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227: Typing on Pillows

 

00:00:00   Hi, this is me and I'm talking to you. Things are happening, John. Sounds good.

00:00:04   Marco, the fact that you're asking me if I'm still here is alarming, but I'm just gonna keep talking until somebody starts to interrupt me and talks over me, which is pretty much the story of this entire show.

00:00:14   [

00:00:14   Serenity Caldwell, friend of the show, has some iPad size comparisons, and so we'll put

00:00:21   a few links in the show notes.

00:00:23   I briefly earlier tonight handled my friend Stee's iPad and was playing with his 10.5,

00:00:31   and it, again, seems nice.

00:00:33   It doesn't really seem any different in size in the hand than the iPad I used to own, the

00:00:39   full-size iPad.

00:00:40   But Serenity has some thoughts and some comparisons and things.

00:00:44   So I don't know, Jon, you want to take us through this?

00:00:46   I like the diagrams.

00:00:48   She originally tweeted them presumably when she was writing the article, but those little

00:00:51   like yellow rectangle diagrams.

00:00:54   Take a look at the one that shows the iPad body size comparison.

00:00:58   You got like the mini is the little thing up in the corner and then the 12.9-inch iPad

00:01:02   Pro is the big thing.

00:01:04   The difference between the 9.7 and the 10.5 is so tiny proportionally.

00:01:09   why they feel almost the same because they really almost are the same. and if you look at the screen

00:01:13   difference between the 9.7 and 10.5 it's a little more uniform where it's not like a, you know,

00:01:19   it's more substantial looking. so this is a great representation of how they've managed to put a

00:01:25   bigger screen on an ipad that's not that much bigger and why it doesn't feel monstrous. why it

00:01:30   just feels like, you know, if you gave it to a regular person and they weren't intimately

00:01:33   familiar with the 9.7 they might not even notice that the physical size of the thing is bigger. so

00:01:38   I think that's a big selling point of this device and if you had any doubts,

00:01:40   take a look at these diagrams. They're pretty convincing.

00:01:44   Speaking of Serenity Caldwell, she also has some information about typing to Siri in iOS 11. So in

00:01:51   iOS 11, when it comes out in the fall, users will be able to turn on type to Siri in their

00:01:56   accessibility settings, which will let you write your commands to Siri rather than shouting them

00:02:00   into space, which we had known about, but she has a little bit more detail. And I can't decide if

00:02:07   if this is going to be awesome or kind of redundant and useless.

00:02:12   I think it's nice to have that option because sometimes you either don't want to speak

00:02:16   out loud but you want to use the functionality provided by Siri, you know, even if it's

00:02:21   just, I don't know if this is the case, but imagine for example that you routinely

00:02:26   ask to set a timer or a reminder in a spoken way but you're not, you're not, you don't

00:02:32   want to go through the hassle of like launching the reminders app and then typing that same

00:02:35   English sentence into the little reminder, new reminder field, which you can do.

00:02:40   You can say like, you know, "Pick up laundry at 4 p.m. tomorrow."

00:02:45   And the reminder will like set itself to 4 p.m. tomorrow and the name of the thing will

00:02:48   be "Pick up laundry."

00:02:50   But if you spend most of your time interacting with Siri, you may not know sort of the syntax

00:02:54   that is understandable by reminders, and I don't think it's exactly the same syntax that

00:02:59   Siri understands.

00:03:00   So it's nice to be able to essentially type into sort of a one-stop shop for all the things

00:03:07   that you can make your phone do in a vaguely unattended way and not have to say, "Oh,

00:03:11   I'm in a place where I can't speak out loud, so rather than me trying to whisper to Siri,

00:03:14   let me just type with my thumbs the thing I know will work with Siri in a nice quiet

00:03:19   way," because like all sane people, you have key clicks turned off.

00:03:23   I don't know how people have key clicks on.

00:03:25   Ryan Jones made an interesting observation via Twitter.

00:03:29   He said, this is with regard to iOS 11, on the iPhone, you can lock an iPhone, and I

00:03:36   still haven't had a chance to play with this, I want to see this, but anyway, he said, you

00:03:39   can lock an iPhone by pulling down from the top, and additionally, there's a software

00:03:44   shutdown button in settings, this is still quoting Ryan, very fishy, the power button

00:03:51   may not be long for this world.

00:03:53   So Ryan's point is, if you can lock your phone, rather than with the button on the right hand

00:03:58   side on most phones these days, but rather by just swiping down from the top. And if

00:04:04   there's a software shutdown button, then what is the purpose of that right-hand button anymore?

00:04:11   Obviously, to turn it on, but there's no reason you couldn't use one of the other buttons

00:04:14   to do that. So does that mean the power button is going away in the future? And if so, what

00:04:18   are we going to do about screenshots, man? I want my screenshots.

00:04:21   So I have an alternate theory on this one. I'm thinking that, you know, first of all,

00:04:26   I really hope they don't get rid of the sleep/wake button.

00:04:28   It serves a very useful purpose,

00:04:31   and while they might be able to come out

00:04:33   with software workarounds,

00:04:35   I like having that physical button there

00:04:39   to control that very, very useful function

00:04:40   of sleeping and waking the phone.

00:04:43   And if they get rid of it, I assume they'll have

00:04:46   some kind of other way to sleep it or automatic,

00:04:49   I don't know, anyway.

00:04:51   There's also different recovery things that this enables,

00:04:54   But the biggest thing that I think this might not be a big deal is maybe that button is

00:05:00   being added to settings not because they're getting rid of the power button, but because

00:05:04   they've learned that a lot of people don't know how to turn their phones off.

00:05:07   Like the way you turn your phone off is to hold this button down for a while.

00:05:10   How many people know that?

00:05:12   I bet a lot of people actually don't.

00:05:14   I wish fewer people knew it.

00:05:18   Having just taken a couple plane flights and seen people on the plane both seated next

00:05:22   to me and in other seats because you know I see them when I'm walking up and down the

00:05:25   aisle to go to the bathroom or peeking through the edges of the seats.

00:05:28   When I see people who own iOS devices who turn them off like off off shut down completely

00:05:35   when they're done using them and then boot them back up when they want to use them again

00:05:39   multiple times during the flight I want to pull my hair out.

00:05:43   It's like just don't just don't do it just hit like hit the power button or whatever

00:05:48   just put it back in your bag and when you take it out later just hit any kind of button

00:05:52   on and it will come back on instantly and you can pick up where you left off and it

00:05:54   will be fine.

00:05:55   But people want, some people want to turn them off and you know how long they take to

00:06:00   boot it's not a fast boot process.

00:06:02   I don't, I don't, ugh, maddening.

00:06:04   So I don't think the, I think you're right Marco most people don't know how to turn off

00:06:09   their phone.

00:06:10   I don't think people should know how to turn it off.

00:06:12   Like it's not a thing that they should be doing routinely.

00:06:14   Say there's some kind of troubleshooting, you need to reboot it or whatever, look it

00:06:18   up online or you know you can figure it out or ask somebody or worst case go to the Apple

00:06:23   store and they will show you but it should not be a routine part of everybody's day.

00:06:26   So I don't want a way for people to better know how to shut down their phone.

00:06:32   That's not a good idea.

00:06:34   All right and additionally Ryan noted that in iOS 11 there's a setting to quote offload

00:06:42   end quote unused apps.

00:06:44   So there's a screenshot, offload unused apps, and then there's an on/off switch.

00:06:49   This will automatically remove unused apps, but keep its documents and data.

00:06:53   Reinstalling the app will place back your data if the app is still available in the

00:07:00   App Store, which is very interesting because a lot of us, and I'm sure I'm included in

00:07:05   that as well, have a whole bunch of ancient apps on our phones that we think we'll need

00:07:10   one day but probably never will.

00:07:12   So in settings in iTunes and app stores in iOS 11

00:07:16   in the beta, there's offload unused apps,

00:07:19   which is kind of cool and kind of interesting.

00:07:21   - This is an interesting problem that I think

00:07:23   maybe Apple's trying to solve.

00:07:24   Like, Gruber's been blogging a little bit about this

00:07:26   recently about how the size of apps,

00:07:30   just the sheer size of apps is just tremendous

00:07:33   in the last couple years.

00:07:35   So many very common popular apps are well over 100 megs.

00:07:40   and it's full of bloat from frameworks

00:07:44   and various assets and everything,

00:07:46   and Apple has tried to do various things

00:07:48   to reduce this, the app thinning group of initiatives

00:07:53   and various technologies and things like that,

00:07:55   but ultimately, if you think about

00:07:58   how much collective bandwidth and battery power

00:08:02   are being used by the App Store

00:08:05   diligently auto-updating apps

00:08:07   that people are not actually using ever on their phones.

00:08:12   You can definitely make a good argument

00:08:13   for why not only should this feature exist,

00:08:16   but it might even, maybe it should even be defaulted to on,

00:08:20   because there is just a tremendous amount of data

00:08:24   and battery being wasted to update like 50, 100 meg apps

00:08:29   on people's phones that are buried in some folder somewhere

00:08:33   that they're never actually using.

00:08:35   So it is an interesting problem.

00:08:37   I do think it is wise for Apple

00:08:40   to start tackling this somehow,

00:08:42   but we'll have to see, I guess,

00:08:43   the implementation details of how this is actually done

00:08:46   to know whether this is the right solution or not.

00:08:48   - I don't think this should be on by default

00:08:50   because the idea that your phone like rots,

00:08:53   like a couple screens away,

00:08:56   the app that you only use once in a blue moon,

00:08:58   and the one time you wanna use it,

00:08:59   it's like, oh, I don't have this app,

00:09:00   I have to redownload it,

00:09:02   and you have to wait for it and you're on a bad connection

00:09:04   or if it's a large app or something like that.

00:09:06   This is striking me as a good idea.

00:09:07   I think a nice compromise, and here's the thing,

00:09:10   someone's phone fills up and they go to the Apple store

00:09:14   and they're like, "Hey, my phone is filled up,"

00:09:16   which I bet is a Genius Bar thing they get a lot.

00:09:19   Help me, what do I do?

00:09:21   How do I make more space beyond my phone,

00:09:23   aside from buying a new one?

00:09:25   And it's like, "Well, are there any apps you're not using?

00:09:27   Let's sort them by size.

00:09:28   Let's go to the usage screen in settings

00:09:29   and see what's using most of your space."

00:09:31   And all those things that I'm sure

00:09:32   the Genius Bar people do all the time.

00:09:37   One possible solution I found reasonably nice that is not the same as this preference that

00:09:41   either you manually turn on or is on by default that slowly rots out the applications that

00:09:45   you don't use and just deletes them out from under you and makes them like these little

00:09:48   booby traps that cause big downloads when you tap on them, is to do what Slack does

00:09:52   and say every once in a while, and I know this sounds like nagging and Skype does this

00:09:56   type of thing all the time, but I found it not to be particularly annoying.

00:10:00   It says, on a fairly infrequent schedule, hey, I've noticed these three apps that are

00:10:06   this big.

00:10:07   You haven't used them in six months.

00:10:08   Do you want to delete them?

00:10:09   And you can say no.

00:10:10   And you can say, don't bother me about this again.

00:10:13   Or you can say yes.

00:10:14   And that seems like, do that like once a month, right?

00:10:19   And have that be a preference, but have it on by default or something.

00:10:21   I bet people would go, oh, yeah, I forgot I installed that game.

00:10:25   Delete.

00:10:26   Or they'll say, you know, as long as you have the button that says no and never asked me

00:10:29   about this again, it will never ask you about that app again. You know, Slack does this

00:10:33   for tons of stuff. "Hey, these channels haven't had anyone talk to them in a while. Do you

00:10:36   want to keep them or do you not want to keep them?" You know, like, maybe the Slack frequency

00:10:41   is a little bit more frequent. I don't know what their frequency is, but I find that a

00:10:44   very useful, you know, if I was a marketing person, I would say, "It's an intelligent

00:10:49   assistant that uses machine learning to aid your..." But bottom line is, it presents options

00:10:56   in an understandable way without introducing any new mechanics in gaming parlance.

00:11:03   The mechanics are still, you have apps, you know you can delete them, right?

00:11:06   You can add apps and you can delete them.

00:11:08   Every once in a while the thing will ask you, "You haven't used this, do you want me to

00:11:11   delete it?"

00:11:12   As opposed to, "Let me introduce the concept of offloading to you, and now do you want

00:11:16   me to do that automatically in a way you have no awareness of, yes or no?"

00:11:21   So that, I mean, we'll see.

00:11:22   I'll try it.

00:11:23   I will probably turn it on too,

00:11:24   because I have tons of apps that I don't use every week,

00:11:26   but well, maybe I won't turn it on,

00:11:27   because I don't want it to like offload my downloaded

00:11:32   for the 24 hours they were up illegal NES emulator apps

00:11:35   that I've had on my phone forever.

00:11:36   Like I don't want to delete that stuff.

00:11:37   And in typical Apple fashion,

00:11:39   it's not as if I'll be able to exclude those or anything.

00:11:40   So I guess I probably won't turn this on.

00:11:43   - Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense for people,

00:11:45   of which there are many,

00:11:47   who are really short on space on their phone

00:11:49   pretty much all the time.

00:11:51   And this is largely because Apple has for so long

00:11:53   sold phones with really small storage sizes

00:11:55   as the base model.

00:11:56   And I think that's less of a problem with the recent phones,

00:11:59   but there's still a lot of those out there.

00:12:01   A lot of those 16 gig phones are still being used,

00:12:05   and so this is a big problem for lots of people.

