The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► How are you Marco?

00:00:01 ◼   ► Pretty good.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Yeah, how are you?

00:00:03 ◼   ► I have a bit of a cold.

00:00:05 ◼   ► I don't want to complain though.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I've been half sick for about three weeks.

00:00:09 ◼   ► It's one of those annoying things that everybody has

00:00:13 ◼   ► where like there's no like one day where it's really bad.

00:00:17 ◼   ► You just feel kind of shitty for like three weeks.

00:00:20 ◼   ► I hear you.

00:00:21 ◼   ► I'm gonna take a look.

00:00:22 ◼   ► And the whole family's gotten it.

00:00:23 ◼   ► So hopefully I won't be too sniffly or gross on the show.

00:00:27 ◼   ► I'm gonna take a little cold medicine.

00:00:29 ◼   ► [snaps fingers]

00:00:30 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:00:31 ◼   ► It doesn't sound like cold medicine that I usually have.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I take it in a can.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:00:39 ◼   ► All right.

00:00:40 ◼   ► I've never done this before.

00:00:41 ◼   ► We're attempting a sort of a double-length episode that we're actually gonna split into

00:00:45 ◼   ► two episodes.

00:00:47 ◼   ► I have some things I really do wanna talk to you about this week.

00:00:51 ◼   ► But I also thought, you know, with all the big deal that got made out of the Mac's 30th

00:00:57 ◼   ► anniversary that I, you know, whoever I have on, we could talk about that.

00:01:02 ◼   ► But maybe you're – I don't know, maybe you're the best person to talk about that

00:01:04 ◼   ► with because you're a relatively, you know, you weren't a long-time Mac user.

00:01:09 ◼   ► I'm only 31.

00:01:12 ◼   ► If Sirikusa and I started talking about that, though, I worry that it would be like six

00:01:15 ◼   ► episodes.

00:01:16 ◼   ► Well, then there you go.

00:01:17 ◼   ► And it's going to take him two weeks to prepare for that.

00:01:20 ◼   ► Right.

00:01:21 ◼   ► Right, like we could do like a 90 minute episode just on ResEdit.

00:01:25 ◼   ► You don't even remember ResEdit.

00:01:27 ◼   ► There was, somebody did eventually make a Windows program with that same name

00:01:31 ◼   ► that I think did the same thing, but I know of it.

00:01:35 ◼   ► I use the Windows version, but who cares?

00:01:37 ◼   ► But yeah, I do know of the Mac version. ResEdit was like your, your, your like

00:01:41 ◼   ► gateway drug.

00:01:44 ◼   ► It was like your gateway drug to hacking your system,

00:01:47 ◼   ► you know and and uh...

00:01:49 ◼   ► it was a the equivalent at the time of like open showing the package contents

00:01:53 ◼   ► of an app and going in and you know

00:01:57 ◼   ► like so for example

00:01:59 ◼   ► if you wanted to change the toolbar icons in any app you could show package

00:02:02 ◼   ► contents on the adopt dot app bundle

00:02:06 ◼   ► find the resources in there and they're just image files replace them with the

00:02:09 ◼   ► image files of your choice

00:02:11 ◼   ► and then the next time you launch the app if you did it right you'll have your

00:02:14 ◼   ► own custom

00:02:15 ◼   ► toolbar icons or something like that. In the classic Mac you didn't have a

00:02:20 ◼   ► bundle like in the file system resources where it was the whole thing where there

00:02:25 ◼   ► were two forks to a file and the resource fork was where a well-written

00:02:29 ◼   ► app would have all of its it's like icons and stuff like that. See that was

00:02:34 ◼   ► back in the days when Apple could actually do creative things with how the

00:02:38 ◼   ► file system worked where they didn't have to worry that much about Windows

00:02:42 ◼   ► compatibility because it wasn't compatible anyway and there wasn't a lot

00:02:44 ◼   ► of network transfer going on.

00:02:46 ◼   ► And now they can't do anything like that.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Now they can't, you know, they, they have to keep their file system as simple

00:02:52 ◼   ► and stupid as the least common denominator that they're going to find out there in

00:02:55 ◼   ► the world, which includes server file systems, network file systems, windows,

00:02:59 ◼   ► compact flashcards, all that stuff.

00:03:01 ◼   ► And so they ha like, they can't do that kind of experimentation where like they

00:03:04 ◼   ► have, I mean, they have, they have like their standard attributes now, but those

00:03:08 ◼   ► are, and you can see how bad that those are supported for as a real life example

00:03:12 ◼   ► of why they can't do much else with that.

00:03:13 ◼   ► And I remember it was. When did you get your first Mac?

00:03:21 ◼   ► I came in in 2004 because I had just graduated from college. I had gotten my first job. So

00:03:27 ◼   ► I had a little bit of money and I needed a new computer because my PCs were aging quickly.

00:03:33 ◼   ► And I had never owned a laptop before that except for like one awful one I bought off

00:03:38 ◼   ► eBay for like a hundred bucks that lasted, you know, a summer. And that was it. But I

00:03:43 ◼   ► never really owned a real laptop. And I had always, I remember there was, there was a

00:03:47 ◼   ► store that still exists, I think called Micro Center, which was a chain of computer sales

00:03:51 ◼   ► stores and stuff like that.

00:03:52 ◼   ► I remember Micro Center.

00:03:53 ◼   ► Yeah, so in Columbus that was like the best place to go. So my friends and I would go

00:03:57 ◼   ► there like every weekend just to like look around and maybe like buy some CDRs or something,

00:04:01 ◼   ► maybe occasionally some kind of cheap peripheral, but nothing really major. And we'd always

00:04:05 ◼   ► stop in the little Mac room, because the Mac had its own enclosed glass area, a lot like

00:04:10 ◼   ► when you go into Best Buy now there's like the Bose room. A lot like that, but for like,

00:04:16 ◼   ► you know, they gotta keep the Macs isolated over here so they don't get the rest of the

00:04:20 ◼   ► computer sick. And so we go in there and we play this game like, alright, try to figure

00:04:25 ◼   ► something out on the Mac. So we'd all sit down at one of them on this table, alright,

00:04:28 ◼   ► who can figure out how to open the CD-ROM drive? And we'd be sitting there like staring

00:04:34 ◼   ► at the computer, pushing various buttons, no one figures out how to open the CD-ROM

00:04:38 ◼   ► drive and then like the guy comes over, obviously like we're just some jerky teenagers in there,

00:04:43 ◼   ► the guy comes over and like with this big sigh like hits the button on the keyboard

00:04:47 ◼   ► and we're like "ohhhh!"

00:04:49 ◼   ► Anyway, so I always knew Macs from that really.

00:04:55 ◼   ► You know I rarely knew anybody growing up who had one and the ones that they were growing

00:05:00 ◼   ► up were terrible because they were all like, you know, the mid 90s max that nobody liked.

00:05:05 ◼   ► I wouldn't say that. I still liked them. It's really that I think it gets overstated in

00:05:11 ◼   ► hindsight how bad the 90s max were. I think the problem is that there were definitely

00:05:22 ◼   ► some performance to price issues where and that's where this whole it's stuck with Apple

00:05:29 ◼   ► ever since that Apple is you know that the computers are overpriced you're

00:05:33 ◼   ► paying for the brand etc etc and if you just ran benchmarks it was you know like

00:05:37 ◼   ► a two grand Mac was almost certainly gonna be slower than a two grand PC

00:05:42 ◼   ► probably slower than like a $1,500 PC I might be getting the prices wrong

00:05:48 ◼   ► because God computers used to be so expensive oh yeah I mean my first

00:05:51 ◼   ► computer in 1994 was $2,500 and it was a pretty pretty mid-range it wasn't like a

00:05:58 ◼   ► super high-end it was a pretty mid-range PC. I think more or less what happened to

00:06:03 ◼   ► Apple in the 90s was that that the Mac lost it needed to be a lot better than

00:06:09 ◼   ► than the the commodity Wintel

00:06:14 ◼   ► machines of the day and it no longer was it was better it was certainly still

00:06:19 ◼   ► more elegant there in terms of the way the OS was designed conceptually not at

00:06:23 ◼   ► the low level you know the way that like a web page could lock up your whole

00:06:28 ◼   ► system. I mean, that was terrible. I mean, that's really where that's one of the that's

00:06:33 ◼   ► the other problem they probably had like their hardware got slow and the OS was I get a geeky

00:06:38 ◼   ► level outdated. And it mattered to users even you know that the geeky stuff was so outdated,

00:06:47 ◼   ► because it affected the real world performance. You know, it's like you don't have to understand

00:06:51 ◼   ► cars at all to understand that when you hit gas, it should go faster. And if you hit gas,

00:06:58 ◼   ► and your car just turned off, which is sort of like what the Mac had.

00:07:02 ◼   ► Well, you know, I don't necessarily think that's exclusive to the Mac, though. I mean,

00:07:08 ◼   ► the mid and late 90s were actually a pretty terrible time for PCs as well. I mean,

00:07:14 ◼   ► that was a time when RAM was still very scarce and expensive. Hard drives, of course, were very,

00:07:20 ◼   ► very slow. And at the same time, this was when browsing the web was really becoming a big thing.

00:07:25 ◼   ► and so you had this pretty resource intensive common task

00:07:30 ◼   ► really for the first time in a while.

00:07:32 ◼   ► Games would always push the envelope,

00:07:34 ◼   ► but games would run okay on pretty much anything

00:07:38 ◼   ► depending on your settings,

00:07:39 ◼   ► but your web browser, like browsing the web,

00:07:42 ◼   ► you can't turn that down and make it less intensive.

00:07:45 ◼   ► And that was, the web browsers were moving very quickly.

00:07:50 ◼   ► You were getting things like inline images,

00:07:52 ◼   ► JavaScript tables, frames, all this new stuff

00:07:55 ◼   ► that was making rendering the page much more complicated

00:07:59 ◼   ► and take much more memory.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And so when memory was still very scarce,

00:08:04 ◼   ► then you have the operating systems being really pushed.

00:08:07 ◼   ► This is like in the PC era.

00:08:08 ◼   ► This was Windows 98, Windows 95.

00:08:10 ◼   ► These were not good operating systems by any means

00:08:14 ◼   ► and certainly not very advanced.

00:08:16 ◼   ► So they were still very rudimentary

00:08:17 ◼   ► with how they manage their memory,

00:08:19 ◼   ► what they could tolerate, how they used hardware.

00:08:22 ◼   ► There was not a lot of video acceleration,

00:08:24 ◼   ► So lots more things were falling on these very slow CPUs.

00:08:27 ◼   ► And so there was all this drain being put on the systems.

00:08:31 ◼   ► Multitasking was getting more and more common

00:08:34 ◼   ► as more people were getting more comfortable with computers.

00:08:36 ◼   ► So they were able to multitask more.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And so they were pushing the RAM even further.

00:08:40 ◼   ► I mean, pretty much anything you would do on a PC in the '90s,

00:08:44 ◼   ► the hard drive would be grinding away,

00:08:46 ◼   ► trying to page everything back into RAM

00:08:47 ◼   ► from whatever you had done recently,

00:08:49 ◼   ► because there was just never enough RAM.

00:08:50 ◼   ► And so just the hard drive lights

00:08:52 ◼   ► were always blinking on 90s PCs.

00:08:54 ◼   ► Like the sound of computing in the 90s

00:08:57 ◼   ► was that like grinding hard drive access sound.

00:08:59 ◼   ► That was it.

00:09:00 ◼   ► - That and the modem.

00:09:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And the biggest signal that you get

00:09:03 ◼   ► because that was the first time

00:09:04 ◼   ► where you'd have unlimited dial up for, you know,

00:09:07 ◼   ► for instead of having to pay like $3 an hour or something.

00:09:10 ◼   ► So it was, it was a pretty bad time for all computers,

00:09:14 ◼   ► really.

00:09:15 ◼   ► I mean, it was exciting that we were making progress

00:09:17 ◼   ► on the internet and stuff to do with the computers,

00:09:20 ◼   ► but it took the hardware a long time

00:09:22 ◼   ► to get a lot of headroom.

00:09:24 ◼   ► And like in the early 2000s, we got that.

00:09:27 ◼   ► RAM got really cheap, CPUs got this big boom

00:09:30 ◼   ► when AMD started really competing with Intel

00:09:32 ◼   ► in a meaningful way.

00:09:33 ◼   ► It was really great for a while there.

00:09:35 ◼   ► - The other thing that struck me

00:09:39 ◼   ► with all the 30-year original Mac nostalgia

00:09:42 ◼   ► is, and it's a cliche to some degree,

00:09:47 ◼   ► to just obsess over how, just how,

00:09:50 ◼   ► the whole thing like, you know, that everybody's cell phone has more computing power than the

00:09:56 ◼   ► entire Apollo project at NASA in the 60s. You know, a single iPhone has more computing

00:10:03 ◼   ► power than every computer NASA had, something like that. I don't know. But it really is

00:10:09 ◼   ► true when you think back to the, you know, especially the 80s, but even the 90s, just

00:10:14 ◼   ► how ridiculously resource constrained the machines were compared to today. So Chris

00:10:19 ◼   ► Espinosa who's like Apple employee number eight I think something like that is ridiculously

00:10:24 ◼   ► Low employee number and has been employed at Apple continuously ever since

00:10:29 ◼   ► Is he the only one who's been employed continuously? Yes, it's all the way back then he probably is right

00:10:36 ◼   ► Was officially I believe has always been an Apple employee

00:10:40 ◼   ► Well, that's that's kind of shaky but was has you know, he's like, you know

00:10:44 ◼   ► His job title is was and it's you know

00:10:47 ◼   ► I don't know that he's ever I don't even know if he can get into an Apple building

00:10:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I think Espinosa is the only person who's

00:10:53 ◼   ► Actually like worked non-stop on real projects, you know ever since when it's almost ridiculous that anybody including

00:11:02 ◼   ► him has I mean it's

00:11:04 ◼   ► preposterous

00:11:06 ◼   ► he was like he was like 16 years old or something like that when he started he got like

00:11:11 ◼   ► So like if he if he does stay until like a even like a reasonable retirement age of you know

00:11:17 ◼   ► 60s or something like that. He'll he'll have been there like an impossible to break record time because he started when he was 16

00:11:24 ◼   ► Yeah, that's that's pretty crazy

00:11:27 ◼   ► Although I mean at this point like why leave, you know, if he's if he's made it this far

00:11:32 ◼   ► Well, I think that's why though I think cuz he loves it. You know, I think that he really you know, he just

00:11:37 ◼   ► Lives and breathes, you know, I don't know him that well, I've met him a few times at like WWDC, you know

00:11:43 ◼   ► But you know, it's the impression you get from him and from the stories that have been published from the old days is you know

00:11:49 ◼   ► He's your prototypical

00:11:51 ◼   ► Apple engineer, you know sort of person who loves obsessing over making something really nice and

00:11:57 ◼   ► You know going the extra mile to do it

00:12:00 ◼   ► Anyway, he tweeted though

00:12:03 ◼   ► Something to the effect of you know the original Mac the 1984 Mac that we're celebrating the 30th anniversary of had

00:12:09 ◼   ► 128 kilobytes of RAM and so that's not even enough or I think he said like it would be enough to fit to

00:12:16 ◼   ► like finder icons from the Mac OS 10.9 and and

00:12:21 ◼   ► Ged from icon factory was like I don't think it would fit any because they're bigger than that now like you couldn't even fit a

00:12:28 ◼   ► single icon

00:12:29 ◼   ► into RAM on an original Mac the entire operating system everything

00:12:33 ◼   ► was

00:12:35 ◼   ► Everything using an app, you know launching an app and using the app and having documents open and all the contents from the documents that are

00:12:41 ◼   ► Ram, all of that was less memory than the finder uses just to throw an icon on screen

00:12:47 ◼   ► Oh, yeah

00:12:47 ◼   ► I mean like like when we so when I encode my podcast I have I have this giant set of shell scripts that I use

00:12:53 ◼   ► To automate as much as possible and the final files encoded on the command line with the lame encoder

00:12:58 ◼   ► And there's a limit of 128 kilobytes for how big the artwork file can be and that's surprisingly hard to hit

00:13:05 ◼   ► Like I had to like really crank the quality down

00:13:08 ◼   ► To just barely fit this one image that isn't even that complex of an image

00:13:15 ◼   ► They just barely fit as one image into the amount of entire RAM the first Mac

00:13:20 ◼   ► It's just ridiculous really and then even you know the next and and Moore's law

00:13:27 ◼   ► applied in all sorts of ways you know from like I don't know probably like the

00:13:32 ◼   ► next maybe not quite two decades but at least the next 15 years like from 1984

00:13:37 ◼   ► through around 2000 where processor speeds doubled every 18 months you know

00:13:42 ◼   ► hard drives doubled or wasn't even hard drives originally was floppies but you

00:13:47 ◼   ► know your storage space doubled pretty quickly your RAM like what's it what's a

00:13:51 ◼   ► typical machine configured with for RAM doubled every couple years but even at

00:13:59 ◼   ► that pace like the first Mac I owned was 1991 when I went to college and it was a

00:14:05 ◼   ► Mac LC with four megs of RAM and a 40 meg hard drive I almost said gig I swear

00:14:13 ◼   ► in hindsight like half of my time using that machine was spent trying to

00:14:21 ◼   ► manage that 40 megabytes of hard drive space.

