226: Smooth Scrolling Is For Suckers
15 Jun 2017Much more WWDC discussion, including what you’ve all been waiting for.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Lots of Follow Up
- John's ancient, slow, Mac Pro
- APFS WWDC session and file name encoding
- Norm forms
- Compression vs. HFS+
- iOS 11
- Dots vs. Bars for signal strength
- Drop of third party service integration
- Many touch options for iOS 11 home screens on non-Force Touch devices
- Log your friends into your WiFi
- Multiple file uploads → Mobile Safari
- Tidbits from The Talk Show #193: Crack Marketing Team
- tvOS
- iCloud storage: 1TB → 2TB
- Sonnet eGFX
- Apple Wireless Keyboard A1016
- New iPads
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- Casey steals something from WWDC
- Marco holds court at Social Policy (more on Run Loop and Under the Radar)
- Jackets and pins
- WWDC Food
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Chapters
- Intro
- APFS filename normalization
- Bars are the new dots
- Social accounts removed
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- Many different taps
- Sharing Wi-Fi passwords
- Upload files in iOS Safari
- The Talk Show Live
- Sponsor: Betterment
- “A lot more” about tvOS
- iCloud storage prices
- eGPUs
- Old Apple Bluetooth keyboard
- HomePod “screen”
- Sponsor: Indochino (code ATP)
- A faster Pencil
- The 120 Hz iPad
- Ending theme
- Post-show: WWDC cuisine
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not going to get through all this follow up. So just a certain point, someone just pull the rip cord and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. Now we have crossed a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful threshold that is totally worth pointing out and calling out on this show. We have? On
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desk is an iPad that is faster in every measure I could possibly think of than John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro. You are so mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re so mean. You are so mean. Oh, you’re so mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It beat the single core a couple of generations ago and it has finally crossed the multi-core.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now, and I’m pretty sure the GPU is probably way ahead. I’m also pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure that the screen on it is higher resolution than the screen connected to John’s Mac Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we have finally crossed the point where not even the best iPad but just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of the road iPad is faster in every respect I can possibly think to measure than John’s Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the best iPad isn’t it? What’s the 12.9 faster? Does it have a higher clock or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something? Actually I think it’s the same in all respects just the higher screen resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah well my fans are faster so beat that. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got so many more of them. It’s a divide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by zero that’s not fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well just put an event in your calendar and we’ll revisit that iPad in 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John see how it’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what you’re clinging to? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the shattered glass on its surface long after it’s been dropped. At least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my hardware still works 10 years on, barely, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it works. That’s all I’ve got to hang on to now. I want this Mac to feel safe and loved
⏹️ ▶️ John and to just carry me through until I can turn places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, now that the iPad medium size has USB 3 over its lightning port, I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have faster ports in your Mac Pro.
APFS filename normalization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, here we go. Tell us about APFS.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the APFS session was on Friday at WWDC. They saved it till the very
⏹️ ▶️ John end. So obviously, we couldn’t talk about it when we had our live WWDC episode because the session hadn’t been run yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was some new information in this session. In particular, all the issues about
⏹️ ▶️ John file naming coding that we’ve been talking about on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John This was the one and only bug I filed against APFS like last year back when it was introduced.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it last year? I think it was last year. Whatever it was, I filed the bug. We talked about it on the show. What are
⏹️ ▶️ John they going to do about encoding? And we’ve been talking about it off and on for a long time. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is the biggest, aside from a data integrity, which basically was a no-go
⏹️ ▶️ John on that, as we found out last year. So set that aside. It’s just a feature it doesn’t have. The
⏹️ ▶️ John encoding issue seemed like a big deal. And it turns out it is a big deal. So
⏹️ ▶️ John some caveats here, the session about it was kind of vague. And I tried to talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple folks afterwards. And I did get to talk to a few of them, including one of the guys who implemented the stuff I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about now. But I didn’t have that much time to talk to them because they went down to the labs and labs this
⏹️ ▶️ John year had like a big line and everything. And it seemed like super official. And I didn’t want to get in that line and like hug
⏹️ ▶️ John the file system engineers from people who are developing apps. So I only got a brief time to talk to them
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of in the hallways in transit. So forgive me if I got some of this wrong. If anyone wants to write in and clarify,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can let me know. But here’s what I’ve got. So in High Sierra,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s something that they’re calling native normalization, and that’s gonna be in APFS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now remember, APFS came to iOS in what, 10.3 point something or other a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple weeks or a month ago, and we talked about it on the show. And the question we had was, what is it
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be like when APFS comes to the Mac? Is it gonna be the same deal, so on and so forth? Well, one thing right off the bat is
⏹️ ▶️ John different. APFS on High Sierra has native normalization. What that means is
⏹️ ▶️ John file names are stored as provided by the program in the file system. So
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever garbage you give it, it says I’m writing that as the file name. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John But directory lookups are done through hashes of normalized
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of the file name. So if you put in some file name that’s, you know, I don’t know, just any
⏹️ ▶️ John valid sequence of Unicode, whatevers. And you do a lookup on it with
⏹️ ▶️ John a different but equivalent sequence. And it’s the whole thing with like cafe with an e with an exclamation, with an accent
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. You can do that e with an accent as a single character or as two combining characters.
⏹️ ▶️ John As far as you’re concerned, that’s the same file name. So what native normalization will do is when it stores
⏹️ ▶️ John the hashes for that directory, it will not hash the file name that you gave it, the file name that’s actually in the file system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, it will normalize that file name and store that hash. And then when you try to look it up, it’ll take
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you gave it, normalize that, hash it, and compare it to the other hash. So it’s kind of weird that you’ve got in the file
⏹️ ▶️ John system a file name and each file name has a corresponding hash that is not a hash
⏹️ ▶️ John of that file name, it’s a hash of the normalized version of that file name. And they’re using NFD normalization. Put a link in
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes to look at the different normalization forms in Unicode, the one they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John according to one of the engineers to talk to is NFD. And this is what they call native normalization.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that will make it so that on the Mac, when you when a program tries to look up a file name
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how sloppy the program is with the encoding it will find it because it’s going to be looking it up by a hash
⏹️ ▶️ John of the normalized version of that not by what you gave it so it’s not going to take what you gave it and compare it to the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual file name because then it might not get it and here’s the other interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John part about this so iOS still has still doesn’t do this yet what they’re going to add something they
⏹️ ▶️ John call runtime normalization in iOS 10 3 3 and iOS 11 which will
⏹️ ▶️ John not change what’s in the file system, but will do something that is vague
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t understand at the file system level to make it so you can find your files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s the kicker of this. This is right from the APFS presentation slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John Future update will convert all devices to the new native normalization. So what that
⏹️ ▶️ John means is some point in the future, they’re gonna update all iOS devices file systems
⏹️ ▶️ John again, and they’re not gonna convert them from one file system to another, they’re going to basically add all the
⏹️ ▶️ John hashes of the normalized forms of all the file names. I don’t know if that is more dangerous or less dangerous than the other thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to me that it could be more dangerous, but I’m assuming they’re doing in an additive way. But this is what I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at when I was hemming and hawing over this encoding stuff. It’s going to cause them to have to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the file system on every single iOS device at some point in the future. Like they didn’t get it over with. There’s another one looming,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas the Mac is going to do this one time conversion and it will have the system from the get go in. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to me that Apple’s file system engineers were surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John at how many iOS programs take strings directly
⏹️ ▶️ John from the UI and feed them to file system APIs without doing like FS representation or any other sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs that turn the string into the form that the file system understands. It just says, oh, someone types
⏹️ ▶️ John something in a field. However, that field on my application got that string, however, it was typed, however,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, you know, whatever, however, it was normalized or not normalized, or decomposed or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just going to pass it straight through to the file system. And that that in turn ends up having people not be able to open up their
⏹️ ▶️ John files, usually in non ASCII languages, obviously, because ASCII is very simple maps one to one to UTF
⏹️ ▶️ John eight and all that. So surprise, your iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to look and update it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was actually something really fascinating about that, and I think I’m jumping ahead in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, and I apologize to Mr. John Syracuse. During the talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, I think it was Federici had mentioned that whatever version of iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t really matter what version it was, that really flipped the switch on APFS, and that migrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone to APFS. for like two or three versions prior during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the upgrade, they would do and jump in john when you’re ready, they would do kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a a trial run of the APFS migration, try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out did this work, what went right, what went what went wrong, phone home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the results and then revert it all back to HFS plus. Is that a fair summary?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And that’s the only way I think people were surprised by this. But if you’ve ever done a sort of a production rollout on
⏹️ ▶️ John a large scale, it’s the only way you can ever do something like this. The first time you run it for real,
⏹️ ▶️ John on everyone’s devices can’t be the first time it runs, right? You have to have run it several
⏹️ ▶️ John times before. Doing it unbeknownst to them is certainly a novel way to do it. One possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it is to roll it out to a small subset of your users and use them as the guinea pigs. I’m not sure how big
⏹️ ▶️ John like that were everybody the guinea pigs. But either way, you want you have to you never you know, programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John you never find out how your thing actually works until you run it for real. And server-side programmers know
⏹️ ▶️ John production is never exactly like staging, is never exactly like dev, and so on and so forth. You think it is, you try
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them as much the same as you possibly can, but inevitably you roll something out to production and surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ John it behaves a little bit differently in strange ways that you never could have predicted, and when you have millions and millions of
⏹️ ▶️ John users, that is sure to be the case. So yeah, since the conversion is non-destructive until the very last step
⏹️ ▶️ John as described in past episodes of the show. They did the conversion, just didn’t do the last step and then
⏹️ ▶️ John ran a full integrity check to say, if I was to do this last step, would this thing be hosed or would it be
⏹️ ▶️ John okay? And then obviously report the results back to themselves and they can see how it goes. And they could have kept doing that process
⏹️ ▶️ John until, you know, like, it could be that, you know, iOS 11 would have been a conversion for it. But I guess they did
⏹️ ▶️ John it enough times and got enough results to say, it’s safe to do it in 10, three, whatever that the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John conversion was. So that’s just good engineering there. And, you know, like I said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the design of APFS, the type of file system that is allows them to do both the trial runs
⏹️ ▶️ John and the conversion in a fairly safe way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I mean, again, like you said, it does make sense. But I just found that fascinating that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the path they chose. And just very clever stuff. It’s super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were a couple of other interesting tidbits we got from the talk show, which we’ll, I’m sure, discuss later. Keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the APFS train, tell me about the compression versus HFS+.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was a question I had a couple shows back. Hey, HFS plus has
⏹️ ▶️ John compression, and a lot of OS files are compressed and other files can be compressed both by user programs
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the OS and stuff like that. That’s totally transparent to you when you read the file off of a
⏹️ ▶️ John file system HFS plus if it’s compressed, it just decompresses it on the fly, you’d never see it, it never looks any different. They added
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature many years ago, right? My question was, how do you non-destructively
⏹️ ▶️ John convert an HFS plus volume to APFS while
⏹️ ▶️ John not moving any of the data? Because if you have a compressed file and you leave it compressed and you convert to
⏹️ ▶️ John APFS and APFS doesn’t understand that compression, when you read that file it will be garbage. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, APFS won’t know how to decompress it, so it’ll just read the compressed bytes, which is not what what you’re going to expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the grand tradition of Gruber forgetting to ask Phil and Craig questions,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot to ask anybody, WDC, how the heck they’re doing this. So if anybody knows, tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me and it’ll be followed up in a future show. I just totally forgot to ask. I should have like written it on my palm or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. Say, hey, by the way, when I’ve got your head, the heck you’re in compression again. The easy solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously that APFS just understands that compression handles it. That could be the case. You know, it’s simple solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have no idea.
Bars are the new dots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so next time next WWDC you’ll have to remember iOS 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dots versus bars for signal strength, so I am only vaguely familiar with what’s going on here But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently in some contexts either screenshots or perhaps the OS itself is showing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Circles for signal strength for your cellular carrier, but in other contexts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s vertical bars. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what that who is running iOS 11.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I have it on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s faster than John’s Mac Pro, and I can tell you that it is definitely using bars all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think people were confused by that, because in the keynote, they showed like the notification center
⏹️ ▶️ John slides were near when you first saw the bars, and they’re like, and we all know notification center, here’s the things you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John in notification center. Those were all iOS 10 screenshots. That’s why it was showing like existing stuff you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do in notification center. It was like a lineup of big things, and they all had dots in them. And the next slide was like, here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do in iOS 11, and those had bars. Someone told me they thought there was a screenshot in the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John that was supposed to be iOS 11 that also had dots. But I don’t recall seeing it. Either way, Marco’s got the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John beta and their bars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. Like whatever you see, like in beta and stuff is never actually final. But I can tell you that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta one on my iPad, it is bars, all bars all the time. And this is a welcome change because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dots always sucked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m going to like dots. But the most important thing about bars versus dots, as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as everyone’s conspiracy theories go on, this is that bars take up less width in the
⏹️ ▶️ John top bar. And why would that be important? Why do you need them to be smaller? All of
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird rumors about the iPhone 8 or whatever they’re going to call it having something
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle of the top of your screen that doesn’t leave enough room for the five dots to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John lay themselves out. That something could be part of the case of the phone, like the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, and it could be like a little monobrow type thing where the top of the phone is not straight
⏹️ ▶️ John across, but actually there’s this little dip in the middle. It could be that the cameras are behind the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen at that point. I don’t quite understand why you’d have to get rid of the bars. Anyway, there are a lot of theories about why it has to be thinner.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that bothers me about the bars is, and one of the reasons that, well I don’t know if the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple got rid of them, but it was one of the things that people don’t like about bars and it was discussed when they did get rid of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John was that visually speaking, like the visual weight of one,
⏹️ ▶️ John two, three, four, five bars is not even. So if you have two
⏹️ ▶️ John bars it doesn’t look like half the lit up pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John of four bars because it’s like a stair step thing and you know it just it looks like your signal is
⏹️ ▶️ John weaker than it is than you do with dots. If you have five evenly sized dots then sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John one you know two dots is exactly you know almost exactly half the lit up pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John as four dots you know and so it seems more fair and you don’t like to see your phone with
⏹️ ▶️ John these tiny little one or two bars even though two bars could be perfectly good you feel a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit better when you see two out of five dots or at least that’s my impression anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember when they fixed Antenna Gate by making the bars taller?
