ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Why is Chrome using a hundred percent of my CPU because Chrome oh, I know why I have an Apple tab open

00:00:05 ◼   ► That's why you know when they add that thing where they put like a little speaker icon

00:00:09 ◼   ► Which by the way, this is kind of like a telephone icon. It's one of those things that I wonder about

00:00:13 ◼   ► People how people recognize it except just by like pattern matching like, you know that you know

00:00:19 ◼   ► the speaker icon looks like a

00:00:21 ◼   ► Paper cone with a little magnet coil like but in profile sure you like which tab is making sound

00:00:27 ◼   ► Yeah with the sound wave coming out of it do people even know that that's supposed to be a speaker

00:00:32 ◼   ► Do they just think that's the sound simple anyway?

00:00:34 ◼   ► Because who the hell knows what a speaker looks like these days, right?

00:00:39 ◼   ► Certainly the speakers in our phones and iPads don't look like that. I mean they have the same parts

00:00:43 ◼   ► Maybe they have similar parts fulfilling similar functions, but then it look like anyway

00:00:47 ◼   ► They have that thing where you can find out what tab is making the noise like Safari has it in Chrome has it they have some

00:00:52 ◼   ► Way for you to find the tab that's making the noise which is like oh, that's great. This is a good feature

00:00:56 ◼   ► They recognize this this need it's annoying when you can't find the tab that's making noise and you find it

00:01:01 ◼   ► And you know kill it or close it

00:01:02 ◼   ► But then when you relaunch the browser and it like restores the state of your previous session

00:01:08 ◼   ► All of the tabs that were they could possibly make noise like everything just starts auto-playing

00:01:14 ◼   ► Yeah, you have seven seven YouTube videos, and they all start playing. It's like well

00:01:17 ◼   ► You're so close you're like you give me the information to stop one when they start spontaneously or I lose track

00:01:22 ◼   ► And you don't auto play when tabs load in the background

00:01:25 ◼   ► But when I relaunch from, you know, and restore a state, it says, "You know what?

00:01:29 ◼   ► I bet this person wants seven YouTube videos to all play at the same time.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Let me do that."

00:01:34 ◼   ► And then, yes, I can find them and stop them all one by one.

00:01:37 ◼   ► You know what a solution to this problem is, Jon?

00:01:40 ◼   ► Having only a couple of tabs open.

00:01:42 ◼   ► That is a completely reasonable solution.

00:01:45 ◼   ► It doesn't take many.

00:01:46 ◼   ► Like, I think I only had four tabs playing, but, you know, because I had a bunch of YouTube

00:01:50 ◼   ► videos up.

00:01:51 ◼   ► I was doing YouTube research, right?

00:01:53 ◼   ► And you have a bunch of videos opening tabs, which is fine.

00:01:55 ◼   ► watch them one at a time, you leave them open, some of them are like paused in the

00:01:58 ◼   ► middle, but then you relaunch your browser for whatever reason and they all

00:02:02 ◼   ► start playing.

00:02:03 ◼   ► [Music]

00:02:04 ◼   ► All right, so I have some follow-up about my MacBook/Macbook1/MacbookAdorable.

00:02:10 ◼   ► You hate it already?

00:02:11 ◼   ► No, no, no, no. There are people that are very perturbed about the

00:02:15 ◼   ► MacBookAdorable nickname, and I think you're monsters. Not really, but I don't

00:02:20 ◼   ► understand why people are so upset by this. A lot of people wrote in to

00:02:24 ◼   ► recommend a particular kind of port replicator that apparently will solve all of my problems

00:02:29 ◼   ► because it has power in, it has Ethernet, it has USB ports, it has an SD card reader,

00:02:34 ◼   ► and on the surface they are correct.

00:02:36 ◼   ► But the reason I didn't buy this was a couple.

00:02:39 ◼   ► One, it was very expensive, although the sum total of the other dongles I got was probably

00:02:44 ◼   ► at least as much, if not more, than this is.

00:02:46 ◼   ► We'll put an example in the show notes, but there appear to be like seven different manufacturers

00:02:51 ◼   ► that I'll white label, or excuse me,

00:02:52 ◼   ► several different companies that I'll white label

00:02:54 ◼   ► the same thing that's manufactured by gosh knows who.

00:02:57 ◼   ► But anyway, the main reason I was not terribly interested

00:03:00 ◼   ► in this is from what I had seen

00:03:03 ◼   ► when I did a little bit of research,

00:03:05 ◼   ► in order to get the Ethernet port to work,

00:03:09 ◼   ► you have to install a kernel extension,

00:03:12 ◼   ► like a specific driver or whatever.

00:03:14 ◼   ► And I was like, nope, I'm out.

00:03:16 ◼   ► And that was problem number one.

00:03:18 ◼   ► And problem number two is it looks very small,

00:03:22 ◼   ► and it appears on the surface to be very small,

00:03:26 ◼   ► but in actuality, it is quite large,

00:03:29 ◼   ► or larger than I would want.

00:03:31 ◼   ► And like when I went to Chicago last week with the adorable,

00:03:34 ◼   ► I didn't bring the ethernet/USB, I almost said hub,

00:03:38 ◼   ► I guess it is kind of a hub,

00:03:39 ◼   ► but anyway, I didn't bring that dongle.

00:03:40 ◼   ► I only brought the HDMI dongle,

00:03:42 ◼   ► which we actually used more than a couple of times,

00:03:45 ◼   ► and it worked out very nicely.

00:03:46 ◼   ► But my point is that I do like the flexibility of only bringing the one or ones that I absolutely need,

00:03:53 ◼   ► and not bringing the one or ones that I don't need.

00:03:56 ◼   ► So I thought I would just mention that, but I do appreciate the feedback.

00:03:59 ◼   ► I honestly do, because sometimes I don't see everything.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And then finally, I just wanted to point out that I also wrote a blog post, a review of my MacBook Adorable,

00:04:09 ◼   ► so if you want many more words than we've already spoken on this podcast about the MacBook,

00:04:15 ◼   ► feel free to check that out.

00:04:16 ◼   ► - That was good, by the way. - That was good.

00:04:17 ◼   ► - I enjoyed that review. - Oh, thanks.

00:04:19 ◼   ► Thanks, I appreciate it.

00:04:20 ◼   ► It was actually a lot longer than I intended,

00:04:21 ◼   ► and for a while I thought,

00:04:23 ◼   ► hmm, maybe I'll go through and try to cut what I can,

00:04:25 ◼   ► and then I thought, you know what?

00:04:26 ◼   ► I'm just gonna leave it, 'cause I have a lot to say,

00:04:27 ◼   ► 'cause I really like this thing.

00:04:29 ◼   ► So anyway, we will put links in the show notes,

00:04:32 ◼   ► but yeah, I really like this adorable.

00:04:34 ◼   ► It is not the fastest thing in the world,

00:04:36 ◼   ► but it is quick enough for me, and that's all that matters.

00:04:40 ◼   ► Speaking of these sorts of things,

00:04:41 ◼   ► Connor Brooks writes in and says,

00:04:43 ◼   ► here's some comparison pictures of the 2016 versus 2017 keycaps.

00:04:49 ◼   ► There's been a small revision.

00:04:51 ◼   ► Connor says, "I've heard that the retrofit is known internally as a shim kit."

00:04:56 ◼   ► And to be honest with you, I can't really see the difference,

00:04:59 ◼   ► which probably means I'm completely missing it.

00:05:01 ◼   ► I'm sure this picture's completely fine.

00:05:03 ◼   ► - I couldn't see it either. - Okay, good.

00:05:04 ◼   ► That makes me feel a little better.

00:05:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I wish there was, like, red arrows or circle.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Like, "Look here! Here's the difference."

00:05:10 ◼   ► - I went back and forth and I'm like,

00:05:12 ◼   ► I could not figure it out.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - Am I looking at the underside of the key caps?

00:05:15 ◼   ► - I will say though, I have had a chance to,

00:05:17 ◼   ► I got a chance to try typing on a 2017 MacBook Pro

00:05:21 ◼   ► in a store and it really is actually a different feeling.

00:05:26 ◼   ► It is not like a dramatic difference,

00:05:29 ◼   ► it doesn't feel like a whole different type of keyboard,

00:05:32 ◼   ► but it does feel a little softer,

00:05:34 ◼   ► like almost as if they put like a rubber mat

00:05:36 ◼   ► under all the keys, so like you're,

00:05:39 ◼   ► when you bottom out the key,

00:05:40 ◼   ► it feels like you're bottoming out on something rubbery

00:05:43 ◼   ► instead of something flat.

00:05:45 ◼   ► And it sounds different as well.

00:05:47 ◼   ► So I think that actually is a nice improvement.

00:05:49 ◼   ► - Is it quieter?

00:05:50 ◼   ► - Slightly, yeah.

00:05:51 ◼   ► It's a little more dull sounding

00:05:52 ◼   ► and a little more dull feeling.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Like it really does feel like

00:05:55 ◼   ► they just added some rubber somewhere,

00:05:57 ◼   ► which I think is actually what they did.

00:05:59 ◼   ► But it is, it seems like it's better.

00:06:03 ◼   ► I still would not describe this as a good keyboard,

00:06:05 ◼   ► but they are incrementally making it more tolerable.

00:06:08 ◼   ► and if they also took this opportunity

00:06:11 ◼   ► to fix whatever was causing the keys to stick and fail,

00:06:14 ◼   ► then I hope they did. - Let's not get too aggressive.

00:06:16 ◼   ► - I know, but-- - I hope so, but--

00:06:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, I hope they did, but yeah.

00:06:20 ◼   ► And maybe this is it, maybe it needed some kind of,

00:06:22 ◼   ► you know, rubber O-ring around a certain part or something.

00:06:26 ◼   ► I don't know the details, but the 2017s

00:06:29 ◼   ► do definitely feel slightly but noticeably different.

00:06:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, I gotta tell you, and I talk about this

00:06:35 ◼   ► in my review, so I'm not gonna belabor it,

00:06:37 ◼   ► but when I first got the keyboard, I was like, ugh.

00:06:40 ◼   ► I mean, I knew what I was getting into,

00:06:41 ◼   ► but at the same time, ugh.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And then I kinda got into like the, eh, it'll work.

00:06:46 ◼   ► And I actually kinda like it now.

00:06:49 ◼   ► - That's it!

00:06:50 ◼   ► - I don't know if I like that I like it though,

00:06:52 ◼   ► because I love my Magic Keyboard.

00:06:55 ◼   ► I would still take my Magic Keyboard.

00:06:56 ◼   ► - You've crossed over to the side now.

00:06:57 ◼   ► You can never come back.

00:06:59 ◼   ► - I know, so I do prefer the Magic Keyboard,

00:07:02 ◼   ► and I think in no small part,

00:07:03 ◼   ► because I prefer a deeper throw

00:07:05 ◼   ► when I, when I, is that the right term for it? Basically I want, I want more travel when I push the key.

00:07:10 ◼   ► I want the key, I want the key to depress whatever amount. I don't know what the amount is on the Magic Keyboard,

00:07:15 ◼   ► but I find that to be perfect. And on the, on the MacBook, it does not travel into the, into the MacBook as much as I would like.

00:07:22 ◼   ► And that still frustrates me a little bit, but in a way, and I couldn't figure out how to describe it, and, and only you guys,

00:07:29 ◼   ► and, you know, a handful of people that read the review, will truly understand what I meant.

00:07:33 ◼   ► But the only way I can describe it is the difference between like a proper shifter on a rear-wheel drive car

00:07:40 ◼   ► You know where like the shifter is sitting directly over the transmission

00:07:45 ◼   ► So there's like rods that are connecting the shifter that you hold in your hand to the transmission itself

00:07:50 ◼   ► Like that feeling of sturdiness and notchiness and just good feeling that's what the adorable keyboard feels like

00:07:59 ◼   ► Whereas, especially the onboard keyboard on my older MacBook Pro, so before they went to these new style keyboards,

00:08:05 ◼   ► that feels like, and I've actually understood Hondas to have very good shift linkages, but like my Saturn, which admittedly, yes,

00:08:12 ◼   ► it's a Saturn, haha, I get it.

00:08:13 ◼   ► But the Saturn had the sloppiest, worst, most disgusting shift linkage in the world, where you could shimmy the stick left and right like an inch

00:08:20 ◼   ► either direction while the thing is in gear. It was terrible.

00:08:23 ◼   ► And that's what the old MacBook Pro feels like.

00:08:26 ◼   ► And the Magic Keyboard is closer to the Adorables keyboard,

00:08:31 ◼   ► but not quite as sturdy.

00:08:33 ◼   ► And that sturdiness is actually really, really, really nice.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And I really enjoy it.

00:08:39 ◼   ► And it seems so silly.

00:08:40 ◼   ► And if I was listening to this, not having really had this

00:08:43 ◼   ► for a while, I would think, you are bananas.

00:08:46 ◼   ► That sturdy keyboard, what?

00:08:48 ◼   ► But that's the best way I can think of to describe it.

00:08:51 ◼   ► And I don't know if your MacBook, what are we calling yours?

00:08:55 ◼   ► The MacBook Escape?

00:08:56 ◼   ► That has the same keyboard that this does, doesn't it?

00:09:00 ◼   ► - Well, probably not, because you probably have

00:09:02 ◼   ► the new 2017 keys on that.

00:09:04 ◼   ► - Oh, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, okay.

00:09:06 ◼   ► - But it's very similar.

00:09:07 ◼   ► - Do you find it to be more sturdy?

00:09:10 ◼   ► Is that a decent adjective for it?

00:09:11 ◼   ► Can you figure out a better way to describe it?

00:09:13 ◼   ► - I know what you mean.

00:09:14 ◼   ► It's basically like what Johnny Ive

00:09:16 ◼   ► in his White World video described as precise or stable.

00:09:19 ◼   ► And so I know the feeling.

00:09:21 ◼   ► Unfortunately, I hesitate to use the word sturdy

00:09:23 ◼   ► because it's unreliable in the 2016 that I have,

00:09:26 ◼   ► which is unfortunate.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And I haven't gotten it replaced by the AppleCare bar yet

00:09:31 ◼   ► because I just don't, I haven't at the time,

00:09:34 ◼   ► and I need to use this computer.

00:09:36 ◼   ► But yeah, so assuming that I can get this fixed,

00:09:40 ◼   ► it'll then be probably the same keyboard,

00:09:42 ◼   ► and then it will be precise and stable

00:09:44 ◼   ► and sturdy and everything else,

00:09:45 ◼   ► but until then, I can't agree with the specific word sturdy

00:09:48 ◼   ► because mine keeps failing.

00:09:50 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:09:51 ◼   ► So coming back to the actual point we're trying to make,

00:09:53 ◼   ► none of the three of us can see the difference

00:09:55 ◼   ► in these two pictures?

00:09:57 ◼   ► - No, but there is a difference.

00:09:58 ◼   ► - I want Connor to write back in

00:10:00 ◼   ► and mark up these diagrams or, you know,

00:10:03 ◼   ► tell us what we're supposed to be seeing

00:10:05 ◼   ► 'cause I've looked at them for a long time

00:10:07 ◼   ► and I'm not getting it.

00:10:09 ◼   ► - I don't doubt that this is accurate

00:10:12 ◼   ► and I'm not trying to say that this is fake news.

00:10:15 ◼   ► It's just that for my eyes, I cannot tell the difference.

00:10:18 ◼   ► I'm sure there's a difference,

00:10:19 ◼   ► but darned if I can see where it is.

00:10:21 ◼   ► All right, moving on.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Joseph writes, "A very, very fascinating email about USB-C."

00:10:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, this was awesome.

00:10:30 ◼   ► 'Cause last episode, I had complained that

00:10:34 ◼   ► one of the problems with the USB-C lifestyle

00:10:36 ◼   ► is that you kind of can't go all in on it yet.

00:10:39 ◼   ► Because, see, to me, one thing I just didn't really

00:10:42 ◼   ► ever come around to saying, but I should've said is,

00:10:44 ◼   ► like, my goal here is, okay, if I have a laptop

00:10:47 ◼   ► that has all USB-C ports on it,

00:10:49 ◼   ► let me go to Amazon and just buy all new cables

00:10:52 ◼   ► for everything that end in USB-C.