00:14:24 ◼   ► Like, figuring out what I could delete,

00:14:28 ◼   ► what I would move to floppies,

00:14:30 ◼   ► and how I'd label the floppies so I could, you know,

00:14:33 ◼   ► refer back to the whatever it was again.

00:14:35 ◼   ► It was, it was like all I ever did.

00:14:40 ◼   ► We used to have a thing,

00:14:42 ◼   ► did I have anything like this for PCs?

00:14:44 ◼   ► We had a thing called Disk Doubler.

00:14:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, where they just like basically does

00:14:49 ◼   ► zip compression on the disk.

00:14:50 ◼   ► Yeah, and there were all sorts of things like that and they were all like you'd always hear stories of people losing everything because all messed

00:14:56 ◼   ► Up and you couldn't read it. I of course in bought it and installed it. I think I bought it

00:15:01 ◼   ► Maybe I pirated it

00:15:02 ◼   ► I don't know but uh

00:15:03 ◼   ► Pretty sure I bought it because it seemed like it was so important that I really I wanted to be sure I was getting a legit

00:15:09 ◼   ► copy

00:15:10 ◼   ► And of course I ran it and it was true it did maybe it wasn't quite double

00:15:16 ◼   ► but it was very, very close to the effective volume of 80 megabytes,

00:15:20 ◼   ► and it just felt so spacious.

00:15:22 ◼   ► And I never had a catastrophic problem with it,

00:15:26 ◼   ► but I knew that there were other people who did.

00:15:29 ◼   ► And in hindsight, I want to go back and just strangle myself,

00:15:31 ◼   ► you know, my 19 or 20-year-old self who did it,

00:15:34 ◼   ► because it seems like the dumbest possible thing you could ever install.

00:15:39 ◼   ► And that was also, like, most people--

00:15:41 ◼   ► I mean, you think today nobody has backups.

00:15:44 ◼   ► It was way worse back then.

00:15:46 ◼   ► - You couldn't.

00:15:47 ◼   ► - Right.

00:15:47 ◼   ► - I mean, another 40 meg hard drive

00:15:50 ◼   ► to serve as like a clone of some sort of my drive.

00:15:53 ◼   ► It was like, it wasn't even possible.

00:15:57 ◼   ► I used to--

00:15:57 ◼   ► - Right, like now you can buy a four terabyte

00:16:00 ◼   ► external drive today for 150 bucks.

00:16:03 ◼   ► There weren't external drives, there wasn't four terabytes,

00:16:08 ◼   ► it certainly wouldn't have been 150 bucks.

00:16:10 ◼   ► Like it wasn't even,

00:16:12 ◼   ► your only option was to copy things into floppies.

00:16:15 ◼   ► That was it.

00:16:16 ◼   ► That was the only realistic option that any consumer,

00:16:18 ◼   ► I mean, you know, businesses and servers

00:16:20 ◼   ► would probably have tape drives at that point,

00:16:21 ◼   ► but consumers would, you know,

00:16:23 ◼   ► your only option was floppies.

00:16:25 ◼   ► - As a college student in the first half of the '90s,

00:16:27 ◼   ► I actually sweated the price of floppy disks.

00:16:30 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:16:31 ◼   ► - Right, and I knew enough,

00:16:33 ◼   ► I was smart enough to know that

00:16:36 ◼   ► it didn't matter too much what, you know,

00:16:42 ◼   ► like paying for name brand floppies.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Floppies in general suck, period.

00:16:45 ◼   ► I mean, you were asking for trouble

00:16:49 ◼   ► if your only copy of data was on a floppy.

00:16:52 ◼   ► So you could get more for your money

00:16:54 ◼   ► by just buying no name brand floppies.

00:16:56 ◼   ► And I don't think it was--

00:16:58 ◼   ► I don't think you were really any worse for it.

00:17:00 ◼   ► But just buying like 10 packs of them on a typical college

00:17:05 ◼   ► student--

00:17:06 ◼   ► I spent most of college knowing which ATM machines

00:17:09 ◼   ► I could use to take $10 out instead of 20

00:17:11 ◼   ► because I only had $17 in my checking account.

00:17:15 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:17:16 ◼   ► And spend it all on floppies.

00:17:18 ◼   ► Exactly. And go out and buy like a...

00:17:20 ◼   ► Up hill both ways.

00:17:21 ◼   ► But I... And then like when companies started giving out floppies for like promotions. I

00:17:25 ◼   ► mean, you know, like people mock and still mock to this day AOL for handing out floppy

00:17:30 ◼   ► disks like cotton candy. It was great because then you could take them and format them and

00:17:36 ◼   ► use them for yourself. And I needed them.

00:17:38 ◼   ► Well sometimes you'd have to actually punch the hole

00:17:41 ◼   ► out in the corner to mark it as writable.

00:17:43 ◼   ► - Right, right, I remember that.

00:17:45 ◼   ► - Or no, you'd have to tape over,

00:17:46 ◼   ► 'cause I think the hole was present, it was read only.

00:17:50 ◼   ► So you'd have to tape over the hole

00:17:51 ◼   ► with something opaque like masking tape,

00:17:52 ◼   ► which of course, great idea putting that into a disk drive.

00:17:56 ◼   ► But yes, of course, we all did that.

00:17:57 ◼   ► - The Mac used to be, this is so ridiculous, the Mac,

00:18:02 ◼   ► I think it was even so in System 7

00:18:05 ◼   ► when I had my LC at first.

00:18:06 ◼   ► like formatting a floppy disk and I think even finder copies was system

00:18:13 ◼   ► modal. So when you're copying something to a floppy

00:18:17 ◼   ► it was it it you had to wait everything had to wait even if you had a couple

00:18:22 ◼   ► apps open you had to wait even just to switch to another app until the copy was

00:18:25 ◼   ► over

00:18:26 ◼   ► yeah I mean at my my first few years of computing were on Windows 3.1 and

00:18:30 ◼   ► and I don't think it was I it wasn't quite that bad I think you could

00:18:35 ◼   ► technically switch apps, but everything else would be so slow you wouldn't really want

00:18:39 ◼   ► to.

00:18:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, it was… computing was so incredibly, like, prehistoric. It was so rudimentary back

00:18:48 ◼   ► then and really… man, we've come a long way. I mean, you know, I used to always wonder,

00:18:54 ◼   ► you know, I would think like ten years ago, like, what… back when I was in the 90s before

00:19:00 ◼   ► I had internet access at all, I had a computer for like three years before ever having internet

00:19:05 ◼   ► access. What the heck did I do all day on that? I remember spending hours on it.

00:19:12 ◼   ► Same here.

00:19:13 ◼   ► But once you have the internet, and then if the internet goes out at your house, especially

00:19:17 ◼   ► before smartphones where you didn't just have an easy backup, if the internet goes out,

00:19:21 ◼   ► you have this computer and you're like, "Well, this is useless. What am I going to do with

00:19:25 ◼   ► this thing?"

00:19:26 ◼   ► Looking back, I would think, "What the heck did I do all day?" But when you think a little

00:19:31 ◼   ► more critically, like actually I wasn't doing that much. Everything just took

00:19:35 ◼   ► forever. --Yeah, that's true. That is very true.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Everything took forever, God Almighty. I feel like if you if you time-traveled

00:19:43 ◼   ► back to then, it would be infuriating. You wouldn't like like having a... it would

00:19:47 ◼   ► take... it might take months and maybe never to get acclimated to how slow

00:19:52 ◼   ► everything was. --And everything but these tiny... like I had a 14 inch CRT, that was my

00:19:56 ◼   ► first monitor that was and that was really nice at the time I mean just and

00:20:01 ◼   ► we've come so long and now I'm bitching about my 30 inch monitor not being high

00:20:05 ◼   ► resolution enough right well in the original Mac had a nine inch diagonal

00:20:09 ◼   ► and it was in by some measures really really nice for the time because it

00:20:14 ◼   ► because it was black and white it and it used square pixels instead of

00:20:18 ◼   ► rectangular pixels which is actually what a lot of the CRT's in the 80s used

00:20:24 ◼   ► it was like lines were thinner and pixels were smaller and then everything

00:20:28 ◼   ► was crisper than on the displays we were used to before it but nine inches

00:20:35 ◼   ► diagonal is tiny I mean you're talking

00:20:40 ◼   ► smaller than an iPad smaller than an iPad it's something that you sit at you

00:20:46 ◼   ► know ostensibly at arms arms length it was crazy I mean like a lot of people

00:20:52 ◼   ► look back and we've seen a lot of this with the Mac anniversary but not as much as I would

00:20:57 ◼   ► have expected. A lot of people look back on previous eras of technology or living and

00:21:03 ◼   ► they're like "Oh wow everything was so great and reliable and simple back then." And I've

00:21:08 ◼   ► never had that kind of nostalgia. I don't care at all about old computers, old technology.

00:21:15 ◼   ► I look back on it with slight contempt. I can't believe these things sucked in ways

00:21:21 ◼   ► X, Y, and Z. Like I, like when a couple years ago all these sites, like Mux Tape started

00:21:29 ◼   ► it and then a bunch of other sites came up to like use the cassette tape, the audio cassette

00:21:34 ◼   ► tape as some kind of like hip metaphor for music activity of some sort or sharing and

00:21:41 ◼   ► I hated cassette tapes, they were terrible. Like it was a terrible, terrible medium in

00:21:46 ◼   ► every possible way. I don't want to relive those days ever. Floppy disks, same thing.

00:21:51 ◼   ► Floppy disks were awful. In every possible way. Even at the time, everyone knew they

00:21:55 ◼   ► were awful. Now everyone knows they're awful. In ten more years, are our kids gonna like

00:22:01 ◼   ► fetishize floppy disks and be like, "Oh, this is so cool. It's so analog kind of..."

00:22:05 ◼   ► Like, is that gonna be a thing?

00:22:07 ◼   ► Somebody tweeted today and it got... I saw it retweeted because I was like @Groubert

00:22:14 ◼   ► in it, so it showed up like six times in my replies, but it was a comic somebody drew

00:22:19 ◼   ► where an adult was showing a child a floppy disk, and the child says, "Cool, you made

00:22:24 ◼   ► a 3D model of the save icon." I thought that was pretty good. I guess the other thing,

00:22:34 ◼   ► though, that really stands out, and I think it's why this 30th anniversary of the Mac

00:22:39 ◼   ► thing has resonated, you know, so strongly is that the technology was so bad, everything

00:22:46 ◼   ► was slow and everything was so constrained that like you said, in some ways, it's not

00:22:50 ◼   ► a lot of nostalgia where it were like you might want to if you're into wristwatches

00:22:54 ◼   ► buying like vintage ones from the 60s, like 50 year old watches, they're still great timepieces,

00:23:00 ◼   ► right? They're still today just great. And like an old car, maybe a little bit less so

00:23:05 ◼   ► in terms of a lot of the details,

00:23:08 ◼   ► but there's a reason people still collect old cars

00:23:11 ◼   ► and like, drive them around. - See, even that,

00:23:12 ◼   ► like my father-in-law had a '77 Corvette,

00:23:16 ◼   ► and they retired, they moved upstate,

00:23:19 ◼   ► and we had it in our garage for a few months

00:23:22 ◼   ► trying to sell it.

00:23:23 ◼   ► And I had to move it a few times,

00:23:24 ◼   ► and he came down a few times,

00:23:25 ◼   ► and we had to drive it to various places.

00:23:27 ◼   ► And there's this appeal for a lot of people

00:23:30 ◼   ► with classic cars, and I was in it like,

00:23:31 ◼   ► "Oh my God, this thing is a death trap,

00:23:33 ◼   ► and it has no features, the heat sucks,

00:23:37 ◼   ► it doesn't run that reliably, like, oh my god,

00:23:39 ◼   ► what, like, why would anybody want this?

00:23:41 ◼   ► Even that, I have no nostalgia for that.

00:23:45 ◼   ► - Hmm, maybe you have a good point there.

00:23:50 ◼   ► Maybe old cars are more like old computers,

00:23:54 ◼   ► where you think that there's a nostalgia,

00:23:55 ◼   ► but then when you actually get into it,

00:23:57 ◼   ► it's actually like unpleasant.

00:23:59 ◼   ► I had a friend who was into old cars,

00:24:00 ◼   ► and he had like an old Ford Falcon,

00:24:03 ◼   ► and when we drive around in it,

00:24:04 ◼   ► it's first you think it's pretty cool,

00:24:06 ◼   ► but then you get out and like,

00:24:08 ◼   ► you realize you smell like gasoline.

00:24:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:24:11 ◼   ► - Right.

00:24:12 ◼   ► - And it's like, oh man, am I,

00:24:13 ◼   ► did I just give myself cancer?

00:24:16 ◼   ► What's going on here? - Yeah.

00:24:18 ◼   ► And you're sitting there in like this aluminum can,

00:24:20 ◼   ► it's like everything's so thin and small

00:24:23 ◼   ► compared to modern giant boat cars,

00:24:25 ◼   ► it's, yeah, it's,

00:24:27 ◼   ► it's not as good as you remember.

