The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I don't feel like there's a lot going on. You feel like there's a lot going on?

00:00:02 ◼   ► So you know what's funny?

00:00:06 ◼   ► Before you texted me yesterday to get on this

00:00:11 ◼   ► this shit show

00:00:12 ◼   ► uh...

00:00:13 ◼   ► I was thinking where is the talk show episode for this week?

00:00:18 ◼   ► Turns out I'm it.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Bit of a let down for me.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Yeah, but that must be nice though. You're sitting there thinking where the hell is the new show and then you find out

00:00:25 ◼   ► you're on the show.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. I do like it.

00:00:28 ◼   ► But yeah, like I said, I didn't think we had anything to talk about.

00:00:32 ◼   ► And then I went and thought about it, and a lot has happened.

00:00:36 ◼   ► So a lot has happened. That's good. That means you have an agenda.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I've got a little list here.

00:00:41 ◼   ► All right. I have a few things. I don't have a lot.

00:00:46 ◼   ► You know, it's a classic slow news period.

00:00:49 ◼   ► But the new phones came out. iOS 7 came out.

00:00:53 ◼   ► out. Mavericks meant GM. Second anniversary of Steve's passing.

00:01:00 ◼   ► Applebot queue, a Google Now thing. Microsoft had some crazy shit going down.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Panic got into video games. When I actually thought about what happened this week, there's

00:01:13 ◼   ► been a lot that's happened.

00:01:14 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a lot. That does sound like a lot, but there's not a lot of talk about

00:01:18 ◼   ► with a lot of that. You know, like with the panic and video games thing. Sounds cool.

00:01:22 ◼   ► It really does.

00:01:23 ◼   ► It's like they're sort of investing in a little video game startup with some really cool names

00:01:29 ◼   ► attached.

00:01:32 ◼   ► But what's the cool part of that is going to be when actual games come out of it, not

00:01:37 ◼   ► just the announcement in advance.

00:01:39 ◼   ► It is what it is.

00:01:40 ◼   ► It got covered on Polygon pretty well.

00:01:41 ◼   ► They had a good interview with Cable and the guys there.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:46 ◼   ► It's just cool.

00:01:47 ◼   ► Just exciting.

00:01:48 ◼   ► Just something new.

00:01:49 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:51 ◼   ► What were you upset about this week?

00:01:54 ◼   ► - I wasn't upset about anything.

00:01:56 ◼   ► That might be the problem.

00:01:57 ◼   ► The problem might be that nothing made me angry this week.

00:02:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, everything's pretty straightforward.

00:02:02 ◼   ► I think the 64-bit thing,

00:02:04 ◼   ► somebody called it a look at marketing gimmick, right?

00:02:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's still interesting.

00:02:10 ◼   ► I feel like there's still a contingent of,

00:02:14 ◼   ► and it's funny because I feel like the people

00:02:16 ◼   ► who are the most skeptical about it

00:02:18 ◼   ► are somewhat technically informed.

00:02:21 ◼   ► But that there's like a subset of technically informed nerds who also, like the Venn diagram

00:02:30 ◼   ► is don't like Apple or don't trust Apple or don't think Apple stuff is technically cutting

00:02:38 ◼   ► edge.

00:02:40 ◼   ► And that at the intersection of them are these people who think that the 64-bit, the move

00:02:44 ◼   ► to 64-bit is like maybe even almost a scam.

00:02:48 ◼   ► I get email from him and I'll tell you what, did you used to work with Mike Ash, right?

00:02:56 ◼   ► Or did you guys not overlap?

00:02:57 ◼   ► You guys did overlap when you guys worked together.

00:02:59 ◼   ► He's a smart mother.

00:03:01 ◼   ► A little bit.

00:03:02 ◼   ► One of the smartest guys I've ever worked with.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And he really, really did a hell of a write up.

00:03:08 ◼   ► His blog piece on sort of, what was it, 64-bit and you.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Just I got layman's overview, an informed layman's overview of what the actual advantages

00:03:17 ◼   ► of 64-bit. And I've emailed that to some people who like, because I get email, like my email

00:03:21 ◼   ► is often, I should sell access to my email, but you know, it's not as vitriolic as comments

00:03:29 ◼   ► would be, but it's, you know, it's, it's acerbic from the people who don't, don't like the

00:03:34 ◼   ► stuff that I write.

00:03:35 ◼   ► Yeah. You know, it's funny, just as I don't even know if I should be saying this, but

00:03:40 ◼   ► you know, I'm, I'm friends with Mike and he got email. There was basically argument arguing

00:03:46 ◼   ► with you, but was directed at him, telling him his blog post was too technical.

00:03:53 ◼   ► And I don't know if you know Mike, but he does not take that kind of shit lightly.

00:03:57 ◼   ► I know him a little bit.

00:03:58 ◼   ► I met him a few times.

00:03:59 ◼   ► Oh yeah, no, he does not suffer fools.

00:04:02 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:04:03 ◼   ► I could not think of a better way to describe Mike Ash.

00:04:06 ◼   ► You should have seen what he responded to this guy.

00:04:09 ◼   ► It was hilarious.

00:04:10 ◼   ► It was really funny.

00:04:13 ◼   ► But yeah, a very, very smart piece that explains exactly what the benefits and pros and cons

00:04:19 ◼   ► and are of not just the fact that the chip is 64 bit, but the software changes to the

00:04:25 ◼   ► objective to see runtime that had been made to take advantage of it.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Right.

00:04:29 ◼   ► And that's what he really covered well.

00:04:31 ◼   ► That's what I really, I have to say going in wasn't, I kind of knew vaguely that, yeah,

00:04:35 ◼   ► there was some cocoa stuff that that was a lot better.

00:04:39 ◼   ► But that really, that's the heart of it.

00:04:40 ◼   ► I mean, I think maybe in basic terms, in general, if just platform a just call it a platform

00:04:47 ◼   ► is 32 bit computing platform, and then you move it to 64 bit. In general, that doesn't

00:04:53 ◼   ► necessarily mean anything gets faster. It might even get Yeah,

00:04:57 ◼   ► yeah, you can't tell anything just by right. doubling everything. It doesn't doesn't really

00:05:01 ◼   ► tell you. Right. It's it's almost like, like the canonical, like, like a logical argument

00:05:07 ◼   ► that, "Okay, there's 100 bills of money in a bag, and one guy takes 10 of them, and the

00:05:15 ◼   ► other guy gets 90 of them. Who got more money?"

00:05:17 ◼   ► Yes.

00:05:18 ◼   ► Well, you can't answer because you don't know the value of the denominations that the guy

00:05:22 ◼   ► who took the 10 bills might have taken all hundreds, and the other guy was left with

00:05:26 ◼   ► 91 dollar bills.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:05:29 ◼   ► You don't have enough information.

00:05:30 ◼   ► It's very reductive to just be like, "Well, this one's got 32 bits, and the other one's

00:05:34 ◼   ► 64 bits, ergo twice as good. It just doesn't work like that at all. It's a complicated

00:05:41 ◼   ► machine.

00:05:42 ◼   ► Right. You have to know the specifics. But in the specifics of this move of iOS and the

00:05:46 ◼   ► A7 and ARM going from 32 to 64, it actually is a lot of very practical advantages.

00:05:52 ◼   ► Yes. Both in the chip and the... they're sort of... you find the ISO, which is the instruction

00:06:00 ◼   ► set that, you know, the assembly that gets generated after you write the C code.

00:06:07 ◼   ► There's good ways of doing stuff and it's sort of like cruft that can accumulate.

00:06:15 ◼   ► And going to this ARM64 ISA, it does away with a lot of the cruft and so there's a

00:06:21 ◼   ► bit of hitting a reset button, you know?

00:06:25 ◼   ► And they take advantage of that.

00:06:27 ◼   ► Even when Apple changes their architectures, they'll tweak the objectivity runtime because

00:06:33 ◼   ► they're breaking binary compatibility anyway.

00:06:38 ◼   ► So since binary compatibility is going to be broken, they take that opportunity to do

00:06:43 ◼   ► fancier stuff with the objectivity runtime that they've been kind of unable to do up

00:06:48 ◼   ► until that point.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And in the case of the ARM64, they do a lot of stuff with, because the pointers are 64-bit,

00:06:56 ◼   ► and they don't need all of those bits to accurately represent what's in memory.

00:07:02 ◼   ► They can do some fancy tricks like having tagged pointers, which means that, like,

00:07:08 ◼   ► let's say you've got a number, you don't actually need it to point to a number,

00:07:12 ◼   ► you can sort of encode it in line in what is essentially a pointer, but in, you know, de facto,

00:07:18 ◼   ► So it is a sort of an inline memory object.

00:07:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:22 ◼   ► That seems like one of the bigger wins that they came away with is the fact that they

00:07:25 ◼   ► don't need all 64 bits in a 64-bit pointer for the pointer itself.

00:07:30 ◼   ► Use those extra bits very judiciously to stash some information about the object itself or

00:07:36 ◼   ► the pointer.

00:07:38 ◼   ► Big win.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Here's the one thing somebody sent me.

00:07:41 ◼   ► And I can't say who because it was a friend at Apple.

00:07:44 ◼   ► But in Mike Ash's piece, he wrote, "In short, the improvements to Apple's runtime make it

00:07:49 ◼   ► so that object allocation in 64-bit mode costs only 40 to 50 percent of what it does in 32-bit

00:07:56 ◼   ► mode.

00:07:57 ◼   ► If your app creates and destroys a lot of objects, that's a big deal."

00:08:01 ◼   ► And what my friend at Apple wrote me, where they just quoted that part, they said, "If

00:08:05 ◼   ► your app creates and destroys a lot of objects," he said, "That's every, you know, cocoa app."

00:08:11 ◼   ► So maybe if you're writing, let's say, a game where the game is only a thin layer of the

00:08:17 ◼   ► Cocoa and everything else inside is all custom C or C++ or something like that, it may not

00:08:24 ◼   ► be as big a deal, but there might be other graphics type wins.

00:08:26 ◼   ► But for an app that's actually doing a lot of standard iOS Cocoa stuff, it's a huge win

00:08:32 ◼   ► because everything's an object.

00:08:34 ◼   ► Yes, yeah, that's exactly the case.

00:08:37 ◼   ► If you're writing Koko, you're allocating objects left, right and center,

00:08:41 ◼   ► especially now that it's being made even easier.

00:08:44 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe this is a little too in-depth for your audience,

00:08:47 ◼   ► but recently, a couple of years ago, they added features to the Objective-C language

00:08:54 ◼   ► so that you could put an @ sign and then a number,

00:09:00 ◼   ► and that would allocate an NSNumber, which is a class which represents a number.

00:09:06 ◼   ► In the old days, that would actually have to be like an actual allocation.

00:09:09 ◼   ► You'd have to allocate a small little object and all of that.

00:09:11 ◼   ► Now, these days, with the way that they've rejiggered these tag pointers and everything,

00:09:17 ◼   ► that's effectively for free.

00:09:20 ◼   ► So there's a lot of really good wins, and there's a lot of small places that you wouldn't expect,

00:09:24 ◼   ► but they really do add up.

00:09:26 ◼   ► Right. I think one way to look at it is that for most iOS developers,

00:09:32 ◼   ► or let's say most non-game developers,

00:09:35 ◼   ► And I think it almost makes sense to separate them because even if you look at the TechTalks,

00:09:41 ◼   ► which are going around the country, they've broken them into two now where there's the games one and

00:09:45 ◼   ► then the everybody else one. And I think one way to look at that is are you writing mostly

00:09:51 ◼   ► Cocoa and Objective-C code or are you mostly writing sort of cross-platform graphics code

00:09:57 ◼   ► for the games. For the cocoa people, the iOS and Mac OS X too, especially as the years have gone by

00:10:05 ◼   ► and carbon has sort of been put out to pasture and even apps that are officially or technically

00:10:11 ◼   ► carbon apps are really now mostly cocoa internally because they're, you know, they can do that.

00:10:16 ◼   ► That the operating system is more than just what you think of as an operating system. It's the

00:10:23 ◼   ► operating system plus that that cocoa runtime on top of it yeah I think that's

00:10:29 ◼   ► fair to say and that's where a lot of these you know not all but a lot of this

00:10:33 ◼   ► the advantages to going 64-bit and iOS 7 really take effect yeah I'd say that

00:10:42 ◼   ► yeah I don't like I'm one of those guys that would just do 64-bit build because

00:10:51 ◼   ► it's not that complicated anyway.

00:10:54 ◼   ► Given that you've been writing OS X code and you know what you're doing, I'm sure

00:10:59 ◼   ► Brent didn't spend a lot of time getting Vesper over to be 64.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Dave Asprey No, he even said on his blog, I mean literally

00:11:05 ◼   ► just a couple of minutes, he had a couple of—I forget what he said it was, but it

00:11:08 ◼   ► was a couple of things and it was easy to search and replace for throughout the whole

00:11:12 ◼   ► app.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Brent Durand Yeah.

00:11:14 ◼   ► So for me personally, I wouldn't necessarily need to take a long time evaluating the benefits.

00:11:19 ◼   ► I would just do it because it's not that big a deal and they're clearly telegraphing where

00:11:25 ◼   ► they want to go, right?

00:11:27 ◼   ► Well, that's what Brent more or less said behind the scenes was that he really does…

00:11:30 ◼   ► if anybody has a hard time going 64-bit, he has no sympathy for them because Apple may

00:11:35 ◼   ► not have actually said, "Hey, we're going to go 64-bit on iOS soon."

00:11:40 ◼   ► But Brent's perspective was anybody… even if you weren't a Mac developer all along,

00:11:45 ◼   ► Even if your introduction to Apple development is iOS, you should at least have had the common

00:11:51 ◼   ► sense to know that iOS trails Mac OS X by a couple of years in some regards, and one

00:11:58 ◼   ► of them would be going 64-bit.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Frankly, this is a product cycle early from what I would have guessed.

00:12:06 ◼   ► I would have guessed next year.

00:12:07 ◼   ► Or I would have guessed on an iPad, like some kind of iPad.

00:12:13 ◼   ► I think I mentioned this on the show a couple weeks ago after the event, but I was at the

00:12:22 ◼   ► event when I was in the audience.

00:12:24 ◼   ► I was two seats over from Anon, from Anon Tech.

00:12:28 ◼   ► And when they announced the 64-bit thing, there were a couple people before the show

00:12:32 ◼   ► where everybody, you know, we all just sit around waiting for them to let us in.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Everybody starts taking guesses as what might be a surprise.

00:12:38 ◼   ► And a couple people did say that, but it was sort of like just shooting a spitball and

00:12:43 ◼   ► see what will stick. But when I announced it, I looked over at Anand and he seemed like

00:12:46 ◼   ► surprised. He was like, "Oh." And I was like, "Okay, then that must be a surprise."

00:12:51 ◼   ► And I even asked him after and he said, "Yeah, I would have thought that was a 2014 thing."

00:12:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I was really kind of…

00:13:01 ◼   ► Before the event, there was a couple of 64-bit rumors, but there's always like, you know,

00:13:08 ◼   ► Retina Mini.

00:13:10 ◼   ► There's always like…

00:13:12 ◼   ► I totally believe they had something running on 64-bit ARM chips.

00:13:17 ◼   ► Whether or not that's actually a product is like a totally different question, you

00:13:20 ◼   ► know?

00:13:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:23 ◼   ► figuring out what the product is actually going to be from the vast sea of rumors is

00:13:26 ◼   ► a totally different game. I'm glad they did. This thing looks... I've got one, I've had

00:13:33 ◼   ► one for about a week now. Kind of crazy. Very, very performant. Accessing large amounts of

00:13:47 ◼   ► is not what the point of this chip is though.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And one thing that I've heard, so one piece of speculation that's become quite common is that

00:13:59 ◼   ► if they do an Apple TV to compete with this next generation of consoles, it'll be built on this,

00:14:05 ◼   ► which I think is pretty obvious, you know. They're not going to ship something that's not on this sort of architecture.

00:14:13 ◼   ► Yeah, I would definitely think that that's the case.

00:14:16 ◼   ► that that's the case. I mean, now whether that's going to happen this year, I would

00:14:20 ◼   ► think no. I would just think common sense says no, that the chip is probably too expensive

00:14:25 ◼   ► to put in a $99 Apple TV. It's probably too hard to make right now. They'd rather—why

00:14:33 ◼   ► waste them in a $99 Apple TV when they're still three, four weeks behind shipping the

00:14:38 ◼   ► 5S?

00:14:39 ◼   ► I tend to agree. The other thing is that whatever the Apple TV console-y/living room thing is

00:14:49 ◼   ► going to be, the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft are coming out with

00:14:54 ◼   ► 8 gigs of RAM. And there's no way you can put 8 gigs of RAM into like a $99 box.

00:15:01 ◼   ► Well maybe they wouldn't compete on that regard though. I mean they're already, for example,

00:15:05 ◼   ► I mean, they're definitely behind in RAM compared to cutting edge Android devices.

00:15:10 ◼   ► I mean, I think the 5S still has one gigabyte of RAM, and I think that most of the top tier

00:15:16 ◼   ► Android phones have two gigs.

00:15:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree.

00:15:18 ◼   ► I'll come back to that in a bit.

00:15:20 ◼   ► But I agree.

00:15:23 ◼   ► I don't think that they would try to compete in terms of raw performance.

00:15:26 ◼   ► And I think a lot of these articles that are looking at this new A7 chip and being really

00:15:31 ◼   ► excited about its capabilities and trying to project it into an Apple TV, aren't really

00:15:36 ◼   ► seeing it as the... I don't think they're appreciating how hard it would be to fit that

00:15:43 ◼   ► kind of power and the kind of price point that Apple TV sells at.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Right, but maybe next year.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Maybe next year, yeah, exactly. So with regards to the Android having more RAM,

00:15:55 ◼   ► I think a bunch of that has to do with... The more RAM you have, the more power drain you've got.

00:16:01 ◼   ► I know we've talked about this offline, I think.

00:16:06 ◼   ► Or maybe it was on the show. I don't know.

00:16:08 ◼   ► But if you've got two gigs of RAM, you need to power that RAM, right?

00:16:11 ◼   ► Right. I think so. I don't think there's any way to only--

00:16:15 ◼   ► I don't think you can power one gig of it and only power the second gig when you use it.

00:16:20 ◼   ► I mean, I've never heard of anything like that.

00:16:23 ◼   ► I haven't heard of that. You'd have to do some crazy swapping stuff in order to get that working.

00:16:29 ◼   ► I don't know. I've never heard of that. But either way, the more RAM you pack in your

00:16:32 ◼   ► – I mean, the more transits you pack in your device, the more power you take, right?

00:16:36 ◼   ► So that's part of the change-offs.

