228: I Never Cancel a Drag
29 Jun 2017Echo Show, USB-C hubs, iOS drag-and-drop, and dyld 3!
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- MacBook Adorable
- Keyboard "shim kit"
- USB-C hubs
- HomePod's "screen"
- Echo Show
- iOS Drag and Drop
dyld3- Marco gets his VBR wish
- Original ATP discussion (Overcast timestamp link)
- This episode, for example:
- Official CBR version, 80 MB
- VBR version, 56 MB
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Investing made better.
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Chapters
- Intro 🔈
- Follow-up: MacBook Adorable
- Follow-up: Keyswitch changes
- Follow-up: USB-C hubs
- Follow-up: HomePod display
- Sponsor: Fracture
- Echo Show
- Sponsor: Harry’s
- iOS drag-and-drop
- Sponsor: Betterment
- dyld 3
- VBR MP3 seeking
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Waffle time!
Intro 🔈
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is chrome using a hundred percent of my cpu because chrome oh, i know, why i have an apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tab open that’s, why
⏹️ ▶️ John you know When they, add that thing, where they put like a little speaker icon, which by the way this is kind of like a telephone
⏹️ ▶️ John icon It’s one of those things that i wonder about People how, people recognize it except just
⏹️ ▶️ John by like pattern matching like you know that you know the speaker icon looks like a
⏹️ ▶️ John Paper cone with a little magnet coil like but in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco profile sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, which tab is making
⏹️ ▶️ John sound Yeah, with the sound wave coming out of it. Do people even know that that’s supposed to be a speaker or do they just
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s the sound symbol? Anyway, they do that to me. It’s convenient because who the hell knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what a speaker looks like these days, right? Certainly the speakers in our phones and iPads don’t look like that. I mean, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the same part. Maybe they have similar parts fulfilling similar functions, but they don’t look like that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have that thing where you can find out what tab is making the noise like Safari has it in Chrome has it. They have some way for you to find
⏹️ ▶️ John the tab that’s making the noise, which is like, oh, that’s great. This is a good feature. They recognize this this need
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s annoying when you can’t find the tab that’s making noise and you find it and you know kill it or close it but then
⏹️ ▶️ John when you relaunch the browser and it like restores the state of your previous session
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the tabs that were they could possibly make noise like everything just starts autoplaying
⏹️ ▶️ John you have seven seven youtube videos and they all start playing it’s like well you’re so close you’re like you give me the information
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop on when they start spontaneously or i lose track and you don’t autoplay when tabs load in the
⏹️ ▶️ John background But when I relaunch from you know and restore a state it says you know what I bet this person wants seven
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube videos All play at the same time. Let me do that and then yes, I can find them and stop them all one by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what a solution to this problem is John having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of tabs open. That is a Completely reasonable solution
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t it doesn’t take many like I think I only had four tabs playing But you know because I had a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of YouTube videos up But you know doing YouTube research right and you have a bunch of videos open in tabs Which is
⏹️ ▶️ John fine you watch them one at a time you leave them open some of them are like paused in the middle but then you relaunch
⏹️ ▶️ John your browser for whatever reason and they all start playing.
Follow-up: MacBook Adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so I have some follow-up about my MacBook slash MacBook one slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You hate it already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know no no no there are people that are very Perturbed about the MacBook adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nickname, and I think you’re monsters not really But I don’t understand why people are so upset by this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people wrote in to recommend a particular Kind of port replicator that apparently will solve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of my problems because it has power in it has Ethernet It has USB ports. It has an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SD card reader and on the surface they are correct But the reason I didn’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was a couple One it was very expensive although the sum total of the other dongles I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got was probably at least as much if not more than this is and we’ll put An example in the show notes, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appear to be like seven different manufacturers that all white label or excuse me Several different companies that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all white label the same thing that’s manufactured by gosh knows who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, the main reason I was not terribly interested in this is from what I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen When I did a little bit of research in order to get the Ethernet port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work You have to install a kernel extension or like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a specific driver or whatever. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, nope and that was problem number one and problem number two is it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks very small and And it appears on the surface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be very small, but in actuality, it is quite large or larger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I would want. And like when I went to Chicago last week with the Adorable, I didn’t bring the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet slash USB, I almost said hub, I guess it is kind of a hub. But anyway, I didn’t bring that dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only brought the HDMI dongle, which we actually used more than a couple of times and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worked out very nicely. But my point is that I do like the flexibility of only bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one or ones that I absolutely need and not bringing the one or ones that I don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought I would just mention that. But I do appreciate the feedback. I honestly do, because sometimes I don’t see everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, I just wanted to point out that I also wrote a blog post,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a review of my MacBook Adorable. So if you want many more words than we’ve already spoken on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast about the MacBook, feel free to check that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That was good, by the way. I enjoyed that review. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks. I appreciate it. It was actually a lot longer than I intended, and for a while I thought, maybe I’ll go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and try to cut what I can, and then I thought, you know what? I’m just going to leave it, because I have a lot to say, because I really like this thing. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will put links in the show notes, but yeah, I really like this adorable. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fastest thing in the world, but it is quick enough for me, and And that’s all that matters.
Follow-up: Keyswitch changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of these sorts of things, Connor Brooks writes in and says, here’s some comparison pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the 2016 versus 2017 keycaps. There’s been a small revision. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connor says, I’ve heard that the Retrofit is known internally as a shim kit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest with you, I can’t really see the difference, which probably means I’m completely missing it. I’m sure this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture is completely fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t see it either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That makes me feel a little better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wish there was like red arrows or circle, like look here,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco here’s the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John forth and I’m like, I could not figure it out. Am I looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the underside of the key caps? I will say though, I have had a chance to, I got a chance to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typing on a 2017 MacBook Pro in a store and it really is actually a different feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not like a dramatic difference, it doesn’t feel like a whole different type of keyboard, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does feel a little softer, like almost as if they put like a rubber mat under all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys so like you’re like you’re you’re when you bottom out the key it feels like you’re bottoming out on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rubbery instead of something flat and and it sounds different as well so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually is a nice improvement is it quieter slightly yeah it’s it’s a little more dull sounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little more dull feeling like it really does feel like they just added some rubber somewhere which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually what they did but it it is it seems like it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still would not describe this as a good keyboard, but they are incrementally making it more tolerable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this if they also took this opportunity to fix whatever was causing the keys to stick and fail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I hope they did. I hope they didn’t get too aggressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope so, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I hope they did, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s and maybe this is it. Maybe it needed some kind of, you know, rubber o-ring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around a certain part or something. I don’t know the details, but the 2017s do definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel slightly but noticeably different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You can never come back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. So I do prefer the Magic Keyboard, and I think in no small part because I prefer a deeper throw.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that the right term for it? Basically, I want more travel when I push
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want the key to depress whatever amount. I don’t know what the amount is on the Magic Keyboard, but I find that to be perfect. And on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook, it does not travel into the MacBook as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like. And that still frustrates me a little bit. But in a way, and I couldn’t figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out how to describe it. And only you guys and a handful of people that read the review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will truly understand what I meant. But the only way I can describe it is the difference between a proper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shifter on a rear-wheel drive car, where the shifter is sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly over the transmission. So there’s rods that are connecting the shifter that you hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your hand to the transmission itself. That feeling of sturdiness and notchiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just good feeling, that’s what the adorable keyboard feels like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas especially the onboard keyboard on my older MacBook Pro, so before they went to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these new style keyboards, that feels like, and I’ve actually understood Hondas to have very good shift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey linkages, but like my Saturn, which admittedly, yes, it’s a Saturn, ha ha, I get it. But the Saturn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the sloppiest, worst, most disgusting shift linkage in the world where where you could shimmy the stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left and right like an inch either direction while the thing is in gear. It was terrible. And that’s what like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old MacBook Pro feels like. And the Magic Keyboard is closer to the Adorables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, but not quite as sturdy. And that sturdiness is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually really, really, really nice. And I really enjoy it. And it seems so silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I was listening to this not having really had this for a while, I would think you are bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sturdy keyboard, what? But that’s the best way I can think of to describe it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if, your MacBook, what are we calling yours?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco The MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Escape? That has the same keyboard that this does, doesn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, probably not, because you probably have the new 2017 keys on that. Oh, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, okay. But it’s very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you find it to be more sturdy? Is that a decent adjective for it? Can you figure out a better way to describe it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what you mean. It’s basically like what Johnny Ive in his White World video described as precise or stable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I know the feeling. Unfortunately, I hesitate to use the word sturdy because it’s unreliable in the 2016
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that I have. Which is unfortunate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I haven’t gotten it replaced by the AppleCare bar yet because I just don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had the time and I need to use this computer. But yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming that I can get this fixed, it’ll then be probably the same keyboard and then it will be precise and stable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sturdy and everything else but until then I can’t agree with the specific word sturdy because mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So coming back to the actual point We’re trying to make none of the three of us can see the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in these two pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is a different
⏹️ ▶️ John order to write back in and like mark up these diagrams or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell us what we’re supposed to be seeing because I looked at them for a long time and I I’m not I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t doubt that this is accurate. I’m not trying to say that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news. It’s just that for my eyes, I cannot tell the difference. I’m sure there’s a difference, but darned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can see where it is.
