280: Extinction-Level Event
28 Jun 2018Marco’s iMac survived its journey, Casey survived his borrowed Jeep, and John survived the WWDC meal plan.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Safari's
Allow Unsigned Extensions
is not a panacea after all - Adobe is rethinking things
- Many people have written their own de-dupe apps
- The long national Music.app default first-alphabetic song nightmare is over
- Safari's
- Apple launches butterfly-keyboard repair program
- Marco's new 🏖️💻
- Marzipan
- Carbon vs. Cocoa
- Gus Mueller's take
- Becky Hansmeyer asks and then answers what makes a Mac app a Mac app?
#askatp
- James Veitch gives us a self-destructing envelope
- Robert Barat wants to know about 4K monitor sizes
- Will Law is [justifiably] upset
- Post-show: Casey had a falling out with (not of) the Jeep
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Rethink what your money can do. Get up to 1 year managed free.
- Linode: Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $5/month. Use code atp2018 for a $20 credit.
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Chapters
- Stolen for the awesome
- Follow-up: Safari extensions
- Adobe rethinking apps
- File de-dupe suggestions
- A A A A Very Good Song
- Keyboard repair program
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- Beach computer update 🖼️
- More time with HomePods
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)
- Marzipan
- Sponsor: Betterment
- #askatp: We run Global Security
- #askatp: 4K > 24”? 🖼️
- WWDC 2018 box lunches!
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Not Casey’s Jeep
Stolen for the awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not heard John yet, but he probably just hasn’t said anything
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m here. Hi John. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John doesn’t speak until spoken to or about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s totally true name one podcast where you speak first
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t say first you said not until spoken to or about which is different than first.
⏹️ ▶️ John I I could not be spoken to and not be spoken about and still speak second. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my word, is it gonna be like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that how tonight’s gonna go? You know, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco called early, I was speaking your the praises of the two of you. I was telling him I wasn’t quite steeled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stolen, steeled, I don’t know, s-t-e-e-l-e-d.
⏹️ ▶️ John you trying to go for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just I wasn’t steeled for the for the for the awesome that comes out of the two of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stolen yeah, I don’t know where that one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know what that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the root word of that and that expression is not the thievery one, but the metal one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey I recovered I recovered anyway the point is I was singing your praises
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before you showed up and now I see how it’s gonna go.
Follow-up: Safari extensions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s start with some follow-up and we have some sad news from Safari. John, can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you tell us about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John So last week was the second time I mentioned what I thought was my solution to my Safari extension
⏹️ ▶️ John woes, which was an option at the bottom of the develop menu that said allow unsigned extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Since then, I’ve learned that that option either doesn’t do what I think it does or doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. And by the way, even if you check it, if you quit Safari and relaunch it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John forgets that you checked it. So that setting is useless for my purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if it did work and stick, I’m not even sure it does what I wanted to do. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John are back to square one, which is every time I launch Safari, I have to manually load my extensions, which I continue to do
⏹️ ▶️ John because it turns out I don’t launch Safari that often. Like I launch it after when the computer boots and I
⏹️ ▶️ John just leave it running all the time. So it’s not great, but that’s what I’m doing.
Adobe rethinking apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In other news, Adobe is rethinking apps, or their apps. John Alper writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they seem to be taking the Photoshop approach you’ve been recommending to evolve Premiere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Premiere is their video editing app, I believe. It’s their equivalent of Final Cut Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’ve said that they’re announcing a new project that just came out at VidCon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re announcing a new project called Project Rush, which is, and now I’m quoting from a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll put in the show notes, a new cross-platform editing application that’s not released yet, but users can apply to be on the beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess this is just a rethinking of Premiere, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like how Final Cut Pro was a rethinking of Final Cut whatever was before it, nine? I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know. You’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of Final Cut Pro 10. Well, I mean, actually, I don’t know if we mentioned this on the last show
⏹️ ▶️ John where we were talking about the clean sheet designs to applications like, oh, we’ve got a popular app,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what if we just rethought everything about it and threw out all the old stuff and just started fresh?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if we didn’t mention it, we should have. The iMovie was the first time Apple did that in a big way, where
⏹️ ▶️ John they had a new idea about how iMovie could work. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ John at least a year where they shipped both the old and the new one, or supported both the old and the new one, because the new one was
⏹️ ▶️ John so new and didn’t have all the stuff that the old one had. But they were so excited to be able to show us the new
⏹️ ▶️ John iMovie. And you may not be ready, but this is the future, so get used to it. And eventually, the old iMovie
⏹️ ▶️ John went away. the new iMovie is now the only iMovie and then they took that basically the new
⏹️ ▶️ John iMovie design and brought it to Final Cut and it went from Final Cut Pro 7 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John what version was to Final Cut Pro capital letter X which may or may not be 10
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on who you ask. I’m sure it’s 10. Is it 10?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I forgot. Yeah, it’s always 10 with Apple. I don’t think they ever use it to actually say X.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, and they didn’t keep the old version of Final Cut around and a lot of the Final a couple people were
⏹️ ▶️ John angry and kept using the old version for a long time. Um, those clean sheet designs were more like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a new idea about how the interface work. The Adobe ones I think are also part of, uh, leaving behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the legacy code. I’m not sure how much code was shared between the old and the new I movie, but I think it was mostly about the interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but anyway, this project rush thing seems like it’s similar in that it’s not just like, oh, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John design the app UI and everything a different way. But it’s like, it’s, I think the reason it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, related to like VidCon is like, It’s for, it’s cross device, so it’ll run on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, and on the desktop, and on phones, because people who are making
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube videos or whatever might actually be shooting and editing them on their iPad or on their phone, not just on their desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you have to have a very different application if it’s gonna run in all those different environments, and you have to start with a clean sheet, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t put Adobe Premiere on your phone because it would be a mess. So here’s another example of Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to give itself a kick in the pants. And maybe there’s a stick, maybe it won’t, maybe this Apple Stink or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, But I mean, and Apple, I think that Apple did something similar with the Clips application of like, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rethink what a video related application looks like in the world of smartphones. I think these are all
File de-dupe suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a lot of people write in, probably five to ten, maybe even fifteen people write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in with examples of programs or scripts that they had written to find duplicate files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think every single one that I noticed was Swift. That’s probably not 100% true. I’m sure there were other ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snuck by, but the submissions we saw were almost exclusively Swift. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in. He was one example, not John Siric. He’s a different John. He said that someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show was asking for a utility to find duplicate files. We made a tool to do just that, and we will put a link in the show notes. This is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one example of many. It might have been the first example. I don’t really recall. I didn’t choose it. John writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the interface is all command line. It doesn’t try to manage your duplicates at all. It just gives you a list of duplicates and singletons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so this all stemmed from—what was it, Marco? It was trying to figure out when there were duplicates in TIFF’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo library. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because basically, like, TIFF’s computer, like, over the years has evolved through a whole bunch—because it’s like one installation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been carried forward for like a decade. So it’s evolved through a whole bunch of different photo management apps and solutions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and archive drives and backup drives and everything else And so there’s basically we think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copies of photos kind of everywhere and I figured hey why don’t we take the APFS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free cloning feature and Basically like find all these duplicates and replace them with APFS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clones of one original that way the duplicates can stay where they are So we don’t like, you know accidentally lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things but they can at least least not take up duplicate space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be nice. But yeah, basically, we got a whole bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responding, almost all of whom had written their own scripts to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my thinking after all that is, wow, I should write my own script to do this sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course. Yeah, the reason I put this one in the notes is because it doesn’t try to do anything with them. And that’s where the danger
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Like a lot of the other scripts, mean, people would even say like, you know, use it if you want, I don’t vouch for whatever. It’s like finding
⏹️ ▶️ John the duplicates is great. That’s a read only operation. It’s then deciding what to do where you can really hose yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I mentioned the metadata issues before, but just the potential to destroy data is high. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why any programmer looking at this might think of themselves like Marco just said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should write one of these on my own. Because at least when you write it yourself, you know exactly what it’s doing. And if you hose yourself, you kind of, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, have yourself to blame. I would not run any of these random things on here, which is why I link to this one, which
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do anything to your files. It just prints out the duplicates. And by the way, it’s written in rust, which I thought was novel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I did not notice that my bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John dot RS files. It looks like c++ but it is fun like Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ John rust looks a lot more like rust looks a lot more like c++ than Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does. Yes, your Swift tries to actually pretend like it’s not c++.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this looks a lot like c++ and I am not liking it. Woof. This has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do with John’s particular app. I’m just saying I do not miss the days of writing C++ for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a living. And now I regret opening that. Moving on!
[A A A A Very Good Song](http://(https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/8td5dt/psa_ios_12_now_randomizes_your_music_collection/)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A fan writes that PSA iOS 12 now randomizes your music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collection rather than simply selecting the first track in your collection when your car starts I tried to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the episode where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were talking about this earlier earlier tonight I was trying to look it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It all you need to search for is a Very good song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgot about that. I’ll have to look again Anyway, maybe somebody in the chat room can find it and I’ll put in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes But what we were talking about was whatever is the alphabetically first song
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your library, which is in some cases like the A-Team theme song, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Reddit link, we’ll put on the, uh, we’ll put in the show notes. Maybe it’s like, uh, 10,000 Maniacs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or some other numeral based. I think that comes first. It might not, it doesn’t matter. One way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it typically ends up that you’ll always hear the same song when, when iOS doesn’t really know what else to play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’ve started Bluetooth playback and it just has to figure something out. Well, apparently in iOS 12,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will just randomly select a song from your library. So, I think the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us can claim this as ours. I think this is our feature and you’re welcome everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also, I’m not sure that this is new. I started noticing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, six months ago or a year ago, that at least if you have Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enabled on your iPhone, it would seemingly just play a like you know stuff you might like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing from Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t confirm this so that’s why I put this link in there but I didn’t actually I don’t know how it confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I have iOS 12 on an iPad but when I upgrade all my devices
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be a good test case this because I continue to get fooled by this like
⏹️ ▶️ John my pattern matching is not working with it like I’m a random you know random play shovel
⏹️ ▶️ John person, right? Um, and I, much to the consternation
⏹️ ▶️ John of everybody who was ever in a car with me, I want to want the play to be random, but I also want
⏹️ ▶️ John to skip if I’m not in the mood for that song. So it’s basically like a radio stations like, how about this song? And I go, no, not that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about this song?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, not in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the mood for
⏹️ ▶️ John that one. How about? Oh, that’s a good, that’s, that’s how I choose to do music. That’s what I like. Don’t, you know, don’t add me as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get enough of it from everyone in my family. You can’t stand to hear me skip tracks. But anyway, um, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John this comes up is because it takes me an average of like 5.7
⏹️ ▶️ John tracks for me to figure out that it’s playing out because it’ll be like I’m not in the mood for that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not in the mood for that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John play that one. I’m not in the mood for that one. I’ll play that one. And then right about there, I’m like, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John All these tracks begin with the letter A. My thing is hosed again. And it very often happens
⏹️ ▶️ John because like the my iPod that I keep in the car for listening to music will go like thermally
⏹️ ▶️ John shut down and have to reboot and you know whatever it goes it forgets my state entirely and so it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John playing from the A’s. So if that never ever happens to me again I will know that whatever this random
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is working is. But rest assured if this is not a real thing I will skip my
⏹️ ▶️ John way through five A tracks before I stupidly realize that every one of these songs begins with A.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you’re welcome everyone.