00:12:08   Or people who, for any size phone,

00:12:10   their storage is full of photos and videos and stuff,

00:12:13   and they don't want to or can't pay

00:12:15   for additional iCloud storage and everything,

00:12:17   so they need the space.

00:12:19   And so, I think, I would venture a guess

00:12:23   that space management is a really big,

00:12:26   very common problem for iOS device owners.

00:12:29   So anything to reduce space is a good thing,

00:12:31   especially in this age where pretty much

00:12:34   any app you download's gonna be like 90 megs.

00:12:36   - All right, we have some observations

00:12:40   from friend of the show, Steve Tran Smith.

00:12:43   iPad multitasking, spaces persist after you reboot

00:12:47   so they can be permanent, which just heightens my desire to be able to pin favorites.

00:12:52   So apparently spaces are a thing and they're a persistent thing so that you can kind of

00:12:57   set up your different multitasking panes and whatnot for different tasks and just swipe

00:13:04   between them as necessary, not unlike what you would do on the Mac.

00:13:07   Yeah, pinning favorites, like the fact that it keeps track of what you did.

00:13:10   Hey, you put messages on one side and your text editor on the other, and you put Slack

00:13:15   on one side and a web browser on the other and it keeps those little spaces and it keeps

00:13:19   them together.

00:13:20   And it's good that it keeps track of them if it really does because people, as I've

00:13:25   said a million times, people want to arrange their working environment in the way that

00:13:29   suits them, but they will give up doing it if they spend any amount of time arranging

00:13:34   and then that arrangement is forgotten.

00:13:36   I've always used Springboard as my modern example to get people to understand spatial

00:13:39   interfaces.

00:13:41   If you picked up your phone and all of a sudden all your icons in Springboard were randomly

00:13:43   rearrange and everything was out of your folders and all scrambled over? A, you'd be pissed.

00:13:48   And B, after three times, you would stop rearranging stuff in Springboard. You'd be like, "Why

00:13:51   bother? Why do I bother carefully making these screens?" Because the next time I pick up

00:13:55   my phone, chances are good that everything will just be randomly shuffled, right? That's

00:13:59   how the finder is to me these days. But to get people to understand, like, "Why do you

00:14:03   care? Why do you care about your screens?" You hear all these podcasts, you know, Cortex

00:14:06   talks about it all the time. I think they talked about it on Hello Internet. We've talked

00:14:08   about in here, talked about it on Connected Upgrade. Is there a tech show that hasn't

00:14:13   talked about, "Hey, how do you arrange your home screen?" The fact that that is a discussion

00:14:17   topic at all is because you can arrange your home screen, you can arrange springboard,

00:14:23   and you put things in a place and they stay there. And that's why it is a thing at all.

00:14:29   So with Spaces, having them persist is great because that will let people start to get

00:14:33   kind of an arrangement. And being able to pin favorites to say, like I guess it sorts

00:14:37   them in like the most recently used order or something.

00:14:39   I don't know, I haven't tried it, but I'm assuming it's some kind of automatic order

00:14:42   that says, "All right, well, when you go back to that switcher, the last two or three spaces

00:14:47   you used will be in the first two or three positions," so on and so forth.

00:14:52   If you could pin a small set of things to say, "No matter what I do with my iPad, these

00:14:57   spaces are always in this position," that would also, I think, help people's workflows

00:15:01   because they have kind of a way of working and a set of applications that they group

00:15:05   together and they're going to do other stuff.

00:15:07   They're going to jump off to some other weird application and go over here or over there,

00:15:10   but when they come back to the switcher to be able to know when you invoke the switcher

00:15:13   to just stab in this position and it'll always be your Safari messages space or whatever.

00:15:19   This is a tiny miniature version of a window arrangement on personal computers, but as

00:15:27   we've seen on personal computers, there's just too many damn windows for most people

00:15:30   and they don't, even if they use spaces like KZ does, I rarely see people who aren't pretty

00:15:38   darn computer nerdy develop any kind of system with spaces just because it's so difficult

00:15:45   to do the same thing you try to do on the iPad.

00:15:48   To pin them, to say, "This space should be here and it should be full screen and it should

00:15:52   have these three windows in it and it should never change."

00:15:56   If you can do that on the iPad, if you make more people be able to do that on the iPad,

00:16:00   will be a lot happier, people who could not accomplish the same task on a Mac.

00:16:05   More from Steve Trout and Smith. iOS 11 lets document-based apps pretty much present the

00:16:10   file system as their launch UI, replacing all the galleries or grid views that everyone

00:16:14   writes. So this is kind of cool that you can just use basically a file browser as the thing

00:16:20   you land on when you launch an app. And so that makes a lot of redundant code that all

00:16:25   these different companies and people have written just go away, which is really exciting.

00:16:29   This is more embracing of the iPad having a file system.

00:16:34   - I put this in here because I just immediately

00:16:37   upon reading this tweet imagined the very first application

00:16:42   that tries to ship and do this, the App Store rejects

00:16:44   and says, "Sorry, you can't show the file picker

00:16:45   as your launch UI."

00:16:46   Doesn't that totally sound like an App Store type thing?

00:16:48   I mean, he means technically speaking, yes,

00:16:50   now there's like a canned Apple view

00:16:52   that shows you the file system.

00:16:53   And in a lot of applications, it makes sense.

00:16:55   Where on Mac apps do it,

00:16:57   where you launch Office apps do it,

00:16:59   maybe even pages of it.

00:17:00   You launch and you get an open save dialogue or you get, well I guess someone do have those

00:17:04   custom galleries like choose from these templates and make a new document or whatever.

00:17:08   But in many types of applications that is a natural way to do it and I think most of

00:17:13   the best iOS applications still would want to write their own like Procreate or whatever

00:17:17   or like Linea or however you pronounce the name of the icon factory app.

00:17:22   They all have kind of a view where it shows you here's all your stuff and especially if

00:17:25   it's an image editing application to show you little thumbnails and stuff rather than

00:17:28   showing you just a bunch of file icons. But if you really do have an application that

00:17:32   mostly deals with just files that are not graphics files, it might make sense to launch

00:17:38   into the Apple-provided picker, at least maybe in version one of your app, until you make

00:17:42   the fancy version that shows you a preview like the Google Docs app shows you. It's just

00:17:45   a bunch of text documents, but it shows you little previews of them, which is actually

00:17:48   surprisingly useful. So anyway, I'm watching this to see the first person brave enough

00:17:54   to ship an app like that to see if they get rejected.

00:17:55   - It's not gonna be a problem.

00:17:57   Apple, they're holding W2C sessions about doing this.

00:17:59   They want people to do this.

00:18:01   It's gonna be fine.

00:18:02   - We'll see, famous last words.

00:18:04   - No, if it's an NES emulator, you have a problem.

00:18:06   - Or do you remember way back when

00:18:08   when there were tethering apps?

00:18:09   I think I had--

00:18:10   - Yeah.

00:18:11   - iTether or something like that.

00:18:13   And I kept that, 'cause it was on the App Store

00:18:15   for like a week, and it was basically like

00:18:18   you needed a component on your Mac,

00:18:20   and you needed the app on your phone.

00:18:22   And I kept that thing on my phone for years,

00:18:25   because I had the AT&T Unlimited plan,

00:18:28   and one of the ways they tried to shimmy you off

00:18:30   of that plan was by never, ever, ever,

00:18:32   or as far as I knew anyway,

00:18:34   never allowing you to tether.

00:18:36   So I had this tether, or iTether, or something like that,

00:18:40   that I would use to be able to tether from time to time.

00:18:43   And I remember I had a saved version of the installer

00:18:46   somewhere on my hard drive,

00:18:47   so just in case the installer went away,

00:18:49   I would still have it.

00:18:50   I had the app that I cherished more.

00:18:52   I probably had a backup of the IPA somewhere,

00:18:55   just to be safe, I mean, oh my God, I remember that.

00:18:58   Those were the days.

00:18:59   And then there would be other apps, like a flashlight app,

00:19:00   that would, oh, by the way, have a socks server on it.

00:19:02   - Yeah, right. (laughs)

00:19:05   - If you triple tap in the upper one third of the screen

00:19:09   while holding your nose and bouncing on one foot,

00:19:11   you would engage a socks server.

00:19:12   - Yeah, like two hours after that was discovered,

00:19:14   it was off the store.

00:19:15   - Moving on, the Apple Design Awards, the ADAs,

00:19:20   they were a thing, which I think we spoke about last time,

00:19:24   But it used to be that, what was it, the Monday evening of WWDC, the first night of WWDC,

00:19:29   they would have an event where the Apple Design Awards would be given out and it would be

00:19:34   done in front of an audience, blah, blah, blah.

00:19:36   This past year they kind of did it quietly, but people got to schmooze with some of the

00:19:40   execs, which is pretty cool.

00:19:41   Well, Zach Conwright says, "It's worth noting that Apple gave out ADAs to indie alternatives

00:19:47   to mail, notes, and reminders, but still won't let you set any of them as a default," which

00:19:52   which was a pretty observant thing that Zach had noticed.

00:19:55   - Yeah, the rewarding, like, oh,

00:19:57   these are well-designed applications and they may well be,

00:20:00   but I always feel for people who tried to use

00:20:02   the non-default applications, because in each one of them,

00:20:05   there's some aspect of it that is less privileged

00:20:08   than the Apple one.

00:20:09   Like for a mail application, it could be as simple as like,

00:20:12   when I click a mail to link,

00:20:13   when I tap a mail to link on my phone,

00:20:14   which application launches,

00:20:16   or when I tell Siri, remind me to blah, blah, blah,

00:20:19   where does it put that reminder?

00:20:20   You know what I mean?

00:20:21   And they're so close. It's not I don't I don't even understand why I mean Apple clearly wants to encourage

00:20:27   Notes and mail and reminder applications like they're a staple of the non-game section of the App Store Apple is not like you know

00:20:35   Growling at them and saying why are those people trying to compete with our built-in applications?

00:20:39   They want to encourage it and here they are 88 winners

00:20:41   These are great examples of applications that Apple apparently wants to encourage

00:20:44   Let people use them as their default right for all these in calendar notes reminders mail

00:20:51   they're so close and the limitations are less than they used to be, it used to be much harder

00:20:55   to use alternate applications but like why not go all the way?

00:21:00   Every year we wait for this, some years there is more to look forward to than others so

00:21:04   we don't talk about it but because I don't think we mentioned this year but I'm always

00:21:07   thinking about it.

00:21:08   Hey, when will I be able to use alternate applications?

00:21:11   Even on the Mac, back in the classic Mac OS days there was an entire control panel for

00:21:16   you to set up, this is the application I want to use for mail, this is the one I want to

00:21:19   to use for instant messages and so on and so forth.

00:21:21   That kind of is still in Mac OS if you know where to mess

00:21:24   with things, but it's not prominent.

00:21:26   Like some of the things are hidden.

00:21:27   You go to Safari preferences to pick your default browser,

00:21:30   and Chrome will constantly try to change your default browser.

00:21:33   It's all weird UIs to the same underlying data store,

00:21:36   but it's clearly not as prominent as it used to be.

00:21:38   At least power users can figure it out.

00:21:40   On iOS, a lot of times it's just not possible,

00:21:43   I suppose, unless you jailbreak, which is frustrating.

00:21:45   Especially-- we already talked about this--

00:21:47   with Siri and the increased number of intents.

00:21:51   It would be great if they made intents

00:21:52   for all the things that you can do with Siri

00:21:54   for mail notes and reminders.

00:21:56   If those things don't already exist, I suppose they don't.

00:21:59   But certainly you can't tell,

00:22:02   I mean, Google's applications do it.

00:22:03   When you'll tap a link in the Gmail app,

00:22:05   it will throw a thing in your face that says,

00:22:07   "Hey, do you wanna open this link in Chrome, hint, hint,

00:22:10   hint, or Safari?"

00:22:11   And then there's a little switch that says,

00:22:14   "Ask me about this every time."

00:22:16   So I always just hit Safari and hit the don't ask me about this every time and then and be done with it

00:22:20   But I feel like Apple can implement this well, and it's not not rocket science so again. Maybe in a couple years

00:22:26   Yeah, and actually for the record. I'm pretty sure they did add there

00:22:29   They are adding it for notes, and I was 11 that's one of the two things that they added

00:22:32   I think but if I get that wrong. I'm sorry

00:22:36   I'm still buried in WBC stuff because I learned that I have to rewrite my entire audio engine

00:22:41   - You mean the-- - Wait, what?

00:22:43   - The what do you call it?

00:22:44   The intent you mean is in iOS 11?

00:22:46   Not that you can change your default application, right?

00:22:48   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:22:49   Yeah, no, yeah, the change in the defaults,

00:22:50   I can't imagine.

00:22:51   Well, see, I don't know.

00:22:53   That's one of those things where,

00:22:55   you know, every WWDC that comes around,

00:22:58   we get a whole bunch of stuff that is no big surprise.

00:23:02   And there's usually a couple of things

00:23:04   that we always say, wow, we never thought Apple

00:23:07   would do that.

00:23:09   And so we've been for years saying,

00:23:11   we're pretty sure Apple's never gonna allow you

00:23:13   to change the default apps for these kinds of things.

00:23:16   But one of these years, it could be one of those things.

00:23:19   They could just do it, and then we'd be like,

00:23:20   oh, look at that, cool, and we'd move on.

00:23:22   The same thing with deleting the built-in apps.