00:24:31 ◼   ► like i bought

00:24:33 ◼   ► but when i was when i was growing up i uh... i was always a say a guy

00:24:37 ◼   ► and then when the saturn came out i'd couldn't afford it was four hundred

00:24:40 ◼   ► dollars that will come for a console in like ninety five or whenever it came out

00:24:44 ◼   ► and uh... so i never got a saturn

00:24:46 ◼   ► and then later like the end of college years later when they were really dirt

00:24:50 ◼   ► cheap money but i'm like you know i'm finally get my saturn this is gonna be

00:24:53 ◼   ► great

00:24:55 ◼   ► and i i buy a saturn with a few games and it's just terrible like it such a

00:24:59 ◼   ► major disappointment

00:25:00 ◼   ► And part of that is because the Saturn sucked.

00:25:03 ◼   ► You're going to get tons of email for that.

00:25:05 ◼   ► I'm so glad that none of these listeners know who I am.

00:25:07 ◼   ► Part of that's the Saturn sucked.

00:25:08 ◼   ► The other part of it was like, you know,

00:25:10 ◼   ► it was looking back on this old era of technology

00:25:13 ◼   ► where I was hoping it would be amazing in modern times

00:25:16 ◼   ► and by modern contexts, it wasn't even close.

00:25:19 ◼   ► - I used to be a Sega guy.

00:25:22 ◼   ► I wonder how much of that...

00:25:23 ◼   ► It's obviously, it's a whole new topic,

00:25:28 ◼   ► But the whole Nintendo should make iOS games, or at least somehow get involved with these devices.

00:25:35 ◼   ► Syracuse is going to be so pleased you picked me for the show.

00:25:38 ◼   ► Right, and then the Nintendo guys tell you how you're wrong and stick to the stuff you understand, dummy.

00:25:44 ◼   ► But I wonder, I never really thought about it, about the fact that in that NES era,

00:25:50 ◼   ► I guess what was the one that was more the rival to the Genesis? It wasn't the NES, was it?

00:25:56 ◼   ► Wasn't it? Well, there was kind of overlap. They weren't timed as well. The NES, yeah, the Genesis came out a few

00:26:02 ◼   ► I think a couple years before the Super Nintendo

00:26:05 ◼   ► So there was a period of time where the Genesis was only competing with the NES

00:26:07 ◼   ► And then the Super Nintendo came out and did a few things better than it. So it was kind of weirdly overlap

00:26:12 ◼   ► I was a Genesis guy. I like Genesis. Yeah, me too

00:26:15 ◼   ► But that was like that was my first experience of like being a fanboy, you know

00:26:20 ◼   ► Like man, I like I bought this thing because my cousins bought this thing and I liked them

00:26:24 ◼   ► so like I bought the same one they bought and I'm all thinking I'm cool and then like

00:26:28 ◼   ► Street Fighter 2 comes out on Super Nintendo only and I'm like, ah, I had to defend myself so much

00:26:34 ◼   ► Yeah, it was it was a terrible time

00:26:37 ◼   ► Anyway the thing that really strikes me about the original Mac in hindsight is how clearly that team that made it

00:26:48 ◼   ► Got it. Whereby it is the thing that still guides Apple to this day

00:26:54 ◼   ► which is a complete encapsulation.

00:27:00 ◼   ► If you're going to say, you know, that this metaphor is how the user is prevented with the system,

00:27:06 ◼   ► with this computer, make it complete, right?

00:27:09 ◼   ► There was no, you know, like in the early years of Windows where you booted, you really were booting into DOS.

00:27:14 ◼   ► I remember you used to type "win" to launch Windows.

00:27:17 ◼   ► But there was nothing like that. There was no command line, right?

00:27:21 ◼   ► The first thing you saw when you booted the machine up in 1984, which was in this blue

00:27:26 ◼   ► people away, is instead of seeing terminal text on the screen as the machine booted up,

00:27:31 ◼   ► you saw a smiling Mac.

00:27:34 ◼   ► You saw a picture of the computer itself smiling at you while you waited four minutes for it

00:27:39 ◼   ► to boot up.

00:27:41 ◼   ► That they totally got it.

00:27:46 ◼   ► And it's amazing, given those ridiculous constraints, 128 kilobytes of RAM, and the only storage

00:27:56 ◼   ► being floppy disk, right?

00:27:58 ◼   ► And they were like 800K floppy disks.

00:28:00 ◼   ► They weren't even double density yet, or high density, whatever they were called.

00:28:04 ◼   ► It's amazing how much of the stuff they did is still around on the Mac today, right?

00:28:09 ◼   ► Apple menu top left, file, edit, view, window.

00:28:14 ◼   ► I think there was a window menu to switch between windows.

00:28:17 ◼   ► But it's like the basic idea,

00:28:18 ◼   ► and the basic idea of how the menu bar works was,

00:28:21 ◼   ► you know, they got it in 1984.

00:28:23 ◼   ► - I think, you know, part of the reason why

00:28:27 ◼   ► they were able to do that,

00:28:28 ◼   ► to have this kind of cohesion and attention to detail,

00:28:31 ◼   ► and like this nice polished 1.0,

00:28:33 ◼   ► which, and I'm sure, you know, of course it wasn't perfect,

00:28:35 ◼   ► but it was, as you're right,

00:28:38 ◼   ► it was like a very, like, cohesive, nice package together.

00:28:43 ◼   ► And part of the reason that was possible

00:28:46 ◼   ► is because at the time, the problem set

00:28:48 ◼   ► for what a personal computer had to do

00:28:51 ◼   ► was very, very small.

00:28:53 ◼   ► And of course, they added a lot to that list

00:28:56 ◼   ► with this product, but it was still a very young,

00:29:00 ◼   ► simple industry.

00:29:01 ◼   ► And I think you can look at a very clear parallel

00:29:04 ◼   ► with the first iPhone, where they had 128 megabytes

00:29:08 ◼   ► of memory and crammed everything possible into that

00:29:11 ◼   ► that nobody thought was possible.

00:29:13 ◼   ► And the first iPhone, it also added a bunch of things

00:29:18 ◼   ► to what phones were expected to do,

00:29:20 ◼   ► but it entered a very young market still,

00:29:23 ◼   ► a market that Apple was able to help reshape

00:29:27 ◼   ► and really to drive that reshaping, especially at first.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And so, but the only reason they were able to do that

00:29:34 ◼   ► is because the problem set of things smartphones had to do

00:29:37 ◼   ► in 2007 was very small and very young and very simple

00:29:41 ◼   ► relative to where it is today.

00:29:43 ◼   ► So we're never gonna see another desktop

00:29:45 ◼   ► or phone operating system or major new hardware platform

00:29:50 ◼   ► that launches with that amount of cohesion.

00:29:53 ◼   ► Again, these industries are too mature now.

00:29:55 ◼   ► We're never gonna see that again.

00:29:57 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:29:58 ◼   ► It's a pretty good analogy, I think,

00:30:00 ◼   ► the original Mac to the original iPhone.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And the 128 numbers is just a happy coincidence.

00:30:05 ◼   ► But in both cases, the idea

00:30:09 ◼   ► and the conceptual design of the user experience

00:30:13 ◼   ► was years ahead of the hardware being capable

00:30:16 ◼   ► of truly fulfilling it.

00:30:18 ◼   ► I think the Mac was a lot further behind.

00:30:22 ◼   ► It took a lot longer for the hardware

00:30:26 ◼   ► to truly catch up with the Mac.

00:30:28 ◼   ► But even then, I think by the late 80s,

00:30:30 ◼   ► it had kind of caught up.

00:30:32 ◼   ► And with the iPhone, I would say, I don't know,

00:30:37 ◼   ► probably with the iPhone 4 when it went red and it seemed like--

00:30:41 ◼   ► - I would say the 3GS was the first great iPhone.

00:30:45 ◼   ► - It's close, it's a close call.

00:30:47 ◼   ► - And the first two were really not bad.

00:30:50 ◼   ► They couldn't do as much.

00:30:53 ◼   ► By the end of the 3G, you were starting to feel like,

00:30:55 ◼   ► you know, I could really use a faster CPU here.

00:30:58 ◼   ► The 3GS, and the 3GS is what went to 256, right?

00:31:03 ◼   ► Didn't that double the RAM?

00:31:04 ◼   ► I think it did. - I think it did.

00:31:05 ◼   ► - It at least had a much faster CPU.

00:31:07 ◼   ► - No, it definitely went to more RAM.

00:31:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, okay, so it had more RAM and a much faster CPU,

00:31:11 ◼   ► and that was a massive improvement.

00:31:13 ◼   ► I mean, I would say the 3GS was really the first truly

00:31:18 ◼   ► like awesome, easy iPhone that didn't have

00:31:21 ◼   ► like major performances.

00:31:22 ◼   ► 'Cause remember, the 4, the 4 wasn't as great

00:31:25 ◼   ► as you remember, especially in practice.

00:31:28 ◼   ► Like, remember how slow the camera was to launch

00:31:31 ◼   ► and after shutters, and especially it seemed like

00:31:34 ◼   ► over time with software updates, it kept getting worse.

00:31:37 ◼   ► Where, yeah, the iPhone 4 camera was very, very slow.

00:31:41 ◼   ► The home button had tons of failures and flaws.

00:31:44 ◼   ► Antennagate was a minor problem for some people.

00:31:47 ◼   ► The proximity sensor was a big problem for a lot of people.

00:31:50 ◼   ► The iPhone 4, which is funny,

00:31:53 ◼   ► 'cause all the crap it got for the Antennagate thing,

00:31:56 ◼   ► when the proximity sensor and the slow camera

00:31:59 ◼   ► and the dying home buttons were actually way worse.

00:32:03 ◼   ► I agree with all of that. I just I was thinking more in terms of that it's always seemed to

00:32:09 ◼   ► me that once the four came out that iOS was always sort of at heart it wanted a retinin

00:32:14 ◼   ► screen that it was it you know that they technically couldn't do it in 2007 but that it it it really

00:32:23 ◼   ► felt like finally the iPhone has the resolution it always should have had because there was

00:32:27 ◼   ► so just because the device is so small there was always you know just like the the the

00:32:31 ◼   ► time rendered in the status bar. It was it's so tiny that on the pre retina devices, it's

00:32:37 ◼   ► really kind of hard to read. If you're, you know, it's like you kind of have to it helps

00:32:42 ◼   ► that you usually have a good idea basically what time it is. But, you know, telling an

00:32:46 ◼   ► eight across apart from a zero or something like that. It was super, super smudgy, because

00:32:51 ◼   ► it was so tiny. Yeah, I guess I don't know, I kind of think I was thinking more in terms

00:32:57 ◼   ► though two of like just RAM and CPU speed you know because like the one

00:33:01 ◼   ► thing that really stood out to me in hindsight after you know year or two

00:33:04 ◼   ► later when we had faster iPhones was if I took my old original iPhone out on

00:33:09 ◼   ► Wi-Fi not edge but Wi-Fi and loaded a web page how long it took to render the

00:33:15 ◼   ► page because it wasn't the networking it was the actual computation of rendering

00:33:22 ◼   ► a you know the front page of the New York Times and it would take like I

00:33:26 ◼   ► I don't know, 20, 30 seconds.

00:33:28 ◼   ► - Still way better than browsing in the 90s.

00:33:30 ◼   ► - Right, but it was sort of a throwback to that though,

00:33:33 ◼   ► where you're, you know, you've kinda forgot

00:33:37 ◼   ► how, just how complex it is to render a webpage

00:33:40 ◼   ► and how we used to, you know,

00:33:41 ◼   ► even when you were developing websites locally,

00:33:43 ◼   ► where you weren't even waiting on the network at all,

00:33:45 ◼   ► that it would, a relatively complex page

00:33:49 ◼   ► took a lot of time to render.

00:33:51 ◼   ► - I mean, even that, that, we didn't get past that,

00:33:54 ◼   ► even on desktops until maybe 2006.

00:33:59 ◼   ► I mean, that was, like there was a while,

00:34:01 ◼   ► I mean on my first Mac that the PowerBook G4

00:34:04 ◼   ► that I got in '04, I remember having to load

00:34:08 ◼   ► like the Newegg website which had a very complex layout

00:34:11 ◼   ► and tons of elements on the page.

00:34:13 ◼   ► Like certain sites that had very complex layouts

00:34:16 ◼   ► would slow the browser to a crawl.

00:34:17 ◼   ► - Right, or slash time.

00:34:18 ◼   ► - And they would, yeah, they would take,

00:34:20 ◼   ► they would even take like 10, 15 seconds

00:34:23 ◼   ► of like beach balling to render a page, a very common page.

00:34:26 ◼   ► - Right, and Slashdot not because it was like

00:34:28 ◼   ► graphically rich or intensive, but just because, you know,

00:34:31 ◼   ► it had so many comments and it was rendered hierarchically,

00:34:35 ◼   ► you know, with threading that it just choked

00:34:39 ◼   ► as it went down the parse tree.

00:34:42 ◼   ► - I mean, if you think about,

00:34:43 ◼   ► and parsing isn't even the problem.

00:34:44 ◼   ► The problem is the incredible amount of dynamic layout

00:34:49 ◼   ► and flexibility that you can achieve now with CSS.

00:34:52 ◼   ► If you think about what, like at a computer science level,

00:34:57 ◼   ► what has to happen to render a page these days?

00:35:02 ◼   ► And it is crazy how much computation goes into that

00:35:07 ◼   ► because of how advanced our web languages are now,

00:35:11 ◼   ► how advanced CSS and HTML are now,

00:35:13 ◼   ► and JavaScript which throws everything for a loop

00:35:15 ◼   ► 'cause then everything changes all the time.

00:35:17 ◼   ► I mean, it's crazy how complicated modern websites are

00:35:21 ◼   ► render and our hardware now does it so quickly it like we are in such a great

00:35:26 ◼   ► age of computer now where we pretty much are only ever waiting on the network

00:35:30 ◼   ► right I agree with them and I feel like that's somewhere along the line that's

00:35:35 ◼   ► where I iOS devices have sort of caught up maybe they're not quite there yet but

00:35:40 ◼   ► they're very close yeah and and and once we once the whole industry has mostly

00:35:46 ◼   ► completed the transition to SSDs in PCs,

00:35:50 ◼   ► I think that will kind of close that door for a long time.

00:35:55 ◼   ► That kind of local performance bad days door.

00:35:59 ◼   ► Because SSDs are thousands of times faster than hard drives,

00:36:02 ◼   ► and in the ways that matter.

00:36:04 ◼   ► Like in random access, which is hard drives

00:36:07 ◼   ► kept getting faster over the years,

00:36:09 ◼   ► but it was mostly in sequential transfers.

00:36:11 ◼   ► It wasn't really in random access nearly as much,

00:36:13 ◼   ► and that's what mattered a lot more.

00:36:14 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter.

00:36:16 ◼   ► they don't go to sleep or stop spinning and then you have to wait for them to spin back up.

