catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

207: Selling Hot Dogs on a Stick

Phone-size waffling, taking too many showers, and saving the iPad.

Episode Description:

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

Chapters

  1. Waffletime
  2. Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
  3. Follow-up: Showering
  4. Follow-up: Aspartame cola
  5. APFS clean install?
  6. Sponsor: Audible
  7. Apple earnings
  8. iPad woes
  9. Sponsor: HelloFresh (code ATP)
  10. iPad woes, cont’d.
  11. Ending theme
  12. Post-show: Mac ARM chip

Waffletime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just for the first time in a while picked up my iPhone 5s. I had it out for it for overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mistake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey See but tried tried Accomplishing anything

⏹️ ▶️ John you you were like someone who were trying not to mention in it whatever the last thing that you’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like that’s the most impression on you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God oh god.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No. I mean yeah, it’s a kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing like like I saw I was doing some testing a few days a few days ago and that’s why I just picked it up now to move it out of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way so we could do this show. And it just feels so good when I pick it up and I’m like, man, it looks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good. I wish phones could still look that good and would still feel like good in my hand. But then when I actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it to do my tests, I’m just like, man, this is such a toy. This is so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small. This is so… I’ve actually, I’ve honestly been thinking like, okay, so my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is continuing to not be able to make phone calls reliably. since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since since day one, both mine and Tiff’s iPhone 7s have been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very frequently exhibiting the exact same problem of the microphone cuts out during phone calls so that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other person can’t hear us for like 10 seconds or 15 seconds at a time, often resulting in them saying hello

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hello hello until they hang up and we’re screaming we’re here we’re here we’re here and they just hang up after a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know usually it doesn’t recover and it’s you You know, you say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might think you’re never on the phone. Oh, I never take phone calls. You know, I use apps on my phone all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d be surprised how many times a phone call becomes something important,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in a lifestyle like this. Simple things like when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your credit card gets flagged for fraud and you have to call them and explain it, and they hang up on you in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle because they say, I’m sorry, it seems like no one’s here anymore, we have to hang up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I’ve been thinking about maybe trying a plus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I get this phone fixed. Oh, boo. But, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I just keep waffling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the camera on it is so good, even though it’s not that great in low light, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I use my phone so much and so often I wish the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was bigger, but when I do have the plus for like a week here or there, I’m just like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is so unwieldy in my hand. I hate holding it. Like, so it’s… Yep. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Anyway, that’s the current waffle, but it’s not a very serious waffle yet. Maybe Mike will work on it for another couple of weeks and we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, but probably not. I’ll probably just wait till the next one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we not put this in the show? Because I don’t want to hear Mike’s lip after it’s inevitably released and then he starts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey celebrating on you waffling again. Also, I take issue with something you said a minute ago. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5S unquestionably feels amazing in the hand. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, it feels so good in the hand. But I actually stand by my earlier assessment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this iPhone 7 matte black that I have in my hands,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey while unquestionably slippier than the most slippy soap that you’ve ever held,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is aesthetically my favorite iPhone I’ve ever used. Which is unfortunate because it is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey holding a bar of soap. But God, I think this thing is beautiful. And that doesn’t mean you have to agree, but this is my favorite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone of all the iPhones I’ve owned purely visually.

⏹️ ▶️ John The on the phone size thing the air pods are giving me a

⏹️ ▶️ John Little bit of relief from the excessive size of the six side Which is the only size

⏹️ ▶️ John of my phone I had but it’s obviously bigger than plus All right, not the plus the the iPod touch as I used to use

⏹️ ▶️ John Remember I said when I first got the air pods that the clicker thing on my wired

⏹️ ▶️ John headphones was beating them in the kitchen Well, the air pods have made a comeback because they allow me to

⏹️ ▶️ John put my phone down someplace else and not have it in my pocket, which you wouldn’t think would make a difference when

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going around the kitchen and cooking. But when you’re cooking in the kitchen, occasionally you have to bend down to get like a pot

⏹️ ▶️ John out of a low thing or whatever. And no matter which pocket I put my phone in, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just big enough to be uncomfortable when I bend down that I feel like I’m either bending my phone or it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know, it’s just nice not to have it there. or you know it’s just anyway I feel better

⏹️ ▶️ John when I put my phone down you know on on a side table in the other room

⏹️ ▶️ John and then just walk around the kitchen with my airpods. My airpods are back in the house now. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it just goes to show that

⏹️ ▶️ John I would never trade down this for the smaller size no matter how good it feels in the hand because like Marco said

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t just hold the thing it’s not it’s not a worry stone that you just rub in your hand you actually look at it and touch the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John and for looking and touching the screen I want a bigger screen so I have one but I do like that the AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ John are letting me keep my phone away from myself while listening to audio.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just I’m so torn because whenever I am using it, I want a bigger screen. But whenever I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding it, I want a smaller phone. And you’re talking about the five s? No, I’m talking about the middle one, the 4.7

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch size.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m never happy with this size. But I’m also not happy with any of the other ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I picked the one in the middle that’s kind of mediocre and everything. I’m I guess least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have least unhappy, but I don’t know this is why I’m hoping so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the next industrial design of the phone puts a larger screen and smaller bodies like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey love so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John much to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the size screen the plus has but in something that isn’t quite as much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger than the plus I you know any any reduction in size would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be enough to push me over the edge even if it’s a small reduction just like fine like and and I don’t I’m not talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thickness you know as as you know from ever listening to me complain about anything ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care that much about thickness it’s in the iPhone’s kids more about the footprint the dimensions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s what makes it awkward in the hand and awkward in my pocket the thickness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself is not that important to me so I’m really really hoping the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one does something like that but I don’t know they keep selling so many of these I don’t know if they’re going to change it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking of topical things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a question. If the next iPhone, let’s just assume it’s called an iPhone 8.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying that’s what I expect. Let’s just assume for this conversation that the next iPhone is the iPhone 8.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let’s assume for the sake of conversation that it is approximately the same size as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPhone 7, physically speaking, but the screen, because of smaller bezels or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Bezel’s, however, is now roughly the size of a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven plus. I don’t even care if that’s like possible physically, just for the sake of discussion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is Mike right if we all get these iPhone eights that are physically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size that we’ve always used, but the screen size is the size of a plus?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is Mike right? Yes or

⏹️ ▶️ John no? Is it like the Tardis where it’s bigger on the inside? The math

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey doesn’t work out on that. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John go with it. Just go with it. No, I mean, you just go with it is like what if what if you could have a bus but it was the size

⏹️ ▶️ John of a matchbox car but it fit your whole

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey family for reference so I have all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco three phones that we’re talking about right here on my desk I’ve been doing this testing and if you place the iPhone 7

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of a plus phone you can still see the size of the plus phone screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticking out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the left and right I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think Casey knows how big a plus is it’s way

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bigger yeah it’s a lot bigger so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah that’s it’s not possible to shove the massive screen into the mid-sized body. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible to put the massive screen into a phone that is less massive. It would still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a very large phone, but it would be possible. It would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more pleasant in the hand. It would be a little bit smaller and honestly I mean you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of the three of us have ever to the best of my knowledge correct me if I’m wrong spent any time with one of these like Android

⏹️ ▶️ Marco curved screen edge phones. But there you know you can look at other phones on the market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have creative ways to shove large screens into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least narrower phones and maybe also shorter but narrower is usually the the more important

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and I think I would agree with that in the hand. Narrower is kind of more important for whether you can reach things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your hand and how it fits how you hold it but man I just again any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the very slightest improvement in size of the big one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You won’t be swayed by what they’re probably going to do which is keep the the the seven form factor but pulling

⏹️ ▶️ John the margins on that like so same same size screen as the seven but smaller surround so basically it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John making it in your hand feel closer to the five size you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John still go for the big giant phone with its margins pulled in as opposed to the the middle phone with the margins pulled

⏹️ ▶️ John in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re probably right that you know that is probably the kind of thing they would do like if they do one they would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do both in with the same kind of treatment. So the phone you just described

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically like the iPhone 8 minus it would be really really great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling in my hand however it I would have the same problems I have with the current six

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is you know seven what I mean this design which is that I just keep wanting more screen space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know all the you know the biggest battery and the biggest camera although honestly truth be told

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I have been totally fine with the battery on the 7. Yeah, agreed. And part of that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m doing a lot of iOS development, so it’s plugged in a lot during the day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, the battery life on the 7 is noticeably better than it was in the 6S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me in my real-world use. It is a substantial difference. And it’s to the point now where,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Tiff and I, a few years ago, I ran a lightning cable between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two segments of our couch so that we would just always be able to pull between two of the cushions, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just be able to pull up a cable and plug our phone in. Call it a charger couch, it’s a great idea. And we recently had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace the couch and I haven’t even set up the new one yet with the charger cable because I realized we never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really use it anymore. Because Tiff’s phone always has the giant battery backpack on it and mine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always plugged into my computer all day and when I’m actually using it throughout their outside world, the battery is actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better enough in the 7, the regular Smart 7. So that is good for them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really happy about that in practice. And that’s one of the reasons why overall, I am

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happier than I thought I would be with the 7. That being said, I still want the bigger screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever the best camera is. Hopefully in the next one they can fit two image stabilized cameras,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hopefully the zoomed in one is both stabilized and not a meaningfully smaller aperture.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that would be nice, but I still do want the best, best, best of all that stuff because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use my phone so heavily so many things throughout the day.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, Apple doesn’t make Best Best Best of anything anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s kind of the problem, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you got to decide what asterisks you’re willing to tolerate. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so to answer your question, John, I should probably just go ahead and get the big one next time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming it is a little bit smaller. But the whole time I would have it, I would be waffling in the other direction.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’ll hear about it. Just wait about, what, about nine months, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’ll start hearing me waffle? I would say

⏹️ ▶️ John this is like you will buy the bigger one, you will receive it, you will use it for a week, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you will keep it for testing purposes and buy a smaller one and use it as your phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Maybe. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want my wonderful 7 that I’m unreasonably happy with in other ways, I just want it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to make phone calls. It’s kind of important.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that, do you think that’s related to the Intel? Do you have the Intel chip instead of the Qualcomm one, the radio?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do. That’s another thing. So I do have both every I think AT&T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold phone. I think I think all of them except in the US I think all of them except the Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the Intel one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that I never make phone calls from. Right, exactly. So that was also one of my theories is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I send this in to get fixed and I buy a new phone in the meantime I would buy a Verizon unlocked one and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just maybe you know if I get the old one back then sell it or something. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. I just don’t to deal with it. This is why I haven’t gotten it fixed yet. It hasn’t been able to make phone calls reliably since day one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just like I need my phone all the time. And so there hasn’t been a time where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve wanted to like, you know, ship it back and be without it for probably at least a few days while Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does whatever to it. And then it comes back and maybe isn’t fixed. Mike’s iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 7s Mine has been completely fine and Aaron’s to the best of my knowledge have both been completely fine since we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten them. We’re We’re both on AT&T, both on iPhone 7s, and they’ve both been no problem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, which I’m not to say that you’re wrong or anything. Obviously, your experience is your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience, but it’s not a systemic issue with all the Intel chips, it would seem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why I was wondering if it was like an OS bug or something. By the way, speaking of how often we use our phones, I have my phone right

⏹️ ▶️ John here, and I can pull up how often I… Does all calls do sent

⏹️ ▶️ John and received or just sent? I’m in the recent calls section in the all tab. That’s everything, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I would think so. So this is 2017 phone calls for me. One on the 5th from my house.