Follow-up: USB-C hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Joseph writes a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating email about USB-C. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was awesome. Because like, because last episode we, I had complained that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the problems with the USB-C lifestyle is that you kind of can’t go all in on it yet because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see to me, the one thing I just didn’t really ever come around to saying, but I should have said is, like, my goal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is okay, if I have a laptop that has all USB-C ports on it, Let me go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon and just buy all new cables for everything that end in USB-C. And then I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally avoid having to use weird adapters all over the place for almost anything. I’ll just get USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables for all my stuff. And I can get a couple of new things like a USB-C card reader,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of things, and then I’m converted. And I can just bring USB-C cables with me on trips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the dream. And that is pretty much impossible to do in practice, or it’s hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do in practice, practice because my complaint last time was basically there are no USB-C hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that multiply USB-C ports to more USB-C ports. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I knew of was the one that’s inside the LG 5k display which converts one to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three and those aren’t and those are just USB-C 3.1 not you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt or DisplayPort which we’ll get to in a second. All week people have been sending me hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they say Oh, I think this does it. Almost none of them actually do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost every other hub that people sent me this past week, the only thing it did was it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C in port and a single USB-C out port. So the best it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is not lose you the port, but it still would not create more. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product I found that actually created more, there’s a Belkin Hub for like 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks, it has one star reviews everywhere because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s totally passive and unpowered. It converts one USB-C port to two USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports and two USB-A ports. And I actually bought one. I have one right here. It’s fine. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is unpowered, so it can’t like really charge anything meaningfully and you can’t plug in like Hydra current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things to it. But and the reason it has one star reviews everywhere is that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expected that when they bought it and it also does not do power pass through. So Casey, it wouldn’t help you at all because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you couldn’t charge your Mac adorable while you, while this was plugged in. Um, but if you have anything but a MacBook one, so if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any more than one USB port, you can plug this into one of the second ones that’s not being used for power and you can, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can turn one board into two. So this is the only thing out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else does not do this. And so Joseph’s email, which is full of wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information about USBC spec that he’s very familiar with basically tells us why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so, basically why aren’t there hubs out there that multiply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ports into more USB-C ports with the same capabilities as the ones built into the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and so I’m gonna read most of this email. It’s a little bit on the long side, especially for feedback email, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating and I think it’s worth it. So go on, go on this journey with me, kids. The problem, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Joseph now, the problem with doing USB-C hubs is the spec. USB-C has alternate modes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s Thunderbolt and DisplayPort. When you go into Thunderbolt mode, the wires are completely disconnected from the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey controller, handed over to the Thunderbolt controller. When you go into the DisplayPort mode, the wires are completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disconnected from the USB controller and handed over to the display controller. The key here is that this is all done at connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. So I think you can see the problems with hubs. If you plug in a hub and nothing’s plugged into it from below,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then what is it? Well, it’s a USB hub, right? So now the upstream lanes from that hub are USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is connected inside the PC or Mac as USB. But those ports below the hub haven’t changed. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still the same USB-C connector, which can have Thunderbolt or DisplayPort devices plugged in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now you go to plug in a display to the downstream hub’s ports. Well, it can’t be a display, because that would mean you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need the upstream port to be renegotiated as a display. You can force a renegotiation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you did that, then none of the other ports downstream from the hub can now be USB ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the upstream port is no longer USB, it’s DisplayPort. And you can see a similar issue for Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now there’s an interesting thing here, and I’m sure somebody at Apple has thought of it. Thunderbolt itself can carry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a display port. It’s a time multiplex bus. And since Thunderbolt is really just PCI Express over a cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the same multiplexing ability of a display, you can build a Thunderbolt hub or dock that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB-C capable host controller in it. And thus the upstream is Thunderbolt, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstream ports can still be USB-C because those ports are now quote unquote root ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Thunderbolt adopting the USB-C connector here is like a Trojan horse. call it USB-C, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead it’s really Thunderbolt. And Thunderbolt takes over the world from within the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spec by making the default behavior of USB-C to be the Thunderbolt alternate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. That is fascinating. I read this email and was like, wow, this is a lot of text.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the sort of email I would normally be like, okay, whatever. I am so glad I actually spent the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time because we actually did cut some of it. This was one of my favorite feedback emails ever. It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it tells you basically everything you need to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I have a feeling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey however, that you guys have some thoughts on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, basically to summarize, because of the way it works, you basically can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a hub that is reasonably good, that multiplies the ports that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on the laptop that have all the same capabilities. So you’re basically never going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that can multiply to more displays or more high, very high speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt peripherals. The problem is that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy USB-C stuff, you don’t really, unless you’re paying really close attention and you’re a huge nerd, you don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know which alternate mode, if any, it needs to work. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this card reader, I have some ethernet adapters, and it’s like, well, are any of these Thunderbolt devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or are they all USB-C devices? I don’t actually know. And as a nerd, I can figure out, well, they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not Thunderbolt devices because that would be overkill. But like, how are regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people supposed navigate this weird world. Like, they tried to make this connector this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unified thing, and this will solve all of our problems, but in reality, this is a world of hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s complicated by things like, you know, by these alternate modes. Where yeah, it’s nice that you can put displays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Thunderbolt over, you know, over the same connector and stuff, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey’s MacBook One doesn’t have Thunderbolt. It only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bingo, I was just about to interrupt you and say exactly that, because that reminded me, one of the things that people would, or one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the common themes amongst what people suggested for alternate dongles for me is, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this thing that has everything you want. And a lot of the times it did, but it was Thunderbolt and not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C. And it wasn’t until I got the Adorable that it was really made clear to me that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, Marco, this machine does have USB-C, but it does not support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt via that connector. So I have a very small subset of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can use that are all on the same physical connector, but internally are very, very different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so this whole, these connectors are kind of a mess. Like the whole spec, the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standard works, it’s kind of, like if you just look at USB-C as USB 3.1 as the protocol,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you only connect USB 3.1 or three devices to it, that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then it’s just a smaller connector for the standard we already had before with USB 3. And it’s great, because there’s lots of USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices out there, and USB 3 is a great standard, relatively speaking. and we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect everything that’s fine. The problem comes like that there’s all these little asterisks on it and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to just and and those asterisks apply to devices, computers, cables, and hubs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All four of those things can screw this up in some way and make something that you bought just not work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a reason that to most people would be a mystery. And even though the computer can put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up some kind of weird dialogue if it’s smart, that’s still not really helping the problem. So it’s It’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they unified this all into one connector, but the implementation details make it kind of a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the idea of Thunderbolt being like, you know, the catch-all or the Trojan horse, like, ah, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to put these ports in their machines, but they’ll eventually learn that, you know, it’s neat that you can connect
⏹️ ▶️ John a display and also a USB device to that thing. But really the only protocol that can tunnel everything
⏹️ ▶️ John over it and multiply stuff out is Thunderbolt. So Thunderbolt will take over the world because it’s the, it’s the superset
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything. won’t everybody just make everything Thunderbolt? Because once they learn, oh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you like this email says you plug in a hub, you the thing has to decide whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, you know, sending through DisplayPort or USB or Thunderbolt, then why wouldn’t everybody just do Thunderbolt?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason everyone do Thunderbolt is because it’s more expensive. It’s more expensive everywhere. It’s more expensive in the cables
⏹️ ▶️ John in the in the hardware that’s in the hubs, in the peripherals, like at USB is just cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement. So it’s It’s going to be very difficult for Thunderbolt to take over everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now maybe Intel opening up a Thunderbolt spec will help with this because people can make like knockoff controllers legally.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not knockoffs but like legally they can implement their own spec. I think it’s just more expensive to
⏹️ ▶️ John implement even if you don’t have to do the active cables with the chips in them because you have a low speed device or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure that you were going to get the Thunderbolt everywhere. I think it will help for
⏹️ ▶️ John the high end devices where people are spending gobs of money on the you know the upcoming Mac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of Thunderbolt peripherals that you can attach to it and there’s tons of you know PCI Express lanes inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the box and you know that I think it will probably live on the high end but for the medium to low end
⏹️ ▶️ John like people just using their laptops around it’s almost like oh this is yet another problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that more ports solve in theory um again I’m not sure how many lanes
⏹️ ▶️ John are but if you know if you’ve got this port like oh this one is connected to a display so it has to be a display and this
⏹️ ▶️ John one is USB so it’s connected my USB hub, like if, if you can have more ports and have
⏹️ ▶️ John each individual port decide what it wants to be independently, but you probably can’t do completely independently once you reach a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain number of ports, because there’s just not enough, you know, controllers on the inside. But surely,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in Casey’s case, if you had one more port, then one port could decide, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s going to burn one and power. So one is power, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then one is USB,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then one is display. So say you had a three port computer, those three ports, and those three ports could decide
⏹️ ▶️ John individually what what they wanted to be if there was sufficient, you know, controller hardware and independence inside the box. Maybe maybe forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about Casey’s thing. Sorry, adorable. You’re stuck. Go to Marcos
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely Marcos computer. You could put four ports in that thing, one of the power and three other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones and then those three ports can decide what they want to be. And then you get the advantage of having a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of uniform ports in your computer that are all the same shape and size and you just put display in this one
⏹️ ▶️ John and put your hub in this one and put your power in that one and they all just work. But once it daisy chains out it’s like well what
⏹️ ▶️ John are you even daisy-chaining like you can’t you can’t sweep that under the carpet because it’s not like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one magic protocol that does everything well there kind of is it’s thunderbolt but it’s the most expensive one
⏹️ ▶️ John and that isn’t on all your peripherals so every time you plug something in you’re sort of deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John what this port is going to be and plugging in a box that has a bunch of other ports
⏹️ ▶️ John on it you’ve basically just decided that the thing has to be thunderbolt and now everything is expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah so anyway uh definitely on the Hall of Fame for me for great feedback emails. Really love
Follow-up: HomePod display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco you have some home pod follow-up according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to the I do tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so this is this is probably my second favorite follow-up in the history of follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorite follow-up in the history of follow-up is there was an old episode of it was either connected or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected predecessor show the prompt one of those shows Mike had misstated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his own age. He was off by one and a listener wrote in the next episode to correct him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on his own age That’s my favorite follow-up ever. This is my second favorite follow-up ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We spent about a half hour a couple episodes ago speculating about whether the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod had a screen or not. And one guy even wrote in to say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was somebody basically like a tipster about it saying here’s how it’s actually implemented there’s this diffuser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s these LEDs below it and it’s not really a screen and but it might be a screen later on and we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this for like a half hour. It turns out none of us thought to check Apple’s site. But Rob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Buckhouse did. And Rob Buckhouse writes in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple site clears us up pretty well. There’s a section on the HomePod page that says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap the top of HomePod to play, pause or adjust the volume. It also shows you when Siri is listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an LED waveform that animates with your every word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I had read that when we did the show. That’s why we talked about the idea of it being like, OK, well, maybe this is just a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ John one and they’ll put the real screen on it later, so who knows. I thought we had all read the website by the time we were discussing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, but I think if Apple’s putting this on their product page saying this is what HomePod does and this is the thing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has, that’s it. That’s final.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s what they’re doing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you read the text, you could describe something as an LED waveform even if it’s a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know how they have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They wouldn’t say LED.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. LED TVs aren’t really LED TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. And if it was OLED, it would say OLED. Like it’s not. And if it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an LCD screen, it say LCD or it wouldn’t say anything
⏹️ ▶️ John But I said it could it fits within if they wanted to change this to a screen they wouldn’t have to change
⏹️ ▶️ John that copy. But but either way as I said on the show this is not the type of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John you would do as a stopgap right because it’s just too complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s too complicated and too polished to have in there as a stopgap. If they were going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it a bitmap display they would already have done that. They wouldn’t have spent all this time on this
⏹️ ▶️ John weird thing. I think it will show us exactly how many colored LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John are inside there. But it’s probably fewer than are in the Google Home, because I think Google Home, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Home has like a ring of them. So it’s got a lot. This probably just has, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe 20, who knows.