00:16:38 ◼   ► Well, and I still think – and I know I've sort of banged this drum for years, but I

00:16:44 ◼   ► still think it's very telling that – and I know that – and we could even talk on

00:16:47 ◼   ► this later in the show. That's one of my ideas for like a maybe is the idea next year

00:16:52 ◼   ► would Apple go with a bigger screen iPhone, at least as an option. And I know that way

00:16:57 ◼   ► Way more breath is spent wondering why Apple hasn't already gone to a bigger screen and

00:17:03 ◼   ► will they go to a bigger screen soon.

00:17:06 ◼   ► Whereas I feel like the thing that doesn't get attention is how come if the current iPhone

00:17:11 ◼   ► with a relatively smaller screen and smaller form factor is the single most profitable

00:17:16 ◼   ► device in the industry, which nobody denies, and is the single best selling phone in the

00:17:21 ◼   ► industry.

00:17:23 ◼   ► Why still don't any of the other, you know, like Samsung or somebody like that come out

00:17:27 ◼   ► with a top tier spec phone of that size?

00:17:30 ◼   ► And I can't help but wonder it's that they can't, that they don't, you know, that they're

00:17:34 ◼   ► the power consumption that they're going through to get the performance that they have, that

00:17:39 ◼   ► they need a bigger battery.

00:17:40 ◼   ► And that's why they have one of the reasons why they only have bigger screens.

00:17:44 ◼   ► I tend to agree that I think that if they did make a device of the same sort of size

00:17:49 ◼   ► form factor of the iPhone, then it would be found wanting, either in battery life or the

00:17:54 ◼   ► screen would be shittier or it just wouldn't be as fast. Maybe they couldn't cool it as

00:17:59 ◼   ► well. For whatever, you know, I think if they went toe to toe in the exact same sort of

00:18:06 ◼   ► form factor, they're just not as good at hardware as Apple, you know. Maybe Nokia or

00:18:12 ◼   ► whatever, Microsoft now I guess.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Yeah, and Nokia is the only one who's done it. I guess Nokia, because, you know, although

00:18:18 ◼   ► I think it's questionable. I feel like you know you could argue that that the Lumias that are the

00:18:23 ◼   ► Highest regarded and have the best performance are the bigger screen ones, but some of the first ones were you know relatively?

00:18:31 ◼   ► Speaking about iPhone size, and I don't think it's any surprise that Nokia was the only other company to do it

00:18:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't either

00:18:38 ◼   ► They felt good. They just I haven't seen one of the bigger screen ones, but yeah, I totally expect Apple

00:18:43 ◼   ► we'll do a larger screen phone next year.

00:18:47 ◼   ► If only because I think now they're getting into that.

00:18:49 ◼   ► Remember the first few years of iPod,

00:18:52 ◼   ► where it'd just be iPod after iPod,

00:18:55 ◼   ► and they'd just get bigger with a couple more features?

00:18:57 ◼   ► And then they started diversifying the line.

00:19:00 ◼   ► I think we're at the point in iPhone now

00:19:02 ◼   ► where we're gonna start diversifying

00:19:04 ◼   ► and having like a large screen one,

00:19:06 ◼   ► what's effectively iPhone Pro,

00:19:09 ◼   ► which is you know, you go older, your gunmetal gray one.

00:19:13 ◼   ► And then the sort of more consumery one with the iPhone 5C.

00:19:17 ◼   ► I always forget what I've spoken about on the show

00:19:19 ◼   ► and what's not on the show.

00:19:20 ◼   ► So if I've said this on-- maybe I said this on the show last week with molds.

00:19:23 ◼   ► But I still think it's a good question.

00:19:26 ◼   ► All right, clearly there's some demand for a bigger screened iPhone.

00:19:30 ◼   ► But I feel there's two entirely different groups

00:19:32 ◼   ► who want a bigger screened iPhone.

00:19:34 ◼   ► One is relatively younger people who have good eyes

00:19:38 ◼   ► and want to pack more pixels on the screen so they can fit.

00:19:41 ◼   ► Let's just say if they're reading, they can fit more words on the screen at one time.

00:19:46 ◼   ► The other group is in general relatively older people who have worse eyes who want the same

00:19:51 ◼   ► amount of text but they just want it 20 percent bigger so that the same amount of text is

00:19:57 ◼   ► different.

00:19:59 ◼   ► And how would you implement that?

00:20:01 ◼   ► One group I think you would want like way more pixels per inch.

00:20:06 ◼   ► They want a higher density screen.

00:20:07 ◼   ► The other group would want what's effectively like the 264 pixels per inch of the current

00:20:15 ◼   ► retina iPad and just cut a five-inch iPhone screen out of that same display.

00:20:22 ◼   ► But I don't see how you make both of those groups happy.

00:20:24 ◼   ► Well, so one argument I've heard from it, and I wish I could remember where I got this

00:20:29 ◼   ► from.

00:20:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Somebody's pretty smart, but I forget where.

00:20:35 ◼   ► I don't want to misattribute it.

00:20:41 ◼   ► In a lot of the world, you get to pick one computing device.

00:20:46 ◼   ► And a phone is too small, and a tablet is too big, and so if you can get a phone with

00:20:53 ◼   ► a mid-range sort of screen, you can accomplish tablet-esque, iPad mini sort of stuff on a

00:21:04 ◼   ► phone on something that you can carry in your pocket. You know what I mean? Like it's

00:21:07 ◼   ► clearly compromised down the line, but it works if you've only got one kind of device.

00:21:11 ◼   ► Yeah. As for pixel resolution, yeah, I think you'd probably want a higher

00:21:15 ◼   ► pixel resolution, but I don't think that that market is necessarily sensitive to that.

00:21:19 ◼   ► It's more sensitive to like, well, this device sort of

00:21:23 ◼   ► compromises down the middle and into a sweet spot

00:21:27 ◼   ► for, you know, a certain market segment. I think that some of the

00:21:31 ◼   ► I think that some of the, like the Note for example, it really is almost a silly device,

00:21:36 ◼   ► at least when you use it as a phone. But I feel like maybe it's, there's a practical

00:21:42 ◼   ► advantage to only carrying one device that, you know.

00:21:46 ◼   ► I think that's too big, but I think it does sort of, it's popular, right?

00:21:51 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, it's popular enough. And I've been there. I actually, I wrote about this

00:21:56 ◼   ► last year, it was a year ago, but it was when I was switching from AT&T to Verizon before

00:22:00 ◼   ► the iPhone 5 came out, I wanted to get my account switched before the phone came out

00:22:05 ◼   ► just so it would all be in order. So I had to go into a Verizon store. It wasn't there.

00:22:09 ◼   ► I was like a couple of like a week before the iPhone came out. It wasn't to buy the

00:22:12 ◼   ► phone. It was to ask a guy at a Verizon store, "If this is what I'm going to do, is it going

00:22:18 ◼   ► to go off without a hitch?" More or less. And while I was in the Verizon store, there

00:22:22 ◼   ► was a, you know, I would say she's probably college age, but real, you know, real short,

00:22:27 ◼   ► a very short woman was in there, you know, young woman.

00:22:31 ◼   ► Well, I'm just saying she was, you know, she just--

00:22:33 ◼   ► - I just left his college age and then her height.

00:22:37 ◼   ► - But I think the fact that she was small emphasized,

00:22:39 ◼   ► she was there looking for a phone and she, you know,

00:22:44 ◼   ► and her boyfriend was with her and he was like,

00:22:45 ◼   ► are you sure you don't want an iPhone?

00:22:47 ◼   ► And she, it was like right out of a commercial for Samsung

00:22:49 ◼   ► and she was like, no, I want, you know,

00:22:50 ◼   ► I don't have a tablet and I wanna do a lot of reading on it.

00:22:53 ◼   ► And so she was gonna buy the Galaxy S3

00:22:56 ◼   ► whatever the current one was a year ago. And then she even said she was obviously

00:23:00 ◼   ► well-informed too because then she said I you know I think she was and she said

00:23:04 ◼   ► you know I was even thinking about the note and I think Verizon didn't sell the

00:23:08 ◼   ► note and so that was the only hitch was that if Verizon had sold the Galaxy Note

00:23:13 ◼   ► which was even bigger she'd have bought that but she wanted to stay at Verizon

00:23:16 ◼   ► so she just wanted the exactly what you I mean this is on you know I was just

00:23:20 ◼   ► there overhearing it and it was exactly that she didn't own a tablet didn't want

00:23:25 ◼   ► to buy a separate tablet, just wanted one thing.

00:23:28 ◼   ► And I've heard from a lot of people that that's actually like a big part of the overall sales

00:23:32 ◼   ► of these five-inch and bigger screens are to women in Asia and who are just demographically,

00:23:40 ◼   ► physically smaller and certainly their hands are smaller, but they like it because they

00:23:44 ◼   ► only have one device to carry and they don't have to worry about putting in a pocket because

00:23:48 ◼   ► they have a purse with them at all times and they just put it in their purse.

00:23:51 ◼   ► So it doesn't matter if it doesn't fit in my pocket.

00:23:55 ◼   ► So would it be stupid for your iPad to make calls?

00:24:01 ◼   ► It is.

00:24:02 ◼   ► It always is stupid.

00:24:03 ◼   ► You don't want to stick that up to your face, but it comes with those earbuds, with the

00:24:06 ◼   ► talky thing.

00:24:07 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing, too, is you know you don't have – I mean, anywhere you go

00:24:12 ◼   ► that's even vaguely touristy, you don't have to go far before you see someone with

00:24:17 ◼   ► a full-screen iPod or iPad taking photos with it.

00:24:20 ◼   ► So if they're going to hold it up and take photos, I mean, why not hold it up and make

00:24:23 ◼   ► phone calls?

00:24:24 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:24:25 ◼   ► I mean, it is kind of stupid, but…

00:24:26 ◼   ► It's stupid, but I mean, it's almost stupid not to do that.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:32 ◼   ► I mean, it does FaceTime, right?

00:24:33 ◼   ► Yeah, it does FaceTime.

00:24:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:35 ◼   ► I think that the thing with using iPads as cameras, I see so many people doing it that

00:24:39 ◼   ► it's like the repetition of it is eroding the comedy of it.

00:24:48 ◼   ► So many people are doing it that you almost can't make fun of it anymore because everybody's

00:24:53 ◼   ► doing it.

00:24:54 ◼   ► Well, it's like when the kids wear their pants so that their ass is showing.

00:24:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:58 ◼   ► Like the saggy jeans.

00:25:01 ◼   ► After five to six years of that, you just kind of get bored of thinking it's stupid

00:25:04 ◼   ► and it's just the way things are, you know?

00:25:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:07 ◼   ► I'll tell you where I see it.

00:25:08 ◼   ► I mean, any kind of kids event, you know, a little league game or a school play or something

00:25:13 ◼   ► like that, I mean, it's unbelievable how many parents have, you know, the iPad in front

00:25:18 ◼   ► their face the whole time just holding it up videoing the whole thing that's

00:25:24 ◼   ► yeah that's suboptimal that's where you want Google glass right so you don't I

00:25:30 ◼   ► guess I don't know but I think there's something about it they don't I mean

00:25:34 ◼   ► method maybe they know that they look stupid but they don't care because it's

00:25:37 ◼   ► what they have or maybe maybe well I think when you're when you're recording

00:25:40 ◼   ► your kid you just do not give a crap what anybody thinks it's like I want it

00:25:44 ◼   ► I want to capture this right well and and maybe the x-factor on that too is especially for like videoing something like that

00:25:51 ◼   ► So the argument against using your phone to do it is like the Louis CK argument, right?

00:25:56 ◼   ► Which I'm gonna butcher but is more or less

00:25:58 ◼   ► How about you just put your fucking phone in your pocket and enjoy this moment for real for once in your life?

00:26:05 ◼   ► You know that here are these kids up on stage singing their heart out being embarrassed and nervous in front of all these people

00:26:10 ◼   ► How about you just be in the moment and just enjoy it and remember it?

00:26:14 ◼   ► I like where you're going with this because you're about to say that with the iPad it's a larger screen exactly like you're right

00:26:22 ◼   ► It's not so much that you're watching it on a little two or three inch screen and missing it

00:26:26 ◼   ► You're watching it on a screen still which is not the same as watching it for real

00:26:30 ◼   ► But it's almost like in terms of your field of vision

00:26:33 ◼   ► It is you know relatively comparable

00:26:37 ◼   ► That's interesting. I think Louis C.K. would still want to punch you in the face.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I think Louis C.K. would definitely still punch you in the face.

00:26:44 ◼   ► But yeah, that's...

00:26:47 ◼   ► But it might explain why people do that.

00:26:49 ◼   ► So yeah, but I do think that Apple will do a larger screen phone. I think it's inevitable.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so. And I think maybe the way to go is to put more pixels in it,

00:27:01 ◼   ► but maybe have some kind of way in settings to, you know, like within a direction that they're going with the dynamic type

00:27:12 ◼   ► to say, "I, you know, all right, I got this bigger phone and it adds all these pixels. I want the text bigger."

00:27:19 ◼   ► And then when you adjust it in settings once, that's hopefully system-wide, not just in Apple's apps but in third-party apps,

00:27:26 ◼   ► They'll take that cue and make stuff bigger rather than pack more on the screen, right?

00:27:32 ◼   ► I mean they can default it by device to write

00:27:34 ◼   ► Right. There's nothing saying that the every oh

00:27:38 ◼   ► Like the OS has to have the same default per device

00:27:43 ◼   ► So if you got a device with a wacky resolution, you could adjust the type, right?

00:27:49 ◼   ► It could even be that the default is bigger text and that the the younger nerdier people who want to pack more on screen would

00:27:55 ◼   ► would have to set it lower rather than expect other people to set it higher.

00:27:58 ◼   ► Okay, I honestly expected the iPad mini for iOS 7 to have different default type settings

00:28:04 ◼   ► than I did to look at written iPad. Yeah, I'm surprised it didn't. Yeah. Well, I mean

00:28:11 ◼   ► that iOS 7 on the iPad seems not quite fully baked yet. Yeah. I think I mentioned this

00:28:18 ◼   ► too. I actually think it even got worse with the GM. I've because I was running the betas

00:28:22 ◼   ► on the iPad and the iPhone over summer. I feel like it got worse with the iPad or with

00:28:27 ◼   ► the GM. I'm really kind of surprised in hindsight that they released it at the same time. I

00:28:34 ◼   ► really thought maybe they would do like 7.0 would be iPhone only and we'd have to wait

00:28:38 ◼   ► an extra month for 7.1 and then it would support the iPad.

00:28:41 ◼   ► Yeah, like iOS 3.2 style, like when they had just the iPad only build?

00:28:47 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, I don't think it was a disaster for them and it doesn't seem like it's been

00:28:51 ◼   ► a disaster but it was clearly still I mean you know that the deal didn't have

00:28:55 ◼   ► a very ww DC right right it just always seemed like it was tracking three weeks

00:28:59 ◼   ► three four weeks behind the iPhone version and it still did even when they

00:29:02 ◼   ► released the GM yeah I'm curious to hear the story behind that yeah I don't know

00:29:07 ◼   ► either because like one thing I've seen over and over again is it you know I I

00:29:10 ◼   ► read a lot of my email on the iPad I'll just catch up on email at the end of the

00:29:14 ◼   ► day and a lot of my email is you know people send me links and I tap the link

00:29:17 ◼   ► and you tap a link and usually it shoots you over to Safari and then you read you

00:29:20 ◼   ► you know, loads and you read it. But every once in a while, I tap a link and I just get

00:29:25 ◼   ► like a white screen and it just waits and it's, you know, I'm guessing that it's like

00:29:29 ◼   ► flushing memory or something like that. But it takes a long time, five, six seconds. And

00:29:33 ◼   ► even when that's happening, I can't, if I click the home button, nothing happens. It

00:29:37 ◼   ► just locks up for five, six seconds and then Safari comes and it, you know, it's all back

00:29:42 ◼   ► to normal. But that's very unusual.

00:29:44 ◼   ► You get the page that you clicked on?

00:29:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:46 ◼   ► Okay. So you do eventually get it.

00:29:48 ◼   ► But it's just a very unusual for iOS wait. I mean, I think it's more or less the

00:29:52 ◼   ► The iOS equivalent of Mac OS X's rainbow cursor, right? Right. They just don't show you the rainbow cursor

00:29:59 ◼   ► You know what's been killing me is uh?

00:30:01 ◼   ► Iowa seven Safari has that infinite tabs thing. Hmm

00:30:07 ◼   ► Which just means that I now have infinite number of tabs set up like do you know somebody told me I know about it

00:30:14 ◼   ► I said that but somebody told me that there is still a limit. I think it's like 32. I might be a little wrong.

00:30:20 ◼   ► Okay, so I'm saying, guess what, I don't actually have an infinite number of tabs. But I got way more than is healthy for me.

00:30:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:27 ◼   ► Like I do on my Mac. I'm not complaining, it's my fault. But it is kind of funny. Like I used to be pretty disciplined about it.

00:30:36 ◼   ► Like if I'd opened something in a tab, I would read it within a day.

00:30:39 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:40 ◼   ► Now I've got tabs and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I opened that like three weeks ago and I should probably read that article."

00:30:44 ◼   ► Right. Like on the one hand, it really sucked when you had all eight tab slots filled up and you opened the ninth

00:30:50 ◼   ► and it would overwrite the oldest or whatever it used to figure out which one it would overwrite.

00:30:55 ◼   ► It would overwrite one of them. And if you didn't remember what it was, you'd have this nagging feeling of,

00:30:59 ◼   ► "Oh, there was something important I had in the tab and I've lost it."

00:31:02 ◼   ► But in a weird way, that's almost like disciplinarian.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Yeah, it made you like, either read it and close it or bookmark it.

00:31:13 ◼   ► But either way, do something with it and get it out of here.

00:31:17 ◼   ► And whereas now, yeah, I'm sort of like you.

00:31:19 ◼   ► I'm surprised I haven't hit the 32 limit yet.

00:31:22 ◼   ► Yeah, me too.

00:31:24 ◼   ► I actually really am surprised.

00:31:26 ◼   ► I do like the fact that they show you all the tabs open on all the other machines.

00:31:30 ◼   ► That's awesome.

00:31:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's great.

00:31:32 ◼   ► And that's one of those little quiet places where, for me at least, iCloud is working

00:31:36 ◼   ► great.

00:31:37 ◼   ► Yes.

00:31:38 ◼   ► Do you know what?

00:31:39 ◼   ► One, I should follow it on this, but if I engage Do Not Disturb on – and this is only

00:31:44 ◼   ► for people like us who are just total idiots and have like stacks of these things lying

00:31:48 ◼   ► around.

00:31:49 ◼   ► But if I put Do Not Disturb on one phone, I just want that to apply to all of my devices.

00:31:56 ◼   ► I go to bed, I hit Do Not Disturb, and then I get an email, and it's like I forgot to

00:32:00 ◼   ► turn it off on like three other phones that happen to have in the next room and

00:32:04 ◼   ► they'll just light up and start beeping at me yeah instead of being a device

00:32:08 ◼   ► setting it should be a it's like a service setting yeah like well and I

00:32:13 ◼   ► cloud account saying like any any machine that's that that has the my of

00:32:17 ◼   ► my iCloud account should also shut up until yet at this time yeah I'd like that

00:32:23 ◼   ► yeah I could see that um okay got a little bit of course looping back to the

00:32:29 ◼   ► Arm 64. Besides the Apple TV console fantasy stuff, a lot of people started talking about

00:32:37 ◼   ► sticking this chip inside a Mac.

