270: Three Major Zippers
18 Apr 2018When was Apple’s heyday?
Episode Description:
- Backpacks:
- HomePod sales look bad
- CloudFlare goes ARM
- When was Apple's heyday?
#askatp- What if the Apple Mac CPU is neither ARM nor x86? (via Colin McKellar)
- Cribbing cooling from the iMac Pro for future not-Pro iMacs (via Scott Nourse)
- How would Apple have treated the Mac Pro and Mac Mini in years past? (via Nick Alexander)
- Post-show: Topics we don't feel we need to cover
Sponsored by:
- Techmeme Ride Home Podcast: Subscribe now in your podcast app!
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Visit http://squarespace.com/atp and enter code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Away: Travel smarter with the suitcase that charges your phone. Get $20 off your suitcase with code ATP.
Chapters
- Casey was right
- HomePod sales look bad
- Cloudflare’s ARM servers
- Backpack impressions
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- Moving Facebook Groups
- Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home
- When was Apple’s heyday?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Custom Apple ISA?
- #askatp: iMac cooling design
- #askatp: WWSJD?
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Unconvered topics
Casey was right
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll go with the zipper one just because I feel like I have a mnemonic for remembering. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three major zippers, four apple heydays. That’s my mnemonic. That’s how you’re going to make this
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Whatever you need, John. That’s going to be the title. Three major zippers,
⏹️ ▶️ John four apple heydays. Too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know where to begin here because in our show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it reads, follow up. Casey was right about something. I don’t know if I should be really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really smug about this or really fearful about this. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steeled myself. I am bracing myself. Marco, what was I right about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As you know, we are going to the beach with increasing frequency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes we go there for long spans and electric cars are not ideal to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave at the ferry because of gradual self-discharge basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Marco bought a Jeep Wrangler. Oh my god, that would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now there’s no charging available there, so it’s, you know, electric is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We kind of decided we need to maintain a gas car. Also normally the only way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way to the beach town that we go to is via ferry. And the ferry’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know it’s slow, you know, it’s not impervious to weather, it runs very infrequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the off-season. about a boat? You can save a lot of time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could be able to go there a lot more easily in the offseason by driving all the way there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which requires you to drive across the island itself which requires a permit for driving on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sand. Oh my god. Now there are very very few of these permits are tightly controlled by the National
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Park Service they’re very hard to get now there was an opportunity to get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we had to act quickly if we wanted it. Now the only downside is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it requires a four-wheel drive vehicle. All-wheel drive is not good enough. It needs true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John four-wheel drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inches of ground clearance. But it also has to be reasonably compact to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the beach town once you get there. Now this didn’t have to be a very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end vehicle, just something usable. And of course, if it’s going to be a gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car I wanted it to be a transmission I could tolerate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I wanted it to be a manual transmission if possible because I don’t think I couldn’t find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey anything with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the you know DSG or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys I’m so happy right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry on now as you know there there are not a lot of options that fit this description
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and because we wanted it used and we wanted it quickly we also didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of choices on things like what color it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god! Oh my god! Tell me you, tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a white Wrangler happened to you. Now certain colors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco despite not being my favorites, are more popular than others.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god I’m gonna be so sad if that’s not where this ends up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And sometimes these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter colors happen to be what you find on used listings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. So, I have some news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re never gonna let me hear the end of. Tell me about your new car, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down. God damn it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re the worst. All of this to Rickroll me? Are you serious? Is it too late for an April Fool’s joke?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s like a Friday
⏹️ ▶️ John the 13th joke, I guess. Oh god, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco There was one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was one thing that I was not lying about. You were right about something. Now here we go. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was Tom. Oh, I just got a Tom bin backpack and it’s really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you were right. You were right about something big. Tom bin is actually really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was at some point I was trying to square the idea of you getting a ring like he’s no way in hell. I got a wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff was true, like, oh, I got a chance to get one of those things and we’re going to drive across the thing instead of taking the ferry and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. There’s just no way. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the truth is, almost everything I said would have been a sound thinking process, but there’s no way we’re ever going to get one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand permits, and we would never have any reason to drive there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you would have gotten a Land Rover. That’s what you would have ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. That’s probably true. There’d be nowhere to park it. No, honestly, if I ever would get a sand permit, a Wrangler would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably be what I get. Because you do want things to be small, inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but you would have to drive it from home, and you do that once, you’d be like, no way I’m getting into that
⏹️ ▶️ John rickety shopping cart again. I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey across the belt park.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where were you going?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was waiting for you to say in your terrible joke that somehow the permit was associated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the car. Like, you had a friend at the beach that was unloading a Wrangler and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is associated with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the car. The ferry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came with the car. Yeah, yeah. Which I understand would have been like a nutso scenario, but that was the only way I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fathom that you would actually end up with a Wrangler. It turns out you’re just a big jerk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, I knew we were low on topics this week, so I figured I’d start with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So starting by trolling me is your new amusement, and I see how it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s better than just whining about the Mac Pro or Destiny or something, right? Debatable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who would whine about Destiny? Who would do that? Besides, you already kicked that question out of this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, true. Thank goodness. You’re welcome, everybody. Next week, watch out.
HomePod sales look bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so HomePod sales, not looking too good. According to Bloomberg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right, this is better. During the HomePod’s first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the smart speaker market, compared with 73% for Amazon’s Echo devices and 14% for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 4% of the smart speaker—God, I cannot say that fast—smart speaker category on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey average, the market research firm says. I’d also seen, maybe it was in this article, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple retail employees are saying that they’ll sell like a couple each day, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess maybe shouldn’t seem that dramatic to me, but it seemed pretty dramatic to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So who knew when you have a speaker that is completely reliant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on good software, and that good software is Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, guess what? The software ain’t so good, and thus the speaker is kind of useless. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s also about like price and features too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s true. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s a lot they can do in the short term that, you know, a lot of people are not buying the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod because of its price versus competitors. A lot of people are not buying the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it lacks features people want, like the stereo pairing or the multi-room audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. So I can see over like the next year as Apple presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improves, you know, like the features of it via software and maybe drops the price during the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holiday season or something like that. I can see it getting a small boost, but ultimately I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the biggest problem it has is still Siri, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Siri ever gets really meaningfully better, it’s gonna be a long-term thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not gonna happen quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know if I buy the premise of this article, because well, first of all, Apple’s not telling people what
⏹️ ▶️ John its HomePod sales are, so it’s all these market research firms trying to come up with things and interviewing Apple Store employees, So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not concrete numbers. And second of all, because Apple’s not giving you numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know what Apple expected. It’s just kind of saying from the outside, as far as we can tell, it doesn’t look
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re selling a lot of them. And presumably Apple wanted to sell a lot of them. Therefore it’s selling less than they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to. We talked about the product and how it stacks up, right? But given
⏹️ ▶️ John how it stacks up, I know it’s the launch and so it should be bigger numbers, but 10% compared to Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Homes 14%. not bad considering how much worse home
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is Google Home
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t and I think about the slow start that lots of Apple products have had, you know, from
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod all the way to obviously the Apple TV is the other obvious example.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is Apple super disappointed in this? I mean, we hope they’re a little disappointed that they couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get all their planned features out the door. But in the grand scheme of things, if they are really dedicated to this market.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, you know, I think that this is kind of what they would have expected. Like, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you could have put out the home pod missing some of your announced features, knowing that your competitors are on multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John generations ahead of you and not expect to, you know, start off in third place.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, you know, I’m not too upset about this now. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s upset about maybe they had grand visions of, know suddenly becoming the market leader
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think despite how vague market research can be I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’d be able to tell if suddenly the home pod was the dominant smart home cylinder thing that you talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to you and it’s not and I hope Apple expected that because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no argument here.
Cloudflare’s ARM servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Cloudflare is on ARM servers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cloudflare, that’s sort of like Linode or something along those lines. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s like a really big CDN. And they provide advanced services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are related to being a CDN, so like DDoS protection and stuff like that. That’s right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John feel like that. We talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about them from the DNS thing the other episode, right? Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, yes, yes, yes. Sorry, I got my wires crossed. So apparently, they’re using ARM. I didn’t get a chance to read this article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we recorded tonight, so I apologize. I am slacking on my chief summarizer and chief duties.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can one of you give me kind of a quick summary, if you don’t mind?
⏹️ ▶️ John I put in the handy quotes. Cloudflare has servers, right? That’s how they do
⏹️ ▶️ John all of this, you know, CDN and DDoS. And, you know, they have things out there on the network
⏹️ ▶️ John that serve content and that route traffic and do all sorts of other things, a lot of them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is from the Matthew Prince, the Cloudflare COO. He said, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John give better than even odds that by Q4 this year, we will no longer spend any money on Intel. What he’s talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about is they want to buy ARM for all of their servers from now on. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about the performance for watt and everything. And he says, we think we’re now at the point where we can
⏹️ ▶️ John go 100% ARM. In our analysis, we found that even if Intel gave us the chips for free, it would still make sense to
⏹️ ▶️ John switch to ARM because the power efficiency is so much better. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloudflare is a perhaps a special case because exactly what they’re doing with their servers
⏹️ ▶️ John is very narrow, and it’s the type of like they’re not running applications that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re not running a bunch of software that they need x 86 compatibility for. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to them, what’s the most important, as they say, is other quotas. How many cores per watt can we
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly get? Because in a CDN or DDoS type of environment or whatever, you want lots
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots of hardware out there, and you want them to be as small
⏹️ ▶️ John and as efficient as possible, because part of their money. I mean, the reason they say, you know, if Intel gave us chips for free, it would still
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense to switch. The electricity costs money. It’s across a surprising amount of money when you’ve got tons and tons and tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of servers and space and data centers cost a lot of money and so on and so forth. So
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps they are the ideal case. But this is an example, a very timely example, given what
⏹️ ▶️ John we just talked about, Apple potentially switching to arm of arm on the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John still trying to, you know, get a foothold. It’s been a thing for many years now that pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John for ARM on the server mostly from people selling ARM chips, but maybe it’s finally getting a little bit of traction?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. But if it’s going to start somewhere, starting someplace like this seems like a safe bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I had no idea that this was a thing. So that’s pretty cool.