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Echo Show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of new family members, Marco, you have welcomed a new family member to your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell us about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s some asterisks on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you already return it? Is that the asterisk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today, I received my pre-order of The Echo Show, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new Amazon Echo device with the screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reviews had come out yesterday or the day before and the reviews showed it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different angles and in real life. Before this, when we pre-ordered, we were only shown like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product shots which were taken at a very careful angle. And even at that very ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flattering angle, this looked like a pretty ugly product. But I thought, okay, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Echoes, I love the Echoes cylinder, it’s really useful. We use it all the time. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are contexts in which it would be nice to have a screen. You know, there’s, you know, timers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially, timers are the big one. You can watch a timer countdown. Or like a lot of, like Tiff will ask it about the weather in the morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be nice to see that as opposed to, you know, just having to sit through this like four sentence long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco description of the weather, you know. So a screen would be helpful, we thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I convinced Tiff, despite the way it looked, to let me preorder one and try it. So we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it here. it up plug it in and boy the thing is hideous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in person I mean it is really ugly in person and and if you look at all the reviews and we got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the white one too I figured that would be a little bit less hideous no it’s just as hideous
⏹️ ▶️ John is it is it uglier than the original Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no but it is larger
⏹️ ▶️ John all right yeah I was gonna say like I think it is it can’t be uglier but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John it does impose the ugliest that it has it doesn’t pose that more in your face than the original Kindle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is it right there. And so let me expand on that. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we plug it in and now like because I hadn’t opened up the Alexa app in a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had not yet connected it to, you know, try to do it like FaceTime or calling thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I open it up in order to set this up. I’m required to give the Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app my real name and confirm it and then it really tries hard to get me to give it a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number and access to my contact list so we can periodically sync it with us with the Amazon service and I say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no no no and there’s no you can skip that part you can skip the contact and phone number part but you can’t skip the name part and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I don’t see any way to opt out of calling completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want people calling me on my echo I know Amazon just launched the service where they you know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that they have like their own like FaceTime network I could not possibly care less or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be less interested in using it like we have a million other ways to do that now that are all better and not run by creepy companies like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon so that the whole idea of being forced to set this up and not having a clear opt-out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really put me off so I was already kind of unhappy and maybe that colored my later reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we set the thing up first thing that’s to do is a software update okay fine it’s off every takes forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, can’t walk away, you know, obviously they couldn’t update the software, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they shipped it to me two days ago, but okay. And then, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing finally boots up, and the screen is super bright, and I know we can probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change that, but the screen is super bright, and it’s just blaring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news headlines at you. that you that late and it the for it’s like you know some celebrity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco baby thing i don’t care at all like the last thing i want is for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen to be blaring visually blaring news headlines at me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we try a couple things okay i guess we’ll set this up like a good we don’t have counters paired as the country is nice for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we really want to give him on access to my counter well maybe not let me know okay i want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do on that stripes music So the first thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it completely fails to recognize my Amazon Music, whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription is that is on the Echo, the premium thing for the Echo that’s like four bucks a month, we have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it totally failed to recognize it. I don’t know why. It eventually started working. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound quality on it is really poor. It is only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small improvement over the Echo Cylinder. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care for that. Like, they had all this time. This device costs $230. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, yes, it has a screen and everything, so that’s a pretty good price for what it is. But they couldn’t improve the sound quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like the one major problem with the Echo Cylinder is the sound quality. And they really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say they almost didn’t improve it at all. It’s very, very close to the old one. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’re using it, it just keeps blaring this screen at us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Tiff was very quickly out of love, and I very quickly followed. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I realized was, regardless of what anyone else thinks of this product, I had made a mistake in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking it was right for us. Because one thing that I now realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in retrospect that we like about the Echo Cylinder is that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not take visual attention away from anything. It is this, you know, it’s not pretty, but it’s discreet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s this black cylinder you put somewhere, then it comes in white too now. So it’s the cylinder you put somewhere. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t really ever have to look at it. It doesn’t draw attention to itself. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the echo cylinder fits into your life in a more discreet way. The echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show with the screen draws attention in. It draws your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes in. It takes attention out of the room. And it does it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that really doesn’t deserve that kind of attention. It is just this screen in your kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s telling you about Kanye’s baby or whatever, and I could not possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and yeah I’m sure I could probably configure those things in some different way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just like this thing draws your eye and it’s designed to do that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon stuff is not good enough to make it worth using their their GUIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I kind of knew that already and I don’t know why I thought those would be any different but for some reason I thought this would be different and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a mistake so this thing is not for us at at all. So I’m returning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you got the Amazon Echo show with special offers. If you paid 50 bucks more,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco without special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and what… One of the things that makes me sad about this is, I realize, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if there is a future where they make their app even worse, and they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me… and they require my calling information or whatever else, or they require more stuff more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to give them. Or if there’s a future in which all Echoes have screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there is no more option to get one without it or that the ones without screens start sucking because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the service assumes you always have one or something like that. It made me realize quite how fragile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this ecosystem is because this was depending on Amazon doing this one cool thing, just keep doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This one thing they made is great, the cylinders, they’re great, just keep doing that. But instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re broadening out into these weird creepy things like the look and the show that are going in a direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I really don’t like and again if you guys you know if you listeners like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff that’s fine all I’m saying is this was dramatically not for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not the kind of thing we were looking for even though I probably should have known that going in but I didn’t oh well sometimes that happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it made me think for a second like I’m actually gonna be really sad if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this ecosystem goes south in a way that ruins the cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us. Because I really like the cylinder the way it has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if that goes away like I mean I guess we could try the Google air freshener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not a big fan of that. The HomePod might be great but we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really know yet and honestly the more I keep trying Siri I keep giving it the benefit of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doubt without and it keeps making me not want to try it anymore. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good luck with Siri, so I’m not incredibly optimistic about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the HomePod is also larger and much more expensive, and so it would be hard to justify buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than one of them, or I don’t know. HomePod is a big question mark. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon does not screw up what they have that’s really great with the Echo Cylinders, with the new weird, creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff they’re trying to do now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what did you think you were going to get from the Echo Show when you bought it? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I’m genuinely asking, like, did you think, oh, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really nice to have, I don’t know, a visible view of your grocery list or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had made mention of your calendar? Like what sorts of things did you think this was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help out with that it seems to either not or do a crummy job of it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only reasons I really wanted the screen were to show me timers and weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And we don’t, I didn’t need the screen. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get along just fine with the cylinder, but it would just be nicer to be able to like just glance at timer statuses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just, you know, see the weather presented without having to listen to the full three sentence description with all the words in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, that would be nice. And this is again, like everyone out there is yelling at me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just wear an Apple Watch because that really does solve many of these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Siri even occasionally works on that. So that could be nice, but it’s just not the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna do things. So this is all really nitpicky stuff, and this technology is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really amazing. So it feels weird to complain about any of it, really, because in absolute terms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is all amazing, and we should be thankful we have any of it. But in relative terms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never wanna use an Amazon GUI, if I can help it. And I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping for is more like what we thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePod might be before we read Apple’s site, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a very small, discreet screen output for small amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of information to be presented subtly. That I think would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could even still be an echo cylinder just with like a little like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an OLED strip around the top to do like a Times Square kind of like you know scrolling marquee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of something like something small and discreet that does not draw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your eye that that like if there’s no timers and if there’s nothing that you’ve asked for recently it would just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blank that would be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but that isn’t that is everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible by the way nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that actually is bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like okay a small screen like a watch size screen, right? You could have like two timers stacked there counting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and it would be fine. You know like something small and discreet is what I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is not that. This is like this becomes the center of attention in your kitchen or wherever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it. It’s like having a TV on and I’m the kind of person that if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a restaurant that has TVs and there’s one in my field of view I’m constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distracted by it and I don’t want to be but my eyes just drawn to it that’s how this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it’s not always like moving and stuff sometimes is but like it just constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drew my eye to it and I couldn’t ignore it and it really deserves to be ignored most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time so if if what you want is more TV like screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are always on in your life this might be for you but that’s not what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like you could have gotten this thing quieted down, so to speak, get it to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John where, I mean, I don’t even know if it displays the timer and the weather stuff, but in theory, one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon might have like over Apple on it is just saying, oh, we’ll just make everything configurable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you’ll just be, you know, turn things on, turn things off, whatever. And then you can get it to the point where all it ever displays is
⏹️ ▶️ John your three timers and the weather. And you start looking at it more like, like an old style
⏹️ ▶️ John clock radio where yeah, it’s a light that’s constantly on, but it doesn’t change much. just shows the time all of them you know I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah it’s probably wise to wait for a second generation device
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of this hideous thing but on the other hand look at your cylinder they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John made great strides with that cylinder they did I wouldn’t worry too much about the ecosystem going all screen because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve still got the the dot and then they got the cylinder and then they got this and now they’ve got like a three-part family
⏹️ ▶️ John not even counting all the weird buttons that you press to get paper towels and stuff so I think Amazon will
⏹️ ▶️ John keep making one of everything but I also think if they actually iterate on this which remains
⏹️ ▶️ John to be seen if they will but if they do iterate on it I think this this
⏹️ ▶️ John approach is better than the hey just give me a cylinder with a tiny screen because cylinder with a tiny screen is just has
⏹️ ▶️ John more limited use cases what you really want is instead of this this thing looks like like a speaker grill
⏹️ ▶️ John housing apparently some crappy speakers and then a screen on top of it what you really want is for it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be and what people are gonna suggest oh Why don’t you just have an iPad in your kitchen? All right Because then you can run whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John app you want can figure out whoever you want use Hey Siri to do everything you want and won’t that solve all your problems and you
⏹️ ▶️ John already heard discussed No, it won’t because Siri doesn’t listen to me and does dumb things
⏹️ ▶️ John But having a big giant screen that can do anything is much more
⏹️ ▶️ John flexible than having a small screen They can do the three things that you want to do with it Provided
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make the big screen, you know quiet down not show you special offers
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, if people don’t know what that’s a reference to the Kindles for many years perhaps They still do this you get a
⏹️ ▶️ John Kindle cheaper if you’re willing to have ads Displayed on it when you’re not using it and
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon had a euphemism for this They called it Kindle with special offers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco saying buy this Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ John for less money And we’ll constantly show you ads and if you want the ads to go away Give us a little bit of more
⏹️ ▶️ John money and let me tell you that’s the best money you’ll ever spend in your life because nobody wants their book
⏹️ ▶️ John to show them special offers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was only 25 bucks. It wasn’t a massive amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like get the one, by all means, get the one with special offers, and then just say every quarter that you find, like in the laundry,
⏹️ ▶️ John just keep saving that until you get 25 bucks, and then spend it. It’s a great use of your money. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still a believer in a big screen thing that is
⏹️ ▶️ John stationary and plugged in and has cameras and microphones and good speakers in it. But apparently, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John yet it. But I also think that Marco didn’t quite give us a long enough chance to know exactly how much he
⏹️ ▶️ John would hate or like it. Because I feel like if you had kept it for a couple of weeks, you could probably come
⏹️ ▶️ John to some uneasy truce with this super bright screen and get it settled down. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John then you really know whether like it’s untenable and this needs to go or whatever. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably easier for all involved if you don’t add more of these devices to your house. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco maybe just start
⏹️ ▶️ John buying cylinders and stockpiling them now. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll be Marco with the cylinders Gruber with his keyboards John and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen Hackett with Everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’ll see the thing with the keyboards is you can probably keep getting those to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the cylinders like if Amazon Gives up on the cylinders the cell that
⏹️ ▶️ John cylinder is useless without the back-end services that feed it So you just have a bunch of useless and
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco you would know to have they ever revised the cylinder? No, that’s that’s not a good sign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve already they revised the dot already there’s been two dots and there’s been the other ones that no one buys that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tap and Okay, what’s the other one called there’s two other ones that nobody buys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot yeah Right, but but yeah, like there’s been two dots, but there’s only ever been one full-size cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything else on the echo show?