00:32:39 ◼   ► Yeah. I did, too. I shot my mouth off about that like a dummy.

00:32:44 ◼   ► Like publicly?

00:32:45 ◼   ► I just said on the day that it was announced, I was like, "I can't help but think, you know,

00:32:48 ◼   ► does this presage an Arm?"

00:32:51 ◼   ► I don't think you're a dummy. I would be shocked if it's not running in the labs.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Right. Oh, I would definitely think so.

00:32:59 ◼   ► no way it's not running in the labs. It's just crazy to if you think otherwise you're just crazy.

00:33:04 ◼   ► Right. Whether it would ever be a product is you know something. And for a couple of reasons,

00:33:10 ◼   ► you know, I think for one thing once Mac OS X moved to 64-bit on Intel a couple years ago,

00:33:18 ◼   ► clearly any future transition to another platform was also going to have to be 64. You can't go back

00:33:26 ◼   ► to 32-bit. But I think for other reasons... You could, but it would be weird.

00:33:32 ◼   ► Right. I mean, they're good at spitting marketing stuff at times. I don't think... I

00:33:38 ◼   ► just don't think... Stepping back from that. Yeah. But I think for a couple of other reasons too,

00:33:42 ◼   ► though, like when they describe the new ARM V, you know, the ARM 64 instruction set and the whole

00:33:49 ◼   ► A7 as a whole as being a desktop class architecture.

00:33:54 ◼   ► Yeah, because they punched that word a number of times.

00:33:58 ◼   ► They also punched...

00:33:59 ◼   ► Oh, here's one thing.

00:34:00 ◼   ► For the A6 that they were describing inside the 5C...

00:34:03 ◼   ► Did I get that right?

00:34:05 ◼   ► Yes, I got that right.

00:34:08 ◼   ► They kept punching console-level gaming, console-level graphics.

00:34:13 ◼   ► And then the A7 was even better.

00:34:16 ◼   ► They were just like...

00:34:17 ◼   ► The graphics blowed away.

00:34:18 ◼   ► And just the way that they add...

00:34:23 ◼   ► You know how they work.

00:34:24 ◼   ► They don't just pick words randomly.

00:34:26 ◼   ► Like when they say desktop class CPU, they want to evoke exactly that sort of thought.

00:34:33 ◼   ► They want to evoke the conspiracy theories that the next MacBook Air is going to have

00:34:37 ◼   ► one of these things in it, because it's just that powerful.

00:34:41 ◼   ► And I also think too that especially with the MacBook Air, the MacBook Air...

00:34:46 ◼   ► And this is one of those areas, too, where the iPhone has clearly gone this route now,

00:34:51 ◼   ► where there's two new devices.

00:34:54 ◼   ► One of them is about having cutting-edge specs and being like a high-end, the most expensive

00:35:01 ◼   ► phone on the market.

00:35:02 ◼   ► And the other one is about being still great, but more about other things, right, with the

00:35:07 ◼   ► 5C.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Well, the MacBook has been like that all along.

00:35:10 ◼   ► There have always been tiers.

00:35:11 ◼   ► And the MacBook Pro has the retina screen now.

00:35:15 ◼   ► You know, obviously it has much higher performance than the Air.

00:35:20 ◼   ► The Air is always about being lightweight, really thin, and battery life.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Ditch the optical drive early.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:35:27 ◼   ► SSD was an option on the very first ones.

00:35:29 ◼   ► I think it was always SSD.

00:35:30 ◼   ► I don't think they've ever had a MacBook Air.

00:35:32 ◼   ► Right?

00:35:33 ◼   ► Rev A was you could get a spinning hard drive.

00:35:36 ◼   ► Oh, right.

00:35:37 ◼   ► And it was like, because they were exorbitantly priced.

00:35:38 ◼   ► It was like, what's the point?

00:35:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:35:41 ◼   ► But it was like, what was the point?

00:35:42 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:35:43 ◼   ► Because performance was bad and everything.

00:35:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:45 ◼   ► you're right. So I feel like they could do that. Like they could, in theory, I think,

00:35:51 ◼   ► put an ARM 64 chip in a MacBook Air. And even if performance takes a hit on certain benchmarks,

00:35:58 ◼   ► if battery life doubles again and they could say, you know, here, now we have a Mac with

00:36:03 ◼   ► 21 hours of battery life, that's a win. Because if your concern is the performance, you're

00:36:08 ◼   ► buying a MacBook Pro anyway.

00:36:10 ◼   ► Yes. So I'm speaking at CocoaConf at the end of the month and my talk is actually all about power management and this kind of stuff.

00:36:20 ◼   ► And I don't... I think people have been chasing this car truck analogy way too much.

00:36:27 ◼   ► Because... I mean, that was what? Steve Jobs' explanation for this iOS devices and this Mac.

00:36:35 ◼   ► and there's the Mac and we'll always have the Mac because the Mac is the truck and the

00:36:38 ◼   ► iOS devices around and everybody just needs a car to get around.

00:36:41 ◼   ► All right. And that was circa 2010, which was at the D whatever, all things D conference

00:36:47 ◼   ► about three months after the original iPad came out.

00:36:50 ◼   ► Yes. And people keep trotting this out over and over and over. And it's, I mean, bless

00:36:57 ◼   ► the guy, but everybody knows that he kind of just, I, you know, I think that was a metaphor

00:37:04 ◼   ► that describe the situation at the time. I don't think that is anything set in stone.

00:37:08 ◼   ► It is not an immutable fact of the way that computers work. And I think that rather than

00:37:14 ◼   ► just seeing cars and trucks, I think we're going to end up seeing a continuum of sort

00:37:20 ◼   ► of performance versus power consumption.

00:37:24 ◼   ► Right. And you could even look at it. If you want to, you could look at it and say, "There's

00:37:30 ◼   ► all sorts of different trucks, too. There's everything from the..."

00:37:33 ◼   ► Yeah, you got your F-150, is that a truck?

00:37:37 ◼   ► Or you've got one of the giant Earth Mufu trucks, which is the Mac Pro versus, you know,

00:37:43 ◼   ► like the legitimate Mac Pro that'll be out by the end of the month kind of thing, versus a MacBook Pro

00:37:50 ◼   ► versus a MacBook Air versus an iPad Pro, like one of those iPads with a bunch of extra money,

00:37:56 ◼   ► A bunch of extra storage all the way down to like a hypothetical watch or something.

00:38:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:05 ◼   ► Right. Or you even got something like, remember the El Camino? Did they have the El Camino up in Canada?

00:38:10 ◼   ► Yeah. You know what? I wanted to make an El Camino joke, but I wanted to not evoke.

00:38:16 ◼   ► I got to send this link in the show notes.

00:38:20 ◼   ► That is the Microsoft Surface of locomotion. Automotives, I guess. No compromises.

00:38:30 ◼   ► No compromises. It's a car. It's a truck. It's a muscle car.

00:38:34 ◼   ► It's not even just a car and a truck. It's a sporty car.

00:38:36 ◼   ► It's a muscle car and a truck.

00:38:38 ◼   ► That's the problem with it. It's that they combine a sports car with a truck.

00:38:45 ◼   ► But it appeals to a certain audience.

00:38:48 ◼   ► Like you could say like a Subaru is kind of a similar sort of hybrid right right well and super

00:38:53 ◼   ► super super who had one like that I forget what it was called I don't know if I bet if you google

00:39:00 ◼   ► Subaru El Camino at all they had a car that was like a suit like an El Camino yeah the Subaru

00:39:09 ◼   ► Brat the Brat look at this you got to go to the Subaru Brat have you seen yeah you've looked at

00:39:16 ◼   ► at this link? Yeah, I remember seeing them. There's like these 80s babes hanging out next

00:39:21 ◼   ► to like El Camino's. Well, you got the Subaru BRAT and BRAT was an acronym for "By Drive

00:39:28 ◼   ► Recreational All-Terrain Transporter." Oh, God, holy crap. Look at this thing. You know

00:39:33 ◼   ► what I will say about the BRAT though is that they didn't go with the sports car look. No,

00:39:38 ◼   ► they did not. Like the front looks like a Saab. Like they took a Saab and they welded

00:39:42 ◼   ► in like a truck thing do it it the Subaru Brad I think looks like like

00:39:48 ◼   ► something that a couple of really clever high school kids yes taking auto shop

00:39:54 ◼   ► could could do to a Subaru station wagon yes like they would get hired

00:40:01 ◼   ► immediately into like designing automobiles yeah right out of high

00:40:07 ◼   ► school and then they would be embarrassed that they'd built this thing

00:40:11 ◼   ► Yeah, but it is yeah, this one's I got more respect for this than the El Camino

00:40:16 ◼   ► It seems a little bit more practical. But anyway, it's like you said there is a continuum even between cars and trucks

00:40:23 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think that holding

00:40:25 ◼   ► Anything that Steve said too, preciously is a mistake

00:40:29 ◼   ► Just in general. Yeah, I don't think he held anything. He said too preciously, so I don't know why everybody else

00:40:35 ◼   ► Well, I I think just take a look

00:40:37 ◼   ► I think that he only meant that that metaphor that analogy at a very very shallow level which was that look for a while

00:40:44 ◼   ► Everybody drove trucks and it you know, if you're gonna buy a motor vehicle you might as you have to haul stuff around

00:40:49 ◼   ► Yeah

00:40:49 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden there was an you know a

00:40:52 ◼   ► Market opportunity to come out with something that would just move the people around and didn't have all that cargo

00:40:56 ◼   ► You know, there's a certain spec in terms of what you can haul

00:41:00 ◼   ► That cars, you know come out almost practically at zero like what you can put in a trunk of a car compared to the bed of

00:41:06 ◼   ► A truck is you know tiny and you know, it's true there and and there's a point though where the people who you know

00:41:12 ◼   ► Or diehard truck users are gonna assume that everybody needs it and they're gonna say nobody nobody can get by with this

00:41:18 ◼   ► Right, and I don't think that's true. No, that's so yeah, we agree. I

00:41:23 ◼   ► be a I'm I

00:41:25 ◼   ► Got it. Whatever. I still get about this talk fully but

00:41:29 ◼   ► But definitely I see that there's going to be a continuum between the sinks.

00:41:35 ◼   ► And I think, you know, like an Arm64 and a Macbook Air, I don't think that's crazy.

00:41:41 ◼   ► In fact, I bet you dollars to donuts that it's working right now.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Whether or not it will be a product is like, who knows?

00:41:52 ◼   ► That has to do with things that we can't possibly guess from the outside, reading any kind of

00:41:56 ◼   ► tea leaves, right?

00:41:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and who knows? It could really come down to some kind of future meeting between

00:42:04 ◼   ► Tim Cook and whoever else and executives from Intel. They come into the room and there's

00:42:10 ◼   ► already the machine running. Here's a prototype running an A7. Now what kind of deal do you

00:42:17 ◼   ► want to give us?

00:42:18 ◼   ► Yes, exactly. The funny thing is Intel will just laugh at them and be like, "Okay, well,

00:42:26 ◼   ► more money at Samsung if you want.

00:42:27 ◼   ► I can't remember if I'm hearing this right, but I seem to recall that maybe they did that

00:42:32 ◼   ► with IBM.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Wasn't it with IBM?

00:42:36 ◼   ► Before they went to Intel, they showed like the… what was the last PowerPC?

00:42:44 ◼   ► You know what?

00:42:45 ◼   ► I used to know the code name for that project.

00:42:47 ◼   ► But that they…

00:42:48 ◼   ► It was a pretty good one.

00:42:49 ◼   ► Trying to get IBM to actually…

00:42:51 ◼   ► Oh, they were begging and pleading.

00:42:52 ◼   ► They did not want to let go of the PowerPC stuff.

00:42:56 ◼   ► And for a while it was pretty good, just IBM just totally stalled out there.

00:43:01 ◼   ► So the thing with the PowerPC is they would, IBM was actually developing power chips.

00:43:07 ◼   ► I forget what they were actually called.

00:43:09 ◼   ► It was just power something.

00:43:10 ◼   ► But they were high end server chips.

00:43:12 ◼   ► Yeah, like power 64 or something like that.

00:43:14 ◼   ► Yeah, they were competing with SunSpark chips and the heavy duty, late 90s, early 2000s

00:43:23 ◼   ► kind of workstations.

00:43:25 ◼   ► class chips, right?

00:43:27 ◼   ► And the PowerPC was cut down versions of those.

00:43:33 ◼   ► And they had promised to be able to fit one into a laptop

00:43:36 ◼   ► and they just could never get the G5 in there because it was

00:43:39 ◼   ► way too hot, which is kind of unsurprising when you think

00:43:42 ◼   ► about it because they're taking something that's built to be

00:43:46 ◼   ► working in a room with air conditioning and fans and all

00:43:48 ◼   ► kinds of stuff and trying to stick it in a laptop.

00:43:52 ◼   ► It's clearly a bit of a stretch there.

00:43:56 ◼   ► So this new wave coming up from the ARM chips seems interesting.

00:44:01 ◼   ► Another interesting thing is, have you been able to identify an application class where we've required a lot more performance over the years, like recently?

00:44:18 ◼   ► You know what I mean? It seems like we can edit Word files fine.

00:44:23 ◼   ► You know what I mean? Like maps, maybe? But even that's mostly GPU stuff.

00:44:28 ◼   ► I don't know. I feel like some of the performance stuff recently...

00:44:34 ◼   ► One of them I feel like you can never underestimate is how computationally expensive HTML rendering is.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Yeah, like it's you forget about it shockingly

00:44:47 ◼   ► Well, I mean you guys supposed to hit this investor right when you try to lay out text. It's like painting ass

00:44:52 ◼   ► well, but we never used we never used the

00:44:55 ◼   ► Like prior to iOS 7, you know the the whatever the text view is that you yeah

00:45:01 ◼   ► Yeah, right

00:45:02 ◼   ► But what I'm saying is like what people don't understand is if you want to do proper kerning and if you want to measure the lines

00:45:07 ◼   ► correctly. Yeah, just simple to yeah, just good proper text layout is actually computationally

00:45:12 ◼   ► expensive, especially when it's in a view that you expect to be able to scroll with your finger

00:45:17 ◼   ► at 60 frames per second. Because you need to sort of iteratively solve like how are you going to

00:45:22 ◼   ► weigh out the text and sort of maybe kernan a little bit extra to like line it up at the end,

00:45:27 ◼   ► like, you know, depending how you uh, man, what's the the alignment? Right? No, it's all expensive.

00:45:37 ◼   ► And then add in all the arbitrary layout stuff that a modern HTML engine lets you do.

00:45:43 ◼   ► It ends up being very expensive. And you can test it. I remember testing it with the original iPhone,

00:45:49 ◼   ► where everybody knew that the cellular networking was super, super slow on the original iPhone.

00:45:54 ◼   ► But even when you were on Wi-Fi, it took a long time to render web pages.

00:46:01 ◼   ► You know what you don't see anymore? That checker box pattern.

00:46:04 ◼   ► Like when you'd use the scroll safari and you'd see that...

00:46:07 ◼   ► Yeah, they've come a long way.

00:46:10 ◼   ► So that's one area where performance is still a factor.

00:46:12 ◼   ► I just read this week there was a good piece on MacRumors,

00:46:16 ◼   ► or maybe it was last week, about DJ and VJ from Algoriddim.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And the performance gains they saw just by recompiling for 64.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Like the same app, before they recompiled for 64,

00:46:30 ◼   ► ran it on the iPhone 5S.

00:46:33 ◼   ► it's you know and it's not when you run a 32-bit app on the 5s it's not emulated

00:46:39 ◼   ► it's you know it runs 32-bit arm code natively yeah they've actually got a

00:46:44 ◼   ► separate section of the chip that will just run 32-bit code right and if 32-bit

00:46:48 ◼   ► code isn't executing they'll just cut power to it so there's a class of app

00:46:53 ◼   ► and now if you know you guys don't know DJ and VJ there are these you know

00:46:57 ◼   ► really cool but I don't even know how to describe but they're you know they're

00:47:00 ◼   ► like it's for like well it's a DJ program and a program that can mix video

00:47:06 ◼   ► in a similar way both very very well done but even even even DJ the one just

00:47:11 ◼   ► for music though is graphically intensive in terms of having these yes

00:47:14 ◼   ► the controls that track your fingers so you can sync up the two songs and yep do

00:47:19 ◼   ► all the stuff that DJ's do to scrub the song and stuff like that yeah now they

00:47:23 ◼   ► busted their ass trying to get that as smooth as possible and it's super smooth

00:47:27 ◼   ► but going 64-bit, just recompiling without rewriting, just recompiling for 64, it just

00:47:32 ◼   ► made them way more performant. So I think there's definitely stuff like that.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Yeah. So I agree. I just think that those apps, as great as they are, I think they're

00:47:47 ◼   ► in a minority use case.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Probably. I think one of the areas where the—

00:47:51 ◼   ► Which isn't to say everybody you listen to, they shouldn't go out and buy them. Just

00:47:54 ◼   ► buy them right now. But I think they've even sponsored you.

00:47:59 ◼   ► Yeah, definitely. I know DJ has.

00:48:02 ◼   ► You know what I'm saying? I think maybe now we're capping out in terms of what we need,

00:48:10 ◼   ► in terms of power, sorry, in terms of computational speed. And maybe now what we want to be going

00:48:18 ◼   ► for is, I never want to plug my computer in.

00:48:22 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, like wouldn't it be great to get two solid days out of an iPhone?

00:48:26 ◼   ► Right then then still get one day, but have it be a little faster again. Yeah, I mean mavericks

00:48:32 ◼   ► Just went GM this week. Can we talk about that? I guess sure I think so

00:48:35 ◼   ► I'm gonna

00:48:38 ◼   ► You know the major features of that are power saving right and this is on a desktop OS in 2013

00:48:44 ◼   ► That I find that fascinating that like sort of the major

00:48:48 ◼   ► push here is

00:48:51 ◼   ► is to make your Mac act more like an iPhone I

00:48:56 ◼   ► Think that's definitely the case hold on second. Let's do this first sponsor break in and that's what we'll pick up

00:49:02 ◼   ► I want to tell you about hover hover. Are you sure we're 50 minutes in you?