⏹️ ▶️ John Spam call on the 12th, spam call on the 18th, one on Thursday,

⏹️ ▶️ John spam call on Thursday, and then one today. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s everything in 2017. One,

⏹️ ▶️ John two, three spam calls and three legit calls in 2017 so far. It’s February.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t use my phone a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. I have 52 calls in 2017. Yeah, so you’re feeling the pain

⏹️ ▶️ John of a weird microphone a lot more than I am. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38. Eight per screen. 40, yeah, it’s somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco between 40 and 50.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m using that NoMoRobo thing too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t, it’s, I mean, I’m using it and I like the

⏹️ ▶️ John fact that it has caught some, but I don’t like that a few still get through.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so iPhone 7, overall thumbs up, but for God’s sake, I wanna make phone calls reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Nomorobo, also thumbs up. Big supporter of that now. I tried a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the call blocking things. Nomorobo was the best. I think it’s like two bucks a month, some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of subscription price, but it’s worth it. Do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, well worth it. I would pay more if it worked better. Although I still have Haya on here, which was

⏹️ ▶️ John the one I was using before, which as you pointed out, Marco, doesn’t work and is annoying and is slightly evil. Because Haya

⏹️ ▶️ John lets you look up numbers, So when one of them gets through, and I don’t answer it, because

⏹️ ▶️ John why would I? I want to know, is this a spam call? And I can just go to high end, paste in the number, and it

⏹️ ▶️ John says, oh, nine out of 10 people reported this as spam, and I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I’ve had No More Robo miss spam calls a couple of times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last few days, but overall, it’s been very solid. Because when I’m not running a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocker of some sort, I get roughly one a day, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Really?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple years I’ve gotten like almost one a day maybe maybe it’s more like four or five a week so it’s like not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite one a day but in in that ballpark and I had a higher block zero of them ever I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran it for like two months uh and then I have I’ve had no more robo now for a couple of weeks and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have gotten I think one or two in like two weeks or so

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link to Marco’s article about this in the show notes because it’s hard to understand the name of these things

⏹️ ▶️ John we we were saying hiya, as in the word hi, and then ya, short for you, H-I-Y-A,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then nomorobo is no more robo calls, but it’s N-O-M-O-R-O-B-O,

⏹️ ▶️ John all one word. Yeah. Anyway, we’ll link to the blog post, all this stuff is linked. It just sounds like we’re saying made up words,

⏹️ ▶️ John but these are real apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome to the app naming. It’s like, you know, Web 2.0 site naming, where you had to like spell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, because it’s like, oh, well, it’s like Flickr without the E, and yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know who else would name sites like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, who would that be?

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Follow-up: Showering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Away for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s start with some follow-up, if you can claim starting this late.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Most important piece of follow-up that I think we have, which is not in the list, which makes John oh so happy when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I go off schedule like this. I have heard a lot of feedback about my shower

⏹️ ▶️ Casey habits, and I have heard one or two pieces of feedback that has disagreed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me and said I am a barbarian for showering at night and overwhelming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amounts of feedback, probably because we’ve been hiding in the shadows for all these years,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ashamed at our peculiar ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trevor Burrus Dozens of us,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco dozens. Michael Sandel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Dozens of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, I tell you. An overwhelming amount of feedback, including many people making that same reference, have said it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is absolutely the only way to go. You must shower at night. It is disgusting to shower

⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the morning time. And many people wrote in to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have kept notes, but I believe it was Japan. It’s just culturally, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way they do it is to shower at night. Forgive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John me. It was like

⏹️ ▶️ John every country outside of the United States. How I characterized the feedback was, well, first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ John still the vast majority of the entire United States is against Casey. And they didn’t write in because they have a silent majority.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey probably true. But basically

⏹️ ▶️ John every

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other person who wrote

⏹️ ▶️ John in and said, in insert country that’s not the United States, everybody either showers at

⏹️ ▶️ John night or showers twice a day. Nobody wrote in from other countries and said, oh, we all shower in the morning. Because maybe there’s a solid

⏹️ ▶️ John majority too. But lots of people from many different countries in Europe, South America, Asia, everywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all like, oh, we totally shower at night. But United States, nothing from them because we all know Casey’s crazy. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so they just let him be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John There

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also were clear trends where hotter countries would more often do it. And also it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed more prevalent in Asia than other places.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And some people point out the farther you get from Europe, the more showers people take.

⏹️ ▶️ John Someone who lived in South America. But yeah, I know. Although I didn’t I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John pay this up. I didn’t think there was anything to follow up. And I think we thought we covered all the bases. But since Casey insists on bringing it back

⏹️ ▶️ John up,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one point. Oh, here we go.

⏹️ ▶️ John One point that nobody brought up the last time is like what I think is the obvious reason, which again wasn’t stated because we

⏹️ ▶️ John all know Casey’s the outlier here that people shower in the morning is gets back to the Dilbert

⏹️ ▶️ John comic strip with after you shower you the cleanest object in your house right so after your shower that’s the cleanest you’re gonna get and

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just gonna get sweaty or during the day if you shower in the morning your interactions with other people

⏹️ ▶️ John for your day for your nine to five day present you at the cleanest because you go from maximal cleanness

⏹️ ▶️ John slowly degrading until five o’clock right those are the best hours you give the hours you’re with

⏹️ ▶️ John you know you’re at work and with other people if you shower at night you’ve got a good solid eight hours of sweating in your bed

⏹️ ▶️ John before you meet the first person the next day for work. So that’s the obvious morning shower thing and I’m assuming that’s why everybody in America

⏹️ ▶️ John showers in the morning.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, John, there’s these magical devices. They’re called air conditioners and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can turn them on and it conditions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the air.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because no one sweats at night if the room is the right temperature. Something like that. I have some bad news

⏹️ ▶️ John for you slash your wife as you age about night sweats.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh John, I love having the old man on the show to keep us in check.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love how this week everyone else is talking about Apple earnings and we’re talking about showers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll get there. This is just follow up. And Casey added this. I didn’t have it in the notes. Casey wanted to bring it up.

⏹️ ▶️ John He’s digging his own grave.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John loves it when I just throw something in at the last second. It’s his favorite.

Follow-up: Aspartame cola

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, I’m going to rearrange the show notes. Aspartame is the artificial sweetener in Diet Coke,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sucralose. I don’t personally care. Whatever it is, it’s freaking delicious.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was Marco who got it wrong when

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco he was

⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about artificial sweeteners.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew that already, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s like the concept

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an artificial sweetener, I made some reference to it causing cancer. And of course, then we heard from everybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how it does or doesn’t cause cancer and which chemical does or doesn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t, but you were making a joke. I took it as a joke, but other people took it seriously, which is worth

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pointing out. I was making a joke, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a real thing. Don’t be afraid. You should be afraid, perhaps, of

⏹️ ▶️ John weight gain and some relation to diabetes from drinking diet soda, because there’s lots of studies in that of like, how could diet soda

⏹️ ▶️ John cause you to gain weight? It’s, you know, zero calories, and how does it have anything to do with diabetes? There’s lots of studies around that

⏹️ ▶️ John that do indicate there might be something to be concerned about, but cancer, not so much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in general, training yourself and your palate to not need all of your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drinks to be sweetened is always a good thing. Because, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for purposes of calorie and sugar control, the stupidest thing you could possibly do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is drink a lot of calories. Like, it’s just, it works so much against you. It is so incredibly bad for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, like, anything that conditions you to still want all your drinks to be sweet probably works against

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in that way, even if one of the things you drink has a zero-calorie sweetener.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. It still tastes delicious and I’m good with that.

APFS clean install?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remco Vandenbosch writes in to say, once iOS 10.3

⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes out, do you think it will be worth restoring my iPhone from scratch to get more APFS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey benefits? And then he or she, they talk for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little while about the HFS to APFS conversion. You know, is that good?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that bad? John, as our resident file system expert, what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ John So what he’s asking about, I think, is, like, if you leave all the data where it is and just write all the metadata

⏹️ ▶️ John to new places, maybe you have files that are fragmented and other stuff like that. I’m not even sure if, by the way, HFS Plus

⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS does the auto defragmenting stuff that they added to HFS Plus

⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, like where it will find files below a certain size that are overly fragmented and in its spare time defragment

⏹️ ▶️ John them and stuff. But so basically he’s asking, like, would it be better,

⏹️ ▶️ John ideally speaking, to wipe your whole phone reformatted as APFS and refill it with your

⏹️ ▶️ John data so that you’d have fewer fragmented files and

⏹️ ▶️ John in theory I think you could potentially get a nicer

⏹️ ▶️ John less fragmented layout but I don’t think it would be

⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you would notice and I think it would actually even be hard to measure because flash is not a spinning

⏹️ ▶️ John disc and random axis is faster on flash than it is on spinning discs

⏹️ ▶️ John and fragmentation even if they don’t have the auto defragment stuff that’s part of hfs

⏹️ ▶️ John plus it’s probably not that big of a concern um so i don’t uh

⏹️ ▶️ John i think you would get some benefit that maybe if you took great pains to measure it and

⏹️ ▶️ John had a really thrashed phone and compared it with a fresh one you would see but it’s definitely not worth people doing

⏹️ ▶️ John so just let it convert in place and it’ll be fine. So that’s my advice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and there’s also a question about whether APFS will be open source, like HFS Plus is kinda sorta.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what Apple has said about that is they’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John document the, what did they say, the volume format? Yeah, the volume specification.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re gonna put a document out for that, but that’s not the source code, but that’s just like telling you, hey, here’s how the bits are on disk.

⏹️ ▶️ John And all they say is an open source implementation is not available at this time. Doesn’t say anything about the future, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows? So basically somebody else could theoretically make a third party tool

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or driver to at least read APFS volumes and probably also write them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you probably wouldn’t want to rely on it. Kind of like the whole Mac on Windows and NTFS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac kind of things, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And you can see the HFS plus code, which was very helpful for all my OS X reviews.

⏹️ ▶️ John all in the Darwin source repository. But APFS, I’m not sure

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a big benefit to them open sourcing it because it’s not like unlike Swift, I don’t think they want APFS take over the world.

⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, I think they want it to be a custom tailored operating system just for their devices that they’re free to change in any way

⏹️ ▶️ John they want. And I bet they will. And I don’t know if anybody else has the exact needs that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has. Like, if you look at the features of APFS, they are are excluding the

⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are, you know, fancy new features. All the other features like having like per

⏹️ ▶️ John file encryption keys and foregoing a lot of these ZFS data integrity features and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John are so tailored to Apple specific needs because it needs that encryption stuff for what it already does on iOS outside the file system

⏹️ ▶️ John now and it can’t have that heavyweight stuff because it has to run on a watch and like I don’t know anyone

⏹️ ▶️ John else has those exact needs. So it’s not really a general purpose PC or server file system. It

⏹️ ▶️ John is a specific purpose Apple file system as its name awkwardly implies.

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Apple earnings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So just, was it yesterday as we record, Apple announced their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first quarter earnings, if I get this right? I believe that’s right. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are going well, as it turns out. We’ll link to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a summary by Jason Snell at Six Colors. And as long as you don’t like the iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are mostly okay. I don’t know. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really have a lot to add on this. I’ve been really busy, so I haven’t dug into this deeply. Marco, any thoughts on this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think it’s probably best that we leave most of the discussion of this to other podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with people who do this kind of like businessy type of reporting more often. But for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most part, it is useful to just see general trends of how things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going for Apple, even if we aren’t directly investing in it ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or care about the stock price. I used to have Apple stock a couple years ago, at least,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not more. But I have since stopped buying and selling any individual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stocks, and I sold off all the ones I had. And now I just invest through mutual funds and things like that that might have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but I’m not directly investing. So that’s a disclosure there. And honestly, I think, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend to friend here, this is not investment advice, whatever, However, I think investing in individual stocks with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a substantial portion of your money is a fool’s game. Anyway, I think looking at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as general trends for Apple, as Apple watchers and Apple fans, it is useful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see, these kind of numbers are what Tim Cook is graded on by the board and by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco investors. And so, optimizing for these numbers is a large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of Cook’s goals. Whether he has other goals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for product quality and new initiatives and things like that, that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco vague and unknowable as to the balance there. However, we do know for sure that it is very important that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook keeps these numbers looking healthy for the board and for investors. And that does drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product decisions on some level. Again, whether it’s a high priority in his mind, we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. That’s up to him. But it is useful to pay attention to what’s going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on here, to see trends in what’s working for Apple and what’s not working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple, and where they need growth. And that can help inform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our predictions and our opinions and our interpretations of what Apple does.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, in these earnings, the iPhone’s doing great. It seems like it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of recovered from the weird boost and then slight dip that it had with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly like related to the massive success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s kind of back on a regular track now of steady growth. So that’s good for the iPhone. The iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it’s fine. So that’s good for it. The Mac division is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the least interesting. It’s up a little bit, but it’s within the normal realm. So Mac seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco steady, healthy, not setting the world on fire. And that’s to be expected But after a year of having very few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac releases, then in this quarter is when the new MacBook Pros became available. So that helped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco boost those for sure. You could see that in the graphs and things like average selling price and everything. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see average selling price for the Mac took a big hike upwards. That’s not a coincidence in the quarter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which they released a whole bunch of more expensive laptops that were significantly more expensive than what they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco replaced. That is probably one of the reasons why to make that boost up a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing really well. Their services revenue is up by a good amount. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting because like, that, it seems like that is a major part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their future growth that they’re gonna want to boost up. So that might include things like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe we’re not gonna see a whole bunch of cheaper iCloud storage this coming fall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or summer or whatever else. Maybe we are gonna see more ways that we can give Apple money every month, more services,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more premium tiers, things like that. This plays into things like what Apple Music is doing and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their possible video efforts that they’re hinting at or saying very little about. Things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So expect to see Apple, because services is a line that’s going up and is now a decent number,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect to see Apple putting more into services and trying to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more from us from services. So, you know, Tim Cook is really good at this. He’s really good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at taking an existing market that’s doing pretty well and turning the screws so that they make more from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco each person. That’s why the iPhones now have two sizes and one of them cost $100 more than the other one and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the base storage just sucked for so long because Tim Cook is really good at pushing those average

⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling prices up, up, up to try to make more money from each new person. That’s why things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad cases are so much more expensive than they were and now they’re two parts and all this stuff. You have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the $100 battery backpack for the iPhone now and all these different things. This is why.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not an accident. And this is definitely why the new MacBook Pros cost so much more than the old ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so expect to see tightening of the screws and boosts in the services area. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re probably going to see again more ways we can spend money on Apple every month coming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fall or summer, whatever else. And then the other thing is the iPad and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad is down again and not by a small amount

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. It’s still going significantly down. It’s kind of hard to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco explain. Everyone has their own theories. Some people say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is not telling the right story, whatever that means. I honestly don’t really get that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco argument, to be fair. Some people say that iPads just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last so long and therefore people don’t replace them very often. Some people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that the iPad is a flop in some way and that nobody likes tablets anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the truth is probably a combination of all of these things, and I guess we’re probably going to talk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more about that for the rest of the show, so I will move on from that for now. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch is kind of buried somewhere in other, and we don’t have any numbers about the watch, except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook says it was the best quarter ever for the watch, so good. On a Bezos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chart, that is now the highest bar on an axis that has no label, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey good for the Apple Watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote other revenue that the Apple Watch is buried in didn’t take a huge jump. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I doesn’t seem like it’s making it’s moving needle much on revenue for the for the company. But oh well we are an analyst maybe I’m missing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something there but you know it’s probably doing fine. What do you guys think?

⏹️ ▶️ John So the services thing I saw some doom and gloom about like oh look there services are growing therefore Apple’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John going to lower prices on iCloud storage. I don’t make that connection at all like services is all about getting more people

⏹️ ▶️ John to pay Apple on a recurring basis for something, anything. One way to do that is to lower the price,

⏹️ ▶️ John because if you can lower the price by half, but get more than double the number of people to sign up for it, then it works out.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a lot of things buried in services. It’s not just, you know, when you say services, a lot of people think you just

⏹️ ▶️ John mean iCloud or like the App Store is in there, which is one of the reasons everything is going up. And Apple Music,

⏹️ ▶️ John which has been backfilling for the iTunes Music Store

⏹️ ▶️ John downloads that sort of disappeared many years ago, and now they’re, you know, Apple’s finally getting to streaming and

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that Apple has all these customers, surely there’s some way Apple can monetize them by making

⏹️ ▶️ John them pay some small amount for each one of these little things and trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to, it’s kind of like the original video content they’re doing, by attaching the original video content to Apple Music,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re basically just trying to get more people to sign up for Apple Music. Why? Because they think once they get you on the Apple Music thing, you’re just used to

⏹️ ▶️ John having all the music available to you, you’ll just keep paying this month after month. And I think to

⏹️ ▶️ John entice more people to like, you know, how many people pay for iCloud storage, whatever the percentage

⏹️ ▶️ John is now, if it’s not really, really high, like in a 90% Apple must be

⏹️ ▶️ John thinking we can get more people to pay for iCloud storage. Let me look at what the numbers are. Actually, we’ve been overcharging

⏹️ ▶️ John by a ridiculous amount, as everybody knows, when compared to other cloud vendors. Why don’t we just bump that or

⏹️ ▶️ John lower the price or both, and then we’ll get more people on board. And by the way, let’s attach some original

⏹️ ▶️ John video content to iCloud storage and you know like that the things they’re willing to do to get to

⏹️ ▶️ John entice people to sign up for in a Rotter Con line parlance another eel are boundless

⏹️ ▶️ John and seemingly don’t have to be that well related because the idea of offering exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ John like essentially television video content to get people to sign up for Apple music doesn’t make any

⏹️ ▶️ John sense except that hey if there’s something you want and the only way to get it is to do this you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John do it like it’s the whole reason people sign up for Amazon Prime so they can watch Ben and the High Castle.

⏹️ ▶️ John What does Ben and the High Castle have to do with getting free shipping from Amazon.com for rolls of toilet paper? Nothing. But

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll do what it takes to get the content, right? And this is this is a weird deal, but people have shown that

⏹️ ▶️ John it works. If you give them something they want, they will sign up for something they don’t want just to get the thing they want. Hell, I did

⏹️ ▶️ John it. I signed up for YouTube Red just so I could, or I signed up for Google Play Music just so I could get YouTube Red on a family

⏹️ ▶️ John plan. I don’t use Google Play Music. I don’t, it’s sitting on my phone, but I never actually launch it is just so I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to see ads on YouTube. It’s a tried and true technique, which is not ideal from a consumer’s

⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, but people love recurring revenue.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I’m slightly surprised. Well, I guess I’ll stick with it. I’m slightly surprised

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that things are going overall as well as they are. I mean, obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this show, we’ve talked a lot about how we feel like things are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the way they once were. And I think the three of us have varying degrees of how dire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything may be. But I mean, this was their best quarter ever. I mean, I’m looking at the very first chart on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Snell’s post, and the most recent quarter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was $78.4 billion. And the nearest one was the prior

⏹️ ▶️ Casey holiday quarter, Or first quarter, I guess, which is over the holidays, which was 75.9 billion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I mean, that’s that’s what, two and a half billion dollars difference, something like that. I mean, that’s a big difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And things are

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey coming

⏹️ ▶️ John up. A percentage wise, like, look at the slopes on this graph, like apples growth is still slowed, especially if you look at the year over year change

⏹️ ▶️ John in revenue. Like the reason this is a big deal is because they’re coming out of three consecutive negative year over year revenue

⏹️ ▶️ John growth quarters. It’s like, hey, we’re back. We’re back in the black. We’re back positive. We made more money in this quarter this year

⏹️ ▶️ John than we did last year. But you can kind of see if you look at those, if you look at like especially the big holiday quarters, 46, 54, 57, the

⏹️ ▶️ John slope of that line versus 74, 75, 78, right? Yeah, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ John Growth is still slowing at Apple, right? And that’s something they have to deal with. But I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is in line with everything that we said on the show. We’ve just been disproportionately focused on our dissatisfaction

⏹️ ▶️ John with the Mac. But when we all were asked to pick what is your favorite Apple product this year, didn’t we all pick the iPhone 7?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think so. So now I would say AirPods, but at the time when like when we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John were…

⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe you did say AirPods, I don’t know. But I think Marco and I, at the very least, said the iPhone. iPhone 7 is a great phone

⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t surprise me that it sold well. You know, headphone jack, whatever. It

⏹️ ▶️ John is a good phone. It is a tried and true thing. It’s their third attempt at the same form factor. It has better battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ John They, you know, they worked out all these issues they could possibly work out. The weird home button

⏹️ ▶️ John and the waterproof thing and the whole, like everything comes… It is a good phone. I’ve always said that they’ve you know, they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John very well in the phone space and because if you look at the giant Pac-man chart and you see the little

⏹️ ▶️ John the Pac-man shape wedge that is the iPhone eating the Rest of Apple’s products if the phone does well

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does well and that totally dwarfs any whatever the iPad some sort of problems there

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s lost in the noise service revenue keeps going up and the Mac Continues doing

⏹️ ▶️ John what it does and the little hike in the graph like oh Mac ASP is going up because they cranked up the price of their Macs It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the old Mac, but for the past few years, it’s been like, produce pent up demand by not releasing

⏹️ ▶️ John any new computers. And then whatever the hell you release, people will buy. And if what you release

⏹️ ▶️ John is 500 bucks more than it used to be, your ASPs will go up. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey healthy

⏹️ ▶️ John situation, but that’s what happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah.

iPad woes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like Marco said, I don’t know how much more analysis we should really be doing on this, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sad about the iPad. It’s funny, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this on the show, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so, but I’ve been flirting with the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting a MacBook adorable whenever the presumably pending refresh happens, although

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the way Apple is these days, I guess I should never assume a refresh is coming. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I really love my iPad mini,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have the most modern one, which was brand new or nearly brand new, not this past Christmas,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the Christmas prior. I really love my iPad mini. I really like that form

⏹️ ▶️ Casey factor. I know a lot of people don’t, and that’s fine. But I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey help personally, but feel like any time I want to do anything but look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Twitter and I don’t want to get into like the consumption versus creation debate, but anytime I want to do anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than glance at Twitter or RSS or something like that, I feel like I’m fighting the device. I feel like I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fighting iOS. And so I’ve really been debating, you know, maybe a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adorable would be a better fix for this problem because it would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also be very portable, not as portable, but very portable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it would do everything a Mac could do. not as fast as other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macs, but that’s why I have a 5K that I’m speaking on right now. And it would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably be a really good compromise. And somebody tweeted, I think earlier today, and I don’t recall who it was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but somebody had said earlier today anyway, that if you think about it, the Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are getting more and more and more portable. And the iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t that different than they were a few years ago. The software’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot better, multitasking is a lot better. Even my iPad mini can do the multitasking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like the change in portability

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the most portable Macs is dramatically better as compared to the change

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in ability of iOS on an iPad. And so that’s led me to wonder,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I should just get a MacBook Adorable as a super portable travel machine because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that might fit my needs even better. And so I use this all, and the reason I bring this up is because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a case study of why maybe the iPad isn’t doing that great. And as Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey alluded to, there’s probably a billion other reasons. But any immediate thoughts on that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we get too far down the rabbit hole? I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think a Mac could replace my iPad usage for me, and I think that’s probably true of most people.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’re using an iPad because no Mac was portable enough, but for people who are using iPads

⏹️ ▶️ John for iPad-type purposes, there is no Mac. Even if there was a Mac exactly the same size and weight

⏹️ ▶️ John as my iPad, I still wouldn’t use it because I don’t want to use a trackpad, I want to touch a screen, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to deal with a keyboard. Like, I want an iPad for when I do iPad stuff, which is, you know, browsing the web

⏹️ ▶️ John or reading Twitter or watching video. I want an iPad, right? So there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John substitute for the Mac for that. The iPad sales stuff, like…

⏹️ ▶️ John I You know that we shouldn’t just rattle off the reasons that we’ve talked about all the other things I think Marco talked

⏹️ ▶️ John about them in his post about the iPad one of the most compelling ones aside from my pads lasting forever

⏹️ ▶️ John is If people just use the iPads to watch video you don’t have to spend $800 to watch video on a little

⏹️ ▶️ John square. That’s a screen right yet. That’s a loser market apples, and that can’t stake out the high-end

⏹️ ▶️ John of Square screens that play video because there is no high end of it that is that is doomed to a low-end

⏹️ ▶️ John thing all you need It is some basic Wi-Fi functionality, a reasonable CPU with

⏹️ ▶️ John some video decoding hardware, and the ability to run the Amazon Prime and Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John apps. There are Amazon tablets for that, there are Android tablets for that. You do not need an iPad to watch Netflix, I promise

⏹️ ▶️ John you. And so if that’s what you’re doing with your iPad, I think people like tablets for that purpose,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t need an iPad for that. And the other thrust of, what was the title

⏹️ ▶️ John of your article, Marco? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like-

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, so we’ve gone over this on the show before and I must remind Marco once again

⏹️ ▶️ John because apparently I wasn’t there to remind him before he wrote this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco post.