⏹️ ▶️ John they just like change the scale because like what is three bars really? You know, yeah they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fussing. They actually did both. Like they I think they changed I think they changed some of the like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know decibel cut off points of what the bars are presented and also they made the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shorter like the left most bars a little bit taller. So that’s why it’s kind of like a like almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a curved ramp up from the left instead of a straight ramp up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t make all the bars the same height so it’s like a block or something. Well, that’s what dots are yeah, but they’re all spread out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but these whole things about like trying to like me to make room for you know a cut out in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 2017 new iPhone. I don’t I’m not sure I buy that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like the whole idea of having these like these protruding like camera and speaker things and then having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen that goes like above to the left and the right of it. I still don’t get that at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all because I just I mean I think we’ve learned by now that the rumor cycle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this kind of stuff gets about a third of what they predict correct like it’s it’s Not a great ratio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think this is just one of those things like, this sounds like something an Android maker would do, not something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would do. Because if you think about how that screen space would actually be used, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of stuff that goes in the status bar. Still, even in iOS 11, there’s lots of stuff that goes in the status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar. One of the big things is, where would the clock go? The clock is right there in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s not really room on the sides to put it there, if you, unless you get rid of something else that everyone likes, or that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. So it’s just like, I just don’t, I don’t see how the status bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morphs to have a big cutout in the middle of it and still be good in any way. And then I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see why you would have the screen extend with this giant rectangle sticking into the middle of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what are you gonna do with that space? Like, are you gonna show parts of a photo that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extend into that space? Then you see the big black cutout? Like, it’s just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see any way in which that looks good and actually works in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let us have eyebrows rendered there, you know, like rendered hair. But she eyebrows. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, so the non conspiracy theory, other than someone that I was just like dots, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is perfectly valid, is that having more room in the status bar
⏹️ ▶️ John is always a good thing, right? I mean, that gives you more options. Sometimes a status box kind of crowded up there. And if you’re taking up
⏹️ ▶️ John less room with dots, then you get a little more breathing room and it looks nicer. If they wanted to, say, take that weird back
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow thingy that is always squished up in the, is that even in the status bar? I don’t even know. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John does. Yeah, like lay that out differently, now that they have extra room, who knows? Anyway, it
⏹️ ▶️ John could just be they didn’t like that, so we’ll find out, you know, in a couple months.
Social accounts removed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Another thing that has happened in iOS 11, apparently the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third-party service integration that came in a couple of versions ago, I don’t remember exactly when. This is integration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the system level with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo. You could enter your passwords
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any of those services at the system level, and then when an app wants to leverage those services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can ask the system for the accounts, blah, blah, blah. Those have all been removed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to the iOS 11 beta release notes, quote, social
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts have been removed from settings in iOS 11. Third-party apps no longer have access to those signed-in accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s that about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s about adding one more thing to my to-do list this summer, because I used the Twitter one, and now I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stop using it and write my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid Twitter login, and I’m not happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry. So Darren Cohen says that Facebook and Twitter are getting rid of the APIs that do that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s why Microsoft also had to pull that support out of Windows. I’m not sure if that’s the case, but you know, so fine, Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John and Twitter got rid of them. What about Flickr and Vimeo? Like no one is even developing, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say no one’s developing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco some might be
⏹️ ▶️ John developing Vimeo. Anyway, it seems more like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems more like a policy decision. This is the interesting about the beta release notes, by the way, I read them a couple times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they have a known issue section, and they, but sometimes they just talk about changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes they phrase it so you realize, Oh, in this build, such and such a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John is like this, but we don’t mean it to be that way. It’s just the way it is in this build. Sometimes things like
⏹️ ▶️ John that are under a known issues header. Sometimes they’re just in the changes section. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I quoted this is because I think this sentence expresses pretty clearly that this is not just
⏹️ ▶️ John something that’s missing in beta one, but that Marko really does have to do work and they’re just not leaving them in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they’re officially deprecated in the API. They’re gone. Like it’s not, yeah, it’s not like a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta one thing. This is actually they’re gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it does simplify things, because anytime Apple has one of these things where it’s like certain blessed
⏹️ ▶️ John third parties are given deeper hooks into the operating system than other ones, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of convenient. But then Apple has to eternally maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John an awareness of the of the social service site. Guys were like, what’s popular
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Because they can’t they can’t just keep the same set of things and support them forever because three or four years later, then there’s something new
⏹️ ▶️ John and some old one needs to go away. but you take the old one and go away. Then people like Marco are sad because
⏹️ ▶️ John they use it in their app. And the most Apple-like solution is, you know what, you don’t get any, just
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with it yourself. Like, cause then you don’t have to worry. We don’t have to keep up with this anymore. If they change their APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John they won’t break our stuff. We don’t have to do deals with them. Every developer can handle it for themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously the best solution would be some way for some sort of extension mechanism for
⏹️ ▶️ John the third party services themselves who are highly motivated to have this type of integration. to write such an
⏹️ ▶️ John integration for iOS, but that’s kind of along the lines of third-party keyboards and that
⏹️ ▶️ John something doesn’t seem like Apple would do, but they could do it someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also like the existing share extension framework really does most of what you need for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and puts the power of creating those things and maintaining them and designing them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the hands of the app makers who run those services and have their apps. So it like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, rather than having Apple design the share to Twitter sheet, for instance, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built into the system and have the system maintain a separate Twitter login account that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is separately set and separately managed. Now that’s all on Twitter or whatever happens. So now Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just with their app have your own login in their app, which they already have to have, and then Twitter can design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own share extension and have it do whatever they want it to do and look however they want to look. And so it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you know it isn’t now just Twitter but now when something new comes along like if Manson
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to to have a share extension from micro.blog, that will now get equal billing as a share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extension as things like Twitter, and that’s great. And again, like we were saying, the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having Apple maintain this fairly short list of services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that matter, that will have first-class integration, that’s not scalable. And I think we’ve seen over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many new networks have come up since then. There was never a share to Snapchat. That’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Snapchat is bigger than some of the things that are in that list. but they just didn’t get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The share to Twitter that Apple made that was there for the last few iOS versions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the share to Twitter in iOS 10 broke on me all the time. It would, I would post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tweet with it and it would just never post. And presumably it was hitting some weird API limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it wasn’t counting characters correctly or something and there was no interface to report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an error to me or to report that it failed or to retry. And it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system Apple had before just did not scale. And so it’s nice to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that we have a new system of share extensions that we’ve actually had for, what, like three iOS versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now? Now Apple can step back and say, all right, you know what? We tried doing this ourselves. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, but now this is up to you guys and we’re gonna step back from it. And you can always kind of tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the data sharing relationship between Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Twitter and Facebook. You could always tell it was a little bit tense. They’re really very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much at odds with their business models and what they wanna do with the user and who owns the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user and who owns the user’s data and what kind of integration they want and everything else. And so to have Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fully step back from that and to just tell everyone else, like, look, you’re now cut off from any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of privilege. You can do these things, but so can everyone else. And everything that’s part of the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is off limits to you. That, I think, is better for everybody, really.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it reminds me of when Apple first added Facebook integration to
⏹️ ▶️ John what was then OS X. One of my old reviews, I remember hearing about how they sort of bent
⏹️ ▶️ John over backwards to try to integrate Facebook with Apple’s contact databases without
⏹️ ▶️ John giving Facebook all of your contact info,
⏹️ ▶️ John having them sync. And it was, yeah, tense is definitely the right word for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only bit about not having these things as part of the system is, I guess this is probably good for the services, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe some users won’t like it. You have to have the app for these things installed now. Even if you’re like, oh, I’m never going to
⏹️ ▶️ John use Flickr on my phone. I just want to be able to post to it from my phone. Well, you got to have the Flickr app installed because the extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John come from the app. So whatever, just put it in a folder somewhere you won’t notice it.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco using your own IMAP host, something like FastMail, or whether you run your own servers, whether it’s for yourself
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is bar none the best spam filter I have ever seen. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of great features. whether you’re a business or an individual, there’s the, you know, this is made for enterprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they have all sorts of wonderful enterprise-y features that I personally don’t understand. They have a whole API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage it, including, you know, all sorts of crazy admin tools. There’s a nice interface if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna use that instead of the API. It’s all designed to make your life better as either an end user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of email or as an email administrator for a business. And it is so, so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot tell you enough how good MailRite is. I hardly ever get spam anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s glorious. It’s really weird when I do get it. That’s how rarely I get it, because it’s noteworthy when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do get it. It is so, so great. I cannot recommend MailRoute enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so again, whether you’re an individual like me putting it in front of an IMAP host, or whether you’re running a bunch of servers for a business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need MailRoute to filter out all the spam and viruses before they get to your servers.
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Many different taps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to MailRoute for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, in iOS 11, according to Fraser Spears, on the home screen, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are like four different things you can do. So a short tap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means open whatever app icon you just tapped on. A medium tap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently opens a popover menu. A medium hold, what is a medium tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you one thing, it took me a very long time to figure out how to move multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps at once on Springboard. You can move an app around just with a regular drag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and drop, but you can’t do multiple apps with that. To do multiple apps, you have to put it into wiggle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X mode. Weird. Like the old way where you long press on it and eventually it goes into wiggle X mode. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do the multi-tap thing. It took me, when I set up this app, it took me so long to figure out some of this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are now like more modes than ever before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s very powerful, but there’s so many modes and gestures and alternate taps and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to be a while before even power users figure out what all this stuff is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to come back to Fraser Spears, who’s a power user. Short tap is open the app. Medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap is the popover menu. Medium hold is begin to drag. Long hold is enter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rearrange mode. of those different things based on you putting your meaty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finger against the screen on top of an icon
⏹️ ▶️ John for various amounts of time with various amounts of movement. I think force touches separate because force touches brings up the
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the force touch menu that the application implements. This reminds me of course of the home button
⏹️ ▶️ John which started out as the button you press to go back to springboard and ended up having a morse code set of
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you can tap on it to do all sorts of weird stuff. I mean at the point where they were we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this before the the accessibility thing where it slides down the screen or whatever that’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John that was like two taps but don’t actually press the button
⏹️ ▶️ John level they were getting at where like they’d used up the one two tap and hold do this to that it’s like okay
⏹️ ▶️ John now now this is a tap but don’t press the button I know it’s weird because the button doesn’t move anymore but
⏹️ ▶️ John like don’t press it enough that it It would move if it did move. very strange.
Sharing Wi-Fi passwords
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing with iOS 11, a new feature of iOS 11, which was mentioned, I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere maybe during the keynote, but I might be wrong about that, but I saw this somewhere last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can now share your Wi-Fi passwords. So, uh, this, there’s an article in nine to five Mac, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put in the show notes. If a friend comes over with an iPhone running iOS 11, you can automatically log them into your Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one tap. And this looks very similar to kind of the, um, the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge status. when you flick open the AirPod case. I don’t obviously think that that’s how it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey activated, but they have a screenshot in here on the 95 Mac article. And what a cool idea, I dig
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So my question is, do they get to see your password? Like, is this just a convenience
⏹️ ▶️ John feature of not having to read something off to somebody and they type it in and get capital letters wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is this a security feature where you can let someone log onto your thing, but they can’t see your password? I’m inclined
⏹️ ▶️ John to think it’s just a convenience feature because once the password is on their phone, surely they can get
⏹️ ▶️ John it off if they wanted it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because presumably, I mean, because they have to know, like, they have to have the password in their device’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possession for it to be on the Wi-Fi. So I’m guessing, like, it probably isn’t shown to them. It’s probably just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put in Keychain, but there are ways to access things in Keychain. Like, if it’s synced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iCloud Keychain, and it syncs to a Mac, then you can go to Keychain access, and you can get the password right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco possibly get off the device. Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I’m guessing that, you know, they end up having a way to get to the password if they want to. And this is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for quick convenience and casual security than it is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real security. Because real security is if you’re letting them on your network, then they’re on your network. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone’s Wi-Fi passwords are like their kids’ names anyway. So come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And no one ever changes their Wi-Fi passwords because now they have like 16 different things
⏹️ ▶️ John People have years in their Wi-Fi passwords and it’s like 1999. Oh, yeah. Mine’s 2008, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi really needs like a token system, like OAuth, where you can just like issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices tokens and then like you can change the password for new devices. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs that. So before everyone writes in, I know there are flavors of Wi-Fi security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that allow that sort of thing, but it is generally speaking, it is not the sort of thing you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will ever find at somebody’s house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Is that like all the enterprise things? I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is possible. Yeah, yeah. And I’ve seen installations in the home that will do this sort of thing. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a thing. It doesn’t really matter the details. Like a friend of mine had some setup with like a Raspberry Pi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or some such, where you would push a little button on some device and it would actually like print out a temporary Wi-Fi password for you just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is the sort of thing you did for a living. So you had like crazy enterprise hardware in his house and it was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cool. But yeah, for any normal person, you’re absolutely right, Marco. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this would be kind of cool if it was usable. And I consider myself a normal person in this context because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not like a super network administrator. So yeah, so for me to like issue a temporary password would be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neat, but that’s That’s not the sort of thing you find in normal WPA2 or whatever it is, households.
