The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► You know, I can't believe I missed the holiday party again.

00:00:03 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:00:04 ◼   ► It was a different kind of holiday party.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Anything interesting happen in the last few weeks?

00:00:10 ◼   ► Nope. It's quiet. Peaceful.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Without a tumbleweed roll-by.

00:00:15 ◼   ► You know. Not much.

00:00:17 ◼   ► Apple doesn't really do much in the fall.

00:00:20 ◼   ► [sigh]

00:00:23 ◼   ► [sigh]

00:00:25 ◼   ► [sigh]

00:00:27 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:00:29 ◼   ► You have to laugh a little.

00:00:32 ◼   ► I was talking to my wife the other day about, we were on a walk, and I said, "You know,

00:00:37 ◼   ► I feel like it's been going nonstop for a long time."

00:00:40 ◼   ► And then I realized it totally had been going nonstop for a long time.

00:00:43 ◼   ► We went to Ireland for Ool, and I realized, literally, I went to the Apple event, and

00:00:50 ◼   ► the next day I got on a plane and went to this event in Southern California, this festival

00:00:55 ◼   ► over the weekend, and then from there I went basically straight to Ool.

00:00:58 ◼   ► And in the middle there, I got the one review unit

00:01:01 ◼   ► of the MacBook Pro, and then the day after I came back

00:01:05 ◼   ► from Ireland, I got the Touch Bar review unit

00:01:08 ◼   ► with the MacBook Pro, and it is nonstop.

00:01:11 ◼   ► It's just like one thing after another, all fall.

00:01:14 ◼   ► - You know what I mean, and it's, you know,

00:01:16 ◼   ► tough life for us, you know what I mean, reviewing--

00:01:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, it's good. - Amazing new computers

00:01:22 ◼   ► before anybody gets them while jetting around the globe

00:01:25 ◼   ► to meet interesting people, but it has been hectic.

00:01:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I'm not complaining.

00:01:32 ◼   ► It is a privilege to do this, but this is the high season.

00:01:35 ◼   ► I mean, that's the way I keep telling people

00:01:37 ◼   ► it's high season.

00:01:38 ◼   ► This is when everything is happening for Apple.

00:01:40 ◼   ► It's like this time period and like WWDC

00:01:43 ◼   ► are the two craziest times of the year.

00:01:44 ◼   ► - I think this is crazier, honestly, for us.

00:01:48 ◼   ► 'Cause just, I don't know, somehow to me,

00:01:52 ◼   ► even that several weeks long period between the iPhone 7 coming out and the

00:01:58 ◼   ► MacBook event, I don't know. That somehow seemed jam-packed with stuff too.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Yeah, rules in Apple Watch, you know, two rules in there.

00:02:08 ◼   ► And yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on. A lot of stuff going on.

00:02:13 ◼   ► Anyway, long story short, just wasn't a good time for an election that I had a,

00:02:17 ◼   ► like 110% obsessive interest into.

00:02:21 ◼   ► No.

00:02:24 ◼   ► So yeah, there's stuff, lots of stuff going on. It was a, it was a busy fall. I do feel like we've

00:02:28 ◼   ► reached, you know, it's all subsiding a little bit now. And I feel like that mentally I'm starting to

00:02:34 ◼   ► shift gears. I still got some stuff that I put off that I need to pick back up again, but it's like

00:02:37 ◼   ► mentally shifting gears into, you know, holidays, end of year people, you know, if you want to make

00:02:43 ◼   ► holiday stories and gift guides and best of the year lists and stuff like that. It's

00:02:49 ◼   ► starting to feel more like that at last. Which is good because it's like Thanksgiving

00:02:53 ◼   ► next week. So, I mean, here it is.

00:02:55 ◼   ► It was a little... The MacBook Pro review... I got all... I got three of them. I got

00:03:02 ◼   ► the button one. What are they called? We're calling it the MacBook

00:03:06 ◼   ► Escape.

00:03:07 ◼   ► I guess we are. Makes me think of a Journey album, but, you know, whatever.

00:03:11 ◼   ► I know I got that the same time you did.

00:03:12 ◼   ► We got that the day of the event.

00:03:14 ◼   ► Yeah, they had those.

00:03:17 ◼   ► I got the 13-inch with the Touch Bar, I don't know,

00:03:20 ◼   ► a week later, about at least a week later.

00:03:22 ◼   ► I don't know if it was six days or eight days.

00:03:24 ◼   ► It was the week I was in Ireland, which

00:03:26 ◼   ► was the week after the event, because I got an email from

00:03:27 ◼   ► Apple on a Wednesday in Ireland saying,

00:03:29 ◼   ► can you come buy Cupertino on Thursday

00:03:31 ◼   ► to pick up your 13-inch MacBook with Touch Bar?

00:03:34 ◼   ► And I was like, uh, no.

00:03:37 ◼   ► And so I didn't get that one.

00:03:39 ◼   ► And then I got the 15-inch, I don't know.

00:03:41 ◼   ► But that was late.

00:03:42 ◼   ► The 15-inch was really only just a few days

00:03:45 ◼   ► before the embargo deadline.

00:03:47 ◼   ► So I opened it, and I turned it on and looked at it.

00:03:50 ◼   ► But I spent much less time with the 15-inch,

00:03:53 ◼   ► simply because I already had the 13-inch with the touch bar set up

00:03:57 ◼   ► with my stuff.

00:03:59 ◼   ► I've got BB Edit on it.

00:04:00 ◼   ► It's just there.

00:04:04 ◼   ► And the thing I do to wrap block quotes,

00:04:07 ◼   ► So they all look like nice markdown block quotes

00:04:09 ◼   ► that's already there.

00:04:10 ◼   ► - Right, and again, not that we're complaining

00:04:12 ◼   ► about getting review units,

00:04:13 ◼   ► but onboarding to a new Mac is a lot of work.

00:04:16 ◼   ► And when you have to do it three times in three weeks,

00:04:18 ◼   ► it's like, oh, here we go again.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Like what files, what do I install?

00:04:23 ◼   ► Can I migrate?

00:04:23 ◼   ► No, I don't really want to migrate,

00:04:25 ◼   ► but then I have to install everything.

00:04:26 ◼   ► I have to hook it up with Dropbox.

00:04:29 ◼   ► And I don't know about you,

00:04:31 ◼   ► I also have to juggle,

00:04:33 ◼   ► like there are these hard breaks

00:04:35 ◼   ► like five authorized iTunes computers and like 10 authorized Apple music devices.

00:04:40 ◼   ► And so I'm always juggling like logging out of different iPads and phones and stuff in

00:04:45 ◼   ► order to get slots back to put other computers in there.

00:04:49 ◼   ► And it's a yeah, so it's again, not complaining.

00:04:51 ◼   ► It's great that we get to do this for our job.

00:04:53 ◼   ► But you know, like that all of this stuff is not meant to be done as frequently as we

00:04:57 ◼   ► do them.

00:04:58 ◼   ► So yeah.

00:04:59 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:05:00 ◼   ► - What I, I mean even little things.

00:05:01 ◼   ► I've run into a little thing where

00:05:03 ◼   ► my Amex card has a maximum limit on how many

00:05:08 ◼   ► Apple Pay devices it can be hooked up to.

00:05:10 ◼   ► - Oh. (laughs)

00:05:11 ◼   ► - And-- - Oh yeah.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - And you know, and it's, it's magnified

00:05:16 ◼   ► because it's like two, now you get two phones

00:05:18 ◼   ► when they give you review phones,

00:05:19 ◼   ► they give you one of each size,

00:05:20 ◼   ► and it's like, I got iPads and stuff,

00:05:23 ◼   ► and it's like, I don't even know, you know,

00:05:25 ◼   ► and some of them I've foolishly left named John's iPad.

00:05:29 ◼   ► So it's like, right?

00:05:31 ◼   ► It's like, what, which one is it?

00:05:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:05:35 ◼   ► I mean, what?

00:05:36 ◼   ► And I just started-

00:05:37 ◼   ► - And occasionally, there are updates that reset the name.

00:05:39 ◼   ► So I realized the other day

00:05:41 ◼   ► that my iPad is called iPad again.

00:05:42 ◼   ► And it's like, well, I don't know when that happened,

00:05:44 ◼   ► but it's like, no wonder I went on my device list

00:05:47 ◼   ► and I saw three things named iPad

00:05:49 ◼   ► and had no idea which was which.

00:05:51 ◼   ► It's, yeah.

00:05:52 ◼   ► It's, I haven't been able to do Apple Pay.

00:05:55 ◼   ► I've been testing the Apple Watch too.

00:05:56 ◼   ► And I actually haven't written about that yet,

00:05:58 ◼   ► but it can't do Apple Pay because it's just,

00:06:00 ◼   ► I think my financial institutions have given up on me

00:06:04 ◼   ► and they're like, no, mm-mm, no more devices for you.

00:06:06 ◼   ► Every time I try to pair it, it's just like,

00:06:07 ◼   ► I can't even forget it, you know?

00:06:10 ◼   ► - Oh, and my bank, sometimes what I've done is,

00:06:13 ◼   ► I generally, if I use a charge card,

00:06:15 ◼   ► I use my Amex, I just use it everywhere.

00:06:18 ◼   ► And the only times I ever don't use it

00:06:20 ◼   ► is if I'm in a place that doesn't take Amex.

00:06:22 ◼   ► But to get around this Amex limit,

00:06:26 ◼   ► If I have a device that I'm testing from Apple that I don't really want to spend--

00:06:32 ◼   ► I know I'm not going to spend a ton of time on.

00:06:35 ◼   ► For example, at WWDC, they gave me an Apple Watch with the beta of watchOS 3.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Wow.

00:06:43 ◼   ► Which I think that's when they gave it to me.

00:06:46 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:06:47 ◼   ► But at some point, they gave it to me.

00:06:48 ◼   ► It wasn't new hardware.

00:06:49 ◼   ► It was just, here, you could try this thing out with the watchOS 3.

00:06:52 ◼   ► And I thought, well, that's interesting.

00:06:53 ◼   ► but it's like, I'll just put the watchos 3 beta on my own Apple watch, you know what I mean?

00:06:57 ◼   ► And so I didn't want to put this Amex limit on it, so I used my other card.

00:07:02 ◼   ► My bank sends me a letter in the mail every time I set up Apple Pay that it's like, "Congratulations."

00:07:08 ◼   ► It's so totally written from the perspective of like, you're going to have one device that you do this with,

00:07:14 ◼   ► and we'll tell you everything, how it works, and I just keep...

00:07:17 ◼   ► I should have kept all the letters, because I'll bet I've got 15 of them by now.

00:07:22 ◼   ► I think the advantage of this is it's so easy in so many different ways that you do,

00:07:28 ◼   ► you review tech products, to lose perspective if you're not careful. And this is like

00:07:34 ◼   ► the reverse of that, which is there's nobody, I think, more aware of the pain of basically

00:07:42 ◼   ► upgrading to a new device than reviewers, because we have to do it like with every device.

00:07:48 ◼   ► Like for a while there, I could tell you everything you need to do to migrate from a MacBook to

00:07:53 ◼   ► another MacBook or from a PowerBook to another PowerBook because I was reviewing all the

00:07:58 ◼   ► laptops at Macworld.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And so like I would go through, I would migrate everything a couple times a year.

00:08:06 ◼   ► And so, I mean, that's good because we get to experience that.

00:08:08 ◼   ► And I think Apple's got some issues with the migration assistant on the Mac and with some

00:08:13 ◼   ► of the stuff they're getting better, but like, you know, they've got some issues there.

00:08:16 ◼   ► And those really come out when you're migrating multiple times a year.

00:08:20 ◼   ► Because regular people only might do it once a year for a phone and once every several

00:08:23 ◼   ► years for an iPad or a Mac.

00:08:25 ◼   ► I have spoken—I still think it's too hard on a Mac.

00:08:30 ◼   ► And I think part of it is because I don't—I think part of it really is a technical challenge

00:08:36 ◼   ► and not just a disinterest.

00:08:37 ◼   ► I think because you can—you still have so much freedom of what to put where in the file

00:08:44 ◼   ► system on a Mac, and it's, you know, really, it's just technically not, it's not, you can't

00:08:51 ◼   ► just say clone the disk and open it, you know, it's because there's all sorts of stuff that's

00:08:55 ◼   ► a different because it's different hardware.

00:08:57 ◼   ► You know, I think it's the number one motivator why they do, why they did desktop and documents

00:09:01 ◼   ► syncing the way they did it, was that that was sort of like their, if you keep everything,

00:09:06 ◼   ► if you buy everything through the App Store, which, you know, some people do, and you're

00:09:11 ◼   ► not a superpower user, but you keep everything in documents and on the desktop, and then

00:09:15 ◼   ► you log into a new Mac. Like, it'll just sync your stuff and you're ready to go. It's for

00:09:21 ◼   ► the rest of us who've got, you know, legacy apps, non-Mac App Store apps, all sorts of

00:09:26 ◼   ► stuff like that, and then you turn to Migration Assistant. I'm not convinced Migration Assistant

00:09:31 ◼   ► is doing so hot. I've tried it twice with these two MacBook Pros that I've got, and

00:09:37 ◼   ► it failed both times.

00:09:38 ◼   ► - You know what's interesting?

00:09:39 ◼   ► I've given up on migration assistant, to be honest.

00:09:41 ◼   ► I haven't used it in a few years.

00:09:43 ◼   ► I mean, and maybe I should give it another shot,

00:09:46 ◼   ► one of these, although what you just said,

00:09:47 ◼   ► it's really not. - I don't think you should.

00:09:49 ◼   ► - What I've got-- - I don't recommend it.

00:09:51 ◼   ► - What I have is an Apple Notes document.

00:09:55 ◼   ► I started this two or three years ago,

00:09:57 ◼   ► setting up a new Mac.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And so it's, the first thing I do is I go through

00:10:02 ◼   ► the first run, I put my iCloud,

00:10:04 ◼   ► I go through and put my iCloud credentials in.

00:10:07 ◼   ► So because I put my iCloud credentials in, my note sinks.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And then the note has a checklist of, you know,

00:10:14 ◼   ► do this, do this, do this.

00:10:16 ◼   ► It's, you know, and some of it-

00:10:18 ◼   ► - It's like an onboarding script for yourself.

00:10:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, more or less.

00:10:21 ◼   ► And then some of the stuff I'll just skip.

00:10:22 ◼   ► - Like a pre-flight checklist, right?

00:10:23 ◼   ► Like do this, then do this, then do this,

00:10:25 ◼   ► and I'm like, all right, got it.

00:10:25 ◼   ► So you don't miss a step.

00:10:27 ◼   ► You know, it kills me, BB Edit will sync all of its,

00:10:30 ◼   ► let's nerd out.

00:10:33 ◼   ► It's you and me.

00:10:34 ◼   ► We talked about baseball, we'll talk about BB Edit.

00:10:36 ◼   ► BBEdit will let you put all of its support stuff in Dropbox, which is great, and I use

00:10:42 ◼   ► that, but its preferences file does not go in Dropbox, and so every time I move to a

00:10:47 ◼   ► new Mac, I either have to manually reset all of the preferences, or I have to go to a home

00:10:54 ◼   ► folder, library application support, no, library preferences, com.barebones, BBEdit preferences,

00:11:01 ◼   ► and copy that file over so that my editor

00:11:04 ◼   ► is the way I like it.

00:11:05 ◼   ► And I do that every single time I move Macs.

00:11:07 ◼   ► It's like one of those things on the checklist

00:11:09 ◼   ► is I gotta move my BBEdit preferences

00:11:11 ◼   ► 'cause they don't cloud sync.

00:11:13 ◼   ► I can't fish them out of Dropbox.

00:11:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've been meaning for,

00:11:15 ◼   ► I've used that ever since BBEdit added that feature.

00:11:18 ◼   ► I mean, it's a couple of years ago at least.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And at first I really liked it,

00:11:22 ◼   ► but it's grown to annoy me

00:11:24 ◼   ► because I end up with like the same documents open

00:11:27 ◼   ► 'cause I also have the preference set

00:11:29 ◼   ► to restore open documents.

00:11:31 ◼   ► and almost everything I write in BB Edit

00:11:34 ◼   ► is stored in Dropbox.

00:11:36 ◼   ► So when I go to a different machine

00:11:39 ◼   ► and use BB Edit there, Dropbox has the same document.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And so it's open in two.

00:11:44 ◼   ► And I have found that I don't want that

00:11:48 ◼   ► because I leave too many documents open.