⏹️ ▶️ John But every time we discuss that, I take great pains to emphasize the idea that the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad as a specific product as made by Apple as it exists now may not necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ John be the product that sweeps across the market and becomes the most important thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ John when I specifically talk about the future of a computer with capital F, capital C, what I’m talking about is

⏹️ ▶️ John post PC computing which means computing without as many of the concerns that

⏹️ ▶️ John have necessarily come with PCs which includes dealing with Windows menus pointers file systems

⏹️ ▶️ John like all that stuff and as compared to iOS which swept all that stuff off the

⏹️ ▶️ John table and abstracted and hid so much of it that is the future of computing because

⏹️ ▶️ John people can’t handle PCs in general and dealing with file systems and their files and Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s just it’s too much on the iOS or smartphone or whatever interface where they take away

⏹️ ▶️ John almost all that complexity and massively simplified and protect you from yourself. That is the future of computing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unquestionably, the question is, okay, how does that manifest? Does it manifest by Mac OS slowly

⏹️ ▶️ John removing all that functionality? Does it manifest by Windows becoming this mutant hybrid thing? Does it manifest by by

⏹️ ▶️ John Android taken over the world? Or does it manifest by Apple introducing the iPad? It’s incumbent upon each

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those products to figure out how they get there. But, you know, it’s not it’s like saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, the Mac isn’t successful. So let’s all go back to DOS. Nope,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s not the answer at all. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can see what the future is, because we’ve all lived our entire lives of seeing how badly

⏹️ ▶️ John humans are at dealing with PCs with all the stuff they come with. And then iOS showed us

⏹️ ▶️ John a way to get a computing platform with almost all that stuff gone. And now we’re just figuring

⏹️ ▶️ John out Yeah, but what about like the stuff you can’t do and the iPad thus far has been doing, as Marco points out,

⏹️ ▶️ John not a great job of showing you how you’re gonna get that same stuff done without the complications. But it’s very clear

⏹️ ▶️ John that without the complications it is so much more accessible because everybody has smartphones and nobody deals with any of

⏹️ ▶️ John that weird PC crap on their smartphones. Like everything is just so much simpler and easier and easier to use,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is why smartphones have raced across the entire world and a tablet is just basically a bigger smartphone in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of how hard it is to use at this point. That has to change if you ever want the

⏹️ ▶️ John capital F capital C future of computing to actually marginalize the PC to push it

⏹️ ▶️ John down to the specific realms where it will have to remain right but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John that hasn’t happened yet Microsoft’s trying to do it with server studio Apple sort of trying to do it with the iPad Pro but half-heartedly

⏹️ ▶️ John is Android doing anything in the space I don’t know I mean maybe you can count Chromebooks as an attempt to get out

⏹️ ▶️ John away from the some of the dangers of PCs but I don’t think they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John a very good job but but anyway that’s that’s the future of computer we all believe in and what we

⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple should be what we should be grading an apple and is like you’re blowing it you are not achieving that you

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to have your cake but you don’t want to eat oh it’s a terrible enough anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they want to say hey look

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the it’s the iPad and it’s simple like your phone it’s like yes it is and you use it to replace

⏹️ ▶️ John your pc it’s like well can we right and you know it’s apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has to show us how to do that because there are things we need to do and we need to be able to do them and they

⏹️ ▶️ John need to be pleasant, just like web browsing. Previously, we were not able to do web browsing on our phones

⏹️ ▶️ John or it was incredibly unpleasant. And Apple said, no, actually, you can do web browsing on a tablet and on a phone. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we would all agree that browsing the web on a tablet is super pleasant in many, many ways,

⏹️ ▶️ John nicer than doing it on a PC, if only because you can be sitting on the couch and leaning back and using your finger. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like more like flipping through a magazine. Web browsing, you’ve nailed it, iPad. But as Marco point

⏹️ ▶️ John out a million other things, like whether it be from editing a podcast or using Photoshop

⏹️ ▶️ John or dealing with complicated products that span lots of different applications and share data, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John of the typical PC PC site stuff. It hasn’t yet been demonstrated

⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re able to do all those things in the same way. So everyone else is a contender. The Mac is a still

⏹️ ▶️ John contender for the future of computing provided Apple was willing to remove all the functionality that we know and love about the Mac, which

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they never do. But that that’s one way you could try to get there. You could try to get there like Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John by by weirdly morphing your desktop OS into a hybrid OS that does both things at once.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, who knows how we get there, but iOS is such a stake in the ground. Just to say it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John obvious that in the future, no one wants to deal with the crap that we deal with on Macs and PCs today. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John that is not the future of computing. We have to leave that behind.

⏹️ ▶️ John But so far, the iPad has not been a compelling argument for that. And there was one other

⏹️ ▶️ John graph that’s not in Jason Snell’s page that we’re looking at here on sixcolors.com which we’ll put in

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes that has tons and tons of pretty graphs. One page that I think maybe Horace tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ John or something it’s showing graphs of days of the week

⏹️ ▶️ John like average days of the week usage time for what was it for smartphones and

⏹️ ▶️ John PCs and the smartphone line is like this little lumpy thing that goes along right you don’t see

⏹️ ▶️ John any particularly large trends there and the PC thing goes Monday

⏹️ ▶️ John through Friday, huge dip Saturday and Sunday and back up from Monday through Friday, huge dip Saturday

⏹️ ▶️ John and Sunday. We’re just saying that people don’t use PCs on the weekends, right? And what are they not on the weekends? They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John at work. So maybe they’re using PCs at work or maybe the only considers PC is a work-like thing but the phones they use all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like if the iPad curve was shown it would look more like the phone curve and less like

⏹️ ▶️ John the PC curve because people aren’t for the most part doing work on their iPad. The iPad curve

⏹️ ▶️ John would just be like, ah, I use it the same amount pretty much every day. It wouldn’t be like, on the weekends here I’m not going to be on my iPad because I use

⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad for work. You’ll know that the iPad or any other PC replacement

⏹️ ▶️ John device or post PC device is finally useful for all the same things PCs are when it starts to get the same curve because everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got to do some work and a lot of people do work involving some kind of task with computing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if they’re still doing that on personal computer type devices, I mean, it could be a lagging indicator. So

⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe we have to wait a few more years. But right now, think of the number of people you know who every day go to work

⏹️ ▶️ John and just use a tablet of any kind as opposed to a PC. I know way more PC users.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s because all my friends are old. But we’ll keep an eye on that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think what we’re seeing, I think the right way to interpret

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad and the future of computing and everything else is probably something between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crazy blog post I made and the argument that John is making and the argument that Jason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Snell made on Upgrade this week. You know, the future of computing is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be just one of these types of things. It’s not gonna be just tablets, and it’s not gonna be just computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My argument is not that the iPad is failing as a thing, or that it’s going away, or that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco useless to everybody. My argument is simply that when people say this is the future

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of computing, what they usually mean by that is going to replace the PC style computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, and again, I mean PCs and Macs in that. I basically mean, for the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean laptops and other desktops and things that run Windows or Mac OS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Linux even, like PC style OSes. And I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most likely outcome here is that the tablets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all sorts are not going to replace PCs. They are going to do what they’ve been doing, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco add to them, augment them. There are gonna be some people who only primarily like tablets,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s gonna be some people that only or primarily like PCs. They’re not going to actually replace each other in either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the only way that’ll happen, I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can have them not replace them

⏹️ ▶️ John unless PCs essentially become, essentially adopt all the attributes

⏹️ ▶️ John that I was just discussing of iOS-style computing. Like, in other words, PCs would have to abandon

⏹️ ▶️ John all the weird ass crap that regular people don’t like and can’t handle about PCs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because they can’t, they can’t stay in their current state of like, with all the legacy stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that PC OSes have to deal with. It’s an untenable situation because people can’t use them and people

⏹️ ▶️ John can use phones. And so something, something is going to marginalize current style

⏹️ ▶️ John PCs, whether it’s the PCs themselves changing, because it totally could be, like you could take any

⏹️ ▶️ John of those PC-style operating systems you listed and slowly basically iOS-ify them

⏹️ ▶️ John while leaving enough of the functionality still there, you know, for showing through so you can get more stuff done than you can

⏹️ ▶️ John on an iPad, for example. But you just can’t leave it there. It’s again, it’s like going back to DOS, like saying, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t do everything on this Mac that I can do on my PC with DOS, therefore it’s a dead end and people just

⏹️ ▶️ John keep using DOS forever. They won’t. Like, the capabilities of the GUI will eventually expand to do enough of the

⏹️ ▶️ John things, you know. So I don’t think there is any situation where

⏹️ ▶️ John the PC as it exists today, with all of its legacy concerns, does not become marginalized in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a question of what will marginalize it. Like not disappear, but marginalized, like in the same

⏹️ ▶️ John way that, you know, people using the command line. Still tons of people using the command line today. I use it every day, but it’s marginalized.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely sure that your premises are sound here. So premise number one is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said people can’t figure out how to use PCs, but they can use their phones. Do we actually know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? Is that actually a thing? Like are PCs really as hard as we think they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use and then are phones as easy as we think they are to use? Or is that gap actually smaller

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what we might think?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s big. Go find someone who has a PC, whether at work or at home even, and just

⏹️ ▶️ John look at it. That’s all I ask, just look at it. Just watch them use it and see what’s on it and see

⏹️ ▶️ John what state it’s in and ask them to use it to do something. And yes, people have trouble with phones too. It’s a relative thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John but one is so much easier than the other. One is not infinitely easy and one is not infinitely hard,

⏹️ ▶️ John and yes, you can learn to use anything, but you have to get rid of those things

⏹️ ▶️ John that people don’t like to be concerned about. This means the reason people love the phone so much is they took away so many things

⏹️ ▶️ John that they have to worry about. Maybe less

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so on Android.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know about this at all, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the bigger reason is that it’s always in your pocket and it has these awesome cameras and sensors and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always data connections. There’s a lot about phones to love that don’t have to do with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the usability paradigm of their software.

⏹️ ▶️ John But people can do things with their phones that PCs could also do, but they never did with

⏹️ ▶️ John the PCs because it was too much of a pain. Even just down to installing software. So easy on phones,

⏹️ ▶️ John hard enough on personal computers, and so fraught on personal computers because of the lack of the App Store and viruses and all

⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of stuff like that, that people didn’t attempt it, or accidentally attempted it by accidentally clicking on things that install browser

⏹️ ▶️ John toolbars and crap like that. Like all the crap of the PC world makes it so people, Even

⏹️ ▶️ John if they were equally easy to use, it would say, well, this feels safer. Suddenly, I’m installing software.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s a cool new app, I’m gonna try it. No one, regular people were not discussing cool new apps for their

⏹️ ▶️ John PCs, only nerds were. That alone is a huge.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re describing Android.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what’s, maybe less so on Android, but even Android, I feel like the disposability

⏹️ ▶️ John of phones is like, well, if my phone is hosed, I’ll like, you know, the fact that it normalized backups and the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John nobody, essentially nobody did to their personal computers, but because of cloud backups with phone stuff built in,

⏹️ ▶️ John more people have a shot at having some kind of backup of something, somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John on their phones, whereas PCs, it was like, forget it, backups might as well not exist as far as the non-nerd

⏹️ ▶️ John world is concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and so I think there’s this continuum here, you know, like you mentioned, like, you know, command

⏹️ ▶️ Marco line all the way up to like GUI and phone. When you’re in the more command line side of it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more difficult side of it, getting like productivity and power user

⏹️ ▶️ Marco type tasks done is possibly easier than on the easy devices,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but casual use is harder. And then on the devices like phones and iPads,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting productivity and power use type things done is actually harder to figure out, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual use is easier. Somewhere in the middle there is the PC style OS. PC style

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OSs are, they kind of try to be everything. I think we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are generally much better at using them for productivity type things and power use type things, And that’s partially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most productivity and power user people have grown up with computers to some degree or have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain number of years using them. So there’s already a lot of people, what people are used to. People are already trained on how to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use computers for the most part. But also part of that is just the design of them is, with like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these kind of file centric paradigms of the desktops and everything and all this drag and drop, multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows kind of stuff. It’s just a lot easier to do a lot of tasks, a lot of like productivity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and power user type tasks on a PC style OS. That’s not to say that iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff can’t get some of those features, but also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t say that PCs can’t get some of the better ease of use and security features that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads and phones have.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s all I’m saying. If you do do that to the PC-style operating system,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you start hiding the file system on PC-style operating systems, it’s the same argument. It’s just like the

⏹️ ▶️ John question of venue. Where is that going to happen? It’s going to happen because people don’t like the old way and they like the

⏹️ ▶️ John new way better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do they? I’m pretty sure that sales curve is showing you something else.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, they’re proving it by what they want to buy. I mean, like, so here’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John with the complexity of tasks. It’s about marginalizing the users. It’s about chasing them farther