Upload files in iOS Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. A friend of the show, Steve Troughton-Smith, he pointed out that drag-and-drop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upload of files to mobile Safari works now. And I actually saw—I don’t think I’m going to have it handy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to be able to dig it up—but I think it was Serendia Caldwell had a tweet about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can take several files from, say, like the Files app, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can drag them into mobile Safari, much like you would do in regular desktop Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will actually upload all of those files, which is super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s another thing Marcos iPad can do that my Mac can also do finally. File
⏹️ ▶️ John uploads the final frontier for iOS web file uploads. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I put this in here is because not because like you know drag and drop works everywhere but because until I read this it
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t have even occurred to me to try that on iOS because I’ve been so conditioned but from so many years.
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do like a file upload you got to go to a Mac for that, right? And even though we all know drag and
⏹️ ▶️ John drop is there, I wouldn’t like you have to change your mindset now with these drag and drop features to think to try something
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of just like walling it off in your mind is like, Oh, you can only do that in the desktop. Not true anymore with iOS 11.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is I think going to be like one of the I mean, this is always the case like with new platforms, but like, this is one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think young people have a way better chance of working on these platforms than we do. Because like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so easy as someone who’s been who’s been around since the early days of iOS like us, you know, it’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to forget all the new things that you can do that you used to not be able to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just don’t even think to try those things, because we like, quote, know, you know, subconsciously, we just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that that’s not a thing you can do here. And like, you need somebody younger than you, like, Viteek Shih to come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around and be like, no, look, you can do all this crap. You guys are dumb. And he’s not that mean. Of course, he’s super nice, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know. He’s young at heart. Yeah, he’s, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, like, you need somebody who’s like more fresh to the platform or more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to experiment or more open minded than us old farts to actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push the boundaries of using the thing and actually use all these new features that we might see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a keynote for five seconds and immediately forget about.
⏹️ ▶️ John The flip side of that, by the way, is whenever the youngsters see me and old fart use my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John they never know all the things that I’m dragging around. And like the fact that you know, proxy icons and title bars
⏹️ ▶️ John like totally undiscoverable stuff if you haven’t been using the Mac forever, or like which applications
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to hold long and then start to drag or start drag immediately versus holding to drag
⏹️ ▶️ John large pieces of text to copy it inside terminal without blowing away your buffer or
⏹️ ▶️ John before you even get into multiple clipboards and all that other stuff. There’s lots of things that old platforms can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that young people don’t learn as well because they didn’t go through all the you know, they didn’t start out with
⏹️ ▶️ John a simple system and see new features get added. They just use the system. They use enough of the system to get their job done
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t have this history of learning all these other obscure features. So there’s secrets lying in
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS as well, especially if you’re an old NeXT user, there’s stuff from NeXT still lurking in there and there’s stuff from the old
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac still working in there. So we have something to teach the youth right before we die.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wow. On our slow Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man, you are really drilling this home, you’re savage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, to be fair to John’s very slow old Mac Pro, it is really impressed, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is kind of an argument for the Mac Pro that, first of all, that he’s still using it almost 10 years later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s mostly fine. Second of all, it’s an argument for upgradability because upgrades like an SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a new GPU have made this possible. And third of all, it really shows quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference when you buy a Mac Pro. Like the Mac, like the iOS hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surpassed five-year-old Macs, you know, long ago. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took until now for it to surpass this 10-year-old Mac in multi-core performance. Because when you have eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores, it takes a long time for things to catch up to that. And one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I love the Mac Pro so much is you get so much headroom. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally, your single-core performance is always limited by whatever the technology of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era is for single-core design. But they cram so many cores in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for parallel workloads, which is what a lot of pros do, you can basically buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself 10 years from now levels of performance today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the Mac Pro, it’s useful to a lot of types of people for way longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any other computer is. So that just shows why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having these high core count workstations is still valuable, because you’re literally buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself a place 10 years from now in performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just wait for the iMac Pro with its 18 cores, that’ll give you another good head start on the phones.
The Talk Show Live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we made a reference to it earlier, but there were a couple of things that were, I mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole show was interesting, but a couple of interesting tidbits that came out of the talk show live from last week. So this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per tradition, it was John Gruber and then as of the last couple of years, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi. And as usual, it was a great show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like that John doesn’t just throw up the softball questions and I can’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the my head of what the hardballs were, but he always asked at least a few hardballs, which I like. And at one point at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end, Schiller actually said to him, in so many words, you know, hey man, you always say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple weeks later, man, I wish I asked Schiller this. So what do you got? And I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took Gruber by surprise, which was kind of funny. And I forget exactly what he came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with. But in summary, it was a really great show. If you haven’t listened to it and or watched it, because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a video available, you really, really should. And John and I had the pleasure of being seated front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey row and watching it. Marco had the pleasure of sitting in a 90-degree sound booth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watching slash listening to it. But there were some interesting things that came from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of them was the trial APFS migrations we mentioned earlier. But the other thing that all of us, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picked up on and were also amazed by was the photo data that is synced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in between devices, which was mentioned And in the keynote, or maybe not the keynote, but the State of the Union, if not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that isn’t what we thought it was. So the way I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understood what was said in whatever, keynote or State of the Union, was that, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the metadata that we generate during the photo crawl process on any of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our devices, all of that is getting synced via iCloud to all your other devices. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were all very, very, very excited about this. out that that is not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what’s actually happening is only the stuff that, that Apple has complete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainty in, and I’m slightly paraphrasing Craig here, only the stuff that Apple has complete certainty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in is what’s synced, which in turn means only the stuff that a user has actively said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes or no to. So in the case of photos, what that means is if there is a photo that has the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it, and I, as a user say, that one is Marco and that one is John, that That photo and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information about it that I’ve provided will be synced via iCloud to the other devices. But anything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the generated metadata and all that, that isn’t synced at all, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably isn’t a bad thing, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a good thing either. And I presume that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because of privacy concerns. But I feel like it was a little bit of a bait and switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe I just misunderstood what was said in the keynote, but it felt like a bait and switch compared to earlier that week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we had heard, oh yeah, we’re syncing things between devices. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it’s… I understand why they’re doing it this way, but I think it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong choice. So like, you know, basically, you know, there were a few problems with the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was before. You know, problem number one was that your… If you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took the time to enter things like Faces data, that wasn’t the same between multiple devices. So it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of… It was very frustrating. It’s like a form of data loss. Like you input that on one device, but then like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to some other device and it’s not there or it’s different. So that’s no good. So that’s the part they’re sinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Problem number two is that every time you do an OS restore or get a new phone or replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a phone from service or a new Mac or any of any new devices with photos on them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your device would basically run really hot and have terrible battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it misbehaved and CPUs would be maxed out for hours or days after you got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as photo analysis D went through your entire photo library and tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to recognize objects in the photos so you could search for them. That one they didn’t fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That one is still being done on all the different devices individually. And it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the reason why is because that’s something that they’re kind of guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on each device. They’re like, they’re using machine learning to try to figure these things out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s fine, But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the reason why they don’t want to sync that is so that a newer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device that maybe has a newer OS that can be smarter about what it recognizes, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get smarter results on that. And that way you don’t have like bad results synced forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from old photos. But that creates the experience not only of having your devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really hot for the first couple days you have them and your CPU cores you maxed out for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that also makes it so that you get different search results on different devices for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the same query. And that’s not really great either. So I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure what what led them to make this decision. There’s probably more information here that we don’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure there were good reasons. But I did from where I sit from the from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subset of the real information that I have. I still think it’s the wrong choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John not just object recognition too, the faces thing is the thing that bothers me the most because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think most people don’t spend that much time confirming faces because it’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. You confirm some or whatever. The way the system is supposed to work, especially on a single, you know, device
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario, is you confirm a bunch of pages and say yes, no, no, yes, maybe make some corrections,
⏹️ ▶️ John and based on your confirmations, the system then guesses
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the other pictures that have this person’s face in them. And that type of feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always wanted this face recognition feature to replace my manual tagging system, where if I want to find
⏹️ ▶️ John all pictures of my wife, I don’t want to have to manually tag every single picture that she’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in, I just want to tell the system. This is her, this is her, this is her, this, or I’ll do that a hundred times. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I am sure I’ve spent way more time in that photo confirmation thing than most people have. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then based on that data set, find all the other ones. And my interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to this is I want, you know, somewhere in the sidebar, like a smart folder or whatever to say, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, pictures of my wife, right? And as far as I’m concerned, the set of
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of my wife is not a thing like finding like telephone or plastic or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, garbage can and a picture that new versions and different machine learning AI
⏹️ ▶️ John algorithms can, you know, do better in future things, it should be the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I want it to be the same as if I had manually tagged it, right? And I want
⏹️ ▶️ John the same experience on every device, right? And if it is better in some future device, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, we are technically guessing and this one is able to guess better. If it is better on another device, they just need to like version
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John When, as soon as they get the better version, sync the better version everywhere. Bottom line, if I have that smart folder
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever this is, pictures of my wife, I don’t wanna see wildly different counts on them and they will be pretty different
⏹️ ▶️ John because depending on how much time you’ve spent adding the people’s faces or how many other people you have
⏹️ ▶️ John look similar or whatever, I don’t want it to re-guess at different times and see like, oh, why do I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a different number of pictures of my wife on these two devices? You don’t, it’s just that one has a different notion of how many pictures of your
⏹️ ▶️ John wife there are because even though they’re both working from the same small data set of manual selected pictures, there’s too much variability,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. I don’t know, it’s better than it was, but I still think there’s room to grow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s always funny to me that Craig seems not like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously uncomfortable, but not totally in love with being on stage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think we talked about this last year too. Until a technical thing comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and suddenly everything changes and he’s like super confident,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome engineer guy. To the point that like his depth of knowledge in things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are reasonably, I don’t know if esoteric is the right word, but like he’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happily go deep on damn near anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the drop of a hat. And I don’t know how the man can keep that much stuff in his head.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just stunning to me, because especially my stereotypical view of managers is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re so far outside of the weeds. They’re sitting on their fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thrones, looking down at their kingdom of minions and saying, Oh minions take care of things not having any idea what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the weeds are and what’s in the weeds, etc But but he can go all the way down like on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. It’s just stunning and I man I love listening to him talk that guy’s and Phil is great as well. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get me wrong But but man Craig is a nerds nerd. I dig it
⏹️ ▶️ John agreed I didn’t listen to the recording, you know, cuz I saw it live But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the live thing there was one heckler who shouted out to her one plan Oh, yeah. So, when is
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri going to get better? I don’t know if they cut that out of the final recording, but that did happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s there, but they didn’t address it because it was like… Yeah. They were basically like, John was in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of asking a question, so they just kept moving because it was not at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a point where it would even make sense to address it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there’s two ways you can go on this. One is that from a hosting perspective, it’s a good idea not to encourage
⏹️ ▶️ John hecklers by addressing them, right? ignoring the heckler is the way of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t heckle at my show. It’s my show. I’m gonna pretend you don’t exist. On the other hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gonna get better? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a line of questioning that could have been brought up in the context of HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think… Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again, like when you have limited time on stage with Apple executives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ask questions, you have to have some degree of just predicting like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what’s a good question here like what’s actually good use of time and a question where they’re just gonna give like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty canned PR like answer is not a good use of time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what do you like what are they gonna say on stage what like do you do you honestly think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil Schiller is gonna gonna be on stage and be like yeah you know what you’re right Siri isn’t very good we’re working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it like no like of course not like it’s gonna be an answer of you know even if you ask that question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly to them it’s gonna be a relatively you know informationless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer of like, well, it’s here’s all the ways that it’s already world leading and it’s always getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a PR question that’s going to get a PR answer. It’s like all the stupid analyst questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the earnings calls. When are you going to make a TV? It’s like that kind of stuff. It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful question because you know they’re not really going to give you an answer that you want. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might as well not even waste time on it and ask a better question.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think you can ask this question in a way that it will get a non-PR
⏹️ ▶️ John vague answer because Apple itself opened the door to this line of questioning with their HomePod announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said this in the last show too, but to reiterate and further emphasize, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pitch for HomePod was look at these two competitors, Sonos and the Amazon Echo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonos sounds good, but is dumb. Amazon Echo sounds like crap, but is smart. HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds great and is smart. Typical great Apple sales pitch for the thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the, so here’s Apple opening the door, but the only thing Apple demonstrated or
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way described, both in the live room where the press could hear it and in the slides where
⏹️ ▶️ John they talked about it, well, we know how HomePod sounds good because a whole bunch of people heard it and they said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing sounds good. It sounds, you know, as good or better than the Sonos, which was the thing Apple held up as sounding good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the pitch of HomePod is, Unlike those two other devices, this one sounds good
⏹️ ▶️ John and is smart, right? Apple itself is saying, we’re making a device that combines the best
⏹️ ▶️ John of these two things. So the is smart part is your entree to say, okay, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have presented us with HomePod telling us it is going to be as smart as Echo and sound as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as Sonos. Do you think Siri is currently as smart as Echo
⏹️ ▶️ John or will it be getting better for HomePod? Because it’s not, you’re not, it’s not a gotcha question. Like they haven’t is the product isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John done yet. Like they did list a bunch of stuff that it’s going to do on the slide. Here’s all the things that HomePod is going to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John are smart, right? So they put them up there. But I think it’s open question at this point. Okay. Like it gives
⏹️ ▶️ John them an opportunity to brag about the product they just announced. They should say the good answer is this
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to you know, HomePod is going to be great. It’s going to be just as smart as Amazon Echo. It’s going to do all these things so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the answer to when a Siri going to get better is going to say, okay, when HomePod comes out, Siri will
⏹️ ▶️ John be much better than it is now. and they can explain all the reasons why or the progress they’ve made on Siri. Like, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s an opening for Apple to brag about the product they just announced. But in the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that they put out in the keynote and in every part of WWDC, the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they demonstrated or pressed on at all was that it sounds good. And the smarts, they’re like, it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John smart, just trust us, we’ll see. Which is fine, but now that’s what I’m waiting for is if this thing is just a Sonos,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s just a Sonos with like existing Siri built in, I mean, I guess it’s still smarter than Sonos, but
⏹️ ▶️ John is it as smart as Echo? You know, we’ll see. So I think this is the competitive question for the HomePod. Apple’s pitch
⏹️ ▶️ John is clear, we have to just see if they can deliver.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing, like they really, they showed us the HomePod and they showed us why we should care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it and why it’s cool, but they didn’t convince
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. Like, they didn’t really, like all they said was basically like, it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, trust us. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s cool. Well, I mean, the press heard it and they said it does sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Yeah, and that’s great. But again, but you know what you’re saying is like, that doesn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it above where Sonos is now. All we have is a vague promise that it has Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is smart, but they didn’t actually show that. And I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. I think it’s mostly because it’s pretty clear that it’s pretty far from being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s not done yet, so it’s not like they’re hiding it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they could have demoed it, they would have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would honestly, the fact that it appears to be in such an early state now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they couldn’t even demo a single Siri command, but they say it’s going to be shipping in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco December, that actually sounds really aggressive to me. I would be impressed if they hit that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like it’s a year away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But otherwise, December launches just in time for the holiday. Oh, never mind. March.
