionals
⏹️ ▶️ John workflows like that they would use AppleScript to automate the things that they did
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was important to them for their professional applications they were using to have AppleScript support to be able to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John automator and you know in the OS 10 age was this other thing like let regular people
⏹️ ▶️ John uh design sets of actions without having to be programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John you know so automated would let you string together do this then do that and do that without having to like learn
⏹️ ▶️ John language even a language is as simple as Apple script. And his
⏹️ ▶️ John position being eliminated. I don’t know enough about the internal rearrangement,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it could just be that like, the division is merged with some other division,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was another person that Apple likes better who’s heading that division. So he’s out and that person is in. But it could also
⏹️ ▶️ John be that and this would totally fit with Apple’s recent moves, has been neglecting the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and having difficulty making pro apps and canning aperture and all that other stuff that they
⏹️ ▶️ John see using a user is creating automations
⏹️ ▶️ John in anything even approaching a program re like environment, whether it be hyper card, rest in peace,
⏹️ ▶️ John or automator or writing Apple scripts and scales. That is not the future of computing. It’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated. Regular people don’t want to do it. The professionals who want to do it are really causing more problems for themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John than they’re solving. And really, they should just allow us to define the workflows by hard coding them into our applications or just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John another application does what they want and stop trying to program it or whatever. Therefore, having an automation division
⏹️ ▶️ John and a product manager of automation, that’s not the future of the company. That’s not the future of the Mac. We don’t need that
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. It’s a waste of time and resources, and it’s holding back or other approaches. That’s like the doomsday scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most pessimistic scenario is that automation is being deemphasized in the same way that writing
⏹️ ▶️ John batch scripts would be deemphasized or or, you know, having to write programs yourself would be deemphasized,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And in some, it makes some sense, like the march
⏹️ ▶️ John of progress has been deemphasizing the need for people who use computers to do stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It used to be that you had to enter your programs by typing them from the back of a magazine in basic and that’s how you got your program
⏹️ ▶️ John to run, right? And no one does that anymore. Now we have the App Store, right? And a lot of the things that we
⏹️ ▶️ John used to use automation for, hopefully are mooted by the fact that programs are just better or
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet does it better or even something as simple as like, what is the thing for iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John workflows? Yeah, workflow, right? It’s a third party opportunity workflows just fine. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t need to do it. We just need to provide the capabilities and Apple events itself. You can’t argue with the fact that Apple events is pretty damn old
⏹️ ▶️ John and creaky. This, you know, it could be that it’s all being replaced by
⏹️ ▶️ John some bold new vision of automation for the modern age in the same way that Apple script replaced everything that came
⏹️ ▶️ John before it. But as with all things in Apple, we don’t know. It’s a big black hole.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have no idea what they’re planning. We just have fear, uncertainty and doubt. And once again, this is all in the
⏹️ ▶️ John context of Apple fans being grumpy for
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of related reasons. So
⏹️ ▶️ John can feel bad, but I’m not entirely ready to go all doom and gloom on this
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it could just be that it’s time to turn a new page because Sal and all
⏹️ ▶️ John the text tech that he was working on, and especially the foundational tech like Apple events has never really felt like
⏹️ ▶️ John it has fit into the OS 10 world. So best case scenario, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John rethinking this all and saying, what does automation mean? You know, from here going forward?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it mean Apple events? Or is there a better overall system for automating things on the computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John So worst case, Tim Cook says, automating things is stupid. We don’t need to do that anymore. People should just tap their
⏹️ ▶️ John meaty little fingers on screens and not worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I never really, I never really wrote much AppleScript. I did real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early on when I’d first gotten my Mac to do, I don’t know, like some silly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basic things. I forget exactly what it was for, but it was like maybe setting a default printer or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this was like in 2008-ish. And I personally have never really gone back and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a need to write more. Now, I know there’s tons of people who write it a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use it heavily, but for me this is not something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m terribly worried about and not something that I use terribly often, but it also does make me a little bit sad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this is a canary in a coal mine, in the coal mine for automation in Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’d bum me out if that went away, but I wouldn’t say would necessarily affect my day-to-day either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean it’s more about like, it’s a very, very powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of features. You know, AppleScript, the language is kind of, you know, that’s just the implementation detail of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the system on which it’s based that exposes Apple events
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and control of applications, automation of other applications, you know, through this entire API that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be any language you need it to be. And there’s many things that expose it as different languages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think JSTalk makes it JavaScript. And there’s, I think there’s a few other things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more this, that feature set, while it is used by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a very tiny percentage of Mac users, the amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power it gives is so great that this, really, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS, one of the things I love so much about Mac OS is that it is just so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful. I mean that deeply. It is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful. powerful if you know how to use its power. Like, there is an… it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in every sense of the word a true workstation OS. You know, as I said in my Mac Pro post,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like OS X is awesome. And to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to let rot or to deprecate a major area of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power from it, I can see why people are worried about that. And John, you know, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem like things are moving away from that, from that direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in consumer software design, mostly by Apple’s doing, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like the whole industry is doing this, mostly Apple doing this, but it was in many ways theirs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose. They really had amazing automation features that were fairly accessible to people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Programmers will always find ways to automate things. The most extreme power users will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always find ways to automate things. But one of the things that made this area of OS X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so powerful is that it was really quite accessible to lots of people. A whole lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people who are not programmers were able to use things like Automator to automate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really time-consuming tasks that then freed them up to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer do what computers are supposed to do. The kind of power that usually you have to be a programmer to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people were given this power by this system and its infrastructure. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the loss of it, I think, is certainly cause for concern if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you love the Mac operating system as much as I do for this power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s always had. And you know, as I said, I’ll be fine because I’m a programmer. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Bash and script something up or actually write an app to do things if I need to automate them, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all the time. I hardly ever use these technologies because I usually just write shell scripts and stuff instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a lot of people use these I think and even again percentage wise I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very small but that’s still that still could be like thousands of people who rely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this to to save them like hours of time a week or to do something that would just be impractical to do otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I feel the word on this that that being said we still there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this that we still don’t know. You know, all we know is that this this guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was his job was cut. Apparently, we don’t know why we don’t know. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’re just rear, you know, reorganizing the department of whatever it’s in. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this is organized inside. Maybe that maybe it’s just you know, a reorg. Maybe it’s like, you know, weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost cutting measures. Maybe they might come back to later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows? Maybe it was just like a personal conflict. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a new team doing basically like maybe all of a sudden there’s overlap because right, you know, we have this
⏹️ ▶️ John automation system, but maybe the Swift people like, Oh, I totally want you to be able to script your applications with Swift and we have this project
⏹️ ▶️ John and then maybe the project wins. And so this will be the legacy version of automation. And then the Swift one will come
⏹️ ▶️ John another one I was thinking about in terms of how do you get people who can’t program to be able to do simple automation stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always feel like the people who are good at using automator and Apple script are either basically programmers already and
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know it, or could be programmers within 15 minutes because to use even
⏹️ ▶️ John though the automator is way easier than coding the people who use it as part of their job they
⏹️ ▶️ John they eventually can’t avoid basically becoming programmers they don’t know their programmers they think they just click buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re learning conditionals loops logic input output like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just learning what programmers would consider to be an awful programming language is just clicking a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of buttons around right which is like let me just write the code right but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s I see also
⏹️ ▶️ John Excel wizards. Yeah, exactly, right? But another way you could do that
⏹️ ▶️ John is, how do you get non-programmers to be able to make their computers do
⏹️ ▶️ John busy work that programmers know how to make them do? Another way to do it would be to have a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John with a computer and describe what you want to have the computer do it. So a much, much, much, much, much, much,
⏹️ ▶️ John much more advanced Siri, you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri, let’s have a discussion. I want you to take all the, when photos arrive in this folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to take all of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco them. And rename them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rename them with the date and, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John tag them with this label and put them into this folder. Something you could do with Hazel or with Automator. Resize
⏹️ ▶️ John them all to be this size or whatever, blah, blah, blah. And Siri would go back and forth. Do you mean like this? Giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you a preview of what you were gonna say? Okay, if I was to do it, this is what I would do. Does this look like what you wanted? Like, all
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be doing behind the scenes is using the automation machinery already there and all the automation you’re able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do for like images easy because they have so many tools for like resizing images or or you know changing the
⏹️ ▶️ John exif data or renaming files like that’s all easy to do all you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is figure out a way to express to the computer what you want and if you can have a conversation with even a pretty stupid siri that
⏹️ ▶️ John is nevertheless hundreds of times smarter than it is now uh to go back and forth eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John siri could figure out essentially here’s the automator action you would have built only we built it together by by having a conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is certainly a much more advanced, much brighter, and I think attainable future
⏹️ ▶️ John of letting normal people automate stuff. So for all we know, maybe the future automation is
⏹️ ▶️ John all wrapped up in the Siri team, and they have grand plans to do that. I wish them luck because so far, they
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t really shown me anything, but it could be done. And so maybe, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, we don’t know what’s going on Apple, it could just be a reorder, it could just be emerging type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have, I I have hope that even if Apple has decided that
⏹️ ▶️ John every single technology that Sal lists on his website is the past of automation, that I have some hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple believes that there is something else that is the future of automation. Because like you said, Marco, people want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use their computers to do complicated things. But if they’re not programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t want to become programmers, that we have to find a way to let them do that, like a gentler slope to
⏹️ ▶️ John get them to be able to do that, because they will be happier with their computers and will find them more indispensable, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if they could perform something as simple as, uh, you know, when I get an email like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John extract the image attachment, put in this folder, rename it this way, uh, and then send me a text message
⏹️ ▶️ John about it or do whatever. Like when you show normal people that they can
⏹️ ▶️ John make something like that work, they think it is the greatest thing in the world because they’re, you know, they’re basically like, you know, someone’s in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ John room. It’s like the gateway drug to programming. Only they never actually go through the gate. They just stay outside of it and go, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John My computer does what I want. Um, which, which I think is great. So I think there’s still need
⏹️ ▶️ John for non-programmers to be able to automate things in their computer, but I’m willing to believe that