00:11:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, and oftentimes I'll leave one place

00:11:55 ◼   ► and finish in the other, and then I go back

00:11:57 ◼   ► and it's like, oh, I don't want that.

00:11:58 ◼   ► It's opening documents that I'm done with

00:12:00 ◼   ► because it lost state, because I'm not keeping them open

00:12:03 ◼   ► and in sync myself.

00:12:05 ◼   ► And I agree, I've noticed that.

00:12:07 ◼   ► But I like the fact that all my scripts and clippings

00:12:10 ◼   ► and things like that are just sort of there everywhere.

00:12:12 ◼   ► That's nice.

00:12:13 ◼   ► - I do too, and I know it's gonna annoy me

00:12:16 ◼   ► to go back to the old way, where if I write a new script,

00:12:19 ◼   ► or just one of my scripts, just tweak one of my scripts,

00:12:22 ◼   ► that to get that script to percolate everywhere,

00:12:25 ◼   ► I'd have to do it manually.

00:12:30 ◼   ► you know, zip up the, I don't know. Maybe what I should do is just turn off the preference

00:12:35 ◼   ► to reopen documents and see. I don't know. I've had a—but it's a mild annoyance that

00:12:39 ◼   ► I've had. I've been thinking for like a year I should like dig into this and redo it, but

00:12:43 ◼   ► I don't.

00:12:44 ◼   ► I know there's so many things that we do with our computers that are like, it's annoying,

00:12:49 ◼   ► but it doesn't—you gotta clear the bar of, "I'm gonna sit down for an hour and figure

00:12:53 ◼   ► out what the hell is going on," and so that you're just like, "Nah, I'm not gonna leave

00:12:56 ◼   ► and probably do you have more than an hour of misery?

00:13:00 ◼   ► Maybe, maybe not, but it's just enough.

00:13:03 ◼   ► I do that all the time with like automation stuff

00:13:05 ◼   ► where automation's great,

00:13:06 ◼   ► but you gotta clear the time to like do it.

00:13:10 ◼   ► And then once you do it, you're like, yay,

00:13:11 ◼   ► I've got this automation thing.

00:13:13 ◼   ► But so often it's just like, eh, I'm not gonna bother.

00:13:16 ◼   ► It's close enough and it's not enough annoyance

00:13:19 ◼   ► for me to break out an hour to try and figure it out.

00:13:22 ◼   ► So you just leave it.

00:13:23 ◼   ► - I actually, you know, it's funny you would say that.

00:13:24 ◼   ► I actually did a couple of those things last week as a sort of get my mind off of other

00:13:32 ◼   ► things, you know, get my mind off the internet.

00:13:35 ◼   ► And I found it very difficult to write, honestly.

00:13:41 ◼   ► I'll tell you what, I read a thing—let's just keep going meta here, and I know Merlin

00:13:47 ◼   ► and I talked about this last week extensively, you know, blah blah blah, the election and

00:13:52 ◼   ► and hard feelings.

00:13:53 ◼   ► But I saw a couple of other people with sight.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Steven Levy had a good thing on his back channel.

00:13:59 ◼   ► He had, I think it was just a day after the election.

00:14:00 ◼   ► But half of me says I should just charge ahead

00:14:05 ◼   ► and write some typically daring fireball topic stuff

00:14:10 ◼   ► because other people who read Daring Fireball, I'm sure,

00:14:14 ◼   ► would more than even usual love to have their mind

00:14:16 ◼   ► occupied by this, to get it off thoughts of the election.

00:14:22 ◼   ► and President Donald Trump.

00:14:25 ◼   ► But then there's another half of me that says,

00:14:27 ◼   ► that is, it's so, it's inappropriate, right?

00:14:32 ◼   ► That something this, you know, of its seismic level happens.

00:14:38 ◼   ► It's just foolish to write something that is so off topic.

00:14:45 ◼   ► And so I found myself unusually jammed last week

00:14:50 ◼   ► in terms of actually getting anything written.

00:14:52 ◼   ► So what I did is I occupied myself

00:14:54 ◼   ► by doing a couple like AppleScript things

00:14:56 ◼   ► that I'd been meaning to write for myself.

00:14:58 ◼   ► And it really, it helped.

00:15:00 ◼   ► It's the sort of thing where once I start

00:15:01 ◼   ► like writing an AppleScript and I'm,

00:15:03 ◼   ► 'cause half of it for me always with AppleScript is,

00:15:08 ◼   ► what the hell is the syntax for blank?

00:15:10 ◼   ► I find myself like an hour can go by

00:15:14 ◼   ► and I haven't had any thoughts of the election

00:15:17 ◼   ► and it's like the best hour of my day was writing.

00:15:19 ◼   ► What is it here?

00:15:21 ◼   ► I've got it, just opened it.

00:15:22 ◼   ► It's a Apple script that creates a new text file

00:15:25 ◼   ► at the current, right in the current finder window.

00:15:28 ◼   ► - That's nice.

00:15:30 ◼   ► I mean, I've, it's funny that we're talking about this

00:15:34 ◼   ► 'cause as we record this,

00:15:36 ◼   ► I think that the news kind of broke today

00:15:38 ◼   ► that Sal Segoian, who was the automation

00:15:42 ◼   ► in Apple script product manager at Apple for years,

00:15:44 ◼   ► is no longer employed by Apple.

00:15:47 ◼   ► - I did not know that.

00:15:48 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah, he just mentioned that he did a presentation

00:15:52 ◼   ► at the Mac Tech Conference today.

00:15:54 ◼   ► I have to say I'm sad, but I'm not really surprised

00:15:58 ◼   ► 'cause I'm not sure Apple's eye has been

00:15:59 ◼   ► on that particular ball for a long time,

00:16:01 ◼   ► but you know, and it's not for everybody.

00:16:03 ◼   ► And when I talk, people know that I do automation stuff

00:16:06 ◼   ► and they're like, "Oh, you know, it's hard to get into."

00:16:09 ◼   ► And that's all true, but then, you know, every,

00:16:13 ◼   ► And again, I do leave things for a long time, and sometimes, and it's like, oh, well, you

00:16:16 ◼   ► know, I should automate that.

00:16:18 ◼   ► But every time I do one of those, I finally put in that work.

00:16:21 ◼   ► Not only is it kind of a pleasure to solve the problem, and I think to myself, this must

00:16:24 ◼   ► be what computer programmers feel all the time, but, you know, once it's done, I can

00:16:31 ◼   ► hand it to other people sometimes if they want it.

00:16:33 ◼   ► I've done that a little bit.

00:16:34 ◼   ► And, you know, things get passed around, and it can make, it just can make your life better.

00:16:38 ◼   ► I have a bunch of things now that are,

00:16:41 ◼   ► they're not even Apple scripts,

00:16:43 ◼   ► they're shell scripts that run inside a service.

00:16:48 ◼   ► So basically, you basically make an automator thing

00:16:52 ◼   ► that says, do the shell scripts.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And then you wire that to--

00:16:56 ◼   ► - Take the current selection as input

00:16:58 ◼   ► and pass it to the script.

00:16:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so I do that for like,

00:17:01 ◼   ► I've got all these scripts that either I'm clicking on

00:17:05 ◼   ► something in the finder and doing a keyboard shortcut

00:17:08 ◼   ► or I'm choosing it from the contextual menu

00:17:11 ◼   ► to do all sorts of like audio processing

00:17:14 ◼   ► and stuff for podcasts.

00:17:15 ◼   ► And I just do it in,

00:17:16 ◼   ► it's all scripts running in the background.

00:17:18 ◼   ► And I got a lot of these scripts from Marco Arment

00:17:20 ◼   ► who is very comfortable with the command line

00:17:22 ◼   ► and just issues all this things from the command line.

00:17:24 ◼   ► I'm like, I'm not gonna do that.

00:17:25 ◼   ► I'm gonna put it in a little,

00:17:27 ◼   ► I'm gonna wrap it in an automator

00:17:28 ◼   ► and just hit a keyboard shortcut and do it.

00:17:30 ◼   ► And it's great.

00:17:31 ◼   ► And every time I do one of those things,

00:17:32 ◼   ► I think to myself, I can't believe I went months

00:17:35 ◼   ► where I was bringing up the terminal

00:17:37 ◼   ► and dragging in folders to get the path names

00:17:39 ◼   ► and then issuing the shell scripting commands

00:17:42 ◼   ► and all of that.

00:17:43 ◼   ► Now all I do is point and click.

00:17:44 ◼   ► I mean, that's the great thing about Mac automation stuff

00:17:47 ◼   ► and iOS too really is once it's done,

00:17:50 ◼   ► it's out of the way, all you do is go boop

00:17:52 ◼   ► and magic things happen.

00:17:53 ◼   ► And that's the abstracted computer user interface

00:17:58 ◼   ► in a nutshell right there

00:17:59 ◼   ► is you shouldn't know what the steps are.

00:18:01 ◼   ► You should be able to build the steps

00:18:02 ◼   ► and then put it aside and just keep doing your work.

00:18:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, and some of the utilities that are along those lines

00:18:09 ◼   ► like TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro,

00:18:12 ◼   ► I think Keyboard Maestro does this.

00:18:13 ◼   ► I'm almost certain TextExpander does this.

00:18:15 ◼   ► There's a way if you go to the About box or something,

00:18:17 ◼   ► it shows you how much time you've saved

00:18:19 ◼   ► since you've been using it.

00:18:21 ◼   ► And if you've been using,

00:18:22 ◼   ► I've got some of these utilities where I somehow,

00:18:24 ◼   ► it's like I look and it tells me I've saved

00:18:27 ◼   ► like 10 hours of time over so many years.

00:18:31 ◼   ► But that's like at each little step.

00:18:34 ◼   ► One of them for me, I've published this somewhere,

00:18:36 ◼   ► I don't know, I think it's on Gist or something like that,

00:18:39 ◼   ► I've written about it on Daring Fireball,

00:18:40 ◼   ► but I have a very particular style of title casing

00:18:43 ◼   ► I use on Daring Fireball.

00:18:44 ◼   ► Where there's, every big word gets an uppercase letter

00:18:50 ◼   ► and then there's a specific set of little words

00:18:52 ◼   ► that are not, like of, a, an.

00:18:55 ◼   ► And it can be tricky though to do it, to automate it,

00:19:02 ◼   ► because you can be fooled by things like quotes

00:19:05 ◼   ► in the text that's being selected

00:19:10 ◼   ► because then the should be capitalized

00:19:13 ◼   ► if it's the first word in the quote

00:19:14 ◼   ► because it's like the title of the thing.

00:19:16 ◼   ► So I've hacked together a script years ago

00:19:18 ◼   ► that gets it right 99.9% of the time.

00:19:22 ◼   ► And I have it exactly like you said,

00:19:24 ◼   ► it's an automator script or a service

00:19:28 ◼   ► with that shell script running in it.

00:19:30 ◼   ► and I have it mapped to shift command T for title case.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And there are some, I think about how much time

00:19:37 ◼   ► that has saved me over the years.

00:19:39 ◼   ► And it's just unbelievable.

00:19:41 ◼   ► And, but before I wrote it,

00:19:42 ◼   ► even though I've been using it for years,

00:19:43 ◼   ► I think, well, all those years,

00:19:44 ◼   ► I was like arrow, arrow, arrow, shift,

00:19:46 ◼   ► retype the letter, arrow, arrow.

00:19:49 ◼   ► It's crazy.

00:19:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's, well, I mean, that's,

00:19:53 ◼   ► KeyboardMeister tells me I've saved seven hours,

00:19:55 ◼   ► by the way, I just looked.

00:19:57 ◼   ► It goes back to regular expressions, right?

00:20:01 ◼   ► Did you write the chapter in the BB Edit manual

00:20:03 ◼   ► about regular expressions?

00:20:04 ◼   ► Was that you?

00:20:05 ◼   ► - No, no, but the second half of it is.

00:20:09 ◼   ► So I think this is fair to say,

00:20:11 ◼   ► I don't wanna take too much credit.

00:20:13 ◼   ► The regular expression chapter in BB Edit

00:20:15 ◼   ► was there when I started.

00:20:17 ◼   ► But BB Edit was using

00:20:19 ◼   ► a very old regular expression library.

00:20:22 ◼   ► It was really a derivative of the original Unix one.

00:20:26 ◼   ► a guy named Henry, somebody wrote it.

00:20:30 ◼   ► And it only had the basic regular expression syntax.

00:20:34 ◼   ► It was almost more like glorified wildcards.

00:20:38 ◼   ► And all the fancy stuff that you can do

00:20:42 ◼   ► when you read that chapter and you're like, holy crap,

00:20:45 ◼   ► was added when I was there.

00:20:47 ◼   ► And so I wrote the, you know,

00:20:49 ◼   ► they added onto the chapter to write all the--

00:20:51 ◼   ► - So all the PCRE stuff. - Yes.

00:20:54 ◼   ► - All right.

00:20:55 ◼   ► Yeah, that's, anyway, that's, I tell people about grep, about regular expressions, and

00:21:00 ◼   ► they have that same look as when I talk about Automator or if you talk about shell scripting,

00:21:03 ◼   ► which is like, I don't want to learn it, I don't understand it, I don't know, and it's

00:21:06 ◼   ► like, I get that.

00:21:07 ◼   ► But like, especially when I would talk to writers and editors about grep, I'd be like,

00:21:13 ◼   ► you don't understand.

00:21:14 ◼   ► Text is what you do for a living.

00:21:16 ◼   ► I am telling you, if you buy, like, buy Jeff Friedl's book, you know, or read the BB Edit

00:21:21 ◼   ► chapter. There are things in there that, you know, if you learn it, all of a sudden you'll

00:21:27 ◼   ► be sitting there thinking, "Oh man, I can't believe I need to do this. This is going to

00:21:30 ◼   ► take me an hour." And if you know the language of grep, if you know those symbols, you can

00:21:35 ◼   ► do it in two minutes. And it only needs to happen once, and you realize that it is a

00:21:43 ◼   ► life skill that you need to have.

00:21:45 ◼   ► I'll tell you the truth. This is a true story. I didn't learn regular expressions

00:21:50 ◼   ► while I was in college, even though I was a BB Edit nerd, comp sci major. I mean, I

00:21:56 ◼   ► think the furthest I ever got was like dot plus and dot star, which is, you know, just

00:22:01 ◼   ► more or less like old DOS wildcards. And I just never saw the need for it. And like a year or so

00:22:10 ◼   ► after college, I got a temp job at the Philadelphia Inquirer in the advertising department,

00:22:19 ◼   ► where they had a bunch of Excel spreadsheets with all of the ad rates for everything.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Each department had their own thing, and each one had like seven pages or 12 pages of ads in a matrix.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Keeping them in Excel as where the business people set them made total sense. Then there'd

00:22:42 ◼   ► be graphic designers who'd turn them into a book that they could send out to people.

00:22:47 ◼   ► So I got hired to do these books,

00:22:48 ◼   ► 'cause I could do graphic design.

00:22:50 ◼   ► And so I did the first one,

00:22:51 ◼   ► and this is how everybody did it,

00:22:52 ◼   ► but there was all sorts of gibberish

00:22:56 ◼   ► in columns that wasn't public.

00:22:58 ◼   ► And it must have made sense for the business people

00:23:01 ◼   ► who'd use the Excel spreadsheet,

00:23:03 ◼   ► but it didn't need to go in there.

00:23:05 ◼   ► And so the way that it was done before,

00:23:08 ◼   ► and the way I did the first book,

00:23:10 ◼   ► was I just went in and edited each column by hand,

00:23:12 ◼   ► and it was just tab, delete, tab, delete.

00:23:15 ◼   ► and just pages and pages and pages and pages.

00:23:18 ◼   ► And a couple of days work easily, or maybe a week's work

00:23:21 ◼   ► for the whole book, mostly just deleting the crap.

00:23:26 ◼   ► And I thought, there's got to be a better way.

00:23:28 ◼   ► And I thought about it.

00:23:28 ◼   ► I thought, I think this is the sort of stuff

00:23:30 ◼   ► regular expressions are supposed to solve.

00:23:32 ◼   ► And so I just spent a day writing just a couple

00:23:36 ◼   ► of regular expressions in BB Edit.

00:23:38 ◼   ► And then so I went from Excel to text,

00:23:41 ◼   ► BB Edit to just run a couple of saved grep patterns,

00:23:46 ◼   ► imported it into the document, and I was done.

00:23:49 ◼   ► And I literally turned a week's work of work for each book

00:23:54 ◼   ► into about two hours.