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“A lot more” about tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. WWDC keynote and TVOS, one of you picked up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and it was not me, a quote, you’ll be hearing a lot more about TVOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later this year. And apparently it’s a just shy nine minutes through the keynote. Interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, it isn’t hard to hear less about TVOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco more, though, is it a lot?
⏹️ ▶️ John We heard something about TVOS. They’re like, look, dark mode can turn on automatically at night. That’s something.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s non-zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re going to be hearing a lot more about it later.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I mean, I guess that that means it’s going to be about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hardware and stuff like, yeah, I’m sure. You know, it would be nice to see 4K. It would be nice to see a redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote. They’re probably going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ John remote. Oh, yeah. You want them to keep the current one? No, I’m just like, I wasn’t even daring
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that I was just picturing the puck. I’m like, oh, it’ll finally be a puck that supports 4K and ATVC and there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be 4K content on the iTunes store. I didn’t dare to even dream that they would fix that damn remote, but I suppose they could.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect the Apple TV remote is going to be looked upon in retrospect the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way the hockey puck mouse is as, like, the worst design offense of the decade by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t think it’s that bad. I will not say it’s flawless by any stretch, but it doesn’t bother me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near as much as it bothers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pretty much everyone else in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I will… It never did the dented version. The puck, they tried to, like, fix it. They’re like, Oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John puck, the puck is a problem. So they put a little dent in like the button so you could feel for which side was
⏹️ ▶️ John the top. They should do that with the Apple TV remote. Just put a dent in, I guess you can’t do it on the track pad side, put
⏹️ ▶️ John a dent in the bottom side or something so you can feel for, oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, yeah, it’s not great. I’m not trying to say that it’s great and flawless or anything like that, but I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t think it’s that bad. It works okay for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is that bad. The puck must look better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the Apple TV remote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your computer was like turning itself off randomly and you’re like, this is fine. Like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might need to raise your expectations a bit of what technology should be, especially from Apple. You know, like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. This. I just want everyone to be happy. Oh, and the thing, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the Apple TV every day. It is our primary TV device. Like the only things we ever use our TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for are the Apple TV and the Switch. And so it’s, I use it all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, which is why I’m so critical of it. Like one thing I would love to see in tvOS, and this is the thing, like they say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m gonna be hearing more about TVOS later this year. Actually, all I want is hardware stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hardware changes. I basically want a new remote. 4K would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a 4K TV yet, but it’s probably gonna happen within the next couple years, so that would be nice. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TVOS, and maybe it’s the hardware, maybe it’s the software, I don’t know. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really slow. I don’t know why. This is current hardware that isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John slow. I think the remote makes it feel slow. Because it’s a clumsy feeling. Like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, we always complain about the remote and I just want to reemphasize this again. Apple TV has the ability to learn
⏹️ ▶️ John remotes. And if you are a lifetime TiVo customer like me and you have extra TiVo remotes hanging around,
⏹️ ▶️ John an old TiVo remote with the Apple TV and it makes it way better. But it doesn’t have a touch pad
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, but it has a five way pad. And I think clumsily swiping on that touch pad to move
⏹️ ▶️ John the focus feels slower than tap tapping on a digital
⏹️ ▶️ John right, left, up, down, center D-pad. So I attribute some of the slowness in that. There’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John with like, hey, I hit the little home button, how long does it take for me to get out of this app
⏹️ ▶️ John and go back to the whatever screen? That also feels slow, but I attribute a lot of it to the remote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and some of it’s clearly software. Some of it is like, you wake up the remote when you’re first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting down, and a few seconds later, eventually you see the home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. Okay, swipe over to the thing you want. Oh, nothing happened. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swipe. Wait, wait, what’s going on? Button, button, button, swipe, swipe, swipe. Come on, push everything, what’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, wait, wait. And then boom, everything happens all at once. It’s queued up all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. It’s like, come on, like what year is this? Like this is, this device doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that much. Like what, what is it doing? Is it conserving power all that time I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not using it? Why? It’s plugged into the wall. Like, what is it doing? I have no idea what it’s doing!
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the sleep thing is brutal. I mean, there’s no fans in there, just
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it on all the time, I’ll take the energy cost if it means that I don’t have to wait for, you know, the interminal
⏹️ ▶️ John seven seconds that it takes to be ready to respond to my commands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, like, why? In 2017, for the most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV connected box, why am Am I ever waiting on the box for anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, why, when I push the menu button to wake it up, why does it take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than one second to become ready and most of that one second should be waiting for my TV to recognize the input?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there is no reason it should take any time at all. It’s not doing that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have that many apps on it. I’m using the same like two over and over again, like Netflix and Plex, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, what is it doing? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the other hardware thing that I’m looking forward to is, as alluded to in the
⏹️ ▶️ John promotion stuff, hey, output at 24, 48 or whatever, you know, different frame rates so that movies can
⏹️ ▶️ John look correct and so it doesn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John downsample everything or whatever, do 3D to pull down to output everything at 60 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that will be great. I don’t know if that’s in the cards. I would assume it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a lot of the things that could potentially, We talked about like, why does an Apple already do this? Oh, changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the output frame rate is annoying because of HDMI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not an Apple like experience, although what Marko just described isn’t exactly an Apple like experience either.
⏹️ ▶️ John One possible way to sort of deal with this is the same way LCD TVs dealt with
⏹️ ▶️ John this in the past and probably still do is to just pick a really high frame rate that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple of 24. It doesn’t you know, you still ideally you should be able to support
⏹️ ▶️ John any reasonable frame rate but if you could just get 24, 60 and 30 or something
⏹️ ▶️ John that would go a long way so I am looking forward to that but there’s a lot of things that I would like to watch like
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought a blu-ray drive a while back because it was cheap to rip blu-rays
⏹️ ▶️ John so and I was like oh well I have all the storage space why don’t I losslessly rip them
⏹️ ▶️ John and have a way to watch any movie at Blu-ray quality through Plex
⏹️ ▶️ John on my TV. The problem is I have no device connected to my television that can read
⏹️ ▶️ John a ripped Blu-ray and play it on my television at the correct 24 frames per second cadence
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, movies and stuff. So I still have to put the Blu-ray in the drive, in my PlayStation 3
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, which does output correct 24 frames per second cadence to my television, which does display correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can watch my movies the way I want to with plastic discs. But I’m just waiting for maybe I’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John to wait for a new TV because it could be that Apple says now we’re never going to support 24 frames per second on your old plastic TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get a new 4K TV with 240 or 120 hertz refresh and hook it up to a new
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV and that’s how we’ll deal with it. And I suppose I’ll do that like Marco eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. But yeah, we’ll see what the announcements that are forthcoming include. And apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever the next Grand Tour season starts, if any of us choose to watch it, which is debatable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you one thing. I’m not. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s up to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guys if you want to watch it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I certainly will, but we’ll see what happens. But anyway, apparently that’ll be on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to reserve all my TV watching time now for Planet of the Apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. I didn’t see the first one because I’m not an Apple Music subscriber. But did you guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t watched it. It’s on my to-do list. I did not do my homework. I did not watch Planet of the Apps. really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do plan to watch it. I I think I should see it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know what it is and to know whether I like it or not. I’m going to have a somewhat interesting perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe because I’ve never seen Shark Tank or any of the shows like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it might be slightly interesting for me to see it, but I based on the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from our friends stuff so far, I don’t have high hopes, but I do want to give it a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to need a reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey watch this show. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a reason and everyone who has seen it tells me it’s bad so until I get a reason I will just
⏹️ ▶️ John let everyone else take that bullet for me.
iCloud storage prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, iCloud storage prices. Apple dropped the two terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud storage price to $999. It eliminated the one terabyte option, so the one terabyte now is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two terabytes. It turns out Jason Snell had that upgrade happen to him. One of you, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds like, had that upgrade happen as well?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, came back from WWDC, pulled up my preference pane on the Mac. Hey, guess what? I got two terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s nice. Me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. Merry Christmas. And it actually, and you can now share it within families. So I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually tried this yet, but Tiff and I have each been paying for the terabyte plan separately, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have a family account, so I wanna try to see, they might have just saved us 10 bucks a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know where you do that? We mentioned it, I actually mentioned the iCloud storage sharing on the last
⏹️ ▶️ John show, but between then and now, I never actually went onto my Mac and clicked around to try to figure out where you do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Do you happen to know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is there a family,
⏹️ ▶️ John like managed family in the iCloud preferring?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sam the Geek in the chat is saying it requires iOS 11, which probably also means it requires High Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this might be a thing that has to wait till the fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh well. Can we also, by the way, this is not in the show notes, but can we reconfirm that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey High Sierra is a terrible damn name?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m still not used to it. No, it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey majority rules sucks
eGPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on Andrew Paul’s rights regarding the Apple eGPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the slide in the presentation in the in the keynote according to Andrew the pictured box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually a sonnet EGFX box And we will put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes to the box that we’re talking about Can you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this so it says sign up for sonnet online short online store ship date? So apparently it is not available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean you’ve been able to buy other similar boxes for a while now, so it’s not like this is a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know thing that’s that’s all of a sudden brand new maybe different Maybe support for it in the OS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is newer than that, but the actual boxes are nothing new
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah People have been hacking this stuff together ever since Thunderbolt appeared even Thunderbolt 2 and by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone wrote in saying that if you’re wondering if Thunderbolt 2 is gonna be officially supported by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John for external GPUs the answer appears to know Thunderbolt three only. So Oh, well, and
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, on that topic, talking about more things that happened later than we could WWDC, Apple itself in
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the one of the sessions, I think it was the AR or the VR thing or something, put up a diagram that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like with a with a graph that in no uncertain terms explained exactly how slow
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt three is compared to like internal cards to say, Alright, so because it was for programmers,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you would think, Oh, okay, internal GPU, external GPU, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s like it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Thunderbolt three is really fast, but it’s not. It’s like a quarter of the speed of an internal
⏹️ ▶️ John card. And maybe your application doesn’t need that. But if you’re not careful, and you don’t realize that your application is shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to and from the card a lot, you’re thinking go way slower on external GPU. And this session was trying to emphasize like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is something you may not have needed to think about before. But suddenly, now that you’re sipping through a smaller straw,
⏹️ ▶️ John think, you know, you may need to think about it. Here’s how you can, you know, check your application to see if it’s doing this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, Apple is not a unified, coordinated beast, so it’s very possible that that could
⏹️ ▶️ John have happened and also that the future Mac Pro comes with an external GPU or something, but it seems to me
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would be a much better story, much better coherent story, even if it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a retrospective story or in hindsight to say. And that’s why the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John has multiple internal GPUs because we don’t have to worry about the limited Thunderbolt 3, Ben, with who’ve got the
⏹️ ▶️ John full 16 PCI Express lanes and your apps will just be super fast all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s your Mac Pro. I hope that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s gotta be the case because like, if that wasn’t the case, the iMac Pro would beat the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro in GPU throughput. Oh, there’s no external stuff on the iMac Pro. It’s all in one. Yeah, so no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty, you know, the eGPU support is clearly meant for laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s really what this is for. It’s for pro customers who have pro GPU needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are using a MacBook Pro, and they want something they can dock with that has a big GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for certain things. But if you’re going to be really pushing it, the answer is still going to be get a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably get a Mac Pro or at least an iMac Pro.
Old Apple Bluetooth keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Matthias Besseman writes in with some nitpicky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up, and to his credit, he actually labeled it himself as nitpicky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up. Apple did actually have a previous Bluetooth keyboard. How is this not Stephen Hackett
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wrote this in? Apple did actually have a Bluetooth keyboard with a numpad previously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Apple wireless keyboard, which is A1016, and this was in 2003. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will put a Google image search in the show notes for your viewing pleasure. Apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a thing in the past. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this is you remember that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the I remember seeing I never bought a Mac that came with this. But when I was Matt curious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the few years before about my first Mac, this was the one that was in the stores that I would that I would play with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then and try. It’s the one with the with the white keys and the clear plastic case
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve got one of these. I’m quite a multiple one. So I’ve met right. This keyboard is most notable
⏹️ ▶️ John for being perhaps the most disgusting keyboard Apple has ever made because like the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John top of it is open. It’s kind of like a bathtub, like a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco plastic bathtub and the
⏹️ ▶️ John keys are in it and it as like food and gross stuff falls between the keys of the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see it’s like a glass bottom boat for the scum of your keyboard. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco see all the crap down there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the worst. Like nothing makes you feel more disgusting than and having one of these keyboards and then just like tilting
⏹️ ▶️ John it up and looking at the sides and the bottom, like, oh, the worst. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful. Ever since then, they’ve been opaque for a reason. And
⏹️ ▶️ John way thinner, like this is giant. Like look at this thing, can you believe, talk about key travel, like the keys alone are like three times the thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Apple aluminum keyboards. I would still prefer that. Oh, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John The keys on this keyboard were not great, by the way. Like I was using my, there’s a reason I used my Apple Extended 2
⏹️ ▶️ John up until RSI stopped me from doing it. This was not a good keyboard in any sense of the word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we just not get Marco started on keyboards, which actually tangential real-time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up. My MacBook Adorable should arrive tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you don’t have it yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh man, I wanted to ask you about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, not until tomorrow, unfortunately. But, and knowing UPS, it’ll be the end of the darn day, which is frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco course it will. It’ll be like seven o’clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First world problems. First world problems, if there are any.
