299: Headphone Bump
08 Nov 2018Hands-on impressions and info from Apple about the new iPad Pro.
Episode Description:
- The ATP Store is back!! Place your orders until 15 November!
- Follow-up:
- The Good News Podcast #201 with Jeremy Burge
- iPad Pro and Apple Pencil compatibility
- Some Macs' microphones are disconnected by hardware
- Our website is now dark-mode enabled! Thanks, Spencer Wohlers!
- iPad Pro impressions
#askatp- How has being a programmer changed our world view? (via Jonathan Bowling)
- Why do high-end iOS devices need so much less RAM than Macs? (via Benedikt Beckmann)
- Post-show: More iPad thoughts & John's homework laptop
Sponsored by:
- Hover: Find a domain name for your passion. Get 10% off your first purchase.
- Betterment: Outsmart average. Get up to 1 year managed free.
- Marine Layer: Clothes that make it easy to get dressed in the morning. Use code atp for 15% off your first order.
Chapters
- ATP Store!
- Good News Podcast
- Old Pencils on new iPads
- T2 mic security
- atp.fm supports Dark Mode
- Sponsor: Hover
- iPad Pro Q&A
- Sponsor: Marine Layer (code ATP)
- iPad Pro Q&A, continued
- Sponsor: Betterment
- #askatp: Programmer thinking
- #askatp: macOS vs. iOS RAM
- Ending theme
- John’s not done yet
ATP Store!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Anyway, shall we? Oh, what are you cracking? Seltzer. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting. Flavored seltzer. Fine then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we have to properly start the show by talking about something that is truly awesome and no, John, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow up, except it kind of is. It’s the ATP store. Yay!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a bell Merlin style, but we have the ATP store back in better than, well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just different. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we are selling some merchandise, merchandising, merchandising. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not have flamethrowers. However, we do have enamel pins. We do have, and we’ll go back to that in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, the classic ATP logo t-shirt that you know and love, a brand new monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Max t-shirt, and then the also bordering on old enough to be called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey classic rainbow Pro Max t-shirt, which was very popular last time around. So running quickly through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these. The enamel pins are excellent. I have several. They are great and they’ve gotten better, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really the pins. The backs have gotten better because by popular demand, we are now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sending them along with locking backs. Marco, I do not have any of these locking backs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. Would you mind telling us a little bit about this magical technology?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it turns out like those little like, what were those like little like black squishy things that came on the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pins? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sorry everyone, those sucked. they came off really easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we investigated for the second round of pins, better locking pin backs. And my wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wife, Tiff Armit, discovered these wonderful locking pin backs on Amazon. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we asked Cotton Bureau to source them for our new batch. And they basically have some little trick where you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, they like hold on more tightly and then you have to kind of like pull them in a certain deliberate way to make them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release and come off. So it basically prevents the pin or significantly reduces the chances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the pin like getting knocked from the inside of a bag maybe and then falling out the front.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, it’s fantastic from everything I’ve heard. Again, I don’t have any myself, but you should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check this out. And I won’t mention because I’m selfish and I want all your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money, that you can also get a billion of these off Amazon for like no money. So we’ll pretend that we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and say you should just get another pin, why not? It’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they don’t come with the pins if you get them on Amazon. I got my pins today actually, and the locking pinbacks are basically
⏹️ ▶️ John identical to the ones on Amazon, like I couldn’t tell the difference between them. So if you have any kind of pins and
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna make sure they don’t fall off, just buy, it’s like, you know, you buy like nine bucks for like a giant bag
⏹️ ▶️ John of these pin backs. And I think what happens is like, that the pins get pulled from the front. It’s not like anything hits
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of them, they just get pulled from the front. And if you pull hard enough on the front of them, they’ll slide out of the backs. But with locking
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, that’s much, much harder to do. So buy some HP pins and buy a giant bucket of
⏹️ ▶️ John pin backs to use for all your pins so they don’t come off whatever you pin them to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but because we love you, we are including the locking backs on all future pin orders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I’ve actually, I need some more of these pins myself because I’m going through a bit of a backpack odyssey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is the night for that. It’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can talk about that another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right along to reiterate, we have the classic t-shirt that is available in men’s and women’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey styles. It is available in tri-blend or 100% cotton. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the standard tee and the premium tee, and this is the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all of our t-shirts, and it is lingering ever longer because it is that great. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you like to tell us about the monochrome Pro Max t-shirt, which is a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey riff on the classic rainbow one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re taking a lot of time for the store stuff. I had a very compact spiel already, but now it’s too late. I’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John blown the allotted time budget for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you forgot- You got
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we got to sell it. sold it in much less time. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other thing you forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John to mention about the shirts is all the shirts that we’re gonna talk about are available in black and white. And like you said, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John available in multiple materials because some people love the tri-blend and some people love 100% cotton. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get whatever you want. You get tri-blend, you get 100% cotton. And also, as you mentioned, that premium tee thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people want a tee shirt that’s going to last them as long as possible so they don’t have to buy another one because these are expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John tee shirts. We understand that, you know, podcast tee shirts are not what you should
⏹️ ▶️ John use staple of your wardrobe, but as a fun one off thing, they’re great. So if you want to spend more kind of like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to spend more to get an even beefier t shirt or a t shirt with better fit. We do offer that option.
⏹️ ▶️ John We realize yes, they do cost a lot more. That’s why we’re still offering the regular ones as well. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John all shirts in black and white, all shirts, tribal and 100% cotton, all shirts in regular
⏹️ ▶️ John and super premium. The new design is kind of riffing on the old pro max design.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re at the silhouettes of selection of professional high and Macintoshes,
⏹️ ▶️ John illustrated by our very own John Syracuse. Yeah, it’s the same thing, but the design now is that they are
⏹️ ▶️ John basically more or less to scale and it’s more like pencil line art than just silhouettes. And it’s not rainbow colored,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s monochrome. So you can get that with a light text on a black t-shirt or black text or black
⏹️ ▶️ John lines on a white t-shirt. So that’s that is the new design that has never been sold before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And real time follow up the the ATP classic logo t-shirt that is
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, really? I thought that was in black and white too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well. No, that’s all right, though. But anyway, but the monochrome max very nicely done. That was an update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by our friends at Cotton Bureau. And then as mentioned, the rainbow pro max T-shirt, which is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. A little inside baseball for the listeners. I, since I kind of have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no job anymore, spend a lot of time working on the text for the ATP dot FM slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store page one more time that URL, ladies and gentlemen, ATP dot FM slash store. I worked on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, not the header text actually, that was all John’s work, but the like little blurbs next to each of these pictures I worked on very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard and I was very proud of the work that I did and then I went back a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I wrote it and sent it to John and Marco to look at and I noticed that John had made some additions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and or really had added a little note to the page which I thought was quite funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you have to look at it and find out for yourself where it is. So if in summary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re working with John Syracuse expect that edits will happen no matter how hard you try, but that’s how you get better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I edited all the texts. I didn’t just add one comment. I edited everything. Of course you did. Gonna give you a once
⏹️ ▶️ John over every single line. No period unturned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in any case, we would love it if you could, before the 15th of November,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ladies and gentlemen, that is Thursday, not this coming Thursday, but next Thursday, before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the evening ATP time, next Thursday, the 15th of November, Please place your orders and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we would love it if you did. And these things make great holiday gifts, especially for the nerds in your life or the people in your life who are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerds and they just don’t realize it yet. They just need a good shirt to find out. So, atp.fm.
Good News Podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the beginning of follow-up, I would like to call your attention to the wonderful Good News podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which Featured Jeremy Burge in a recent episode. The Good News podcast is five minutes or less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking Pretty much every weekday morning and they talk about guess what good news and a friend of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show Jeremy Burge was on the show and he predicted a kerfuffle with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to square versus round waffles Which we talked about a couple episodes back and so I thought that was quite funny because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we released our episode like a couple of days after this episode was released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so he had predicted it even before we spoke about it, which I thought was quite amusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he is in two episodes of that show, of the Good News Podcast. And you should check them both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out because Jeremy’s awesome and so is the Good News Podcast.
Old Pencils on new iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on front of the show John Gruber has Eliminated all doubt and told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us that the new Apple pencil only works with new iPad Pros Additionally, the old Apple pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will only work on old iPad Pros and that 6th gen iPad weird thing that came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out Semi-recently so that is good to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hadn’t thought about that when they made the announcement I’m a little bit surprised that they’re so hardline about
⏹️ ▶️ John it Like you understand why the new one they would make only work with the new one because if you buy the new pencil and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have an old iPad, how are you gonna charge it? Like, there’s no place to plug it in. It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of ports or plugs or anything. It’s just got that flat side that they want you to shove up against the little flat
⏹️ ▶️ John charging thingy. So I see how that’s a problem. Now I’m sure someone could come up with some sort of little thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John charges the new pencil just from like, you know, like some, I don’t know, some flat thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John put it against. But right now there’s nothing like that. And I’m sure Apple doesn’t want that. How would it pair?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s there’s two problems. There’s charging and pairing right and that’s that’s why like even if you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like even if You had an old pencil and you want to do that on a new iPad say and you you were willing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to carry around like a Lightning charger for it that still wouldn’t solve the issue of how the heck do you pair it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the new iPad? You know cuz like there’s no way to adapt Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure someone could figure something out though like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could have figured something out and I’m sure there was going to Be accessories that you can buy from China or something that will do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but well, yeah Yeah, but like, but yes, it’s a very hard separation between the things
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know going the other direction. So you have an old pencil and you want to use a new thing. Well, if you have an old pencil already,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably you have something you can charge it with, but then yeah, the pairing thing. I mean, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some kind of Bluetooth thing going on in the pencil and Apple could have updated the software to find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it pair, but they didn’t. So it is just basically a hard line. The old Rolly pencil is the old world, the
⏹️ ▶️ John new flat sided pencil in the new world. And in case you were wondering about that, don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to, I don’t need to buy a pencil because I’ve got an old one. won’t work with the new iPads.
T2 mic security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Something interesting came out recently with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops with T2 chips in them. It says, all Mac portables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Apple T2 security chip feature a feature, a hardware disconnect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ensures that the microphone is disabled whenever the lid is closed. So this is something that is literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in hardware. And in fact, the paper continues, this disconnect is implemented in hardware alone and therefore prevents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any software even with root or kernel privileges in Mac OS. and even the software on the T2 chip itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From engaging the microphone, the lid is closed. The camera is not disconnected in hardware because guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can’t see anything when the lid is closed. So that is pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember where we found that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there’s a PDF. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John PDF, and like Apple has this PDF on their website we’ll put in the show notes that just tells you all about the T2. So this is coming straight from Apple. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not speculation. Of course, the whole thing about the camera not being disconnected, because why would you need to disconnect it?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t see anything when the lid is closed. That’s the part where like the 80s spy movie tells you that by
⏹️ ▶️ John noticing slight variances in light, you can reconstruct the image of the surrounding room even when the thing is closed, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is one of those ridiculous movie things that you would see, but I remember seeing a demo of an MIT thing
⏹️ ▶️ John at one point where they were like using scattered ambient light to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John see around corners to be able to see what card was completely out of view of a camera and it was mind boggling
⏹️ ▶️ John and terrifying. So I bet you could pull something like this off in a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John and people would accept it. But anyway, the hardware disconnect, that’s something I’d love to see iFixit
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out because the way they make it sound, it’s like two metal things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are pulled apart from each other. And I suppose, again, the 80s hacker movie way to do it would be you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John overdrive the circuit to cause an arc to connect the thing to hook up the, which also wouldn’t work. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re essentially moving two pieces of metal far away from each other when the lid is closed because there’s a hinge
⏹️ ▶️ John going on there. And so there’s nothing you can do in software to bridge that gap to turn the microphone back on. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is to prevent someone from somehow hacking your laptop and you close the lid and you think everything’s fine and it’s closed the lid,
⏹️ ▶️ John but really it’s they’re listening and sending all of your audio to this nefarious person who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John spying on you or whatever. So this is Apple bragging about their
⏹️ ▶️ John increased security and their T2 supporting Macs. And all of this is going towards,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure we’ll talk about in the future, is something that Apple has said themselves and it will just,
⏹️ ▶️ John the drumbeat will continue as they go with the T3 and all the other things. They want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs like iPhones. We’ve talked many times in the past, and there’s an old adage in the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John world that physical access trumps all security. So if you have access to someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John PC, as in you’re sitting in front of it, you’re physically there with it, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John security-wise that can be done in that computer to stop you from getting into it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s so many different ways to get into a PC, despite any kind of encryption or anything like that, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if the PC is running all the way down to those ones that freeze the thing, and so they freeze the state
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the RAM chips, literally with cold stuff, freeze the RAM, and then extract
⏹️ ▶️ John your encryption keys because they’re in memory somewhere when your computer is on, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John All sorts of things like that. Just think, look, security is great. It’s great for preventing remote exploits of people
⏹️ ▶️ John attacking your computer over the network and all sorts of firewalls and all sorts of things to prevent
⏹️ ▶️ John privilege escalation. If you’re having, you know, if you connect to the computer somehow that you can escalate
⏹️ ▶️ John your privileges, but physical, if you’re in there in the room with it, or if some nefarious person steals your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have it in their laboratory and like they’re physically with it, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. And as we
⏹️ ▶️ John know from phones, that has not really been the case for a long time with phones and that the goal is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if even if someone nefarious has your phone, that it’s very difficult or impossible, the
⏹️ ▶️ John goal for it to be impossible to get into that phone. And there are all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of exploits that have, you know, made this not true for phones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John every time one of those exploits is found, Apple closes it in the next phone and so on and so forth. So it gets harder
⏹️ ▶️ John and harder. The whole goal of the T chip architecture for Macs is to make Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John like phones, where there is no longer a blanket expectation that if you have physical access to a Mac, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get into it. You want to make it more like phones where you might not be able to get into it. And the goal is you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not supposed to be able to get into it and anytime you can get into a Mac because you have Physical access Apple goes back to the drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John board and finds a way to close that hole and produces something better So the Macs aren’t there yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s the goal and it’ll be pretty neat when they get there despite the fact that it will make
⏹️ ▶️ John dual booting and Doing what we want with our computers and all sorts of other stuff Much much
⏹️ ▶️ John harder, but that’s just the world we live in and I think it’s probably the right move And I just hope they can preserve as much of
⏹️ ▶️ John the cool hackery fun things you can do with computers while they make things more secure
⏹️ ▶️ John for regular people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a fun line to walk, but I think they can do it.