00:23:25   We never thought they would do that either,

00:23:26   and there's all the little asterisks

00:23:28   on how they kind of sort of offer it now,

00:23:31   but it's not really deleting it, and things like that.

00:23:33   But they did it, and they put the effort into that

00:23:36   to make that happen.

00:23:37   So as iOS gets more and more mature,

00:23:40   many of the arguments against them offering defaults,

00:23:45   like for instance, one of the arguments used to be like,

00:23:48   well, things like mail, there are places all over the OS

00:23:51   where they have built-in mail compose sheets.

00:23:54   And yeah, that's true, but then they made extensions,

00:23:56   and they made Siri intents and things like that,

00:23:58   which kind of break down these barriers

00:24:00   and let anything plug in and kind of do similar things.

00:24:04   So the idea of having custom integrations

00:24:07   with certain things, those are actually slowly being removed

00:24:10   in favor of things like extensions and intents.

00:24:13   And so it would not surprise me if they decided

00:24:17   to actually let you change things like your default mail app

00:24:20   and your default browser at some point in the future.

00:24:23   I still wouldn't say it's likely,

00:24:25   but I think the technical foundation is now there

00:24:30   that they could do it if they wanted to

00:24:31   without massive weird side effects.

00:24:34   I still don't think they will, but again with Apple

00:24:36   you never really know what, you know,

00:24:37   never say they'll never do something.

00:24:40   - Well they're so close now, like you said,

00:24:41   with the extensions.

00:24:42   In each individual application, just take web browsers,

00:24:45   or mail applications for example,

00:24:47   is all they would need to do for mail

00:24:49   make a preference in Safari that controls

00:24:52   where mail tool links go to?

00:24:53   Is that it?

00:24:54   Like what's left?

00:24:55   Because, you know, there's the extensions for like

00:24:58   add this as a bookmark, or, I mean I suppose

00:25:00   They also have like tapping links in Safari search

00:25:04   and Siri search results or something, you know what I mean?

00:25:06   Or do you want me to open this webpage and stuff like that?

00:25:09   I don't know.

00:25:09   It's probably weave throughout the system

00:25:11   in more places than I think,

00:25:12   but it always seems like they're so close

00:25:15   that like there's no, what are they holding back for now?

00:25:18   Because extensions really did blow it wide open.

00:25:20   And now almost all the things that you had previously done

00:25:24   with a single default application,

00:25:26   now you can pick from a list and you can rearrange a list,

00:25:28   which by the way, I really hope the rearranging

00:25:29   that list sticks better. I hope these spaces stick better than they're rearranging that

00:25:33   list because I've always had problems with that.

00:25:36   But yeah, it seems like I don't know what the holdup is other than it's just not a big

00:25:40   priority and it's like one of those sort of small things that most people don't care about

00:25:44   that they'll get to eventually.

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00:28:17   All right, speaking of photos a moment ago,

00:28:20   let's talk about, what is it, heaf or heaf?

00:28:22   I always get it wrong.

00:28:23   - The Apple people have been saying heaf.

00:28:26   - Heaf, okay.

00:28:27   All right, so somebody in the show notes,

00:28:30   I'm assuming John, says that heaf is good.

00:28:33   - Heaf is good.

00:28:33   Heaf is, like, those are some of my favorite sessions,

00:28:36   the heaf HEVC sessions.

00:28:38   If you want to take a look at some sessions,

00:28:41   Technology Stuff at WWC, I think these are some

00:28:44   of the best ones, for a bunch of reasons.

00:28:46   So the first is that Heif is good.

00:28:49   It is better than JPEG.

00:28:51   It's better than Ping.

00:28:52   It's better than all the existing formats

00:28:54   in terms of the things that Apple cares about

00:28:57   and that you should care about too.

00:28:59   Image size, flexibility of the format.

00:29:01   It kind of reminds me of like the various,

00:29:04   I'm not gonna call them pirate formats,

00:29:05   but like the Matryoshka or whatever, MKV container thing,

00:29:08   like where they just say,

00:29:09   here is a really super generic container

00:29:12   that can, you know, that is flexible and straightforward

00:29:15   and fits a whole bunch of stuff in it,

00:29:17   and look at all these things that it can do.

00:29:19   And we don't pin it down with these arbitrary limitations

00:29:22   that make sense at the time.

00:29:24   And one of the examples in the thing was like,

00:29:25   whatever the maximum size of a JPEG is,

00:29:27   I forget what it is, but I'm sure it seemed ridiculous

00:29:29   when JPEG was created in whatever, 1980 or 90 something.

00:29:33   And yet here we are today,

00:29:36   and it's an actual legit limitation

00:29:38   that is problematic for JPEGs.

00:29:40   One of the demos they had, and not to spoil it too much,

00:29:42   one of the demos they had of Heef was

00:29:44   of a panorama that they zoomed in on

00:29:47   and they just kept zooming and zooming and zooming.

00:29:49   And it was this ridiculously large panorama.

00:29:50   And it was like, is this some cool new application

00:29:53   like Google Earth that just reloads new tiles

00:29:55   and like totally custom UI?

00:29:58   No, they were just zooming a heaf image,

00:30:00   which itself internally can use a tile-based format.

00:30:03   And its resolution can be massive.

00:30:04   And you literally couldn't do it with JPEG.

00:30:06   Like all it was was an image view as far as I could tell.

00:30:08   But you couldn't do it with JPEG

00:30:09   'cause JPEG can't support an image that size, period.

00:30:12   never mind the efficiency of being able to quickly read and display just the portion

00:30:16   that is on the screen with the whole tiling stuff.

00:30:19   The pictures are smaller for the same quality or better quality for larger sizes and they

00:30:26   can contain lots of different things like it's almost like he was made for live photos

00:30:30   I bet it was kind of the reverse but it's a shame the live photos came before he but

00:30:35   hey you can store a series of photos, photos plus video at the same time but you know smart

00:30:39   diffs between the frames of the stuff in them is what I was talking about in the live show

00:30:42   where I was speculating that perhaps that every frame of a live photo stored in heap

00:30:48   format is of equal quality, that's why you can pick among them.

00:30:51   Reportedly that's not the case, we can at least want to report that if you pick the

00:30:54   real photo it is still, like you know, the still photo is still higher quality than any

00:30:58   of the animation frames, but maybe the animation frames are higher quality than they were.

00:31:03   I suppose it makes sense that if you had to shave full quality for every single frame

00:31:06   you'd take up a lot of memory because those are actually pretty big.

00:31:12   Maybe you couldn't even dump them off the sensor that fast, but even if you could you

00:31:14   probably wouldn't want them to because it's kind of inefficient even with inter-frame

00:31:16   diffs.

00:31:17   But anyway, the reason Heath and HEVC are big deals is because, aside from just being

00:31:23   new formats and better, is that this is like a foundational technology.

00:31:28   Like they didn't really hammer on it too much, but this is going to last, if all goes well,

00:31:33   this is going to last 10, 15, 20 years.

00:31:36   It's going to define your experience on iOS and Mac in terms of what are my images, what

00:31:43   is my video made of, how good does it look and how much room does it take.

00:31:46   And it's so fundamental to every single thing that we do especially with cameras being as

00:31:50   pervasive as they are today that any kind of change in them is like you don't change

00:31:55   it for the hell of it.

00:31:56   "Oh, this year we're using a totally different image format.

00:31:57   Next year there's a different image format."

00:31:58   No, we pick an image format and we stick with it for a long time and these formats are just

00:32:01   better.

00:32:02   They're just better.

00:32:04   And this will change all of our computing's lives in boring ways and will continue to

00:32:11   change them for years and years and years.

00:32:13   I don't think this is a weird fad type thing.

00:32:15   I really hope it really does catch on and sweep across the entire industry because I'm

00:32:20   ready to get rid of those old formats and change to this new one.

00:32:24   Why hold on to a format that makes larger files that are worse quality, that has less

00:32:27   flexibility and is more difficult to deal with?

00:32:31   So I encourage everyone to look at these sessions.

00:32:32   I think this is exactly the type of sort of underlying core technology that's certainly

00:32:35   within the Apple ecosystem and hopefully within the ecosystem across the whole industry because

00:32:39   I hate it when Apple does something better and no one else copies it.

00:32:42   And again, Heef and HEVC are not Apple standards.

00:32:45   These are ISO standards, international standards.

00:32:47   Apple, I don't know if Apple had any influence at all in making them, who knows, but either

00:32:51   way they're not Apple proprietary.

00:32:53   So I really want the whole world to move to this.

00:32:55   Every time I think about the whole world moving to it, I think back on GIF and then I think

00:33:00   We couldn't even escape GIF.

00:33:02   Are we really gonna all change?

00:33:04   Are we all gonna change to heap and HTTP?

00:33:06   How long did it take to get transparent ping support

00:33:07   in all of our browsers?

00:33:09   I'm old, I know.

00:33:10   But my fingers are crossed for these standards.

00:33:14   - All right, let's see what else we've got going on.

00:33:17   I didn't entirely understand this tweet

00:33:20   from not_DavidSmith, from Apple employee, David Smith.

00:33:26   He'd said that 32-bit support is sunset in Mac OS.

00:33:31   This is a bigger deal than it seems.

00:33:33   I386 is the last fragile-obsc-abi

00:33:38   non-swift supporting architecture.

00:33:41   I understood bits and pieces of that.

00:33:43   Can one of you translate for me

00:33:45   what the crap that actually means?

00:33:47   - Says it in the notes right below it.

00:33:49   So the fragile Objective-C API.

00:33:52   So the fragile Objective-C API is where,

00:33:55   Well, the non-fragile one is where it escapes

00:33:58   the fragile base class problem,

00:33:59   which is basically if Apple ships a framework

00:34:01   and they have a class and it has fields name and age in it,

00:34:04   and people build applications on top of that framework

00:34:06   and they ship them.

00:34:07   And then the next version of the operating system,

00:34:08   Apple wants to add a hair color field to that same class.

00:34:12   The fragile base class problem is like,

00:34:15   oh, we can't add hair color fields to this class

00:34:17   because a bunch of applications are shipped

00:34:20   that are compiled against the old version

00:34:21   that just has name and age.

00:34:23   And so the only way we can add a field

00:34:25   because of the fragile base status problem,

00:34:27   is all those people need to recompile their application

00:34:29   against the new version of the framework

00:34:30   that has this new field, right?

00:34:32   And so the Apple fixes this, I think,

00:34:33   maybe in the upgrade to 64-bit runtime.

00:34:36   And it's not a problem now,

00:34:40   but it is still a problem in the 32-bit Objective-C ABI.

00:34:45   So they didn't bother fixing it there

00:34:48   because, you know, backward compatibility,

00:34:50   and also because I assumed they'd be moving away

00:34:52   from 32-bit eventually, and now they are.

00:34:54   And so that problem goes away entirely.

00:34:57   Like then everything that they have, certainly Swift and also,

00:34:59   well, Swift eventually.

00:35:00   I'm going to get a stable API, but I'm

00:35:02   assuming they will do the same thing there.

00:35:04   And all the 64-bit objectors don't have this problem.

00:35:07   So they're leaving behind a limitation.

00:35:10   And also, 32-bit doesn't support Swift, which is 64-bit only.

00:35:15   So that's another reason to ditch it.

00:35:17   So yeah, 32-bit Mac, not long for this world.

00:35:21   And someone asked me on Twitter recently, why do I care?

00:35:24   as a user, whether, aside from a bunch of my applications potentially breaking, what

00:35:29   benefit is there to me as a user for Apple ditching 32-bit support?

00:35:33   I don't care if it's a problem for Apple and they have this fragile base class problem

00:35:37   and they can't update frameworks, blah, blah, blah.

00:35:39   Who cares?

00:35:40   I'm not a developer.

00:35:41   I'm just a user.

00:35:42   I don't want a bunch of my applications to go away.

00:35:43   Why do I care?

00:35:44   The main reason, especially on phones, is once you load a 32-bit application that loads

00:35:49   32-bit libraries, those take up memory, and it's better to just have the 64-bit ones in

00:35:55   memory instead of having, you know, you'd have seven 64-bit applications all sharing

00:35:59   a single, you know, shared memory instance of a library, and then you launch one 32-bit

00:36:03   application and it has to bring in the 32-bit version of that library just for that application.

00:36:08   So you know, your phone will use less memory doing the same things in theory.

00:36:15   And then the other one is just, you know, simplification.

00:36:16   If Apple doesn't have to support this old runtime, they can--

00:36:19   it's a simpler operating system to not

00:36:21   have to support this old stuff.

00:36:23   And any time you can delete code and not include things,

00:36:25   and it simplifies everything.

00:36:28   So presumably that will make your phone more

00:36:30   stable and faster, and your applications more stable

00:36:32   and faster, and yada, yada, yada.

00:36:33   So the benefit to the user is kind of esoteric

00:36:36   and maybe not that particularly visible,

00:36:38   but this is what we call progress.

00:36:40   You can't support 32-bit forever.

00:36:43   More on High Sierra.

00:36:45   The High Sierra format is the early logical file system—

00:36:49   I love that we're actually following up on this.

00:36:51   —used for CD-ROMs.

00:36:52   The joke that Jon made during the live show—

00:36:54   Was that a joke?

00:36:55   It was a memory.

00:36:56   Yeah, about High Sierra being like a CD-ROM format name.

00:37:00   Yeah, just to say that High Sierra is not two words that have been combined just by

00:37:05   Apple for the purpose of its operating system, that it is in fact a thing.

