265: Simon Says Volume Five
15 Mar 2018If you could add just one more port to your new, water-resistant laptop, what would it be?
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Onboarding and GDPR
- Slack 💔 IRC
- Alexa can solicit follow-up
- Siri drama at The Information
- Crumb-proof keyboards
- MacBook Air refresh?
- MacBook fantasies
- WWDC 2018 announced
- Apple acquires Texture
#askatp- Migrations between Macs (via Matt Wallin)
- Polite language in user interfaces (via Bill Balinor)
- Video game completionists (via Chad Toporski)
- Post-show: Do working developers need to know the "fundamentals"?
Sponsored by:
- Jamf Now: Set up and protect your Apple devices at work, from anywhere. First 3 devices are free.
- AfterShokz: Headphones powered by bone-conduction technology. Get $30 off your Trekz Air with code ATP30.
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Chapters
- Pre-show: pan vs. panel
- GDPR
- Follow-up: Slack IRC going away
- Alexa Follow-Up Mode
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Siri report at The Information
- Future keyboard designs
- Sponsor: Aftershokz (code ATP30)
- Future MacBooks
- Which port would you add?
- Sponsor: Jamf Now
- WWDC, ATP Live, promo art
- Apple buys Texture
- #askatp: Old Mac Pro migration
- #askatp: Wordy button text 🖼️
- #askatp: Game completionists
- Ending theme
- Post-show: “Back” to Work
Pre-show: pan vs. panel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we’ve already discussed, I have my paneled setup of windows and and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one- Where does that
⏹️ ▶️ John accent come from? It’s not a Connecticut thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wasn’t aware I had one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The word for the thing that you cook in and the first syllable for your arrangement of windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John P-A-N-E-L versus P-A-N.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What, how do you pronounce it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the same way as the as the thing that you cook
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in. Well, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, what do you cook in?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh. Not a pan. So, wait, so I, I’m…
⏹️ ▶️ John You say them both the same. You say, I cook in a pan and I have a bunch of panels. Yeah. So how would you say it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I cook in a pan, I have a bunch of panels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounded the exact… Are you trolling me right now? That sounded exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Analyze the waveforms. Pan, panels, pan, panels.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, you say it. What do you have going on over there? Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have panels. Hmm. Interesting middle ground.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly different from each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand what am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I hammered? What is happening? I can’t hear the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John difference. What is going on right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Is this what being colorblind feels like? What the hell is happening?
GDPR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we talked a lot last week about onboarding screens and why they’re there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is their purpose, whether they’re good, whether they’re bad, etc. And I was informed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reason that these screens are happening is because of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GDPR, which I know almost nothing about. And I’ve been a little busy and so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a poor chief summarizer in chief, but nevertheless, GDPR is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a general data protection regulation, which is something that the EU passed recently and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has come into effect or is coming into effect very, very, very soon. It becomes enforceable from the 25th of May, 2018. So we are coming up on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. I guess this doesn’t apply to Britain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too soon. Anyway, the point is, sorry, everybody. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point is, apparently it talks about how companies store your data and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tries to give you more control of your data. And I’ve been told that that is the genesis of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these onboarding screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if I buy that because I bet that screen is going to be everywhere, not just in Europe.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like Apple is above doing region specific U.S. I do a bunch of stuff. I think it’s only visible
⏹️ ▶️ John in China, for instance. Interesting. Maybe. Yeah. On the other hand, I feel like this GDPR
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which I’m basically just learning about now because I didn’t actually follow your link in the show notes, reminds me of the European
⏹️ ▶️ John cookie regulation stuff. Do you remember that? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to remember. I think it’s still in effect. Like if you go to, they got to throw up a pop up that says just so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this website is going to, you know, use cookies to keep track of you agree or disagree. Right. Another example
⏹️ ▶️ John of properly motivated but ill conceived legislation
⏹️ ▶️ John where the motivation is pure, like there’s these computers and they potentially could be storing us
⏹️ ▶️ John personal information and tracking us, which by the way, they totally do. Um, do something with the law
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with that. But this, you know, the impulse to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this comes really early on in the history of the web when the scariest thing out there is a cookie, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the legislation is, I know, let’s make every website in the world annoying forever
⏹️ ▶️ John and let’s never do anything else related to other kinds of tracking that will be much, much worse than cookies. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, like so many other laws, like it just sits there until someone, you know, who’s going to have the motivation to say, you know, we we should stop
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that because it’s dumb. Or we should realize the folly of this
⏹️ ▶️ John particular technique of trying to get people to grapple with privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you say this is the way we should deal with everything, then you gotta have stuff like that for all
⏹️ ▶️ John forms of JavaScript, every kind of local storage, all the Flash-based super cookie whatever thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just, it never ends, and you’d have to plow through 50 layers of
⏹️ ▶️ John click wrap, as they call it, to get to the website that you want. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s some new kind of legislation that says, by the way, every time you launch an application, you gotta throw a thing in someone’s face, which I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what this GDPR thing says. But if there were such a thing, I think that would be sort of the modern equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of the cookie legislation, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John motivated by noble intent, but ill-conceived, badly implemented, and sure to
⏹️ ▶️ John age badly. So we’ll see. Maybe when these things roll out
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple talks about them on stage, maybe they will make a pitch in that direction. But as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks a lot more like what we talked about last show, a way for Apple to advertise one of its competitive advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John and to provide some reassurance and to explain what the applications do in a more clear way
⏹️ ▶️ John than just showing an empty list view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see. But supposedly that is that is kind of the genesis for this. There’s also going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a link in the show notes. magazine has how GDPR will change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way you develop, which talks about, you know, kind of how, how all this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will affect developers. And the rumblings I’ve heard through various sources is that this is a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal than any of us Americans are realizing because it doesn’t seem to apply to us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it applies to any of us that have, you know, code that reaches more than one country and more than just
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is possible to make good legislation to protect consumers privacy. just really hard to do when
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes to tech because, you know, the tendency is to pick whatever the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ John of the technology are at the moment and attack them and demonize them when really it’s a much more general concern.
⏹️ ▶️ John And historically speaking, legislative bodies have not had a good track record with
⏹️ ▶️ John legislating technology, essentially like understanding what the underlying issue is rather than attacking a specific
⏹️ ▶️ John technology as the one and only through which this issue will manifest.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s never true. Like maybe that, you know, cookies were how privacy manifested a long, long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Privacy issues manifest in the following decades in so many more
⏹️ ▶️ John important ways than cookies. And yet the legislation just sits there staring at cookies, which is why you can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John legislate to technical details. You have to figure out what it is that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really concerned about and make a law such that it applies in a useful way to
⏹️ ▶️ John any future technology, but also at the same time doesn’t preclude future technologies that may
⏹️ ▶️ John run afoul of the letter of law, if not the spirit. Making laws is hard. Making laws about technology is doubly
⏹️ ▶️ John hard. One way to help with this, by the way, I’m saying this mostly from a US perspective, I have no idea if this is done in Europe, is
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps take the advice and consultation of people who know things about technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t have a vested interest in one way or the other, kind of like talking to mathematicians and cryptographic
⏹️ ▶️ John experts when you make any laws related to cryptography, which the US seems completely incapable of doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they talk to them and ignore what they say, and said, I think I’ll listen to industry lobbying groups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead. They have all the money, so they must know what they’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, like, we can’t even agree that facts are facts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. I know. I’m thinking back to a, you know, a more naive
⏹️ ▶️ John time when we would just we could simply just complain about how technologically illiterate our legislative
⏹️ ▶️ John bodies are. Now we have much more pressing concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now I’m sad. Thanks for that, John. You
Follow-up: Slack IRC going away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, last week we talked about how, if you are a member of one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 30 slack teams, you can actually, uh, little known fact, you can access slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via IRC. I don’t know when this announcement actually happened, but as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got word within moments of releasing the episode that that’s going away now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has been disabled for slack teams that haven’t enabled it. And I think it will be the, it will be phased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in the next some duration of time. So whoops, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John it totally seems like a thing that slack might do early on, as part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, let’s let’s make sure you have no excuse not to use slack, right. And then as slack becomes more successful,
⏹️ ▶️ John and as they can compare the statistics of how many people use our IRC gateway versus how much does it take to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John it versus how much does it help our you know, strategic intent of the company, it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably used by a vanishingly small percentage of Slack’s customers. They no longer are in that
⏹️ ▶️ John mode where they need to convince people to use Slack because the ball started rolling. And it probably does take some amount to maintain.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just a distraction. So kind of make sure it makes sense that it goes away. But I bet if you use it, you’re probably pretty annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So that happened coincidentally, right around the time we were bringing up on the show with that. Hey, you can do
Alexa Follow-Up Mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Amazon’s Alexa is gaining a new follow-up mode, which no longer requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a trigger word after every request. So what’ll happen is Alexa will listen for five seconds after your previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey request to see if you’re wanting to ask another question. The blue ring on your Echo will remain lit and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicate that she is still listening. In this time period, you can ask her another question, otherwise she’ll go back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sleep mode. That’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, this to me, this is, it sounds cool until you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about how that works in practice. and I think you can actually enable it now, but the problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, it’s not addressing what you actually want, which is what you actually want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, Cylinder, play El Scorcho by Weezer and turn the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to five. You know, like you want to be able to do multiple commands in one sentence or in one command,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can’t do that right now. None of them can as far as I know, and that’s what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want. What this feature does is, hey Cylinder, play El Scorcho by Weezer, and then it says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay and then it starts playing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that is not I don’t think I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stopping on the command I think all it’s doing is I mean it’s my reading of this article is all it’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is it will immediately start playing the song that you asked for but for the next five seconds anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else you say it will try to interpret as a command as if you had prefixed it with a cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right but then like I’m pretty sure than the volume still stays ducked and it’s just like I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the percentage of the time that’s going to actually do what you want versus the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time that it’s going to either keep listening something you say afterwards that you didn’t intend for it to be a command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just delay what you were trying to do or do something or like you thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was still listening give it another command but the five seconds had just ended like I feel like the failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate of that to do what people actually want is going to be way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too high to be acceptable. It’s just it’s not going to be good enough enough of the time. Whereas what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and it’s also like to me that’s not smart. That’s just like a very small implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detail. That’s not actually making the service smarter. What we actually need is for all these voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistants to become smarter and to recognize compound commands. That’s what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want. Play El scorcher by Weezer and turn the volume to five set of rice timer for 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes and a pasta timer for seven minutes. This is what people actually want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, little trees like this, like that, that’s a dumb hack. Really what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need is for the for the voices to get better, to actually recognize multiple commands the way humans will actually
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is also not what I was asking for last week. I think that’s why I was sent to us as follow up. What I was asking for
⏹️ ▶️ John was context awareness such that follow-up commands could be aware of what you asked for previously and interpret your
⏹️ ▶️ John subsequent commands in light of what you had just asked it based on like like the way a person
⏹️ ▶️ John would if you say something to a person and an hour later you say something else there’s no way they’re gonna connect that to the context of the last thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you said to them but if you say something to them and then add an addendum two seconds later they have the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of the first command you know to understand what you mean and the the key part of that is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John second thing that you say is not itself a complete command, it relies on the knowledge of
⏹️ ▶️ John the context. That’s why I said last week that it probably requires some more local hardware, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you would want on any for privacy reasons or whatever you want some, some of that local context awareness to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, locally, you don’t need the server to keep track of like your session, or whatever. So it can
⏹️ ▶️ John understand that I think we keep some of that locally. compound commands would also be good and
⏹️ ▶️ John actually seem much easier to me than what I’m asking for, because like it’s two commands, and there’s a joiner and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can figure it out and break it up into pieces but I think it’s more natural to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a conversation to hone in on what you want because that’s what you do with other people than to
⏹️ ▶️ John formulate even a single command let alone a compound command as if
⏹️ ▶️ John I said a couple weeks ago you’re playing a verbal text adventure where maybe you don’t have to get the syntax
⏹️ ▶️ John just right but you understand that you’re issuing a command and now you maybe you can issue compound commands but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the way you would yell into the other room for Marco to add something to your shopping list you You don’t you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to formulate a command for Marco you can basically say it in any way that you want including addendums
⏹️ ▶️ John and revisions and You know what never mind about I just get the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John You can say stuff like that and it knows what the heck you’re talking about and the cylinder does not and that is
⏹️ ▶️ John a really tall order Delay mode or follow-up mode or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ John not close to that, but it at least shows
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that they understand that the current mode of wake word
⏹️ ▶️ John or wake phrase followed by single command followed by I forget you exist is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also I feel like this kind of has like a Simon Says problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where if you get accustomed to not saying the wake word before every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco command you give, that doesn’t work all the time. Like, you can’t say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cylinder, play El Scorcho by Weezer, and then 10 seconds later say, Volume 5, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t recognize it. Yeah, you have to say, Simon says Volume 5. You got to say, Cylinder, Volume 5. Right. And it’s like, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you don’t have to say that. Like, if you say it within five seconds of the previous command being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completed, then you can omit the word Cylinder. And it’s like, well, that’s like, that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be confusing. Like, Like that’s gonna trip you up when you’re like it’s gonna increase your error rate. Like this is again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is one of the reasons why this isn’t a solution. I feel like in at a high level I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of makes me sad about the voice assistant market is that all of us like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple fans are accustomed to somebody being you know historically Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being really good at designing really smart software and really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software experiences And the rest of the industry has always been pretty crappy overall. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been a couple of bright spots here or there, but not many. And I feel like, like we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all having to use like the, like Amazon and Google stuff and Amazon and Google have always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty rough, especially Amazon, pretty rough at user interaction design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and software usability design. And what we’re seeing here is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, tech companies making stuff that’s mediocre, which is what we’ve always seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple was always the one who could save us from that. But unfortunately, in this particular market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just seem not capable of that for whatever reason. And that just makes me sad. Because it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually, Apple will be the ones to save us and to make the really good thing for people like us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who cared about good experiences and all the details and everything. And in voice assistants, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just aren’t capable of doing that for whatever reason. That’s kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to think that this is much more in Google’s wheelhouse than Apple’s. yes, it’s a part of user interface design, but
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically this this realm of translating
⏹️ ▶️ John words that a human comes up comes up with into an intent is what the Google search box
⏹️ ▶️ John is all about. It frustrates some of us because it no longer works like Alta Vista, where you can formulate like a Boolean query
⏹️ ▶️ John with exact substring matching and and get predictable results. But that Google search box is all
⏹️ ▶️ John about saying people just type lots of stuff there and you can type things there
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m still amazed at the Google search box I type things there and it finds what I meant
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to find and I don’t even know how it’s doing it like I didn’t it’s not it’s you know how did
⏹️ ▶️ John you get what I was trying you know you go to the page or whatever and like none of those words are on this page
⏹️ ▶️ John like you somehow figured out what I meant I’m granted it’s still a single command and response and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a conversation but Google was founded on that strength of going beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of simple direct computer search to intelligent interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John of human generated words and translating that to an attempt and satisfying the
⏹️ ▶️ John request despite spelling errors weird phrasing you know the foibles of
⏹️ ▶️ John humans right and the verbal one of that now that speech to text is as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as it is it maps very well onto the search problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in that you have to figure out intent and you can get the words from it pretty well and then you have to figure out intent and same thing with spelling
⏹️ ▶️ John errors same thing with like you know homonyms or whatever that the Google is good at figuring out that’s always been Google strength so I