Backpack impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, real-time follow-up, which backpack did you end up getting, Marco? I was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumpy about your troll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that I didn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask you which backpack it
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel bad. It’s called the Wrangler.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes, it’s white and it’s, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever. Anyway, I got the Synapse 25. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I figured. I can talk about it a little bit if you want. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing is I haven’t traveled with it yet, because it just arrived yesterday. I’ve been playing with it, packing it, configuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, stuff like that. But I haven’t actually traveled with it. So far, what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like about, so I, you know, in my great backpack odyssey of spring 2018, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tried a few different ones. The one that I’ve been using for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of months is the Peak Design Everyday 20 liter. And the Peak Design is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really nice backpack in a number of ways. It is far better looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is like a much more like fashionable backpack. If you want to like look cool every day with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re going, you want to like, you know, travel in style, the Peak Design is by far the better choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also has a few nice advantages, like the Peak Design can stand up on its own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The, you know, the Katan Bin, I guess maybe you could load it in a way that it would do that, but I haven’t yet. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, you know, you’ve set it down and it flops over, you know, but the Peak Design can stand up. It’s really nice. It has really good handles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has handles on the sides. So if you can carry it sideways, if you need to do that for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found that kind of useful. So the Peak Design is good in a number of ways. What I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like about the Peak design, and what made me ultimately start looking around again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the, first of all, there really is not very much space. And all the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said the 30 liter version was really bulky and big looking, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good reviews, like our friend Chase Reeves does really great bag reviews on YouTube. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he said, and I saw a number of other things in some photos that said, basically nobody should get the Peak 30 liter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just too big visually, and just looks weird on people. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of what scared me away from it, but the 20 liter really does not hold very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. It’s very hard to put things in it. And one of the big problems with the Peak 20 liter, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Peak in general, all of the compartments in it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intrude into the space of the main compartment. So even like the laptop thing on the back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you put a laptop in it, it pushes into the main compartment, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a number of problems. Number one, you lose space in the main compartment, but number two, if the main compartment is full, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to put a laptop in, or it’s really hard to have those side pockets close, things like that. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re constantly intruding into that center space, which is already not really big enough. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the side pocket, basically the Peak Design has very little exterior organization.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has all the organization interior. So like, there’s like three major zippers to it, and everything else is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside like sub pockets of those or something like that. So it’s all like these like these like sub areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like to get to the side pockets, you have to actually open two different zippers. Like first to open the main flap and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second to actually get into the side pocket. The side pockets I did not find very useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re very skinny. All the little like pen slots and like wire slots and stuff are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super tall and skinny or super tiny. And it’s very hard to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that space. And then when you close it up, like you can’t close those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well if the center is full. And if you open it in the center is full, your center stuff can fall out when you’re just trying to get to stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the side pocket. So the peak has a lot of great things going for it. Ultimately, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very good when it’s filled up a lot. And like if you’re carrying around a small amount of stuff, it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, they call it the everyday and I think that’s a really good summary of it. It’s really good for like taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work or something. It’s not, I would not say it’s amazing for travel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it just doesn’t hold enough, and a lot of the organization inside is really clumsy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also just heavy. I weighed them with a little luggage weighing thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Peak Empty is four pounds. And by comparison, the Tom Bihn Synapse 25
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 2.2 pounds, including the 15-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash pocket inside. So 2.2 versus 4, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost an entire MacBook One difference. So that’s like, the peak,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s made of this very thick, you know, heavy duty material. It’s really made to be like a camera and gear bag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which one? The peak? The peak, yeah. Okay. So it’s like all surfaces are padded. Like you know how like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, certain bags, they have like padding around the laptop compartment, but then if you, if you like put the laptop in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different compartment, there’s no padding, you know, you like slide it in and it could like hit the ground really hard, you know, don’t want that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Peak, the whole bag is padded and I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s so much heavier. But the Tom Bin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the bag is just like thin fabric. It’s strong, but it’s thin and you know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want something padded you have to buy some kind of insert like the 15-inch laptop cache that I got with it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of in the Peak all the, as I said, all the organization is internal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the Tom Bin, all the organization is external. You have like many different pockets accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the outside. You don’t have to like unzip one thing and then go into another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket on the inside. Now you can if you want to have all these like sub bags that you put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into their pockets and they have this whole system for how you can attach these o-rings and everything. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to get into that I don’t know yet but what I like about the Tom Bin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you can it seems you can more easily access stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s there’s fewer steps there’s fewer like pockets and sub pockets, it’s more easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessed to all your stuff. And it’s also just way lighter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it holds way more. I cannot believe how much more it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holds. I can’t say much more than that until I actually travel with the Tombin. I did travel with the Peak a couple times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I kind of knew like what wasn’t so good about it but the Tombin so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m going to like it. It does seem like it would it would I think be overkill for an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyday like carry to work bag but for travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially like if you want to do like traveling light and maybe just taking the backpack as your only bag or as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of only you know two small bags then it’s pretty I think it’s gonna be a lot more useful so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask me again after a few more trips this summer and then I’ll give a final verdict on it but so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem really nice it’s also a lot cheaper if that matters it’s a hundred dollars cheaper but it just it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John It feels like you’re creeping up on my big ugly yellow bean backpack because the previous one the Peak design
⏹️ ▶️ John one is very sleek. Yeah. Very stylish trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be understated. Oh yeah the Peak is like a work of art like it really is very stylish very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice and parts of it like even like the zipper pulls are there like the entire zipper pull is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fabric and just it’s kind of like this rubberized tough it’s really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just using the Peak feels really nice like it’s a very nicely constructed bag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything has a great look and feel and style but it just really parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it are very clumsy oh also one big thing to mention with the peak the 15-inch retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro from 2015 barely fits in the laptop compartment and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely cannot recommend this bag if you carry anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would go in a laptop compartment besides a laptop so for instance an iPad it technically has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has two different segments of the laptop compartment, but it’s so tight that even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting an iPad in and out is really hard, especially if you have one of these silicone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covers on it. It’s really, really hard. So I cannot recommend the Peak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you carry a laptop and an iPad. But otherwise, I really do like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like a lot about it, but I think for my actual needs where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly a travel bag, do need to hold a lot when I do travel I think the time bins gonna work out better
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re able to tolerate this backpack you are very close to tolerating the LL Bean one because this
⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot of pockets a lot of zippers a lot of straps it is not particularly sleek so
⏹️ ▶️ John and the LL Bean one just to be clear holds way more than this and has like ten times as many pockets and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John 80 bucks it’s 80 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah the other thing is I don’t want it to be too massive because I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually want this to fit under the seat in an airplane Yeah, mine fits under the seat. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, yeah, so, like, the peak, the 20-liter peak does fit very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the 30 would, or at least it would be a lot, maybe not on the planes that have the big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, computer box under the seat, you know? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the box under the seat, that’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John always get a different seat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use a Tambin Cadet, which is similar, except it’s a messenger bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is terrible if If you’re going to, it’s terrible if you’re going to be carrying it for hours and hours and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours and hours and hours, then I would use something like a Synapse. But I only have it on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey body for, you know, a half an hour at a time at most, generally speaking. And I tend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prefer messenger bags for those sorts of uses. And I love my Cadet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had it for like three years now. It looks brand new. It fits my, I mean, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyday carry for work is my 15-inch MacBook Pro that I use begrudgingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you sought out. It has my MacBook One in it, both in their own individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey caches. I used to carry my iPad with me when I still used iPads and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other miscellaneous cables and goodies and things of that nature. So I love my Cadet. I cannot say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough good things about it. I’ll link my review in the show notes. Tom Bin’s stuff is great. The people there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super nice. I adore their stuff. And even if you prefer a backpack,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Get the Synapse, if you prefer Messenger bag, get the Cadet or something else. You can’t go wrong with Tom Bannon. It’s great stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And definitely, I would strongly recommend anybody who’s looking at these kind of things, check out Chase Reeves’ video reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on YouTube. He is incredibly well-versed. He travels a lot, first of all, and he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has tons of bags. I don’t know. I mean, at this point, if I was a bag manufacturer, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be sending him the bags to review. I don’t know if that’s a situation, but he has tons of great bag reviews, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of backpacks, And he really takes the whole in and out of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think has a really good point of view on them. definitely check out Chase Reeves on YouTube.