00:49:06 ◼   ► Calling it a bit earlier. Yeah, I'll start well

00:49:12 ◼   ► I'm gonna start the first one early hover calm if you've ever registered in Maine

00:49:16 ◼   ► God bless you because you know that the companies that most of the companies that let you register domains all there to do

00:49:21 ◼   ► The registered domain isn't even their business their business is up selling you with all sorts of stuff. You don't want

00:49:27 ◼   ► If you don't check the right box, you're gonna buy it by accident

00:49:31 ◼   ► There's there there scams really they really are

00:49:34 ◼   ► I'm not gonna name names, but you can probably take a guess at some of the companies hover is the complete opposite

00:49:39 ◼   ► They never try to upsell you on anything. All they want to do is

00:49:44 ◼   ► Sell you domain names with a great interface a great management interface after you've registered to domains

00:49:50 ◼   ► and offer you good services that you might want from a domain registrar like who is privacy and

00:49:57 ◼   ► Domain forwarding features that you know actually make sense for a domain registrar to give you they make the whole process easy

00:50:04 ◼   ► To get a dot-com address or dot net dot co that's the dot co that's what we got for for Vesper app

00:50:12 ◼   ► Dot me or just about dot anything you want. That's a legitimate top-level domain

00:50:17 ◼   ► They make it easy to search

00:50:20 ◼   ► for available domain names which is often one of the hardest parts

00:50:24 ◼   ► and they make it easy to see what's available, what's similar to what you're

00:50:28 ◼   ► looking for, what top-level domains you can get the

00:50:31 ◼   ► the word for. If you have any problems at all

00:50:34 ◼   ► they are well known throughout the industry for

00:50:38 ◼   ► having great customer support. You just call hover and a real human being answers

00:50:42 ◼   ► the phone and they'll take care of your problems.

00:50:44 ◼   ► They even have something called valet transfer. So if you have a domain

00:50:48 ◼   ► somewhere else at some domain registrar that you're unhappy with and you want to switch,

00:50:54 ◼   ► they will literally do the whole process of moving the domain to hover for you. And that

00:50:57 ◼   ► can be a huge pain in the ass. And they recently also did just started offering if you want

00:51:03 ◼   ► Google Apps for domains. So you can use that if you're using Google Apps to get you know,

00:51:09 ◼   ► let's say you have your whole domain, your company, your small business, whatever running

00:51:13 ◼   ► Gmail through your domain, you can go to Hover and they'll help you integrate that.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Well, I'll tell you what they've got is they've got a 30-day free trial to see what you think.

00:51:23 ◼   ► I bet there's not a single person who's taken them up on their 30-day free trial who hasn't

00:51:27 ◼   ► stuck with them.

00:51:28 ◼   ► So go to Hover.com/talkshow, find out more and get your domain from Hover.com.

00:51:42 ◼   ► You know what I got to do is I got to use their valet service thing.

00:51:46 ◼   ► I got a domain that's like stuck on network, whatever they're called, the guys that shoot

00:51:51 ◼   ► elephants.

00:51:52 ◼   ► I got to get it off there.

00:51:56 ◼   ► I forget about it all the time.

00:51:57 ◼   ► But I got to use their valet thing to pry that away.

00:52:00 ◼   ► I've got a few on like some oddball registrars where I don't even remember why over the

00:52:04 ◼   ► years that I used some oddball one-off.

00:52:07 ◼   ► I have like one domain on this one registrar.

00:52:10 ◼   ► I got to consolidate all that.

00:52:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:52:13 ◼   ► - Oh man.

00:52:16 ◼   ► You have a good day, have a tasty beverage with you?

00:52:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, I do.

00:52:19 ◼   ► - Oh man, I like a tasty beverage.

00:52:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually ducked out to reload during your ad read.

00:52:25 ◼   ► - What were we talking about?

00:52:27 ◼   ► - We were talking about the chips, power management stuff.

00:52:30 ◼   ► - Oh, I know exactly what you said,

00:52:31 ◼   ► where isn't it interesting that Apple's direction

00:52:34 ◼   ► for Mavericks, both of the hardware and,

00:52:37 ◼   ► 'cause that was really, I mean,

00:52:38 ◼   ► And that was the whole takeaway from this year's upgrade to the MacBook Air's was really

00:52:43 ◼   ► all about battery life.

00:52:44 ◼   ► I mean, the screens are the same.

00:52:47 ◼   ► I kind of don't envy the marketing department.

00:52:50 ◼   ► Although it is a good pitch.

00:52:51 ◼   ► 12 hours battery is good or whatever, 18 hours, whatever the hell it was.

00:52:56 ◼   ► But at the same time, it's not sexy, right?

00:52:57 ◼   ► It's not like, you know, you don't get to do a demo with the Unreal Engine where you

00:53:03 ◼   ► slice something up with a sword.

00:53:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:53:06 ◼   ► definitely harder to demo. You know, I mean, let's face it, I mean, in some ways,

00:53:11 ◼   ► you know, the Mac Pro is almost certainly going to be, by unit sales, the least

00:53:15 ◼   ► popular Mac that Apple makes. It probably always has been, because it's so

00:53:20 ◼   ► expensive and so few. One of my most interesting devices that I'm looking

00:53:25 ◼   ► forward to. But it's, you know, it's not a mass-market device. It's, you know, not by

00:53:29 ◼   ► a long shot. It's a race car. But it demos. It's great for demos, because you can, you

00:53:34 ◼   ► That's the one where you can do the--

00:53:37 ◼   ► it can run the most advanced demos you can possibly think of.

00:53:40 ◼   ► You can create video or graphics demos that could only run on a Mac Pro.

00:53:47 ◼   ► So it's great for demos.

00:53:48 ◼   ► And what's the MacBook Air?

00:53:50 ◼   ► It's probably almost certainly the Mac with the least graphics capabilities.

00:53:55 ◼   ► You know what they need to do?

00:53:56 ◼   ► They need to lock a MacBook Air in a glass cube over the Vega strip

00:54:03 ◼   ► with one of those magicians that just does endurance stuff.

00:54:08 ◼   ► - Just have it running.

00:54:08 ◼   ► - See which one lasts longer, basically.

00:54:11 ◼   ► That's your gimmick.

00:54:12 ◼   ► - Well, I always think of it whenever I'm in an airport

00:54:15 ◼   ► and you're just walking down the terminal,

00:54:17 ◼   ► going to your gate, and you just see grown businessmen

00:54:20 ◼   ► wearing a nice suit, just sitting on the floor,

00:54:24 ◼   ► back against the wall, because they need to have

00:54:27 ◼   ► their laptop near an outlet.

00:54:29 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:54:30 ◼   ► - It's a serious deal.

00:54:31 ◼   ► evokes like a high school thing for me there. I don't know. Just this weird

00:54:37 ◼   ► helplessness of this guy that's just kind of stuck sitting in the corner

00:54:41 ◼   ► with this laptop plugged in, sitting cross-legged.

00:54:46 ◼   ► It's not comfortable but it's like the greatest commodity in an

00:54:51 ◼   ► airport is battery life. Because there's so few outlets, very

00:54:58 ◼   ► few airlines. I mean, there's Virgin America, which sadly, you know, a few people fly on,

00:55:03 ◼   ► they're struggling. They've got power outlets by the seats, but most airlines don't. So

00:55:06 ◼   ► once you're on the plane, it's like whatever battery life you've got on your laptop when

00:55:09 ◼   ► you get on the plane, that's all you've got for the flight.

00:55:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I like Virgin. I flew Virgin once. Can you guess when?

00:55:18 ◼   ► I probably to Vegas. No, because I don't fly to Vegas.

00:55:22 ◼   ► From Vegas to San Francisco.

00:55:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right.

00:55:24 ◼   ► The weekend I went to Vegas at the wrong time.

00:55:27 ◼   ► I've done the opposite. I have flown San Francisco to Vegas on Virgin.

00:55:33 ◼   ► That's good.

00:55:34 ◼   ► It's too quick of a flight because Virgin is so nice.

00:55:37 ◼   ► Yeah, it really is. Yeah. But it got a test of it, so that was good.

00:55:40 ◼   ► But there's very few airlines. I mean, just because of the way the planes were designed,

00:55:44 ◼   ► few of the airlines have planes that were designed for the modern era where people really desperately need AC power in their seats.

00:55:52 ◼   ► And who knows, you know, like the way that everything is transitioning to these long-life tablets, you know by the time

00:55:59 ◼   ► You know the the planes get refreshed that may not even be an issue anymore

00:56:04 ◼   ► I mean people still want to charge their phones and stuff, but

00:56:07 ◼   ► Yeah, virgin even has unless I'm misremembering. It's been a couple of months since I've flown

00:56:12 ◼   ► I think virgin even has USB outlets, which is really what you need

00:56:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I've seen a few of those

00:56:19 ◼   ► But anyway, it's clearly an I'm not optimistic about battery

00:56:23 ◼   ► technology

00:56:26 ◼   ► Well, I think that's you know like it like it it certainly hasn't been advancing at the same rate of as you know

00:56:32 ◼   ► Computer technology no definitely not

00:56:35 ◼   ► But that's why some of the things some of the jumps that Apple has taken in recent years stick out like the fact that this

00:56:41 ◼   ► year's MacBook Airs

00:56:42 ◼   ► Went from I forget what they were the year before but it was more than just like a one or two hour bump

00:56:47 ◼   ► It was like a five or six hour bump.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:56:50 ◼   ► As far as I know, I haven't looked at the – I have to do some research for this talk

00:56:54 ◼   ► I'm going to give.

00:56:55 ◼   ► But it's not like the batteries got better.

00:56:57 ◼   ► It's that the software got better.

00:57:00 ◼   ► The hardware got better at turning itself off.

00:57:03 ◼   ► But the basic power source is not improving at a very great rate.

00:57:08 ◼   ► No.

00:57:09 ◼   ► That's clear.

00:57:10 ◼   ► Like you said, that's clearly a lot of what Mavericks is about.

00:57:12 ◼   ► What else is in Mavericks that's battery related?

00:57:15 ◼   ► Okay, so that's a good question. There's a couple of things like when you're...

00:57:21 ◼   ► If all of the windows in your app are covered, you'll get a callback, you'll be notified.

00:57:28 ◼   ► And then you can stop doing any kind of background processing.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Because you're clearly not rendering, right? You won't be updating.

00:57:36 ◼   ► What else is there?

00:57:39 ◼   ► That seemed like a big one in and of itself. The fact that a window that's obscured isn't going to consume power.

00:57:48 ◼   ► Because that was a really good demo at WWDC.

00:57:51 ◼   ► Yeah, so I was sitting with Chris Parrish, or not sitting, after the show, I was with Parrish and our friend Luke Adamson,

00:57:59 ◼   ► who's ex-omnigoop guy, very, very smart guy. And we were trying to figure out how that worked because

00:58:06 ◼   ► If you're expecting to update, if you're in, you know, let's say you're web browsing, you're

00:58:14 ◼   ► playing something back in the background and you're expecting to update 60 times a second

00:58:18 ◼   ► every time the screen refreshes, and you do work that isn't purely to render but is to

00:58:25 ◼   ► do some sort of housekeeping stuff, and when you get covered then you don't get a chance

00:58:29 ◼   ► to do the housekeeping stuff, what happens?

00:58:31 ◼   ► Do we know?

00:58:33 ◼   ► What's the answer?

00:58:35 ◼   ► But the answer is you get told when you're—first of all, you opt into this.

00:58:42 ◼   ► Even as a webpage?

00:58:43 ◼   ► No.

00:58:44 ◼   ► Well, Safari does it for you.

00:58:47 ◼   ► And they juggle whatever the hell they juggle.

00:58:49 ◼   ► Right.

00:58:50 ◼   ► So for an app to take advantage of this, you have to opt into it.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:58:53 ◼   ► And Safari does opt in, and I don't even know if they support plugins anymore, but

00:58:57 ◼   ► guess what?

00:58:58 ◼   ► They don't have to wait for Adobe to make this work.

00:59:00 ◼   ► They just do it for themselves with their own stuff.

00:59:06 ◼   ► And then you basically just don't be an idiot.

00:59:10 ◼   ► When you get called to render, you just render.

00:59:12 ◼   ► If you don't get called to render, you don't render.

00:59:14 ◼   ► So you try to separate the logic of any kind of house cleaning that you may have to do

00:59:18 ◼   ► from the rendering logic.

00:59:21 ◼   ► So you get called on a...

00:59:22 ◼   ► You can be told...

00:59:24 ◼   ► It's kind of like the way when you get swapped out on iOS, your app just gets told, "Okay,

00:59:30 ◼   ► you're going to sleep. Well, if you take that principle and bring it to the Mac, your app

00:59:36 ◼   ► gets told when per window, when the window gets obscured so that rendering is pointless,

00:59:43 ◼   ► and it gets told when all of the windows in the app go away. So you can, you know, further

00:59:50 ◼   ► turn back any housekeeping that you're trying to do.

00:59:54 ◼   ► Seems like a huge win. I mean, and I've always known it too, like, you know, and I'm nerdy

01:00:03 ◼   ► enough that I'll be running Activity Monitor just to see what's going on. But I'll be on

01:00:08 ◼   ► an airplane and I'm writing an article and I have two or three tabs open in Safari because

01:00:13 ◼   ► they're the things I'm referencing for what I'm writing about. And I can see that Safari

01:00:17 ◼   ► is taking 30% of my CPU. And it's because I have these things open and they're just,

01:00:22 ◼   ► It's just running JavaScript or something over and over and over again.

01:00:27 ◼   ► And it kills me because I know it's killing my battery, but I don't want to close the

01:00:31 ◼   ► window.

01:00:32 ◼   ► Peter T. Leeson So one feature, which is kind of…

01:00:37 ◼   ► I'm a little surprised that they surfaced this at quite this user level.

01:00:47 ◼   ► But if you click the battery icon in Mavericks, it will show you how much charge the battery has,

01:00:55 ◼   ► but it'll also give you a list of the apps that are using the most energy.

01:01:00 ◼   ► That's pretty interesting.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And so you can click on it and just kill it, if you want.

01:01:08 ◼   ► And that's kind of a weirdly nerdy thing for them to do.

01:01:12 ◼   ► Like OS X has usually been trying to move away from pointing out nerdy stuff.

01:01:18 ◼   ► Or even making you think about what app is running and what is not.

01:01:21 ◼   ► I mean, in every couple of years they'll come out with a new doc design and usually

01:01:26 ◼   ► the first thing they do is take away the indicator of what apps are running.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And then the guys like me and you are like, "Hey, hey, hey, come on.

01:01:34 ◼   ► I gotta know what's running and what's not running."

01:01:36 ◼   ► Well, guys like you, I'm kind of okay with them not having an indicator there.

01:01:41 ◼   ► Well, you know what I mean though by guys I use people who truly at least understand

01:01:46 ◼   ► the difference between an app that's still running and an app that is not still yes of

01:01:50 ◼   ► our gang of pals. I feel that I would be the odd man out being like I don't want to see

01:01:55 ◼   ► the little dot. In theory, I think everybody would agree that nobody wants to know what

01:02:00 ◼   ► app is actually open or closed. They should just all be working right. Which is the way

01:02:06 ◼   ► iOS has always been.

01:02:08 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly. In practice, you know, it's still a Mac and there's still some, you know,

01:02:13 ◼   ► bullshit going on.

01:02:14 ◼   ► Right. And the goal should be that if your app isn't running, you should make it as quick

01:02:18 ◼   ► to launch as possible and go right back to where you were the last time you weren't so

01:02:22 ◼   ► that the user doesn't even see the difference. Maybe there's a couple of seconds of difference,

01:02:27 ◼   ► but, you know.

01:02:28 ◼   ► So, Mountain Learning and MapFix have both added a bunch of APIs to make that a lot easier

01:02:33 ◼   ► to do. You can save state and quit your app and relaunch it and it should all just come

01:02:40 ◼   ► back to exactly where you were with the selection. You could save off what you had selected so

01:02:47 ◼   ► that when you relaunch the app you get the same selection and everything, which we do

01:02:52 ◼   ► for napkin. What you do lose, which kind of sucks, is that you can opt in and say that

01:02:59 ◼   ► you can quickly kill my app at any point.

01:03:02 ◼   ► And what will happen is when you switch away from it, it'll

01:03:05 ◼   ► automatically save in the background.

01:03:08 ◼   ► And then if there's some kind of memory pressure or there's

01:03:12 ◼   ► no Windows on the screen, or if the user just logs out, your

01:03:15 ◼   ► app will be killed.

01:03:16 ◼   ► When you log back in or whatever, when you relaunch

01:03:21 ◼   ► the app, your app is expected to restore its state, which

01:03:27 ◼   ► you can do, if you write the code correctly. But what you lose is the undo state. You can't

01:03:33 ◼   ► keep your undo stack. Which to me is like…

01:03:37 ◼   ► You're breaking the illusion.

01:03:40 ◼   ► Not only are you breaking the illusion, undo is, I think, one of the best computers…

01:03:48 ◼   ► Computers have ever had.

01:03:51 ◼   ► Exactly. Undo is what computers do.

01:03:55 ◼   ► like modern, like what the Mac style of interface design compared to the...

01:03:59 ◼   ► Exactly. You mess around, did you fuck it up? Undo.

01:04:02 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:04 ◼   ► Not a problem. And like removing that is a, you know, that's...

01:04:09 ◼   ► It was a, you know what, there were probably 30 different people who came up with the exact

01:04:14 ◼   ► same design for a t-shirt and, you know, but I remember like back in college in the early

01:04:18 ◼   ► 90s, there was a lot of people had a shirt that just said, I never had one, I couldn't

01:04:23 ◼   ► out where they got it, but it just said Command Z, like the little command symbol Z.

01:04:28 ◼   ► Because it was, you know, it was like the best.

01:04:30 ◼   ► >> Yeah. It's great. I love it.

01:04:33 ◼   ► >> All right. Yeah. So I don't even mean to say that it's minor breaking the illusion. Yeah,

01:04:38 ◼   ► it's actual, like losing the undo stack is losing something important. It's true destructive behavior.

01:04:44 ◼   ► >> Exactly. And I think that it's mostly, I mean, again, to be reductive, you know,

01:04:53 ◼   ► Guys like us, like people that would be listening to the show would notice it, and I don't think most other people would notice it.

01:04:58 ◼   ► But I think that while they won't notice exactly what happened, they will learn to become mistrustful.

01:05:06 ◼   ► The more seamless you make the illusion that the app is running even when it's not,

01:05:12 ◼   ► the more apparent it will be that the induced act just vanishes from time to time.

01:05:20 ◼   ► And it's going to feel random. I think even to someone like me, I may not even guess.

01:05:25 ◼   ► I'm fairly technically adept. I could be running napkin and sometimes undo works and sometimes undo doesn't.

01:05:32 ◼   ► Is what it's going to seem like to me because I wasn't even aware that it got closed out in the background

01:05:37 ◼   ► because I'd left it open for two days. I just know I'm coming back to this thing and I remember what I was doing

01:05:43 ◼   ► and now why did I add this stupid text? I want to undo it.

01:05:47 ◼   ► Yeah. And you may figure it out or you may just yell at me and I'll tell you what happened.

01:05:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:05:52 ◼   ► Yeah. It's an issue.

01:05:55 ◼   ► Uh, Gil, you had something in mind?

01:06:00 ◼   ► Well, I was going to take a second sponsor break.