00:36:19 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I think the SSD transition is like the last, the last like major

00:36:26 ◼   ► like modern computer performance bottleneck in sight right now. And yeah, I'm sure in, you know,

00:36:32 ◼   ► five or 10 years, something that we think is commonplace today will seem completely archaic

00:36:37 ◼   ► and slow. But I think the SSD transition is going to carry us for a long time.

00:36:43 ◼   ► Let me take a break here and do our first sponsor and that's our good friends at lynda.com.

00:36:49 ◼   ► L-y-n-d-a dot com. lynda.com. They've been around forever and they have a fantastic library of

00:36:58 ◼   ► like self-teaching courses for computer stuff, for design stuff, and with coverage ranging from

00:37:07 ◼   ► beginner level to advanced. Their videos include animations and diagrams. It's easy to find

00:37:13 ◼   ► what you need, what you're interested in, what you're looking to learn.

00:37:16 ◼   ► And when you do, they just have top quality content.

00:37:21 ◼   ► They have over 2,000 high quality video courses right now.

00:37:26 ◼   ► And you think, well, if there's 2,000 of them, a bunch of them are probably junk.

00:37:30 ◼   ► No, it's all like, it's the fact that they've been doing it for so long. They have

00:37:33 ◼   ► this big library of content,

00:37:35 ◼   ► and they have so many experts, but everything is made to really high

00:37:38 ◼   ► standards.

00:37:39 ◼   ► Examples that might interest listeners of this show.

00:37:42 ◼   ► They have iOS developer courses.

00:37:46 ◼   ► Unix for Mac OS X users.

00:37:48 ◼   ► So if you're out there and you've always wanted to learn more about the stuff you can do in

00:37:51 ◼   ► Terminal, they have great content for that.

00:37:54 ◼   ► Objective-C, similar to iOS developer, but more just how do you learn the language.

00:38:01 ◼   ► And for the flip side, for more design-oriented stuff, user experience design techniques for

00:38:07 ◼   ► iOS.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Great stuff like that.

00:38:10 ◼   ► They have web development courses, everything.

00:38:13 ◼   ► Perl for John Siracusa, ASP.net, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript.

00:38:21 ◼   ► I mean, everybody's using JavaScript these days.

00:38:24 ◼   ► Pure design stuff, Creative Cloud, Photoshop CC,

00:38:28 ◼   ► InDesign CC, Premiere Pro, After Effects, all of that.

00:38:33 ◼   ► They've got courses in all of this stuff.

00:38:35 ◼   ► What do you do?

00:38:36 ◼   ► You go there.

00:38:37 ◼   ► you pay one low price $25 a month and you get access to the entire unlimited library.

00:38:47 ◼   ► You can watch from your computer, your tablet, your mobile device, super high quality stuff.

00:38:53 ◼   ► Total opposite of like the homemade stuff you find on YouTube. Really easy to follow,

00:38:59 ◼   ► really easy to learn. It's just great stuff. I have a great deal for you that they're offering

00:39:03 ◼   ► to listeners of the show, here's what you do. Go to Linda comm slash the talk show.

00:39:10 ◼   ► That's l y n da.com slash the talk show, and you get a seven day free trial. So you can

00:39:19 ◼   ► go there use that code. You can start watching the videos that they have for seven days free

00:39:24 ◼   ► of charge. See just how good they are. And I will bet that you will sign up at the end

00:39:31 ◼   ► that period. So my thanks to lynda.com. Go check them out and learn some stuff.

00:39:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I was actually there earlier this evening. They sponsor our show as well. So I went to

00:39:45 ◼   ► check it out and I was watching this great thing on logic and editing the podcast and

00:39:52 ◼   ► managing the dynamics compressors and everything. It was really, really good. They had the diagrams

00:39:58 ◼   ► and the animations and the graphs and everything. I was very impressed.

00:40:01 ◼   ► about like someone who's been around a long time. I remember the

00:40:05 ◼   ► Lynda.com booth at Macworld New York, Macworld Expo New York, back when Macworld

00:40:12 ◼   ► was a twice a year show. And that the Lynda.com booth was just

00:40:18 ◼   ► swamped, just absolutely packed. Because it was like the late 90s and

00:40:22 ◼   ► everybody was a graphic designer, felt you know, and realized they had to learn

00:40:27 ◼   ► how to do web design to stay relevant in the industry and it was just like gang

00:40:33 ◼   ► buster business of New York designers you know who went to Macworld buying

00:40:39 ◼   ► their stuff great stuff that's gonna be me in in a few more years when PHP

00:40:46 ◼   ► finally stops being useful to me on on the web and I have to learn anything

00:40:49 ◼   ► else I I I've never done as much web development as you it's always been

00:40:57 ◼   ► sort of hobby for me but I wrote my own link shortener the df4 when you look

00:41:08 ◼   ► follow the at daring fall fireball Twitter account the df4 us URLs are all

00:41:16 ◼   ► it's my own little homemade system and Brent Simmons was asking me about it the

00:41:22 ◼   ► other day and it made me think about it and it's one of those things where I

00:41:26 ◼   ► I forget when I wrote it exactly. It must have been like 2008, 2009.

00:41:29 ◼   ► It's a couple of years now. It's quite a few.

00:41:31 ◼   ► And it mostly just runs.

00:41:34 ◼   ► But when I wrote it, and there's a whole bunch of pieces, like everything I write,

00:41:37 ◼   ► it's sort of a Rube Goldberg contraption between movable type and this other standalone thing.

00:41:42 ◼   ► But at df4.us, it's just a little standalone web service.

00:41:47 ◼   ► It doesn't actually create the short URLs.

00:41:49 ◼   ► It just redirects them to the right URL at daringfireball.net.

00:41:53 ◼   ► at the time I thought I wanted to learn Ruby I was at least curious about Ruby

00:41:57 ◼   ► and so I realized rails was overkill for a root what should be a simple couple

00:42:03 ◼   ► you know maybe a hundred line thing total and there's another framework it's

00:42:09 ◼   ► a lot smaller and it just fit my model of how programming works better called

00:42:13 ◼   ► Sinatra to rehearse anatra that's for Ruby yeah I have heard of it I I assumed

00:42:20 ◼   ► It was Python. Well, that's yeah, you can tell how how in touch I am with any of these things, which is really sad

00:42:26 ◼   ► I really should know more, you know, and it's like a simple little thing where you you you know

00:42:30 ◼   ► You run your you write your little Sinatra program and you write these handlers to take the URLs

00:42:34 ◼   ► you know Matt pattern match the URLs and then

00:42:37 ◼   ► Whenever it matches one of your patterns it then it dispatches to where you tell it to go

00:42:42 ◼   ► And I had a good enough time doing it and I thought you know it worked well enough

00:42:48 ◼   ► enough but then it's like I never did anything else in Sinatra or Ruby and now

00:42:53 ◼   ► it's like if I wanted to go back and do something with it like I'd have to start

00:42:57 ◼   ► all over from scratch I have zero memory of how it actually works well I feel

00:43:02 ◼   ► like right now we're in we're in this kind of terrible adolescent period

00:43:07 ◼   ► between major web language eras where you know like like three or four years

00:43:14 ◼   ► ago I would have said, "Yeah, use PHP, Python or Ruby. No problem." Not in that order. I'd

00:43:19 ◼   ► say probably use Python first, Ruby second, PHP third, and I say this as a PHP program.

00:43:26 ◼   ► They were all very mature, very stable, very easy to use. Most importantly, they were boring.

00:43:33 ◼   ► You could set it up and not have to worry that the bleeding edge beta version of the

00:43:38 ◼   ► server that you set it up with is out of date in two weeks, and you set it up with the intention

00:43:43 ◼   ► touching it for four years.

00:43:45 ◼   ► And so that's kind of incompatible with that.

00:43:48 ◼   ► But now, if you would learn one of those languages today,

00:43:51 ◼   ► it's kind of like, well, you know,

00:43:53 ◼   ► that's kind of like learning C++ today.

00:43:55 ◼   ► It's like, you can do it, and there are jobs out there

00:43:58 ◼   ► for it, but you're kind of learning the past.

00:44:01 ◼   ► And that might get out of date pretty soon.

00:44:04 ◼   ► And so now, like all the new cool stuff, like Node,

00:44:08 ◼   ► and some of the other cool stuff that's going on,

00:44:11 ◼   ► you could tell this is the next generation progressing

00:44:16 ◼   ► as we speak.

00:44:17 ◼   ► And you could tell in five years,

00:44:21 ◼   ► we're gonna be telling people in all likelihood,

00:44:23 ◼   ► yeah, you should learn Node

00:44:24 ◼   ► 'cause now it's really easy and stable

00:44:26 ◼   ► and there's a billion jobs for it.

00:44:27 ◼   ► - Node makes me feel old though.

00:44:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, but between now and then,

00:44:32 ◼   ► all these new things are still very, very young.

00:44:36 ◼   ► Their tools are very young,

00:44:37 ◼   ► they're running the stupid beta everything

00:44:39 ◼   ► and it changes every two weeks and there's new frameworks.

00:44:41 ◼   ► There's a billion frameworks to choose from.

00:44:43 ◼   ► You don't know which ones are gonna quote win.

00:44:45 ◼   ► It's like a format war.

00:44:46 ◼   ► Like you don't know what you should be investing

00:44:48 ◼   ► your time in and you could, you know,

00:44:51 ◼   ► it's easy to say, especially for the younger programmers,

00:44:56 ◼   ► like if you're just getting into college or something,

00:44:57 ◼   ► it's easy to say, oh, well just learn all of them.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Who cares?

00:45:00 ◼   ► But there is a lot of value in mastering something

00:45:02 ◼   ► and like learning the depths, the every detail

00:45:05 ◼   ► of a language and a framework to really be very advanced

00:45:09 ◼   ► in that thing.

00:45:11 ◼   ► And so right now, if you wanted to start down

00:45:13 ◼   ► that path of mastering something,

00:45:15 ◼   ► there is no clear choice of what that should be.

00:45:18 ◼   ► I think it's interesting, too, that web programming has

00:45:23 ◼   ► changed a lot more in a shorter period of time

00:45:28 ◼   ► than native desktop-- and by desktop, I mean PC or mobile--

00:45:33 ◼   ► but native app development.

00:45:36 ◼   ► Because native apps in the old days

00:45:38 ◼   ► used to be written in C or on a Mac it was Pascal but Pascal and C were you

00:45:43 ◼   ► know it conceptually very very similar where if you could speak one you'd at

00:45:47 ◼   ► least understand the code of the other and then when everything went object

00:45:54 ◼   ► oriented C++ won out and people wrote on the Mac it was called power plant was

00:46:02 ◼   ► the the C++ framework that a lot of apps used and it was funny because it didn't

00:46:07 ◼   ► didn't come from Apple, it came from third party Metro works that made the top compiler,

00:46:12 ◼   ► which just tells you, that's another sign of how bad a shape Apple was in in the 90s,

00:46:16 ◼   ► where they sort of lost control of the tool chain. By on merits, you know, that they got

00:46:23 ◼   ► beaten out by by a product, a third party product that was just better than what they

00:46:28 ◼   ► had. And the win 16 and when I don't know if when 16 was object oriented, but when 32

00:46:33 ◼   ► was a lot of C++, right?

00:46:35 ◼   ► - Uh, no. - No?

00:46:37 ◼   ► - There's com, yeah, it's weird.

00:46:39 ◼   ► Windows, the Windows APIs have always been--

00:46:41 ◼   ► - But it was C and C++.

00:46:42 ◼   ► - It was C, yeah.

00:46:43 ◼   ► The Windows APIs have always been kind of a disaster

00:46:47 ◼   ► because Microsoft would always come out,

00:46:49 ◼   ► like every three years they would change

00:46:52 ◼   ► what the new cool thing is that you're supposed to use,

00:46:54 ◼   ► but then they themselves would never use it.

00:46:56 ◼   ► And so it was, and that's why it kept changing

00:46:59 ◼   ► 'cause no one, like none of them ever caught on.

00:47:01 ◼   ► It was always a disaster.

00:47:03 ◼   ► And then there's Java, which never got big on the Mac,

00:47:06 ◼   ► but I don't know how much Windows software was written on it.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Maybe commercially not much,

00:47:10 ◼   ► but in the enterprise certainly a lot.

00:47:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think Java is and always has been way bigger

00:47:18 ◼   ► on servers than anywhere on desktop and mobile.

00:47:22 ◼   ► Especially, I mean, back in the early days

00:47:24 ◼   ► of terrible cell phones, the Java mobile stuff and Brew,

00:47:29 ◼   ► which I think was based on Java,

00:47:31 ◼   ► That had some foothold, but not strongly.

00:47:34 ◼   ► It was mostly servers.

00:47:36 ◼   ► And nextstep/coco is not that it's unchanged since 1989,

00:47:42 ◼   ► but it's still Objective C. And the language

00:47:46 ◼   ► has added features over time.

00:47:48 ◼   ► But whenever I ask at WWDC, when I meet an old school Next

00:47:53 ◼   ► developer, I've asked them, if you time traveled back

00:47:57 ◼   ► to your 1990 self who was writing on the then brand new Next platform and showed them code

00:48:04 ◼   ► from an iPhone app.

00:48:06 ◼   ► Would it be familiar?

00:48:07 ◼   ► They always say, "Yeah."

00:48:09 ◼   ► There'd be a couple of things that'd be like a head scratcher, but for the most part, it

00:48:12 ◼   ► would be like, "Wow, this is really cool.

00:48:14 ◼   ► The future is great on this platform."

00:48:16 ◼   ► It was clearly the same sort of philosophy and mindset to the APIs and stuff like that.

00:48:22 ◼   ► Whereas web programming has changed so much.

00:48:26 ◼   ► I remember writing my first CGI program I wrote in C. I remember compiling CGI's in

00:48:32 ◼   ► like 1995 and then Perl was really took off just because you didn't have to compile code.

00:48:38 ◼   ► You could just save a text file and have it execute. But it went from CGI to PHP which

00:48:44 ◼   ► was wildly different. Maybe not linguistically but conceptually it was where you'd have actual

00:48:50 ◼   ► executable code in the pages that that you had and just I think it's undergone

00:48:57 ◼   ► you know total unfamiliar totally unfamiliar to what you knew before

00:49:01 ◼   ► changes every three four years I think part of it and certainly you know you're

00:49:09 ◼   ► you're right but you know you can like if you're a PHP programmer and you look

00:49:13 ◼   ► at Python or you look at Ruby you can pretty much figure out what's going on

00:49:17 ◼   ► Like it's not, it's not so radically different. It's just different function names, a few different syntax things, a few different capabilities, but not massively. So especially Python. Yeah, Python famously, I mean, it's even like, part of the design behind it is that it's supposed to look like pseudocode. Exactly. But if you, you know, I think I think where, where things are very clearly going, partly out of just advancement, and partly out of hardware necessity,

00:49:47 ◼   ► where things are very clearly going is concurrency.

00:49:50 ◼   ► And all the modern languages we have for web programming

00:49:55 ◼   ► so far, at least the big established ones,

00:49:58 ◼   ► have not been great at dealing with concurrency.

00:50:00 ◼   ► And it's way worse in PHP than the others.

00:50:02 ◼   ► So I fully admit that.

