254: Hot Box With Knobs
26 Dec 2017iPhone slowdowns with old batteries, a unified iOS/macOS UI framework, and padded walls.
Episode Description:
- Follow up:
#askatp- Attention detection and Apple Watch (via Scott Lougheed)
- RAID and SSDs and Thunderbolt (via Max Velasco Knott)
- Soundproofing in our in-home studios (via Joshua Rogers)
- Casey's acoustic panels
- Marco's SoundTrax Pro acoustic foam and tape
- Marco's Podcasting Microphones Mega-Review
- Casey's [past] blanket
- Microphone pickup patterns (more at Wikipedia)
- Marco's microphone recommendation (87A, not 87C!)
- Casey's microphone
- John's microphone
- Marcus dePaula
- Sound Devices USBPre 2
- iPhone Performance and Battery Age
- iOS and macOS apps as one?
- Post-show: The Grand Tour season 2 review (so far)
Sponsored by:
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Chapters
- Follow-up: Secure Boot
- Follow-up: Female car journalists
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- #askatp: Watch attention detection
- #askatp: RAID-0 SSD enclosures
- #askatp: Acoustic foam
- Sponsor: HelloFresh (code ATP30)
- Slow iPhones with old batteries
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- iOS/macOS UI framework rumor
- Ending theme
- Post-show: The Grand Tour S2
Follow-up: Secure Boot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels like I haven’t talked to you gentlemen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for seven days. It definitely hasn’t been 48 hours. Definitely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has been exactly seven days since we last spoke, allegedly, and boy, there sure was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of news seven days ago. So I think we should talk about that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that sounds like a good idea. Are we doing any sort of pre-show or are we just going to skip that? I think that was the pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re going to start with some follow-up and Alvi Stoddard writes in, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple support document entitled about secure boot where it says and I’m quoting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Full security is the default secure boot setting offering the highest level of security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this was it with regard to the t2 chip the liquid metal chip that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the iMac Pro and It is the thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will only let you boot stuff that Apple signs in in quasi not really at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all accurate summary. So which one of you guys put this in here? Any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll just put it in there because, are we pretending that we’re recording this? Not recording
⏹️ ▶️ John this two days after the previous show? Please put
⏹️ ▶️ John follow up, and this is a straightforward follow up. We didn’t know what the default was. Apple told us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We got a lot of follow up seven days ago about this, and we wanted to talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting that the cranked up security is the default one, because remember the full security
⏹️ ▶️ John setting was the one that doesn’t even let you boot if you have an old version of the OS and I’m having a hard
⏹️ ▶️ John time figuring out who would find that behavior desirable
⏹️ ▶️ John other than people who have a bunch of Macs other than enterprise people and you know my old definition of enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John software of like the people buying the software and other people using it well an enterprise situation is where
⏹️ ▶️ John the people deciding how the computers work are picking things based on how easy it is for
⏹️ ▶️ John them to manage the computers, not based on how nice it is for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have to use the computers to use them. But even in an enterprise scenario, enterprise people don’t want their
⏹️ ▶️ John computers automatically updating without them having extensively tested that every single piece of software on them is compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. So I don’t know. Apple phrases this as being like the iPhone. Oh, it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, all this physical security, so much stronger than the old just firmware password. Now it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John an iOS device. But iOS devices don’t refuse to boot unless you update. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re pretty naggy about it, telling you, hey, there’s a new update. Look at this red badge on your settings app. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually force the update on you. And that’s not misunderstanding how the full security works. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John when Marco gets his Mac Pro, he will be able to confirm this default. And then I suppose,
⏹️ ▶️ John just wait for the first dot release of High Sierra to come out, and then reboot and see if it
⏹️ ▶️ John demands that you update. You’ll be a good guinea pig, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think we, yeah, a lot of this remains to be seen, but one thing I misunderstood about it, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen, it seems like their language is such that they’re not necessarily requiring you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the latest. They say that they can prevent you from booting versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple no longer trusts. So I think what that could mean, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not from PR, this is just from things I read on the internet. What that probably means is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s a version of the OS that is an older version that security holes were discovered in, and somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries to like, you know, boot that maybe, or install over your OS with that so they can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your stuff, maybe that’s what it’s preventing, which is a legitimate security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concern. Because I can’t imagine, like, if it’s actually just like, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is telling it, hey, the newest version is 10.13.7 or whatever. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, what mechanism does it even learn about that from? That’s one question. But if it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming that the secure boot enclave protection unit, whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enforcing this, assuming that doesn’t like the version you’re running, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine it would just like brick your computer. Like it’s probably about preventing you from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rolling it back. It’s not going to break
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s going to download the update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so your computer can download updates without you approving it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like when you boot, it will download the update before, like as part of the initial boot procedure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, I’m going to boot, but wait a second, I got to do an update first. And so it will download, it’ll know from the internet what the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John version is. It will know from the internet all the information about, like this is what, this is the advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John slash whatever of having a whole other CPU. That you know, there is a boot
⏹️ ▶️ John procedure to boot up the T2 chip. And that’s the thing going to the internet, looking up all this information,
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading the software update, applying it to your computer, so on and so forth. but your idea about the fact that it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John like it has to be the latest, but that it’s only in cases where Apple says there’s some version that we absolutely don’t want anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John running. Uh, that would make more sense to me because if they do like a point release where they fix like a bug in mail or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, you don’t want, you don’t want the thing to force that update or like a, an update from Sierra to high
⏹️ ▶️ John Sierra, like presumably the very last version of Sierra, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, 10, 12, six or whatever, doesn’t have any terrible security flaws. So it wouldn’t force
⏹️ ▶️ John you to download High Sierra when you boot. It would only force you to
⏹️ ▶️ John update if there was some terrible security flaw in the one you had. I don’t know. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Or rather, you’ll see, because you’ll have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I mean, that’s the only way that I can figure that this makes sense, because any other implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this, I think, would wreak havoc, and nobody would leave it on. Especially, like you mentioned, Enterprise. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last thing Enterprise IT managers want is their computers forcing them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update their OS without them doing it or approving it or testing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the last thing enterprise people would want. So I have to imagine this is about just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not letting law enforcement take your computer over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overwrite your OS with an older version that they have some tool that can hack and get your stuff. That’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this is about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But enterprise people do want you not to be able to boot their computers off an external disk. They do want you
⏹️ ▶️ John not to be able to install malware on their computers. people have like if you’re running a computer lab in a college
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have kind of public computers a lot of these features appeal in that scenario of sort of protecting the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John from the outside it’s just like the final straw is like oh and by the way also
⏹️ ▶️ John updates may be forced on you and that is you know that’s that’s a bridge too far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah I don’t expect that this would be used to aggressively update like on day zero I expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this would be to more aggressively force along the stragglers to the point that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco you’re still on Sierra, not High Sierra, on most of your machines, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On half of my machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How many machines do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh wait, no, I have the Mac Mini, most of my machines. I always forget about the Mac Mini, because it’s just like a headless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, the Mac Mini still exists? Does it still work? Actually, at this point, if you had Secure Boot, it would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco start up because of its age. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, I bring this up to say… Maybe it would only run at a third of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance, because it happens to be…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we not talk about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely talking about that. That was a huge deal seven days ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was a huge deal like two or three weeks ago and everyone has been begging us to talk about it and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really have no interest in it, but we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is, I think at this point, you know, a couple of months on, this may be the time when a secure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boot thing may start to compel you or try, or I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say try, but I guess it would compel you to upgrade to High Sierra. But personally, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine If I were to get an iMac Pro, or whatever computers come with this in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would turn this from anything but full security. Like I update not day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero or day one, if you will, but I update reasonably quickly. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that personally, I would have any reason to crank this down. And it sounds like the two of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys would. Marco, is that what you’re saying? That you would not want to run at full security?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends. So I’m gonna have to do some research over the next negative three to six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, But it has to be something more like preventing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you from overriding the OS with an old hacked version. It has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey be. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine it’s like, I can’t imagine it’s gonna like, I’m gonna wake up my computer one day and it’s gonna say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nope, sorry, you can’t run Sierra anymore. I don’t think that’s gonna be what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, that would just wreak havoc with so many big installations and people’s needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. I can’t imagine. So I’m gonna give it the benefit of the doubt and leave it on the default, which is the full security.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I’m proven wrong in my research three to six days ago, then maybe I’ll change my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to look up. I deleted from the show notes the screenshot that Cable had posted. But my recollection
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is that it is different than the screenshot that it’s on the Apple support document that we’ll put in the show notes and
⏹️ ▶️ John the wording underneath what full security means. From Cable’s screenshot, it was, full
⏹️ ▶️ John security ensures that only the latest and most secure software can be run.
⏹️ ▶️ John requires a network connection in software installation, right? So that’s the old wording. Oh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John only the latest and most secure software latest and most secure. I mean, is that just saying like the latest is always the
⏹️ ▶️ John most secure, but latest is pretty unambiguous. New text on Apple’s page ensures that only
⏹️ ▶️ John your current OS or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple can run
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that is very
⏹️ ▶️ John different, very, very different. You know, so only your current OS meaning whatever is currently on your system,
⏹️ ▶️ John or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple. And that’s more like what Marco was talking about, currently trusted
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple, as Apple could say, okay, we put out a bump point release that is no longer trusted. So that particular
⏹️ ▶️ John one can’t run, but any of these other 20 versions are all fine. So maybe Apple is changing its mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess I would assume the one on the Apple site is the most up to date one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would assume that the text changes reflect the reality of the future. But you know, as we said, Marco will find
⏹️ ▶️ John out for us, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. And I’d also like to reiterate what John, you had said a little while ago about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort of larger organization wanting complete and utter control over their machines. At my work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a 500-employee company, I was put on the blessed list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I could install High Sierra, but by default you are not allowed to install High Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my work is actually fairly hands-off with our machines. Like by default, average users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not get administrator privileges, but all developers do. And they’re generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not too bad about giving us reasonably full access to our computers. And yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey despite that, we are not allowed to install upgrades of operating systems without them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having blessed them and so on and so forth. And so they’re kind of sort of beta testing with a group of, I don’t know, 10 or 20 of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us internally, of which I’m part of that. A friend of mine works at a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large financial organization, and I’ve heard through this friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that their computer pretty much is inoperable. Their MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is pretty much inoperable unless they are connected to the company’s VPN or the company’s Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like that’s how stodgy these sorts of larger companies, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in financial services can get over time is that this person’s computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they basically can’t get to anything on the internet, even on their home Wi-Fi, until they’ve connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Big Brother, I mean to the company’s VPN so that they can be monitored, I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracked, I mean just taken care of. It’s crazy out there, I tell you.
Follow-up: Female car journalists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, William Pierce writes in there’s a lot of women car journalists these days But one blog that sprung to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind is at black flag dot jalopnik comm and it’s by Steph Schrader and Alex King
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a great great place for racing news solid coverage and they’ve gotten plenty of scoops I have not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the chance to check this out. I’ve been pretty much off the internet all day I’m assuming one of the two of you did probably
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was a but we had an ask ATP question about you know car magazines
⏹️ ▶️ John for someone’s kid and I went into how a lot of the car magazines are written as assuming that everyone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John reading it is a dude and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and how it’s not really a great thing to introduce young readers to if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want them to avoid perpetuating you know sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior that excludes people or whatever but the question was specifically about magazines and I’m assuming the person meant
⏹️ ▶️ John paper magazines because when I see magazines, that’s what I think. But William brings up, uh, you know, a good point. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to look for, uh, you know, a more modern, uh, inclusive take
⏹️ ▶️ John on whatever your hobby may be online is probably the place to do it. And I do, I do read some car sites. I
⏹️ ▶️ John watch more YouTube videos than I read car sites, but I certainly go to Jalopnik a lot, mostly led there by
⏹️ ▶️ John other people that I follow linking to cool car stories on Jalopnik. And so, yeah, they have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, blogs and journalists and if you’re looking for, depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on what kind of news you’re looking for. I looked at this thing and it’s a lot of racing news and I’m really not into racing, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a better bet for finding new voices as they say in the automotive
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#askatp: Watch attention detection
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Scott Lauheid writes in, what do you think the odds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are of attention detection on Apple Watch? It could really refine race to wake. Display remains on as long as you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it, turns on with attention, et cetera. So quick recap on the iPhone, don’t call it X,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a feature by which if it realizes that you’re not actively looking at the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s using the front-facing camera array, if you’re not looking at the phone, it will dim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself reasonably quickly. And if it’s dimmed but still on, it will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn itself to full brightness again once it realizes you’ve looked at it again. And it’s actually extremely cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so Scott’s thought was, hey, could we use that same tech in the Apple Watch? So as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at the Apple Watch, then it will continue to be full brightness. It won’t ever turn itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off until it knows that you’re no longer looking at it, in which case obviously it can turn itself back down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or off or etc. To my eyes, I do think that this will on an infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time scale be a thing, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon because even though they’ve taken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was effectively a Microsoft Kinect and shrank it down to be in the notch in the iPhone X,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see it becoming small enough to be on the Apple Watch anytime soon, much less having the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery power to power it. But that’s just me. Marco, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, because, you know, for all the reasons you said, like, I can’t imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have the battery power to be constantly scanning to see if you’re looking at it or not. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the feature of things like keeping the screen on for a while, if you are looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, again, it doesn’t It doesn’t seem like it’s worth the power. It doesn’t seem like they have the physical space to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sensors on the front of it. I don’t think they intend for you to be looking at the watch without touching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for very long anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John any other thoughts? If they had the battery power to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John face detection, to power all the cameras and have them do all the things, they should spend that battery
⏹️ ▶️ John power on having a watch face that never turns off. I know it’s probably different amounts, but like that’s the goal. I think that’s a better
⏹️ ▶️ John goal, like to basically get to the point where the watch face never turns off using whatever. Better technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John better screens, whatever they have to do, that’s what you want. And so this in-between thing where you burn a lot of battery
⏹️ ▶️ John energy trying to be super smart about when you turn the screen on and off seems like a bad trade-off to me.