00:10:54 ◼   ► And then I can totally avoid having to use

00:10:57 ◼   ► weird adapters all over the place for almost anything.

00:10:59 ◼   ► I'll just get USB-C cables for all my stuff.

00:11:02 ◼   ► And I can get a couple of new things,

00:11:04 ◼   ► like a USB-C card reader, a couple of things,

00:11:07 ◼   ► and then I'm converted.

00:11:08 ◼   ► And then I can just bring USB-C cables with me on trips.

00:11:11 ◼   ► That is the dream.

00:11:12 ◼   ► And that is pretty much impossible to do in practice,

00:11:16 ◼   ► or it's hard to do in practice because,

00:11:19 ◼   ► my complaint last time was basically,

00:11:20 ◼   ► there are no USB-C hubs that multiply USB-C ports

00:11:24 ◼   ► to more USB-C ports.

00:11:26 ◼   ► The only one I knew of was the one that's inside

00:11:29 ◼   ► the LG 5K display, which converts one to three,

00:11:34 ◼   ► and those are just USB-C 3.1, not Thunderbolt

00:11:38 ◼   ► or DisplayPort, which we'll get to in a second.

00:11:40 ◼   ► All week, people have been sending me hubs,

00:11:44 ◼   ► and they say, "Oh, I think this does it."

00:11:46 ◼   ► almost none of them actually do.

00:11:48 ◼   ► Almost every other hub that people sent me this past week,

00:11:52 ◼   ► the only thing it did was it had USB-C in port

00:11:56 ◼   ► and a single USB-C out port.

00:11:58 ◼   ► So the best it could do is not lose you the port,

00:12:02 ◼   ► but it still would not create more.

00:12:04 ◼   ► The only product I found that actually created more,

00:12:08 ◼   ► there's a Belkin hub for like 30 bucks.

00:12:11 ◼   ► It has one star reviews everywhere,

00:12:14 ◼   ► because it's totally passive and unpowered,

00:12:17 ◼   ► it converts one USB-C port to two USB-C ports

00:12:20 ◼   ► and two USB-A ports.

00:12:22 ◼   ► And I actually bought one, I have one right here,

00:12:24 ◼   ► it's fine, it is unpowered, so it can't really charge

00:12:27 ◼   ► anything meaningfully and you can't plug in

00:12:29 ◼   ► like Hydra current things to it, but,

00:12:32 ◼   ► and the reason it has one star reviews everywhere

00:12:34 ◼   ► is that nobody expected that when they bought it,

00:12:37 ◼   ► and it also does not do power pass through,

00:12:38 ◼   ► so KSC, it wouldn't help you at all,

00:12:40 ◼   ► 'cause you couldn't charge your Macbook Adorable

00:12:42 ◼   ► while this was plugged in.

00:12:43 ◼   ► But if you have anything but a MacBook One,

00:12:45 ◼   ► so if you have any more than one USB port,

00:12:48 ◼   ► you can plug this into one of the second ones

00:12:49 ◼   ► that's not being used for power,

00:12:50 ◼   ► and you can turn one port into two.

00:12:52 ◼   ► So this is the only thing out there.

00:12:54 ◼   ► And everything else does not do this.

00:12:58 ◼   ► And so Joseph's email,

00:12:59 ◼   ► which is full of wonderful information about USB-C spec

00:13:03 ◼   ► that he's very familiar with,

00:13:05 ◼   ► basically tells us why it's so,

00:13:07 ◼   ► basically why aren't there hubs out there

00:13:10 ◼   ► that multiply USB-C ports into more USB-C ports

00:13:14 ◼   ► with the same capabilities as the ones built into the laptop.

00:13:17 ◼   ► - Right, and so I'm gonna read most of this email.

00:13:20 ◼   ► It's a little bit on the long side,

00:13:21 ◼   ► especially for feedback email, but it's fascinating

00:13:23 ◼   ► and I think it's worth it, so go on.

00:13:25 ◼   ► Go on this journey with me, kids.

00:13:27 ◼   ► The problem, this is Joseph now,

00:13:28 ◼   ► the problem with doing USB-C hubs is the spec.

00:13:30 ◼   ► USB-C has alternate modes.

00:13:33 ◼   ► There's Thunderbolt and DisplayPort.

00:13:34 ◼   ► When you go into Thunderbolt mode,

00:13:36 ◼   ► the wires are completely disconnected

00:13:37 ◼   ► from the USB controller,

00:13:38 ◼   ► hand it over to the Thunderbolt controller. When you go into the DisplayPort mode, the

00:13:42 ◼   ► wires are completely disconnected from the USB controller and handed over to the DisplayController.

00:13:46 ◼   ► The key here is that this is all done at connection time, so I think you can see the problems

00:13:50 ◼   ► with hubs. If you plug in a hub and nothing's plugged into it from below, then what is it?

00:13:55 ◼   ► Well, it's a USB hub, right? So now the upstream lanes from that hub are USB and this is connected

00:13:59 ◼   ► inside the PC or Mac as USB. But those ports below the hub haven't changed. They're still

00:14:04 ◼   ► the same USB-C connector, which can have Thunderbolt or DisplayPort devices plugged in.

00:14:09 ◼   ► So now you go to plug in a display to the downstream hub's ports.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Well, it can't be a display, because that would mean you need the upstream port to be

00:14:16 ◼   ► renegotiated as a display.

00:14:18 ◼   ► You can force a renegotiation, but if you did that, then none of the other ports downstream

00:14:22 ◼   ► from the hub can now be USB ports, because the upstream port is no longer USB, it's DisplayPort.

00:14:28 ◼   ► And you can see a similar issue for Thunderbolt.

00:14:31 ◼   ► Now there's an interesting thing here, and I'm sure somebody at Apple has thought of

00:14:34 ◼   ► it.

00:14:35 ◼   ► Thunderbolt itself can carry a display port.

00:14:38 ◼   ► It's a time multiplex bus.

00:14:39 ◼   ► And since Thunderbolt is really just PCI Express over a cable with the same multiplexing ability

00:14:43 ◼   ► of a display, you can build a Thunderbolt hub or dock that has a USB-C capable host

00:14:48 ◼   ► controller in it.

00:14:50 ◼   ► And thus the upstream is Thunderbolt, but the downstream ports can still be USB-C because

00:14:54 ◼   ► those ports are now "root ports."

00:14:57 ◼   ► I think Thunderbolt adopting the USB-C connector here is like a Trojan horse.

00:15:01 ◼   ► call it USB-C, but instead it's really Thunderbolt,

00:15:04 ◼   ► and Thunderbolt takes over the world

00:15:06 ◼   ► from within the USB-C spec by making the default behavior

00:15:10 ◼   ► of USB-C to be the Thunderbolt alternate mode.

00:15:14 ◼   ► That is fascinating.

00:15:16 ◼   ► I read this email and was like, wow, this is a lot of text.

00:15:18 ◼   ► This is the sort of email I would normally be like,

00:15:20 ◼   ► okay, whatever, I am so glad I actually spent the time,

00:15:24 ◼   ► 'cause we actually did cut some of it.

00:15:26 ◼   ► This was one of my favorite feedback emails ever.

00:15:28 ◼   ► and it tells you basically everything you need to know.

00:15:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, so basically-- - I have a feeling, however,

00:15:33 ◼   ► yeah, that you guys have some thoughts on this.

00:15:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, basically, to summarize,

00:15:37 ◼   ► like, because of the way it works,

00:15:38 ◼   ► you basically can't make a hub that is reasonably good

00:15:43 ◼   ► that multiplies the ports that are on the laptop

00:15:46 ◼   ► that have all the same capabilities.

00:15:48 ◼   ► So you're basically never gonna get one

00:15:50 ◼   ► that can multiply to, like, more displays

00:15:54 ◼   ► or more very high-speed Thunderbolt peripherals.

00:15:58 ◼   ► The problem is that you buy USB-C stuff,

00:16:01 ◼   ► you don't really, unless you're paying

00:16:03 ◼   ► really close attention and you're a huge nerd,

00:16:05 ◼   ► you don't really know which alternate mode,

00:16:08 ◼   ► if any, it needs to work.

00:16:10 ◼   ► Like, I have this car reader, I have some Ethernet adapters,

00:16:13 ◼   ► and it's like, well, are any of these Thunderbolt devices,

00:16:16 ◼   ► or are they all USB-C devices?

00:16:18 ◼   ► I don't actually know.

00:16:20 ◼   ► And as a nerd, I can figure out, well,

00:16:21 ◼   ► they're probably not Thunderbolt devices,

00:16:23 ◼   ► because that would be overkill.

00:16:25 ◼   ► But how are regular people supposed to navigate

00:16:28 ◼   ► this weird world?

00:16:29 ◼   ► They tried to make this connector this one unified thing

00:16:33 ◼   ► and this will solve all of our problems,

00:16:35 ◼   ► but in reality, this is a world of hurt.

00:16:38 ◼   ► And it's complicated by things like,

00:16:40 ◼   ► by these alternate modes, where yeah, it's nice

00:16:42 ◼   ► that you can put displays and Thunderbolt

00:16:44 ◼   ► over the same connector and stuff,

00:16:48 ◼   ► but like, KC's MacBook One doesn't have Thunderbolt.

00:16:51 ◼   ► It only has USB-C. - Bingo.

00:16:53 ◼   ► I was just about to interrupt you and say exactly that

00:16:55 ◼   ► because that reminded me one of the things that people would, or one of the common themes

00:16:58 ◼   ► amongst what people suggested for alternate dongles for me is, "Oh, use this thing that

00:17:04 ◼   ► has everything you want." And a lot of the times it did, but it was Thunderbolt and not

00:17:08 ◼   ► USB-C. And it wasn't until I got the adorable that it was really made clear to me that,

00:17:13 ◼   ► that just like you said, Marco, this, this machine does have USB-C, but it does not support

00:17:18 ◼   ► Thunderbolt via that connector. So, so I have a very small subset of things that I can use

00:17:25 ◼   ► that are all on the same physical connector,

00:17:27 ◼   ► but internally are very, very different.

00:17:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so this whole,

00:17:31 ◼   ► these connectors are kind of a mess.

00:17:33 ◼   ► Like the whole spec, the way the standard works,

00:17:35 ◼   ► it's kind of, like if you just look at USB-C as USB 3.1

00:17:39 ◼   ► as the protocol, and you only connect USB 3.1

00:17:43 ◼   ► or three devices to it, that's great.

00:17:45 ◼   ► Then it's just a smaller connector for the standard

00:17:47 ◼   ► we already had before with USB 3.0, and it's great,

00:17:49 ◼   ► 'cause there's lots of USB devices out there,

00:17:51 ◼   ► and USB 3.0 is a great standard, relatively speaking,

00:17:54 ◼   ► and we can connect everything, that's fine.

00:17:56 ◼   ► The problem comes like,

00:17:58 ◼   ► that there's all these little asterisks on it,

00:18:00 ◼   ► and that's going to just,

00:18:01 ◼   ► and those asterisks apply to devices,

00:18:04 ◼   ► computers, cables, and hubs.

00:18:06 ◼   ► All four of those things can screw this up in some way

00:18:10 ◼   ► and make something that you bought just not work

00:18:12 ◼   ► for a reason that to most people would be a mystery.

00:18:15 ◼   ► And even though the computer can put up

00:18:17 ◼   ► some kind of weird dialogue if it's smart,

00:18:19 ◼   ► that's still not really helping the problem.

00:18:21 ◼   ► So it's nice that they unified this all into one connector, but the implementation details

00:18:26 ◼   ► make it kind of a mess.

00:18:27 ◼   ► So the idea of Thunderbolt being like, you know, the catch-all or the Trojan horse, like

00:18:32 ◼   ► "Haha, everyone's going to put these ports in their machines," but they'll eventually

00:18:35 ◼   ► learn that, you know, it's neat that you can connect a display and also a USB device to

00:18:40 ◼   ► that thing, but really the only protocol that can tunnel everything over it and multiply

00:18:44 ◼   ► stuff out is Thunderbolt.

00:18:46 ◼   ► So Thunderbolt will take over the world because it's the superset of everything.

00:18:49 ◼   ► Like won't everybody just make everything Thunderbolt?

00:18:52 ◼   ► Because once they learn, oh, you know, if you, like this email says, if you plug in

00:18:56 ◼   ► a hub, the thing has to decide whether it is, you know, sending through DisplayPort

00:19:02 ◼   ► or USB or Thunderbolt, then why wouldn't everybody just do Thunderbolt?

00:19:05 ◼   ► And the reason everyone won't do Thunderbolt is because it's more expensive.

00:19:08 ◼   ► It's more expensive everywhere.

00:19:09 ◼   ► It's more expensive in the cables, in the hardware that's in the hubs, in the peripherals.

00:19:14 ◼   ► Like at USB is just cheaper to implement.

00:19:16 ◼   ► So it's going to be very difficult for Thunderbolt to take over everywhere.

00:19:21 ◼   ► Now maybe Intel opening up a Thunderbolt spec will help with this because people can make

00:19:24 ◼   ► like knockoff controllers legally, not knockoffs, but like legally they can implement their

00:19:28 ◼   ► own spec, but I think it's just more expensive to implement.

00:19:31 ◼   ► Even if you don't have to do the active cables with the chips in them because you have a

00:19:34 ◼   ► low speed device or whatever, I'm not entirely sure that we're going to get the Thunderbolt

00:19:39 ◼   ► everywhere.

00:19:40 ◼   ► Now I think it will help for the high end devices where people are spending gobs of

00:19:44 ◼   ► money on the, you know, the upcoming Mac Pro and there's a bunch of Thunderbolt peripherals

00:19:48 ◼   ► that you can attach to it and there's tons of, you know, PCI Express lanes inside the

00:19:52 ◼   ► box and, you know, that I think it will probably live on the high end, but for the medium to

00:19:56 ◼   ► low end, like people just using their laptops around, it's almost like, this is yet another

00:20:02 ◼   ► problem that more ports solve in theory.

00:20:03 ◼   ► Again, I'm not sure how many lanes there are, but if, you know, if you've got this port

00:20:07 ◼   ► like, oh, this one is connected to a display, so it has to be a display and this one is

00:20:11 ◼   ► USB, so it's connected to my USB hub.

00:20:13 ◼   ► Like if you can have more ports and have each individual port decide what it wants to be

00:20:17 ◼   ► independently, but you probably can't do completely independently once you reach a certain number

00:20:21 ◼   ► of ports because there's just not enough, you know, controllers on the inside.

00:20:24 ◼   ► But surely, you know, in Casey's case, if you had one more port, then one port could

00:20:30 ◼   ► decide, well, he's going to burn one on power.

00:20:32 ◼   ► So one is power, and then one is USB, and then one is display.

00:20:37 ◼   ► So say you had a three-port computer, those three ports and those three ports could decide

00:20:41 ◼   ► individually what they wanted to be if there was sufficient, you know, controller hardware

00:20:44 ◼   ► and independence inside the box. Maybe, maybe forget about Casey's thing. Sorry, adorable,

00:20:47 ◼   ► you're stuck. Go to Marco's computer. Surely Marco's computer, you could put four ports

00:20:53 ◼   ► in that thing, one of them would be power and three other ones, and then those three

00:20:56 ◼   ► ports can decide what they want to be. And then you get the advantage of having a bunch

00:21:00 ◼   ► of uniform ports in your computer that are all the same shape and size, and you just

00:21:04 ◼   ► put display in this one and put your hub in this one and put your power in that one and

00:21:07 ◼   ► they all just work. But once it daisy chains out it's like well what are you even daisy

00:21:11 ◼   ► chaining? Like you can't you can't sweep that under the carpet because it's not like there's

00:21:15 ◼   ► one magic protocol that does everything. Well there kind of is, it's Thunderbolt but it's

00:21:19 ◼   ► the most expensive one and that isn't on all your peripherals. So every time you plug something

00:21:24 ◼   ► in you're sort of deciding what this port is going to be and plugging in a box that

00:21:30 ◼   ► has a bunch of other ports on it you've basically just decided that the thing has to be Thunderbolt

00:21:34 ◼   ► and now everything is expensive.