⏹️ ▶️ John totally look to them to be the ones to figure to figure out this aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of user interface before Apple and I think they are doing it better than Apple but I agree that all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are are not not as good as I could hope it like Apple is way behind and Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google have been ahead but I’m waiting for them both to take the next small step.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪ Backblaze theme music ♪ Well, did you guys see, there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of like, drama about Siri that happened today? I did not get a chance to look up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happened, but apparently someone was like, oh, Siri’s garbage and it’s not my fault. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about? Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know. It’s a story on the information, which when I see that website, always think of Marco and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like the website it’s much worse it’s much worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than the magazine ever was because the information is like anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the information is really spammy I really don’t like like they signed me up to their mailing list when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched as if I had signed up saying I was interested and as a result even though I have never responded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anything never signed up for anything they they still incessantly spam me and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know I know it’s kind of low to call them out publicly for this but that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay for anybody to do. It just drives me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can unsubscribe. I just unsubscribed today, speaking of them. I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it finally drove me that nuts. But I’m just like, I never signed up for this, and all you’re doing is promoting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco articles that I can’t see because I’m not going to pay forty bucks a month to a spammer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it just drives me nuts. People play fast and loose with mailing lists all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the mailing list companies like MailChimp and everything, they’re all complicit in this because they don’t require a double opt-in when you import
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a man list from another service allegedly and so like they’re all complicit because they all make spamming people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in in mass really easy and as a result I get on all sorts of spam lists that appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I signed up for them and you know it’s just it’s it’s a dirty scammy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trick when you’re launching something like this to use like a PR list you find somewhere or you buy somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the information was one of the companies that does this one of the many companies that does this and so I just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero respect for them zero. And I know it’s a dumb reason, but that’s how nuts this drives me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, this explains why none of us actually read the article because none of us have paid for the information, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John know about it because they’re good at spamming people and letting them know this article exists. It was, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John summarized on 9to5Mac, which is also kind of a scummy practice of like taking a paywalled article and then
⏹️ ▶️ John basically rewriting it worse on your site so that people read your site instead of the paywalled thing. Yeah, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s such a great business. I should really go back to publishing web content. That sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John fun. I mean, I can understand like a paragraph and a link seems reasonable. But once you’ve gone on
⏹️ ▶️ John for a page and a half with laboriously summarizing an article that you didn’t write anyway, the story as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ John could tell was a bunch of bunch of reports from people inside Apple or
⏹️ ▶️ John X Apple people who know about the internal workings of Siri over the years and saying how and where
⏹️ ▶️ John things went wrong with specific quotes from specific people assigning blame to other people, not to themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John explaining the situation. And it’s just the typical, you know, things aren’t going great
⏹️ ▶️ John inside a big company, you know, product launches and it’s not scalable and it’s band-aided
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone points fingers about who set the priorities or what they should be doing and how often it should be updated. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s mostly details that may be like interesting, uh, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like from a business case perspective, if you’re learning about how business has run
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting, but like practically speaking, I care less and less about the internal
⏹️ ▶️ John political goings on in Apple and mostly just say like that’s Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John job to figure out. Like I’m not running Apple. I’m not an executive there. I’m not a high level manager.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s their job as a company to figure out how to corral the people to
⏹️ ▶️ John produce results. And if it doesn’t go well, I’m not that interested in why it didn’t go well,
⏹️ ▶️ John who is to blame, person was more difficult, which person made the big wrong strategic decision at what point.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just need to figure that out. But on the outside, it is a look, how’s the product doing and the product as we’ve discussed in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that great. And they’ve had a long time, so I hope they get it sorted out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even want to get angry about Siri again. So let’s just move on. And instead, let’s get angry about keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, this is your cue. Apple apparently has patented a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that cannot be defeated by crumbs. Marco, I know you have have been celebrating, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are swinging from the rafters. You’re so excited. So I don’t know when we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to expect to see this, but hopefully it will mean that I don’t need to invest in compressed air anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is a problem I don’t have, because I have a laptop that has a functioning keyboard. That’s true. I walked
⏹️ ▶️ John But why do you think Marco would be excited by this? This seems like Marco’s nightmare to me, because Marco loves
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the keyboard he hates also has a terrible reliability problem that allows him to righteously rail against
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Imagine if they made that keyboard 100% reliable. Then all he’s got is, this keyboard works all the time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, when it first came out, before we knew how badly it would break all the time, that is what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also the arrow key placement is still horrendous. Not having the gap above the arrows is above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the left and right is unforgivable. But anyway, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m of two minds of this. You know, number one, John’s right. You know, in a way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to see this keyboard succeed and be fixed. I’m not gonna lie, that is part of my motivation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t like it so much. But also, keep in mind I had those keyboards for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, about a year before I finally gave up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Across 13 different laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Three, and so I had the keyboard and I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to it enough. I never liked it, but I was able to function with it until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stopped working reliably. And so the reality is I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I gotta, I gotta choose my battles here. I know that a lot of people out there don’t care or even like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this keyboard. I know that Apple is always going to press to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things thinner. And I think Apple has shown across multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years and multiple products that they only care about making the keyboard thinner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they will make some efforts to make the thin keyboard tolerable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are no longer interested in keeping it a good keyboard if that means they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it thinner. And so I just have to kind of resign myself to accept that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I’m not going to rail on this for a half hour like I usually do because I fought this battle, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost this battle, and I’m going to continue to lose this battle into the future. The last thing I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s going to do in the next MacBook revision is to make the keyboard thicker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I it’s just not gonna happen and I fundamentally don’t believe that they can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a keyboard with this little travel good I
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t think they can do it good as far as you’re concerned though because lots of people do really like the keyboard I mean Casey and I included
⏹️ ▶️ John have basically being converted to this new keyboard it’s just the reliability issues and as you said the key layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and so basically if they can fix the reliability problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love if they made the keyboard a different style, but if they can fix the reliability problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the best I can hope for.
Future keyboard designs
⏹️ ▶️ John The key layout is just sitting right there too because there can be divisive opinions about do you like how this keyboard feels
⏹️ ▶️ John or not Like some people like it some people don’t fine, but I feel like key layout changes. There are certain key layout
⏹️ ▶️ John changes that Would be universally praised from the perspective of using
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard and the only naysayers would be aesthetic for example inverted T full-size breaking
⏹️ ▶️ John the rectangle of the keyboard Aesthetically people would hate that it would be like the notch on the keyboard It would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John an asymmetrical notch on the bottom of your keyboard and those people would yell about it But from the perspective of
⏹️ ▶️ John people who type, how does it feel to type on? I don’t see anybody saying, please bring back the half-size
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow keys. With or without the gaps above them. I mean, are there fans out there who would say, please bring them back? Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco from an aesthetic perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine it. But not from a functional perspective. Did you just say that you would
⏹️ ▶️ John ask to bring back the half-hour keys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You mean the way I have them on my 2015, where the left and right are half height?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, make a full height and have the rectangular shape that the keyboard defines be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken. So basically have the up key in line with the other ones now, but have the down, left and right in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own row below it. Yes, exactly, and
⏹️ ▶️ John have all of them be full sized and have gaps above them. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be cool, but they’re never gonna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I’m just saying, there are key layout changes that I think would be universally praised from a functional
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, but derided only from an aesthetic perspective. And I’m not even saying they’re wrong, because I understand thinking that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly, but boy, would that be nicer for people who use arrow keys a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is I think everybody like who doesn’t use the arrow keys a lot like my
⏹️ ▶️ John son oh god when he’s taking those online
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco coding the course these days he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John using the mouse to move his insertion point one space I’m just like use the arrow keys
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you lose them
⏹️ ▶️ John like stop he goes from the keyboard to the mouse of the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he can’t reach him he can’t figure out where they are because they’re all the same height as everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John oh he’s using a full size Apple extended keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John size hour are you kidding we’re not using not my
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, he’s in real real keyboards here. And like I even showed him the modifier for moving
⏹️ ▶️ John a word at a time and beginning of end of line, but just for single character like seeing him take the mouse and steer
⏹️ ▶️ John it to go to the left of you know, the place where he needs to insert a quotation mark to
⏹️ ▶️ John match the other one. It’s like just just hit the left arrow once I swear to you it will work. And he’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not on that page. This is what happens from not using computers and only using like iPads and iPhones like your whole formative
⏹️ ▶️ John years, you have no idea about moving the cursor with arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, anyway, yeah, I don’t I wouldn’t expect Apple to do anything that’s going to make the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less attractive to the current Apple design teams aesthetic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. Unfortunately, they’re just not going to do it like, you know, it’s this is not not like a rare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing with Apple these days. Like look at the Apple TV remote. Look at I mean, look even look there at their regular like keyboards and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mice and everything like if they were willing to make it a little bit ugly. They could make it better economically or feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better or work better or whatever else, but they’re not. And it’s easy to see both sides of this argument. Like we all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue like these things should work better. Design is how it works. They argue we are printing money and this is how we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to design things and this is what looks good and people buy our stuff in part because it looks good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is aesthetically better. I think we would all agree. It does look better when the keyboard is just a rectangle like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just does like as a piece of art as a you know, but yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and look Apple these days is really good at designing beautiful things that kind of suck to use. Like that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John best at, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It could even be argued that the uniformity is the reason the right and left arrow keys became full height, because those little gaps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you that’s the reason. Because there’s no other reason to do it. It doesn’t make them easier
⏹️ ▶️ John use. The same reason that the bottom row of keys is now the same height as all the other rows. Again, uniformity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, oh totally. Yeah. It’s, you know, because it’s designed purely to aesthetics. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco egotistical It is indulgent design for the designers to indulge themselves and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they think looks the best without regard to how things work
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone I think also pointed out that even on the like the external keyboards for desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computers The bottom row of keys is now the same high as all the other ones I didn’t actually check this
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t have one of those new keyboards to compare with but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case
⏹️ ▶️ John if only for part sharing reasons because you all know how Apple likes to use the same keyboard across all of his
⏹️ ▶️ John all of its laptops from 12 inches to 17 which I will you know forever remember as
⏹️ ▶️ John a ridiculous thing and now it is only slightly less ridiculous it’s shared between the 15 and 13 and the 12 I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John oh so on this before we leave this this bit of follow-up here on this this
⏹️ ▶️ John a 2016 which makes me think like just as the original macbooks
⏹️ ▶️ John were coming out. Was that 2016 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they came out in early 2015 a year before a year and a half before they brought this keyboard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of their laptops during which it was very clear during that year and a half that it failed
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so so but they but in 2016 they introduced the MacBook pros with the same keyboard at the same time
⏹️ ▶️ John they filed this patent. So it shows that they had been thinking about at some point, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John before 2016 they had been investigating these different ways to seal up the bottom of that thing. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I brought this up when we talked about the original slim line keyboard, or maybe it was when we talked about the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think this is I’ll use this opportunity to once again promote the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think Apple would benefit from on all of its laptops. This idea of sealing up the key caps with a little membrane so that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff can’t get in there. Just take it to the next level and make these damn things waterproof right? If you can waterproof a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, if you made a waterproof keyboard include which would also obviously include as a side effect of the inability to get
⏹️ ▶️ John crap underneath the keys, I would imagine. I mean, it doesn’t have to necessarily, but I would imagine that would be that could be part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John People will love you for it. How many people, Casey, spill things on their laptops?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you could, like, is it beyond us? Technologically speaking, to make a sort of sealed keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that feels good. I mean, maybe these patents are just patents, because Apple figured out if you do this, it makes the keyboard feel even worse. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. We’ll see if they ever produce something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But well, no, I mean, we kind of know that from the smart keyboard. The iPad Pro smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard has, I think, but the same butterfly switches, or at least similar feeling switches, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like a membrane across the whole thing. And so it is, I think, roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water resistant at least, but it doesn’t get stuff under the keys. It at least doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. So we kind of know like this is possible to do with just a membrane. I know that one of the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Surface notebook lines does it too, and they have issues with it, like, you know, getting dirty and looking really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grimy and gross really fast, but that’s not to say that it has to go that way. Maybe different material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choices could have different results there. That’s not actually that bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a thing to try. I don’t know if it would feel better or worse than what we have now, but the smart keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use the smart keyboard all the time on the iPad. I wouldn’t call it great, but it’s tolerable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s about what I can say for the notebook one as well. So it’s just tolerable in slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different ways. But you know what? The smart keyboard keys have never failed on me, not once, because stuff can’t get in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not a ridiculous idea. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the problems with the smart keyboard with like, I think it was iOS 11 or something, people were complaining the smart keyboard doesn’t work reliable anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John due to like some change in the debouncing firmware or some crap?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, no, I mean it’s not, I haven’t had, I don’t know if it’s related to debouncing or not. No, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely is less reliable. That seems like an iOS software thing, like just like the way the apps behave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the keyboard attached or detached has been more buggy, rotation’s been more buggy. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been kind of a mess, but I attribute that to iOS 11. But I don’t know. Anyway, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one challenge you might have with the idea of waterproofing a laptop is ventilation and cooling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I mean, obviously the MacBook is your easiest one, right? Because the reason I bring up this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea of waterproofing now is that Apple has slowly been sealing up its laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John not for the purpose of waterproofing, but just for the purpose of Apple being Apple, like getting rid of moving parts and seams
⏹️ ▶️ John and making them unibody and the battery’s not removable. And then I think another would look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this as decontent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s a simplification. It’s moving towards this platonic idea of like this is a featureless, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth. They are certainly featureless. Right. And so the MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ John no vents, right? You still have to deal with the ports, which I think might be challenging because Apple doesn’t get to define all those ports. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to come up with the sealed but still repairable, internal or replaceable USB-C port
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But there’s not a lot of holes in a 12 inch MacBook. Right. I feel like that is a good
⏹️ ▶️ John candidate. If you can seal an iPad or an iPhone, it has a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John number of holes to a MacBook Adorable, the 12-inch Apple laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the ones with vents and fans, granted it’s a lot harder, but even on those, if you say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not waterproof, but the top surface, the keyboard surface, if you do a spill
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, you’ll be okay. The water will shed away and not be sucked into
⏹️ ▶️ John the vents and the top is sealed so that it’s waterproof so it can take a spill. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John dunk the thing in water, but it’s better than it was before where if you spill on the keyboard you’re doomed
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple would never repair your thing again. And if this membrane keyboard, like if they do this for crumb
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, I say while you’re in there see what you can do about water, let’s call it water resistance
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, you know. I just think it’s kind of silly
⏹️ ▶️ John as time goes on that our phones can be dropped into a glass of water and come
⏹️ ▶️ John back out okay, but our much more expensive laptops, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a pin drop of water falls on the keyboard and filters down into the inside and starts corroding
⏹️ ▶️ John things and it’s all over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One speck of dust, $700. One speck of wet dust, $1,200. Yeah, no, more than that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like total replacements. Like, sorry, it’s like the phones. Water got in this and we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John cover water damage. I don’t know if that’s true of laptops, but I know the phones have those little water damage
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor thingies on them that they yell at you about if it turns out your thing has water damage.