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Moving Facebook Groups
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey song ♪ You have a Facebook groups problem, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I tweeted about this a couple weeks ago. The gist is, you know, I’ve never been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fan of Facebook. We discussed a couple weeks ago, like, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like Facebook, but I really do like Instagram, and it’s owned by Facebook, and so it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awkward. Anyway, I would love to delete my Facebook account entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never actively used it. It’s only a source of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spam and stuff I don’t care about and drama for me, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just wanna escape Facebook. The only thing keeping me there is these two private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groups. One for the local parents of our school, And then the second one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Beachtown has like a local community group. And they’re both private, you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like apply to get in, so like no kind of like public, you know, scraping of them, whatever actually work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least in a simplistic way, you know, maybe I could scrape something together with like using my login cookie or whatever, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I wanna just delete my account and just be done with Facebook entirely. And so my question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, first of all, do I need to retain membership in these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groups? and then second of all could I attempt you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the local parents one is very unimportant to me. The beach one is actually pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important because it’s a you know it’s a small community there and you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of old people and who live there year round at least and so I like to keep up with what’s going on in the town and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can like you know check on everyone’s houses to make sure it’s not flooded and everything else and it’s just it’s a little community.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was wondering, could I plausibly start another community
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace it and maybe get some or many of those people to move to it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what I came to… so I asked Twitter this, like you know basically asked like, have you ever, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, has anybody tried to move a community like this off of Facebook or to start another one somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else? If so, like how did it go and where do you, where are you supposed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that? That was the plot of the secretive NIM, wasn’t it? I think so, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It didn’t go well, spoiler alert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first thought it was maybe a slack group, but I don’t know how older people appreciate or don’t appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or understand slack. And I don’t know how regular average people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who aren’t like nerds, I don’t know how popular slack is or how amenable people would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to it. I didn’t want to just go to some other like, you know, crappy social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network. Like a bunch of people recommended things like, like next door, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, what I hear from Merlin about next door makes me not want to attempt that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, well that’s, that’s my first question for you on this topic is how much, speaking of next
⏹️ ▶️ John door, how much like next door is the Facebook group? Is the Facebook group as it exists now, just like forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John moving it, but just like as it exists now, if you had to characterize it, what is it most like? Because yeah, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the mechanism. Yeah. people type words into boxes in Facebook. But what does it seem like? What do people talk about? Does it seem like a next
⏹️ ▶️ John door community? Does it seem like a slack channel? Does it seem like a web bulletin board? Like what’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s pretty low traffic. First of all, there’s only like one or two posts a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s usually people posting, you know, photos of what’s going on in town,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think is interesting, because like over the over the winter, a lot of construction happens. And I like to watch like, oh, look, there’s a new story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re getting built or all they they tore down that thing, you know stuff like that. So that’s kind of fun and it’s it’s also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local political summaries of like oh he was there was a board meeting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the village or whatever and here’s the notes from the from the meeting or here’s this issue people are talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requesting public comment stuff like that. It’s not you know if I’m honest it isn’t that important,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I kind of like it and I also feel like it’ll be useful to be a part of some kind of community
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this as we spend more time there because you know one you can do in the summertime. It’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to get rid of this old fridge. Anybody want to come pick it up for free stuff like that, you know, or like anybody have any recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for where to get prescriptions when we’re out here something, you know, stuff like that. I feel like being a part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a community like that is useful in ways like that, especially when it’s, you know, a fairly small and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, hard to access community. I guess like it helps to have connections to people like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I you know, I went through basically like, you know, all people’s replies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at all the services people were recommending, and I just, it just was, it was totally unproductive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was basically no consensus except either using Nextdoor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but nobody even had done it. Like everyone was saying, like, oh just use that, but the people who had said they’d actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried to do it, almost all of them said it just didn’t work. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nobody moved over, or they couldn’t get it to work, or everyone moved back, or the people complained, they couldn’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, whatever else. Even, you know, and that was for everything people tried for things like slack for things like I think discord
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is can be used in this way, but I don’t understand discord yet. So I don’t, I don’t even know. Um, or like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, somebody’s setting up a forum somewhere. Uh, I don’t know. So there were a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. None of them were very good. And so here I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am basically back at square one, which was the situation that most of the responders were in who had tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, basically like, yeah, you know what it, I tried, nobody wanted to move. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my current theory is I want to find out like how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually need to be a part of these communities. I think the right answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately gonna be I just don’t need these. You know like you know because one thing is like I found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other day I found basically the Instagram community for this place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought well that’s actually much more pleasant. There’s way more photos. I can see like kind of what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and there’s nobody like complaining to the mayor about stupid stuff that doesn’t matter. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of felt like maybe Instagram is enough. It’s certainly nicer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m there anyway, so I might as well enjoy this part of Instagram instead of just dogs and watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I guess maybe I could just have Instagram satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the photo fix and just stop the community interaction or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could this summer stick a bunch of papers on the telephone poles and try to start my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Slack group and I don’t know I don’t know how that would be received if anybody would actually join it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that would matter I have no idea I think the conclusion I’m coming to is that the Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groups are are probably not able to be easily moved but are also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either low value or low traffic enough that I might just go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without them and that might just be fine
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you have a pretty reasonable long-term solution here I think you’re right that you’re not gonna be able to move
⏹️ ▶️ John these people, right? I also think you should not go to Nextdoor because I think that is all,
⏹️ ▶️ John from what I’ve heard, it’s all of the worst things about the Facebook group and it involves moving people.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what you can do, I think eventually pretty successfully,
⏹️ ▶️ John is start a new community. Don’t try to move anybody. Start a new community,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for the old people to die, aggregate the young people, so that eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John the Facebook community just dwindles. Like you’re not going to convince them to come over. Don’t stick anything
⏹️ ▶️ John on any polls. Just get two or three people who are similarly inclined
⏹️ ▶️ John to go on whatever you want to use with those two or three people, right? And those two or three people
⏹️ ▶️ John probably will still be on the Facebook group, but just slowly over the years, many, many years, start moving
⏹️ ▶️ John the traffic there. Start to build a critical mass until people on the Facebook group start hearing about things that were discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Slack or on the whatever else other thing you have. That’s the way you win in the end.
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the meantime you can do what we do in our household which is
⏹️ ▶️ John have one designated person in the pair be the person who uses facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you have to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it but tiff could use it so i don’t use facebook but my wife uses it to look at things and sometimes she tells
⏹️ ▶️ John me what’s happening there well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sad part is i used to be in that situation then tiff got fed up with facebook and deleted her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account like three or four years ago uh… yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that person so you’re that person yes
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like I said, you know, start the parallel thing like it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the advantage you have of coming into a neighborhood as the new person in the neighborhood. Hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re younger than a lot of the people that are there and there will be turnover. And so you can if you start
⏹️ ▶️ John a new community and start small, you can build it up over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s probably the right answer. But I you know, the reason I wanted to bring this up on the on the show is because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a it’s relevant because Facebook is horrible and be I think a lot of people are in situations like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think a lot of people are in a situation of like I want to stop using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash delete my account on Facebook but I quote have to be there for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s there whether it’s like you know my my grandparents because that’s the only place they post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some group they have to be a part of for family or work or something you know and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard from so many people who this was the case for And so I feel like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could come up with some kind of solution or set a good example that could maybe help more people than just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me on this. But I do think you’re probably right that I think the best solution not only for me but probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people who find themselves in this situation is to just abandon those Facebook groups and just take the hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of whatever you’re missing. Because honestly I’m probably not gonna be missing that much honestly like I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a part of these groups six months ago and I was fine so maybe it isn’t that I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the big advantage you have is that it’s not like this is the only place where you can talk to your Grandparents these aren’t your
⏹️ ▶️ John families aren’t you know these you don’t have any reason like you’re not abandoning anybody, right? So you
⏹️ ▶️ John are just going off and doing your own thing It’s much more difficult when like this is the only thing my whole family knows how to
⏹️ ▶️ John use So if I want to know what’s going on in their life at all, I have to go to Facebook to find out They’re never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John move. I’m never even gonna ask them to move That’s just not how this is ever gonna work, but I can’t abandon them and
⏹️ ▶️ John go. See you grandma We’re starting our own group over here. Join us when you can like she will never
⏹️ ▶️ John join You’ll just never hear about your grandmother again So take advantage of the fact that you don’t have those kind of ties to
⏹️ ▶️ John the group and just start your own much better cooler group
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you’ll take to the streets snapping at each other in groups
⏹️ ▶️ John mark hasn’t seen that movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Tiff has. Probably
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. Subscribe
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to this show, you’re probably gonna like Tech Meme Right Home as well, because it talks about many of the similar kinds of
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they’re doing is they’re taking it to a podcast now. So they take the same headlines