Keyboard repair program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of things that clearly we can take credit for, Marco, you’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your moment in the sun. Apple has announced a keyboard repair program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Which is weird because they did the very, very non-confident thing of releasing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at like 5 o’clock on a Friday evening, which is not a terribly good look. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand it, but it does not imply a position of confidence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or strength in any way, shape, or form. form. But basically it says on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top of this article, which we’ll put in the show notes, this is from Apple, Apple has determined that a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, well, this is my quote, small percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook and MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro models may exhibit one or more of the following behaviors, letters or characters that repeat unexpectedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey letters or characters that do not appear at all, or keys that feel, this is their quote, sticky,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or do not respond in a in a consistent manner. And basically for what is it four years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, four years after purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then you can get your keyboard either either the button replace the key replaced or the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard replaced on any of the butterfly switch keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since early 2015 on the MacBook Adorable. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your your congratulations are hopefully rolling in right now, Marco. So congrats, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have accomplished it. I expect to see you on an aircraft carrier with Mission Accomplished behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. Yeah, I don’t take credit for this. One person complaining on a podcast is not going to make Apple launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a probably very expensive repair program.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about three people complaining? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about one person complaining three times a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John week? Does that change the math at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple had to do this because it really is a real problem. Their number started showing, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap, this is a real issue. There was a pretty good discussion about it on Connected this week. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting about it, I see two sides to this. One I tweeted about, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why only four years after purchase? There are some computers that Apple doesn’t even update every four years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do they think is the lifespan of a Mac? Like, what I see, I mean, look, the computer I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using is a 2015 computer. So I could have bought it then, it would now be almost three years old. it’s still totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And I expect after they make new ones, which we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about in a second, and I will presumably buy one of those. And then sell it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I’ll give this away to a friend or family. And then regret it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you know me so well. And then buy another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And then buy another one, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s like, this one I have, that’s a 2015 model, it’s already 2018 and it’s totally fine. I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna give it to somebody who’s gonna use it until 2021, how long does Apple think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that laptops last? I have a feeling they know as well as I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if there’s some kind of critical flaw, because here’s the thing, it covers you for four years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after purchase. So you can, if you have a flaky keyboard, bring it in, they’ll cover it. If you’ve paid for a keyboard repair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on any of these butterfly keyboards, you can request a refund for that repair. But like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four years is kind of cheap because I know that they’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to repair these. Like they’re gonna have the parts to repair these for more than the next four years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think they should actually extend it to the expected lifetime of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac. And I bet that’s longer than four years. Anyway, so for this announcement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself, I think what’s interesting about it is it’s one of the very few occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they’ve announced, basically they’ve admitted to a hardware flaw in a product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not only is still for sale, but is still top of the line. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their high-end and mid-range laptops. You cannot buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple laptop today, except for like the old models that are still for sale, but you can’t buy like a modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple laptop today that doesn’t have this keyboard problem that they just admitted to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And nowhere have they said, we’ve had press people ask them, nowhere has Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that the new keyboards they’re putting into these won’t have the same problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, you know, the silence on that is deafening. Like people have asked them lots of other questions. They’ve been very forthcoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in answering questions from the press on anything except that. People have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked them and the press people have said that Apple did not reply to that question. So it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty clear, you know, what pretty much we all knew, which is this keyboard just has this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaw and Apple seems unable to fix it in this keyboard. whatever the fix is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be is probably gonna be in a future model. So these computers are basically given a lifespan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of four years. Even the one you buy fresh today after this has been announced has a useful lifetime of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four years. And after that it’s just a huge risk and it could break at any moment and cost you $700. And
⏹️ ▶️ John keep in mind during those four years you may have taken in any number of times to get a fix for free but still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And people are saying who have started bringing it in that they’re being quoted repair times of like five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business days without it. That doesn’t make it okay to have these computers because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are buying like a $3,000 MacBook Pro and it maybe once a year or once every two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years requires all of a sudden to be out of commission for a week to go get repaired,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably can’t afford to lose it for that long. And so anyway, I’m glad they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did this. In typical Apple fashion, they admitted to a hardware flaw and started a repair program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only very reluctantly, very late and kind of are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing like the minimum possible to kind of get out of it. But I do think it’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they announced it. There was enough pressure on them to announce it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they have new models for sale. And we’re all assuming that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we all thought they were going to have them in June. The chips are out now. It seems like they should be able to have them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So hopefully this fall, I hope at the latest on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an October event we’ll get these things. And I hope the next it may
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the reason that laptops are now going to be a few months later than everyone thought. Maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushed forward a design refresh that was maybe they were planning on having it start like next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, but they push it forward to this year because of all these keyboard problems. But I’m happy they they did this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could have done it better, but I’m not surprised they didn’t. So what we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is nice for people who own these computers. I still think it is the elephant in the room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that these are the current models and that there is no keyboard for sale right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple makes on a laptop that is now known to be reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, their statement of the problem is pretty damning. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing the wrong thing again, they’re doing the right thing finally, right, more or less. But the four-year limit, as
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, emphasizes the fact that Apple itself has no expectation that their fix will
⏹️ ▶️ John solve the problem. All it will do is start the timer again, right? That’s why it’s four years. That’s why it’s not forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And look at the list of models, right? You know, the algebra model is listed below, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What they don’t mention and what we all know is it’s every single computer that ever shipped with this keyboard. Every variant.
⏹️ ▶️ John Start like it’s all of them. It’s not It’s not like specific models, it’s not just the 2017. So think of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2015 you’re excited by the new really, really skinny MacBook because you hate ports and you love lightweight things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you get your 2015 laptop and it’s got a wonky keyboard. You’re gonna wait three years before Apple acknowledges
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s a problem. And when they acknowledge it, it’s gonna go all the way back to your model and great, you can get your money back for your repairs or however
⏹️ ▶️ John many of them you had done. But this shows that Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ John this keyboard and just like, well, maybe there’s problems with 2015s, Let’s soldier on like as
⏹️ ▶️ John we said in many podcasts, let’s put this keyboard in every computer we make, for every laptop we make for the
⏹️ ▶️ John next three years. Let’s just keep doing it. The 2016 MacBook, no, let’s not change it. 2017, now
⏹️ ▶️ John make it a little bit quieter. The 13 inches, the touch bar is just, we’re gonna keep using this keyboard. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John at no point did anyone say, wait a second, they must have known surely by 2016 or early 2017
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was a problem, but they just kept making computers with the keyboard. And part of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like the pipeline. like, you know, well, we assume we would use this keyboard for the next three years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, this is a big ship, and it takes a while to turn. But it just honestly just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look good, especially that they didn’t have new laptop hardware. Now it seems like it was full
⏹️ ▶️ John steam ahead on all their laptops having this keyboard. And either they just couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bring themselves to admit that there was a problem or they learned there was a problem early and it takes this long to like
⏹️ ▶️ John turn things around. But it just it just it’s not good. You know, if you wanted to,
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone says, Oh, what what laptop I should buy? And we’re all I go all depressed about Apple laptops, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s you’re just depressed about laptops. Yeah, I don’t you know, who cares? You follow them too closely. You’re worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about small details. This article from Apple itself is the
⏹️ ▶️ John most powerful persuader of someone if you told someone now is not a good time
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy an Apple app. This is why because no No matter what you buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are in for potential repairs, and after four years, you’re on your own, and the repairs are really expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is no safe haven. For the past three years, all of the new laptops have been like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I kind of understand why Apple would want to hide this story, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the most troubling and concrete evidence that now is not a good time to buy an Apple laptop, except for the 2015 model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think, you know, if the explanation for this, which I’m sure will never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually be told, but if the explanation for this is truly that like, oh, it turns out in, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, late 2015, after the MacBook One had been out for like six months, they realized, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these keyboards fail a lot, but couldn’t turn the ship around, as you said, John, and can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix or replace or re-engineer a high failure rate critical component
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their main computer for like three years, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signifies a pretty large problem in their process. It’s not like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is strapped for resources here, and I know things take time, and I know things are complicated, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty major flaw to be not able to fix for three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a company of their scale and their resources, if that is the explanation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is unacceptable. And if the explanation is instead that it took them a while to realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a problem, then I think there’s a huge problem in the pipeline somewhere, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the users were realizing it in mid-2015. Like after a few months with those MacBooks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people said, you know, these keyboards fail a lot. I even remember back when it came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember hearing from a couple of little birdies that one of the problems with the MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very first one that came out, was that they had a lot of trouble manufacturing those keyboards and getting yields.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which means that many of the ones they manufactured didn’t pass verification or didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. So like, this was a problem back then. Why did it take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them until apparently now to finally realize this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or why have they not been, why did they realize it earlier and have not been able to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix the products that they’re shipping to people and that people are buying brand new and possibly having their first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience with an Apple laptop? Like, why are they burning all these people for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years? Something went really wrong in this process. Same thing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Trashcan Mac Pro, same thing. Like, that had all sorts of engineering problems. It had the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failure issue on that, which by the way, that was another example of a product that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a repair extension program while it was still the current top of the line product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which by the way, it’s still, I guess, technically I guess the iMac Pro is now the top of the line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product but like you know that too it had GPU failures from from design flaws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and GPUs would overheat and die and that problem was never fixed in the TrashCam Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just is always a problem if you have a TrashCam Mac Pro your GPU is very likely to fail at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early point compared to the rest of the computer and there’s not much you can do about it. You know same thing with the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NVIDIA GPU stuff anyway the problem of these laptops is so and this isn’t even the only problem with these laptops they also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like weird thermal issues where like the hinge will pop or other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things will like kind of like metal will pop it when it gets warm even regular levels of warmth like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being used like metal keeps popping and things like that the USB C ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least on 2016 had a lot of problems especially my book escape where like if you plugged in certain third-party adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Wi-Fi would cut out and stuff like that certain hubs just didn’t work or they’ve worked only on some ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or work with only some things like there were a lot of problems laptops and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to the keyboard issues, like, I think this points to larger problems with Apple’s engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality control. Why did these things get out? And then why are they taking so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long to finally fix?
⏹️ ▶️ John So part of the human nature and you know, Apple can do company is like, focusing on
⏹️ ▶️ John the potential for like the yields being bad and the original ones like, Oh, well, it’s a product ramp. Like we just started making
⏹️ ▶️ John these the hard to make surely we’re gonna we’re gonna undertake we’re a smart company, we’re undertake a program to get our
⏹️ ▶️ John yields up. And I bet they did. I bet when they manufactured these keyboards in the beginning was really hard to get them to pass verification.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had some metric that said, you know, X percent are failing verification. And they reduced that to like X divided
⏹️ ▶️ John by 20, like, or, you know, X divided by 100. And now it’s like, practically all of them are perfect off the line. We did
⏹️ ▶️ John it, we made it better. Right. And the same thing with the failure is like that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you’re thinking, well, maybe we modify in some way and put those rubber gaskets that’ll help both of the
⏹️ ▶️ John sound and reliability. And we can’t really tell until they get out of the field. And then finally, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the money thing. It’s like, well, some of them are failing. But how much is it really costing us versus how much would repair program
⏹️ ▶️ John cost? And let’s do the math and say, we’ll just continue to, you know, is it hurt actually hurting our customer satisfaction?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we just afford to, you know, can we take this hit? Like, what is the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John monetary cost? Like, you know, not thinking, oh, they didn’t know about the problem or didn’t care. They knew and cared. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a question. What what’s the best thing to do about it? And it’s potentially, you know, any big company
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say, well, you know, what do we care about here? What matters do we care? We care about customer satisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John We care about money. So what’s the best way to balance those two with this problem? And
⏹️ ▶️ John only at a certain point does it tip over to say, the best way to deal with this
⏹️ ▶️ John is this repair program. Whereas every point before that, when they did the math, the best way to deal with it was just on a case
⏹️ ▶️ John by case basis, and things are under warranty, and so on and so forth. So yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s not good. You don’t have to think that Apple is nefarious, merely that it’s just made up of humans
⏹️ ▶️ John who have the same foibles as any other human. We hope Apple would be better and learn from this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as the history of repair extension programs shows like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of Apple’s M.O. Like this is how they handle issues like this. It doesn’t seem to be evolving
⏹️ ▶️ John too much or changing. It’s that’s that’s why we could predict. Oh, here’s what’s going to happen with this keyboard. It just happened again. in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s, that’s how they deal with manufacturing problems. And the only real solution
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be and this is always a terrible solution of like, you know, when you do a postmortem, let’s just be more
⏹️ ▶️ John careful in the future, which is not a solution to anything, but effectively is what they do with the phones, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have had problems with the phones, but it’s clear that they are much more careful
⏹️ ▶️ John about hardware problems with the phones, which are arguably more complicated and more difficult to get right
⏹️ ▶️ John than something larger like a laptop just because everything is so small and crammed in there. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ John this huge manufacturing lead times is that to make millions and millions and millions of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in recent years, they’ve been doing a pretty good job of not having any kind of catastrophic problem, even of this magnitude
⏹️ ▶️ John with the phones. And that’s extremely difficult to do, especially since the phone, the phones improving it faster and are radically
⏹️ ▶️ John different like the iPhone 10 and everything. So you know, the final factor in all
⏹️ ▶️ John this This might just be that they pay more attention, spend more time and resources
⏹️ ▶️ John on the product that makes them more money. And so the Mac gets short shrift and a result of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is business as usual with hardware problems and how long it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a repair program going.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was funny because this all happened, like I said, on Friday evening. Saturday, I’m using my beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Adorable. And as I think I’ve said in the past, this keyboard, when it works, has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won my over one me over is my favorite Apple keyboard. I used to love the magic keyboard. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do love the magic keyboard, the external ones, but this one, when it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working is my favorite Apple keyboard. And as I’m typing something at my parents, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out one or two of my keys got sticky and was like not really working. And so I asked dad, Hey, do you have any compressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air? What I forgot was that dad is an amateur mechanic and has a three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horsepower air compressor in his garage. And so he said, yes, I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John into the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. How much do you need? And, uh, and he took me to his three horsepower, something like 60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gallon, uh, air compressor, wherein I used that in the tip of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a inflate a basketball. I don’t know the name of the term for this, but you know, the, the little tip you would stick inside a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basketball to inflate it, I use that to clean off my Mac book adorable and it worked much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better thereafter, but it was kind of funny to me that this was the first time this had happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a few months and I needed to take compressed air to it in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to clear it out. And I did, and then the problem moved to another key and then it went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away a few minutes later. And it’s just, it’s just frustrating. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope that whenever the next laptops come, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope that even if the feel of this keyboard has to change. And even if I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it worse, I too am annoyed enough by it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would love to have a new keyboard design that is more reliable, even at the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I consider to be an almost perfect feel.