atp.fm supports Dark Mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, in follow-up, ATP FM, our website, is now dark mode enabled, thanks to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of the show, Spencer Wohlers, who basically gave me a bunch of CSS to dump in Squarespace. And that’s what I did. Hooray.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you happen to have Purple Safari, and you’re on Mojave, and would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to check that out, please feel free. If you have bug reports, I guess send them to me, and I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to them one day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See? You touch it, it becomes your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know. This is what I do, though. I do it for you guys, so you don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one goes to the ATP website, so it doesn’t matter. But everyone’s going to go there because they’re going to go to ATP dot FM slash store,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And then they’ll see the ATP website. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey running Mojave and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have dark mode enabled and you’re running Safari technology preview, officially known as Purple Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John then yes, you too will see dark mode, which is exactly like light mode, except basically reversed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not very exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a very exciting website.
Sponsor: Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Hover. Visit hover.com slash ATP to learn more and get 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first purchase. Get a domain name for whatever you’re passionate about. Hover is an awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place to buy and manage domain names. I’ll tell you what, these days you want your own name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just manage your own identity. Wherever you have your identity, whether it’s your email address or the website URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you give people, it says something about you, good or bad. You know, if you have some kind of massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web host behind your name and what you’re giving people, That comes with a certain degree of baggage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what if that company is falling out of favor, or what if it’s no longer cool, or what if it has political
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, right? And it also just kind of shows like you’re not established very well, or you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really saying something with who you are. Hover can change that for you by giving you a domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name. Your email address can be your name at whatever you want. Your website can be whatever you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco .com or.info or.plumbing or.design, whatever it is. You can have a name that you own and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control. And Hover is just a wonderful place to do that. You know, there’s lots of places you can get domain names online.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried a lot of them myself, and I manage most of my domains at Hover for a reason. Because Hover is just really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. They’re pleasant, they don’t try to upsell you or scam you. They give you privacy by default.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their control panel is super nice, and they have wonderful support if you ever need it. Although I bet you won’t, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just really easy to use, and it’s really nice. But I highly suggest, once again, check out Hover for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco domain name. You can control your own identity, control the branding that you’re showing the world. It really makes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look better when you have your own domain name.
iPad Pro Q&A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So visit hover.com slash ATP to learn more and get 10% off your first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase. Hover, get a domain name for whatever you’re passionate about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have had a busy week. I had a very busy week, as did Marco, last week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we kind of turned our worlds upside down in order to go to Brooklyn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a whim, if you will. But Marco, you really missed the city a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you decided to go back, if I understand things correctly. So tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To make a long story short, I’m sitting here with a 12.9 inch iPad review unit, and a pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keyboard. So jealous. By the way, some quick real-time follow-up. I realized right after we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finished the last segment about connecting the old pencil, that there is indeed a way to do it with all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple gear. You can plug, using a USB-C to lightning cable, you can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the C end into the iPad, the lightning end into the kind of ginger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changer adapter for the pencil that lets you plug an iPad, plug into it to charge it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had, you know, C to lightning, to flippy dongle thing to pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I plugged it all in to see if it would pair and it wouldn’t. So there is a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed to plug the old pencil into the new iPad very indirectly, but it doesn’t do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my word. Anyway, so yeah, so I was able to ask some questions of some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful Apple people who gave me, very generously, gave me some time. I asked a whole bunch of nerdy questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t really, this was literally a few hours ago, and so I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not had a lot of time to formulate my own impressions of this device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a few exceptions. But for the most part, I haven’t had that much time. All the official press
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews all hit this morning as we record. So, you know, if you need, if you want a review from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who’s been using it for more than a couple hours, I would suggest going to those. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe next week, after I have had more time with it, I will have more to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for now, I don’t know, what do you guys want to know? I mean, you had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some pretty good questions earlier. What do you want to know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you ask Apple most of the things that we asked you to ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Apple? Yeah, so, and so to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put this in context too, Like I’ve had a couple of fortunate occasions in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’ve gotten the chance to ask Apple people questions. And you have to understand, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and you see this a lot in the reactions whenever Gruber has an exec on the talk show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you have to understand that, you know, Apple people are not gonna tell you all their secrets. They’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you about future products. They’re not gonna say anything that makes the company or their products look bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the certain questions aren’t even worth asking. These all have limited time. Like, you know, when Gruber’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the talk show with an executive, he has, what, like 45 minutes maybe at most? Like, you know, the press briefings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like, you know, 20 minutes to a half hour at most. So like, there’s not a lot of time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask questions that you don’t think you’re gonna get a useful answer on. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask a few of them anyway. So one of the, you know, one of the, you know, I didn’t get a lot of, you know, solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ground on things like, you know, price increases and everything. I did find out, though, about the headphone jack removal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad Pro that basically literally just doesn’t fit. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main issue with the iPad Pro is the thickness and while the headphone jack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would indeed probably still fit on the outer edge, it would have to protrude into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case into where the screen area is and it doesn’t fit behind the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the main problem with that. And I’m actually, I’m kind of like looking at it, I’m kind of surprised that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ports even fit, But I think the answer of why the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new iPad bezel is exactly the size that it is, is probably that the USB-C port just barely fits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I bet if you look at the teardown that iFixit will probably publish sometime in the next 24 hours or so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess that there’s very little clearance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the USB-C port and the screen behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something that people pointed out after last week’s show, we were talking about USB-C on the phone. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you, Marco, mentioned that lightning still has an advantage it’s thinner, but many people
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out that the new iPads are thinner than any of
⏹️ ▶️ John the current iPhones, in fact thinner I think than any iPhone ever made. Yes, by a
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet they have USB-C, and yet it has USB-C on it. I think the argument for the phone though was always,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that you couldn’t fit USB-C in any of the phones, but that ideally
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would still continue to like to make the phone thinner. Just because thinner would mean lighter,
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner means more room for a case, thinner means more room for a larger battery case, it’s just, you know, the naked robotic core,
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s room to make it thinner, and if you could get the iPhone X but
⏹️ ▶️ John have it half the thickness and then put a chunky case on it or something, it would be a better, lighter phone
⏹️ ▶️ John than the current one. Obviously, setting aside, obviously, battery life and all the reasons why it’s not thinner, but all the things being equal, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you could find a way to keep the battery life but also make it thinner, it’d be good. On the other hand, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like making the iPad half the thickness of the current one,
⏹️ ▶️ John you start to run into to issues with like, now it has to be like a bendy material because it’s so large and you get so much
⏹️ ▶️ John leverage if you have any kind of fulcrum, like in the center, like your knee or something, if it really is half the
⏹️ ▶️ John thickness or, you know, it has to be bendy at certain points. Same thing with the phones. I mean, at a certain point, if you make your phone too thin, it has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John bendy, but we’re not at bendy materials yet. So I feel like the phone can get thinner easier
⏹️ ▶️ John than the iPad because you have less leverage to bend a phone, although, you know, talk about the iPhone 6, we’ve already seen,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what the phone is made out of and if it doesn’t have enough spring back, you can bend it already, but
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning on the phone gives Apple the ability to make the phone even thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John than the current iPad, which would be advantageous for the phone, again, assuming you could fit the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and assuming it can be springy or whatever, but perhaps not advantageous to the iPad because the challenges are
⏹️ ▶️ John so much greater. Probably some other way that force touch isn’t on the iPads because just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the physical reality is of having a larger surface area to figure out where to put all the force sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John and bending and all that other stuff. Anyway, all this is to say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the headphone thing, that’s interesting information that they couldn’t get it to fit, but USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John barely fitting makes total sense to me, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a computer standard and it is a flat thing instead of a round cylindrical thing. But when you said that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, the headphone jack won’t fit, I immediately thought of our friend, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone will tell me the exact name of this, the little skinnier headphone jack, what is that called? The 1.8 millimeter thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s 1.8 or 1.16, I believe. It’s like the, it’s half the diameter
⏹️ ▶️ John What a troll that would be to put that thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there because
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody has anything that plugs into that. It’d be like, oh, look at this headphone jack and you’d go to plug in your headphones. It’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, why is this not, is this a joke? Why is this headphone so tiny? And you can get an adapter, of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco from the- Of course, a dongle. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone to headphone dongle. You’d have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, David Schaub in the chat got it right. It’s 2.5 millimeter and the other ones are 3.5. So it’s not, it isn’t half the size, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that would have been great. I mean, actually, it sounds silly. Like we would make fun of them mercilessly
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had a headphone dongle instead of no headphone. But I think it would actually solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the low latency cheap audio problem that people are complaining about. Like they want to be able to, you know, edit audio without
⏹️ ▶️ John the latency of a Bluetooth headphone. Uh, and you, you know, you want to be able to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing plugged in while you did that. And anyway, that makes sense. I mostly buy that. I think I would prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad to be thin and not fint the headphone jack. So I think they made the right call in terms of that trade off. It’s kind of surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John that they didn’t mention that in the keynote. Like it’s such a explicable,
⏹️ ▶️ John easily testable reason that makes sense and would like, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John to save that for briefings instead of, instead of just tell us on stage, it’s so thin we couldn’t even fit
⏹️ ▶️ John a headphone. I don’t know, maybe they didn’t have a good way to sell and they figured let’s just not mention it at all. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John still feel like it’s going to be somewhat disappointing to people, but it also sounds like it’s not coming back because if it doesn’t fit, it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t fit. The only way they can get it to come back is if they switch to OLED where the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John will be thinner, kind of like the iPhone X versus the iPhone XR or
⏹️ ▶️ John XS versus the XR, where the OLEDs apparently are thinner than LCDs because you don’t have of the backlight assembly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe it can come back then, but until then, don’t look for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I mean, and so, yeah, so I got a number of good tidbits about this kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, and I think, honestly, I don’t think it’s coming back no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what technology does, because like, I think once Apple is done with the port, like, they’re not gonna bring it back. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just not the way they operate.
⏹️ ▶️ John So wait until USB-A comes roaring back to the laptops. Keep hope alive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or maybe SD. Like, if it didn’t come back to the MacBook Air, It’s not coming back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we don’t, we gotta wait for the new design philosophy. There could be an SD card slot. I’m still holding on to hope.
⏹️ ▶️ John SD card could come back. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco actually, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been thinking more about MagSafe, just because it annoys me more and more to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John using a Thunderbolt 3 port to power something, like plugging a power adapter into it. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that incredibly high bandwidth, incredibly capable port is doing is supplying power. And it’s like, put a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, and then let people still run their laptops through USB-C. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make those ports stop working for that purpose, but also have MagSafe. So if people want, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can use MagSafe for power, leaving all their other ports available for port stuff. But if they don’t want and
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to bring one charger with them, you can also charge it from USB-C. This is my current Mac laptop fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, sorry to interrupt. Go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, so I did ask about OLED because like, you know, one question obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you have these phones that have OLED now for two years. You know, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not OLED on the iPad? Like is it just not ready yet or anything? And of course, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are never gonna say something is, you know, not ready yet, because that implies a future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction. So, you know, again, like, you gotta take what you can get with like, with, you know, the way they answer stuff, because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just knowing how they work, like, they’re not gonna, they’re never gonna transmit future intentions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they know that can bite them in the butt, and so they’re cautious. But the impression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, basically the impression I got about OLED is that the OLED tech simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t there yet for panels of the right size and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco properties that would go in an iPad, that they’re basically just not good enough yet in areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like off-axis viewing and color and everything else. So my interpretation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer is like, that might be coming down the road, but not imminently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that makes sense because, think about OLED panels and where they’re made, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John we all know they’ve been made in phones for a long time. Apple is kind of late to this party, but phones are all of a similar size. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not too giant. And then they’re also made for television sets, but the television set ones, as thin as they are, are massively
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker than any screen that has to fit inside a 5.9 millimeter iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And much lower density. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have way fewer pixels in them. So there’s the two ends of the spectrum. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phone size, very high density, very, very thin. And there’s television size, comparatively
⏹️ ▶️ John monstrously low density, gigantic but way too thick. And so I think they have to meet in
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle there where they can finally make something that is very high density,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also like the size of an iPad, which would be a huge number of pixels. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if an OLED screen has ever been made with that many pixels. Like I don’t do the math on how many pixels are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John on the big iPad at the retina resolution, what are the native pixels?