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish them best of luck with Tech Meme Ride Home because it’s a really good show. Thank you so much to Tech Meme for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this topic has been in the show notes for, I feel like, a couple of months. John’s Mongoose Californian?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually, it’s been a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John years. Didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that? We did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John eventually. Yes. We did. Even I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. This showed up a couple of months ago and pretty much every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode for probably the last eight to 15 episodes has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had us on the verge of doing this topic and then we just run out of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tonight’s the night. And Kyle Geter writes in to say, when I hear you guys along with some of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other favorite podcasters, Jason Snell, Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Federico Vatici, talk about your many experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over several years using Apple’s various devices and OS’s, it makes me feel like I missed out on the time when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple was on the cutting edge, a time when their products were pretty much universally regarded as being new and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full of innovation, something they seem to be lacking lately. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple’s ecosystem in its current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state and perfections and all, but I find myself agreeing with you when you’re discussing everything that is currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lacking. That’s not to say that all their products are stale, but you get what I mean. My question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or ask rather, is if you guys, John specifically, can explain what that time was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. I’d love to hear a firsthand account of what using a new Apple product was like when it genuinely had new features that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no other product had. I’ve watched some Steve Jobs documentaries and ended up watching the dramatic movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jobs and Steve Jobs pretty frequently because I find the idea of old Apple or Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jobs’ Apple very fascinating. I wish I had migrated to it earlier so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could have been a part of it. I don’t have a clear answer for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I bet you John will, but he’s going to be disgusted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by what Marco and I have to say. So we’re going to start and then John will clean up our mess. And I can, since I have the floor, I’ll go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead and start. And I was thinking about this earlier as I was washing dishes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have two answers and I’m not sure which I prefer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The answer that speaks to me the most is a few years after the Intel transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to say probably the late aughts or early 2010s, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually was quite a few years after the Intel transition, if I remember correctly, when the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were getting really fricking good. And when you started to see regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people understanding the fact that if you want a good laptop, you’re buying a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re reliable, they’re reasonably rugged, and they pretty much just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. And at that point in time, they really did just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. And we’ve talked a lot on the show about whether we’re just getting old and curmudgeonly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we are, whether things are actually worse with software on Apple platforms, which it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, or a combination of the both, which it is. But nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember, and maybe it’s rose colored glasses, but I remember a time when my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always just worked. I never had to take compressed air to it, which by the way, don’t tell Marco, but I I need to take compressed air to my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never had, I know you are. I’ve, I’ve, I never had to worry about things just randomly breaking or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not working anymore. It was just, it was great. And as a PC, well, PC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as in like personal computer user, it was, it was awesome. And this was again, probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were to try to pin it down even more, right around the time that SSDs were starting to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affordable. So most computers did not have them, But those who were willing to part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a lot of money to get them could. And so I want to say this is roughly 2012, maybe actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just feel like that was the heyday of Apple laptops. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think things have, have taken some turns from here. And even though I don’t think it’s so bad that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I was buying a new 15 inch, I would actually buy an old 15 inch, hi Marco, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely agree that there are problems in the current lineup. The other answer I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is perhaps a couple of years ago when the iPad Pro was announced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 12-inch iPad Pro. And even though that didn’t really do anything for me, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am willing to concede that the Mac is a relic of a bygone era or soon to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bygone era and the iPad is the future, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad Pro probably was the inflection point at which it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey became clear that the iPad was a real computer. And as much as I snark about it, it’s not a toy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. Not specifically because of the iPad Pro, but I think that moment in time was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about when that happened, which is a combination of iOS 10, iOS 11,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t matter really. But you know, multitasking got a lot better. The software got a lot better. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device was far more capable. It was bigger. Everything about it just seemed like a confluence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of good events. And I know that the iPad lovers of the world, like the Mike Hurleys and the Federicos and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Jason Snells, could not have been happier. And so that actually was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last couple of years. The Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pinnacle of the Mac laptop was a few years ago, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would choose probably one of those as my answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually feel a little more positive with a new do about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The idea of trying to nail down like, when was Apple’s heyday? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard because first of all, you do have the rose colored glasses issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is hard for us to really think past objectively. It matters a lot like what’s important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you and what stage of your own life you were at when certain things came out or whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you missed certain things you came too late or because you’re young, which I’m sure John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna tell us about. So, you know, there’s a lot of, and also, you know, parts of this were tied up in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like just kind of missing Steve, because he was a big personality that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all really liked, and, you know, Apple’s not gonna recapture that without him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s hard, it’s hard to try to think about this objectively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Getting around the rose-colored glasses thing, I think it’s also hard to look back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remember there actually were like, you know, product flaws and software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaws and missteps and iPod hi-fis, like all, you know, there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things during the times that I think of as like, you know, really great times in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s past. So it’s really hard to nail down one time and say like, this was significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than today. You know, obviously the implication with the question, when was Apple’s heyday is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not today. What I think my answer is for when the heyday was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably right around 2012 or so. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I was thinking, somewhere around there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know this is like, you know, right after Steve died. So, you know, his influence was still very strong. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of sounds like it was partly like a Steve versus Tim thing. And I don’t mean that specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think there’s some elements of that, but I don’t think that’s like the, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only problem or even the biggest difference. If you look back, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I wrote my best laptop ever post, you know, praising the 2015 laptop in a thinly veiled attempt to insult the 2016 laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I realized, like, you know, the 2015 MacBook Pro, Retina MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, which was actually the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, just after a few updates, really is such an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing computer. I can’t point to any time before that computer and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather be back then than now. or like the Macs back then were better. Like no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they weren’t. That computer, which I’m still using, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, that is like the pinnacle of what I love most about Apple design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, it isn’t like totally perfect. There have been problems with screen delamination for some people and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones with dedicated GPUs often had GPU failures. Well, that was a problem with pretty much every MacBook Pro generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, it’s not perfect, but it’s really damn good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s better than everything that came before it. And I can’t say, you know, obviously I have a lot of problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern laptops so I can’t say that about the current generation. The current ones, I cannot say either that they are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good or that they are better than the ones that came before them. But I think that’s actually a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent thing. Most of the rest of the Mac lineup has been pretty great in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it isn’t always updated as much as I want it to be. And the Mac Mini, I know some people look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Mini these days and say, and they say, oh, they haven’t updated it forever. Yeah, they never update the Mac Mini very often. It’s always been a last priority,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even under Steve, even when it first came out. It’s always been a very low priority, and it’s always been very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overpriced for what it is, and very rarely updated. Yeah, so anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac, the MacBook Pro up through 2015, the MacBook Air, which got that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing update in 2010 that made the best computer possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever for most average people. They had some really good years fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently and some really good products and like you know look at the iPhone line as it’s matured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad line as matured like they’ve made some amazing products across almost all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their product lines up until either the present day or pretty recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like the crappy laptops only came out in 2016 that wasn’t that long ago it feels longer by the day but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of bad decisions were made by the world in 2016 and Apple was not immune to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, maybe there’s hope in some of these areas, I hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I hope. But so the premise of this question is that Apple is currently in a really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in like a bad state and that their heyday was maybe a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. And I do think Apple has some problems today, which I could talk about every week. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that their best times were that long ago. Their best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times, I think, were only a few years ago and included years that were under Tim Cook and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco included years where Johnny Ive was designing things. I don’t think this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive problem that we have to look back very far to get what we think is the heyday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also wouldn’t say that today isn’t the heyday for everything. I think the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great today. The iPad is great today. That’s a good point and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac the iMac Pro is amazing like it and even the 5k iMac before that in 2014
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was also amazing so there are parts of Apple that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still doing amazing work and I would say almost all of Apple was doing amazing work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that long ago if not today so I don’t think it’s that far in the past I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s like this thing that can never be achieved again or cannot be you know, maintained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they have to do some course correction in a few areas, some big, some small. There’s evidence that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe have or are beginning that process in some of the bigger ones, like the Mac Pro and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, and Siri maybe, I hope. And so I think we’re actually going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be okay eventually, I hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell us the real answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo will like this because there’s four.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Here are my top
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco four heydays of Apple Computer. been how many times
⏹️ ▶️ John four heydays for have all can be erased we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you have any honorable mentions