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Beach computer update
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Travel, away travel ♪ Marco, you were talking about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro as though you’re using it right now. Is that what you’re doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, Tiff’s using it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, but what are you using in general for your computing needs at the beach? Because last I heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you got a super sexy carrying case your iMac Pro and were treating that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as your purse as you were walking around the beach. Is that not the case anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So I discussed last week how I had decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring an iMac to the beach and I was probably going to bring my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and I had ordered a big fancy gator case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to carry it in a nice big padded way, and I was leaning towards bringing my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, not like Tiff’s old iMac that we were preparing to sell. And that’s exactly what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I brought my iMac Pro. And to just give a brief review of this case, the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Gator case for the iMac Pro, or just for any 27-inch iMac, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually is a really nice case. It is nicely made, it seems nicely padded, it has a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pockets, like dedicated pockets for things like if you wanna take the stock keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouse, and trackpad. It has dedicated pockets for those little icons on the outside. It includes a rain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poncho cover and a dedicated pocket just to hold the rain poncho
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s not in use. And it has a really nice strap. You know, it makes carrying the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight, you know, as easy as it can. The downside is that the case itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weighs nine pounds empty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the iMac Pro weighs about 22 pounds, so the combined weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you throw in the power cable, the mouse and the trackpad, was about 32 pounds. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not small, so to have a pretty hefty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32 pound large rectangle hanging off of your shoulder is very heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very awkward to carry for any length of time. Now I had to walk with it for about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half mile or so. It was a hell of a walk. It was not fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s what you have wagons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. Don’t you have wagons? It wasn’t up there. We had to walk. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should have waited patiently by the dock
⏹️ ▶️ John giant suitcase filled with either a body folded in half or an iMac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John had someone come back to you with a little wheelie wagon and then you could have wheeled it around like your beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is. Yeah, but the wagon that came with this house weighs…
⏹️ ▶️ John The wagon that came with the house. were constrained by the wagon that came with the house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a new modern wagon it seems like it was made before plastic or aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were known materials to work with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like you feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like you shouldn’t be constrained by the wagon that came with your house you can get a new wagon
⏹️ ▶️ John your car can damn computer from you know all right anyway anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoulder doing my My shoulder has recovered, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not comfortable. I will say, so this is not something I would ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do on a regular basis. The idea of carrying this to Panera or to a coffee shop or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or doing what that guy in that picture was doing, even with the one that weighs a lot less and has the foot hanging out, flapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wind, that’s a completely ridiculous idea. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see anybody ever actually wanted to carry their 27-inch iMac anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis. But as a way to just like, you know, to do like large moves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, to transport it infrequently, it did indeed work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is actually a fairly humorous, unexpected bonus to this. Let me ask you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a theoretical question. you put your desktop computer into a bag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and walked a half mile with it what kind of surprises do you think might await you when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Scratch screen I would hope not.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah if you got any kind of grit in there that it’s going up and down on but I’m trying to think of is anything we can fall
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco computer? Yes
⏹️ ▶️ John there is. What was I mean I don’t know that the logistics of the case
⏹️ ▶️ John but is like are all the peripherals like separate in separate pockets like nothing is mixing in there with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the peripherals are in separate pockets it is nicely you know padded and isolated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but something did indeed fall out of the computer spiders large blobs of dust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the iMac Pro intake vents are on the bottom edge of the screen facing down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t think of this like when I before I put it in I like dust it off the hood the back like the foot I dusted the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like outside of the computer But I didn’t like run a towel under the lip of the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge. So I opened it up to you know when we get to the house and I you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open and make sure everything’s okay and I’m like what the heck is all that stuff at the bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure enough. Yep. Pringles dust. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lots of dust blobs that fall out of my computer on the walk. Can you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were walking with like a like a cheese grater, Mac Pro tower, like all the dust would fall out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the dust in my Mac Pro is structural now, though. It’s load bearing dust. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, those things. Those things are quite impressive with their dust anyway. So I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, though, you know, so even though it was kind of ridiculous getting it here and it’s going to be equally ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting it back, I am really happy I brought my Mac Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am getting tons of work done here. And it’s really, you know, Now, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what everyone always says about laptops. It’s really nice having all of my files and my apps already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and set up the way I want, and everything, like I know how everything is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to behave. And I’m doing an unexpectedly large amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work this summer, very heavy work, that is maxing out my cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my screen space, which is basically remaking from scratch the Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch app. I don’t wanna spoil anything or pre-announce anything yet, except to say the Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch update this fall is awesome already, and it’s not even July yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is almost done. I mean, I’m just at the polishing stage now, but I am now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking walks every day with standalone watch playback of podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is fantastic. It works. Apple finally gave me what I need to make this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, and I’ve made it, and it’s almost done. Like, it’s basically done now. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna start the beta pretty soon, I think. It is so good, I’m so happy. I’ve taken the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they gave me that standalone audio now works to also revamp some other parts of the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface. And so it’s really, really good. And it’s way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the watch app I had before. And back during that brief period where I had offline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback, it’s way better than that was. So I’m very, very happy with this. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling really good right now about this. and I’m so happy I brought my iMac Pro out here. Every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing some kind of big build and I look up at my iStat menus and I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all 10 cores pegged for a little while, I’m like, yep, this was the right decision. Even right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I talk to you, and I’m not hearing fan noise from my laptop somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like working like crazy just to drive the screen. I’m really happy I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the Dell 24, whatever whatever 4K display and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that on my 2015 laptop because that wouldn’t have been enough screen space. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Casey, you know, and as many of our listeners know, iOS development burns screen space, as I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week. So like the last thing you want is significantly less screen space when you’re having like an iOS development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy summer. So I’m just, I’m really glad I brought this computer. I’m doing tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work on it. This is a very work heavy summer for Overcast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really, really happy with how the watch update is turning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re the only person I know that does his work while he’s at his vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home. You can’t do work at your actual home. You have to go to your vacation house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get work done.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it stops being a vacation maybe the second month that you’re there. Like, there’s vacation and
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s where we live during the summer. Fair point. Fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really take, like for me, like vacation to me ends after like four or five days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at most, like that’s about as long as I can go on vacation. Then I’m like, I have to turn my brain back on now. Like I just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t, I can’t let my brain just like stagnate in jello forever.
More time with HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what about your HomePod situation? What’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s another thing that I’ve come to appreciate here. I brought both of the HomePods here because I figured
⏹️ ▶️ John You have that big carrying case with two more HomePods strapped to your hat. They’re heavy. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John balance on your head like a water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePods are ridiculously heavy. I bought the two at first. I bought two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a time. And just carrying one in each hand in a little square bag back to my car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which required you know, maybe a quarter mile walk, like back to like the parking garage. They were really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy. I was like, damn, like these handles are digging into my hands. And they’re filled with all that bass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bass is heavy. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great. Anyway, so I now have had a lot more experience using the HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just as my computer speakers, but now like, you know, I brought them here for the summer to test with, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing AirPlay 2 stuff yet. I’m still in the watch app. So I just put them out in the living room and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one’s kind of off the side of the kitchen, one’s in the living room, it still has a big stereo pair, it’s kind of one big room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say, I really like the HomePod. Just as a music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker that’s in your living room. It is really good. As other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewers have mentioned, it hears you from great distances at very low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking volumes, and you can talk really fast, and music can be playing. So there can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a song playing at moderate volume, And I can say from like 20 feet away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey Siri, stop. And it does. I’m amazed how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it hears me and I don’t have to really try hard for it to hear me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is something that, I have a lot of experience now with the Amazon Echo family of products and the Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hears you decently. But this is another league. Like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both the consistency of how it hears me, like how often it hears me and in what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conditions it hears me. With the Echo, the Echo hears pretty well when there’s not a lot of noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if there’s really any room noise, you gotta be pretty close for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Echo to hear you. And also if music is playing. Whereas the HomePod really beats it in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still not thrilled with Siri, of course. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intelligence of Siri is not that much of a problem in the context of using it as a music speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. The thing that really bugs me is that it’s so verbose in its response,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just like, again, just like Siri everywhere else. But when you’re used to the Echo where it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, and it just goes. Siri is so verbose in what it says back to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnecessarily so. It’s almost like it’s trying to be your friend. And like, I don’t want to be your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend, Siri. I just want you to say okay and move on. You aren’t a human. But otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it stands right now, I would say, you know, in the kitchen, no contest, the Echo is still the device to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, Siri could add just one feature to almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely close that gap. Multiple named timers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why that feature is not there yet, even after WBDC and everything, is beyond me. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no idea why. So my only assumption is that maybe they’re gonna mention the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod in the fall event, maybe give it some kind of small update or price drop or something, and maybe they’ll announce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it there, who knows. But like multiple name timers, I don’t think they should be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult. I really hope they add that soon, because that’s really, like that could close the gap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how good these are in kitchens really well. Also, I’ve had a little more experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using, just playing music on the HomePod since then, just at, you know, not from my computer, but from everywhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 2 and the integration it has with Control Center on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Music app on iOS, It’s actually really nice. You can use voice to control it, but you can also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like, you know, control it from your iPad or from your iPhone because when you force push in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music thing on Control Center, it pops down and you can see like one of the entries in there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever’s going on on the HomePod right now. So any device on your network can control that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and can change it to be what they want to be playing. And that’s just really, or you can just do the simplest things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like adjust the volume by your finger instead of saying, you know, hey thing, volume 25 or whatever. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really very nice. Built-in integration with iTunes on the desktop, as I mentioned last week, is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy, but is sometimes convenient. Once you figure out that weird thing, you have to like drop it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and like scroll down past the separate entries to get to like the combined one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is kind of weird. So really, and one other major area that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePod is way better than both the Alexa family of products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also the Sonos family of products, is if you have your own music collection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you want to play from. I tried, I’ve had all these products. I’ve had Sonos, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had Echos, and I have tried Amazon’s thing first to import my music from my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I paid for their weird upload thing, which I think they have just discontinued. With Sonos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed their Mac software, and it indexed my library and had it play off that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. Both the Amazon Echo and the Sonos systems for playing your own collections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are buggy as hell and basically unusable. They effectively don’t work. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if anybody actually uses them, but they’re total garbage. So if you want to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things out of your own collection, the HomePod is where it’s at, because you can literally just ask for things by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voice or start playing something on your iPad so you can pick exactly which fish performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to play, and it just does it. and then you have the voice interaction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that music of yours. It’s really nice, and it’s something that the other players really don’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s pretty nice. Overall, I really do like it a lot for music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are the caveats that it doesn’t have good support for things like Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other services like that. So if you need a speaker that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably not in your kitchen, and you can probably afford two of them at $350
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each because they, it really does, like if your room is larger than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small room, if you have like a medium or large size room, you’re gonna want two HomePods to fill that room. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you fit into this very narrow case of like, you don’t mind spending $700 for a pair of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also it’s not going in your kitchen, you don’t need timers, and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you either want to play your own music collection from iTunes slash Apple Music, and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you’re an Apple Music subscriber, then the HomePod is really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if any of those things aren’t, oh, and also, you also don’t need these $700 pair of speakers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have inputs from your TV or anything. And so, with all those caveats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really nice. So, you know, fortunately there are a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places in my life where this is nice, like here, for instance. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m, I’m looking forward to how Apple matures the HomePod product line. I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they put some resources behind it. Like I hope they don’t just Apple TV it and just kind of, you know, half-ass it forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really could be great. It’s already like getting there, but there are some shortcomings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here or there, some limitations here and there, some of which can be solved by pricing or hardware updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which are just kind of fundamental things like Siri, but it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice if you fit into that very narrow set of needs
⏹️ ▶️ John You just better hope they don’t iPod hi-fi it. Forget about Apple TV, I’ve been hi-fising it
⏹️ ▶️ John for a few years. How about just, nope, we never make another one. Big mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I thought about that actually. I really hope they don’t do that. But this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing that I see Apple actually doing pretty well. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like AirPods being a big thing. AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a way for Apple to flex really over the top hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineering and industrial design without having to worry about pesky UI design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because UI design is hard, and app platforms are hard, and all these things that plague
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple TV, those are hard, those are big problems over time. The only hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem about the HomePod that Apple needs to work on over time is the quality of Siri. And that is, again, that is hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is certainly a larger impediment to the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it is to the AirPods. But this is also a case where like, Apple can sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same household a lot of these things. And they can update them over time and sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them even more. And they can change the shape or the size or the input situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sell them to their existing customers again. And so this is actually the kind of thing Apple does pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well these days. Like Apple does like fancy over-engineered, over-designed hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no UI and that you can make $300
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from all of your customers with every couple of years. Like yeah, Apple’s pretty good at those things now.
Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host. Go to linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to learn more and get a $20 credit. Linode is frankly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great web host. I have been with a lot of web hosts in my day. I think I started buying web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting in about the year 2000, like no numbers after it, just 2000 with all zeros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after it. So it’s been a while. I’ve been with a lot of different web hosts, lots of different types of web hosts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Linode is the one I’ve been with the longest. I think I’ve been with them for about eight years now. I’ve stuck with them the longest and I’ve slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved all of my stuff to Linode because it’s just nicer than everything else I’ve used. The services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great, the pricing is incredible. The prices start at just $5 a month for 1GB of RAM. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first signed up I think I was paying something like $50 a month for like 128MB or something like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then that was a great deal. But today it’s an even better deal. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never found a better value on an ongoing basis in the web hosting business. somebody else will like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tie them for a little while but then six months later Linode beats them. It’s just it’s such a great service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have all sorts of features that you might need, backups, load balancers, stats services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a full-blown API that you can use to script the creation and resizing configuration of instances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can have a whole complicated application automatically scales if you want to. All this is running with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native enterprise grade SSDs, a 40 gigabit network, and my favorite Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xeon E5 processors. There’s so much more to recommend about Linode, but what you need to know right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is that plans start at just $5 a month to get you 1GB of RAM in the Linode cloud. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of bigger and better plans above that if you have higher needs than that, although you can do a lot with that, honestly. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get your server running in under a minute, and all of this has a 7-day money back guarantee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, try it. You have nothing to lose.
Marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you need a web host, Linode is the place to go. Go to linode.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP and see for yourself why I love it so much. You get a $20 credit with that link, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you only use that $5 monthly plan, that could be four free months. Once again, 70 money-back guarantee on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Linode for keeping all my servers running for so long, for at least eight years now. I love Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much, and for sponsoring this show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk Marzipan. We’ve kind of made brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentions of this in the last couple of shows, but the end, it was the end, right, of the WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keynote was all about this technology which was never really named,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but was about bringing iOS apps onto the Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the general gist of it is UIKit on the Mac, which is something that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been, We as a community have been wondering, hey, is this a thing? Could this be a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would this be a thing? And this was in no small part inflamed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by or spurned on by the discovery of UXKit, which apparently was this sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a thing, but it was for just photos. Is that right on the Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was just one or two apps that were using this thing called UXKit that Apple apparently had written is kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shim between the app written for UIKit and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an app kit, which is what you use on the Mac. So there’s been a lot of chatter about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marzipan, what it means, where we’re going to go from here. And I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure what we don’t really have like a narrative arc with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stuff in the show notes. So I’m just going to start picking it off one by one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do that because I have a narrative arc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, perfect. John, take me on your narrative arc.
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bunch of random stuff in the notes, but there is an arc, an overall arc, at least as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m concerned. So yeah, we talked about this stuff at ABC and haven’t talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it much since, and part of that, at least for me personally, is that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like ruminating on it, right? Like, I didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to rush to judgment, and I needed some time to sit with this and just really
⏹️ ▶️ John think about what this is going to mean. I think maybe I mentioned on the W W C episode
⏹️ ▶️ John potential parallels with carbon and cocoa, which were the two
⏹️ ▶️ John apis for making Mac OS 10 applications back when Mac OS 10 was launched.
⏹️ ▶️ John Carbon came from the classic world and was a bridge to the classic world, and it was an evolution of the classic Mac tool
⏹️ ▶️ John kit and and all that stuff. And Coco, of course, was the next stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple spent a lot of years with both API’s. A lot of W. W. C. S. Were like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we introduced a new control and it’s only available in Coco or only available in carbon or last
⏹️ ▶️ John year. This thing was only available on either carbon or cocoa, but now it’s available in both. Or now we’re going to update them in parallel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then eventually it evolved to, you know what? Not so much carbon anymore. We’re going to everything that is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in Coco and eventually carbon doesn’t even make it a 64 bit and it’s there we eventually we crown a clear winner
⏹️ ▶️ John which is Coco say goodbye to carbon but that took many many years
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinking about the marzipan stuff and lots of people have been discussing this I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know how I felt about sort of my my gut instinct towards
⏹️ ▶️ John you know who is in the in the battle of marzipan better if you I kid versus app kit
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of them a carbon and one of them is a cocoa or is that analogy not fit and neither one is fits
⏹️ ▶️ John need not the into the slots and the historical precedent doesn’t make any difference like but what does this
⏹️ ▶️ John do so I kind of have been setting aside the carbon versus cocoa thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John start thinking more in terms of animals and nature and like invasive species
⏹️ ▶️ John and somehow that got its hook into my brain I really hope some other pockets didn’t already use the exact analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been consciously avoiding reading and listening to anything having to do with this topic just to give myself time to
⏹️ ▶️ John do with it, but I keep thinking of UI kid on the Mac is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m probably gonna make a bunch of bad analogies based on half remembered things from popular movies like introducing
⏹️ ▶️ John rabbits to Australia or bringing some invasive plant or fish species into North America
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t previously here, you know, or sorts of situations where you, you have an ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John that is what it is and you bring some unexpected item into the ecosystem and it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s It’s not equipped to deal with that, whether it’s a predator that starts eating everything or a prey animal that
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduces very quickly or a plant that can grow in more harsh condition that totally shuts
⏹️ ▶️ John out all the other plants. Those are all sort of like thinking of it as a bad way. But
⏹️ ▶️ John just that I feel like the Mac ecosystem as it exists today, the Mac software
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem is not like dropping
⏹️ ▶️ John UI kit into there is going to have a big effect, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the ecosystem itself is not prepared for that. It’s not strong.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac software market is not the powerhouse that it once
⏹️ ▶️ John was. It’s certainly nothing compared to the iOS app ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are way more iOS developers and there are Mac developers of any stripe, that will
⏹️ ▶️ John seemingly continue to be the case, and you’re gonna drop UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the Mac. And I’m trying to think of any scenario in which
⏹️ ▶️ John this doesn’t spell doom for AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John and traditional Mac applications not written in some thing that is derived from UIKit. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that sounds like overblown, right? It’s like that’s why I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’m just like, you know, that’s your gut instinct.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, come on, Mars Band is some weird separate process that like variant
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iOS simulator that takes your iOS applications and run them in little windows. How is that a threat to like real native Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John applications? They’re nothing like native app. They don’t look like it. They don’t behave like it. They have their own little engine running with their own
⏹️ ▶️ John little version of iOS. You can’t even mix app kit with them. How is that a threat to
⏹️ ▶️ John anything having to do with the Mac kind of like introducing that one weird snail or rabbit
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, vine species seems like it’s not going to be a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then fast forward a couple of years and all of a sudden you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake and suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John marzipan is out of the little iOS system support thing and applications are able to link against
⏹️ ▶️ John both app kit and and UI kit and mix and match them within the same application and the frameworks are just loaded
⏹️ ▶️ John as normal and the UI kit variant for the Mac starts having the ability to use more
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac-like controls and spawn new windows and do toolbars and all the other things that the Macs can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, this is where I’ll throw it to you guys. Am I being
⏹️ ▶️ John too pessimistic? Do you see a scenario in which AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John long term, not like this year or next year, but AppKit can survive a successful
⏹️ ▶️ John invasion by UIKit on the Mac platform?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you look at like, well, there’s the native way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write apps with AppKit, and you can make the best quality apps with that, that have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most native system behavior, the most system integration, feel the most, you know, quote, Mac-like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s also then this cross-platform thing that you can write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for that can run in the same system. Won’t everyone just start making apps for that? Won’t it mess up the conventions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Won’t it do things like that? you could say the same thing about when web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps became a thing. We already have a cross-platform system where things that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of app-like run in kind of Windows, with this kind of cross-platform language, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called web apps. And so maybe the effects could be similar to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, and I think the economics are similar to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the people who are real Mac enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or are real hardcore Mac developers or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are companies that have the resources to where making a native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app makes sense will continue to make AppKit apps. But there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other thing that in the past has been web apps and now could be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS unified code base with Mac and stuff, where if they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the resources or don’t want to spend the resources to make an AppKit app, they’re gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these cross-platform apps. And in the past, again, in the past, that was the web app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the future, maybe it’ll be a Marzipan app also, or instead. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the effects of it could be seen similarly to the effects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what web apps have done to the platform, which is, yeah, we’re gonna see a lot of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things are gonna be Marshapan only on the Mac. They’re not gonna have native Mac apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is gonna mess up some stuff. But I don’t think it’s necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a massive threat to the platform any more than web apps and the economics of cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development have been. That being said, it depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot on the implementation. It depends a lot like on how good are these apps? How usable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they? Is it like web apps where they can be functional, but that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always kind of feel a little bit off in the environment? That they never quite feel like Mac apps? That they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never quite feel right? You can always tell, you know, is it gonna be like that? Or are they gonna add enough functionality to them that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can actually make one pretty well that you kind of don’t notice that it’s not like, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quote, real Mac app or, you know, not an AppKit app? The other thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider is that AppKit, You know, as you mentioned, it’s not in a good place right now. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem is not in a strong place right now. It’s really very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vulnerable to attack because it’s been just beaten down by iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general neglect and cross-platform frameworks over the last 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it’s time for AppKit to go the way of Carbon. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it is yet. But I think that time is not that far off if it’s coming. I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to address your earlier point about comparing to the web stuff, although I think you could probably
⏹️ ▶️ John argue against your own point if you stood on it a little bit. But like there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some prerequisites for that to happen. And one of the prerequisites is that UI
⏹️ ▶️ John kit. That’s why I mentioned Mars Ben. We the weird thing that is now that the UI kind of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John stays as like, oh, it’s a way to get iOS applications to get in your Mac as opposed to it
⏹️ ▶️ John evolving into the new way to write Mac applications again we’re far from that now with the demos
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’ve seen in with the stuff that Apple is running in Mojave right but my
⏹️ ▶️ John assumption based on all the conversations and all the information I was able to glean from being at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and putting my ears to the ground or whatever is that the current weird implementation of marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ John and Mojave is not representative of the long-term vision of how this is supposed to work it is merely
⏹️ ▶️ John what had to be done to make it happen in this time frame. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that, I feel like once you’re out of this weird implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of, of Mars, a pan and into a more like, Oh, I just linked against UI kit in my application.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see any reason for Apple not to continue to evolve UI kit on the Mac in a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John like direction. They already have, they added a bunch of classes to UI kit when it runs on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to do things like have a menu bar, which you you can’t you know there’s no menu bar on iOS right there is in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John ones they added classes to UI kit that makes me think they’re not going to leave UI kit as a cross platform
⏹️ ▶️ John thing they’re going to try to make it into the new way to write Mac applications
⏹️ ▶️ John and the biggest difference the two biggest differences between this and web stuff is one it really is actually native
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a web view like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John is native as native can be right and two Apple is using it
⏹️ ▶️ John to make its own applications that’s one of the few things we can pull from the notes here, right? So we have the four demo applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John which are iOS ports, right? But there are a bunch of applications on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that are extremely likely candidates for Mars. Japan conversion. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John one example that has existed for years, and I feel like it’s got to be
⏹️ ▶️ John right up there in the list is messages on the Mac, which does not have feature parity with the iOS version.