00:23:57 ◼   ► And so I just--

00:23:59 ◼   ► but I acted as though I didn't write the script

00:24:01 ◼   ► and just sat there and browse the web.

00:24:04 ◼   ► That's actually-- going out of Excel,

00:24:09 ◼   ► that's like a pro tip for all this stuff too.

00:24:12 ◼   ► It's like, I can't tell you how many times

00:24:14 ◼   ► I've had something in Excel that's been a disaster

00:24:16 ◼   ► and I just select it and paste it into BB edit.

00:24:18 ◼   ► It comes in as tab delimited

00:24:20 ◼   ► and or you save it out as a tab delimited file

00:24:22 ◼   ► and you do all of the crazy tech stuff

00:24:24 ◼   ► and you just make sure that there are tabs

00:24:26 ◼   ► between the fields and you bring it back into Excel

00:24:28 ◼   ► and you're like, look, it was in Excel all along

00:24:31 ◼   ► but it wasn't, you know, you completely take it out.

00:24:34 ◼   ► You know, times where I've taken multiple columns in Excel

00:24:36 ◼   ► and I pulled them out and then kind of like mixed them

00:24:39 ◼   ► and match them and reassembled them in the right way,

00:24:42 ◼   ► and then you paste them back in.

00:24:44 ◼   ► And it's like, you know, it's like they never left Excel,

00:24:47 ◼   ► but they totally came out of Excel.

00:24:48 ◼   ► And it's not like you can't do some wildcard stuff

00:24:50 ◼   ► in Excel, but, and you probably can write

00:24:52 ◼   ► Visual Basic scripts that do things too.

00:24:54 ◼   ► But for me, it was just like, can I get this back to text?

00:24:56 ◼   ► And can I write a couple of pattern matching

00:25:00 ◼   ► search and replaces that solve this problem?

00:25:02 ◼   ► And usually the answer is, yeah,

00:25:04 ◼   ► and you can take an hour of work

00:25:05 ◼   ► and do it in 10 minutes, five minutes.

00:25:07 ◼   ► - I mean, it literally turned-

00:25:08 ◼   ► turn literally turn weeks weeks of work into hours of work and I just got paid for weeks of work

00:25:16 ◼   ► I felt like I deserved it um yeah I will just say this one last thing it was a long time ago

00:25:23 ◼   ► it must have been 2001 or so when I wrote that the the second half of the bbedit grep chapter

00:25:29 ◼   ► I would still say is one of the pieces of writing that I am most proud of in my entire life because

00:25:34 ◼   ► I've people have told me many times when they find out that I wrote it they're like oh my god that

00:25:38 ◼   ► That was the first time regular expressions

00:25:40 ◼   ► ever made sense to me.

00:25:41 ◼   ► And I can't take credit for the whole chapter.

00:25:43 ◼   ► But I did take a pass through the early part,

00:25:45 ◼   ► 'cause that was my goal, is I do feel like

00:25:48 ◼   ► I have a knack for regular expressions.

00:25:50 ◼   ► It's the one area of programming

00:25:52 ◼   ► where I'm better than almost anybody.

00:25:54 ◼   ► I really am good at figuring out how to create the syntax

00:26:00 ◼   ► to match what I wanna match.

00:26:01 ◼   ► And it ends up creating these things

00:26:04 ◼   ► that most people look at and they're like,

00:26:05 ◼   ► "What the hell?"

00:26:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's the big problem

00:26:09 ◼   ► with regular expressions is readability.

00:26:12 ◼   ► Like, people see them and they think,

00:26:13 ◼   ► it's nonsense, I can't do it.

00:26:14 ◼   ► And it's like, no, no, no.

00:26:15 ◼   ► If you learn it, it's actually fairly straightforward.

00:26:18 ◼   ► Not all of them, but most of them.

00:26:19 ◼   ► But they look like nonsense.

00:26:22 ◼   ► - Well, I just thought, you know, but this is something,

00:26:24 ◼   ► this is like a perfect combination for me

00:26:26 ◼   ► because I have a knack for explaining things

00:26:28 ◼   ► and I have a knack for regular expressions.

00:26:30 ◼   ► And in hindsight, I still feel, you know, what is it?

00:26:33 ◼   ► 14, 15 years later, I still feel

00:26:36 ◼   ► one of the best things I've ever written. Yeah, I love that chapter. I mentioned Jeff

00:26:42 ◼   ► Friedl's O'Reilly book about this. It's great, but it's from the possession of a

00:26:46 ◼   ► long-time Unix guy, and he talks about scripting a lot in that like shell and Perl scripting. And

00:26:53 ◼   ► for me, the most direct application was BBEdit. So the BBEdit chapter is a much more distilled,

00:26:59 ◼   ► clear approach to this than—I love that Friedl book, and I reference it all the time, but

00:27:05 ◼   ► the BBA chapter is just a much more simple, gentle introduction.

00:27:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I love it. I love the "FREEDLE" book, too, and I've read both editions—maybe three

00:27:13 ◼   ► editions. I think there might be a third—I don't know. Every time there's a new edition, I buy it.

00:27:16 ◼   ► There is a third.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And I have all three copies, and I've read them all cover to cover.

00:27:20 ◼   ► It is. But it's a—I would definitely say it is—this "FREEDLE" book is so comprehensive and so

00:27:32 ◼   ► well done. I don't know that I've ever read any book on any subject where you could say,

00:27:37 ◼   ► "Well, there's no need for anybody else to ever write a book on this again." But I would honestly

00:27:41 ◼   ► say that that's the case with Friedel's book on regular expressions. I just can't see how

00:27:45 ◼   ► anybody else would say, "Well, I'll take the time to write a technical book," which is really hard

00:27:52 ◼   ► on this subject when there's a book that covers it both perfectly and extensively.

00:27:58 ◼   ► All right, maybe I'll take a break. How about I take a break here and thank the first

00:28:02 ◼   ► friend of the show. It's our good friends.

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00:28:21 ◼   ► Hold on, I'll tell you what that is.

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00:28:46 ◼   ► These guys, it really is sort of like the Apple attitude

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00:30:48 ◼   ► I've had readers tell me-- this is the thing.

00:30:51 ◼   ► When I first did this read, I didn't

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00:30:56 ◼   ► So I had a couple of readers who said,

00:30:57 ◼   ► "Hey, I bought my dog the mattress,

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00:31:13 ◼   ► - Maybe that would get my dog off my couch.

00:31:17 ◼   ► - I love doing sponsor reads.

00:31:21 ◼   ► I've gone from having it be the part of this job that I hate to a part that I love.

00:31:27 ◼   ► I think that makes the—not to get podcasty inside baseball, but I think that makes the

00:31:32 ◼   ► reads better once.

00:31:34 ◼   ► When you can't—there are a couple of podcasts I listen to where, you know, the ads are part

00:31:40 ◼   ► of the entertainment and you just can't, you know, you can't not listen to them.

00:31:43 ◼   ► You can't tune out, you can't skip.

00:31:45 ◼   ► You really got to pay attention because they put their personality into them and, you know,

00:31:50 ◼   ► And I think that makes the difference.

00:31:52 ◼   ► If it's like a hostage video or something,

00:31:55 ◼   ► it's a lot less entertaining.

00:31:56 ◼   ► But if it's part of the fun, then it's a lot better.

00:31:59 ◼   ► - I can't even tell you how many emails I got from people

00:32:02 ◼   ► about last week's show with Merlin.

00:32:03 ◼   ► Were there, A, just thanking us like,

00:32:05 ◼   ► oh my God, I needed that for the election week.

00:32:08 ◼   ► And they were like, oh my God,

00:32:09 ◼   ► the sponsor reads so good.

00:32:11 ◼   ► I will just take a meta break here and just say,

00:32:15 ◼   ► I don't have time to respond to all of my email,

00:32:19 ◼   ► but I got so much email,

00:32:21 ◼   ► the most email I've gotten about an episode of the show

00:32:24 ◼   ► in as long as I can remember from people last week.

00:32:28 ◼   ► And all of it, I honestly didn't see one that was,

00:32:32 ◼   ► I honestly thought there'd be some from Trump people

00:32:34 ◼   ► or people who just don't wanna hear about people

00:32:37 ◼   ► who are upset about the way the election turned out.

00:32:41 ◼   ► Go back to tech, dummy.

00:32:42 ◼   ► I didn't get any of that, which was sort of our goal.

00:32:45 ◼   ► It was the way that we approached it

00:32:46 ◼   ► and what we talked about.

00:32:48 ◼   ► but I got so much email from people thanking us for that.

00:32:52 ◼   ► So I just wanna say to all of you who listen,

00:32:54 ◼   ► thank you for listening and thank you for the good words.

00:32:58 ◼   ► I have a podcast question for you, Jason.

00:33:00 ◼   ► You don't, I mean, do you do any other podcasts regularly?

00:33:04 ◼   ► - Occasionally.

00:33:07 ◼   ► - So you occasionally-- - I hear and there.

00:33:08 ◼   ► - Occasionally podcast. (laughs)

00:33:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, just from time to,

00:33:12 ◼   ► you mean like per day?

00:33:14 ◼   ► Some days I don't podcast.

00:33:16 ◼   ► I got a bug up my butt recently about something that I had never thought about before.

00:33:25 ◼   ► This is the sort of thing that I tend to think about.

00:33:27 ◼   ► I can't believe I didn't really think that much about it when I set up the talk show

00:33:30 ◼   ► to be on Daring Fireball, which is the fact that I've been doing it.

00:33:39 ◼   ► I've always done it.

00:33:40 ◼   ► And in most of the podcasts, almost all the podcasts I see do it.

00:33:44 ◼   ► putting the episode number in the title and making the episode number a major part, you know, like the

00:33:49 ◼   ► the main anchor on the URL that the like dead on on our websites on six colors and during fireball

00:33:57 ◼   ► we don't have post number you know for 23123. Right, oh that was a good one. Yeah, good old

00:34:06 ◼   ► good old 23,323. Why why do we do this and and you know uh tv shows don't do it i mean they

00:34:14 ◼   ► sort of do now, like when you watch digitally, you know, you're going through season one,

00:34:20 ◼   ► episode seven of American Horror Story or whatever. So there is, there's sort of that on TV, but...

00:34:28 ◼   ► I don't know. It's a good question. Like, why? Why do we number podcasts? And you,

00:34:36 ◼   ► I can always tell what number it is, because you actually do number them in the, like, the slug

00:34:39 ◼   ► of the talk show, but not like in what people see, just like the written descriptions.

00:34:46 ◼   ► Right. Well, but I have them in the metadata for the show, so like when you're looking at it in

00:34:52 ◼   ► your podcast player, it will say 173 colon. Well, I switched recently. I did switch just a couple

00:35:00 ◼   ► weeks ago from putting EP period space, the digital, you know, representation of the number

00:35:08 ◼   ► colon, I took out the EP.

00:35:11 ◼   ► Because I thought, you know what?

00:35:13 ◼   ► It's cruft like that that I don't like.

00:35:16 ◼   ► I like clean URLs.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I don't like seeing dot PHP at the end of a URL.

00:35:21 ◼   ► I don't like seeing all the gibberish and the medium URLs.

00:35:26 ◼   ► I don't like tracking any URL.

00:35:28 ◼   ► I like the URL to have every single bit of it be meaningful.

00:35:33 ◼   ► And that same way with the titles.

00:35:35 ◼   ► It seems to me--

00:35:37 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:35:38 ◼   ► There seemed it part of me thinks that part of it is that you want to know which one's the newest episode in your podcast

00:35:43 ◼   ► player and that maybe it actually is useful because you

00:35:46 ◼   ► It's it's a more confident way of making sure that your podcast player whatever software it is

00:35:52 ◼   ► Whichever sort order it's using top to bottom or bottom to top, you know, which one's the newest one

00:35:57 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. So I'm keeping it. I like when I made the change to get rid of the EP period I

00:36:02 ◼   ► Was on the verge of just getting rid of them period and maybe just putting them in the URL

00:36:07 ◼   ► But then I thought you know what? I think there's a reason everybody does it

00:36:10 ◼   ► And I'm curious what you think. I don't know if it's a reason that is

00:36:15 ◼   ► I don't know if it's a good reason or if it's more just sort of continuity. I mean some of it is

00:36:20 ◼   ► reference wise to be able to say it's this one like saying like um

00:36:25 ◼   ► like a Mac world we had volumes and

00:36:29 ◼   ► numbers like

00:36:31 ◼   ► Internally we would have like you turn in a story and it would be 24-04 and that was

00:36:38 ◼   ► Literally 24-04 was like the to the April

00:36:43 ◼   ► 2008 issue or something. It was like volume 24 number 4

00:36:48 ◼   ► And and that was partially because in a file in the file system like it would sort right

00:36:53 ◼   ► That all the 24-04 s would go together and then there you'd have 24-05 and it would just kind of keep going like that

00:37:00 ◼   ► So I think some of it is just sort of like finding an internal structure and for podcasts you could do it by date

00:37:04 ◼   ► You could literally say, you know, this is the one for

00:37:08 ◼   ► You know this day in November of 2016 and the metadata certainly supplies that so you could just you could just do that

00:37:16 ◼   ► You could have nothing

00:37:18 ◼   ► I don't know as a kid growing up

00:37:21 ◼   ► I really loved reading comic books and the comic books always had that like this is Amazing Spider-Man number

00:37:27 ◼   ► 1983 and and they would have footnotes and they would say Oh spider-man face the scorpion before in Amazing Spider-Man number

00:37:34 ◼   ► 83 and sent him to prison and you'd be like, oh number 83

00:37:37 ◼   ► Yes

00:37:37 ◼   ► if only I had that issue I could read that now and I

00:37:40 ◼   ► Part of what appeals to me about the podcast numbering scheme is that which is just it lets you hang a number on it and say

00:37:47 ◼   ► For reference sake this is what it is rather than saying season one number three

00:37:52 ◼   ► Or just giving you a date

00:37:56 ◼   ► But I don't know if that's a great reason to do it

00:37:58 ◼   ► Probably also the the other thought I had is since the incomparable is now at three hundred and twenty six episodes

00:38:05 ◼   ► I

00:38:07 ◼   ► think maybe it was a

00:38:09 ◼   ► It made sense when you did ten episodes of a podcast in the early days of podcasting and now there are these podcasts that have

00:38:17 ◼   ► Hundreds and hundreds of episodes were pretty soon. If not already there will very soon be many

00:38:23 ◼   ► podcasts with with

00:38:25 ◼   ► a thousand plus episodes. It's sort of crazy. Marco was saying on ATP a couple an episode or two ago

00:38:32 ◼   ► because he knows because he runs the radio ones. Yeah, he said that the radio they're already there.

00:38:39 ◼   ► Yeah, and they do because there's radio stations that will publish five or six podcasts a day like

00:38:44 ◼   ► meaning like the 15 hour one hour two hour three hour four of the you know the sports fans podcast

00:38:52 ◼   ► in the morning. And so you'll have episode 1500. It's crazy. The comic book analogy is pretty good.

00:39:00 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the best for me is it gives you something to hang it on sequentially and say,

00:39:06 ◼   ► "Look, we've done a lot of these." And then I have that with Incomparable. I mean, even though

00:39:11 ◼   ► we built an index, one of the reasons that we did end up using use Moveable Type, which you

00:39:15 ◼   ► you use on Daring Fireball for the incomparable CMS is because I wanted an index of topics.

00:39:24 ◼   ► And so, I've got an index of topics. So, if somebody wants to see what's that episode

00:39:27 ◼   ► where John Gruber and John Syracuse are talking about the Godfather, you can look up the Godfather

00:39:32 ◼   ► and it'll be like, it's this number, right? But still, people will email me, tweet me,

00:39:37 ◼   ► post on Facebook, whatever they'll say. When was that episode about whatever? And there

00:39:42 ◼   ► is something nice about being able to say that was number 32 and just kind of point

00:39:46 ◼   ► them and be like, it's that one, that number. I don't know. It's like a little handle for

00:39:51 ◼   ► an episode.

00:39:52 ◼   ► Yeah. The alternative would be to just look at the dates and somehow, but that doesn't

00:39:57 ◼   ► show up. That's not going to show up in the list in your podcast player.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Well, but that's maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

00:40:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:40:05 ◼   ► I mean, I think maybe podcast player UI is in part based on the idea that a lot of podcasts

00:40:11 ◼   ► organize themselves by numbers, but like Overcast has a date field, and there are dates for

00:40:17 ◼   ► every episode in Overcast, and I would imagine most podcast players are kind of like that.