00:50:05 ◼   ► Because PHP basically says, what's concurrency?

00:50:08 ◼   ► We don't support that.

00:50:10 ◼   ► But when you're designing a language

00:50:13 ◼   ► for a hardware environment where processor speeds have pretty

00:50:19 ◼   ► much stopped getting faster.

00:50:21 ◼   ► They're making incremental improvements,

00:50:23 ◼   ► but it's no longer doubling in single core performance,

00:50:25 ◼   ► not even close.

00:50:27 ◼   ► I mean, look at the Mac Pro.

00:50:28 ◼   ► We've improved single core performance something like 10%

00:50:31 ◼   ► in three years.

00:50:32 ◼   ► I mean, it's terrible.

00:50:34 ◼   ► And these are the best CPUs Intel has to offer.

00:50:36 ◼   ► So the design of a language changes dramatically

00:50:42 ◼   ► once concurrency at the hardware level

00:50:44 ◼   ► is a big thing that has to be considered from the beginning

00:50:48 ◼   ► and not just something you can add later

00:50:49 ◼   ► or something that only the advanced apps have to do.

00:50:51 ◼   ► This is not something that every app has to do.

00:50:54 ◼   ► And Apple's done a very good job adding it

00:50:58 ◼   ► to the desktop and mobile stuff with GCD.

00:51:01 ◼   ► It's been awesome.

00:51:01 ◼   ► I mean, GCD is a fantastic API.

00:51:05 ◼   ► And there's still some room to go on that

00:51:08 ◼   ► in regards to getting Cocoa apps,

00:51:13 ◼   ► making them make better use of multiple threads

00:51:16 ◼   ► and multiple cores.

00:51:17 ◼   ► But GCD goes a long way.

00:51:19 ◼   ► It's really good.

00:51:20 ◼   ► Whereas in the web world, we're still

00:51:23 ◼   ► in the very early days of that transition, very, very early.

00:51:26 ◼   ► And most of the languages still don't do it well.

00:51:29 ◼   ► And so that's going to be the thing where

00:51:32 ◼   ► when you make a major shift-- like for me

00:51:34 ◼   ► to learn something that's not PHP,

00:51:36 ◼   ► that's what's going to do it.

00:51:37 ◼   ► It's not some syntactical sugar that Ruby has that I don't care about.

00:51:41 ◼   ► It's going to be great concurrency support, and you kind of have to design a language

00:51:45 ◼   ► like that with that in mind from the beginning.

00:51:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's fundamentally just that you're solving a different problem.

00:51:55 ◼   ► The native code has always had their eyes on the right prize, which is getting this

00:52:00 ◼   ► thing to run as well as possible on this machine for this user.

00:52:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:07 ◼   ► Whereas the problem that web software is trying to solve is very different.

00:52:11 ◼   ► It's not just concurrency in the sense of that's the way Intel's, you know, that if

00:52:16 ◼   ► you want to take advantage, you've got to be able to go across cores because the clock,

00:52:22 ◼   ► like you said, the clock speed isn't getting faster anymore.

00:52:25 ◼   ► But really it's like that you want your app, if it gets popular, to be able to handle the

00:52:30 ◼   ► most people with the least hardware.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:52:35 ◼   ► Yeah, hardware is very cheap these days, but when you start talking about "web scale",

00:52:42 ◼   ► things get expensive pretty quickly.

00:52:43 ◼   ► If you have an app that's on the App Store that gets a couple downloads a day, you're

00:52:49 ◼   ► not going to notice on your servers any kind of major cost problems.

00:52:53 ◼   ► But if you run something that gets popular, then you're going to start having to spend

00:52:58 ◼   ► thousands of dollars a month on servers and that's going to add up quickly.

00:53:02 ◼   ► And so this stuff really starts to matter.

00:53:04 ◼   ► Look, actually, you're probably thinking about recently, huh?

00:53:10 ◼   ► - With what?

00:53:12 ◼   ► - Well, with an iPhone app you might have

00:53:13 ◼   ► that might need some server stuff soon.

00:53:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I don't even wanna be secretive about it,

00:53:19 ◼   ► but I just don't wanna speak on behalf of Brent.

00:53:25 ◼   ► But yeah, definitely, we've given that a lot of thought

00:53:29 ◼   ► in terms of how that's going to work.

00:53:31 ◼   ► - Right, I mean it changes everything,

00:53:33 ◼   ► especially before, like I'm facing this with Overcast,

00:53:36 ◼   ► because I haven't launched this thing yet,

00:53:37 ◼   ► and I have no clue what my costs are gonna be.

00:53:42 ◼   ► I have absolutely no clue.

00:53:43 ◼   ► I have a server that I've been running

00:53:46 ◼   ► for like six months in a test environment,

00:53:49 ◼   ► but I have no idea once I release it

00:53:51 ◼   ► how popular it's gonna be

00:53:52 ◼   ► and what that's going to actually use on the servers,

00:53:55 ◼   ► but it's going to matter a lot.

00:53:56 ◼   ► And you have, you at least have an installed base so far,

00:53:59 ◼   ► So you know, with Vesper, you know, like, all right,

00:54:02 ◼   ► well, we have X many users, probably, you know,

00:54:05 ◼   ► X percent of them are going to enable sync

00:54:07 ◼   ► in the first place, and then we can kind of expect

00:54:10 ◼   ► this volume.

00:54:11 ◼   ► - Well, here's a good example, though, of what we don't know.

00:54:13 ◼   ► It's just a simple question, is what, how many,

00:54:16 ◼   ► how many notes that Vesper users use have photos attached?

00:54:21 ◼   ► Because that's actually going to,

00:54:23 ◼   ► depending on the answer to that,

00:54:25 ◼   ► it would significantly increase our storage, right?

00:54:30 ◼   ► Because the notes that are mostly text,

00:54:32 ◼   ► even if, let's just say for example,

00:54:35 ◼   ► we came out with a Mac version,

00:54:37 ◼   ► where you would more easily be able to type longer notes,

00:54:43 ◼   ► text is, and it compresses.

00:54:45 ◼   ► So text is not going to be a storage problem.

00:54:49 ◼   ► But photos could be, you know,

00:54:51 ◼   ► because a photo is at least a megabyte or so.

00:54:56 ◼   ► It's just throw out a ballpark number.

00:54:58 ◼   ► Could be a huge difference,

00:55:00 ◼   ► depending if Vesper users store a lot of photos.

00:55:04 ◼   ► We don't know.

00:55:05 ◼   ► We'll only find out once we have sync enabled.

00:55:08 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:55:08 ◼   ► And there's also,

00:55:12 ◼   ► you don't know where the bottlenecks are gonna be yet.

00:55:14 ◼   ► You know, and I have this problem too.

00:55:17 ◼   ► I've written this entire sync method

00:55:20 ◼   ► that I have no idea if it's a terrible idea or not.

00:55:23 ◼   ► Like, I think it's reasonably decent,

00:55:26 ◼   ► but I can point to the main sync action and be like,

00:55:29 ◼   ► you know, I have to load a lot of database records

00:55:32 ◼   ► to make this happen, and maybe that's gonna bite me.

00:55:35 ◼   ► I don't know. - It's true.

00:55:36 ◼   ► It is a very different development cycle.

00:55:40 ◼   ► 'Cause Brent's doing all the development,

00:55:43 ◼   ► and it's funny because it's just like

00:55:45 ◼   ► what we've been talking about.

00:55:46 ◼   ► Writing the actual iPhone app,

00:55:49 ◼   ► Brent was doing what he's been doing for the last 12, 13 years or so, which is writing

00:55:55 ◼   ► you know, cocoa code.

00:55:57 ◼   ► And you know, obviously the API's on iOS seven are a lot different than the API's from Mac

00:56:03 ◼   ► OS 10.2 or whatever was out when net newswire shipped.

00:56:09 ◼   ► But it's like he feels like he's on it on that degree.

00:56:12 ◼   ► He's on a continuum and he's doing the same thing, but just staying on the leading edge

00:56:15 ◼   ► and doing it over and over again.

00:56:16 ◼   ► the the backend code for the sync server is like nothing he's ever written before.

00:56:23 ◼   ► Not that he hasn't written backend code before, it's just that it changes so

00:56:27 ◼   ► often. Oh yeah, and again, like, and not being able to predict what kind of usage

00:56:34 ◼   ► and what kind of load and what kind of cost you're gonna see from that makes it

00:56:38 ◼   ► very, very just stressful. And then when you launch, you know, it's possible, like,

00:56:46 ◼   ► Like if you have to buy your own hardware, it's even worse.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Where you might launch with one server and realize you need five.

00:56:55 ◼   ► Or you might launch with five and realize you need half of one and that nobody likes

00:56:59 ◼   ► your app.

00:57:01 ◼   ► So it's very, very hard.

00:57:06 ◼   ► Launching a modern app/service, and I think that line is pretty safely blurred these days,

00:57:13 ◼   ► It's way more complicated than just making one app that has to run on one kind of phone,

00:57:19 ◼   ► and that's it.

00:57:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:22 ◼   ► And it's a mystery, too, because the other thing, too, is when you're writing native

00:57:25 ◼   ► code for a device, as you go, you get to a certain point.

00:57:30 ◼   ► There's still, like, a scaffolding period where, like, there's nothing to even see.

00:57:34 ◼   ► And then it got to a point where Brent could share it with me and Dave, and we could try

00:57:39 ◼   ► it.

00:57:40 ◼   ► On a daily basis, we could critique certain things.

00:57:44 ◼   ► We could ignore certain things that we knew where he just hadn't gotten to yet.

00:57:48 ◼   ► But you can kind of see it coming together and you know as it progresses, you see, well,

00:57:53 ◼   ► this is definitely going to work.

00:57:54 ◼   ► This is going to work.

00:57:55 ◼   ► That's not going to work.

00:57:56 ◼   ► Look, this idea we had to do this where you swipe left, right, it doesn't – it just

00:58:01 ◼   ► doesn't – it's confusing.

00:58:02 ◼   ► And then you back it out.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Whereas when you're wondering about scale, you don't know until you've unleashed

00:58:08 ◼   ► the hounds.

00:58:09 ◼   ► - Right, and by that time, it's like,

00:58:12 ◼   ► we have to have this fixed 10 minutes ago.

00:58:13 ◼   ► - Right.

00:58:14 ◼   ► - Like, there's no time, like once you launch,

00:58:17 ◼   ► if you're having a scaling problem,

00:58:18 ◼   ► especially if your problem is you have to scale up,

00:58:21 ◼   ► if that's your problem, then you don't have a lot of time

00:58:25 ◼   ► to like, oh, let's rewrite this entire sync engine

00:58:28 ◼   ► to work this completely different way,

00:58:30 ◼   ► or let's swap out this entire backend component

00:58:33 ◼   ► because it turns out, you know, we need to use S3,

00:58:35 ◼   ► or we need to get off S3, or something like that.

00:58:38 ◼   ► you know, there's these big decisions are much harder to do

00:58:41 ◼   ► after you've launched, but you don't know that you have to do

00:58:43 ◼   ► them until after you've launched. So it's, you're just

00:58:45 ◼   ► kind of screwed either way, you just kind of have to deal with

00:58:47 ◼   ► this launch might be bumpy.

00:58:49 ◼   ► Which is what I'm facing whenever I actually ship over

00:58:53 ◼   ► guys.

00:58:54 ◼   ► How close do you think you're getting?

00:58:56 ◼   ► I'm almost ready for a beta. I'm I was going through this.

00:59:01 ◼   ► Here goes every talk show listener emailing right now.

00:59:04 ◼   ► Please don't.

00:59:07 ◼   ► I, yeah, I've, oh my god, I've had so many,

00:59:10 ◼   ► and it's very flattering, I've had a million requests.

00:59:13 ◼   ► Problem is, I only have 100 UDID slots.

00:59:16 ◼   ► - Right, and you probably have eight of them

00:59:17 ◼   ► for your own devices, so you've only got like--

00:59:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, something like that, and so yeah,

00:59:21 ◼   ► like I'm probably not gonna make the beta,

00:59:23 ◼   ► and I have, you know, if I wanna do a beta

00:59:26 ◼   ► before it's actually shipped in the store,

00:59:28 ◼   ► I have, you know, if I wanna do that for press people,

00:59:32 ◼   ► I have to leave room for them.

00:59:33 ◼   ► So there goes like, you know, another 10 slots, and--

00:59:35 ◼   ► We ran out of them on Q branch.

00:59:38 ◼   ► I forget what we're gonna do.

00:59:40 ◼   ► But it's almost like what I said when I had a LC

00:59:44 ◼   ► with a 40 megabyte hard drive and I spent half my time

00:59:46 ◼   ► trying to clear things up.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Like us trying to clear up device IDs.

00:59:51 ◼   ► - If you can't delete these files,

00:59:52 ◼   ► you delete them and they actually get deleted a year later.

00:59:54 ◼   ► - Right, well, exactly.

00:59:56 ◼   ► It's like you can only empty your trash once a year.

00:59:59 ◼   ► - Right.

01:00:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:00:01 ◼   ► Think carefully, do you really wanna do it now?

01:00:03 ◼   ► - I don't think a lot of people realize that,

01:00:05 ◼   ► but it is crazy.

01:00:06 ◼   ► I think a lot of people know there's 100 device limit

01:00:10 ◼   ► to developer beta device IDs.

01:00:13 ◼   ► I don't think a lot of people realize though

01:00:15 ◼   ► that that only gets reset once a year.

01:00:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the rules have kind of,

01:00:20 ◼   ► it's very unclear, at least it used to be,

01:00:22 ◼   ► it's very unclear as to when that would happen.

01:00:26 ◼   ► So you're like, well, I'll get another 60 devices back

01:00:30 ◼   ► sometime around this few month period

01:00:34 ◼   ► that I forget exactly what date it'll happen on.

01:00:36 ◼   ► There's nowhere to see that.

01:00:37 ◼   ► And yeah, it's probably better now,

01:00:39 ◼   ► but it's still, you know, if you delete a device

01:00:42 ◼   ► that doesn't make room for somebody else,

01:00:44 ◼   ► it might in the future.

01:00:46 ◼   ► At that moment, it doesn't, you just lose that device.

01:00:48 ◼   ► - It's a real problem, and it's like something

01:00:52 ◼   ► that iOS developers, when commiserating amongst themselves,

01:00:56 ◼   ► never shut up about because it's never ending.

01:00:58 ◼   ► 'Cause iPads count across the limit

01:01:02 ◼   ► if you have a universal app.

01:01:04 ◼   ► And most people who beta test, at least the ones we have,

01:01:08 ◼   ► are people who are just like me and you

01:01:10 ◼   ► who get a new iPhone every year.

01:01:12 ◼   ► - Right, so every time there's a new iPhone or iPad launch,

01:01:14 ◼   ► we get this massive pile of emails from TestFlight saying,

01:01:17 ◼   ► all these people deleted a device,

01:01:18 ◼   ► all these people added a device,

01:01:19 ◼   ► and you better update your records

01:01:20 ◼   ► and burn all those slots some more.