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, I would love one. And I’m sure if they get there, they will use it because that’s clearly the direction they’re going, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John surprise me that they’re not quite there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also keep in mind, and this is not anything they said, but keep in mind that when you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way the phones went OLED, they had to go to 3X. Like 2X isn’t enough. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to go to 3X because, I think partly because of the way that OLED doesn’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the subpixels. Like if you look at the little subpixel pattern of how OLED screens represent the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red, green, and blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not all OLEDs, it’s just that’s what they chose to do with their panels, pen tile or whatever, which is gross if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and there’s a bunch of different arrangements and everything, but basically, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixel doesn’t have red, green, and blue. Basically, every pixel has any two of those. They all have green, and then they kind of alternate red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and blue. And so maybe they went 3X on the phones to try to alleviate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the problems that came along with having those not really all there subpixels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe they would have to go 3X on the iPad to get acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality. And that would of course make it even harder, because then that’s an even bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also I think price could become a problem at that point. Again, this is nothing they said, but the phone sells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for more than what the iPad sells for. But the iPad has almost all of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware as the phone. So you basically have a larger panel and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few other extra things, like the bigger GPU and everything. And yeah, the phone has more cost in the cameras maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like the iPad has some pretty major costs that the phone doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have or has smaller ones of, but sells for less money. So I would imagine there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an economic issue there of like you probably can’t put an extremely cutting edge OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3X panel and get enough of them to supply all the iPad Pros necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2018. So anyway, so I had a bunch of other like miscellany that I asked before I got into some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good stuff. I did ask because I was so concerned about my fingerprint pad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my 10.5 finger pad pro that’s just covered in smeary greasy fingerprints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. I asked if there was any change to the oleophobic coating. No, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t. So that’s unfortunate. It’s the same oleophobic coating as before. The anti-reflective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coating got better, but that’s actually under the oleophobic coating so that’s not going to probably have any effect here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So unfortunately the new one is going to be probably just as fingerprinty as the old one and that’s a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rear camera, there’s been a lot of question about what the rear camera is. Is it the XR camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is it different in certain specs? And the answer basically is that it’s a whole new camera, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly comparable in most major ways to the one that’s in the XS and XR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it supports Smart HDR, it does not support portrait mode, but, and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impression wise, it’s freaking huge. Like the camera looks massive. It actually looks kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it looks like it’s a pretty awesome camera. I know that people are down on iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras who are nerds, but I would say that’s a short-sighted view and you’re missing out. Like I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the iPad camera. I don’t carry it around in the world and hold it up to landmarks, but I use it around the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it like, you know, I’ll take pictures of like my breakfast and send it to Mike. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like I will do a lot of things with the iPad camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re just gonna let that go and not explain it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And like, or like a lot of apps will use it in useful ways. besides AR demos, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care about, even stuff like the eBay app, if you’re selling something on eBay, you can do the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually way easier to do it on an iPad than it is on a desktop browser because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it integrates the photo taking right with it and so you can just like, snap a few pictures of the thing you’re selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just post it right there and have it all be done. It’s like, there’s uses like that, that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad benefits from its camera. So anyway, it is a good camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not exactly the same as the other ones, but it seems like it’s close enough. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked also, the iPad is seemingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s marketed seemingly as a portrait device. You know, like the logo on the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faces a certain way. Like the logo on the back only looks right when you’re in portrait. Yet, the way that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it is in a keyboard case, and the way a lot of people use it is in landscape, like a keyboard case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked like, you know, if there was like something behind that. And I think I provoked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some thought. It didn’t seem like a lot of people asked that. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a number of responses to my questions that indicated that not a lot of people asked the kind of things I was asking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think a lot of it was just like, legacy, it was always designed that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also it matters less and less, because now, since there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more home button, the official orientation of the device in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware matters less, because you see it less. Like when it’s in landscape,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have this big circle on the side where the home button is. You do still have certain things that are not on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all four sides. You still have the positioning of the sleep wake button, the volume buttons, and the face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera being significant things that are only in one spot. But otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only time you would notice that your iPad is in the wrong orientation, if you have a keyboard case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected to it, is if it boots and you see the Apple boot logo. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t reboot your iPad that much. And now even the keyboard case covers up the back. So you don’t see the Apple logo on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back being sideways either. So that was interesting, I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked a lot about the smart connector. The original smart connector for the first iPad Pro, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any listeners who aren’t following along, that’s the little three dots that the keyboard plugs into. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple advertised it as a thing and it was positioned as the kind of thing that other people can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make accessories for it besides Apple. And in the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, three years since the iPad Pro has existed? Has it been about that long?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Something like that, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in the three-ish years that the iPad Pro has existed, I think only two non-Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart connector things have ever been made. They were both by Logitech, I think. One was a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird keyboard that nobody liked, and one was the slowest charging dock in the world. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I asked about this, and you know, because now, the new iPad Pro still has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart connector, but now it’s in a different spot, and only Apple’s keyboard uses it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, the gist I got is that this could theoretically be used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other things, but that it’s still really pretty much only designed for keyboards. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t have the bandwidth or power to really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than that. For anything more than that, they expect people to be using USB-C instead, and that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. I asked about backlit keys and whether the smart connector would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to provide enough power for backlit keys. Basically, the answer I got on that was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they try to make this thing as thin-lined as possible, and I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though I want backlit keys, I also am a user of this thing, and when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard is on the iPad, it does get pretty bulky. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I don’t need more bulk on that. So I respect that decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple knows as well as I do that there are aftermarket options of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancier keyboard cases that have backlighting and maybe aluminum and stuff like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can cover it somewhat. I did ask, is there an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MFI program or something? Are there gonna be third-party smart connector things? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the general answer I got was pretty much no, or at least like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t happened yet. Like it didn’t seem like they were closing the door to that, but it seemed like there certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t any on the horizon. So I’m guessing that’s gonna stay that way because if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re a device manufacturer, why would you make something for the smart connector when you could make something for USB or Bluetooth and have it serve everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple wants a thin and light solution to backlit keys, I have a suggestion for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I’m gonna suggest? You all have kids. What am I gonna say? A light bright?
⏹️ ▶️ John Close. Do any of your kids’ bedrooms have things stuck to the wall?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I know what you’re talking about. The thing where you, it kind of, it’s like a light capacitor, if you will, so it’ll like-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a light, I was gonna reference this, but I realized maybe you two didn’t have this in your childhood.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was a kid, glow in the dark was big. Yeah. Lots of kids’ toys
⏹️ ▶️ John were glow in the dark in some fashion. I guess it was maybe in the 50s, 60s, and 70s,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whenever it was invented it was a big thing. Maybe by the time you were kids it wasn’t that big of a deal. Anyway, this technology still
⏹️ ▶️ John exists. Most often used to have little stickers of stars that you put on your bedroom wall or ceiling in your child’s bedroom,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then when you turn on the lights at night. It’s most often used in watches. Yeah, well the watches
⏹️ ▶️ John have radium, which I don’t think was a great suggestion for a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they haven’t had radium since the 50s. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but that wouldn’t be a good
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestion for keys. But glow in the dark is still a thing. Look in the trunk of all of your cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s probably a little tiny handle that government mandates be in there so you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John out if you’re ever trapped in your trunk. And chances are, because car manufacturers want to save money and weight, they just make it glow in
⏹️ ▶️ John the dark instead of putting a light, because I think there’s some government requirement that you have to be able to find it. What else did I see
⏹️ ▶️ John that was glow in the dark? There was something else that I saw recently that was like a modern thing that had a plastic glow in the dark part.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, if they made the little, the key caps or the little white parts of the key caps out of the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John glow in the dark material that sort of charges up with sunlight during the day and then when it’s dark, glows in the dark,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could do that, but it would look incredibly cheap and it would look like it was a toy from the 70s, but it would work and it would not add
⏹️ ▶️ John weight. Thank you, you’re welcome, Apple. Oh, I’ll send you a bill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good luck. Yeah, the entire watch world figured this out too. It’s called Lume Paint and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very widely used. Or you can use, I believe, tritium gas tubes, which is what ball watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, that kind of always softly glow, although I can’t imagine Apple going for that. Like, yeah, our newest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environmental initiative, tritium gas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that doesn’t sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better than radium. Yeah, it’s not really, but the lume paint is fine. What else did I ask?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, why does the iPhone aggressively pursue water resistance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the iPad doesn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s my children want to know this answer too, and so do I on behalf of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked you, like, you know, like had there been maybe any advances in water resistance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just haven’t been talked about? Like that it happens to be more water resistant now, but that she never really said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, the answer I basically got is like, I’m the first person to ever have asked that question.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco come on, that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to, like, I have a better answer. The answer for them is, I mean, I don’t know, the answer is that it’s more like a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John or a laptop, and you wouldn’t stick your Mac underwater, and therefore it’s not a concern. I mean, the real answer, as we’ve talked before, is I’ve,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey, I’m sure, has argued, for Mac laptops to be more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey water-resistant. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I would say, oh, well, it’s more like a laptop, so there doesn’t have to be, no, no, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, you’re taking the wrong idea from that. In fact, iPads should be waterproof and
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops should be way more water resistant than they are because we all live in the world where we have drinks
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are computers and there are iPads and there are phones and yes, maybe you’re less likely to drop your iPod,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad off the edge of a boat into the water than you are your phone. But who knows, like people are, to Mark’s
⏹️ ▶️ John point earlier, take pictures with their iPads and stuff like that. There’s really no reason Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t make all the iPads as just as waterproof as the phone, other than the fact that they just don’t consider an important
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do. But I think it’s super important, and I think everybody with kids and iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John feels the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the reason I ask is like, I would want that. Even though I don’t frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to use my iPad out in the rain, I would like the option to if it comes up, and that’s something that computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly can’t do, right? And so at least, you can do it with your iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Apple Watch, that’s great. It would be awesome if the iPad could be your any conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, and you wouldn’t have to worry about that. In practice, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anybody liquid damaging an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m sure somebody like Casey could
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Oh, I’m sure it could happen. Here’s the thing, if any iPad is easy to waterproof, it’s the one with only one remaining port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, well, all those speakers though. I think the speakers might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the hard part. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but I feel like the watch has solved that problem. Sealed speaker chambers that expel water
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other jazz. The watch is much more complicated to waterproof than the current iPad, the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro rather, because it’s literally just got one hole in it. That’s all, and then the speaker rails. But again, you seal
⏹️ ▶️ John off the speaker chambers just like they are on the watch and deal with the one USB-C port.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the thing practically looks like it’s waterproof now. Not that I think anyone should go and test this, but look at it. Like, do you see any place where
⏹️ ▶️ John water can get in besides the speaker holes and USB-C? Are there creases? Are there gaps? I bet the thing is, you know, completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I have a feeling it would be hard to make the speakers be good and waterproof. Like the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch doesn’t need to be good. It just needs to be like barely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John They made it, they made the speaker on the watch louder. Anyway, I feel like this is within Apple’s grasp and it would be a
⏹️ ▶️ John useful thing to do. And in terms of water resistance, you know, like maybe it is, like if you spill a
⏹️ ▶️ John drink on top of your iPad and the water just sort of runs off the edges, you know, does it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does capillary action suck it into the speaker holes or does it just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, you just wipe it off with a