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iOS drag-and-drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Harry’s for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, moving on. Uh, we wanted to talk a little bit about iOS drag and drop and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not really experienced this yet. Uh, I don’t have a new iPad. I haven’t put the bait on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad mini, but there’s, there was a little bit of a discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think all of us had, had overheard when we were in San Jose for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC. And it was a really fascinating conversation that I’m gonna try my best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to summarize. So Dr. Wave, Michael Johnson of Pixar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had an interesting use case that he didn’t feel like the existing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drag and drop API would work with. And his specific example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is slightly different than this, but I heard him talk about this a couple of times with a couple of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m gonna use his example that is not really for Pixar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just a general example. So let’s say you had a photograph that you were dragging from say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos into pages, you know, the Apple word processor app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What Dr. Wave was saying was, in general, like say on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would expect that as you’re dragging this photo over the text that’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pages, say you’re dragging it into the middle like an essay or something, you would expect that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the text would flow around the image such that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hugging the borders of this image. Presumably this image is some sort of rectangle and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it’s trying to hug the four edges of that image as best as possible. So as you drag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up, all the text moves down. As you drag it down, all the text moves up, et cetera. I’m trying my best to paint a word picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. So what he was saying was that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really allowed the way things work today. And now I’m talking a little outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my comfort zone, so feel free to interrupt me. But basically you’re given a bare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minimum of, I guess, metadata about what’s getting dragged, if any.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not until the user releases the drag and thus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commits, yes, this is the app I would like to receive this thing I’m holding onto.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the moment at which the destination app gets all kinds of information,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including the actual object that’s being dragged. But the theory from Apple was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until you have released your finger and taken it off the screen and thus dropped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you have, quote unquote, in your hand, what if you drag across some other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that you don’t want to see anything about that information? Let’s say you have one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situations where you have three apps open, you’re going from photos and you’re going across Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and because you’re a maniac, you don’t use Tweetbot, you use the official Twitter app. Don’t at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. So you drag across Twitter.app, but you don’t want Twitter to see that photograph
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you go into pages and that’s when you release. So that’s why they don’t want to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a not final destination, any sort of real information about what’s being dragged.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s a real bummer for cases where you want to do things like reflow text around an image.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was a very, very interesting use case. I actually witnessed a couple of conversations between Dr. Wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a couple of people, including some Apple employees, one of which was extremely fascinating, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are the pros and cons of Apple’s approach and what could or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should they do about it. And there’s a lot of gray area here that I’m kind of fluffing over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As an example, if the source and destination apps are from the same developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say com.pixar.whatever, then there’s, I believe, more information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available to you than there would be otherwise. But I don’t recall if that’s enough to get through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular problem or not. But it was just a really, really fascinating use case. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I should go so far as to say edge case, but it’s certainly not one of those things where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I heard this and was like, wow, this API sucks. It’s actually, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they really, really thought about this API. They made a decision that may or may not have been the best,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think that makes sense and I understand why they did it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I have not experienced this myself. I’ve kind of summarized as best I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you have a new iPad and you do have the beta on it, right? So anything to add on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought you’re wrong but now I’m questioning it. I thought that there was a whole thing in WDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sessions which I haven’t finished watching the drag-and-drop ones yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I haven’t seen them either. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that that they actually did provide for photos they provided dimensions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey was even some way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to like to tell the drag agent how to render
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a preview to say like show a thumbnail of the image here like and didn’t Federighi talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on the talk show like I for some reason I think you might be wrong about this entire this entire concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think they’re like you are right that that the that the apps don’t receive information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t receive the data that’s being right unless it’s dropped for security concern reasons but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s this whole API in place for like previewing that allows the like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Windows Server to the basically the app can tell it was really well if you happen to have an image,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me know its dimensions and render it at this kind of alpha level at this scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I think there actually is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a way to do that. So maybe the… No, no, no. Let
⏹️ ▶️ John me clear this up for you. You’re both right. Marco, you were recalling this and
⏹️ ▶️ John actually there’s even more than that. There’s other places where you can stash a limited amount of actual data, like an 8K
⏹️ ▶️ John buffer or something. And Casey’s right about the, not friend apps, but like app groups and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John All those things are true, but The specific use case and the case that Apple has specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John protected against is getting at the actual data that is behind that dragged item.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have all these things surrounding it to give you some way to let the destination
⏹️ ▶️ John know stuff about your thing without getting at the actual data. And there’s a couple reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that. One is the thing that Casey talked about, which is privacy. And it kind of makes sense. In
⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS ecosystem, in the modern computing ecosystem, the idea of dragging an image
⏹️ ▶️ John across the Facebook app and the Facebook app extracting all the image data and
⏹️ ▶️ John analyzing it and uploading it or whatever, like that sounds crazy, you’re just paranoid. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we’ve seen worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve seen worse from other applications on iOS. This is why Apple did this,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t give you the data. And so if they’re not gonna give you the data, then all these
⏹️ ▶️ John problems you’re talking about, well, what do I do for a preview? What should it look like when I’m dragging it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I give some metadata? Can I give some limited amount of other data of my choosing,
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of kilobytes of information? And a lot of times that can be enough. For example, if the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re dragging is representable by a URL, for example, and you can jam that URL into that
⏹️ ▶️ John eight kilobyte field, then your destination application is like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John ha ha, you’re dragging this thing, but I can’t get at the real data. like, yeah, but my data is just a URL, and I’ll put it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little area. And then you can read the URL, and then you can hit the URL and pull down the data and get it. But in other
⏹️ ▶️ John cases, when you’re dragging something very large, like a large data file or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want the application to get it that actual data and all the preview stuff you can do is never going to represent
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing I don’t want to get into I know some more specific details about the use cases of the Pixar thing, but I don’t want to talk about them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there are situations where a preview is not sufficient a thumbnail preview dimensions
⏹️ ▶️ John all of which are not sufficient you can imagine things that Pixar does that may not be adequately
⏹️ ▶️ John representable or nicely representable as merely some dimensions
⏹️ ▶️ John in the thumbnail right because Pixar does stuff in 3d so just feel free to extrapolate from there
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s that’s a user experience thing where you would just expect on on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John or on a PC type operating system that the destination has access to the full set of data
⏹️ ▶️ John and can do whatever it wants with it and not just say give me a little placeholder
⏹️ ▶️ John because sometimes a placeholder especially if the place holders a thumbnail or something or a kilobits is not
⏹️ ▶️ John adequate and so I think Apple made the right decision for the environment because and especially since it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so hard to ensure that you don’t drag across something
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that did you like because everything is you know it’s a tiling window manager essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no dead zone. There’s no demilitarized zone between the quote unquote windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I guess if you invoke the multitasking switcher, you’ve got, you’re sort of out
⏹️ ▶️ John of dragging across things until you pull it back. But maybe when you pull it to the front, maybe you’re not hovering over the right side of
⏹️ ▶️ John the pane as it zooms in. Like it’s difficult not to accidentally hover over something. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s just iOS or just modern computing in general, but iOS grew up in an environment where
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not, it is not overly paranoid to think that
⏹️ ▶️ John applications will try to extract any piece of information they can because they can do stuff with it. They can upload
⏹️ ▶️ John to a server, they can analyze it, they can figure out how to sell ads against your thing, they can, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is real stuff that happens so they have to protect against it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John but after hearing these specific use cases, I think there is there is a situation that Apple needs to address
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think the best way to address it is probably by, you know, that same thing with the app group stuff of like
⏹️ ▶️ John opening the floodgates between applications that that know each other. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sure there’s a use case beyond that was like, right. Well, what about, you know, third party
⏹️ ▶️ John company that wants to sell an application to professional environment and they’re not the same company and they want to share things. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be some sort of secure way for applications, even. Across
⏹️ ▶️ John companies to agree that it’s okay that we show that we share each other’s full data instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing a lot of this stuff. But I mean, this is what software design is about that, you know, you make
⏹️ ▶️ John the best decision for everybody. And then everybody who’s who doesn’t fall into
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, that 80% the fat part of the bell curve, sends you bug reports, and you try to find some
⏹️ ▶️ John way to accommodate them. So I don’t know what the outcome of this conversation is, other than I was fairly convinced that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a legit use case. And I think Apple was as well. And I hopefully they’ll do stuff to address it. But I still think
⏹️ ▶️ John they made, they made the right decision for the majority of users, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that sort of safety first, security first, privacy first approach with
⏹️ ▶️ John many allowances to let, you know, your average application do something reasonable. And then the more
⏹️ ▶️ John demanding applications have to find another solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else on drag and drop? So there’s a subsection
⏹️ ▶️ John here about dragging on a drag and drop on the phone. This was all this
⏹️ ▶️ John all older notes, but it was like right after the keynote was like, wait, does drag and drop work on the phone? or does it work in the
⏹️ ▶️ John beta, or is it supposed to work, or no, they’re gonna intentionally make it not work because they don’t want drag and drop