01:01:22 ◼   ► - Right, so if you have a universal--

01:01:23 ◼   ► - I mean, it would be so much easier,

01:01:24 ◼   ► like, forever developers have been suggesting,

01:01:27 ◼   ► why doesn't Apple just tie it to Apple IDs?

01:01:30 ◼   ► Say 100 Apple IDs.

01:01:31 ◼   ► - Oh my God, that would be so great.

01:01:32 ◼   ► instead of 100 device IDs.

01:01:34 ◼   ► That would be amazing.

01:01:35 ◼   ► - That alone would get me to shut up about it

01:01:38 ◼   ► 'cause it would solve the problem.

01:01:41 ◼   ► - Totally.

01:01:41 ◼   ► - 'Cause effectively,

01:01:42 ◼   ► it's really more like a limit of 40 people

01:01:48 ◼   ► if most of them are gonna get a new iPhone every year.

01:01:51 ◼   ► And then if you're going to do universal

01:01:53 ◼   ► with iPhone and iPad,

01:01:54 ◼   ► you're talking about sort of like 25, 30 at the tops

01:01:58 ◼   ► if they're gonna go through both an iPad and an iPhone

01:02:01 ◼   ► and maybe a new iPhone, let alone me.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I go through, I have two new iPads,

01:02:06 ◼   ► or one new iPad a year and a new iPhone.

01:02:09 ◼   ► - Really, and even for the testers,

01:02:12 ◼   ► I'm beta testing an app now for iPad,

01:02:15 ◼   ► and my primary iPad is a mini.

01:02:17 ◼   ► So I was like, all right, I gave them that UDID.

01:02:19 ◼   ► And now that I got the app,

01:02:21 ◼   ► I actually would like more screen space for this app.

01:02:23 ◼   ► I wish I could test it on my wife's Air,

01:02:25 ◼   ► but I can't, 'cause I didn't give them that UDID,

01:02:28 ◼   ► and I'm not gonna go back to them and say,

01:02:29 ◼   ► "Please burn another one."

01:02:31 ◼   ► So, you know, but like, none of this

01:02:34 ◼   ► is the best testing it could be.

01:02:36 ◼   ► None of this is set up for good quality,

01:02:40 ◼   ► easy interaction at all.

01:02:41 ◼   ► It's all incredibly rudimentary and hostile.

01:02:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's a lot of ways that iOS development

01:02:50 ◼   ► has gotten better over the years

01:02:52 ◼   ► in terms of managing some of that stuff,

01:02:55 ◼   ► like code signing and stuff,

01:02:57 ◼   ► but the device limit hasn't changed at all.

01:03:01 ◼   ► And it's more of a problem now than it was

01:03:03 ◼   ► when it happened because of the iPad.

01:03:07 ◼   ► And I think it's totally reasonable that you'd,

01:03:10 ◼   ► you know, if a tester has both an iPad Air and an iPad Mini,

01:03:14 ◼   ► you'd want them using both to make sure everything,

01:03:16 ◼   ► you know, is sized comfortably for both.

01:03:19 ◼   ► - Right, or you know, if it's a really good tester,

01:03:21 ◼   ► make them run it on an iPad 3.

01:03:23 ◼   ► You know, like be able to run it

01:03:24 ◼   ► on the weird edge case devices

01:03:26 ◼   ► that might show different problems.

01:03:28 ◼   ► Let me run it on a non retina device and a retina device.

01:03:31 ◼   ► Like there, you know, if you're gonna have somebody

01:03:33 ◼   ► actively testing beyond just like,

01:03:36 ◼   ► oh, let me try out the app 'cause I wanna be cool

01:03:37 ◼   ► and get it in, you know, ahead of time,

01:03:40 ◼   ► you want them to test it on many different devices.

01:03:43 ◼   ► - Let me take a break here and thank our second sponsor.

01:03:49 ◼   ► What a great service this is, Backblaze.

01:03:52 ◼   ► - Love these guys.

01:03:53 ◼   ► unlimited, un-throttled backup for your Mac, $5 a month.

01:04:01 ◼   ► They have an iOS app that lets you access and share any of your files that have been

01:04:05 ◼   ► backed up from your Mac.

01:04:06 ◼   ► You can restore one file at a time.

01:04:09 ◼   ► If there's one thing that's gone bad, corrupted, or you've erased it, or you've edited such,

01:04:14 ◼   ► and Time Machine, you know, doesn't get it back, you can restore one file at a time.

01:04:22 ◼   ► Or you could restore everything.

01:04:26 ◼   ► You can use the website to access your files.

01:04:29 ◼   ► Backblaze was founded, and this is super key to the thing.

01:04:33 ◼   ► It was founded by ex-Apple engineers.

01:04:35 ◼   ► It's not some kind of Windows service, and then there's also a Mac client, and it all

01:04:39 ◼   ► feels kind of weird and gross.

01:04:42 ◼   ► It looks and feels like something that arguably maybe even should come from Apple.

01:04:47 ◼   ► It's so good.

01:04:49 ◼   ► And it feels totally right.

01:04:51 ◼   ► it runs totally native on Mac, including Maverick support. There's no add ons, there's no gimmicks,

01:04:57 ◼   ► there's no additional charges. It's not like a thing where you go there and there's something

01:05:02 ◼   ► for $5 a month, but to make it work the way you want it to you really ought to pay, you

01:05:06 ◼   ► know, $25 a month or something like that. No, you pay $5 per month, you get unlimited

01:05:12 ◼   ► unthrottle backup. We were just talking earlier about how people, you know, couldn't back

01:05:17 ◼   ► up in the old days, but there's so many people who don't back up now, if you're not using

01:05:21 ◼   ► something that backs up your whole drive your nut your whole Mac you're nuts

01:05:24 ◼   ► because it eventually your drives gonna go bad really five dollars a month you

01:05:30 ◼   ► will sleep so much better knowing that you've got back blaze backing up all

01:05:35 ◼   ► your data it'll be it's like the best five dollars a month you can spend what

01:05:40 ◼   ► do you do to find out more how do you know how do they know you're coming from

01:05:42 ◼   ► the show. Here's the trackable link they have www dot back blaze.com slash daring fireball.

01:05:52 ◼   ► Now it's not the talk show it's dip slash during fireball. I think because it's a it's

01:05:57 ◼   ► a it's a link that they're tying into a deck ad or something like that or during fireball

01:06:04 ◼   ► sponsorship. Use that URL and they'll know you're coming from the show. And if you haven't

01:06:11 ◼   ► tried it yet. You're nuts if you haven't. I mean, I can recommend this service wholeheartedly.

01:06:16 ◼   ► I wish I could buy it for all of you because it makes the world a better place when a Mac

01:06:21 ◼   ► is being backed up to back place.

01:06:23 ◼   ► You're going to get so much email.

01:06:26 ◼   ► Why? I don't get email. Well, I don't read it. Maybe I do get a lot of email. What am

01:06:30 ◼   ► I going to get email about?

01:06:31 ◼   ► Well, people are going to want to take you up on that.

01:06:34 ◼   ► Oh, they know I'm not serious about buying it for them. Five dollars a month, buy it

01:06:37 ◼   ► It's so cheap. It's ridiculous. I

01:06:40 ◼   ► Would I mean that sincerely not just because they're sponsoring the show I have five dollars a month for back plays is

01:06:49 ◼   ► Easily the best I can't imagine how you get more for your money for five dollars. I can't imagine

01:06:55 ◼   ► Yeah, it's great. I mean, you know and I've used it for years. We have it on my computer

01:07:00 ◼   ► But I'm a wife's computer. I have many I think I have three terabytes of total data in there between our computers

01:07:07 ◼   ► it's a lot of terabytes and you have Time Machine locally,

01:07:12 ◼   ► and definitely do that for that way you have like

01:07:15 ◼   ► fast whole drive recovery, Time Machine locally.

01:07:19 ◼   ► And then the question is like, all right, well,

01:07:21 ◼   ► if Time Machine is my only backup,

01:07:23 ◼   ► then what happens if either there's some bug

01:07:27 ◼   ► and that gets corrupted?

01:07:28 ◼   ► Or I'm sure everyone who's ever used Time Machine

01:07:31 ◼   ► has had a problem where sometimes Time Machine

01:07:33 ◼   ► kind of flakes out and decides that it can't back up

01:07:35 ◼   ► to your disk anymore, 'cause it keeps saying

01:07:37 ◼   ► it doesn't have enough space even though it does.

01:07:39 ◼   ► And the solution often is format your time machine drive

01:07:42 ◼   ► and start over.

01:07:44 ◼   ► But then you create this window

01:07:45 ◼   ► during which you don't have a backup.

01:07:47 ◼   ► And like what if your hard drive dies during that window?

01:07:50 ◼   ► Then you're screwed, right?

01:07:51 ◼   ► - Right, and Murphy's Law will tell you

01:07:52 ◼   ► that your machine is a lot more likely

01:07:54 ◼   ► to die in that window.

01:07:56 ◼   ► It really is. - Especially, you know,

01:07:57 ◼   ► your hard drive's like, well yeah,

01:07:58 ◼   ► all of a sudden your hard drive

01:08:00 ◼   ► that's been gently used every day,

01:08:02 ◼   ► you're now asking it to read its entire content

01:08:04 ◼   ► straight through so that's gonna have a lot of activity and maybe that will

01:08:07 ◼   ► accelerate it's down and there's the whole off-site issue right now you've

01:08:10 ◼   ► got a backup that is not in your house and that means if your house gets

01:08:13 ◼   ► robbed if there's a fire our surge right a years ago we at a previous apartment

01:08:21 ◼   ► we had a bedroom where there was like a water leak above the ceiling and a big

01:08:25 ◼   ► part of the ceiling you know fell through and water came dripping down and

01:08:30 ◼   ► and there weren't any computers underneath.

01:08:32 ◼   ► But, first thing I thought when I saw it,

01:08:35 ◼   ► when I realized what happened is,

01:08:37 ◼   ► it was a perfectly logical place to put a desk and a computer in that bedroom.

01:08:42 ◼   ► We just didn't have the computers in a different room.

01:08:45 ◼   ► But if we had put computers in that room,

01:08:47 ◼   ► it would have been right over where the computer went.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, if you have a combination of

01:08:52 ◼   ► a local drive for fast, easy recovery, like Time Machine,

01:08:55 ◼   ► and then a cloud backup service,

01:08:57 ◼   ► that's a fantastic combination that will cover pretty much any

01:09:00 ◼   ► condition and I've tried multiple cloud backup services and backblaze is the one

01:09:05 ◼   ► that I keep

01:09:06 ◼   ► its off-site is key

01:09:09 ◼   ► because then that's what makes you sleep better that's what makes me sleep better

01:09:13 ◼   ► because anything could happen you know forget your keys you're locked out of

01:09:19 ◼   ► your house

01:09:20 ◼   ► well with backblaze you could just move to a new house yeah just burn down the

01:09:24 ◼   ► old one

01:09:24 ◼   ► right matter

01:09:29 ◼   ► what else is going on well says in the news

01:09:32 ◼   ► well those apple earnings crap but i don't care do you yes the really

01:09:36 ◼   ► starting to bore me

01:09:37 ◼   ► it's still like because they've gotten bigger

01:09:41 ◼   ► it's it the earnings stuff is boring and it's worth i'd took a look and just to

01:09:45 ◼   ► make sure there weren't any surprises and there weren't

01:09:50 ◼   ► so you know i'm pretty much done with it

01:09:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the earnings were briefly newsworthy

01:09:58 ◼   ► during that two or three year period

01:10:00 ◼   ► where they were growing insanely a couple years ago.

01:10:02 ◼   ► Yeah, it really was, because it was just 20 something,

01:10:06 ◼   ► 30 something, 40 something percent growth.

01:10:09 ◼   ► I think there were some years in there where there was 50%

01:10:12 ◼   ► year over year iPhone unit share sell growth.

01:10:17 ◼   ► But even then, even during those years

01:10:19 ◼   ► where the earnings numbers themselves

01:10:22 ◼   ► were very exciting. Even then, the resulting news of that happening was like, you know,

01:10:27 ◼   ► B-grade news. Like, it really wasn't that interesting. Like, only the top Apple watchers

01:10:32 ◼   ► really gave a crap about that, or the top finance people really gave a crap about that,

01:10:36 ◼   ► even during the exciting finance times. Now, we're entering a period where Apple's finances

01:10:41 ◼   ► are much less interesting because they're just--you aren't having those massive growth

01:10:44 ◼   ► spikes anymore now. It's more incremental. And so it's even less exciting to people just

01:10:51 ◼   ► following the news? Yeah, I think so too. I guess there's a little bit of news

01:10:56 ◼   ► that came out, it's that Apple at least to some degree confirmed that the 5c was

01:11:03 ◼   ► a little bit of a disappointment and that the 5s was a little bit more

01:11:07 ◼   ► popular than they expected, that they their their predicted mix was a little

01:11:13 ◼   ► bit more balanced and that the actual demand was a lot heavier in favor of the

01:11:19 ◼   ► 5S. Right. Even that, it's like, the news there is this phone that none of you care

01:11:25 ◼   ► about turns out no one else really cares that much about it either. Well, but the

01:11:29 ◼   ► thing is, and I don't think it's worth writing off the 5C at all, and I think I

01:11:34 ◼   ► saw some people on Twitter saying it's clearly a flop, etc, etc. To me it's... No, it's not a

01:11:39 ◼   ► flop, it's boring. It's all, yeah, it is, it is boring, and it's all written from

01:11:44 ◼   ► the perspective that it's it's more of a change than it really is from previous

01:11:50 ◼   ► years where they sold the last year's top-of-the-line iPhone at $100 less

01:11:56 ◼   ► because that's what it is it's the iPhone 5 $100 less oh but it also has a

01:12:01 ◼   ► different has a plastic case instead of a metal case but it you know it's every

01:12:06 ◼   ► every other way it's exactly an iPhone 5 which is exactly what Apple has done

01:12:11 ◼   ► ever since the 3GS when did they first start moving them down I think when I

01:12:18 ◼   ► believe it was 3GS right that we just came out 3GS became I know that when I

01:12:22 ◼   ► think when the 3GS came out they kept the 3G well did they keep the 3G I think

01:12:26 ◼   ► well it was one of them it was either the 3G or the 3GS but ever since they've

01:12:30 ◼   ► done that and I think the mix has always been you know in the quarter the new

01:12:36 ◼   ► iPhone comes out heavily in favor of the new one because all of the enthusiasts

01:12:40 ◼   ► who want a new iPhone when it's new get it then because it does if you're going to get a new iPhone

01:12:46 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense to buy it other than in the if you really care about the the device

01:12:51 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense to buy it except when it first comes out because then

01:12:54 ◼   ► You know if you're like us and you're gonna get a new one every year. Why why wait?