#askatp: RAID-0 SSD enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Max Velasco Not writes in, I’m in the market for a RAID 0 external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD storage. I’m wondering what you use and what you’d recommend. I’m on a Thunderbolt 2 machine, but I’m open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a backwards compatible Thunderbolt 3 drive if you happen to be using one. Thank you for any advice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have precisely zero input on this, so Marco, take it away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As mentioned, seven days ago, TIFF’s iMac has had a 4-drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID 0 SSD Thunderbolt 2 enclosure for the last few years. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have direct experience with these. They’re fine, they’re nothing special. They tend to come with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really loud, crappy fans. I replaced the fan in hers with a much quieter Noctua super quiet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan, and that was a very, very good upgrade to do to it that didn’t seem to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the life of anything at all because it’s really just cooling the very, very hot Thunderbolt chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s inside. It’s not really, you know, the SSDs don’t need much cooling themselves, so. It’s fine, we’ve never had any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with it, like, you know, disconnecting or failing or anything like that, but they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a fairly expensive solution. A much better solution if,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t know what, what Max’s needs are here, but if you can all, if you can at all avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having an external RAID enclosure, you’ll be better off for it. If you can either just get like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big disk of some sort, or if you can use network storage like a NAS or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, like that’s generally better, it’s just less hassle and less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap and less hardware to break and maintain. But if you still want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, the enclosure we got was from OWC, you know, maxsales.com. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few hundred dollars maybe just for the enclosure. Anything involving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple disc enclosures with a Thunderbolt interface is not going to be cheap. Another option that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to use the built-in software RAID in macOS. I know, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that applies to APFS yet, but is that right, John, do you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John What, do you wanna know if you can do software RAID at all with APFS? Yeah. I don’t remember. I remember, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have the same vague memory as you do that there was a bunch of limitations. I think they might have taken it away with
⏹️ ▶️ John APFS, but I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so if you can do software RAID still with whatever your file system needs are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another option you have, if the performance of this won’t be too bad, is to just get a bunch of really inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB 3.0 enclosures. because you can get a USB 3 SSD enclosure for like 15 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a few of these from my own computer. Bus powered, that’s the important part, bus powered. Yes, and bus powered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. And because SSDs don’t need external power, so that way you avoid having not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional cable clutter, but also if you can eliminate some device’s own power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply from your setup, you eliminate a major source of failure and weirdness. Because those little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power bricks that come with everything are terrible. They just aren’t very reliable, they fail all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to mention that they’re big and bulky and ugly. So anything that can be bus powered is generally a gain for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you here. And because you’re powering SSDs and not big spinning disks, you should be able to get away with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you can get away with just a handful of cheap USB enclosures, if that will work for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance and throughput needs, that will be way cheaper and just a simpler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup in general. But again, it all depends on what you need. If you do still truly need an external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID 0 enclosure, I’ve had totally fine luck with the OWC, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s called the Thunder Bay Mini or something like that. It’s the one that held specifically for two and a half inch drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It holds four of them. It’s Thunderbolt from OWC, and it has a very loud fan until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you put an Octuva fan in there.
#askatp: Acoustic foam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joshua Rogers writes, do any of you use any soundproofing or acoustic material
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the room that you podcast in to help with audio recording quality? I will start. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to before I moved rooms on account of our forthcoming kid, I used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use literally a fleece blanket that I push pinned into the wall behind my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was enough sound deadening to get the job done. Marco had told me very early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that I was echoing quite a bit and this was probably during the neutral time, in fact. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something in like 2013 or thereabouts, I push pinned this blanket to the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it stayed up for about four years until we moved rooms. Now we have some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soundproofing something or other that I think, Marco, you might have recommended that I’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Soundtracks Pro? Maybe. I’ll have to look through my Amazon order history. If it has the cool like swirly pattern,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s Soundtracks Pro. No, definitely not. I probably got something considerably cheaper knowing me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will put links to both of these things into the show notes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically, I have a panel of nine of these. So let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me back up a half step. So my iMac and my desk is in between two windows. Above
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac is a panel of nine, I don’t know, foot long by foot wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound deadening things. And so there’s basically the wall behind my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is all sound deadening material. There’s nothing on the opposite wall because it’s far enough away. Not that this room is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that big, but it’s far enough away that I don’t think it really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to link to the thumbtacks that you use. They kept a fleece blanket on your wall for four years
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thinking of the idea of a
⏹️ ▶️ John fleece blanket that I want to hold on the wall. You know, I’ll use I’ll use some to RSKC would say push pins. I’ll use thumbtacks
⏹️ ▶️ John to put it on the wall. I would think within five minutes that thing would fall down. Did you use a hundred of them or are these
⏹️ ▶️ John the world’s best thumbtacks?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it was it was not a terribly heavy nor thick fleece blanket I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure I have a picture somewhere of it, but I I don’t know if I could dig it up easily But it was not a very heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blanket by any means. It was fairly thin
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think you feel like it made a difference?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well Marco, I mean this in the most respectful way possible Marco complained and moaned about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my echoes and then I put that up and then he stopped complaining and moaning about my echoes So either he figured out a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was getting used to it. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. That’s how I show my approval.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When Marco stops complaining, you know he’s happy. But anyway, Marco, tell me again what you have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have Soundtrax? Soundtrax,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T-R-A-X, Pro. You can get them on Amazon. You get a decent-sized pack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like $40 or $50 with, I think, eight 1x4 foot sections, something like that. They also make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger ones. If you want to do a big wall, you can get larger panels that are about 2x5 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two by four feet. I have a few of those behind my computer. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing, so it does help to treat the room with soft things to make you sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. A lot of times people go a little overboard with it and they just kind of keep going because they think they need it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it just looks cool. It makes you look like a really professional podcaster to have sound editing material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your entire office, but usually you don’t need as much of it as people use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, there’s lots of alternatives that will work just as well. Your hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a blanket on the wall was totally fine because what you basically need is for the room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be filled with as many soft things as possible that can avoid echoes. That’s what you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid here is echo. You’re not trying to insulate, like sound insulation to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the room soundproof so that people outside the room can’t hear you and that outside sounds can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get in. That’s not what this is. That’s a different thing and you don’t do that for 50 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All we’re doing here is trying to reduce the echoes of sound bouncing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard surfaces of the room. And so some places just don’t need this. Like one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, like sometimes we joke like when podcasters have to record like in our closets for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds great because closets are small spaces filled with soft clothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s like, there’s no echoes that can be had. If you think about like the opposite, like the worst place you could record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be like in a bathroom, with a hard floor and tile walls everywhere. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever moved out of an apartment and you’ve already packed up the shower curtain and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your towels from the bathroom so it’s just totally empty, you notice how incredibly echoey it is with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no soft things in there. So we’re going for the opposite of that. You generally just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soft things in the room. That doesn’t have to be sound editing material. A rug helps tremendously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just having blankets around. If you have like a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open hard floor, put a blanket or a rug on it while you record. But the best thing you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, as Casey mentioned with the blanket, the best place to put something soft is on whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall or whatever else is behind the microphone. Because if you think about how you talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards a microphone, the first place that you’re gonna get those echoes is they’re gonna be bouncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the wall behind the mic. Either your sound’s gonna go past the mic, bounce off the wall behind it, and then get fed back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the mic as an echo from the back or from the sides or whatever else. Anything you can do to minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound echoing from right behind the mic, you will see a large result from that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can be sound-absorbing material. If you’re looking for something, you know, more like a permanent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of setup that you can hang up and just leave there for years and be done with it, yeah, go for some kind of acoustic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foam and honestly, it doesn’t really matter which acoustic foam you get. They’re not very different. All you’re looking for is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soft, squishy material to absorb the echoes. I like the Soundtracks Pro because it looks cool, has this nice little like swirly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of hexagon like pattern, so that’s kind of fun, but it doesn’t really matter. You can get pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much anything at pretty much any price and it’ll work about the same. A second thing that you should consider if this is a problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, consider using a different microphone. A lot of microphones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come highly recommended on like gear guides and stuff and how to podcast and even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come recommended from podcasters who just don’t have a lot of experience with other microphones, A lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them are inexpensive large diaphragm cardioid condensers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This includes things like the Blue Yeti and a whole lot of entry level microphones. Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s a condenser and you spent less than $200 for it, it’s probably one of these. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these, they do sound very nice and crisp and they pick up a lot of detail in your voice, but they also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick up like if a pin drops in the room. They’ll pick up any background noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as a result they also very, very easily pick pickup echo from the walls. If you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a mic with a different pickup pattern, some people say you have to use a dynamic mic. This is not actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case. You have to use a supercardioid mic. That’s what you actually want. It can be a condenser or dynamic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It should be supercardioid or hypercardioid. What you’re looking at, and I did a whole review. You can listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to audio samples. What you’re looking at basically is the Shure Beta 87A.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what you’re looking at. It is about 250 bucks. It’s an XLR mic, not a USB mic. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know of any USB supercardioid podcast microphones. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone knows of any, please let me know. But what this does, the supercardioid pickup pattern, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically tightens and narrows the area from which it picks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up sound. So it will pick up a lot less sound coming from different directions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and coming from further away from the mic, which in turn will kind of inherently reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of echo it picks up. It’s also really nice that it’ll reduce amount of background noise it picks up. Like if somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, breaks a plate in the next room over, like you’ll hear a much quieter version of it than you would on a different pickup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pattern. Because it’s just, the sound drops off further the more you go away from the mic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anything you can do to narrow that pickup pattern, that will serve you very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the mic. And then you won’t need to do as much babying of the room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, it’s really weird. I was using a Rode Podcaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, I don’t know, something like the first year that I was doing this with you two fine gentlemen, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am now using, what do I have, I don’t have the 87A, I have the 58A, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should switch to the 87A, by the way. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey well, I’m sure I’ll be good at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You sound good enough that I don’t bother you about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the Marco seal of approval. But it really is tremendous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the difference, because right now, my mouth is within an inch of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pop filter, not the pop filter, with the foam on the edge of the microphone. And if I were to turn my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouth and maybe do something like 90 degrees the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is tremendous, the difference that that makes. And if I go 180 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the other direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco barely even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear me. It’s really crazy what a supercardiod,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco supercardiod, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Supercardiod, yeah, and that’s what you’re using. Yeah, the Beta 58A is a supercardiodynamic mic. It is very good for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price. It’s a little bit like boomy and fat in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the mid-bass frequency area. Yeah, it is. I mean, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but for the price, it’s pretty good. But I do recommend it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a setup that can take an XLR mic and you can spend whatever that is, like 160 bucks for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save up another 80 bucks and get the 87A instead. It’s better. Yeah, this is 160, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you say the 87A is 60 more, then so be it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what is your situation with regard to sound deadening material? John does not count.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John has an inexpensive, large diaphragm condenser microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not inexpensive, it was like 350 bucks or something, wasn’t it? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well, you probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the most it ever cost was 250, but still. Yeah, you have the Shure PG42 USB. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds incredible. It sounds very, very good, but it is an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picky microphone for room dynamics because it’s what I mentioned earlier, it’s the kind that picks up like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a needle dropping, like it picks up anything. However, all the rules of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microphone cease to apply in John Syracuse’s office and I don’t know why, and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never wanted to tell him to change anything because for some reason that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot fathom or figure out, he sounds perfect all the time. He does not have any echo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s never any noise or hiss on the track. All the problems that you would usually get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this type of condenser. And I bought that exact microphone to try in my mega review,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was incredibly picky for me. But for some reason, it’s perfect for John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t, like, the rules do not apply in John’s office.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, some rules do. So, for the sound deadening material, for getting
⏹️ ▶️ John to this question, The main reason I don’t have sound deadening material is back when we were all buying sound
⏹️ ▶️ John foam and stuff Of course Marco bought this swirly one that he was just telling you about and I went I’m like Oh, I should get that
⏹️ ▶️ John same swirly stuff Marco got and I went to the web page where they sell it and it was $60 and my interpretation was
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s $60 for one rectangle And then I looked at how much how
⏹️ ▶️ John many rectangles Marco has on his walls like well Marco, you know All right fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John spending $60 times 12 to put foam
⏹️ ▶️ John on my wall. And I’m like, this is ridiculous. I did some researching for cheaper foam, but I was just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just not going to do it. So anyway, now that I know that it is not $60 for one square, it’s $60 for what? How many is it? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John six or 12. It’s enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The $60 pack of the one by two sheets, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, that’s enough for pretty much anybody to make their setup sound great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that sounds more reasonable, although it really annoys me that the pattern doesn’t line up if you buy all the squares.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Yeah, and so I have some of the big ones that I mentioned. It doesn’t line up on them either, but at least with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big ones, you have fewer seams.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so anyway, but I still don’t have the foam. And also, I want to ask Marco how he attached it to his wall, and he’s like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John permanently stuck it on there, and if I ever want to remove it, I have to repaint the wall. And I was like, eh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like adhesive squares that they recommend that you use with it, and I got those. So each one of them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck on with something like six little two-by-one-inch adhesive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco square things, like double-sided tape kind of things. And yeah, I’m pretty sure… And they haven’t fallen off at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is great. But I’m pretty sure that’s a pretty permanent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John installation. That’s it for the wall. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should have used Casey’s thumbtacks.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, it’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you bring that up. We tried to use command strips on the foam that we have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they have all fallen over time. But I think if memory serves, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the adhesive squares that Marco recommended, and then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put those on the back of the foam and then command stripped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John those. Does that make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s foam, adhesive squares, command strips, and that actually seems to be holding pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a good idea. You can put it right over the thumbtack holes if you have them. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John as for my room, early on in this series, someone I forget who it was, Marco, do you remember?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one of the helpful audio people I’m about to talk about? I believe it was Marcus DePaula. Yes, there you go. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably it. Um, send us a bunch of advice about what we’re doing and what he had to say about my mic was that he heard a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of echo and he surmised that I had my monitor really close to my microphone and he was