00:21:35 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:21:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, so anyway, definitely on the Hall of Fame for me

00:21:40 ◼   ► for great feedback emails, really love that.

00:21:42 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:21:43 ◼   ► - Marco, you have some HomePod follow-up,

00:21:46 ◼   ► according to the show notes? - I do.

00:21:47 ◼   ► - Tell me more.

00:21:48 ◼   ► - Okay, so this is probably my second favorite follow-up

00:21:52 ◼   ► in the history of follow-up.

00:21:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:21:54 ◼   ► My favorite follow-up in the history of follow-up

00:21:55 ◼   ► is there was an old episode of,

00:21:57 ◼   ► it was either Connected or the Connected's predecessor

00:22:00 ◼   ► show The Prompt.

00:22:01 ◼   ► One of those shows, Mike had misstated his own age,

00:22:05 ◼   ► he was off by one, and a listener wrote in the next episode

00:22:08 ◼   ► to correct him on his own age.

00:22:11 ◼   ► That's my favorite follow-up ever.

00:22:13 ◼   ► This is my second favorite follow-up ever.

00:22:14 ◼   ► We spent about a half hour, a couple episodes ago,

00:22:18 ◼   ► speculating about whether the HomePod had a screen or not.

00:22:22 ◼   ► And one guy even wrote in to say,

00:22:24 ◼   ► it was somebody basically, like a tipster about it,

00:22:27 ◼   ► saying here's how it's actually implemented,

00:22:29 ◼   ► there's this diffuser and there's these LEDs below it

00:22:31 ◼   ► and it's not really a screen,

00:22:32 ◼   ► but it might be a screen later on.

00:22:34 ◼   ► And we talked about this for like a half hour.

00:22:37 ◼   ► It turns out none of us thought to check Apple's site.

00:22:39 ◼   ► But Rob Buckhouse did.

00:22:41 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:42 ◼   ► And Rob Buckhouse writes in to say,

00:22:45 ◼   ► "Apple's site clears us up pretty well.

00:22:47 ◼   ► "There's a section on the HomePod page that says,

00:22:51 ◼   ► "tap the top of HomePod to play, pause,

00:22:53 ◼   ► "or adjust the volume.

00:22:54 ◼   ► "It also shows you when Siri is listening

00:22:56 ◼   ► with an LED waveform that animates with your every word.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I had read that when we did the show. That's why we talked about the idea of it

00:23:02 ◼   ► being like, "Okay, well, maybe this is just a temporary one and they'll put the real screen

00:23:06 ◼   ► on it later, so who knows?" I thought we had all read the website at the time we were discussing

00:23:10 ◼   ► it. Yeah, but I think if Apple's putting this

00:23:12 ◼   ► on their product page saying, "This is what HomePod does and this is the thing it has,"

00:23:17 ◼   ► that's it. That's final. That's what they're doing.

00:23:19 ◼   ► If you read the text, you could describe something as an LED waveform even if it's a screen,

00:23:24 ◼   ► You know how they have like LED TVs?

00:23:25 ◼   ► They wouldn't say LED.

00:23:27 ◼   ► I know.

00:23:28 ◼   ► LED TVs aren't really LED TVs either.

00:23:30 ◼   ► And if it was OLED, it would say OLED.

00:23:33 ◼   ► Like it's not.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And if it was an LCD screen, it would say LCD,

00:23:37 ◼   ► or it wouldn't say anything at all.

00:23:38 ◼   ► But like I said, if they wanted to change this to a screen,

00:23:42 ◼   ► they wouldn't have to change that copy.

00:23:43 ◼   ► But either way, as I said on the show,

00:23:47 ◼   ► this is not the type of thing that you

00:23:48 ◼   ► would do as a stopgap, right?

00:23:51 ◼   ► Because it's just too complicated.

00:23:53 ◼   ► It's too complicated and too polished to have in there as a stopgap.

00:23:58 ◼   ► If they were going to make it a bitmap display, they would already have done that or they

00:24:02 ◼   ► wouldn't have spent all this time on this weird thing.

00:24:05 ◼   ► iFixit will show us exactly how many colored LEDs are inside there.

00:24:11 ◼   ► But it's probably fewer than are in the Google Home, because I think Google Home, like I

00:24:14 ◼   ► said, Google Home has like a ring of them.

00:24:16 ◼   ► So it's got a lot.

00:24:17 ◼   ► This probably just has, I don't know, maybe 20?

00:24:20 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:24:22 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week by Fracture,

00:24:24 ◼   ► who prints vivid color photos directly on glass.

00:24:27 ◼   ► Visit fractureme.com/podcast for more info.

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00:25:00 ◼   ► and it matches pretty much any decorating style.

00:25:03 ◼   ► And again, you don't have to get these framed.

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00:25:22 ◼   ► They really appreciate that.

00:25:23 ◼   ► These make wonderful gifts.

00:25:24 ◼   ► We've given lots of them over time.

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00:25:29 ◼   ► We get compliments on them all the time.

00:25:31 ◼   ► Tiff actually recently ordered a giant one.

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00:26:21 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

00:26:24 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:26:26 ◼   ► - Speaking of new family members, Marco,

00:26:30 ◼   ► you have welcomed a new family member to your house.

00:26:33 ◼   ► Can you tell us about this?

00:26:34 ◼   ► - Well, there's some asterisks on that.

00:26:36 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:26:37 ◼   ► - Did you already return it?

00:26:38 ◼   ► Is that the asterisk?

00:26:39 ◼   ► - Today I received my pre-order of the Echo Show,

00:26:44 ◼   ► the new Amazon Echo device with the screen.

00:26:49 ◼   ► And the reviews had come out yesterday or the day before,

00:26:52 ◼   ► and the reviews showed it in different angles

00:26:56 ◼   ► and in real life.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Before this, when we preordered,

00:26:59 ◼   ► we were only shown the product shots,

00:27:01 ◼   ► which were taken at a very careful angle.

00:27:03 ◼   ► And even at that very ideal, flattering angle,

00:27:07 ◼   ► this looked like a pretty ugly product,

00:27:09 ◼   ► but I thought, okay, but you know,

00:27:11 ◼   ► I love the Echo cylinder, it's really useful.

00:27:13 ◼   ► We use it all the time, and there are contexts

00:27:17 ◼   ► in which it would be nice to have a screen.

00:27:19 ◼   ► You know, there's, you know, timers especially,

00:27:22 ◼   ► timers are the big one, you can watch a timer countdown.

00:27:24 ◼   ► Or like a lot of, like Tiff will ask it

00:27:25 ◼   ► about the weather in the morning,

00:27:26 ◼   ► it would be nice to see that, as opposed to, you know,

00:27:28 ◼   ► just having to sit through this like four sentence long

00:27:32 ◼   ► description of the weather, you know, so.

00:27:34 ◼   ► A screen would be helpful, we thought.

00:27:37 ◼   ► And I convinced Tiff, despite the way it looked,

00:27:40 ◼   ► to let me preorder one and try it.

00:27:42 ◼   ► So we get it here.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Set it up, plug it in, and boy,

00:27:47 ◼   ► the thing is hideous in person.

00:27:49 ◼   ► I mean, it is really ugly in person.

00:27:51 ◼   ► And if you look at all the reviews,

00:27:53 ◼   ► and we got the white one too,

00:27:54 ◼   ► I figured that would be a little bit less hideous.

00:27:56 ◼   ► No, it's just as hideous.

00:27:58 ◼   ► - So is it uglier than the original Kindle?

00:28:01 ◼   ► - No, but it is larger.

00:28:03 ◼   ► - All right, yeah, so I was gonna say,

00:28:06 ◼   ► I think it is, it can't be uglier,

00:28:08 ◼   ► but it does impose, the ugliest that it has,

00:28:12 ◼   ► it does impose that more in your face

00:28:13 ◼   ► than the original Kindle.

00:28:15 ◼   ► That is it right there.

00:28:17 ◼   ► And so let me expand on that.

00:28:18 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:28:19 ◼   ► So basically, so it would plug it in.

00:28:23 ◼   ► And now, because I hadn't opened up the Alexa app

00:28:27 ◼   ► in a long time, I had not yet connected it

00:28:30 ◼   ► to try to do its FaceTime or calling thing.

00:28:34 ◼   ► So I open it up, in order to set this up,

00:28:36 ◼   ► I'm required to give the Alexa app my real name

00:28:40 ◼   ► and confirm it, and then it really tries hard

00:28:43 ◼   ► to get me to give it a phone number

00:28:44 ◼   ► and access to my contact list so we can periodically

00:28:47 ◼   ► sync it with the Amazon service.

00:28:49 ◼   ► And I say no, no, no, and there's no,

00:28:50 ◼   ► you can skip that part, you can skip the contact

00:28:52 ◼   ► and phone number part, but you can't skip the name part

00:28:54 ◼   ► and I don't see any way to opt out of calling completely.

00:28:58 ◼   ► I don't want people calling me on my Echo.

00:29:02 ◼   ► I know Amazon just launched the service where they,

00:29:04 ◼   ► you know, they're doing, they have their own

00:29:06 ◼   ► like FaceTime network.

00:29:08 ◼   ► I could not possibly care less

00:29:10 ◼   ► or be less interested in using it.

00:29:12 ◼   ► Like we have a million other ways to do that now

00:29:14 ◼   ► they're all better and not run by creepy companies like Amazon. So that the whole idea of being

00:29:18 ◼   ► forced to set this up and not having a clear opt-out really put me off. So I was already

00:29:23 ◼   ► kind of unhappy and maybe that colored my later reaction. So we set the thing up, first

00:29:29 ◼   ► thing I have to do is a software update. Okay fine. A software update takes forever. So

00:29:33 ◼   ► can't walk away, you know, obviously they couldn't update the software, you know, before

00:29:38 ◼   ► they shipped it to me two days ago, but okay. And then the thing finally boots up and the

00:29:45 ◼   ► screen is super bright and I know we can probably change that, but the screen is super bright

00:29:51 ◼   ► and it's just blaring news headlines at you that you, and it's like some celebrity baby

00:29:59 ◼   ► thing, I don't care at all, like the last thing I want is for this screen to be blaring

00:30:06 ◼   ► visually blaring news headlines at me. And we tried a couple things, okay I guess we'll

00:30:11 ◼   ► set this up, like we don't have calendars paired yet so the counter screen isn't that

00:30:14 ◼   ► useful yet but do I really want to give Amazon access to my calendar? Well maybe not, but

00:30:18 ◼   ► maybe we will. Okay I won't judge it on that. Let's try playing some music. So the first

00:30:24 ◼   ► thing is it completely fails to recognize my Amazon music, whatever the subscription

00:30:30 ◼   ► is that is on the Echo, like the premium thing for the Echo that's like four bucks a month,

00:30:34 ◼   ► We have that, and it totally failed to recognize it.

00:30:37 ◼   ► I don't know why.

00:30:38 ◼   ► It eventually started working.

00:30:39 ◼   ► The sound quality on it is really poor.

00:30:44 ◼   ► It is only a very small improvement over the Echo Cylinder.

00:30:49 ◼   ► And I don't care for that.

00:30:51 ◼   ► They had all this time, this device costs $230,

00:30:56 ◼   ► and granted, yes, it has a screen and everything,

00:30:58 ◼   ► so that's a pretty good price for what it is.

00:31:00 ◼   ► But they couldn't improve the sound quality?

00:31:02 ◼   ► That's like the one major problem with the Echo Cylinder,

00:31:04 ◼   ► the sound quality.

00:31:05 ◼   ► And they really, I would say they almost didn't

00:31:08 ◼   ► improve it at all.

00:31:09 ◼   ► It's very, very close to the old one.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And as we're using it, it just keeps blaring

00:31:16 ◼   ► this screen at us.

00:31:19 ◼   ► And Tiff was very quickly out of love,

00:31:22 ◼   ► and I very quickly followed.

00:31:24 ◼   ► Because what I realized was,

00:31:26 ◼   ► regardless of what anyone else thinks of this product,

00:31:29 ◼   ► I had made a mistake in thinking it was right for us.

00:31:31 ◼   ► because one thing that I now realize in retrospect

00:31:35 ◼   ► that we like about the echo cylinder

00:31:38 ◼   ► is that it does not take visual attention

00:31:41 ◼   ► away from anything.

00:31:42 ◼   ► It is this, it's not pretty, but it's discreet.

00:31:46 ◼   ► It's this black cylinder you put somewhere,

00:31:47 ◼   ► it comes in white too now,

00:31:48 ◼   ► so it's the cylinder you put somewhere.

00:31:50 ◼   ► And you don't really ever have to look at it.

00:31:53 ◼   ► It doesn't draw attention to itself.

00:31:56 ◼   ► So the echo cylinder fits into your life

00:31:59 ◼   ► in a more discreet way.

00:32:01 ◼   ► The Echo Show with the screen draws attention in.

00:32:05 ◼   ► It draws your eyes in.

00:32:07 ◼   ► It takes attention out of the room.

00:32:09 ◼   ► And it does it for something that really doesn't deserve

00:32:13 ◼   ► that kind of attention.

00:32:14 ◼   ► It is just this screen in your kitchen

00:32:17 ◼   ► that's telling you about Kanye's baby or whatever.

00:32:20 ◼   ► And I could not possibly,

00:32:22 ◼   ► and I'm sure I could probably configure those things

00:32:25 ◼   ► in some different way,

00:32:27 ◼   ► It just like, this thing draws your eye

00:32:30 ◼   ► and it's designed to do that.

00:32:31 ◼   ► And it's, Amazon's stuff is not good enough

00:32:34 ◼   ► to make it worth using their GUIs.

00:32:37 ◼   ► And I kind of knew that already

00:32:39 ◼   ► and I don't know why I thought those would be any different.

00:32:41 ◼   ► But for some reason I thought this would be different

00:32:42 ◼   ► and that was a mistake.

00:32:43 ◼   ► So this thing is not for us at all.

00:32:47 ◼   ► So I'm returning it.

00:32:48 ◼   ► - Oh, that's disappointing, but.

00:32:50 ◼   ► - Maybe you got the Amazon Echo Show with special offers.

00:32:54 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:32:54 ◼   ► bucks more, get one without special offers.

00:32:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, and one of the things that makes me sad about this

00:33:02 ◼   ► is I realize like, what if there is a future

00:33:07 ◼   ► where they make their app even worse

00:33:10 ◼   ► and they require my calling information or whatever else

00:33:15 ◼   ► or they require more stuff I don't wanna give them.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Or if there's a future in which all Echo's have screens

00:33:21 ◼   ► and there is no more option to get one without it

00:33:23 ◼   ► or that the ones without screens start sucking

00:33:25 ◼   ► because the service assumes you always have one

00:33:28 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:33:30 ◼   ► It made me realize quite how fragile this ecosystem is

00:33:33 ◼   ► because this was depending on Amazon doing this

00:33:35 ◼   ► one cool thing, just keep doing it.

00:33:38 ◼   ► This one thing they made is great.

00:33:39 ◼   ► The cylinders, they're great, just keep doing that.

00:33:42 ◼   ► But instead, they're broadening out into these weird,

00:33:44 ◼   ► creepy things like the look and the show

00:33:47 ◼   ► that are going in a direction that I really don't like.

00:33:50 ◼   ► And again, if you listeners like this stuff, that's fine.

00:33:55 ◼   ► All I'm saying is this was dramatically not for us

00:33:58 ◼   ► and not the kind of thing we were looking for,

00:34:00 ◼   ► even though I probably should have known that going in,

00:34:02 ◼   ► but I didn't, oh well, sometimes that happens.

00:34:04 ◼   ► But it made me think for a second,

00:34:07 ◼   ► I'm actually gonna be really sad

00:34:10 ◼   ► if this ecosystem goes south in a way

00:34:13 ◼   ► that ruins the cylinder for us.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Because I really like the cylinder the way it has been,

00:34:20 ◼   ► And if that goes away, like, I mean,

00:34:24 ◼   ► I guess we could try the Google air freshener,

00:34:26 ◼   ► but I'm not a big fan of that.