⏹️ ▶️ John Despite being written in app kit and despite Apple presumably having AppKit developers, the
⏹️ ▶️ John easiest way to get feature parity for Messages on the Mac is to replace Messages on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John with Messages from iOS tweaked to be a Marsband app.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is way easier than, you know, adding the features that are in the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John version to the AppKit version on the Mac. And by the way, speaking of web views, it’s my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John that the message list that you see in Messages on the Mac is in fact a web view, which explains why
⏹️ ▶️ John it might be difficult to implement, say, the laser beams or any other special effects. Yeah, maybe they use Web
⏹️ ▶️ John GL, but then the thing would probably crash. There are lots of applications like that
⏹️ ▶️ John that on the Mac do not have feature parity where their iOS counterparts and the Mac ones are written in app kit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will ship UI conversions to those applications, whereas Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably never say we’re replacing messages with an electron app. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John messages with a WebKit view, and it will be entirely We’re replacing pages with iCloud.com’s
⏹️ ▶️ John version of pages, and it’s just a giant web view. Apple would not do that. Apple will do that with UIKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will be native. And if Apple continues to
⏹️ ▶️ John pursue that type of strategy and doesn’t just say, this is just a way for you to quickly port your iOS application to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, again, I see it as an extinction-level event for AppKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not making any technical judgments. You mentioned maybe it’s time for AppKit to go. I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have experience writing applications. and these are one of the things I have. I have no idea what the pros and cons are and understand obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John our app kit has more craft and so on and so forth. But I mentioned all those months ago that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know what Apple’s opinion of like, what is the best thinking about how to make a GUI application. And to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mars man effort makes me think that Apple thinks UI kit what we’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS, that’s our current best thinking on how to make applications for any platform that where you have a GUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a GUI the Mac. And so the best way to make Mac applications will be a variant of
⏹️ ▶️ John UIKit, extended with classes that do Mac-specific things. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John granted, this implementation is weird, but slowly over time we’ll expand it. It will be very native. If anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be, you know, it has the potential to be faster than AppKit because it’s things that were originally designed to run on
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone and has more modern thinking, takes advantage of more modern hardware, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. Anyway, Casey, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I think I have an optimistic view of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that UIKit kind of appearing on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac is, you know, Jeff Goldblum uploading his virus into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Independence Day alien spaceship.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know, right? I do think that it is quite likely that that is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be the first step in the either death
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or significant reworking of AppKit. I don’t think you’re wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see that as a potential, if not inevitable, end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The difference between the way I think you’re thinking of it, John, and the way I think of it, though, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think that Apple believes that UIKit is their best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and greatest approach to GUI development.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that it could very well be that UIKit coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Mac today seems like it is very, not even half-baked, like quarter-baked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s why it’s a preview and it’s not, well, with the exception of the four apps that they’re shipping, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it’s in general a preview and that’s why we don’t really have access to it except for what, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Trout and Smith and Rambo, Mr. Rambo himself, if you please, have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing to kind of make this work anyway. But I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I hope that if AppKit does have to wither and die, that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new marzipan, you know, it’s UIKit except it isn’t, will expand in such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way that it will embrace all the unique things that makes a Mac a Mac. It will embrace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the menu bar in a way that maybe it isn’t doing today. It will embrace a preferences window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that maybe it isn’t doing today and so on and so forth. Because if you look at the way things are today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who really loves the Mac and I really love the Mac and I don’t know which one of the three of us loves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the most doesn’t really matter, but I love it a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John lot. It’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s probably you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either way, I mean, Marco and I can can fight over second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I really fine. I as the guy who hates the Mac on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really love the Mac and I feel most at home on the Mac, and I don’t want the Mac to change, and I am not—change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in ways that are unfamiliar and scary. But I do think that this very well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be a time where this change is healthy and it will be for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I can give you a million and seven ways where this could go all kinds of pear-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and terribly wrong, and where we only get half-baked apps, we get—it’s basically the second coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Electron, it’s just mildly less offensive. We get apps that are clearly a five-minute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port from iPad or iPhone, where the menu bar is just an afterthought, and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so forth. There’s a million ways where this can absolutely go wrong, and we will be really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really sad pandas. But there’s several ways, I think, where this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can go right. And I think that for now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to choose to be optimistic and think that, you know But this isn’t 100% there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, but it may be 100% there in a year or in a couple of years or in a few years. And anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can do to get more native, not electron apps onto the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m on the same page with you with the extending. Like I said, they already extended it with menu bar stuff. I truly believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that if things go according to Apple’s plan, when you know, and plans change that they will improve
⏹️ ▶️ John UI kit on the Mac, they will add even more classes to extend more functionality, like that their goal is not just
⏹️ ▶️ John to make ports and we will get the shovel where 100% we’ll get there’s no there’s no avoiding that and there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be a long period of time before UI kit on the Mac can match all the features that are available to
⏹️ ▶️ John app kit. But it just like to do the reverse of it just fit to figure out like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, can you envision the opposite? Where UI
⏹️ ▶️ John kit and app kit continue to march along each one of them being enhanced and improved
⏹️ ▶️ John long term. I can’t envision that scenario. Obviously Apkits not going to like disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a huge legacy code base that will continue to work for a long time. Gus Mueller, creator of Acorn and many
⏹️ ▶️ John other great pieces of software, had a good piece on trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple could ever leave Apkit behind. And he pointed out that the
⏹️ ▶️ John place, the convenient place that Apple has frequently dropped frameworks and stuff has
⏹️ ▶️ John been architectural changes, whether it’s from 64 bit to 32 bit or power PC to Intel or 68 K
⏹️ ▶️ John to power PC. Those are great inflection points to be able to finally drop the
⏹️ ▶️ John legacy framework or the, you know, drop support for all the things that you previously could never get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of because people are doing big changes anyway, and it kind of makes sense to people. That’s how they got rid of carbon.
⏹️ ▶️ John They couldn’t get rid of carbon until 64 bit came along because if some point before that they had said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we decided Coco one, we’re not going to do carbon anymore. They’d be like, but wait, we ported Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John to carbon offices in carbon, the finder is in carbon. Like, what are you even doing? You can’t do this. And it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about this? How about when we go 64 bit? That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Although we’ll completely develop carbon 64 and just change your mind at the last minute. Like, and I think that was probably a wise
⏹️ ▶️ John decision. Whoever made that call, probably was like, we really dodged a bullet there, because otherwise, they’d still be supporting
⏹️ ▶️ John carbon and we’d still be running carbon applications. So how can you get rid of app kit? Gus is saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the arm max come out, that’s a perfect time to say, well, Coco’s not coming to arm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, you know, we’ll have some sort of emulation solution or whatever the heck we’re going to do. But, uh, you know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on the timing of these things, that may not work out because you can’t, you can’t drop Coco until you like it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is way better than it is now. Right. But you know, the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way I can see this, this going, uh, app kit surviving longterm is that it has to win this
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem battle it would be like, Okay, we tried marzipan, and it turned out not to be a big thing. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John were going to take a different approach, like they change their mind, or they bail out or they say, like, Oh, it’s just a way to support iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. But we’re not committed to, we were we were on that path of like, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to keep enhancing and make it the great new Mac framework, we decided that we’re not going to do that. And that would leave room for
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Okay, well, app kit is still king of the hill, because its competitor ran away. Right? That’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that’s the only way that app can And as for optimism and pessimism, like the shovelware
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff aside, which is gonna be gross, but still better than Electron. Like we’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John to live through that no matter what. I’m not entirely sure, like I don’t have enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, knowledge or experience of developing applications to say whether like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know everyone loves UIKit and there’s tons of UIKit developers, people who never learned AppKit think UIKit is better, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also a lot of people who I know and respect who think AppKit is pretty great. And I’m wondering, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, is this good or bad? Net, net, obviously, like, technology aside, it’s good because
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s tons more iOS developers and it’s, you know, the more popular platform and so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ John technology wise, part of me wonders if, you know, if the early,
⏹️ ▶️ John our earlier discussion in Marzipan of like, what if they make a new framework that is better than both AppKit and UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ John and is able to write applications for both platforms? Not that you write one application and run it in both places, but that the framework
⏹️ ▶️ John spans everything. It can do menu bars, it can do toolbars, it can do all the stuff on iOS, it can do touch,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can do mouse pointer, it can do stylus, it can do everything. And you use that one new framework that
⏹️ ▶️ John is better than the thinking in UIKit, better than the thinking in AppKit. It has all new ideas and whatever. It’s Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John native from top to bottom, whatever you wanna do. They didn’t do that. They’re instead saying, we’re gonna go with UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make UIKit better and bring it to the Mac and extend it to the Mac functionality. I do wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerd wise, whether, it’s always nice to, kind of like I did with like the language that replace
⏹️ ▶️ John objective C. Let’s imagine the most magical, wonderful language there ever could be unconstrained
⏹️ ▶️ John by practical concerns. That’s just merely better than everything that came before it. And it turns out that’s really hard to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you take what you can get. And so again, the Apple probably made, uh, the right decision here, but I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either optimistic or pessimistic about it, but I am, I have sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John accepted or come to terms with the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John this, that things, you know, that things don’t look good for AppKit, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but I think it’s going to be a big change on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully a positive one, just because for all of the great AppKit apps that start
⏹️ ▶️ John to get left behind, presumably they’ll be replaced by even more great applications
⏹️ ▶️ John written by formerly iOS developers, I’m willing to I don’t know if we have time to get to this
⏹️ ▶️ John in this episode, but I’m willing to I have to have been willing to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that what makes a Mac application a Mac application changes over time because it has believe
⏹️ ▶️ John me what makes a Mac application in 1984 is not the same thing as it makes now and there’s been a million iterations of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Becky Hansen Meyer asked on Twitter, you know, like, can anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John that even written a rundown of the unique characterizations characteristics of native Mac app? Like what is it that makes a Mac app and
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I don’t want to devil into that type because I think it’s too big a topic, but I am 100% willing for
⏹️ ▶️ John what makes a Mac app a Mac app to change and you like it coming to the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily will change that. Hopefully for the better. It it’s changed so many times before and mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John it has been for the better. So I’m I’m not pessimistic about that, but I am as
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Mac OS 10 transition as with many transitions before. And as Casey pointed out, there is great
⏹️ ▶️ John potential for things to go terribly wrong and you’re not going to every decision right. File name extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we have to be on the lookout for things that get screwed up along the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think I’m like, both terrified and cautiously optimistic. Is there some combination
⏹️ ▶️ John emoji for that, Casey? Maybe you can look that up for me. I’ll work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I also would not rule out the possibility. You know, John, you know, you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, like, like we talked a little while back about a new cross platform framework,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly that seems to be what Mark Gurman was talking about at some point or what John Gruber was talking about at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what Mark Gurman named like I don’t think that what we see what we’ve seen so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far from this UI kit on the Mac effort rules that out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like because when you’re talking about running UI kit on the Mac you’re talking about a number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different things one of them which they talked about was reunifying all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the underlying frameworks the networking frameworks, the graphics frameworks, like the sound for like all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that has diverged from between iOS and Mac over time, you know, reunifying that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a small job. That’s probably actually more work than the interface side. The other part of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re doing is like making UI kit work on the Mac. Well, UI kit has been running in the simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a decade. So the the actual like part of making it operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some functional form on Intel Macs, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Like they did that already. And so now it’s just down to the details of like, okay, giving it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a window, giving it a menu bar. And again, that’s not a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of work either, but I think all the underlying system stuff is probably more work than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they’re selling this right now as, look, here’s a way to take this handful of random,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly low effort Apple apps and basically bring their iPad versions to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac. But what if that’s just like the demo? What if that’s just what we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year? And what if one of the reasons why we can’t write these yet is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would rather us use the new thing that’s coming out in the