HomePod “screen”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, moving on there was some anonymous feedback about the HomePod screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and we’re putting that in quotes and So to set a little bit of context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is there’s been a little bit of debate over whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The HomePod has a screen on the top and I think that some people had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like there were some leaks beforehand that it either Absolutely would or absolutely would not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a screen and whatever the leak was doesn’t really matter matter. And then when it was announced last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, there was a lot of debate over whether or not what they showed is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is not a screen. Because all they really showed was this like Siri waveform on the top of the device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is parallel with like the surface it’s resting on parallel with the floor. It’s the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking waveform on the top. Is that really a screen? Like you could hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey present that just by having some LEDs, like a handful of larger LED lights behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of like translucent top. Can you really interact with that? Can you show anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that screen or can you only show the waveform and nothing else? And so…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, complicating matters, some people have said that it can also show a plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and minus for volume control that are touch sensitive. So there’s some speculation about is it it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually a touch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so there was some debate about this. Gruber, I don’t remember what side he came down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, it doesn’t really matter, but he said it’s one thing. There are many people who disagreed. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an anonymous person wrote in and told us the following, the Siri waveform on the top of the device is an LED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey array covered by a circular feathered mask to prevent bleed and a diffuser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two. Each LED is rather large, about half a centimeter in diameter, arranged in a somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circular pattern. The purpose is only to display the Siri waveform, but it does change behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and color based on the state of Siri and the device. There are also plus and minus buttons, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was commenting on, for volume control which appear during music playback or when hovering your hand over the device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These work similarly to the waveform in that they are white LEDs covered by a mask and diffuser. The entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top panel is covered in glass. This individual would consider the controls more like capacitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buttons rather than a full-on display. However, the entire top panel is capacitive, so gestures could hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be performed for additional controls like a tap, double tap, swipe, etc.” And this seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be true as of what we saw at DubDub. I don’t know where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I come down on this. Like I don’t think it’s a screen in the sense that most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean and that it can show really anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, if that’s a screen, then the Amazon Echo has a screen because the Echo also has a whole bunch of LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top that show different states.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So it’s like a semantic, I think it comes down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a semantic argument about what is or is not a screen. I don’t think it really matters, but this was certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some interesting feedback about how supposedly this is all wired together under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hood. Yeah, I mean that’s not a screen, that’s indicator lights. You know, it’s indicating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state with lights. That is very much not a screen. That might still be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very useful. I mean, the LEDs on the Amazon Echo cylinders are very useful. They’re quite nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do indicate the state of the device and they provide useful feedback. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say that this is bad. However, I would never in a million years say this has a screen and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this day and age, I think what we’re seeing from this market is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe there’s something to having a screen. There are certainly cases where at least having some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen output would be nice, such as watching a timer countdown. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends. I think if this is very early hardware, probably, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably why you couldn’t even, you know, demo Siri and stuff on it. So this could change that could be a placeholder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe maybe the software UI for the final screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will be there wasn’t ready yet and so they just put this thing in there as a temporary thing to show the demo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco units during this like listening test and stuff. We don’t actually know yet. It does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of stuff to put in there to and have like a big touch panel to then not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have at least a small OLED screen below. Like I’m thinking basically have it be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a you know, roughly the capabilities of an Apple watch face. You know, like not having a ton of smarts and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, lots of apps and everything, but just like some display of some things, clock, weather, timers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, basic stuff like that. So that when you ask for things, it can be more useful. That would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, if the focus of this is going to remain pretty much mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for music, and then just a little bit for smart home stuff, basically the way it was presented to us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it doesn’t maybe need a screen. Like if the idea of this is to have it in a big white Ikea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room with nothing in it and you’re looking at it from 10 feet away when you ask it to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something by Drake or whoever, I don’t know anything about music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least modern music, then it wouldn’t need a screen, especially one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top because you won’t be able to see it from 10 feet away. But if it is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete also in the smart assistant area, which I think it should, and I would like it to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I don’t think for a $350 product, I don’t think that’s good enough. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should have a small screen that can actually do things like display timers. And so I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just a placeholder hardware thing until they get the final hardware done, or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also possible that this tip is complete garbage and total BS, and maybe that was actually a bitmap screen. But from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way people were describing it, who saw it, who had hands on, or actually nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had hands on, but people were like in the room with it. And from what we saw,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this does sound like a pretty plausible explanation for what that was. Mike Santos Sure. Jared Polin And why there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now this kind of disagreement on whether or not it has a screen, because it kind of looks like one, but this explains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it pretty well. Mike
⏹️ ▶️ John Santos So does the Echo have a touchpad on top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Jared Polin No. The whole top of the Echo is a turnable knob, so you can turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for volume, which is very nice. and it has two physical buttons on top,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mute and like an action button. So like if a timer’s beeping, you can hit the action button and it stops it rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than having to say, a lot of stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John So on the Google Home, it seems like they’re doing a very similar thing to the Apple thing where it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of colored LEDs, like light changing LEDs underneath the diffuser type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for volume control on the Google Home, you trace out a circle along the line of
⏹️ ▶️ John the circle of LC, like it basically it’s a touch pad, like a very crude trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing. And Apple having a whole glass top, and according to this thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John to be believed, supporting not just arbitrary gestures like you would on a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John on the glass top of it, but also apparently like hovering, so they must have proximity detection, like when your hand gets close
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, the plus and the minuses light up. Yeah, that definitely makes me think that this is not a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of hardware, but like that they, but this is a design that they have done whether
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an earlier design and they have already changed their mind but they don’t have it manufactured and they’re gonna put a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure. But the second thing is what Marco just pointed out, they can’t put a screen on this to any
⏹️ ▶️ John great effect unless they totally redesign it because a screen that faces the ceiling, it’s better than nothing, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty crap compared to the Amazon whatever show thing. Like you can’t glance
⏹️ ▶️ John at this from across the kitchen to see what your timer is because you probably won’t even be able to see the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John it to see the timer. Timer needs to be facing you. You need to, preferably like multiple timers. You can’t sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John see it at an angle depending on where you nestle this thing in the corner. So they need an entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John different device if they’re gonna go screen, all of which makes me think this thing on the top will be a thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can gesture and wiggle your fingers on and have some status information on, but not a thing that Apple expects you
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at because it’s just in the wrong place.
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A faster Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Indochino for sponsoring our show. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so moving on to iPad, we have a bunch of things to talk about about the iPad and some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it we’ll cover this week and I think some of it we’ll cover next week because we have some food stories to tell. But a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of the show, Serenity Caldwell, has written a lot about the iPad, has used the new iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit, and has tweeted about the iPad a fair bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m just going to kind of shotgun approach some of the things she’s talked about. One of the things she was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking of—now Serenity, if you don’t know her, is a very talented illustrator. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if she’s like professionally trained or not, but to my eyes, she’s really, really good at it. And so she has some very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strong and good opinions about the pencil in a way that I would never be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to because I don’t know how to draw anything but stick figures. So, Serenity was saying that the Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has always been 240 Hz on both old and new iPad Pros. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s true. It samples
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco at 240 Hz. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the difference is that the touch input on, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct me if I get this wrong, the touch input on the old Pros was much slower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than 120 Hz. Is that right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touch was sampled at, I believe, only 60 Hz. touch I believe was sampled with the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the display. Only the pencil was sampled at the super high rate, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know at least the pencil was, but I think only the pencil was. And then also the frame rate of the display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the entire UI was 60 frames per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think she’s saying that touch was 120. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so no matter, it says in her tweet, you know, so it’s the difference between input and output. Touch input was 120, pencil 240,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but output was only 60. So there you go. The point we’re driving at is the particular numbers don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter that much. The point is just that it’s all better now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Serendi continues, you know, that was great info for predicting lines and touch, but it couldn’t render the input at the rate it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was being given. With these new pros, the screen can now output at 120 hertz. So touch is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at par, pencil input is closer to par, less prediction and more accuracy. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a series of tweets that we’ll put in the show notes talking about all of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of them, if I open these up, I believe has a video. Do we have that here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The video of her showing the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two different devices, the old iPad Pro and the new one. If we don’t have that in the show notes, then I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to dig it up. But it’s just, in summary, it’s damned impressive. It really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. It’s super duper impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is the kind of thing that I I wish I used the pencil more. I wish I had that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensibility and habit. I don’t, but I wish I did because seeing Serenity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do stuff with it in person that everybody see, like wow, it’s like, I mean, first of all, like yeah, she’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, you know, typically it’s like, you know, the talent of the person is way more important than the tools in most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things. But just as a nerd looking at the tools, wow, they’re impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s, I could not believe the latency and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smoothness of it, it is incredible. And if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a heavy pencil user, I highly suggest you consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrading your iPad because it is remarkably different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I was able to see it side by side and it really is a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t tell my wife, because then I’ll have to buy another iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John the sample rate thing, like it may seem weird to people that both the previous and the new iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John are sampling at a faster rate than the screen could display. Because it’s true of both of them. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil’s at 240 and now the screen is only 120. And back then the pencil was 240 and the screen was only 60. What good
⏹️ ▶️ John is it to sample if your output is only a fraction of that frame rate?
⏹️ ▶️ John And as Serenity points out, it’s about knowing where the implement, whether it be your finger
⏹️ ▶️ John or the pencil, is so you can make predictions about the line. It’s kind of like client-side prediction in
⏹️ ▶️ John first-person shooters, in that you want it to feel like there is less latency than there is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so as the pencil is gliding along, even though you don’t get to display this frame
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t get to display this frame, but you’re sampling it fast enough that you know, okay, now I know where it is
⏹️ ▶️ John in time to render this frame. And so it reduces the perceived latency. And Serenity’s
⏹️ ▶️ John number were 20 milliseconds versus 50. So the old pencil was 50 milliseconds, the new one is 20.
⏹️ ▶️ John The pencil is being sampled at exactly the same rate, 240 Hertz on both the old and the
⏹️ ▶️ John new. The difference is all about the display can now refresh more frequently. And
⏹️ ▶️ John once again, referring to that, what was it, the Microsoft video with their little test demo device where they can
⏹️ ▶️ John scale the latency from like a hundred to ten to one. Right. So this have the latency
⏹️ ▶️ John less than, you know, so it was it got cut and cut in half even more, more than half.