⏹️ ▶️ John true of laptops. Use desktop kids. They don’t get wet. Well, I don’t know. They don’t get wet unless
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s around. I bet he could find some way to get water into one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Challenge accepted. I would say hold my beer, but I’m going to need it.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you guys think? I know this has been very well covered, especially on the talk show a few days ago, but what do you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of the rumors of a potential MacBook Air update? This to me, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is potentially very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I heard that, what was the talk show with? With Jason. was on yeah Jason Snell and
⏹️ ▶️ John John Griver were talking about that. I kind of agree with Jason about his consternation of this like
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow we can’t kill this laptop and I’m mostly I’m also coming at it from a sort of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should be embarrassed angle not so much that the MacBook Air is a bad machine but there is one part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John machine I think is inexcusable and that’s the screen. Not because it’s not in Retina like they made all the points
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show some people don’t care about Retina some people can’t even see the difference but because it has such incredibly bad
⏹️ ▶️ John viewing angles, brightness, and color reproduction, right? It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, when it was introduced, fine. At this point, it is just a bad screen. It looks worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than basically any new PC laptop screen you could buy at any price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, hold on, honest question. Have you seen a 12-inch MacBook screen? Yeah, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you look at the 12-inch compared to the other higher-end ones, the 12-inch screen is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeably worse things like viewing angle color everything it’s it’s not a good screen
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s better than it’s better than the air that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true I’ll give you that but but but it’s not it’s still like a crap screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is not oh slow down it is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crack screen when you compare it to a MacBook Pro screen of any even the old ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do that every day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know yeah the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook adorable one any day
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s right now so it’s like way better than that but but I just I’m just saying for color reproduction of viewing a thing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John used to pride itself on that They never really had crap monitors. They always had pretty much the best monitors and they wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John a really old monitor stay around for a long time, that they would refresh. And they have been refreshing the MacBook Air, like
⏹️ ▶️ John ripping out the, you know, changing the internals and everything like that. But leaving that screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it just boggles my mind. Because I feel like at this point, I would never want to buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand dollar laptop with that screen on it. It seems inexcusable. So if they
⏹️ ▶️ John had been updating the MacBook Air to keep it limping along on life support and had also updated the screen, I would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, this is not ideal, but they’re, you know, they found themselves in a weird place with their product line. So let’s see
⏹️ ▶️ John what they do with it. Like I think Jason and, uh, uh, Gruber had a good analysis of that as they,
⏹️ ▶️ John they somehow it’s conceivable. They somehow found themselves in this scenario where any move,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, to replace it would re result in reduced margins on one or both lines as the,
⏹️ ▶️ John as the pyre shifted. And then Tim Cook philosophy is like, if, if it ain’t broke, if people are still giving
⏹️ ▶️ John us money for it, don’t fix it, which is a terrible from a like coherent product line directive. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John there is another live talk show with Apple executives on it, I really hope John asks them
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I hope he doesn’t ask them. Because if you ask them, uh, it seems like your laptop line has no coherent story.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make a coherent story like, well, the errors for people who like blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have the MacBook is for people. All you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is like risk listing the pros and cons of your models. But there, there is no coherent story to the naming
⏹️ ▶️ John features or pricing of the current Apple laptop line. It is a mess. And so I would state that and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, there’s no coherent story to the naming features or pricing of your laptop line. Why is
⏹️ ▶️ John that? And if they want to contest that, I would push back pretty hard to say, come on, one of them is called air,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not the lightest, but it’s super old. It’s got MagSafe on it, but the other ones don’t have MagSafe. One’s called MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, but it’s got the internals of the air and it’s just like, your brain explodes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think their line is in disarray. And I think they can make,
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the MacBook Air was a great model of laptop, but that we have
⏹️ ▶️ John the technology now to make a line of computers that spans the exact same price range
⏹️ ▶️ John that offers a better computer at the thousand dollar price point than they currently offer now. And also offers a better computer
⏹️ ▶️ John at all the other ones, and you know, depending on how you want to do it. Hey, put on MagSafe and USB-C and let people charge from
⏹️ ▶️ John both. Let’s see which one people like better. Right? Because then you get the advantages of Casey using his, uh, his Switch charger
⏹️ ▶️ John and the the advantage of you trip over my card, you won’t break it. And you can maybe you can choose when you order it, whether you want the magsafe or not, because
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you just want to be able to use all your same chart anyway, or put an SD card slot in the side of it of these
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, or maybe you have an HDMI port on one model, like, I don’t know, I’m going a little bit crazy here. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I long for the days when you can look at the line of Apple laptops and say, I see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Big, small, low price, high price, lot, not a lot of features, a bunch of features, and have them
⏹️ ▶️ John all look like a family. And That’s not the case. Not the case at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. So one, I think, curiosity that I had throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other nice discussions over this, and again I think listening to the talk show this week it’s a really good discussion about this from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of different angles, but one thought I had was like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make a Retina MacBook Air, if they literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change nothing else about it except a Retina screen and maybe replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two Thunderbolt 2 ports it has does have one or two replacing its Thunderbolt 2 ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with USB C ports and then of course you know a modern chipset of the same type that we that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently the MacBook escape would anybody still buy the MacBook escape
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the problem we talked about if you if you improve the MacBook Air why would anyone buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a MacBook or a Mac but why would anyone know it is sorry a MacBook Pro rather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a MacBook. The MacBook Escape, the 13-inch MacBook without Touch Bar, is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many measures a MacBook Air. It has the MacBook Air class processors, the MacBook Air class chipset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. It’s the same approximate size and weight. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit, you know, it’s slightly different, but roughly the same size and weight as the 13-inch MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you put a Retina screen in the old, ancient MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco body it was designed in 2010, I bet it would sell better than the 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be a better laptop. It has an SD card slot, it has MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John the option for MagSafe, it has legacy USB ports, which Apple acknowledges is a thing that some people want, otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t have put them on the iMac Pro, right? Yeah. If you showed a regular person which one of these laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think is better and which one do you want and didn’t tell them about the price, and they weren’t sensitive to styling cues that clearly indicate
⏹️ ▶️ John that the MacBook Air is super old, right? They would say, well, that one’s got more stuff. It’s got more features.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got more things. And this magnet, uh, power cable is really smart, right? Why would you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John pick the other one? If we tell you, guess what? That one’s $300 more. You’d be like, well, who would pay $300 more to have no
⏹️ ▶️ John ports on the side for a computer that is basically the same size and weight. And it perceptibly
⏹️ ▶️ John seems thicker because it doesn’t taper, right? Like the MacBook air is thicker on one end, but thinner on the other,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it seems smaller because it gets skinny just for that perception type thing. Like that’s the,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fine if they do that. Like if they want to remake their line in that way, you’d have to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of thing out. But instead, they leave it in the current scenario where
⏹️ ▶️ John the old one is clearly old and has serious downsides versus the regular one in terms of that terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John screen they have on it, right? The new one is expensive for no perceptible reason and you trade
⏹️ ▶️ John off a bunch of stuff and then it gets even more super expensive and you still don’t get your ports back and you still have no mag safe
⏹️ ▶️ John and the keyboard is weird and breaks all the time. So they need to do something. I really want them
⏹️ ▶️ John to just clean house on the laptop line and say, all new line, one nice
⏹️ ▶️ John family, unified in appearance features, and has a coherent ramp from expensive to inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, at all price points and at all sizes, every one of them is better in some way, whether it has
⏹️ ▶️ John more features or better reliability or faster or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Yeah, I suspect we’re gonna see some kind of major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movement in the laptop line this year. I really hope we do. The current line has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of these weird issues, not to mention some of the problems it has, but just like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird things that make it more or less compelling or seemingly weirdly priced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain ways or really segmented in other ways. It needs help. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling Apple knew that two years ago, shortly after it launched, and I have a feeling they’ve worked to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And so the only question is how they’re fixing it. And I don’t expect this to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving me all my hopes and dreams or anything, but I do expect change and hopefully improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’ll see what that means.
Which port would you add?