00:34:28 ◼   ► The HomePod might be great, but we don't really know yet,

00:34:32 ◼   ► and honestly, the more, I keep trying Siri,

00:34:35 ◼   ► I keep giving it the benefit of the doubt,

00:34:37 ◼   ► and it keeps making me not wanna try it anymore.

00:34:40 ◼   ► I don't have good luck with Siri,

00:34:42 ◼   ► so I'm not incredibly optimistic about that.

00:34:47 ◼   ► And the HomePod is also larger and much more expensive,

00:34:50 ◼   ► and so it would be hard to justify buying

00:34:52 ◼   ► more than one of them, or I don't know.

00:34:55 ◼   ► HomePod is a big question mark.

00:34:57 ◼   ► I hope Amazon does not screw up what they have

00:35:00 ◼   ► that's really great with the Echo cylinders,

00:35:02 ◼   ► with the new weird creepy stuff they're trying to do now.

00:35:05 ◼   ► - So what did you think you were going to get

00:35:06 ◼   ► from the Echo Show when you bought it?

00:35:09 ◼   ► Like, and I don't mean that in a nasty way,

00:35:13 ◼   ► I'm genuinely asking, like did you think,

00:35:15 ◼   ► oh, it'll be really nice to have, I don't know,

00:35:17 ◼   ► a visible view of your grocery list,

00:35:20 ◼   ► or you made mention of your calendar.

00:35:22 ◼   ► Like, what sorts of things did you think

00:35:24 ◼   ► this was going to help out with

00:35:27 ◼   ► that it seems to either not or do a crummy job of it?

00:35:31 ◼   ► - The only reasons I really wanted the screen

00:35:33 ◼   ► were to show me timers and weather.

00:35:35 ◼   ► That's about it.

00:35:36 ◼   ► And we don't, I didn't need the screen.

00:35:41 ◼   ► Like, we get along just fine with the cylinder,

00:35:43 ◼   ► But it would just be nicer to be able to like,

00:35:45 ◼   ► just glance at timer statuses and just, you know,

00:35:48 ◼   ► see the weather presented without having to listen

00:35:49 ◼   ► to the full, you know, three sentence description

00:35:51 ◼   ► with all the words in it.

00:35:52 ◼   ► Like, that would be nice.

00:35:54 ◼   ► And this is again, like everyone out there is yelling at me

00:35:57 ◼   ► to just, you know, wear an Apple watch.

00:35:58 ◼   ► Because that really does solve many of these problems.

00:36:01 ◼   ► And Siri even occasionally works on that.

00:36:04 ◼   ► So that could be nice, but it's just not the way

00:36:07 ◼   ► I wanna do things.

00:36:08 ◼   ► So, you know, this is all really nitpicky stuff.

00:36:11 ◼   ► And this technology is all really amazing.

00:36:13 ◼   ► So it feels weird to complain about any of it really

00:36:15 ◼   ► because in like absolute terms, this is all amazing

00:36:19 ◼   ► and we should be thankful we have any of it.

00:36:21 ◼   ► But in relative terms, I never wanna use an Amazon GUI

00:36:25 ◼   ► if I can help it.

00:36:26 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:36:27 ◼   ► And I think what I was hoping for is

00:36:30 ◼   ► more like what we thought the HomePod might be

00:36:35 ◼   ► before we read Apple's site, which was (laughs)

00:36:39 ◼   ► Like, just a very small, discrete screen output

00:36:43 ◼   ► for small amounts of information to be presented subtly.

00:36:47 ◼   ► That I think would be nice.

00:36:50 ◼   ► It could even still be an echo cylinder,

00:36:52 ◼   ► just with like a little, like an OLED strip around the top

00:36:57 ◼   ► to do like a Times Square kind of like, you know,

00:36:59 ◼   ► scrolling marquee kind of, something like,

00:37:01 ◼   ► it's something small and discrete

00:37:04 ◼   ► that does not draw your eye, that,

00:37:06 ◼   ► Like if there's no timers and if there's nothing

00:37:09 ◼   ► that you've asked for recently, it would just be blank.

00:37:12 ◼   ► That would be nice.

00:37:13 ◼   ► But that isn't what this is. - That's terrible,

00:37:15 ◼   ► by the way, nobody knew that place.

00:37:16 ◼   ► - I know, that actually is bad.

00:37:18 ◼   ► But like, okay, a small screen, like a watch-size screen.

00:37:21 ◼   ► You could have two timers stacked there counting down

00:37:23 ◼   ► and it would be fine.

00:37:24 ◼   ► Something small on the screen is what I wanted.

00:37:29 ◼   ► And this is not that.

00:37:30 ◼   ► This is like, this becomes the center of attention

00:37:33 ◼   ► in your kitchen or wherever you put it.

00:37:35 ◼   ► It's like having a TV on.

00:37:37 ◼   ► And I'm the kind of person that,

00:37:39 ◼   ► if I'm in a restaurant that has TVs,

00:37:42 ◼   ► and there's one in my field of view,

00:37:43 ◼   ► I'm constantly distracted by it.

00:37:45 ◼   ► And I don't want to be, but my eyes just drawn to it.

00:37:48 ◼   ► That's how this is.

00:37:50 ◼   ► Even though it's not always moving and stuff,

00:37:52 ◼   ► although it sometimes is,

00:37:53 ◼   ► but it just constantly drew my eye to it,

00:37:56 ◼   ► and I couldn't ignore it.

00:37:58 ◼   ► And it really deserves to be ignored most of the time.

00:38:01 ◼   ► So if what you want is more TV-like screens that are always on in your life, this might

00:38:07 ◼   ► be for you.

00:38:08 ◼   ► But that's not what I want.

00:38:09 ◼   ► >> It feels like you could have gotten this thing quieted down, so to speak.

00:38:14 ◼   ► Get it to the point where, I mean, I don't even know if it displays the timer and the

00:38:17 ◼   ► weather stuff, but in theory, one of the things that Amazon might have a leg up over Apple

00:38:23 ◼   ► on is just saying, "Oh, we'll just make everything configurable."

00:38:26 ◼   ► Like you'll just be, you know, turn things on, turn things off, whatever, and then you

00:38:29 ◼   ► You can get it to the point where all it ever displays is your three timers and the weather.

00:38:34 ◼   ► And you start looking at it more like an old-style clock radio where, yeah, it's a light that's

00:38:38 ◼   ► constantly on, but it doesn't change much, it just shows the time all the time, you know

00:38:42 ◼   ► what I mean?

00:38:43 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

00:38:44 ◼   ► >> It's probably wise to wait for a second-generation device instead of this hideous thing, but

00:38:49 ◼   ► on the other hand, look at your cylinder.

00:38:52 ◼   ► They haven't made great strides with that cylinder.

00:38:54 ◼   ► They did -- I wouldn't worry too much about the ecosystem going all screen because they've

00:38:58 ◼   ► They've still got the dot, and then they've got the cylinder, and then they've got this,

00:39:01 ◼   ► and now they've got like a three-part family, not even counting all the weird buttons that

00:39:05 ◼   ► you press to get paper towels and stuff.

00:39:08 ◼   ► So I think Amazon will keep making one of everything, but I also think if they actually

00:39:13 ◼   ► iterate on this, which remains to be seen if they will, but if they do iterate on it,

00:39:19 ◼   ► I think this approach is better than the "hey, just give me a cylinder with a tiny screen,"

00:39:23 ◼   ► because a cylinder with a tiny screen has more limited use cases.

00:39:27 ◼   ► What you really want is instead of this thing looks like a speaker grill housing apparently

00:39:31 ◼   ► some crappy speakers and then a screen on top of it.

00:39:34 ◼   ► What you really want is for it to be, and what people are going to suggest is oh why

00:39:37 ◼   ► don't you just have an iPad in your kitchen.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Because then you can run whatever app you want, configure whatever you want, use Hey

00:39:42 ◼   ► Siri to do everything you want and won't that solve all your problems and you already discussed

00:39:46 ◼   ► no it won't because Siri doesn't listen to me and does dumb things.

00:39:51 ◼   ► But having a big giant screen that can do anything is much more flexible than having

00:39:57 ◼   ► a small screen that can do the three things that you want to do with it.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Provided you can make the big screen quiet down, not show you special offers.

00:40:06 ◼   ► By the way, if people don't know what that's a reference to, the Kindles, for many years

00:40:10 ◼   ► perhaps they still do this, you can get a Kindle cheaper if you're willing to have ads

00:40:15 ◼   ► displayed on it when you're not using it.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Amazon had a euphemism for this they called it Kindle with special offers a way of saying buy this Kindle for less money and

00:40:24 ◼   ► We'll constantly show you ads and if you want the ads to go away

00:40:27 ◼   ► Give us a little bit of more money and let me tell you that's the best money you'll ever spend in your life

00:40:31 ◼   ► Their book to show them special offers. Yeah, it was only it was only 25 bucks. It wasn't a massive amount of money

00:40:38 ◼   ► Yeah, like get the one by all means get the one with special offers and then just say every quarter that you're fine like in

00:40:43 ◼   ► the laundry, just keep saving that until you get $25 and then spend it. It's a great use

00:40:47 ◼   ► of your money. But anyway, I'm still a believer in a big screen thing that is stationary and

00:40:55 ◼   ► plugged in and has cameras and microphones and good speakers in it, but apparently this

00:40:59 ◼   ► is not yet it. But I also think that Marco didn't quite give us a long enough chance

00:41:03 ◼   ► to know exactly how much he would hate or like it. Because I feel like if you had kept

00:41:07 ◼   ► it for a couple weeks, you could probably come to some uneasy truce with this super

00:41:13 ◼   ► bright screen and get it settled down and then then you really know whether

00:41:17 ◼   ► like it's untenable and this needs to go or whatever but it's probably easier for

00:41:22 ◼   ► all involved if you don't add more of these devices to your house so maybe

00:41:26 ◼   ► just start buying cylinders and stockpiling them now yeah it'll be

00:41:30 ◼   ► Marco with the cylinders Gruber with his keyboards John and Stephen Hackett with

00:41:36 ◼   ► everything well see the thing with the keyboards is you can probably keep

00:41:41 ◼   ► getting those to work but the cylinders like if Amazon gives up on the cylinders

00:41:47 ◼   ► the cylinder is useless without the backend services that feed it so you

00:41:51 ◼   ► just have a bunch of useless and Marco you would know have they ever revised

00:41:55 ◼   ► the cylinder no that's that's not a good sign they've already they revised the

00:41:59 ◼   ► dot already that there's been two dots and there's been the other ones that no

00:42:02 ◼   ► one buys that the the tap and oh god what's the other one called there's two

00:42:07 ◼   ► other ones that nobody buys but the tap and the spud and the dot yeah but but

00:42:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's been two dots,

00:42:13 ◼   ► but there's only ever been one full-size cylinder.

00:42:16 ◼   ► - All right, anything else on the Echo Show?

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00:43:50 ◼   ► - Okay, moving on.

00:43:55 ◼   ► We wanted to talk a little bit about iOS drag and drop,

00:43:58 ◼   ► and I have not really experienced this yet.

00:44:01 ◼   ► I don't have a new iPad.

00:44:03 ◼   ► I haven't put the beta on my iPad mini,

00:44:05 ◼   ► But there was a little bit of a discussion that I think all of us had overheard when

00:44:12 ◼   ► we were in San Jose for WWDC.

00:44:16 ◼   ► And it was a really fascinating conversation that I'm going to try my best to summarize.

00:44:21 ◼   ► So Dr. Wave, Michael Johnson of Pixar, had an interesting use case that he didn't feel

00:44:29 ◼   ► like the existing drag and drop API would work with.

00:44:34 ◼   ► His specific example is slightly different than this

00:44:36 ◼   ► But I heard him talk about this a couple of times with a couple of people and I'm gonna use his

00:44:43 ◼   ► Example that is not really for Pixar, but just a general example

00:44:46 ◼   ► So let's say you had a photograph that you were dragging from say photos into pages

00:44:53 ◼   ► You know the Apple word processor app

00:44:55 ◼   ► What what dr. Wave was saying was?

00:44:58 ◼   ► in general like say on a Mac

00:45:02 ◼   ► You would expect that as you're dragging this photo over the text that's in pages,

00:45:08 ◼   ► say you're dragging it into the middle of like an essay or something, you would expect that the text would flow around

00:45:14 ◼   ► the image such that it's hugging the borders of this image.

00:45:20 ◼   ► Presumably this image is some sort of rectangle and you know, it's trying to hug the four edges of that image as best as possible.

00:45:27 ◼   ► So as you drag it up all the text moves down, as you drag it down all the text moves up, etc.

00:45:31 ◼   ► I'm trying my best to paint a word picture here.

00:45:34 ◼   ► So what he was saying was, that's not really allowed the way things work today.

00:45:42 ◼   ► And now I'm talking a little outside my comfort zone, so feel free to interrupt me.

00:45:46 ◼   ► But basically, you're given a bare minimum of, I guess, metadata about what's getting

00:45:53 ◼   ► dragged, if any.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And it's not until the user releases the drag and thus commits, "Yes, this is the app I

00:46:02 ◼   ► would like to receive this thing I'm holding onto."

00:46:06 ◼   ► That's the moment at which the destination app gets all kinds of information, including

00:46:11 ◼   ► the actual object that's being dragged.

00:46:13 ◼   ► But the theory from Apple was, until you have released your finger and taken it off the

00:46:20 ◼   ► screen and thus dropped what you have quote-unquote in your hand, what if you drag across some other

00:46:26 ◼   ► app that you don't want to see anything about that information? So let's say you have, you know,

00:46:31 ◼   ► one of those situations where you have three apps open, you're going from photos, and you're going

00:46:35 ◼   ► across Twitter, and because you're a maniac you don't use Tweetbot, you use the official Twitter

00:46:41 ◼   ► app. Don't @ me. So you drag across twitter.app, but you don't want Twitter to see that photograph,

00:46:47 ◼   ► and then you go into pages and that's when you release.

00:46:51 ◼   ► So that's why they don't want to give a not final destination,

00:46:56 ◼   ► any sort of real information about what's being dragged.

00:46:59 ◼   ► But that's a real bummer for cases where you want to do things like

00:47:02 ◼   ► reflow text around an image.

00:47:05 ◼   ► So it was a very, very interesting use case,

00:47:07 ◼   ► and I actually witnessed a couple of conversations between Dr. Wave

00:47:10 ◼   ► and a couple of people, including some Apple employees,

00:47:13 ◼   ► one of which was extremely fascinating,

00:47:15 ◼   ► about what are the pros and cons of Apple's approach,

00:47:18 ◼   ► and what could or should they do about it.

00:47:22 ◼   ► And there's a lot of gray area here

00:47:25 ◼   ► that I'm kind of fluffing over.

00:47:26 ◼   ► As an example, if the source and destination apps

00:47:30 ◼   ► are from the same developer, say com.pixar.whatever,

00:47:34 ◼   ► then there's, I believe, more information available to you

00:47:38 ◼   ► than there would be otherwise,

00:47:40 ◼   ► but I don't recall if that's enough

00:47:42 ◼   ► to get through this particular problem or not,

00:47:44 ◼   ► but it was just a really, really fascinating use case.

00:47:47 ◼   ► And I don't know if I should go so far as to say edge case,

00:47:51 ◼   ► but it's certainly, it's not one of those things

00:47:53 ◼   ► where I heard this and was like, wow, this API sucks.

00:47:57 ◼   ► It's actually, wow, they really, really thought

00:47:59 ◼   ► about this API.

00:48:01 ◼   ► They made a decision that may or may not have been the best,

00:48:04 ◼   ► but I think that makes sense,

00:48:06 ◼   ► and I understand why they did it.

00:48:08 ◼   ► So I have not experienced this myself.

00:48:12 ◼   ► I've kind of summarized as best I can.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Marco, you have a new iPad,

00:48:17 ◼   ► and you do have the beta on it, right?

00:48:18 ◼   ► So anything to add on this?

00:48:20 ◼   ► - I thought you're wrong, but now I'm questioning it.

00:48:23 ◼   ► I thought that there was a whole thing in the WDC sessions,

00:48:26 ◼   ► which I haven't finished watching

00:48:28 ◼   ► the drag and drop ones yet.