01:12:58 ◼   ► And then the next three quarters after that

01:13:02 ◼   ► the balance comes down, you know, and that's measured by active the

01:13:09 ◼   ► average selling price

01:13:10 ◼   ► The average selling price is always way higher in the quarter when the new one comes out and then it goes down

01:13:16 ◼   ► The next three until the next new one comes out

01:13:18 ◼   ► so the next three quarters are when the 5c is supposed to sell better because that's when

01:13:23 ◼   ► The people buying iPhones are more, you know, just people regular people who's like, I guess I'll buy an iPhone. I

01:13:31 ◼   ► think the most interesting part of

01:13:33 ◼   ► The most interesting insight I think we can get from the 5c

01:13:38 ◼   ► probably not selling any better than the previous quote "old iPhones" is that

01:13:43 ◼   ► people weren't really fooled. Like the 5C seemed like an attempt by Apple to make the old iPhone cooler than

01:13:52 ◼   ► just it being the old iPhone and

01:13:55 ◼   ► they tried to you know, put the old iPhone in a new suit and

01:14:00 ◼   ► call it another new model.

01:14:02 ◼   ► When in reality the public was not fooled. The public knew that this is not really the new one. The public knew what the new

01:14:08 ◼   ► new one was, beyond nerds.

01:14:13 ◼   ► This went into regular people, regular people knew that the new iPhone had the fingerprint

01:14:18 ◼   ► sensor and was this cool new still metal one and this plastic one was not the new iPhone.

01:14:25 ◼   ► And so they weren't fooled, it continued selling as a lower end model but very few people I

01:14:33 ◼   ► I think, bought one as thinking they're getting the new one.

01:14:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, and clearly some people were.

01:14:42 ◼   ► I remember somebody telling me that they were

01:14:43 ◼   ► in a coffee shop and they heard a guy in front of them,

01:14:46 ◼   ► they're waiting in line, and the guy in front of them

01:14:48 ◼   ► was telling the girl he was standing next to,

01:14:51 ◼   ► he had a 5C and he was like, "Yeah, don't be a dummy.

01:14:54 ◼   ► "It's the exact same thing and $100 cheaper."

01:14:57 ◼   ► And he was acting like he was a tech expert.

01:14:59 ◼   ► And he's actually wrong.

01:15:02 ◼   ► It is $100 cheaper, but it's not the exact same thing.

01:15:05 ◼   ► - Right, and I think we nerds tend to assume

01:15:10 ◼   ► that regular buyers are less savvy than they really are,

01:15:14 ◼   ► and there are people like that, certainly,

01:15:18 ◼   ► but I think the number speakers themselves,

01:15:20 ◼   ► that at least in the relatively high-end market

01:15:24 ◼   ► that all iPhones sit in, relative to all phones globally,

01:15:28 ◼   ► this is still a fairly high-end segment,

01:15:31 ◼   ► at least within that high-end segment,

01:15:33 ◼   ► overall people were not fooled in a major way.

01:15:35 ◼   ► Overall people still know what the new iPhone is

01:15:39 ◼   ► and they still want the new one.

01:15:42 ◼   ► If they ever wanted the new one in the past,

01:15:44 ◼   ► they still want what's really the new one this time.

01:15:47 ◼   ► And if they were, people who bought the 5C,

01:15:51 ◼   ► and people who buy the 5C,

01:15:54 ◼   ► probably would have also bought the 5

01:15:57 ◼   ► if they kept that around as the old phone this year.

01:16:00 ◼   ► What else can you glean? I mean, to me, the most... the numbers don't really matter.

01:16:06 ◼   ► The dollars don't matter that much.

01:16:09 ◼   ► I mean, you know, revenue is up a little.

01:16:13 ◼   ► Profits were flat because margins are down a little bit.

01:16:17 ◼   ► But still, you know, compared to all of its competitors or would-be competitors,

01:16:21 ◼   ► way higher,

01:16:22 ◼   ► you know, margins. Do you think now that Samsung had kind of a week quarter

01:16:28 ◼   ► that all the analysts are going to start telling them they have to make small phones?

01:16:31 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

01:16:35 ◼   ► We should save that.

01:16:36 ◼   ► I did save that for the next show, the big screen phone thing, because I think that's

01:16:42 ◼   ► a long topic.

01:16:44 ◼   ► But I don't think the analysts are going to say that to Samsung.

01:16:46 ◼   ► I think that everybody has it in their heads that Apple needs to make a big phone, but

01:16:53 ◼   ► yet never occur-- because it never has occurred.

01:16:56 ◼   ► Never said it and I mean now that you know Samsung had a bum quarter, but all the other Android makers

01:17:01 ◼   ► Who've been losing money nobody's ever said well? Why don't they do you know make a phone like the iPhone since the iPhone?

01:17:07 ◼   ► Is the most profitable and best single best-selling smartphone on the market?

01:17:12 ◼   ► Do you think Samsung can innovate anymore?

01:17:15 ◼   ► The innovation is dead I

01:17:19 ◼   ► Don't know

01:17:23 ◼   ► How bad was their quarter I didn't see the details of it

01:17:25 ◼   ► - It was, I mean, I didn't look too far into it.

01:17:29 ◼   ► I think it was a single digit percentage decline

01:17:31 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:17:32 ◼   ► It wasn't a major problem, but it was like

01:17:34 ◼   ► their first down quarter in years.

01:17:36 ◼   ► I don't know, it's just funny.

01:17:40 ◼   ► I don't take the news about Samsung and Apple too seriously

01:17:45 ◼   ► because to me it's just humorous.

01:17:48 ◼   ► Watching everybody fall all over themselves

01:17:51 ◼   ► trying to make terrible fake analyst predictions

01:17:54 ◼   ► and watching everyone try to be an analyst,

01:17:57 ◼   ► and watching even half of the real analysts

01:18:00 ◼   ► make terrible predictions, and trying to tell a company,

01:18:03 ◼   ► I mean, this is like half your business, right?

01:18:05 ◼   ► It's like pointing out these idiots.

01:18:07 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:18:08 ◼   ► Like telling, you know, seeing all these people

01:18:10 ◼   ► who think they know what these big tech companies should do

01:18:14 ◼   ► because they're reading the same news as everybody else.

01:18:16 ◼   ► - I think the basic problem though is that Samsung and Apple

01:18:18 ◼   ► have both run into with phones is that,

01:18:22 ◼   ► Not that we've run out of that they've run out of new customers, but they're getting

01:18:26 ◼   ► pretty close to running out where there's not this huge untapped market of people who

01:18:33 ◼   ► a might be interested in a five, six, $700 smartphone and be actually have five, six,

01:18:42 ◼   ► $700 to spend on a smartphone, right?

01:18:47 ◼   ► It's like peak oil.

01:18:48 ◼   ► - Right.

01:18:49 ◼   ► - Like we're slowing down the rate at which these companies

01:18:53 ◼   ► can find new customers that are profitable

01:18:57 ◼   ► and that they can reach with good economics

01:19:00 ◼   ► and good products.

01:19:01 ◼   ► There's always gonna be this massive amount of people

01:19:04 ◼   ► in the world who are very willing to buy these phones

01:19:08 ◼   ► if they can pay a lot less for them

01:19:10 ◼   ► because they can't pay more.

01:19:11 ◼   ► And that's always going to exist,

01:19:13 ◼   ► but you're not gonna see these massive profit rises

01:19:16 ◼   ► from companies trying to address markets

01:19:18 ◼   ► that have very, very thin margins

01:19:20 ◼   ► and big volumes, no profit,

01:19:23 ◼   ► that's always gonna be a challenge.

01:19:24 ◼   ► And so I think we've reached peak,

01:19:27 ◼   ► rich smartphone customers,

01:19:28 ◼   ► if that makes any sense at all.

01:19:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, and not that, again,

01:19:33 ◼   ► it's like you said with peak oil,

01:19:35 ◼   ► where oil production still goes up,

01:19:37 ◼   ► but it's hard enough to reach it

01:19:41 ◼   ► that the go-go days are over.

01:19:44 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:19:44 ◼   ► way to get to double digit, especially high double digit growth anymore because it's just

01:19:50 ◼   ► there's just not enough people left.

01:19:52 ◼   ► Too many of them already have the phones and are in two-year upgrade cycles.

01:19:57 ◼   ► The other thing I saw mentioned was that US iPhone sales were actually down year over

01:20:03 ◼   ► year.

01:20:04 ◼   ► It was and it was made up.

01:20:05 ◼   ► The overall six or seven percent growth was made up outside the US and that Tim Cook attributed

01:20:13 ◼   ► to carrier changes, which is more or less basically that all the major US carriers

01:20:18 ◼   ► now make you wait the full 24 months of your contract before they'll offer you

01:20:23 ◼   ► upgrade pricing. Yeah, that has to hurt. Yeah, but like I think the Cook's

01:20:30 ◼   ► explanation though is that now, but now that they're all there, it'll, it'll work

01:20:34 ◼   ► out going forward because everybody's on the same cycle and they'll be upgrading

01:20:39 ◼   ► every two years. Although I'm not sure that that actually makes sense because

01:20:42 ◼   ► because I think the argument against that was that people used to, a lot of people,

01:20:47 ◼   ► more people were upgrading quicker than 24 months.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Whether it was every 12 months when the phones came out, or like 18 months, or something

01:20:56 ◼   ► like that.

01:20:57 ◼   ► Right.

01:20:58 ◼   ► I think at least in the US for a while, the average was 18 months.

01:21:01 ◼   ► Because a lot of people would upgrade early, because you get either a half or a full subsidy

01:21:05 ◼   ► even at 18 months, they would just kind of not tell you.

01:21:08 ◼   ► They wouldn't start advertising to you yet because they wanted you to keep going, but

01:21:11 ◼   ► You could get it earlier.

01:21:13 ◼   ► A lot of people also lose or break or drop their phones in the toilet, and so they have

01:21:16 ◼   ► to get new ones earlier.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And so a lot of times the policies would allow a bit of a discount before then, and yeah,

01:21:23 ◼   ► now all the carriers have tightened those down.

01:21:26 ◼   ► So the average used to be 18 months, and now I'm going to guess that's going to go up by

01:21:29 ◼   ► a few.

01:21:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I think definitely.

01:21:34 ◼   ► By the way, that's totally with no citations or evidence.

01:21:38 ◼   ► It could be completely wrong.

01:21:39 ◼   ► It could have been 13 months.

01:21:40 ◼   ► could have been just like in Ohio or something. I have no idea. I keep my notes

01:21:44 ◼   ► in my head as well. Yeah. I think the average selling price for an iPhone this

01:21:48 ◼   ► past quarter was $637 and the average selling price for an iPad was somewhere

01:21:54 ◼   ► around 400, which is interesting in the context of the show I did last week with

01:22:01 ◼   ► Moltz when we were talking about the iPad camera and how it's everybody's, you

01:22:07 ◼   ► know, not everybody, but so many people are using their iPads as as a major

01:22:12 ◼   ► camera or their their favorite camera, you know, that's the kid that's what they

01:22:16 ◼   ► take out on vacation to take, you know, snapshots. And that I wish, I hope, that

01:22:22 ◼   ► Apple can somehow manage to get the top-of-the-line camera from the iPhone

01:22:27 ◼   ► into the iPad either this year or next year, but maybe they can't because only

01:22:36 ◼   ► the iPhone which sells at a significantly higher price right if it's

01:22:40 ◼   ► 400 to 637 that's like one point over 1.5 times the average price so there's a

01:22:52 ◼   ► lot more room in the average price of an iPhone especially the high-end models

01:22:56 ◼   ► which you know are above the average selling price the 5s there's a lot more

01:23:01 ◼   ► room to put a bleeding edge technology camera in there than on the iPad.

01:23:08 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and the difference in these sensors, it might be like either $25 or $45 for the

01:23:15 ◼   ► camera thing, but you would think, "Oh, they should just put that in the iPad because they

01:23:20 ◼   ► have all that room," but all these component differences add up pretty quickly and they

01:23:25 ◼   ► they start affecting that margin number and you'll see,

01:23:28 ◼   ► you know, any, I mean, didn't the stock take a hit

01:23:31 ◼   ► from today's results?

01:23:32 ◼   ► I mean, like any--

01:23:33 ◼   ► - No, 8%, but who knows? - Yeah, that's pretty--

01:23:35 ◼   ► - By the time, but now that we're recording,

01:23:36 ◼   ► who knows, it could be, you know.

01:23:38 ◼   ► - Right, right, right. - Could be more,

01:23:38 ◼   ► could be less.

01:23:39 ◼   ► - But, you know, there's a lot of pressure

01:23:42 ◼   ► from the finance side of things

01:23:44 ◼   ► to keep that percentage margin,

01:23:47 ◼   ► that gross margin percentage of, what is it,

01:23:49 ◼   ► like 37% or something like that?

01:23:51 ◼   ► I don't even know, I'm not good with this finance stuff,

01:23:53 ◼   ► but there's a lot of pressure to keep that where it is

01:23:56 ◼   ► or get it bigger.

01:23:58 ◼   ► And this quarter it went down slightly

01:24:00 ◼   ► and I bet that's gonna hurt a little bit.

01:24:02 ◼   ► And Apple has to, Apple's kind of squeezing all sides

01:24:07 ◼   ► with this kind of stuff.

01:24:09 ◼   ► Their shareholders and the board probably want them

01:24:12 ◼   ► to keep that number pretty healthy,

01:24:14 ◼   ► but the whole rest of the market is saying

01:24:16 ◼   ► we want things cheaper, we want things better.

01:24:18 ◼   ► There's all this competition now that's making things

01:24:20 ◼   ► cheaper and better in a lot of cases.

01:24:22 ◼   ► And so they're really kind of squeezing both sides there.

01:24:25 ◼   ► And they're in a tough position with that.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Like, I think we're always gonna see Apple struggling

01:24:30 ◼   ► to hit that balance optimally.

01:24:33 ◼   ► And we're not always going to like what they have to do

01:24:35 ◼   ► to hit it.

01:24:35 ◼   ► Or the finance people aren't gonna like what they have

01:24:37 ◼   ► to do to hit it.

01:24:38 ◼   ► - Right.

01:24:39 ◼   ► And I think that there was,

01:24:40 ◼   ► you know, what gives me hope is the way that the iPad Mini

01:24:46 ◼   ► went retina this year, rather than next year,

01:24:49 ◼   ► which is what I had expected a year ago.

01:24:51 ◼   ► And that it you know, it's totally caught up. It's on the a7

01:24:55 ◼   ► It's you know what it's like 5% under clocked compared to the air but you know for all intents and purposes

01:25:02 ◼   ► They're the exact same iPad just with two different sized screens same

01:25:08 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, same display and that to me is really impressive and that's the sort of same

01:25:12 ◼   ► Efficiency

01:25:15 ◼   ► that that if I'm right or if my wish is correct that that

01:25:21 ◼   ► That they could get like maybe next year get the iPads to use the same

01:25:25 ◼   ► Camera as the iPhone 6 or whatever. They're gonna call it. It would be the same type of move

01:25:31 ◼   ► It would be a pleasant surprise, but I don't think it's something that people should hold their breath for

01:25:36 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll see. There's also the issue of thickness

01:25:39 ◼   ► Where you have physical room concerns also with especially with the mini actually no, I think isn't the air thinner than the mini

01:25:48 ◼   ► - Either way, they're probably very close.

01:25:51 ◼   ► So yeah, there's also depth concerns

01:25:53 ◼   ► because one of the easiest ways to make cameras bigger

01:25:58 ◼   ► is to make a larger sensor, which needs larger optics,

01:26:01 ◼   ► which, you know, physics kind of starts getting--

01:26:03 ◼   ► - It has to be further away.