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of hopes and dreams, this is a tough question in the style
⏹️ ▶️ John of these recent ones that listeners have been sending us for the high-end laptops, which is where we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all shopping. Well, you two are shopping because I don’t buy laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John getting towards that point. If you had to pick one
⏹️ ▶️ John port to add to the current crop of MacBook Pro ports, I just picked the 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro because that is the most. You can only pick one for your own personal purposes, not for like what would
⏹️ ▶️ John make a better laptop for Apple to sell. What would you pick?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On a 15-inch, no question, an SD card reader. Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m torn between ancient USB and SD card reader. I would probably, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually HDMI would also be convenient. Pick one. I know, I’m thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, and like to me, like if you, if it’s less, if it’s not the 15-inch, like if you ask me what, what port I would add to the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Escape, it would be a third of anything. Like a third USB-C port, just One more of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s what it most desperately needs like the 12x2 right yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah the same thing I would kill for a second USB C port in my
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I picked the 15 just it just to see like you know you feel like there’s enough USB C’s in the 15
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can add one more thing. You know what would it be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I am very torn between SD between old USB and between HDMI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think if I had to pick I Think I would probably for me I would probably come down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on SD card reader because I don’t find a need for plugging in the HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that often And I have a dongle for it I don’t have a need for plugging in legacy USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that often and I have a dongle for it But I do have an SD card reader that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like quite a lot But it would be more convenient to just be able to slot that thing right in the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, like to me it’s like you can solve a lot like a lot of the annoyances of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the new laptop ports are solved by just having a lot of them. Like, you know, when you have four of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, technically, really, you have three of them because one of them has a power plug in it. But, you know, when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey useful ones. Well, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a pass-through. Like, I hear your point 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you’re in Dongletown. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey okay, so anyway. You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be in Dongletown regardless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, that’s part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. We’re all landowners in Dongletown, my friend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I feel like, you know, the other ports, you know, you can, you can fix a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the inconvenience of USB ceiling, laptops with getting new cables for old devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you can, you can, you can go on, you know, a lot of price for Amazon or whatever and get inexpensive cables that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB C on one end and whatever your peripheral needs on the other end. And you can just replace their cables. And, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some issues with hubs and multiplying those that I’ve talked about before, which is still annoying. But, um, but I feel like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can reduce a lot of the annoyance with just like new cables. But if you, if you need SD cards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of your workflow, There’s no way to reduce that annoyance. You’re always gonna have an SD card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hanging out of the side of it through a cable or something. That sucks. And when it’s built in, it sucks less. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other problems can be solved with either time or cabling choices or peripheral choices, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having an SD card reader, if you use SD cards, is always a pain.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason I ask this question is because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. And I can tell you, if you surveyed all
⏹️ ▶️ John the people at my office at work, they would all say HDMI. Because every time, increasingly, when
⏹️ ▶️ John we land in a conference room and someone needs to project. Nevermind the fact that they should really, with the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of Macs that are in this office, they should really have Apple TVs connected to every single thing so we could AirPlay to them because it would solve this problem in a much
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer way. Steve Jobs would approve. You don’t need an HDMI port, you just need to be able to AirPlay to everything. I agree, Steve, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t fight the IT department. Anyway, they would all say HDMI because it’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all sit down there and it’s like, we look around for the one person with the 2015 laptop who can actually
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in because everyone forgot their dongle. Wow. And it used to be there was just one person with
⏹️ ▶️ John the new laptop and we would laugh at them. And now there’s like one person left with the old laptop. And once the old laptop disappears,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s gonna be a bunch of people sitting around unable to project. I don’t understand why they don’t put the adapters for this. But anyway, that’s what people
⏹️ ▶️ John at work would say, but that’s not what I would say because in my regular life, if I was buying a laptop for myself, I don’t need to connect to HDMI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So never pick HDMI, but work totally would. I would have said in the past SD,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I do have cameras that have SD cards. When I go on vacation, I like to offload pictures from my camera
⏹️ ▶️ John to my thing without a dongle. convenient, build it in, it’s small, it’s skinny, it’ll fit fine. But the more I’ve been thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, the more I’ve been getting attached to the idea of taking a 15 inch MacBook Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John adding MagSafe. And still having the ability to charge by any of the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Like not removing that ability, but adding MagSafe as an addition. Because I feel like you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the twofer. You get MagSafe, which is better to trip over and stuff. You get as a, I think it was a,
⏹️ ▶️ John was it Jason Snell or maybe it was a Gruber saying, you get the indicator light, which I think is a useful feature when you have your closed
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop and you plug it in to make sure you see the little light that shows amber or green, to show whether it’s fully charged
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah, it’s a great feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like, and Apple had that, what, 15 years ago? Like, it’s not a new thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop design. Right, and you also get one of your ports back. Now you really do have four ports
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of three. If you want the convenience of, I just have a USB-C charger with me on vacation and I can charge
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, you’ve got it, but also you could have the MagSafe. And then the only question is, what do you ship in the box?
⏹️ ▶️ John you ship MagSafe, do you ship USB, or do you ship both? And probably Apple would make you pick or something. And I know it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be backsliding, and I know MagSafe had problems too, and that’s why I feel like, ship them both.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let people decide what they wanna use. Hell, Apple can collect stats about what they use and anonymously send
⏹️ ▶️ John them back with its differential privacy for how often laptops are charging via MagSafe versus how
⏹️ ▶️ John often they’re charging via USB-C. I probably would get more benefit out of SD, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m finding the twofer of getting a port back and having
⏹️ ▶️ John the option of MagSafe, irresistible. So now I’m envisioning, before I was envisioning Apple revising its laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John by adding an SD card slot, and now I’m envisioning them adding back MagSafe, which I think is astronomically less likely than
⏹️ ▶️ John adding an SD card slot, because it just, it would be like egg on face of like, oh, remember MagSafe?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re bringing it back. That would be a tough sell. Whereas SD, God, there’s so much room alongside
⏹️ ▶️ John of those, the edges of those 15 inch laptops, right? It’s just a giant expanse with these two little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C holes, SD card slot even Johnny I could tolerate the aesthetic
⏹️ ▶️ John marring of a very skinny discreet SD card slot
⏹️ ▶️ John there how it looks fine on Marcos 2015 MacBook Pro I think it would be fine on a 2018
⏹️ ▶️ John model one thing also they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that that I think it probably goes against their sensibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but I think it probably shouldn’t because I think it’s one of the biggest engineering flops of the new of new lineup is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the the number of USB like it’s it to me I mean like one of the biggest problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these, as I’ve said numerous times, is just there aren’t enough ports. Like if you’re going to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us on an all USB-C world, okay, we can adapt to that over time with dongles and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and new cables and everything. There still aren’t enough ports, especially with one of them being lost to power. As you said, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you basically lose one during most practical usage for most people most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, like the MacBook Escape basically has one port. Casey’s MacBook One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has no ports. pretty much. Right? And so like, and the 15 inch has three. And if you look at,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the 13 pro also, and if you look at like, you know, what the previous ones had, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could connect more than that amount of things to them without adapters. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like one of the, if you look at the engineering behind this, one of the challenges, for example, one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why the MacBook escape only has two ports is because of limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how many Thunderbolt channels you can deliver, because Apple decided to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these USB-C ports also Thunderbolt 3 ports, except for the one in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey’s MacBook One. And that’s a choice that they made. They didn’t have to. It is possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a USB-C port that does not support Thunderbolt 3, like the one in Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook One. And so Apple, no, trust me, this is in many ways a good thing. You just need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of them. And so I feel like, you know, one of the biggest ways to solve the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoyance of these laptops is to just, If you’re going to insist on USB-C, okay, but we need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of them. Two total, including your power hole, is not enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you can’t make them on certain models, if you can’t make them full-blown Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports, which you already can’t, they’re already not Thunderbolt 3 on the MacBook One, and the ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right side of the 13-inch MacBook Pro are half-bam with whatever it is. So there’s already exceptions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The cable that comes with it that charges from the brick to the computer is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C cable that is not a Thunderbolt cable. In fact, it’s a USB 2.0 USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable which shouldn’t even exist, but they do and that’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know there’s already all these exceptions to what the ports can and can’t do. In addition, Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage in practice is pretty low and it is not the common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case what most people are plugging into these things it needs either just power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or power and USB it’s you know most of the peripherals being plugged into these ports do not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need Thunderbolt 3 and so by Apple taking taking these ports on the on most of the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except for Casey’s and saying we can only have as many as the Thunderbolt controllers allow us to with this chipset or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s very limiting to the number of ports you can have if they had if they had like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two to four of them that could do Thunderbolt 3 and two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more that couldn’t maybe on the other side or whatever that you know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ideal but I think that’s better than not having enough ports to do basic things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you need. So I know be more complicated I know they wouldn’t be able to put a little Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning bolt symbol next to all of them but I think that is the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromise that that we have if we’re going to do in all USB-C world, we need more of these ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is a waste to suggest that they all need to have Thunderbolt 3. I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them, most of the time, is used for power and nothing else, no data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. You’re wasting Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth on a port that transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing except power. So like, obviously, like, you know, there’s a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineering inefficiency in tying Thunderbolt 3 to USB-C for all these laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you can separate them, you could give us way more ports. Well, not way more, but you can give us two more ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least on most of these without having any bandwidth challenges.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could give way more. Like, they have USB inside these cases. You could give six USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John ports along with four Thunderbolt ports. Like, I feel like they have the controller capacity or space inside the case to put a controller
⏹️ ▶️ John that can support that. Like, USB connections are cheap in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scheme of things. Yeah, I mean, it becomes, I think, more complicated with like the wiring and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the other ones could also do some of the other alternate modes. Like if they can take power input, or if they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do certain video output types, but, because I know Thunderbolt’s required for some of the alternate modes, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them, or it is one of the alternate modes, I don’t know, something like that. But like, tying this to Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made these ports very limited in number, and probably fairly expensive to implement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that was an unforced error. They didn’t need to do that. I understand why they did, but I think that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wrong move, and I hope they fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, a couple of things. First of all, you just said unforced error, and to my ears, it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct usage of the term, and I’m really uncomfortable with my reality right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so is that a sports term? Because I learned it from John. It is a sports term. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me it’s a Syracusa term.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, well, now my reality is back to being reality, so I appreciate that. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on a adventure together, a little mental exercise together. It is 2016,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever year it was, that the USB-C MacBook Pros came out. It doesn’t matter when it was, but whenever they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey debuted, it’s that year, that moment. And within a few weeks of each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new MacBook Pros come out, and let’s pick on the 15 specifically. There’s a new MacBook Pro, it’s 15 inches, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has four USB-C and Thunderbolt ports. Simultaneously, Lenovo or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell or somebody else comes out with effectively the same thing as they are off to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it has the same four physical USB-C ports, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only two of them are Thunderbolt. Do you know what the three of us would be doing at that moment? We would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be saying, oh, ha ha, these idiot PC vendors. Now they have to worry about whether or not you’re plugging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the right port. What a ridiculous mess that
⏹️ ▶️ John is. We did. We didn’t say that on the MacBook where Margaret has pointed out it’s a situation now where you have to know
⏹️ ▶️ John one side is special. That’s been a thing on Apple Apple’s for a long time that certain points on one side are better than the ports
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other side. That’s been true for many laptops in Apple’s history. And yeah, it’s always kind of annoying, but we understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why it is the way it is. we accept it. I don’t think it’s a source of ridicule.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I just feel like all I can imagine is all of us going, ha ha, those idiot PC
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we have talked about that as an inherent problem with using the same connector for all these things. I still think that the advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John of using the same connector for all of them outweigh the disadvantages. But as Marco just said, your laptop has a
⏹️ ▶️ John port, has a hole that’s exactly the same shape as the ones in Marco’s, and yet it is not capable of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s old ones were capable of.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s both the
⏹️ ▶️ John same cables fit into both of them, but if you plug in a thing that expects thunderbolt into yours, it won’t work. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no indication for that physically speaking. I don’t even know if there’s a little lightning bolt thingy next to them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. So, I mean, that’s just, that’s just the nature.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t ask me after all. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, I think the implicit assumption, I’m also thinking of my own feelings about
⏹️ ▶️ John underlying discussion is that I still, I still believe, I’m still hoping, I guess, that
⏹️ ▶️ John when When Apple does make a big revision to their laptop line,
⏹️ ▶️ John that one or more of the new laptops they introduce will have more ports than the thing that it’s replacing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I keep getting to, what do you think they’ll add or whatever. If I’m wrong about that, and if they introduce a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole new laptop line that’s the next generation after this current crop of 2016, 2017, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had time to process the feedback from the market and so on and so forth, and none
⏹️ ▶️ John of them have any more ports, I will be extremely, extremely disappointed. Like I realized to myself