00:40:22 ◼   ► And certainly if podcasts weren't numbered, I'm sure they would all be like that.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Yeah, but if I made mine not numbered, or didn't put the numbers into titles, it's not

00:40:32 ◼   ► going to change it, you know what I mean? It's the collective decision that the podcast

00:40:38 ◼   ► industry as a whole has made to do that.

00:40:40 ◼   ► Yeah, it's more fun for me to say we talked about Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Incomparable

00:40:46 ◼   ► Number Eight than it is to say October 17, 2010 episode.

00:40:55 ◼   ► Was that the gap in my appearances on the Incomparable? Because we laughed about it.

00:40:59 ◼   ► I was just on recently, like you just said, to talk about the Godfather with John Sirkusa

00:41:03 ◼   ► and a few other… I forget their names. I'm sorry.

00:41:08 ◼   ► There was a bunch.

00:41:09 ◼   ► It was great.

00:41:11 ◼   ► I had a great time.

00:41:13 ◼   ► I can't count the number of people who made the crack on Twitter that they can't believe

00:41:17 ◼   ► that all of us long-winded podcasters made a podcast about the Godfather that was shorter

00:41:22 ◼   ► than the Godfather.

00:41:23 ◼   ► I know.

00:41:26 ◼   ► But was that it?

00:41:27 ◼   ► That I hadn't been on since Raiders, which was episode 8?

00:41:29 ◼   ► Yeah, that was basically six years, October 10 to October 16.

00:41:34 ◼   ► Other than that day—you were in—I interviewed my Dave Letterman episode, which was last

00:41:38 ◼   ► year. But in terms of being on the panel, yeah, we went from 8 to 323. It's fine. It's fine. I tried

00:41:44 ◼   ► a couple of times to get you on, and it's like you're busy, and I want to, like with Merlin,

00:41:48 ◼   ► I kind of want to deploy you guys tactically. I don't want to be like, I want to ask you when

00:41:52 ◼   ► there's something I got that's really good. And it was like, for like a couple years I've been

00:41:55 ◼   ► thinking, we're going to do the Godfather, I'm going to get Syracuse, I'm going to ask John

00:41:58 ◼   ► Gruber, we're going to make it happen. And we finally made it happen. It was great. We got to

00:42:02 ◼   ► talk about Abe Vigoda. Any chance to talk about Abe Vigoda is worth it.

00:42:06 ◼   ► Although we didn't make it happen until Abe Vagoda was actually dead.

00:42:10 ◼   ► Yeah, well, that's true. Maybe that was what I was waiting for.

00:42:13 ◼   ► I wanted Abe to pass on before we talked about him.

00:42:16 ◼   ► This is so amazing. I literally, just five seconds ago, got a DM from Rich Segal, creator of BBEdit,

00:42:28 ◼   ► asking if I'd heard that Sal had left Apple.

00:42:31 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:34 ◼   ► - I was spooked, I was like, is he listening?

00:42:35 ◼   ► Do we have a live broadcast that I don't know about?

00:42:38 ◼   ► - I should have turned off the live stream

00:42:40 ◼   ► for being comfortable.

00:42:42 ◼   ► - But then I realized that--

00:42:43 ◼   ► - He knows we're talking about him.

00:42:43 ◼   ► - Well, then I realized that asking have I heard

00:42:47 ◼   ► means he's not spooking me, but that was kind of spooky

00:42:50 ◼   ► given that we spent a good chunk of the last 45 minutes

00:42:53 ◼   ► talking about BB Edit and automation and Sal.

00:42:56 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:42:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:43:01 ◼   ► - New MacBook Pros.

00:43:02 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:43:04 ◼   ► - I read, I really enjoyed your review.

00:43:07 ◼   ► I often think, when I write these reviews,

00:43:11 ◼   ► I don't know if you feel the same way,

00:43:12 ◼   ► but I write them and sometimes I feel like

00:43:16 ◼   ► I know that I've got this.

00:43:18 ◼   ► Like, I don't care if other people agree with me or not,

00:43:22 ◼   ► but I know that what I'm saying about this, I'm certain of.

00:43:25 ◼   ► Other times, I feel like I haven't had enough time

00:43:27 ◼   ► Or it's-- a lot of times it's just

00:43:32 ◼   ► that I feel like I haven't had enough time.

00:43:34 ◼   ► But other times it's like, I'm not sure

00:43:36 ◼   ► that what I care about is representative

00:43:39 ◼   ► of enough people.

00:43:41 ◼   ► And I kind of had that worry with the review

00:43:44 ◼   ► I wrote of these MacBook Pros.

00:43:46 ◼   ► Because I know that there's a lot of people

00:43:50 ◼   ► who are disappointed in just the basic idea of the direction

00:43:55 ◼   ► Apple is taking them.

00:43:56 ◼   ► But I read a whole bunch of the reviews from people

00:43:59 ◼   ► who I really respect, like you and Joanna Stern.

00:44:01 ◼   ► It goes on.

00:44:05 ◼   ► I read a whole bunch of them after my review.

00:44:08 ◼   ► And it really seemed to me like a very large consensus

00:44:12 ◼   ► of that these are pretty good machines.

00:44:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I tried to,

00:44:18 ◼   ► I mean, because of the way it got kind of strung out,

00:44:20 ◼   ► I got to write a piece after the Apple event

00:44:25 ◼   ► that was basically quick hands-on with that 13-inch MacBook escape. And then I got to use it for a week

00:44:31 ◼   ► and travel and then write another piece about it. So by the time I got to the Touch Bar one,

00:44:35 ◼   ► I felt like I'd kind of addressed the issues about people's disappointment. I wrote, I think,

00:44:40 ◼   ► a Macworld column about people's disappointment and what that meant for why Apple let everything

00:44:46 ◼   ► build up and people kind of—this was a thing they could focus some of their disappointment and let

00:44:51 ◼   ► it out. And so I felt like by the time I got to the Touch Bar review, it was great because

00:44:56 ◼   ► I could just write about the Touch Bar. I wrote a couple sections about the rest of

00:45:00 ◼   ► the computer, but really it was an essay about the Touch Bar and Touch ID, because that was

00:45:04 ◼   ► the thing that was left and frankly was the thing I found most interesting.

00:45:09 ◼   ► And it's really why I—honestly, I'm not just saying it because you're on the show

00:45:14 ◼   ► and you're a pal—it's really why, of all the reviews, I really think I liked yours

00:45:18 ◼   ► best because I spent a relatively little amount on Touch Bar just because I had so much else

00:45:24 ◼   ► to say about sort of the bigger picture.

00:45:29 ◼   ► And the other thing I thought was that your video, which focused almost entirely on the

00:45:35 ◼   ► Touch Bar, was super instructive in the difference between the way Apple would do a promotional

00:45:42 ◼   ► video about the Touch Bar, or in fact did, and they showed it during the event.

00:45:47 ◼   ► was focused on, look, when you're doing real stuff,

00:45:49 ◼   ► like here's just stupid little things,

00:45:52 ◼   ► like the fact that you can--

00:45:55 ◼   ► when you adjust the brightness or the volume,

00:45:57 ◼   ► you can just put your finger on it

00:45:59 ◼   ► and slide without tapping on the actual thing that shows up.

00:46:03 ◼   ► It illustrated in a way that I feel like 10,000 words

00:46:07 ◼   ► wouldn't have conveyed.

00:46:09 ◼   ► It's a visual-- it's clearly a very visual input device.

00:46:13 ◼   ► And so I feel like the video really helped.

00:46:14 ◼   ► Have you done video reviews before?

00:46:17 ◼   ► - I've done a handful of them.

00:46:18 ◼   ► I mean, I did some at Macworld.

00:46:20 ◼   ► And then since I've been doing Six Colors,

00:46:21 ◼   ► I've done a few, you know, they take time.

00:46:24 ◼   ► And the challenge is always,

00:46:25 ◼   ► am I doing this because everybody agrees

00:46:27 ◼   ► that video is the future and we need to do video?

00:46:29 ◼   ► Or am I doing it because video will be able

00:46:31 ◼   ► to impart something that's worth imparting?

00:46:34 ◼   ► And for me, it really is like,

00:46:36 ◼   ► I will put in the time if I feel like

00:46:38 ◼   ► this is gonna be the best way to communicate something.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And with the touch bar, it was very clear.

00:46:41 ◼   ► This was the way to,

00:46:43 ◼   ► I needed to communicate what was going on with the touch bar.

00:46:46 ◼   ► And I had the time.

00:46:47 ◼   ► I finished that review basically on Friday afternoon,

00:46:50 ◼   ► and the embargo was Monday morning.

00:46:52 ◼   ► And so on the weekend, on the Sunday morning,

00:46:53 ◼   ► I basically sat down and said, all right,

00:46:55 ◼   ► let's figure out if I can make a video here.

00:46:57 ◼   ► And I ended up with an iPhone 7 in a glyph attached

00:47:02 ◼   ► to a little tripod and then a bigger tripod.

00:47:06 ◼   ► And I tried to figure out, could I

00:47:08 ◼   ► get an angle where I can see the touch bar

00:47:10 ◼   ► and it's not blown out?

00:47:11 ◼   ► and then I can capture the screen

00:47:14 ◼   ► and kind of put them together.

00:47:15 ◼   ► And in the end, it did work, which is good.

00:47:17 ◼   ► 'Cause that's what I wanted is like,

00:47:19 ◼   ► I wanted people to be able to see like,

00:47:21 ◼   ► what happens on screen?

00:47:22 ◼   ► What happens on the touch bar?

00:47:23 ◼   ► Where do your fingers go?

00:47:24 ◼   ► What's the result?

00:47:25 ◼   ► Can you see the animations?

00:47:26 ◼   ► Can you see how some of the apps

00:47:30 ◼   ► have these totally wild like slider interfaces

00:47:33 ◼   ► and others just have keys?

00:47:34 ◼   ► Some of them color the keys,

00:47:35 ◼   ► some of them don't color the keys.

00:47:37 ◼   ► And until, you know, there will be,

00:47:40 ◼   ► It's a little harder because you can't do a screen capture of it, so it's harder to make those videos.

00:47:44 ◼   ► And I had the advantage of having some time to shoot the video, and I figured out of the gate,

00:47:48 ◼   ► there aren't going to be that many videos that explain this feature.

00:47:51 ◼   ► And Apple's videos are probably not what people want to see because they're going to be really slick,

00:47:56 ◼   ► but they're not necessarily—I mean, they're marketing videos.

00:47:58 ◼   ► They're not going to be necessarily slowed down enough for people to see what's going on.

00:48:03 ◼   ► And in the end, it was about five minutes long, which, you know, I kind of feel like could be too long,

00:48:08 ◼   ► but at the same time I felt like I really packed it in

00:48:10 ◼   ► with stuff, so, but it was worth doing because of that,

00:48:13 ◼   ► because it was, how much, how many words, like you said,

00:48:16 ◼   ► how many words would I have had to try to write

00:48:18 ◼   ► to convey what I could just show in a video?

00:48:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, I honestly feel like that's the sort of thing

00:48:25 ◼   ► that just can't be done verbally.

00:48:27 ◼   ► And you know, even just little things like,

00:48:33 ◼   ► look, here's what it looks like in this app,

00:48:34 ◼   ► here's what it looks like in this app,

00:48:36 ◼   ► and they're all sort of monochromatic,

00:48:38 ◼   ► And you can go through a bunch of stuff in the touch bar apps,

00:48:42 ◼   ► switching from app to app and doing things

00:48:45 ◼   ► and using the control strip.

00:48:46 ◼   ► And it almost feels like a monochrome screen.

00:48:51 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden, you're in something like Maps.

00:48:54 ◼   ► And it is all lit up like Times Square.

00:48:58 ◼   ► And I'm not saying that's wrong yet.

00:49:00 ◼   ► But it is such a different thing, though.

00:49:03 ◼   ► And all of a sudden, when your keyboard--

00:49:06 ◼   ► Maps is probably the best example,

00:49:08 ◼   ► but when your keyboard lights up with all those colors,

00:49:12 ◼   ► it is a weird different thing because I've

00:49:15 ◼   ► been using laptops for, I don't know, a long time, at least 15,

00:49:23 ◼   ► 16, 17 years since I first bought one.

00:49:27 ◼   ► And I had one at the school paper before that,

00:49:29 ◼   ► so probably 20 years.

00:49:31 ◼   ► My keyboards never lit up in color before.

00:49:35 ◼   ► It was surprisingly weird to me.

00:49:37 ◼   ► It really was, when you get the burst of color,

00:49:41 ◼   ► it really was surprisingly interesting to me.

00:49:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, the calculator is the other one that struck me

00:49:46 ◼   ► because there are a few of those keys are like in orange,

00:49:48 ◼   ► they're like super bright.

00:49:50 ◼   ► And they're still keys, but they're super bright.

00:49:53 ◼   ► That maps, it's basically putting up the same icons

00:49:56 ◼   ► that are in iOS and they're very colorful.

00:49:57 ◼   ► That is by far the most colorful implementation

00:49:59 ◼   ► of sort of standard buttons.

00:50:01 ◼   ► But like, the calculator,

00:50:03 ◼   ► I thought calculator was really instructive,

00:50:04 ◼   ► not only in the use of color, but both Calculator and James

00:50:07 ◼   ► Thompson's PCALC app.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Those were both instructive to me

00:50:12 ◼   ► in realizing that what I think is the right way to handle

00:50:16 ◼   ► the touch bar is as an extension of the keyboard and not--

00:50:20 ◼   ► I mean, when all the questions of like, why would you

00:50:23 ◼   ► need a touch bar?

00:50:24 ◼   ► Why wouldn't you just want to use the Mac interface?

00:50:26 ◼   ► It was that idea of, I don't know

00:50:28 ◼   ► how to do this with the keyboard, which

00:50:31 ◼   ► means that I'm going to get to a certain point

00:50:33 ◼   ► where I have to take my hands off the keyboard,

00:50:35 ◼   ► move down to the track pad,

00:50:36 ◼   ► and click on some UI on the screen.

00:50:38 ◼   ► And so the calculator was that moment where I realized,

00:50:40 ◼   ► oh, I can put like square root and cube root

00:50:43 ◼   ► and log and sine and cosine on the touch bar.

00:50:46 ◼   ► And I can do numbers and then immediately

00:50:49 ◼   ► just move my hands slightly up and go tap.

00:50:51 ◼   ► And now I've got a result or conversion,

00:50:54 ◼   ► you know, Fahrenheit to Celsius or something.

00:50:55 ◼   ► And my hands stay, I was already up on the number row,

00:50:58 ◼   ► right, and my hands just move up.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And that was that moment where I thought, oh yeah,

00:51:02 ◼   ► this is why this is, this is where this shines,

00:51:05 ◼   ► is I just stay on the keyboard.

00:51:07 ◼   ► And the touch bar kind of just is an extension

00:51:09 ◼   ► of the keyboard that,

00:51:11 ◼   ► and is that how everybody's going to use it?

00:51:13 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:51:14 ◼   ► It's so early, we don't really know,

00:51:15 ◼   ► but it felt to me like that was the moment that unlocked,

00:51:18 ◼   ► like, I see why you would use this.

00:51:21 ◼   ► And when I, James sent me a beta of PCALC,

00:51:25 ◼   ► where when you tap the function keys,

00:51:27 ◼   ► it brought up a palette of all his functions in the UI.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And what that meant was I tapped the touch bar

00:51:33 ◼   ► and then I had to take my hands off the keyboard,

00:51:36 ◼   ► move to the track pad, and then move the cursor up

00:51:38 ◼   ► and then click on which one I wanted.

00:51:40 ◼   ► And I sent him an email back and I said,

00:51:41 ◼   ► "You know, I think this is wrong.

00:51:43 ◼   ► I think what you need is to put your functions

00:51:46 ◼   ► in the touch bar because it feels like a defeat.

00:51:50 ◼   ► If I touch the touch bar and then I have to take my hands

00:51:52 ◼   ► off of it and move around with the cursor."

00:51:54 ◼   ► And so he changed it and now it's like your most recent

00:51:58 ◼   ► functions and conversions appear in the touch bar.

00:52:00 ◼   ► and it's like night and day because now I type in 32 and I tap conversion Fahrenheit to Celsius and

00:52:06 ◼   ► That and it all happens on the touch bar and I never have to sort of switch modes to mousing around

00:52:12 ◼   ► yeah, and I think that

00:52:15 ◼   ► Calculator is the apples calculators an interesting example in a couple of ways I I

00:52:22 ◼   ► My gut feeling is that that's one of the apps that got it most, right?