⏹️ ▶️ John future? I don’t think the new thing can be a separate thing, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it can be a separate UI framework. They do have this significant problem of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have multiple different platforms that all use different UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frameworks for the most part. They have AppKit, they have UIKit on the Mac, They have UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS, even though UIKit on the iPad is kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain ways and kind of needs some things from AppKit as they push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more into like iPad Pro areas and multiple windows, multiple apps running, things like that. It kind of needs to borrow some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that stuff. The tvOS and the watchOS stuff are totally different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each totally different from each other and from everything else. tvOS kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of runs UIKit but only parts of it and it has all of its own stuff it has to add on top of that. WatchOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has WatchKit which is nothing like UIKit it has no support for UIKit and and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole different thing. Not to mention you have Swift like that’s a huge thing and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing paradigms in what is considered you know a good way to write UIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the old like you know manual state-based way to the more you know modern like you know reactive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash declarative ways that Casey knows about. Like, this is a pretty good time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take this opportunity to launch a new UI framework, if they wanna do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think anything we’ve seen precludes that. I think these are not mutually exclusive things. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could run UIKit on the Mac and also support a new framework for apps
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there are always lots of projects in flight at Apple, so I totally believe that something like this
⏹️ ▶️ John could have happened, and like, it is important to remember that Apple hasn’t committed to anything yet because like the
⏹️ ▶️ John commitment event is essentially the publishing of a public API for third party developers and they’re pointedly
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that this year. Like there’s no there’s no API for you to use like yeah Apple’s doing it but that’s not for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like you ask it Apple did it with you I said the difference this time like they’re they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John hinting at the idea that next year this will be a thing that you can do right but they
⏹️ ▶️ John have an entire year to decide, is this what we’re doing? Are we going to let people
⏹️ ▶️ John use our Mac version of UIKit with a bunch of extra classes for menus and toolbars? Or,
⏹️ ▶️ John to your point, Marco, what about that other project that we had stewing for? And I don’t want to call it a cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John framework. I want to call it a platform-spanning framework, which I feel like is different. Cross-platform is like, all right, one set
⏹️ ▶️ John of code, and when it runs here, it does this, and when it runs here, it does that. A platform-spanning set of code is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John if you took AppKit plus UIKit and unioned them and say, here’s an API that can
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything. You can’t call the menu bar ones on iOS, and you can’t call the touch ones on the Mac for now.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s just a framework that spans everything. Yeah, they could have a new framework like that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the more tame version, assuming they stick to their current plans is, oh, now you can have an application that, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about, I forget what it’s called, like iOS system server or something like that. Basically the
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS simulator that’s not an iOS simulator that lets your iOS applications have little windows and do all that crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs all your stuff, which is why you can’t link against AppKit. Like it will forcibly not let you link against AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re running inside that thing. Instead of that, just have your Mac application link against UIKit for the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, link against AppKit and then mix and match them the same way you can mix and match Carbon and Cocoa
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I think the fact that they went public with this means
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of decision has been made that if there was a like, let’s here’s a new way to,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s a platform spanning API that we can eventually extend to everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that project existed, it lost to this project. And this definitely feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like a, you know, swift aside, it feels like a more Apple way to do things in that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve kind of picked a winner like they picked a winner with Cocoa and the winner is UIKit. And they realize the
⏹️ ▶️ John new API will be UIKit on the Mac extended with ever more
⏹️ ▶️ John classes that are Mac specific. They did like the minimum possible classes that you needed to get
⏹️ ▶️ John anything running in a reasonable way for the Mojave thing. But they could
⏹️ ▶️ John double the size of UIKit on the Mac, just trying to keep pace with all the stuff that AppKit could do. And that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be the new API, because it would be a bunch of new classes that never existed before that are basically UIKit-ified
⏹️ ▶️ John ways to do things that AppKit can do, plus the continued evolution of UIKit. And the unified
⏹️ ▶️ John substrate, I remember seeing that slide and being super excited about it, but it’s hard for me to gauge exactly how far they’ve drifted.
⏹️ ▶️ John because the core has been the same forever. Obviously they had to hack it to hell to
⏹️ ▶️ John get it to work on the original iPhone and there’s tech debt and there’s drift and so on and so forth, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they haven’t drifted so much that that actually is the bigger job. It could be, it could be the bigger job.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how badly they’ve spread from each other. I don’t know how much tech debt has accumulated
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but at this point, the iOS devices are just as powerful as most of the Macs. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no real reason for that drift. I’m glad to see them unifying and I’m hoping it’s not a big job, But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the job of, hey, make UI kit-ish versions of all that stuff that AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John does is a huge job just because of the psychic weight of knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John that this API that you come up with, you’re gonna be stuck with for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with UI kit. Making a public
⏹️ ▶️ John API, Apple making a public API is one of the most dangerous and scary things that Apple can do because
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s policy trying to support it. Like you can’t just make an API and say, Oh, we made
⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible stake. Nevermind. Like people build apps on it and you have to support them. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why they’re taking so long with ABI compatibility and swift. It’s like you get one chance to get this right. You can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Oh yeah, we tried last year, but we changed our mind. All your applications are going to break. Um, so
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is regardless of the way this goes. This is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the, you know, may you live in interesting the curse, whatever. It’s an exciting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an exciting slash terrifying time for the Mac. These next few years are going to be, as many people
⏹️ ▶️ John have pointed out, the biggest change in the Mac’s history since
⏹️ ▶️ John the classic to Mac OS X transition. Maybe not, potentially not as big,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also potentially bigger. Like it’s not, with the OS transition, it was so clear. It’s like old OS gone,
⏹️ ▶️ John new OS here, like very little share between except of
⏹️ ▶️ John This could be a gradual evolution or that invasive species could rush through
⏹️ ▶️ John our ecosystem and just change it overnight over the course of a year or two. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been talking about the Mac. Some people would say it’s stagnating or
⏹️ ▶️ John not evolving as much as it was before. And regardless of how this goes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think our complaint over the next five years will be a lack of change
⏹️ ▶️ John or excitement or terror on the Mac. I think that we’ll be getting all that in
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#askatp: We run Global Security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s betterment.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Betterment for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Let’s start with an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of simulation or scenario is a better word for it from the comedian James Veach who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote, I’m placing all three of you in charge of security at Apple, putting to one side the leaky supply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chain. How are you going to work out how Gurman and other people like him are getting his information?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And how are you going to put an end to it once and for all? Tim Cook is relying on you guys. Casey, you have a desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job again. Marco, you have a job. And John, very little has changed for you. You have an unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey budget. Be reasonable with this, John. Things to consider. How is Gurman getting his stories? Is it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends in high places or does he have other more nefarious means? Remember those health app mockups? Why did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gurman get those so wrong? And case manufacturers got it really wrong with the iPhone Nano and the teardrop iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey James writes, I’ve often wondered whether schematics for one or both of these products were disseminated in an attempt to root out the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leakers. And I find this fascinating. So what would you do? I think that last thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the thing that I find most interesting and most exciting is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deliberately telling people the wrong data just to see where it ends up. Another thing I would do is just figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out like what did the CIA and like FBI do in these sorts of scenarios.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Presumably there have been people in intelligence operations, presumably, that have tried to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this out before. What do they do? How do they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sniff out when there’s a leak? How do they figure that out? Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard, well, we have heard as a community and I’ve heard from friends that work at Apple that disclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a big thing. My understanding is there is actually an app or it’s part of an app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple has where you can look up, okay, Marco and I both work at Apple. I want to talk to Marco about Project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Titan. Let me go look real quick and see if Marco is disclosed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Project Titan. Oh, no, he’s not. Okay. Well, Marco, let me just tell you what I’m working on these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something interesting. And that’s all I can tell you. So compartmentalizing even more, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a roundabout way of saying compartmentalizing even more is probably a good way to prevent the problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in terms of sniffing it out, that’s a tough question. And other than planting bogus data, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure what to say. Marco, how would you handle it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Mazzella I mean, there are certain things you can do to actually track down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and catch individual leakers. I’m sure Apple’s—in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of the three of us have ever worked in this kind of field before, of secrecy and security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff as far as I know. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but like, but were you in charge of enforcing it and like tracking people down? If we were, we couldn’t say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so like, you know, these suggestions might be ridiculous, you know, compared to people who actually know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re talking about in this area. But with that disclaimer, you know, obviously one angle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to catch the people who are existing leakers and you do that. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One idea is, you know, what you mentioned, like kind of like fake leaks, like, you know, to kind of find out where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are leaking from. Like one little idea I thought of, which I’m sure they’ve thought of, and might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even do, is, you know, there’s been a lot of leaking of memos recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if every copy of an email memo that went out to everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had software that slightly varied some of the wording? Because you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, like you could try to embed invisible Unicode space characters and stuff like that, but that’s easy to filter out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like changes to the wording are not easy to detect if you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to report on or quote a memo unless you have more than one copy. Then you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diff it and stuff like that. But like if you only got one copy, then you know, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically make enough minor wording variations in it that you could kind of binary search it down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whoever is doing the leaking. So that’s part of it too, but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most of it’s probably less on the technical side and more just on the human side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there have been, over time, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of crazy Apple leaks, and most of the recent ones, honestly, have boiled down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple slipping up and just accidentally publicizing HomePod software or things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. You know, that’s been a lot of them recently. But otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are human factors involved. and like what makes someone leak? What motivates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to do that? Oftentimes those are issues that you can’t really do anything about. Like oftentimes it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are mad that they maybe lost an argument internally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that the product they’re working on was gutted or they have some other acts to grind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the company and so they leak stuff that will basically argue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their favor or that will kinda, you know, made the company look bad in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives them some kind of vindication. And those people, you’re kind of always gonna have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk, and I’m not sure there’s that much you can do about that. Except what Apple is doing about that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically scaring people into saying, look, if you do this, we’re probably gonna catch you, and you might go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to jail. That’s a pretty effective thing, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like from their language around this recently, it seems like they have tried to lean heavily on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the appeal to emotion. you’re letting the team down if you leak, you know, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, that probably isn’t very effective. I can’t see that being a major thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, ultimately, you’re always gonna have some amount of leaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m not sure they’re necessarily that bad. I mean, sure, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you want the official company line to be, leaking is bad, you’re letting the team down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t do this, you’ll get in trouble. But these leaks are also really good PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually. And they cultivate this community around Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this hype around Apple that we’re all just so excited about what they might do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future that there’s this huge demand for leaks and rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about things they might be working on. And that all plays into the reputation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the brand, the hype, the PR cycle. I think most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time the dreamers actually help Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So leaks are helpful. Marco, you’re fired from your security job. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong attitude for your position. Unfortunately, James Selvig, one of the classic blunders,
⏹️ ▶️ John the most famous, as you know, Casey, is what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of course. But
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly less well known is this. No, I’m not going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that Princess Bride?
