223: Throw the Fork Away
25 May 2017We tried really hard to talk about Google I/O.
Episode Description:
- Follow up:
- Those ✂️️🔑
- More on box lunches!
- Denise Young Smith: VP, HR → VP, Inclusion & Diversity
- Thunderbolt to become royalty-free (Intel press release)
- Apple Siri-speaker-with-screen
- Google I/O
- Kotlin
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
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Chapters
- Intro
- Follow-up: Butterfly keys
- Follow-up: Box lunches
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Apple names VP of Diversity
- Intel to open Thunderbolt
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- Rumored Siri speaker
- Sponsor: Fracture
- Google I/O
- Kotlin
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Out of curiosity and you can choose not to answer this. What did we conclude with regard to headgear for the live show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did we ever reach a conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to wear your retainer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey? Yeah, I’m definitely wearing headphones. I don’t care how nerdy I look you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are welcome to make that choice for yourselves You
⏹️ ▶️ John should have you should have headphones available for us put them on the table in front of us We can choose to put them on
⏹️ ▶️ John or not It really for me it depends on Whether I it’s weird for me not to be able to hear myself or whether just
⏹️ ▶️ John the the in-room speakers will be enough and hearing audience and so I’m gonna make the call at the moment
⏹️ ▶️ John to see what it’s like. I’m gonna try it without first and if it’s weird I’ll put them on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So what I’m hearing is I will bring a pair of scissors and hundreds of dollars to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refund Marco for the headphones that I break if John tries to put them on.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s on myself. I’m not gonna put them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on you. I know, but if you put them on and Marco has them on, what am I gonna be, the lone cool kid?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can totally—you’re your own person. I’m not the boss of you. you do what you want with your own head.
Follow-up: Butterfly keys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ian McDowell writes in, this is, he is not an Apple genius, but apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard from an Apple genius, if I understand this correctly, that the key caps on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new scissor key keyboards are not removable. Dirt commonly gets under the keys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they now have special tools in the stores to help fix them. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would love to know what the special tools are. Is it like tiny nanomachines that they send in through those
⏹️ ▶️ John little cracks between the keys and then they grab little pieces of dirt and come out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a magical school bus that they drive through and use to clean things up. Speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the keyboard and cleaning it, there is actually an article, I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume it was Stephen, entitled Clean the Keyboard of your MacBook Retina 12-inch 2015 and Later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It describes holding your MacBook at exactly a 75-degree angle. Thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is very important. You hold it at 80. This does not work. Forget 90. Forget it. What are you even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, I’m joking, but it really does show a 75 degree angle. And with a little diagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of what that looks like. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of… I don’t know if that’s really 75. Someone get out your protractor. But anyway, they’re very insistent about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And so then you use compressed air to spray the keyboard or just the effective keys in a left to right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motion. Very important. then rotate your MacBook to its right side and spray the keyboard again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from left to right. And they have a little diagram.
⏹️ ▶️ John rotate it to your left side, this will not work. Warranty voided.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. So anyway, so yeah, they have this whole process that apparently amounts to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blow crap out from under the keycaps. And that is an actual knowledge base article.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in the time since our last show, I had my whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rant about the heat and the keys, right? That was last
⏹️ ▶️ John year. Yeah, the expanding, like when it gets warmer weather, you thought maybe the keys are expanding and filling the openings more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve actually, so I went on a little Twitter rant about this almost a week ago, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard from a lot of people who have computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new keyboards, and it actually seems like this might not be as much of an issue on the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One’s keyboard, the first generation of this on the 12-inch, but it seems like this is a major issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people and you know and when I say a lot of people I’m saying like I’ve heard from a lot of people on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t mean that like a large percentage of customers have this problem only Apple knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that but it certainly seems like this is a noteworthy problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys get stuck or feel different or get stuck down or repeat or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somehow don’t work properly on a pretty regular basis with a lot of these keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people have to get them replaced. And also, it seems to be related to heat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That when they are warm, either when the computer is working really hard, so it’s getting warm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you’re in a hot environment, like I was when I was having this problem. I was outside on a hot day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the keys tend to stick a lot more then. And so, I don’t know enough about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way these are built to know why that is. Some of the Twitter people were speculating that maybe the tolerances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so tight that maybe a little bit of thermal expansion is enough to make it not work properly. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does seem like that’s kind of a problem if that’s true. That seems like a big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t really know what the answer here is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that Apple is doing so many replacements of these keyboards under warranty that it motivates them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change things if they can. The only question is, can they? Or are they going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait until the next major revision of the keyboard in new laptops entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone who owns this generation might just be out of luck and just might have to get frequent keyboard replacements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hope that’s not the answer because that’s not a good answer and as an owner of one of these I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not happy with this. The idea that I’m going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring it to Apple at least once and go without it for like a week at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once to get this keyboard fixed. I want to work reliably that is not very appealing to me because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I buy a laptop because I need a laptop and going without it for a week is usually not very convenient,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to mention having to get an appointment with apple or call them away on the phone and do mail order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else like none of these are good options. None of these are great solutions to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what should be a pretty basic thing, which is I expect the keyboards on my laptops to work reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is all like feeling aside like We’ve talked at length about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much we like or dislike, mostly dislike, the new, you know, shallow keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve heard from people who defend them, who like the feel, and that’s fine. It’s a personal preference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The feel of the keyboard doesn’t bother me as much as it used to now that I’ve used it for a while. But what does bother me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is reliability being bad and I think regardless of what you think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feel of the keyboard, I think we can probably probably all agree that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an unreliable keyboard in a laptop, especially such a young laptop, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really worrying. If it was just me, then that’s fine. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can disregard it, I would disregard it as well, I got a bad keyboard, you know, you should get it fixed. But from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I keep hearing from people over and over and over again, when I bring this up, a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have had to get multiple replacements, and the replacements have the same problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it just seems like it’s a design flaw and that’s a pretty big design flaw. I hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is smaller than it seems. I hope that I can just get it replaced once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then have a reliable laptop keyboard for the next you know one to four years that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this laptop whatever it ends up being. I hope that’s it but so far what I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard is discouraging in that area. It sounds like this might just be a problem with this entire generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of keyboards that’s that’s in the 2016 MacBook Pro. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is solvable if they, you know, if Apple figures out what the problem is, like they, you know, they diagnose
⏹️ ▶️ John this and they figure it out and say, aha, if we change the design in this way, change a different
⏹️ ▶️ John material, make little bits of the key differently shaped or larger or smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it takes, make the key caps themselves slightly smaller, this all seems like something that could be solved by,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like they did with the screen image retention where it’s like, oh, we sold you a bunch of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Retina MacBook Pros and if you got the LG screen or the Samsung screen I can’t even remember which one was the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John one you might have image retention problems they don’t fix it by giving you another one of the same screen that an image retention problems
⏹️ ▶️ John they give you a different better screen that still fulfills the same purpose has the same resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John and the same characteristics but doesn’t have burn numbers like a different part either a new part from the same maker or apart
⏹️ ▶️ John from a different manufacturer so if they figure this out with a keyboard they will make a new keyboard that fits these things
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you come in for a repair, they’ll replace it with the new version. It’s just a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John how long it takes them to figure out what the heck the problem is, assuming it even is a problem according to their numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, to save you a bunch of email, image retention, 15 inch, 2012 Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro screens, they didn’t guarantee that you got a better one. Like the LG was the problem, the Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the good one. When you got it replaced, you could get either one. It was just kind of dumb luck which one you got. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just hope that you got the Samsung panel.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they could they could do that like nothing if they know one’s good and one’s bad So that’s even true like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s our conventional wisdom of like oh if you got this one You’re okay, and if you got this one, you’re not but assuming they know
⏹️ ▶️ John one is better They have the option what I’m saying is they have the option of giving me they don’t have to redesign the thing you don’t Have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next model if Apple knows Replace this part with this other part that is different
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will fix the problem They have the ability to do that with it. You’re not you’re not out of luck That’s what I’m saying with this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to wait until you buy the next computer not to return this one and get a different one. You just need Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to A, make an improved thing and B, actually give it to you when they replace it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it comes to moving along with Apple, moving along with the newest technologies and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the newest stuff and keeping up with Apple, you have to swallow some things. You have to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, yeah, I guess I’ll get rid of my headphone jack. I guess I can get rid of all my ports and my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD card reader and everything else. And a lot of these things are easier or harder to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swallow. Having a keyboard not be reliable is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive problem. Like, I don’t care what you think of this keyboard. Having it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be reliable for almost everyone who buys one, that is unacceptable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not a trade-off, that is not moving towards the future, that is not, like, there is no excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. That is a design flaw, and that needs to be fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I really want to tell you that you, or especially early on, that you were being a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baby about the keyboard and how you didn’t like it, blah, blah, blah, but you know, you’re allowed your opinion, that’s fine. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not agree with you more that if these reliability problems are as widespread as they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anecdotally seem to be, then this is definitely a step backwards and needs to be addressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. If you do have a problem with your keycaps, There are some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people that apparently do remove them without breaking them, according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a somewhat shady YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John Asterisk, asterisk at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the end of that. Without
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking them, because, well, we’ll continue to the next following, but anyway, this is a video of someone showing you how he can pry his keycap off
⏹️ ▶️ John with a guitar pick, and kind of how they work under the covers, so you can kind of visualize what it is
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re doing when you pry this thing up. So, some people are doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a thing, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, was sent in by Kuba B.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Michael M. writes in regarding the fragility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the new keyboard types and how they differ from the days of old. Here are some photos of the damaged keycaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far that I’ve replaced, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. There are four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures here of what appears to be three different keycaps and a scissor switch that have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an issue. Note the clips at the top. Each top corner should have two fingers to clip around a pin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the butterfly and the hooks at the bottom. To remove these keys must be pried up at the top and then removed by moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cap toward the top of the keyboard. Anything else would break the fragile clips, as will any misalignment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on reassembly. I only broke the pins off two butterflies while I damaged at least seven keycaps. I have a first-generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook One. I’ve had it since shortly after release. My FN key worked properly but didn’t return to its full height correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from new. I ignored the issue. Turns out that keycap had been broken for years. bigger and more concerning issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is why I’ve not yet made a second or third round of keycap and butterfly replacement part purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that a couple of keys I’m having difficulty with do not have any apparent physical damage to the keycap or the butterfly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they do not have any bits stuck under them that can be seen upon very close inspection. So I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dearly regret taking these keycaps off. This isn’t a keyboard to be worked on by an expert. It’s a keyboard to be worked on by a trained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expert with a spare parts stash.