⏹️ ▶️ John no it’s not a mentions only for how many number fours do you have just the one actually I’m not gonna even rank them I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna I’m just gonna do the chronological and at the end I think we can try to decide well I can try to decide because you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two or two of them all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right finally how can you possibly think that Western Pennsylvania is not the Midwest
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s state borders man like there’s lots of places that are a lot like the Midwest but they’re like in China and not part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the midwest yeah um so the four errors i’ll do them chronologically
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and you can you can vote for your favorite uh the one i’m not going to talk too much about is apple 2 that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an obvious one that’s apple the tech company from nowhere the big tech company uh ipo
⏹️ ▶️ John the company that’s making personal computers computers for the rest of us that was a big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John it only doesn’t seem big uh in hindsight because of the much bigger things that would come after it
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s That’s true of a lot of these earlier errors. But at the time, the Apple two was very big. Also, the IBM PC came along
⏹️ ▶️ John and kind of cut short their reign. But for a long time, uh, then the go go eighties, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John seventies and eighties, uh, Apple and the Apple two were a big story and a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you are getting back to like, well, you know how old you are at the time or, you know, what point,
⏹️ ▶️ John what point you were in your life. If you are just getting into the technology scene when the Apple two came on board, it can
⏹️ ▶️ John be, you know, the most important event in your life. It was a very important event for the entire industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the first heyday. The second heyday
⏹️ ▶️ John starts with the advent of the Mac, which was not a particularly successfully launched
⏹️ ▶️ John product. And then Jobs was booted out shortly after. So this is actually Jobs’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exit. He does this great thing with the Mac. And the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is a super important product for the world and for Apple. For kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the iPhone of its day because computers didn’t look or work like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac before the Mac, like computers that regular people bought, like just, you know, run of the mill personal computers, the IBM
⏹️ ▶️ John PC existed, but it did not look or work like the Mac. And after the Mac, all computers looked and work like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, they all had mice, they all had a graphical interface, so on and so forth. So the Mac was super important. And the reason I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a heyday, not because Oh, great, so you made the one Mac with not enough RAM that nobody bought, because it was too expensive. That’s not what made
⏹️ ▶️ John this the heyday. The heyday is actually the the dawn of the Mac, and then after
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs left, the era that everyone complains about, the Scully era, essentially, when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John produced a bunch of computers with the Snow White design language, the Mac SE, the SE30, the 2,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2Ci, the 2X, 2FX, that whole era
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of platinum, pinstripe, Snow White Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John the dawn of desktop publishing, the dawn of color on the Mac, That was
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps the strongest run of Mac models,
⏹️ ▶️ John one after the other, from the perspective of someone who understood what made the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John good. To everyone else, they’re like, Mac, whatever. Everything’s about MS-DOS and
⏹️ ▶️ John IBM and eventually Windows. Who cares about the Mac? It’s just a silly toy, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of what made it special. I mean, to get back to what the experience was like, you, you had a secret,
⏹️ ▶️ John you and a bunch of other people understood a that Apple was special, maybe you understood
⏹️ ▶️ John that from the Apple to heyday, and be that the Mac was head and shoulders
⏹️ ▶️ John above anything else that anywhere it was there and you had like a long time to be
⏹️ ▶️ John living in everyone else’s future. It’s as if the iPhone came out, and nobody copied it for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they just derided it like they kept making you know, Nokia candy bar phones where you typed with like the number pad and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they didn’t immediately copy it, right. But instead, they gave you several years where
⏹️ ▶️ John they made fun of you for using the phone that you had that your phone is a screen. You don’t even have a keyboard on how you can text
⏹️ ▶️ John people like that didn’t happen. That happened for like a month and a half, right? And then everyone’s like, Oh, yeah, no, that we
⏹️ ▶️ John need to do that, right? And so there was a long time there where Apple is putting out great,
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing Macintosh computers solely for like this, this narrow audience
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who understood how great they were. And we got to see all the computing revolutions. the GUI revolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also desktop publishing revolution and even things having to do with like, you know, color graphics, high resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics, lots of things that were available in a personal computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that was widely sold for the first time and would only much later be copied. So that’s the second era,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is that they’re often derided the Mac, you know, Scully, you know, jobs is gone and Scully is making all these computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that cost way too much money. And they did cost way too much money, but they were great. The third era
⏹️ ▶️ John is the return of Steve Jobs, the iMac and the iPod and I think we’re getting to the things that you’d remember now.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got the iMac obviously is the big, you know, Jobs comes back, uh, the next he comes back
⏹️ ▶️ John with next, but that’s not the error I’m talking about. It’s not like the Mac OS 10 error. It’s he’s working on Mac OS 10. They’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out the whole OS thing. They have the false start with a Rhapsody and a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 server, which is not what you think it was. Uh, but in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John when he came back, what they first did was the iMac, the, you know, Johnny Ives big coming out party that made
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our irons and vacuum cleaners teal for a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the iPod. And the Macs at this point are running classic Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not running Mac OS X. The iPod has like a monochrome screen and a wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John that moves and it is Mac only and it’s Firewire. But this little section here that extends
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit farther into the Mac OS X era, where every time Apple came out
⏹️ ▶️ John with anything, you never knew what the hell it would be. The iMac was like, what is this? A weird teal
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. And then after that, the iMacs would come in different colors. They’re going to make them in all sorts of colors. Then the iPod, and it’s kind of a curiosity,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then it starts to gain a little momentum. Then they got those toilet seat iBooks, and then you got the G4 Cube, and
⏹️ ▶️ John tower computers are weird looking. Like every time they went up on stage, there was the expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple could do anything. Like you don’t know what to expect. Like you are ready to be bowled over every
⏹️ ▶️ John single time. And that is the sort of the defining period of the Steve Jobs keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ John where we would all gather and it was like we’re just waiting for like, you know, candy to
⏹️ ▶️ John rain from the sky. It’s like, I don’t know, but every time we go to one of these things, something amazing happens. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s just, I mean, in a way the bar was lower because back then the
⏹️ ▶️ John audience would be blown away by just the audacity of the industrial design. You can’t do that anymore, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If they came out with the toilet seat iBook now, it’d be like, that’s an ugly computer. I don’t know why they made that. Like we’re so used
⏹️ ▶️ John to the fact that you can make color, uh, make computers and colors and make them have fancy design to all stuff, but back then
⏹️ ▶️ John it was mind-blowing and every single time, even if it was like a flop like the cube, the cube Keanu
⏹️ ▶️ John was insane. Everyone loved that. Everyone was like, could not believe he’s pulling this little core out of the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the stage. And I was like, wow, it almost doesn’t even matter that it wasn’t particularly successful in the market
⏹️ ▶️ John because we got the benefit of like the, the amazing reveal and the, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s sort of like making people expand the
⏹️ ▶️ John notion of what the possibility space is. That every time they put something else, it pushed some corner of the possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John space out again. Like I didn’t even think you could put anything over there, but now they’ve pushed the envelope out over there. And now who knows, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John this product was a dud, but who knows what else they can put in there. It made room for the next product, the next product, the next product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the final heyday of Apple is the iPhone error. Which
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know where you want to cap that, but it starts with the iPhone and it extends
⏹️ ▶️ John at least through like probably the 6, 6 and 6S where they finally made the big
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. But that run from the original iPhone, redefining this entire category,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, the 3GS but the 4, the
⏹️ ▶️ John 4S and then the 5 and then I guess the big phone with the 6, that run right there
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple once again redefining what a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John product category and also by the way redefining a product category that would become the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important product category in all of technology despite the fact that they don’t dominate in market share whereas but but
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we define this category and it’s not just like oh we make some cool
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs and iPods and you know it’s kind of cool and the iPod gets big a little bit but then it that sort of dies down or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was, you know, huge numbers, gigantic numbers. If you graph
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these other areas I talked about, graph, Apple to sales, graph, Apple’s original IPO graph, Max
⏹️ ▶️ John or the IMAX, the iPod is nothing. It doesn’t even show up on the graph until the iPhone comes. And it’s not like we’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John about, oh, you know how much money Apple makes. Who cares? We don’t run Apple. It’s not our money. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John is like the dawning of the modern Apple as like the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest and this incredibly important, you know, uh, technology company that everybody knows
⏹️ ▶️ John about. It is no longer the secret that we had back in the, you know, the Scully era. And it’s no longer like
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of, uh, tech craze, technology fans, just waiting to see what,
⏹️ ▶️ John what jobs, uh, you know, has hidden under a black cloth on a stage or whatever. This is the iPhone age
⏹️ ▶️ John is where everybody cares what Apple does and everyone has to care. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you want to cap that because you think they’ve lost their way in some areas or because the iPhone is tapering off or whatever, I’ll allow
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but I would actually honestly extend the iPhone era probably all the way up to today. Despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that we complain about the Macs, the fourth heyday of Apple is not about the Mac. It’s about the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPad and other stuff. So those are the four heydays of Apple. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think is, if you had to pick one, because it’s kind of cheating to pick four, even though I’m following the rules of top four,
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike some people. If we had to pick one, what would you guys vote for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re talking Apple II,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. The Mac and the Skully era. You know what I’m talking about when I say those? Like the Snow White design languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that are platinum and they have lots of pinstripes on them. A whole line of ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all in ones. Mac II,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac II FX, the Mac II CI, the SE, the SE30, portrait displays, desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John publishing, the LaserWriter, all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And then your third option was what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was the third
⏹️ ▶️ John one is the iMac iPod era where everything was teal and candy colored and you got the toilet seat iBooks and
⏹️ ▶️ John the blue white power Mac G3 and the cube and you know all the different color
⏹️ ▶️ John iMacs and the iPod mixed in there and the various lines of iPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the fourth one is basically iPhone iPhone really coming into its own
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. Yeah just iPhone period like from it’s like the Mac ones from the dawning of the first iPhone and the whole line of find like
⏹️ ▶️ John just just you know, took took Apple from a company, those three heydays before that were