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And so the only thing I’ve done to make this room better for audio when I’m podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ John is I move my monitor farther away from my microphone or my microphone farther away from my monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think the echo is there, it’s just the delay is slightly different. The
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I think that’s good about this room is, to my right is a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John bookshelf, and bookshelves are surprisingly good baffles for sound because of all the little knobbly books,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the little gaps between them and behind them, and even my bookshelf is where every spine is meticulously
⏹️ ▶️ John lined up. It helps if the spines are uneven, I bet it works even
⏹️ ▶️ John better. This room is carpeted, which also helps. And the windows do have blinds on
⏹️ ▶️ John them, which are also kind of knobbly. But yeah, it’s not, and the gain
⏹️ ▶️ John is really low on my mic. And I have like tons of, I have a double pop filter and a foam shield
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. So I don’t know, I’m dreading changing my setup, but I think I will eventually when I get my new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John mumble mumble. I’m gonna have to because, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m thinking of getting a
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco. Marco’s recommended mic and Marco’s recommended little hot box with knobs
⏹️ ▶️ John and and for my brand new computer. And then I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John I call those like you can spend $750 for a hot box with knobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s actually up to like 900. Now the one the one I like is the USB pre to from sound devices like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that this is this is the box that converts USB to microphones. I’ve tried a lot of these things. There’s lots of them that are totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for like 150 bucks. But I wanted something that was better than totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want something that was great. And Sound Devices USB Pre 2 is great. It’s the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing that if you’ve ever had a problem or bad performance with one of the $150 ones, and you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get fed up and you’re like, can I just throw money at this problem to make it go away? This is the answer to that question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason you should get it, John, is that it has amazing knobs. Like all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John other ones have cheap, crappy… But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not supposed to ever touch the knobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, you got to touch them a couple times to set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it up. And trust me… Once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then never move them again. feel any other microphone interfaces knob and you’re gonna be like oh god my toaster is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this you try these knobs and you’re like oh my god I want these knobs on everything I own they’re so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah oh my god I love
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I may eventually get something new but we’ll see but That’s it, no foam.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I love you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much. What is this show about? Knob feel, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the show’s about. itself
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for the last few weeks we’ve had a reasonably significant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of people tell us in various states of anger that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we need to take Apple to task about about how iPhones are throttling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU performance when the batteries get old and how this is horse crap and we really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to beat Apple up because apparently they think that people who matter listen to this show and guess what? They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t. But anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. Point is people were really upset about this and this has been going on for probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a month now or, or near abouts. I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found this to be a particularly interesting thing to talk about a particularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly interesting topic because I mean, Hey, guess what? As your phones get old, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get slow that, that, I mean, like, I understand that that probably shouldn’t happen that a CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a CPU is a CPU, but. I mean, Hey, as stuff gets older, it gets worse as I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older, I get worse. And so it stands to reason as other things get older, maybe they will get worse too. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s been a whole bunch of activity about this, not today, but seven days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, exactly, wherein we actually got some information from Apple. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to try to do my chief summarizer in chief and you guys jump in and, or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct me after the fact. And what it sounds like is, and I experienced this with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six or maybe it was my success. As my 6er 6S got older, occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would go from something like 20 or 30% charge, as reported by the iPhone, to dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just turned itself off. And this was deeply infuriating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because here it is, I’m trying to perform some sort of task, and my battery says that it’s at something like a third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge. I don’t use battery percentage, or I didn’t use battery percentage before the iPhone X,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m not a monster. And so anyway, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco look at the— I just look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the— You’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make a lot of friends with this segment. Oh, I know. I know. But regardless, well, I already made friends with my Fahrenheit discussion, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what? Why not? Sorry, I’m not sorry. But anyway, the point is that, you know, I look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little icon and it says it’s about a third full. I go to perform some sort of operation. Suddenly the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone turns off. So then I turn it back on. Suddenly it’s back at a third battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that seems really, really weird. Well, what it sounds like was happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that when the CPU or other components were really, really asked to do a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot, it would cause enough draw on the battery that the battery would end up kind of just not failing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just going kaput. And so the phone would turn off and that would be that. And so what Apple’s decided to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is as the battery gets older and as they realize that the battery can’t really handle this anymore, they will start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throttling the CPU. So they’ll not let the CPU operate at 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speed in order to prevent these sorts of things from happening, which to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes is a perfectly reasonable engineering solution to a problem. And this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that batteries, as they get older, they get crummier. That’s the way batteries work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It may not be the way CPUs work, but it is the way batteries work. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, that’s perfectly fine. I don’t see why everyone has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up in arms about this. But, oh man, a lot of people are really angry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. And I think part of that is probably because as you upgrade to the latest versions of iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as you have operating systems that are more and more taxing on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU, it ends up causing a system-wide slowdown. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not having experienced that because I’ve gone on the complete, you know, douchebag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get a new iPhone every year train. But I, I, I had, I was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always on this train and I do remember times when my older phones got a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit slow over time. And I think the moral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the story is these, these devices, or certainly the latest versions of iOS aren’t really designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use through, you know, two plus year old phones, maybe three or four year old phones. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe the thing that we should all be up in arms about is why is iOS 11 being supported all the way back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the iPhone 4 or whatever, that’s probably not accurate, but just for the sake of conversation. And that’s to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that maybe is a little bit more controversial, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that the CPU is being slowed down, like, Hey, this is making it so your phone doesn’t spontaneously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey die, but okay, fine. If you prefer that, go ahead. Maybe that’s what we should do. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, I don’t, I think it was either Panzerino or Gruber that said, I think it was Panzerino that said, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the issue here is really communication that, that Apple never told anyone why this was happening. And if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just disclosed, Hey, we’ve realized that these spikes in battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey draw have caused the batteries to temporarily fail, fail probably isn’t the right word, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give up. That’s why we’ve throttled your CPUs is to prevent that problem. And if they had said that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upfront, then I think this wouldn’t be an issue, But they didn’t, and so here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. So that is not a very succinct summary, but that is the summary nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I apologize. But Marco, tell me about this. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Timmins So this is—it seems like this is a very well-intentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution to a very real problem. Steven Horwitz I agree. Marco Timmins But because of the context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is complicated and hard to get rid of, which I’ll get to in a second. So because of the context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because of the execution details of this, I think it’s a really big problem for them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the context is probably the most important part here that we’ve known, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who is an Apple fan or Apple defender in any way ever, and Apple frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs defense because like people out there have a lot of horrible misconception about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have forever, right? And I think this is part of why Apple fans are so defensive so much of the time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so much bad information out there about Apple and people are always having to fight it or correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And so one of the things that a large portion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the population who buys iPhones believes is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple intentionally makes their phones slower with every new software update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make them buy new phones. And there is some truth in this. the intentionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, but there is some truth that new OSes do usually run slower on old hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the ones that they shipped with. I don’t think Apple’s doing any of that intentionally. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John Gruber wrote today, I think Apple employees would just quit before they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do something as crazy and fraudulent and evil as that. But the fact is the new OSes do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually run worse on the old hardware than what shipped with them. And that’s just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re new OS’s. There’s new animations and higher memory usage and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stuff happening in the background because it seems like these are designed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run really well on the current generation and making them run on previous generations is… It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem like it’s a very high priority to make that smooth or awesome. And maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I don’t know, maybe it is, maybe there’s tons of people working on that but the results that people see usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that when they update their like two-year-old phone to the newest OS that comes out every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall it’s slower and it gets worse battery life. Now there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of complicating factors to this that make this you know partially true, partially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not true, partially the you know inevitable you know the behavior of lithium-ion batteries over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, the progress of software over time, but the fact is there is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very widespread belief that this is planned obsolescence. That Apple is forcing people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones to be slower over time so that people go out and buy new phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that is the context in which this story now comes out. Now Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been doing this for almost a year. They and even, Penn’s gonna link to an article he wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last February, like almost a year ago, saying like Apple said this about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new update and here’s what it does. Because there was a big problem back then about iPhone 6 and 6s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, as you mentioned, doing the whole unexpected shutdown thing when they were getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit old. What has come out over the last few days, as you mentioned, there was a Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post that kicked it all off, we’ll link to it in the show notes, where somebody basically said that he ran Geekbench,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a popular benchmark, before getting his battery replaced. And then he got his battery replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple and ran Geekbench again, and that his CPU performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the battery replacement was like half of what it was after. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he made this reddit post saying like, hey it looks like Apple is throttling CPU performance when your battery is old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it took a while before like everyone was getting all up in arms for a few days and then about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nine days ago, it was a John Poole, you guys name it? Geekbench? I believe it’s John Poole,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer of Geekbench went through all the data and found like trends and peaks of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the iPhone 6s and 6s and 7s that are running Geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before and after the software update that added this behavior and their different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performances like in the aggregate and there were very very clear peaks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the update there was a clear peak where it’s supposed to be and then after the update there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was still that main peak where it’s supposed to be but then there were like three other peaks at lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels at about even intervals. It’s like it’s subtracting 20%, 20%, 20%. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were clear peaks there that like, okay, there’s clearly a lot of phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are benchmarking in these levels here. And that came out about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nine days ago. And then exactly seven days ago, Apple issued a press statement basically saying, look, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we do. This is to combat lithium-ion battery problems over time when they get older,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can’t maintain like the highest peak output when the CPU is drawing the most energy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so we throttle down those peaks only when necessary to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know keep the phone running basically to prevent it from shutting down. So they basically just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did and then confirmed that they did something that slows down your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it gets older and I know they had like I’m sure they had the best of intentions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s clear from their statement you know I believe them I I believe this is why they did it. I don’t think they’re trying to push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new phones even harder. I think the iPhones sell themselves. Like, I don’t think they need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break your old phone to sell new ones on a regular basis. But I do think this was done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very poorly. Even if this is the right thing to do, the right way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it is to tell the user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I said on Twitter earlier, like, this should be a setting and you should tell the user. I have since come around, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs to necessarily be a setting because as somebody pointed out, if you turn the setting off, your phone just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco randomly dies all day. That’s not great. So maybe it doesn’t need to be a setting, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it absolutely needs to be communicated to the user. These phones are people’s primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers. You can’t slow down people’s primary computers by seemingly 20 to 50%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a reason that you don’t tell them about and that they have no way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know unless they run a benchmark. All they know is my phone is really slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe it’s just because it’s old, I guess. Maybe I have to get a new one. And a new phone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of money and a battery replacement is not. So for a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could just get battery. If they knew that their phone would be way less slow if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just got a battery replacement for 20 to $70, a lot of people would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose that option and save their money and maybe that’ll help them out. So, and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not tell them, to slow it down for reasons that are not apparent to the user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are never told to the user, no matter what Apple says the reason is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the users don’t know that or don’t believe them. So this narrative that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been battling for years, that Apple is intentionally slowing down phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with each iOS update to make you buy a new one, and we’ve been saying, no, no, no, they wouldn’t do that, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do that. actually just did that. Not to make you buy a new one, but they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now slowing down old phones with a new software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update. And even though their justifications are good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not how it looks to the people who it’s happening to. And now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a small thing. We’ve talked before about how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain tech myths get embedded in people. We’ve talked about things like how, oh, you should quit all your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to save your battery. Those things get embedded and are very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard to ever remove. Like, Windows people probably still are defragging their hard drives. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, this is the kind of thing, like, this doesn’t change. Like, you still have people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever, like, when their Macs are having weird problems, you still have, like, everyone in the world telling them to, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reset their PRAM and stuff, and, like, all these weird little, like, voodoo things that usually don’t do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What Apple has done with with this is they have confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fears of a very very persistent and pervasive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damaging theory or myth that was going on about what Apple does with iPhones and iOS updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is going to hurt their reputation in this area for a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might even be longer. This is the kind of thing that people do not forget quickly. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing that while we might know the truth or how things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perceived or what things probably mean or what Apple probably intends, we may know that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this is going to linger forever is like your crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco table and stuff like that. People who, like kind of casual users who think they know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re doing and who spread that knowledge around their friends and family, this is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to persist with them for a decade. And this is going to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, Apple’s going to have to fight this for a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they really, really should have done instead, which would have like, anything they would have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here to solve this problem is hard. Like there’s downsides to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any solution to the problem of like, oh, if your battery can’t actually run the phone at its full speed and you get random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shutdowns. Well yeah that’s bad. They should do something to fix that if they can. And they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even with the fix. Even if they did it perfectly with great communication people would say, I am, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am upset that Apple is slowing down my phone until I replace the battery. But at least they would know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wouldn’t seem like deception. It wouldn’t seem like there were, there’s like this huge ulterior motive that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want you to buy a new phone. They want to trick you into buying a new phone. The only way to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this right is to clearly communicate communicate to the user when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this throttling happens to put up a notification or something. It can’t just be buried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the battery screen and settings like waiting for you to go check it. You have to notify the user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a dialogue or a notification that says something like your battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco condition needs to be serviced or is too worn out or something like that. As a result,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone will not perform at its fullest. Something like that. Tell people exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is happening, when it happens. The first time that it has to be throttled by this mechanism.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Put up a notification, put up a dialogue that says, your battery is too weak to do this, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone will now be slower because of this, and you know, click here for more information or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to tell people. This problem would have been so much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more manageable and so much better received if they would just tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people when this happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I agree with you that the messaging is the crux of the issue, but do you really think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe Consumer is going to be aware of this whole kerfuffle? Has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this reached regular media? Because it seems to me like this is just nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting angry about nerdy things, is it not? Or maybe I’m missing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boat. Oh, no, no. I mean, first of all, my tweet about this has like hundreds of retweets already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as of seven days ago. It’s like, this is spreading far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular people don’t have to know about this, their crazy uncles at the Thanksgiving table are the ones that have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about this, and they’re all the ones on Reddit who are picking all this up. Believe me, it spreads, it spreads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all of them. It’s all those people who advise everyone in their life that they have to quit all their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. It’s the same thing, like, it’s that, It’s spreading through that support channel. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the casual, crazy power user support channel of people who are partially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not adequately informed and who spread that to all the people they know. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be there for a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ John You two aren’t really helping much on this and neither are the million headlines that have been about this
⏹️ ▶️ John because I, you know, setting aside all the perception issues which are totally true and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, at this point there’s not much Apple can do about it they should have communicated better and so on and so forth everything
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark was already covered for the people who who
⏹️ ▶️ John know or are casually listening to this podcast or it’s on the back or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the essential thing that both of you did that I that I think is not the right thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is to promote the the sort of summary narrative like not the nuance
⏹️ ▶️ John detailed exactly what’s going on thing but the summary narrative is that as I would describe
⏹️ ▶️ John it, there was a perception that Apple’s doing a thing to make their phones slower to make you buy new phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John People in the know said they’re not doing that, but now we have new information that shows that actually they kind of were.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s where I draw the line because the perception was Apple is doing something,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing whatever to make you buy a new phone. That’s the important part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the story because it makes Apple the bad guy. Not that Apple is doing something makes you phone slower because we all know
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is doing something to make your phone slower. it’s called releasing new OSes. Like, that’s what they’re doing. But that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John we would tell them. It’s like, they’re not doing it on purpose. They just made a new s and new OS is very often make your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John slower for all the reasons Marco listed, and we can go into all the details, and they don’t even care, right? But they said, No, no, no, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re doing that. They’re doing something on purpose that they don’t have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not part of the new OS to make your phone slower, so that you will buy a new
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, not for any other reason, not because, you know, they added more features or background processing
⏹️ ▶️ John or blah blah blah for no reason other than you must buy a new phone and To
⏹️ ▶️ John make the summary narrative it says we said they were never doing that but guess what they were they weren’t they’re not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing To make you buy a new phone that I feel is the
⏹️ ▶️ John important thing and you’re right that people don’t won’t catch this nuance like Everyone will just assume it’s been confirmed But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s irresponsible of people who run tech websites and do tech podcasts to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way what came out today confirms the false narrative from before. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it might if you don’t know what you’re talking about, and it will make people think it confirms. I totally agree that perception is there, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the truth of the situation is that Apple is not and was not doing something to make
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy a new phone. And that’s the only nuance point I want to make to the people who care about nuance points.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that it’s going to help, you could talk about it as carefully as you want, people are going to believe what they want to believe, you know, so I’m totally pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John and cynical about the communication thing. But I do want to make that point here that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think no part of this confirms the false narrative, right? It makes people think
⏹️ ▶️ John it does, which is terrible for Apple and Marcos, right? This is going to be really, really bad for them, but it doesn’t actually confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And on that issue, if they had communicated it better,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be better. But in the same way that I’m pessimistic that even if you understand all the nuances, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter. Like perception is reality for lots of people. It by the same token,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple had communicated this guarantee some percentage, perhaps a smaller percentage, but some percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John would say that message is fake. Apple just puts that up. Why do they put that up to make you buy a new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re lying to you with this dialogue box, it says your phone’s gonna slow to make you buy an Oh, what a coincidence,
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPhone comes out, and I get this dialogue box on my old phone is telling me I need to buy a new phone. Right? Now, again, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean they shouldn’t do it, it’s still the right thing to do. It’s still way better than what they did. But this This is this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John job of, you know, and arguably this is why they made this this decision not to say anything about it because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re trying to they’re trying to find the way to minimize the bad perceptions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think probably communicating would be the way to minimize it because the really hurtful part of this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the error of omission, the deception by omission of like, Apple never
⏹️ ▶️ John said anything about this before, right? And that that is a deceptive thing to do. And so that’s on Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they deserve some of the reputation hit they were taking there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s no there’s no perfect solution. So I, you know, even if even if they change it to do that, and I heard some
⏹️ ▶️ John good suggestions on Twitter, I forget who’s just maybe it was Marco, maybe it was someone else, like change the color of the battery meter
⏹️ ▶️ John to like purple or I don’t know, they already use red and green and yellow, but some other color to show
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not just that your battery is like lower in the middle, but we found that your battery is underperforming.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to what Casey said at the beginning of this, your battery doesn’t give up, it’s just it just is not
⏹️ ▶️ John capable of delivering either the volts or the amps that are required by the CPU. And the CPU has has
⏹️ ▶️ John things that cause it, you know, or not the CPU, but like the parts of the electronics say, look, if my
⏹️ ▶️ John voltage or current are both dropped below some threshold, game over, right, and that’s what’s happening. So the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John is there dutifully pumping out as much energy as it can in the CPU is like, Nope, sorry, game over, can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, everything goes black. Not that really matters the details. But anyway, that’s, that’s, that’s what’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, the, the if you want to get on Apple for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a thing that, you know, what, you know, five, why this down to like, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John the root cause here, you could get to the batteries not easily replaceable, but you know, it’s not that expensive to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You could get to the size of the battery, you could get to how long And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use your phone like a regular person, how long does your battery last? Like the planned obsolescence thing is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like different than the perception that Apple is doing, you know, an evil
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to make you buy a new phone because planned obsolescence, you could say they make a sealed phone with a battery that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be crappy after two years. And they know all those numbers, they know how long it will last, they know that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sealed so on and so forth. Isn’t that planned obsolescence? Because this phone is released to you. they
⏹️ ▶️ John know the plan is that if you use this like a regular phone, it will be a much worse phone
⏹️ ▶️ John in two years. And that’s essentially their plan. They couldn’t make a phone that becomes a much
⏹️ ▶️ John worse phone in a week. They can make a plan a phone that becomes much worse phone in five years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where have they chosen to draw that line is wherever they don’t know if it’s two years, we’re just making a number but that is a design choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this brings me to a thing that has been buried in our show notes for a while that I will now hoist up because it is relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a YouTube video from, God, one of the things I hate most about YouTube is
⏹️ ▶️ John how hard they make it to find the stupid date. From September 1st, 2017. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John another typical sensationally titled thing like all the articles today about, you know, new information
⏹️ ▶️ John reveals that Apple is just as deceptive as your crazy uncle always said. No, that’s not what it confirms at all. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple ruining your Mac’s performance? mark. Isn’t that doesn’t that great? Clickbait title.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like every Doug DeMuro title ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John His or well, yeah, yes, his his are boring because they’re two same. The number
⏹️ ▶️ John one, the number one pinned comment on this is Apple ruining your max performance. Spoiler alert.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. This article is about thermal throttling
⏹️ ▶️ John on max, which actually Marco talked about a little bit. Although he’s from Isaac was thermal based, like when you plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John in your external monitor at the at the beach house, like how it slowed down the clocks on your MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, am I remembering that right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a pretty significant limitation of the 2017 MacBook Pro, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is not just the, this test was the 9 Mac, right? So, this is another case where,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the sensational headline would make you think that Apple is inserting code, I mean, this isn’t about
⏹️ ▶️ John making you buy a new Mac, but Apple’s inserting code that says, your computer could be faster, but we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something in software make it not faster and withhold the performance from you because we’re evil apple and we do this
⏹️ ▶️ John for insert reason that doesn’t make any sense because obviously as as group of points out and as many people point out like
⏹️ ▶️ John people think it’s in apples interest to make you buy them and buy a new phone but it is not an apples interest to make you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a new phone by sabotaging your current iphone because that will just make you feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ John about iphones it’ll make you want to buy a different phone but anyway setting that aside logic doesn’t factor in like again perception
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter that’s not logic
⏹️ ▶️ John enter into it um The reason so many Macs thermal throttle, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you watch his video, this is about gaming performance on an iMac, or
⏹️ ▶️ John actually MacBook as well. Maybe it’s both, I forget. Anyway, he puts it in a freezer
⏹️ ▶️ John and runs the benchmark and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco having it out of the freezer. So
⏹️ ▶️ John all these sort of temperature things, look, I’m not making this up. Look, performance is here, but then as things
⏹️ ▶️ John warm up, performance goes down. You can see this stair-step pattern in the graphs of what your frame rate is. And then you put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the freezer and you don’t see that. pretty clear that things inside this computer run at more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John full speed until it gets kind of hot and sweaty in there and the mechanisms inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer that are there to protect the silicon from melting itself say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John start slowing things down and it cranks down the clock speed. And this doesn’t have to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life, this has to do with performance. And I would say that, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not doing a malicious thing to make your computer bad because they are evil, you know, rubbing their hands together,
⏹️ ▶️ John villains twirling their mustaches. But they did design a computer. They did design a
⏹️ ▶️ John computer in which if you play a game on it in, you know, in a certain reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John ambient temperature for human kind of room, eventually get so hot that the mechanisms
⏹️ ▶️ John that protect the silicon will kick in and it will start throttling down. And Apple designed that computer right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a manufacturing defect? Did they put it together wrong? Is the thermal paste not working? Is the heat
⏹️ ▶️ John pipe not working right? Or are they all like that? Or are they all like that after a certain number
⏹️ ▶️ John of years and then in the beginning they’re not like that? Whatever the thing is, this is a product that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple made and you are not getting all the performance you would hope to get out of it that you could get out of it
⏹️ ▶️ John if it had better cooling. And same thing with the plugging in the external monitor. Whether that is a sort of programmatic,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the external monitor is plugged in just throttled down immediately because we know there’s gonna be thermal issues, or whether it just so happens that
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as you plug in the external monitor, it immediately trips thermal thing and it drops it down. Either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ability to extract heat away from the heat sensitive components
⏹️ ▶️ John is inadequate to allow those components to run at their top rated speed all the time. And that is a design
⏹️ ▶️ John choice by Apple or design flaw from Apple, however you want to phrase it. In no case is it malicious,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a real fact of the products. And you know, another reason we’re all I’m waiting for Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is like you know, it’s a compromise that you may say, well, that compromise allows it to be thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and lighter, especially with laptop with an iMac, it’s harder to justify saying, Yeah, it is thin
⏹️ ▶️ John back there. But does it really need to be but we want it to be sleek and elegant, whatever. These
⏹️ ▶️ John these are real, you know, and, and same this, this is like the phone with like, oh, they chose to put
⏹️ ▶️ John a battery in there, that maybe if it was a bigger battery, you’d have more headroom, and you wouldn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John charge it full as much and you could, you know, have have more buffer on either side of it sort of use the middle part of the battery like Marcos
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla does, or they could buy a battery from a different manufacturer or they could you know like there are things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do to design the phone to try to avoid this situation and that i think is
⏹️ ▶️ John a legitimate place of potential difference with apple and uh arguably they have
⏹️ ▶️ John made different moves there because this is about the sixth generation with the shutdown stuff the seven
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bigger better battery than the six right and the 10 seems to have a bigger better better battery
⏹️ ▶️ John still, right? So it seems like they are making adjustments and learning from where they came
⏹️ ▶️ John from. But that I feel like is, you know, the communication stuff and everything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel for Apple, but at the same time, by being secretive and crossing the fingers that people wouldn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s on them and they, you know, they get all the bad PR. I do feel bad that the perception
⏹️ ▶️ John will not match up with reality, even more or so now because of this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I also think that the design choices that Apple has made that cause
⏹️ ▶️ John performance degradation like their compromises, I’m not sure they have
⏹️ ▶️ John struck the right balance. It really depends on who you are. Obviously, tech nerds are going to say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, you struck the wrong balance because I’ll give up, you know, half a pound to get a non throttled GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other people might want the half a pound because they don’t care about throttling and all they do is use Microsoft Word all day.
⏹️ ▶️ John But from my perspective as a tech nerd, it bothers me to get a product that has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be sort of, you know, baby to use in a freezer to get the to
⏹️ ▶️ John get sort of the rated performance out of it. Kind of not to crash on Marcos Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ John but kind of like the Tesla’s where a lot of people wrote in when we talked about Tesla’s and road tests and
⏹️ ▶️ John how I felt like it wasn’t getting its due and how you know, it’s such a great performance car, but it’s never
⏹️ ▶️ John put up against the real ones. And a lot of people pointed out and I should have recalled this from reading all the lightning laps. A lot of that is not just
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not great at handling because it’s really heavy, but also because you drive a Tesla hard around a racetrack.