⏹️ ▶️ John the lesson of all portable devices like everything that you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple increasingly the things that are assembled with glue or the sort of the one-way assembly where
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes together but it does not come apart and go back together the same way it was maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you can take it apart and maybe you can put it back together but it will never be the same and so the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh I’m a do-it-yourself or I can pry these keycaps off I can see how they work you look at these pictures and
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the size the sort of the feature size in and and you know silicon chip parlance
⏹️ ▶️ John how small the little clippy things are on the bottom of this and the tiny little pins on
⏹️ ▶️ John the butterfly switch that they grip very very small very delicate
⏹️ ▶️ John right and so if you are thinking about prying these things off the possibility that you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to break off or bend or otherwise screw up one of those clips or one of those pins seems
⏹️ ▶️ John very high which is probably why Apple doesn’t like repair these keyboards they give you a whole new one wasn’t that in the last show someone said it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not enough that they’re going to fix one key for you. They can replace the whole keyboard. As
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco far as I know, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this doesn’t seem like a repairable thing. Now, in Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge-based article, they tell you how to blow compressed air on it to maybe get the grit out, because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to shake out on its own because all the gaps are so small. And that might solve your little grit-type problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other interesting thing about Michael’s story here is that he had a key that had one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the little clippy things underneath it Broken, you know from the I’m not sure how he knows this because maybe he broke it when
⏹️ ▶️ John he took it off or whatever But that it hadn’t been working and and he had just been
⏹️ ▶️ John ignoring it and it had been broken for a really long time If these little
⏹️ ▶️ John clippy things are broken under one of your key caps, you can’t know that It’s like you have x-ray vision Like maybe that could explain why it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John working because the little clippy things Help the key rise and fall and sequence with the butterfly switch and stay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know Stable and everything and if it’s not connected to one of the little clippy things, it’s kind of like, you know Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John independent suspension when you want are really live rear axle
⏹️ ▶️ John and strong anti-roll bars, car analogies. I think this one actually works,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it only works for people who know what those things are. So I can imagine if you have a bad clip,
⏹️ ▶️ John and one corner of your key is not being pushed upwards and pulled downward with the whole rest of your key,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter where you hit it. It is basically like an anti-roll bar under the car. When one
⏹️ ▶️ John corner of the key goes up or down, want the whole rest of the key to go with it that can make the key tilt in
⏹️ ▶️ John a way that it doesn’t expect and get stuck and do all sorts of other things and got even just looking at the pictures of these keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John make me start freaking out a little bit about how how delicate these little bits
⏹️ ▶️ John are and how easy it is for something to go wrong now if you open up a scissor
⏹️ ▶️ John key keyboard like the one I use every day it’s also extremely delicate and tiny inside there
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the features of the keycaps and the mechanisms are actually all that different. It could just be a matter of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John butterfly versus scissor and and travel distance and maybe the switching mechanism underneath it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not. I do not like keyboards. I don’t like thinking about these keyboards. It
⏹️ ▶️ John almost makes me long for a non moving iPhone seven home button style keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John where nothing actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t say that. They’ll do it. No, like I don’t like thinking about keyboards either. That’s why this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoys me so much, because I’ve had every other laptop I’ve ever had from Apple. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had to think about the keyboard. It just worked and it was fine. That’s why this bothers me so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like we’re moving backwards in technology if the basics become
Follow-up: Box lunches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hector Ramos wrote in to tell us that he worked at a big company’s tech conference at the McEmory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Convention Center last month, which I don’t even know, but I’m assuming that’s the one that we’re going to be in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for WWDC. Having been to WWDC, says Hector, I think it’s fair to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the box lunches in the San Jose McEmory were worse. Sad trombone. So don’t get your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopes up. The box lunches were all cold sandwiches with either soggy bread or hard and impossible to eat bread,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along with mystery dessert. They also had salad-only options that were passable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, the real news here, which is terrible, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was no aduola. Sorry, Casey. CASEY
⏹️ ▶️ Marco METZLER I’m so sorry, man. Are you going to be okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PONDER Well, I’m hopeful that it’s just that this particular event may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have sprung for the aduola option, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m nervous. And also, a real-time follow-up from a friend of the show, Jason Snell, it’s McEnnery, not McEmery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s M-C-E-N-E-R-Y before I get all the San Jose residents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing me. Phillip
⏹️ ▶️ John Hector, he wrote it with M’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So in any case, yeah, so no Odwalla for this particular tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conference. And reading between the lines, it was not the sort of tech conference where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they needed to worry about money. This was a spared no expense kind of experience. So I’m nervous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hopefully, Hopefully, Apple will spring for the oddwalla just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. I know that there’s discussion somewhere in Cupertino. You know, Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it this year. He won the lottery this year, and we don’t want to hear him whining and moaning for a year if there’s no oddwalla, so we might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well just pony it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite thing about this is that we have become the podcast of conference box lunches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So true. So anyway, so we’ll see what happens. But that is that is sad times tentatively.
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Apple names VP of Diversity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make your next move with Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey News broke earlier today as we record this. Denise Young-Smith, who used to be the vice president of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Worldwide HR, has now been named the vice president of inclusion and diversity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is cool. I think that’s pretty awesome. We don’t really know much about it yet, so, you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we don’t want to celebrate it too much quite yet, but this is absolutely a step in the right direction. And she’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a white dude because that seems to be the classical thing to do which is to put a white dude in charge of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Diversity and inclusion and so at least Apple wasn’t so tone-deaf that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they made that faux pas So this in theory seems like a great thing
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a newly created position like this position didn’t exist as a new vice president level position that they’ve created
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t know how this is gonna work out because so much corporate stuff is is opaque
⏹️ ▶️ John like I I always, when I see stuff like this in companies other than Apple, I think Apple’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John exception in many, many ways. But when a big company
⏹️ ▶️ John makes a new role for a vice president or someone who’s going to address
⏹️ ▶️ John some problem that they think they have, I always fear that that person is being set up for failure because
⏹️ ▶️ John how is it that they’re going to pursue their agenda their agenda
⏹️ ▶️ John in a company that didn’t even have this position previously and and to pursue
⏹️ ▶️ John the agenda requires you know massive company shifting policy changes
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s that’s my usual fear with these type of things that you know what can they even do is it just symbolic
⏹️ ▶️ John will the rest of the company listen to them and you know this will they be empowered to make change the thing that encourages
⏹️ ▶️ John me about this for Apple specifically is that it seems like like Apple has done this
⏹️ ▶️ John to pretty good effect in the past. One example is, who’s it, Lisa Jackson, who was on the talk show? The,
⏹️ ▶️ John who does like environment or whatever. I’m assuming that position was newly created at some point in the past too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, Apple 20 years ago probably didn’t have a, you know, environment czar or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John her title is. And she’s got results. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John she does things that change the way Apple makes its products, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John she wasn’t just put in this position to say, Oh yeah, no, we have someone worrying about the environment. That’s a whole vice president role. And then they just continue to do
⏹️ ▶️ John what they did and put out press releases or like, it becomes like a PR
⏹️ ▶️ John type position. From the interview, which you should definitely listen to, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is changing what it does across its entire business because of initiatives spearheaded by this person
⏹️ ▶️ John and what in any other company would be like a symbolic position. So let’s hope that this newly created position is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good sign. And Apple’s been reasonably good about publicly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing their diversity report, I think at the end of the year, I forget exactly when it is, but at some point during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the year, they share it. And so in theory, we can judge them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what their results are after this move over the coming years. Obviously, they massage that report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be as complimentary as they possibly can while still being truthful, hopefully anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But certainly, this is a good sign and I’m hopeful and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we should celebrate it.
Intel to open Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright John tell us about Thunderbolt 3 and what’s going on with Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time we talk about Apple not using Intel chips Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John will write us many someone’s right and say oh But that’s not gonna happen because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use Intel chips, you can’t have Thunderbolt and Apple needs to have Thunderbolt because reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John Therefore don’t worry about it. And I think the last time we discussed this what I tried to emphasize was
⏹️ ▶️ John I think was when we talk about like Ryzen AMD’s Ryzen and you know making and reasonably competitive chips in certain market
⏹️ ▶️ John segments again, and they’re sort of their comeback bid, that if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John decided to go to AMD for whatever reason, you know, AMD, Apple, and Intel are all companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John things can be worked out. Money can change hands, deals can be made.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s a type of thing that all three parties would be able to work out, that none of them
⏹️ ▶️ John would be so adamant that they would say, there is literally no amount of money that you can give us, Apple, that would allow,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would let us, that would make us license Thunderbolt 3 to AMD. Like, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of grudge like that going on there. So I’m like, set that aside. Yes, it’s an issue. It would have to be worked out by the people involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if Apple thought it was to their advantage to start going to AMD for certain chips or certain things, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has the advantage that it wouldn’t be an architectural change. And having two vendors is a thing that Apple loves to do
⏹️ ▶️ John for every part and all of its things. And at a certain point, it’s kind of against Apple’s instincts
⏹️ ▶️ John and general policy to have a single vendor for like an extremely important component, you know, a single
⏹️ ▶️ John non Apple vendor, I suppose, like they always want to have multiple people, multiple people fabbing their chips, buying their chips
⏹️ ▶️ John from multiple vendors, if they can help it, pitting them against each other, like, you know, just typical business.