00:48:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, see, I haven't seen them either.

00:48:31 ◼   ► - But I thought that they actually did provide,

00:48:34 ◼   ► for photos, they provided dimensions.

00:48:36 ◼   ► And there was even some way to tell the drag

00:48:41 ◼   ► drag agent how to render a preview to say like,

00:48:44 ◼   ► show a thumbnail of the image here.

00:48:46 ◼   ► And didn't Federighi talk about that on the talk show?

00:48:49 ◼   ► For some reason I think you might be wrong

00:48:52 ◼   ► about this entire concept.

00:48:54 ◼   ► Like I think they're, you are right that the apps

00:48:58 ◼   ► don't receive information, don't receive the data

00:49:01 ◼   ► that's being dragged unless it's dropped

00:49:03 ◼   ► for security concern reasons, but I think there's

00:49:06 ◼   ► this whole API in place for like previewing

00:49:09 ◼   ► that allows the Windows Server to,

00:49:12 ◼   ► basically the app can tell the Windows Server,

00:49:14 ◼   ► like, well, if you happen to have an image,

00:49:16 ◼   ► let me know its dimensions and render it

00:49:19 ◼   ► at this kind of alpha level at this scale here.

00:49:23 ◼   ► Like, I think there actually is a way to do that.

00:49:25 ◼   ► So we'll have to follow up on this.

00:49:27 ◼   ► - No, no, let me clear this up for you guys.

00:49:29 ◼   ► You're both right.

00:49:30 ◼   ► Marco, you were recalling this,

00:49:31 ◼   ► and actually there's even more than that.

00:49:33 ◼   ► There's other places where you can stash

00:49:34 ◼   ► a limited amount of actual data,

00:49:36 ◼   ► like an 8K buffer or something,

00:49:37 ◼   ► and Casey's right about the, not friend apps,

00:49:40 ◼   ► but like app groups and stuff.

00:49:42 ◼   ► All those things are true, but the specific use case

00:49:45 ◼   ► and the case that Apple has specifically protected against

00:49:49 ◼   ► is getting at the actual data that is behind that drag data.

00:49:53 ◼   ► They have all these things surrounding it

00:49:55 ◼   ► to give you some way to let the destination

00:49:59 ◼   ► know stuff about your thing

00:50:01 ◼   ► without getting at the actual data.

00:50:03 ◼   ► And there's a couple reasons that.

00:50:04 ◼   ► One is the thing that Casey talked about, which is privacy.

00:50:07 ◼   ► it kind of makes sense. In the iOS ecosystem, in the modern computing ecosystem, the idea of

00:50:13 ◼   ► dragging an image across the Facebook app and the Facebook app extracting all the image data and

00:50:20 ◼   ► like analyzing and uploading or whatever, like that sounds crazy, you're just paranoid. No,

00:50:24 ◼   ► we've seen not crazy at all. We've seen worse from other applications on iOS. This is why Apple

00:50:31 ◼   ► did this. They can't give you the data. And so if they're not going to give you the data,

00:50:36 ◼   ► then all these problems you're talking about, well, what do I do for a preview? What should

00:50:41 ◼   ► it look like when I'm dragging it? Can I give some metadata? Can I give some limited amount

00:50:45 ◼   ► of other data of my choosing, a couple of kilobytes of information? And a lot of times that can be

00:50:51 ◼   ► enough. For example, if the thing that you're dragging is representable by URL, for example,

00:50:56 ◼   ► and you can jam that URL into that, you know, eight kilobyte field, then your destination

00:51:01 ◼   ► application is like, oh, ha, you're dragging this thing, but I can't get it the real data. It's like,

00:51:06 ◼   ► yeah, but my data is just a URL, and I'll put it in a little area, and then you can read the URL,

00:51:10 ◼   ► and then you can hit the URL and pull down the data and get it. But in other cases,

00:51:14 ◼   ► when you're dragging something very large, like a large data file or something like that,

00:51:18 ◼   ► they don't want the application to get at that actual data. And all the preview stuff you can

00:51:22 ◼   ► do is never going to represent the thing. I don't want to get into, I know some more specific

00:51:26 ◼   ► details about the use cases of the Pixar thing, but I don't want to talk about them, but

00:51:28 ◼   ► there are situations where a preview is not sufficient. A thumbnail, a preview, dimensions,

00:51:35 ◼   ► all of which are not sufficient. You can imagine things that Pixar does that may not be adequately

00:51:40 ◼   ► representable or nicely representable as merely some dimensions in a thumbnail, right? Because

00:51:46 ◼   ► because Pixar does stuff in 3D.

00:51:48 ◼   ► So just feel free to extrapolate from there.

00:51:50 ◼   ► And that's a user experience thing

00:51:53 ◼   ► where you would just expect on the Mac

00:51:57 ◼   ► or on a PC type operating system

00:51:58 ◼   ► that the destination has access to the full set of data

00:52:02 ◼   ► and can do whatever it wants with it

00:52:04 ◼   ► and not just say, give me a little placeholder

00:52:07 ◼   ► because sometimes a placeholder,

00:52:09 ◼   ► especially if the placeholder is just a thumbnail

00:52:11 ◼   ► or something array of kilobits is not adequate.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And so I think Apple made the right decision

00:52:16 ◼   ► for the environment, because, and especially since it's so hard to ensure that you don't

00:52:21 ◼   ► drag across something, you know, that you like, because everything is, you know, it's

00:52:27 ◼   ► a tiling window manager, essentially, there is no dead zone, there's no demilitarized

00:52:32 ◼   ► zone between the quote unquote, windows. Right. So I guess if you invoke the multitasking

00:52:38 ◼   ► switcher, you've got your you're sort of out of dragging across things until you pull it

00:52:41 ◼   ► back from maybe when you pull it to the front, maybe you don't, you're not hovering over

00:52:44 ◼   ► the right side of the pane as it zooms in. It's difficult not to accidentally hover over

00:52:49 ◼   ► something. And I don't know if it's just iOS or just modern computing in general, but iOS

00:52:53 ◼   ► grew up in an environment where it is not overly paranoid to think that applications

00:53:01 ◼   ► will try to extract any piece of information they can because they can do stuff with it.

00:53:05 ◼   ► They can upload to a server, they can analyze it, they can figure out how to sell ads against

00:53:09 ◼   ► your thing. That is real stuff that happens, so they have to protect against it.

00:53:14 ◼   ► it. But after hearing these specific use cases, I think there is a situation that Apple needs

00:53:21 ◼   ► to address, and I think the best way to address it is probably by, you know, that same thing

00:53:25 ◼   ► with the App Group stuff of like opening the floodgates between applications that know

00:53:30 ◼   ► each other, right? And I'm sure there's a use case beyond that, where it's like, "Right,

00:53:34 ◼   ► what about, you know, a third-party company that wants to sell an application into a professional

00:53:39 ◼   ► environment and they're not the same company and they want to share things?" So there needs

00:53:42 ◼   ► to be some sort of secure way for applications, even across companies, to agree that it's

00:53:49 ◼   ► okay that we share each other's full data instead of doing a lot of this stuff. But

00:53:54 ◼   ► I mean, this is what software design is about. You make the best decision for everybody,

00:54:00 ◼   ► and then everybody who doesn't fall into that 80%, the fat part of the bell curve, sends

00:54:06 ◼   ► you bug reports and you try to find some way to accommodate them. So I don't know what

00:54:09 ◼   ► outcome of this conversation is other than I was fairly convinced that this is a legit

00:54:13 ◼   ► use case and I think Apple was as well and hopefully they'll do stuff to address it.

00:54:17 ◼   ► But I still think they made the right decision for the majority of users, you know, that's

00:54:23 ◼   ► sort of safety first, security first, privacy first approach with many allowances to let,

00:54:30 ◼   ► you know, your average application do something reasonable and then the more demanding applications

00:54:35 ◼   ► have to find another solution.

00:54:37 ◼   ► Anything else on drag and drop?

00:54:38 ◼   ► So there's a subsection here about dragging,

00:54:42 ◼   ► drag and drop on the phone.

00:54:43 ◼   ► This was all, this is all older notes,

00:54:45 ◼   ► but it was like right after the keynote,

00:54:47 ◼   ► it was like, wait, does drag and drop work on the phone?

00:54:48 ◼   ► Or does it work in the beta?

00:54:49 ◼   ► Is it supposed to work?

00:54:50 ◼   ► Or no, they're gonna intentionally make it not work

00:54:53 ◼   ► because they don't want drag and drop to be on the phone.

00:54:55 ◼   ► I don't have iOS 11 on a phone,

00:54:57 ◼   ► so I don't know the current status of this.

00:54:59 ◼   ► Marco, do you have it?

00:55:00 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:55:01 ◼   ► - Can you drag between anything on the phone?

00:55:02 ◼   ► Can you drag between apps?

00:55:04 ◼   ► - No, you can drag within your own app though.

00:55:07 ◼   ► I'm not entirely sure why they impose this limitation.

00:55:11 ◼   ► Like I can see why somebody might have argued for this.

00:55:14 ◼   ► But you know, on the iPad you can drag and drop

00:55:16 ◼   ► within an app and also between apps.

00:55:19 ◼   ► On the iPhone you can only drag and drop within an app.

00:55:22 ◼   ► However, if the argument is the screen is too small

00:55:26 ◼   ► and so you can't expect people to like, you know,

00:55:28 ◼   ► cram their fingers on it or whatever,

00:55:30 ◼   ► that doesn't work because there's this awesome system

00:55:34 ◼   ► that they built where you can pick up some items in a drag

00:55:38 ◼   ► and then with another finger, maybe from your other hand,

00:55:42 ◼   ► with another finger, you can navigate the interface

00:55:45 ◼   ► to a different screen and then drop the dragged items

00:55:49 ◼   ► somewhere else, like not just within the same list

00:55:51 ◼   ► or within the same screen, but you can actually go

00:55:53 ◼   ► to a different level in the navigation hierarchy

00:55:55 ◼   ► and drop them there, or you can drive them

00:55:57 ◼   ► to a whole different app entirely.

00:55:59 ◼   ► And that's great, that's an incredibly powerful system.

00:56:02 ◼   ► But if you're gonna allow navigation within an app

00:56:06 ◼   ► to happen while you're in mid-drag on the phone,

00:56:09 ◼   ► why not also allow you to kick out to a different app

00:56:12 ◼   ► and launch something else?

00:56:14 ◼   ► So the only thing I can think of is,

00:56:16 ◼   ► on the iPad you have the screen space

00:56:17 ◼   ► to have two apps side by side,

00:56:19 ◼   ► or more than one app side by side.

00:56:22 ◼   ► So you have that ability on the iPad

00:56:24 ◼   ► and you don't have that on the iPhone.

00:56:25 ◼   ► And that's fine, I think that makes sense

00:56:27 ◼   ► given the screen sizes and the app environment.

00:56:30 ◼   ► but I don't see why there's a limitation

00:56:33 ◼   ► that you can't do it between apps

00:56:36 ◼   ► by holding down your dragged items on the phone

00:56:39 ◼   ► and then hitting the home button and going to a different app

00:56:41 ◼   ► and opening up a different app.

00:56:41 ◼   ► It's like you already enabled it within the app.

00:56:44 ◼   ► So why not that?

00:56:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, Steve Drouton Smith responding

00:56:48 ◼   ► to some people offering that maybe it's because

00:56:51 ◼   ► the phone's not powerful enough

00:56:54 ◼   ► or they wanna save it as an upsell feature

00:56:56 ◼   ► for the next iPhone or whatever.

00:56:58 ◼   ► And from what he heard at WWDC is that they just wanted this to be an iPad only feature

00:57:04 ◼   ► for now.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Maybe it will come to the phone eventually.

00:57:06 ◼   ► By the way, related to this, both on the phone and on the iPad, one of the things that kept

00:57:11 ◼   ► coming up during the keynote and afterwards is the idea of a shelf, which is a concept

00:57:16 ◼   ► that I'm pretty sure existed in Next Step, but certainly there were like copycat products

00:57:22 ◼   ► on the Mac, there probably still are on the Mac these days.

00:57:25 ◼   ► It's just, I think even Quicksilver has something like that.

00:57:29 ◼   ► It's a region of the screen, like a shelf, like a little rectangular area that comes

00:57:33 ◼   ► out and it's like, "Hey, put stuff here."

00:57:35 ◼   ► And when you put things there, it doesn't actually move them to there, they're just

00:57:38 ◼   ► proxies, like, "Oh."

00:57:39 ◼   ► It's like if you start dragging something, just put it on the shelf here.

00:57:43 ◼   ► It's as if you continued the drag, but you don't have to, you just drop it on the shelf.

00:57:46 ◼   ► Then you can go do whatever it is you want to do, go find where you were going to drop

00:57:50 ◼   ► that drag thing, then you open up the shelf again and you're like, "All right, take the

00:57:53 ◼   ► thing back off the shelf and put it in."

00:57:55 ◼   ► So it's a multi-part drag operation with a rest stop in between.

00:58:00 ◼   ► You can have multiple things on the shelf.

00:58:01 ◼   ► You can imagine it's multiple clipboards.

00:58:03 ◼   ► It's lots of things in the current interface that are equivalent to that.

00:58:07 ◼   ► The tricky bit in iOS, and maybe the reason Apple hasn't committed to anything like a

00:58:11 ◼   ► shelf yet, is where do you put the shelf?

00:58:13 ◼   ► How do you activate it?

00:58:14 ◼   ► Do you want to hog a whole screen edge with it?

00:58:17 ◼   ► How do you get it to appear and disappear?

00:58:19 ◼   ► Do you feel like you're burning...

00:58:22 ◼   ► Are you burning parts of the interface for this?

00:58:23 ◼   ► Now you can use entire applications as a shelf.

00:58:26 ◼   ► You can make a shelf application

00:58:27 ◼   ► and dock it on the right side of your thing.

00:58:29 ◼   ► And like there's lots of ways you can work around this,

00:58:31 ◼   ► but all the demos and the keynotes

00:58:33 ◼   ► and a lot of the stuff that I've seen online

00:58:35 ◼   ► is people showing multi-finger drags

00:58:38 ◼   ► with the thing I think I referred to on the live show

00:58:41 ◼   ► is the holding your breath operation,

00:58:43 ◼   ► where you begin doing a bunch of stuff

00:58:45 ◼   ► and now you've got stuff in flight,

00:58:47 ◼   ► like fingers are on the screen

00:58:48 ◼   ► and basically you can't let go.

00:58:51 ◼   ► Like you're dragging stuff and you can't let go.

00:58:52 ◼   ► You haven't gotten to your destination yet,

00:58:54 ◼   ► you're getting there.

00:58:55 ◼   ► Your other hand is navigating somehow,

00:58:56 ◼   ► you're doing this with one hand

00:58:58 ◼   ► wrapped around your little phone,

00:58:59 ◼   ► or you have two hands on the phone

00:59:01 ◼   ► and it's resting at whatever.

00:59:02 ◼   ► Those type of operations,

00:59:05 ◼   ► that's kind of the same reason that,

00:59:07 ◼   ► you guys don't remember this, but on the Mac originally,

00:59:11 ◼   ► the menu bar worked like the thing at the top of the screen.

00:59:14 ◼   ► You'd have to hold down the mouse button.

00:59:17 ◼   ► So you'd go up to the file menu,

00:59:18 ◼   ► you'd click and hold down the mouse button,

00:59:21 ◼   ► and you'd have to keep holding down the mouse button

00:59:23 ◼   ► until you moused over the menu item you wanted

00:59:25 ◼   ► and then you would release.

00:59:26 ◼   ► And that is like the smallest version

00:59:28 ◼   ► of a breath-holding maneuver,

00:59:30 ◼   ► because you did mouse down

00:59:33 ◼   ► and you had to keep holding it down

00:59:34 ◼   ► while you looked around the menus.

00:59:36 ◼   ► You can go to the next menu, go down, go into a sub-menu,

00:59:38 ◼   ► try to find the thing you want,

00:59:39 ◼   ► but you're holding the mouse button down this entire time,

00:59:42 ◼   ► which is a more difficult operation,

00:59:43 ◼   ► especially back when the Mac was new

00:59:45 ◼   ► and no one knew how to use a mouse.