⏹️ ▶️ John How close are we to an actual pencil, which is zero milliseconds latency?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the demo video, we’ll put a link in the show notes, 10 milliseconds still
⏹️ ▶️ John feels better than, than obviously better than 100 and probably better
⏹️ ▶️ John than 20. One millisecond looks a lot better than 10. So if you wanna say like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how close are we for this to being just like real pencil, we’re getting close, but we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John an order of magnitude off. We’re still 20 versus one. So hold
⏹️ ▶️ John on tight for I guess five years from now, we can get it down from 20 milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ John to five or something and we’ll start to be in the ballpark and then things start to get really interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, one more reason why you wanna sample the pencil at a faster rate than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display possibly is that if you’re drawing very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big lines quickly, lines quickly, so like you’re moving, there’s a lot of motion happening. If you’re only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sampling it at 60 hertz, you might, or even 120 hertz, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re drawing really fast, big squiggly lines, the number of points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re capturing might be further apart than the pixels, and so you have to then, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re drawing a line, like from the software side, you just have to interpolate, you have to, all right, well, it went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this dot to this dot, and we’ll assume it’s gonna be a smooth curve between those two dots. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the higher sampling rate is, the less interpolation you have to do, and the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re actually capturing what the movement was that the artist was doing if they’re making a really big,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it takes time to render frames too. So you always have to pick like, okay, tell me where all the inputs are because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna start doing the work to draw the screen. And then it says, okay, I got all your inputs. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John input, if it was exactly the same frame rate as the screen, you might fall on a boundary where like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have liked to wait three more milliseconds and get the next input. And that would, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a better prediction. But it turns out that, you know, they weren’t lined up in the video games have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of problems with this, like in terms of the game engine trying to get its work done at just the right time to give the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the system time to render out that frame. You don’t want big gaps. And this is also in by when the AR VR things
⏹️ ▶️ John where they put up a big like, sort of like a Gantt chart and Microsoft project of like all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are happening in a system and you don’t want to have big gaps there. You want everything to finish just in time to get the optimal
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rate output for the optimal experience. And same thing with those, what was it, the
⏹️ ▶️ John NVIDIA, I think, G-Sync thing, where they try to synchronize the refresh of the monitor with the game engine, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John to reduce those gaps so you get a smoother, tear-free drawing at
⏹️ ▶️ John variable frame rates, instead of having a 60 hertz vertical blanking interval holdover from the
⏹️ ▶️ John CRT days, doing away with that and trying to get the engine and the screen all on the same page. having
⏹️ ▶️ John more samples also makes it more likely that you will be able to get a recent
⏹️ ▶️ John input close to the optimal window for handing off to the system to render
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and speaking of those sorts of things, Joel LeBlanc writes in and saying, people are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferring 120 hertz displays in blind tests. And this appears to be gamer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related. In fact, the actual title, vast majority of gamers prefer 120 hertz monitors. but uh…
The 120 Hz iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey People like them. Although, did you, somewhere I feel like I heard some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that it kind of made them a little queasy, which is interesting. I hypothetically may have seen one of these iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very briefly, and I liked it, but I haven’t used it for a long time. Marco, you received yours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today? Yesterday? Yesterday. Okay, and what do you think? It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculously good. It is so good. Not only is it faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than John’s Mac Pro, but it is it is just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good in so many ways. So you know I’m not a heavy iPad user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use my iPad lightly, but frequently. Like I sold my old one on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 24 hours before my new one was going to arrive. So I went like 24 without having an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I actually really missed it and I never thought like two years ago I would never I never would have guessed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be in that state what really changed the iPad for me what what what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know and for everyone this is a different thing but if what really made me get the iPad finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after years was the combination of having really great speakers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smart keyboard and basically leaving the smart keyboard permanently attached combined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with really great speakers so that it basically became my kitchen computer because it plays podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can look stuff up if I have if I’m cooking off of a recipe online. I can look I can hold the recipe there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can browse the web while I’m waiting for coffee to roast and like it’s just having it always in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard made that difference for me and having the great speakers made it by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best podcast player that you can have in a kitchen because you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast you know the experience of using overcast through something like Sonos or Alexa is not great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using the app is always going to be better than that by a mile. And the speakers are really good and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard puts it up in a nice position for like standing up at counter use. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just great. I very much enjoy the iPad for that. And then like you know if we’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching some you know low mental effort TV at night I will bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad over to the couch and it’ll be my couch computer like what everyone else in the world has done for years. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is basically me discovering what everyone else discovered about the iPad a long time ago. So anyway, I now like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad even though I’m not using it to get much work done. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy it as a basic entertainment device and a light work device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so the new hardware is ridiculously awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John In general… Would you say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blow away? In general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not waiting for anything. And I’m using the iOS 11 beta. First thing I did was install the beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I was using it on my other one, because this is clearly something that I want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, I want to get used to it, I want to learn it. And the iOS 11 beta is buggy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and slow, and slaughters the battery. Nobody should be using the iOS 11 beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am using it, but nobody should. It is a terrible idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put this beta on any device rely on or care about at all. It also apparently has been breaking some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s devices. So again I really don’t recommend that anybody install the beta. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did and so I can’t really judge things like battery life and even performance. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beta is really slow and it was really slow on my old iPad but on the new one it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially noticeably faster because the hardware is so much better. If you do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy on the iPad. If you were just a heavy iPad user, I strongly suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you check it out. And I should clarify also, this is the 10.5. I did not get the 12.9 because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my aforementioned use of basically casual plus light work, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the 12.9 fans would agree that the 10.5 is the size to get for that. The 12.9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the size to get if you are a heavy iPad productivity user and you want two full screen apps side by side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis and you don’t really need to carry it around a whole lot, then the 12.9 is for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s not gonna be most people. Most people, the 10.5 is the size to get. And this is all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything I’ve just said is not even mentioning the 120 hertz display. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me tell you, when you see the 120 hertz display,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ruins everything else for you forever. It is as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a lot of people, I think, or will be as big to a lot of people, as the retina transition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’m glad you qualified that because had I hypothetically spent a little time with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of these last week, I came into it and my first impression was, meh. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw it being used for a while, hypothetically, I saw it being used for a while and I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eh, actually this is pretty impressive. And where I left it, not having used one, even hypothetically, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than a few minutes, was this is important and it’s a bigger deal than I initially thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a lot of people have been saying it’s as big as retina. Perhaps I’ll feel that way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later, but sitting here now after only brief usage, it is certainly the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressive thing that I’ve seen in a long time a la retina, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think it was as big as retina. But we’ll see what I feel like and whenever I get my hands on one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually, one day, or if the phone, for example, has them, you know, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t as big as retina in the sense of looking at it. if you just look at a screenshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t see it. It is basically the motion version of Retina. It’s like- That’s an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way of looking at it, yeah, yeah. Any kind of motion, any animation, any touch input, scrolling, especially scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text, like if you’re reading a webpage, you notice that. Like, because when you’re scrolling, the text blurs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less. So if you’re reading while scrolling, like it’s a noticeable difference. Even just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving page to page in Springboard, just like, that’s the first thing I did when I got it, right before I installed the beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I guess like swipe back and forth on springboard like between my two pages of after like whoa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a way bigger gain than I thought it would be you know I I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t think it would be that noticeable but it really is that noticeable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean if I had to pick either only having retina or only having 120 Hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d pick retina every time but we already have right now know retina is a done deal now like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know well tell it to the MacBook Air but for the most part it’s a done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now and so now we now that we’ve all established that we’ve had that we can move on from that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now Wow 120 Hertz is that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of advancement and it won’t be as high for some people for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I really think it is on that magnitude
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the comparison to Retina is extremely apt because just like Retina,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guarantee you there are people who you will put this thing in front of who
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea that it’s 120 Hertz will not be able to distinguish between the two and will not
⏹️ ▶️ John care about it. Like sure I’ve shown a lot of people Retina screens they’re like don’t you see how different
⏹️ ▶️ John these screens are these pixels are the size of boulders and you can’t even see them here they’d be like yeah like the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing again in the TV parlance thing that they are much more likely to notice say that screens brighter.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t like some people just don’t care about retina. They don’t see it. You point it out to them. Look at the text. Look at the serif. See
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re like, oh, yeah, I don’t care. Now it could be those same people who don’t care, get used
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and can’t go back to the other thing. But it could be that they’re just always like, well, that’s not not
⏹️ ▶️ John important to me or my vision is not acute enough for me to be able to notice the differences. 120 hertz is just
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Some people will be like, but how can you not? It’s just like what Marco said before about drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the pencil. When you scroll really fast if you’ve only got 60 frames per second it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John that the line that was previously in the middle of the screen in the next frame is at the top of the screen so your device
⏹️ ▶️ John shows two frames line in the middle and line at the top and you get to see no position in between
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that if you were taking a piece of paper and moving it by that same speed you would see more positions in
⏹️ ▶️ John between right and so 120 Hertz gives you more frames in between makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John appear smoother and I’ll bet there are people you show that to, you know, look at the slow motion, look, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t you tell the difference? They’ll be like, oh, all right, I guess that’s nice. But so I think a
⏹️ ▶️ John retina is perfectly apt. It’s a thing that’s gonna mean so much to certain geeks and other people will absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John take for granted. And I think that everyone will just become accustomed to, so that if you fast forward many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John like say we get the screen up to 240 and you pull out, it’s too bad we never had a 30 frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John because iOS is always aiming for 60, wasn’t it 60 from the beginning? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey remember. I believe that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if we had 30 and compare that to a 240, people like, oh, how did you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John use this 30 frame per second thing? It’s so terrible. And I think it’s back to this this gamer story here
⏹️ ▶️ John that I mentioned in the last show, like gamers are always obsessing about frame rate. And the question was like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the point of diminishing returns? Like, should you get a system that can play this game, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John at 500 frames per second? Or once you pass 60 or so, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it not matter anymore? And that’s what gamers are always obsessed with. And this this test of 120 hertz monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, was trying to figure out, like asking these gamers who are presumably very sensitive to frame rates and their first person shooters and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. One of the questions was, can you even tell, like they put them in front of a screen? We’re not going to tell you if this is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the 2100 hertz one, the 60 hertz one. Can you even tell if the screen you’re in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of is one 20 or 60 and most of them could not all of them though, but most of them was like 88% could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, I’ve correctly identified the screen that I’m using. This is a one 20 and this is a 60. So the fact that there are even some gamers
⏹️ ▶️ John who couldn’t tell shows and by the way this was a game obviously this that with a frame rate that exceeds 60 so
⏹️ ▶️ John it would you know it would look different and things sometimes it’s not even that easy to tell and the other question for the gamers perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John is like did i do better on the screen with the higher frame rate and the methodology of this article
⏹️ ▶️ John is not conclusive because they you know have a few people playing something or whatever but that’s what they want to know is like
⏹️ ▶️ John does this make me a better player or not and that probably all comes down with what it’s used to but for things like
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing with the the pencil it’s pretty clear that you know if you’re drawing with something in the line you’re tracing
⏹️ ▶️ John lags behind your cursor by twice as much on one device as another you’re gonna like the other one better
⏹️ ▶️ John but the fact that most people can tell shows that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the point of diminishing returns for first-person shooters may be hovering somewhere past 60 or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John that people can can see the difference especially with very fast motions
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty easily if you’re looking for it if you know what to look for if you have the two devices there and you move your finger on you can totally
⏹️ ▶️ John see the difference which makes me think that you know where is the limit on this for seeing the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of human visual acuity is would 240 would we be able to tell the
⏹️ ▶️ John difference between 240 and 120 and look at it and go oh wow I can really see that 120 looks like it’s all stuttery and this one
⏹️ ▶️ John is smooth as butter right or is there a point after which you know we can’t tell anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d put the two devices side by side and you scroll them as much as you want you’d be like I I can’t tell is this one 5,000 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John a second and this one is 2,000. I can’t tell anymore So we may be approaching that I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John someone should write in about the Human visual system and tell us at what point will be side-by-side scrolling to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop working on humans And that’s where Apple can stop their work. But in the meantime, they they should keep going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean I would even go further to say like this is so impressive that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all I think the reason why Maybe some people this makes them feel weird and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there actually is an accessibility option to to restrict to cap the frame rate at 60 Hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is probably for this reason in addition to looking really cool It’s jarring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how different it looks the first time you see it and the first time you you you touch it and move and you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco An animation it actually is like jarring and it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time you see a a like high frame rate movie and it like the soap opera effect on on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV’s that John loves so much like it’s kind of like that but but like you know the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer interaction version of that word like you’re looking at you’re like oh that’s this is like surreal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way it’s it’s a very jarring thing to see but I would so I will go as far as to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like it so much it makes such a big difference that between the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and the Mac Pro if one of them somehow somehow supports this on its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display, but the other one doesn’t this might be enough to convince me to to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision one way or the other on that like in the same way that when the 5k iMac came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out I gave up my cylinder Mac Pro because I wanted desktop retina so badly and that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way to get it at that time at that size this this is that big of a deal to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me now that I’ve seen it now that I play with it like now if the iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say say the iMac Pro can do it, like maybe the built-in screen can use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantages of an internal bus and everything. Say the iMac Pro can do 120 hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Mac Pro over some cable to some separate display can’t, I’ll get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro for that reason alone. That’s how good this is. I
⏹️ ▶️ John might consider that as well, although the Mac Pro is further hindered by the potential rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of 8K, because remember we were just talking about, boy, when will we be able to to do 5K at 60 frames per second over a cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, surprise, 8K at 120 hertz. Where’s your God now? Like, that’s a lot of damn
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels going over. There’s almost no hope, and that’s why Marco is right to, like, if you’re gonna pin your
⏹️ ▶️ John hopes on anything, pin it on the thing where they have everything in the box and they can hide the two ugly cables and the timing
⏹️ ▶️ John chip and all that other stuff. Like, they could conceivably pull that off, but even then, like, the GPU starts
⏹️ ▶️ John to weep at a certain point, like, start doing the math. That is a lot of pixels per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s it is a difficult challenge. And honestly, I would imagine that it
⏹️ ▶️ John is more perceptible on a device that you’re constantly touching and swiping. Maybe if you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Apple touch mouse and you’re swiping for scrolling, it would start to show up. But I do. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that I know that’s that’s a difficult. I have two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple touch pointing devices, one on each side of my keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, and you’re not drawing on your Mac screen with a pencil, I suppose. No. You can use your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John as a 120 hertz display that you can draw on when you connect to your
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. That didn’t get announced at WRC by the way, but it’s still out there. Yeah, if that feature ever ships.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, but I mean like, you know, one thing you do on desktop a lot is scroll. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re scrolling webpages all the time on desktop. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like… You can just page down and page up and have it set to jump. Smooth scrolling is for suckers. Instant
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey scrolling. That is so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John feature. I had that secret prep set for a long time. I think it’s gone now, though. I think you have no choice. You get smooth swirling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it or not. Yeah, I think when they went fully GPU rendered, I think that happened. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another reason to use Chrome, right, guys? Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Indochino, and MailRoute, and we’ll see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcasting is so