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve just been assuming I basically since the Apple roundtable about the Mac when they talked about the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John from that point on I you know I read into what they said within my hopes and dreams
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying yeah I know you’re talking about the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro like I know that’s what this is really about and about a reallocation to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac but the few sentences they said about the laptops I latched on to really hard and said
⏹️ ▶️ John that means eventually you know after you know to your cycle whatever takes a long time like not not immediately but eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John when they do the next big laptop revision, one or more of them will have more ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know what I’m going to do if that turns out not to be the case. Like my faith, and I’m already
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop hater I guess, but my faith in Apple’s laptops will be fundamentally shaken. Because so far it’s still just
⏹️ ▶️ John like they made a wrong turn and things were already in the pipeline and they couldn’t really do much
⏹️ ▶️ John about the revision for 2017. All they did was add the rubber gaskets and stuff and it’s like hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John they know what’s wrong. they do the big revision, that’ll be the time to make more different fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions. But if the next ones come along and they’re exactly the same set of just USB C only a MacBook one
⏹️ ▶️ John is still the MacBook one. The other one still just have two ports and you know, and there’s no changes
⏹️ ▶️ John and no MagSafe and no SD card, no HDMI, no like nobody gets anything, not even an additional
⏹️ ▶️ John USB C port, nothing. I don’t, I’m going to be super disappointed. I’ll probably, you know, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John probably console myself by hugging my new Mac pro, but uh, But I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know about you. Have you, you guys, like, have you internalized that as a thing you expect and
⏹️ ▶️ John so now you’re set up to be disappointed by
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey being there? Or are
⏹️ ▶️ John you still like pessimistic and you’ll be pleasantly surprised if they do anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That I will be stunned if there’s any sort of not really mea culpa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like, if they add any sort of ports to any of these laptops, I will be flabbergasted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it’s it’s unreasonable. But I do think it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, what did you say, like egg on the face sort of admission that oh, maybe we didn’t get this exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they add a USB-C or a Thunderbolt 3, I feel like it’s not an admission of anything. It’s just they added a more port. Even that will be something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll say, look, we realize USB-C is great, but when you only get two of them, one’s taken with power, it really limits things.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now you got one more, so you got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three. Yeah, I mean, and let’s be realistic here also. Like, if you look at the size of one of these things, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at like the height of ports I think it’s very unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we will see the return of USB a or even MagSafe because I don’t think they fit I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too tall I don’t think they could reasonably fit those it would have to be a new MagSafe yeah it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to be MagSafe 3 yeah right which I don’t I can’t see them doing that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m honestly I’m totally okay with USB C charging I wish the charger was nicer I wish it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had things like the charging light and some kind of version of MagSafe would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nice but other than that I actually like USB-C charging because you can get third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chargers that have like you know like the wonderful anchor one that has the built-in USB charging also like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it makes the charging situation much more flexible and then you can you can travel a little bit lighter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So I like that but if you look at what can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit in this new super thin case design not a lot can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C you know You know, you could fit more of them. And maybe, you know what, Apple? Maybe you could put them a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further apart because they’re really close to each other and it makes it a little bit annoying to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, the headphone jack should move back to the left side where it belongs because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why headphones were always on the left side of laptops before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s because when you have a headphone cable that only has a wire on one side, historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has been conventionally on the left ear cup. So, your headphone cable goes down the left ear cup, down your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left arm into the left side port of the laptop. When it’s on the right side, you have to cross your headphone cable over your laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which sucks. So that’s wrong. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can wrap it around the back. Oh, by the way, speaking of ports on different sides, I do, that’s another thing I appreciate about USB power,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can connect the power to either side. So depending on like where you are on the couch or wherever, if you’re in some weird place that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it. Like that’s why I think they should always keep that. And I really don’t ever expect them to make MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John free, but I’ve been musing on it lately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway. I think if we look at like what kind of ports we might realistically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually get, I wouldn’t expect USB-A, I wouldn’t expect MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD cards are actually plausible, that I think could fit if, I’m not sure if they want to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again I think that would go a long way towards addressing a lot of people’s complaints. HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost certainly won’t fit, they could do mini HDMI but they won’t, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to rely on Thunderbolt and USB-C for that but ultimately I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most realistic option is to either get no port changes at all which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like John I would be very disappointed by or to get more USB C ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I would be very happy with so we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah more USB C ports is the most likely I’m still rooting for SD I think back
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talked about this originally I said just add an SD card and it’ll be fine but the more I think about the port being taken up by
⏹️ ▶️ John power and experiencing myself the more I think more more USB C would be good idea and by the way for a magsafe 3
⏹️ ▶️ John design again not that they’re doing this but if you give up on the notion that the magnet is on the side of the computer you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do lots of interesting things imagine if magsafe look like a little shovel and and it was large surface area magnet
⏹️ ▶️ John on the sort of on the bottom like in an L shape like it clipped onto the corner and tucked underneath the little curve
⏹️ ▶️ John like there are things you could do to add much more magnet surface area while keeping it very thin like we don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John think inside the box defined by magsafe as as it previously existed. Magnetically
⏹️ ▶️ John detachable charging cables for trip-proofness is, I still think,
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea and an idea that could manifest in a way that will work with the thinnest possible laptops still.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the chat room, Espresli asked an interesting question. They said, would you prefer a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C on the Adorable or a headphone jack? And I presume the genesis of this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the opposite side of the laptop, on the right-hand side, and Marco, you’re right to say that that is bananas, But on the right-hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side of the laptop of the Adorable, there is a headphone jack. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, trade in that headphone jack for another USB-C port without question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you’ve got AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why. Right. Yeah. I mean, and all sorts of other Bluetooth headphones. And yeah, there are occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have plugged in headphones to this laptop, but they are extremely rare. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would get much more, maybe not daily, but much more frequent use out of a second USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port than I would the headphone jack that’s there today.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no reason to make that trade though. We already did 20 shows about complaining about it. There’s no room for another
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C port. There is. There’s room for another
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco USB-C port and the
⏹️ ▶️ John headphone. It will be fine.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin WWDC is announced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is in San Jose again. It is the 4th through the 8th of June, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is phenomenally great because that’s what the three of us guessed it would be. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we booked hotel tickets for a long time ago. So that’s great news. It is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be apparently about Marzipan or whatever it’s being called today, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you believe what people are looking at on the invitation, which I think is a exercise in futility,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the invitation never means anything. But also of interest on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monday, which is the fourth, all three of your hosts will be there to do another episode in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey addition of ATP Live, which is part of a what are they calling it like a podcast fair or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? Festival that’s what I was looking for. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Which means two live podcasts at alt conf.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so we’re going to be doing a kind of a joint thing between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us alt conf like like Marco said and Relay. They’re going to be doing an episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Connected in addition to some other things that I genuinely don’t know what’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I know enough to know that it’s going to be an extravaganza. So if you are interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in coming to see ATP Live in San Jose on Monday, June 4th, you can get tickets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Alt Conf’s website, and we will put a link in the show notes. They are $5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a piece. If they are still available, I honestly haven’t even looked. That money goes to Alt Conf, which is good because Alt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Conf is free. So we don’t see any of that money, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. And additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can get tickets to to the relay thing as well, or to Alt Conf. And it’s worth noting that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if WWDC lot, if the, if the lottery doesn’t work out well for you. In addition to Alt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Conf, there’s also layers that will be going on the same time run by friend of the show, uh, Jesse Char,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, and a couple of other lovely women, actually, I think it’s just Elaine and she, but anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are awesome. They are super, super awesome. And the, the conference is super, super awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the snacks at the conference are super, super awesome. So no matter how you slice it layers is great all conf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is great WWDC is great plenty of options if you can find yourself in San Jose that week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that it? Well, that was fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it pretty well go to summarized in chief Yeah, chief summarizer and cheap at a chief actually doing my job for once
⏹️ ▶️ John You talk about the WWDC graphics, which you alluded to earlier I think
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the commentary about this or commentary tweets whatever about this have Kind of combined
⏹️ ▶️ John two things that are not really related One is the artwork Apple puts
⏹️ ▶️ John on the email invitations to select press when they are gonna have an event. Come
⏹️ ▶️ John hear us talk about whatever, we, you know, like iPhone announcement event or, you know, Mac update,
⏹️ ▶️ John press events, right? And traditionally they make a little graphic and usually sometimes a little phrase underneath it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there is what we’re actually talking about here, which is every year when they do WWDC, there’s some kind of graphical
⏹️ ▶️ John motif or theme. It’s used like in the banners that hang in the exhibition halls
⏹️ ▶️ John and the rooms where they have things. It’s used in all the websites and the materials and the emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it started off pretty generic many, many years ago, but it has evolved so that now each
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC has kind of like a branding theme or flavor.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for the press invitations, sometimes those have been
⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally pointing to something they’re gonna say, like the one with the little rotating apple with
⏹️ ▶️ John the like back to the Mac thing behind it where they were gonna talk more about the Mac and guess what, they talked more about the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. Some of them are only explicable in hindsight where you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the graphic treatments on the invitation were the same ones they would use when they announced a particular product, whether it’s the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But sometimes it’s just a fun graphical theme that has to do with, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have an app store and you make apps for it and apps are these little rounded rectangle things. So we use lots of rounded rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ John in our stuff. But I would say that there is a fairly solid track
⏹️ ▶️ John record of some of the time the press invitations do in fact intentionally indicate
⏹️ ▶️ John something that they’re going to talk about in a vague way. WWDC art on the other hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John has a much worse track record of communicating anything about what’s going to be presented other than the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that it’s a developer conference where they tell you about developing for Apple platforms. As far as I can recall,
⏹️ ▶️ John there has never been a WWDC website that hinted strongly at the specific
⏹️ ▶️ John nature of a specific thing they’re going to announce. Probably mostly because at the time this artwork is
⏹️ ▶️ John commissioned, they’re not even entirely sure what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John be presented at WWDC and things are going into and out of the keynote and into and out of the sessions
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. So I feel like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to read the tea leaves in this artwork is probably about as useful as trying to read the tea leaves
⏹️ ▶️ John in last year’s artwork, which is all those top views of people. Yeah, the little people,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was like, it’s a particular artist who does that style of stuff. And it was that that aesthetic theme was all
⏹️ ▶️ John over WWDC last year, but it had nothing to do with anything that was presented. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a cool, fun marketing style that talked about, you know, people, developers are people, and they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John developy things. And it’s fun and interesting or whatever. Right? This one looks super cool. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got these cool 3d representations of like, you know, UI elements from iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Mac. It’s because, and it’s got curly braces and other weird shapes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it communicates like, hey, these are things you use when you’re developing for our platforms, and this is a conference
⏹️ ▶️ John about developing for our platforms. It’s really hard to read anything into it, but people are so,
⏹️ ▶️ John they so want to see something in it, they’re saying, see how these are all 3D? It’s showing that they’re moving away from flat
⏹️ ▶️ John design, because nothing is flat in this, get it, man?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, it’s really reaching, and I have to admit, when I saw this, My thought was nostalgia
⏹️ ▶️ John because one of, I tweeted this, one of the elements in this very cool looking, like this is an animation that goes along
⏹️ ▶️ John with it, very cool looking 3D rendered thing showing a bunch of controls. One of the elements in the lower left
⏹️ ▶️ John corner are three translucent spheres with symbols
⏹️ ▶️ John in them an X, a minus, and then two little arrowy things like a box with a slash through it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I tweeted about it with one more tweet that said memories, dot, dot,
⏹️ ▶️ John dot. A lot of people didn’t know They responded and thought I was referring
⏹️ ▶️ John to things in like iOS 10 or something or you know Or pre iOS 7 or whatever what I was actually
⏹️ ▶️ John referring to was The window control widgets what we used to call the stoplight widgets
⏹️ ▶️ John Red for window closed yellow for minimizing green for what used to be zoom and is now Full screen or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell it does now They used to be rendered as if they
⏹️ ▶️ John were glossy spheres and when you brought your mouse near them or hovered over one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them you’d see these symbols appear in the spheres and they were glossy spheres just like these spheres. Oh this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just viewing them from a different angle. Later in the life of the Mac operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John they became flatter and eventually they just became like what they are now which is like you know flat colors
⏹️ ▶️ John of red yellow and green. They’re not they don’t even look like they’re spheres at all right even though they still have the symbols in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But floating in this thing are not the flat window widgets of today’s High Sierra. Floating this thing are the window
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets of you know cheetah puma and panther um uh mac os 10 uh i
⏹️ ▶️ John forgot i missed jaguar sorry that goes 10.01 uh two and three i think is
⏹️ ▶️ John how long these things last before they start getting really flat and that i thought was a nice nostalgic nod
⏹️ ▶️ John or an indication that the mac is considered legacy but it’s a nice nod towards
⏹️ ▶️ John the past because most of the other controls that you see here are clearly elements from ios
⏹️ ▶️ John or elements from applications that are popularized by iOS, like the little dot dot dot when someone’s typing in messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I think it’s the same graphic they use in in messages on the Mac, but I associate it with iOS just
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s where, you know, text messaging first came to the Apple platform. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my take is that you should not read into these type of graphics. I think this is an awesome graphic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love the aesthetic theme, and I’m just enjoying it as cool branding for WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with everything you just said. So we will all be there and I’m excited for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s one of my favorite times of year and it’s really, really fun.