00:37:09   Not just, you know, this volume format, logical file system used for CD-ROMs in 1985 and 1986,

00:37:15   They named it after High Sierra,

00:37:17   like they didn't also make up that term,

00:37:18   so I'm just defending the High Sierra name.

00:37:21   Put a link in the show notes too.

00:37:21   - Which is still terrible.

00:37:22   - The Wikipedia article on the topic.

00:37:25   - Oh, that's really old.

00:37:26   Yeah, 'cause it's before the ISO 9660.

00:37:28   That's the one that most CD-ROMs were, right?

00:37:31   Remember the Mount Rainier packet writing standard

00:37:34   that was trying, like, did you guys ever get packet writing

00:37:37   CD-Rs to actually work and not be a problem for something?

00:37:41   - Yep, I did.

00:37:42   'cause I got the super expensive fancy one

00:37:45   that all the magazines said would work and it really did.

00:37:47   You could incrementally add data to CDs.

00:37:49   It was amazing technology.

00:37:52   - That was, the whole thing, in CD-RWs too,

00:37:56   how incredibly slow and unreliable they were,

00:37:58   there were so many efforts put into trying to make

00:38:02   CD burners behave more like floppies

00:38:04   so that you could just write part of one

00:38:07   and then add some files to it later

00:38:09   and then maybe delete some files

00:38:11   which wouldn't actually really delete them,

00:38:13   but would just mark that block as deleted

00:38:15   and just add some more to the end.

00:38:17   There were all these different standards of doing it

00:38:18   and they tried to define industry standards

00:38:21   to combine them all.

00:38:22   And it was always a just giant buggy mess.

00:38:26   And maybe this is one of those things

00:38:27   that you Mac people, Jon, maybe it was perfect for you

00:38:31   and it was just crap on the PC side,

00:38:33   but I can tell you one thing,

00:38:34   it was really crap on the PC side.

00:38:37   And my first CD burner, which was a SCSI four by two by six

00:38:41   - Yep. - From Yamaha,

00:38:42   which was awesome.

00:38:43   - We might have had the same one.

00:38:44   - Probably. (laughs)

00:38:46   That was like, it was so good at everything else,

00:38:50   but you try to get any of those packet writing things

00:38:53   to work and it just, like, no other computer

00:38:56   could ever read them.

00:38:58   You were lucky if your computer could read it tomorrow.

00:39:00   Like, it was just terrible. (laughs)

00:39:05   - I was gonna say, the reason you had all those problems

00:39:06   is using crappy IDE CD-ROM drives,

00:39:09   but using SCSI ones too. - Nope.

00:39:10   and Yamaha was a pretty reputable vendor.

00:39:12   All of mine were obviously SCSI

00:39:13   and mine were super expensive, top of the line Yamaha things

00:39:17   with fancy Mac applications.

00:39:20   I had pretty good luck with it.

00:39:21   I did it all the time.

00:39:21   That was my form of backups back before I had enough money

00:39:25   to have duplicate hard drive space.

00:39:28   - I think it was hard drive

00:39:29   that was still quite expensive back then.

00:39:31   Like having the first CD burners, it was awesome.

00:39:33   It was amazing being able to make your own mix CDs

00:39:36   but everything that tried to make it more like a floppy

00:39:39   or a hard drive just always sucked, so many problems.

00:39:43   Before we leave this topic, I will say,

00:39:44   one of my favorite pieces of esoteric

00:39:47   optical disc technology I ever owned

00:39:49   was I had one of the Kenwood True X CD-ROM drives

00:39:53   that read at 72X by splitting the laser

00:39:57   into seven different beams

00:39:58   and reading seven tracks in parallel.

00:40:01   - That's different.

00:40:02   - That sounds super reliable,

00:40:03   and I'm sure it was very quiet when it's spinning at 72X.

00:40:06   - No, because I think it was only spinning at like 12X.

00:40:09   - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:40:09   - So it was way better than the 52X CD-ROMs of the time

00:40:14   that it sounded like a four-stage jet engine

00:40:18   that spin up one stage and vroom, vroom,

00:40:21   like a really super loud--

00:40:22   - It was waiting for the disc to shatter apart

00:40:24   like a wheel that's going too fast.

00:40:26   - Which they occasionally did.

00:40:27   And I was always kind of surprised

00:40:29   with the 52X CD-ROMs that sounded so crazy.

00:40:33   It was kind of surprising how few discs shattered inside.

00:40:37   They actually worked most of the time,

00:40:39   and they really shouldn't have.

00:40:41   - Yeah, I always got nervous putting the sticky labels,

00:40:44   you ever do that, the sticky labels?

00:40:45   - Oh yeah. - Oh yeah.

00:40:46   - Your things, right? - Oh yeah.

00:40:47   - You have to put them on perfectly,

00:40:48   'cause it's like having an unbalanced tire.

00:40:50   - Yep. - You get it in there,

00:40:50   and the label is a little bit off.

00:40:52   (laughing)

00:40:53   - I remember all of that.

00:40:54   I remember when we had one of our earlier PCs

00:40:57   that had an external CD-ROM drive that was,

00:41:00   it had like a little tray or cartridge

00:41:02   that you would put the CD in.

00:41:03   - Yeah, the caddy.

00:41:04   - Yes, I couldn't think of the word.

00:41:05   I knew it wasn't cartridge,

00:41:06   but I couldn't think of the right way.

00:41:07   Yeah, it had a CD caddy.

00:41:09   I remember that.

00:41:09   I remember getting the CD burner early on.

00:41:12   So this was high school for me.

00:41:14   And I remember I was very popular

00:41:16   amongst the high school kids

00:41:17   'cause I could like make a mix CD just like you said.

00:41:19   And I also remember,

00:41:20   and Marco, you particularly will appreciate this.

00:41:23   I briefly got into trading tapes

00:41:27   in the Dave Matthews Band taping community

00:41:29   because Dave Matthews Band, as we all agree, is a jam band.

00:41:33   And so my first couple of trades,

00:41:35   What I had done was I had said, "Hey, send me cassettes of what you've got, and since

00:41:41   I have nothing to trade, I have no concerts of my own, I will digitize them, put them

00:41:46   on CD, and send them back to you."

00:41:48   And that's how I scored my first couple of concerts, and these were concerts that I had

00:41:52   been at.

00:41:53   And these concerts were very different from each other because, as we said, Dave Matthews'

00:41:56   band is a jam band.

00:41:57   Anyway, we should move on and talk about APFS.

00:42:00   APFS is good as well, as it turns out.

00:42:03   And yeah, apparently.

00:42:05   And you know, I know, Jon, you don't have many words to say about this, so Marco, would

00:42:08   you like to take over?

00:42:09   >> Yeah, sure.

00:42:10   It's a file system, and it's new, and it's not HFS Plus, and so therefore it's good.

00:42:16   Let's move on.

00:42:17   >> Moving on.

00:42:18   >> Did we -- seriously, did we -- did I talk about all these things on a past show already?

00:42:21   >> I don't think you did.

00:42:22   I'm not 100 percent sure, but I don't think you did.

00:42:26   >> I'm not done -- in a rare case of me not finishing the previous episode, I have like

00:42:30   40 minutes left on last week's episode because we're recording this early.

00:42:35   Did I talk about all this already?

00:42:39   You know, it's fine.

00:42:40   The people love you, Jon.

00:42:42   If they want, they can skip to the next chapter.

00:42:44   That's what it's there for.

00:42:45   Well, add a caveat.

00:42:46   I may have talked about everything I'm about to say in a past episode.

00:42:51   If I did, I apologize, but just pretend I'm like a teacher and telling you things multiple

00:42:54   times to make you retain it more.

00:42:58   So APFS is good.

00:43:00   I learned some things about it in the APFS session

00:43:02   that I may have talked about last week.

00:43:05   It will convert your encrypted drive.

00:43:07   So if you have FileVault on, you don't have to worry about,

00:43:09   oh, it won't be able to convert by thing,

00:43:10   because it understands the FileVault encryption,

00:43:13   and it will do all the things it has to do.

00:43:14   So you won't lose any data, and you won't lose any encryption.

00:43:18   It will convert your fusion drives.

00:43:20   And when it converts them, it will improve your fusion

00:43:22   drives, because APFS, unlike Ahrefs+,

00:43:25   will guarantee that the metadata all stays on the SSD.

00:43:28   Like, that's where it writes the new APFS metadata,

00:43:30   and it keeps it all there.

00:43:31   So aside from the Fusion Drive moving the actual data,

00:43:34   like, oh, the files you access frequently

00:43:36   will move to the fast storage and leave

00:43:38   the files you access less frequently on a slow storage,

00:43:40   that's how Fusion Drive works.

00:43:42   APFS will make sure that all of the metadata, all

00:43:44   the information about the files, all the file names,

00:43:46   their sizes, their dates, where all the little data

00:43:49   blocks are, all that will stay on the SSD always,

00:43:52   which will make things a lot faster because reading

00:43:54   metadata involves a lot of seeks and a lot of small reads,

00:43:58   and it's great to have them all in the SSD.

00:44:00   Disk utility, the new version of disk utility,

00:44:03   which I don't know if it has a resizable window

00:44:05   and resizable columns yet, I haven't checked,

00:44:07   but that would be a great feature.

00:44:08   Anyway, it will convert your volumes.

00:44:10   So you can open disk utility and point it

00:44:12   in any age of S+ disk and say,

00:44:13   please change this to APFS.

00:44:15   It will not currently make them bootable.

00:44:16   I'm assuming they're gonna fix that.

00:44:18   If you wanna make it bootable,

00:44:19   you have to run the installer,

00:44:20   the High Sierra installer to make it bootable.

00:44:22   But again, I'm assuming that'll be fixed.

00:44:24   Mobile time machine,

00:44:27   a thing that most people don't know exists,

00:44:28   but does, I think it still only runs on laptops.

00:44:31   If you're on your Mac laptop and you're not connected

00:44:34   through a time capsule wirelessly

00:44:35   or any other time machine interface,

00:44:38   you have Time Machine on, but as far as you can tell,

00:44:41   your backup drives are not,

00:44:43   you're not communicating with your backup drives.

00:44:44   Like say you're on an airplane or something

00:44:46   and you're editing a document.

00:44:47   Many years ago, Apple added a thing

00:44:49   that still backs up using Time Machine to your own disk.

00:44:54   It's not gonna protect you if your hard drive dies

00:44:57   because you're backing up your disk to your disk.

00:45:00   But it's supposed to save you,

00:45:01   like if you're editing something

00:45:02   and then a while later you accidentally delete it

00:45:05   and you're like, oh, I want that back,

00:45:06   I'm on a plane and it was my important presentation.

00:45:08   Well, Mobile Time Machine had been in the background

00:45:10   making copies of your stuff

00:45:11   to this other location on your disk

00:45:13   and you can invoke Time Machine on an airplane with no WiFi

00:45:17   and get back old versions of your document.

00:45:19   There are some caveats to that,

00:45:21   which I'll get to in a second.

00:45:22   But the AVFS story here is that because AVFS

00:45:27   has constant time snapshots, where

00:45:29   they can take a consistent snapshot of your disk

00:45:33   in a small and fixed amount of time.

00:45:36   It doesn't depend on how much has

00:45:37   changed since the last time or anything like that.

00:45:39   It is just mark this as a consistent state,

00:45:43   and it takes space on your disk, obviously, and retain that.

00:45:46   But it can do it very quickly and very efficiently,

00:45:49   which means the previous implementation of Mobile Time

00:45:51   Machine, which is fairly intense,

00:45:54   Like it was mounting a virtual file system

00:45:58   in a secret corner of your drive

00:45:59   and then writing to it as if it was another volume,

00:46:02   but it's not, like it was really weird

00:46:04   involving hidden directories and fakery,

00:46:06   making it look like you have a second volume

00:46:08   inside your first volume.

00:46:09   And it would have to like crawl over all your files

00:46:12   and find the ones that have changed

00:46:14   and make copies of them to this virtual file system.

00:46:16   Very, very slow.

00:46:16   Whereas the APFS one is just snapshot.

00:46:19   And it's like literally a couple seconds.

00:46:20   Doesn't matter how much stuff you've done

00:46:22   since the last time you did that.

00:46:23   The snapshot itself, it takes constant time.

00:46:28   You can do it yourself with a command line, TMUTIL, the time machine command line utility,

00:46:32   which is useful, by the way, on any Mac.

00:46:33   If you've never just typed man TMUTIL to see all these different things, you can delete

00:46:36   old backups and mess with your backups and screw yourself if you're not careful.

00:46:40   But anyway, it's a neat utility.

00:46:43   New command, TMUTIL space snapshot.

00:46:45   We'll take a snapshot.

00:46:46   If you have high CR beta, run it now.

00:46:48   You'll be amazed at how quickly it runs.

00:46:50   The thing that bothers me about Mobile Time Machine,

00:46:52   and I kinda understand why Apple's doing this,

00:46:54   but it's still a little bit of a bother,

00:46:56   is it runs hourly.

00:46:59   And so for you working on a presentation

00:47:01   and you hose it in some way, you want the backup,

00:47:03   you can get the one from an hour ago.

00:47:05   But if you just created this thing within the current hour,

00:47:07   there are no backups of it.

00:47:08   It's like, oh, hourly, that's not good.

00:47:10   Why don't you take, you know,

00:47:11   I wish I had backups every five minutes or 10 minutes.

00:47:14   Well, remember, all these snapshots take up space

00:47:17   because it basically says everything

00:47:18   on your disk right now, save it.

00:47:21   And so if you delete a bunch of files,

00:47:23   they're still taking up space in the snapshot, right?