⏹️ ▶️ John paper towel and you’re fine. Like, it might be more water resistant than we think, but the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple does not tell you that it’s waterproof basically says, please do not use your iPad in the bath, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not drop your iPad into the water. Do not use your iPad in the rain. Makes me think that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John vulnerable in ways that it doesn’t need to be. So Apple, if you’re listening, please make waterproof iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, it took Amazon a long time to even make a waterproof Kindle. And that’s one where a lot of people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read on the beach or in the bath. And so there was clear demand for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it took them a long time for even a simple device. So maybe there was something too, like larger devices being harder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, and the Kindle doesn’t cost $2,000. So please, please make my $2,000 iPad waterproof. It’s more important than my $99 Kindle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did ask John one of your pet questions. I asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, is there anything that we are losing by leaving the lightning ecosystem and going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to USB-C, like the example that you cited, which is that the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging cables are like thicker and bulkier and less flexible than the lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, or than the USB-A ones in the lightning world. Like the USB-C lightning cables are like much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thicker and the connector is bigger and everything else as you described last
⏹️ ▶️ John time. You didn’t feed them that answer though. You just asked the question, right? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use those as an example of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Sorry. I just wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John see if they have the same thing because you gotta answer in an innocent way. Like, cause they could just say no, we’re not losing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John then you pull out the, well, what about the thinner cables? but I would love to see if they came up with that and they probably wouldn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not gonna tell you anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. I’ll tell you what though, so I have the one meter cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, and it’s basically the same specs wise as the power cable that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes from the USB-C brick to MacBook Pros for the last two years. So it’s a USB 2.0 data only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not really meant for high speed data. 2.0 data only, and you know, typical white C to C cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it feels like it’s thinner and more flexible than the two meter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. That comes with, like, I don’t know if they just didn’t need as much stuff inside to make a shorter one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does feel better. It’s not quite as flexible as an old Lightning one is, like a USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lightning one, but it’s really close. I would say it’s close enough. So that might not be an issue anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How long is the hard plastic connectory part? It’s the same as the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember the, I think it was lightning cables, in the beginning had
⏹️ ▶️ John longer, stiff plastic sections and then they shortened it up at some point? Am I crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? I think you’re right. No, yeah, I think you’re right. That was a while ago. Anyway, and I also asked, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to USB-C at all and why do it now? And the answer I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got was very interesting. Basically, it seems like one of the things they were really aiming for here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pro display use, external displays. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB, and lightning was not designed to handle 5K displays. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add enough bandwidth or whatever to lightning to make it handle a 5K external display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have required updating the lightning spec, adding new circuitry, new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables, an updated connector maybe. Something about lighting would have had to change to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much bandwidth. Rather than make that change, they decided to just go to USB-C because they could already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. And so, I’m a little curious, and I didn’t ask this, I didn’t really have time, but from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software side, it seems like a pretty big decision to make for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a probably rare use case. I don’t think there’s that many people doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external monitor work on 5K monitors with iPads. Maybe that’s because there wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good way to do it before, but I don’t know. I did verify though, so the new, the USB-C port on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads does output full 5K at 60 hertz without any downscaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in transit. So like it’s actually full bandwidth. And it’s USB 3.1 Gen 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the old ones were Gen 1, this is Gen 2. Oh, I also asked like, I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is the first port transition I think that Apple has had in modern history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has no backwards compatibility adapters. If you have Lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, you can’t connect them to the iPad Pro at all, through anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, when they went dock to Lightning, there were dongles. When they went USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to A, or A to C, there are dongles. When they went FireWire 400 to 800, there were adapters. Like, it seems like they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt, there’s always been adapters. Like, I don’t think there’s ever been a time when in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one generation they’ve changed a port and all the old stuff could not even be adapted to it. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have lightning docks or lightning audio garbage peripherals or anything like that, you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t put them in here.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about the adapter you just talked about using for the pencil?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I was gonna say that the lightning cables are like the wrong gender plug, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about that. But I’m guessing it won’t work for the same reason. Because I asked this and I got a surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or technical-oriented answer of basically like, the way you would have to negotiate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s put into it. It would be very hard to design that kind of adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it would be, it sounds like it’s not in the cards. It sounds like, the impression I got is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that they just haven’t shipped the dongle yet, it sounds like they’re not going to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back up a second, I think I missed your answer before of like, are there any disadvantages to going from
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning to USB-C and you gave, described your examples of downgrades,
⏹️ ▶️ John but did Apple say anything? Did they have anything to offer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just making sure that we get their non-answer on the record.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, and again, like, again, a lot of this stuff is gonna be like, you know, me asking a very probing question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and getting not really the answer I was looking for, but other interesting information, at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know. But that USB, the USB C monitor one, the extra monitor one, you know, I’m sure is 100% true
⏹️ ▶️ John and makes, you know, some kind of sense. But as you noted, like that is a rare enough use case that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to think strategically that there, that it’s not just that, like, that’s the reason they gave
⏹️ ▶️ John you and it is a reason and it may be an important reason for some people, but to completely ditch lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John for USB C has to be part of some larger, strategic, longer reaching thing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they believe. I’m surprised they didn’t give this answer that they believe long term, the number of things that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do with USB C on an iPad is greater than the number you’ll ever be able to do with lightning. So it’s not just about external
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors. It’s basically about, you know, as we’ve all said, like going to a standard port that has more capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, whose capabilities have been expanded within the same connector and parameters and probably will
⏹️ ▶️ John be like at a certain point, I’m sure the iPad pros are gonna, you know, have thunderbolt if they possibly can, just because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same connector and they’ll just creep up there. Like that’s, that’s the the more strategic answer that I guess they didn’t give
⏹️ ▶️ John because it hints at future things that haven’t been announced. And then you would have come out and say, oh, Apple promises new,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, USB-C peripherals to do these amazing things. Instead they just gave you the
⏹️ ▶️ John one concrete use case for this iPad Pro that they have announced and it’s a real thing. You can do external video
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just gonna say, you know, use your imagination, but we’re not gonna talk about that other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also asked a lot about like USB-C hubs and power and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. And I gotta say, it was all good stuff, basically. So number one, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I’m gonna knock on the microphone here. I finally have my little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C power brick from Apple. And for some reason that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people I spoke to today weren’t aware of, you can’t buy it separately. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know why, I’m guessing this is a temporary oversight. They didn’t seem to think this was a decision. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounded like it was just like, you know, oops, that should be available separately. So, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a wonderful little power adapter. It is approximately the same volume as the old iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little, you know, 10 watt brick that came with pretty much all iPads before this. It’s about the same, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly different shape, but it’s about the same total size. And that makes it about slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger than the Aukey brand one that I got from Amazon recently that also is an 18
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watt USB PD charger, but is probably built with like, you know, sawdust and cats. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would much rather trust the Apple one. I would love to get a few more of these. But basically, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wonderful little power adapter. It’s 18 watts. I also asked if, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous iPad Pros added fast charging, but if you looked at actual, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, time tests of people doing fast charge tests, it seemed like they weren’t drawing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much power through the fast chargers. Like, it’s like the regular brick is 10 to 12 watts, depending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on which one you have. and it seemed like the previous ones were not drawing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole lot more than that, even in fast charge mode. So I asked if the new one has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, like what is the maximum wattage that it will fast charge at?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And was told that it can go as high as 45 watts, which is awesome. Like to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to charge that quickly. So that being said, I’ve been trying to drain the battery of mine over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour, so I can see that. I’m down to 64% and it will only charge, I have a little power measuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thingy, and it will only pull about 27 watts at this rate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is still way better than I think it was before, which I would estimate it closer to like the 15 to 18 range before. So it is- What have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got it plugged into? I have a plugable USB power monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s going to an Apple 62 watt power brick. So anyway, so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will fast charge faster. I don’t know how much faster yet, but it does seem like it’s going to at least be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant. And if the 45 watt figure was correct, that will be very significant indeed. It apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will charge 7.5 watts outbound. So if you plug something into it, it can supply up to 7.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts, which is massive. That’s great. And I thought for like, some of the reviews were a little bit spotty on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what would work and what didn’t. So I brought my trusty Sound Devices USB Pre-2. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought it to the briefing with a USB-C cable. And so I could plug it in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if it worked. And sure enough, the previous iPad 10.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the lightning USB adapter things would not power up the USB pre. It would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start to power up and then stop. And it couldn’t draw enough power. You’d have to use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird little two-port one that offered power pass-through with the lightning input for power and the USB port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the lightning output that they released a year and a half ago. You’d have to use that, and that was dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So sure enough, the new iPad, I plug in the USB pre with a USB-C cable right into the side of it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it powers up fully. That is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we pause for a second? What was the look of the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey employees in the room when you say, one moment please, and bust out a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB pre 2, which if you’ve not seen one, is like the size of a relatively large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least relatively thick paperback novel. And you say, hold on please, I would like to plug this into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad Pro. Were they like, what the hell are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, as we covered before, physical access to iOS devices does not trump all security. In fact, all iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices are designed to resist physical attacks. So they’re like, go ahead, plug your little toy thing into your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. You’re not gonna crack it, probably, we hope. I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. I will say it was less of a weird look than when I took out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kitchen scale to weight the smart keyboard. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my word. You could have just asked them. They might have had the weight on the spec sheet. They didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did and they didn’t. So anyway, I asked about the USB mass storage access,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is one thing that every review has cited as a thing, because it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an obvious flaw in like, here you have this device that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really a computer replacement in a lot of different ways. Not in all ways and not in some big ways, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways a computer replacement. And you have this amazing hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can now do things with USB-C ecosystem. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really weird that the one thing that I think a lot of iPad owners have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do before and have hit a wall with is like, oh, I have this thumb drive, I wanna import
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the presentation into Keynote or something. Or I have this sound recorder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this camera that recorded stuff onto an SD card that I want to get onto my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only way it supported any of that stuff to date is, and still supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it today, is it can import photos from photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage, whether it’s a card or whatever, into the Apple Photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. And the hardware support is there for more than that. Like, third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are able, like, there’s a few things, I think Jason’s talked about this before, There’s a few, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, SanDisk things, or something, some brand that sells thumb drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can work with your iPad. But that’s because they have a custom app that is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly accessing the USB port and writing its own file access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, basically. And that’s stupid, they shouldn’t need to do that. And so I did ask,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this a deliberate choice not to offer this, or is it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like you haven’t gotten there yet. And of course, that is implicitly a question about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future Apple products, so I didn’t really get a straight answer, but I did get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions like, what would you use that for? And so it does seem to be the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John see my- You had answers for that, right? Of course it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course it did. So it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that they were being dismissive about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seemed like they didn’t want to tell me what’s coming in the future, but that that probably is coming in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. That’s kind of how it seemed to me. I mean, they didn’t give anything away, of course, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess, the way I would characterize their interest in the question, I would guess like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably is not like an opinionated choice to say, no, we don’t want anyone to ever access mass storage devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s probably not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Trout and Smith on Twitter was saying that it’s so easy to do, like the Apple itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John since they write the OS and they have access to the OS, can, it would be very easy for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John put a very simple driver in so that the files app could see all of your USB mass storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I surmise the fact that they haven’t is just because that’s one of the many things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we all think got kicked out of iOS 12 down the road to iOS 13. And due to the way Apple’s release
⏹️ ▶️ John cycles work, a feature like that, even though it would be in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John code, you know, like Shirley has already done, it’s like, well, you could just release that in a point release of iOS 12.