⏹️ ▶️ John into the corner. Like so people who use the command line and who do sophisticated things for their computers

⏹️ ▶️ John will still need PCs. But all those people who just do email, word processing, calendaring,

⏹️ ▶️ John web browsing, they don’t need PCs now. They have them because basically it’s the only way

⏹️ ▶️ John to get Outlook and to be able to see PDFs and to do all the other stuff but increasingly

⏹️ ▶️ John if your company uses Google Docs and Slack and so on like you there’s no reason those

⏹️ ▶️ John people need a full-fledged PC. Not because they’re not doing command-line stuff but they’re not even

⏹️ ▶️ John doing anything complicated enough to require them to use the non command-line

⏹️ ▶️ John portions of a GUI like they They don’t have multiple files that they’re assembling into a large

⏹️ ▶️ John project. They’re not doing… Development is also kind of a command-liney thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a matter of slowly making the people who need PCs a smaller and smaller subset

⏹️ ▶️ John of people, in the same way the people who need command lines have become a smaller and smaller subset of people. It stops at some point. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John as if… I mean, if the command line… Marginalizing the command line has really stalled out, because so many people do

⏹️ ▶️ John software development or do stuff involving you know servers and so on where the

⏹️ ▶️ John command line is important and is not going away anytime soon right so it’s not like you chased command lines away

⏹️ ▶️ John until there’s only three people in the world using it but it shrinks way down from where it was a DOS thing like to

⏹️ ▶️ John do your regular business stuff you don’t need command line you can get that all

⏹️ ▶️ John done with a GUI which was which was an argument one point it’s like well if I want to get real that work done I need DOS but if I want to do this one silly

⏹️ ▶️ John thing like draw a silly digital painting maybe I can use a GUI eventually you can do everything from GUI.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can do your fancy business spreadsheets, you can write your word processing things, email hadn’t been invented but you could do that too,

⏹️ ▶️ John like you know you know you can do all that stuff from the GUI, it’s just a question of marginalizing that stuff. And if

⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff gets marginalized by like old-style PC operating system and

⏹️ ▶️ John new style one that hides all that crap or modes within one or it really depends on the particular

⏹️ ▶️ John company that ends up figuring this out, whether it be Apple with its whole different OS iPad approach or Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John with its hybrid approach or Android with its phone OS everywhere, Chrome OS whatever hybrid

⏹️ ▶️ John S thing or even just with the web stuff like can you get everything done with the web browser and use a Chromebook for regular people

⏹️ ▶️ John so you have nothing locally and it’s just everything is on the web maybe you can do that in that case you definitely don’t know to

⏹️ ▶️ John need a PC style operating system to do that you just need something that can run all the web apps and that’s not so far-fetched

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if like there’s a slack client stuff like that so

⏹️ ▶️ John you know I don’t I wouldn’t focus on one single product I wouldn’t even focus on what we call PCs because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John possible for them them to be the future of computing as well. Just have to look for where,

⏹️ ▶️ John where and how the people who really do continue to need a GUI end up getting,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, where, where do they get chased? What corner do they get chased into? And they’ll be hanging out there with the command line people

⏹️ ▶️ John because the command line people are not going anywhere. And very often they’re the same people. And soon eventually they’ll be joined

⏹️ ▶️ John by the people who need to use like full PC operating systems. Then everyone else will be

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to book rooms and outlook futilely on their future of

⏹️ ▶️ John computing devices, because that’s what they do all day is send people emails and mess with calendars

⏹️ ▶️ John and waste time in Slack.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t disagree with much of what you said. I think we’re kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco arguing two different points here. Basically, my theory is that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC-style operating system and the iPad-style

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operating system have this this kind of common ground between the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two that they’re both kind of aiming for or should be aiming for to solve their problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not sure they I’m not sure that either product can get to the other ones common ground or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if they actually meet in the middle successfully I’m not sure that would be a good product for either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but I don’t mean the

⏹️ ▶️ John same company because the same company would be foolish to make their two products meet in the middle.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they could be like the iPad meets Windows 10 in the middle, you know what I mean? Windows 10

⏹️ ▶️ John goes tablet-y and the iPad goes PC, but the Mac would still be hanging out there in full-fledged

⏹️ ▶️ John PC area.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. However, I do think though that we are judging this for the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part from what Apple’s doing. Because Microsoft does crazy things, they’re kind of on drugs, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they work, sometimes they don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows what they’re doing over there. Sometimes they’re pretty cool. is showing that there is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a lot that can maybe be done in PC style OSes and and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also there there is a possibility of making more productivity focused tablets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Microsoft is doing a bunch of stuff in that area and it’s all wacky and some of it is cool most of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is weird and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t okay but they actually are moving and they’re actually seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some progress there and some success with their server stuff and various Windows 10 stuff and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we make fun of it but it actually actually is starting to actually succeed. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are looking at Apple for this because we know Apple, if they put their mind to it, would do a better job

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at both sides of this. However, I think it’s very clear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from recent years that Apple’s not really stepping on the gas too hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on either side of this. They’re devoting their resources elsewhere. They’re focusing on things like the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and services and the watch and maybe occasionally the TV and pouring God knows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much effort into this car thing. They’re not really stepping on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gas on trying to improve Mac OS, which seems like it’s almost in maintenance mode. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad OS slash iOS, in these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity style or power user style ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it jumps forward every two years in some interesting way. they add multitasking or split-screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or extensions or whatever else, but then that kind of just sits there for a while. They’re not really driving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly towards either of these goals. And it’s kind of unclear as to whether they even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco intend to. So I think it’s kind of a bad example. We are trying to argue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether these things are possible or whether convergence is possible or which one of these is like quote the right or the inevitable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the future approach. But we’re basing that on only what Apple’s doing here. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of blinding us to what might be possible, because if a company

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had these platforms that really cared a lot about these particular things, enough to prioritize them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher than what Apple does, I think we might see more answers more quickly. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we might see ideas tried that we wouldn’t have considered. And Microsoft is almost doing that. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing a lot of crazy stuff. They’re just not doing it very well most of the time because they’re not that great at it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are seeing, like, it is possible if you invest heavily in these areas and you really step

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the gas in these areas, it is possible to both have interesting tablets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be easy to use and also run productivity software pretty well, and it’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible to do interesting new things with desktops to bring them closer to the tablet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world in ways that make the tablet world good. I think it’s only a matter of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple specifically. Do they care enough about Mac OS to make major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to the OS and to the way it works and we just saw the touch bar and everything and that’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a major change to the to the interaction model or the application model of the OS. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hardware feature that sells new hardware and has some software integration and it’s really cool the way it integrates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the hardware and everything but that’s not fundamentally changing Mac OS in any meaningful way. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it doesn’t… Today. Well, okay, fair. It’s not, it’s not, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John additive. It’s, I think Mark is right, it’s purely additive. It’s not, it’s not taking away any complexity from the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, put it that way. Any of the weird stuff on the Mac, like the touch bar doesn’t alter that at all. It’s just an additive cool

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? But it does not allow you to avoid or otherwise hide or make moot any

⏹️ ▶️ John of the complexity involved in all the things that iOS does better than the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And then on the other side, iOS on, you know, on the phone, the phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is making great strides, of course, because that’s where Apple focuses a lot, because that’s good. They should. That’s where all the action is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That makes sense. But on the iPad, we’ve seen the same pattern from them over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and over again, which is they give the iPad a little bit of attention, and then they just let it sit for a year or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two. And then they give it a little bit more attention, and let it sit for a year or two. But ultimately, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad always is playing second fiddle to the iPhone. And that’s true of both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s attention and also just the design of the iOS. In so many ways, the iPad is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a blown up iPhone. And it seems like that’s mostly okay with everybody. And that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a lot of advantages to doing it that way. But if you keep doing it that way, I don’t see how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ever replaces more PCs meaningfully than what it’s replacing now.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just go to the screen thing, which is the thing I always bring up. Like people don’t use PCs with 12 inch screens

⏹️ ▶️ John on their desk if they can help it. Like maybe in laptops, But even then if they if they want to work all day there they

⏹️ ▶️ John hook it up to a bigger screen There’s a reason for that, but you know bigger screen lets you see more stuff It makes you more productive remember

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the maybe you don’t remember back in the 80s all the studies about how uh productivity Worker productivity

⏹️ ▶️ John increases when you have bigger crt on your desk and like employees would use as an excuse to demand a massive 21

⏹️ ▶️ John inch crt Which actually they were massive. They’re really huge and heavy and people don’t understand exactly how

⏹️ ▶️ John big those things were. Um but yeah, I mean like how

⏹️ ▶️ John Both the iPad and on the Mac one of the things that I always attribute to the fictional person of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John computer Which is not a person but a collection of people but you know, it’s sort of turning it into a person like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is hoping that People don’t have to do such complicated things

⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t you do all of your stuff with the iPad apps that we give you look how simple they are You just need these simple functions.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just need to be able to crop your images in this way No, you don’t need to be able to crop with

⏹️ ▶️ John with fixed proportions, but also in landscape and portrait You only need to do that on Mac. On the iPhone, do you really need to

⏹️ ▶️ John do that? When you edit video, do you really need that fine control of how the audio comes in? Or can

⏹️ ▶️ John you just drag the slider and we’ll pick the curve for you? Like, do you really need that much? All right, how about

⏹️ ▶️ John the precision editor? Is that precise enough? Can’t you get your work done just with these simple, because it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John much easier with the simple because we don’t have dialogues with all these numbers in them. We don’t have all these palettes that you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to rearrange and there’s so many palettes, you can’t even have them all on the screen at the same time. You have to pick which ones you want. That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John too much. Look how much simpler this is. guys write, can’t you get your work done? And people say, sometimes,

⏹️ ▶️ John but other times, no. And Apple really doesn’t want to give you either.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like for the Mac, it’s like, can’t you get your work done with one CPU? Most of the time, yeah, but maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I want, if I had two of them and they both had 12 cores, I could cut this portion of my

⏹️ ▶️ John work down in half and it would make me more productive. But can’t you get, isn’t this okay? We just buy

⏹️ ▶️ John this one. And it’s like wishful thinking that the massive simplification that is so

⏹️ ▶️ John good for everybody, doesn’t that fit, they seem to be thinking that it’ll fit more people into it than

⏹️ ▶️ John it does. And as Mark was always saying, it’s people just getting shaved off the top. And Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has shown that they’re essentially a captive audience. When you come up with the new laptops and they’re $500 more expensive, and they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have all the ports and features that you may have wanted, you’re gonna buy them anyway. What choice do you have? What are you

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do? Vote for a third party candidate? Go ahead, throw your vote away. I

⏹️ ▶️ John finally get the reference, yay. So, so, so yeah, like, that

⏹️ ▶️ John is that I feel like is where Apple is dropping the ball. And they’re, they’re have been

⏹️ ▶️ John too optimistic, too hopeful that every new thing they make, whether it’s like the new

⏹️ ▶️ John version of iMovie, where they had to keep the old one around for you know, or that old one that that really old kerfuffle from many,

⏹️ ▶️ John many years ago, you know, all the way up to the hopes that the

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS versions of their apps like the iOS versions of photo editing and so on and so forth would

⏹️ ▶️ John be enough for anybody, so much so that we can even just port them to the Mac and there’d be enough for everybody there, too. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is probably a good strategy for trying to simplify this for most people, but it is slowly,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, torturing the people who really do have demanding needs, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want to complexify the software, and Apple doesn’t seem to want to make it so that other people can make

⏹️ ▶️ John similarly complicated software, if only because they refuse to make and I’ve had with a bigger screen. Cause you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John fit all of Lightroom’s palettes in there. Marco was playing with Lightroom on a 28 inch Surface Studio. That gives you

⏹️ ▶️ John enough room for all of Lightroom’s crazy palettes. Oh, do you really need all those controls in Lightroom? Can’t you get away with just the controls

⏹️ ▶️ John that are in like an okay iOS app? No, you actually can’t. For a certain section of the market, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t. And if Apple doesn’t care about them, they are seeding that entire market, both on the PC and

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac to other people. Now, to bring Microsoft into it, the thing about Microsoft, they’re kind of in the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John position and I kind of feel bad for them, but kind of not because, you know, history.