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the phone. I don’t have iOS 11 on a phone, so I don’t know the current status of this. Marco, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John have it? Yeah. Can you drag between anything on the phone? Can you drag between apps?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. You can drag within your own app, though. I’m not entirely sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they impose this limitation. Like, I can see why somebody might have argued for this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but on the iPad, you can drag and drop within an app and also between apps. On the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, you can only drag and drop within an app. However, if the argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the screen is too small and so you can’t expect people to like, you know, cram their fingers on or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t work because there’s this awesome system that they built where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can, you know, pick up some items in a drag and then with another finger, from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe from your other hand, with another finger, you can navigate the interface to a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen and then drop the dragged items somewhere else, like not just within the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list or within the same screen, but you can actually go to a different level in the navigation hierarchy and drop them there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can drive them to a whole different app entirely. And that’s great, that’s an incredibly powerful system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re gonna allow navigation within an app to happen while you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mid-drag on the phone, why not also allow you to kick out to a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and launch something else? So the only thing I can think of is on the iPad, you have the screen space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have two apps side by side, or more than one app side by side. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that ability on the iPad, and you don’t have that on the iPhone, and that’s fine. I think that makes sense, given the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sizes and the app environment. But I don’t see why there’s this limitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t do it between apps by holding down your dragged items on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then hitting the home button, and going to a different app, and opening up a different app. It’s like you already enabled it within the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Steve Trout and Smith responding to some people offering that maybe it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone’s not powerful enough, or they want to save it as an upsell feature for the next iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And from what he heard at WWDC is that they just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John this to be an iPad only feature for now. Maybe it will come to the phone eventually. By the way, related to this, both
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone and on the iPad, one of the things that kept coming up during the keynote and
⏹️ ▶️ John afterwards is the idea of a shelf, which is a concept that I’m pretty sure existed in
⏹️ ▶️ John Next Step, but certainly there were, there were like copycat products on the Mac. They probably still are
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac these days. It’s just, I think even Quicksilver has something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a region of the screen, like a shelf, like a little rectangular area that comes out and it’s like, hey, put
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff here. And when you put things there, it doesn’t actually move them to there. They’re just proxies, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, if you start dragging something, just put it on the shelf here. It’s as if you continue the drag, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to you just drop it on the shelf Then you can go do whatever it is you want to do go find where you were gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John Originally drop that drag thing then you open up the shelf again And you’re like all right take the thing back off the shelf and put it in so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s a multi part drag operation with like a rest stop in between you can
⏹️ ▶️ John have multiple things on the shelf so you could imagine it’s like multiple clipboards it’s lots of Things
⏹️ ▶️ John in the current interface that are equivalent to that The tricky bit in iOS and maybe the reason Apple hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John committed to anything like a shelf yet is where do you put the shelf? How do you activate it? Do you want to hog a whole screen
⏹️ ▶️ John edge with it? How do you get it to appear and disappear? Do you feel like you’re burning?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you burning parts of the interface? Now, you use entire applications as a shelf, you can make a shelf application
⏹️ ▶️ John and dock it on the right side of your thing. And like this, there’s lots of ways you can work around this. But all the demos
⏹️ ▶️ John in the keynotes and a lot of the stuff that I’ve seen online is people showing multi finger
⏹️ ▶️ John drags with the thing I think I refer to with the on the live show is the holding your breath operation
⏹️ ▶️ John where you begin doing a bunch of stuff and now you got stuff in flight like fingers are on the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and maybe and basically you can’t let go like you’re dragging stuff and you can’t let go you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten to your destination yet you’re getting there your other hand is navigating somehow you’re you’re doing this with one hand
⏹️ ▶️ John wrapped around your little phone or you have two hands on the phone it’s resting it whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John those type of operations that’s kind of the same reason that you guys don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John this but that on the Mac originally the menu bar worked like the thing at the top of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John you would have to hold down the mouse button so you go up to the file menu you’d click and hold down
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse button and you’d have to keep holding down the mouse button until you moused over the menu item you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted and then you would release and that is like the smallest version of a breath holding maneuver
⏹️ ▶️ John because you did mouse down and And you had to keep holding it down while
⏹️ ▶️ John you looked around the menus. You can go to the next menu, go down, go into a sub menu, try to find the thing you want, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John holding the mouse button down this entire time, which is a more difficult operation, especially back when the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John was new and no one knew how to use a mouse. It’s a more difficult operation than you might think. Like, okay, hold down
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse button, but keep moving the mouse. But I have to keep pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John the button. So do I just rest my finger on it and press it into the table? Or do I push upward on the mouse? And these things
⏹️ ▶️ John we take for granted now that it sounds crazy that I’m even suggesting this, but believe me, this was a maneuver that was difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John for people to do, much more difficult for people to do than the equivalent, which is what Windows did, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the File menu and click, mouse down, mouse up. No, you don’t have to hold anything down anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John The File menu will fall down and now you’re free to navigate. And the flip side of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Windows world, is okay, well, I did this click on the File menu and I decided I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want anything in the File menu, but now the File menu was stuck down. Like, how do I get rid of it? I think you move your cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John around and the other menus come down and you try to move your cursor off the end and it’s like, I just wanna get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of these menus. How do I make them go away? You can do it on your Mac now, click the file menu and then just move your mouse around it and
⏹️ ▶️ John pretend you’re a novice user. It’s like how the file menu is down, I don’t want it to go. And then you hit the edit
⏹️ ▶️ John menu, now the edit menu is down, you have to find a safe place to click to deactivate it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas if with the old Mac style, when you hold down, you just release the mouse button
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere that’s not on a menu item and you have canceled the operation. Eventually, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John came around to the Windows way of doing things because it’s less of a breath-holding maneuver. You get to click and now you
⏹️ ▶️ John get to think. Find the menu item, scroll around, whatever, and eventually people learn the safe areas to click
⏹️ ▶️ John to deactivate the thing or whatever. So on iOS, all these drag operations,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just holding your breath that whole time until you can find a place to put these. And worse, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is my question after the keynote, and I still kind of have this question, even though I do have iOS 11 on my iPad now, is
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you safely cancel a complex drag operation? You’ve got seven things in flight, you’re swiping around
⏹️ ▶️ John and you change your mind. You’re like, no, nevermind. If I was on the Mac, I would hit the escape key, which nobody knows because
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t old school
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mac users, and it would cancel the drag operation. I didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But in iOS, I’m like, well, what do I do with
⏹️ ▶️ John all this crap that I’ve got in my hand? I’m holding my breath. I gotta get rid of this. It’s like a hanger in it. I gotta get rid of this stuff safely. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to accidentally drag all this stuff into it. So like- You go off the screen edge maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, there’s a million places we know is you probably go to Springboard and it’s probably safe unless you’re dragging applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John in which case maybe you’ll move them to there. You can go to a thing, they have different cursors of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can this drag potentially happen in this location at all? One of them is like the forbidden cursor, which they tell you you’re not supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to use, but at least tells you like, look, you can’t drag this here ever. It’s never gonna work, don’t bother. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s safe to drop, I can drop it there. Like they don’t show demos like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John having having a safe way to change your mind mid flight
⏹️ ▶️ John and also having a way to to think about what you’re doing mid
⏹️ ▶️ John flight without the pressure without the literal pressure of having to hold your fingers down on the screen or the mental
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure of knowing that you have this thing in flight. Those are problems that can potentially be solved
⏹️ ▶️ John by a shelf because then you have a two part maneuver. I’m gonna do something with this thing and this other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chuck them on the shelf. And now I’m free. I’m not holding my breath anymore. I’m not holding my fingers on
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen. I’m free to figure out what I’m going to do with that stuff. If I decide I’m not going to do anything with it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John over. Like I can just leave it on the shelf or I could delete it from the shelf or just let it age out of the shelf or whatever. But eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I do find the thing I want to do, I can bring the shelf back onto the screen, take the thing off the shelf, put it where I was going to put it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think there’s room for that type of interface element in iOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think a lot of these multi-finger drag things are cool to look at and impressive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but are way above the physical mental
⏹️ ▶️ John dexterity of most people most of the time. And even for people who can pull them off, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they are less comfortable than a more relaxed
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-part operation. In the same way that holding down the mouse cursor on a menu was less comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John for people on the original Mac and why we’re all used to just single clicking. If you want to get a feeling of
⏹️ ▶️ John this, by the way, just fire up an old Mac emulator. Everybody, even old school Mac users like me, you fire up one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those old Mac emulators and you go to a menu and you click on it and the menu briefly flickers on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and you go, oh yeah, yeah, I remember this. Or if you’re not an old school Mac user, you’re like, this thing is broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was an app that I loved that is not being made anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there was like an API change or they got booted from the Mac App Store. I don’t remember what it was, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was called Dragon Drop. That’s dragon as in the animal drop, and it was a play obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the phrase drag and drop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, funny, huh? Anyway, what it did was, on the Mac, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you start a drag and then wiggle your mouse the same way you wiggle your mouse to get the huge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cursor in Sierra, what it would do is it would pop up, I’m sure there’s a term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this kind of pain, But whatever the term is, it would bring up one of those, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s like a little temporary window basically. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could drag or you could drop, I should say, whatever you have in your, in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your drag onto this drag and drop pane. And it would stay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Then you couldn’t, you know, mouse around and do whatever you needed, maybe get to a different path on your,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your desktop, you know, or, or, you know, on your hard drive, whatever. And then you could go back to drag and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop and drag out of that So it was basically a shelf like you were saying and drag out of that and onto finder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what-have-you And it was amazing and it made the computer so much better and easier to use and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe there’s another Equivalent of that and if there is that actually kind of like to know it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But I’m like 20
⏹️ ▶️ John of those apps for the Mac the drag-and-drops innovation was the wiggly cursor I think that was the first app that did that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of them use screen edges. Like I said quicksilver has one I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I want the wiggly cursor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh you want the wiggly cursor? I don’t know, maybe some copy drag and drop, but yeah. I’m trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ John if the next shelf was the original one of these, but I’m mostly coming from Macworld and even
⏹️ ▶️ John in classic MacOS, there was a ton of these things. Some of them are really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I love this thing. And I also did know you could hit escape to cancel drag,
⏹️ ▶️ John And I lived this long not knowing this, Mark. What do you do when you have to cancel a drag? I never cancel
⏹️ ▶️ John You never cancel. I’ve committed to this drag. I’m seeing it
⏹️ ▶️ John to the end. I got to find some place to drop this thing, damn it. I know what I’m doing. Oh, sick burn.
⏹️ ▶️ John good on the Mac. You can only grab, well, you can only grab either one thing at once or multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John things all at once. It is more difficult than most Mac programs do not allow you to do this to add to your
⏹️ ▶️ John drag. Well, as an iOS, that’s all the demos. Like, I’ve gone into another app, and you know what? I’m going to add more crap to this drag.