⏹️ ▶️ John So today’s announcement for I think it’s today from Intel. As an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John twist to this first is that Intel is adding Thunderbolt to their CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t have to buy a separate chipset, which apparently has been a barrier to,
⏹️ ▶️ John PC manufacturers aren’t willing to spend the money to license or buy the Alpine Ridge
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the latest chipset is for Thunderbolt support. Like, nah, we’ll just take the CPUs. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have support for USB, blah, blah, blah, and PCI Express on the chips. I don’t care about Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not buying another chip. It’s pointless, right? So now they’re putting it on the CPUs with so many other things, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that will make it cheaper for people to use, and you basically can’t not get it if you buy a part that has it built
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I mean, maybe they’ll still sell parts that don’t have it built in. And I assume it’s better for packaging,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably also better for power. And it’s a move that will make Apple computers better because Apple likes to
⏹️ ▶️ John put Thunderbolt 3 on its high-end computers. And if Apple can get that built
⏹️ ▶️ John into the CPU, they’d love it because they’d love to make everything small and lower power.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it’s cheaper on top of that, all the better, right? And the second part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John story is Intel is going to license Thunderbolt 3 for free
⏹️ ▶️ John to anybody who wants it. Then that would include, obviously include AMD. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that barrier to Apple using AMD CPUs, assuming it ever was a barrier, because I’m not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced that Apple is so wedded to Thunderbolt 3 that they wouldn’t consider a CPU, consider building a Mac without
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because they do. That barrier is gone. Thunderbolt 3,
⏹️ ▶️ John and from Intel’s perspective, it’s not like they’re doing this to let Apple take AMD CPUs. doing this because they want Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John to spread more widely and a barrier to adoption is you got to buy this extra chip set for only
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can only get it from us and you can’t make your own thing so Intel’s like no no we want to see Thunderbolt 3 everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really important for us to the standard to spread guess what it’s free for everybody and it’s cheaper when you buy Intel CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m hoping that all the other manufacturers of PCs and parts and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth will take the ball and run with it I’m hoping the reason they were staying away from Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John was that it was too expensive. I’m assuming Intel and, you know, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple are, you know, the people who created this standard still have the most influence of it. So maybe people were
⏹️ ▶️ John staying away because they feel like it’s not like an industry standard. It’s more like an Intel or Intel Apple standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John But either way, I’m happy to see moves that will that have a chance of
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping Thunderbolt from Firewire’s fate. Firewire just never got the wide adoption that
⏹️ ▶️ John would have helped it to stick around longer and be a viable technology. It was only used by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and video and a few other things. And USB, meanwhile, went literally everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this seems like yet more of the USBification of Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ John They already stole their connector and their port, confusing the world with a port that is 17 different
⏹️ ▶️ John things in one. But I think that’s really cool tech-wise. And now it’s free for everybody. So go forth and Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think that Thunderbolt has already been firewired? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see a lot of the same signs of it. Like Thunderbolt, and the earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of it, I think, had a more severe problem of this, where just very few peripherals were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever really made for Thunderbolt. And what was made for Thunderbolt was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more expensive than the USB 2 or 3 version of the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like hard drive enclosures or SSD enclosures. Like, there’s almost no reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anybody to go Thunderbolt when USB 3 is an option, unless you have really, really high-end parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you need maximum bandwidth and you don’t care about the price. For most people, one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not true. So like, I don’t think Thunderbolt really has taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off very far. I would say Thunderbolt is exactly where FireWire was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both 400 and 800 of like, It is this, you know, standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in quotes, but in practice it is only used by some Apple stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some high-end peripherals and storage enclosures. But almost everything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people use uses USB two or three.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Apple did a really smart, or Apple Intel, did a really smart thing here because when they changed the connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you’re right that there are many people who don’t need Thunderbolt, they just need USB.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same little hole on the side of your computer, right? And so if Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John gets confined to be, oh, it’s just this weird thing that Apple does, like Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be happy with that because maybe Intel wants it to be used more broadly for whatever strategic reasons. But it’s not like Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John to change anything about its strategy as long as Thunderbolt continues to be
⏹️ ▶️ John made or like basically the little plugs on the side of the computer, you already have a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get, don’t some of, doesn’t the low end like MacBook not have a Thunderbolt 3 port, but instead just has the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John and power thing. Am I wrong about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s correct. The 12 inch MacBook does not have Thunderbolt. It only has USB 3 over that port.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same old little connector. And similarly, the Thunderbolt ports can just run USB off of them. The main
⏹️ ▶️ John place, sadly, the main place, or maybe not sadly, depends on how you look at it. The main functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John that Thunderbolt 3 brings to Apple’s products is they can put
⏹️ ▶️ John a small set set of very, very small uniform ports on the side of their portable computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people can connect stuff to them. They give them all the other ports, all the other things you can imagine all
⏹️ ▶️ John those different breakout boxes. That’s the magic of Thunderbolt, right? Do you need Thunderbolt three for that or whatever? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I suppose, you know, high end monitor support, depending on how they want to implement that, whether they want to do with like multiple display port streams
⏹️ ▶️ John or telling things over Thunderbolt and external GPUs and all the other fancy stuff you can get.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you don’t take advantage of that fancy stuff, it still just looks like you’re plugging a little USB type
⏹️ ▶️ John C connector into the side of your computer. And if you do take advantage of it, you buy the fancy Apple computer and the same little
⏹️ ▶️ John port you can plug in all that other stuff, but also you can plug in these other things and get these cool breakout boxes. I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would be perfectly fine with that. They’re not faced with a FireWire-like situation where they have to say, oh, all those peripherals you bought
⏹️ ▶️ John are useless. As long as Thunderbolt continues to be an ongoing concern in some fashion, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can continue to ship all of its, you know, peripherals, all of its Mac stuff, all of its dongles and adapters
⏹️ ▶️ John with that one little hole on them. So I think they’re better off but the reason I brought a firewire is
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the reasons you said that it seems like Thunderbolt is being confined because USB 3
⏹️ ▶️ John is so fast and so good and so cheap and so ubiquitous but in some respects
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the other angle on this USB type-c is kind of I’m gonna say it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as firewire but I get a little bit of whiff of that firewire on it in the general reluctance
⏹️ ▶️ John of the rest of the industry to follow Apple along with this, even like Microsoft not putting USB-C on all of its new service stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and then making excuses about like, well, when we think the world is ready for USB-C, we’ll change it. But in the meantime, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get a dongle that lets you connect USB-C stuff, which is a pretty, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty, uh, good, uh, snark there. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to me, if you, when I look around and see laptops, the only ones I ever see with USB-C ports are Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. So maybe they’re just ahead of everyone else and people will convert over but that stupid USB
⏹️ ▶️ John type A connector may be very difficult to dislodge and it could be that like
⏹️ ▶️ John firewire the only hardware you ever see with these weird USB C things are probably cell phones because size
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to make those people turn over and mini USB sucks and then Macs but every
⏹️ ▶️ John other portable you know PC or tablet or surface thing or whatever will have just a bunch of USB type
⏹️ ▶️ John A connectors on the side of it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I’ll tell you one thing I like now that I’m in the USB C ecosystem with my my new laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve been looking at USB-C peripherals and looking for adapters and dongles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and various peripherals that use it, there are not many. Like I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with the 12-inch MacBook being now two years old, I figured there’s gotta be tons of them now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are a small number of things that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug into that port natively, but it seems like almost all of them are like cheap crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from no-name brands on Amazon for 40 bucks that is all unreliable and badly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built and all probably uses the same chipset inside. And it seems like it’s a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a very immature market. And I hope it matures soon, now that all the MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use only these ports. That should be enough of a motivation for peripheral makers. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not where I thought it would be by now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know what the resistance is to USB-C, because, man, it’s just USB still. I mean, it’s a different spec,
⏹️ ▶️ John And the cables are different and maybe they’re more expensive and the connectors are more expensive than they used to be But it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John I fully expect just a complete turnover eventually to USB-C because it’s not it’s not a firewire
⏹️ ▶️ John situation Oh, it’s so much more expensive and you have to put these way more expensive chips in the things and the chips have to be on
⏹️ ▶️ John both ends and You know or Thunderbolt with the weird chips in the wires for the high-speed connection and all sorts of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that Like that’s not it’s just a different physical connector for USB plus a different
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, chipset and USB 3, I think is rolling out pretty well. 3.1 maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the I don’t know what the holdup is. People chat room saying that Windows, there are Windows laptops that have USB-C. Of course, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows laptops that have everything on it. It’s just that I don’t I don’t see the
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s not like remember when USB 2 came along, USB 1.1 did not last long in the
⏹️ ▶️ John face of USB 2. USB 2 just rolled out across the whole industry. And, you know, you would have
⏹️ ▶️ John USB 2 ports everywhere except for like your keyboard and mouse, which would be 1.1 for a while. But USBC has not
⏹️ ▶️ John rolled out like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, for a long time, like almost every PC you would buy would have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two blue ports and then six
⏹️ ▶️ John black ports. But the point is it had the blue ones like it had like, you know, keep the old ones around the same
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they kept like parallel port and the PS2 port around because they’re they’re PC makers always do that. But you had the new
⏹️ ▶️ John ones USB to buy a PC without USB to anywhere on it and the USB to age was unheard of.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like I said, Microsoft with these very expensive high-end fancy surface tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop convertible whatever thingies seems proudly to be shipping them without any USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John ports and defending their decision by saying oh you can get an adapter it’s USB 3.1 it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing we just don’t like that connector which is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know um having now had my first well what I consider to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be my first USB-C device which is the Switch yes Yes, I have an Apple TV and yes, it’s USB-C, but that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really count. The idea of a theoretical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future where I have a MacBook that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been updated, which in and of itself is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John theoretical future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a MacBook that’s been updated that is powered by USB-C. I have a Switch that is powered by USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thought of a phone being powered by USB-C for convenience alone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Sounds pretty awesome. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really love the USB-C connector as much as I like the Lightning connector, no small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because the Lightning connector is smaller and also because I have 11 D billion Lightning cables strewn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throughout my entire life. But having one port, one connector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can really be all things to all people is pretty neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and does sound appealing. So as much as I don’t actually begrudge the Lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector, because I think it’s really, really good, especially in ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dock connector wasn’t. I still think a USB-C future might be pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hell, it would make the phones get thicker too, right? So that’s a win as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Bigger battery. Yeah, that means more battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Well, we’ll see. But I mean, it certainly does sound appealing. In that sense, I am a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit envious of the Android folks with their USB-C lives.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So Apple has maybe started working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, I mean, presumably started working on a Siri thing with the screen. And obviously this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all rumors. There’s been a lot of rumors that this might happen in a couple of weeks at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s TechCrunch article, get ready for a new iPad and a mysterious Siri speaker at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC. As we’ve talked about numerous times, I currently anyway don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really care about ladies in a tube, so Marco or John, do you want to kind of take this one over?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, our timing on this is terrible because…
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an old story and there’s no rumors about it now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, just because it’s rumored to be announced in two weeks, so it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a great time to speculate too much on it. I would simply say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you’re in in the market for one of these home speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Amazon Echo or Google Home or whatever else, I would say it’s probably worth waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this announcement just to see what it is, see what you’re dealing with. But I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am concerned because this is the kind of product that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco historically has not done well, something that has to be cheap and integrates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well with everything else people have and based on a really reliable, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced voice assistant. Maybe they’ve become a different company. Maybe they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really ramped up the API. I mean, I do expect WBDC to have a lot of SiriKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advancements, the Siri API for third-party apps. I would love to have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like audio library functionality so that Overcast could actually use the Siri API, because right now there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it to use. But that would be nice if there was some way to say, you know, hey thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play this podcast in Overcast or something like that. That would be awesome. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that now? You can’t say, hey, play episode number 17 of My Favorite Podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, can’t do it. Oh, that’s right, because they, yeah, I forget whether we talked about this after last WDC, but it was like a really limited
⏹️ ▶️ John domain of things you can do. It’s not so much the playing of the audio, it’s the idea that this is a voice command
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can issue that causes something to happen, like they had abstracted it away from the level of the app
⏹️ ▶️ John to just be like, this is a desire for a thing to happen that is not app-specific that your app can
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with. This is all coming back to me now. It’ll come back to me more at WWDC sessions, but that’s a killer
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that you just described right there, just like it is a killer feature of many of these TV attached pucks where you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John play episode five, season two of Seinfeld, and it does that. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have the world’s worst television remote, a.k.a. the Apple remote, it’s a pain to use any