⏹️ ▶️ John Where even if Microsoft has the right product, and even if their product is awesome,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you’re just not in the right market position, or you have the wrong reputation. Like, forces

⏹️ ▶️ John independent of the quality of your product can cause your thing to fail. Look at Apple in the 90s.

⏹️ ▶️ John The best operating system, the best GUI, but it was too late. Like, Microsoft had already won.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wait, hang on, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying OS, like classic OS was the best operating system in the 90s? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll give you the 80s and maybe the first part of the 90s, first few years maybe, but like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, until Windows 2000. Windows 2000 was what, 99-ish? Yeah, 99. Yeah, see, trust me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Maybe. I mean, certainly on the GUI and then

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like

⏹️ ▶️ John on the tech things, you know, it’s borderline. But anyway, certainly back when it was like the Macintosh

⏹️ ▶️ John versus DOS and like Windows 1.0 and stuff, but anyway, not to rehash that. Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t win with the best product, right? And so even if Microsoft gets it right, or gets it righter than

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like we are at the whim of the companies that exist and

⏹️ ▶️ John their entrenched legacies and their customer bases and where they make their, like, it’s not a perfect

⏹️ ▶️ John system where once someone comes up with the right answer, it will just, you know, we are stuck

⏹️ ▶️ John with the companies that we have or the new companies that we’ll have to grow to replace them and that is a ugly, messy, slow

⏹️ ▶️ John process. And so it’s really hard to tell if Microsoft actually has the right answer. Like for example, if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John had done what Microsoft’s doing with its OS strategy, they would probably be farther along because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has been in a stronger position because of a little thing called the iPhone and they could have made a lot of headway there. Whereas Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John was coming way from behind, having really gotten, you know, really missed the boat on the mobile thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and having all sorts of problems with their traditional sources of revenue, switching around and trying to change into a services

⏹️ ▶️ John company. And like, so it’s really hard to tell if they’ve got the right answer either, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that Microsoft has the luxury having a completely failed smartphone effort. So they have no legacy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John smartphones to worry about.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s tough like now that that that that iOS and Android have like sort of run the table,

⏹️ ▶️ John what room is there for like Tyson or whatever the hell that thing is called or you know, Windows Phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s tough like it again, even if Microsoft had the best smartphone operating

⏹️ ▶️ John system, technically, aesthetically, user friendliness or whatever, it’s so hard to go up against

⏹️ ▶️ John entrenched interest. But again, we always talk about Apple because know more about it. And I feel like apples apples mistake is

⏹️ ▶️ John actually one of naive optimism or wishful thinking. And

⏹️ ▶️ John they keep plugging away at like they plugged away at you don’t need access to the file system for how many years before they did iCloud Drive

⏹️ ▶️ John like this all just wasted time like if they if they were going to come up with a better answer that fine if you can’t come up with a better answer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not really good to wait six years or the hell it was before before iCloud Drive comes out because

⏹️ ▶️ John by that point, everybody’s already using Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever the heck they’re using

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know iCloud drive because it’s entrenched and it’s from the platform vendor, it’s going to do okay. Same

⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Apple Music streaming, like there is an advantage to being the platform owner but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a strong move to take away the file system and all the functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John it provides while hiding the complexity and then not come up with a suitable replacement and then just bail

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple years later and say, okay, here’s Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is always the struggle of the iPad and iOS in general also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think more for the iPad, that in order to enable these power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses, you have to give a little on the simplicity. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always the question of whether you’re actually just slowly re-implementing the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco poorly, like the whole Lisp joke. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think that the industry has shown yet that anybody has a really good idea of how to balance those things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between power usability and multitasking and file access and things like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and simplicity of tablet use. I think almost everybody just kind of punts the answer to that question

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, oh well, Apple will figure it out. They’re smart or some answer like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that’s really not an answer. And it’s like, usually Apple doesn’t figure things out that we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out a solution to ourselves. Because usually Apple is made up for the same kind of people as outside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple. And if we can’t figure out whether a solution to a problem can even exist,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they usually can’t either. They usually just punt and say, well, yep, this is a problem, deal with it, and we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And it’s fine. You know? Like when the iPad was first being rumored,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were all like, well, what are they going to do for text input? Because onscreen keyboards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty limited, but you can’t have like a physical keyboard on a tablet. That doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work either. What are they going to do? And they punted. They said, alright, well here’s an on-screen keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s limited, but deal with it, and we’ll sell you the external one. That was really bizarre.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes these are just unsolvable design problems that you just have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pick one or the other, and neither are great. I think the balance between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the file system access, and windowing, and multitasking, and everything like that and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the simplicity of what iOS offers today I just don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there is a good balance between those two. There might be ways to do it better than what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac and what Windows do but I still think that if you add that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power you are going to ruin the simplicity you’re going to add complexity it’s good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is going to be one of those design punts and I’m not sure that this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is necessarily avoidable, but I do think it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be an unsolvable problem, because tablets have been around for a while now and we still haven’t figured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a solution to this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep coming back to, as I’m listening to you guys, I think about what Chris Latner had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said a couple episodes ago. God, it’s cool that we can say that. Anyway, what he had said about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift having, and I forget the term he use, maybe one of you remembers, but like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco progressive disclosure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. You knew where I was going with this. Where I think by and large, Marco, I actually agree with you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that I don’t, I personally don’t see a way to square the circle. And in order

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make an iPad more usable for more people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a professional capacity, I think you would have to take away a lot of the things that make the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so great today. But progressive disclosure is a thing that’s already

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening. Like if you don’t do a swipe from the right side of the screen toward the center of the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you ever really know about multitasking? If you don’t hit that, that little,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I know about it when I accidentally do it playing a game all

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the time and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fair,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know what I’m driving at? You know what I’m driving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at? And

⏹️ ▶️ John actually, I think that’s actually relevant. Like it sounds like a side thing. I go, you accidentally do a gesture. So what? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that is more troublesome on touch devices and less on PCs, where

⏹️ ▶️ John progressive disclosure is easier on a desktop operating system because you’re less likely to accidentally trigger something because

⏹️ ▶️ John the input is more precise.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s more mechanisms. You have an entire keyboard, and then you have all the hotkeys, and you have a pointing device and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can have alternate clicks and modifier keys.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re not afraid to put preferences in. Like, hey, if you want to disable dashboard and disable all hot corners, you can.

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS has, you know, disabled multitasking gestures and stuff, but some things you just can’t turn off on iOS because they’re always there. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John actually control center. I think you can as a preference for that too. But yeah, that type of that type of thing

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, how do you do progressive disclosure disclosure? Well, on a device where you’ve already used up like

⏹️ ▶️ John every possible Morse code click combination on the home button and 50 million gestures and there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard like they’re kind of already painted themselves into a corner and their ability in their

⏹️ ▶️ John eagerness to gild the lily of of iOS touch interface, it’s not leaving

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of room for them to wedge in the more complicated stuff in a nice progressive disclosure way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with you. I just can’t help but wonder, is there something that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not seeing today that would lend itself to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey having the iPad feel like a more I’m gonna use the word professional, but I can think of a better way better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey word for it, but a more professional device. And I think about if you had told me during the iOS 6

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 7 days, oh, you know, there’s going to come a time that you can have this floating window that plays video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can shimmy around the screen and enlarge and shrink and swipe off to the side to kind of hide it for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a minute. I would have thought you were bonkers. And I would have wondered, you know, how do you activate that? How do you make it go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey away? What do you do with this thing? And as it turns out, picture in picture on the iPad is awesome. And similarly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey multitasking is pretty awesome. It’s pretty crappy switching between apps on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the little multitasking app switcher, but by and large, it’s pretty awesome. And I don’t know that I would have seen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to do that prior to having actually seen the way it was implemented. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do agree with both of you, but I can’t help but wonder, what is it that we are not thinking of that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would make something in the spirit of progressive disclosure possible? And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I have no specifics, but it makes me wonder what’s coming. What’s coming in June?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’re not thinking of it, but I totally am thinking of it. Like, there’s, like, that’s what I was getting at with Apple being wishful

⏹️ ▶️ John in hoping that the simple applications and the limited form factors and interface venues

⏹️ ▶️ John that they have provided on the iPad and increasingly on the Mac will be sufficient for everybody’s needs.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are intentionally not doing a bunch of obvious things. For a long time, they intentionally didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do the obvious thing of giving you a pencil, basically, the Apple Pencil. For a long time they avoided

⏹️ ▶️ John that because it’s like that’s an additional complication and most people don’t need it. Maybe people

⏹️ ▶️ John can get along without it and you know we had to endure many many years of people selling hot dogs on a stick

⏹️ ▶️ John that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know you used to draw on your iPad. This

⏹️ ▶️ John big stubby artificial finger thing and like it took so long for them to get it through their skulls like people want to

⏹️ ▶️ John draw on these things. They’re buying these terrible devices to do it for God’s sake make a pencil and they did finally right.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are so many obvious things they can do. They can make a much bigger form factor. If you want to see,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Microsoft’s already gone and done a whole product that you can rip off ideas from or get inspired from. You can do

⏹️ ▶️ John more things with multitasking than simply splitting the screen. You can do more things with hotkeys

⏹️ ▶️ John and with the little floating windows. Like there’s tons of obvious things they can do.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, the thing that Mark was talking about, something I talked about, you know, in my, the first OS X reviews that

⏹️ ▶️ John I did just after iOS came out, I think it was maybe the very first one after it was clear there was some crossover

⏹️ ▶️ John between them. was like, is it easier to make the Mac more like iOS or to or

⏹️ ▶️ John to make iOS more like the Mac? Like is it easier to simplify Mac OS or bring these capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac to iOS? And I think it said then I think now it is much easier to add the capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac to iOS without messing it up than it is to do the reverse. Because as soon as you start

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make the Mac to be like iOS, you totally destroy its usefulness for the people who want to use it

⏹️ ▶️ John for like the current use cases and there’s no replacement for that. If If, on the other hand, you take iOS, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ John cleaner slate, it was much cleaner back then than it is now, but a cleaner slate, and try

⏹️ ▶️ John to let people do the more complicated stuff with, like I said, progressive disclosures, it

⏹️ ▶️ John is a much easier thing to do. And you get a chance to do it in a different way over there. And while

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing that, you’re not screwing up professionals who presumably can still use your Macs. And if you’re doing a good job on iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re also not screwing up people who never use that functionality. And arguably, that’s what Apple has been doing by making the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro, by making the 12 point whatever inch iPad, by making the pencil, by adding multitasking, but

⏹️ ▶️ John boy did it take them a long time, and they’re still stubborn about, you know, about going

⏹️ ▶️ John all the way, like, I don’t know what, I don’t know what they’re holding out for, I don’t know what they’re waiting for, I don’t know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re waiting for people to die and habits to change, but I agree with Marco in that like, the use cases aren’t going

⏹️ ▶️ John to change. People would like to do them with less complications, but if they can’t do it with less complications, they just want to do them, period.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’ll, they, you know, they have to do them because it is part of their job, and If you don’t give them a simpler way to do it,

⏹️ ▶️ John they will limp along with the more complicated way until and unless somebody could be Microsoft could be anybody else gives

⏹️ ▶️ John them a way to literally do the same really complicated jobs with less of less concerns

⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, less fighting with the machine. And Apple still seems like, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, like, like, give them a little bit. Does this move the needle? Is the iPad really a pro device

⏹️ ▶️ John now because we made a slightly bigger one and gave you a pencil? It

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey helps. It doesn’t hurt.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. studio is like, what are you even doing? You know, what is

⏹️ ▶️ John the meme? You’re like a little baby in the 28 inch Microsoft Surface Studio. That’s how

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should feel. But the impression I get from the personification of Apple is they still really

⏹️ ▶️ John wish people didn’t have to do such complicated things with computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like they’re almost put out by people’s actual needs. We

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you are right that it is easier to advance the iPad probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to lock down or dumb down the Mac. And that is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, your argument about like, you know, leaving Mac people behind, you know, how bad that would be versus bringing along iPad people, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a lot of sense. I still think it’s gonna be hard. We still don’t really know if the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do these things well, and we still don’t see massive efforts from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple in the software department. We see interesting efforts in the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco department. You know, like I mentioned in past shows, the iPad Pro 9.7 is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the 12.9 is also amazing for people who like even bigger ones, but the 9.7

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being the kind of average mainstream iPad, it is amazing hardware. Like it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the hardware is better than ever as is usually the case, but the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better than ever. They’re doing fine on the hardware, but the software is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder to do because it’s a more significant and trickier design challenge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it takes a lot of investment to to massively move software around.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s also there’s two more issues I want to mention here that that I that are I think problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big problems for the iPad. One is the application ecosystem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apps that are used by professionals or content creation or even just a lot of productivity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are just really, really mature and stable and usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more financially healthy on the Mac. And when these applications have tried to move to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, they’ve had pretty mixed success. Some of them work, many of them don’t. Many of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work UI-wise to some degree with a lot of work, but then fail business-wise. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t sell enough, they don’t bring in enough money, and so the companies aren’t interested in investing in them further or can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco afford to bring over more of their apps or whatever else. That’s a huge problem with the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with customer expectations for pricing for these things. That significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurts the iPad. There’s no end in sight to Really.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been a couple of things Apple has tried to maybe help move needle on that a little bit, like, oh, now you can do subscriptions, and that’s cool,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t seem like that’s really helping a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John They could totally tie up the entire market for pro users who routinely spend their day using a 12.5-inch

⏹️ ▶️ John screen. Those people are like, great, I can now switch my work to the iPad and get it all. Nobody does that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody sits at a desk doing any complicated app on a 12.5-inch screen. The screen size alone,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, is a disqualification. if you could get Lightroom, like exactly Lightroom, exactly how it is, like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John OS X on your iPad, would you choose to use it on a 12.5 inch screen when you could use it

⏹️ ▶️ John on a 5K? I’m like, nobody would!