⏹️ ▶️ John Add, add, add. I’m running out of fingers, but it’s OK. And you keep going. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John one more thing on this, since we got to have an APFS section in every show now,
⏹️ ▶️ John legal agreement with Apple. Another one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things, I keep bringing this up, like why do I care about APFS? Then I brought up snapshots and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John last time. Dragging a large thing, whether it be a photo
⏹️ ▶️ John or a giant audio file or a video file or a 3D model or whatever, from some iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John application to another one, when you drop it and you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John committed to have all the data appear over there, Sandboxing is still a thing in iOS. And despite
⏹️ ▶️ John app groups and all the things with data sharing or whatever, especially if it’s across applications from different
⏹️ ▶️ John vendors, it has to get you all that data. If this is a three gigabyte video
⏹️ ▶️ John file, it can’t just say, oh, you can just read that three gigabyte video file out of that other application
⏹️ ▶️ John sandbox, because you can’t, that’s the whole point of sandboxing. You can’t get to that other application stuff. But you also don’t want to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John and like throw up a progress bar of like now copying three gigabytes of data from application A to application
⏹️ ▶️ John B, Which is what would happen on the Mac if you drag this huge thing someplace, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac progress bars are everywhere. You know, everyone gets a progress bar. That’s that’s part of the Mac experience. Progress
⏹️ ▶️ John bars are less a part of the iOS experience, massively less a part of the iOS experience. The best we
⏹️ ▶️ John get are stupid little spinners in the app store that never actually terminate. But anyway, those are circular.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those aren’t progress bars. Those are progress rings. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution to this, good old APFS to the rescue, because drag and drop is
⏹️ ▶️ John only available in iOS 11 in the way that we’re talking about, and because iOS 11
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with APFS for everybody, when you drag that three gigabyte video
⏹️ ▶️ John file from one application to another, you get an instant clone of it in the other application sandbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t actually copy any data. It doesn’t matter how big it is. The clone takes the exact same amount of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t take up any more space on disk. It’s copy on write, so if that application starts modifying it, it’ll start
⏹️ ▶️ John to become unshared. Not gonna say that APFS makes drag and drop possible,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it almost makes drag, because if you didn’t, think of what you would have to do. Like, where would the progress bar even appear?
⏹️ ▶️ John Would it be app modal? Would it be like a progress bar just underneath the little thumbnail icon
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing as it slowly copies three gigabytes? It would be terrible. APFS is saving the universe once again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. Oh, John. Although I kind of think it’s enabling like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s enabling them not to think about sandboxing like a sandboxing but then how are we going to have drag and drop between applications Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry, you don’t have to rethink your sandboxing model. They’ll just be an instant clone. I kind of wish they had to
⏹️ ▶️ John rethink their sandboxing model or have come up with some other sharing service. They’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, everyone will have their own copy of this data in their own sandbox and we can make as many clones as we want instantly
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s no problem right and I still think it actually has a problem
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dyld 3
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about DILD 3. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another one of those sneaky things that Apple does every once in a while. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not sneaky. Maybe people don’t care about it. I used to write about them in my iOS 10 reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ John The canonical example is LaunchD. Where, or actually more recently, we’ve had DiscoveryD.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of things that end in D. And so does DYLD. Where
⏹️ ▶️ John their core parts of the Mac operating system, sometimes the core parts of the underlying
⏹️ ▶️ John base operating system, Darwin is underneath, you know, iOS and Mac OS, you never hear that name anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John these days. And Apple decide they need to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that can be exciting, but also scary. Discovery
⏹️ ▶️ John D, last time that happened, was a little bit scary because they, what was thing that was replacing I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John uh MDNS responders yeah and so that was a problem because
⏹️ ▶️ John like MDNS responder was a mess and had tons of bugs but the thing that replaced it
⏹️ ▶️ John had more bugs and was even a bigger mess and so they rolled back that change um
⏹️ ▶️ John but things like launchd where they replace the uh the process that
⏹️ ▶️ John spawns off all the other processes and does a million dozen million other things rewrite that from scratch and replace
⏹️ ▶️ John the old in it process that worked out pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did we ever find out whether it was Bono that rescued us from rescued us from Discovery D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember there was like a like when that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey happened there was some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some celebrity complained Tim Cook and I think it was Bono like you know of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all the things of all like
⏹️ ▶️ John Bob doesn’t know how to use computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it was some big celebrity and like imagine like you know of all the like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piece things that Bono has done but like also rescuing us from Discovery D that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would rank pretty high up on that
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it John Mayer? I’m trying to think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was something it was some some celebrity that that allegedly complained to Tim Cook about this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and got it fixed like the next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah well fix as in roll rolling it back to MD&S Responder.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Whatever it was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed. Yeah. Oh, for some people. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the upcoming operating systems in High Sierra and iOS 11, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John CoreOS group, I’m assuming, or some other people who work down in the guts of stuff, have decided there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another part that needs to be replaced, and that’s the dynamic linker, which is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably don’t know about if you’re not a programmer, But it’s the thing that figures out
⏹️ ▶️ John where all the other code that you’re going to be calling into is. And so you can call it from your application.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can pile your application saying I’m going to call this method and this framework here and this function and this library there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you launch your application, the operating system needs to connect all those dots.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, you know, maybe that library has changed and these libraries aren’t part of your application. application,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re somewhere else in the system directory, and the address of all the functions in them might be
⏹️ ▶️ John different from when you compile your application. So this is dynamic linking. It’s not static linking where at the time they
⏹️ ▶️ John can build your application it knows where everything is and writes all that information. It’s dynamic linking. It says I’m going to call
⏹️ ▶️ John this function in this framework and you’re going to tell me where it is because it’s going to move around. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s also address-based randomization and a bunch of other stuff for security reasons, which means that dynamic linking really
⏹️ ▶️ John has to figure out where everything is. The title of the relevant WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John session is app startup time colon past present and future
⏹️ ▶️ John which seems like it’s very innocuous like oh I’m gonna learn how to make my app start up faster
⏹️ ▶️ John but surprise session 413 we’ll put the link in the show notes this session is really about how Apple’s rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ John the dynamic linker again for the third time and as you might imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic linker is a really really really important part of of the system because if it’s broken, like
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing works, because everything is dynamic linked to everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s super important. It’s kind of like when they changed the compiler, but worse because the compiler,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they left the old compiler around and the new dynamic linker is going to be used to link
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything in the operating system itself and probably eventually all your
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party applications. So here’s the, the skinny on this, the
⏹️ ▶️ John old version, DYLD 2, will be completely replaced by the new DYLD 3.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Hopefully this will go well and not be a repeated
⏹️ ▶️ John discovery situation. It will be the default for all system apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is their phrasing, for 2017 Apple OS platforms. So I guess that means
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch, the HomePod, the Apple TV, the Mac, and all iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John For system apps which means apples on applications. I mean, I guess third-party applications will keep still be using
⏹️ ▶️ John the wale d2.0 anyway The reason this session is called app start
⏹️ ▶️ John time pass person future is because what they’re pitching developers on is this will let your application Launch
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, and there’s been a lot of wwc sessions about that and you might think this is like oh great My app
⏹️ ▶️ John is slow and startup this d. Well d3 will make my app launch faster well
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe but probably not because as a session says in the beginning to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John you know level set What they’re talking about making startup time faster
⏹️ ▶️ John is Everything that happens before they call main you’re like well wait a second my code
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even start until they call main My I can’t you know if your application is slow on startup
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re doing a bunch of stuff in your code This will not help you because this all the time they’re trying to remove
⏹️ ▶️ John is before main is called right you’re like Oh, well, nothing happens before you call main,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Isn’t that like that the first thing that happens and from the dynamic linkership perspective like no no No, you think
⏹️ ▶️ John your program starts at main really? We have to do a bunch of crap to find all your stuff before we can even call main
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this team is like we are everything that happens before developers think there is zero time before
⏹️ ▶️ John main is called But that is not true at all And so they’re working at a much smaller level obviously in
⏹️ ▶️ John most non-trivial applications I would imagine the time required You know
⏹️ ▶️ John after main is called and before like your application are usable dwarfs all this time
⏹️ ▶️ John But for very small simple applications or system demons or other stuff like that maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, I’m not gonna. I’m gonna repeat everything that’s in the presentation, but the summary is that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are taking the dynamic linker and and moving it out into a daemon process,
⏹️ ▶️ John which might be terrifying to people. Like, wait, how can the dynamic linker be a daemon process?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like daemon processes, and D-Y-L-D already ends in D, which is convenient for them. Is it called
⏹️ ▶️ John the D-Y-L-D-D? I don’t know. They tried to, it’s a simple
⏹️ ▶️ John caching mechanism. There’s a bunch of stuff that has to happen before you call main of like, figuring out
⏹️ ▶️ John where all your stuff is and the addresses of everything, and finding all the dependencies and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John Doing symbol lookups that doesn’t change Unless the libraries change and so they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do all that in an external process and cache the results of it So on subsequent launches,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have to redo that. They could say oh I’ve launched you before I know where all your crap is
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we can skip right to the part where we start Doing stuff and executing and having it in a separate process
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it sounds terrifying like from a security perspective like oh that if you could hack that process you own the system
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually better than having it in the process because if you’re gonna try to mess with dynamic linker
⏹️ ▶️ John and Dynamic linker is running in the same process as you if you can corrupt that process
⏹️ ▶️ John You have access to all the stuff that the dynamic linker is doing because you were in the same process Whereas if it’s in an external process
⏹️ ▶️ John and a program is corrupted. It’s gonna have a harder time Leaping across the barrier to
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole separate process that it hasn’t yet corrupted. I don’t know We’ll see how this works out security wise I can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the argument for it that it is harder to hack with things in a separate process than in your own process But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other hand, this is now a very attractive target for all sorts of hacks so I’m sure they’re doing a good job with
⏹️ ▶️ John it and they made a pitch from a development perspective of like Developing this
⏹️ ▶️ John as a separate process Makes it easier for them to test like it’s not a bunch of code
⏹️ ▶️ John running inside a bunch of other people’s applications Right inside other people’s memory spaces or who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what the heck is going on It is a separate process in its own memory space that other processes
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t messing with because of memory protection And that makes it more reproducible and reliable everything like that
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think this is a fascinating presentation one most people probably haven’t watched session 413 I encourage everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch it WDC videos are free for everybody. You don’t have to have developer account You can just click on the link in our show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John and watch it right away. I think this stuff is super cool I love it when Apple replaces the guts
⏹️ ▶️ John of operating systems I hope they don’t screw it up because this is super important and terrifying, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I really like that they’re doing it. Yeah, one of my favorite sessions this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are a few people in my life who are not programmers, but listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the show anyway. And there are a number of people who write in and comment to that effect. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are going to love this chapter of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t go to that much detail. You can watch the session to go into detail. the session to go into detail. But let’s put it this way
⏹️ ▶️ John here for regular people like again with APFS like why do I care this happening? In theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John things could launch faster on your Apple platforms. In
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, will that be perceptible to you? I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other and the potential downside is everything is broken and nothing works. So if that doesn’t happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John consider it a victory.