00:47:26   So I understand why they don't wanna do

00:47:27   like a snapshot every five minutes,

00:47:28   'cause you'll fill your disk with snapshots,

00:47:29   even if they trim them off the end.

00:47:30   So hourly is probably a reasonable compromise,

00:47:33   but I mentioned TMUtilSnapshot,

00:47:37   it's like, well, if you're paranoid,

00:47:38   you can set up a cron job that runs TMUtilSnapshot

00:47:41   every five minutes while you're on the flight,

00:47:43   and you'll be saved that pane,

00:47:45   just remember to turn it off later,

00:47:46   or it was gonna fill your disk.

00:47:48   But the important thing is those snapshots happen

00:47:50   really, really quickly.

00:47:52   And it's gotta be way more reliable and efficient

00:47:56   than all the weird stuff that was going on before.

00:47:57   So this is a nice upgrade for mobile time machine.

00:48:01   We mentioned a couple of shows ago,

00:48:02   hey, when will Apple release the version of macOS

00:48:06   that uses AWS to make time machine better?

00:48:08   This isn't that because it's only for local backups,

00:48:11   but I assume in a future version

00:48:13   of the Mac operating system,

00:48:15   assuming Apple continues along this road,

00:48:18   that I guess you would call it remote time machine.

00:48:20   Actual time machine backups to a different volume,

00:48:23   hopefully on a different disk,

00:48:24   will use the smarts of APFS to do something intelligent.

00:48:29   I think they might be using it now to just take the snapshot

00:48:31   and read from that snapshot to send to the remote disk,

00:48:33   but it's not quite the same thing as you can imagine,

00:48:35   like smart deltas are what's changed.

00:48:37   I'm not quite sure what they can do.

00:48:39   They can't do the same thing to ZFS

00:48:40   where you get like block diffs and stuff like that,

00:48:42   which is really cool, but they didn't go with ZFS,

00:48:44   they went with APFS, so we got what we got.

00:48:46   But anyway, I feel like they can make strides there as well.

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00:51:04   (upbeat music)

00:51:09   - Can we please do a topic?

00:51:11   - No, we have two, three pages of follow-up left to do.

00:51:16   - This feels like we need to declare like a follow-up barrier

00:51:21   and just...

00:51:21   - We can go through them quickly.

00:51:25   - Oh, okay.

00:51:26   Challenge accepted, start the clock.

00:51:31   All right, here we go.

00:51:32   You two ready?

00:51:33   Buckle up.

00:51:34   Matt Biddulph writes, "IMAC Pro's price comparisons.

00:51:37   PC Gamer had a hand-built PC from parts that matches the iMac Pro in spec.

00:51:42   It cost $4,686 versus Apple's $4,999.

00:51:46   Billy Flattery writes, "iMac model price comparisons."

00:51:49   Just notice the name and height.

00:51:50   That's not how you do it.

00:51:51   You can't just read the follow-up items.

00:51:52   That's not how you go through quickly.

00:51:53   You have to have commentary from everybody on each item.

00:51:56   We just have abbreviated commentary.

00:51:58   The iMac opening price is fine.

00:52:00   Bill Flattery, go ahead.

00:52:01   No, no, no, no, no.

00:52:02   You have to have discussion on it.

00:52:04   Marco, we tried.

00:52:06   It's not just a race to read things.

00:52:08   This is what people tune in for.

00:52:09   We tried so hard.

00:52:10   This is the show.

00:52:11   So you think just reading quickly is how you get through it quickly.

00:52:13   How you get through it quickly is by not having extended conversations, by saying one or two

00:52:17   things about each time.

00:52:18   How we get through it quickly is by not breathing when I'm reading at all.

00:52:21   That's how we get through it quickly.

00:52:22   I'm going to build some gills and give them to myself.

00:52:26   That's how I get through it.

00:52:27   I will show you if you'd like me to do the next one.

00:52:28   I can do it.

00:52:29   Anyway, I might prefer a price comparison.

00:52:32   The thing I want to point out here is anytime there's price comparisons from one computer

00:52:35   You know, the iMac Pro versus some PC that you build, they're like, "Hey, if you match

00:52:40   the specs of the iMac Pro, you end up with a pretty expensive PC too."

00:52:44   The obvious little asterisk that's on all these stories is no sane person would build

00:52:50   a PC like the iMac Pro, because most people who need, like, say, a really big GPU for

00:52:55   gaming, aren't going to put a Xeon in it, and they're not going to have ECC RAM, and

00:52:58   they're not going to have this really expensive 5K display.

00:53:02   So even though this price comparison is right, nobody – no PC builder would build a PC

00:53:07   like the iMac Pro for most of the things that people build PCs for, because they would tailor-build

00:53:14   it.

00:53:15   It wouldn't be the most expensive, best everything you can put in a computer.

00:53:18   They would decide, "I care about – do I care about ECC?

00:53:21   Do I care about the CPU?

00:53:22   Do I care about the 5K screen?"

00:53:24   And they would end up with a less expensive machine.

00:53:26   That's all I wanted to say on that.

00:53:28   - Also, Billy Flaherty said.

00:53:30   - He points out that between the mid and high-end iMacs,

00:53:35   not the iMac Pro, but iMacs,

00:53:36   with the same configuration, have the same price,

00:53:39   but the high-end has the better video.

00:53:41   Is he missing something?

00:53:43   And there's a screenshot,

00:53:44   we will put his tweet in the show notes.

00:53:46   - Yeah, I mean, look, when you play with a configurator,

00:53:48   sometimes things don't make sense.

00:53:49   Oh well, Apple's not always perfect

00:53:51   and we aren't always perfect, let's move on.

00:53:53   - Well, that means the advice here is,

00:53:55   if you're configuring a Mac, try config,

00:53:58   You click on one of them and like pick three or whatever try the other one too and try to match the spec

00:54:02   It's worth doing once or twice just to make sure the prices aren't out of whack bingo

00:54:06   John you had volunteered to cover this next piece. Oh, that's because you can't pronounce this Victor's last name

00:54:12   Guess what Victor wrote in to tell us that?

00:54:16   You can build a smart device using how do you pronounce that Arduino

00:54:26   I believe that's right.

00:54:27   Yeah.

00:54:28   And control it via HomeKit without getting an MFI license.

00:54:31   So this seems like, "Oh, great.

00:54:32   Apple has opened up HomeKit and now you don't have to go through all this onerous stuff

00:54:35   to get HomeKit certified."

00:54:37   But there's a twist, right?

00:54:39   So this is for interoperability.

00:54:40   People can build things that are compatible with HomeKit and you don't have to be an MFI

00:54:46   made for iPhone.

00:54:47   Is that still what it stands for?

00:54:48   Is this made for iPod?

00:54:49   I don't know.

00:54:50   It should be made for iOS.

00:54:51   Anyway, you don't have to get that license.

00:54:55   And this is Apple's explanation.

00:54:56   At a user level, differences will include the process for onboarding an IP-based accessory

00:55:00   to the network and a warning dialog in iOS that the user must acknowledge before continuing.

00:55:04   So yeah, you don't have to be certified as part of the program and you can interoperate,

00:55:09   right?

00:55:10   But you won't have the Apple authentication coprocessor and you won't have the Wi-Fi alliance

00:55:18   certification and the user of your device will get a warning dialog.

00:55:21   So it's not – it's great for hackers.

00:55:24   It's like it opened up, hey, if you want to mess with something and you can bypass these,

00:55:27   that's kind of like when you right-click open something on the Mac.

00:55:31   Power users can do it, but it doesn't suddenly make HomeKit a free-for-all for everybody

00:55:36   in practice if you want to be part of the HomeKit ecosystem as a first-class citizen.

00:55:40   You still have to go through all the old stuff, but this is nice for people who just want

00:55:42   to hack something the other to get it working.

00:55:46   The App Store guidelines have been updated to allow programming environments, and so we'll

00:55:49   put a link in the show notes to this.

00:55:51   "Apps designed to teach, develop, or test executable code may, in limited circumstances,

00:55:56   download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes.

00:55:59   Such apps must make the source code provided by the application completely viewable and

00:56:03   editable by the user."

00:56:05   Not surprising, but nevertheless somewhat interesting.

00:56:08   Yeah, they've been against, like, "Hey, no programming environment for such a long

00:56:13   time.

00:56:14   It's nice to see them turn the corner on this.

00:56:15   Does this mean that Xcode for iOS is any closer?"

00:56:18   No.

00:56:19   It's the same distance it's always been, which I think is actually pretty close.

00:56:23   But it does mean that people trying to make programming compliance for iOS, programming

00:56:28   environments for iOS no longer have to deal with App Review just summarily rejecting them

00:56:33   because they execute code from the internet or whatever.

00:56:37   Speaking of the App Store, reviews no longer reset on update but may optionally do so.

00:56:42   Did we not get to this last episode?

00:56:44   I don't think so, but it's an exciting development in App Store land.

00:56:48   (laughing)

00:56:48   Yeah, short version is basically,

00:56:50   before when you would submit a new update to an app,

00:56:53   all your reviews would reset,

00:56:54   and you'd have to click over to the All Reviews tab.

00:56:57   Now, there are no more two different tabs now,

00:56:59   but there's only one set of reviews,

00:57:00   and every time you submit a new version,

00:57:02   you could now choose whether you want your reviews to reset.

00:57:05   By default, they don't, which is good.

00:57:07   So if you have a really huge,

00:57:08   buggy, horrible version of your app,

00:57:10   and you get a whole bunch of one stars,

00:57:11   and your next update, you wanna reset the slate,

00:57:15   you can do that, but by default,

00:57:16   you're gonna get a whole bunch of reviews

00:57:18   all mixed together from all previous versions

00:57:19   and it'll be fine and you won't lose your ratings anymore.

00:57:21   Awesome.

00:57:23   - All right, additionally with the App Store,

00:57:25   the review API, this is for developers to say,

00:57:29   hey, why don't you go review my app or rate my app

00:57:31   or blah, blah, blah.

00:57:32   They had announced a new API somewhat recently,

00:57:35   it doesn't matter exactly when, but apparently, thank you,

00:57:38   but apparently it is now mandatory.

00:57:40   Quote, use the provided API to prompt users

00:57:44   to review your app.

00:57:45   "This functionality allows customers to provide

00:57:47   "an App Store rating and review without the inconvenience

00:57:49   "of leaving your app, and we will disallow

00:57:51   "custom review prompts."

00:57:53   - Yeah, the only thing here is like, we don't know,

00:57:56   it doesn't, they don't actually say when

00:57:58   they are disallowing your own custom rate this app prompt,

00:58:02   and they also don't say how they're actually

00:58:04   going to be enforcing this.

00:58:06   And they're probably not gonna ever say that,

00:58:08   but there's been rules against using push notifications

00:58:11   for promotional or marketing purposes

00:58:14   since the beginning of push notifications.

00:58:15   And yet, if you look at pretty much everybody's phone

00:58:18   that isn't yours as a computer nerd, and maybe even yours,

00:58:23   almost everyone else's phone always has,

00:58:25   on the lock screen, a notification

00:58:27   from some mass market app that's like,

00:58:30   hey, these things are now on sale,

00:58:31   come buy them now, or something.

00:58:33   Those are against the rules.

00:58:35   They have always been against the rules,

00:58:36   but Apple has never enforced it,

00:58:38   because it's a hard thing to enforce.

00:58:40   So this is one of those things too,

00:58:43   where like are they actually going to find a way

00:58:44   to enforce a ban on custom rate this app dialogues?

00:58:49   Maybe, but it sounds like, you know,

00:58:51   what are they gonna do?

00:58:52   Like have people using the app inside Apple

00:58:55   and hitting the report button when an app does this?

00:58:58   'Cause it's not gonna do it during like the two minutes

00:59:01   that they're reviewing it during app review.

00:59:03   So this sounds like something that it would be nice.

00:59:06   I hope they can find a way to enforce this,

00:59:08   but based on their rate of enforcement

00:59:10   on spam push notifications, I'm not hopeful.

00:59:13   - Yep, no argument here.

00:59:15   There's a question, can we see iPad and Mac apps on iPhone

00:59:19   in the iOS 11 app store?

00:59:21   - Probably not, if so, it's a bug, who cares?

00:59:23   - Moving on.

00:59:25   Trode Wennerborg writes, previous keynotes you've discussed

00:59:28   Apple's efforts for quality on stage,

00:59:30   it's even more important to do so

00:59:31   when it's as bad as this year.

00:59:33   Was it that bad?

00:59:35   Did I miss something? - I think it was pretty bad.

00:59:37   Can you think back to who you saw on stage

00:59:39   during the keynote?

00:59:40   Did you see anybody except for white guys?

00:59:42   - There were a couple of women,

00:59:44   but I think it was a worse ratio than usual.

00:59:48   - Yeah, and as we discussed in the past,

00:59:50   this is not the type of thing

00:59:52   that you can easily solve in a year,

00:59:55   because it's not like you're gonna fire

00:59:56   all your senior executives and bring up other people.

00:59:59   What you want to happen is the people who are in charge

01:00:02   of the things that are being announced,

01:00:04   the people who are most responsible for them,

01:00:06   get to get up there and show off their thing.

01:00:09   And you would hope the people in charge of the important things at Apple have a reasonable

01:00:13   ratio, some kind of diversity that reflects the diversity that you want your company to

01:00:22   have.

01:00:23   At Apple's top executive ranks, the diversity is not that great.

01:00:26   And so every time there is a product that is announced for, "This is your department,

01:00:33   come up and talk about it," guess what?