⏹️ ▶️ John right yes the classic blender that he felt like he knows he felt like he says it right here in the question
⏹️ ▶️ John here is the problem with your questions James you have an unlimited budget
⏹️ ▶️ John be reasonable with this John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that he knew that case and I wouldn’t give two craps with that line and he knew you would
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is the crux of the entire question the easy solution this question is how do you stop Mark Gurman from leaking
⏹️ ▶️ John you have an unlimited budget I would pay Mark Gurman whatever he wanted to pay everyone has number for the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ John his life and boom, problem solved. I get promoted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you say that as Marco was talking. 100 million dollars a year. German is done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As Marco was talking, I was thinking to myself, you know, if I really want to just think outside the box, what if I just said, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was taking a more negative approach, you know, what if you said if you can get us, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can lead us to a leaker, your bounty is a billion dollars, like literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a billion dollars, because money no
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to lead to the leaker. You know it’s German. Just get him off the board. Pay him $100 million a year, your German
⏹️ ▶️ John problem goes away, 100% guaranteed. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s always going to be more Germans. German wasn’t… German’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, before there was German, how many Germans were there? German is like, you know, to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John the German issue, so buy Bloomberg, buy the whole company that they work for. You have an unlimited budget, the question says.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a very bad question, James. You told me to be reasonable, but it’s not possible. The terms of your question is you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an unlimited budget. And you know, that just destroys it. So try
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey next time. Okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how about this? You have a budget of whatever Apple has in the bank right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the question. That’s basically an unlimited budget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s also pretty much an unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We can move on. But But James, if if you would like to reword your question, perhaps we’ll approach
⏹️ ▶️ John day. That’s it. This is your one and only chance to ever get an ask ATP question given the the huge volume of of
#askatp: 4K > 24”?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Robert Burrat would like to know, on a recent show, Marco advised that when getting a 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor, you shouldn’t get anything bigger than a 24-incher. Can you elaborate on why this is, please? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I can field some of that. When I was exploring a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K monitor, really what I wanted was an external retina monitor at work. This was like a year ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we had gotten in a 27-inch 4K monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I sat down at it, it was clear to me that I could actually see pixels. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you remember way back when to the original retina screen announcement, was that iPhone 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that right? Yep. The colloquial definition, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that you wouldn’t be able to see the pixels at the distance at which you would generally hold the device. They also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gave like a DPI number, whatever the hell it was, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically said, thank you, but they basically said, hey, listen, you can’t see the pixels, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the whole point. And on a 27 inch 4K monitor, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my crummy eyes, I could see the pixels, or maybe I felt like I could. But with about a 22
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 24 inch 4K monitor, I could no longer see those pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to my eyes, that was the sweet spot. So if you’re going 24 or below, 4K is fine. If you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey above 24, you need 5K. Otherwise, you’re not really living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the retina dream after all. You’re just living a very, very large amount real estate dream,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that makes any sense. But Marco, anything you would like to clarify or add on that point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Manuele, PhD You know, as computer monitor technology has advanced, we’ve kind of had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard size monitors for most of personal computing history. They’re kind of evolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standard density range of like, this is roughly the DPI range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that monitors were. And so like for LCDs, you had like, you know, the 15 inch I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are usually like 1024 by 768. The 17 inch was 1280 by 1024. The 19 inch was 1600 by 1200.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the 24 inch class monitor was 1920.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the 30 inch class monitor was 2560 across.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then in the Retina era, the way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most monitors have gone Retina is by just doubling the pixels in each dimension. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way the OS can render everything at a perfect 2X. It makes a lot of things simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes a lot of things look nicer. And it’s just generally a good way to go high DPI, just double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. So the problem is 4K is double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 1920 wide resolution that was the common resolution on 24 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitors. Now actually then what happened a little bit later is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things got slightly smaller. 24 inch monitor resolution of 1920 across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just 1080p as well. That was the shorter version, but yeah, anyway, we’ll ignore that difference for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 16 by nine versus 16 by 10 difference. We’ll ignore that for now. Uh, sorry, 16 by 10 fans. We lost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was one of you, but we lost. Uh, anyway, at some point, like, you know, maybe 10 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, they started making 21 inch monitors that actually had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution of 24s and 27 inch monitor starting with 27 inch iMac that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the resolution of previous 30-inch monitors. So there is a slight correction downward where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had the same number of pixels just in a slightly smaller monitor. So other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that correction, things have stayed pretty much the same. Now that correction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes for 4k being the ideal size at either the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-correction size of 24 inches or the new post-correction size of 21.5 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is why the 4k iMac is 21.5 inches. The correct, quote, correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of 5k is, as Casey said, 27 inches, or 30 inches, depending on, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you can find. I don’t even know if anybody makes a 30 inch 5k, but it, those, this is like the standard sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the problem is, if you get something that falls between them, so for example, 4k
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 27 inches, which is what the question is about, you have to either run the monitor at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2x, which I would want to run a 4k monitor at 2x unless it’s like 40 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wide. So run it at 2X, which means at that size, everything will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like quote, too big, compared to most other computer monitors you’ve seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or run it at 1X, which means you’re gonna have things be really tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You will have a lot of real estate, but it will be really tiny. And if your eyes are good enough for that, more power to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, but I think most people would not probably wanna run that at 1X. So that is why. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of other screen sizes out now. We’re kind of in a glorious heyday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of inexpensive but really good monitors out there. Like you can get, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that whole class of ultra-wide ones, have you seen those? They’re like 34 inches wide but kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of short. So it’s almost like having two 20-inch monitors next to each other, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in one big screen. Those are not yet available in anything I would call like a high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DPI resolution at that size, I think you pretty much have to run those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 1X, and so you’re getting real estate, but not really getting retina quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of people love those things, and they’re not that expensive. So anyway, you have a lot of choices these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the reason why there are these certain sizes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sense for certain resolutions is just because we’ve had these conventions for so long that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OSes all assume will be in place when they size elements on screen. And so if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run them at 1X versus 2X, things will either be too small or too big, unless you’re in the certain size ranges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, there’s a great blog post by our friends at Bajango who make iStat menus for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a great blog post that I think we linked to last time we talked about this, but I’ll link to it again, that basically shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like the two good ranges of like the good range of 1X and the good range of 2X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what size and resolution monitors fall and which part of that spectrum.
WWDC 2018 box lunches!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Will Law writes in to say, what kind of sick,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sad world do we live in where WWDC comes and goes and there is no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussion of box lunches or cuisine? I expected more of you all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am deeply disappointed in myself that we did not talk about this in any way, shape or form.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only ate like one or two WWDC lunches this year because I was running around like a crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person. The keynote day, by the time I made it to the lunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area, the particular lunch I wanted was long since sold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, if you will. It’s not actually for sale, but all of them had been cleaned up and people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had claimed them. Also, I would like to file a formal complaint that I only had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one bottle of Mango Tango Adewale. This is unacceptable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only saw it once, very briefly and it was actually a friend of mine that grabbed it for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am upset. This is not the way the Odwalla containers or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Odwalla selection should be and I am disappointed Tim and I’m holding you personally responsible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, as the only other person who was in the conference, anything you would like to add about the cuisine this year? It seemed to be basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same as last year as far as I could tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I had a Bach lunch every day. I think I even had breakfast every day. So I’m on my normal like WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John meal plan. Before we get into box launchers, I just want to make a brief comment on the breakfast. It’s the second year
⏹️ ▶️ John at San Jose and the second year they’ve done a thing that I don’t like for the breakfast, which is to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to add variety by having different things at breakfast each day. The
⏹️ ▶️ John that variety consists of taking what used to be at breakfast at WWDC and taking one third of it on this
⏹️ ▶️ John day and then one third on this day and then one third on this day. So some days just have donuts, some days just have bagels. Some days
⏹️ ▶️ John just had little pastries like you got to have donuts, bagels, pastries, cream cheese, all of it every day. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that is the style to which we have become accustomed like Moscone
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it was so much better for food service in terms of traffic flow and everything. But they had all that stuff every single
⏹️ ▶️ John breakfast, right? I don’t like coming on the day where there’s just donuts. I don’t want to have a donut for breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to you know, like I you gotta have everything every day. I have to decide to you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John today’s the day I’m going to have a donut and make it my call not like, oh, guess
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what? You haven’t done it today because that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing. So setting that aside, oh, and on the Odwalla front, I never even saw a container
⏹️ ▶️ John of Odwalla. I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey physically see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one in someone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hand. I have no idea where they were. I don’t know how you managed to get one. I’m not as obsessed with them as you are, but I feel like the Odwalla
⏹️ ▶️ John supply has dwindled to startlingly low levels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it was still there, which is better than a couple of years, but I only saw it a couple of times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like I said, it was a friend of mine that actually saw the mango tango and grabbed it and tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at me to say, Hey, I’ve got a mango tango if you want it. So if it wasn’t for him, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would not have had one at all. But, uh, but yeah, I could not agree with you more about breakfast. Like I didn’t even think about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the breakfast scenario, which was awful because as much as the West coast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not understand what a bagel is, like they truly and utterly do not grasp what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bagel is much in the same way. Montreal doesn’t. Um, but, but with that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, at least give me your crappy bagel-esque
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baked good. So I can slather some cream cheese on it, assuming I can open the container.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can slather some cream cheese on it and, and use that for my breakfast every day. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the, one of the days I went in for breakfast, I really, really wanted this bagel-like contraption.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it turned out they only had like really crappy baked, uh, like pastries, which I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero interest in. I want to make that choice. I’m a grown man. Let me choose, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gotta have all the breakfast options every day. Also the butter balls, meaning they had like little tiny grape-sized
⏹️ ▶️ John balls of butter. Wait, just like loose? Yeah, like in a bowl, a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of butter balls in a bowl with a knife. Like- And you just go like grab one? Yeah, those individually foil-wrapped
⏹️ ▶️ John pats of butter are way better choice when you’re trying to serve a lot of people. Otherwise people are trying to dig out these
⏹️ ▶️ John butter balls with the butter knife and just like put the ball on their plate and then hope that when they get back to their seat, it’s softened
⏹️ ▶️ John enough so they don’t break their plastic knife trying to spread it. Anyway, breakfast had problems. But
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the box lunches, it was an interesting turn of events this year on the box lunches. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve complained a lot about them in the past. Externally, like, they looked about the same. You’re like, it wasn’t the same as every
⏹️ ▶️ John year, but there was a difference. They leaned much more heavily on salads
⏹️ ▶️ John this year than usual. It used to be that they would lean a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John on sandwich things and things that look kind of like dinner meal and then there’d be like
⏹️ ▶️ John one salad. I saw a lot of salads and this protected them from one of their
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest problems which was historically anything they try to make a sandwich
⏹️ ▶️ John has either terrible bread or bread that might have been good except it ended up sitting in some liquid so it got soggy
⏹️ ▶️ John and a sandwich with soggy bread is no good, right? So they did a lot of salads and salads are
⏹️ ▶️ John good because if they’re not out in the sun, and you know, pro tip I learned from last year, take,
⏹️ ▶️ John get your lunch indoors, not outdoors, because the outdoor ones may have been baking in the sun, they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John they hold up better. Like, it’s like greens and fruit and some dried
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like, there’s nothing really to get soggy, like the salad dressing is
⏹️ ▶️ John usually on the side in a little container, and if a little bit spills out, it’s not a big deal, and it avoids
⏹️ ▶️ John them having to find some way to get decent bread or decent filling for their sandwiches.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, I mostly give a thumbs up to that cause I feel like the average quality of the lunch
⏹️ ▶️ John I had was higher than in years past. That said, I like a good sandwich and I miss the sandwiches. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure, I’m not sure what they need to do. Like they haven’t cracked the sandwich codes. Now they’re just avoiding it by avoiding
⏹️ ▶️ John their weakness and just not making many sandwiches, which improve the average quality. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get tired of salad after a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I was going to just move on from this topic, but it occurred to me, Marco also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had conference issues at your conference, from what I’ve understood, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding is social policy did not have a good system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up for them either.