VBR MP3 seeking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you got a little bonus surprise at WWDC. Marco, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also got a little bonus surprise at WWDC, did you not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. Last summer, as I was writing my MP3 encoder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ran into an issue. You know, MP3 has had, for a very, very long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has had the option to have VBR, or variable bitrate files. The idea being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if different parts of a file, of like an audio track, could have different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity levels. In a podcast, all of the gaps that are between all the words that we’re speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need that many bits to encode what’s mostly silence to a level that most people would not even notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you can use more bits to encode complex passages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like music. And a variable bitrate file allows the encoder you just decide like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know for this for these few milliseconds I’m going to use this bitrate and then for the next few milliseconds I’m going to use a different bitrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and so on and it’s a much more efficient way to encode audio and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is that the mp3 format does not have great ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least it did not start out having great ways to know ahead of time before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve read the entire file. If you want to say jump to an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour and 10 seconds in, what byte position is that? If it’s a constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bitrate file you can just calculate well each second is this many bytes so therefore just jump to you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offset times bytes per second and that’s where you go. If it’s a VBR file you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t guarantee that because you don’t know what the average bitrate is across the whole file and so in order to jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a precise point you have to have some kind of lookup table or something to say, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every second or for every half second or for every tenth of a second, this is its byte position.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, maybe you put that at the beginning of the file in the metadata section or something and then you can jump to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there were a few standards on how to do this, but Apple supported none of them. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would load a very long file like a podcast in something that was using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple decoder which is every podcast player on iOS or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Safari or any pretty much anywhere on an Apple platforms that could play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an mp3 would have this problem you would jump ahead like if you were trying to seek
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it within that file you jump ahead and you would actually not be at the right point because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not having any kind of intelligence about VBR files and how to seek within them so it would just try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco estimate based on file size and it would say, well, you know, you, you, this file is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 100 megabytes and it’s, I can read from the duration header up front that it’s two hours long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you told me to jump to one hour. So I’m going to jump to the 50 megabyte mark and just assume that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that could be off by like two minutes or more. Like that could be off by a lot depending on the content on the content of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the file and like how the variable bitrate stuff was allocated between different parts of it. And so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucked. So it basically meant that it It was impractical for podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any kind of long-form audio content to really ever use VBR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encoding. And I filed a bug report. It’s the best I could. And I wrote a blog post to draw attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it and heard nothing for a very long time. Well, for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then in iOS 11 and in High Sierra, that’s fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 11 and High Sierra now properly seek VBR mp3s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have the seek tables at the beginning of them. There are three different formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those that I know that exist. They support all three of them. They prioritize the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precision one first, which is the MLLT ID3 tag. They prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that first. Forecast, my encoder, now writes those tags. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we will soon, you know, there’s always going to be issues with VBR files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like random like car head units and stuff, you know, like things that aren’t, you know, advanced computer platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it will soon become more reasonable, like, you know, once iOS 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and High Sierra are widespread, it will become more reasonable for podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to potentially use VBR encoding on their MP3s. And what this means for you, the listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better sound quality for things like dropped in music. Like, if we drop in a clip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of music or if we play our theme song, whatever, you will hear better quality on that. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can maintain the same level of quality for the whole file for just basic speech like what we’re doing now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it take up like 25 to 50% less space and therefore also download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster, use less battery while downloading, less space burned on your phone, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a pretty nice gain. It’s like a 25 to 50% gain of hitting the content. It’s a pretty nice gain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can get better quality for dropped in clips and stuff all because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now Apple will seek this properly. Now again like there are going to be non Apple platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be ways in which people like you know Android listeners for instance are kind of a problem for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know podcasters like us will have to decide like what percentage of our audience is on platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t support proper VBR seeking? And are we willing to let them live with miscalculated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco durations or miscalculated seek points as they seek throughout the file?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, that’s going to be a trade-off for, you know, any podcaster trying to decide what format to encode their audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. But having it in the Apple platforms is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far the biggest gain. Like it is like that’s the big one we needed. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast already supports it because I use Apple’s decoder. So like Overcast already supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff in iOS 11 and High Sierra. Well, I don’t have a Mac app, sorry Casey, but if I made one it would support it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in High Sierra. And every other app that uses Apple’s decoders, which is as far as I know all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them, I don’t think any podcast apps have bundled their own MP3 decoders. So you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this basically makes all iOS apps suddenly support this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without any changes whatsoever. So that’s really great. I’m incredibly happy about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might be a while, you know, it might be another year or two before we should practically use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is the start of it. Like this is the first step. And that’s really great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Spoiler alert, audience, Marco will make a VBR episode of ATP way before you think he’s going to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, definitely. He’s dying to do it. The episode you’re listening to right now might
⏹️ ▶️ John be VBR. That’s what I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t do it during the beta of iOS 11.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure you would. You wouldn’t tell anybody either. It’ll just be like, you know what? That last episode, that was VBR. You didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it. Yeah. Notice how good the theme song sounded?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. That’s all we got is that. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have to add more music clips, like inexplicably. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of cymbals and syncopated rhythms that trip up impression algorithms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing is, too, Apple also added, in very few places, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did add rudimentary support for the Opus audio codec also, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very interesting. The Opus audio codec is kind of the successor to Ogvorbis. It’s by the same people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s open source. And as far as anybody knows, patent-free, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s always open to whether it’s really been challenged or not. But it’s a very good codec, very advanced, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern. In a very small number of places, iOS 11 and High Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support that now. So there might be a future in which mp3 might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be the most practical solution anymore. It might become, you know, if everywhere support starts supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Opus, you know, this is step one towards that possibility. That’s probably not going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in reality. Just, you know, it’s probably always going to be more practical to just ship mp3s because everything supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. But, you know, maybe in the future, I get together with some other podcast app makers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we figure out like how to advertise multiple formats of the same show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re using a compatible client that maybe it sends an accept header that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lets it say to the downloading server, you know what? You can send me Opus if you have it. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishers then can publish files that are automatically transcoded to multiple formats or something. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would take a lot on the tooling side to make anybody actually do this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the start of making better quality podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that take up less space. And I love that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember having to make multiple video tags because with the whole, was it a VC1
⏹️ ▶️ John or VP9, I forget. The WebM thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John WebM and all that other stuff because they wouldn’t do H.264 and send all my OS X reviews. I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to have multiple versions of every video so all devices could see them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s from a production perspective, it’s annoying, but it is nice to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a cascade and say, here’s seven versions of this thing and just, you know, browsers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and between the browser and the server, you figure out which one you want. But I rank them, kind of like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did with the algorithms for the VBR thing, rank them in order from best to worst, and you just go down the scale until you find
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that you can read.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Fracture, and Harry’s, and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they did it mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, check podcast so long
Post-show: Waffle time!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was not entirely clear about why I had experience with a 2017
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop keyboard earlier. Oh god. I lied. I said I used it in a store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t use it in a store. I use it in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so here’s the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, and it begins. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John parents went away on a week’s vacation, I know. Is that a reference?
⏹️ ▶️ John Come on, I’m trying to do the 90s references for you guys. your generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you know how I’m the chief summarizer in chief? Marco is the chief justifier in chief.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes, that is true. What did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how did you justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? My MacBook Escape, as I mentioned, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to send it in and get the keyboard repairs. That started me thinking like, all right, when’s a good time to do this and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going away for a week. week. We also will be at the beach for a month later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this summer. I have placed an LG 5K display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the beach house so I can work for a month. I work a lot in the summer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an iOS developer, you do major upgrades using the new beta OS and new capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. Of course, I’m still going to be recording with you guys. I’m going to be podcasting while there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to be a work month for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part. I work a lot during the summer would be a great title for this episode if we want to see me and DeMarco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my plan was to bring the MacBook Escape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and connect it to the LG 5k and work on that all summer long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait on your on your LG 5k before you go on. Yeah. Do you did you get it replaced with the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like destroy it doesn’t flicker off when Wi-Fi is nearby because then they like fix that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah as far as I know because I bought it on the very last day of the discount because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were starting to plan our summer. We were thinking we would probably you know do a whole month out there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so and I was like you know I should have some big monitor to plug into and on the very last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day the discount before I even had the MacBook escape I decided you know what I’m probably gonna do this you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know and this was this was after they had like paused selling them to fix the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem so as far as I know mine is on have the problem all right all right so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this was my plan bring the escape up there and and just you know work of it work on that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer long and I knew it would be slower than my iMac but fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s it’s still you know it’s a compromise situation but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would deal with it because I love the escape in so many other ways then the escape keyboard started having problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I went on to WDC and hated having only two USB ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we discussed last episode. Like that got in the way a lot. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that the keyboard is fixed on the new ones probably, that is still the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing that I can say I didn’t like about the MacBook Escape overall in my use of it so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like having only those two ports. Which if you’re powered is really only one port. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a big enough problem to make me dump it. But I have this other problem now. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac keeps having problems. And these are problems that I don’t think we’re going to get easily fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My iMac is not only does it have the image retention that it’s that I complained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about months ago and that’s still getting worse and worse and worse. I’m also getting what appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be I O stalls on a pretty regular basis. My performance is actually getting noticeably worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m having weird pauses. Logic is giving me that wonderful disk disk too slow or system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overload dialogue if you’ve ever seen that I love it so much. I’ve never seen that dialogue before two months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m having problems with my iMac is what I’m saying. Now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really want either an iMac Pro or probably a Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My plan has always been you know let me ride this iMac out the Apple care on my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is up in a few months in October I think we know whenever whatever three years after the 5k came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out is which I think is October. Let me just last till then and then and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell it and get the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should make a run at getting the screen, Jake’s like, before your thing runs out, just bring it in, just be like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS stalls and the screen has image trends and blah, blah, blah, do something. And who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to. But the thing is, there’s never a good time to do that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there’s never- I know, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it while you’re at the beach for a month. But you can’t have Apple send it back to you and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it sit in a store for a month. I think that would be a problem. You know, so like that- Yeah, that’d be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sit on my porch for a month, like that would be a problem too. So basically I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having problems with my iMac. But this is a terrible time for me to want to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desktop. Because I want to wait, even if the iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ends up being for me, what I should really do is wait for the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come out before I decide that. Just so I can see what the Mac Pro is and I can weigh those decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equally. and whatever their pro display is, et cetera. I already have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LG display. So my new plan is, let me use a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop full-time with the LG display after vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month this summer. I’ll bring the display home, I will use it on my desk full-time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will send in my iMac to get serviced, the new laptop plus display will become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iMac, you know, it’ll become like my desktop, my main computer. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can bridge me over until the Mac Pro comes out, presumably, like probably about a year from now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I can buy a new desktop with all the options available to me and decide that.