⏹️ ▶️ John They still could do that, but Apple’s philosophy is like, quote unquote, major
⏹️ ▶️ John features and major new functionality go in the big releases. There’s been a few rare occasions where they’ve released
⏹️ ▶️ John major functionality in the point release, but for the most part, they don’t like, it might seem like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so trivial to just throw it into iOS 12, but you don’t know how that’s gonna perturb iOS 12. And really you want
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 12 to get more stable as the point releases increase. So it’s just safer and more in keeping with Apple’s release philosophy
⏹️ ▶️ John to put that in 13, no matter how trivial it might be. along with all the other much less
⏹️ ▶️ John trivial stuff that builds on that. So I fully expect to see it in iOS 13. And even though we’re disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John that they don’t just sneak it out at a point release, yeah, we’ll live,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll wait. Yeah, I mean, it seems like the kind of thing that like if they’re gonna do a major update to iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even further increase productivity of iPad stuff, that seems like a low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hanging fruit. I know it isn’t super simple in the sense that like, you know, you probably don’t wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like opening files directly off the card because then what happens if they eject the card? So you probably want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it copy the files over first or something, but have some kind of interface and method for that. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to unmount it first. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Safely eject your card. There are a lot of implications for apps and all sorts of,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though writing the code is simple and just to get it to work, right? There’s like a one day of work for Steve Trout
⏹️ ▶️ John and Smith. The implications that that has for the whole rest of the system and the applications and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John that takes much more thought and probably relies stuff that’s been done in iOS 12, 13 and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything like that. So it does make some kind of sense that they wouldn’t try to rush that
⏹️ ▶️ John out to you. And they’re not going to tell you that It got booted out of iOS 12 or so we’ll just, we’ll just wait for
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco More miscellaneous things here. I’m going to try to go through these quickly cause it’s getting kind of boring. Um, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, new USB-C to headphone adapter is a standard USB audio device works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with max or does anything, uh, you can plug it into a hub. It like it’s, which is good. Which is interesting, because one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question I asked is, what are people supposed to do if they want to listen to headphones and charge it at the same time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer basically is, you can now use hubs for that. Which is not a great answer. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were better solutions, but that is unanswered in the sense that all standard USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hubs work. And as long as they are standards-based, they should and generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will work. So if you want to have charging while having something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else plugged in, You can do that the same way Casey’s doing it with his dumb 12-inch laptop. You have a power pass-through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub, and you plug the power cable into the power pass-through port, and then you have, you know, you can plug whatever else you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want into the other ports the hub offers, which is way better than the old, like, you know, weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning thing you had to buy from Belkin to do this on the iPhone. Like, you know, it’s still a dongle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still a hub, but it’s less horrible than other ones, I guess, you know? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna hog the one USB-C pass-through port that’s not used for power
⏹️ ▶️ John use it for your headphones. It also would have been better if they made a USB-A to headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter because most of those, like as we pointed out, most of those hubs don’t let you multiply your USB-C hubs. You usually
⏹️ ▶️ John just get one in and one out, but there’s usually tons of USB-A anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Basically, the answer to a lot of my, what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco official way to do this now or what should people do to solve this issue, the answer to a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was basically USB-C hubs. because I think Apple likes them a lot. Like, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to iPad people, talking to Mac people, it just seems like Apple is a big fan of USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hubs. So maybe they’ve had better luck with theirs than I have with mine. I hope so. Anyway, I also asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why just one USB-C port? Because like it seems, for this exact reason, like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like you would want two, like in an ideal world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know Apple’s not gonna give us like six, right? But like- North, South, East, West. There you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. But like, it wouldn’t be bad to have two because then you could have power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input along with a peripheral of some kind, whether it’s headphones or something else. That seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fairly common thing. It’s like, if you’re gonna use the port at all, you probably want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two of them. Right, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, two would be lovely. It would be 100% more. Yeah, so anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, yeah, I think that covers a bit of all the USB-C stuff. What was their answer to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why isn’t there two? Oh, you know, noncommittal like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of ports would you like? Why? So again, this is like, I don’t mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. In these very few chances I’ve had to talk to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple in this kind of capacity, I think about half the value of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to get answers to little nitpicky questions. The other half of the value is for me to make my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case pace to people who are pretty strong decision makers probably in these areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, here’s something I care about that I would like you to address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really take that opportunity very seriously and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treasure the chance to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I see you coming a mile away. It’s like if Marco ever asks a question you don’t want to answer, just ask him what he
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks about it. And then he’ll go off for 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes. But you know, look, Apple’s a company of smart people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue with each other and try to figure out what’s right to do, right? And so like, if I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give a counter argument or an argument to why something is a good idea or why something should change or should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, I feel like they respect that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like multiple USB ports are an inevitability in the iPad line. So you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they obviously know more, they know their future plans. So maybe they’re have been testing for the past six
⏹️ ▶️ John months, an iPad with four USB C, but it’s inevitable. Like you can’t, especially as they get larger,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when they go to like the third size and they start getting big enough, you know, like it’s going to happen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not this year and probably not next year and probably not the year after that, you know. So we’ll have to wait a while, but
⏹️ ▶️ John them asking you about it is the strongest hint you’re gonna get is that this is a thing we’ve already thought about
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’d love to hear your thoughts on, you know, because it’s the same thing with the USB mass storage. What would you use that for? Hmm, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, right, yeah, exactly. That’s very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I asked a lot of questions about the Apple pencil. One of the things I asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did try to pick up the iPad by the pencil, very carefully, like over a couch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can’t do it, but you can almost do it. It doesn’t, it isn’t as firmly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco held on there as I would have liked, but it is pretty firmly on there. As a couple of the reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have pointed out, I think, you know, the main vulnerability is if you like push it side to side, side to side as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just pulling it straight off, it’ll move a lot more easily. Just like MagSafe. Yeah, exactly. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, you know, the physics of how magnets and stuff work. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I noticed about the new pencil design is that, like I’ve seen a lot of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencils in the wild where people have some kind of ergonomic grip on them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s something fancy like what Mike has, like those like metal barrel around the whole thing, or whether it’s like one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those like rubber triangle things that we all had in school that made pencils easier to hold. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mentioned that a couple weeks ago when I was talking about how the Apple Pencil is designed as an
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal solid and not as a thing that fits in people’s hands. And when I saw the magnetic thing that solves the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem over at the pencil, I immediately thought, that solves a whole mess of problems, but causes
⏹️ ▶️ John one that didn’t exist before, which is now you can’t have a cool ergonomic rubber grip thing, but then how the hell do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge it? Yeah, exactly. I asked, basically, how much thickness can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you add to the pencil before it stops charging? And the answer was not much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the answer is zero, do not do that. It wasn’t zero, but it’s like, you know, on the order of like, you know, one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two millimeters. So like, you could maybe do like a vinyl wrap, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like a case, or not like a grip or anything like that. Like anything like that is gonna make it too far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the inuctive charger to
⏹️ ▶️ John charge. You can have this starting to get into nightmare territory, but you gotta have something that is kind of like a creature
⏹️ ▶️ John that opens up, like that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a rubber thing with like, you know, they’re like those toys
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like, they’re like rubber with metal armatures inside them, like that it would open up so you could attach
⏹️ ▶️ John it and there would just be a thin film between it. And then when you take it off, the little nightmare creature thing clamps down again.
⏹️ ▶️ John face hugger or a Metroid or something, something that clasps your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Pencil in a death grip. What is happening? I can see this product in my head. Someone needs to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I also asked, can anything else charge the new pencil? Like suppose you were like managing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of them and you wanted to bulk charge them. No, you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that aforementioned things from China will absolutely be able to charge your pencil. Maybe, I don’t know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just inductive charging. It’s not rocket science that someone will easily be able, unless they put DRM on the charging
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of some kind, some sort of security thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not talking about pairing, but just purely charging, someone will be able to make something that does. Now, whether someone
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to make something that does it, like where would you put that? And what would the use case be? I don’t know, but technically
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it should definitely be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. I mean, one use case would be like, suppose you have like a big fleet of these in like some big office or school or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You wanna like bulk charge all the pencils at night, but it seems like now that you can just stick them on top of the iPad, it seems like that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. Well, that’ll actually be interesting. Like we talked about the pencil canoes in Apple stores, where the pencils
⏹️ ▶️ John are, so they don’t need the canoes anymore because they can be stuck to it. But if anyone had a need to potentially bulk
⏹️ ▶️ John charge a bunch of Apple pencils, it might be Apple stores. So maybe Apple stores will have somewhere in the back room
⏹️ ▶️ John that exact thing you just talked about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the secret bulk pencil charger. I asked if the charge rate is slower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that it’s inductive. Didn’t get a strong answer on that, but the answer I got is a good explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, basically, or a good dodge at least, basically like, you know, it matters a lot less now because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pencil will so rarely have to charge from zero now, because it’s, you know, if you can just stick it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top, it’s gonna be 100% charged almost every time you pick it up. And I asked like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the battery, Like, if you’re just using it continuously, where you’re never putting it down, you’re just using it continuously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does the battery life compare to the first pencil? And they didn’t have exact figures, but they did say the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery is very slightly smaller to fit some of the new stuff inside. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be a little bit less in that scenario, but it’s likely to matter a lot less because it’s always fully charged.
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised they didn’t tell you that you have two pencils, one always charging, one in your hand. Battery runs out, swap them. Day pencil, night pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Apple loves for you to buy more of its peripherals. Exactly. Yeah, actually, I don’t think there’s any reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything to prevent you from doing that besides $130. You can use two pencils at
⏹️ ▶️ John once, I think. I only have the one. Someone needs to try that. The multi-play people definitely need to try that. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do like 11 touch points or something and touch one of the pencils, probably just one other touch point. I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John there probably aren’t many drawing applications that expect you to be drawing with two pencils at once, but now this is the thing I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also don’t know, the pencil I think uses a special type of digitizer to recognize itself. so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t do more than one, I don’t know. I also asked, we didn’t really hear anything about the pencils’
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance. It’s obviously a form factor change, but is anything different about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it more pressure sensitive, is it more, higher response rate, anything like that? Is any of that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different? And the answer is no. All that stuff is the same. And honestly, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. All that stuff, in my opinion, as a layman, none of that stuff needed to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What needed to change was all this physical stuff that made it really clumsy to use. So they did, and that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also learned that the capacitive area of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically like the lower third of the pencil. Like if you look, I think Panzerino’s article had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a diagram of where the magnets are in the pencil. And basically like as soon as the magnet ends from that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to the tip, it’s all, that whole surface is capacitive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you do the double tap gesture, it doesn’t have to be on the flat part. You can be anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the barrel, as long as it’s in that bottom third of the pencil, anywhere along the whole bottom of the barrel, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can double tap. So you don’t have to hold it in a certain way that puts the flat part under your index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finger. Like you can rotate it and have the flat part be anywhere and you can still have double tap access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your index finger.
⏹️ ▶️ John And apparently, again, Steve Trout and Smith on Twitter before the event even was finding a gesture, pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John gesture recognizers in iOS. One of them was a slide or like a swipe, right? Right, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that Apple just said you can tap it, but hardware wise, it seemed, and you mentioned a capacitive
⏹️ ▶️ John area, hardware wise, it seems like the pencil is capable of gestures. I can kind of understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t release gestures for the pencil because as hard as it is to get taps to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John intentional, like, Apple emphasizes very strongly in their sort of WWDC style videos
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you add this to your application, you should honor the system setting. I mean, if you wanna have custom settings,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fine, but like the honoring the system setting is important because if someone in the system says, ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John taps to the pencil, because say they’re a nervous pencil tapper, like if that’s their idle animation
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to use video game parlance, right? They
⏹️ ▶️ John would constantly be doing it. They also say, Apple says, “‘Don’t make it a destructive action,’ because if someone does it accidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want them to delete half their document accidentally, because it’s a thing that you can do accidentally.” So
⏹️ ▶️ John if double tapping is a thing that you can do accidentally, finger gestures, like sliding your finger along
⏹️ ▶️ John the pencil, talk about a thing that you could do accidentally. We all adjust our grip and move our fingers around on a pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John if the entire lower third of the pencil is capacitive, it would be very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John distinguish an intentional pencil gesture from someone just sliding their fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John around a pencil as part of the natural use. So I’m kind of glad that it didn’t go with gestures. But hardware wise, it’s kind of cool
⏹️ ▶️ John that the pencil has the ability to do more. And I can imagine that coming into, like maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a custom per application thing that you can actually turn on to have more sophisticated gestures for very complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John applications where the pencil would recognize both a tap and a slide gesture, of course a slide
⏹️ ▶️ John gesture immediately made me think of being able to slide my finger along my AirPods to change the volume. Please Apple, make that a real
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But yeah, so as is the case with many things related to
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Pro, as Jason so eloquently put it in something he wrote on Sex Colors,
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware is willing, but the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is weak. I think I’m mostly done here. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked if Logitech Crayon will work with the new iPad Pro, no. I also asked, I think my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco final question here that actually might be interesting. If you notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the very back, if you have a smart keyboard, get it out now, listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and look straight on the edge of it, that if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upper left and upper right keys, the tilde and the delete key, and you go straight up from there to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge of the smart keyboard cover, there are like five or six little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vent holes. Like, there’s holes in the keyboard connector on like the back edge of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I noticed this the other day, and the new ones have it too, and so I asked, what are those holes? Turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, they’re vent holes. It’s for the air to get out. Yeah, when you push down on a key, you know, if it was sealed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, it wouldn’t have feedback or anything, so like it wouldn’t be able to depress particularly well. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John actually air holes. It would be a pneumatic pressure keyboard where the bounce back of the key would be from the air
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure that’s built up when you press down on it, it would be a very unpleasing feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ John like the keyboard feel of the butterfly switches. Try
