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68: We`re Gonna Get Email

 

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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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