00:52:28 ◼   ► Yeah, me too and one thing too and I know Apple said this is true

00:52:31 ◼   ► but my experience testing the device is that it is clear that

00:52:35 ◼   ► Apple's Mac app

00:52:39 ◼   ► engineering teams spent a lot of time working on touch bar support for their apps because there are

00:52:44 ◼   ► Obviously some of the oddball apps like the ones that are in applications slash utilities, you know

00:52:49 ◼   ► Those got updated. Did you really go through everyone? I did I did

00:52:54 ◼   ► You want you want to hear the list?

00:52:58 ◼   ► - It's like, so, so, you, activity monitor,

00:53:03 ◼   ► that's the one that gets me.

00:53:04 ◼   ► Activity monitor and terminal are the two utilities

00:53:07 ◼   ► that got updated. - Oh, I knew about terminal.

00:53:09 ◼   ► I forgot about that.

00:53:10 ◼   ► I forgot that terminal was that,

00:53:11 ◼   ► was buried away in utilities.

00:53:13 ◼   ► I use it so much. - Yeah, but,

00:53:14 ◼   ► but they also updated, and this is some of their stock,

00:53:16 ◼   ► and some of them are their sort of app store apps,

00:53:18 ◼   ► but calculator, calendar, contacts,

00:53:20 ◼   ► finder, Final Cut Pro, GarageBand, iMovie, iTunes,

00:53:23 ◼   ► keynote, mail, maps, messages, numbers, pages, photos,

00:53:26 ◼   ► Preview, QuickTime Player, Safari system preferences.

00:53:30 ◼   ► And then there are a bunch of apps that use the sort of standard text editing interface,

00:53:33 ◼   ► and they pick up a text editor touch bar interface, so like TextEdit and Notes get that text editing

00:53:41 ◼   ► interface too.

00:53:42 ◼   ► So there's like more than a dozen.

00:53:43 ◼   ► They did a lot.

00:53:44 ◼   ► I mean, for people who say Apple doesn't care about the Mac, it's like they built this whole

00:53:48 ◼   ► new bit of hardware, and then they updated all of these Mac apps to support it.

00:53:53 ◼   ► That was a lot of work.

00:53:54 ◼   ► Right.

00:53:55 ◼   ► there's a lot of work in,

00:53:58 ◼   ► I might be missing something actually,

00:54:01 ◼   ► but there's the hardware engineering work

00:54:05 ◼   ► of actually putting an embedded iOS device

00:54:08 ◼   ► into the keyboard with the system on a chip

00:54:11 ◼   ► and having a way that it can interface with the Intel side.

00:54:15 ◼   ► You've got like this little arm computer

00:54:18 ◼   ► running on your keyboard,

00:54:19 ◼   ► and it communicates with the Intel side.

00:54:22 ◼   ► And the Intel side even does the,

00:54:23 ◼   ► because one of the things that the iOS device

00:54:26 ◼   ► on the touch bar doesn't have is a GPU.

00:54:28 ◼   ► So the Intel side does the GPU rendering

00:54:32 ◼   ► and it has to go back, but it's all done securely.

00:54:34 ◼   ► And there's a whole bunch of electrical engineering

00:54:37 ◼   ► going on there that's, and it just,

00:54:39 ◼   ► you'd never know it, right?

00:54:40 ◼   ► It's 60 frames per second, just like iOS.

00:54:45 ◼   ► It's instantaneous touch.

00:54:48 ◼   ► It's just like you'd expect

00:54:50 ◼   ► from any Apple iOS touch device.

00:54:52 ◼   ► So there's the physical hardware engineering of that.

00:54:55 ◼   ► And then the second level is the Mac programming side,

00:55:04 ◼   ► where all of these apps were updated with--

00:55:08 ◼   ► whether they got it right or wrong, none of them

00:55:10 ◼   ► seemed half-assed.

00:55:11 ◼   ► They all seemed like a lot of thought went into it.

00:55:13 ◼   ► All of these apps got updated with touch bar support,

00:55:17 ◼   ► which is a lot of work.

00:55:19 ◼   ► But then in between those two, there's the Xcode side,

00:55:23 ◼   ► where the people who work on the APIs and Xcode itself

00:55:28 ◼   ► had to do all the work to make it so that Mac developers have

00:55:33 ◼   ► APIs and simulators so they can test it

00:55:36 ◼   ► on machines that don't actually have a touch bar

00:55:38 ◼   ► and all of that stuff.

00:55:39 ◼   ► So an awful lot of work went into this.

00:55:42 ◼   ► And I completely agree.

00:55:43 ◼   ► It's, to me, example number one, that whatever else is going on

00:55:47 ◼   ► with the Mac and some of the machines that have gone way too long without getting updated,

00:55:52 ◼   ► it's clear that Apple is invested in the Mac. I really think the touch bar is proof of it.

00:55:58 ◼   ► Yeah, and we can debate, and I've been trying to make this distinction for the last couple

00:56:03 ◼   ► of weeks. It's like, part of what I think a lot of us do is try to understand why Apple

00:56:07 ◼   ► is doing what Apple's motivation is, why Apple made the choices it made, and I want to separate

00:56:12 ◼   ► that from the judgments about whether these are good decisions or not. Because I think

00:56:17 ◼   ► we could debate whether doing the touch bar is a good decision or not. And we can debate

00:56:22 ◼   ► the price of these systems, and we can debate, you know, there's so many aspects of this

00:56:28 ◼   ► that we can talk about, but I think you can't debate the fact that Apple made a major investment

00:56:34 ◼   ► in the Mac platform in this particular computer, because we're seeing a huge bit of hardware

00:56:42 ◼   ► engineering happening here, and a whole lot of software engineering happening here. So

00:56:46 ◼   ► We can debate whether we think this was the right approach,

00:56:49 ◼   ► whether this was a waste of time,

00:56:51 ◼   ► whether having a laptop-focused input device method

00:56:55 ◼   ► is good or bad, if it's gonna be a gimmick.

00:56:57 ◼   ► There's all those things, but you can't debate.

00:57:00 ◼   ► It was a huge investment on Apple's part to do this,

00:57:02 ◼   ► and if they really didn't care about the Mac,

00:57:04 ◼   ► why would they do it?

00:57:05 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:57:07 ◼   ► I--

00:57:08 ◼   ► - Just do another laptop with the latest Intel chips

00:57:10 ◼   ► and move on, right?

00:57:11 ◼   ► I mean, they could do that.

00:57:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:57:13 ◼   ► Here's why I think calculators is a great example.

00:57:15 ◼   ► Apple calculator app is a great example because the buttons, so Apple it at least I don't know

00:57:21 ◼   ► ever since like iOS 7 or so and then when you know the the Yosemite whenever the Mac version was that

00:57:29 ◼   ► got the sort of iOS style visual refresh, Apple has a very consistent calculator look and it's

00:57:35 ◼   ► you know mostly based on the color orange. Yeah. They you know orange buttons so when those buttons

00:57:43 ◼   ► are on the keyboard, it makes the keyboard look calculator-branded, right?

00:57:48 ◼   ► Like, and so if you use Apple's calculator, you know what it looks like.

00:57:51 ◼   ► It's got this sort of just orange calculator look. You see these buttons

00:57:55 ◼   ► that are orange, and it's, it to me is a very cool way of making the touch bar

00:58:00 ◼   ► feel like it's part of the app. It's, it's a really cool move. And all of the, all

00:58:06 ◼   ► of the functions that are in orange on the UI are orange on the touch bar, and

00:58:13 ◼   ► And so it's like, yeah, you immediately get it.

00:58:15 ◼   ► You're like, oh yeah, right, of course they are.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Of course the equals button is orange.

00:58:19 ◼   ► - So when I was at the event,

00:58:23 ◼   ► and I got to talk to people at Apple,

00:58:27 ◼   ► and they showed me the calculator,

00:58:27 ◼   ► and they said, and a couple of the people I spoke to,

00:58:31 ◼   ► said this is one of my favorite examples,

00:58:32 ◼   ► and I know it sounds silly, but they showed me calculator.

00:58:34 ◼   ► And then at first, like in the default calculator mode,

00:58:37 ◼   ► the only buttons you have up there

00:58:38 ◼   ► are divide times minus plus equals.

00:58:40 ◼   ► And they said, no, that seems silly,

00:58:43 ◼   ► because those buttons are there.

00:58:44 ◼   ► You can hit Shift on the equals key to get plus.

00:58:47 ◼   ► And it's not like you can't type that.

00:58:52 ◼   ► But they said, in our testing with the team that

00:58:57 ◼   ► was using it, we found that we loved this.

00:58:59 ◼   ► And surprising how many people inside Apple

00:59:03 ◼   ► who had access to this and were working on it

00:59:06 ◼   ► loved the calculator thing.

00:59:07 ◼   ► Because all of a sudden, you don't have to--

00:59:10 ◼   ► it makes your laptop keyboard feel more

00:59:14 ◼   ► like having that extended keyboard that

00:59:16 ◼   ► has the thing on the right side where

00:59:18 ◼   ► you have number pads and dedicated buttons

00:59:21 ◼   ► for those features.

00:59:22 ◼   ► There's a reason why some people who enter numbers a lot

00:59:25 ◼   ► like having an extended keyboard that

00:59:27 ◼   ► has that keypad over there.

00:59:29 ◼   ► It gives you sort of the--

00:59:30 ◼   ► now, the number layout maybe isn't

00:59:32 ◼   ► quite as convenient having a horizontal row of numbers,

00:59:34 ◼   ► but not having to worry about ever hitting Shift

00:59:37 ◼   ► or the fact that they're not consecutive,

00:59:41 ◼   ► that minus is right there,

00:59:43 ◼   ► but plus you have to hit shift to get,

00:59:45 ◼   ► I mean, it's all sort of weird typing those operators

00:59:48 ◼   ► on the keyboard, on a regular keyboard,

00:59:51 ◼   ► with you don't have a numpad.

00:59:52 ◼   ► With the touch bar, it really is natural.

00:59:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, you could argue that calculator

01:00:00 ◼   ► is the best example,

01:00:02 ◼   ► and that they really do run the gamut.

01:00:05 ◼   ► I do think that this is gonna be an interface playground

01:00:08 ◼   ► where we're gonna learn a lot in the next year or two,

01:00:11 ◼   ► where Apple and third-party developers try a bunch of stuff

01:00:14 ◼   ► and find out what the right approach is,

01:00:16 ◼   ► because it's all over the map now.

01:00:17 ◼   ► Like calculator is a good example

01:00:19 ◼   ► because there are buttons you wanna press

01:00:22 ◼   ► that aren't on keys.

01:00:24 ◼   ► Like there is no, I mean, there's an equals key

01:00:27 ◼   ► and there's a plus and minus,

01:00:28 ◼   ► and, you know, but like multiplication is the asterisk

01:00:32 ◼   ► and division is the slash.

01:00:33 ◼   ► And it's like, no, no, we're just gonna put

01:00:35 ◼   ► the symbols on these virtual keys at the top.

01:00:38 ◼   ► It's like, that is the like almost purest example

01:00:41 ◼   ► where there are things you want to type

01:00:42 ◼   ► that you don't know what keys to press.

01:00:45 ◼   ► So we're gonna just draw those keys on the touch bar

01:00:48 ◼   ► and now you know how to press them.

01:00:50 ◼   ► And you go all the way down to something like Final Cut,

01:00:54 ◼   ► which is this incredibly intricate context-based set of,

01:00:59 ◼   ► sometimes it's buttons,

01:01:00 ◼   ► sometimes it's got like sliders and scrubbers and things.

01:01:03 ◼   ► And then there's a bunch of stuff that's in between,

01:01:06 ◼   ► where some of them you look at it and you go,

01:01:08 ◼   ► I don't know if this is very useful.

01:01:10 ◼   ► And then others you look at and like maps

01:01:13 ◼   ► and you're like, whoa, what am I seeing now?

01:01:15 ◼   ► I can tap the gas station button now

01:01:19 ◼   ► and it'll show me all the gas stations around me.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And I think over time, we'll figure out what,

01:01:25 ◼   ► philosophically, like what's the right approach?

01:01:27 ◼   ► What do people, what looks good

01:01:29 ◼   ► and what do people actually wanna use?

01:01:32 ◼   ► I found Safaris to be useless.

01:01:34 ◼   ► And I have to admit that I didn't spend a lot of time

01:01:38 ◼   ► configuring the touch bar in a lot of apps,

01:01:40 ◼   ► just because I ran out of time.

01:01:41 ◼   ► And I feel like I will, once I'm using a touch bar equipped

01:01:46 ◼   ► MacBook Pro as my main laptop, I will get in to do that.

01:01:51 ◼   ► But I found Safaris default implementation to be useless,

01:01:55 ◼   ► which is that it shows thumbnails of your tabs

01:01:57 ◼   ► in your current window.

01:01:59 ◼   ► And I mean, maybe daring fireball is identifiable

01:02:03 ◼   ► 'cause it looks like a gray button,

01:02:05 ◼   ► but they just look like a bunch of,

01:02:07 ◼   ► almost every webpage just shrunk to that size

01:02:11 ◼   ► is indistinguishable.

01:02:13 ◼   ► They're just little white with things,

01:02:17 ◼   ► little white with gray, it's just too small.

01:02:21 ◼   ► I couldn't possibly use that.

01:02:24 ◼   ► - I also am a little bit baffled.

01:02:26 ◼   ► And I say this also, this is a larger complaint

01:02:29 ◼   ► have is they added these tabs, Safari tabs in El Capitan, and I like them and I use them,

01:02:36 ◼   ► but they're not on iOS to this day, and they're not in the touch bar, which also kind of baffles

01:02:41 ◼   ► me. Like, I've told you I want these sites and they've got these nice little icons and

01:02:47 ◼   ► they're important enough that I want you to keep them tabbed all the time.

01:02:50 ◼   ► Oh, the pin tabs you mean?

01:02:52 ◼   ► Yeah, the pin tabs. They're not accessible either. So it's a little bit... And yeah,

01:02:56 ◼   ► graphic that's a great example of like

01:02:59 ◼   ► what we can do graphic previews of what

01:03:00 ◼   ► of all the pages that you've gotten your

01:03:02 ◼   ► tabs and make it a slider it's like well

01:03:04 ◼   ► that sounds great that's a really cool

01:03:05 ◼   ► way of showing that this is a feature

01:03:09 ◼   ► that has more than just buttons in it

01:03:10 ◼   ► but in practice I don't think it makes

01:03:13 ◼   ► any sense I don't think it works at all

01:03:14 ◼   ► I think that that's the there are a

01:03:16 ◼   ► bunch of things like that like you know

01:03:17 ◼   ► I get why you did it but I honestly got

01:03:20 ◼   ► I feel embarrassed that I didn't even

01:03:22 ◼   ► look because it maybe I actually you

01:03:24 ◼   ► maybe you can actually go in and

01:03:26 ◼   ► configure it to do this. But so if it's already there, I'm going

01:03:29 ◼   ► to go after we're done recording, I'm going to go set

01:03:32 ◼   ► up my my review unit to do this. But I think it should be the

01:03:35 ◼   ► default. I in my gut is I think that Safari should just default

01:03:40 ◼   ► to putting next tab previous tab buttons up in the don't show me

01:03:45 ◼   ► a one just say next tab previous tab and make them nice and big

01:03:48 ◼   ► and have them say next tab previous tab. Oh, yeah.

01:03:50 ◼   ► No, it's got backward and forward.

01:03:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't want back one forward. I want next tab, previous tab, because I feel that the

01:03:58 ◼   ► shortcuts for that is kind of convoluted. It's like control tab and control shift tab, which is

01:04:04 ◼   ► really a fingerful. So you get that with those visual previews. I do wonder, and I suspect that

01:04:11 ◼   ► there's a guideline somewhere that I haven't seen because I'm not a developer. I do wonder about

01:04:15 ◼   ► the touch bar being used for informational purposes if somebody laid down an edict that,

01:04:20 ◼   ► like information that isn't permanent, that's like temporary text, should not go in the touch bar.