Apple buys Texture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really care at all about texture. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which one of you added this to the show notes, but do you want to take it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away? Apparently magazines are a really hot business right now. It’s really a growth industry Apple’s getting into here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you really messed that one up, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we should explain what this thing is. I hadn’t heard of it before
⏹️ ▶️ John today, surprise. Because it’s really popular. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John as an Apple press release and or PR person would say, Apple acquires small companies all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it actually is really a high number. Every time they say like, did you know that last year Apple acquired 35 companies? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John some huge number, like really? It’s mostly small, like Apple doesn’t wanna buy them when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a 10 bazillion dollar company. They wanna get them before that. Sometimes they buy companies just for the people, sometimes for the technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John or patents. Rarely do they buy them for complete working businesses, but that does happen too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Beats, they bought Beats and then continue to sell Beats headphones as Beats headphones, right? I think that’s maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most recent full-fledged businesses they purchased. So Texture seems like one of the small ones. It’s not clear to me whether they bought it for
⏹️ ▶️ John the business or the people or the tech or anything like that, but what it is described as is
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix for magazines, where you pay a flat fee and get access to a bunch of magazines in the same way you pay a flat fee every month for Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get access to a bunch of movies. Why does Apple need to buy this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure why they might wanna buy it, but Apple has in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past shown that they’re interested in being some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a platform aid to periodicals. We all remember newsstand Marco, I’m sure most
⏹️ ▶️ John fondly. And that was an attempt to do something like this. Newsstand did not work
⏹️ ▶️ John out so well. Newsstand is now gone, but it signals Apple’s interest in this
⏹️ ▶️ John texture strikes me as all right, the approach with newsstand of making this weird app
⏹️ ▶️ John slash folder where a bunch of things go and putting weird limitations on them and giving them, you know, recurring structures like
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole newsstand thing didn’t work out having individual applications for individual things, but having them be newsstand savvy
⏹️ ▶️ John that that model didn’t work for us. Let’s try this model. And this model seems a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple News or Apple itself could potentially make an application. And within that application,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see a bunch of magazines, just like within Apple News, you see a bunch of news and other content,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, content providers can participate in Apple News, not by launching their own application that is Apple News powered, but rather
⏹️ ▶️ John by getting their news into the one and only Apple News application. Texture is
⏹️ ▶️ John an established business that works in a certain way, so I’m not sure if Apple’s gonna rebrand it or just put it out the way it is
⏹️ ▶️ John or just scrap Texture entirely and take those people and tell them to make Newsstand version two, this time
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be better. But as Marco or maybe Casey pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great that they’re kind of into that, but I’m not sure magazines on computers or otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John are really where it’s at in terms of a growth industry but I you know
⏹️ ▶️ John I I would give Apple full credit for recognizing the newsstand didn’t work out
⏹️ ▶️ John sun setting in a fairly graceful way you know as I think Marco said the best time to cancel something is when no one
⏹️ ▶️ John no one notices that you can’t split and many people don’t realize new Stan has gone now because if you never really knew that
⏹️ ▶️ John like is new Stan gone or if you remember what new Stan was yeah it’s gone and no one really kicked
⏹️ ▶️ John up a fuss about it so that was that was good and I think it’s worth taking another run on I I know I read magazines
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do have individual app, you know, I have like the Edge magazine application. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John read magazines on my iPads. I don’t, I’m not totally offended by that idea. I read eBooks on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad too. And so if Apple wants to make a really nice service application
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy for reading magazines, sure, give it a shot. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to give that a try?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no argument here. It’s just, this was not on my radar before and as soon as we cease talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, it will not be on my radar again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do either one of you read magazines at all on any iOS device? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t read magazines at all on anything
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. Yeah, no, I mean, I still read Car and Driver on paper and
⏹️ ▶️ John I read Edge on paper and also an iOS because I think their iOS app, I mean, it’s not great, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the bad old days of like the original Zinio for all I know. This is the new Zinio behind these. I have no idea what the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John powers it is, but it’s not just a bunch of PDFs they throw under your screen. Although with today’s retina,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could probably do that and it would probably be okay, especially on a 12.9 inch because it’s practically magazine size and
⏹️ ▶️ John with the rightness screen it would look great. I’m mostly doing it for edge and card driver because I like the content
⏹️ ▶️ John but the presentation on iOS isn’t bad and it’s nice not to have to carry around you know if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John on vacation you want to read through your last three issues of edge magazine to have them all on your iPad rather than three
⏹️ ▶️ John paper things. Yeah it’s convenient so I’m I will probably download
⏹️ ▶️ John this and try it and see how good the app is and if there any magazines that I care about in there. I doubt I’ll subscribe to it, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. I have nothing to say about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this at all. I know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just I don’t care. And maybe I should care. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just Apple buys leading manufacturer of fax machines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fax machines. Yeah. I mean, here’s the thing with magazines like we’re making fun of them because magazines is the old world or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But websites most websites are not that different from magazines. And once you have a magazine that publishes through
⏹️ ▶️ John an application, it’s like is this just like a closed version of the web and a closed version of a web browser? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John but I you know websites and magazines still seem slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John different like magazines have websites but I don’t know maybe I’m just nostalgic for the
⏹️ ▶️ John old days of magazines and there’s lots of legacy businesses that are tied
⏹️ ▶️ John to the magazine format that I’m glad to see allowed to live another decade or
⏹️ ▶️ John two through an effort like this.
#askatp: Old Mac Pro migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So time for ask HUP. Matt Wallin writes, my Mac pro does not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a wifi card. Wait, this is a Mac pro question. I don’t care. Bill Balinor writes, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just kidding. My Mac pro does not have a wifi card. My wife and son, both have accounts in the Mac pro. And I was thinking of using migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assistant, copy stuff from the old machine to the new. Can I connect them via ethernet for this purpose? Does, or will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it matter that the new machine that will be running on high Sierra and the old machine is El Capitan. I’ve looked for specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentation on this online and haven’t found a satisfyingly definitive answer. Now, Now I don’t think I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever used Migration Assistant ever. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m not saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m doing things the right way. It’s just I like to kind of start fresh each time. I know that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is also a little bit different because you’re talking about other people and they may not want to start fresh even though you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t really have any good answers with regard to Migration Assistant. Have you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys used that? I thought both of
⏹️ ▶️ John you have. I definitely have. I’m a big proponent of Migration Assistant. I think there are a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of this question starting at the very end. Uh, I have looked for specific documentation, haven’t found anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I almost guarantee that there is satisfying definitive documentation related to this on Apple’s website. But yes, sometimes it
⏹️ ▶️ John can be hard to find. The beginning of the question, going back to the beginning, I can connect via all these different things. I don’t have wifi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, does it matter? I can tell you that you do not
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use my greatest issue, migration assistant over wifi if you can at all help
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that your Mac pro doesn’t have a wifi card, don’t worry about it. I would never recommend doing it. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was worse when Wi-Fi was slower. It’s better now that Wi-Fi is faster. But I have not had
⏹️ ▶️ John good luck with using migration assistant over Wi-Fi. The good news is that most reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ John modern Macs can do migration assistant through almost any of their ports. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they can do it over the headphone jack yet, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows. Like the old iPod Shuffle syncing over the headphone jack.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I used to do it through Firewire. You can do it through Ethernet. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it through Thunderbolt. You can do, there’s all sorts of ways that migration and system will work. The bad
⏹️ ▶️ John news is, figuring out how to get it to work, especially with the more obscure ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John can be tricky. So what I would recommend is finding, going back to Apple’s website and
⏹️ ▶️ John digging through this stuff and finding the documentation for your specific computer. And it will usually tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, from your computer, you can only migrate to this set of computers through these interfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there is like sort of a matrix of what connections can I use and how it was the computer. And you can, unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John find yourself in a situation where you’re trying to migrate from a really old computer to a really new one
⏹️ ▶️ John when there’s no great way to do it, except for maybe ethernet, but then you need an ethernet adapter or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I have never, as someone who keeps computers for a long time, I’ve never kept one long enough that I was unable to run Migration Assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would suggest using the fastest connection you can. Ethernet is probably sufficient, and it’s probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the baseline. So try to do that if you possibly can. find the docs for it and just give it a try.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you will be mostly pleased with the results. I always have been. I find that migration assistance
⏹️ ▶️ John really does migrate my stuff. And yes, it does take a long time, but the amount of time it takes when I do the math
⏹️ ▶️ John works out to be roughly amount of data it has to transfer, you know, divided by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. I have had almost similar luck as that. The only differences I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggest are When you connect the old Mac via target disk mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tends to be a significantly faster. Migration Assistant has a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big problem that I think it’s had basically forever, in that it is terrible at estimating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much time you have left. And it will frequently get into a state where it appears as though it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no progress at all. And it could stay there for hours or even days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s very frustrating. very hard to tell often what it’s doing whether it is still going to go how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long it’s still going to go for.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I said do the math like if you know you have you know a one terabyte hard drive that’s mostly full
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know your connection is one gigabit like do the division figure out how long you think it’s going to take and use that as your outside
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like to get an idea of how long you think it’s going to take if it takes 10 times that thing something has probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gone wrong but it don’t you know don’t believe the progress bar because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Well anyway, I have had significantly better luck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with doing it via target disk mode on the sending machine rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having both machines run the Migratory Assistant app. This would probably also, if there’s any problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the old one being El Capitan, target disk mode would probably avoid those problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more likely or more easily than running the Migratory Assistant app on both sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, yeah, I’ve found the disk method to be way faster and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more reliable and I have never had it reach one of those states where it seems like it’s gonna just take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. Whereas over Wi-Fi and even Gigabit Ethernet, I’ve had that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So by doing Target Disk Mode, you have most of the options that John suggested.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the old Mac Pro, you probably, let’s see, the Mac Pros that had Wi-Fi are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optional, would be 2006 into 2008. I believe it was standard after that, so it’s pretty old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will definitely predate all Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt came after the Mac Pro. So your best port is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably FireWire 800. Assuming you have, well you definitely have that, assuming it still works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I would suggest, if you have any problems trying to do this over Ethernet, I would suggest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming the new machine has Thunderbolt, go to the Apple Store, get a Thunderbolt 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well let’s see, you’re gonna need two
⏹️ ▶️ John dongles. No, FireWire 800, that’s what I’ve got on the iMac right now, I was gonna suggest. like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Targeted Smoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But does it go Firewire 800 to USB 3 Thunderbolt or does it have to you have to adapt 2 to 3 and then 2 to 800? I only have one
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter in the back of my 5k iMac. It’s like Firewire 800
⏹️ ▶️ John into this adapter and this adapter into the back of the iMac but I confess I do
⏹️ ▶️ John what exactly it’s going into the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iMac. So you know it’s assuming that you’re good he doesn’t actually say what he’s going to right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey believe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so assuming that it’s a that it’s a current generation machine that only has Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three ports, you might need two dongles to go once from 800 to Thunderbolt two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then once again from Thunderbolt two to Thunderbolt three. So that might be like $80 worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dongles because Thunderbolt one’s like 50 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We have to start considering Ethernet because they do both have Ethernet ports. Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John is fast and practically speaking, the reason I find myself using Ethernet is because I’m doing two desktops and they’re far
⏹️ ▶️ John away from each other and it’s kind of a pain to like disconnect the decktop and lug it over and put it close enough so your
⏹️ ▶️ John little firewire or thunderbolt or usb-c cable can connect to the right ports
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just then you’re like like you know ethernet is easier even if your home isn’t wired for ethernet to just
⏹️ ▶️ John get 100 feet of ethernet cable and plug it in and snake it over and leave it there for a day for you to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John transfers that’ll of course encourage you to wire your house or ethernet like a civilized person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, I mean, if they have a Mac Pro that doesn’t have Wi-Fi, they probably have this covered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, that I agree. Try it first and only go by the $80
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth of dongles and cables. If for some reason, Ethernet always fails
⏹️ ▶️ John and backup before you do anything, backup, make a bunch of backups, take the backups, disconnect them from all
⏹️ ▶️ John your computers, put it, you know, put it someplace else and then have fun screwing with your computers. Worst case scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John you screw everything up, you erase everything, you restore from backup and then you’re back to your initial stage again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, if you can back up to like a USB 3 hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John old Mac Pro doesn’t have USB 3. Migration. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah you could just then plug that into the new computer and just do it that way. Oh my word.