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It doesn’t fit. No, I disagree. I disagree. Unless you had

⏹️ ▶️ John to be portable, obviously, like the whole use case is portability. Like, oh, I have to use it on the go or whatever. Like, yeah, so portability is a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but portability is only a concern for people who are not currently sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John in a dark room at a desk, plugging away at their computers,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I disagree with you, John. Working at

⏹️ ▶️ John Pixar or working on Photoshop all day, or even if you’re just doing big

⏹️ ▶️ John CAD drawings or just assembling a big presentation. Some people need to be on the go, and

⏹️ ▶️ John portability is important, yada, yada, yada. But everything Margo’s talking about, all these applications with strong

⏹️ ▶️ John financial foundations, and they charge a lot of money, and people routinely upgrade and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the only company that is straddling that line is maybe Microsoft with its Office which I have

⏹️ ▶️ John a feeling is still subsidized by the other businesses, and Omni, which is still selling expensive Mac apps and

⏹️ ▶️ John still making partner apps that also work on iOS for when you want to do the same stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John but portably. But almost everybody else is like, how are you going to get that guy off the desk

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re only offering them a 12.5 inch screen? There’s so many remaining hardware barriers

⏹️ ▶️ John to success in this area that Apple just, like Margo said, he didn’t see an end in sight because he’s like, I don’t see Apple coming

⏹️ ▶️ John out with a 28 inch iPad. It doesn’t even make any sense. It’s not an iPad anymore. right, it’s not, it’s something else, but you’re never gonna get those

⏹️ ▶️ John people off their desks if you force them to use a portable form factor all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s also a lot to be said for using the same application from a 12-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop all the way up to a 30-inch display on a desktop. Like, you can use the same app,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can write one app for the PC operating system, you can have it show up for all those screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sizes, and you can have people both portably and at their desks using this one app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s easier to develop that app, it’s easier to sell it, people who buy it only have to buy one copy of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s a huge advantage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But I think, I think you guys are over emphasizing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your own needs and not considering the needs of other kinds of users. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a distinct advantage to being a single machine person. And that machine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be a 13 inch iPad. There is a distinct advantage to never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to rearrange your windows every time you plug in an external, there’s a distinct advantage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to having a simpler experience. Just because CAD doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a 12-inch screen, which I bet it could, but it certainly wouldn’t be as easy as a 40-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, just because CAD doesn’t, doesn’t mean everything doesn’t. And I think a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey value having one machine that they can carry anywhere. I mean, look at me. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking for most of my life have had a single laptop that was my everything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer and yes, there were compromises for sure, but I preferred

⏹️ ▶️ Casey having one machine that always had all of my stuff always

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that was better to me and that was a, that was a trade-off I was willing to make. And just because a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CAD operator or designer or what have you doesn’t necessarily want to make that trade.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t mean that everyone doesn’t want to make that trade. And I mean, look at all the people that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have MacBook Airs that may or may not plug them into external monitors all the time. Like those are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey small displays. They aren’t even a retina. They may or may

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be dry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They may or may not be dry, too. You never know. Keep your liquids away from your computers, kids.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so I’m not trying to say that you’re wrong, John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Marco, but I think that there There is a spectrum here that you’re not really giving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey credit.

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s context was specifically about pro applications that are

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive, that have a foundation on the Mac, sell to people who use them for work. And those are the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who you can’t pry away from their desks with a 12.5 inch screen, right? Obviously, there’s tons of

⏹️ ▶️ John people who, again, like I said, are just doing, you know, they’re just messing around with Outlook and sending emails and doing web browsing and writing stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John up and talking with other people in chat applications, like by all means, like It’s just a question of whether you want a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John or a hardware keyboard Ultra stuff like that and even within the realm of your single machine being an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John with a 2 terabyte flash drive in it you can sit down on your desk and connect it up to a massive 28 inch touchscreen and have like

⏹️ ▶️ John Server studio when you’re sitting and when you pick it up on an iPad I guess back to what Marco was saying to be able to sell one app

⏹️ ▶️ John that scales to different screen sizes like you can if you buy lightroom on a PC and you have a 5k iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John or A 5k external screen assuming your Wi-Fi routers and nearby

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ John you connect it to your laptop, right? But again, that is an experience that

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad does not offer at all. You’ve got a 12.5 inch screen and that’s what you’re stuck with, whether

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re at a desk or not. You can’t sell one version of your application that you can use on all those different screens, no matter

⏹️ ▶️ John how you wanna do it, whether you wanna do single machine, multiple machine or whatever, the iPad does not address that at all

⏹️ ▶️ John for hardware reasons. And that’s all we’re saying, like specifically talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about those high-end people, you will never dislodge them until the AR VR realm

⏹️ ▶️ John comes and things are being projected onto their retinas or something. And then we don’t care how big screens are and this is all a moot point. But

⏹️ ▶️ John for now anyway, the hardware limitations of the iPad and the software

⏹️ ▶️ John and the application ecosystems that Apple has chosen for itself are necessarily limiting that. Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John has made different choices but they have so many other challenges that are unrelated to the quality or potential of

⏹️ ▶️ John their products. So we’re still just sitting here patiently waiting for Apple to make

⏹️ ▶️ John its next progression of the iPad, but it just seems like Apple needs to be dragged kicking and screaming

⏹️ ▶️ John into the future. And in the meantime, they’ve been chopping out the legs from underneath the Mac and hoping people

⏹️ ▶️ John can get all their work done in even simpler situations on the Mac, and if they can’t, have fun dealing with third-party monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the other problem, so I mentioned the applications issue, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what got us on this big tangent, but the other problem, Casey, is what we were just talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really nice to have one machine for lots of reasons. Lots of people have one machine for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price concerns alone. That’s a huge concern because a decent specced iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not cheap. Like if you buy an iPad that’s any good, you’re lucky to be out of there for less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than 600 bucks. And that’s without any accessories. If you actually want like a keyboard or a cover or anything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so easy to spend like eight, $900 and just to get what you consider

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a mid-ranged iPad with a couple of accessories that are required

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it very useful to you. A lot of people just cannot justify $500 to $1,000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this in-between device when they already have a phone which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco covers most of their ultra-mobile and ultra-simple needs, and they already might have a computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a laptop. And so people who want only one device,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one device so often, I’m not going to say I’m not even going to say most of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I’m not even going to say sometimes, but that one device often can’t be an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that one I mean and assuming the phone is always going to be there because that doesn’t even count. I’m talking one device between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad or computer so often that can’t be an iPad because of things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were just complaining about hardware limitations of just they don’t they just don’t make it in this size. You can’t plug in an external screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. There are so many limitations with iPads that if you need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something outside of what is considered and optimized for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple, you hit a brick wall and you just can’t. It’s just like, well, the answer to that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just can’t do that. Or you hit what appears to be a brick wall and there might be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of power user app to work around that, but you might not know that as a typical iPad user

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you might not have that app or you might not want to spend the money for that app or whatever else. So there are so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard brick walls that you hit when trying to do any kind of edge case thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even some pretty common things on iPads and iOS. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your one device is a computer, it might be less fun or harder or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complicated to use, but there are far fewer of those brick walls.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The computer is like, it’s, you know, just partly from legacy, partly from architecture, partly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from hardware ecosystem, the computer is the everything device.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can do so, so much, especially when combined with a phone, because then like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone covers your like ultra mobile, your camera, and then the computer covers like everything else. For

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people, if they can only have, or if they only want, or they can only justify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying for one device besides their phone, the idea that it would be a tablet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not high on their list because they need to do something or they want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something or they prefer the way something is done that can only be done on a computer and that trying to do it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS is either impossible or really it just fights you the whole time. And that’s what you were saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier about wanting to maybe get a small laptop instead of your RetinaPad Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry Stephen, again. There are these walls that you hit trying to do things with iOS that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while many people can do great work on iOS and love doing it, I think they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a minority. You know, everyone can always point to, you know, power users like the Vatici,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who like use the iPad like for everything. And you can point to everyone has like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a relative or a friend who’s like a novice at using computers and the iPad is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their only computer. But there’s a lot of people in between. And for so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of those people in between, a PC style operating system and PC style hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the only way they can get their needs solved in one device. Today. Well, that’s true. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this could change in the future. But I think changing that would require

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many changes and expansions to both iOS and iPad hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just seem very unlikely that Apple would ever do. And that’s why I think it’s fairly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlikely that we’re going to get to that point. I think it’s much more likely that we’re going to keep going where we are for a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while, which is Apple’s strategy is basically, we’re going to keep selling you these devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are kind of in this big Venn diagram where all the circles overlap like a third of the way with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other circles. And we just want to, you know, Apple’s a hardware company. They want to sell you more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware. So Apple is perfectly fine to have the strategy be, oh, for you, you like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of this device and parts of this device? You should buy both. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a feeling that’s going to be their strategy for a long time, but as long as it is their strategy, the iPad is never going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace the Mac, and at least it shouldn’t. If there’s a future for any kind of mainstream

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and power computing on Apple devices, the iPad better not replace the Mac unless it has significant changes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, I don’t see… It just seems very unlikely that the Apple that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know today would do the kind of changes to both iPadOS and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware that would enable it to fully replace the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It must be tough. And imagine how stinky it is to have to worry about charging

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your computer every day. And God, imagine how crummy it would be to have to carry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a brick that you need to charge it that’s big and heavy. For

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I can just charge wherever I have a USB port. And imagine how crummy it would be if any time I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get on the internet, I had to have wifi. Okay. Yes, I have a phone in my pocket, but, but I can just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey flip on my little cellular switch and suddenly I have wifi in the device I’m using. Imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how crummy it would be to not be able to tear your keyboard off the device because you just really don’t need it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you know, you’re not going to need it for a while. Imagine how crummy it would be to feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you can’t always bring your, your one device everywhere you’re going because it’s this big computer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yeah. Okay. They’re smaller than they used to be. And they’re certainly more portable than they used to be. But, man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would stink if I felt like I had to have this big laptop bag. How barbaric

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What kind of pants are you putting an iPad into, out of curiosity?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I can fit a mini in several of my jackets. Not my pants, but my jackets.

⏹️ ▶️ John Underscore has got laptops in every pocket of all the clothing he wears every day.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, imagine how boring it would be to have to use a Mac every day when you can just touch and swipe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your way through getting work done. I’m being silly and I started the show by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, I don’t really know if there’s an iPad, if there’s a place in my life for an iPad anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I absolutely understand how it would be possible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prefer an iPad for all the reasons I don’t like it and I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the three of us are too preoccupied with our own needs and our own desires and our own wants.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think there are plenty of people that would prefer an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro, be that a 10-inch or a 12-inch or a 9.7 or what have you, that would prefer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all these things. And Vatici is an example of this. And yes, I acknowledge that he is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way on the other side of the spectrum. But I don’t think a lot of his desires are that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual to have an LTE-equipped device, to have only one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey device to have to manage. again, like you, Marco, I agree that the phone is just a given, to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something where the software is always the software he has, it always looks the same regardless of what,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it’s because the device is always the same size. It’s, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like there’s so many advantages to living an iPad only life that are disadvantages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. They’re disadvantages to you too, but they are advantages to some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people. Sure. And I think we’re all, all three of us are discounting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s plenty of real work that can be done. Maybe not CAD, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not development, maybe video editing, maybe not, maybe podcast editing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not. But there’s a lot of real work that can be done on an iPad today. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the rumblings I’ve heard is that things are gonna get a lot more interesting in the next few months. So imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what will be possible tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any of us are discounting that at all. Not that you haven’t been listening to us. We’ve been talking specifically about the high end.