01:00:34   It's another gray-haired white guy.

01:00:38   And so it's good to mix in other people for other portions.

01:00:43   Like they brought up some women to do demos, for example, or if you get third-party people

01:00:48   up there, I mean, they're faced with the same problem because who knows who's running

01:00:51   those third-party companies as well.

01:00:53   But it's a thing that I'm sure Apple is watching, and I think we should at least

01:00:59   continue to be cognizant of it as well.

01:01:01   I don't know what the solution is other than for Apple to continue its efforts to

01:01:07   hire and promote all different kinds of people

01:01:10   instead of making it an old boys club.

01:01:13   - I'm now disappointed in myself

01:01:15   'cause I usually am at least basically aware of,

01:01:19   in broad strokes, how good or bad it was.

01:01:21   And I really didn't think it was that bad this year.

01:01:24   And I must be wrong,

01:01:25   but I feel like I remember a handful of women up there,

01:01:28   certainly not in the executive roles, but nevertheless.

01:01:30   So that's one demerit for me, apparently.

01:01:33   - Well, it's like that thing where they say,

01:01:35   people's perception, what was the one with people talking?

01:01:40   If you're in a meeting and you ask the men in the meeting

01:01:43   what percentage of the time were women talking

01:01:44   and what percentage of the time were men were talking,

01:01:46   the men will say it was about 50/50

01:01:48   when in reality it was like 15% the women were talking,

01:01:52   right, and 85% of the men were talking.

01:01:54   That seems like 50/50 to men.

01:01:55   I forget what the exact number is,

01:01:56   but there's some absurd amount that men perceive it

01:01:59   to be equal when women get a fraction of the time.

01:02:02   And if women even start to approach

01:02:04   like a quarter of the time or a half of the time,

01:02:07   then men perceive it as the women talking all the time

01:02:09   and men don't get a chance at all.

01:02:10   And it's just what you're used to, right?

01:02:12   So if you're used to seeing a keynote,

01:02:14   which is literally three well-known white guys

01:02:17   who we see every single year, and there's one woman,

01:02:20   you're like, wow, it was 50% women this time,

01:02:22   and really it was like one woman

01:02:23   out of three other white guys.

01:02:25   So that's just something to be aware of

01:02:28   in terms of cognitive biases.

01:02:30   It all depends on what you're used to

01:02:32   and where you're coming from.

01:02:33   So the perception that it was not that bad and seemed like it was pretty even is just

01:02:38   based on what you're used to seeing and if it was different than what you're used to.

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01:04:44   Are we done with follow-up?

01:04:50   - See how we're able to do it?

01:04:52   Even with the middle part where Casey's trying

01:04:54   to speed run through it and I had to scold him?

01:04:55   Even with that.

01:04:56   (laughing)

01:04:57   - Still got through it pretty quickly.

01:04:58   - I'm so sorry, Dad.

01:05:00   - So, Casey, you have a new Mac in your family.

01:05:05   - I do.

01:05:06   - It's a new, it's a baby Mac.

01:05:08   you got a baby Mac in your family, congratulations.

01:05:10   - It is an adorable baby Mac, isn't it?

01:05:12   Yes, I think I spoke about at the live show

01:05:16   that we just mentioned that I had placed an order

01:05:18   for a MacBook Adorable for those who are not aware

01:05:21   of the lingo, which by the way, was it you or Gray

01:05:24   that coined MacBook Adorable?

01:05:25   - Gray. - I want to say it was Gray.

01:05:27   Okay. - I call it the MacBook One.

01:05:28   - That's right, okay. - I've even mostly stopped

01:05:31   doing that recently because I feel like now

01:05:33   it's been long enough that I can, you can just say

01:05:35   it's the 12-inch MacBook now, so I usually just call it

01:05:37   the 12 inch MacBook now.

01:05:39   But CGP Grey on Hello Internet, or was it Cortex?

01:05:42   I forget on which show.

01:05:43   - It might have been Cortex.

01:05:44   - Yeah, I think it was probably Cortex.

01:05:45   Anyway, on Cortex, Grey was the one

01:05:48   who coined the term MacBook Adorable.

01:05:50   And then Mike and you stole it.

01:05:53   I don't think anyone else calls it that

01:05:54   among our podcaster friends, but yeah.

01:05:57   Regardless, the 12 inch MacBook

01:05:59   slash MacBook Adorable slash MacBook One.

01:06:01   - Indeed.

01:06:03   So when Apple announced that they had refreshed them

01:06:07   at the WWDC keynote, which was mildly surprising to me.

01:06:10   I know a lot of people had said,

01:06:11   "Oh, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming,"

01:06:12   but I wasn't so sure.

01:06:15   - At this point, every time Apple refreshes a Mac,

01:06:17   it's mildly surprising.

01:06:18   - Yeah, that's actually pretty accurate.

01:06:20   But yeah, so within hours,

01:06:23   I had placed an order for my MacBook Adorable.

01:06:26   It arrived Thursday of last week,

01:06:30   so the day after we recorded.

01:06:31   I don't recall when the episode went out,

01:06:32   but it arrived after we recorded.

01:06:35   and I have been using it on and off for the last four days,

01:06:39   whatever it is we're recording on the following Monday.

01:06:41   And I have to say so far, I freaking love this thing

01:06:46   because imagine how amazing it would be

01:06:49   to have a device the size of an iPad,

01:06:54   but it's a computer, so it can do anything.

01:06:59   - Oh no, you're gonna hear about that.

01:07:02   - It's not a toy.

01:07:03   It's not a thing.

01:07:05   There's no ball and chain involved, asterisk.

01:07:09   There's no ball and chain there.

01:07:10   It's a full-on computer that can do,

01:07:13   prepare yourselves, computery things.

01:07:17   Amazing.

01:07:18   You know what I did just a few minutes ago?

01:07:20   I transcoded something on FFmpeg.

01:07:22   Did you hear it?

01:07:23   No.

01:07:24   Why?

01:07:25   Because it was slower than dirt.

01:07:26   But also because there's no fans.

01:07:28   Because there's no fans on this device.

01:07:29   - Are you sure it's done yet?

01:07:31   - No, it is done.

01:07:32   It took forever, it was running at like 1/2x,

01:07:35   whereas my MacBook Pro would do it at like 1 1/2x,

01:07:38   and I haven't done this on my iMac in a long time.

01:07:40   But anyway, all kidding aside, I do love this thing.

01:07:44   It is not without problems, but I do love it.

01:07:47   It is unbelievably light,

01:07:50   and I picked up Erin's MacBook Air,

01:07:51   which is several years old now,

01:07:54   but I mean, obviously, nothing's changed on the MacBook Air

01:07:56   except that megahertz boost that it got.

01:07:58   So her MacBook Air is a aircraft carrier

01:08:02   by comparison. It is mammoth by comparison. It weighs a ton. And in fact, just this morning,

01:08:09   I was carrying my beloved iPad Mini, which is also ancient and also effectively brand

01:08:13   new. Funny how that works. And I was carrying my iPad Mini in my MacBook. Adorable. And

01:08:18   it occurred to me, based on no facts, based on just what it felt like in my hand, it felt

01:08:23   like my third generation iPad. You know, the one that Jon and I both had that we both loved.

01:08:28   That was the first of the Retina iPads, which kind of weighed a ton, kind of overheated

01:08:34   a lot.

01:08:35   The combination of my MacBook Adorable and my iPad felt like roughly the same weight

01:08:41   as the full-size iPad from a few years ago.

01:08:45   The keyboard, there are pluses and minuses.

01:08:48   Overall, I would say I like it.

01:08:52   I absolutely do not love it like I do the Magic Keyboard.

01:08:56   If it had 20 to 30 percent more travel, I think I would start moving toward love.

01:09:04   And it's hard to describe because it's a weird turn of phrase, but it feels more stable,

01:09:14   this keyboard, than perhaps even my beloved Magic Keyboard.

01:09:18   I think the keys just don't move laterally

01:09:22   in the way that certainly my MacBook Pro does.

01:09:26   My MacBook Pro is effectively unusable,

01:09:29   that keyboard right now,

01:09:30   because between the Magic Keyboard and this keyboard,

01:09:32   the MacBook Pro is like, it's like typing on,

01:09:36   you know what, the MacBook Pro keyboards,

01:09:38   not the new fancy pants ones,

01:09:40   I'm talking about before the scissor switches,

01:09:42   the MacBook Pro keyboards are the Lexuses of keyboards.

01:09:46   They are the marshmallows of keyboards.

01:09:49   It's like typing on pillows.

01:09:50   And I don't mean that in the like, ah, comfortable way.

01:09:53   I mean that in the, ugh, God, this feels gross way.

01:09:56   - I like those keyboard pillows.

01:09:57   They're comfortable to type on.

01:09:59   You can feel the keys. - I hate them.

01:10:00   - And you can feel where the arrow keys are

01:10:02   without looking or missing the, oh, God, I don't know.

01:10:06   No, so first of all, I think it's hilarious

01:10:09   how many people have yelled at me

01:10:12   for complaining about the new keyboard so much

01:10:15   when even the fan, basically if you're a fan

01:10:18   of the new keyboard, you will tend to complain

01:10:21   that much about the old one.

01:10:23   So either way, it's like because the new keyboard

01:10:25   is so different from the old ones,

01:10:28   if you like the new one, you're going to complain

01:10:30   about the old one and vice versa.

01:10:32   - I think that's mostly true, however,

01:10:34   I only dislike the old one in retrospect,

01:10:38   because at the time, I thought it was

01:10:39   a perfectly fine keyboard, it's just,

01:10:41   now I've seen the light and now I don't ever want to type

01:10:44   that mushy, marshmallowy, disgusting mess ever again.

01:10:48   But no, I do love this MacBook Adorable.

01:10:51   I don't feel, generally speaking, that it's particularly slow.

01:10:55   I have done a little bit of Xcode on it.

01:10:57   I've done some basic computing tasks.

01:11:02   And to be fair, this thing is never really intended to be a powerhouse, right?

01:11:05   It's intended to be a travel computer.

01:11:07   It's intended to be an around-the-house computer.

01:11:09   It's intended to be basically a "I don't want to use my work computer" or "I don't want

01:11:15   to be sitting in my in-home office computer" computer.

01:11:18   So it's for anywhere that's not either my actual office or the office in my house.

01:11:25   Everywhere else I would be using this.

01:11:27   I do still use my iPad from time to time.

01:11:29   And for better or worse, as much as I snark, I absolutely believe that you can get work

01:11:34   done on an iPad.

01:11:35   For me, as I've said before, and I was joking earlier, but for me, every time I use an iPad

01:11:40   to do work, and define work however you would like for the sorts of work that I do, I either

01:11:47   can't do it on an iPad because there is no Xcode on an iPad, or it would be considerably

01:11:53   more difficult because something like transcoding a video in FFmpeg, which I do way more often

01:11:57   than any normal human should, I would have to remote into my iMac and do it that way,

01:12:02   And the particular iPad I have doesn't have a keyboard attached to it.

01:12:07   And so for me, anytime I try to accomplish anything on the iPad, it genuinely feels like

01:12:13   I have a ball and chain attached to me.

01:12:15   I'm not saying that's true for you, Mike.

01:12:17   It's okay.

01:12:18   You don't have to yell at me.

01:12:19   But for me, that is true.

01:12:22   And so having an actual friggin' computer that can do anything that's as light and portable

01:12:29   as an iPad, in my personal opinion, is amazing.

01:12:34   And I love this thing.

01:12:36   The one thing I'm not sure I love is the one part of the MacBook One.

01:12:41   Because by and large, I actually don't mind having only one port.

01:12:46   I mean, I'm pouring one out for MagSafe, because man, do I love MagSafe.

01:12:49   But generally, I don't really mind having one port.

01:12:54   I've gotten two or three, I think three dongles.

01:12:57   I have a, I think it's Anker, we'll put links in the show notes, it's an, it's, I believe

01:13:02   it's an Anker device that has three traditional USB, what is that, USB-A?

01:13:08   I always get it wrong.

01:13:09   Thank you.

01:13:10   Three USB-A ports and a gigabit Ethernet jack, or port, connector, whatever, interface on

01:13:16   it.

01:13:17   But it does not have pass-through power.

01:13:21   And that's a bummer.

01:13:22   So as an example, when I wanted to do my initial time machine backup, I had to make sure that

01:13:27   this damn thing was topped up, because otherwise I wasn't going to make it.

01:13:30   And there's like not that much data on this thing to begin with.

01:13:34   So that's uncomfortable, and that's something I've never had to worry about before, and

01:13:38   that's kind of frustrating.

01:13:40   If this particular device, if this particular Ethernet adapter had pass-through power, that

01:13:46   would go away.

01:13:47   I got a SD card reader.

01:13:50   I don't often take pictures off my camera.

01:13:53   I almost never do it on the road,

01:13:56   but I wanna have the ability to do so.

01:13:59   I don't lament the fact that there's not an SD card slot

01:14:02   on the device.

01:14:03   Would I like it?

01:14:04   Of course.

01:14:04   - Yeah, how much do you pay for that card reader?

01:14:06   30 bucks?

01:14:07   - 12, I think, for Monoprice,

01:14:09   and I've already used it and it works.

01:14:12   It was very, very cheap.

01:14:14   Would I prefer it to be on the computer?

01:14:16   Of course.

01:14:16   But am I bitter about it not being?

01:14:18   No.