00:59:47 ◼   ► It's a more difficult operation than you might think.

00:59:49 ◼   ► like okay, hold down the mouse button,

00:59:51 ◼   ► but keep moving the mouse, you know,

00:59:53 ◼   ► but I have to keep pressing the button,

00:59:56 ◼   ► so do I just rest my finger on it

00:59:58 ◼   ► and press it into the table,

00:59:58 ◼   ► or do I push upward on the mouse?

01:00:00 ◼   ► And these things we take for granted now

01:00:01 ◼   ► that it sounds crazy that I'm even suggesting this,

01:00:03 ◼   ► but believe me, this was a maneuver

01:00:05 ◼   ► that was difficult for people to do,

01:00:07 ◼   ► much more difficult for people to do than the equivalent,

01:00:09 ◼   ► which is what Windows did,

01:00:10 ◼   ► which is go to the file menu and click mouse down, mouse up.

01:00:14 ◼   ► No, you don't have to hold anything down anymore.

01:00:16 ◼   ► The file menu will fall down,

01:00:18 ◼   ► And now you're free to navigate.

01:00:20 ◼   ► And the flip side of that in the Windows world is, OK, well,

01:00:23 ◼   ► I did this click on the File menu.

01:00:25 ◼   ► And I decided I don't want anything in the File menu.

01:00:27 ◼   ► But now the File menu is stuck down.

01:00:29 ◼   ► Like, how do I get rid of it?

01:00:30 ◼   ► And you move your cursor around.

01:00:32 ◼   ► The other menus come down.

01:00:33 ◼   ► And you try to move your cursor off the end.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And it's like, I just want to get rid of these menus.

01:00:37 ◼   ► How do I make them go away?

01:00:38 ◼   ► You can do it on your Mac now.

01:00:39 ◼   ► Click the File menu.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And then just move your mouse around it.

01:00:41 ◼   ► And pretend you're a novice user.

01:00:43 ◼   ► It's like, the File menu is down.

01:00:45 ◼   ► I don't want it to go.

01:00:46 ◼   ► and then you hit the edit menu,

01:00:47 ◼   ► now the edit menu is down,

01:00:49 ◼   ► you have to find a safe place to click to deactivate it.

01:00:52 ◼   ► Whereas if with the old Mac style one,

01:00:54 ◼   ► when you hold down,

01:00:56 ◼   ► you just release the mouse button

01:00:57 ◼   ► anywhere that's not on a menu item,

01:00:59 ◼   ► and you have canceled the operation.

01:01:01 ◼   ► Eventually, Apple came around to the Windows way

01:01:04 ◼   ► of doing things because it's less

01:01:05 ◼   ► of a breath-holding maneuver.

01:01:06 ◼   ► You get to click and now you get to think,

01:01:08 ◼   ► find the menu item, scroll around or whatever,

01:01:11 ◼   ► and eventually people learn the safe areas

01:01:12 ◼   ► to click to deactivate thing or whatever.

01:01:14 ◼   ► So on iOS, all these drag operations,

01:01:18 ◼   ► you're just holding your breath that whole time

01:01:19 ◼   ► until you can find a place to put these.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And worse, this is my question after the keynote,

01:01:24 ◼   ► and I still kind of have this question,

01:01:25 ◼   ► even though I do have iOS 11 on my iPad now,

01:01:27 ◼   ► is how do you safely cancel a complex drag operation?

01:01:32 ◼   ► You've got seven things in flight,

01:01:33 ◼   ► you're swiping around and you're like,

01:01:34 ◼   ► you changed your mind.

01:01:35 ◼   ► You're like, no, nevermind.

01:01:37 ◼   ► If I was in the Mac, I would hit the escape key,

01:01:38 ◼   ► which nobody knows because people

01:01:40 ◼   ► aren't old school Mac users,

01:01:41 ◼   ► and it would cancel the drag operation, right?

01:01:42 ◼   ► - I didn't know that.

01:01:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:45 ◼   ► But on, in iOS, I'm like, well, what do I do

01:01:50 ◼   ► with all this crap that I've got in my hand?

01:01:51 ◼   ► I'm holding my breath.

01:01:52 ◼   ► I gotta get rid of this, it's like a hanger in it.

01:01:54 ◼   ► I gotta get rid of this stuff safely.

01:01:55 ◼   ► I don't wanna accidentally drag all this stuff into it.

01:01:58 ◼   ► So like--

01:01:59 ◼   ► - You go off the screen edge maybe?

01:02:00 ◼   ► - I mean, there's a million places we know

01:02:02 ◼   ► is you probably go to Springboard and it's probably safe,

01:02:04 ◼   ► unless you're dragging applications,

01:02:06 ◼   ► in which case maybe you'll move them to there.

01:02:07 ◼   ► You can go to a thing, they have different cursors of like,

01:02:12 ◼   ► Can this drag potentially happen in this location at all?

01:02:14 ◼   ► One of them is like the forbidden cursor,

01:02:16 ◼   ► which they tell you you're not supposed to use,

01:02:17 ◼   ► but at least tells you like,

01:02:18 ◼   ► look, you can't drag this here ever.

01:02:20 ◼   ► It's never gonna work, don't bother.

01:02:21 ◼   ► Like, oh, now it's safe to drop.

01:02:23 ◼   ► I can drop it there.

01:02:24 ◼   ► Like, they don't show demos like that,

01:02:26 ◼   ► but having a safe way to change your mind mid-flight

01:02:31 ◼   ► and also having a way to think about what you're doing

01:02:38 ◼   ► mid-flight without the pressure,

01:02:39 ◼   ► without the literal pressure of having to hold your fingers

01:02:42 ◼   ► down on the screen or the mental pressure of knowing that you have this thing in flight,

01:02:46 ◼   ► those are problems that could potentially be solved by a shelf because then you have

01:02:50 ◼   ► a two-part maneuver. I'm going to do something with this thing and this other thing, chuck

01:02:54 ◼   ► them on the shelf. And now I'm free, I'm not holding my breath anymore, I'm not holding

01:02:58 ◼   ► my fingers on the screen, I'm free to figure out what I'm going to do with that stuff.

01:03:01 ◼   ► If I decide I'm not going to do anything with it, it's over. Like I can just leave it on

01:03:05 ◼   ► the shelf or I can delete it from the shelf or just let it age out of the shelf or whatever.

01:03:09 ◼   ► But eventually I do find the thing I want to do, I can bring the shelf back onto the

01:03:11 ◼   ► screen, take the thing off the shelf, put it where I was going to put it. So I think

01:03:16 ◼   ► there's room for that type of interface element in iOS and I think a lot of

01:03:20 ◼   ► these multi-finger drag things are cool to look at and impressive but are way

01:03:27 ◼   ► above the physical mental dexterity of most people most of the time and even

01:03:35 ◼   ► for people who can pull them off I think they are they're less comfortable than a

01:03:40 ◼   ► a more relaxed multi-part operation,

01:03:43 ◼   ► the same way that holding down the mouse cursor on a menu

01:03:46 ◼   ► was less comfortable for people on the original Mac

01:03:49 ◼   ► and why we're all used to just single clicking.

01:03:51 ◼   ► If you wanna get a feeling for this, by the way,

01:03:52 ◼   ► just fire up an old Mac emulator.

01:03:54 ◼   ► Everybody, even old school Mac users like me,

01:03:57 ◼   ► you fire up one of those old Mac emulators

01:03:58 ◼   ► and you go to a menu and you click on it,

01:04:00 ◼   ► and the menu briefly flickers on the screen,

01:04:02 ◼   ► and you go, "Oh yeah, yeah, I remember this."

01:04:05 ◼   ► Or if you're not an old school Mac user,

01:04:06 ◼   ► you're like, "This thing is broken," and you just quit.

01:04:09 ◼   ► So there was an app that I loved that is not being made anymore, and I think there was

01:04:15 ◼   ► like an API change, and they got booted from the Mac App Store.

01:04:18 ◼   ► I don't remember what it was.

01:04:19 ◼   ► But it was called Dragon Drop.

01:04:21 ◼   ► That's "dragon" as in the animal drop, and it was a play, obviously, on the phrase "drag

01:04:26 ◼   ► and drop."

01:04:27 ◼   ► Oh!

01:04:28 ◼   ► Yeah, funny, huh?

01:04:30 ◼   ► Anyway, what it did was, on the Mac, if you start a drag and then wiggle your mouse the

01:04:37 ◼   ► the same way you wiggle your mouse to get the huge cursor in Sierra.

01:04:42 ◼   ► What it would do is it would pop up—I'm sure there's a term for this kind of pain,

01:04:46 ◼   ► but whatever the term is, it would bring up one of those, like—I don't know how to describe

01:04:52 ◼   ► it, but it's like a little temporary window, basically.

01:04:55 ◼   ► And you could drag—or you could drop, I should say, whatever you have in your drag

01:05:01 ◼   ► onto this drag-and-drop pane, and it would stay there.

01:05:06 ◼   ► Then you could mouse around and do whatever you needed, maybe get to a different path

01:05:10 ◼   ► on your desktop or on your hard drive, whatever.

01:05:14 ◼   ► And then you could go back to drag and drop and drag out of that.

01:05:17 ◼   ► So it was basically a shelf, like you were saying, and drag out of that and onto finder

01:05:20 ◼   ► or what have you.

01:05:21 ◼   ► And it was amazing and it made the computer so much better and easier to use.

01:05:25 ◼   ► And maybe there's another equivalent of that, and if there is, I'd actually kind of like

01:05:29 ◼   ► to know it.

01:05:30 ◼   ► But there's like 20 of those apps for the Mac.

01:05:32 ◼   ► The drag and drop innovation was the Wiggly cursor.

01:05:34 ◼   ► I think that was the first app that did that one.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Most of them use screen edges.

01:05:37 ◼   ► Like I said, Quicksilver has one.

01:05:39 ◼   ► I'm sure LaunchBar has one.

01:05:40 ◼   ► Yes, I want the Wiggly cursor.

01:05:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:42 ◼   ► Oh, you want the Wiggly cursor?

01:05:43 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:05:44 ◼   ► Maybe someone copied drag and drop.

01:05:45 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm trying to think if the next shelf was the original one of these.

01:05:49 ◼   ► I'm mostly coming from Mac world.

01:05:51 ◼   ► Even in classic Mac OS, there was a ton of these things.

01:05:53 ◼   ► Some of them are really good.

01:05:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I love this thing.

01:05:57 ◼   ► And I also did know you could hit escape to cancel drag, by the way.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And I live this long not knowing this, Mark.

01:06:03 ◼   ► What are you doing you have to cancel a drag? I never cancel a drag. You never cancel. I've committed to this drag

01:06:08 ◼   ► I'm seeing it through to the end. I gotta find some place to drop this thing damn it. I know what I'm doing oh

01:06:13 ◼   ► sick burn yeah

01:06:16 ◼   ► Let's go to the Mac. You can only grab well

01:06:18 ◼   ► You can only grab either one thing at once or multiple things all at once

01:06:23 ◼   ► It is more difficult than most Mac programs do not allow you to do this to add to your drag

01:06:28 ◼   ► Well as an iOS that's all the demos like like I've gone into another app

01:06:31 ◼   ► You know what? I'm gonna add more crap to this drag. Add, add, add. I'm running out of fingers, but it's okay."

01:06:35 ◼   ► And you know, you keep going.

01:06:37 ◼   ► Oh, one more thing on this, since we got to have an APFS section in every show now, as part of my legal agreement with Apple.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Another one of the things, you know, I keep bringing up like, "Why do I care about APFS?"

01:06:52 ◼   ► And, you know, I brought up snapshots and everything last time.

01:06:56 ◼   ► dragging a large thing whether it be a photo or a giant audio file or a video file or you know a 3d model or

01:07:02 ◼   ► Whatever from some iOS application

01:07:04 ◼   ► to another one

01:07:07 ◼   ► When you drop it and you've committed to have all the data appear over there

01:07:11 ◼   ► Sandboxing is still a thing in iOS and despite app groups and all the things with the data sharing or whatever

01:07:17 ◼   ► Especially if it's across applications from different vendors

01:07:20 ◼   ► It has to get you all that data. This is a three gigabyte video file

01:07:25 ◼   ► it can't just say, oh, you can just read

01:07:28 ◼   ► that three gigabyte video file out of

01:07:29 ◼   ► that other application sandbox, because you can't.

01:07:31 ◼   ► That's the whole point of sandbox.

01:07:32 ◼   ► You can't get to that other application stuff.

01:07:34 ◼   ► But you also don't want to wait

01:07:35 ◼   ► and like throw up a progress bar of like,

01:07:37 ◼   ► now copying three gigabytes of data

01:07:39 ◼   ► from application A to application B,

01:07:41 ◼   ► which is what would happen on the Mac

01:07:43 ◼   ► if you drag this huge thing someplace,

01:07:45 ◼   ► you know, in the Mac progress bars are everywhere.

01:07:48 ◼   ► You know, everyone gets a progress bar.

01:07:49 ◼   ► That's part of the Mac experience.

01:07:51 ◼   ► Progress bars are less a part of the iOS experience,

01:07:54 ◼   ► massively less a part of the iOS experience the best we get our

01:07:56 ◼   ► Stupid little spinners in the app store app store that never actually terminated. But anyway, those are circular

01:08:01 ◼   ► Those aren't progress bars as their progress rings

01:08:04 ◼   ► So the solution to this good old APFS to the rescue

01:08:09 ◼   ► Because drag-and-drop is only available in iOS 11 in in the way that we're talking about and because iOS 11 comes with APFS for everybody

01:08:20 ◼   ► When you drag that three gigabyte video file from one application to another you get an instant clone of it in the other application

01:08:26 ◼   ► Sandbox, it doesn't actually actually copy any data doesn't matter how big it is

01:08:30 ◼   ► That's clone takes the exact same amount of time doesn't take up any more space on disk. It's copy on right

01:08:35 ◼   ► So if that application starts modifying it, it'll start to become unshared

01:08:39 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say that a BFS makes dragon route possible

01:08:42 ◼   ► But it almost makes drag because if you didn't think of what you would have to do like what where would the progress bar?

01:08:47 ◼   ► appear. Would it be at modal? Would it be like a progress bar just underneath the little thumbnail

01:08:52 ◼   ► icon of the thing as it slowly copies three gigabytes? It would be terrible. APFS is saving

01:08:57 ◼   ► the universe once again. Wow. Oh, Jon. Although I kind of think it's enabling like it's enabling

01:09:06 ◼   ► them not to think about sandboxing like, "Hey, sandboxing, but then how are we going to have

01:09:09 ◼   ► drag and drop between applications?" "Oh, don't worry. You don't have to rethink your sandboxing

01:09:13 ◼   ► model. It'll just be an instant clone." I kind of wish they had to rethink their sandboxing model

01:09:17 ◼   ► or have come up with some other sharing center

01:09:19 ◼   ► instead of saying, it's all right,

01:09:20 ◼   ► everyone will have their own copy of this data

01:09:22 ◼   ► in their own sandbox and we can make as many clones

01:09:25 ◼   ► as we want instantly, so it's no problem, right?

01:09:27 ◼   ► And I still think it actually is a problem.

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01:10:44 ◼   ► [music]

01:10:48 ◼   ► John, tell me about Dold 3.

01:10:51 ◼   ► This is another one of those sneaky things that Apple does every once in a while.

01:10:56 ◼   ► Maybe it's not sneaky, maybe it's because people don't care about it.

01:10:59 ◼   ► I used to write about them in my OS X reviews.

01:11:02 ◼   ► The canonical example is Launch-D, where...

01:11:05 ◼   ► Or actually, more recently we've had Discovery-D.

01:11:08 ◼   ► Lots of things that didn't do D.

01:11:11 ◼   ► And so does DYLD.

01:11:13 ◼   ► Where they're core parts of the Mac operating system, sometimes core parts of the underlying

01:11:19 ◼   ► base operating system, Darwin's underneath iOS and Mac OS, you never hear that name anymore

01:11:25 ◼   ► these days.

01:11:27 ◼   ► And Apple decide they need to rewrite it.