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually the test is like, and not so much. How about you? How about you lay off
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit and it goes into not limp mode, but it goes into please stop hurting me mode because my battery
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting really hot. And I really don’t like doing, you know, hot laps as they’re called, like literally
⏹️ ▶️ John hot laps. I’m I’m not up for this. And so it’s hard to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of, you know, good lap times because you do one or two fast laps and the Tesla’s says
⏹️ ▶️ John no more, like, you know, like thermal throttling on a Mac and like the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John that can’t give enough juice. It says, well, can we just wait for the battery to cool down a little bit maybe? And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not something you’re looking for in a performance car. So
⏹️ ▶️ John fast in a straight line, not so fast around curves, and you drive it fast for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time, And it really, really doesn’t like that and says with its electronics,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will not be doing that anymore for a while. I’m sorry, physics, you know, my bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, to wrap this up, somehow I’ve managed to turn this story about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple software protecting its hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John into a story about how I really wanted the Mac Pro to not be thermal throttled and Apple should make computers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey faster. Shock horse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Like I said, if you take one thing away from this, take away the
⏹️ ▶️ John sad realization, the idea, the knowledge that
⏹️ ▶️ John none of this information actually confirms the evil things people used to think about Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John but everyone will believe it does. And that’s a bummer for Apple, and they’re partially to blame with
⏹️ ▶️ John bad PR handling. But you should continue not to believe that Apple purposely slows down computers because
⏹️ ▶️ John a that would be a dumb thing to do and be they don’t do it to make you buy a new phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also please never put your computing devices in the freezer condensation exists this is a problem put them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mineral oil come on yeah you probably don’t know about this because you were you were always a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac person case you might remember do you remember back back then like one of the early heydays of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overclocking and like the very late 90s early 2000s overclockers started using I don’t know how these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pronounced Peltier Peltier plates you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You want to talk about this? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I think I know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. So one of the ways that you know, water cooling was not extreme enough if you wanted to push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a seller on up to two gigahertz or whatever. So people started using these Peltier devices, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are these these like thermo electric things that they’re like, they’re like their solid state, no moving parts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you apply a ton of power to them. And one side gets super cold. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one side gets super hot. I think that I think integrals use these I’m not sure. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however you pronounce those things. Overclockers decided that this was a good way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get even colder cooling of their CPUs. They could push them even further. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially egregious because all the power that it draws, which is a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to perform this cooling, the hot side gets all the heat of the processor plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wattage that it’s using. So the cold side gets a little cold, the hot side gets
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the Mac DLT of cooling solutions. Hot side hot, cold side cold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss the Mac DLT. Yeah, anyway, and so one of the problems, one of the reasons, one of the many reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why people I don’t think really use those for more than about six months is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you introduce the possibility for something in your computer case to get below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ambient temperature, you start having problems with condensation and possibly frost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is a really big problem inside of a computer case. Electronics do not like water.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, they decided, okay, now we can back off frost and condensation, and now we can just go to pumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water through our case. That’s much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like you said, it’s all about ambient temperature, because if you start making the surrounding air cooler and it can no
⏹️ ▶️ John longer hold the water that is in it, it condenses out of the air, that’s a problem. But if everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is at air temperature or higher, you’re still it’s still way lower than the temperature of the little hot piece of silicon in
⏹️ ▶️ John there. So you’re fine with condensation. You just gotta make sure you have no leaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is that it on the deliberately planned obsolescence? That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may or may not really be a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not you’re doing it again. Not may or may not really be a thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not really a thing. I’m kidding. This is the problem. Like no matter how much people talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, but like, yeah, but this does kind of confirm what everyone said, doesn’t it? No, no, it doesn’t. Because what they were saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what they were saying was not
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re slung down the computer but for a reason and this I know this is the nuance and I totally agree that no one is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get this but the ATP listeners will know and I would I would caution you ATP listeners do not attempt to explain this
⏹️ ▶️ John to other people like at Christmas dinner because it will not go over well just nod your head and say you were right
⏹️ ▶️ John all like whatever don’t even confirm that they’re right just go have a different conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no guess yeah guess what you’re not going to be the one bringing it up like all of our listeners who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco known probably as like the computer people in their family all their other relatives are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask them about it. You won’t have to bring it up. People will ask you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, then you can tell them the truth, I suppose, but like it’s a nuance that people don’t care about because people really, really want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be right about their conspiracy theory. And we can get into the psychology of this. Everyone wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like they are savvy, like that the world’s not pulling one over on me, that this is how they get you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, the world attempts to pull one over, but I’m no dummy. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John what the truth is. So, Apple, people think apple’s great but i know the truth about apple the truth about
⏹️ ▶️ John apple is they intentionally make your phone slower to make you buy a new one and i’m on you know they’re they’re not fooling
⏹️ ▶️ John me right and it’s important to them to feel like they
⏹️ ▶️ John are that the world is not fooling them this is often people who are uh mostly being fooled by almost everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world and so they you know that it’s important that they’re that they show that that’s not the case
⏹️ ▶️ John um so they no matter how much like you can’t you will never convince these people that it’s not the case. Like, there is no,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, literally you will never convince them. Like, if they could personally speak to and live with for a year
⏹️ ▶️ John every employee living and dead of Apple and be truly convinced that they were never doing this, they would do
⏹️ ▶️ John that in their infant lifespan, come back and say, yeah, but I kind of think they were really doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, and it really doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help that Apple just basically proved the first two-thirds of their theory correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, but that’s the thing. Like, the important—there is no two-thirds of the theory. Like, the conclusion, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, this is what they’re doing. Like, they’re doing it to make you buy a new phone because the other part of
⏹️ ▶️ John is not something to get worked about. They’re doing it to make sure the hardware doesn’t make sure my phone doesn’t turn off. Well, that doesn’t sound like something
⏹️ ▶️ John I should get that mad about it because they don’t. They don’t care about the nuances like PR communication and so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Maybe if you want to convince them, maybe you could say what you should really be mad about is the fact that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t say this earlier and then they can get mad about that and maybe they’ll feel like they still like are righteously angry and they
⏹️ ▶️ John could be righteously angry about that. That’s fine, but some people will never give up on the notion of
⏹️ ▶️ John malice that like like like Volkswagen engineers secretly cheating emissions
⏹️ ▶️ John tests because that’s the worst thing about this. This is Gruber points out in his article. He used Uber as an example because he doesn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John about the automotive world, but VW is probably a more apt example. Large corporations
⏹️ ▶️ John do legitimately do actual actively maliciously evil, cheaty things like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not by accident, not to protect the engine, but like detect when you’re being emission tested
⏹️ ▶️ John and pretend like you have less emissions than you do. than really when you get used as a car put out way more emissions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Volkswagen did that. That’s not good for that company. So it’s not a stretch to believe the corporation
⏹️ ▶️ John would do that. But you know, the reason I mean, I guess we have to say like, the reason we
⏹️ ▶️ John all believe Apple wouldn’t do this is mostly because it doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. I mean, it’s partially because we know people at Apple and we trust Apple and believe it and maybe we’re suckers and blah, blah, blah. But
⏹️ ▶️ John also because unlike cheating on emissions tests, which has a big upside for VW if they can pull
⏹️ ▶️ John it off. Successfully pulling off intentionally making your phones worse to make people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John new ones. Like, it wouldn’t make people buy new ones. As Gruber has pointed out many, many times, it would make people buy an Android
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Like if they knew, like if their phones just get worse. And this has happened, by the way, with the shutdown
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I’ve seen stuff like I bought my last iPhone, but then it just kept turning off. Forget it. Next time I’m getting an Android phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s way cheaper anyway, right? That’s what actually happens if you intentionally or not intentionally,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the phone you have starts getting worse. You know, like Casey with his BMW, if your engine keeps blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John up, you’re thinking, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be a BMW. He’s not like that clever BMW tricking me into buying
⏹️ ▶️ John another BMW by making my engine blow up intentionally. That’s not how the world works.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people do really want to feel like that, you know, they understand how they get you and the world’s not pulling one over on them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, because in this case, the world did pull one over on them. And like, it is the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix to this. I mean, It’s going to be a long-term reputation problem, and having malice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attributed to it is going to be a very long-term problem. But the only way to start fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is to communicate about it from the phone. A PR statement is not enough, because most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will not read PR statements, and if they do, they won’t believe them. The phone has to tell them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when this throttling happens and tell them why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John happening. How much
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think that will help? I agree that it will help, but how much?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, massively. Because that totally changes the view of it, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everybody, they’re not going to convince everybody, but it will at least appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re not trying to hide this fact from you. You know, because the narrative is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are secretly, trickily slowing down your phone. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they tell you, your phone can’t run at full speed because the battery is too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worn out, that’s a very different look. And again, that’s gonna piss people off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, but not as many. It’s way fewer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, well, let’s give a percentage. So like if 100% is everyone suddenly has good feelings, and 0%
⏹️ ▶️ John is this doesn’t make anybody feel better, what percentage would you say that this helps?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eh, maybe half to two-thirds, I’d say. I mean, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. We’re on the same page, because I think it’s half as well. My guess would be about half. Like a half of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John will see that dialogue and will be like, yeah, it’s a bummer, but I understand what’s going on. And the other
⏹️ ▶️ John half of the people, like I said, will say this dialogue box proves that Apple’s trying to get me a new phone by lying to me with
⏹️ ▶️ John this dialogue box. So it is way better than what they did this time. But I’m pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John that this will, you know, and if you think about it, the like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the not saying anything strategy, pretend they’re not saying anything strategy had been ongoing. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, this, this whole information had not come out right. They just continued with the not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John anything thing. Apple could have theoretically weathered that storm and just put better batteries in their phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually the sixes all cycle out and then you know they sort of quote unquote win
⏹️ ▶️ John um so they’re you know this strategy they chose to do is riskier right because something like
⏹️ ▶️ John what what just happened could happen but the potential upside i think is better than the 50 solution
⏹️ ▶️ John where half the people think now the dialogue box is proof positive that apple is trying to trick you into buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a new phone by making your phone slower because that dialogue box is total bs my that battery’s fine, I know it’s fine. But it’s telling me I
⏹️ ▶️ John need a new phone, it’s just, you know, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be clear, they said, like, they said in a statement that right now it applies to iPhone 6 and 6s, but it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, but the 7 is gonna be added soon, and future devices will be added as time goes on. Like, they said that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it isn’t a problem inherent to the 6 and 6s. Like, this problem isn’t gonna go away. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think the battery’s better in the 7, though. Like, I think, like, they put a bigger battery in it, and that supposedly will
⏹️ ▶️ John make it, you know, so that it doesn’t get, go under current as, you know, so maybe it’ll last instead of two years,
⏹️ ▶️ John two and a half years or whatever. Like I think there because I think the root problem is sort of the design lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone, right? It’s not like, you know, they have to pick a design lifetime. Like you have to, like I said, they could pick any number
⏹️ ▶️ John they wanted as their target, right? I think they’ve been moving their target up, which will help them with this problem. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John no phone. I think a design where this problem will never come up unless they have totally different battery technology. So they have to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John a time and no matter what, they need to have this messaging. So if someone happens to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John their phone, they make a phone the last five years. Um, so what if someone keeps it for six years? You
⏹️ ▶️ John still need this, all this mechanism in there for when it goes bad. It’s just a question of what
⏹️ ▶️ John that number is. And I think the number is farther out on the sevens and tens. We’ll see. We’ll see when
⏹️ ▶️ John they, when they have the software feature. I mean, you’ll find out basically of like, do people have sevens now that are like switching off
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey six used to or all the sevens too young at this point? I don’t know. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John heard I mean, I have a seven, so I’ll be watching for it, but, um, it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John inherent problem with the battery technology and the problem with having a steel battery and all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. And so communication will help with that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple also dreads the idea of people seeing that dialogue box because some
⏹️ ▶️ John people, some percentage of people will see that dialogue box and have
⏹️ ▶️ John a concrete thing to point to to say that Apple is malicious and evil. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at this dialogue box. Apple’s coming right out and telling me, you should buy a new phone because we’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’re artificially making your phone slow to make you buy a new phone. That’s how they’ll read that dialogue box. That’s a bummer.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is taking a page from the Windows playbook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I wouldn’t say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At least I hope not. Just today, and by today I mean exactly seven days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, or I should say that Bloomberg released a post, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman, saying, Apple plans combined iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps to create one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user experience. Speaking of a Microsoft tagline, one user experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of a headline that does not accurately represent the ideas contained in the article.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true too. I’m shocked. Yeah, no way. So this is, again, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post by Gurman, And the summary seems to be that there will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a change probably next year, if he’s right, that what we currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think of as a universal app, or maybe there’ll be a new term for it, but there will be a mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which the same app can be run on iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS. And so in the same way that we have universal apps on the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store, which can be run on iPhone and iPad in the future there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess Apple watch, although that’s not really part of being universal, but anyway, but it’s three different platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future there will, there may, or perhaps will be a mechanism by which we will have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same app running on iPhone, on iPad, potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple watch and on Mac iOS, and nobody really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knows what the engineering mechanism is behind this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that supposedly is the future, if you believe Mark Gurman. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s worth pontificating about what the different paths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are to this end. But before we go down that road, are there any immediate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts on this, starting with John?
⏹️ ▶️ John 19.34 I think the important thing, the important part of the story to think about, and this is a rumor, so we don’t know, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. They did a lot of equivocating in this. It’s like, oh, but it might come next year, but they might cancel it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it might not. Great. OK, so the motivation behind this is something that we’ve talked about in this
⏹️ ▶️ John show a lot, specifically when Marco’s been like making Mac applications and stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco struggles he’s had
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. Here’s what I think. Why? Why? I believe that projects
⏹️ ▶️ John like this are, you know, conceivably going on inside Apple and may actually
⏹️ ▶️ John ship. Um, Apple has an important asset,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, that they brag about in keynotes all the time. Uh, but that I think people tend not to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John that much, which is, you know, when they put up that slide, it says we have X number
⏹️ ▶️ John of thousands or millions of developers. They brag about number apps, but number of apps is a proxy for number of developers
⏹️ ▶️ John because developers are writing those apps. Apple used to have a certain amount of people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are Mac developers, but now they have way, way more people who are iOS developers. There are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS developers. That is a tremendous asset for Apple. It’s huge number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know how to write applications for iOS and do it to make money. It’s a virtuous
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle, like it’s, you know, the whole marketplace. It’s great for Apple makes money when they make money. But really,
⏹️ ▶️ John the important asset is a bunch of people out there know how to write iOS apps. Fewer people
⏹️ ▶️ John out there know how to write Mac apps fewer every year because the Mac Mac developers
⏹️ ▶️ John get older and most people who are learning to write apps are learning to write them on iOS. One way Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could deal with this is say we’re just going to sunset the Mac whatever the Mac was the past iOS is the future
⏹️ ▶️ John all these developers know how to develop for iOS we’ll just let all the Mac developers retiring off into the sunset
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll can the Mac line and blah blah blah you know and everything we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John out of our VRS has said no we’re not doing that the Mac is important, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it’s important until
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not. But so far, the messaging is pretty clear. Thumbs up on the Mac. In fact, we’re rededicating
⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves to the Mac. The Mac is an important product. The Mac and iOS fill different roles.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re never gonna force the Mac to be like iOS or force iOS to be like the Mac, all those things
⏹️ ▶️ John that they said. But they do have the problem of a small number of Mac developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John a small number of Mac apps and smaller all the time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of applications are available on iOS and TV OS but not on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the old days of just the PC world, of course they’d be available on the Mac if they were available in any app platform. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John many things are available in our platform is not available on the Mac. And one of the big reasons is
⏹️ ▶️ John you have all these developers in our iOS apps, but they don’t know how to write Mac apps and writing Mac apps is different
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that it is non trivial to do that. So they’re assuming Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep the Mac around, which they keep saying they do. One way to solve that problem is to find