01:14:19   small it was like 12 or 13 dollars again I'll put a link in the show notes and it

01:14:23   seems to work just fine yeah just add it to your dongle bag that we all have to

01:14:26   carry now and that's the thing like yes in I do have to have a dongle bag the

01:14:30   other thing I got was a HDMI adapter which does have pass-through power and

01:14:35   this particular one also has a single USB a port on it so that's probably

01:14:41   going to be my general purpose adapter because it has pass-through power it has

01:14:46   USB-A and it has HDMI. So it has any of the things I would typically want to have while having pass-through power.

01:14:54   The only thing it doesn't have is Ethernet. So I guess maybe in retrospect I should have gotten a USB-A Ethernet adapter,

01:15:01   but presumably it would have been speed limited, whatever, it doesn't matter.

01:15:04   But to your point, I have yet to order, but plan to order a small little, I forget the name of it, but a Tom Bihn bag

01:15:11   that I can put all of these little dongles in

01:15:14   and have my USB-C dongle bag.

01:15:17   There's not that many of them.

01:15:18   I don't feel like I need any more, but I needed them.

01:15:22   Well, need is relevant, right?

01:15:23   - In the name of portability, you now need a dongle bag.

01:15:25   I have one too, and for the same reason,

01:15:27   because I use these new computers now when traveling,

01:15:31   and well, you just kinda need that.

01:15:33   I mean, the one thing, so before I make you continue

01:15:38   and tell me all about more stuff about this,

01:15:40   I do want to interject one brief thing here,

01:15:42   and that is that even that I've been using

01:15:44   the MacBook Escape as my computer for this role,

01:15:48   the MacBook Escape has only two ports,

01:15:50   and I have found that to be incredibly inconvenient

01:15:54   more often than I expected.

01:15:56   And so to go from two, well so for example,

01:15:59   during our live stream, the MacBook Escape was my computer,

01:16:04   it was doing the live broadcast,

01:16:07   It was playing sound effects into the PA system

01:16:11   for our ad bumpers and stuff,

01:16:13   and it was backup recording.

01:16:16   Anyway, so I was using it.

01:16:17   Because we were in a room full of laptops and nerds,

01:16:21   I didn't want to rely on WiFi,

01:16:23   so I had an Ethernet connection

01:16:24   for the livestream internet connection.

01:16:26   So that's Ethernet takes up one of the spots.

01:16:29   The audio interface,

01:16:30   because there's no more audio line-in functionality

01:16:33   in any Mac, except for the Mac Mini anymore,

01:16:36   I don't know why, except just to save money, I guess.

01:16:39   Line-in used to come on every computer.

01:16:42   I don't know why Apple decided nobody needs line-in anymore

01:16:45   because it's really cheap to add,

01:16:47   it's really cheap to be there,

01:16:48   it doesn't take up a lot of space,

01:16:50   it's just another headphone jack.

01:16:51   There's room for that, why isn't there room for a line-in?

01:16:53   But whatever the reason, Apple decides that computers

01:16:57   don't need line-in jacks anymore.

01:16:59   So you need an entire audio interface

01:17:01   or USB sound card or something

01:17:03   if you want a line-in on a computer.

01:17:05   So anyway, ethernet in one port,

01:17:08   line in audio interface on the other port,

01:17:11   that's it, and I also wanted power.

01:17:13   So I have a few options here.

01:17:15   I can get some kind of dongle.

01:17:19   And I actually bought the Apple dongle

01:17:21   that is the expensive like $70 one

01:17:24   that has the one HDMI port, one USB-A port,

01:17:28   and a charging pass-through.

01:17:30   - That's basically what I have, but a cheap knockoff.

01:17:33   - Right, and the reason I bought the Apple one

01:17:36   is because I was using this in production,

01:17:39   like in a live show with a thousand people in the room.

01:17:42   I did not want any part of that thing to fail.

01:17:45   The other problem is that that's a USB-A port on there.

01:17:49   And so one thing that's very interesting,

01:17:50   as I found as I'm trying to convert to a USB-C lifestyle

01:17:54   as much as I can just for my own convenience when traveling,

01:17:56   trying to get as much USB stuff as possible,

01:17:58   and actually, listener Remy wrote in,

01:18:01   I'm not sure, he didn't say whether we can use

01:18:03   last name so I'm not going to, but listener Remy wrote in a few days ago basically pointing

01:18:07   out this problem in the USB-C ecosystem right now that as far as he could tell, and I agree

01:18:12   as far as I can tell, is anybody making hubs that convert a USB-C port to more USB-C ports?

01:18:19   - Yeah, that was a very interesting point and I'm sure that there is one somewhere,

01:18:24   or maybe there's many, but I certainly have not stumbled across one.

01:18:27   - Yeah, and actually the LG 5K monitor is one such thing,

01:18:32   but I'm not aware of any stand-alone hubs

01:18:35   that you convert one USB-C port to four USB-C ports.

01:18:40   I have not seen that.

01:18:42   One of the problems with the USB-C lifestyle

01:18:44   is what I was facing with this Apple dongle,

01:18:46   which is like, okay, so I have a USB-C cable

01:18:49   for my sound interface, and I have a USB-C ethernet adapter,

01:18:52   and I have a USB-C power adapter.

01:18:55   The Apple dongle thing only converts one to one on C.

01:19:00   So it has an A port, but then I need to have

01:19:04   an A ethernet adapter, which I don't have.

01:19:06   I haven't had it since the MacBook Air.

01:19:08   I can move the sound card to that,

01:19:10   but I wasn't sure I wanted something as critical

01:19:11   as the sound card to be going through a dongle

01:19:14   with a weird little mini hub in it.

01:19:17   So the USB-C ecosystem is actually kind of hard

01:19:20   to fully adopt right now because you can't,

01:19:24   Generally, as far as we can tell,

01:19:26   you can't multiply USB-C ports.

01:19:28   You might think, "Oh good, my computer has two or four,"

01:19:31   or in your case, one USB-C port,

01:19:33   but that also replaces the power port.

01:19:35   So, (laughs)

01:19:38   like that, well, if you actually want to be plugged

01:19:41   into power, you just lost a port,

01:19:43   which might be your only one,

01:19:44   or at least so now you're down from two to one.

01:19:46   So like, if you've been accustomed to most Apple laptops

01:19:51   for the last many years have generally had two USB ports

01:19:55   on them and you could be plugged into power

01:19:56   and also have two USB things plugged in.

01:19:59   Well now you're down to, on the MacBook One,

01:20:01   you're down to zero.

01:20:02   On the MacBook Escape, you have one if you're plugged in.

01:20:05   And so like it's, and if you actually try,

01:20:08   if you actually spend the lots of money

01:20:10   on one of the Apple dongles or the less money

01:20:13   but still money on one of the third party ones,

01:20:15   that by the way, if you look at Amazon reviews

01:20:18   for third party USB-C hubs and dongles and things.

01:20:23   The reviews are all over the map

01:20:25   and most of them seem like they're at best inconsistent,

01:20:29   maybe unreliable.

01:20:30   They have a lot of problems it seems.

01:20:33   And they're probably all using one of a very small number

01:20:35   of chipsets and things and maybe those are the problems.

01:20:37   Who knows what the problem is?

01:20:38   But regardless, it's a problem.

01:20:40   Like if you want to reliably multiply these ports,

01:20:45   it's really hard to do that.

01:20:46   So that's a big problem.

01:20:49   And now that you're in this ecosystem,

01:20:51   you're going to find that as well.

01:20:52   Anyway, so what I ended up doing for our live show,

01:20:54   I just ran on battery power the whole time,

01:20:57   which is a terrible solution.

01:20:59   And the MacBook Escape, which has amazing battery power

01:21:02   when you're not doing much,

01:21:03   goes from 12 hours battery life

01:21:07   when you're casually browsing Safari

01:21:09   to if you're actually running stuff off of it,

01:21:12   it goes to about three hours of battery life.

01:21:15   and that's not great when you're running a podcast

01:21:20   like this one live.

01:21:22   - Indeed.

01:21:22   - It was like, I was basically juggling.

01:21:25   Like before the show, I would unplug the sound card

01:21:27   and plug in power for a while,

01:21:29   and then right before we started, yank that out

01:21:31   and switch it over, but then you can't test things.

01:21:34   It was actually really incredibly inconvenient,

01:21:37   and that was one of the first times,

01:21:39   besides when my keyboard stopped working,

01:21:41   that was one of the first times

01:21:43   when I actually did regret having the escape,

01:21:46   because having only two ports is incredibly inconvenient.

01:21:50   And this is not the first time

01:21:51   that this has been inconvenient for me,

01:21:53   but having one port, I imagine for you, is even worse.

01:21:58   - Yeah, it is and it isn't.

01:22:00   I think if this was my only computer,

01:22:02   it would get really ugly really quickly,

01:22:04   and I would probably have some sort of ridiculous dock.

01:22:07   But again, the whole point of this machine

01:22:09   is to be super portable.

01:22:11   And so what I ended up with was $80 worth of dongles and cables.

01:22:17   So the Lightning-- I didn't mention previously,

01:22:20   but I got a Lightning USB-C cable off Amazon, again, a knockoff.

01:22:24   That was $8.

01:22:25   The HDMI adapter, which is basically the same thing that Apple sells,

01:22:29   except a knockoff from Monoprice, that was $30.

01:22:32   The SD card reader was $12, and the ethernet thing was $30.

01:22:36   And so that's a total of $80, roughly.

01:22:39   I'll have links in the show notes.

01:22:40   All of these seem to work fine.

01:22:42   They're not terribly large.

01:22:44   They seem to work OK.

01:22:46   If this was my only computer, I'd be really grumpy and

01:22:48   bitter, but since it's not, and since I'm not going to be

01:22:50   doing terribly challenging, difficult tasks on it for the

01:22:53   most part, it's really not bad at all.

01:22:56   And I can see where USB-C will be pretty cool.

01:23:02   And the reason I can see that is I wanted to

01:23:04   try out my HDMI cable.

01:23:08   And so I brought the MacBook Adorable downstairs,

01:23:11   I hooked up an HDMI cable to the TV,

01:23:13   hooked up that cable to the dongle,

01:23:15   hooked up the dongle to the MacBook.

01:23:17   And then I thought to myself,

01:23:19   I wonder if I can power this all at the same time

01:23:21   just to see, 'cause I thought for a minute

01:23:23   I would like maybe watch a movie off of it

01:23:25   just to see if it would work.

01:23:27   And it occurred to me, wait a second,

01:23:30   my Switch dock is right here,

01:23:34   as is my Pro Controller charging cable.

01:23:37   I wonder if, and sure enough, it wasn't actively charging the MacBook, but it was at least

01:23:46   slightly keeping it afloat by taking the charging cable for the Pro Controller on the Switch,

01:23:53   which I believe is USB-A to USB-C. So it comes out of the Switch as USB-A, goes into the

01:23:59   Pro Controller, or in my case the MacBook, as USB-C, and it seemed to work.

01:24:04   And I'm sure over hours it would eventually drain my battery, but it was very wild that

01:24:10   that was an acceptable way of doing things.

01:24:12   And additionally, I was talking to Underscore, who has one of these as his travel computer

01:24:16   as far as I'm aware anyway, and he was saying that what you can do is you can issue the

01:24:22   actual charging brick that came with it, which by the way, to my eyes, looks barely any bigger

01:24:27   than the iPad charging brick that's been the iPad charging brick forever.

01:24:32   I understand that there's one that works with the iPad, blah blah blah, or the same one

01:24:35   with the right cable that works with the iPad, but this thing, the charging brick is comically

01:24:39   small.

01:24:40   Well anyways, what Underscore was saying was, just use one of your Anker or whatever USB-A

01:24:46   like hubs that does nothing but charge.

01:24:49   Just let the thing sit overnight, suspended, charging, and it'll be just fine.

01:24:53   It'll be topped up by the morning.

01:24:55   And I don't know if I necessarily need to go to that route, but the fact that that's

01:24:59   an option, that's super cool.

01:25:01   So I can see how this USB-C lifestyle could be awesome,

01:25:04   but it's definitely not 100% awesome yet.

01:25:08   I don't know.

01:25:09   Now, Jon, you haven't gotten your new computer

01:25:10   for work yet, right?

01:25:12   - No, they notified me about it.

01:25:14   They said, "Hey, we're gonna buy the new ones, guess what?"

01:25:16   And then they started giving me flack

01:25:18   about wanting a one terabyte drive

01:25:19   'cause it costs a bazillion dollars from Apple.

01:25:21   So we're working on it.

01:25:23   - Why do you need a one terabyte drive for work?

01:25:25   - 'Cause I got a lot of virtual machines.

01:25:26   They asked me the same question.

01:25:27   Why do you need such a big drive?

01:25:28   you have unlimited space on Microsoft OneDrive or blah, blah, blah.

01:25:32   It's like, you don't want to run a virtual machine off of that.

01:25:34   Why do you have so many virtual machines?

01:25:35   Well, because I do.

01:25:36   We're doing local development and you're doing it on a Mac.

01:25:39   And Docker runs in a virtual machine and virtual machines

01:25:42   for other kinds of flavors of Linux.

01:25:43   And it's just the way it is.

01:25:45   So you sound just like them.

01:25:47   Why do you need all this stuff?

01:25:48   This is what I got.

01:25:49   As soon as you said VM, the conversation was over for me.

01:25:51   And it's not it's not just one VM.

01:25:53   And I try to convince them that you can't run a VM off like OneDrive or Google Drive.

01:25:57   permitting you could, but it'll just be painful.

01:26:00   So we'll see how that goes, but.