#askatp: Wordy button text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Bill Ballanor writes, is it okay for developers to force polite interactions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their users such as labeling the okay button in a prompt, yes please, or the dismiss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button in a confirmation dialogue, thanks. These things make me cranky. You’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is absolutely acceptable and I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Oh god no! Okay, so okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if done in a non-intrusive, non-suggestive, not putting words in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mouth kind of way. It can be fine. Unfortunately, that’s how it happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. In practice, you have things like, no, I don’t want to subscribe to the newsletter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get all these special deals because I’m cheap. Like or like something like that. Like they make you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often the words they use are passive aggressively condemning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself for making a choice that does not benefit the developers business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interests. And it’s really obnoxious. Oftentimes, other than that, it just, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it tries to sound human and hip and cool, but it’s from like a big corporation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we know that’s fake. And it comes off as just insincere fakery trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to appeal to be more human from a company that is anything but. So it’s very, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard and very rare to get this kind of thing right in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds both sincere and non-offensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re reading too much into this or maybe I’m not reading enough into it to me like having a having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Dismiss button that says thanks. I don’t have a problem with that having a dismiss button dismiss button that says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no I’m too cheap or even if it’s passive-aggressively saying no, I’m too cheap and not using those literal words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that yes I agree with you. That’s total garbage, but something as simple as yes, please or thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or no Thank you Like I don’t have a problem with that
⏹️ ▶️ John at all you I think you would have a problem with the thanks because thanks is putting words in your mouth, like you just want the box
⏹️ ▶️ John to go away. So there’s there’s two aspects of problem one is the the giving your you know, pressing personality
⏹️ ▶️ John and putting words into the mouth of the user because what if they’re annoyed at your application right now and are forced to hit a button that says thanks and they don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to thank your application at all because they’re frustrated with your application that thanks button makes them hate your application anymore because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John forcing them to pretend they’re saying thanks, right. But the second reason independent of all this stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John people are accustomed to dialogue boxes learning a certain way. Yes, no, okay, cancel like their interface standards
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re accustomed to. And if your application deviates from those standards in any way, there
⏹️ ▶️ John should be a reason for it. Maybe your carrot weather and you have a personality type thing, and that’s part of the selling
⏹️ ▶️ John point of your application. Fine. But if your application is selling point, it’s not like there’s a cost to
⏹️ ▶️ John define expectations. It causes people to pause and have to look at it and think about what the hit and
⏹️ ▶️ John and like read it causes them to have to read. Whereas no one reads yes, no or okay, cancel if they see them a million times. They just
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it becomes like a visual macro. You just like, I recognize that and I know which thing I want to hit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even just a single button dismiss thing on iOS, where the button is always labeled as okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now suddenly that button has different text on it, you’re forced to read it, you find out it says thanks, you don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like thanking anybody, and now you’re annoyed. So I would in general say there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no 100% safe way to inject personality into labels like that. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are a lot of downsides, and the only potential upsides are your application’s value proposition
⏹️ ▶️ John is based on its personality and whimsy, which can be done but is much
⏹️ ▶️ John trickier than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also be very careful when you’re writing dialogue text if you’re a developer or if you’re Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that attributes malice or actions to the user or if there are attributes it an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intent or actions to the user that may or may not be the case. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the most infuriating pieces of text in all of Mac OS is the dialogue that comes up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after it has a kernel panic and shuts down and reboots that says, you shut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down your computer because of a problem. And a lot of times, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shut down my computer because of your problem. It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that, does it? It totally says
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It says your computer shut down due to a problem. It says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shut down your computer. I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this now. I agree with John. That is not how I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this. Are you sure? I am not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I would check because I don’t see it often, but every time I see it, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, I’m on fire. You shut down my computer. I didn’t shut down my
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. So so here’s what the kernel panic, you know, the overlay, the overlay that comes on in five languages
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get a kernel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panic. Yeah, it’s not that it’s it’s the dialogue that shows up on the first boot after.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. OK, but so anyway, the overlay says your computer restarted because of a problem. So that may
⏹️ ▶️ John be what I’m remembering for that wording. All right. Well, the after your computer restarts, Marco is
⏹️ ▶️ John right, I’m looking at this thing on Apple’s website, it says, you shut down your computer because of a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, it sets me on fire if
⏹️ ▶️ John see it. It’s right on Apple’s website. We will put it in the show notes. I’m assuming this is the current dialogue, but it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support document. It looks like it might be an old theme, but yeah, that’s definitely the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wording. Yeah, maybe I was
⏹️ ▶️ John reading it as your because, you know, the kernel panic one does say your, but the dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John after says you shut down, it doesn’t even make sense. How would you shut down the computer, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John spontaneously because of a problem? Like, is it just like all of a sudden you saw a problem and you reach for the
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in the wall and yanked it out? Like, how is that even a thing that you could do? Because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John found a problem and you selected shut down, you would never see this dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box. You know, it’s kind of like putting words in my mouth, but in this case it’s like putting actions in my mouth. It’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t do this, you know, you did this, you know, like, and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you see an app that’s forcing you to say thanks or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I don’t want to see your great deals, I don’t like great deals. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, it seems like it might be cute or helpful or something and trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, it’s not at all. You have to be so careful with that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is an additional dialogue, by the way, that says your computer was restarted because of a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John And that one that says the, uh, you know, uh, ignore more info
⏹️ ▶️ John and move to trash, uh, for like an application that crashed. Like we see that one when, when an app crashes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there is one that is more, you know, less blamey, but the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John there exists any dialogue that says you shut down your computer because of a problem, because it’s the dialogue that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John asking whether you want it to restore all the applications that were open. So your choices are, please reopen everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was before it cancel to not reopen stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, I’m sorry, what reopen everything? please reopen everything
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i’m not a dialogue box i don’t have to put that like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the button does not say please
⏹️ ▶️ John the button says open and the cancel button says no thanks comma cancel oh i’m sorry it doesn’t say no thanks comma cancel it says
⏹️ ▶️ John cancel because that’s what cancel buttons say i don’t know um i’m not a button i’m a person um
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah that’s that’s what it’s asking you and so again if it’s asking you that it it means the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire thing abruptly stopped functioning and it realizes that abruptly stopped functioning because it
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do all like the nice shutdown cleanup stuff so the next time it starts up it says I don’t see the nice shut down cleanup stuff which means
⏹️ ▶️ John things ended abruptly last time and I honestly don’t think there’s any user
⏹️ ▶️ John action that you could take other than if it knew somehow because of cameras that you had yanked the cord
⏹️ ▶️ John out or flick the power switch the hardware power switch yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it sees you do it it still shouldn’t say that it’s just it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John setting you on fire unnecessarily and how would it know it was because of a problem maybe you shut
⏹️ ▶️ John down your computer because you couldn’t figure out any other way to like, you know, you’re, you’re an inexperienced
⏹️ ▶️ John computer user. And the only way you know how to turn it off is to hold down the power button for five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds. Maybe you shut out your computer as a statement. Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John of a problem. It wasn’t a problem with your computer. It was just like a problem in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you might be reading too much into this. I think what the way I’ve always read this and why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t been perturbed by it is because the computer, well, I guess it can turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself off but in this scenario of a kernel panic it doesn’t turn itself off it is you that is physically turning the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and restarting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it not always no no not in the case by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco default it reboots itself doesn’t it does it reboot it i didn’t think it did i think it does now i think that’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case for the last few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years oh no you’re right you know press a key or wait a few seconds to continue starting out no i guess you’re right i guess you’re right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all i know is you guys are clearly from the northeast or have lived there too long because you’re impolite assholes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John moving on I’m trying to parse me.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, before you move on. Again, I want to iterate. It’s not about politeness. It’s about the fact that there are conventions
⏹️ ▶️ John for the user interface. Anything that deviates to the convention, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, don’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco me think, whatever. Don’t make me think, book.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anything that deviates from the convention requires thinking and processing time. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cognitive load for no benefit unless there is actual benefit of the personality of the application. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John every time we look at a dialogue, we’d have to parse each person’s politeness and
⏹️ ▶️ John phrasing and preambles and stuff. and stuff and we just want okay cancel or you know we’re just standard buttons that say standard
⏹️ ▶️ John things that fit in a standard amount of space and we don’t want to have to read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them i actually do I completely agree with you on that.
#askatp: Game completionists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Chad Teporski writes, when it comes to video games, how much of a completionist do you each of you consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yourselves to be? How much does it depend on the type of game, scope of the game and your level of interest in it? I will start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by saying I am not at all a completionist. And obviously, I am. I think Marco and I fight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over who is the least video gamey person of the three of us. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do play video games from time to time, as I think we mentioned last week, the week before I’ve been getting back into Breath
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Wild, but whenever it is I beat Ganon at the end of Breath of the Wild,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I don’t have all 120 whatever it is shrines, if I don’t have all 80 gazillion curac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or curac or whatever they’re called seeds, I am not going to care. I will be putting that game down and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never playing it again. And that’s just me. Marco, since you are also useless like me, how do you treat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kind of in between you and a normal person. I will try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fairly complete as I’m playing, but then I will usually reach a point at which my interest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just falls. Um, you know, for a game that, that can be quote beaten or that has like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main storyline that can be completed. I do really want to complete that main storyline, but like you, I, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, once I, and on my way there, I might be, you know, collecting as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I possibly can, like, like, like when playing Mario Odyssey, um, I, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried to get as many of the moons as possible like you know as I’m going through each world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t just fly away as soon as I can but then after you complete the main storyline you can go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get a whole bunch more and I started doing that I just haven’t really continued yet and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I intend to go back and play it I don’t know when I will exactly because now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing other games I don’t know when I actually will but I do intend to still go back and do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t stop because I decide, I’m done with this game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. It just kind of happens. Like Stardew Valley, I played Stardew Valley very heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time. And I intend to go back to it, but the last time I played it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably three months ago. And I just haven’t gone back to it yet. But I do intend to, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t had a kid yet, I wanna see how that works. You know, there’s more I wanna do in that game. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I reach a certain point where I feel like I’ve done mostly everything there is to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find it hard to motivate myself to go back and get like the last 10%.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you did have an actual kid. What you mean is a pixelated kid? Yes. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just to make that clear. You’re like, I haven’t had a kid yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In Stardew Valley, the game I was talking about during that sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just seems context-free. Where’s Adam? He’s upstairs, asleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this question doesn’t really define what completionist means but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of with Marco and that like there’s there’s two strains I like Marco if I’m playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a narrative game that is trying to tell me a story and if I like the game well enough
⏹️ ▶️ John like you know that like I’m having fun playing it I do want to see how that story
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out but the modern practice of video games of basically
⏹️ ▶️ John providing a tremendous amount of things to do outside the main story
⏹️ ▶️ John means that for me to actually 100% clear game by getting all the things that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get and doing all the things that you can do has actually become a lot harder over the years, both in terms of time investment
⏹️ ▶️ John and skill. Uh, it used to be that if you finish the story, then there’d be a couple of ancillary things to do. But Mario Odyssey
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, the story is like one eighth of the game. And then like, if you really wanted to complete it in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of hours spent and effort required, the real game begins after you finish the story mode. So I did
⏹️ ▶️ John finish the story mode of Mario Odyssey. and I did enjoy it. And I do like the fact that there’s a lot more after that
⏹️ ▶️ John and that you can do it kind of in any order that you want, but I don’t think I will 100% clear Mario
⏹️ ▶️ John Odyssey ever. Contrast that with Mario Sunshine, which was not as good a Mario game by any stretch of the imagination
⏹️ ▶️ John as Odyssey, and yet I 100% cleared Sunshine. Because the amount of stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to do beyond the main story and Sunshine seemed so much more tractable to me. And because
⏹️ ▶️ John the things they had you doing were like one annoying collection quest and a bunch of levels
⏹️ ▶️ John that were hard but of the variety that they’d already had that I really enjoyed. And so it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that I could do and lo and behold I did do it. Similarly with Zelda games,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will always finish a story in any Zelda game. I love Zelda games. I 100% cleared a couple of Zeldas
⏹️ ▶️ John but not all of them because especially as time goes on when they start adding even more and more collectibles, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to get all the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. I won’t. It’s never going to happen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I probably will do eventually all the shrines. Uh, and that’s kind of, and that’s, that’s a game that I love.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s not a game that I love, I’ll do the story and I feel like I’m done with it. What if the game has no story? If the game has
⏹️ ▶️ John no story, I’ll just play it when it’s fun and when it stops being fun, I’ll stop playing it. Like I feel like I will actually
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to play a game after it stops being fun. I’m really close to the end of a narrative story just because I want to see how it ends. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of true. Like movies and books too. We sometimes you’re like, well, I’m invested and I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only three chapters left and even those books kind of knowing me, I still want to see how it ends. And so you’ll power your way
⏹️ ▶️ John through. So that’s kind of my take on completionism in video games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Aftershocks, Backblaze, and Jamf Now. and we’ll talk to you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M A-N-T-Marco-Armen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental They didn’t mean to accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John Check podcasts so long
Post-show: “Back” to Work
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you’re back at work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Yeah, tell us about that. So you’re full-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right? No. Like totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to normal? No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m spending the month of March
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easing my way in. So as we record this, last week I did a sum total
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of one day of work, and I did two half days, which basically means I went in when Declan was at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preschool. And then this week I did a full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day Tuesday, but only half of it at work. I did the rest from home, so you can guess where this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going. I went to work when Declan was at preschool, then I came home and was here working on my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the remainder of the day. And then tomorrow, I am doing sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of the same. We have an appointment to get Michaela’s passport for some events
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are happening in a couple of months that I believe I’ll be seeing both of you at. So we need to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that squared away. But this week, I’m doing two days. Next week, I’m doing three whole days. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the week after that I’m actually ramped up to full time. Now I might be doing some of that from home here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not what I usually did. I usually pretty much only worked in the office. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a week after next that I will be a real, real adult worker again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s going fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a pretty understanding job letting you ease back into it. I’ve never even heard of a company doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the second time. Yeah, like the last time I took less time easing my way into it. And I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t take an unpaid leave. But they were fairly cool about it, both the last job and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job. So that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pretty cool. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that would give me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. At most of my jobs, I had trouble taking vacation days, let alone doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, I didn’t as much ask as said this is what I was planning to do and waited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for somebody to say no, and nobody said no. And that’s been nice. And I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the place I work, it’s pretty, I was gonna say chill, but I sound like a tool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it’s very relaxed. And I think in part because it’s not consulting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like most of the last few jobs I’ve had, there’s a lot less urgency,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s kind of okay if I’m gone. That being said, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easing back in terms of hours worked. I am not easing back in terms of stress level and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need for me to be paying attention to things again. The staff that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work with is excellent, but, or at least on the iOS side, but is very young, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not a bad thing at all. But that means that they’ve kind of been queuing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a whole bunch of questions to ask, and how do I do this, what should we do here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are we gonna do about this other thing? And so I have been in high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demand in the little bit of time I’ve been working, which is a good
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Are they elementary school students? What the hell does very young
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean when you’re saying that? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one is, she started as an intern and is still in school and is part-time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is- What major version of Pearl were they born during?