01:06:02 ◼   ► Yeah, go for it.

01:06:03 ◼   ► I'm going to tell you about Ding. D-I-N-G by Tite. New sponsor. What is Ding? It's time tracking for people who are running their own show.

01:06:14 ◼   ► It's built for freelancers, small teams, and it's a product that the guys who built it,

01:06:21 ◼   ► these guys at Tite, it's the time tracker they wanted to use. They built it for themselves

01:06:25 ◼   ► and it's meant for any small teams. It's got all the features that managers, you know,

01:06:31 ◼   ► the type of things, like a type of time tracking software that's designed by like managers

01:06:35 ◼   ► and that's a real pain for the actual people using it to work. Yeah, they took all those

01:06:38 ◼   ► features out. And all they did is focus on the features that people who actually have

01:06:42 ◼   ► to do stuff during the day would want to use. Focus on the hours you put in, what you spend

01:06:47 ◼   ► it on, and the money you're going to make. It's got a beautiful UI. It's a tool you're

01:06:52 ◼   ► actually going to like using in your day because it just looks cool, very fast. And the iPhone

01:06:59 ◼   ► app is designed for iOS 7. And they have a pretty slick iOS 7 design in terms of, and

01:07:05 ◼   ► I know I spent a lot of time the last few weeks talking about what to do with the new

01:07:09 ◼   ► status bar. I think they have a pretty cool solution to it. You can just see the screenshots

01:07:14 ◼   ► if you go to the App Store and search for ding. But it's designed for iOS seven and

01:07:19 ◼   ► definitely looks like it. So if you sign up, here's where you go to sign up. Their website

01:07:24 ◼   ► is ding.io slash the talk show di ng.io slash the talk show. If you use the promo code,

01:07:34 ◼   ► talk show, you get a 90-day free trial. No credit card required upfront. That's an amazing

01:07:42 ◼   ► deal. I mean, that's like three months. That's like well past the end of the year. Well more

01:07:47 ◼   ► than enough time to tell if this is the time tracker for you. That's how confident these

01:07:50 ◼   ► guys are that you're going to like it. The app, the iPhone app is in the App Store now.

01:07:55 ◼   ► It's brand new. Built for iOS 7. You can check that out just by searching for Ding in the

01:07:59 ◼   ► App Store.

01:08:01 ◼   ► My thanks to Ding. Anybody out there looking for time tracking software, check them out.

01:08:06 ◼   ► It's really cool stuff, very nicely designed.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Steve: I'd use it. I've only got one client now. I work for my company and for one client,

01:08:15 ◼   ► so I don't actually have much use for it. But man, keeping track of that stuff is a

01:08:21 ◼   ► pain in the ass.

01:08:22 ◼   ► Dave: I used to. Before I did Daring Firebolt full-time, I did a lot of freelance work.

01:08:25 ◼   ► I guess I had some full-time jobs in there, here and there. Spent most of my career

01:08:31 ◼   ► before that doing freelance work. And at the time I was doing freelance work, there were

01:08:35 ◼   ► no good time tracking apps, none. It's terrible.

01:08:38 ◼   ► Steve: Yeah. It's all a pain in the ass.

01:08:40 ◼   ► Dave: It was the worst.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Steve; It feels like busy work too, right? So you want to make it as easy as possible.

01:08:45 ◼   ► Dave; Exactly.

01:08:46 ◼   ► Steve; You see that?

01:08:47 ◼   ► Dave; I'll have to put that in the show notes. I could see me and you driving across the

01:08:54 ◼   ► country.

01:08:55 ◼   ► Steve; Do you know what my joke is going to be? We're going to buy one of these. We're

01:08:59 ◼   ► going to get an El Camino.

01:09:00 ◼   ► But we've got to get one like this.

01:09:02 ◼   ► I'm going to keep this tablet, but I'll put it in the show notes.

01:09:06 ◼   ► Badass.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Okay, so.

01:09:14 ◼   ► Ding, designed for iOS 7.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Okay, I'm going to switch. We're going to run along.

01:09:22 ◼   ► But whatever. I'm going to turn the tables on you.

01:09:25 ◼   ► Vesper, iOS 7.

01:09:28 ◼   ► Yes or no?

01:09:31 ◼   ► To go iOS 7 only?

01:09:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:34 ◼   ► I don't think so.

01:09:35 ◼   ► And it was funny.

01:09:36 ◼   ► I agree.

01:09:37 ◼   ► And back at WWDC, when they first announced iOS 7, I mean, this is literally while Brent

01:09:45 ◼   ► and Dave and I were all in San Francisco for WWDC, and they announced it, and they showed

01:09:50 ◼   ► it, and we had a day or two to think about it.

01:09:51 ◼   ► And it was like, I think like Tuesday or Wednesday of that week.

01:09:55 ◼   ► And I had a meeting on Thursday with like a rep at the app store, just like a sort of

01:10:02 ◼   ► meet and greet, you know, "We're happy to have you guys in the store," and, you know,

01:10:05 ◼   ► just, you know, "Get to know you" type of thing.

01:10:07 ◼   ► And do you have any questions for us?

01:10:09 ◼   ► And I asked then when they said, "Hey, do you have any questions?"

01:10:12 ◼   ► I said, "What would you guys think about us going iOS 7 for our next update?"

01:10:16 ◼   ► iOS 7 only.

01:10:18 ◼   ► And even the guys at Apple were like, "Oh, I don't know.

01:10:21 ◼   ► That might be a little, you know, maybe you want to wait a couple, you know."

01:10:25 ◼   ► We love that you're interested in it.

01:10:26 ◼   ► We want everybody to get on board with it,

01:10:28 ◼   ► and we want everybody to design for it.

01:10:31 ◼   ► But Iowa 7 only right out of the gate,

01:10:34 ◼   ► I don't know about that, was sort of the,

01:10:36 ◼   ► think about it, they were like, think about it.

01:10:40 ◼   ► But the more we thought about it, we thought,

01:10:41 ◼   ► well, who is our current audience?

01:10:42 ◼   ► Our current audience is clearly people

01:10:44 ◼   ► who are a little bit more nerdy, right?

01:10:48 ◼   ► People who know who, read "Daring Fireball"

01:10:50 ◼   ► or know who Brent Simmons is.

01:10:52 ◼   ► They're clearly going to be at the leading edge of that, you know, what is it, 200 million

01:10:58 ◼   ► people have already upgraded to iOS 7 and we knew it was going to be like that.

01:11:02 ◼   ► I don't know how many people there are who are Vesper users who still are clinging to

01:11:09 ◼   ► iOS 6, you know, maybe for good reasons but it doesn't seem like it's been a support

01:11:14 ◼   ► issue for us.

01:11:16 ◼   ► If there are complaints about that, I don't even know about them.

01:11:20 ◼   ► I think it was a no-brainer.

01:11:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I tend to agree. For technical reasons, supporting both 6 and 7 is a huge pain in the ass.

01:11:27 ◼   ► One thing I found interesting, you know what, I don't know a quote, this could be secondhand, but didn't Barack Obama compare the rollout of the ACA website to iOS 7?

01:11:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I just saw that yesterday.

01:11:45 ◼   ► It's fascinating as that I don't think it's a knock against Apple per se.

01:11:50 ◼   ► It's more that like it's such a cultural touchstone now that you can just compare one to the other

01:11:55 ◼   ► and be like, "Look, you know, it's technology.

01:11:57 ◼   ► Shit happens and even the best stuff has problems."

01:12:00 ◼   ► Yeah, US politics has gotten so weird and not to turn this into a political show, but

01:12:05 ◼   ► without taking any partisan side even.

01:12:09 ◼   ► But it's gotten so weird over the last decade or two where certain extraordinarily short

01:12:17 ◼   ► catch phrases will capture the coverage for about 48 hours and then just sort of fade

01:12:22 ◼   ► away.

01:12:23 ◼   ► And the thing that happened this week with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act website

01:12:27 ◼   ► was this word "glitch."

01:12:30 ◼   ► Instead of bugs, it was glitch.

01:12:32 ◼   ► You couldn't go anywhere without seeing that there were glitches, quote-unquote "glitches."

01:12:37 ◼   ► you know that some people jumped on this is somehow a sign that it was you know a

01:12:42 ◼   ► Disaster and it's never gonna work and other people are like no

01:12:45 ◼   ► It's just a sign that it's way more popular than it was expected and yeah, so Obama

01:12:50 ◼   ► President Obama said something to the effect of look even you know, he always says look look

01:12:56 ◼   ► That's my Obama impression. Look, it's good. Even iOS 7 from Apple ship with a glitch. They fixed it. They moved on

01:13:07 ◼   ► improved it. We'll do the same thing. We'll fix the glitch. We'll move on. Which is really true.

01:13:12 ◼   ► Yeah, it's reasonable. It's in a weirdly politically charged atmosphere, granted.

01:13:19 ◼   ► Right. But even if you think it's crap public policy, even if you think it's a mistake,

01:13:25 ◼   ► public policy-

01:13:26 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, policy aside. Whatever he was implementing.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Right. To jump on the fact that the website couldn't keep up with the traffic on day one,

01:13:35 ◼   ► Come on, that's a fixable problem.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:38 ◼   ► No, it's not just a fixable problem.

01:13:40 ◼   ► It's a problem that every website has that has any kind of traction.

01:13:45 ◼   ► But it was telling, though.

01:13:46 ◼   ► What I found interesting is that he compared it to iOS 7 specifically.

01:13:50 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:52 ◼   ► And that gets back to—because I don't want to go totally off in the weeds because

01:13:58 ◼   ► I'm from Canada and we have, you know.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Health insurance.

01:14:02 ◼   ► I just couldn't avoid that dig and I couldn't finish shoving the knife in enough.

01:14:10 ◼   ► When people get sick, they just assume they can go to a doctor.

01:14:14 ◼   ► It's like I shoved the knife in halfway and then thought, "Ah, he's going to pay a lot

01:14:17 ◼   ► for these medical bills and I better not do that."

01:14:24 ◼   ► It goes back to your targeting Vesper at iOS 7.

01:14:30 ◼   ► when the President of the United States can stand up and compare his roll out of his signature

01:14:37 ◼   ► legislation of his career, probably of his life, killing Obama, killing Obama, killing

01:14:44 ◼   ► Osama.

01:14:45 ◼   ► I mean, come on, that's like, yeah, clearly you've made it clearly you're up in the

01:14:52 ◼   ► big leagues at that point.

01:14:55 ◼   ► So yeah, targeting the latest seems like the, yeah, I think that's the acceptable thing

01:15:00 ◼   ► to do. I think that's fair to say no matter which side of the partisan divide you're on,

01:15:04 ◼   ► where even if you like the guy or dislike the guy, I think everybody would agree that

01:15:07 ◼   ► historically, that's his signature legislative accomplishment. And if you're maybe almost…

01:15:12 ◼   ► Whether you agree with it or not. Right. Maybe you think on one side, you think

01:15:15 ◼   ► this is why everybody's… eventually everybody's going to agree the guy was a terrible president,

01:15:19 ◼   ► on the other side maybe you think this is why he's going to be remembered as a guy

01:15:22 ◼   ► who accomplished something that really improved the country. But it's clearly the biggest

01:15:27 ◼   ► he's going to get past.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it's the biggest thing he did, and then he compared it to something from Apple.

01:15:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I think too...

01:15:34 ◼   ► Which is weird. It's weird, and it's almost petty in a way.

01:15:37 ◼   ► Like, he should be kind of above that.

01:15:39 ◼   ► But I think it speaks to the culture of the time.

01:15:42 ◼   ► I think that our... the tech crowd underestimates, and especially with iOS 7,

01:15:48 ◼   ► vastly underestimated just how aware the general public is of things like iOS 7.

01:15:56 ◼   ► Because there were a lot of people who for the whole summer,

01:16:00 ◼   ► there was a lot of people in the iOS developer circles who were like,

01:16:04 ◼   ► "Look, I think when this thing ships, people are going to go nuts and hate it."

01:16:08 ◼   ► They're going to see the dialogue that says, "Oh, you have an update available."

01:16:12 ◼   ► And the last three, four, five years, when they've seen that dialogue,

01:16:18 ◼   ► they hit OK, they wait five minutes, and their phone or iPad restarts,

01:16:23 ◼   ► and it looks the same as it did before except, you know, as bugs fixed and stuff.

01:16:27 ◼   ► And now this one time they're going to do it, and when they hit restart,

01:16:31 ◼   ► their phone or iPad is going to look completely different, and they're going to lose their shit.

01:16:35 ◼   ► Because normal people lose their shit when their stuff changes.

01:16:39 ◼   ► So I showed a beta, I probably shouldn't have, but whatever.

01:16:45 ◼   ► I showed a beta, like an early beta, to a couple of friends of mine who were not tech literate at all.

01:16:51 ◼   ► And they were like, nonplussed. They were like, "Oh, no, it looks the same."

01:16:59 ◼   ► I'm like, "No, look, it's all flattened." But they could navigate it the same.

01:17:03 ◼   ► They were like, "Yeah, it works exactly the same. It's not a big deal."

01:17:06 ◼   ► Right. We see the differences way more easily than most people.

01:17:10 ◼   ► And I think a lot of us, even me included, underestimated how much work Apple did

01:17:17 ◼   ► to keep it at a certain fundamental level familiar.

01:17:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree. And I didn't really realize that until I put the phone in the hands of people that really don't know anything about tech.

01:17:31 ◼   ► Yeah. My mom is a good example of that because my mom is more in charge of the Mac in their house than my dad.

01:17:39 ◼   ► But she'll never install a Mac OS X update without calling me or just waiting for me to visit and do it myself.

01:17:46 ◼   ► You know even though they're relatively automated now whereas she never even asked me

01:17:52 ◼   ► She just called me after she upgraded her iPad to iOS 7 and she had like one question and and then and all

01:17:59 ◼   ► She had like one question about it

01:18:00 ◼   ► And she said I keep hitting I keep going to the wrong side of the bar in Safari because the bookmark

01:18:06 ◼   ► Menu moved hmm and she that wasn't really a complaint

01:18:10 ◼   ► She was just like isn't it funny how my finger just always goes to the same side and that was it

01:18:14 ◼   ► I mean that was I couldn't believe it because she didn't even call to ask is that when you gave her a Syracuse's number? Yeah

01:18:20 ◼   ► You want to talk about spatial I'll tell you what that would be a good show John Syracuse that talks to John Gruber's mother about

01:18:29 ◼   ► Technology would be in order to solve her problems with her computer. That would be great

01:18:34 ◼   ► Sure, you could hook that up. Holy hell, that would be good

01:18:37 ◼   ► Sure. I'm sure it'll work. I'll tell you what it would it would get John Syracuse on the sauce

01:18:42 ◼   ► His sauce is what? His sauce is Sprite.

01:18:49 ◼   ► By the end of the 10-episode series, he'd be in rehab.

01:18:54 ◼   ► I love that it's a miniseries.

01:18:56 ◼   ► Yeah, it would be a limited run.

01:19:01 ◼   ► Oh, we're going to make this happen.

01:19:04 ◼   ► I do think that that's kind of--I think all the predictions of doom and gloom

01:19:09 ◼   ► about consumer reaction to iOS 7 have all been overstated.

01:19:13 ◼   ► You know, and I feel like people have wanted to make hay out of certain things

01:19:17 ◼   ► like the parallax making of, you know, a few people

01:19:21 ◼   ► motion sickness. Yeah, yeah.

01:19:25 ◼   ► But I don't want to make, like, that's a serious problem, I can understand that.

01:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah, you know what though, the way that it got reported, it was funny, I was talking to somebody else

01:19:33 ◼   ► in my family, you know, total regular consumer person

01:19:37 ◼   ► And they were very confused by it because they saw it on TV and said what it were they just making that up

01:19:44 ◼   ► This is stupid

01:19:45 ◼   ► I don't see anything like that and they because they got the impression from the TV report that everybody was getting

01:19:51 ◼   ► Sick from iOS 7 then iOS 7 had these 3d effects and Apple screwed up and they're making everybody ill and this is

01:19:58 ◼   ► And she you know, she has an iPhone and an iPad and as you know

01:20:02 ◼   ► Upgraded them both like the first two days and likes it and enjoys it. She's like, I don't get it

01:20:07 ◼   ► I was like no no no what you don't get is that it's it's people with like a certain

01:20:11 ◼   ► Disorder or even I don't even know if you want to call it a disorder

01:20:14 ◼   ► They just have a proclivity to get motion sickness from from certain 3d effects

01:20:19 ◼   ► And yes, this is triggering it for them, and she was like oh

01:20:23 ◼   ► I didn't get that because I feel like the way you know yeah, I guess it gets reported

01:20:28 ◼   ► It's like hey, I was seven makes you sick right which is man

01:20:33 ◼   ► Video games would be making people sick for freaking, I don't know, like how many years?

01:20:38 ◼   ► Right. You know, and I totally sympathize because if video games make you sick...

01:20:44 ◼   ► Well that sucks, well you just know like, well I'll avoid playing a video game, it's gonna make me sick.

01:20:48 ◼   ► Like I'm not gonna play this 3D video game.

01:20:50 ◼   ► Right, whereas...

01:20:51 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden your phone gets all 3D and now you're like kinda screwed.

01:20:54 ◼   ► And that's, that sucks, you know, it's...

01:20:58 ◼   ► But you know, you just turn it off and...

01:21:00 ◼   ► Well, yeah, and I know that you can only turn off some of the effects right now and there's some of the

01:21:04 ◼   ► Zooming ones you can't I just can't help but feel but but that by like iOS 7.1 or something like that

01:21:09 ◼   ► There will be a setting in you know, accessibility or something like that

01:21:13 ◼   ► That turns off some of the zoom this, you know, yeah, but here's the thing. It's a funny subtle distinction. Is that?

01:21:21 ◼   ► Whenever you tapped an icon the app always zoomed in on iOS

01:21:26 ◼   ► When you tap it on ios 7 is zooms in from where the icon is on the screen, right?

01:21:31 ◼   ► Rather than from the center, right and for some reason that triggers this

01:21:37 ◼   ► Nausea this this motion sickness. Yeah, we're and it's for me

01:21:42 ◼   ► It's what I one of the things that makes ios 7 so much more pleasing to me like him here semantically

01:21:47 ◼   ► Because it's saying like I'm diving into things this app is zooming out to take the screen and when you go back

01:21:53 ◼   ► the screen is going into that icon.

01:21:56 ◼   ► Yes.

01:21:57 ◼   ► There's this more of this sense of place.

01:21:59 ◼   ► It does even a crossfade and it's kind of nice.

01:22:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's more though than just the fact that it's not always from the center though.

01:22:05 ◼   ► I do think that it zooms more and I think it zooms for a longer period of time or at least it seems like it does.

01:22:14 ◼   ► Yeah, the animations definitely feel a little bit slower.

01:22:17 ◼   ► Because I've also heard from readers like when they first saw it in person, you know,

01:22:22 ◼   ► like in the first day or two after it came out, some daring Fireball readers who emailed

01:22:26 ◼   ► in were like, "Is there a way to speed that up?"