01:04:27 ◼   ► Because like I'm baffled why the now playing in the control strip brings up a scrubber for iTunes,

01:04:33 ◼   ► which is like I'm never going to scrub for music, but it might be kind of fun to if I pop that open

01:04:38 ◼   ► to see the name of the song I'm listening to. It's not there. And it won't, it'll show you in Safari,

01:04:43 ◼   ► it'll show you little tiny thumbnails of part of the page of the web page that you're, you've got

01:04:47 ◼   ► got loaded in your tabs, but what it won't do is put up like the name of that tab of

01:04:53 ◼   ► that page, which would be more, way more useful. And I wonder if they've decided like, no,

01:04:59 ◼   ► ephemeral kind of like text labels of what's in a page is not something you should do in

01:05:04 ◼   ► the touch bar. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it seems like there's a rule at work here

01:05:10 ◼   ► that they don't want to put like a text readout. It's only for controls, not for information.

01:05:16 ◼   ► even then I would say, but a sliver of, a horizontal sliver of a web page as a

01:05:22 ◼   ► preview is useless to me too. I am reminded, and I skimmed the user interface

01:05:33 ◼   ► guidelines for the touch bar. I should go back to that and reread them, read them

01:05:37 ◼   ► thoroughly. But I can't help but think that no matter how well-written that

01:05:41 ◼   ► document is just the evidence of using all of Apple's apps is that it's still

01:05:47 ◼   ► sort of a Wild West and they're feeling and now the third-party developers can

01:05:52 ◼   ► get in on it we collectively are feeling our way to how we should use it and what

01:05:56 ◼   ► I'm reminded of is how in the very early years of the original Mac let's say

01:06:02 ◼   ► somewhere around 1984 to 89 or so I would say it took four or five years the

01:06:11 ◼   ► The Mac was famous for its human interface guidelines

01:06:14 ◼   ► right from the beginning, and that there was consistency

01:06:16 ◼   ► and a toolbox that developers could use

01:06:18 ◼   ► so everybody's alert would look the same.

01:06:20 ◼   ► But you go back and look at screenshots

01:06:22 ◼   ► from almost close to the '90s.

01:06:26 ◼   ► I'd say right around System 6 is where things

01:06:28 ◼   ► got very definitively, oh, that's Mac-like,

01:06:32 ◼   ► or this app was clearly written by a developer

01:06:35 ◼   ► who does not know the Mac.

01:06:36 ◼   ► You just see stupid things.

01:06:38 ◼   ► like somebody who spelled OKAY in a button, right?

01:06:43 ◼   ► Like to a Mac user's eyes,

01:06:46 ◼   ► it just jumps right out as, that's a mistake, right?

01:06:51 ◼   ► You do not spell OKAY.

01:06:53 ◼   ► But if you look back at like 84, 85, 86, like Mac dialogues,

01:06:57 ◼   ► you'd see that all the time.

01:07:00 ◼   ► And you are just weird layout,

01:07:02 ◼   ► like not having a default button in a dialogue, right?

01:07:06 ◼   ► things that you are putting the default button,

01:07:09 ◼   ► not in the bottom right corner.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Just things that eventually became like,

01:07:13 ◼   ► what's the word idiomatic, right?

01:07:18 ◼   ► Idiomatic Mac UI design.

01:07:20 ◼   ► We don't have that yet.

01:07:21 ◼   ► That's the what's an idiomatic design

01:07:24 ◼   ► for the touch bar of an app,

01:07:25 ◼   ► the touch bar interface for an app.

01:07:27 ◼   ► What type of features are, should go in there by default?

01:07:30 ◼   ► We don't have it yet.

01:07:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I'm excited by the fact,

01:07:35 ◼   ► I mean, you could argue like maybe Apple's app

01:07:38 ◼   ► should show a little more unification than they have,

01:07:41 ◼   ► but I'm okay with it the way it is,

01:07:43 ◼   ► which is everybody, it looks like,

01:07:45 ◼   ► with some rules and restrictions,

01:07:47 ◼   ► everybody has tried to develop the right approach

01:07:51 ◼   ► for their app and their content and their users

01:07:55 ◼   ► and sort of let the chips fall where they may.

01:07:58 ◼   ► And I think that's great because I, I mean, right now,

01:08:01 ◼   ► I think I could say with certainty that there are apps

01:08:04 ◼   ► do it wrong and that do it right. And we can argue about which is which, but like there

01:08:07 ◼   ► is such a variation. And maybe it'll turn out that something like what Final Cut does

01:08:15 ◼   ► is totally the right way to do it, which is you got sliders and you're intensively using

01:08:20 ◼   ► it like the DJ app on stage, right? And maybe, you know, if I had to choose, I would guess

01:08:28 ◼   ► that maybe we're going to back off of that and say actually what we saw with DJ in Photoshop,

01:08:33 ◼   ► we see with Final Cut Pro is maybe too far, too intense, too much of a UI instead of a

01:08:40 ◼   ► set of shortcuts. And maybe we'll back off of it. Maybe not. Maybe it'll turn out that

01:08:45 ◼   ► that UI is what people love and having that surface there is the best thing in the world.

01:08:50 ◼   ► But my gut feeling is that it's like, that's a big step to go and I'm not sure that it's

01:08:56 ◼   ► the right approach. But I'm sure people at Apple were debating it too. And it doesn't

01:08:59 ◼   ► have to be one or the other. I mean, right now it isn't. In fact, my biggest criticism of Final

01:09:03 ◼   ► Cut is more that it's so complicated that it seems to be not customizable in any way.

01:09:07 ◼   ► And that's, for me, the fact that they went back to this classic, like, from 10.0 customized

01:09:14 ◼   ► toolbar interface to let people customize the touch bar, I really like that because

01:09:19 ◼   ► it should be personal. You should be putting the stuff on it that you care about the most.

01:09:24 ◼   ► And I don't know how many people do that, but I'm glad that that's there and that it is customizable.

01:09:28 ◼   ► I worried that it wasn't. I mean, the next step should probably be to make the

01:09:32 ◼   ► let third parties have access to the control strip, but one thing at a time.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Yeah, and I really like it just feels so Mac-like

01:09:39 ◼   ► in terms of the way that the customization feels exactly like

01:09:46 ◼   ► customizing the toolbar in a window in a cocoa app. It's,

01:09:50 ◼   ► you know, and that's, you know, it's by design and it's no surprise, but it

01:09:53 ◼   ► really just goes to show that the people who wrote these

01:09:56 ◼   ► APIs are, you know, knew what they were doing and they did it the right way.

01:10:01 ◼   ► Yeah, and I, you know, I always say when they show these things on stage and people ask afterward,

01:10:07 ◼   ► I'm sure they do the same to you, like, "Well, what did you think?" A lot of it's like, "Well,

01:10:11 ◼   ► it looked good. Let's see what the details are." And when I first customized the toolbar,

01:10:15 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, wow. Okay, good." Like, they did a really good job. Like, I had this whole

01:10:20 ◼   ► worry about how do you use like you move the cursor to the bottom of the screen and it like

01:10:27 ◼   ► disappears and suddenly you get a selection in a toolbar but you in the touch bar but you don't

01:10:32 ◼   ► see your cursor anymore but it's still sort of there as a ghost and you can move it around and

01:10:37 ◼   ► then if you move it back up it pops back out on the bottom of your display i'm like that's weird

01:10:42 ◼   ► how are they going to do that and when i used it i was like oh it makes perfect sense like they

01:10:45 ◼   ► nailed it. They really did figure out a way to do it where you never feel like suddenly your pointing

01:10:51 ◼   ► device has gone into a different parallel universe and nothing makes sense anymore. Like it all held

01:10:57 ◼   ► together and I'm impressed by the kind of care that they took with that stuff. It's a little thing

01:11:03 ◼   ► but I appreciate, so when you go into editing mode the buttons that are there jiggle. It's a little

01:11:10 ◼   ► similar to, you know, very similar and clearly drawn from the home screen

01:11:16 ◼   ► customization in iOS, where if you want to move your apps around in iOS, you know,

01:11:21 ◼   ► you hold the home button and you go into the mode and all your apps jiggle. It's a

01:11:27 ◼   ► good way of playing off something people are familiar with. I feel like that

01:11:33 ◼   ► idea, that if you're gonna put them in reorder mode, make them, you know, jiggle

01:11:37 ◼   ► around. But what I really like is that to me, I think it feels just slightly more of

01:11:44 ◼   ► a serious jiggle than the iOS jiggle. Like the iOS one is a move more or less in a goofy

01:11:51 ◼   ► way.

01:11:52 ◼   ► They kind of twist.

01:11:53 ◼   ► Yeah, they twist. And the Mac ones just kind of go back and forth. And now maybe part of

01:11:58 ◼   ► that is that it's just horizontal. But I think they could have made them twist if they wanted

01:12:02 ◼   ► to even if it made the corners go off the top.

01:12:06 ◼   ► It just feels more appropriate to the Mac

01:12:09 ◼   ► in a way that the Mac is a more serious platform than iOS.

01:12:14 ◼   ► - I do like the personality.

01:12:16 ◼   ► I mean, that's one of the things I said in my review

01:12:18 ◼   ► that you quoted.

01:12:19 ◼   ► I always had the moment of like,

01:12:21 ◼   ► if Jon links to me, what part will he quote?

01:12:24 ◼   ► And that one was, it's just reporting a true feeling I had,

01:12:29 ◼   ► which is this has more personality than I thought it would.

01:12:32 ◼   ► Like, it has a lot of animations.

01:12:34 ◼   ► I think if you just read about this feature,

01:12:37 ◼   ► you would not imagine that everything animates.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And like the touch ID sensor, when it comes on,

01:12:44 ◼   ► there is this arrow, and the arrow like stretches

01:12:47 ◼   ► like it's made of rubber as it points at the touch ID sensor

01:12:51 ◼   ► and it is, I mean, it's not wacky, but it is whimsical

01:12:56 ◼   ► in a way that it totally didn't need to be.

01:12:59 ◼   ► And there's just little stuff like that,

01:13:01 ◼   ► that I think, you know, there is personality here.

01:13:04 ◼   ► It isn't just this kind of gray,

01:13:06 ◼   ► we gave you a toolbar, enjoy.

01:13:08 ◼   ► It's like a little bit more enthusiastic

01:13:11 ◼   ► and I like that it's got personality.

01:13:13 ◼   ► - It's a Mac-like whimsicalness though,

01:13:16 ◼   ► that touch here to log in with touch ID

01:13:20 ◼   ► and the arrow stretching,

01:13:23 ◼   ► that to me feels right for the Mac

01:13:26 ◼   ► and it should be if they did something similar on iOS,

01:13:30 ◼   ► it would be more whimsical and appropriately so.

01:13:32 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's right.

01:13:35 ◼   ► - Horace, I quoted this thing that Horace did you wrote

01:13:38 ◼   ► a week or two ago, where he wrote a piece about,

01:13:43 ◼   ► let's see if I can find it here.

01:13:45 ◼   ► - I love that piece.

01:13:48 ◼   ► - I did too, but where's Apple going with the Macintosh?

01:13:51 ◼   ► And an analogy about why isn't the Mac a touchscreen?

01:13:56 ◼   ► And I'll put the link again in the show notes

01:14:00 ◼   ► anybody who hasn't read it can do it. Wherefore art thou, Macintosh? But he wrote, let's see

01:14:07 ◼   ► if I can find the quote.

01:14:10 ◼   ► "It cannot take on the role of being the future." He's talking about the Mac. That

01:14:18 ◼   ► belongs to the touchscreen devices. "It will not morph into a touchscreen device

01:14:22 ◼   ► any more than a tech, a teen's parent will become cool by putting on skinny

01:14:27 ◼   ► genes. What it will do is become better at what it is hired to do. I'll put a link in the show notes.

01:14:34 ◼   ► It says I promise I'm doing it right now. I'm copying and pasting. I'm so infamous for saying

01:14:38 ◼   ► I'll put something in the show notes and not doing it. Here it is. Copy, paste. There it is.

01:14:43 ◼   ► - Very well done. It's great. I mean, I wrote a piece about the same time called like parallel

01:14:49 ◼   ► or perpendicular philosophies. And it's the same thing. It's like, why does Microsoft

01:14:54 ◼   ► insist on doing these touch screen things and everybody's like, "Oh God, I can't believe

01:14:57 ◼   ► Apple's not doing them." It's like, well, number one reason is Apple already has a touch screen OS,

01:15:01 ◼   ► so what Apple's doing is differentiating. They're saying, and this can be hard for Mac users to hear,

01:15:05 ◼   ► although I don't mind it, it's like the Mac is like the classic computing metaphor that Apple

01:15:11 ◼   ► makes, and you can't push it too far because it becomes an iPad or an iPhone then, and they've

01:15:16 ◼   ► already got that. Like, they don't need to do a touch screen tablet, like they have a touch screen

01:15:21 ◼   ► tablet already. So the Mac has to be defined by some fundamental premises and

01:15:29 ◼   ► Apple and again you could debate it and say no no no Microsoft's doing the right

01:15:34 ◼   ► thing but what Apple has decided and they've done this again again they've

01:15:37 ◼   ► set it publicly repeatedly is the Mac is for traditional computing with a

01:15:42 ◼   ► pointing device and in the case of a laptop it's very clear it's two

01:15:46 ◼   ► perpendicular surfaces but it's even true on the desktop. You've got your

01:15:49 ◼   ► keyboard tray or the bottom of your laptop and that's the control surface

01:15:53 ◼   ► and it's got the keys and it's got the touch bar maybe and it's got the track

01:15:56 ◼   ► pad and then you got the screen and this stuff happens on the screen and you

01:16:00 ◼   ► control it from the from the perpendicular surface that's in front of

01:16:04 ◼   ► you and if you would rather directly manipulate with your hands that's fine

01:16:07 ◼   ► that's not what a Mac is Mac's aren't for that yeah I this adult with you know

01:16:13 ◼   ► becoming it cool by putting on skinny jeans is the best it's the best metaphor

01:16:19 ◼   ► I've seen, because I didn't think of it. He did, but I love it. And to me, the way that

01:16:28 ◼   ► Apple has adopted some of these things, like the animation for that arrow, is exactly the same way,

01:16:33 ◼   ► where it's not trying to be iOS. It's not trying to be, you know, it's doing it in a Macintosh way.

01:16:39 ◼   ► And I have to say, personally, on the flip side, I got to spend, I spent like half an hour in a

01:16:44 ◼   ► Microsoft store when I was in San Francisco last month for the Apple event, and they had

01:16:48 ◼   ► the new Surface, I don't know what they call it, Surface Studio? Yeah, Surface Studio.

01:16:54 ◼   ► Had a couple of them set up and a whole bunch of apps like Photoshop and stuff and there wasn't,

01:17:01 ◼   ► you know, it wasn't that crowded. They're actually, I'm not making fun of them for

01:17:07 ◼   ► having stores that aren't crowded. There was actually a line for people to try out the VR

01:17:11 ◼   ► thing they had set up. So there was a thing there that was drawing a crowd of, it seemed to me like

01:17:17 ◼   ► like at least 10 people at a time,

01:17:18 ◼   ► constantly waiting to try the VR thing.

01:17:21 ◼   ► So there is something there that is drawing people

01:17:22 ◼   ► in the store, but the surface wasn't.

01:17:26 ◼   ► So I got to play with it.

01:17:27 ◼   ► And old person trying to dress like a teenager

01:17:31 ◼   ► is exactly, it's better than anything I could say.

01:17:34 ◼   ► I had other complaints about the latency

01:17:36 ◼   ► compared to the Apple Pencil on iPad.

01:17:39 ◼   ► It was low latency.

01:17:39 ◼   ► I mean, Microsoft definitely did some work on that,

01:17:42 ◼   ► but it was not like Apple Pencil.

01:17:45 ◼   ► But the weirdest part was the way that just exactly what you would think, like having

01:17:50 ◼   ► a mouse-based interface but then using touch and a pencil to do things was weird, like

01:17:55 ◼   ► where all of a sudden as your pencil gets near, you see a cursor on screen right beneath

01:17:58 ◼   ► it and it's like, "Ugh, weird."

01:18:00 ◼   ► I feel like I'm using—it's not that much better than one of those airport terminals

01:18:06 ◼   ► where you get your boarding pass and every time you touch the screen, the Windows mouse

01:18:09 ◼   ► cursor moves to where you touch it.

01:18:13 ◼   ► It just feels like old person dressing like a teenager.

01:18:16 ◼   ► Is exact, I can't think of anything better than that.

01:18:19 ◼   ► And it would just break my heart

01:18:21 ◼   ► to see Apple do that to the Mac.

01:18:24 ◼   ► - I guess the one thing that,

01:18:26 ◼   ► if I extended to Horace's metaphor a little bit is,

01:18:30 ◼   ► it is possible for something theoretically,

01:18:33 ◼   ► for something like Windows to have a,

01:18:35 ◼   ► like a chrysalis and like turn into a teenager, right?