⏹️ ▶️ John of them- So are you at the stage now where anyone in their 20s counts as very young?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m getting there. I mean, my birthday’s Saturday, for goodness sakes. I’m turning 36. I’m getting old, John. Getting old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, I’ll be that old
⏹️ ▶️ John in a couple more months.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the 29-year-olds at work are very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey young. No, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one of the intern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just turned 21 at the end of last year. So she was born in 96, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, she’s younger than Weezer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. So, yeah, so the intern who is now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part-time was born in 96 and we just hired a guy who I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know how old he is, but I would guess 25 or less. So, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the whole staff is me and these two, well, the whole iOS staff that is. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and these other two. So, and they’re great. They really are great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m really, really lucky to have them as my coworkers, but they’re young and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there are things that you only get from being in the trenches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any sort of code base, be it iOS or otherwise for a long time. And so I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the old man in every measurable way. And that’s just my life I need to adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s a question. Do you have anybody yet who is either so young or just so new to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS programming that they have no Objective-C experience, that they only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Swift experience?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to think if the part-time person did. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she had done some Objective-C in the past, if I’m not mistaken, but it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toss-up. Because I almost wonder, like that might make things easier, right? Like if you try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maintain an all Swift code base or a mostly Swift code base and you have somebody who doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any mental baggage of Objective-C, that actually might be a good thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I’m not at all saying you’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t know, because it’s one of those things like, do you really need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what a pointer is to be able to write code today? And I know you’re both probably going to jump all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over me, but if you think about it on a surface level, in a lot of cases is you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really need to know what a pointer is. Now, I strongly believe that you do. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I’m presenting an argument I don’t actually believe in. But you could make an argument that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you don’t totally need a pointer to understand what the concept of a pointer is in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift. Yeah, I would totally argue that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. And I still think it’s important to understand what a pointer is. It’s important to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand these sorts of things. And I think to some degree, you get a lot more of that from Objective-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only because you have stupid asterisks everywhere, but what I’m meandering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward is I think having an understanding of what makes Objective-C Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helps you understand what makes Cocoa and Cocoa Touch Cocoa into Cocoa Touch. Does that make any sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I could see that. Although I would also suggest that, like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my time working around other programmers, I was fortunate enough to usually work around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really smart people, but not 100% of the time. And I was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes really surprised how little somebody could know about programming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be working full-time as a programmer. Oh, yeah. And I think—and I’m not saying this to say, like, oh, they’re so dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That just there are a lot of programming jobs out there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty forgiving of having a very shallow understanding of it or pretty forgiving of bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coding or mistakes or leaking memory or things like that. And iOS is a huge example of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When the App Store was this huge explosion gold rush thing back 10 years ago and in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intervening years since, a lot of people learned Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just enough to get an app out there and just kind of stumbling through. And I mean, heck,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was basically me when I first started too. I had a C background, so I knew that kind of stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of people who start knowing a lot less and can get an app in the store. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they leave memory all over the place, it doesn’t matter what the scale they are. Or if their app gets kicked out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the background because it crashes in the background, you don’t even notice. You launch it again and there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s actually a fairly forgiving environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the tools now protect you so much from doing things that are too horrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can actually get by pretty far without having knowledge of things like pointers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and memory and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so, and it’s also, you know, to some degree, like what level are you hiring, right? Like when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we hired our newest developer, you know, we were hiring somebody, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were intending to hire someone that was a bit junior. And so I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how this went during his interview. I did interview him, but like, I’m sure asked him, you know, what’s a retain cycle?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you create it? Well, how would you accidentally create it? How would you find it? How would you fix it? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m hiring a junior developer, they can get that wrong, and I potentially would be okay with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I would hope that they would at least somewhat understand what I’m talking about, but they can have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wrong answer. And as long as they have a vague understanding and I feel like they’re coachable, which is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corporate thing to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco then— Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. We can have a coaching opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in the parking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand up. Right. So you have worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John with me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you see what I’m driving at? I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being – I’m agreeing with you in a roundabout way. I don’t think being super experienced and having a deep, deep, deep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowledge of the history of Objective-C and why is message passing different than calling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a method – I don’t think you need all of that. But I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is – No one needs that. Fair enough. it is assistive in understanding, like I said earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what makes COCO the way it is. It’s because it’s in large ways because of what made Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it is. And I don’t think it’s necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the thing? It’s necessary but not sufficient. I screwed that up, didn’t I? Sufficient but not necessary. You get what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco driving at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Sufficient but not necessary. That’s what Johnson always says.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, totally. Um, but, uh, anyway, so, so the point is that, you know, it’s, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful to have, but, but not required. John, you’ve been very quiet. Any thoughts about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a specific, uh, instance of the more general, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John question of whether, uh, not whether you should have, but what the value
⏹️ ▶️ John is of having a background in the fundamentals when it comes to the everyday
⏹️ ▶️ John craft of doing a thing. Like, so can I do particular task
⏹️ ▶️ John without knowing the history, cultural baggage,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other lower levels of abstraction that I’m building upon. The answer is yes, you can. You can be a craftsman
⏹️ ▶️ John at a higher level of abstraction without knowledge of detailed knowledge of history and culture
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the lower layers. But there is most certainly value
⏹️ ▶️ John in knowing all that stuff. I mean you could take it just auto mechanic, right? There’s lots of things that you can be trained to do to a
⏹️ ▶️ John car without knowing the details of the levels of abstraction that you’re not dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ John without knowing the history of internal combustion engines particularly the history of the features
⏹️ ▶️ John of the internal combustion engines of a particular make of car you don’t need that background to be really
⏹️ ▶️ John good at doing the brakes changing the oil even disassembling and reassembling
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular model of engine if you know how to do that at that level you’re fine you know
⏹️ ▶️ John but and you know So getting back to computer programming, the question is, do I need a computer science background and a
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge of algorithms, data structures, electrical engineering,
⏹️ ▶️ John circuit design, basics of electronics? Like, do you need to have all that to write an iOS app? Hell
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you do not. But having that background is valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John and makes you better at the job of writing an iOS application, particularly when,
⏹️ ▶️ John as inevitably happens, things go wrong and you have to figure out why they’re going wrong. that’s when
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever level of abstraction you’re working at starts to fall apart and you find yourself looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John memory addresses in a debugger, assuming you even know enough to navigate a debugger. And if you don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John a pointer is, it just feels like gibberish and you feel lost, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you understand all those lower levels, you can drop down a level and drop down a little further. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really good and know the whole stack and you’re a Mike Ash type person, you can look at machine code and figure out what in the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ John going on, right? And even if you’re not, though, even if if you’re not like someone who really can navigate the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole stack, just knowing how in general computers work from top to bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you understand at least what parts you don’t know and where you might go to look up something and understand I know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m looking at here. I just don’t know specifically what it says, but I understand where it came
⏹️ ▶️ John from. And I understand if there’s a part of it that I need to figure out, I know where to look for
⏹️ ▶️ John it or, you know, and all the way down to like, hopefully none of us get down to the hardware level where you got to figure out what what’s wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with the hardware level, but I still feel like even that, which probably won’t come up and debugging a program
⏹️ ▶️ John is useful to know because it explains many of the features higher up. Just as you were saying knowing about objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C explains a lot of the weird features of Swift. Like if you don’t know about objective C, it may seem weird that
⏹️ ▶️ John that Swift has these things and what the hell is at obscene mean and why is that even there and what
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? What do you mean by an object being backed by the objective C runtime versus one that isn’t? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is that? You know, you can get by without it, but there is most certainly value for it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the question when people ask about this, whether it’s should I have to know pointers or do I have to have a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John science background is they want to know if it’s like a gating factor. And I don’t think it is. I think you can actually be a successful,
⏹️ ▶️ John good programmer. But I think all that background that you’re like, do I have to know this?
⏹️ ▶️ John There is value for it. It’s just a question of how much value does it have for the thing that you are doing. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you are working at Apple on frameworks, it’s probably more important that you have that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John background. If you’re working an apple on the compiler team, yet more important. If you are designing a
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and software system from top to bottom, really, really important. So you just kind of have to decide
⏹️ ▶️ John how much how much of the background knowledge do I
⏹️ ▶️ John need to do my job well, and what is the cost of me acquiring
⏹️ ▶️ John an apple in terms of time and money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you said something smart a minute ago, with regard to it It becomes important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when things fall apart. In general, in my experience, I’m a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey novice iOS developer. I’ve been doing it casually for a fairly long time, but I’ve only been doing it professionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for two years now. It’s when things fall apart that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start really getting stressed and I have to start reaching way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside my comfort zone trying to figure out what is broken and why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think in some ways, if I was a more experienced developer, I would get through these problems a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quicker, a more experienced iOS developer, I would get through some of these problems more quickly. But it’s my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in general as a developer, and in general, it’s my experience of understanding most of the stack. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what keeps me kind of level-headed, and that’s what gives me the patience and tenacity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out a lot of these problems. And I wish I had a specific example offhand, and I don’t, which is good, I guess, because that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means things haven’t violently died recently. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s valuable that I have not only a CS background, but a computer engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey background, which to me is a combination of CS and electrical engineering. And I’m sure a lot of people will take offense at that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t care. That’s just the way I look at it. And that means where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CS, from my experience, and I’m not trying to say this is fact. This is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way I look at it. CS tends to stop with code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually or maybe memory, whereas computer engineering goes all the way down to logic gates. And that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helpful in a day-to-day time, but it is helpful, just like John said a minute ago, it’s helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to understand what, at least vaguely, what are all these abstractions and how do they relate to
⏹️ ▶️ John other? It demystifies it. Like, you know, I don’t know the details of how any of these works, but I know how a CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John works, and I have built a CPU from the logic level up, and I have built a logic gate with a solid state electrical
⏹️ ▶️ John components and you know, like that whole thing. It doesn’t mean suddenly you know how your computer works, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no more magic. Like you know from top to bottom, you know, the magic starts basically at the quantum level
⏹️ ▶️ John where my physics courses ran out. Like that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the magic starts. That’s pretty low,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s pretty low down. Everything else is like, I’m not scared of it, it doesn’t seem magical. The other thing I forgot to
⏹️ ▶️ John mention about having a background in the fundamentals is it also gates
⏹️ ▶️ John how high you can go. So if you want to make an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John application, chances are good that you won’t need any sort of in-depth knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John about data structures and fundamental computer science-y algorithms
⏹️ ▶️ John or even things like neural networks and stuff like that because the frameworks do a lot for you
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably your application is not as complicated as you think it is. Like probably it’s just a fairly basic application, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you are building a more complicated application, games are a great example
⏹️ ▶️ John they employ a lot of things where, uh, you know, the first approach that occurs to you is terrible and won’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John well. That’s the time where you’re like, if I had a background in computer science, I might know
⏹️ ▶️ John some algorithms that would do this in a more efficient way. Um, if you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a background in that very often, you will find like you’ll find yourself deriving
⏹️ ▶️ John from first principles, a sort of half ass version of a well-known algorithm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you, you, you know, I’m not saying you can figure it out yourself, but it’s like you’re wasting your own time. If you just
⏹️ ▶️ John had a background in data structures and algorithms, you would have immediately narrowed down to a couple of choices
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe recalled off the top of your head, the big O notation for all these different things and known
⏹️ ▶️ John which one works best. And then just, you know, you know, implemented that yourself. Most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, again, most time you don’t have to do this. Most time libraries implement these things for you. If you have some sort of associative
⏹️ ▶️ John array or dictionary or hash structure, NSRA under the covers is doing all sorts of smart things with all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ John smarter algorithms, switching from hash buckets to a linear search when the size dictates that it’s smart, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t even have to know what that the magic happens behind the scenes for you. But if you are building a structure like that yourself, to manage your
⏹️ ▶️ John own data, again, maybe in games where efficiency is paramount, it really, really helps to have that background
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge. So not just figuring out the lower layers above you, but being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do for yourself, The things that for most developers are done for them by the frameworks and the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything does give you the ability to Do more complicated things and if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have that background you can still do it, but you will essentially be Figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out things that people figured out tens or hundreds of years ago as you derive from first principles Basic old mathematical
⏹️ ▶️ John concepts and data structures, which works fine, but it’s it takes more time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a Truly phenomenal series of YouTube videos that PBS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made in association with I think a few other groups it’s called crash course computer science and Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I talked about this a little bit on analog and we were trying to do like a you know We’ll watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one each week and it turns out that it’s it’s not very entertaining as a podcast But I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend enough watching this series There’s 40 videos of which each of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like 10 to 15 minutes and it brings you from the abacus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way to modern computing. And I’ve only watched the first maybe quarter of them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is step by step going from an abacus all the way up to cloud computing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and machine learning and stuff like that. And what you learn by watching these, even if you don’t totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand the ins and outs of what they’re talking about. The thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think is most important that you can glean from these videos is that everything is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one abstraction on top of another and it’s abstractions all the way down and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is impressive and fascinating to see this broken out in 40 different chunks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bite-sized pieces. And you see like, especially once you get into like how memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually works and how, you know, these logic gates are held together or put together, I should say, in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make memory. Even I sort of kind of have my eyes glaze over a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit. But the point that you get from this isn’t necessarily that, oh, you need 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NAND gates or whatever in order to store eight bytes of data. And I’m obviously making this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all up. But the point is just that, oh, you take a bunch of transistors, hook them up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes gates. You take a bunch of gates, hook them up, that makes memory. You take a bunch of memory, hook it up, that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole wad or block of memory. And it’s just you build upon what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you. So if you happen to have roughly 400 to 500 minutes to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spare, I cannot recommend Crash Course Computer Science enough. And we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m behind an analog. So you might just build on that. Yeah, we did. I knew that already. That’s disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that series. I was too. I couldn’t get him to get into it. I tried. And I don’t blame him. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem. I think he enjoyed it to some degree. But There isn’t a lot for us to say about it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s little interpretation involved, right? And and that’s that’s the bummer behind it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really I hope that he won’t. He won’t. But I hope that he watches
⏹️ ▶️ John it. He’s just not that into computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, he used he uses a fake computer all the time. What do you expect?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Can you make him a video series called how iPads work? And maybe that would work better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just open it up. It’s just a bunch of unicorns and elves dancing around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, just two at a time, one maybe hovering over.