Post-show: WWDC cuisine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need to discuss a few things and the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the three things we need to discuss, the other two should be quick, is the food at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is your teaser everyone that it is coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it is coming this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so, I can’t wait because I haven’t had it yet because I wasn’t, I didn’t have a ticket. I can’t wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Before though we need to talk about a couple of different things. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stole something from DubDub. I’m admitting it publicly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Except Not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it everybody’s heart, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it is not everybody’s heart. That is very kind of you to even make that joke. Now, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t really steal anything. This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I just thought it was funny and a nice story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how Apple nerds are actually nice people. So I forget what day it was. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to say it was Wednesday. It doesn’t really matter. But one of the days toward the end of the week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went and I sat down with my old and busted 2015, circa 2015,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro before Touch Bar, before anything fancy and cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had wanted to use Ethernet. And so as with prior years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plugged in my Thunderbolt Ethernet connector, plugged in one of the Ethernet ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me back up a half step. So basically they have areas in the conference center where they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet ports, they’ll have power strips. And in years past, they used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to actually provide Thunderbolt to Ethernet connections that you could use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You didn’t have to bring your own, but because the new hotness is USB-C, that’s what they had this year instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they had just plain old Ethernet cables that you could plug into a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector that you provide, which is what I did. So I sit down, I plug in my Ethernet adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I download a bunch of videos, I leave, and I completely forget my Ethernet adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap. I go back almost exactly 24 hours later, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was still there. My ethernet adapter. I was overjoyed because that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a $30 damn adapter and no nerds, none of these nerds was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big enough jerk or noticed to take it. I was so excited. But then that, then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that awkward social moment where there’s a bunch of people around you and you sit down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you plug in and then you take the adapter and walk off? And I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco only imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the people around me thought. Because, hand on heart, it was the exact same spot I was the day before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am 99% sure it was the same adapter. But here it is. I sit down without an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adapter and walk away with an adapter. And I’m sure the people around me were like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just happened? But anyway, so yeah. So when I say I stole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something from DubDub, really, I stole something that I had left at DubDub. Also tangential note, I don’t know if we’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this on the show, and you two obviously know the answer, but for the listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have one of these Ethernet to whatever adapters, so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet to USB-C, Ethernet to Thunderbolt, how do you ensure that the ones that Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t leave behind don’t walk away? What do you do? Because Apple came up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a completely genius solution to this problem. So obviously you two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, but the answer is take a, um, what do you call that tie?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. A zip tie. Take a zip tie. And if you imagine an ethernet cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way they generally work is they have like the part with all the, you know, the eight or whatever it is, wires in it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then like a little tabby that pops up. And in order to pull the ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cord out of the device it’s plugged into, you have to push the tabby down. So what they do is they take the zip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tie and tie it super tight around the Ethernet cable under the tabby thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the only way to get this out is to push down on the tabby thing, but you can’t because the zip tie is there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How freaking clever is that? It’s been the same way for years, but I don’t think we’ve ever had an impetus to talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Super clever. Such a low tech, but great solution to the problem, which I thought was really funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yep, that was me stealing something from DubDub, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not really at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have just told them you’re using the Apple app that makes it look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it, but you totally paid for it. I’m using easy pay. You just put your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone in it for a few seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and then take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, just walk away. Surely nobody would have thought of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that. It works with everything in Apple stores, by the way. Just come in with
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone. Doesn’t even need to be on. Doesn’t even need to have a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or work. Just point it at things and walk out with them. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco God, please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. Oh, don’t do that. Okay, so we should also talk about what Marco did for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. And as far as I can tell from every time I saw you, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just drank coffee and sat outside. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically it. It was glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was funny. So at San Jose, there was a coffee shop called Social
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Policy, which was either genuinely or ironically called Sopo. I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was intentional or not. I mean, their sign said Sopo on it, so I guess it’s embraced. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a—from what I could tell, a nice coffee shop. Actually, I guess I should say more of like a cafe, they had a little bit of food.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you talked about this on, was it Run Loop? Is that right? Which show were you on that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco discussed this? Yeah, Run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Loop, and also Under the Radar, but I don’t think it’s out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to Run Loop. But yeah, so Marco basically each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning, and jump in when you’re ready, but I’m just telling you my observation, would roll out of bed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it suited him, and then shuffle on down to social policy, which was like across the street
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Fairmont Hotel, across the street from the Four Points Hotel, very, very close to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conference center. So you would roll into social policy and because California doesn’t have weather, you could sit outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seemed like no matter when I passed by social policy, you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, to your credit, often with different people, but you were a fixture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire week. So it was really you just holding court in social policy. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone wanted a conference with the king, they just had to show up at social policy and that’s where he would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s basically true. and there was even there was one day where I went there for breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried to leave and then ran into a bunch of our friends who were heading there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and right back there with them. Then I had a lunch meeting there like 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes later. So I just stayed hung out with our friends and then change tables for the lunch meeting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then then then had the lunch meeting. Then after that, like there were some other reason why I had to be there like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was basically I spent like a whole day there, but it’s a great place. I mean, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things in general that I like about having it in San Jose that we have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had really in San Francisco, is that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are these clear common places, because it’s a much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area that most people are really walking between, like the hotels that most people are staying in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were very, very close to the conference center, and there were more affordable hotels close to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conference center than there are in San Francisco. And so everyone was in, not everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more people were in a smaller area. It seems like San Jose is a much quieter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco town most of the time, outside of conferences, at least in this part of the town. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were very few other people walking around who weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conference attendees or adjacent people like me. And so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a really, really good hangout area in general. There were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a handful of coffee shops, a handful of bars, a handful of restaurants that are all right around there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you could just hang out at one of them and you would see tons of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were conference attendees. And if you know a lot of people there like we do, you’d see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of your friends. And so it was a really, really great scenario. And San Francisco never had that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no place in San Francisco that you could sit and just run into people that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily and that quickly that was that nice and that you would run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into people that often. It was great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Summarize Marco’s review. San Jose, a great place not to attend WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Honestly, yes. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know what to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect going into it. This is my first time going without a ticket, but wow, was it great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and and I should you know and to to clarify here, I talked a little bit that’s on under the radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which should come out about the same time as this to clarify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons I was able to do that is because I’ve been going for so many years with a ticket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I know a lot of people now. So when you know a lot of people’s, this is like a that’s fine for marketing like when you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, you can do that really easily. It’s harder if you don’t know it’s like if you don’t know anybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not recommend going out there with no conferences to attend because I think you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to anchor your day. If you know most unless you know a lot of people there you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of other things scheduled you need something to anchor your days. So go you know get a ticket to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a conference whether it’s WBDC or layers or all conf honestly it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much which one you pick you know pick whichever one appeals to you most and that you can get into and afford and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you are going out there mostly for social reasons and you already know some people out there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can hang out with and stuff, then going totally ticketless is pretty cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can recommend it because it’s a very different experience in San Jose than it ever was in San Francisco. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean I can’t count the number of breakfasts I had in San Francisco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that sad little bagel deli next to the park 55, just like as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John rushing out the door
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on the way out to try to make the morning session. Like I’ve had so many like sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breakfasts alone, just like rushing to Moscone, and that never happened in San
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jose. Like, I would go downstairs for breakfast and there would already be four people I know at the coffee shop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d order food and then eight more people would show up. It was just, it was awesome. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a very, very different experience. So I really did appreciate that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I’m giving you a hard time, but if it were me, I’d probably be in the exact same boat. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was really nice to have a place that we could all gather that would appeal to everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m not a coffee drinker, but they had other things to drink and they had food to eat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was right by the two most popular hotels, or at least amongst our kind of social circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, you would end up, because oftentimes you’d be eating outside, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be walking by maybe to go to your hotel and be like, oh, there’s Marco. I’ll swing by and say, hey, and the next thing you know, it’s three hours later. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m giving you a hard time, but I couldn’t agree more with pretty much everything you just said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much the only thing I regret about not having a ticket this year is I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get one of those cool jackets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, and the pins! That’s right. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the first time in I would say four years, however long they’ve been doing those weird nylon track jackets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they finally have great jackets. Like, I even looked on eBay like should I just buy one on eBay? I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are dumping them. And sure enough the answer is yes people are dumping them, but they’re going for like a hundred and fifty dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more. Wow. I don’t want one that badly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Suddenly I don’t want mine. If it’s a large, maybe let’s talk. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. No, they were nice jackets. And yeah, I don’t think we did we talk about this last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode with the pins? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so. The pins, yeah, that other people have, but we haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So short, short version is when you walked in and registered, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a package of six pins and a country pin. So you know, a pin that shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the US flag or maybe like Federico got the Italian flag, etc. And the six pins, they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re differing reports as to how many of them were consistent, how many were different. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not all six were the same amongst every single attendee. So what ended up happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was you started like wheeling and dealing just like Disney style trying to find somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, uh, what was it, John, that you traded with Federico? You took a happy Mac and he took a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey metal logo. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John I sacrificed my metal pin, which is one of the ones I liked, but I had to do what it took to get a Happy Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you end up trading with people, and then at certain points throughout the week, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you went to certain things or did certain things, they would give you a pin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So at some point I was hanging out downstairs, maybe when I was leaving my dongle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind, and I got a San Jose pin. And you walked into the bash on Thursday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey afternoon, you got like a metal, not metal the M, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey metal like pinky and forefinger up with WWDC on it. And I think if you went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to one of the labs, you got like a Space Invader thing. If you went to another lab, you got something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I forget what it was. That was a rocket. Somebody got a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rocket on them. Oh yeah. And so if you’re curious what the pins are, almost all of them, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not all of them, are in the WWDC app on the iPhone. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sticker pack for messages, which I also thought was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco neat. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cute. Yeah. So I’m being told via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sam the Geek in the chat room that Space Invaders was the games meet up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there were some other ones elsewhere as well. But anyways, the point is you would kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exchange these pins, if you so desired, throughout the course of the week, and you could kind of, quote unquote, earn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more as you did different things throughout the week. got your wristband
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go into the bash. You got either a command Z or one other kind of pin. I forget what the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one was. But anyways, I thought that was really clever. At first I was like, come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, really? But it ended up being really cute and really fun. And I am fully on board with them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing that again. I put a sunglasses emoji and a thumbs up emoji on my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bag. So I’m a sunglasses guy giving a thumbs up. Jelly in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chat, Jelly Bean Soup said Born to Code was the other one when you got your wristband. To be honest, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really matter. But the point is, these pins I thought were really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, if you happen to be selling one on eBay with a good set of pins, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for over $300 then. My word. If you would have asked me before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did this search to predict how much they were going for, I would have guessed maybe like $50.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they’re going for a lot, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a lot of pins. So
⏹️ ▶️ John late to the pin trading game I think maybe Disney started it but several years ago the penny arcade Expo
⏹️ ▶️ John goes yeah go and search for how much a complete pin collection and any of those other conferences or venues
⏹️ ▶️ John goes for Apple It’s finally found another market where they can make a
⏹️ ▶️ John small number of finely crafted things sell for a huge amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’re not selling them That’s why they’re worth a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. Well secondary market It’s like when people get their iPhones early and then they sell them immediately on eBay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing. Only there will never be any more of these pins if you didn’t get one. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too late. And thanks again to our friend, Sam the Geek in the chat. We have learned that if I want to buy the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jacket without the WBC logo on it, it appears to be the Levi’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called the trucker jacket and it’s 70 bucks. I’ll put a link in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So I actually might. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really, really nice on everybody. The only thing is I don’t really know whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a medium or a large. the only question, so I’ll have to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, the time has come. We need to talk about the food. And Marco, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be as exciting for you, perhaps, but we have to talk about the food.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting for me, you have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with the most important thing. There was Odwalla.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, there was no Mango Tango. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was just basically the whole week was a long troll of Casey List. There were trams. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what they’re called. It doesn’t really matter. But there were trams that ran actually right next to social policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the tram or many of the trams, one of the designs on the tram, there was a billboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that took up the entire side of the tram. It was one of the situations where they painted an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advertisement on the side of the tram. One of them was an Odwalla advertisement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not only that, but it was featuring Mango Tango.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We get into the show, and actually, I think people had seen some Odwalla coolers, which is what we had seen in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past, and they had sent me pictures on Twitter, and I’m all excited with myself, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not see one Mango Tango all week. You guys, the struggle was real.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco There was orange juice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a chalky chocolate milk sort of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John what was the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey John? There was that orange
⏹️ ▶️ John one that was the decoy. I almost rushed