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to let the huge number of people who know how to write iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ John reuse some or all of those skills to target the Mac. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is what any project like this would be about it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John about leveraging that asset to you know
⏹️ ▶️ John bring up their other platform and yes the unification is important to like trying to unify but you know
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I said this headline was misleading is because it says to create one user experience but
⏹️ ▶️ John then you read the article and it’s like the application sometimes we’ll use touch but then sometimes we’ll use a mouse and a pointer it’s like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that’s what not one user experience that’s two user experiences and it should be because the mouse cursor is different than touch
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can’t use, you know, different things work in different, you know, anyway, this is all about
⏹️ ▶️ John letting leveraging the those skills. And I and I think I think Mark already talked about this on one
⏹️ ▶️ John of his podcasts that he’s already recorded in the in the past future. I don’t I don’t know how time works anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The days of future past seven days ago, we discussed that under the radar. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think you’ll hear a lot about iOS developers saying I’d Yeah, if I
⏹️ ▶️ John if I could use my skills to either make a Mac app or to bring the app that I already have an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPad to the Mac, maybe that would make sense. At the very least, I would entertain it like I wouldn’t rule it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I have to see if it makes sense in terms of economics and so on and so forth. There are some potential upsides and downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ John But a lot of time, you know, like it, it’s when you remove the barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John and say you can use your skills that you have for iOS. And you know, you know how to use UI kit and make table views and
⏹️ ▶️ John do all this stuff. And there’s some new stuff you might learn. But you can reuse your code and you can reuse your skills to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to varying extents, they would be open to that idea because it is potential new way to make
⏹️ ▶️ John money. And yes, it’s a smaller platform. But in theory, we don’t know if this is true, but in theory, you might be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John charge even higher prices than you do on the iPad. So that’s the lens through which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John viewing all these rumors and getting it. What case you’re talking about? Yeah, but how? But how would they do that? There are many
⏹️ ▶️ John ways that they could do it. That would be bad for Mac users and bad for developers like they could blow it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if I wanted to put up like, what are the goals of this project? goals are leverage one of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s greatest assets, tons of developers who know how to develop for iOS. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Right. So before we talk how, Marco, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Marconi The devil’s in the details. But conceptually, I love this idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not going to be an easy thing to do. You know, if assuming this is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really a thing they’re working on. It’s that’s not easy, because the two platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very, very different from each other. And I don’t just mean like on an API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m talking about just like the interaction and usefulness level and the needs of a Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know versus iOS like in many ways developing an iOS is way easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there’s a lot of things that you don’t have to worry about that on the Mac you have to accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or think about or support Just because people expect different kind of interaction in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac like you know just simple things like you know You have the entire menu system you also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have things like drag and drop and and different types of data providing services that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, all sorts of different windowing, multiple windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple documents being open, the entire document system behind that. You have things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco undo, which you don’t have really on iOS. All sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rich behaviors that have been built over time, many of which are quite a long time ago, that people expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all like, you know, quote, computer apps to be able to do now. Things like scriptability,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even, like, there’s so, there’s so, so much that Mac apps do that iOS developers don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever have to worry about or don’t have to even think about. Making something that can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that rich power of the Mac with iOS-like code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or iOS-like UI frameworks, that’s not a small job. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of ways to do that very badly. And so a lot of Mac people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are wary of this announcement, or they were seven days ago at least, where they’re worried, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we don’t want like the equivalent of an iOS app running in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simulator window, just, you know, and here we are like dragging our mouse over it to simulate tuck swipes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. Like, nobody wants that. And if that’s what this ends up being, that would be a huge failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a number of levels and a tragedy, honestly. But I have a feeling Apple’s better than that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think they would do that. I think if they’re gonna do this at all, hopefully they’re gonna do a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good job of it. And that’s, again, that’s not easy. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t surprise me if they go down this road, if they’ve been going down this road for a while, and then they eventually decide, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, this actually isn’t good enough, we shouldn’t do this anymore. Like, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like even if they did, and maybe they’ve done that three times already, they would take another run at it, because I feel like the only two possible
⏹️ ▶️ John options are sunset the Mac or find a way to leverage your fleet. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, in a not huge number of
⏹️ ▶️ John years. Would you say on an infinite
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco time scale? No, non-infinite, on
⏹️ ▶️ John a finite and fairly short time scale. That one just gets the desk gone. The number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know how to make a good Mac app is not going up. It’s just not, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the number of people who know how to make a good iOS app is going up, and there’s a tremendous number of them. So you have to find a way to either,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have people develop the Mac anymore or repurpose repoint your big asset of that
⏹️ ▶️ John fleet of developers at the Mac because that’s the only way you’re going to get an ongoing supply of good Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps right and so I think you know there like you said there are just so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this wrong right and if they tried a bunch of approaches and they suck I think they would say okay
⏹️ ▶️ John but let’s try again with a different approach eventually you assume the one they come out with is one of it’s an approach
⏹️ ▶️ John that they feel kind of okay with, but you know, they could blow it and try again. Anyway, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the approaches, I think there’s a few obvious ones, a couple of the obvious ones. It’s not clear to me
⏹️ ▶️ John whether these are approaches that they’ve decided suck, and they don’t want to pursue. But at very least, these approaches
⏹️ ▶️ John they have code for things like UX kit, which is like what, when a lot of applications start
⏹️ ▶️ John appearing on the Mac, and people said they looked and smelled kind of like iOS applications, a lot of them use either actual
⏹️ ▶️ John UX kit or similar approaches where it is like a UI kit sort of facade
⏹️ ▶️ John that just calls app kit stuff under the covers to let you repurpose code that you originally wrote for iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John to make an applicant a quote unquote Mac application that kind of looks and behaves a little bit like an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS application photos for the Mac is a great example this you know, arguably like
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts or even something like the new notes application a lot of these
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that you look at them what maps Yeah, a lot of apps out there. They kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of I mean, there’s a family resemblance, but also like behavior wise, you can kind of tell that they’re not just using
⏹️ ▶️ John straight app kit, because a lot of the stuff that you basically get for free with app kit doesn’t exist in these applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John like different behaviors, different, you know, behaviors in terms of focus and keyboard shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, that are just different for reasons that don’t make sense until you realize that they probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John reused a lot of UI kit code. So a UX kit like approach is one possible way to do that. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, it’s not clear to me whether they did that and decided actually, that’s not great. So we’re not taking that approach,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they did that over many years with many applications decided, actually, this approach works pretty well. And this is what we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to go with. So that approach would be essentially a new framework that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John app kit, but not UI kit, but it looks very much like UI kit and lets people reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John some of their code from UI kit, maybe with small tweaks, but a lot of their skills, oh, I kind of know
⏹️ ▶️ John how table views work. I know how buttons work. I know how you know, animations and transitions work, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of new stuff you have to learn to with menus and so on and so forth. But that’s one approach. A second approach
⏹️ ▶️ John is make a new toolkit and unfortunately, Apple has really used up all the
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the good names. It’s a kit for making apps. We can’t call it app kit. It’s a UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, forget about that one. It’s an HI tool. But no, nevermind. Like they’ve really used
⏹️ ▶️ John hi kit is one of the ones I’ve heard like you can combine kit with anyway, come up with a new framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks almost exactly like UI kit because it presumably UI kit represents the best thinking the company has about
⏹️ ▶️ John how to make a UI, but with changes to fundamental things about
⏹️ ▶️ John it that allow it to handle all the things the Mac does, menus, cursors,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, scroll bars, blah, blah, blah. And also all the things you like it does. So that’s the that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the actual sort of grand unified, like there is one framework to write applications
⏹️ ▶️ John for everything. And that would mean that it’s It’s not a shim on top of app kit that
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably they would implement whatever behaviors they implemented would define going forward what it
⏹️ ▶️ John means to be Mac like right as opposed to now where app kit defines what it means
⏹️ ▶️ John to be at Mac like more or less an app kit itself is influenced by being smushed together with
⏹️ ▶️ John carbon and H I toolkit and all that other stuff. That’s why that what defines our definition
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac like and that definition changed from classic Mac OS as well. So it’s not like the definition of Mac like can’t change.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but But yeah an entirely new framework to do it and that new framework would also be the same new framework that people
⏹️ ▶️ John use for iOS So when you wrote your iOS application you would also use this is like the one new Framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that can do everything the risks in that are hey Why are you messing up all of these these
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS developers days? Well, I learn all this UI kit stuff and now I have to learn this new thing But yeah, it looks like not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you I can’t but why do I want to use that if it’s just like UI kit But suddenly different with a bunch of Mac crap that I don’t care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would I learn that? that. So that’s that is more difficult to pull off and risky,
⏹️ ▶️ John but potentially the reward is finally Apple has one way to write applications for all its platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, they have a unified API. But in all of these solutions, and I think the real place where
⏹️ ▶️ John this any of these solutions are gonna be really hard to come up with something that ends up being,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a win for all involved is, you know, as this headline,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, incorrectly states, not one user experience for everybody. Apple still seems dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John to the idea that a mouse pointer and cursor and like, you know, the Mac user interface
⏹️ ▶️ John will continue to be a thing. And applications that work like that are different
⏹️ ▶️ John than applications that work when you’re touching them with your finger in fundamental important ways. And there’s really no way
⏹️ ▶️ John to say this one magic application just magically works everywhere. I made a tweet earlier today was
⏹️ ▶️ John right thrice run anywhere, which is a joke on the old Java thing of right once run anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John thrice means even if it is a unified toolkit and it’s the same thing everywhere you use Xcode use
⏹️ ▶️ John one framework and you write an application that runs on all these platforms you still have essentially to quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote write it thrice which means you have to write the Mac version and do all the stuff with the menus
⏹️ ▶️ John and the keyboard shortcuts and the drag and drop and everything that the Mac has to do and you know right you have to write the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John version which is a known quantity and you have to write the iPad version it’s like well why do you have to write the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad version that’s not another version ask somebody with an iOS app, if the iPad version comes for free, because they use
⏹️ ▶️ John UI kit, it does not come for free, you have to not write it thrice, like it’s three
⏹️ ▶️ John times the application. But just because the screen gets bigger, you have to say, let me rethink how my
⏹️ ▶️ John application works, right, I have to add new elements to it, I have to potentially add new features.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like, it’s not enough to just be a phone app that is stretched to be a little bit wider.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s no way of avoiding having to write a good application for
⏹️ ▶️ John every platform. If the platforms continue to be different in both form factor and in the
⏹️ ▶️ John case of the Mac, you know, interface paradigm, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very different and an environment. Yeah, and no, no framework, no UI framework
⏹️ ▶️ John will ever eliminate that work. All it can do is say, the only work you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is that work to make a good, a good application that works in the Mac, a good app, but you won’t have to relearn how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? You have to relearn
⏹️ ▶️ John how like to play audio like you know just that that they’ll unify
⏹️ ▶️ John the underlying things and have one unified framework and one unified language and ide and
⏹️ ▶️ John one unified binary but you still have to design essentially three different applications or three very different forms and
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way the watch which you know they could unify that as well and not have watch kit and have that be a variant of this thing if
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to go whole hog but there’s no there’s there’s no avoiding that. It’s not one user experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one, I guess, framework, one language, you know, and maybe not even that
⏹️ ▶️ John if they end up going with the shim approach. So I believe they have to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But boy, there’s a lot of ways it could mess up. And so I wish them luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if if they go whole new framework, so they make HI kit or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I mean, come on, it’s Swift. There’s no way it would just be called kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny. It’s funny you say that because my question was going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do they abandon Objective-C? I don’t see why that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be either productive or necessary, but Marco, do you think they would abandon Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this hypothetical HI kit?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, if it’s scheduled, if it’s intended to, you know, be in development now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and come out in like a year or two maybe but as time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes on on a finite time scale you know in a few like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the longer it is from now I think the more likely that that would be the approach but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not even gonna say it’s unlikely even now I would say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be reasonable like I don’t think that would be overly aggressive to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit require Swift, like to just have to be a Swift only framework.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s different than saying objective C is gone, because like, even if they went full Swift, you have to keep the objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C runtime around for a really, really long time, because it’s how Swift calls into all the other code, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so like, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re just saying, like, would you have to write it in objective C, right? The one thing I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably will do is no 32 bit ever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for whatever this thing is, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac itself as it exists is going to lose 32 bit probably next year, right? So that’s that’s a gimme.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s possible that depending on the timelines, if they switch the Mac to arm, this could
⏹️ ▶️ John be arm only depending on you know, is this one year, five year, whatever, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John that timeline could coincide to simplify matters. These are all low level things that really in the end don’t matter. Like I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re into it because you know, either software developers are into software development things and we’re interested than a digger. D details.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the bottom line, like the most interesting thing from the consumer’s perspective is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s plan to continue to sell devices of different sizes in different forms, continuing
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell, you know, things that we call Max, things that we call iPhones, things that we call iPads, things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we call watchers, all of which have, uh, different ways to interact with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some are closer to each other than other iPads are very similar to an iPhone, but a watch is very different from both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Mac is very different from the iOS devices, but there’s a range of hardware devices they sell and
⏹️ ▶️ John and presumably will continue to sell because they’re not giving up on that range like they’re not, you know, they can make new
⏹️ ▶️ John hybrids like Jason and I talked on upgrade about an iOS laptop like this other
⏹️ ▶️ John form factors that can be explored. And the other one is obviously touch coming to the Mac and how that might influence
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But we met Casey mentioned Microsoft at the beginning of this topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s an important lesson because Microsoft for all its success or failure in actually
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling this off was way ahead on the thinking of we’re going to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John one software platform that lets you write applications for all sorts of different weird form factors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they have laptops that are convertible into tablets that have touchscreens on them. They also have tablets. And at one time they had
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and they tried to run the whole range with a single unified platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’d have to write, you know, different style applications for. I forget what was their thing was like WMP
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. They had an acronym
⏹️ ▶️ John believe. Yeah, unified windows platform or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John that that approach. If Apple could snap its fingers and have something like that now,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would love to have it because the hard work is coming up with a single framework that could span all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as far as consumers concerned, the interesting part is, so can I buy a thing from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John where it like runs Mac, you know, it runs Adobe Photoshop like the legacy version,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also I can get all the new apps, but also I can touch a screen, but also it looks like a laptop like
⏹️ ▶️ John the unified Apple platform is a time to make different decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John about the boundaries between these things. Like you can get rid of the Mac iOS, whatever distinction
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to have these universal apps and we’re all set exciting economics for now. That’s a whole other can of worms, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is an opportunity to revisit How those boundaries are drawn because if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making a new framework or you know a new shim type framework or whatever it is that? You’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an opportunity to consider. How could the Mac be different in ways that allow you to make touch
⏹️ ▶️ John a Useful interface for Macs, and if you’ve used the Windows Convertible or laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John with a touchscreen or whatever you have some experience with this that Microsoft is way ahead in
⏹️ ▶️ John both figuring out what makes sense for touching the screens of PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John for lack of a better term and also making the frameworks that allow you to do it. Apple’s lucky
⏹️ ▶️ John that they just haven’t been particularly successful in the market with their approach, but like that you learn,
⏹️ ▶️ John you learn by doing and Microsoft has done many different attempts at this and
⏹️ ▶️ John from all accounts each time they try their new surface, whatever thing and the
⏹️ ▶️ John new operating system that runs on it makes an ever more compelling case for
⏹️ ▶️ John being open to different form factors and different kinds of input instead of the sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John rather rigid boundary certainly between the Mac and iOS, but arguably also between like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS devices of different sizes. So I’m most excited from a consumer perspective of seeing Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s what I want out of a unified thing. It’s not like, yeah, the unified technical underpinnings would be awesome, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John that finally it gives the Apple the freedom to spread it