01:22:28 ◼   ► Because they're like, it's not that they're getting sick or anything, it's that they're

01:22:33 ◼   ► so – I don't know, probably they're all jazzed up on coffee, but that they're

01:22:36 ◼   ► so intent on making it go as fast as possible that it drives them nuts that they're waiting

01:22:41 ◼   ► for an animation that they see as a superfluous effect.

01:22:44 ◼   ► Oh, sure.

01:22:45 ◼   ► No, no, it's easy.

01:22:46 ◼   ► wait for 7.1 and they'll shave off a split second on that. I mean, if you look at the

01:22:52 ◼   ► animations from OS X over the course of history, they just keep getting faster and faster.

01:23:01 ◼   ► I think 7.0 introduces a new visual language to things, so it's a little bit sluggish.

01:23:15 ◼   ► I like the pinstripes sort of went over the top of the acro stuff.

01:23:18 ◼   ► The speed of the animations are slower because they're, I don't know, maybe they're prouder

01:23:22 ◼   ► of them that they want to show them off.

01:23:24 ◼   ► They want the experience there.

01:23:27 ◼   ► When the novelty sort of wears off, that'll get shaved down and probably get a lot faster.

01:23:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:33 ◼   ► I totally agree.

01:23:34 ◼   ► Let me do the last sponsor, third and final sponsor of the show and then we can talk about

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01:26:10 ◼   ► I expect Mac Pro by the end of the month.

01:26:11 ◼   ► I'm just going to drop that without any comment.

01:26:15 ◼   ► So Applebot Q.

01:26:16 ◼   ► C-U-E.

01:26:17 ◼   ► Because it's, you know, there's all sorts of ways you could bot that.

01:26:23 ◼   ► So let's talk about that and then let's end on what we're both really good at talking

01:26:26 ◼   ► about and we're very knowledgeable about, which is Microsoft.

01:26:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:30 ◼   ► I'm a long time Microsoft expert.

01:26:33 ◼   ► Devotee, if you will.

01:26:34 ◼   ► So tell me, do you know Q?

01:26:36 ◼   ► I never heard.

01:26:37 ◼   ► I saw this.

01:26:38 ◼   ► during Fireball, because, not because I didn't think it was a big deal, but because I'd

01:26:41 ◼   ► never even heard of them before.

01:26:43 ◼   ► I'd heard of Gremlin and I had heard of Q. I had not checked him out. It was one of

01:26:48 ◼   ► those things where I'm like, "Oh, that's a good idea," and then I just didn't

01:26:51 ◼   ► really follow up on it. What it is is effectively a service like what Google Now is, in that

01:27:01 ◼   ► it I'm trying to come up with a way to describe the category but it's an

01:27:09 ◼   ► aggregator it's just gonna sound cheesy well the way I'd like an aggregate a

01:27:15 ◼   ► fuel life is what I'm gonna say yeah and I the way I've heard it is that it's

01:27:19 ◼   ► it's this is my layman's understanding but that whatever it is they bought

01:27:23 ◼   ► them for surely it's to help populate the today tab of notification center

01:27:30 ◼   ► That it's what's going on with you today, like now, where you are.

01:27:35 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what people have been saying.

01:27:39 ◼   ► You think it's more than that? You think that's underselling it?

01:27:42 ◼   ► I actually don't know if it's more than that.

01:27:47 ◼   ► There's becoming these weird ghettos in iOS.

01:27:55 ◼   ► We've got the Today tab, we've got the Siri interface, we've got your calendar.

01:28:02 ◼   ► What else is there? There's other weird little... I'm trying to come up with one.

01:28:09 ◼   ► I thought I had one other, but I can't remember it by now.

01:28:12 ◼   ► A lot of this stuff should be cross-functional, right?

01:28:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:19 ◼   ► Like, why is today different than what?

01:28:22 ◼   ► Like, what's the difference between today and Siri?

01:28:26 ◼   ► Well, Siri only comes up when you ask for the voice interface, right?

01:28:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:33 ◼   ► It is sort of related, though.

01:28:34 ◼   ► Why?

01:28:35 ◼   ► And I feel like it looks more related.

01:28:36 ◼   ► Well, I don't know.

01:28:37 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:28:38 ◼   ► Because it's an overlay.

01:28:39 ◼   ► It's an overlay over--

01:28:40 ◼   ► Take out Siri and call her Sarah, your personal assistant, or Sean, your personal assistant,

01:28:45 ◼   ► to be pick a gender, whatever. Wouldn't your personal assistant just be telling you what

01:28:52 ◼   ► the hell you got to do today and then you can just ask them a question and they'll

01:28:56 ◼   ► answer it?

01:28:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess so.

01:28:58 ◼   ► Why aren't these two the same thing? Why, like, shouldn't Siri, Sarah, Sean be surfacing

01:29:05 ◼   ► information to you like Google Now does?

01:29:13 ◼   ► Right. Well, here's an example of that. And so I don't—I haven't seen this because I don't go anywhere.

01:29:18 ◼   ► I wake up and just come downstairs and make coffee.

01:29:21 ◼   ► Yeah, same.

01:29:22 ◼   ► But I just got an email—you know, there's a feature in iOS 7 where it's supposed to, like, you know,

01:29:28 ◼   ► it uses the M7 motion co-processor and figures out where you go on a daily basis and when you do it.

01:29:35 ◼   ► And somebody who reads Daring Fireball just like, "Wow, this just happened to me today for the first time."

01:29:40 ◼   ► pretty impressive is that like Thursday afternoon, like for 445, you know, in the today tab,

01:29:50 ◼   ► it gave them like an estimate of the traffic to drive home. That it was going to take longer

01:29:56 ◼   ► than usual to drive home because there was traffic on the route that he usually drives.

01:30:02 ◼   ► Which I guess I remember being advertised as a feature but I never really gave much

01:30:05 ◼   ► thought to because A, it doesn't really apply to me but B, I wasn't sure how it would work.

01:30:10 ◼   ► And he was like, "I never did anything."

01:30:11 ◼   ► I mean, obviously, he opted into the whatever, asked permission for his location.

01:30:17 ◼   ► But other than that, he didn't opt into it.

01:30:18 ◼   ► And now, like when he goes to work, his Today tab gives him like a traffic estimate.

01:30:24 ◼   ► So I think that's pretty cool.

01:30:25 ◼   ► Well, that's kind of cool.

01:30:26 ◼   ► That is cool.

01:30:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:28 ◼   ► And that is clearly – that's the sort of cool thing too.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Let's face it, that Google has been a lot better at than anybody else.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Yes.

01:30:34 ◼   ► Apple, you know, Microsoft, anybody.

01:30:36 ◼   ► Google clearly leads the industry in that sort of combination of services and your history,

01:30:50 ◼   ► online services that know what the state of the whole world is right now, like that this

01:30:54 ◼   ► certain road is backed up, combined with the prediction of, "I think you're going to do

01:30:59 ◼   ► this again."

01:31:00 ◼   ► Because every Thursday…

01:31:01 ◼   ► Anyway, all the things that make them creepy are their strengths.

01:31:05 ◼   ► And I'm not even trying to be a jerk about that.

01:31:09 ◼   ► It cuts both ways.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, they know exactly where you're up to

01:31:17 ◼   ► and where you're going and your ETA.

01:31:21 ◼   ► What can be creepy about them, in my opinion, is what they do with it

01:31:25 ◼   ► and how far they go with it.

01:31:29 ◼   ► you got a 30-minute drive home, there's a roadblock here, why don't you stop at this

01:31:33 ◼   ► restaurant and have your favorite burger? Here's a $5 discount. That gets a little bit weird.

01:31:39 ◼   ► To me, what this says that they bought Q isn't so much that they want to do Google Now,

01:31:50 ◼   ► because of course they want to do a Google Now kind of thing. What it says to me is that they

01:31:54 ◼   ► haven't got one going yet. Or at least that they need to augment it. Right?

01:32:01 ◼   ► Like if they were well down the road to getting this done, they wouldn't necessarily need

01:32:06 ◼   ► to buy Q.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Yeah, possibly. Let's face it, Siri was the exact same type of acquisition. I mean,

01:32:13 ◼   ► Siri didn't even change names, which is one of the most unusual marketing decisions. I

01:32:18 ◼   ► mean, I'm not even saying that's not a great name.

01:32:19 ◼   ► Apparently Steve wanted to change the name.

01:32:21 ◼   ► Oh, really?

01:32:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:23 ◼   ► I didn't know that.

01:32:24 ◼   ► a source for that. It could have been the Isaacson book.

01:32:27 ◼   ► Huh. I don't remember that from the book, but I believe it.

01:32:30 ◼   ► They couldn't come up with anything better. So they just stuck with Siri.

01:32:33 ◼   ► Like it was going to be something cold, like personal assistant.

01:32:38 ◼   ► And they just danned the billing.

01:32:41 ◼   ► But, you know, Siri was just a startup that they acquired.

01:32:44 ◼   ► Siri used to be in the App Store.

01:32:46 ◼   ► Yep.

01:32:49 ◼   ► Anyway, interesting stuff.

01:32:52 ◼   ► But you know, let's get, you know, let's finally settle in what we're good at talking about.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Microsoft.

01:32:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:58 ◼   ► How did you like that Ballmer farewell?

01:33:01 ◼   ► You know, I feel like it was perfect for him.

01:33:07 ◼   ► And you know, it divided everybody.

01:33:09 ◼   ► It's a good way of putting it.

01:33:11 ◼   ► Perfect for him.

01:33:12 ◼   ► It was a perfect Steve Ballmer goodbye.

01:33:16 ◼   ► And for those of you who didn't watch it, if you skip the video, you should go look

01:33:18 ◼   ► it up.

01:33:19 ◼   ► Because it's worth watching.

01:33:20 ◼   ► It's only four minutes long.

01:33:22 ◼   ► But A, it just shows all sorts of things that I think are unique to Microsoft. Like the

01:33:25 ◼   ► fact that they have a company meeting every year in a 14,000 seat basketball arena is

01:33:32 ◼   ► crazy.

01:33:33 ◼   ► That's crazy.

01:33:34 ◼   ► I mean, Apple's got lots of employees like that, but they never rent out the place where

01:33:38 ◼   ► the San Jose Sharks play and have them all meet there at once for like effectively a

01:33:42 ◼   ► pep rally.

01:33:43 ◼   ► You're not even putting –

01:33:44 ◼   ► And I'm not even putting – I put it down because you know what? I wouldn't do that.

01:33:47 ◼   ► But I mean, you know, some people go for that. Microsoft's always gone for things like

01:33:51 ◼   ► that. Yeah, I mean, believe me, that is not my style. This is not what I would be doing.

01:33:56 ◼   ► People always accuse Apple of being more cult-like or religion-like or whatever,

01:34:03 ◼   ► but in my experience, people who work at Apple are the opposite of that. People who work at Apple,

01:34:07 ◼   ► they may love Apple and they may love the products, but they're not. They don't have a fervor about

01:34:11 ◼   ► it. I agree. You know, the story I remember, I hate to cut you off. Remember your thought. Do you

01:34:18 ◼   ► Do you have your thought in mind?

01:34:20 ◼   ► The story I remember was from way back.

01:34:23 ◼   ► And this was back at the--

01:34:25 ◼   ► when Microsoft-- let's face it.

01:34:30 ◼   ► They screwed IBM over on the next generation operating system.

01:34:35 ◼   ► Where-- what was it?

01:34:36 ◼   ► I was an OS/2 fan.

01:34:37 ◼   ► Yeah, OS/2.

01:34:38 ◼   ► So--

01:34:39 ◼   ► All in on OS/2.

01:34:40 ◼   ► And they got--

01:34:41 ◼   ► All right.

01:34:42 ◼   ► So you know more than I do.

01:34:43 ◼   ► Long story short, though, OS/2 was

01:34:47 ◼   ► supposed to be like a joint product of Microsoft and IBM, mostly IBM, but Microsoft would back

01:34:52 ◼   ► it and they'd write apps for it and they'd port Office and Excel and everything to it.

01:34:56 ◼   ► And then, you know, that was...

01:34:57 ◼   ► >> Microsoft worked, they had a joint team working on the OS.

01:35:01 ◼   ► >> Right.

01:35:02 ◼   ► >> What the file system for OS/2 ended up being converted into NTFS.

01:35:08 ◼   ► >> But secretly behind the scenes, they kept working on Windows.

01:35:13 ◼   ► >> They had their own kernel that they dropped in underneath the OS/2 kernel.

01:35:17 ◼   ► Yeah. And it was. It was secretly behind the scenes. They made NT while IBM was working

01:35:22 ◼   ► on OS/2 and Microsoft was working on OS/2.

01:35:25 ◼   ► Right. And they had no real intention of ever porting Word and Excel, though, as to…

01:35:30 ◼   ► Uh…

01:35:31 ◼   ► And just kind of… But I remember reading the story…

01:35:34 ◼   ► It's politically murky, but yeah, basically, they, you know, they shift.

01:35:37 ◼   ► I remember reading… And I could be misremembering details. I should Google this, I guess, before

01:35:42 ◼   ► the show goes live.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it must be 20 years.

01:35:44 ◼   ► It was like one of these big company meetings with 10, 20,000 Microsoft employees at once.

01:35:50 ◼   ► And they drove out a jalopy that said OS/2.

01:35:55 ◼   ► And everybody booed.

01:35:57 ◼   ► And then they drove out a cool-looking car that said Windows.

01:36:00 ◼   ► And everybody cheered.

01:36:01 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:36:02 ◼   ► This was after the falling out.

01:36:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:04 ◼   ► But after the falling out became public.

01:36:05 ◼   ► And it was just, you know.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Yes.

01:36:08 ◼   ► And it just seemed vaguely dangerous.

01:36:10 ◼   ► It always seemed to rub me the wrong way that it was dangerously close to like a book burning.

01:36:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:16 ◼   ► I never thought of it like that.

01:36:21 ◼   ► But yeah, that's horrible.

01:36:24 ◼   ► You know, like an apple…

01:36:25 ◼   ► I used to work at a… this is totally on the side.

01:36:27 ◼   ► I used to work at a used bookstore and every now and then we'd buy like…

01:36:31 ◼   ► you know, we would buy books from people who were selling them to resell.

01:36:35 ◼   ► and eventually we'd have like five copies of some romance novel.

01:36:40 ◼   ► And three of them would have to go in the trash.

01:36:43 ◼   ► And I could never actually throw them out in the trash.

01:36:46 ◼   ► I would just take the big box that I was tasked with throwing out,

01:36:49 ◼   ► and I would sit them next to the recycling bin.

01:36:52 ◼   ► Because I couldn't bring myself to actually just destroy the box.

01:36:55 ◼   ► It just always seemed wrong. I remember working.

01:36:57 ◼   ► I didn't work at a bookstore, but I worked at a drugstore chain

01:37:01 ◼   ► that had, you know, that sold like mass market books and you used to have to, you

01:37:06 ◼   ► had to tear the cover off for the paperbacks and they even used to print,

01:37:09 ◼   ► I do, they probably still do, where they say if you bought this book without a

01:37:12 ◼   ► cover you've bought an illegal book, you know, that you would tear the cover

01:37:17 ◼   ► off and send those covers back to the publisher as proof that you didn't sell

01:37:22 ◼   ► those books but in the meantime, yeah, you were just expected to like shred the

01:37:25 ◼   ► books and it always... Yeah, I don't know about you but I was like fuck that and

01:37:29 ◼   ► You know, whatever.

01:37:33 ◼   ► There's just too much history behind book burning to ever get behind it.

01:37:36 ◼   ► Even like you said, even if it's just like a totally apolitical, just a pulp romance

01:37:43 ◼   ► or a detective thriller.

01:37:45 ◼   ► Just like just utter...

01:37:46 ◼   ► There's just something I have in me.

01:37:47 ◼   ► I am not putting books in the garbage.

01:37:49 ◼   ► I am not.

01:37:50 ◼   ► I won't be doing it.

01:37:52 ◼   ► Which is weird.

01:37:53 ◼   ► But whatever.

01:37:54 ◼   ► But yeah, anyway, back to your point.

01:37:56 ◼   ► Yes, they've got a weird company culture.

01:37:59 ◼   ► What I found striking about this Ballmer farewell is that he was at his Ballmer best, where

01:38:07 ◼   ► he's sort of weepy and screaming and fist-pumping the air.

01:38:13 ◼   ► Sweaty.

01:38:14 ◼   ► Sweaty.

01:38:15 ◼   ► Let's face it.

01:38:16 ◼   ► It's sort of a...

01:38:17 ◼   ► I mean, hey, even if you love the guy, you've got to admit the guy has a history of sweating.

01:38:22 ◼   ► Yes.

01:38:23 ◼   ► That's his style.

01:38:24 ◼   ► What I found interesting, but this sort of took a bit of the sting away from that developers,

01:38:28 ◼   ► developers developers thing for me though in that when I watch that I just thought he

01:38:33 ◼   ► was on a coke fueled I literally thought he was just coked out of his mind and just whatever

01:38:39 ◼   ► like maybe he doesn't like public speaking just a couple like does a line or two before

01:38:43 ◼   ► he gets out there and just and this is again this is just interpretation of like his excitement

01:38:49 ◼   ► it had nothing to do with anything else but this was like no he's just a legitimately

01:38:54 ◼   ► very emotional kind of guy. Did you notice the person that just screamed out, "We love

01:38:59 ◼   ► you," from the audience? That's weird. I would not be screaming that at my CEO.

01:39:06 ◼   ► But it fit right in there.

01:39:08 ◼   ► But it felt natural. It really did. So that little farewell thing to me was like, "Okay,

01:39:14 ◼   ► this is weird. This is not my culture." But they've got a culture there that this is their

01:39:19 ◼   ► thing and it's interesting.

01:39:23 ◼   ► The Verge, I think, I don't even know how they got the "exclusive" video to it at first.

01:39:29 ◼   ► They asked around and they pulled some strings.

01:39:32 ◼   ► But they had the video and their description of it, and who knows, maybe it's partly because they pulled some strings and got it from Microsoft and so they had to frame it positively.

01:39:40 ◼   ► But they really made it seem like it was like, everybody's gotta love this video.

01:39:45 ◼   ► Whereas a couple of readers after I linked to it wrote to me and they were like look

01:39:49 ◼   ► I you know

01:39:50 ◼   ► I don't really even care that much about my so I gotta tell you that video made me uncomfortable

01:39:53 ◼   ► And if I was there I would have been oh I was totally I would have been really uncomfortable

01:39:57 ◼   ► Like I can't believe that nobody is mentioning just how kind of uncomfortable this is and I was like, oh, I'm right there with you

01:40:04 ◼   ► It's you know, yeah, I don't think that they were I don't know. I think maybe needle I got it

01:40:09 ◼   ► I don't think he was passing it off as

01:40:13 ◼   ► This is just amazing and great right and isn't it? I think it was more like a you got to love these guys

01:40:20 ◼   ► Well, you know what I mean, but there's a distinction there being like I was uncomfortable

01:40:25 ◼   ► But at the same time I was like well everybody in this room seems kind of into this

01:40:29 ◼   ► Yeah, well and it was not for me

01:40:31 ◼   ► But I mean that's a lot of people that are kind of into this and it was definitely his style. Yeah

01:40:37 ◼   ► Yeah, he went out like he you know went out like he lived so

01:40:40 ◼   ► He definitely got hooked off stage though. There's some weird stuff going on there.