01:26:04 ◼   ► - Exactly, I mean, there's some tricks you can pull

01:26:07 ◼   ► to reduce that distance, but not many that won't hurt

01:26:11 ◼   ► the image quality noticeably, and so there's always gonna be

01:26:14 ◼   ► this battle between device thickness and camera quality,

01:26:17 ◼   ► which I'll save some of that discussion for.

01:26:19 ◼   ► - I wonder if you went out and just went to a carrier.

01:26:24 ◼   ► This is a question I never really thought about this before

01:26:26 ◼   ► and you just went to a Verizon store

01:26:28 ◼   ► and looked at every Android and Windows phone,

01:26:33 ◼   ► smartphone that they're selling.

01:26:37 ◼   ► How many of them have a bump for the camera?

01:26:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a lot I bet.

01:26:42 ◼   ► - It's gotta be most, has to be.

01:26:45 ◼   ► 'Cause all the ones I've seen always have a bump

01:26:47 ◼   ► of some kind, whether it's just for the camera lens

01:26:50 ◼   ► and it's sort of like almost like a nipple,

01:26:53 ◼   ► or it's like half the back of it is a different thickness

01:26:56 ◼   ► than the other half.

01:26:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's been, as far as, I mean,

01:27:02 ◼   ► we're the probably two worst people in the world

01:27:04 ◼   ► to talk about this, but as far as I know,

01:27:06 ◼   ► that's been like a pretty standard thing on Android

01:27:09 ◼   ► for years now.

01:27:10 ◼   ► - Pretty sure I saw an Android phone once.

01:27:14 ◼   ► I've seen one in a last time on 2018 t store two years ago.

01:27:17 ◼   ► Let me do the third sponsor. Yeah. Another repeat sponsor.

01:27:22 ◼   ► Another fantastic service. What a great idea. It's our friends at

01:27:27 ◼   ► fracture. fracture prints your photos in vivid color directly

01:27:34 ◼   ► on glass. You get it in the mail then and it's a picture, a frame

01:27:39 ◼   ► and amount all in one. Your box contains everything you need to get your photo on your wall or

01:27:46 ◼   ► on your desk propped up. It's a small team. They hand assemble every print right here

01:27:52 ◼   ► in the USA and they have a 30-day happiness guarantee and a lifetime warranty. They have

01:27:59 ◼   ► sizes starting at 5 x 5 small which is 12 bucks all the way up to 22 x 29. Those are

01:28:06 ◼   ► This is the USA folks

01:28:08 ◼   ► extra-large

01:28:10 ◼   ► You got a cowboy hat when you're saying that

01:28:12 ◼   ► You know, have I ever given you my rant on Fahrenheit versus Celsius?

01:28:16 ◼   ► I think I did it on a talk show once but I get into that extra large and that's 125 bucks, but that's huge

01:28:22 ◼   ► And they have a special promotion for talk show listeners use this coupon code the talk show all one word

01:28:29 ◼   ► No spaces the talk show gets you 10% off your order

01:28:34 ◼   ► I have a bunch of these now

01:28:36 ◼   ► From when they sponsored the show before yeah, I got six of them in my office right now

01:28:40 ◼   ► My wife Paul

01:28:44 ◼   ► Paul and Amy my wife they had this they had we're doing their talk show

01:28:48 ◼   ► Their podcast before they had fractures a sponsor and they did a thing where they were sending each other gimmick fractures

01:28:56 ◼   ► They were sending each other like joke ones back and forth for each episode of the that fracture sponsored them

01:29:01 ◼   ► So we have fractures all over the house. They all look great

01:29:04 ◼   ► And it was a big hit for our family at Christmas because it was a go-to gift.

01:29:11 ◼   ► You don't know what to get someone to get them.

01:29:12 ◼   ► Get them a present as someone in the family in that fracture.

01:29:15 ◼   ► It looks amazing.

01:29:17 ◼   ► And I just can't say enough how different it looks.

01:29:22 ◼   ► It's like it's the weirdest effect that they say they print the photos directly on glass.

01:29:28 ◼   ► Didn't make any sense to me until I got one and looked at it.

01:29:30 ◼   ► It's exactly what it looks like.

01:29:33 ◼   ► It's way cooler and somehow different than a print under glass.

01:29:39 ◼   ► Really cool thing.

01:29:40 ◼   ► Go to their website.

01:29:42 ◼   ► Their website is fractureme.com.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Just spell out the word F-R-A-C-T-U-R-E-ME.com.

01:29:51 ◼   ► Doesn't hurt.

01:29:53 ◼   ► Doesn't hurt.

01:29:55 ◼   ► Check them out.

01:29:56 ◼   ► Use that coupon code, the talk show, and trust me, it's better than I expected it to be,

01:30:00 ◼   ► I expect it to be pretty good, but it's really, really cool way to print photos.

01:30:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I saw it on my show too, because they sponsored my show too.

01:30:08 ◼   ► One use I came up with for them is their small size.

01:30:11 ◼   ► It's square, it's five inches by five inches, or there's a rectangle version that I think is 4 by 6,

01:30:16 ◼   ► something like that. And their small size is great for app icons.

01:30:21 ◼   ► And so I have on my wall of my office this row of three app icons of the apps I've worked on.

01:30:27 ◼   ► I have Instapaper, the magazine, and Overcast all in a row hanging up on my wall kind of

01:30:32 ◼   ► as like a trophy/motivation row for me.

01:30:36 ◼   ► Because, you know, the square size.

01:30:38 ◼   ► It's 12 bucks for each of these things.

01:30:39 ◼   ► It's fantastic.

01:30:40 ◼   ► And that's before the discount.

01:30:41 ◼   ► So, yeah.

01:30:42 ◼   ► That's a great idea.

01:30:44 ◼   ► It works so well.

01:30:45 ◼   ► You should, I mean, you know, it's square.

01:30:47 ◼   ► Like, they don't cut the corners for you.

01:30:49 ◼   ► Although, they do have a custom option, which I didn't look into.

01:30:53 ◼   ► But you know, these things look great.

01:30:55 ◼   ► What's a good great way to bring your bring your work into the physical world for once if they did cut the corners

01:31:00 ◼   ► They would add a recut the the data retool the machine when I was seven came out because the corners change

01:31:06 ◼   ► Yep, so don't don't cut the corners

01:31:08 ◼   ► Just that's actually that's such an Apple thing to do to change that shape. Yeah, like just just to be a dick to everyone

01:31:14 ◼   ► It's fantastic

01:31:17 ◼   ► Let me give you my rant on Celsius first Fahrenheit sure

01:31:22 ◼   ► Fahrenheit I won't argue in favor of imperial measures, whatever you want to call them in general the the you know in general the the

01:31:29 ◼   ► Metric system is superior because of the logical, you know, everything's scale of a hundred

01:31:36 ◼   ► But Fahrenheit I will argue for and Fahrenheit is a scale of zero to a hundred

01:31:45 ◼   ► Zero and it's all based on temperature like like a weather temperature

01:31:50 ◼   ► Zero degrees Fahrenheit is freezing your fucking ass off

01:31:53 ◼   ► it's like the most you kid a human being can a typical human can bear outside and a hundred is

01:32:00 ◼   ► Unbearably hot zero to a hundred

01:32:04 ◼   ► super ass cold

01:32:07 ◼   ► super ass hot

01:32:09 ◼   ► So Celsius this scale of zero is freezing point of water and a hundred is boiling who gives a shit

01:32:17 ◼   ► Who gives a shit about what temperatures water boils at?

01:32:20 ◼   ► When you're talking about the weather Fahrenheit makes so much more sense than Celsius

01:32:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I agree and even back when Dan was doing the show and I was doing a show with Dan

01:32:31 ◼   ► I think Dan and I got in a rant about this important to you. You always say boy, you're gonna get email

01:32:35 ◼   ► I'll tell you what we got email. Oh, you got email because everybody outside the US

01:32:39 ◼   ► Rate I'm telling you you're wrong Celsius is is terrible. Well, and they're both

01:32:46 ◼   ► not based on absolute zero.

01:32:48 ◼   ► And so I feel like, you know, for expressing the temperature of the weather, of the air,

01:32:54 ◼   ► I agree, I think Fahrenheit makes more sense. And you know, it's not,

01:32:57 ◼   ► it's not that zero, it's not that you're gonna die below zero, or that you're gonna die above 100 Fahrenheit.

01:33:04 ◼   ► You just, you know, you will see these extremes in your life, if you live somewhere normal.

01:33:09 ◼   ► But, you know, you don't really want to be there. You want to be inside, with climate control at that point.

01:33:16 ◼   ► Whereas Celsius, yeah, it's like zero is kind of cold and a hundred is you're

01:33:22 ◼   ► dead. Right. And you died a long time ago actually. Right. And so it... So like

01:33:28 ◼   ► negative three Celsius. Negative three Celsius is a few degrees below

01:33:32 ◼   ► water freezing. So it's, you know, it must be, I don't know, I'm not gonna look this

01:33:37 ◼   ► up, but it, you know, must be like what we would call something in the high 20s

01:33:40 ◼   ► Fahrenheit. Yeah, probably. Or somewhere in the 20s. So that's cold, but it's

01:33:46 ◼   ► not crazy cold that's not like to walk my dog in that oh yeah you know you're

01:33:51 ◼   ► not gonna get hurt outside in that right when it's negative three Fahrenheit

01:33:55 ◼   ► you're gonna get hurt you you you might get frostbite oh yeah come in below 10 I

01:34:00 ◼   ► don't really go outside oh holy shit yeah when it's above a hundred degrees

01:34:06 ◼   ► Fahrenheit you got a you know like call your grandfather and make sure that he's

01:34:10 ◼   ► still alive because you make sure when air conditioning and make sure he's

01:34:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, and I feel like, you know,

01:34:16 ◼   ► because neither of them are based on absolute zero,

01:34:19 ◼   ► they both have this kind of arbitrary zero point

01:34:23 ◼   ► and this arbitrary scale going forward.

01:34:26 ◼   ► You know, you can look at the rest of the metric units

01:34:28 ◼   ► and you can say, well, it's a lot easier

01:34:30 ◼   ► when working with computers and science,

01:34:32 ◼   ► it's a lot easier to work with the metric stuff

01:34:34 ◼   ► because of their nice evenly divisible increments

01:34:36 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:34:37 ◼   ► But temperature, it seems like

01:34:39 ◼   ► the only true temperature measurement

01:34:41 ◼   ► that's easy to work with would be Kelvin.

01:34:42 ◼   ► And if you're arguing for the sake of,

01:34:45 ◼   ► well Celsius is better for science or something,

01:34:48 ◼   ► not really, Kelvin would be the one

01:34:50 ◼   ► that would make more sense there.

01:34:52 ◼   ► For science and computation,

01:34:53 ◼   ► seems like you'd want the one where zero actually is zero

01:34:56 ◼   ► in a meaningful way,

01:34:58 ◼   ► and not based on this weird arbitrary midsection

01:35:01 ◼   ► of actual temperatures.

01:35:02 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:35:03 ◼   ► - So I would say Celsius is equally stupid as Fahrenheit.

01:35:08 ◼   ► I wouldn't say either of them

01:35:09 ◼   ► are necessarily overall better.

01:35:12 ◼   ► I would say Celsius is equally stupid.

01:35:13 ◼   ► No, Fahrenheit is brilliant.

01:35:15 ◼   ► Fahrenheit is a perfect scale for weather temperatures,

01:35:19 ◼   ► air temperatures, call it.

01:35:21 ◼   ► Yeah, actually, I can see-- for the temperature of the weather

01:35:25 ◼   ► air, yeah, I agree Fahrenheit makes more sense there.

01:35:29 ◼   ► I'm telling you, it's 20 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit.

01:35:32 ◼   ► What is that?

01:35:32 ◼   ► Let's see.

01:35:33 ◼   ► 20 degrees Celsius.

01:35:34 ◼   ► I think it's like 50 or something, right?

01:35:36 ◼   ► 60?

01:35:37 ◼   ► Isn't that one of the temperature ranges?

01:35:39 ◼   ► 68.

01:35:39 ◼   ► It's 68.

01:35:40 ◼   ► and then 29 degrees Fahrenheit, or 29 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit is 84.

01:35:47 ◼   ► So that's totally different.

01:35:49 ◼   ► It's like in terms of weather, you're talking two totally different days.

01:35:52 ◼   ► Whereas in Fahrenheit, you could say, what's it like today?

01:35:55 ◼   ► Well, it's in the 70s.

01:35:57 ◼   ► Then you know what I mean.

01:35:58 ◼   ► It means it's beautiful.

01:35:59 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter if it's 72 or if it's 78.

01:36:03 ◼   ► It's a beautiful day.

01:36:06 ◼   ► If I say--

01:36:06 ◼   ► It's not like, oh, it's between 22 and 27.

01:36:10 ◼   ► Yeah, terrible.

01:36:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:12 ◼   ► Although this is, of course, why when you and I travel internationally, we probably

01:36:16 ◼   ► set the thermostats to some ridiculous temperature.

01:36:21 ◼   ► I don't know if it's because it's called the Intercontinental or if it was just that

01:36:28 ◼   ► the guests before me happened to do it and whoever made up the room.

01:36:32 ◼   ► I remember one time for WWDC, I stayed at the Intercontinental in San Francisco and

01:36:36 ◼   ► I came in the room and I checked the thermostat and it was, I don't know, 20-something. And

01:36:42 ◼   ► I thought, you know, debonair world traveler that I am, well, that's fine. And, you know,

01:36:49 ◼   ► stashed my bag and went out and, you know, had some dinner and had a couple drinks, got

01:36:55 ◼   ► back to the room ready to sleep, ready to get a good night's rest for the WWDC keynote

01:37:00 ◼   ► the next morning and woke up with like the night sweats. And I was like, "Oh, did I eat

01:37:05 ◼   ► something bad that I did I drink too much oh it's I don't want to do that

01:37:09 ◼   ► before the keynote and it's like I I've I gotta go get some water and then I go

01:37:13 ◼   ► and I like check the thermostat and I find the button and then I'm blind in

01:37:19 ◼   ► the night because I don't have my contacts and I find my glasses check the

01:37:21 ◼   ► thermostat and I like find the button that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit and

01:37:26 ◼   ► it's it's the dipshit who had the room before me had it set to like 77 degrees

01:37:31 ◼   ► Fahrenheit. See, normally I would say, "Oh man, that sucks. I feel so bad for you."

01:37:37 ◼   ► However, when you did wake up from that horrible sleep at 930 in the morning, you

01:37:43 ◼   ► probably walked right past me in the keynote line where I had been since 6 in

01:37:47 ◼   ► the morning, so I don't feel bad for you at all. Yeah, I think I remember seeing

01:37:51 ◼   ► you in the line. Alright, should we call that? We could call that a show, right? Let's do it.

01:37:57 ◼   ► Let's call it a show and keep going. That is a show. Jesus, we went an hour and 40 minutes on just one show.

01:38:00 ◼   ► all right I'm hitting stop