⏹️ ▶️ John to to make new variations along the spectrum instead of being siloed into this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what a Mac’s like and this is what a phone is like and they’re so different for each other and there’s no crossover and don’t try to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No iOS laptops, no touchscreen Macs, never, never, never. If it’s a unified platform, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for that distinction anymore and now they could start exploring different steps along the spectrum.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually look forward to that because I do think it’s pretty clear, like the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and consumers have spoken on the issue of like touch laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As much as Apple says, this isn’t a good experience, nobody wants this, it turns out a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it and they do it anyway. And they try and they touch their screens and nothing happens. And they get like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple is losing that fight in the in actuality, whether they know it or not. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they probably do know it at this point. tried they tried like one last-ditch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort with touch bar and giant track pads but that’s not enough that’s not what people actually want what people actually want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have to touch the screen sometime or to be able to touch screen sometimes like that’s that’s what people are actually doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and wanting and expecting so anything that gets us closer to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is a good direction for the Mac to take because again the reality is like this is what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing and a lot of this I think the whole idea of this of like this cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI framework needing to exist. I think you put it well, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless of what you think people should do here, a lot of Mac developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, people should just write Mac apps in AppKit. And yeah, they should, but they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reality is very different. The reality is that all the action is happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS in the Apple world. they can’t get people to care enough about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac to develop a lot of Mac apps anymore. The Mac feels increasingly like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very stale, low priority platform for a lot of developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including Apple. They have to do something to make it easier for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring Mac apps over. And if they don’t, we’re gonna have the situation we have now on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna slowly worsen, which is right now, we already have tons major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applications that are either that are not available on the Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that have really neglected low priority Mac versions like the Twitter app, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we have a lot of apps that say, oh, just use the web app and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guilty. I’m guilty of myself. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix is a great example because you can’t even watch 4K Netflix on a Mac because there’s no 4K support probably for some
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb copyright reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Exactly. And like there’s so many types of apps where the answer on the Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either, eh, sorry, we don’t support it or just use our web app. Best case scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of complex things like Slack, you get these like weird web native apps that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likes because they’re terrible in a lot of ways and perform badly and use all your RAM and aren’t Mac-like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. So like anything like that’s the status quo. That’s the reality. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality is, AppKit is the past. And as capable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it is, the people who know it, the market has said otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Economics have said otherwise, and people’s attention has said otherwise. In many ways, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar to Swift versus Objective-C. In that, Objective-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people like me who know it really well, Swift came along and were like, we don’t need, I don’t need that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to just keep using the thing I already know how to use. It’s totally fine. But the reality was, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reasons they did need Swift, which we talked about at the time it came out, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Objective-C was old and crufty, and it turned off new developers. Developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were actively avoiding writing Objective-C because it was old and crufty, and it didn’t fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern aesthetics for programming languages. AppKit has that problem as an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API. Like, AppKit is really old and crufty, and when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS developer sees AppKit for the first time, it is not a positive impression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And as an iOS developer working through this, and I know other people who’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done the same thing, it’s like, it’s really, it doesn’t ever let up. Like, there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of it that, like, when you first discover like what NSDocument does automatically for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like, wow, this is really capable, this is awesome. but there’s just so much friction in getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those interfaces developed. And to be clear, the lower level frameworks, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the audio stuff, a lot of the data types and stuff, a lot of those things are already unified.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like a lot of the networking, there’s so much stuff that is already unified between the two platforms. The main area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this is necessary is the UI layer. And there are just so many differences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like so many things work completely differently between Mac OS and iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a huge barrier to developing for the Mac. It is so hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and unfriendly, and you can’t look up help on the web because there’s almost no results
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. And it’s like a ghost town of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old cruft and unfriendliness. And I know that’s not, like, if you’re familiar with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re an expert in AppKit, you don’t see it that way. But for all the rest of the iOS developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are not familiar with it, that is how it is. So even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is fine for its current developers, it needs to change because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire world has changed around it. So something has to happen here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, if they gave the Mac its own completely new UI framework that was not shared with anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at what happened with tvOS. tvOS had that. It had a whole new framework that was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not UIKit. It kind of has its own stuff. Although it has way more in common with UIKit than AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does. And making a tvOS app is really uncompelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you have to rewrite your entire UI from scratch and it’s just not very good. WatchOS has a similar problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WatchKit is very little like UIKit, although it’s still way more like it than AppKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And making a WatchKit app is really not compelling because these are smaller usage platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad is a great example, and I think probably, honestly, a big part of why this kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be done. On the iPad, you know, John, you said earlier, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t get an iPad app for free, but you do get it for cheap. Like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an iPhone app, to port it to the iPad is effort, but it’s not a ton of effort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nowhere near the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of effort. Yeah, because it uses the same UI framework, but then, like, to make a good iPad app, you have to redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it’s like, you know, like Overcast iPad app is used by something like 5% or less of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it every day, but most people don’t use it. But it was, you know, it’s about 5%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra work to do it also. So like, it was worth it to me. And yeah, it could be better than it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be more iPad optimized, but it doesn’t need to be. Like right now, it’s fine on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no glaring shortcomings with it. It’s totally fine. And I didn’t, it didn’t need to be that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. And it isn’t that much of a maintenance headache ongoing. If the Mac can be anywhere near that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect the Mac to be as easy to port to. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John be harder because you got menus and all that, and no touch interface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Right, so it’s not gonna be the same. It’s not gonna be as easy as porting to the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from iPhone, but if it can be somewhere near that, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be only three times harder instead of 20 times harder, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge, huge gain. that could lead to so many more Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. And honestly, as you said, John, honestly, I think, I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac has much of a choice. Because the reality is that if they don’t do something like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just going to keep stagnating and it will die. That is it. That is the future of the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has no future if they don’t find a way to make it easier to develop apps for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you already have an iOS code base.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the other way to have a future is to sell 100 times more Macs, but that’s that’s a tall order
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like if you could suddenly sell as many Macs as you sell iPhones this problem takes care of itself and people just continue to Write an app
⏹️ ▶️ John kit and you’re fine, but that’s not the reality right exactly so what one more technical thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on this This is not this is not likely, but I like thinking about ways you could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John get this win another problem Apple has with its platforms arguably Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, we can debate what the causes are, but there’s a lot of applications, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of very sophisticated, very powerful applications are only available on the Mac and Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John love for those applications to be available on iOS devices. But for a variety of reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, that’s not always the case. Now, if you make a unified UI framework, depending on how you do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking about a shim layer that lets you basically write with a UI kit like API, but they call it app kit stuff under
⏹️ ▶️ John the covers as a quicker way to let people reuse some of their code and skills to write Mac applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could make something like that in the reverse direction to let someone take a complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John sophisticated Mac application and and allow it to run on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS with some changes to make it work for touch. I’m sure Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know if Apple is frustrated by this, but I know a lot of users are frustrated by the fact that there’s no Photoshop for the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, right? Adobe makes a Photoshop for the iPad, but it’s not it’s not Photoshop Photoshop. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe makes a bunch of applications that try to play to the strengths of the iOS platform, but none of them is full. None of them are full fledged Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John like there and there are other companies trying to pick up that slack. So fine, Adobe, you’re not going to do it. Trust me, you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adobe to port Photoshop to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know I’m just saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John capability wise, like affinity makes a bunch of great applications. And what’s the other one, the other well known one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s pixelmator, pixelmator pro affinity, acorn, a whole lot of a whole lot of good ones. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of applications that are targeted. But there’s still a lot of sophisticated applications that are only on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you say, well, it’s because the Mac is powerful enough and so on and so forth. All the excuses for why those are only on Mac eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John will come down to, well, it’s written in this framework that doesn’t run on iOS, and we’re not going to rewrite our whole application because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really big and complicated. The only companies that can afford to do stuff like that are Microsoft. And even their
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS versions are Microsoft Word and Excel kind of in name only. They’re very different.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you could have a way to make a unified framework and shim layer or something or other that lets a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac developers with some amount of work that is less than
⏹️ ▶️ John rewriting their entire application, which is, you know, it’s pretty easy to hit that bar, some some smaller amount of work than rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and you like it, let them sell their well known well established, extremely powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John application for the new 27 inch iPad pro. That is a compelling
⏹️ ▶️ John case and it solves it solves Mac developers problems in that one now suddenly you can address this market with
⏹️ ▶️ John your skills that you have, right? But that’s not why Apple cares about that, because they’ll just let those Mac developers retire and
⏹️ ▶️ John die. Whatever, who cares? It solves the problem Apple has, which is, hey, we would really like it
⏹️ ▶️ John if we could get way more expensive, powerful applications on iOS. Apple’s been trying that
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. That’s why the iPad Pro exists. And it is happening. It is happening slowly. But
⏹️ ▶️ John one way to get a nice boost of complicated, powerful applications if you could somehow make that happen. Now, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not a big enough upside for upside for people to undertake this. It kind of goes against what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get people to do is to get people to stop writing an app kit. And who cares about the 10 Mac developers
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the you know, 1000 x number of them that are on the other platform. So I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John this will happen. But for the briefest moment, I had the idea of like, all our
⏹️ ▶️ John greatest and favorite Mac applications, suddenly having cool iOS versions
⏹️ ▶️ John and making iOS a more powerful platform and giving new life to Mac developers. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that is extremely unlikely, but it gives me a warm fuzzy to think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one final question, because I can’t help myself. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume for the sake of discussion that there’s a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complete break, and it’s not just a shim, it’s a completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new HI kit. Do you think that Apple would follow the same like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delegation everywhere pattern that that UI kit has today? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to think of a way to summarize delegation easily. And I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think of a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. But you want it to all be reactive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s exactly what I’m driving at. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John to app kit as delegates all over the place, too. Is that what you’re comparing it to delegation app kit style, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would say delegation as compared to react style stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, like functional reactive programming yourself. It doesn’t have to be FRP, it doesn’t have to be RxSwift necessarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like anything that’s more modern than delegation, even just closures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everywhere, which I admittedly Apple is moving toward, but like something more modern than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delegation. Do you think that it would be a slight step forward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such as closures everywhere? Or do you think it would be a whole hog? Like we’re going to just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey burn the world down and build it a new, let’s go all in on something along the lines of functional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reactive programming, and maybe that’s not the actual answer, but something that dramatic. Do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it would be something that big, this hypothetical HI kit, or do you think it would be something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much closer to a shim? And let me start with Marco on this. It’s going to be all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cocoa bindings. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t honestly, like, I’m not hugely into the whole reactive thing. I kind do my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing with that, but of course. So I’m not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convinced that that is the inevitable forward place to go. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey whatever the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the larger question of would they fundamentally change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design patterns of the way to do UI frameworks? Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they want to also like blow up iOS as well? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the idea of this is to make developing for the Mac more like iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then no, they shouldn’t move on in such a major way because that isn’t how iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works. But if the goal of this is to be like the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unified UI framework for all of their platforms, possibly making it Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, then sure, that would make sense. Like it would make the most sense to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design it in a way that takes maximum advantage and fits in best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the design of the Swift language, which would come with lots of changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t work the same way. Because like so much of AppKit and UIKit is based on the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Objective-C works and is designed because it was always the language. It was designed with that in mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was designed with a lot of Objective-C idioms and things that work very well with Bits of C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With Swift, there’s a lot of weird friction when you try to, when you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UIKit and a lot of Apple frameworks from Swift, you can tell, like, this really wasn’t designed for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not as good as it could be, or it doesn’t quite fit in right, doesn’t feel right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is not as graceful as it could be. So if they’re gonna move forward and make this like the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift-only thing that is our modern answer, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna be over the next 15 years framework, then yeah, change a lot to make it more Swift-like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not necessarily like functional reactive, I don’t, you know. Sure, sure. But just make it more Swift-like, you know, make it ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Swift. But if they’re going for, let’s make it as easy as possible for existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS developers to also make Mac apps, then not necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to, I think, look at, when you talk about UIKit, and even AppKit for that matter,
⏹️ ▶️ John any framework like that that lives for a long time evolves. And you can see like, as you look down through
⏹️ ▶️ John the layers of like, how things have changed, like, as Casey pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out before, before, you know, closures were a thing, everything was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John straight up delegation. And then suddenly, when closures were a thing, even setting aside Swift, it was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John now a bunch of new API’s are coming, take a callback, right? And they take a closure as an argument. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that becomes a pattern that you start to see, you don’t see it everywhere. You the old API’s don’t have it, but they introduce new API’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that do have it. And so you know, each new year WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John the framework that you knew slowly changes and evolves. Whatever the next framework
⏹️ ▶️ John is, the the most conservative answer is take whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John the current best thinking about UI kit is not like make it like UI kit exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are parts of UI kit that have been updated to use the current best thinking and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the closure is an example of like, and that happens to fit with Swift, because if it’s native support for that, and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to use a stupid block syntax and all of this stuff, but make all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John new API’s use the current best thinking. And I don’t think that actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely precludes a larger change. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you keep doing that, like over time, we introduce new API’s with new thinking, and there’s a new language in the mix, and it evolves
⏹️ ▶️ John and evolves and evolves, eventually, you get to deprecate or just never use the really old, really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird API’s. So if your starting point is the current best modern
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking UI kit, with maybe some minor tweaks, you get a lot of the benefit of people being who are familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with the UI kit being able to use that. Because people are familiar with UI kit, presumably, you’re somewhat up to date on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And don’t say I, I only know how to use the UI kit API’s introduced in like iOS two,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I never learned anything after and I don’t know what a closure is. And I’m really confused, right? I don’t know anything about all
⏹️ ▶️ John these property syntax and all this animation stuff. It’s all tint colors. I don’t know what that is. Of course, they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John know they have to know the modern ones, too. So if that’s your starting point, you can bring those people along
⏹️ ▶️ John now with the with the whole reactive thing. It’s like that’s not something you can gradually add. That’s kind of a paradigm shift. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a is a tougher sell. But even that you could you could pitch that to you know, pretend
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac doesn’t exist. And it’s just UI kit, eventually in the lifetime of UI kit. If the thinking inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is that there’s a better way to design you eyes with you know, whatever, reactive paradigm
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, some functional thing or something entirely different. They could roll that out just in UI kit to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of new API’s, you’re gonna be using this thing, and we have a new view system. And we’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac has had multiple view systems, even on Mac OS 10. It has multiple, you know, it had carbon and it had cocoa,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they coexisted for a while and one of them faded away. It’s not impossible to have two paradigms in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John platform and slowly transition to another one. So I don’t think anything Apple does precludes switching to