01:11:31 ◼   ► And that can be exciting, but also scary.

01:11:35 ◼   ► Discovery D, last time that happened, was a little bit scary because they, what was

01:11:39 ◼   ► the thing that was replacing it?

01:11:40 ◼   ► I forget.

01:11:41 ◼   ► >> MDNS responders.

01:11:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and so that was a problem because like, mdns responder was a mess and had tons of

01:11:48 ◼   ► bugs, but the thing that replaced it had more bugs and was even a bigger mess, and so they

01:11:55 ◼   ► wrote back that change.

01:11:58 ◼   ► But things like launchd, where they replace the process that spawns off all the other

01:12:03 ◼   ► processes and does a million other things, rewrite that from scratch and replace the

01:12:08 ◼   ► old init process. That worked out pretty well.

01:12:12 ◼   ► Did we ever find out whether it was Bono that rescued us from Discovery-D? Remember when

01:12:20 ◼   ► that change happened there was some kind of rumor like some celebrity complained to Tim

01:12:24 ◼   ► Cook and I think it was Bono. Like, you know, of all the things...

01:12:27 ◼   ► I don't think it was Bono. Bono doesn't know how to use computers.

01:12:29 ◼   ► Remember, it was some big celebrity and like imagine like, you know, of all the like the

01:12:33 ◼   ► the world peace things that Bono has done,

01:12:35 ◼   ► but like also rescuing us from Discovery D.

01:12:38 ◼   ► That would rank pretty high up on that list.

01:12:40 ◼   ► - Was it John Mayer?

01:12:41 ◼   ► I'm trying to think of like a celebrity.

01:12:41 ◼   ► - Maybe, yeah.

01:12:42 ◼   ► It was some celebrity that allegedly complained

01:12:46 ◼   ► to Tim Cook about this thing

01:12:48 ◼   ► and got it fixed like the next week.

01:12:50 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:12:51 ◼   ► Well, fixed as in rolling it back to MDNS Responder.

01:12:54 ◼   ► - Whatever it was, it was fixed.

01:12:56 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:12:57 ◼   ► Oh, for some people.

01:12:59 ◼   ► So in the upcoming operating systems in High Sierra and iOS 11,

01:13:07 ◼   ► Apple's Core OS group, I'm assuming, or some other people who work down

01:13:11 ◼   ► in the guts of stuff, have decided there's another part that needs to be replaced.

01:13:16 ◼   ► And that's the dynamic linker, which is a thing you probably don't know about

01:13:19 ◼   ► if you're not a programmer.

01:13:21 ◼   ► But it's the thing that figures out where all the other code that you're

01:13:26 ◼   ► going to be calling into is, and so you can call it

01:13:29 ◼   ► from your application.

01:13:30 ◼   ► You compile your application, saying,

01:13:31 ◼   ► I'm going to call this method and this framework here

01:13:33 ◼   ► and this function and this library there.

01:13:36 ◼   ► And when you launch your application,

01:13:39 ◼   ► the operating system needs to connect all those dots,

01:13:42 ◼   ► because maybe that library has changed,

01:13:44 ◼   ► and these libraries aren't part of your application.

01:13:47 ◼   ► They're somewhere else in the system directory,

01:13:49 ◼   ► and the address of all the functions in them

01:13:51 ◼   ► might be different from when you compiled your application.

01:13:54 ◼   ► So this is dynamic linking.

01:13:55 ◼   ► It's not static linking where at the time they can build your application, it knows where everything is and writes all that information.

01:14:00 ◼   ► It's dynamic linking. It says I'm going to call this function in this framework, and you're going to tell me where it is because it's going to move around.

01:14:07 ◼   ► And there's also address-based randomization, a bunch of other stuff for security reasons, which means that dynamic linking really has to figure out where everything is.

01:14:14 ◼   ► The title of the relevant WWDC session is "App Startup Time, colon, Past, Present, and Future," which seems like it's very innocuous.

01:14:25 ◼   ► like, "Oh, I'm going to learn how to make my app start up faster."

01:14:28 ◼   ► But surprise, session 413, we will put the link in the show notes,

01:14:32 ◼   ► this session is really about how Apple's rewriting the dynamic linker again,

01:14:36 ◼   ► for the third time.

01:14:38 ◼   ► And as you might imagine, the dynamic linker is a really, really, really important part of the system.

01:14:42 ◼   ► Because if it's broken, like, nothing works.

01:14:45 ◼   ► Because everything is dynamic linked to everything, and it's super important.

01:14:52 ◼   ► It's kind of like when they change the compiler, but worse,

01:14:54 ◼   ► because the compiler, like they left the old compiler around,

01:14:57 ◼   ► and the new dynamic linker is going

01:14:59 ◼   ► to be used to link everything in the operating system itself

01:15:03 ◼   ► and probably eventually all your third party applications.

01:15:07 ◼   ► So here's the scanning on this.

01:15:10 ◼   ► The old version, DYLD2, will be completely replaced

01:15:14 ◼   ► by the new DYLD3.

01:15:16 ◼   ► It's not maybe you've heard this one before.

01:15:17 ◼   ► Hopefully this will go well and not be a repeated discovery

01:15:22 ◼   ► situation. It will be the default for all system apps, and this is their phrasing,

01:15:27 ◼   ► for 2017 Apple OS platforms. So I guess that means the watch, the home pod, the

01:15:34 ◼   ► Apple TV, the Mac, and all iOS devices for system apps, which means Apple's own

01:15:40 ◼   ► applications. I mean, I guess third-party applications will keep still be using

01:15:44 ◼   ► D-Wale D 2.0. Anyway, the reason this session is called App Star Up Time Past,

01:15:49 ◼   ► in the future is because what they're pitching developers on is this will let your application

01:15:54 ◼   ► launch faster. And there's been a lot of WWC sessions about that and you might think this

01:15:58 ◼   ► is like, "Oh great, my app is slow on startup. This DYLD3 will make my app launch faster."

01:16:03 ◼   ► Well, maybe, but probably not because as the session says in the beginning to try to, you know,

01:16:11 ◼   ► level set, what they're talking about making startup time faster is everything that happens

01:16:17 ◼   ► before they call main.

01:16:19 ◼   ► You're like, well, wait a second.

01:16:20 ◼   ► My code doesn't even start until they call main.

01:16:23 ◼   ► If your application is slow on startup

01:16:26 ◼   ► because you're doing a bunch of stuff in your code,

01:16:28 ◼   ► this will not help you because this,

01:16:30 ◼   ► all the time they're trying to remove

01:16:32 ◼   ► is before main is called, right?

01:16:34 ◼   ► You're like, oh, well,

01:16:35 ◼   ► nothing happens before you call main, right?

01:16:37 ◼   ► Isn't that like the first thing that happens?

01:16:38 ◼   ► And from the dynamic language perspective,

01:16:40 ◼   ► it's like, no, no, no.

01:16:41 ◼   ► You think your program starts at main.

01:16:43 ◼   ► Really, we have to do a bunch of crap

01:16:44 ◼   ► to find all your stuff before we can even call main.

01:16:47 ◼   ► And so this team is like, we are everything that happens before.

01:16:50 ◼   ► Developers think there is zero time before main is called, but that is not true at all.

01:16:54 ◼   ► And so they're working at a much smaller level, obviously, in most non-trivial applications.

01:16:59 ◼   ► I would imagine the time required after main is called and before your application is usable

01:17:06 ◼   ► dwarfs all this time. But for very small, simple applications or system demons or other stuff

01:17:11 ◼   ► like that, maybe not. Sorry, I'm not going to repeat everything that's in the presentation,

01:17:15 ◼   ► but the summary is that they're taking the dynamic linker and moving it out into a daemon

01:17:22 ◼   ► process, which might be terrifying to people.

01:17:25 ◼   ► Like, "Wait, how can the dynamic linker be a daemon process?"

01:17:29 ◼   ► I don't like daemon processes, and DYLD already ends in D, which is convenient for them.

01:17:33 ◼   ► Is it called a DYLDD?

01:17:35 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:17:37 ◼   ► They tried to—it's a simple caching mechanism.

01:17:39 ◼   ► There's a bunch of stuff that has to happen before you call main of, like, figuring out

01:17:44 ◼   ► where all your stuff is and the addresses of everything

01:17:46 ◼   ► and finding all the dependencies and stuff like that

01:17:49 ◼   ► and doing symbol lookups.

01:17:51 ◼   ► That doesn't change unless the libraries change.

01:17:54 ◼   ► And so they're gonna do all that in an external process

01:17:57 ◼   ► and cache the results of it.

01:17:59 ◼   ► And so on subsequent launches,

01:18:00 ◼   ► they don't have to redo that.

01:18:01 ◼   ► They could say, "Oh, I've launched you before.

01:18:03 ◼   ► I know where all your crap is."

01:18:05 ◼   ► And so we can skip right to the part

01:18:07 ◼   ► where we start doing stuff and executing.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And having it in a separate process,

01:18:11 ◼   ► even though it sounds terrifying,

01:18:12 ◼   ► like from a security perspective,

01:18:13 ◼   ► Like, oh, if you can hack that process, you own the system.

01:18:16 ◼   ► It's actually better than having it in the process

01:18:18 ◼   ► because if you're gonna try to mess with dynamic linker

01:18:22 ◼   ► and dynamic linker is running in the same process as you,

01:18:25 ◼   ► if you can corrupt that process,

01:18:27 ◼   ► you have access to all the stuff

01:18:29 ◼   ► that dynamic linker is doing

01:18:30 ◼   ► because you were in the same process.

01:18:31 ◼   ► Whereas if it's in an external process

01:18:32 ◼   ► and a program is corrupted,

01:18:34 ◼   ► it's gonna have a harder time leaping across the barrier

01:18:37 ◼   ► to a whole separate process that it hasn't yet corrupted.

01:18:41 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:18:41 ◼   ► We'll see how this works out security wise.

01:18:42 ◼   ► I can see the argument for it, that it is harder to hack with things in a separate process

01:18:46 ◼   ► than in your own process, but on the other hand, this is now a very attractive target

01:18:51 ◼   ► for all sorts of hacks, so I'm sure they're doing a good job with it.

01:18:54 ◼   ► And they made a pitch from a development perspective of developing this as a separate process makes

01:19:01 ◼   ► it easier for them to test.

01:19:03 ◼   ► It's not a bunch of code running inside a bunch of other people's applications, inside

01:19:07 ◼   ► other people's memory spaces where who knows what the heck is going on.

01:19:10 ◼   ► It is a separate process in its own memory space that other processes aren't messing

01:19:15 ◼   ► with because of memory protection, and that makes it more reproducible and reliable, everything

01:19:19 ◼   ► like that.

01:19:20 ◼   ► So I think this is a fascinating presentation.

01:19:22 ◼   ► It's one most people probably haven't watched, session 413.

01:19:24 ◼   ► I encourage everyone to watch it.

01:19:26 ◼   ► W2C videos are free for everybody.

01:19:27 ◼   ► You don't have to have a developer account.

01:19:29 ◼   ► You can just click on the link in our show notes and watch it right away.

01:19:32 ◼   ► I think this stuff is super cool.

01:19:34 ◼   ► I love it when Apple replaces the guts of operating systems.

01:19:37 ◼   ► I hope they don't screw it up because this is super important and terrifying, but I really

01:19:41 ◼   ► like that they're doing it.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Yeah, one of my favorite sessions this year.

01:19:46 ◼   ► So there are a few people in my life who are not programmers but listen to the show anyway,

01:19:53 ◼   ► and there are a number of people who write in and comment to that effect sometimes.

01:19:57 ◼   ► They are going to love this chapter of the show.

01:20:00 ◼   ► I didn't go to that much detail.

01:20:01 ◼   ► You can watch the session to go into detail.

01:20:04 ◼   ► But let's put it this way here, for regular people, like again with APFS, like why do

01:20:07 ◼   ► I care this happening?

01:20:09 ◼   ► In theory, things could launch faster on your Apple platforms, in theory.

01:20:16 ◼   ► Will that be perceptible to you?

01:20:18 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:20:20 ◼   ► Maybe not.

01:20:21 ◼   ► But anyway, the other – and the potential downside is everything is broken and nothing

01:20:24 ◼   ► works.

01:20:25 ◼   ► So if that doesn't happen, consider it a victory.

01:20:29 ◼   ► So you got a little bonus surprise at WWDC.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Marco, you also got a little bonus surprise at WWDC,

01:20:37 ◼   ► did you not?

01:20:38 ◼   ► - I did.

01:20:40 ◼   ► Last summer, as I was writing my MP3 encoder,

01:20:44 ◼   ► I ran into an issue.

01:20:46 ◼   ► MP3 has had, for a very, very long time,

01:20:50 ◼   ► has had the option to have VBR,

01:20:52 ◼   ► or variable bit rate files.

01:20:54 ◼   ► The idea being that if different parts of a file,

01:20:58 ◼   ► of like an audio track, have different complexity levels.

01:21:02 ◼   ► In a podcast, all of the gaps that are between

01:21:05 ◼   ► all the words that we're speaking,

01:21:06 ◼   ► you don't need that many bits to encode

01:21:08 ◼   ► what's mostly silence to a level that most people

01:21:10 ◼   ► would not even notice, right?

01:21:12 ◼   ► And then you can use more bits to encode

01:21:17 ◼   ► complex passages like music.

01:21:19 ◼   ► And a variable bitrate file allows the encoder

01:21:22 ◼   ► to just decide, like, you know, for these few milliseconds,

01:21:25 ◼   ► I'm gonna use this bitrate, and then for the next

01:21:26 ◼   ► few milliseconds, I'm gonna use a different bitrate,

01:21:28 ◼   ► and so on, and it's a much more efficient way

01:21:31 ◼   ► to encode audio.

01:21:33 ◼   ► And the problem is that the MP3 format

01:21:38 ◼   ► does not have great ways, at least it did not start out

01:21:41 ◼   ► having great ways to know ahead of time

01:21:45 ◼   ► before you've read the entire file,

01:21:47 ◼   ► if you want to say jump to an hour and 10 seconds in,

01:21:52 ◼   ► what byte position is that?

01:21:55 ◼   ► If it's a constant bitrate file, you can just calculate,

01:21:57 ◼   ► well, each second is this many bytes,

01:21:59 ◼   ► So therefore just jump to offset times bytes per second

01:22:02 ◼   ► and that's where you go.

01:22:04 ◼   ► If it's a VBR file, you can't guarantee that

01:22:07 ◼   ► because you don't know what the average bit rate is

01:22:08 ◼   ► across the whole file.

01:22:10 ◼   ► And so in order to jump to a precise point,

01:22:12 ◼   ► you have to have some kind of lookup table or something

01:22:15 ◼   ► to say for every second or for every half second

01:22:18 ◼   ► or for every tenth of a second, this is its byte position.

01:22:21 ◼   ► And maybe you put that at the beginning of the file

01:22:24 ◼   ► and the metadata section or something

01:22:25 ◼   ► and then you can jump to it.

01:22:27 ◼   ► And there were a few standards on how to do this,

01:22:29 ◼   ► but Apple supported none of them.

01:22:31 ◼   ► So if you would load a very long file, like a podcast,

01:22:36 ◼   ► in something that was using an Apple decoder,

01:22:38 ◼   ► which is every podcast player on iOS, or Safari,

01:22:43 ◼   ► or pretty much anywhere on Apple platforms

01:22:47 ◼   ► that could play in MP3 would have this problem.

01:22:50 ◼   ► You would jump ahead, like if you were trying to seek

01:22:52 ◼   ► within that file, you'd jump ahead and you would actually

01:22:55 ◼   ► not be at the right point because it was not having

01:22:58 ◼   ► any kind of intelligence about VBR files

01:23:00 ◼   ► and how to seek within them.

01:23:02 ◼   ► So it would just try to estimate based on file size

01:23:04 ◼   ► and it would say, well, this file is 100 megabytes

01:23:09 ◼   ► and I can read from the duration header up front

01:23:12 ◼   ► that it's two hours long and you told me to jump to one hour

01:23:15 ◼   ► so I'm gonna jump to the 50 megabyte mark

01:23:18 ◼   ► and just assume that's correct.