⏹️ ▶️ John remote to do that. The sentence I just said, you will be watching that episode so much faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than if you have to navigate, find, Seinfeld. Also, my recent shows, oh, seasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John season two, scroll, scroll, scroll, episode five, but like, it’s so much better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to do that, especially on, you know, overcast feature suggestions, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t expect you to all have that already downloaded, like if overcast understood, you don’t have to be subscribed
⏹️ ▶️ John to the podcast, I will go to overcast directory, find the podcast that I think is the best match for that download
⏹️ ▶️ John the episode number that you asked for and start playing it like all in one thing. Again, doing that by hand, you can do it by hand and overcast right
⏹️ ▶️ John now. But being able to say that sentence into your phone and have it do that, that would be like magic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And that is, I assume, if and when they do any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like music or audio type integration with Siri, with SiriKit, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume that’s the kind of thing that they will do because most other services that would use this, you know, think of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music streaming service. They’re not going to have the entire index of all songs that are available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the service stored locally in the app. They’re going to have to make a network request. going to have to have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way for Apple to index their libraries. And that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Siri logic, probably server side, could then figure out what you’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking about and send an ID to the app. And I think this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they didn’t have it last year. Because all the existing intents, they call them, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SiriKit, all the different ways you can use SiriKit, it’s stuff like booking a ride or sending a payment or things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those are things that have like a limited command dictionary that you could pretty much deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locally without having to custom index content from Uber or whatever else or Lyft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know and or you know any any of the other things they can do. Whereas if you say like integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Overcast or Spotify or things like that, Siri has to has to have some way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to index these services just to see what are the possible things people can be asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for and you know and then have some way to interpret what people are asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be those things and then tell the app this person just asked for the you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know artist with this ID and the track with this ID or whatever else and that’s a lot more to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s why I assume that it wasn’t there last year and I don’t even know if it’s gonna be there this year or ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if if they give the the option for Siri to integrate with audio services to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it right is gonna involve all that stuff and that’s a lot of work and that’s a lot of stuff for us to implement on our side as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it could be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one advantage I feel like they have on this, is the, you know, this happens every time we talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, is if you’re in the audience, and they’re announcing whatever their Siri thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you talk to, right? And you don’t already have one of the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you talk to, almost anything in the demo will look amazing if you’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John seen it done before. So assume, speaking of the audio thing, assume they say, even if it’s just integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple Music. It’s not third party, you can’t do it, but Apple Music has it. And they go up there and demo something
⏹️ ▶️ John and they rattle off some sentence that’s like, what’s that song that goes blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe they hum a tune or do the lyrics or some kind of vague,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing that you might ask a person. They
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely won’t do that. Right, and it finds it. Because Amazon and Google both have
⏹️ ▶️ John the say in arbitrary lyric from a song and it will find it. I don’t know if either one of them has
⏹️ ▶️ John a do, you know, hum the tune and it will find it. I mean, I guess people aren’t in tune
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Echo has lyric search, at least. I don’t know if it has like melody search.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I’m saying. Like Google Home has it too. If you say literally any lyric from a song, if
⏹️ ▶️ John get it close to right, it will find that song and play it. And it works amazingly well, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s almost as if Apple doesn’t demo that. They’re just showing that they’re behind to people who know. But if you don’t have an Echo and don’t have a Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Home, that demo is incredibly powerful. And because it’s Apple, this is one of those places
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s true, they’re like, oh, Apple just announced something that everyone else has had for years and they just get pressed because they’re Apple. That
⏹️ ▶️ John effect exists, right? Because they’re good showmans and the showmanship that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have and the way they’re able to give a compelling demo
⏹️ ▶️ John in ways that like the Amazon Echo commercial or the Google Home things are not able to. And
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s so many eyes on Apple and yada, yada, yada, it is an opportunity for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John really sell features that other people have had for years that Apple is probably going to do worse and come out
⏹️ ▶️ John looking like, wow, Apple is amazing and innovative. And the only stories that will be, hey, Apple’s playing catch up are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the nerdy tech press that we read. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I think Apple is going to own privacy, looks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the UI on the screen. And then, you know, maybe sound quality, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the echo sound quality is not that great. I don’t know about the Google Home, but who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not great. I mean, you’ve seen it. It’s not very big. It’s one little dinky speaker thing in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right. So Apple’s probably going to own those things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the usefulness of these products is based so heavily on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible speed and reliability of the voice service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s where I have concerns about Apple because Siri, for all of its smarts, for all of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful international support for all of the different, you know, the more advanced API that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has compared to like the Echo. Because like what I was saying earlier about like Siri having to parse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that people say things and kind of just pass off to the application like, all right, the user requested this artist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID, this track ID. The way that like the Echo does it is it has a very limited vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what you can specify. And then it just can tell you like the exact words somebody said, but then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to the application to figure out like how do I parse that, which is easier to implement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is it enables a lot more things from day one to be possible in that API because you don’t have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around for them to like to design your specific use case, but it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder to actually use for anything non trivial where Apple’s going to come in from is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know they’re going to come in with Siri kit support only I would imagine it’s going to be really great for these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 12 app types to integrate with this, but nobody else can, or nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else can do anything useful with this. So that’s gonna be problem number one. And problem number two is just like, again, the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Siri and the advancement of Siri, I don’t think they have kept up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is always an argument. Everyone always thinks like, oh, well, I asked the Amazon device about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing and it gave me this kind of weird answer. And then I asked Siri and it gave me a better answer. Or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google and Amazon devices don’t support my language or my country and Siri does. And that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco valid, everyone can have their own opinions, but I think overall, it’s fairly clear that Siri has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, for most people, less reliable and less smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the whole than the other services. And this is the kind of device where, like you know, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone it’s kind of a secondary thing, you know, some people use it heavily, but for the most part, like everywhere else that Siri exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of a secondary input type. With this kind of device, it is the primary input method.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has to be fast and it has to be reliable and it has to get it right almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single time. And that’s what makes the Amazon products, which I have the most experience with, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes them so compelling when you’re used to the Apple ecosystem, when you’re used to Siri, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you first see an echo, you’re like, oh my God, that was fast. And then as you start using it more and more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like, this works like every time. And that has just never been a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people’s experience with Siri. So for this product to succeed, I think Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be way better than it is now. And maybe it is. Maybe they’re about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to unveil a brand new version of Siri WDC that is way better and way more reliable. I just don’t think it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely based on their past performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, those are all things they can hide in the demo though. From the PR perspective, of course it’s gonna work amazingly in the demo because they rehearse
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s all set up to work perfectly. We won’t know whether they’ve actually done a good job with
⏹️ ▶️ John it until we get the things in our hands. So which is why they could get, I think, a bunch of positive reactions from the audience
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s there, because most people don’t, you know, won’t have any experience with the existing devices like this so everything
⏹️ ▶️ John they see is new and amazing. And the performance will be awesome on the stage because they’re good at making a demo and everything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll get good press out of it from everybody except the tech press who knows they’re playing catch up. And this is assuming they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even have some big wow feature. I bet they probably will have at least one headlining feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that Echo and Home don’t have. Whatever it may be, something that plays to Apple’s strength.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’ll be privacy. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the privacy angle too, but also, especially if there’s one with the screen, I bet they can put better
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, more impressive things on that screen than Amazon can on their Amazon show, whatever their terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for their thing. Like I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon thing, but Amazon is so bad at user interface design, I expect that to be clunky.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’ll be underpowered, so they can’t do like whatever crazy GPU is going to be in the Apple one to have cool effects
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, like just the same kind of functionality, but just, you know, even if it’s just like nice screensavers
⏹️ ▶️ John of your family that it pulls from your photo library. This is another angle, by the way, of like, A, it’s why Casey will get one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter, you know, no matter what he says now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And B, it’s why I’m actually interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like, it’s because the Google Home one I got because I have lots of my life,
⏹️ ▶️ John I use the Google ecosystem. It’s got my email, my calendar, and one copy of my photos, but the real copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of my photos are in Apple’s photo library and Google Photos is just my sort of redundant backup that I use for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for search and other things like that. I’m interested in this one because the other half of my
⏹️ ▶️ John life is not in the Amazon ecosystem, it’s in the Apple ecosystem. So I would like one of these in my house so that I’ll have something that
⏹️ ▶️ John I can talk to that has access to the other half of my stuff and hopefully can do something interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other problem that it’s gonna have is that the support for home automation devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be limited to HomeKit. And the Echo and the other things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Echo supports way more than just HomeKit. And HomeKit is still like, like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new smart home device is still not shipping with HomeKit today. Many of them are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s still a lot out there, and especially most of the cheap ones that most people are probably actually buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of them are not HomeKit compatible.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could play that up with the privacy angle, right? Like I think you’re right about that, but the way they can spin
⏹️ ▶️ John that is as part of their pitch to you about privacy, like I think that’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John strengths HomeKit has, and the stringent requirements, the more stringent security requirements for devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that comply with it, they won’t come right out and say, yeah, there’s not as much HomeKit stuff out
⏹️ ▶️ John there, and the best stuff is not HomeKit compatible, but the stuff you do buy that is actually HomeKit certified
⏹️ ▶️ John will have a slightly less chance of letting people own your entire house. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true, yeah, but, so like, again, it’s gonna be the kind of thing where like, the main selling points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this are gonna be things that most people aren’t really going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think to ask about or care about. And the main downsides of it are probably going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be cost and support of devices out there, and the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and intelligence of its voice assistant. Those are pretty big things. That’s why I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worried about this product. I don’t think that it’s going to go very far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the market. I mean, we haven’t seen it or know anything about it yet. We don’t even know technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s real. So this could all change when we see it, but I am very skeptical of this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because it seems like it requires strengths that Apple doesn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’ll be a good test for this because this device is in many ways like Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s, you know, a, especially the one with no screen, a kind of a faceless device
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s cheap, small. It’s not a Mac. It’s not an iOS device, strictly speaking, even though it’s running
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS under the covers. And Apple TV is like, well, look how
⏹️ ▶️ John badly they’ve done with that device. They’ve made so many revisions of it. It used to be this giant Mac running, you know, Tiger
⏹️ ▶️ John that did some weird stuff with iTunes and it morphed into this puck, which was better, but then it didn’t get much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John This, the Siri in a puck, in a tube, in a whatever thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is a great test to say, is the Apple TV not great because Apple’s not good at
⏹️ ▶️ John making this kind of device? Or is the Apple TV not great because they were never able to do the content deals or is it
⏹️ ▶️ John some combination? Because it could be that the Apple TV, The biggest thing hobbling it is
⏹️ ▶️ John all their grand visions for how this is gonna change the way you watch TV have been thwarted by the fact that they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get their deals done. They cannot produce a compelling offering that lets people actually do all the things they wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John do. And the poor kind of orphaned ghost town TV
⏹️ ▶️ John app on the Apple TV is, you know, there’s no better example of the Apple’s failure to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it all together on the TV front. Most people don’t have complaints about the hardware again, other than
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible remote, which hopefully will not be an issue on this tube thing. So it could be that Apple’s really good at making
⏹️ ▶️ John embedded devices that efficiently listen to audio and play music and make it, maybe they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ John good at that. And in this case, they don’t need any content deals because it’s just a speaker and a microphone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in a tube. But on the other hand, if they roll this out and it looks to us two years later, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of those things that Apple makes like the Apple TV that is kind of mediocre, more expensive than the competition
⏹️ ▶️ John and not as good. And then we just like sit there and wait year after year for it to be updated in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ John While Apple refuses to acknowledge its shortcomings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I take small issue with what you said. I really love my Apple TV. Now, to be fair, I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it for a very particular set of tasks and it is very well suited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to basically what it boils down to is playing Plex or playing Netflix. And that’s basically all it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever does. But for those things, it’s actually quite good. And I mean, I’m not saying the remote is perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by any stretch, but it’s fine. It’s not great, but it’s fine. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. I don’t know. I wish it wasn’t so symmetrical.