⏹️ ▶️ John TTPassay in the chat room has a good suggestion for you. It sounds like what you need
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Mac subscription service
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey where you just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pay a flat fee every month
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple just sends you every computer it makes, just all of them. Whenever they have a new computer, either
⏹️ ▶️ John they just send them to you and you just keep paying the subscription and the ones you don’t like, you return. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like Blue Apron. If you wanna cancel a Mac, you don’t want the Mac to come this month, that’s fine. And if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like one of the Macs you have, you just send it back to them, and they send you a different one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They actually have leasing for business customers, and I’m a business customer at my local store. So they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started offering me the leasing option, which is not that different from that. The only reason I didn’t take it was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that great of a deal. It’s like it’s a two-year, it’s either two or three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed, of course, you know, because it’s a lease, and it’s like a fixed time scale. And I don’t love having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my computer purchases be tied to a fixed time scale. Like I care less about a car because that’s like a big deal to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, when new minor revisions come out, I don’t really care. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tie a laptop to like a two year schedule that can’t be slower or faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that, that I don’t like that much. And also the way it was priced is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a pretty nice discount for doing the lease. Like if you add up all the payments, you end up paying something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 20% less than the retail price, but then at the end, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing on that. Like, you’re not paying it off. At the end, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it out for fair market value at the time, but you’re basically paying 80%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the retail price over two years to at the end have nothing. Whereas if you just buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then sell it later, you might only lose 20 to 50% instead of 80%, and you can sell it whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John got these sticky keys, and you had your image retention, you had your I.O. stalls, you seem to be
⏹️ ▶️ John having a lot of problems with computer reliability. If you’re interested, in a couple of years, I may have a very
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable computer on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the market for sale.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. If you’re interested, this is a proven track record. I can give you all the repair history,
⏹️ ▶️ John totally solid, everything works. One owner, only drove it to church on Sundays,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great. God. been in an accident.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s been full of browser tabs the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John been a few. It loves them. It eats them up. It eats them for breakfast. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically I did have a chance to use the LG display. We went to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beach a couple of weeks ago or days ago, whenever it was, and I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do some stuff on it with the MacBook Escape. And the GPU in the Escape is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great at fairly basic operations on a 5k display and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all fairness that’s not what it’s made to do that like that’s a hefty GPU load to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an Intel integrated GPU there’s a reason why like Apple does not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertise much with like the 13-inch class of laptops on the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5k display they always show it with the 15-inch because the Phoenix has a discrete GPU which is way more powerful than the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and when you plug a 15 inch into just into a display the discrete GPU locks itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like it always uses that it forces it on if it’s ever connected to an external display because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it knows like you kind of need that so the MacBook escape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while awesome for everything I needed before now with this summer need that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to have a nice big monitor and do big development of the summer over the summertime I now have a need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it does not cover very well it really is quite poor at it actually like even things like resizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows is like sluggish like that’s you know because it isn’t made to be doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided now that my needs now that my iMac has caused me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have different needs and I now need a desktop replacement to last me a year until the Mac Pro comes out presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need something more powerful so I got a 15 inch again I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 2017 almost maxed out 15 inch I’m gonna see how this goes I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still in the return period. Business rep said I can return whenever I want. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I wonder if he has a big pile in his office that just says Marco over
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. Just like the maximum likelihood is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put it in the Marco pile. Well, technically, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like this is, oh, I have a 15 inch again. But you don’t, you have the 2017 keyboard. That will
⏹️ ▶️ John make all the difference, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, it does feel dramatically better. but I don’t know yet how reliable it is. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got fairly accustomed to the MacBook Escape keyboard. Like, I didn’t, you know, I still don’t love the butterfly keys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I got used to it enough that I could operate. But I can’t operate when the keys fail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so that’s, I hope they have fixed that. I’ll tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know in a few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not a lot of grit in the beach house, so you’ll be fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean I don’t use it in the sand but yeah there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what they say about sand what neither
⏹️ ▶️ John no correction you two don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine there’s one time I’m glad you didn’t get a reference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my word hmm anyway so yes I know this is totally ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes I know this is completely completely wasteful, but my requirements changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not wasteful. It’s not like you’re throwing these computers in the garbage. You’re returning or selling them so other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting use of them. Yeah, and when they’re this new, the resale is not too bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a shame because I really do love everything else about the Escape, and in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once my desktop situation settles back down again, once I get a Mac Pro probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an iMac Pro next year, it wouldn’t surprise me if whatever laptop I buy next after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I might then go back to the Escape form factor because I really do like it as a travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. But it is not what I want for a desktop replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want more power for that. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get an adorable. You’re going to get a two-port adorable, you’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that exists, maybe. But I really do like the Escape over the Adorable, honestly. The Adorable I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find a little bit too small to comfortably use in my lap. The way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sits on my legs, like I need a little bit more width and the 13-inch line offers that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m a big fan of the 13-inch size overall. I think it really is. I think for almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, the 13-inch is the right choice. It is really great and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wonderful balance. I will say though, now that I’ve used the Escape for, you know, three months or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been, the 15-inch looks like an aircraft carrier by comparison. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it seems so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big now. I mean Casey, it’s probably even worse for you, right? Because you’re like bouncing between the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adorable and the old 15 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right. So I’ve got the adorable that I used from Wednesday through Sunday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was in Chicago. Then I came home to the 27 inch iMac and then I needed to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific for work. So I got out the 15 and the iMac is a little different because it’s kind of an, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an external display. So to speak and that it’s, it just occupies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different part of my brain. You know, it’s like, oh, that’s a, that’s a desktop, but holy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smokes. When I grabbed that 15 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked enormous. And aircraft carrier is a perfect description. And I vaguely remember having handled 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch computers back when they were.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, those were great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind, I kind of want to just use the adorable for a while and then have somebody hand me a 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch and I, I would, I can’t imagine what it was, what it would be like because the 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just looked. Obscenely large and I’d had 15s for years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the adorable probably six or so years by now and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Godly it just looked massive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a Mac portable if you’re interested How do you feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16 pound portable Macintosh with a lead-acid battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow I think that’s gonna have trouble driving the 5k display
⏹️ ▶️ John Active Matrix LCD display. That’s the thing I can’t communicate to you youngsters
⏹️ ▶️ John adequately. Like the idea that back in the day every Mac had something amazing about it. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John this giant, disgusting, portable computer had an Active Matrix LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John display. And all of the typical PC laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John had passive matrix screens. I don’t know if you remember what those were like. Awful. ghosting
⏹️ ▶️ John like you would you would move the cursor or move windows and you would see like 17 ghost images of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Active Matrix.
⏹️ ▶️ John Transistor behind every pixel and you could move your cursor and the cursor would actually move and it was like it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a portable a flat screen can’t do that because everyone knows what a flat screen looks like it’s this ghosty mess
⏹️ ▶️ John and yes it was monochrome I think yeah I think the first back portal was monochrome but Active
⏹️ ▶️ John Matrix it was like well for it’s like it was it was the ProMotion of its day. It
⏹️ ▶️ John hertz of its day. It’s like, well, once you see active matrix, you can’t go back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My dad had a had a ThinkPad, and I don’t remember the model number, but it was black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and white, or well, I should say it’s grayscale. It was grayscale. And and I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running Wolfenstein 3d on it, and it was unplayable because of all the ghosting. It was ridiculous. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe at dad’s house right now is an IBM PC convertible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And john, you don’t know anything about these because you didn’t believe in PC. So let me Let me tell you about old hardware, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The PC convertible came out in the early 90s and it had two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low-density 3.5-inch drives. As a matter of fact, according to Wikipedia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the first IBM computer to use the 3.5-inch floppy disk format, which went on to become the industry standard. You’re welcome,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. Anyway, it was a complete piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t IBM that made it the industry standard. It was Apple. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It weighed 13 pounds according to Wikipedia, and it was an amazing machine and I loved it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a total piece of garbage if I’m really honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse than the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John portable, which is saying something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So the if you look at the image in Wikipedia, and you close, so imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you close the lid. If you look at the very front of the keyboard, you see how there’s like a gray
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar going across the front and the side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, it was John that just said that. Yep. It’s a handle. So it’s I remember these computers because I
⏹️ ▶️ John when these were, too, you know, that’s what being old means. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, the thing would slide out as you grabbed it and you can carry the 13 pounds. I mean, granted, I am not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongest man in the world, but I actually saw this thing within the last year at Dad’s and I picked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up and was like, oh God, this thing is heavy. Like it is uncomfortably heavy at apparently 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds, which for those of you who believe in units that make sense, that’s almost six kilograms.
⏹️ ▶️ John lighter than the Mac portable by almost an entire 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop. I will say though, the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only four pounds. It’s about the weight of the previous 13-inch models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the old Retina generation. And so it really is very light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just large. It has a big footprint. So it feels like you’re waving around a lunch tray, you know, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, you know, I do like a lot of that. Like if, if you’re, if you want a really powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop, that’s a great one to have. And that’s probably the best one to have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really, you know, all my complaints about battery life aside, and I haven’t had time to test this one really yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t really used it on battery yet because it’s only a few days old, but the form factor of this current 15 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really remarkable because if you put it in a bag, you know, It’s like all the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13s. It doesn’t feel any heavier than that, but you have the power and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive screen size relatively of the 15-inch. So it’s a great computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it wasn’t for me before, but my requirements changed dramatically so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why I have it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, so you have something that your convertible PC can’t do and didn’t do, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is it auto-eject a floppy disk in space. In space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it no gravity you mean
⏹️ ▶️ John well, there’s gravity, but you’re falling on the earth. It’s called orbit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway Yeah, I put a video I put it if you bring on to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco geostationary orbit satellite Can you eject
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah? Auto inject and eject drives on the max were great, but anyway This is
⏹️ ▶️ John word for that auto inject is the feature yet another feature that made Apple computers
⏹️ ▶️ John superior to PCs for you know all those years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love you John but but you being smug about old have Apple hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh auto auto inject and eject will never die will never get old that they will
⏹️ ▶️ John live forever. They did though. They will live forever. No because the floppy disk just went away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean on the other hand like you know you look at this IBM monstrosity and like you think like you know what’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a laptop with a floppy drive? A laptop with two floppy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there was no hard drive. What are you going to do? You had, you know, one floppy for like DOS or whatever, and then the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other floppy for actually doing it. There wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John enough room in
⏹️ ▶️ John a 13 pound package for them to fit the hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, there wasn’t. I mean, I know you’re snarking, but there wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the Mac Portable had a 40 megabyte hard drive. So there you go. 40 megabytes. It was That’s