01:23:20 ◼   ► And that could be off by like two minutes or more.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Like that could be off by a lot depending on the content

01:23:25 ◼   ► the file and like how the variable bit rate stuff

01:23:27 ◼   ► was allocated between different parts of it.

01:23:29 ◼   ► And so that sucked.

01:23:30 ◼   ► So it basically meant that it was impractical

01:23:34 ◼   ► for podcasts or a lot of, any kind of long form

01:23:38 ◼   ► audio content to really ever use VBR encoding.

01:23:41 ◼   ► And I filed a bug report, it's the best I could,

01:23:45 ◼   ► and I wrote a blog post to draw attention to it.

01:23:46 ◼   ► And heard nothing for a very long time,

01:23:50 ◼   ► well for a year.

01:23:52 ◼   ► And then in iOS 11 and in High Sierra, that's fixed.

01:23:57 ◼   ► iOS 11 and High Sierra now properly seek VBR MP3s

01:24:03 ◼   ► that have the seek tables at the beginning of them.

01:24:07 ◼   ► There are three different formats of those

01:24:09 ◼   ► that I know that exist.

01:24:10 ◼   ► They support all three of them.

01:24:12 ◼   ► They prioritize the highest precision one first,

01:24:15 ◼   ► which is the MLLT ID3 tag.

01:24:18 ◼   ► They prioritize that first.

01:24:20 ◼   ► forecast my encoder now writes those tags.

01:24:23 ◼   ► So now we will soon, you know,

01:24:28 ◼   ► there's always gonna be issues with VBR files

01:24:30 ◼   ► on like random like car head units and stuff,

01:24:33 ◼   ► you know, like things that aren't, you know,

01:24:34 ◼   ► advanced computer platforms.

01:24:36 ◼   ► But it will soon become more reasonable,

01:24:40 ◼   ► like, you know, once iOS 11 and High Sierra are widespread,

01:24:44 ◼   ► it will become more reasonable for podcasters

01:24:47 ◼   ► to potentially use VBR encoding on their MP3s.

01:24:51 ◼   ► And what this means for you, the listeners,

01:24:53 ◼   ► is better sound quality for things like dropped-in music.

01:24:57 ◼   ► Like if we drop in a clip for music

01:24:58 ◼   ► or if we play our theme song or whatever,

01:25:00 ◼   ► you will hear better quality on that.

01:25:02 ◼   ► And also, you can maintain the same level of quality

01:25:06 ◼   ► for the whole file for just basic speech,

01:25:07 ◼   ► like what we're doing now,

01:25:09 ◼   ► and have it take up 25 to 50% less space.

01:25:13 ◼   ► And therefore also download faster,

01:25:15 ◼   ► use less battery while downloading

01:25:17 ◼   ► less space burned on your phone, et cetera.

01:25:20 ◼   ► So it's a pretty nice gain.

01:25:21 ◼   ► It's like a 25 to 50% gain, depending on the content.

01:25:24 ◼   ► It's a pretty nice gain, and you can get better quality

01:25:28 ◼   ► for dropped in clips and stuff,

01:25:30 ◼   ► all because now Apple will seek this properly.

01:25:33 ◼   ► Now, again, there are gonna be non-Apple platforms.

01:25:37 ◼   ► There's gonna be ways in which,

01:25:38 ◼   ► like Android listeners, for instance,

01:25:41 ◼   ► are kind of a problem for this.

01:25:43 ◼   ► So podcasters like us will have to decide

01:25:45 ◼   ► Like what percentage of our audience is on platforms

01:25:48 ◼   ► that don't support proper VBR seeking?

01:25:50 ◼   ► And are we willing to let them live with

01:25:53 ◼   ► miscalculated durations or miscalculated seek points

01:25:56 ◼   ► as they seek throughout the file?

01:25:58 ◼   ► And so that's gonna be a trade off for any podcast

01:26:02 ◼   ► or trend, so what format to encode their audio in.

01:26:05 ◼   ► But having it in the Apple platforms

01:26:08 ◼   ► is by far the biggest gain.

01:26:11 ◼   ► Like that's the big one we needed.

01:26:14 ◼   ► Like Overcast already supports it,

01:26:16 ◼   ► because I use Apple's decoder.

01:26:18 ◼   ► So like Overcast already supports all this stuff

01:26:20 ◼   ► in iOS 11 and High Sierra, well I don't have a Mac app,

01:26:22 ◼   ► sorry Casey, but if I made one it would support it

01:26:24 ◼   ► in High Sierra.

01:26:25 ◼   ► And every other app that uses Apple's decoders,

01:26:28 ◼   ► which is as far as I know all of them,

01:26:30 ◼   ► I don't think any podcast apps bundle their own MP3 decoders.

01:26:33 ◼   ► So, you know, this basically makes all iOS apps

01:26:37 ◼   ► suddenly support this without any changes whatsoever.

01:26:42 ◼   ► So that's really great.

01:26:43 ◼   ► I'm incredibly happy about this.

01:26:45 ◼   ► It might be a while, you know,

01:26:46 ◼   ► it might be another year or two

01:26:47 ◼   ► before we should practically use that,

01:26:51 ◼   ► but this is the start of that.

01:26:52 ◼   ► This is the first step, and that's really great.

01:26:55 ◼   ► - Spoiler alert, audience.

01:26:56 ◼   ► Marco will make a VBR episode of ATP

01:26:59 ◼   ► way before you think he's going to.

01:27:00 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, definitely.

01:27:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:27:02 ◼   ► - He's dying to do it.

01:27:03 ◼   ► The episode you're listening to right now might be VBR.

01:27:06 ◼   ► That's what I'm saying.

01:27:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:27:08 ◼   ► - I wouldn't do it during the beta if I was 11.

01:27:12 ◼   ► - Sure you would.

01:27:13 ◼   ► - I wouldn't tell anybody either, it would just be like,

01:27:14 ◼   ► you know what, that last episode, that was VBR,

01:27:16 ◼   ► you didn't even know it.

01:27:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, notice how good the theme song sounded?

01:27:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, all we got is that, we'll have to add

01:27:21 ◼   ► more music clips, like, inexplicably.

01:27:24 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:27:26 ◼   ► Lots of cymbals and syncopated rhythms

01:27:28 ◼   ► that trip up compression algorithms.

01:27:31 ◼   ► - The funny thing is, too, Apple also added,

01:27:34 ◼   ► in very few places, but they did add rudimentary support

01:27:38 ◼   ► for the Opus audio codec, also, which is very interesting.

01:27:42 ◼   ► The Opus Audio codec is kind of the successor to Ogg Vorbis.

01:27:45 ◼   ► It's by the same people, and it's open source,

01:27:49 ◼   ► and as far as anybody knows, patent-free,

01:27:52 ◼   ► although that's always open to whether

01:27:54 ◼   ► it's really been challenged or not,

01:27:56 ◼   ► but it's a very good codec, very advanced, very modern.

01:27:59 ◼   ► In a very small number of places,

01:28:02 ◼   ► iOS 11 and High Sierra support that now.

01:28:05 ◼   ► So there might be a future in which MP3

01:28:08 ◼   ► might not be the most practical solution anymore.

01:28:11 ◼   ► that might become, if everywhere starts supporting Opus,

01:28:15 ◼   ► this is step one towards that possibility,

01:28:18 ◼   ► that's probably not gonna happen in reality.

01:28:20 ◼   ► It's probably always gonna be more practical

01:28:22 ◼   ► to just ship MP3s because everything supports them.

01:28:25 ◼   ► But maybe in the future, I get together

01:28:28 ◼   ► with some other podcast app makers

01:28:29 ◼   ► and we figure out how to advertise multiple formats

01:28:33 ◼   ► of the same show.

01:28:34 ◼   ► And if you're using a compatible client

01:28:36 ◼   ► that maybe it sends an accept header

01:28:38 ◼   ► that lets it say to the downloading server,

01:28:41 ◼   ► "You know what, you can send me Opus if you have it."

01:28:43 ◼   ► And maybe publishers then can publish files

01:28:47 ◼   ► that are automatically transcoded to multiple formats.

01:28:50 ◼   ► This would take a lot on the tooling side

01:28:52 ◼   ► to make anybody actually do this.

01:28:54 ◼   ► But this is the start of making better quality podcasts

01:28:59 ◼   ► that take up less space, and I love that.

01:29:03 ◼   ► - I remember having to make multiple video tags

01:29:06 ◼   ► because with the whole, was it a VC1 or VP9, I forget.

01:29:11 ◼   ► - The WebM thing?

01:29:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, WebM and all that other stuff

01:29:14 ◼   ► 'cause they wouldn't do H.264

01:29:16 ◼   ► and send out all my OS X reviews, I had to have

01:29:19 ◼   ► multiple versions of every video

01:29:22 ◼   ► so all devices could see them.

01:29:23 ◼   ► But anyway, that's from a production perspective,

01:29:26 ◼   ► it's annoying, but it is nice to be able to do a cascade

01:29:29 ◼   ► and say, here's seven versions of this thing

01:29:31 ◼   ► and just, you know, browsers,

01:29:33 ◼   ► and between the browser and the server,

01:29:35 ◼   ► figure out which one you want, but I rank them kind of like Apple did with the algorithms

01:29:39 ◼   ► for the VBR thing. Rank them in order from best to worst, and you just go down the scale

01:29:43 ◼   ► until you find the one that you can read.

01:29:45 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Fracture, and Harry's, and we'll

01:29:49 ◼   ► see you next week.

01:29:50 ◼   ► [Music]

01:29:51 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it

01:30:01 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:30:03 ◼   ► John didn't do any research

01:30:05 ◼   ► Margo and Casey wouldn't let him

01:30:08 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental

01:30:10 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:30:12 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:30:14 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:30:19 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter

01:30:22 ◼   ► You can follow them

01:30:24 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:30:28 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:30:40 ◼   ► It's accidental, accidental, accidental, accidental, accidental, accidental, accidental,

01:30:48 ◼   ► Tech Podcast, so long.

01:30:53 ◼   ► So I was not entirely clear about why I had experience with the 2017 laptop keyboard earlier.

01:31:00 ◼   ► Oh god.

01:31:02 ◼   ► I lied. I said I used it in a store. I didn't use it in a store. I used it in my house.

01:31:06 ◼   ► Oh god.

01:31:08 ◼   ► Yeah, so here's the situation.

01:31:11 ◼   ► Oh, and it begins.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Your parents went away on a week's vacation, I know.

01:31:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:16 ◼   ► Is that a reference?

01:31:17 ◼   ► Come on, I'm trying to do the 90s references for you guys.

01:31:23 ◼   ► - This is your generation.

01:31:24 ◼   ► - So you know how I'm the chief summarizer in chief?

01:31:27 ◼   ► Marco is the chief justifier in chief.

01:31:30 ◼   ► - Yes, that is true.

01:31:30 ◼   ► - So what did you buy and how did you justify it?

01:31:34 ◼   ► - My MacBook escape, as I mentioned,

01:31:37 ◼   ► I need to send it in and get the keyboard repairs.

01:31:40 ◼   ► That started me thinking like,

01:31:41 ◼   ► all right, when's a good time to do this

01:31:42 ◼   ► and everything else?

01:31:44 ◼   ► I'm going away for a week.

01:31:46 ◼   ► We also will be at the beach for a month later this summer.

01:31:51 ◼   ► I have placed an LG 5K display at the Beach House

01:31:55 ◼   ► so I can work for a month.

01:31:58 ◼   ► 'Cause the summertime, I work a lot in the summer

01:32:01 ◼   ► because as an iOS developer, you do major upgrades

01:32:04 ◼   ► using the new beta OS and new capabilities and everything.

01:32:07 ◼   ► And of course, I'm still gonna be recording with you guys.

01:32:10 ◼   ► I'm gonna be podcasting while there.

01:32:12 ◼   ► It's gonna be a work month for the most part.

01:32:14 ◼   ► - But I Work a Lot During the Summer would be a great title

01:32:17 ◼   ► for this episode if we wanted to meet DeMarco.

01:32:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:32:20 ◼   ► - We will not do that.

01:32:22 ◼   ► - So, my plan was to bring the MacBook Escape

01:32:27 ◼   ► and connect it to the LG 5K and work on that

01:32:31 ◼   ► all summer long.

01:32:32 ◼   ► - Wait, on your LG 5K before you go on,

01:32:35 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:32:35 ◼   ► - Did you get it replaced with the one

01:32:37 ◼   ► that doesn't like destroy,

01:32:38 ◼   ► it doesn't flicker off when WiFi is nearby?

01:32:41 ◼   ► 'Cause then they like fix that?

01:32:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, as far as I know,

01:32:43 ◼   ► 'cause I bought it on the very last day of the discount.

01:32:46 ◼   ► 'Cause we were starting to plan our summer,

01:32:48 ◼   ► we were thinking we would probably do a whole month

01:32:51 ◼   ► out there and I was like, you know,

01:32:53 ◼   ► I should have some big monitor to plug into.

01:32:56 ◼   ► And on the very last day of the discount,

01:32:58 ◼   ► before I even had the MacBook escape,

01:33:00 ◼   ► I decided, you know what, I'm probably gonna do this.

01:33:02 ◼   ► And this was after they had paused selling them

01:33:07 ◼   ► to fix the problem.

01:33:08 ◼   ► So as far as I know, mine does not have the problem.

01:33:10 ◼   ► - Ah, all right.

01:33:11 ◼   ► - All right, so anyway.

01:33:13 ◼   ► So this was my plan, bring the escape up there

01:33:15 ◼   ► and just work on that all summer long.

01:33:18 ◼   ► And I knew it would be slower than my iMac, but fine.

01:33:23 ◼   ► It's still, it's a compromised situation,

01:33:27 ◼   ► but I would deal with it,

01:33:29 ◼   ► 'cause I love the Escape in so many other ways.

01:33:32 ◼   ► Then the Escape keyboard started having problems.

01:33:34 ◼   ► Then I went on to W2C and hated having only two USB ports,

01:33:38 ◼   ► as we discussed last episode.

01:33:41 ◼   ► Like that got in the way a lot.

01:33:44 ◼   ► And even now that the keyboard is fixed on the new ones,

01:33:47 ◼   ► probably, that is still the one thing that I can say

01:33:51 ◼   ► I didn't like about the MacBook Escape overall

01:33:53 ◼   ► in my use of it so far.

01:33:55 ◼   ► I really don't like having only those two ports,

01:33:57 ◼   ► which if you're powered, is really only one port.

01:33:59 ◼   ► But that's not a big enough problem to make me dump it.

01:34:02 ◼   ► But I have this other problem now.

01:34:05 ◼   ► My iMac keeps having problems.

01:34:08 ◼   ► And these are problems that I don't think

01:34:09 ◼   ► we're gonna get easily fixed.

01:34:11 ◼   ► My iMac is, not only does it have the image retention

01:34:15 ◼   ► that I complained about months ago,

01:34:17 ◼   ► and that's still getting worse and worse and worse.

01:34:21 ◼   ► I'm also getting what appear to be I/O stalls

01:34:23 ◼   ► on a pretty regular basis.

01:34:25 ◼   ► My performance is actually getting noticeably worse.

01:34:27 ◼   ► I'm having weird pauses.

01:34:28 ◼   ► Logic is giving me that wonderful

01:34:30 ◼   ► disk to slower system overload dialogue.

01:34:33 ◼   ► Have you ever seen that?

01:34:34 ◼   ► I love it so much.

01:34:35 ◼   ► I've never seen that dialogue before two months ago,

01:34:37 ◼   ► and I'm having problems with my iMac is what I'm saying.

01:34:40 ◼   ► Now, I really want either an iMac Pro or probably a Mac Pro.

01:34:45 ◼   ► My plan has always been, you know,

01:34:50 ◼   ► let me ride this iMac out.

01:34:51 ◼   ► The Apple Care on my iMac is up in a few months,

01:34:55 ◼   ► in October, I think, whatever three years

01:34:57 ◼   ► after the 5K came out is, which I think is October.

01:35:00 ◼   ► Let me just last 'til then, and then I can like,

01:35:03 ◼   ► sell it and get the iMac Pro.