⏹️ ▶️ John But compare it to the competition. The other pucks that have 4K support that cost less money, that
⏹️ ▶️ John play Netflix just as well, that the remotes are better on. Like, that’s why people say Apple TV is not bad. The remote is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple TV itself is not bad. I use it all the time too, right? But if you are in the market for a
⏹️ ▶️ John puck and you don’t have a bunch of movies that you bought on iTunes, Apple’s puck costs more,
⏹️ ▶️ John does less, and is worse in pretty much every way than the competition. And that’s why people say
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, it’s not the best puck offering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. I don’t know. We’ll see. I mean, we’re only a couple weeks away, so we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh, and on the other puck front is like when the various versions were introduced, sometimes they were
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty darn good, right? But Apple just is not interested in keeping up with the Joneses. So
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else gets 4K support or does 24 frames per second output for the film nerds or whatever. And Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the one we got is fine. Let’s say that for a few years. Don’t worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’ll update it. Maybe we won’t. Who needs 4K? Is that a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That can’t be a thing. No way that’s a thing. That’s not a thing. Sigh.
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Google I/O
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to take a really weird turn now. We’re going to talk about Google I.O. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat interesting. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John believe it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so timely, given that it happened two weeks ago. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Google I.O. happened May 17th through 19th. We’re recording this on the 24th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the only bit of I.O. that I watched was the keynote, but I did watch the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was very, well, given it was not an Apple keynote, it was very good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there’s anything that we can all agree that Apple is very good at, it’s doing a keynote presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I watched the keynote and by and large, I didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there was that much to discuss for us to discuss. There were a couple things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. One was the updates to Google Photos, which I am a devout fan of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, Yes, I understand that I’m giving Google my data. Yes, I understand that that can be creepy. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand that there are penalties for doing so. Yes, I understand I am paying them, and yet they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still scanning all my data, despite the fact that I’m paying them. However, I made the choice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, to me, the benefits are worth it in the case of Google Photos, and so that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my choice. It may not be right for you, but it’s right for me. So what they’ve done is they’ve done a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with sharing with Google Photos, so it’s much easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share your photos with your spouse or with those that are at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an event, like a party or something like that. That looks really cool. It’s trying to be more proactive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, hey, it looks like Marco and John are in all these pictures. Do you want to share this with them? You’ll make an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey album and automatically share it with them. That sort of stuff is really cool and I’m looking forward to it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although I think it’ll be more useful if I knew more people that were devout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Photos users like myself. But we’ll see. But I thought the photos improvements looked neat.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I tried to merge this in the notes with an old question that we had many, many months
⏹️ ▶️ John ago from Mark Wadham, who was asking about family iCloud photo libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a general question. I think it was like, we talk about it a long time, but what the heck do we mean? And it’s suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John more relevant because, like Casey said, this was a headlining feature of their Google I O presentation of the Google
⏹️ ▶️ John photos portion of it like, Hey, look at this neat way to do a thing that they
⏹️ ▶️ John think is common. Like, you know, you and your partner and your spouse, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to share all of your pictures with each other. Not like on a case by case basis, like Casey was talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is another feature of like, Oh, let’s suggest sharing these or whatever. We just say, look, everything that I take also
⏹️ ▶️ John show it to this person and the way they implemented it is they get to see that stuff and then they can look
⏹️ ▶️ John at them and save them into their own library if they like them. Right, oh, I like that one, I wanna keep that one, I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John keep that one. So it’s not, it’s more like automatic by default offering
⏹️ ▶️ John of your photos to someone else, but it’s still two separate libraries. And the broader question
⏹️ ▶️ John about, from way back in the day in Hypercritical, I know iLife is an island, is the very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult problem that Apple has not yet tackled, but that they’re slowly building up the infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John to tackle, I feel like, and I hope they address it soon is the way my family
⏹️ ▶️ John at least uses photos and the way I think a lot of families would use photos if given
⏹️ ▶️ John the option which is you know if you have two parents and children
⏹️ ▶️ John both parents take pictures of their children depending on maybe at the same time at the same event or if
⏹️ ▶️ John one parent is with one child one parents with other they take pictures on their phone they take pictures with their cameras however they take them
⏹️ ▶️ John each Each parent is an adult and has their own Apple ID or whatever Google account or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they have their own accounts, which means in the Apple and Google worlds, they have their own photo libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s it’s kind of the siloed arrangement. And yet in a family situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John usually you want all the pictures, at least all the pictures of the kids, probably all the pictures, period,
⏹️ ▶️ John to be together in one big library and not have to deal with, you know, two different people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries and sharing between them. It’s inefficient, it’s hard to keep track of like the one master
⏹️ ▶️ John library of family photos. Very often the solution is, oh, just designate one parent
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the official holder of their Apple ID has the library, right? That’s what we do at our house,
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife’s Apple ID, she is the owner of the photos library. So on her iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John she has access to all of our pictures on my iOS devices. And on my Mac, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have access to only the pictures I’ve taken with my iPhone. all the other pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John go into the big library and periodically I have to manually export
⏹️ ▶️ John unmodified original you know to make sure I get all the stuff you know I can’t bother editing them on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything I have to just let them stream into my Mac export all the unmodified originals
⏹️ ▶️ John and import them into the quote-unquote real photo library that is hers and we used that this used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John mine and now it’s hers we’ve gone back and forth it but this is this is not what I want and it’s not what any family
⏹️ ▶️ John wants and I think a lot of families do get by by having the designated person who owns the photo library, but it’s terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John because of some, you know, we take so many pictures on our phones. I don’t want to be signed into my wife’s Apple ID on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, right? It’s bad enough that we all had to do that from the, you know, the old days of like buying
⏹️ ▶️ John things through the App Store and Apple does let you be signed into the App Store as your spouse, but signed into everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else is you, like they let you do that for sharing of apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what we do. The, you know, Erin is me for the App Store, but she is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her in every other way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Apple added the capability to do that because it is a common arrangement, but it’s not great. So Apple eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John added a couple years ago now, uh, the concept of a family where you can make a family
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple’s interface to say, here are the people who are members of the family. Here are the adults, here are the children and
⏹️ ▶️ John family sharing allows you to share applications that that allow this. I think the default is
⏹️ ▶️ John to allow, but Marco would know. I think you could configure your app to say it’s not shareable. Like I don’t want you to be able to share
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but in my experience, pretty much all apps are like this. If I buy an app, my children’s
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices have access to that app just because I bought it. It’s a little bit weirder
⏹️ ▶️ John within that purchases. And since so many things are free within that purchases now, it’s still a little bit weird. But it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the key thing is Apple allows the concept of a family to exist
⏹️ ▶️ John and membership in that family to exist. And then membership brings certain sharing privileges that only exist within the family, including
⏹️ ▶️ John from things of like my kids try to buy stuff on their iOS device and it sends me a notification that I have to approve or deny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re leveraging that functionality to do that. So they’re, they’re creeping up on it before. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be a bunch of a bunch of Apple IDs that you’d be shared in weird ways. Now you can construct a family
⏹️ ▶️ John unit and specify everything about it. You can give kids Apple IDs, which you didn’t used to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. And now you can, they just need to take the next step, which is stop siloing
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries of photos. Um, and it’s a really difficult problem because you might think, well, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John all the photos from two people to be shared forever into one giant library. Like how would that even work in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John billing and how do I keep some photos private if I’m taking a million pictures with my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, a bunch of things in the hardware store for some repair I’m doing and
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife doesn’t want them appearing on her phone because you know, that’s just relevant to me. Like it is a hard problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get me wrong. It is not like they should just snap their fingers and do this. They just need to make incremental progress towards
⏹️ ▶️ John it and eventually they need to get there. And even Google with their thing of like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just see all my pictures and pick the ones that you want. That is still incremental progress because it is still two entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries. It’s just easing the friction of how you get thing one thing from one thing to the other. But I wouldn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John that solution either because I’d constantly be thinking, Oh, did you pull in all the photos I took yesterday? Or did you did you
⏹️ ▶️ John forget some or where did you leave off? I just want them all to be in one big pool. I just want them to be our photos
⏹️ ▶️ John like the way it is now. And so I really hope Apple is slowly but surely working towards this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hope Google is too, because I think that is, that is a better way for families
⏹️ ▶️ John to manage their photos than any of the current systems. I agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who has the photo libraries in your houses? I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have two different ones with lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey duplication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lots of wasted effort and lots of wasted iCloud space and hard drive space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we are our own people and we, you know, have our own ways of doing things. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some of our own pictures. We have a bunch of family pictures. It would be nice to have both,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but usually what actually happens is whenever one of us wants a picture, the other one took.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We ask across the office, hey, can you send me that picture of whatever, whatever. And then we either airdrop it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to each other or we go browse our hard drives on our network share and do it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you get freaked out about whether you’re actually getting original quality when you share them with each other? Because almost all the sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces do not give you original quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we don’t we don’t do any of the sharing with like, you know in inside the photos app like the shared albums like that We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do with like sharing photos with friends that war, you know for an event But but those are not full quality as Jason’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t pointed out. I think I upgraded this this past week Those are only like three megapixels. I mean, they’re very very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m doing like transfers between Tiff and I You know, we just we either do airdrop or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like direct file transfer over the network Which
⏹️ ▶️ John airdrop from the photos thing on iOS? Yes, sometimes. Is that full
⏹️ ▶️ John quality? Like do you get the raw if she shot it in raw? Do you get a raw coming over the wire? Do you get a JPEG?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For transfers of raws, that’s when we’ll usually involve just the network shares. We’re all just I will just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open up her hard drive on my computer over the network and pull the file over Ethernet because Ethernet is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air drop is usually when the photo has originated on an iPhone. It was taken by an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then we will air drop it. You know, and that’s that I’m pretty sure that is the original file then in that case. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other terrible thing about separate libraries and sharing photos is it either discourages
⏹️ ▶️ John you, the individual people from doing edits, or it makes you feel bad about it. Because say you both have your own photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and your own things and you’ve done your own edits and cropped things and made them look nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would like it, like what I would want to happen is, look we’re both, say you are both using photos, I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John you are, but if you are both using Apple’s Photos app, why can’t I get all of that? Give