01:18:38 ◼   ► I mean, they could evolve Windows

01:18:40 ◼   ► to the point where it is a touch interface.

01:18:42 ◼   ► The problem is, they've got everybody who's using Windows PCs, and they don't want to,

01:18:47 ◼   ► you know, they don't have a, they tried it, right?

01:18:49 ◼   ► They tried it with Metro and with their ARM-based stuff, and in the end, they retreated back

01:18:57 ◼   ► to the power of their successful Windows platform, and they've made it better, but like, they

01:19:01 ◼   ► have one operating system, and they can change the context, but it's one operating system,

01:19:05 ◼   ► and there are challenges with that.

01:19:07 ◼   ► I don't, you know, it's not that they're not unsolvable, they may be solvable, but it's like,

01:19:13 ◼   ► I'm not saying that fundamentally Microsoft is right or wrong or Apple is right or wrong,

01:19:20 ◼   ► but if you look at what the assets of both companies are, Microsoft has this incredibly

01:19:25 ◼   ► successful desktop operating system, traditional computer operating system, and they haven't done

01:19:30 ◼   ► anything in mobile. So what do you do to get to approach sort of like the mobile world and the

01:19:36 ◼   ► the touch-based world. You gotta take Windows and you gotta jam it in there. And if you're

01:19:40 ◼   ► Apple, you got the Mac, you got iOS, they're fine. You don't need to do that. So they're

01:19:44 ◼   ► not gonna do that. And so when people say, you know, one of them is right and one of

01:19:48 ◼   ► them is wrong, that may well be, I'm not quite sure it's that clear. I think it may

01:19:53 ◼   ► be a much more kind of shades of gray situation, depends on your use cases, and who knows where

01:19:57 ◼   ► we'll be in five or 10 years. But I would argue both companies are doing what makes

01:20:02 ◼   ► sense for them because you know Microsoft has the assets it has and

01:20:06 ◼   ► Apple is very, Apple is extremely fortunate. In fact they're basically the

01:20:11 ◼   ► only company in the world who has a very successful touch-based operating system

01:20:16 ◼   ► and a traditional computer operating system and so they don't need to jam

01:20:19 ◼   ► them together. They can just keep them apart and everybody like us who's like I

01:20:22 ◼   ► love the Mac I want to keep using the Mac, they're not gonna make a Mac that's

01:20:25 ◼   ► totally unrecognizable because at that point why wouldn't you just use a PC or

01:20:29 ◼   ► or switch and use an iPad.

01:20:31 ◼   ► So Apple has the luxury of doing that,

01:20:34 ◼   ► and it makes perfect sense that that's what they're doing.

01:20:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I also will say that I found Windows 10

01:20:39 ◼   ► running on the Surface, what's it called again?

01:20:42 ◼   ► - The Studio. - Studio, Surface Studio.

01:20:45 ◼   ► I was very lost and confused,

01:20:49 ◼   ► just going between apps and navigating the system,

01:20:52 ◼   ► and I honestly found it confusing.

01:20:56 ◼   ► And part of it is just that I haven't used Windows regularly

01:20:59 ◼   ► in over a decade.

01:21:00 ◼   ► - Yeah. - But--

01:21:02 ◼   ► - And it's very, all my Windows skills

01:21:04 ◼   ► were really good up to a point,

01:21:05 ◼   ► and then they, Windows has evolved enough now,

01:21:07 ◼   ► 'cause I've got Windows 10 on my iMac and Bootcamp,

01:21:09 ◼   ► and Windows has evolved to the point

01:21:12 ◼   ► where all my old Windows skills, which were pretty good,

01:21:15 ◼   ► are just useless now.

01:21:16 ◼   ► I have no idea what I'm looking at.

01:21:18 ◼   ► So that doesn't help matters.

01:21:20 ◼   ► - But I will say that I've spent time a few years ago

01:21:23 ◼   ► with like Windows original surfaces,

01:21:24 ◼   ► and I didn't find those confusing at all.

01:21:27 ◼   ► Now, I didn't really love the whole idea

01:21:28 ◼   ► where you can go into traditional Windows mouse pointer

01:21:31 ◼   ► mode and run your traditional Windows software,

01:21:34 ◼   ► and you go into this other mode, the Metro mode,

01:21:38 ◼   ► and it's all touch-based.

01:21:39 ◼   ► But I got it, because the Metro thing was clear,

01:21:42 ◼   ► like, oh, these are big, chunky touch targets.

01:21:45 ◼   ► And instead of tiled windows, they're

01:21:48 ◼   ► going on more of a 2D thing, and you swipe side to side.

01:21:53 ◼   ► And this is all new, and everything is big.

01:21:56 ◼   ► and big thumb-sizable touch targets.

01:21:59 ◼   ► Oh, and if I want to run my Microsoft Excel,

01:22:02 ◼   ► I switch to this other mode,

01:22:03 ◼   ► and it looks exactly like Excel.

01:22:05 ◼   ► I know exactly where I am.

01:22:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, plug in a mouse.

01:22:07 ◼   ► - Right.

01:22:08 ◼   ► I guess I can see why they went away from that

01:22:10 ◼   ► and why people rejected it,

01:22:12 ◼   ► but it made way more sense to me to go that way.

01:22:16 ◼   ► And I think part of it was, under Stanofsky,

01:22:19 ◼   ► they clearly wanted to,

01:22:21 ◼   ► 'cause they had the ARM-based Surface tablets

01:22:24 ◼   ► that only had the Metro mode.

01:22:26 ◼   ► And I really feel like that's where some of them,

01:22:29 ◼   ► the ones who have good taste in Microsoft wanted to go,

01:22:32 ◼   ► like good taste in the Apple sense.

01:22:34 ◼   ► And it was a much, to me, a much more compelling device.

01:22:37 ◼   ► And I think it only failed

01:22:38 ◼   ► because it didn't get developer support.

01:22:40 ◼   ► That developers kept writing the old classic,

01:22:43 ◼   ► Windows Win 32 API apps.

01:22:46 ◼   ► - So I was at the D conference when they did that demo

01:22:49 ◼   ► for the first time.

01:22:50 ◼   ► And I remember seeing all the Metro stuff and thinking,

01:22:53 ◼   ► with the original Surface and thinking,

01:22:55 ◼   ► "Damn, that is really good.

01:22:57 ◼   ► "Here comes Microsoft.

01:22:58 ◼   ► "Everybody watch out."

01:22:59 ◼   ► And then they did that moment where they're like,

01:23:01 ◼   ► "And if you wanna run Office,"

01:23:02 ◼   ► instead of showing what I expected to see,

01:23:04 ◼   ► which was like a demo of a touch-based Office,

01:23:07 ◼   ► like Office or iPad is today.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And they were like, "Boom, now you're in the Windows desktop

01:23:13 ◼   ► "and you plug in a mouse and a keyboard and you have a PC."

01:23:17 ◼   ► And I thought, "No, no, no, no, no, no."

01:23:18 ◼   ► I remember, you know what?

01:23:19 ◼   ► I wrote a piece, you wrote a piece about it.

01:23:21 ◼   ► We were talking about it.

01:23:22 ◼   ► And it was like, "No, no, you're so close."

01:23:24 ◼   ► And I still believe like the right thing to do

01:23:27 ◼   ► was for Microsoft to say,

01:23:29 ◼   ► we have taken all our knowledge of Windows

01:23:31 ◼   ► and we have built a touch-based operating system

01:23:33 ◼   ► that will, you know, it's related.

01:23:35 ◼   ► And if Steve Ballmer wants to call it Windows something,

01:23:37 ◼   ► we'll call it that, but it's different.

01:23:39 ◼   ► And the Windows RT was like that,

01:23:41 ◼   ► but it was like already compromised and half-hearted.

01:23:44 ◼   ► Like they'd already kind of sold it out.

01:23:46 ◼   ► That all said, given the strength of Apple and Google

01:23:50 ◼   ► in mobile operating systems,

01:23:52 ◼   ► and what has happened with all of Microsoft's attempts to make just a mobile operating system,

01:23:56 ◼   ► I'm not really convinced now that even if they had done what I think would have been

01:24:01 ◼   ► the best product, that anybody would have bought it. Because they would have been selling,

01:24:05 ◼   ► they couldn't have leveraged any of their, or much of their strength, which was Windows,

01:24:10 ◼   ► to get people on board. So they'd be starting from scratch like they did with Windows Phone.

01:24:15 ◼   ► And so, you know, I think it would have been a way better product, but I feel like by the

01:24:20 ◼   ► the time they got to Metro and making that demo,

01:24:23 ◼   ► the ship had kind of sailed already.

01:24:26 ◼   ► - I think it was the right thing--

01:24:27 ◼   ► - Which is too bad, 'cause it was cool.

01:24:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it was the right thing to do

01:24:30 ◼   ► from a design perspective, but it was not going to work

01:24:35 ◼   ► from a market perspective.

01:24:37 ◼   ► It just wasn't going to gain traction.

01:24:39 ◼   ► I don't know that there's anything they could have done

01:24:41 ◼   ► to make Metro better, just better in terms of

01:24:44 ◼   ► if we had done a better job designing it,

01:24:46 ◼   ► if we'd done a better job making the initial set of apps,

01:24:49 ◼   ► it would have succeeded.

01:24:50 ◼   ► I don't think it failed because it wasn't good enough.

01:24:54 ◼   ► I think it failed for other reasons.

01:24:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, and it's tough

01:24:59 ◼   ► 'cause you look at Microsoft and, you know,

01:25:01 ◼   ► Microsoft's ambition was that

01:25:04 ◼   ► of a dominant operating system vendor,

01:25:06 ◼   ► but their position was that of a newcomer, essentially,

01:25:10 ◼   ► because, you know, Android and iOS gobbled that market up

01:25:15 ◼   ► very quickly and they were left kind of with

01:25:18 ◼   ► not a whole lot.

01:25:19 ◼   ► like they were there in the in the Blackberry camp down and also receiving

01:25:23 ◼   ► votes were these people with 5% of the market and that's tough that's a tough

01:25:26 ◼   ► position to be in I don't you know I love a lot of what Microsoft's doing now

01:25:31 ◼   ► but it's a it's still a tough position to be in because they do need to be

01:25:34 ◼   ► Windows and try to innovate and you know I know a lot of people especially

01:25:39 ◼   ► creative people people who use pen input all the time on their Mac with a with a

01:25:45 ◼   ► tablet and all that people who really kind of going ape over the over the

01:25:49 ◼   ► surface studio and I'm not one of those people so it didn't really thrill me and

01:25:56 ◼   ► in fact when I looked at it I thought I would much I think I would much rather

01:25:59 ◼   ► have a desktop iPad yeah but I will say this I that I if you draw for a living I

01:26:09 ◼   ► don't know if you draw comics if you are an architect or something like that I

01:26:13 ◼   ► I can totally see how the Surface tablet is a device for you, but I don't see any reason

01:26:18 ◼   ► to like that device if you're not someone who makes a living with a pen in your hand.

01:26:24 ◼   ► The funny thing, and this is part of the people coming back to people being grumpy with Apple

01:26:29 ◼   ► about various things, it's like one of the things I've seen, it's like, yeah, if you're

01:26:32 ◼   ► a cartoonist or a comic book artist or anybody who is using these certain kind of inputs,

01:26:38 ◼   ► is going to be a class of user for whom the Surface Studio is the perfect computer. And

01:26:43 ◼   ► you know what? A lot of those people are going to be loyal Mac users, and they're going to

01:26:47 ◼   ► feel torn, and they're going to feel like Apple has let them down a little bit because

01:26:51 ◼   ► Apple isn't providing them with that same kind of product. And all of those feelings

01:26:56 ◼   ► are valid, but I would also say it's also valid for Apple to say, "We're never going

01:27:00 ◼   ► to make a product like that." Like that is not... How big a market is that? How many

01:27:05 ◼   ► surface studios are going to sell right i mean it's a cool product that will be

01:27:09 ◼   ► perfect for a very specific group of people

01:27:11 ◼   ► and they should love it because you know because it's it's made for them and

01:27:15 ◼   ► it's brilliant for them but i'm not sure that i can see the logic

01:27:18 ◼   ► of apple like making their next iMac like a surface studio it just doesn't

01:27:22 ◼   ► make sense to me. I could see not in the very near future not within the next

01:27:26 ◼   ► handful of years but i could see within 10 years i could see apple having

01:27:31 ◼   ► a 30-inch iOS device.

01:27:33 ◼   ► Oh, I agree. I mean, that's the… at some point, I was talking to somebody about it,

01:27:39 ◼   ► and that's what I said, is it's way more likely that Apple makes a giant iPad than

01:27:43 ◼   ► they make a touchscreen Mac on your desk. Like, way more likely.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Way more likely. So much more likely that, you know… says the guy… says the guy who

01:27:53 ◼   ► thought Hillary Clinton was locked to win.

01:27:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right.

01:27:57 ◼   ► But it just--

01:27:58 ◼   ► I do think it's--

01:27:59 ◼   ► Are you the guy from Princeton who said it was a 99%?

01:28:02 ◼   ► Or are you Nate Silver who said it was two to one odds?

01:28:05 ◼   ► Because that makes the difference there.

01:28:07 ◼   ► Oh, I woke up loving that guy from Princeton.

01:28:10 ◼   ► And I woke up the next day wanting to have a talk with him.

01:28:16 ◼   ► He wrote a blog post.

01:28:17 ◼   ► And it's just kind of hilarious.

01:28:18 ◼   ► Because it's like, dude, you said greater than 99%

01:28:20 ◼   ► probability.

01:28:20 ◼   ► I don't think you know how probability works.

01:28:23 ◼   ► And that was Nate Silver.

01:28:24 ◼   ► People were really ragging on Nate Silver about it.

01:28:25 ◼   ► not to get too much into the election,

01:28:27 ◼   ► but it's like Nate Silver all along,

01:28:28 ◼   ► he got crap from so many people

01:28:30 ◼   ► saying Donald Trump had a chance.

01:28:32 ◼   ► And he's like, "Look, if we miss our numbers up,

01:28:34 ◼   ► "then she's gonna have a sweep.

01:28:37 ◼   ► "But if the polls are all off 2% down,"

01:28:40 ◼   ► which by less than they were off for Obama-Romney,

01:28:43 ◼   ► which was off by 3%,

01:28:45 ◼   ► if they're off in Trump's favor by 2%,

01:28:48 ◼   ► he's gonna win in the electoral college.

01:28:50 ◼   ► He said that days before the election,

01:28:52 ◼   ► and that's what happened. - And they were off by 2%.

01:28:55 ◼   ► Yeah, so it was totally within that cone of probability.

01:28:59 ◼   ► The final polls nationwide had her up 3%,

01:29:01 ◼   ► and she wound up winning the popular vote by 1%, which--

01:29:04 ◼   ► By 1%.

01:29:05 ◼   ► And it was not, please don't email me.

01:29:07 ◼   ► I know, I'm not arguing.

01:29:08 ◼   ► That means she should be president.

01:29:09 ◼   ► I know the rules.

01:29:10 ◼   ► The idea, though, is that if a candidate, especially

01:29:13 ◼   ► a Democrat, only wins--

01:29:14 ◼   ► because of the electoral college--

01:29:16 ◼   ► only wins the popular vote by 1%,

01:29:18 ◼   ► that there is a very high probability

01:29:20 ◼   ► that the Republican candidate will

01:29:22 ◼   ► win the electoral college.

01:29:23 ◼   ► And that is exactly what will happen.

01:29:25 ◼   ► Yes, and it--

01:29:26 ◼   ► This year.

01:29:26 ◼   ► In 2012, Silver said that it was actually in Obama's favor.

01:29:31 ◼   ► The way the states were stacking up,

01:29:32 ◼   ► he could have lost the popular vote by half a percent

01:29:34 ◼   ► or something, and he would have won the electoral college.

01:29:36 ◼   ► But for this election, the way it stacked up--

01:29:40 ◼   ► and they factored in.

01:29:41 ◼   ► For weeks before, you can go back and look,

01:29:43 ◼   ► they had an 8%, 10%, 12% chance that Trump

01:29:46 ◼   ► would lose the popular vote and win the electoral college.

01:29:49 ◼   ► And so probabilities are hard.

01:29:52 ◼   ► It's hard for people to understand them.

01:29:53 ◼   ► The New York Times had that field goal the whole time.

01:29:56 ◼   ► That was one of my thoughts on election night was like,

01:29:58 ◼   ► I guess she missed the field goal.