⏹️ ▶️ John something better. But I think the main reason that they won’t is there are two reasons. One, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Apple is convinced that there is a better paradigm. This case, he may be convinced,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I convinced it like there is a better paradigm that is better enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John take the hit for it and be like, they can they can defer that they can say
⏹️ ▶️ John use the current best thinking and UI kit plus whatever the current best thing that we don’t know about is that they’re doing inside Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because there’s always something every year, right? And make that the starting point of your new framework
⏹️ ▶️ John and then go from there. Um, and I don’t, we’re gonna wrap this up because we’re running long. But one, one final thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think is worth voicing, especially from the concerns of Mac users, I mentioned photos, apps and how they feel
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of weird. That’s another way that this can all go wrong. If they, no matter what solution they use,
⏹️ ▶️ John If it lets experienced iOS developers target the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the applications they create are all like photos essentially, like that they
⏹️ ▶️ John feel weird and non-Mac-like and are unsatisfying, I don’t think that will be
⏹️ ▶️ John a very big success. Because as few Mac users as there may be,
⏹️ ▶️ John and even Mac users who have no idea what it means to be quote-unquote Mac-like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, people who have no idea what Electron is or no idea what makes slack weird. They feel
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel the friction and the weirdness even if they can’t identify it even with something like chrome versus safari.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s a real thing that people can feel and I and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Mac enthusiasts are actually an important subset of the Mac market
⏹️ ▶️ John at a proportion of their of their the money that they give or whatever right. It’s the whole reason the Mac Pro exists
⏹️ ▶️ John or will exist eventually and I think that is a really,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be one of the hardest things to avoid. Yes, let people retarget their skills to the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John how are you gonna get them to make applications that are satisfying Mac applications?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a really tall order, both because iOS users don’t know how to make a satisfying Mac application
⏹️ ▶️ John because they never have before, and because a lot of things you can do to make it easier for them lead them down
⏹️ ▶️ John the path to an application that is like an iOS application that you can use a mouse cursor with. and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s no good. That’s no good, boss.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean, I would argue it’s better than not having these apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it though? Like I was saying, I don’t know if it’s better than not having the apps. Like, is it better than just letting the Mac platform die?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would rather have a good native 27 inch iPad Pro application than a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS port to a 27 inch iMac. You know what I mean? Like, just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. Well, but I, you know, keep in mind, like whatever Mac apps are in practice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what ends up being the good Mac apps. It ends up being the standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t think we have a choice here. I think something like this has to happen to keep the Mac alive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if what ends up being most Mac apps people use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if those are more iOS-y, that will just become what it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a standard Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I said that I was getting at it before what it means to be Mac-like, but I’m just talking about just straight up performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John that they feel laggy and slow and not powerful. That they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have the features. One part is the feature set, and the second is that they’re slow and weird. And is
⏹️ ▶️ John it because they’re slow and weird because of the shim layer? And are they missing features that we expect from a Mac app because they’re an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS port and those features don’t fit or don’t make sense on iOS? That’s what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re totally right to be super concerned about that by using Photos app as the example of a cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework. But the reason why Photos app on the Mac is slow and weird and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t feel right and it lacks so many features and drives you nuts is because it is a terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed app on so many levels and horribly neglected all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it starts out with a bad design, they never change it, they never make it better. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your explanation during our famous episode number 223, throw the fork away, was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so great, so perfect. photos app is a terrible example of how to do cross platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frameworks it happens to be built on a cross platform framework but it is a terrible design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that has nothing to do with the framework it has everything to do with the actual UI design for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the flow of the app the
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t you think it has to do with the framework and that it’s like the the flow and the UI design is inherited
⏹️ ▶️ John in large part from how photos works in iOS and then they just added a couple little sidebars here and there like
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like an iOS application in design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise? No, definitely not. It is entirely because that is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco badly designed app. It’s designed by people who don’t use it the way anybody else uses it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if at all, and it is designed to look good in demos, not to actually be used by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human beings. That is not a problem with the framework. That’s a problem with just the design of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is slow and cumbersome, not because it copies iOS stuff, but because it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too many modes and too many slow animations and it lacks convenient keyboard shortcuts. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting it. It has those modes because photos on iOS has to have the modes because you don’t have the room on the screen for
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. So think about when you go to crop on photos, you got to hit the little crop icon or you go to color or light,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you got all the submenus and you eventually dig your way down to the feature you want. And it’s a lot of taps. And why is it a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of taps? Because you’re on a phone. You don’t have room to have that stuff visible all the time. But you take that UI paradigm
⏹️ ▶️ John and you bring it to the Mac and it’s still a lot of taps. Why are you making this a lot of taps? well,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is sort of how the code base works. And we kind of added a sidebar here and there. But we didn’t want to change
⏹️ ▶️ John too much. Like, isn’t that the whole thing? We don’t have to change too much. And we get a Mac application out of it. And it’s like, you should have changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. That isn’t the whole thing. Like, first of all, the fact that they use something called like UX collection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view doesn’t make the design bad. The fact that their views are using UX color instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of NS color and UI color. That doesn’t like that. That’s what we’re asking for here is like, give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us like, stock widgets and stuff that we can use in both places, but the actual interface layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the choices they made with all these different modes and everything, that’s just a bad design for the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period, and it has nothing to do with the framework. That is entirely to do with laziness and bad
⏹️ ▶️ John design. But no, it doesn’t have to do with the framework. It has to do with the fact that the code base came from an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS app. You started with an iOS app and you’re like, I would like this app on the Mac. So you start with that code base,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that code base works the way it works on the phone. And so you don’t want to completely like you’re you’re motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John not to change too much about it, right? So it’s gonna Yeah, it’s not the framework. It’s not the fact that if you had written it from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same framework as a Mac app, you would be fine. But I my fear, what I’m getting at here is that
⏹️ ▶️ John people have iOS applications that they want to essentially port to the Mac. And they’re not starting
⏹️ ▶️ John from scratch and figuring out how to make a good Mac app. They’re starting from their iOS app and mutating
⏹️ ▶️ John it until they feel like it’s more or less a Mac app. And so the photos app feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS photos app mutated just enough to masquerade as a Mac application.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re totally right. That’s not the fault of the framework. It’s not the fault of even UX kit or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It is the fault of the fact that they that it is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John port and that you start with one code base and you change it and you know, you don’t start over from
⏹️ ▶️ John scratch, right? And we’re going way too long here. But but one of the that Craig Hockenberry
⏹️ ▶️ John was pointing out about like Twitter iffic where icon factory wrote their own framework
⏹️ ▶️ John to basically be UI kit on the Mac was called chameleon or something. Yep. Right. So they have experience doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Hey, let’s write a framework on the Mac. But the API is all look like UI kit. They did that. And they also
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Let’s make a Mac version of an iOS application. And we’ll do it by
⏹️ ▶️ John cleanly and slightly painfully because you know, programmers aren’t perfect, separating the
⏹️ ▶️ John internals from the externals, which all programmers are supposed to be doing but until you actually try to separate them with a big scissor
⏹️ ▶️ John you realize how much your crap has leaked into each other like that’s life right and
⏹️ ▶️ John according to Craig the second approach for them anyway worked better for Twitterific where
⏹️ ▶️ John what they reused across the iOS and the Mac app is all the faceless stuff but the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac app is written totally from scratch the only
⏹️ ▶️ John part that shared is the inside now they wrote it from I don’t even know what they used they could have written it from scratch using you know
⏹️ ▶️ John the chameleon thing they could have written their scratch using app kit they could have written from scratch using a hypothetical hi kit but the point
⏹️ ▶️ John is they wrote it from scratch they didn’t take the interface from the phone port it
⏹️ ▶️ John and start tweaking it but that that I think will be a temptation and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know sort of the equivalent of shovel where that will be a temptation if Apple does a good job making that easy and in fact have a little demo
⏹️ ▶️ John that look I went from your iPhone application and then I just move two things around and added a sidebar and set up a few menu
⏹️ ▶️ John items voila, Mac app and I’m going to say no, not a not a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week. Casper, Squarespace and HelloFresh. 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental, tech podcasts so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good thing so much stuff happened in the…
⏹️ ▶️ John days ago. Yeah, exactly.
Post-show: The Grand Tour S2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco you said you had watched the first two episodes of the grand tour I have yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s pretty good. I feel like the in-studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segments are Slightly less garbage II than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season. Oh, yeah to clarify I skipped those Pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like I don’t skip like the little bumpers to their second But like when they like sit down with a celebrity or something I skip that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I but I always did that with the with the BBC show also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the the BBC show the in-studio segments were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty decent if not good, but man the grand tour in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the studio is bad Outside of the studio. I think the films where they’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in the world doing things I think those are 80 to 90 percent of what they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Top Gear and I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything directly for John but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my goodness, the studio stuff is just nothing. I feel like all I’m doing is cringing the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time they’re in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studio. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no question. The studio stuff is still, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as cringeworthy as it was in season one. But season two, episodes one and two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you skip the studio long parts and you just pay attention to the rest of the film segments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d say it’s very good, very fun. And the last few seasons of Top Gear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they were on, But there was like a bit of a decline in those too. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say the current season of whatever this is, Grand Tour, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on par with or better than the last few seasons of Top Gear they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John fair. You know, one of the In-Studio segments that I actually kind of liked and I think is the strength that they should be leaning
⏹️ ▶️ John on in Grand Tour, but in Season 1 apparently they did not. I always like the news segments
⏹️ ▶️ John because I guess it’s because it’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast. Like they would they would have a little TV screen up there to show an image and they’d be like just
⏹️ ▶️ John quick hits on the news. Oh, you know, Volkswagen’s coming out with a new car. What do you think of this? And they all just have something snarky
⏹️ ▶️ John to say about it in much the same way we do on a podcast. What do you think of the news they talk about? Right? And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no celebrity involved. And you can’t say they’re not trying to be funny because they are. They’re trying to be funny. And very often the snarky
⏹️ ▶️ John lines were written ahead of time. Clearly, right? Like it wasn’t all spontaneous or whatever, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John lets them be them in a way in the same way that they would out of the studio, just sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John joking around with each other about a topic that they all have strong feelings about. You think all portion 9 11
⏹️ ▶️ John is like the same. You are into trucks. You are like whatever, like their personalities and their enthusiasm for
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, which you know, is my always big thing with top gear, um, comes through in those segments and their studio segments
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re fine. And even some of the celebrity ones, depending on the celebrity passable, but anything
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, we’re not going to talk about car news, we’re not going to talk about cars, we’re not going to talk to a celebrity we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do like a funny skit with each other did not work in the green
⏹️ ▶️ John door like just just like because because like what’s left then then it’s just like a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of people who are like are they trying to be Saturday Night Live very often they’d be trying to make a joke they’d be like huh
⏹️ ▶️ John huh isn’t that funny and they’d be like making fun of like you know children with cancer and be like no
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not it’s not funny it’s like but it was it was funny when I was a boy in 1942 it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like just guys like you can’t Talk to somebody before you you do these segments
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not or whatever the one but they were Making fun of gay people or any ice cream or something
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like just talk to one person before you plan a 15-minute segment that you think is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be hilarious Yeah, it’s it’s not and it’s no good. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, there’s a lot more of that It’s definitely like older dudes who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that some of this stuff is funny and it’s just not funny anymore more. And the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the second episode, they officially maybe they talked about in the first, but in the second episode was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first time they really did a hot lap, if I recall correctly. And they have ditched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the American and they said something like, yeah, well, you know, it didn’t really work out and nobody liked it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there was at least a modicum of like, self awareness there. But they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring on a woman, some woman, and they say she’s a really great driver.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And The reason I haven’t named this woman is because they didn’t name her. Like, did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you watch this, Marco? Did you notice that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well? Yeah, she was like the new Stig, kind of. Right. That was, I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was part of some kind of bit that’s going to play out over time, but I thought that was weird too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just seemed like, I don’t know if inappropriate is the right word, but just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not funny. It seemed like, you know, 50 plus year old guys trying to be funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that in the the year almost 2018 really isn’t funny anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think this is me being like a stick in the mud. I don’t think this is me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being a social justice warrior. It’s just, it’s, I’m trying to be better about being aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these sorts of things. And so now that I am more aware of these sorts of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they don’t name this woman driver, like they praised her, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t name her, it’s just like, come on guys, really, this is really a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just like you said, John, like nobody told you this was not cool. Nobody, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a one, not a single person said that this was not cool. And so I I’ve never fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forwarded on a, on an initial viewing. I’ve never fast forwarded any of top gear or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the grand tour, but I am. Well, that’s the thing I was about to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am paying less and less and less attention to the in-studio segments. That being said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the The films I thought were really good particularly this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last one and again I’m trying not to spoil it but it involves Marco and John’s either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current or old stomping grounds That one I thought was really good and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoyable. So the the the films are great. But golly the studio stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m running out of patience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it Yeah There is no question in my mind that if the show was Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the films and each episode was like, you know I guess I guess be like 20 minutes long or 25 minutes long and instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an hour if it was just that It would be a better show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m looking forward to the to the rest of the episodes from this season, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Might do the unthinkable and pull a Marco and just skip the in-studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoo boy I give you permission mission it is a much more enjoyable show if you do that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah look some titles here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had some good ones this week as I get older I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse yeah that’s pretty good I like hot box with knobs hot box with
⏹️ ▶️ John knobs those little boxes does the USB pre to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get hot no no not even not at all Not even
⏹️ ▶️ John the slightest. My description is not, I’ve never had one of those boxes. I just assumed they got hot, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Hot box, hot box. You guys don’t know that movie, do you? Nope. Casey should
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco watch it. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might like it. Yeah, my vote, my final vote is either for Older, Worse or Hot Box with
⏹️ ▶️ John Knobs. Hmm, I like them both. Hot Box with Knobs definitely has a musical ring
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and seems like an ATP title, but now that I learned the boxes don’t get hot, I like it less.
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them do like the ones do What does dirty speaking of ones does your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes? You you do have some hot boxes with knobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right yeah, cuz it’s like a you know It’s a class a B amp the smaller ones like I had one that was a class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a my god like even just a headphone amp That’s class a it gets ridiculously hot
⏹️ ▶️ John That puts hot box with knobs over the top Fantastic Mr. Fox. Watch it. Watch it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John kids. It’s a good kid movie. Even Declan might like it. I’ve heard of this. And then you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see where I am saying to recommend that because of the hotbox features in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movie. Isn’t that a euphemism for like farting in bed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. I’m glad you caught that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not just hotbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh… Isn’t it also like when you like smoke pot in the car with the windows up? What do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Uh… Dutch oven? Come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room. That’s a no you’re correct. You’re right. You’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know we don’t need to go to the chat room for fart confirmation. Casey is there with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the. Oh when it comes to farts I know what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John As a title for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do farts ever stop being funny. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. Well it’s like humor is rooted in just like what makes people like uncomfortable like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in a certain way. And like farts are just so against the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco facade that we are not animals. we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco civilized people and then like this bad smelling gas comes out of our butts like that’s that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be funny like it is like it and and like it’s so taboo and like and it makes the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole room smell bad for like ten minutes and so it’s like that’s like that’s going to be if that’s always gonna be funny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across all cultures across all times because we try so hard to pretend like we’re not animals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with butts and poop and stuff and then this reminds us anyway that’s my theory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on farts good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John good thing we’re still Good talk. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should make an app about that. I hear they’re all the rage. Yeah, right.