⏹️ ▶️ John me the unmodified original, give me your modifications, like it keeps them all losslessly, like it has all that information.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your only choices instead are what I do, which is export unmodified original, which I really hope does what
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, because I’m trusting it. But you are losing all of the edits at that point, because you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about the edits. And it’s like, oh, why did I even bother to, it happens when we go on vacation a lot, because a lot of times I go
⏹️ ▶️ John on vacation, and I’ll be putting the photos into my photos library and my Apple ID, and like picking
⏹️ ▶️ John favorites and doing edits, and then I have to do this laborious manual sync process, it reminds me of the old days when I would get a new
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and like manually do what Migration Assistant does today, which was fun to the first five
⏹️ ▶️ John or 600 times, so eventually it gets old. I will do all this picking
⏹️ ▶️ John and editing and cropping and all this other stuff, and then when I come back to the home computer, I have to make a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of smart albums to pull all the favorites and export unmodified originals
⏹️ ▶️ John for those, and then redo my edits to make them look like I did over there, cribbing off of them
⏹️ ▶️ John to see how I decided to crop it and stuff. It’s just, it is not good at all. And the other choice is to
⏹️ ▶️ John just be like, okay, well, I’m not going to, I’m gonna import them into my library because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the device with me. And then when I get home to the real library, I will, you know, I’ll just dump
⏹️ ▶️ John them because I haven’t done any modifications to them. Or I’ll be logged in as my wife the whole vacation and
⏹️ ▶️ John use her account on this thing. It’s just a bunch of bad options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we solved that problem again by duplication. There’s lots of duplication. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that helps here is that Tiff and I both have very different editing styles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She’s way better at it, but I will often take my own pass at things before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her, or if I don’t think she’s going to care about that photo, or if it’s something I took. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually anything edited in my library was edited by me. And she takes her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version and makes a way better version later. But again, we solve this problem just by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duplication, more and more duplication. And it’s a terrible solution, but it does avoid a lot of the problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that any kind of shared library would add. It’s just really inefficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another feature request I have for photos and a thing that I do a lot is that I don’t have two people with conflicting editing
⏹️ ▶️ John styles. I have just me who has different ideas about how to edit things. And a very frequent operation for me is to duplicate a
⏹️ ▶️ John photo so I can do a different edit on it because you can’t have more than one edit per photo. All right, so with a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John library, family photo library, one of the features they should have is the ability to do multiple edits of a
⏹️ ▶️ John single photo. So then you could have the TIFF edit and the Marco edit With one you know unmodified
⏹️ ▶️ John original beneath them and have an interface to that that would be great instead of me You know instead of me duplicating
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing getting image 1 2 3 4 You know copy that JPEG and they do my modifications
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there, and you know like
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I think I think I think people do multiple possible edits Even if it’s just two different crops right one
⏹️ ▶️ John one crop that you’re gonna use for sharing with the family because you know they’re gonna Be looking at on a phone and then a different crop and edit
⏹️ ▶️ John for the one that you’re gonna like you know print on a fracture or something and throw up on the wall because it’ll be much bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of low-hanging fruit in the photo world for features like this, but then the
⏹️ ▶️ John family sharing is not lying for it is a really difficult problem and I do see Apple making progress towards it. I just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for them to just finally to finally do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in general, like kind of broadening this a little bit. One of my biggest wish list items
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac specifically and I know this is probably involve iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also just because of the way this big sync setup works, but I just want the Photos app to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get more, just get better and get more added to it. You know, like first on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the realm of get better, I really hope they finally sync the recognition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data between images so that each new device doesn’t have to run CPU hot for three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days just to figure it all out itself. That’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you still use that feature? I’ve kind of given up on it already. I don’t think you can turn it off. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like in terms of, oh, I’m thinking mostly of the faces. I know you’re talking about like finding a picture of like a boat, right? That
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing, which I think works okay. Yeah, it works okay. The Google Photos one is better, but the face one is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had the most hope for and that makes me the most disappointed. I continue to manually keyword label
⏹️ ▶️ John the faces that I care about, which is incredibly tedious. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the Photos app fights you every step of the way. Like when they remove the keywords from underneath, you can’t display them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so hard to figure out which ones have keywords on them or not. And I was like, well, why do you need to do that? Just let
⏹️ ▶️ John the face recognition figure it out. And I try to train it and I try to convince it.
⏹️ ▶️ John close, but it’s still just, you know, guess what? People who are genetically
⏹️ ▶️ John related to each other tend to look similar. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard problem. I don’t blame them for it. Google doesn’t get it perfectly either, but I just wish I could just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to worry about that. If I want to find pictures of my son, I can just type in his name it will find all the pictures of my son.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reality in photos, it will find 15% of the photos of my son.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so photos, there is so much area for improvement with photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only in the intelligence of what you were just talking about, like the intelligence of the recognition and the faces and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the syncing of that data, which is always my complaint, that like, why does each device have to do this over and over again and burn through its battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the first few days or weeks that you own it? And then, just the entire photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. On iOS, it’s fine. I wouldn’t say it’s great, but it’s fine. The Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photos app really needs a lot of help. It is seemingly designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by people who don’t use Photos apps, and who have never used it to edit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than one photo, or to browse a library that had more than 10 photos. It really does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was rushed out once, three years ago, whenever it came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, and then not touched since in any meaningful way. And I really hope that changes, because there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much promise. Because the syncing system they’ve built for iCloud Photo Library has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock solid for me and for everyone else I’ve talked to who uses it. It has been rock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid. It’s a great sync system. It’s integrated into everything. It gets everything off your phone automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The sharing is decent. You know, it’s not amazing, but it’s decent, good enough. I just wish the app on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was better. It is still not as good or not as responsive or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as easy to work through more than four photos as even iPhoto,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let alone Aperture or Lightroom. Like there’s so much room for improvement in just the basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of navigating it, picking through photos, rating photos, deleting the ones you don’t wanna keep, editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones, performing minor edits. It seems like it’s designed right now for maximum friction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to be as error-prone as possible. And I just really, really wish, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know this is a long shot, I wish they would like I don’t put a different team on it, put a different designer on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something get some new blood in there to make the photos app on the Mac great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or even just good. I’m not asking for a lot here, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it usable for people to actually go through and sort through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thousands of pictures that we could now take with these amazing devices in our pockets all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like make that better, make it easier. Don’t show me 60 different animations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go all these different levels deep in this weird hierarchy. Just do it. Just respond to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keystrokes quickly. When you’re deleting photos out of a big list, move it to the right to the next one. Just do what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other photo app has ever done before. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one doesn’t do it. So I really, really hope they got better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine if they added features too. Imagine that, like they actually added features. The
⏹️ ▶️ John next year there’d be more features in it? Imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be great. I’m not even, see, I’m not asking for much. I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of asking for features at this point. I feel like it’s been long enough. But what you said about the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I listed photos, Apple’s photos is one of my favorite applications one year when we did like a favorites list. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s for the reason you just said, it’s for the syncing. And I know people have horror stories about like, oh, my images were black thumbnails
⏹️ ▶️ John and I lost all my data and blah, blah, blah. But like you, Marco, for me, it has been solid. I just have
⏹️ ▶️ John my fingers crossed that I’m not just lucky. right, and that, you know, that it really is, I think it really is
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonably reliable. And so that’s why I love it, because it solved that problem for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John or not for me, for my wife, because it’s on her phone. But anyway, it solved the problem for one of us. That’s, by the way, that’s one of the things I use Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos for, because we have this thing where her Apple ID is the family photo library, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on her phone and her iPad, but then I have Google Photos running on her account,
⏹️ ▶️ John on her Mac, uploading to my Google account. So if I want to pull one of our family photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John I launch Google Photos on my phone because it’s the only way on my phone that I can get to our family’s photos. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, I pay for one terabyte of storage in Google and also the maximum amount
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy in Apple. So it is not particularly monetarily efficient. This is the system I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve just now remembered that we’re talking about Google I.O. Yeah. Yep. This is a song about Alice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the photo, photos is a thing, photos is a thing they talk about. And my credit where credit is due to Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are very smart for giving me that ability. The fact that I can run a client a thing, a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on my Mac that somehow sucks all of the photos out of my
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple photos library and uploads them to Google. By the way, I’m gonna give a two second rant on this little thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s a little menu bar icon and it does what I want it to do, which is like, I’ll find, I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll do it, but I’ll dig through your Apple crap and I will find your photos, probably in a way that Apple doesn’t want us to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do it and it works. And I will push them up to the Google account of your choosing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so, from my wife’s account, I can push up to mine. But, this little menu bar thing
⏹️ ▶️ John has this feature in terrible scare quotes where it will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will tell you how many uploads failed. And sometimes it will give you a notification saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to upload these pictures to Google Photos and they failed, click here to learn more. And you click
⏹️ ▶️ John and it gives you this terrible little tiny dialogue that lists these very long file paths that you can’t see the right hand
⏹️ ▶️ John side of unless you scroll. Right. And it says, these are all the ones that failed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a button on it, or other, you know, other is a button or menu item, whatever lets you through this thing, say,
⏹️ ▶️ John please retry them. And it’s like, don’t wait for me to tell you just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John trying little Google thing. And maybe here’s the thing, maybe it does automatically retry, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to retry no matter what anyway, but the fact that the UI has a way for you to see what failed and click the retry
⏹️ ▶️ John button compels me to every time I’m on her computer, that and because
⏹️ ▶️ John their file names are all obscure I can’t is it trying to reupload these seven Ross over and over again can it just not upload Ross
⏹️ ▶️ John at all and every time it fails to upload them it tells me about it or is it if I never touched it would it
⏹️ ▶️ John merely retry constantly and eventually succeed no way to tell one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst like sort of like nerd baiting interfaces because once you give me an interface to see the things that failed and you
⏹️ ▶️ John give me a button to tell it to retry it’s cruel it is a cruel interface and if someone that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google is listening to this, A, either make your thing, never tell me about this and just upload them
⏹️ ▶️ John all, or B, make it so that I have some explanation for the failures and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, or some kind of progress indication or something that will, like if you’re gonna give me information, give me actionable information.