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Also, on the keyboard, I don’t know if this is because it’s new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does feel like it has more feedback than mine. But I’m guessing it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably because it’s new. I wouldn’t say it has more travel, it doesn’t. But it does feel like the keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like snap back a little bit better. But again, I’m pretty sure it’s probably just because they’re new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, the design of the smart keyboard is very, very different. So we’re moving on to the hands-on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area now. The design is very, very different. The old smart keyboard had a number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems. Number one was when you first got it, there was a pretty good chance that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t sit flat on a table. And if that happened to you, that was often never fixed because there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of problem with making it or the way the fabric would bend or whatever that made it very common,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this happened to me, where it just wouldn’t sit flat. like it just wouldn’t bend right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the fabric had some flaw. The way the new one is designed, I don’t think that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. Like I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem because it’s not doing the kind of crazy bends that the old one did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think it will be the problem. And also, the whole bottom plate of the new smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard is one piece instead of before it was two. Before you had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the part that was in front of the iPad and the part that was behind it, it would form like a little triangle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could like swivel on that little hinge point there, which made it also suck in your lap. The new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one sucks way less in your lap. It’s still not amazing like a laptop because the weight balance is off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s way better than it was. And this actually, like, one of the big things for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me of how I’m going to justify upgrading is that, because I use it in my lap a lot, and the smart keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way better in your lap now than it was before. As for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size, I have the 12.9 here, the 12.9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I don’t have the 11 but I was able to play with it there. The 11 is still right for me. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was right for me before, it’s right for me now. The 12.9 is really big still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is less big and I would I would actually recommend it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are an iPad power user. If you really like get a lot of work done on the iPad, if you multitask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, if you are doing heavy productivity, if you’re you’re drawing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it maybe, you want a bigger drawing area or things like that, I would suggest checking out the 12-9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is no longer ridiculous. Before, the first 12-9 was ridiculous. Like it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy in your hands, it felt too big, it just felt unwieldy. The new one is still big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s smaller enough that that is less of an issue. And so, it’s now within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the realm of normalcy. It’s still too big for me though. For what I use my iPad for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really need it to be a little bit smaller. But it’s closer than it’s ever been. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have been meaning to check out the large size, I would suggest you do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re on the fence, maybe go to a store before you commit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, really good day. Tired. Actually, going to the city is way nicer than it used to be because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a Shake Shack in Grand Central now. Nice. So I actually went there like multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you’re suggested them. I’m thinking back to their their headphone thing and how’s that not for him? They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got a camera bump. Obviously, the camera is a little bit more important than headphone jack, but you know, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John put a headphone jack bump in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there like that’s what Samsung would do. God,
⏹️ ▶️ John you tell you know, Apple, that’s what Samsung would do. And they’d be they’d say exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s amazing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think hasn’t Samsung actually made a phone with a headphone bump. I think I’ve seen phones in real life with a headphone bump on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wouldn’t surprise me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, you have this review unit. What do you plan on or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what did you order? I don’t recall. And does this change what you did or were planning to order?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have nothing ordered yet because by the time I decided to place an order,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was back ordered and I’m like, all right, fine. I’ll just, I’ll go to, so I’m just going to go to the store on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, what is it? What is it? Wednesday? Did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out? I’m just I’m just gonna go to the store on Wednesday and just see what I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get. What I want is the 11 now. Like I was very much on the fence between the sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like when we had the hands-on area, I remember being very surprised how big the 12.9 wasn’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still surprised at that. But now that I’m actually using it, where the 12.9 is really good, you know, I mentioned multitasking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned productivity, big drawing area. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12.9 is really good with browsing the web. It’s like webpages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like a desktop browser. Like the 11 inch, well the 10.5 and that class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always kind of feel like it’s just a big phone window that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re browsing. Like a lot of websites still will display like a mobile type layout. A lot of times you’ll have to do a lot of scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see something on a webpage or things like that. The 12.9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like you’re using a desktop browser. There’s still gonna be some functional differences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just in the way mobile Safari works, but the viewport that you get and the scale that you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of web pages, you feel like you’re just using a desktop, and that’s really cool. So if I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stuff that involved reading big websites or productivity stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I would go for the big one. I don’t, though. Most of what I’m doing on the iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couch surfing. Wait, that means something else, doesn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m surfing stuff on the couch casually. I’m like balancing it on my knee while using the keyboard type stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s sitting on my kitchen counter And I’m typing like during the day if I’m like cooking and somebody sends me a message. I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and type a response And so for what I’m for what I use it for I think the the 11 inches the better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size But one thing I do like a lot about the 12 9 besides the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheer size of web pages Is the aspect ratio the you know the the 10 the 11 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is? The first iPad that isn’t 4 by 3. It’s a little bit wider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I didn’t need it to get any wider. I would like to get a little bit taller. That’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the height, since I’m usually using it in landscape, because of the keyboard, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short height is usually a limiting factor of how much of a webpage I can see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually would, like, seeing the 12.9 here, it’s like, oh, this is actually nice to see this kind of height.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish the 11-inch expanded in the other direction, but, you know, that would also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it closer sort of square, and I know that would look weird to Apple, and so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not surprised it didn’t, but that is one thing, like the 12.9 has me like, questioning like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hmm, if I, I kinda like this height. Like, whenever I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been to a Microsoft store, and I’ve picked up like the big 15 inch Surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablet thing, it’s really cool to have a really big tablet. Like, it feels really cool for a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to actually, to hold it in one hand, and like draw with it with the pencil with the other hand, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big legal pad, like that’s really cool. I’m never gonna do stuff like that in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s really cool. So I do get kind of that feeling with 12.9, like, boy, wouldn’t this be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool if I was a different kind of person than I am? If I was actually somebody who would use like a giant pad of paper, that would be really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or who would pick up a webpage and mark it up, right? But the reality is like, I don’t mark up anything because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t work with anybody. Nobody ever asked me to mark up anything. So, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t handwrite anything myself. So that’s not really a thing either. But it is tempting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the bigger one. But now that I have the bigger one in hand for tonight, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already decided, yeah, I actually don’t want the bigger one after all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the 11 inch just gets taller, like in the ratio that it already was taller, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets even taller still in that dimension. And some of that is sacrificed
⏹️ ▶️ John to the home indicator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, you’re actually losing space because of the home indicator.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but that’s the dimension that it also got taller. If you have it in
⏹️ ▶️ John portrait, is the home indicator eats some space, but then you get that space back because it’s got like 164 extra points or pixels,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which, in that dimension. And overall, the 11 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re talking about a GUI and not a video or something, the safe area insets eat,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got rounded corners, eat some of your content area. So I’m kind of glad that it got bigger in at least one
⏹️ ▶️ John dimension, it’s partially offset the safe area insets that we all now have to deal with and anything with a UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John The 12.9 is so big anyway that the safe area insets as a percentage are less of a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as someone who watches a lot of video on the iPad, if I end up getting an 11 inch that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John this iPad someday, I’m kind of glad that it got wider just because that means a typical,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, letterbox style wide video will make a more efficient use of the space. The
⏹️ ▶️ John letterboxing will be less because it’s, you know. it’s wetter, so that’s good for me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I get where you’re coming from with the four by three thing and having a more square ratio,
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to square ratio being more versatile for a device that may be used in portrait and may be used in landscape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the other thing too is using the 12.9 just, again, for only a couple hours so far, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of iOS just feels like it was not designed to be this big. And that’s always a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem on iPadOS to some degree, but on the 12 nine it seems extreme. Like it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you just have like these massive empty spaces or huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like big wide text areas for no apparent reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And so that gives
⏹️ ▶️ John like- The Germans love it. Their UI can finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit. Yes. Yeah. But like, yeah, definitely like the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS is still not really ideal at this size. Everything does feel a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit too big and too spaced out as if they’re just kind of killing space so they don’t have anything to do with it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder how that changes over time, but for right now, it’s just like, it’s everything’s just really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and spread out, and that works really well on webpages and not so well in a lot of other places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, it’s been reported elsewhere too that like the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were not built with the 12.1 SDK that just came out, they’re kind of letterboxed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a special way when they’re shown on this iPad. Almost every third-party app I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched so far has been letterboxed in this way. I don’t know if just the App Store has not opened the gates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet for that, or if more likely, developers just haven’t had a chance. I haven’t updated Overcast yet for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I just haven’t had a chance. I’ve had a few days to do it. It’s gonna be probably a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before most of the apps you use on the iPad are updated, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna be seeing a lot of black boxes. So if you’re thinking about maybe getting this iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say A, you probably do want it. It looks pretty cool, and so far it’s pretty awesome. but B,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you shouldn’t be in a huge rush to get it. Like, if you can’t get it for like a few weeks, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, because like right now, the software really isn’t there yet to support it. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might take a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll be quick because everyone did all the safe area insight work for the iPhone X, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John do need to recompile a link against the 12.1 SDK, but I think it might just be a straight recompile for a lot of people to just
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly get your 12.1 update. Like, you’ve got your iPhone X version, do a quick validation that
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, If you compile with 12 on SDK, the safe area inset, save your butt on the iPad and then just ship it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s what James Thompson was saying he was doing with Pcalc, that basically all he needed to do was rebuild,
⏹️ ▶️ John voila, Pcalc filled the whole iPad Pro in the simulator or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s probably all I’m gonna have to do as well, but people don’t update their iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps necessarily that often. Like develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like the iPad. Or make them at all Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m still, God, I’m so mad at Instagram for that. What a perfect consumption platform for Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they just refuse to do it. But that’s a separate issue, I guess. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad apps in general are often low priorities for companies, which is a separate problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that holds back the iPad in other ways. But it was easy with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone X, when that came out, there’s huge motivation to update your app to the newest iPhone. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new iPads come out, especially when it’s only high-end ones that are affected, I don’t think developers have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much motivation to update. And not indies like me, who are trying to be fancy craftspeople. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about big companies. How the hell is a big company gonna justify doing this? How long did it take people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google to do SplitView and stuff? So it’s, I think it might be a little while before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are meaningfully updated for
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Speaking of SplitView, Apple talked about this, I think, in their developer videos as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. If you have applications in SplitView, and if one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t compliant with all the safe area insets and linked against 12.1 ISD, all the other applications
⏹️ ▶️ John in the split view get like letterbox in that way. Even if every application except the badly behaving one has been
⏹️ ▶️ John updated, I guess for uniformity purposes, so you don’t have like one bigger than the other, they all
⏹️ ▶️ John revert to the weird letterbox black stuff around the outside mode, which is kind of disappointing because as you
⏹️ ▶️ John just pointed out, like Google’s probably gonna take forever to update their things. And so if you use Google Docs in any capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John on your iOS, on your big new iPad Pro, and you do any kind of multitasking, guess what, all your other applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be, It’s not that noticeable letterboxing, but once you know it’s there, it’s kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re losing pixels because of one non-updated app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They gave you a keyboard and a pencil, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so have you had any interesting impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about either? You talked about the keyboard, but like the pencil, like does the matte finish really make as big a difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as people have said? Because when I played with it last week, I mean, I’ve never, I’ve used a pencil for 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it didn’t make a big difference to me, but are things like the matte finish a big deal? Do you not really care?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also has Tiff used any of these and what were her thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She hasn’t had a chance yet because she was busy doing it too, but I hope to get that done by next week to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, have her impressions. Otherwise, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my impression of using it for two seconds is the new one feels a lot better for both, both have, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the matte finish is a very noticeable difference and having that flat side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it like, that’s just like, it’s a place to put your fingers. It’s a place to orient it and like to feel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like even like you can now feel better the transition between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the flat part and when it starts to taper into the cone shape to form the point. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when I’m holding it, I can put a finger there on that transition between the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat and the taper. And I kind of like my middle finger on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my index finger further up on the grip using, like on the flat part and my thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the opposite side, it’s a really stable, firm grip. It feels good. The old pencil, you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that because it was a smooth finish and it would then have a smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition into the taper. And so it was easy to have your finger like slide around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. And the new one, you don’t have that. The new one, your finger can feel that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge and can anchor itself in place. And so you have like a feel orientation. It’s almost like the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between like using a real controller versus using touch buttons, like a touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco virtual D-pad on a screen for a game. It’s like, you need to feel the orientation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where your fingers are to have good control. The old pencil didn’t have that so much, the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one does. So that I think is a huge difference in addition to all the other stuff, like the charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. And so like to me, the pencil is the story of this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny, I had more questions about the pencil, the keyboard, and the port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I did about the iPad itself, like the internals of the iPad. I had almost no questions about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because to me, what makes the iPad Pro useful to me is not most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its internal stuff, because the internal stuff was already great before. It didn’t really need to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any better. It did, which is nice, it’s welcome, but it was already great. It was already way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what I needed to do the small amount of work I do on my iPad. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted though was better accessories because I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a smart keyboard all the time. I want to use the pencil and never could because it was never there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the accessories changed this product for me. Now that I always have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pencil stuck to the top of it, then maybe I’ll use something like the wonderful Applenaia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Icon Factory to be like a sketch pad to doodle like a quick diagram of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I wanna show someone something, or explain something, or to think something through, maybe some quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco math trigonometry for a thing I’m working on in code or something. I don’t use paper a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do use it sometimes. And I would like to have that ability whenever I’m out with my iPad to have something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. And with the old pencil, it was just never there. It was never with me, it was never charged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was probably somewhere buried on Tiff’s desk because she, at some point, she couldn’t find hers because hers was somewhere discharged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not with her. And so like it was just always a mess. Like it was such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterthought almost, the way it was designed before. And now it’s actually designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the way people use it. You know, there was a period there where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed like Apple was not designing so many things that way. And now I think that’s changing. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s changing for the better finally. And I’m very, very happy to see that. Even, you know, and the smart keyboard, Like, the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart keyboard was fine. Wasn’t great, it was fine. It had some issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just kind of thought, like, well, here’s this kind of, you know, half-assed product that Apple made as an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessory, and it’s fine, it’s never gonna be good, but this is as good as I guess we’re gonna get, and I’ll live with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It wasn’t until I saw the new one and used it that I realized, oh, that old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one was crap. Because it turns out, oh, it was so tippy and wobbly in my lap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, didn’t cover the back and everything else. and the new one is really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The accessories make this product, really, and they’re really, really good. Also, just like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally like subjectively, I love the new physical design of the iPad. The new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge, my God, it looks so good. Like, I love the flat edge so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just looks awesome. It looks modern. Like, the old one now, with its,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, curve, everything being like the curved edge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks and feels really dated now. And I don’t know if I would have thought that a week ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly now it’s like, oh my God, like those curved edges are like giant, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad had the same shape since the iPad 2. It just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed. It just always had that curved edge, so it just, it felt, it looked and felt really old. And this new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one looks and feels incredibly modern and really nice. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m curious about the pencil usage too, because on one hand I feel like if you’re not the type of person