01:40:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too. Who knows if anything will come with it, but it's not like it was reported in a crackpot publication.

01:40:57 ◼   ► I think it was Bloomberg where they said that there's a group that controls 3-5% of Microsoft shares who want Bill Gates to step down as chairman.

01:41:06 ◼   ► That's exactly my next thing.

01:41:08 ◼   ► So it was three out of – I believe it was three out of the top 20 investors, which is

01:41:12 ◼   ► such a weird thing to say because that's a pretty big range.

01:41:17 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:41:18 ◼   ► Like what is it like?

01:41:19 ◼   ► Number five, number 18, and number 20?

01:41:21 ◼   ► Like what –

01:41:22 ◼   ► Well, and the big question is are they just the three who are willing to put their names

01:41:27 ◼   ► out in public right now and do it?

01:41:29 ◼   ► Do they speak for a larger number of the institutional investors?

01:41:34 ◼   ► Normal people like us, if you and I go out tomorrow and log into our E-Trade accounts

01:41:39 ◼   ► to spend a couple hundred or thousand dollars on Microsoft stock, well, we don't give it.

01:41:43 ◼   ► It doesn't matter anyway. What matters are the big investors, the institutional ones, pension funds,

01:41:48 ◼   ► hedge funds and things like that. Somebody who controls, even if it's just 1%, if you control 1%,

01:41:54 ◼   ► you're talking serious money, like a billion dollars. Then you have a say in that matter.

01:42:02 ◼   ► And how many… is this just a small group and that's it and it's just going to float away?

01:42:07 ◼   ► Or is there a serious contingent of institutional Microsoft investors who want,

01:42:11 ◼   ► effectively, not just Balmer gone, but they want the board gone, including Gates?

01:42:17 ◼   ► Okay, so let's just back up a bit and just… because we're running long, but let's play this

01:42:24 ◼   ► back chronologically when it gets stepped down, like 15 years ago type thing?

01:42:31 ◼   ► It was sort of gradual. 15 years ago might have been too long though. I think it was

01:42:39 ◼   ► more about 10 years ago. But I don't know.

01:42:43 ◼   ► Following that, stock price effectively stagnates. Microsoft fails to get into mobile, does get

01:42:52 ◼   ► into consoles but doesn't really make a shitload of money off that. Windows starts to stagnate

01:42:59 ◼   ► as tablets come up, like they missed Adwave too.

01:43:05 ◼   ► I'll tell you when it was. I looked it up. January 2000. So we're about halfway right.

01:43:10 ◼   ► About 13 years. But you were a little bit closer to me. So closer to 15.

01:43:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I was about to call you out. I'm splitting the difference, but I was like, "I'm on his

01:43:22 ◼   ► I'm just I'm gonna be polite. I'm not gonna rub it in his face

01:43:25 ◼   ► And I was closer than because we're two months away from it being 14 years, so we'll call it halfway between 10

01:43:30 ◼   ► No, and you know and and well what happened pretty quickly

01:43:35 ◼   ► I mean here's a quick example and who knows what would have happened differently if he'd stayed and been and you know if he didn't

01:43:40 ◼   ► If you wanted to have stayed but a perfect example is XP XP is probably

01:43:45 ◼   ► The I think everybody might agree was the most successful version of Windows ever that at a time it came out

01:43:52 ◼   ► It was popular and it remained popular, but they got stuck on it

01:43:56 ◼   ► But it's certainly the most successful right and you know and it was a long time before the next one came out

01:44:01 ◼   ► Which was Vista and when the Vista did come out people didn't like it and they stuck with XP so yeah

01:44:06 ◼   ► This was a disaster and in fact bomber mentioned

01:44:09 ◼   ► In the early 2000s to failure

01:44:13 ◼   ► Focusing on Vista made them miss much of other opportunities because effectively they go to Vistas

01:44:19 ◼   ► they go Longhorn right which had this crazy file system and a whole bunch of other stuff and

01:44:24 ◼   ► Then this ended up having to back off a bunch of that and then ship what was Vista right which is kind of this half-assed

01:44:31 ◼   ► We got a ship something. Holy shit. It's been five years six years

01:44:36 ◼   ► It was like it

01:44:36 ◼   ► You know we now have 12 to 18 months to get something out the door or we just look like total idiots, right?

01:44:43 ◼   ► It was more or less like okay. None of this. We were not we haven't shipped any of this stuff from Longhorn

01:44:48 ◼   ► Here's some invisible windows or translucent windows. Yeah, like way way overdone blur effect, right?

01:44:55 ◼   ► That's probably the same blur effect. It's an iOS 7 right now, probably

01:44:58 ◼   ► I'm sure there's somebody up in Redmond who you know when at the day that I was seven was unveiled and everybody was

01:45:05 ◼   ► Wow, look at that cool blurred like the guy who like wrote the blur for Vista is what do you think?

01:45:11 ◼   ► It was like a fist pump or a face palm. I think it was like a pour out of scotch

01:45:16 ◼   ► Like this is why daddy drinks

01:45:18 ◼   ► Right because it was like the exact same people who like in 2007 when vista ship they were like what the fuck is this

01:45:27 ◼   ► blurship

01:45:30 ◼   ► Why are you wasting my time with it and now they're like wow

01:45:33 ◼   ► Notification Center blurs the background

01:45:36 ◼   ► Poor bastards, right? Um

01:45:40 ◼   ► Stock stagnates

01:45:44 ◼   ► They end up losing well-known executives left, right and center over the past couple of years.

01:45:50 ◼   ► Jay Allard, Sinofsky, Ray Ozzie, who they brought in to sort of rejuvenate the technologist

01:46:02 ◼   ► side of the company and then left like three to five years after he got in.

01:46:07 ◼   ► It wasn't a long enough tenure to really make his mark.

01:46:10 ◼   ► know what I mean? Just recently announced a Total Vorg to fit the Apple model, which

01:46:20 ◼   ► is weird because that's a model that apparently only Apple does.

01:46:27 ◼   ► Seemingly, at least for companies of that size where there's only one marketing division.

01:46:33 ◼   ► Phil Schiller is in charge of marketing for Apple. There is no separate Mac marketing

01:46:38 ◼   ► manager. There's no separate iPhone marketing manager. There's one marketing team. And now

01:46:44 ◼   ► there's one OS engineer.

01:46:45 ◼   ► The iOS marketing group does not fight with the Mac marketing group to figure out who

01:46:49 ◼   ► gets the ad. It's not even up for debate.

01:46:55 ◼   ► There may be a debate, but it's a debate within one team.

01:46:58 ◼   ► Yeah, sorry. It's not up to butting heads and rutting, whatever the hell that expression

01:47:06 ◼   ► is. But Apple will arguably go into it organically.

01:47:13 ◼   ► Well, I mean maybe Steve came back and shook it up.

01:47:18 ◼   ► Well, maybe, yeah, because they've always been like that. No, they were always like that. Always.

01:47:20 ◼   ► I mean, and, you know, and at least always dating back to 1997, right?

01:47:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:47:26 ◼   ► I mean, let's just say that, you know, that Apple effectively truly got the, you know, if they ever had a real reorder.

01:47:30 ◼   ► If you give, if you give, if you see 97 as like a reboot switch, then yeah.

01:47:37 ◼   ► And the problem with Apple in terms of organization-wise, before Steve Jobs came back in '97, wasn't

01:47:43 ◼   ► really that they were set up in divisions.

01:47:45 ◼   ► It's just that they were just a mess.

01:47:47 ◼   ► I mean, it wasn't really like Microsoft where they had separate, that the Newton group was

01:47:51 ◼   ► separate from Apple, from the Mac group, even though they were, and that was part of the

01:47:55 ◼   ► problem.

01:47:56 ◼   ► But it was really just more that they were a mess and didn't have, you know, they were

01:47:59 ◼   ► just disorganized.

01:48:00 ◼   ► disorganized rather than how they were organized.

01:48:03 ◼   ► Yes, that's a good distinction.

01:48:06 ◼   ► So, whatever.

01:48:08 ◼   ► And that's a total view.

01:48:10 ◼   ► And then what, like a couple of months later, one month?

01:48:14 ◼   ► Bama gets the boot.

01:48:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:17 ◼   ► That's weird.

01:48:20 ◼   ► It looks bad. It makes you wonder just how nervous and desperate they are behind the scenes

01:48:24 ◼   ► because you wouldn't do that.

01:48:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:27 ◼   ► Right? In theory.

01:48:28 ◼   ► No, it doesn't make any sense.

01:48:29 ◼   ► If you're going to give Ballmer the boot, you give him the boot before he does a re-organ,

01:48:31 ◼   ► you let the new guy do it.

01:48:33 ◼   ► Right.

01:48:34 ◼   ► And how did they let him go?

01:48:35 ◼   ► You know, clearly, the re-org, you know, I don't know how much, how and when.

01:48:40 ◼   ► And actually, yeah, how much is that?

01:48:41 ◼   ► It's just paperwork, right?

01:48:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:43 ◼   ► How much does the CEO…

01:48:44 ◼   ► Like within six months, you will change your organization to be blah.

01:48:48 ◼   ► And then it hasn't actually changed and you just can the guy that said it and you

01:48:51 ◼   ► can just cancel all the paperwork without actually reassigning people to defend.

01:48:55 ◼   ► Right.

01:48:56 ◼   ► Ballmer had been CEO for 13 years and he had been at the company as a right-hand man to

01:49:04 ◼   ► Gates all along. So he'd been there since the company was 13 or 14 people. I don't know

01:49:12 ◼   ► what employee number he is, but it's probably double digits. One thing I don't think Steve

01:49:22 ◼   ► Balmer was lacking in or even still is probably his confidence.

01:49:26 ◼   ► You know, but so how much does a CEO who's been there for all along, he's been CEO for

01:49:31 ◼   ► 13 years, clearly a pretty confident guy, how much does he have to run by the board

01:49:36 ◼   ► before he gets through?

01:49:37 ◼   ► Well, I would guess something like a reorg is something he has to go to the board and

01:49:41 ◼   ► say here's what I want to do.

01:49:42 ◼   ► I don't think that he can announce a company wide reorganization without going to the board

01:49:47 ◼   ► first.

01:49:48 ◼   ► But there is some kind of weird dynamic there where he went to the board, presumably, and

01:49:53 ◼   ► got the okay for it, but at the same time the board must have already been thinking,

01:49:57 ◼   ► "We want to ask this guy to step down."

01:50:00 ◼   ► It seems weird that they didn't say, "Hey, let's slow down on the reorg for a second.

01:50:05 ◼   ► We want to talk to you about something."

01:50:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:50:08 ◼   ► I don't understand how there's—I can't see a scenario where this is good for Microsoft.

01:50:18 ◼   ► just did the reorg without talking to the board?

01:50:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:50:21 ◼   ► But, you know...

01:50:22 ◼   ► That kind of makes a bit of sense.

01:50:24 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay, you just reorg this and we publicly want to shame you or us, so you're

01:50:30 ◼   ► gone."

01:50:31 ◼   ► But even that seems crazy.

01:50:32 ◼   ► I hate to make sports analogies, whereby I mean I love to make sports analogies.

01:50:37 ◼   ► But to me it's like a team that's in trouble.

01:50:40 ◼   ► And the coach announces, "Here's our new playbook for next year."

01:50:43 ◼   ► Sure.

01:50:44 ◼   ► It's the third quarter of the 14th season.

01:50:45 ◼   ► We've driven we're gonna get these we're gonna set the whole team up to fit this playbook. That's new

01:50:52 ◼   ► It's a totally different style of play than what it doesn't matter what sport you're talking about, but a totally different style of play

01:50:57 ◼   ► We're gonna switch to it. We're gonna set the whole thing up. We're gonna get all the players

01:51:01 ◼   ► We're gonna get players who fit this new style of play and oh by the way, I'm not gonna be here next year

01:51:06 ◼   ► We're gonna get a new coach and now you come in but we've already shuffled the team and reorganize the team

01:51:13 ◼   ► Yeah, that to me just… I wrote a bit about that. You don't get to set the play… I'm

01:51:23 ◼   ► desperately going to try to follow your analogy. You don't get to set up the play and then

01:51:26 ◼   ► just walk away from the field and let somebody else deal with the consequences.

01:51:31 ◼   ► It just seems 100% backwards, that you really want to pick the leader first and let the

01:51:34 ◼   ► leader set the organizational structure. Exactly. Like, "Here's the structure.

01:51:39 ◼   ► I'm going to wipe my hands of this and I'm walking away. Good luck with that.

01:51:42 ◼   ► That's just crazy. And even Balmer in his...

01:51:48 ◼   ► I believe it was... I'm trying to remember the email.

01:51:52 ◼   ► Wasn't it long and rambling and kind of really poorly written and not a...

01:51:57 ◼   ► It seemed like it needed three paragraphs, frankly.

01:52:00 ◼   ► Except for upfront where I thought he was unusually honest about the fact that he

01:52:08 ◼   ► He didn't think that, you know, now would not have been the time he would have picked.

01:52:12 ◼   ► That's the bit I was going to comment on. He comes out and says that he wanted to do it later, at least halfway through the transition, which even that's weird, but whatever.

01:52:24 ◼   ► But right at the beginning, it's just weird. Anyway, and now we're hearing that Bill Gates is facing pressure to step away from the board.

01:52:33 ◼   ► How is this not a company that's in chaos?

01:52:38 ◼   ► Like, I can't...

01:52:43 ◼   ► As much ink as is spent talking about Apple,

01:52:48 ◼   ► I think Microsoft is the most interesting story in tech these days.

01:52:53 ◼   ► Yeah, because there's more drama. I mean, I think that Apple...

01:52:55 ◼   ► Yeah, and I don't mean that in a salacious way.

01:52:57 ◼   ► Right.

01:52:58 ◼   ► I mean, I didn't know, like, this is a technological powerhouse with a lot of talent

01:53:02 ◼   ► that is clearly in turmoil and we honestly don't know what's going to happen.

01:53:06 ◼   ► The other big tell, and this is the sort of thing where because I don't follow Microsoft

01:53:10 ◼   ► as closely, I never even heard of the guy before, but back in April of this year, Microsoft's

01:53:14 ◼   ► CFO Peter Klein announced his resignation because he wanted to, literally this is the

01:53:19 ◼   ► explanation, he wanted to spend more time with his family. Which is, you know, is sort

01:53:24 ◼   ► of PR speak for, I'm not going to tell you why I'm leaving. Could be anything. But M.G.

01:53:28 ◼   ► MG Siegler was the first one I remember, when the Balmer resignation was announced, where

01:53:34 ◼   ► he was like, "You know, who's the first one to know?"

01:53:37 ◼   ► You know, typical MG fashion spun it with a TV or movie reference, but to know when

01:53:42 ◼   ► winter is coming, to sort of call out Game of Thrones.

01:53:46 ◼   ► MG has a bit better up his sleeve than that.

01:53:50 ◼   ► You know what he means, though.

01:53:51 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:53:52 ◼   ► It totally works.

01:53:53 ◼   ► It totally, totally, totally works.

01:53:54 ◼   ► See, that's the thing.

01:53:55 ◼   ► I know people give MG a hard time about his movie and TV references, but he uses them

01:53:57 ◼   ► in a way where it saves a lot of words and you know what I like him and I like

01:54:02 ◼   ► his references I just think he's like who knows it's a bit of a shallow reach

01:54:06 ◼   ► right like the CFO is the one who knows when bad news is coming six months nine

01:54:11 ◼   ► months from now like kind of sees which way the wind is blowing and publicly

01:54:14 ◼   ► yeah they only talk about what they just did in the last quarter and they give

01:54:19 ◼   ► guidance for the next quarter well I don't think that I mean I think that's

01:54:23 ◼   ► like legally right yeah of course yeah I think it is yeah but behind the scenes

01:54:28 ◼   ► he might have a better idea of what's going oh yeah yeah and you know and and

01:54:33 ◼   ► they can say all they want that they're you know not worried about the post PC

01:54:41 ◼   ► effect on PC sales but I mean it's been a long time since PC sales have grown

01:54:45 ◼   ► quarter to quarter they're shrinking and it it's the sort of I've overused this

01:54:51 ◼   ► analogy it's the the Hemingway description of what it how do you go

01:54:56 ◼   ► bankrupt and it's you go bankrupt two ways slowly and then quickly yeah you

01:55:02 ◼   ► know that the the pop in in Windows licensing sales could happen very

01:55:06 ◼   ► quickly and it seems like before it would get dramatically bad what you would

01:55:12 ◼   ► see is exactly what you've seen over the last year or two where it gets slowly

01:55:16 ◼   ► bad. So do you think that's what's happening at Microsoft? Is it their executive level

01:55:24 ◼   ► and their most informed investors see the writing on the wall? That's exactly what

01:55:29 ◼   ► I think is happening. I think the most informed investors… I think that the reason the RE-ORG

01:55:34 ◼   ► was made in a way that I think is contrary to Microsoft's, you know, the way that they've

01:55:40 ◼   ► been for 20 years and following who else, Apple, is about that writing on the wall.

01:55:45 ◼   ► on the wall. We don't know what else to try but to try this because it seems to be working

01:55:49 ◼   ► for somebody.

01:55:50 ◼   ► And I think with the investors, what they see is the only good thing about this company

01:55:56 ◼   ► over the last 10 years has been the revenue they've had from the institutions of Windows

01:56:02 ◼   ► on PCs and office sales on top of those PCs and enterprise service money, all sorts, whatever

01:56:11 ◼   ► else you want to file into that but all of that is going based on people sitting

01:56:17 ◼   ► at desks using Windows PCs right I mean so yeah it's more the client side is

01:56:22 ◼   ► getting you voted by right iOS or Mac sir right hell whatever even right home

01:56:27 ◼   ► books whatever you want to say and the services side is getting you voted by

01:56:29 ◼   ► Google like I totally understand that it is Microsoft's revenue and profit centers

01:56:34 ◼   ► are way more complicated than it used to be where you really could just say it's

01:56:38 ◼   ► It's all just Windows and Office.

01:56:39 ◼   ► And I totally understand that it's more complicated than that now.

01:56:44 ◼   ► But I still think that all the stuff that makes it more complicated than that is still

01:56:47 ◼   ► sitting on top of Windows on PCs.

01:56:50 ◼   ► And I think that there's a lot of people who see that the bottom is just going to drop

01:56:52 ◼   ► out on it.