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it. I’m like oh finally I got mango tango. I’m gonna pick one of these up for Casey but it was a decoy. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like It was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John decoy. It did have mango in it right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah it was I think so. I tweeted about it at some point. But yeah it was the entire week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of Vaudevala was one long troll of Casey List. And now I know exactly how how you felt several years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, when you had the long troll of Marco Armand when they took away Strawberry Sea Monster. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was the worst, you guys. It was the worst. It was also funny talking to people because after I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been chatting about it both online and on the show, people came up to me and one of the common things that everyone said to me was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did you ever look at the nutrition information on an Odwalla? And the story I told them, which is true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it wasn’t until like my third or fourth dub-dub that I finally took a look at the nutrition information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those things are like 300 or 400 calories a bottle or something like that. Whatever the number is, it is intense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no way, like any kind of juice that you’re gonna be having in the general public drink,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs tons of sugar to taste good. It’s always gonna have tons of sugar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, it’s bad. But anyway, so the Odwalla, that was the thing. So the boxed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lunches, and John, at this point, feel free to jump in whenever you’re ready. Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t get to the boxed lunches. I should mention the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breakfast. The breakfast, I think I only had one day because I was running around most of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other day sometimes at Social Policy. Did they have the world’s worst bagels, John, as per usual?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, they did, that’s right. Well, we have to talk about the cream cheese.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was a downgrade. I feel like it was a downgrade on the breakfast. Starting off with the breakfast, I always have the breakfast,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they usually have a lot of junk food for breakfast. It’s like, well, if you’re gonna get bad quality food,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it junk food, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco junk food- I’ll tell you one thing, by the way, the breakfast at Social Policy was amazing. Like, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like five or six different amazing options. It’s so good. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John best breakfast I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John conference. Yeah, the social policy breakfasts definitely look better. But the junk food
⏹️ ▶️ John they usually have in San Francisco for the past few years is they have various kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of danishes with some kind of fruit jelly. Again, 90% sugar, speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John things that appear to be fruit but are actually just sugar. Donuts
⏹️ ▶️ John is what they normally have at San Francisco. They also have bagels. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they have these big… Are they really bagels?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, whatever. West Coast bagels. With a bunch of different spreads. They have butter, you can put it on, usually jelly,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also whipped cream cheese. So this year, it seemed like the same stuff. Oh, there are the danishes
⏹️ ▶️ John with the little fruit in the middle. Oh, there are the quote unquote bagels. But the cream cheese and
⏹️ ▶️ John the spread situation was kind of grim. They did have butter in little balls, but I think it was unsalted butter, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a technical foul there. I don’t like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Cream cheese, they did not have… Giant
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they did not have a giant, you know open vat of whipped cream cheese instead. They
⏹️ ▶️ John had Casey proof packages Philadelphia brand Casey it was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay, all that so now I have to feel is he’s a tiny man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have to fill in some color commentary, so I don’t know I don’t think I’m gonna be able to find an image of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but but But Americans, anyway, I think this is a uniquely American thing. So Kraft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a cream cheese. The brand is Philadelphia Cream Cheese. And one of the ways it comes is rather than in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tub, it comes as like a little brick. If you’ve ever held or opened a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brick of Philadelphia cream cheese, it has this unique wrapper in it. Marco, do you know what I’m talking about? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of aluminum foil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not— Yeah. It’s a rectangle that’s kind of foily, but it’s thick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s lined. Right. And then it has that weird ridge across the top that you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to peel apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Okay, so with that mental model in mind—and again, if you’re not from America or have never seen this, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely am sorry, but I don’t know. I’m looking at Google search or Google images and I can’t find an example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if we find one, we’ll put it in the show notes. But anyway, imagine a really thick aluminum foil, and on the top of the brick, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pushed together. The two ends of it are pushed together, and you’re supposed to peel them apart, just like Marco said. So what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had at Dub Dub was they had kind of like little mini versions of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was the same material, but it was the size of like a ketchup mail, a little bit bigger than a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ketchup packet, but kind of around that size. So you with me so far, Marco? Like similar material,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, much, much smaller. So I sit down embarrassingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right at the edge of that outdoor seating area. So anyone can walk by and see me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I try to open—and I actually got two of these cream cheeses because I’m a man that likes my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cream cheese, and so I didn’t think one would be enough. I get two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve never sounded more New York than you just have right then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. So I try to open it on the side because it says open here and it points to the side. And I notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that—you know, at first I try to do the tear thing, like tear off the side because you would expect like a perforation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. So I go to tear off the side—I really shouldn’t be telling this story publicly, but it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny not to. I go to tear off the side and that doesn’t work. And then I realize, wait a second, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks a lot like the top of the brick of cream cheese. I know what I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. I have to pull it apart. I kid you not, I spent five minutes across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two different cream cheeses trying to pull this damn thing apart. I’ve never felt dumber in my life, but it’s the truth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not figure it out. So I ended up having the world’s worst bagel plain because I just couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t have like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven hours to work on this. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John gave up? That’s the best part of the story is that you were defeated. That it wasn’t like it was really
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to get it out or you made a big mess when you opened it up. You were defeated. You
⏹️ ▶️ John surrendered to the cream
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cheese packets.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you had a second run, you’re like, okay, let me just put this down. It’s all hot and like slippery now for my finger
⏹️ ▶️ John reason. Let me get the second fresh one. Let me take a new approach. Nope. Oh, and two, you were oh and two
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cream cheese packets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish I could tell you I was making this up just for the listeners’ enjoyment. I swear to God, this is exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like you should have at least resorted to your sort of like animalistic nature and
⏹️ ▶️ John just torn the thing open with your teeth to just be like, you know what? You’re not going to beat me packet
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cream cheese.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true. I tried with my teeth, couldn’t get it. So I am I am I can laugh about it because it is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn funny, but it is also super
⏹️ ▶️ John let me be clear. These containers were not hard to open after he said this. The next
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey day I had to get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a package. I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t even see the package the first time I didn’t even bother getting a bagel because I’m like, oh, well, there’s no cream cheese. the hell am I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that bagel?” and I had already discovered that the, uh, they had croissants, but I already
⏹️ ▶️ John discovered that the, the, the butter wasn’t sold. But anyway, I took one of those packets, it has little things that open here,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tore, it opened. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, humans with opposable thumbs can open these, but not cases. Lies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Syracuse said those are lies. I texted him. I opened two packets on the first try. This is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. Two packets on the first try, you guys didn’t know. He really did send me a text and basically said, you f***ing idiot, look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was able to do. Oh my god,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s so funny. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, getting back to the breakfast, like, the lack of cream cheese for the bagels was good. It seemed to be less variety of
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. The croissants were okay, but sometimes they had weird almonds on top of them. Unsalted butter, no good. The danishes
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed about the same, maybe less variety. Like usually in the old thing, there would be like all five
⏹️ ▶️ John flavors of danishes and there was no donuts, no donuts at all. Not that the donuts were great at San Francisco, but some
⏹️ ▶️ John donuts are better than no donuts. All
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right, so I now have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another thing another thing that I regret about not having a ticket to the conference. I regret
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey not watching the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and experience this food.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. Okay, so let’s talk about the lunches. So we had heard rumblings of maybe there were executive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box lunches, maybe they were just box lunches. And so on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keynote day, we were eventually shuffled outside, if I’m not mistaken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they were distributing lunches. So immediate win, they offered Diet Coke. I believe we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the legendary Dub Dub Food episode a few episodes back that they had either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world’s worst lemonade or the world’s worst iced tea. And those used to be your two lunch selections.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you were there early enough, there was usually a single Odwalla fridge that would get raided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in seconds. So you had to be there early, but those were your options. Now this time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they actually offered Diet Coke, which is the nectar of the gods. Don’t listen to the other two guys don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen to the other two guys it’s true wait so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was already excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were the only three options like country time lemonade crap iced tea and diet coke
⏹️ ▶️ John more no they didn’t have them in a nice tea at all right I didn’t see it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I saw the iced tea or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John lemon had a bunch of soda that regular coke
⏹️ ▶️ John right I don’t know I didn’t never got a soda when I was there but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say yeah so I had my diet coke and the first day what I had was actually a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Caesar salad with some sort of seasoned shrimp on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You had shrimp at a conference box lunch? That’s a risky move, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to say, it actually tasted quite good. I was very impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That was day one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the rumors, before you get to day two, part of the rumors about San Jose was like, oh, there’s going to be a different caterer, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be totally different munch. Some people sent us pictures of lunches in the same convention center that look
⏹️ ▶️ John very different. But whatever powerful force is behind
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC lunch presentation, like big plastic container split into three
⏹️ ▶️ John parts, whatever, it was basically the same container that you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and love. Clear boxes, three little, you know, hospital tray
⏹️ ▶️ John sections, one for your main course, one for your side dish, one for your dessert. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was still in effect. So when I saw those things all rolled out, I’m like, oh, well, these lunches are not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John radically different than the old ones. And sure enough, they weren’t radically different. And for the first day lunch,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what I had was, I don’t know, some kind of sandwich. So a reasonable default choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was mostly impressed with how, like, maybe they heard
⏹️ ▶️ John our last episode where we talked about this, about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the mystery side dishes.
⏹️ ▶️ John The mystery side dishes that are just unidentifiable and the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco desserts that are weird. It tastes like salad
⏹️ ▶️ John dressing. The side dish, yeah, the side dish was identifiable. I forget what it was, but I think it was like a macaroni salad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was not weird and had like unknown vegetable matter in it and tasted different than it
⏹️ ▶️ John looked. It wasn’t good, mind you, like the pasta or whatever in the pasta salad was like mush,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It was bad, but when you looked at it, you say, I know how that’s gonna taste. And you put it in your mouth and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and regretfully you are correct. You know that’s what it tastes like.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And the dessert,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think on the first day was a cookie. And like, hey, and it wasn’t like a cookie that was like
⏹️ ▶️ John secretly something different. It was a straight up whatever it was, chocolate chip cookie or oatmeal cookie or whatever. And again, wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John a good cookie, but it tasted like a cookie. So I applaud them for making those two
⏹️ ▶️ John sections of the container reflect their
⏹️ ▶️ John in a sane way. And the sandwich, so this is day one. The sandwich, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a good sandwich, particularly the bread, which I can most charitably describe as a
⏹️ ▶️ John dark colored hot dog bun. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John not good bread, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Casey, you can go on to day two. Did you get food poisoning from the shrimp?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no I didn’t. Not to my knowledge anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you take one of the packages that was outside in the sun?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I was like one of the first people out there, so I mean it was still cold. Like I’m not too worried about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things did take a turn on day two, however. On day two, I think I went back outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall for sure. I love that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this is the only other significant story and then my stories are basically done. But on day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, I went and I grabbed my lunch and I forget what the options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were, but one of the options were a BLTA or a blat or whatever Californians call it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bacon, lettuce, tomato and avocado because hashtag California. And it was in a wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because hashtag California. It was tasty, however, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t recall ever having seen any avocado anywhere inside of that wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even adjacent to that wrap. But it was very tasty and I was actually quite enjoying it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was feeling pretty good about the food situation. I mean, yeah, the odd wall is still annoying, but yeah, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got my Diet Coke, so I got a win there. Two meals in a row, pretty tasty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Halfway through the meal, and God, I wish I remember who I was eating with, but halfway through the meal I look down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s a blue thing inside of my wrap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This wrap did not contain any other blue objects.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah blue is not a common color in food.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I look down and I pull out this blue thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure it was a piece of glove of the person that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my wrap. Okay. And so my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrap, apparently whoever was preparing it, not only did they lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a section of their glove, but they didn’t think it was worth bothering to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go and find it again. You didn’t complain when you ate their fingertip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. Yeah, that’s the other question is like when, if whatever, you know, presumably there’s a piece of glove because they probably sliced it off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a knife. So the question is, how deep did that cut go? Who knows? But I did finish my wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very tasty. Oh my God. So first, I have many questions here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let me do my rest of the week summary.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s the end of my story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So one quick thing then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there any sandwich in the world that has improved by being in a wrap instead
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve discussed wraps before and I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think where I
⏹️ ▶️ John came down in the previous thing is like I’ve tried them. I’ve gone back to them several times,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in general, f-raps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’ve regretted it every time. And I saw the raps that were there, and I saw the one that you’re talking about, Casey, and I’m like, oh, that sounds like it might
⏹️ ▶️ John be an interesting combo. But I just can’t do the raps. Like I said, they just become
⏹️ ▶️ John one sort of homogenous concretized solid with just this pasty
⏹️ ▶️ John starch on the outside. I think raps can be done well, but they are never done well at WWC,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that trend continues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know a real question real quick question John Syracuse of rap sandwich or not
⏹️ ▶️ John Did we do that on the show Myself
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have to run it back through the machine. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say no but anyway to summarize the rest of my WC lunch experience So the staging was
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue like it was cool. They had a lot of outdoor seating We haven’t really talked about the weather that much but there were some days
⏹️ ▶️ John where it was actually hot but you
⏹️ ▶️ John put lunches in clear containers out in the hot sun.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like you just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t. One day I decided to have a salad. I thought I had just gotten there, like Casey, like oh I get there
⏹️ ▶️ John early, the food’s still cold. Apparently that stuff had been staged there longer than I thought. My salad was hot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hot salad is not good. Salads do not respond well to heat and it’s like in
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny little greenhouse container. It was all wilted and gross and terrible. Here’s the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John occurred to me as I went through the week of having lunches and I had that lunch every single day and had that breakfast every single day.
⏹️ ▶️ John By day three, it became clear that apparently the only non-wrap bread
⏹️ ▶️ John offered by this catering company is the aforementioned hot dog bun. Every sandwich was in that
⏹️ ▶️ John hot dog bun. There was no escaping it. Eventually it was like, you were telling me, that’s why I got the salad. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re telling me not to get a sandwich because it’s gonna be in a hot dog bun. I’m like, that’s all I’ve got. Like maybe different shades of
⏹️ ▶️ John hot dog bun, but it was just terrible. Like why, like it was making me consider wraps. That’s where I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at. I’m like, well, at least the wrap will be, have some more solidity than this puffy air
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. That hot dog bun destroyed every sandwich that they put in. And the content
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes weren’t that bad, like vaguely passable lunchmeat, tomatoes look something like
⏹️ ▶️ John tomatoes. It was soggy about 50% of the time, which is above average
⏹️ ▶️ John for WWDC. Normally it’s soggy about 75% of the time. I did have a dry hot dog bun a couple of occasions,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was novel. The side dishes
⏹️ ▶️ John were explicable. The cookies were always not very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was like a brownie or something. I have to say, because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John hot dog bun and the explicable sides and the diminished breakfast I started
⏹️ ▶️ John to miss the mystery sides from San Francisco. At least
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that had an interest
⏹️ ▶️ John knew what the hell crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing you were going to get. It was almost like those magic, those taste berry things that alter your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taste for your tongue and everything tastes weird. That’s how trying every side thing at Moscone was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no connection to how it looked versus how it tasted. It was always kind of a fun
⏹️ ▶️ John And you try to identify the ingredients in it, like what is it that I’m even eating? So
⏹️ ▶️ John were all explicable and because the bread was the same every time, there was no variety. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John like being in jail, being in prison. Just every day the same gruels, hot dog bun,
⏹️ ▶️ John smooshy side dish, wilted salad, and then of course wraps, but
⏹️ ▶️ John f-wraps. So overall, I’m going to have to give the San Jose food
⏹️ ▶️ John a lower grade than WODC. It’s kind of like those movies, the good bad movie in the Flophouse
⏹️ ▶️ John parlance where this was not a good bad, this was bad bad, bad bad lunch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, that’s funny because leaving aside the fact that I probably consumed a tip of a human finger, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought the lunches were pretty good. Besides that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. I think, did we ever eat lunch together? I think maybe the very first day we did, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t discuss it. We should have discussed the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lunches in person. Or at
⏹️ ▶️ John least you should have given me some of yours and say, what is this food you think is good? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you should have snuck one out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me and then we could all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have like, we could actually
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it wouldn’t have survived. I think it would be like, it would become a pool of liquid if you get like 20
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco paces away from the conference center. The
⏹️ ▶️ John structural integrity is not high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually thank you for not doing that it sounds like i i didn’t miss much