⏹️ ▶️ John who uses a pencil, having a better place to store it is not gonna change that about you. Like I always just thought about the storage place for
⏹️ ▶️ John the pencil was for people who use the pencil all the time and just grumble as they use the pencil. Now where is that pencil?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it’s attached by some weird thing, or it’s not charged or whatever. But if you’re not the type of person that uses the pencil, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I predict that you’re going to stick the pencil on the side of the thing. And maybe you’ll get away with it because you use it as
⏹️ ▶️ John a kitchen computer and it’s always just sitting there in the kitchen with the keyboard and with the pencil sitting there on top of it, like it will always be
⏹️ ▶️ John there for you. But for anybody who carries around their iPad or uses it without
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard most of the time, the pencil will probably kind of get in the way. Like if you weren’t already using the pencil and
⏹️ ▶️ John already annoyed that you didn’t have a good place to put it, I’m not sure this will turn you into
⏹️ ▶️ John a pencil user because the use cases for the pencil as far as what you can do with it in the OS are about
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as they’ve always been. And yeah, this is a better iteration of the pencil in terms of the ergonomics you just mentioned, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it still, I don’t think it changes the math that so I think maybe maybe you’ll get away with it because just because
⏹️ ▶️ John like the pencil is not harming you in any way when it’s sitting there on top of the thing but I’m not sure it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John convert people and as for the ergonomics of the pencil yeah obvious obvious improvement but still a long way
⏹️ ▶️ John to go and you get to like you know the ergonomic grip type thing and honestly they’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John do that for the same reason they make a robotic pencil like you don’t want to make a pencil that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes that decision for you and says oh well we want we think everybody wants one of those weird ergonomic
⏹️ ▶️ John grip Triangular shape rubber things. No, everybody doesn’t want that. So your best bet is to make a pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John that Accepts that type of thing if you want it and does some minimal nod towards ergonomics by not
⏹️ ▶️ John being glossy by not being perfectly Cylindrical so on and so forth, but doesn’t make all those decisions and lets
⏹️ ▶️ John people add to the pencil as needed Although hearing, you know, hearing people talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil. I have one too. I’m not a pencil person I sit next to my iPad, but I rarely use
⏹️ ▶️ John it Um, and it just makes me feel like such an old man when I try to do anything with the pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, drawing with it or whatever, because I feel like drawing with a pencil as someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John grew up drawing a lot with like plain old graphite pencils made of wood,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Drawing with the apple pencil or any other stylus type device
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me feel like it’s like the equivalent of driving a car by throwing marbles into buckets attached to pulleys.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey throw five marbles in that
⏹️ ▶️ John bucket. The bucket pulls down the rope on the pulley and the car turns left. That’s how distant I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel. And it’s like, well, what do you mean? How does it you aren’t you drawing directly on the screen? It’s like, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a it’s a pencil thing that’s skittering along glass that’s not actually making marks
⏹️ ▶️ John that like an accelerometer or whatever gyroscope is detecting my angle like, compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to actually taking a graphite pencil and dragging it across a piece of the paper, something that I’m just like intimately
⏹️ ▶️ John familiar with from from like my entire life and my childhood. This
⏹️ ▶️ John feels so distant and that makes me an old person because you know people who grow up with this technology and use
⏹️ ▶️ John it as their tool it’s what they’re noodling on like their whole childhood to do drawings and stuff like that feels
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly natural to them and this is a good iteration of it but like when you mentioned Marco like oh the things having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the pencil don’t need to be improved like in terms of the the drawing response and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I think they need to be improved massively. It’s not just because I’m an old man, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John again, go back to that responsiveness video from that tech demo for the Microsoft hat or whatever. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think even artists would appreciate a 10 X or a hundred X, uh, increase in responsiveness of the pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but that’s not the thing that really makes me feel distant is the fact that I’m, it’s not a little
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of graphite that I rub on paper and it leaves little, you know, like that’s not what it is. That’s not what it will ever be and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s the advantage of it obviously that you can erase infinitely and it can be a brush it can be a pencil it can
⏹️ ▶️ John be a marker like I get all that but every time I use it I just feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never choose to draw this way and that’s that’s what makes me feel old like that
⏹️ ▶️ John never go away from the the actual pencil if I ever wanted to draw something right
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know I don’t know if you feel that way and use it like in terms of if you’re just going to draw math
⏹️ ▶️ John problems or whatever, would you feel like, you know what, I would feel better drawing this math problem on a piece of paper with a pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though you’re not actually like it’s not an artistic endeavor, you’re just drawing like equations and stuff or does it just feel fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not picky about that kind of stuff. So it’s I really can’t say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apiki is wonderful.
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#askatp: Programmer thinking
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, let’s move on to Ask ATP. And we have a few questions as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usual today, starting with Jonathan Bowling, who asks, in what ways has being a programmer changed the way you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think in other areas in life? What’s the oddest experience you’ve had of applying programmer thinking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something else, especially in your personal life. You know, I don’t feel like I have a particularly awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question of this other than awesome answer to this, other than to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like being a developer has helped me break down problems into smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chunks better, because that’s a lot of times what development is all about is, you know, how do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you make a podcast player? Well, you have to download files and you need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to play them. All right. Well, how do you download the files? well, you need to have an RSS reader
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you need to go get those files. Well, what’s an RSS reader? You just go all the way down. And I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of thinking has helped a lot, but unfortunately, I don’t have any particular specific stories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think really well encapsulate this, but I love the question so much. So I’m hoping that one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will save me. Maybe Marco, since you’ve been talking a lot, understandably, John, you can give Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a a breather. And maybe is there an example of this in your life where being a developer has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really changed the way you handle the situation?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so. I think my experience is the reverse, that me being the way I am has helped
⏹️ ▶️ John me be a programmer. Because I started to think about it and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, trying to come up with examples where I’ve applied lessons for programming in real life, but it’s really the opposite.
⏹️ ▶️ John Programming presents certain problems to you and to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to solve them requires you to bring to bear your experience elsewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in life. At least that’s how it feels to me, that I look at a programming problem and then I use everything that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John learned from, obviously from all my life programming, but also just like, you know, in my initial forays into
⏹️ ▶️ John programming, I was bringing myself to the table saying like, these qualities
⏹️ ▶️ John is that about the way I work, the way I think about things, the way I operate in all aspects
⏹️ ▶️ John of life are the reason that I am suited to be a programmer, because they are useful
⏹️ ▶️ John in that context, because programming is tractable in that way, like that it makes sense in that particular
⏹️ ▶️ John way. I’m sure that’s not entirely true. I’m sure there is some case of the reverse, but
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing dramatic comes to mind. And I think I was going to offer the same thing that you just said, Casey, like breaking a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John down to smaller pieces or whatever. Honestly, that’s not as applicable in real life as you would imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John like to think it is because we like to think that the real world is tractable in the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way that computers are, but it’s not. There’s many other variables that you don’t see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the things that make me good at programming are separate
⏹️ ▶️ John from things that are useful in the real world. The overlap between them is, in my
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, surprisingly small. It’s two very different skill sets. that said, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the skills that are useful elsewhere in the world are very important for
⏹️ ▶️ John the job of being a program because the job of being a programmer, contrary to what many people think, especially if you’re not a programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ John is not just you in the computer. There are other people involved. There’s the person who’s going to use your program, presumably if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any person other than you, right? There’s all the people that you work with. There is there’s so many aspects
⏹️ ▶️ John to being a working programmer that have nothing to do with you in the computer that, you know, mastering and becoming better
⏹️ ▶️ John at the part where you type code into the computer is such a small aspect of
⏹️ ▶️ John being a real programmer in the modern world that all the skills that you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to hold down any job really, but also to be a programmer in a real
⏹️ ▶️ John job in a real company with real people, those skills definitely translate
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere in life. And again, hopefully you’re bringing those skills to your job as a programmer and not learning them on the job as a
⏹️ ▶️ John programmer because you won’t be very pleasant to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really have any good stories about a particular thing that I approached weirdly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a programmer in real life. But I will say that it infects the way I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. Like anything that I have to do twice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m starting to look at how can I possibly automate this into a subroutine. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how can I break this out? I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually like make something that makes me never have to do this thing again, you know, which mostly is laziness but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big thing for me is that I’m able to Kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of feel bugs in everything like whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever it’s like we’re in the world and like something that we’re interacting with or depending on or trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Doesn’t work quite right. I I can usually kind of feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intrinsically why. Like I’m like, oh, they’re having slave lag on their backend or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, I can feel like, oh, I know this problem. I’ve seen this problem. I’ve caused this problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, like, oh, it’s like, this is clearly like, oh, they didn’t, the screen didn’t refresh in time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a race with this other thing. And if you go back out and go back in, it’ll fix that. It’s like, I can kind of feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by just observing the symptoms of how things are not working correctly, I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand like what has probably happened because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealt with so many bugs in so many things that like, you know, mostly my own code that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I just have like a sense for bug behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can gather very quickly the behavior of a system and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s doing and why it’s doing it. Does that make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the not wanting to repeat an operation that can
⏹️ ▶️ John be automated or whatever. I think one of the reason I gave the answer I did is that I have probably uniquely among
⏹️ ▶️ John three of us experience being a person before computers existed in any meaningful way
⏹️ ▶️ John in their life. Right. So in my childhood before, certainly before computers were in my life in any fashion,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that individual people didn’t have before I got my Vic 20, let’s say, right. My first computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was already thinking in that way in terms of like doing chores and fantasizing about
⏹️ ▶️ John designing machines to do my chores. Like it’s a repetitive task and you realize that it can be automated
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you do it once it seems like a waste to do it like from scratch each time, right? That’s, you know, thinking in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of gadgets, again, ropes and pulleys and buckets and mechanical robots and other things like that before
⏹️ ▶️ John the world of computer is why I say that I brought my that self to the task
⏹️ ▶️ John of programming. And it’s like, oh, here’s a realm in which I can actually do those things without having to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fashion a Rube Goldberg device to, you know, clean the toilet for me or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, same deal with the like finding bugs in systems or whatever, like realizing
⏹️ ▶️ John why things aren’t working. What I’m realizing what’s not working is the literal thing I’m trying to build out of ropes and
⏹️ ▶️ John pulleys in my backyard with sticks and figuring why does in my head I imagine this would work. But here and
⏹️ ▶️ John now I am with the sticks and this rope and these hammers and this nail and whatever, and why is it
⏹️ ▶️ John not working? Quote unquote debugging that physical world system and figuring out,
⏹️ ▶️ John I brought that to programming as well because it’s a thing that, you know, instead of just throwing up
⏹️ ▶️ John your hands and saying, well, I thought it would work and it wouldn’t, oh, well, fair, why doesn’t it work or whatever? So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have the experience of being a kid before computers existed, it may seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John those are skills that, you know, that come from programming, but I think they are
⏹️ ▶️ John like ways of thinking that you bring to programming and that even if computers never existed, you would still be thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that way about like, you know, tending the fields and like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John feudal era as a surf on a farm or something.
#askatp: macOS vs. iOS RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. Benedict Beckman writes, given that the new 2018 iPad Pros are very likely incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast and they quote-unquote only have up to 6 gigs of RAM, if any laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that runs Mac OS had 6 gigs of RAM we would laugh about it. So how is this possible? Why is so little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM okay for an iOS device? How much would you need to put into a Mac to get the same kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, you know, performance and whatnot?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think we actually talked about this a lot like last last week or or the week before that, we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS getting swap. I think much of that discussion holds, where basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS has been designed from day one, and the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software ecosystem has been designed from day one, to be very careful with how much memory it uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the system has such a hard wall. If you try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take more than what is available to you, you just crash, that’s it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you crash hard. And so you have to be very careful in the way you develop things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimize RAM usage. Whereas on the Mac, that hasn’t been the case for like 20 years. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can… so we have bloat. We have, you know, a combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of negligence and sloppiness. But also we have features that are built on the assumption that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you won’t be constantly dumped out of RAM. And you can’t… and you have lots of RAM to spare. So you have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the Mac and PC world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have a bunch of browser tabs open and you can switch between them and stuff and they don’t usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to reload themselves because they’ve been in the background too long. Safari does it a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part other browsers mainly don’t and even with Safari, once it’s open, it tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay open for that boot session. Whereas on iOS, you leave a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, you come back, it has to reload. There’s all sorts of stuff like that where like the all of iOS is designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have memory just expunge at any moment to have apps really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sip it very carefully and to have the OS manage it all very strictly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you as the user. Whereas the desktop we haven’t had that environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime recently. And so apps use as much RAM as they need to. They don’t really pay much attention to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You as the user expect certain things to be the case that you expect your web pages to be there when you return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them. You expect the OS not to be terminating apps in the background without your knowledge. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just, the OS has just worked so differently and the software is so different that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just, you can get away with a lot less on iOS. Even considering that it’s also sharing it with video, which is a whole separate thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and if I had to get the same result as a six gig on an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John device, I would say probably 16 gigs on a Mac. Yeah, that’s about right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you mentioned design. Obviously, the OS was designed for that reason, again, for reasons we discussed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the key part is the second part, which is not design in the evolutionary sense. But it’s like the fitness criteria.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fitness criteria for applications on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John has been survive within a RAM-constrained environment. If you don’t, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one uses your app because it crashes all the time, right? That force has
⏹️ ▶️ John created the ecosystem of applications that we have now. It’s not as if that the programmers are like
⏹️ ▶️ John better or more careful. They have no choice. It’s the environment is such that it’s sink or swim.