⏹️ ▶️ John But otherwise, I would prefer it if you just did your best and kept trying without any input
⏹️ ▶️ John from me. And it drives me nuts. I’ve lost my train of thought and I was in too busy being angry about that thing. Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I know exactly what you’re thinking of, and it’s so bad. You’re absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you use that thing as well, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, the uploader that’s on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you get suckered into going into the fail dialog? Fail
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey upload dialog? Oh, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do. And it seems like there’s about 10 files, mostly raw. Now, I have a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of raw files, don’t get me wrong. So it uploads a raw as a general point of fact, but there are like 10 files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it just seems to forever be confused about. And you can sort of figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are, But yes, the everything you described, an emphatic thumbs up to, well, really thumbs down to the uploader,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but thumbs up to what you were saying, because I completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you gotten to the point where you wrote down the file paths so that
⏹️ ▶️ John time a dialogue comes up, you compare or screenshot it or otherwise try to record it? Because I’m coming
⏹️ ▶️ John close to that, because, you know, you can’t remember what they’re all like nonsense names or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it the same three files that it’s been telling me about every day for the past, you know, year and a half? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s different amounts. I can tell you that. Sometimes it’s 100, sometimes it’s 35, sometimes it’s 50. Like it tells you the counts on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, this is a very long trip around for me to emphatically
⏹️ ▶️ John agreeing with Marco’s other complaint and that using Apple’s photos feels like walking through like waist deep
⏹️ ▶️ John molasses, right? And this is an esoteric thing that I think only that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m particularly sensitive to. And I think not everybody has the same hangups that I do about responsiveness,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I have big, deep, deep hangups about responsiveness and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything I do in photos, because in photos you do a lot of repetitive operations. Go to the next thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John crop, move, resize, adjust, star, favorite keyword, go to the next thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John delete, go to the next thing. Like that cycle, that thing I do when I do photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I go through my photos, every single operation takes just a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit longer than I think is reasonable. Everything has this lag, has this, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually I’ll do that. Oh, did you want to crop? Oh, you want to exit full screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you want to enter full screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, you want to edit this photo? Wait
⏹️ ▶️ John a second. Okay, now I’m drawing the edit thing. Like, I want this to be so fast that
⏹️ ▶️ John before the key comes up off the keyboard, like have it activated on key down for, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to be so incredibly fast because, I mean, at the time we bought this 5K iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the fastest iMac you could buy. And the fastest Mac you could buy, period, in single
⏹️ ▶️ John through end of performance. I don’t know what the holdup is. I do have a massive library. I admit that my
⏹️ ▶️ John library is not small. Maybe if I literally did have 100 photos, it would be fine. I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m up to 80,000, 90,000, I forget. I don’t know if I’ve broken 100K yet. I have a lot of photos. I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand it’s a difficult problem case, but if, like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want out of it. And my perception of it is that it is slower now than it was with iPhoto. Now, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John fair, because when I was using iPhoto, especially older versions of iPhoto, I had way fewer photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But on the other hand, I also had a slower Mac and there was no SSD and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, either way, that’s what I personally want out of this program and aside from the features, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to just be so, so much faster. Make every single operation that I
⏹️ ▶️ John do, like have as little lag as possible. No transition,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you know, redrawing things. And again, it’s not just a transition. Very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very often I will hit a key combo to like zoom to full screen and either
⏹️ ▶️ John it will ignore the fact that I hit space bar, it’ll be like, that never happened, I’m never gonna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it will start at the animation to go into editing mode but I double click the thing or
⏹️ ▶️ John click into edit mode, it will start it perceptively after I am completely done with
⏹️ ▶️ John the input. I have clicked or double clicked or done whatever, nothing happens on the screen for
⏹️ ▶️ John fractions of a second that seemed like an eternity And then the animation begins, and I just want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s bring this back around. Remember we were talking about Google I O like three hours ago? Ha ha ha ha.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Related to that, I’m getting back to Google Photos. Getting back to Google
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a comment I saw from somebody, maybe it was Gruber, maybe it was just retweeting somebody. Somebody saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John using Google Photos in your web browser is more responsive than using the native Apple Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I wouldn’t quite go that far, because I I don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of going through photos, picking and editing and tagging and stuff in Google Photos, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ John use Google Photos in the web interface frequently, basically to find a picture that I’m looking for. I go into it, I use a search, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is pretty neat. I try to use its face recognition, which is not really that much better than Apple’s, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s what I’ve got or whatever. And my perception of scrolling through photos, especially like scrolling through
⏹️ ▶️ John photos by date or filtering or searching, those operations do actually feel faster in Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and Chrome than using the native app. But for the picking and zooming and everything, I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d end up with like download speed being an issue because you got to, you know, if I want to see the full res photo to edit it and I want to go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John next full res photo, that’s going to happen way faster on my five K I Mac with everything coming off the SSD than it is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be pulling that stuff over the network. So I’m not going to go as far as whoever that person was who said that the
⏹️ ▶️ John web version felt better than the native. But the fact that there are any operations in which it’s a contest shows that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple photos is a long way to go. And kudos to Google for making essentially a web page that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John go to that I can scroll through literally 90,000 photos and find what I want. It’s pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because this isn’t like a web versus native argument. This is just the photos app on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just not very good at all. Like it really is quite poor. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when you get into any kind of operation like this where you’re trying to go through a batch of photos and pick through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and delete and maybe star or do minor edits on even it’s again, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it fights you at every turn. Like it seems like it wants to show you its animations more than it wants you to get your work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. You’re just, you’re always waiting for it to do its thing, to transition itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to animate something. It’s also, I don’t know, what do you guys think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the incredibly deep, like, modal hierarchy that it has in the various editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls? Like, you know, they typically, like, in a lot of image editors, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, like, a browsing mode, and then you enter editing mode. And in editing mode, pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the controls are visible or or at least very close or at least like can be collapsed out really quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like a triangle drop down thing. But with photos both on IOS and on the Mac, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has these like this like second tier. So everything is like two or three levels in where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go into editing mode and you don’t just have a crop control. You have the like, you know, controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box and you open up the controls box and then you can crop from in there or and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is like two or three levels deep and I find that quite cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in real use and I know it’s kind of a challenge on mobile because there’s not a lot of space for controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but on the Mac that’s not true but it seems like on the Mac they have copied over the iPhone style anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnecessarily I guess for consistency or because they didn’t have any better ideas I don’t know but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of powerful controls that photos on the Mac has but they’re buried under so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different levels and modes and you have to toggle them on every single time and all these different things that I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just incredibly cumbersome. Is it just me?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s that was I remember the last time I complained about it was about the crop aspect original crop aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey aspect original because
⏹️ ▶️ John because it wouldn’t remember and also as you point out because why do I have to go three levels deep to get to this anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like on my 5k iMac screen it’s comical that I have to click the thing to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the screen where I can get my crop options then click the thing that brings up the crop options then click like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so much room on the side of that screen, you could put literally every edit control. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a big screen, there’s a lot of resolution. There’s not that many controls
⏹️ ▶️ John here like, you know, that’s why applications, you know, from Adobe and some of it have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of configurable power pallets. Now I’m not saying photos needs configurable pallets that is, you know, a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that regular people you don’t want to throw a bunch of pallets in their face, it’s too much. But the old version,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I photo before photos had a more Mac like interface where they said, well, we got all this screen real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s put as many of the commonly used editing functions on the screen at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, it’s visible interface in the same way that Apple used to be all into the toolbars and stuff like don’t hide everything
⏹️ ▶️ John away. If you have, if you can make the controls visible to somebody, it’s easier than
⏹️ ▶️ John going, going hunting for them. And the multi-layer certainly is elegant and clean, but it adds insult to injury
⏹️ ▶️ John on the timing thing, because even setting aside the mysterious lag before anything happens, all those transitions have, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, some kind of animation and they add up and it doesn’t remember your preferences and if you do the same thing over and over
⏹️ ▶️ John again, you just feel like you’re it’s like you’re eating dinner, but every time you wanted to take a bite of your dinner, you had
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to the kitchen, take a fork out of the silverware door, close the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey silverware door, come back down, take a bite, take a bite
⏹️ ▶️ John of your dinner and then throw that fork away into the garbage. The next time you want to take a bite, you got to get up from your seat,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey chicken, go to the kitchen, go to the silverware
⏹️ ▶️ John door, take out your fork, close the door, come back, sit down, take a bite with it, throw the fork away. That’s That’s what using photos feels like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My word. I could not have put it better. That’s perfect. how it feels.
Kotlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Kotlin’s a thing. Remember, we’re talking about I-O kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Google announced first-party support or official blessing, if nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, for Kotlin. Now Kotlin is a language by JetBrains. JetBrains is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a third-party entity. If you’re a.NET developer or were once a.NET developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like myself, ReSharper is a JetBrains thing, if I’m not mistaken. You’re a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco recovering.NET developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A recovering.NET developer. And so JetBrains knows development tools pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn well. And they decided to come up with Kotlin, which my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vague understanding is runs on the JVM. It is compatible with the Android libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is it? Android Studio, I believe it is. Shoot, I probably have that wrong. I apologize. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the IDE that is the official Blest IDE, I believe started as a JetBrains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IDE. This is for all of Android development, not just Kotlin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now Google has said, hey, we understand that Kotlin’s a thing. We embrace it. If you want to make your apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Kotlin, then feel free. What’s really fascinating about Kotlin is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really eerily similar to Swift. Now, at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone with a neck beard is probably saying, well, actually, it’s not exactly like Swift at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all and blah, blah, blah. But the point is at a glance, it looks really, really, really similar to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift. And that’s a huge improvement, because if you’ve ever seen how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely bananas closures are in Java, or at least up until modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of Java, which I don’t think Android supports or maybe has just recently supported,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Closures are comically awful. And so Kotlin is a new-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language. It was started around the same time as Swift and looks really, really similar to Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a website that’s going around. We’ll put a link in the show notes. It is not a flawless comparison of Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Kotlin, but it gives you a basic idea of what the two of them look like side by side. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put that in the show notes, like I said. This is super cool. team at work had been kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at Kotlin and debating whether or not they wanted to dive in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it, but it kind of pushed their pump the brakes because it wasn’t officially blessed. Well, now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officially blessed. And so now we’re going to start using it as for, well, really the Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team’s going to start using it as far as I’m aware. So this is all really cool stuff and I’m really excited about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m interested to see if server-side Swift and server-side Kotlin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if either of those really becomes a thing? And if so, do both of them become a real thing? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it just Swift or just Kotlin? And are there cross-compatibility libraries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the two? I’m just curious to see where all this goes. But I think this is a super positive move by Google because, man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the versions of Java that our team is using, oh, they’re ugly. Man,
⏹️ ▶️ John So this website that compares Swift and Kotlin, and I mean, it’s a useful thing to have. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one of the things people are most interested about when they hear a new language is like, what does it look like? And so this website is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying, at the top level, here’s how they look similar. And they do look very
⏹️ ▶️ John similar. Like, what is the syntax? So what are they use for defining these common constructs and everything?
⏹️ ▶️ John As you scroll down this page, you eventually get to the things that I’m more interested in, which is, all right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John so for the easy stuff, like how do you define a function in a variable and how you iterate over things and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, every language has those. But you get to the things that define
⏹️ ▶️ John the language that have nothing to do with the syntax. Like the way Swift leans on protocols and how it uses them
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement its standard library and how you’re expected to use them in your functions versus using inheritance and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the struct versus class thing. Those are the things that make Swift, Swift more,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, practically speaking, more than the syntax. Because the syntax is the thing people
⏹️ ▶️ John care about. It’s kind of like, that’s the cover of the book. But what’s in the book is what really makes different. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you scroll down this thing, you see the Kotlin is actually at least superficially similar
⏹️ ▶️ John to Swift and that it supports a lot of the same constructs as tuple return values. It does have protocols.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, it’s difficult for me to tell without knowing anything about Kotlin other than reading a couple of web pages about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John how deep the similarity goes in terms of the things I just said of like, you know, how, how does it use protocols
⏹️ ▶️ John in, you know, how does it, the language expect you sort of culturally and as expressed through his own standard library
⏹️ ▶️ John to use protocols versus inheritance? Does it have the struct versus class distinction with the
⏹️ ▶️ John same trade-offs as Swift has, or does it not have that at all? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the interesting question to me, is how language looks
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of good in that you’ll be like, OK, I’m not scared of this. It doesn’t look like Erlang
⏹️ ▶️ John or Haskell. It looks like something I’m familiar with, so I feel comfortable diving right in. But then,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what does this language bring in terms of new constructs and new ways
⏹️ ▶️ John of programming? And to that, and one of the other things I’ve heard about Kotlin, maybe Casey could correct me if I’m wrong, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has some things in its tool chest or standard library or whatever that Swift doesn’t yet
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of concurrency. Is that the case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if Kotlin has it, but I can assure you that that Swift is not really yet. I mean, they Swift has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Grand Central Dispatch, but it’s not entirely the sort of thing that most people want. Like what most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want is more along the lines of.NET’s async await. And that certainly does not exist in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift. I honestly don’t know if it exists in Kotlin.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what I had heard that it had either some kind of async stuff, the Kotlin has some kind of async stuff, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John also coroutines like Go or, you know, that it was ahead of Swift in the area of concurrency because they had
⏹️ ▶️ John chosen a solution for that and had undertaken it. And Swift is still like it’s still Swift knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that it needs to add it eventually and they don’t have their their big solution for that. And like you said, in the meantime, it’s like use Grand Central
⏹️ ▶️ John Central Dispatch. Obviously, uh, Kotlin is not an option for Apple because Colin does not
⏹️ ▶️ John prioritize objective C interrupt, which is kind of important for Apple. Um, so yeah, there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and you know, for Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of weird that this is coming from a company that’s outside Google. Like, does is the move for Google to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John them now? the reason this can happen is this is a JVM based language and they have this, you know, you don’t have to use Java. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other languages that are on top of the JVM and here’s one of them and their Kotlin is reportedly
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really good about Java compatibility because that’s that’s their equivalent of Objective C interop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s you know, no, you totally can use this with your Java code and even the weird nitty gritty corner case details
⏹️ ▶️ John will make that interop like perfect because that’s that’s this thing’s whole purpose in life. So it could be the Kotlin
⏹️ ▶️ John and ends up being Google Swift, or they just buy this company or whatever, or it was an open standard, or just adopted
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole hog and say, you know what, stop, like Apple has said, stop using the other language,
⏹️ ▶️ John use this one instead, from now on, all of our examples, all of our libraries, all of everything will be in this
⏹️ ▶️ John Kotlin world. I mean, two main barriers there. One, this company is not owned by Google
⏹️ ▶️ John yet, and two, the name is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Kotlin. Fair
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. K-O-T-L-I-N. Big thumbs down. I apologize if that’s someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John last name, but when you’re naming a computer language, marketing counts, and Swift is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an island off Russia, I believe, or something like that. There is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or place that it is named after, and I don’t remember what it is. I mean, it’s OK. On the plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side, it’s a little easier to search for because there are a few things, other than this island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, that are named Kotlin, whereas there’s a gazillion things that are named Swift or that have the word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift in them, not the least of which is Taylor Swift, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it really rolls off the tongue either. So I don’t know. When some lose some.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Apple with the place names for Mac OS. Like it’s good for you just this year’s OS is named after this place in California.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get away with kind of vanity place name, sort of regional things like that with
⏹️ ▶️ John yearly releases. But if you’re going to name a language, probably not the best idea to name it after
⏹️ ▶️ John some obscure place that’s like near the people who made it. But what can you do? It’s their thing. They name it right up
⏹️ ▶️ John until Google buys it and rebrands it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, but no, I’m really excited about this. I think this is really awesome. Again, I mean, look at I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what version of Java that our team is using, but it’s at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least a generation or two old. And when you look at how they use closures and what they I think what they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do is, they have to make like an anonymous class and like implement a function
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that class or something along those lines. particular details aren’t really that important. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is that to make a closure, it is just comically just weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and clunky and ridiculous. And so even just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a language that supports closures better, I think is a huge win. Yes, I know that more modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of Java do support this sort of thing. But again, based off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I see day to day, it isn’t a thing in our world, in whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of Java we’re running on. And this is already a huge improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought Java programmers liked tons of complexity and making tons of classes. Isn’t that the whole point of programming in Java?
⏹️ ▶️ John They like it when their IDE does that for them. They just type two or three characters and just auto-complete it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, MailRoute, and Fracture. and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to accidental. Accidental! Check the podcast
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I really hope that the new MacBook actually comes out soon. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, and you know people are saying it might come out next week or two weeks from it, WDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really hope that it does because I cannot wait to hear what you think of it after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve used it for like a month. I really am curious to hear this because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to have relatively similar needs as I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people who I know who have had the 12-inch MacBook, who have enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, have had much lighter needs. You know, it’s people who are writers or who are doing basic productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tasks like email and stuff on it mostly. I don’t know a lot of programmers who use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And so I would love to hear your opinion of it when you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I can’t say I’m rooting for you to hate it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be interesting if you did, I don’t know. I just I really want to hear your opinion of it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s assuming that they don’t make like massive upgrades to it in this next version, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doubt they I’m expecting the same thing but with Kaby Lake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, to be fair, I don’t think I would be doing very much development on it. You know, if I did, it would just be for personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things like it’s unlikely that I would do any real work and by that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean work for my job work on it. I would certainly write for my blog and that’s just Visual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio Code, which is electron based but unlike Slack is actually well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I would do a little development sort of kind of in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard. But the likelihood of me running Xcode for more than a few minutes to do like a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix or something like that is not terribly likely. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you’re saying and by and large I agree with you and I am also interested in it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s a perfect apples to to Apple’s comparison because I will probably not be doing much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote real work
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. So eventually, soon my work ever buys a new line of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s laptops and doesn’t continue to buy the 2015s. All three of us will have daily
⏹️ ▶️ John access to a Mac with the new low profile keyboard and that
⏹️ ▶️ John will be interesting test case one, I guess for reliability. Well, speaking of reliability, I just learned
⏹️ ▶️ John that the 2015 MacBook Pro I have
⏹️ ▶️ John at work has this screen delamination problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John At first I thought it was like someone had rubbed off the anti-glare surface, but now seeing Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John post pictures of his issue and hearing other people talk about it, that it’s a delamination thing, which in theory I could
⏹️ ▶️ John just go get replaced, but I’m not going to because it’s not my computer and I don’t want to be without it at work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then all three of us having the keyboard, we’ll see where we all end up with in terms of liking
⏹️ ▶️ John or disliking the feel of the keyboard. We have heard a lot of reports from people saying that they really love it and that
⏹️ ▶️ John the old keyboards feel like junk now. And I feel like that could definitely be a thing. But then also reliability. If all three
⏹️ ▶️ John of us get it, and within a couple months, all three of us have keyboard problems that cost them to be repaired. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps not statistically significant, even though that phrase means nothing and none of us know anything about statistics. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is something versus if it’s just Marco that has the problem and our keys work fine for year after year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean if that ends up being the case and if yours are perfect, then I will gladly go in and get mine serviced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not complain about it anymore after well for
⏹️ ▶️ John Outdoors where it’s hot I mean Casey can do that down there in the south But like if you’re gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your beach and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, I’m just using mine in an air-conditioned office I’m never gonna run into whatever heat expansion thing you’re running it to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know What’s even it was like in the 70s? It wasn’t even that hot I don’t know. But what happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first had the problem, just the O key was stuck down. And then I eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dislodged it and it stuck back up. When I realized it was a bigger problem was when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting in this 75-degree environment typing away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden, lots of keys started misbehaving and feeling weird, sounding different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and clicking weirdly, and being less reliable. And that’s when I realized this is not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one speck of dust under one key, this is like many keys suddenly misbehaving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then since that day it hasn’t happened again. So like this is not just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dust thing, this is this is an actual flaw in the way these things react to something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it might be heat. But I don’t know, it’s it’s really I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope this is a temporary thing thing that I can just get fixed once but I just I don’t have