01:30:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:30:01 ◼   ► It's a 30, any NFL fan when they say her chances

01:30:04 ◼   ► are like making a 38 yard field goal in the NFL.

01:30:08 ◼   ► It's like, you know what?

01:30:08 ◼   ► People miss it 38 yard field goals all the time.

01:30:10 ◼   ► - Ask Buffalo Bills fans.

01:30:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, it happens.

01:30:15 ◼   ► - Let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor.

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01:33:18 ◼   ► You talked about the control strip before we move on to other things. But do you remember—I

01:33:22 ◼   ► mean, this is the stupidest question I'm ever going to ask. Do you remember the control

01:33:26 ◼   ► strip classic Mac OS?

01:33:29 ◼   ► Do I remember the control strip? Yeah, I actually booted up an emulator the other day to look

01:33:36 ◼   ► at it to just remind myself. But God, I had that on my PowerBook. I don't know if you

01:33:41 ◼   ► remember like CPU, Connectix, PowerBook utilities, which like added items to the control strip.

01:33:45 ◼   ► Oh, I loved it. Yes. Yeah, totally loved it.

01:33:48 ◼   ► Right? I mean, that was like the dock of its day to put in context to people who are modern

01:33:53 ◼   ► Mac users. Yeah.

01:33:54 ◼   ► It was better.

01:33:55 ◼   ► But to me, it was one of the things, I mean, famously, or maybe not famously because I

01:33:59 ◼   ► was maybe more obscure, but the first like three, four years at Daring Fireball is mostly

01:34:02 ◼   ► me bitching about Mac OS X in the ways that the interface is not as good as the classic

01:34:07 ◼   ► Mac OS.

01:34:08 ◼   ► And Control Strip is one of those things where it was so perfectly Mac-like.

01:34:13 ◼   ► Every pixel of it was perfectly of the way that things were supposed to look in that

01:34:19 ◼   ► OS.

01:34:20 ◼   ► And just everything, the close button, the little zipper thing that you would just tap

01:34:26 ◼   ► to make it expand and contract.

01:34:30 ◼   ► Just everything about it was so nice.

01:34:32 ◼   ► And it was so elegant.

01:34:34 ◼   ► And it felt so right for the Mac system-wide

01:34:36 ◼   ► that you just have this little thing.

01:34:38 ◼   ► And then eventually you could drag it around to any corner.

01:34:41 ◼   ► Did it have to be in a corner?

01:34:42 ◼   ► I think it had to be in a corner, right?

01:34:44 ◼   ► No, it could be anywhere along either side.

01:34:47 ◼   ► Anywhere along the left or right.

01:34:48 ◼   ► And you'd zip it open, and you'd get all these little icons.

01:34:51 ◼   ► And they opened it up to third parties.

01:34:53 ◼   ► And third parties did some really useful stuff.

01:34:57 ◼   ► And the Mac OS X equivalent of it

01:35:01 ◼   ► is all these little turd icons in the top right of our menu

01:35:04 ◼   ► bars.

01:35:05 ◼   ► The toolbar or the menu bar.

01:35:06 ◼   ► Yeah, the menu bar.

01:35:07 ◼   ► We've still got them.

01:35:08 ◼   ► All those little icons up there.

01:35:09 ◼   ► In the old Mac OS, those would all be Control Strip items.

01:35:13 ◼   ► And your menu bar would only have menus.

01:35:16 ◼   ► And then anything else would be in a Control Strip,

01:35:18 ◼   ► which was really nice.

01:35:21 ◼   ► It bothers me to no end. 15 years later that we don't we don't we had something so elegant as the

01:35:29 ◼   ► control strip and now we've put all these turds in our menu bars. I wonder if bartender

01:35:36 ◼   ► does bartender let you put their bar anywhere? I wonder about that like because bartender is

01:35:43 ◼   ► kind of like that where you can actually pull things out of the menu bar and put them in the

01:35:45 ◼   ► little bartender bar and I wonder if you can you can yeah you can I think you can move it around

01:35:51 ◼   ► Hmm. I should look at that. I looked at Bartender, I remember looking at it years ago, and for some reason

01:35:56 ◼   ► rejected it, but maybe I should take another look.

01:35:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. It's not, I mean, it's kind of hacky, although it's got some things going for it.

01:36:06 ◼   ► I use it to clean up my menu bar because there's some items that I don't need to see most of the time,

01:36:09 ◼   ► but I occasionally need to get to it. But it's in the ballpark, right? And the idea there is, could you imagine

01:36:14 ◼   ► pulling all of the stuff off the menu bar and putting it in this little bar that you dock somewhere else,

01:36:20 ◼   ► or you pop up somewhere else.

01:36:22 ◼   ► And yeah, we just, I think the answer is screen real estate

01:36:25 ◼   ► is that in the control strip was designed

01:36:28 ◼   ► to be very small when collapsed,

01:36:30 ◼   ► and then you'd pop it open to get to the UI

01:36:33 ◼   ► and it floated above everything.

01:36:35 ◼   ► And then you'd turn off Apple Talk

01:36:36 ◼   ► or do whatever you need to do,

01:36:37 ◼   ► or connect via PPP to the internet,

01:36:41 ◼   ► or dial in with your modem.

01:36:43 ◼   ► And then you snap it closed

01:36:45 ◼   ► and it just is this little tiny thing in the corner,

01:36:48 ◼   ► and then you're done.

01:36:49 ◼   ► And now we've got these huge monitors and they're just littered with menu bar items

01:36:52 ◼   ► at the top. But yeah, Control Strip was great. It was an unsung hero of the sort of latter-day

01:36:58 ◼   ► classic Mac OS. Yeah, it really was. And I'm so... I think it started on laptops too,

01:37:02 ◼   ► and then it was so popular they brought it to the desktop, to every computer,

01:37:07 ◼   ► even though it started on PowerBooks. I haven't... I wish that I'd asked while I was talking to

01:37:11 ◼   ► people from Apple, but I can't help but think that they named the new thing the Control Strip,

01:37:15 ◼   ► That it's not a coincidence that it's you know

01:37:17 ◼   ► Built by people who remember the old one because it's so similar in concept the way it zips open from the side

01:37:23 ◼   ► uh

01:37:25 ◼   ► I mentioned it to them. I was like, oh that's a familiar name and they're like, yeah, we knew we knew uh,

01:37:29 ◼   ► You know some of you guys would notice that we reused the name. Um, and you know, it's it's uh,

01:37:34 ◼   ► It's a cute reference. Like I think that's what they were going for was those in the know

01:37:38 ◼   ► You know apple's aware of all these things that it has the intellectual, you know property in the trademark four

01:37:44 ◼   ► and that was a name that they had and it was doing a similar job and so they used it.

01:37:48 ◼   ► Yeah and it just has similar character you know just the way that it animates

01:37:51 ◼   ► soup soup oh it's so nice. Yep.

01:37:56 ◼   ► Anything else on the MacBook Pros? I have one I guess broad topic about it

01:38:02 ◼   ► but anything you want to talk about with the new MacBook Pros?

01:38:06 ◼   ► I don't know I mean it's the other big thing about them well I mean we

01:38:12 ◼   ► We mentioned TouchBar, we mentioned Touch ID.

01:38:14 ◼   ► The other big thing about them is the ports.

01:38:16 ◼   ► And I feel sort of talked out about it

01:38:19 ◼   ► 'cause we've been talking about it

01:38:20 ◼   ► since the MacBook came out a year ago

01:38:22 ◼   ► and almost two years ago now.

01:38:24 ◼   ► And certainly in the last month since the Apple event.

01:38:29 ◼   ► And I'm kind of over it.

01:38:30 ◼   ► Like it's a port transition.

01:38:32 ◼   ► It stinks, everybody knows it stinks.

01:38:34 ◼   ► Everybody buys adapters.

01:38:36 ◼   ► There's a period where everybody's got the adapters

01:38:38 ◼   ► and has old hardware and then eventually it goes away.

01:38:41 ◼   ► And I think USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 is like a good direction to go.

01:38:45 ◼   ► And the only way you get there is by going through a transition.

01:38:47 ◼   ► So here we are.

01:38:48 ◼   ► And, you know, I, I don't know if.

01:38:51 ◼   ► I I'm, I, I'm kind of drained of outrage for something like that, because I do

01:38:57 ◼   ► think it's superior in almost every way.

01:38:59 ◼   ► Every time I try to plug something into the back of my iMac and get the USB

01:39:03 ◼   ► orientation wrong and have to flip it over and peer into the port to make sure

01:39:07 ◼   ► that I'm doing it right, I think, well,

01:39:09 ◼   ► USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 solve this, this is dumb.

01:39:13 ◼   ► And so, you know, I get people complaining about it

01:39:18 ◼   ► and they're right to complain about it,

01:39:19 ◼   ► but at the same time, I feel like in the long run,

01:39:22 ◼   ► it's gonna be great and I'm gonna miss MagSafe, I will,

01:39:27 ◼   ► but at the same time, I think it's also cool that you can,

01:39:31 ◼   ► on the touch bar models,

01:39:32 ◼   ► you can plug in your Mac on either side.

01:39:34 ◼   ► - That is great, that is so great.

01:39:36 ◼   ► It's so many-- there are so many times where it's--

01:39:41 ◼   ► the worst is when you're far enough away from the power

01:39:44 ◼   ► where it would fit to the right but not the left.

01:39:47 ◼   ► It's just at the--

01:39:48 ◼   ► but then there's just other times

01:39:49 ◼   ► where you just don't want to have to drape it

01:39:51 ◼   ► around the outside, where it just is inelegant.

01:39:55 ◼   ► I mean, one case for me as an East Coaster

01:39:59 ◼   ► is sometimes if you're on the Acela on the East Coast

01:40:03 ◼   ► train, the Amtrak Acela, you can get, there's some really cool seats that have a table in between

01:40:09 ◼   ► them, but you're facing people on the other side. And the tables are relatively, as you might expect,

01:40:14 ◼   ► they're, it's not a very wide table. You know, you're pretty close, but you have enough space

01:40:19 ◼   ► where two people back to back can, you know, put their laptops, you know, fair, you know, easily.

01:40:26 ◼   ► But if you want to stretch the power around the other side, it's, you know, you can do it, but it,

01:40:31 ◼   ► it would be so much easier if you could always just plug it in on the side closest to the wall.

01:40:36 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, so it's, again, I get people's complaints about it. Maybe I'm just a little

01:40:43 ◼   ► jaded because I've seen it all before. It's like, yes, everybody will complain, yes, it will be a

01:40:48 ◼   ► pain, yes, we will need adapters, then we'll get over it, and then in a few years we'll look back

01:40:52 ◼   ► and think, wow, I can't believe that we used that stuff. This stuff is so much better. I linked to

01:40:57 ◼   ► a couple of examples from like the four years ago MacBook Pros and they it was so uncanny how the

01:41:04 ◼   ► almost word for word you didn't even have to like edit out like you know one you know the name of

01:41:09 ◼   ► the port they would just be like you know not enough ports too thin you know they're exactly

01:41:15 ◼   ► word for word what people are saying about these I also believe I've written about this too but I

01:41:20 ◼   ► And I believe firmly that Apple's aggressive traditional,

01:41:25 ◼   ► not just in this case with the going all USB-C Thunderbolt 3,

01:41:30 ◼   ► but that they've done this so many times in the past

01:41:33 ◼   ► that it brings about the future where being all USB-C is fine

01:41:40 ◼   ► sooner than if they had stuck a couple of legacy ports

01:41:43 ◼   ► on the devices.

01:41:45 ◼   ► If they'd put an old school USB and one old Thunderbolt

01:41:50 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:41:52 ◼   ► And I firmly-- I can't prove it.

01:41:54 ◼   ► There is no way to prove it without the ability

01:41:57 ◼   ► to fork the universe.

01:42:00 ◼   ► But in the alternate universe, where these new MacBook Pros

01:42:03 ◼   ► have a USB port and a Thunderbolt port--

01:42:06 ◼   ► I don't know what other ports people still wish they had,

01:42:09 ◼   ► but--

01:42:10 ◼   ► or a SD card reader or something like that.

01:42:14 ◼   ► I really believe that two or three years ago,

01:42:17 ◼   ► it's less of a USB-C everywhere world.

01:42:21 ◼   ► - Oh, sure.

01:42:23 ◼   ► I mean, I think it's only a matter of degrees

01:42:26 ◼   ► because I think you made this point on "Daring Fireball,"

01:42:29 ◼   ► which is if you have legacy ports,

01:42:31 ◼   ► you have no motivation to switch

01:42:34 ◼   ► because you can just keep using your legacy ports.

01:42:35 ◼   ► But once you've switched

01:42:36 ◼   ► and you have no more of the old ports,

01:42:39 ◼   ► then there's no longer any point

01:42:41 ◼   ► in buying anything using the old ports

01:42:43 ◼   ► and you move to the new ports and then you move on.

01:42:45 ◼   ► And the longer you leave the bridge,

01:42:48 ◼   ► and Apple's done that in the past

01:42:49 ◼   ► where they've left the bridges

01:42:50 ◼   ► and they've done it where they've ripped the bandaid off.

01:42:52 ◼   ► And this time they decided to rip the bandaid off

01:42:56 ◼   ► and I'm okay with it.

01:42:58 ◼   ► In fact, the people that I have the most sympathy for

01:43:01 ◼   ► are probably like the photographers and videographers

01:43:04 ◼   ► who use that SD card slot.

01:43:06 ◼   ► And I totally get why it is a pain to have to go

01:43:09 ◼   ► from having no reader to having a reader.

01:43:12 ◼   ► somebody who used an 11-inch air, I didn't have a slot. I already felt that pain, but I get it.

01:43:20 ◼   ► I totally get it. Yeah, I get that one too. I do get it, and it speaks to how useful the built-in

01:43:26 ◼   ► SD slot is to serious photographers that Apple did it ever in the first place, because it's the

01:43:33 ◼   ► least Apple-y thing that they've done in a long time. It is. Yeah, it's like since they put S

01:43:41 ◼   ► video on the Macintosh TV. It's like, why is this port here?

01:43:44 ◼   ► Right. It has to be if it's so unred... Really, the SD card slot on Macs is the return of the

01:43:52 ◼   ► floppy drive. I mean, it's way, you know, thousands of times faster and thousands of

01:43:57 ◼   ► times more storage, but it's, you know, it's the floppy drive. It is the least Apple-y thing.

01:44:05 ◼   ► I know. So the fact that it's so useful is the reason they did it in the first place.

01:44:09 ◼   ► But the fact that they removed it is the reason why, you know, Apple was the first company to remove the floppy drive.

01:44:16 ◼   ► Right. Although, I mean, I just bought, um, for experimenting for like podcasting stuff, I bought

01:44:22 ◼   ► an SD card that does wi-fi. It's not the iFi. It's a Toshiba, I think, one. And it's pretty good.

01:44:30 ◼   ► You know, it's again not perfect, but I can see Apple's philosophy here, too, of saying, you know,

01:44:36 ◼   ► you can get a card reader, and then there are also new wireless technologies in the SD cards,

01:44:41 ◼   ► in the cameras. There are other ways to transfer this stuff. Or you bring a cable and attach your

01:44:48 ◼   ► camera direct. But I get it. I get why that's a major inconvenience, because that was their

01:44:56 ◼   ► storage medium of choice, and it had a reader built in, and now it's gone. I totally get it.

01:45:03 ◼   ► That said though, there's still a fair number. I realize SD is the most popular size, but there's

01:45:07 ◼   ► still a fair number of people shooting on cannons that shoot the CF card. And there's other cameras

01:45:15 ◼   ► that use the super micro, almost like sim card size SD card. Right, the super tiny one. Yeah.

01:45:21 ◼   ► And then with them, you have to bring and adapt. Usually, I think most people probably use, there's

01:45:26 ◼   ► SD, standard SD card size adapters that you slide it in and then you put in. So you're still,

01:45:31 ◼   ► You know, it wasn't an ideal world, and I feel like the world where

01:45:35 ◼   ► everything just works wirelessly and you can very, very quickly

01:45:39 ◼   ► airdrop things, equivalent of airdrop, whether it's actually official airdrop or

01:45:43 ◼   ► not, but just, you know, plop a thing from your standalone

01:45:46 ◼   ► camera to your MacBook. It's going to come quicker

01:45:48 ◼   ► now that the SD card is not in Macintosh's.

01:45:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's true, but I think maybe there'll be a little longer

01:45:58 ◼   ► of a pain. The pain transition will be a little different there than for like USB stuff, but