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Apple heydays, the iPhone is like worldwide payday, like everybody, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John come to come to the size that they are today that they become a much more important company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for me, you just answered the question, because what I was going to say is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that the three prior heydays, because I picked the last one, if I had to pick one of those four.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The three prior heydays, there is an argument, I guess, how do you define heyday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? And I don’t mean that to be silly, but to me, the heyday of a company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Apple specifically is the moment at which everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be it the quote unquote fanboys and girls or sheeple or whatever, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone thinks that Apple can do no wrong. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back Back when the Mac was new, and I was only slightly paying attention at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, no, the Mac was new in 82, right? Or do I have that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John timeline wrong? It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco does matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco 84, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I was two, so I was not paying attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so was I. So anyway, the point being, I was aware of the Mac versus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC wars when I was a kid. This is, you know, I would guess late 80s, early 90s. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never thought that Macs were that particularly superior. the hindsight of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adulthood I can see that I was wrong, but at the time I wasn’t impressed. And to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, the heyday is when even if you for some reason choose not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use an Apple product, even if you choose to use an Android product, you can look at an iPhone and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I can see why people would dig this. Or look at a Mac, I can see why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people would dig this. And thus, because to me the heyday is about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey achievement in the hive mind of popular culture, to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leads me to the iPhone, your final option as being the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heyday. But that’s all based on how I’m defining heyday, and it’s completely reasonable for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either of you to disagree with that definition. So before you argue with me on that, Marco, what would you pick of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would also pick the iPhone in part just selfishly because I was there for that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like when the one or two I was a child and using a PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, number three with all the candy color computers, that was like right before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started really getting into looking at Macs and then eventually getting my own Mac in 2004. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all like late 90s, early 2000s and by the time I bought a Mac, they were all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal again. So it was, you know, I missed that whole, that whole era.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, but also, you know, the, the Mac was, I was not a big fan of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of classic Mac iOS when I used it like three times ever. Um, so, you know, I can’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really enthralled me when I would see like as a kid, I think Mac OS 10 is, is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS 10 is the Mac that I know. And I know that, that, you know, kills people like John who’ve been around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here for much longer. Uh, but At this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, Mac OS X has been around longer than Classic, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize. Okay, I guess that makes sense, yeah. I think it just barely crossed over, like 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years? Anyway, so to me, the Apple I know is the Apple that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made OS X and metal laptops. That’s all I’ve ever known. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just by default, number 4 would win. That being said, like I do have some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, slight hesitation or ambivalence about the iPhone coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what I love so much the Mac has undoubtedly been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really deprioritized because of the iPhone. So like in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, even though I love using the iPhone and my entire career now is writing apps for the iPhone and then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to the Mac Marco. Yeah, it’s like an insta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper. I have mixed feelings about it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of my statement about Apple’s heyday had a lot more to do about the hardware than the software, but in reality the software is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just as much of a part of the story. No question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the advent of having Apple’s attention being split between two different major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OSes and one of them being way more popular and profitable than the other one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No question that split, which started with the iPhone, has done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serious damage to the Mac. It is really, in many areas, software-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac is really behind, really in disrepair in certain areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it seems like this might be turning around based on rumblings and rumors and statements, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if that actually turns into actions, hopefully over the next couple of years. But I do have some ambivalence over the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the iPhone killed my Mac, basically, much as I like the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone bought your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if I had to pick one of these errors, so first,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I was picking personally, I would pick the Mac, the introduction of the Mac, but that’s just for personal reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like what you know, the age I was at the time, what I was into, so on and so forth. But I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is the only way I could argue for that is it wouldn’t be Apple’s heyday. It’s because we’re using the word
⏹️ ▶️ John heyday. If we fast forward 200 years, I can retroactively argue why the introduction of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John was, you know, super important, even more important than the iPhone in some specific aspects. But
⏹️ ▶️ John heyday, it was not Apple’s heyday, right? But for me, that is the era of Apple that has
⏹️ ▶️ John the most emotional resonance, mostly because of the age I was and the fact that I was getting into computers at that time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John how I idolized all the people who made it and read all about it and all that stuff, right? But if I have to pick the heyday
⏹️ ▶️ John out of these things from more less personal perspective, I would actually
⏹️ ▶️ John pick, surprisingly, and mostly based on Kyle’s question and what I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he wants out of heyday, I would pick the iMac iPod, iPod error, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that was the most exciting time to
⏹️ ▶️ John be into Apple. And it culminated with the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPhone marks the end of that error, right? So this iMac iPod era, like I said, was
⏹️ ▶️ John the dawn of the Steve note. We would go to Macworld Expo, which was still a thing then,
⏹️ ▶️ John and WWDC, and it was like a transitional period. Steve Jobs is back, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure how things are going to go down, and it got kicked off with the iMac, which was a big surprise. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John from that point up until the iPhone, every time we sat down there to hear what Apple had to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody knew what it was going to be. It could be anything and every time it was something
⏹️ ▶️ John that nobody expected because again, the possibility space had been so small and every keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John just kick that possibility space out bigger and bigger and bigger. And it was just, you know, keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John after keynote of just surprising, exciting stuff. And it built to
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone, the most surprising, the most exciting and you know, the most successful
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the stuff that they produce and everything in there. Like I just think back through those keynotes. It wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t in
⏹️ ▶️ John my formative years then, right? But so I’m not I don’t think it’s like rose colored grasses of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the rock music you listen to in high school or whatever. This was if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to know what it was like to be, you know, an Apple fan at a time when Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the most stuff to make Apple Apple fans eyes had the little emoji hearts over them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was this era. This was the heyday. And I would say it wasn’t Apple’s best products. was lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of not so great stuff mixed in there, not just the cube, like a lot of the stuff the computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John they look neat, but were they good computers, even some of the IMAX for like, not quite like the move
⏹️ ▶️ John to like the aluminum glass era. Like like you said, Casey, that, you know, 2011 MacBook Air stomps all over
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything during this heyday. But if you just wanted to be like super excited about what the heck Apple is going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John next, and have have it climax in like the most important technology product of our lifetime.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was the error.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a good discussion. Thanks, Kyle, for for that question. I really dig it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should. I was you know, when you said like, Oh, John’s gonna tell us that be disappointed because we’re so young and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John What kills me every time we talk about this is that you guys both just missed this error,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? And looking back on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like I said, you look back on it. It’s like that doesn’t look that good. The computers now are better. And they were like the who was the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John were better when you came on board. But you just missed this, like super exciting time when, when
⏹️ ▶️ John like every, every keynote was just like Christmas morning and you had no idea what was going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember, uh, vividly that even when the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out, I don’t know why I wasn’t that impressed by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I, and obviously it was, it didn’t work with PCs for the first
⏹️ ▶️ John $400 and it was firewire and it was Mac only. And this screen was monochrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And leaving aside the Mac only part, once it was available to be used with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the PC, even at first, I guess it was the price, because at this point in my life, I was considerably more price sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I am now. But for whatever reason, I remember not being impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then all of a sudden, and it looks like it was 2005, all of a sudden,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPod Nano happened, the very, very first iPod Nano.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was the first Apple product that I really and truly coveted. And I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one badly. And I eventually got one. And I loved it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a great example of having a keynote where, you know, like at that point it was clear Apple was making
⏹️ ▶️ John iPods. Like iPods was going to be successful. It was like, well, Apple’s going to be the iPod company. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John even the Mac company anymore. Ha ha ha. Uncomfortable laugh. But we had seen
⏹️ ▶️ John the big white iPods and we had seen the mini, which were candy colored and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, seem not to be worth the price from people who are measuring specs and everything and yet sold like crazy, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as an indication of where this market was actually going. And the nano is a great example of like we
⏹️ ▶️ John also they’re gonna announce the iPods, whatever one of these will be like, and to no one was thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, guess what you see what what they look like now the iPod you’re looking at now, take them and cut them into like
⏹️ ▶️ John seven pieces. And that little skinny sliver that you’ve had, that’s going to be the next iPod It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, yeah. Maybe that’s like the cover of the next iPod. It’s like, no, that’s the whole thing. It just seemed impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, because it was in his change pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? I was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about to ask. This was the one that was in the change pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, right. It was like, you have got to be kidding me. Like, every
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was like that. Every time they pulled something
⏹️ ▶️ John out, like, there was the reaction, you’ve got to be kidding me. Like, it doesn’t happen anymore, because we all know so much about the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s available. We’re following so closely that, like, we know two years ahead of time that Apple’s gonna use an OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John screen in its phone, and it’s going to be like it’s it was I guess mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John people weren’t paying enough attention people just learning to start paying attention that we were all just surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John there was and the rumor scene was completely bonkers like because anything was possible