⏹️ ▶️ John He ordered lunch at social policy every day, but only received one,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and presumably his other six lunches are arriving now to whoever is sitting at his table.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurate. But yeah, social policy, as much as I love it as a hangout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot, the food service part of it seemed to only get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse this year, not better. So I’ve started to, I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the later half of the week to just start exploring other options like Beer and sausage place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the beer and sausage place is great if what you want is beer and
⏹️ ▶️ John sausage. That is amazing. I wish I had discovered it last year. Amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John you your food in a timely manner. It’s cheap and it’s good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John God, where was this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place? Yeah, like the only downside is their
⏹️ ▶️ John menu is fairly small. Yeah, no, it’s fine. If I find one thing I like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Yeah, like and it’s not small in total. It’s small. It’s small in diversity. Like if you want beer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have like 60 beers. If you want sausage, they have like 60 sausages. But then they also have they have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s that weird Montreal fries and duck fat and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John curds. That’s it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have regular fries too. They have a bunch of different kinds of sausages and french fries. That’s all you need. Yeah. And poutine and
⏹️ ▶️ John grilled cheese. That’s that’s their entire food. Yeah. No, I think I had a grilled cheese there,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco too. It’s good. It’s good. I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like it’s not cheap cheap, but like for 10 or 11 dollars, you get a very filling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meal. Yeah. And it’s called something public house for anybody looking at San Jose. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like I thought it was called it’s not called original gravity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Original gravity public house. That’s it. All right. All right. Teamwork. Good. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Yeah, that place. Also, I went across the street from Social Policy, across that little plaza
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Taco Mania one time, and that was surprisingly good. It looks like some kind of weird cheesy chain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but you go in and it’s surprisingly good and I would say it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some of San Jose-ness to it, but it’s almost normal. The beer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sausage place, I would say, is normal. That place-
⏹️ ▶️ John 100% normal. They hustle, they get you your food, they find where you are, they bring it to you and you don’t have to wait long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressed. Yeah, the Beer and Sausage Place is by far like the most up to speed, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistent eatery I’ve found there. I also, also a good word to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it called Good Karma? The vegan place across the street from that? Yes. I finally got to eat there. Last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t because there was always a big line. This year I finally got to eat there a couple times and it’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, you know, somewhat limited menu, but if what you want is on their menu,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good and the service was pretty good too. So I think what I’ve found as I’ve explored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco San Jose one more year is a. In a one block radius of the hotel, yeah. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes exactly. Is that yeah, social policy, I ate very few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like lunches there because I was just finding better places for lunch. Anyway, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Away and Linode. And we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m A-n-t Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-r-a-q-z-a
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to, accidental Tech Podcasts,
Neutral: Not Casey’s Jeep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, how is not your Jeep going?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had, we’ve had a bit of a falling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Oh, already? It’s been what, like a week and a half or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, something like that. It was Father’s Day that I got it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what I’ve realized is I want to own a Jeep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like a second car, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cards for me. I think some of this would get better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a more modern Jeep and or if I treated the Jeep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more like a traditional car and less like an erector set. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s rare that I have a car that’s, that’s a convertible and even more rare that I have a car that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the doors can come off now. And because of summertime, naturally I’ve been trying to roll with this, with the doors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and the top down as much as possible. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I forgot about is that in Virginia, it’s like a light version of Florida
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to weather, uh, summer weather in the sense that, well, both in temperature, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more in the terms of precipitation, because my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that every frigging day it is unbearably humid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then it torrentially rains for about four and a half minutes and then it’s beautiful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still fairly humid, but otherwise beautiful. Well, Virginia is kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, but way less extreme in every measurable way. Not as humid, humid, but not as humid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The rain is not a thunderstorm often, and sometimes it doesn’t even rain every day. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, though, is if you’re going to go and park a vehicle with no top and no doors outdoors for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight hours, say if you’re, I don’t know, at work, all you end up doing is looking out the window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see, oh, it’s getting a little dark. Oh, it’s getting a little dark. Oh, dark sky says no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the windows say maybe. So I’ve been every day like running out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, in, in panic because I’ve decided to at least put the top up. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’ll still be rain coming in from every measurable part of the car, except the roof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And putting the top up is doable as one person, but it’s not easy. Putting the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down by one as a single person is pretty easy, but putting back up is a little bit of a pain and doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doors. Absolutely. A one person job, but I don’t bring the doors with me. I mean, it’s a two, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, a door Wrangler. So it’s not like I have a place to store the doors. I don’t have any really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reliable place to put the windows, the rear and side windows. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ends up happening is I just stress out all day about whether or not my dad’s car is going to get rained on. So I could, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I could absolutely just leave everything put together and just treat it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like a regular SUV. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John treated like a really bad, uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. Right, exactly. Exactly right. But where’s the fun in that? It’s a Wrangler. It’s a Wrangler for a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It should be fun. So what I’m realizing is it’s probably—it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those things that I think we’ve talked about many times, although I can’t think of a specific example, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fun in your head, but in reality it’s a lot less fun than you thought. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually a great example is, Marco, when you had two cars. said many times that it was fun in principle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the reality of it was that it was just kind of a pain in the butt. And I think that’s kind of where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting with Wrangler. And then this was the deal. I mean, it’s still a possibility, officially speaking, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the deal was really sealed when we had all four of us in the car, top down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and two things happened. Number one, any time we stopped moving, the poor kids in the back roasted because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no top blocking the Virginia sun and there’s no airflow. even though I cranked the AC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pointed it directly at them and not at me at all, it’s a wide open car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course it’s just going to flutter out into the surrounding area. So I was trying to air condition all of Richmond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to lightly cool my children. And so there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are baking, and every time we hit a red light. And then as we’re driving somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this was all at surface streets, Aaron and I got talking about what it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like if we got in an accident with no doors on the car. M. Which is something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the three of us discussed.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just a curse to you now? We’ve been yelling at you about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for months. Well when it comes from your wife you pay closer attention.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pay attention to me, Casey. You made a vow to me when you started
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcast. We left Obey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Oh man. So anyway, so she did not say that this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an option, but I’m starting to feel like maybe I should explore other alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I don’t really have a good answer for what the other alternative is. I keep coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to I feel like my only choices that I’m interested in are GTI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Golf R. Aren’t those basically the same car? Basically except the GTI has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sunroof and the Golf has all-wheel drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the sunroof. I always forget what a big factor that is. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my sunroofs. I love how hard you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say golf. I know. Well, it’s I can’t. I keep wanting to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John golf. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s working on it. He’s doing a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Encourage him. I’m trying very hard. You guys expect to see this on my performance review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarter. Anyway, so I I like both of those cars in principle. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having driven neither of them and everyone I know and I think I’ve made the speech many times. Everyone I know has ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driven a GTI says it is the far and away best all around or that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can buy today if you wanted to have a car, if you want to be a one-car person, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one car can do anything within reason, of course, get a GTI. But I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the idea of the Golf R, and if I got a GTI, I think I would always say, well, why didn’t you get the R? Conversely, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got the R, I would always say, man, I really wish I had a friggin’ sunroof. Also the Golf R’s wheels are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not good in the 2018 models. The 2017 models were great. The 18s are no good. So I don’t know what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to do. You just happen to find a white 2017 model?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I could get a 2017, actually could, that is the same generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I should just get a 2017, see if I can find one. The other thing I looked at was you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OEM 2017 wheels for like $1,500 or something like that, and you can actually get, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friend recommended a company out of Canada called Replica, I think, I saved a link somewhere, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it in front of me, but there’s a company out of Canada that basically does fake OEM wheels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, yeah, it’s Replica, R-E-P-L-I-K-A. And they have a version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the wheels that I like that are like $150 a wheel. So it would be what, like $600 or something like that for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four, which I actually think would be a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternative as well. But anyway, so we’ll see what happens. I plan on test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving the stupid Accord, which I’m fearful that I’ll actually love, in which case I
⏹️ ▶️ John do. You should bring your family so they can bask in exactly how much room there is in that backseat compared to a Golf.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very true, actually. Or any of the other cars you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frankly. Yeah, then I plan to test drive the Golf and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plan to test drive the GTI and see what I think. Really, my life would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, on the one side, my life would be so much easier if I was willing to get an automatic, but the thing that occurred to me is I’m still not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure what specific car I would get. Like, even if an automatic was an option, what would I buy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know that it really changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. Let me point out, too, like, with your Jeep experimentation here, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very quick Jeep phase. And by the way, thank your dad profusely for making you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not actually need to buy one to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this out of your system, right? That is true, that is true. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, you’ve already said by trying the Jeep experiment, by almost convincing yourself to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Jeep, that fun and stick is more important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than speed and luxury.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So I honestly think you should give the Accord serious consideration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I should. I just don’t. It’s so boring. I’m sorry, John. I don’t mean that to be offensive, but it strikes me so boring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I got to drive it because I very well maybe not at all boring, but I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just nothing about it makes you go. Who’s got a car? Is it a car
⏹️ ▶️ John play support? Does that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go? That’s about the only thing I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would. So I don’t know. I mean, this can be an exercise for the listener slash for me slash for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys to pontificate or to think about. But but I don’t know. I just I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I want, and that’s the problem. And the right answer is probably to get nothing. I mean, if you look at my total cost of ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the BMW over the six years I’ve had it, it’s been like 500 bucks a month. And it occurred to me, when I don’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional job, I could lift a lot of times for 500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks a month. And it would not make me as happy, but it would save money, which right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now would be very useful. So maybe we’ll just be a one-car family. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks a month is a lot more than you would pay to lease something new that’s fairly reasonable. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanted to lease a new stick version of an Accord, you’re probably looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well under that. What’s a decent specced Accord lease? In the $300 to $400 range, probably? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. It’s probably in that range. Probably like $300 something. I honestly think you would have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, you get a lot more utility out of being a family person now. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a second kid and bought a seven-seater SUV. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see you fitting comfortably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hatchback, into a golf. You have the SUV, you got the Jeep out of your system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’d be very happy with a sedan. You’ve been driving a sedan, you know you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, you know they’re practical. They’re a great balance of good driving dynamics versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also having pretty good cargo space. And it’s really hard to beat the accord for that, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the kind of variables that you are prioritizing. And when you’re self-employed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like being able to have predictable cash flow become more valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you. And when you do something like a lease, it totally gives you predictable cash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flow. After all the costs of getting a lease started, you’re probably into it for like under $2,000, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you pay a couple hundred bucks a month, and you know it’s gonna be only that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know it’s gonna be three years from now that’s going to end and you can start a new one or you can do something else at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that kind of predictability is awesome when you’re first getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started because like what you want right now is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your financial and hassle life that you can find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control and to make predictable because it’s about to be very unpredictable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of other ways. And so the more things you can fix down a predictable level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both money and in hassle, the better. This is why I think no matter what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, I think a lease is the way to go for you right now. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think separately from that, I think you should also seriously consider the Accord stick, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just copy John’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I can’t. I realized I can’t have an Accord, because don’t they petulantly insist on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting the sunroof controls to the left of the steering wheel, which is barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea where those controls are because I would never buy one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sunroof. Every Honda I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco seen is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. At this point, can you really afford to rule out cars based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? No. Where the controls are. What you want is so insanely specific.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, what I want, the problem is what I really, what I want, what I really, really want is a 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Series, is a new 3 Series, but I’m not going to do that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself. I know. What you should really do is lease an M3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Well, it looks like you can get this Accord really nicely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done if you don’t want to have a six-speed. Because it looks very luxurious on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the inside when you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John gallery. Yeah, if you were saying, like, what kind of car would I get if I gave up on the stick? You can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get the fancier Accord without a stick. With a 10-speed auto, they have a 10-speed
⏹️ ▶️ John auto as the fancy option, so you don’t have to have the CVT. But honestly, it’s gross. You should get the stick. That’s a good stick.