⏹️ ▶️ John We totally concede that the vast majority, we were only talking about the high end. That’s all we’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey about.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but my point is that your high end, when you say high end,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it implies, I’m trying to think of how to describe this. I feel like you feel like the high end is the Empire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey State Building, and to me, the high end is the mighty Blackstone. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are people that can, this analogy is falling apart already, But I think that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys are treating this mythical high-end as this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John unattainable thing. It’s not a myth, it’s a real thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, you’re treating this high-end as this thing that could never be accomplished by a single touch device.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John case.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m not treating that at all. I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying the iPad could totally do all this stuff. Apple has been reluctant to extend

⏹️ ▶️ John it to do so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, because the hardware power is there. The will of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to want to carry an iPad and do these things on it is there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really just a very strong problem of the iPad OS really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being advanced enough and being too high friction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the way a lot of people want to work and the way some people need to work.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the app store and upgrades and the hardware flexibility. And

⏹️ ▶️ John again, Apple’s been making steps in that direction. Remember they weren’t making any steps in that direction for a long time. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John was frustrating because it was static. but they have been making moves, and as Marco characterized it,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re sporadic moves, and they move a little bit each time, and they hang out in between,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if they move faster it would be more dramatic, but I don’t really, if they have to choose

⏹️ ▶️ John whether to put the resources behind the next iPhone or the next iPad, the iPhone is where you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have to do it. Yeah, it’s not a choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so who knows, maybe they will accelerate or whatever, but I am heartened by any

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of progress, because it’s as if they, you know, they came out with a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that was a weird trash can and then they waited a year. And then they let you have two CPUs and one GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John and then they waited a year. And then they upgraded the GPU to be not really old

⏹️ ▶️ John and they waited a year. That’s not great.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This sounds amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than what we got. It’s better than what we got. So on the iPad where it’s like, oh, finally let

⏹️ ▶️ John us to have multitasking and then wait a year. Oh, here’s a pencil too. And then wait a year. Like this is good. This is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as good as it could be but it’s better than, you know, the high end of the Mac where they’re like, nope, that’s not a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Just buy what we sell.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week. HelloFresh, Audible, and Away. We will see you next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A-N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to ♪ Are you

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Tech, we’ve been broadcasting for so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long

Post-show: Mac ARM chip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So today Scoop Gurman has written a post

⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that Apple well, let me just read the headline Apple is said to work on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip that would lessen Intel role And I think that actually has changed I think it was a different headline earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in any rate

⏹️ ▶️ John read the slug for the original headline

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple developing new Mac chip in test of Intel independence Which is certainly a little more aggressive, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is

⏹️ ▶️ John not true and an inaccurate headline So that’s why they changed it but they never change the slugs because people make terrible CMSs that

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t let you change a slug or if they do let you know it never changes them like do they think people don’t see URLs? I know

⏹️ ▶️ John Safari hides them by default but come on people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway so there’s a delightful autoplay video that’s going on here which is the most frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing in the entire world but anyway the article in short seems to say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey there’s this T1 chip that was done to power the touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s ARM based what if for like power nap for example, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this new chip that apparently has been codenamed T310, because that matters. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this mythical T310 chip could handle power nap and wake up and do those sorts of things and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then go back to sleep. And because ARM just sips power, that would be flawless and perfect. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the way forward is we can slowly encroach on Intel’s territory

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by making an ARM chip that’s used when convenient and then use the Intel chip for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the other time. So it’s an interesting premise. It’s certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not something that I had really considered, but I like the idea of it. I don’t know if I really buy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it would be flexible enough short of like virtualization, which would be a terrible idea and ruin most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the power savings, that it would be flexible enough to just do anything on this pro on this mythical ARM

⏹️ ▶️ Casey processor. Um, but you know, maybe like via the extension framework,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I saw somebody else talking about this earlier, the extensions maybe could, you know, have an extension that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey compiled for ARM and the rest of the app is compiled for Intel. I don’t know. But it’s certainly a fascinating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. And every sign that I can see, all of the tea leaves are pointing to Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least exploring getting rid of Intel and using their own chips, even if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not anytime soon. So, John, what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a weird story because like the chip that powers the touch bar like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sense it only makes sense that there will be a successor to that chip that powers the touch bar on the next generation

⏹️ ▶️ John things and maybe it’ll be a little better in a bunch of ways like sure granted and whatever that chips codename is fine and we already

⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s a little arm CPU and run some little mini thing of iOS and

⏹️ ▶️ John you could use it to do smart things when the Intel CPU is asleep

⏹️ ▶️ John right where this story gets fuzzy is like all right So the power nap

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, like, first of all, I’m not sure that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John your computer does when it’s essentially asleep and you’re not using it is a really big source of power draw, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John like idle power, people don’t even list this anymore in laptop use. How long can I leave this laptop asleep

⏹️ ▶️ John before the battery drends? Like, that’s not that’s not a very common use case. Like, oh, I need to be able to leave it at my house for

⏹️ ▶️ John a week in sleep mode and come back and have it have 100%

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey battery.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not going to happen. Nobody even test that and it’s not a common use case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it does happen. It’s like now it’s like a month because what they do is after I think like eight hours or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of idle time and I believe you can tweak that time out with some kind of you know NVRAM command it goes into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco full hibernate mode like hibernate to

⏹️ ▶️ John disk. Even in full hibernate batteries drain that’s why you don’t bring your Tesla to Fire Island because you’re afraid.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco True but that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure that the idle time has been about a month since like the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right but that’s not a use case they care about so putting a lot of investment into making that use case even better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like now it’s two months, like who cares? That’s not a selling point. It’s not a big thing, you know. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the second the idea that that this thing would be able to do the stuff that happens during power nap power

⏹️ ▶️ John nap, like the computer is basically asleep, but it wakes up the real live

⏹️ ▶️ John CPU periodically to do stuff in a lower clock lower power type way doesn’t turn on the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen that doesn’t even turn on the fan in the cases of modern computers with fans, I think, right.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s still running the real software in a limited capacity. And it has to be

⏹️ ▶️ John running something that has the ability to do I.O. to the disk, or you know, to the SSD essentially.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t receive your email or do time machine backups if you can’t do I.O. to the disk.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have a hard time believing that there would be an ARM CPU in there that could not wake

⏹️ ▶️ John up the Intel CPU at all, which is still the main CPU to the system, but wake up and somehow run code

⏹️ ▶️ John for your mail application to fetch mail and do IO to your disk while the Intel CPU is asleep.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you are compiling extensions with arm binaries and shipping them off to the little arm CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John to run and like and that that little CPU is going to have access to IO and it’s it’s such

⏹️ ▶️ John a weird situation. It’s like, what are you even optimizing for? So it makes me look at the story and think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John totally a successor to this t one, it is better and more capable and will do more things like perhaps listening for a

⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac so I can to finally use Siri in a sane way. But will it do everything? Will it

⏹️ ▶️ John do all that PowerNap stuff and let third-party applications run arbitrary code in the background without waking the Intel CPU?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it could. I’m not saying this is technically impossible, but it seems like that is not a use case that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John would be investing money in. Whereas I think they would invest money in making Siri better

⏹️ ▶️ John or have it always listening for stuff or have it be able to do more sophisticated things

⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with the management of the system. But once it starts shading into actual applications,

⏹️ ▶️ John running code, whether they be first party or third party, without waking up the Intel CPU, it just

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like it’s worth the hardware, OS and software investment to

⏹️ ▶️ John make that work, because the benefit is not something that you would sell and not things that people would notice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this is yet another case where a rumor article

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has good sourcing gets probably the gist of the facts correct,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the story wrong. It seems like this is not like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to reduce their dependence on Intel as a chip supplier. It seems much more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely that it’s like, well, we are putting this chip in, in these machines for the touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. So we have this whole little embedded arm and computer in these machines that uses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no power. Like we’re, we’re including this hardware anyway. So, can we have it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything else? Can we have it be more useful than what it’s doing now while the computer is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needing it for anything else? Because it’s convenient. We have all this great stuff in here. Let’s figure out if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can help us out any other way. I think it’s probably going to, you know, the facts here are plausible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is probably truly there to do very low power tasks. What those low

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power tasks include is another story. And I don’t think this is at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all indicative that Apple is slowly going to cut Intel out and make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARM Macs. They might be doing that in the future, who knows? But I don’t think this is related to that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like a totally separate project or task here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it seems like what they’re doing here is more effectively utilizing the resources they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already have in these computers and are already building in any way. And it would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be such a technical challenge and such a hurdle and so much complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have this chip meaningfully take over lots of what the Intel CPU is doing, any kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco major application level thing. You know, like I think you mentioned, you know, that it would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably an extension and you know, that would be an ARM extension if it’s accessible to third parties

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, or even just the way Apple’s apps implanted. It is probably like, you know, a little extension kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that is native ARM code that I can run here and John, I share your concern about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, does this have access to the disk somehow? Like how does that work? How does the,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, how does it interact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with?

⏹️ ▶️ John All the buses and wifi and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco network

⏹️ ▶️ John operations. Like it’s like a dual CPU system with two different CPU instruction sets. Which again, you could

⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Like this is all technically possible, but that’s hell of an investment and I just don’t see the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit. Right, exactly. So that’s why I think it’s more likely that this is a real story,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that the task it’s going to do we’re going to be very, very limited. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a big deal. It doesn’t mean anything about Apple’s relationship with Intel or the future of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible ARM MacBooks. That is all totally separate discussions. And it seems much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more likely that this is mostly a non-issue, something that they might mention in a keynote for two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds that we would immediately forget about.

⏹️ ▶️ John It could be a headlining feature if they use it right. So one example is you could do a Windows 10 style face recognition

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, not to let you in because that’s terrible people just print out a picture of your face and get access to your computer. But

⏹️ ▶️ John even just something as simple as, hey, it’s always listening for you. And there’s proximity detectors

⏹️ ▶️ John to see when you’re close by. And when you sit down in front of your sleeping computer, it does face recognition with the camera

⏹️ ▶️ John to realize who you are to bring you your login prompt, like even if it was on a different user, so

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to like pick the user or do the thing like that would be a good use

⏹️ ▶️ John of a fairly capable, low power CPU that has access to some things as access to

⏹️ ▶️ John the camera has access to his own proximity detectors has access to touch ID and the secure enclave and can do stuff with the

⏹️ ▶️ John touch bar that doesn’t involve oh hey I’m taking over power now not to mention like the power

⏹️ ▶️ John nap the reason it works and it works even better now is because you can make these Intel CPUs run in a super underclocked rate

⏹️ ▶️ John turning off most of the cores like they’re pretty efficient like a sky like in super duper low

⏹️ ▶️ John power mode with half of the chip disabled is actually pretty good you can let like yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John most of the power is going to be from your Wi-Fi radio trying to do your time machine backup and all

⏹️ ▶️ John your SSD access the CPU is not the problem there so either if you’re going to let power not happen at all

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not worried oh I can’t have this Intel CPU running it at 600 megahertz with one core

⏹️ ▶️ John enabled doing my thing it’s because the SSD and the Wi-Fi are going to overwhelm that anyway but

⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway back to the little arm chip if the feature I just described like face recognition proximity

⏹️ ▶️ John detection touch id blah blah That’s that’s a keynote keynote demoable feature right there. And yeah, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John a big deal, technically speaking. And they already have the hardware there. It’s an easy win. It’s a cool thing. It’s something that Microsoft has

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of already done. And Apple can pretend they don’t know that and just pretend they invented it. And we’ll all ooh and ah. And

⏹️ ▶️ John just like we like sitting down to use Touch ID to unlock our computers, we’d like sitting down in a shared environment and having

⏹️ ▶️ John it know that it’s us and wake from sleep and show us our password prompt, even if someone else was logged in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that it? I think so.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ship it