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors that were happening then were just as outlandish as the things that came out and like massively wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and not founded on any information and just would you know amuse us to no end because nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John knew anything and like when things did leak like we weren’t sure whether to believe them or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was it was a hell of a time to be an Apple fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I gotta say the the that iPod Nano reveal was I think one of the best Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reveals of all time. Like it might have even been the best like short little moment because like with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone Steve like really built up to it slowly. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John although are you gonna fault them for building up? Are you gonna build it to something building up to the iPhone? It’s a good thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build up. No, it’s it’s true. But like if you’re talking about like the moment of the reveal. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the original MacBook Air coming out of the envelope was good. That was very good. I think that first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPod Nano coming out of his change pocket, I think that wins though that I can’t think of anything that was like a more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shocking initial view of something than that.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Colin McKellar writes, could the Apple CPU in Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the potential forthcoming ARM CPU or whatever, is it possible that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might not be ARM or x86, but an Apple designed architecture? Apple switching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey architectures anyway, why not move to one they create or control? It’s not like they would ever use a non Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arm chip at a Mac. And in short, how feasible is it to create your own chip architecture? And what are the disadvantages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or advantages from using an existing architecture? This is an interesting question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really know what Apple would have to gain. Like, yes, it would all be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey custom made directly for Apple, but like chip Web architectures,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s by design, the programming interface to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a CPU is, I want to say simple, but somebody’s going to weigh it. Well, actually me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a bunch of fundamental building blocks that you can build into very impressive things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t feel like this is an unsolved problem. I don’t know what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have to gain, really, by doing this. But maybe I’m missing something. So Marco, thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you basically covered it. I don’t think, you know, creating a new architecture is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant upgrade in the amount of work they will be spending on their own chip design. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there aren’t that many chip architectures in the world. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even fewer that are actually in widespread use for general purpose computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t think that they would have nearly enough to gain. You know, they already control a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot about their chip design, and they license the architecture from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARM, and ARM designs it, and I’m sure Apple influences it pretty heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, but it’s still being, like, that’s mainly being outsourced and pooled with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other companies that are all using ARM or making ARM chips or whatever else. And then also, on the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, there’s a lot of just software that can compile to ARM that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take advantage of, they can only be running on the same number of architectures that the rest of the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really running on because lots of stuff in the world now is split between x86 and ARM. Adding a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole other additional instruction set for just Macs, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see that flying in today’s world. I think that would be a really tough sell for a lot of people. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t see it being worth the work for Apple. I wonder if there’s patent issues too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mean, probably, right? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco patent issues. Right, like Arm is the one who would be facing any patent issues with their instruction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set, not, maybe not Apple directly, but it would probably become Apple’s problem at some point. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple started their own whole thing, they would have to dodge a whole bunch of patents and file a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their own in this area and have problems with those. And using someone else’s instruction set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps them probably avoid quite a lot of that as well. So there’s lots of reasons for them not to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think there’s enough good reasons for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John So making your own instruction set, like Casey kind of played it down as if like I don’t see why they would do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but there is a bunch of important advantages to being
⏹️ ▶️ John able to define the instruction set. And that’s the reason we’re not using the same instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set now that we were in the 60s or whatever, before there were instruction sets,
⏹️ ▶️ John or before there were widely shared instruction sets. What is it, the IBM, oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone in the chat room looks up for me so I can correct myself later. system 360
⏹️ ▶️ John something? Anyway, in the modern era, instruction sets,
⏹️ ▶️ John the advantage you get for defining one is you get to learn from the mistakes of everybody who made instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set before you and more importantly, much more importantly, you get to tailor your instruction set
⏹️ ▶️ John to the nature of the hardware and software of the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a lot of the older instruction sets are tailored to hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware designs that are no longer relevant, like the, you know, CPUs are not designed the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the problems they’re asked to solve are not the same either. Like, for example, instruction sets that
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any SIMD capability, were created in error before sort of large scale
⏹️ ▶️ John multimedia processing operations, right? They didn’t need an instruction set like that. If you make a new instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set, or you know, you append an existing one, you have the opportunity to say today, one of the problems we
⏹️ ▶️ John have is dealing with lots of data that might be, you know, audio or video or sound or things where we can do
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of operations in parallel, uh, you know, on, on big chunks of data
⏹️ ▶️ John and the old instruction sets don’t work with that. So we can define a new one that fits that and fits like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, modern CPUs and that we have more transistors and we can put more cash on the used to so on and so forth. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, IBM system three 60. I knew there was a slash in their system slash three 60. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was, I think it was the first computer with like a common instruction sets. They’re gonna make a line
⏹️ ▶️ John of computers that all use the same instruction set instead of making a new instruction set for every computer, which was a thing to do back then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so the question is, has enough changed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the industry or in the hardware world that Apple would gain some advantage from making a new instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set? Now arm in the grand scheme of things, it’s not new, but it’s not super old.
⏹️ ▶️ John If anything, you know, it’s it’s it’s a modern ish risk architecture, but arm has warts and
⏹️ ▶️ John it has extensions for Cindy stuff. If Apple, knowing what it knows now,
⏹️ ▶️ John could design a new instruction set for iPhones or Macs, they can make one that’s better than arm.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wouldn’t have as many warts, it would be better fit for their compiler technology for the hardware that they know it’s out there, it would be better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wouldn’t be that much better. On the flip side of this is what we talked about all last show.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple wants to have any chance of
⏹️ ▶️ John maintaining or eventually regaining the current situation where, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can run all the legacy x 86 binaries
⏹️ ▶️ John from, you know, and fast, fast virtualization for windows and for Unix and all
⏹️ ▶️ John those things like the client side of the server side and cross platform as well unified and x86.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they ever want to get that again, they can’t have their own instruction set. If they make their own arm chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that somehow the whole rest of the industry as we talked about for also goes arm and yay, we’re back into our,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, golden age again, where everything is arm everywhere. And it’s not because they’re all using Apple chips, but it’s because they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John using arm and arm is an instruction set that Apple doesn’t own and control. And so servers are free to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And we have this nice ecosystem. If our Apple, I would never give up that possibility,
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it didn’t look like it was going to be likely, I wouldn’t give up the possibility. So it’s either Apple tries to define
⏹️ ▶️ John a new instruction set and then sells it to the whole rest of the industry, not likely, or they really, really need
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick one that there’s at least some slim chance that the whole rest of the industry will eventually use. They should,
⏹️ ▶️ John should not and will not go their own way on a CPU architecture for phones or Max
#askatp: iMac cooling design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Scott Norse writes, do you think Apple will upgrade the cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey design for the 2018 iMac lineup using ideas from the iMac Pro for longevity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps better GPU options? I don’t think that’s unreasonable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that they would put that much cooling in a machine that they don’t feel like needs that much cooling. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be slightly surprised, but I don’t know. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they totally should because this this is a very well worded question here. Using Ideas from the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. They can’t just take oh, let’s just take the iMac Pro the exact cooling design Because it’s probably expensive and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like you said you don’t need to remove that much heat from the lower power chips but the ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they did to the iMac Pro a machine that You know dissipates more heat,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s quieter than the 5k iMac Yes, please bring those ideas because if you can make the iMac Pro that quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John use slightly less money and you have Slightly less
⏹️ ▶️ John power to dissipate Use those ideas in the 5k iMac make it let it be less of a hairdryer.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should totally do that
⏹️ ▶️ John will they do it? Maybe in a couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t see them Because the iMac Pro is so big and important and expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and seems even though it looks the same from the outside It seems when you look at in the insides It seems like a different planet
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s made it was like made by a different set of people people than the five guy Mac entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it looks so similar on the outside. So I’m not particularly optimistic about suddenly now that
⏹️ ▶️ John the I Mac pros at the very next five K I’m asking to look like the Mac pro on the inside, but I hope in a few years
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a trickle down of that, uh, of those ideas and that cooling and that, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, airflow and heat management solution because Apple has proven they can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, they just need to do it slightly cheaper in a slightly easier situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would love for them to do it. I think they absolutely should. I agree with everything you just said. The only problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the iMac Pro cooling solution won’t fit in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular iMac unless they eliminate options for spinning disk hard drives. Which would also eliminate the fusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive options. And so it would significantly drive up the cost of low-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac configurations for people who need a lot of space. Now, I’m of the opinion that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should probably be doing that anyway. I think that the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has passed where Apple should have stopped selling spinning disks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that I don’t think they should be still selling anything with non-retina screens. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fusion drives are not very good and not very fast and very inconsistent. They even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, remember a few years ago when they cheaped out and made the SSD portion of the Fusion drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even smaller than it was before? Like, the Fusion drive is a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hack. There was a time for it when flash storage was smaller and more expensive than it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is today. I think that time has passed and while they wouldn’t be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer, say, a terabyte or two terabytes as cheaply as they could today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is the kind of situation where it’s worth taking a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher price on larger storage tiers like that, especially now as people need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less storage because of various cloud services and the lack of large music libraries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore, this is a good time to do that, even though things would be temporarily more expensive because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would allow all of the iMacs to then have this awesome cooling design and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would benefit significantly from that. You’d probably have longer component lifespans, you’d definitely have less noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac Pro is a fantastic thermal design, at least as we know it so far. I mean, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if it has any kind of massive flaw that’ll happen three years in, but so far it appears to be a great thermal design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the sooner that can get into all iMacs, I think the better. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing holding that back is probably cost of doing a redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the three and a half inch drive that’s in there. The other problem is if Apple decides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remove the three and a half inch drive from the iMac, they might decide to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it thinner, which nobody wants except probably Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might decide to make it thinner instead of spending that newfound space on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional cooling capacity. I hope that’s not what they do. I especially hope they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also then force that onto the iMac Pro somehow and then make it just louder and worse or make it lower power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it throttle its CPUs at even lower speeds. Both of those would be terrible because nobody’s asking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But I also can’t deny this is Apple. This is especially today Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and heyday arguments aside, we all know they love making things thinner that nobody was really asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so they might just do that instead I hope they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John well that might is gonna get thinner it’s just a question of when.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re probably right.