⏹️ ▶️ John You either, your app is going to die and not want to run and no one will ever do it, or you will figure out how to fit into this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the hard unyielding ceiling has forced everyone to do that. So.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple came up with the design and everyone else is, you know, is, is in an evolutionary environment
⏹️ ▶️ John where the only way you, the only way you don’t get eaten by the out of memory killer is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to, how to make it work. And the fitness criteria of a Mac application has
⏹️ ▶️ John been let people do powerful things with their computer. There has been no monster waiting around the corner to just instantly
⏹️ ▶️ John kill you, right? Instead, people, you know, the fitness criteria is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do people like your application? Is it good? Does it let them open a million tabs? Because people want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if your browser suddenly quit, if you open too many tabs, people would move to one that didn’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of forces at work in these two environments are so different that it’s not surprising that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has produced two very different breeds of applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Betterment, and Marine Layer. and we’ll see you next time.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Armin, s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They didn’t mean to, accidental, tech
John’s not done yet
⏹️ ▶️ John I got some more questions about the iPad now that you’ve got it sitting there in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John How is the one hand and picking it up off the table modified by having
⏹️ ▶️ John the case on it? Is it easier?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s I actually thought of that exact same thing because like I wonder I was worried like is my thumb going to be on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way because like normally the way I mean I almost always carry my smart keyboard and iPad 10.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around by basically I stick my hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I stick my bottom three fingers of my hand into the triangle on the right side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put my index finger behind it and my thumb on the front of it and pick it up like that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can still do that and it turns out Lisa on the twelve nine. I can do that and it’s you know it’s a little heavier obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like it’s fine. It picks up just fine. It doesn’t touch the screen and the case still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is amenable to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you worry about touching the screen for it’s a touch screen just accidental input yeah that’s pretty good about
⏹️ ▶️ John the rejection stuff and plus that you can turn off when you carry but now I mean like laying flat on the table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh oh I see you mean okay so when it’s closed you’re talking about picking up when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John close you so use your iPad as a weird laptop it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so not how I use my head at all it’s not easy to pick up off the table one-handed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got the kit you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smart case. Yeah, the whole folio with that on. Yeah, it’s easier, because the folio, the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has the keys is thicker than the side that doesn’t. So if the thick part is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down, then it’s easier, because you have more space before the ridge happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can- You can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey under there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. So it’s easier if you store it keys down. But either way, it’s very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do one handed without the whole thing just sliding to the right, so you know, the direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume you didn’t ask Apple about this. No, I didn’t, because I never do this. I didn’t have it on the list of questions,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I probably, you brought the kitchen scale to weigh the case. I would have
⏹️ ▶️ John put the thing flat on the table and said, how am I supposed to pick this thing up one handed? You guys, it would have been a challenge.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would have been like Thor’s hammer in the Avengers movie. Everyone would gather around. Everyone in this room is now going to try to pick this up with one hand
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re all going to see how we do it. Because like, I guess they can refuse to do it, but if they
⏹️ ▶️ John accept the challenge, there’s some pressure for them to make it look like it’s not that hard, right? of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re going to use the Marco deflection technique, they would say, tell me why do you want to pick it up with one hand?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d be like, just pick up the damn iPad. I’m absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John going to try this in the Apple store because I’m excited about the possibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually I think I have a little bit of now like I where I store my iPad is sitting on top of
⏹️ ▶️ John its case. It has I know you’re shocked to hear this, but I have a pouch from
⏹️ ▶️ John it. No, surely you don’t. I brought it to WDC every year, but I brought my thing. It’s like a Waterfield Design,
⏹️ ▶️ John like suede line pouch thingy. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad sits on top of it and it is squishy. So even a flat iPad, I feel like, because it’s sitting on top of a squishy thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can dig my fingers into the squishy thing and pick it up. I pick up my iPad one-handed all the time. I’m pretty sure it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way I pick up my iPad. It is laying flat and I pick it up off of the little thing that lays on top of.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is like a very important use case for me, which is why I’m harping on it. So I’m gonna go to an Apple store and check this
⏹️ ▶️ John out. You should compare it to like the naked, make the naked iPad and see
⏹️ ▶️ John if it is impossible to pick up. Like face down, naked face down, 12.9 inch iPad, one hand pickup.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the new Olympic event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would never store my iPad face down because I would be worried about the screen getting scratched.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course not, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I can’t do it. Can it be done?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like taking that to sort from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stone. I I have to like slide it off the edge of the desk It’s a little bit and then pick it up off the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge. Yeah, that’s cheating Yeah hurting it never mind the hurting it towards the edge of the desk is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John dangerous thing to do with your $2,000 piece of Glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I know here. I’m gonna try if at least face up you have the camera bump. Hold on. Let me see if that’s a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s just it just
⏹️ ▶️ John slides like cuz it’s so slick go to the corner where the camera bump is see if you can get your fingernails under there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Could if it wasn’t sliding the whole iPad just slides across This is a friction issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, like with the case the case solves the friction issue But yeah, so I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom line is you’re gonna want this in a case
⏹️ ▶️ John All right Now to be fair to make the scientific go grab an iPad Pro or some other like
⏹️ ▶️ John non rectilinear iPad and put it in the same scenario Because
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you put that one face down the curve works against you right like again No one should be putting their iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John face down. We’re not we’re not animals here She cook at the one you killed the cricket with
⏹️ ▶️ John Now Marco is furiously digging through the mountain of boxes that are in his office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Yeah, it’s true Okay, I’m back with my 10.5. Welcome
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a case or anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in the smart things smart keyboard. All right, so So 10.5 is easy to pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up face down. It’s super easy face down with the case because there’s a huge gap because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case is like kind of stepped. It has like the thicker keyboard part and the thinner non-keyboard part. So you can just grab that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gap. It’s super easy. Let’s see if it’s keyboard down. Yeah, you can still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it if it’s like, you know, case back down, keyboard up. You can still do it super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily by grabbing the edge. Yeah, that works totally fine. All right, now let me try no case.
⏹️ ▶️ John so. No case normal first, because that should
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be straightforwardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier. Yeah, screen up, super easy. Yeah, screen up, super easy, because the curve does that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do it. Yeah, the curve is working
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco against you instead of for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I would say if grabbing something off the table one-handed is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a move that you do often with your iPad while it is closed, then by all means,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe don’t get this
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. Or while it’s open, if you have, I guess you don’t have the non-keyboard case, like whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the regular Folio smart
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing that’s just no keyboard. Yeah, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this model. I had, for previous iPads, I had that one. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Yeah, that’s probably what I’m gonna get. My wife is concerned about your complaint about the keys
⏹️ ▶️ John being, facing out the back, like if you were to flip the keyboard cover around. Does that feel as weird as you thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would? Let me see, back to this. Jogging all these iPads for you, John. Let’s see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not as bad on the 12-9 because there’s more height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bottom. When you flip it around, when you put the keyboard against the back of the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just try to hold it like a regular caseless iPad but with the keyboard still attached, basically the keys are facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out on the top half of what you’re holding. So if you keep your hands low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re only holding the bottom half, you don’t really hit them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, you’re talking landscape like a crazy person who uses their iPad in landscape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. Yes, if you’re holding it in portrait, if you’re holding it like pencil side to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, then you’re gonna wanna be holding the iPad with your left hand, that will avoid pushing the keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, well since the orientation doesn’t matter, you can just rotate it the other way. I mean, your Apple logo will be upside down, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t see that anyway. True, yeah. All right, I mean, that’s, yeah. We’re gonna go to the Apple store and check
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. The ability to rotate it so that whatever hand you’re using to grip it is gripping the non-keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John section of the thing seems like it’d be good. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, remind me, you have not ordered anything as yet because you want to go to the Apple store as you just mentioned?
⏹️ ▶️ John I ordered a homework laptop. Oh. Yeah, MacBook Air. I told you I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get that. So I’ve ordered the new MacBook Air. It’s, what did I get? Specking it out was so
⏹️ ▶️ John painful. I have a bunch of stuff in the notes that I guess we’ll talk about next week about the prices, the relative
⏹️ ▶️ John prices and power of the various products in Apple’s lineup, at least the portable-ish ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when specking it out, Like, I don’t wanna pay a lot for this muffler and I don’t wanna pay a lot for a homework
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But, I also don’t want to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t wanna buy something, like, I want
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing to last a long time. I don’t want it to, I just want this to be the last homework laptop I ever have to buy for
⏹️ ▶️ John at least one of my kids. Like, he’s a freshman in high school, he can go through four years of high school with this laptop and be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Because all they’re using is Google Docs. I’m like, why can’t you just use it on your iPad? They’re like, no, they make a groaning
⏹️ ▶️ John noise. Anyway, so I don’t want to buy a new laptop, so I don’t wanna get it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum, minimum specs, and the minimum specs are low, like 128 gig SSD is not like the
⏹️ ▶️ John default one or the lowest one. That’s not enough to do anything. Like both of these kids
⏹️ ▶️ John have devices they take photos on, and both of them have enough photos that if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re both gonna have accounts on this thing, and if they both allow their photos things to run, and even though they put optimized
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, quote unquote, they’re gonna fill the disk with their photos, It’s like maybe don’t let them bring the photos out like
⏹️ ▶️ John they need them. The thing is for school assignments these days They need photos like they take photos
⏹️ ▶️ John like the school assignment is like get a photo of your family and do it like They’re gonna need their photo collections on there So
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna have photos on there and they’re gonna like this is what I’m thinking about So I had to up the SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m not gonna pay for a 1.5 terabyte as I see now It’s like expensive as a MacBook Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ John all I could do is 512 which is like too much money because because Apple chargers are, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna like for the charge, but I could not buy this thing with 128. So I got a 512 gig SSD, which I feel like is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be tight for two kids with photos, but it’s enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that I feel like we’ll get by. And maybe Apple will actually improve its optimized storage thing in photos someday and
⏹️ ▶️ John not have to eat all my disk space. And then for RAM, I had to get 16, because
⏹️ ▶️ John from my experience, having these two kids log into my wife’s iMac, which
⏹️ ▶️ John also has 16 gigs of RAM. You get three people logging in, four people,
⏹️ ▶️ John 16 gig starts to get stressed, two people. It can handle it, eight is too little. So I got 16 gigs, 512,
⏹️ ▶️ John and those are basically the only choices you have because you don’t get to pick CPU or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got AppleCare because, again, my children have destroyed the 2011 MacBook Air that
⏹️ ▶️ John they had, eventually totally killing it. So, you know, I need all the help I can get in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of keeping this thing alive. The the the idea of it being dropped down the stairs is not
⏹️ ▶️ John fantastical or being stepped on. Oh goodness I’m gonna be I’m gonna become one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John dads is reminding them exactly how much money the thing they’re doing homework on costs Please don’t break it
⏹️ ▶️ John because like all all the all the hand-me-down iPads like whatever like we knew they’re gonna destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John them and they do right and My son just asked for a new smart cover for Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John because he destroyed the smart cover on his iPad How can you destroy the smart cover like what is there to destroy? He found
⏹️ ▶️ John a way It looks like it’s been chewed by dogs. Like it’s just it’s disintegrated. It’s the same age I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s newer than like the smart covers on like the adults iPads But somehow I don’t I don’t know what he
⏹️ ▶️ John does to it. I just Anyway, and yeah, they destroyed a 2011 MacBook Air, but that was there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a hand-me-down computer It’s like you expect the whole point is you hand down the older devices to your kids and they destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John them But this is a brand new 2018 laptop that cost a ton of money and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just gonna say here you go kids use it for homework only only, don’t eat near it, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it on your floor, don’t drop it down the stairs, don’t step on it. I don’t know how this is gonna go.