01:56:55 ◼   ► And I think that it's not that they necessarily think, "Hey, the existing team can't possibly

01:57:01 ◼   ► be the ones who write this."

01:57:03 ◼   ► I think it's more or less, "But we've given them enough time and they've dropped the ball

01:57:08 ◼   ► enough times that we're going to make a change.

01:57:10 ◼   ► So should Gates go?

01:57:11 ◼   ► I don't know. I don't know. It's hard for me to say because I don't really know. I really

01:57:15 ◼   ► have no idea how involved he is.

01:57:17 ◼   ► Well, I do know that he's been a big supportive bomber.

01:57:20 ◼   ► Right.

01:57:21 ◼   ► Like, he's always had his back kind of thing.

01:57:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:57:24 ◼   ► So maybe it's one of those like, well, bombers clearly led us into these woods and…

01:57:29 ◼   ► It happened on Gates' watch.

01:57:30 ◼   ► Yeah. It's like, now we're looking for a new CEO. We don't want Gates to be the one

01:57:35 ◼   ► to pick the next CEO because he's going to pick the same thing that he's going to

01:57:38 ◼   ► Or he's the one who let Ballmer stay as long as he did.

01:57:41 ◼   ► Exactly, yeah. But frankly, I can't imagine Microsoft without either Ballmer or Gates.

01:57:47 ◼   ► It seems very obvious.

01:57:49 ◼   ► It blows my mind. And they're talking about getting the CEO from Ford to run Microsoft?

01:57:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:57:54 ◼   ► Does that remind you of anything? Like a Pepsi CEO?

01:57:59 ◼   ► Yeah, right. Selling sugar water. Right? It just does not seem to me that they need somebody from outside tech.

01:58:06 ◼   ► I don't know what they need. What do you think they need? I'm tempted to say like

01:58:14 ◼   ► Jay Allard or like even Sinofsky or something like comes back. But I mean that's because

01:58:19 ◼   ► those are names that I know. You know who I like is the guy that does all the presentations

01:58:23 ◼   ► for the surface. Oh man, what's his name?

01:58:26 ◼   ► Oh, I know who you mean.

01:58:28 ◼   ► The one guy that doesn't blow it on stage. He does a great job.

01:58:32 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, I forget his name.

01:58:34 ◼   ► But I'm sure that's mostly just because I'm thinking of a stage presence rather than the

01:58:38 ◼   ► ability to manage anything day to day.

01:58:41 ◼   ► Oh, man, I wish I knew that guy's name.

01:58:44 ◼   ► I'm going to look it up.

01:58:46 ◼   ► So yeah, what do you think they need?

01:58:48 ◼   ► I wonder.

01:58:49 ◼   ► I wonder if there's anything that they can do to stay relevant as the type of company

01:58:53 ◼   ► that we talk about on shows like this and that we write about on our blogs.

01:58:58 ◼   ► To me, the easiest out is, and to make investors happy and keep the stock float, is to go the

01:59:06 ◼   ► IBM route where you just sort of become a consulting company and there's all sorts of

01:59:12 ◼   ► money to be made in the enterprise.

01:59:14 ◼   ► They still have all sorts of people in the enterprise who know and trust Microsoft products,

01:59:19 ◼   ► but to sort of fade from view as a consumer tech company.

01:59:24 ◼   ► When is the last time IBM has done anything that you or I have taken note of?

01:59:28 ◼   ► I can't remember. But IBM remains one of the most successful, profitable, and successful.

01:59:34 ◼   ► You know, their stock is successful, their profits are high, their revenue is high.

01:59:38 ◼   ► Panos Panay is the Microsoft's name. Yes. Exactly.

01:59:43 ◼   ► Last time I paid attention to IBM was, I don't know, OS/2 warp 4, maybe? Like, fucking, like, 20 years ago?

01:59:52 ◼   ► Right. I would say it was probably, for me, the last time I remember paying attention to them was when they still owned the ThinkPad.

01:59:58 ◼   ► brand and still oh yeah but it's been a long time and I was already waiting

02:00:03 ◼   ► right though dry but at point I just you know and I wasn't like I was buying

02:00:08 ◼   ► thinkpads but I always thought and I still think it was good quality hard when

02:00:12 ◼   ► they sold it to Lenovo right I still think in general like when I've seen

02:00:16 ◼   ► them and you know just typed on whatever they say I still think Lenovo makes good

02:00:19 ◼   ► laptops that if I had to use a laptop other than a MacBook I'd probably get a

02:00:24 ◼   ► Lenovo if I had to just pick a brand but but you know IBM's been out of that came

02:00:28 ◼   ► for a while but I did that sort of route of you know sort of getting away from

02:00:32 ◼   ► consumer technology and off this train of chasing this is you know one solution

02:00:38 ◼   ► I could think of and I can't help but think too that if they were to hire the

02:00:42 ◼   ► Ford guy that that's what they're talking about you know that he would need

02:00:46 ◼   ► Microsoft what Lou Gerstner was to IBM.

02:00:50 ◼   ► Yeah, Lou Gerstner is interesting though, right? I mean, that company was tanking.

02:00:57 ◼   ► And he fired for the first time in their history, he laid off and fired a bunch of people.

02:01:03 ◼   ► Like I said, I'm not even saying it's the wrong way to go. But for the enthusiasts,

02:01:08 ◼   ► the people who read The Verge and really like Microsoft products, the people who read Paul

02:01:13 ◼   ► throws so yeah yeah people like you and I will not find I mean it would be

02:01:18 ◼   ► hard last time we do you know the name of an IBM executive I don't know yeah I

02:01:23 ◼   ► don't know right and it you know but I could see them going I do know that you

02:01:27 ◼   ► know I know the Blackberry guys to the way through restraints on airliners

02:01:30 ◼   ► that's at least you know you're going out in style he's going down fighting at

02:01:35 ◼   ► that point now on the other hand though at least at this point with the current

02:01:40 ◼   ► board and leadership it certainly doesn't seem like Microsoft's

02:01:44 ◼   ► Current leadership even with Ballmer on the way out is thinking in that way like there's no because if they were there's no way they would

02:01:50 ◼   ► Be you know trying to acquire Nokia's handset business

02:01:53 ◼   ► It's you know Microsoft as it stands today wants to fight

02:01:58 ◼   ► they want to I think so they want to get ahead of Android and market share and they want to

02:02:04 ◼   ► Compete or you get ahead of Apple in terms of you know

02:02:09 ◼   ► popularity and branding and style.

02:02:11 ◼   ► One of the creepiest things about that Balmer video was the signage in the background above

02:02:22 ◼   ► this sort of the first row of seats.

02:02:25 ◼   ► Did you notice it?

02:02:26 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

02:02:27 ◼   ► So it's all blue, but it's like a banner ad.

02:02:30 ◼   ► And it says, "Microsoft colon can't hold us."

02:02:36 ◼   ► Which is this weirdly defensive…

02:02:40 ◼   ► I don't even…

02:02:41 ◼   ► There's a weird psychology to that, right?

02:02:45 ◼   ► We're getting picked on, but we're not going to stop.

02:02:49 ◼   ► We're going to keep fighting.

02:02:51 ◼   ► It's a "keep fighting" sort of message, right?

02:02:54 ◼   ► Can't hold us?

02:02:56 ◼   ► It implies that somebody's trying to hold you down and that they're not going to succeed.

02:03:01 ◼   ► That's a weird mentality to be sticking on a banner.

02:03:06 ◼   ► Microsoft – start your photocopiers.

02:03:10 ◼   ► It's funny, right?

02:03:14 ◼   ► It's a rivalry thing.

02:03:15 ◼   ► Can't hold us?

02:03:16 ◼   ► That's like, I don't know, somebody, some poor nerd getting held down and having it

02:03:21 ◼   ► fit.

02:03:22 ◼   ► All right.

02:03:23 ◼   ► Failure doesn't sit right with anybody.

02:03:24 ◼   ► No, of course not.

02:03:25 ◼   ► Of course not.

02:03:26 ◼   ► And maybe failure is, well, in some regards, some of the products they've done recently,

02:03:31 ◼   ► which I think that they were totally serious and put a lot of wood behind the arrows, like

02:03:37 ◼   ► Surface.

02:03:38 ◼   ► I think it is fair to describe Surface as a failure.

02:03:41 ◼   ► Windows phone—

02:03:42 ◼   ► You know what's funny?

02:03:43 ◼   ► I was on the show with you right after the announcement of Surface things, and we both

02:03:48 ◼   ► liked the Surface RT better than the Surface.

02:03:50 ◼   ► Oh, totally.

02:03:51 ◼   ► It's true.

02:03:52 ◼   ► Me too.

02:03:53 ◼   ► And it tanked.

02:03:54 ◼   ► In our defense, I think we both want to call it the metro tablet or something. Yeah, just color something else and ditch the window stuff

02:04:01 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. I still think I think the biggest problem with the whole surface to thing is that they've stuck with the the dual

02:04:07 ◼   ► You know, I don't understand that I don't I don't get it

02:04:10 ◼   ► I think honestly I would have them rather have killed the the arm version like the RT version or just kill

02:04:16 ◼   ► Why I would have preferred that they stick with the arm in RT version

02:04:20 ◼   ► As a product, I like that better. As an outcome given the previous generation,

02:04:25 ◼   ► you just pick one or the other. Which is what we were saying the last time.

02:04:29 ◼   ► Even if they just took two of them, threw them up in the air and whichever one the glass didn't break,

02:04:35 ◼   ► well, that's the one we'll pick. I mean flip a coin, but just put

02:04:38 ◼   ► put all of your wood behind one of those arrows because and I can't believe too that

02:04:43 ◼   ► I could see how they launched a year ago with both because I wanted to keep them secret

02:04:48 ◼   ► So they didn't talk to people about it

02:04:50 ◼   ► But then after they came out and how much palpable

02:04:52 ◼   ► confusion there was over what the hell the difference between them and if you're even vaguely interested in one which one should you buy

02:04:59 ◼   ► That they didn't realize oh, man

02:05:01 ◼   ► We really screwed this up because people have no idea what the difference is between these two things even though the difference is actually pretty

02:05:07 ◼   ► significant I

02:05:08 ◼   ► Can't believe what they do that to themselves because they name everything windows, right?

02:05:11 ◼   ► And they named the both these things surface even though they're very different

02:05:16 ◼   ► They gave him like almost identical names and that they run literally run different operating systems that look the same I

02:05:22 ◼   ► Could almost forgive that if it was like surface Metro and surface windows, right? I

02:05:29 ◼   ► Don't mean even that's a bit confusing. But at least you're describing the device and then the OS is running

02:05:35 ◼   ► Anyway, you know, I mean maybe Windows Phone maybe failure is a bad word for that

02:05:40 ◼   ► It's it's having trouble getting traction

02:05:42 ◼   ► But it's not zero and it's you know it seems like it's at least growing a little bit

02:05:48 ◼   ► You know it's doing better than the blackberry is right definitely. Yeah, did you ever play with that z10?

02:05:53 ◼   ► I did and I I really thought that software was a total mess. I thought the hardware was pretty interesting

02:06:00 ◼   ► They did a pretty good job

02:06:01 ◼   ► And the software was it's so bad that I really can't so the the apps the apps stink

02:06:08 ◼   ► The software stack is pretty decent

02:06:11 ◼   ► It's my week is I would you mean like oh, yeah, no, it's definitely not fully baked

02:06:15 ◼   ► But if you let's say you go to the camera app and then you swipe up to sort of get into the tasks richer

02:06:20 ◼   ► So it moves into basically like a card like sort of a web OS card the camera

02:06:26 ◼   ► As you're panning around the camera is still active even though it's like shrunk down into a card

02:06:31 ◼   ► Do you know what I mean? Yeah, well, it's it's live updating

02:06:35 ◼   ► While you're switching. Yes, we talked about a while ago. I mean, it's you know, it's what you think from

02:06:41 ◼   ► What do you call it? What's the OS? QNX. Yeah, QNX. It's very serious computer science underneath.

02:06:48 ◼   ► Yeah, they've got a good stack and an awful implementation of any kind of app.

02:06:52 ◼   ► Yeah, and there's some conceptual stuff like going left to get the all messages view,

02:06:58 ◼   ► which just shows a universal inbox of everything. But it's not really an app.

02:07:03 ◼   ► It's just you've gone left and now here's all your messages. It just seems like some kind of...

02:07:07 ◼   ► It's one of those things where they're wedded to this idea that a BlackBerry device is all about being a communicator first.

02:07:15 ◼   ► Right, a messaging app first, right?

02:07:17 ◼   ► So how do you do that? Well, from anywhere you just go left and you've got this weird mixed inbox where you can do some stuff and you can't do some other stuff.

02:07:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:07:27 ◼   ► Anyway.

02:07:28 ◼   ► It's sad. If they would have come out with it two years ago, who knows, you know, three years ago.

02:07:32 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:07:33 ◼   ► But something for this year is too little, too late.

02:07:36 ◼   ► I think they had, they have the pieces, they just can't, they couldn't figure out how to stick them together in time and they're gone now.

02:07:43 ◼   ► What's your advice for Microsoft?

02:07:45 ◼   ► I think Microsoft did incredibly, I think Microsoft is a success story. I think they won.

02:07:55 ◼   ► If you look at the original mission statement, it was what, like a PC on every desk in every home?

02:08:02 ◼   ► Right.

02:08:03 ◼   ► They've succeeded. They wildly succeeded and then they didn't know what to do next.

02:08:10 ◼   ► I think they need to figure out what to do next.

02:08:13 ◼   ► I think they missed. They totally sort of flubbed it.

02:08:19 ◼   ► Guess what? PC in every pocket.

02:08:21 ◼   ► So they've missed that.

02:08:24 ◼   ► I think they need somebody with a good vision to try to figure out what the next

02:08:28 ◼   ► over-the-top goal is that they can try to aim for.

02:08:31 ◼   ► Because I think they have the talent to build towards that.

02:08:36 ◼   ► And they've certainly got the weird--given that video, they've got the crazy cultish passion to get there.

02:08:41 ◼   ► I just think they need to know what that is. I don't know what that is.

02:08:47 ◼   ► I think if they wanted my 10 seconds of consulting advice, I would tell them

02:08:52 ◼   ► I think that they need to be focused on who the competitor that's really hurt them is.

02:08:57 ◼   ► hurt them is. And to me, it's Google, not Apple. Not that Apple's success hasn't been

02:09:01 ◼   ► somewhat at their expense, but that it's orthogonal and they're never going to be Apple. And the

02:09:06 ◼   ► things that Apple is best at, they're never going to be good at.

02:09:08 ◼   ► Why do you say Google? Because they undercut, they basically commoditized operating systems.

02:09:12 ◼   ► They commoditized operating systems and they're commoditizing office type applications with

02:09:18 ◼   ► docs and stuff like that. And that they've got institutions like schools that are buying

02:09:25 ◼   ► based on something other than design and the quality of just how nice the stuff is. They've

02:09:30 ◼   ► got them using, you know, get to get all the kids on Google Docs.

02:09:34 ◼   ► Yeah, but I disagree with you on that. Because what can they do? Okay, so you focus on Google,

02:09:40 ◼   ► what are you gonna do give it away for free? That doesn't suit their business model. You

02:09:46 ◼   ► know, like, I don't think they need to be figuring out. Google has gutted their business.

02:09:52 ◼   ► They need a new business.

02:09:53 ◼   ► Do you know what I think? I think the biggest mistake Microsoft made in the last 10 years,

02:09:58 ◼   ► honestly, and I think I've mentioned this before, but not for a while. I think the biggest

02:10:03 ◼   ► mistake they made was that somewhere around 2008 or so, they should have focused on shipping

02:10:14 ◼   ► versions of Internet Explorer for Windows that blocked all advertising, any and all

02:10:20 ◼   ► advertising by default just to cut the air off it from Google because that was

02:10:26 ◼   ► the way Microsoft used to... I think 2008's late but yeah I would agree with that and you know

02:10:30 ◼   ► what frankly, May will have found themselves back in court. Yep and you

02:10:35 ◼   ► know what and and in the old days when that happened then they'd find themselves in court

02:10:38 ◼   ► and they'd fight it and by the time even if they lost by the time they

02:10:42 ◼   ► wouldn't have mattered because Google would have been dried up or

02:10:45 ◼   ► something like that but the time they needed to cut off the advertising to

02:10:49 ◼   ► Google because all that was the thing that I think galls Microsoft the most is

02:10:53 ◼   ► that Google is... 2004 to 2006 I think is a window where they could have really

02:10:57 ◼   ► just crushed that. That almost all of this money that made Google what Google

02:11:01 ◼   ► is today came from people using Windows PCs and that they you know and I think a

02:11:06 ◼   ► lot of them are using most of them are using IE and they could have just said

02:11:10 ◼   ► and they couldn't they wouldn't have had to come out and say we're gonna block

02:11:12 ◼   ► Google Ads they should have said you know what there's a great new feature

02:11:15 ◼   ► you know... Ad blocker. Right it's ad blocker built into IE it's on by default

02:11:19 ◼   ► and it saves 20% of your battery life every time you visit a webpage.

02:11:23 ◼   ► So I don't know, maybe at this point in time it is too late. I don't know

02:11:27 ◼   ► how you compete. It is. Just for the record, I don't run ad blockers. I don't believe in that shit.

02:11:31 ◼   ► I don't have an ad blocker. I don't have flash installed either.

02:11:35 ◼   ► I do think that that would have really crippled Google. Yeah, but that was the old Microsoft.

02:11:39 ◼   ► It was notorious. They cut off the air supply. Well, what was the air supply

02:11:43 ◼   ► to Google? It was ads being shown to users of Internet

02:11:47 ◼   ► Explorer on Windows.

02:11:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:11:49 ◼   ► I think that would have been the right piece.

02:11:50 ◼   ► I think I probably would have been pretty pissed at them for that.

02:11:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:11:54 ◼   ► But …

02:11:55 ◼   ► It would have been the right move.

02:11:56 ◼   ► Here's what happens when they let somebody grow like that.

02:11:59 ◼   ► It is … I think a lot of people get confused by it because everybody wants to pit Android

02:12:04 ◼   ► against iOS and they talk about market share and blah, blah, blah.

02:12:07 ◼   ► But the thing that Android really has hurt is it's hurt the whole idea of a licensed

02:12:12 ◼   ► operating system that you sell for money because now the idea is what's the price to get

02:12:17 ◼   ► a totally professional, robust, modern operating system for a computing device. Zero.

02:12:23 ◼   ► I'm not sure that's entirely fair because I think Microsoft

02:12:26 ◼   ► fucked that up first because Microsoft did charge for Windows, but they had these crazy deals where

02:12:33 ◼   ► even if you didn't ship Windows on your PC, you would pay for Windows anyway.

02:12:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:12:41 ◼   ► You know what? You got to get to Gasset. Get to JLG on the show.

02:12:45 ◼   ► Yeah, I should.

02:12:46 ◼   ► You really should. You're punching low getting idiots like me and Molt on the show.