#askatp: WWSJD?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick Alexander writes, a legitimate question that’s not trying to stir any bad blood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think Steve Jobs’ Apple would have treated the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini generally the same way that Tim Cook’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have? If so, what do you think that Jobs would have done differently?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no interest in doing the oh, if Steve were alive thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so if one of you has a different angle on this, then I’m happy to hear it, but I respectfully abstain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I added this one because I thought it was interesting not to just bash on Tim Cook and wish for Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be here again, but I thought there was some constructive commentary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be had here. Basically, we can ask ourselves a lot of questions like, what would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve do? How would things be different if Steve was still here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would Steve have done the things that Tim Cook’s apple has done?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a number of sides to this, some of which are constructive, some of which are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useless speculation. What we have to really consider here is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a completely different time and a fairly different company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from when Steve was alive. He passed away in 2011. That was a good amount of time ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Since then, the company has gotten substantially larger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has more product lines. It has significant maturation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the existing product lines that were there when he was there. So like, you know, the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though he was there for the launch of the iPhone, the iPhone today is very different from what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He passed away right after the iPhone 4S was unveiled to give you some idea of how far we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come. So it’s hard to say what this person would have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who led a company that was much smaller than it is today in a very different time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven years ago. In general themes we can speculate we can say things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Steve did seem to really like computers a lot and Tim seems to have bigger picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ambitions that don’t prioritize computers but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Steve do lots of things too. Steve ship bad products too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do really miss Steve for a lot of reasons I’ve really really missed Steve and I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does too but it’s hard to say what he would have done because what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we saw from him and the company that he saw was so different from the one today and the environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the competitive landscape and all the product lines today
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think Steve Jobs probably would have treated the Mac Mini just as badly because he didn’t really care about the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco either he did treat the Mac Mini just as badly
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah so I’m saying like so it’s not you don’t just make that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one yeah the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro I think he had a pretty decent record with the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I think the best way to characterize how Steve would have done things differently is that we wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have been, I wouldn’t have had so many situations where things were in limbo because Steve was
⏹️ ▶️ John very decisive, right? And so if he had decided that
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone and the iPad are the future and the Mac was the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John he would have not hesitated to can the Mac, like if that was the thing that he wanted to do, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John On the other hand, if he decided that, because he’s a computer guy, and because of the time that he grew up, and he just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, he loves computers, as evidenced by his entire career, that he just loves computers, that
⏹️ ▶️ John he was never gonna let them go, he would not have let the Mac Pro languish like that, because he would have said, look, either we’re doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, or we’re not doing them. Are we doing them or not doing them? I’m the one who decides, and I decide we’re doing them, so don’t leave that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing out there for all those years, right? He used a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Yeah. Like, I don’t think Tim Cook has ever sat in front of a Mac Pro once. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Tim Cook really gives two craps about Macs or computers. He’s a businessman
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. He’s not a product person at all. Whereas Steve loved computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He lived and breathed computers even more than I do. This is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frustration so often. I want Apple to care as much about computers as I do. A lot of times it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. But with Steve I never had that
⏹️ ▶️ John concern. So, and the important thing to remember is like with the Mac Mini, right? It’s not as if, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that Steve gave 100% attention to every product. Like, yeah, he’d let the Mac Mini be
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly languished, right? And so how can you say he loved computers if he’s not constantly updating the Mac Mini or with the Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John is such a bad deal. And you know, like, what, how can you say that? Like, it’s going back to the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the case for the true Mac Pro successor car guys analogy. Steve Jobs was a car guy when he was a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John guy, right? And computer guys, mostly, you know, they have something that they like, whether it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John big American muscle cars or sleek, fast sports cars. There are far fewer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, car enthusiasts who are really, really into,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sort of low powered, inexpensive cars. Part of being
⏹️ ▶️ John into cars is about, you know, speed, right? You know, car, someone asked, this is the slowest
⏹️ ▶️ John car ever made. Isn’t that great? Speed is part of car and motorsports, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, Steve Jobs, the computer guy, loved the big, fast computers, loved to have
⏹️ ▶️ John all that, you know, computing horsepower up there, and was less enthused about making a really inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John headless Mac where you could use your own crappy Logitech keyboard or your own crappy PC monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. Like, that wasn’t his thing. It wasn’t elegant, it wasn’t beautiful, it was like a product that you make, some people
⏹️ ▶️ John like, maybe it’s neat, isn’t it kind of cool that it’s small, whatever, but he was never enthusiastic about it right
⏹️ ▶️ John but he was enthusiastic about computers and in the same way that you can imagine the CEO of
⏹️ ▶️ John a car company you know I mean something like Toyota like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know they make all these Camrys and you know Corollas and everything right but if you are
⏹️ ▶️ John the CEO of Toyota and you’re going to like you know hang out with the workers and see what they’re up to
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to go to see the team making the LFA yeah you’re gonna visit the Camry line and check out the curls and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But if you’re, you know, really into cars, and you’re the CEO of Toyota,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna you want to go talk to the LFA people, you want to say like, how’s the LFA coming? I know this is like, not important to our bottom line, and shareholders
⏹️ ▶️ John care about how many cameras we sold. But I want to see how the LFA is coming, right. And Steve Jobs always seemed to be the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like he would have been more decisive. And, and that would have worked,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like I said, either one of two ways, he would decisively cut off the Mac when he felt like it was time because
⏹️ ▶️ John he was ruthless in that way, even though he loved computers. But up until that point, he
⏹️ ▶️ John would have supported ridiculous overpowered computers that were he would
⏹️ ▶️ John have made that jellyfish 100% the Mac Pro jellyfish. He would have made that he made he made the cube he made
⏹️ ▶️ John all those weird iMacs. He would have commissioned the jellyfish and he would have been like this is awesome. It’s got tentacles and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s amazing. Each one has a CPU and then it probably would have flopped but he did love some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers. All right, thanks Thanks to our sponsors this week, Away, Squarespace, and Techmeme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ride Home. we will see you next.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check the broadcast so
Post-show: Unconvered topics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to, since we don’t have anything else to talk about in the after show, I do want to very briefly address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topics that have come up that people keep asking us to talk about that we haven’t mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them is Apple hiring that dude and the other one is Mark Zuckerberg being a d**k. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t, everything Apple does, you know, we also didn’t cover the red iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything Apple does doesn’t warrant mentioning, honestly. He does a lot of stuff these days that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really boring, that is not newsworthy. And so we can’t mention everything and some of the stuff just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets cut. And as for Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress and everything else, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all just a dog and pony show. He’s going to keep doing what he’s doing. No one’s going to do anything. No one’s going to leave Facebook except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me and maybe two people in my group. Big companies do boring stuff all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and Zuckerberg is going to be a turd all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing’s going to change either of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can always talk about Apple things. I like the the person I hired the reason The reason I think this didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John come from the show Like what was it the the AI person from Google or whatever all this one this
⏹️ ▶️ John one hire is gonna make Siri better Like that’s not that’s not how these things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey work Yeah, exactly how it
⏹️ ▶️ John works like the only the only the times that happens It’s very notable because it’s rare like
⏹️ ▶️ John getting hiring Steve Jobs. That was a big deal for Apple mid 1997, right? That’s one case where you
⏹️ ▶️ John could say you have this one guy’s gonna turn the company around. Yeah, actually did it. But it’s hard to think
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not saying that they’re not going to help and it’s not a good move or anything, but we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John this person. We don’t know. It’s so hard to tell when you’re like someone who works at that level
⏹️ ▶️ John in a corporation. It’s so hard to tell exactly what their skill set is, right? Like what are
⏹️ ▶️ John they bringing to the table? Were they just in the right place at the right time and had the
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum necessary skills to take advantage of a success that was going to happen with
⏹️ ▶️ John or without them? Or did that success happened only because they were there. Right? And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know because we don’t know these people are not like you don’t have like, you know, tech executive trading cards. I don’t I never heard this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John name. I don’t even remember it anymore. So when there’s some big hire like that, I say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, good, good. Rappel looks like they’re they know they need to work on Siri. And then I just don’t pay attention for a couple years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see. And if a couple years it turns around and be like, See, you thought that guy wasn’t gonna do it. But great,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Show me. But I’m always like, show me the results. all I care about even with Steve Jobs show me
⏹️ ▶️ John the results I didn’t think he was a succeed either famously because history had shown
⏹️ ▶️ John that he’d flamed out spectacularly every time he tried to do something and he was a mess but he figured it out so
⏹️ ▶️ John I always just think show me the results and then the Facebook stuff yeah I can’t can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John bothered like our entire government is so depressing nothing’s gonna happen from that Facebook thing Facebook is
⏹️ ▶️ John depressing I try not to pay attention to it yeah it’s the best you could do Anything else? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the red phones. I do like the fact that they’re giving red backs with black fronts because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I always wish they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did. I love that I started the segment with, here’s things we’re not going to talk about on the show and then we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John them on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s two seconds. It’s a quickie. That’s the take everyone has on it. It’s like everyone who likes the black fronts of
⏹️ ▶️ John the phones. And I kind of like, my kids have a lot of like mostly iPod touches and stuff that are colored backs
⏹️ ▶️ John but white fronts. They do look kind of cool. They could look kind of like, like the red ones look Christmassy,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the white and the red and we have like a blue and the white front like it’s not ugly but I
⏹️ ▶️ John like the black fronts better for contrast reasons and having always to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the white front with the colorful backs and the black front only with the boring backs that streak went on
⏹️ ▶️ John too long so that and the the supposed FCC picture of the gold backed
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 10 did you see that one yeah yep same thing black front gold back I think that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John super cool looks like a bumblebee and the red back black front product
⏹️ ▶️ John red iPhone 8, I think it also looks cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I just wish it was like it’s just so like shameless that they wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the slow mid-cycle time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and then they update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phones and they didn’t even update the flagship phone that cost more money and the people really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s like It’s just like, it’s just so… bleugh