01:26:02   - Well and also like one of the big reasons is like

01:26:04   you can never upgrade it.

01:26:06   Like that's a-- - Exactly.

01:26:08   - That is all the justification you need.

01:26:10   Like if you are buying an Apple laptop,

01:26:13   or at most Macs today actually,

01:26:14   if you're buying a Mac today

01:26:16   that does not have upgradeable storage,

01:26:18   then the answer to why do you need the terabyte

01:26:21   is literally like you can never upgrade this.

01:26:25   So if you want this laptop to last however many years

01:26:28   that you intend it to last,

01:26:30   you have to really get as much storage as you can afford

01:26:32   because that is one barrier you'll just run into

01:26:35   and that's like, you can never change it.

01:26:38   - Well, at work, they're never gonna upgrade anything anyway.

01:26:40   They don't care.

01:26:41   My main pitch was like, look,

01:26:43   the Mac I'm using right now is eight years old.

01:26:45   Come and break here.

01:26:46   I already saved the company a lot of money.

01:26:47   (laughing)

01:26:50   - Nice.

01:26:50   Yeah, and I don't think I was specific, by the way,

01:26:52   about what I ordered and for the record,

01:26:54   ordered the basically maxed out MacBook adorable because to build on what you

01:26:58   were just saying the conclusion I've come to is when buying a Mac this may

01:27:01   not be applicable to other manufacturers but when buying a Mac the order of

01:27:05   operations is get as much RAM as you possibly can that's step one step two is

01:27:09   get as much disk space as you possibly can within your budget and then step

01:27:13   three in my personal estimation is get the biggest processor you possibly can

01:27:17   given your budget and I find that RAM makes the biggest difference SSD because

01:27:22   all the reasons Marco just gave you and then finally CPU because why not and so I got a maxed out

01:27:28   MacBook adorable and it was not cheap but it can do anything I want it to do maybe not with the

01:27:36   speed I want it to because like I was saying you know the transcoding something in ffmpeg is not

01:27:41   fast but it is otherwise to me a no compromise machine and that's really awesome the only thing

01:27:51   that I think is slightly a compromise

01:27:52   that does make me jealous of my iPad Mini

01:27:55   is I kinda want cellular in it.

01:27:58   - Yes. - I don't need it.

01:28:00   I don't need it.

01:28:01   It's really kinda frivolous. - No, you do need it.

01:28:02   It's like-- - It's kinda frivolous,

01:28:04   but God, it would be so nice.

01:28:05   - No, it's not frivolous.

01:28:06   It's 2017, for God's sake.

01:28:09   Having cellular in laptops, which PCs did in 2005,

01:28:13   like, this is not a ridiculous thing to ask for.

01:28:17   This is something that a lot of people could use.

01:28:21   Like, you know, I've been getting it on iPads

01:28:24   basically forever because it really does make iPads

01:28:26   way, way more usable for people who are picky like me.

01:28:29   And yes, I know tethering exists,

01:28:31   and tethering has gotten way better than it used to be.

01:28:33   It's way easier than it used to be to use.

01:28:36   But to have cellular built in is way better.

01:28:39   And like, now the data plans are cheaper than ever,

01:28:43   and like when you have a combined family plan,

01:28:45   It only costs me 10 bucks a month

01:28:47   to have my iPad on my cellular plan.

01:28:50   So, and it's just using the same shared pool

01:28:52   of massive data that I have from AT&T

01:28:54   for just another 10 bucks a month.

01:28:56   And that's great.

01:28:58   So, to me, it's a no-brainer on an iPad.

01:29:00   And the second they release cellular laptops,

01:29:04   if Apple ever does this,

01:29:06   I will immediately trade in whatever laptop I have

01:29:09   for a new one with cellular.

01:29:10   Like, that is how much I want that.

01:29:12   Like it is such a big thing.

01:29:15   - It's one of those things that,

01:29:16   unless you experience like having a Wi-Fi only iPad

01:29:20   and then having a cellular iPad,

01:29:22   which is the exact path I went through,

01:29:24   I don't think you'll ever really understand

01:29:25   how much more convenient it is.

01:29:27   Yes, I understand tethering is a thing.

01:29:30   Yes, I'm aware that you can turn on tethering

01:29:32   from the other device,

01:29:33   if they're all in the same iCloud account,

01:29:34   yada, yada, yada.

01:29:35   I am aware that it is as easy as it can possibly be

01:29:40   to make tethering against another device work.

01:29:42   I get it, but that will never, ever be as convenient

01:29:47   as having the connection on the device you're on.

01:29:50   It just won't.

01:29:52   If you're sitting there and you have a furrowed brow

01:29:54   and you're like, "What is he talking about?

01:29:55   "That's totally," no, I'm telling you,

01:29:57   it's the way it is, try it sometime.

01:30:00   - Yeah, it's like having to use a dial-up API,

01:30:04   like a dial-up interface on your computer.

01:30:06   Okay, connect to the tether.

01:30:07   Now disconnect from the tether to save the battery

01:30:09   on the tethering thing, or to make it stop burning data

01:30:12   in the background in my backpack.

01:30:14   You have to manage it.

01:30:15   It's still something you have to manage,

01:30:17   you have to do, you have to sometimes wait for,

01:30:19   and you're still then draining the battery of your phone

01:30:21   or having to plug it into one of your one USB ports.

01:30:24   Like it's just, it's not,

01:30:27   everything about that is painful.

01:30:30   That's another thing, another reason I ran into

01:30:32   with my laptop planning with the live show is that

01:30:36   my backup option before I got to the venue,

01:30:38   I was thinking I might have to use tethering

01:30:41   has the internet connection.

01:30:42   And again, I'm not gonna rely on wireless tethering

01:30:45   in a room full of a thousand people with Apple devices.

01:30:47   So I was going to use USB tethering.

01:30:50   And I had to bring lightning cables

01:30:52   with both types of USB ends so I could make sure

01:30:56   that I'd be able to plug in with either the dongle

01:30:58   or direct port or something. (laughs)

01:31:01   It's just, friction, it's just all these things

01:31:03   where they just add friction.

01:31:05   The USB transition is adding friction.

01:31:07   The fact that it still isn't like,

01:31:09   no matter how much money you're willing to spend

01:31:11   and dongles and new cables right now,

01:31:13   you still can't fully transition to USB-C.

01:31:16   So you're still gonna be living in a mixed world

01:31:18   for a long time, and it still sucks,

01:31:20   and there's still these inconveniences like,

01:31:22   how like, okay, well now my ethernet adapter is USB-C,

01:31:25   but now I can't plug it into USB-A port

01:31:26   if I ever have to use a hub

01:31:28   or something that only outputs USB-A.

01:31:30   There's gonna be these problems forever, right?

01:31:32   Tethering versus built-in cellular is like a,

01:31:36   it's similar, it's just friction, it's more friction,

01:31:39   and when there's friction, you use things less,

01:31:42   or it gets in the way, or sometimes it doesn't work.

01:31:46   Like, you know, when it's built in, it'll work every time.

01:31:49   When it's not built in, when you're tethering,

01:31:50   like occasionally it won't work,

01:31:52   and that will be annoying or a problem for you.

01:31:55   Like, having it built in is just so much nicer.

01:31:58   - Yep, I completely agree.

01:32:00   Does your escape have Thunderbolt?

01:32:01   - Yes.

01:32:02   - You're looking to Thunderbolt hubs to try to solve here?

01:32:05   'Cause I know USB C hubs,

01:32:07   multipliers apparently aren't out there.

01:32:08   has not delivered his promised one. But a Thunderbolt hub that gives you Ethernet and

01:32:14   a bunch of USB ports and audio in and all of that stuff. Have you looked into that?

01:32:18   You know I haven't yet. Maybe I should. I'm not sure any of those Thunderbolt hubs ever

01:32:24   really were adopted by enough people to even know if they suck or not. I would be hesitant

01:32:30   to also invest in any kind of Thunderbolt 2 gear right now. And Thunderbolt 3 gear is

01:32:35   probably still too young or not even out yet, depending.

01:32:39   - Well, and I can't use it either, because if I understand--

01:32:41   - Right, you don't have Thunderbolt.

01:32:43   - Right, exactly.

01:32:44   If I understand this whole kerfuffle correctly,

01:32:46   I don't have Thunderbolt that I can get to externally.

01:32:50   So for me, that's useless.

01:32:52   I'm stuck with just straight USB-C.

01:32:54   And I'm not saying, obviously,

01:32:55   that that's true for everyone,

01:32:56   but for me, it's USB-C or bust.

01:32:59   And yeah, I mean, so far, I really love this thing.

01:33:03   I'm traveling with it very, very soon,

01:33:05   So we'll see what I think of it then.

01:33:07   Part of the draw of getting such a small computer

01:33:11   was on the plane back from Dub-Dub,

01:33:14   the person in front of me decided to recline

01:33:17   and I have very strong opinions about jerks,

01:33:20   people who recline their seats in planes.

01:33:22   - Totally agreed.

01:33:24   - And when this person reclined their seats,

01:33:27   there was no way for me to use my laptop,

01:33:31   except perhaps reclining,

01:33:32   but I'm a gentleman so I wouldn't do that.

01:33:34   There was no way to use my 15-inch laptop

01:33:36   without giving myself horrible pain somewhere on my body.

01:33:40   And as silly as it sounds, that two or three inches

01:33:43   that that person infringed upon what is my space, dammit,

01:33:47   that made the difference between me being able

01:33:48   to use my computer and me not.

01:33:50   Whereas this thing, I mean, it's almost an iPad.

01:33:53   I could pretty much use it anywhere.

01:33:55   And I just, I really, really love it.

01:33:59   I'm super happy with it.

01:34:01   The space gray is so darn good looking.

01:34:03   I don't know why anyone would buy any other color.

01:34:06   I love this thing.

01:34:07   It definitely does have some problems here and there.

01:34:10   It has some catches.

01:34:11   It has some issues.

01:34:13   Most notably, I do think even just one more USB-C port would

01:34:17   make a world of difference.

01:34:18   But generally speaking, for the purpose this laptop exists

01:34:24   in my world, which is to be an accessory, to be either a

01:34:29   portable machine to do something, to do everything in

01:34:31   a pinch or to just be an accessory so it doesn't have to do everything at all.

01:34:37   It is pretty much perfect and I am overjoyed with it.

01:34:41   Now, ask me again once I start getting some real time with one of the bigger iPads on

01:34:47   iOS 11 and maybe I'm going to start having some buyer's remorse because this new stuff

01:34:52   on iOS 11 does look darn good.

01:34:54   But I don't think that will ever really change the fact that this computer can do everything

01:35:00   I want it to do.

01:35:01   Maybe not the speed at which I want it to do, maybe not without a few dongles that I

01:35:05   wish I didn't have to carry, but it can do literally everything I want it to do.

01:35:11   Whereas an iPad, for me, either can't or can't do it without having a Mac nearby or having

01:35:18   a keyboard nearby or without having any number of other things to support it.

01:35:25   And while I deeply respect the Mics and the Federicos and the Ben Brookses of the world

01:35:29   who can figure out a way to make this technology work for them.

01:35:34   For me, if I have to write a workflow, which again is one of the most mind-blowingly amazing

01:35:39   apps written by unbelievably great, great people.

01:35:42   If I have to write a workflow in order to get this device to do what I want it to do,

01:35:50   then to me, it's already failed because I have to bend the device to my will.

01:35:57   Whereas this computer, this tiny, adorable, darling little computer of mine, can do everything

01:36:03   right off the bat.

01:36:04   And that's what's important to me.

01:36:07   You know they sell ski racks for the top of cars?

01:36:10   Mm-hmm.

01:36:11   They should sell that for Macbooks.

01:36:14   Like you would just be like a ski rack for your MacBook and you just click on all your

01:36:19   dongles, right?

01:36:20   Yeah, right, right, right.

01:36:21   So I think that would really hammer home the point that Marco was getting at before, which

01:36:25   like you buy these computers that are super slim because portability is paramount, right?

01:36:30   But then everybody needs to bring some other thing with them to make the computer usable

01:36:36   for them and that some other thing compromises portability so much more than an extra millimeter

01:36:41   would on the thing.

01:36:42   Now I suppose if you never need to bring anything then you win the portability.

01:36:46   Like yes, thank God it's portable and smaller and light, but if you have to bring a single

01:36:51   dongle, then it's like game over. And having an actual rack attached to the back of them

01:36:55   would be a nice way to communicate to Apple, like, if that ever became a popular product,

01:36:59   like, "Look, you made this thing portable, but then we had to put a ski rack on it. Thanks

01:37:03   a lot."

01:37:04   - Yeah, and that's the thing, like, whenever Apple removes a port, we hear from people

01:37:09   who say things like, "Well, you know, you never use that anyway." Like, you know, just

01:37:13   now, I was, 20 minutes ago, I was ranting about how no Macs have line-in ports anymore,

01:37:18   except the Mac Mini.

01:37:19   The reasoning behind that, that almost any Apple fan

01:37:23   would come up with in two seconds,

01:37:25   because it isn't that hard to come up with this reason,

01:37:27   is well, most people don't use that.

01:37:29   I have one, I've never used it.

01:37:31   Like that's what everyone says.

01:37:32   Whenever Apple removes something that I like,

01:37:34   everyone else says, well, I've never used that port.

01:37:39   But like, for everyone, that's different.

01:37:41   So one thing that I would say about that

01:37:43   with all my previous laptops is that

01:37:46   I've never used the HDMI port.

01:37:49   But a lot of people do use the HDMI port.

01:37:51   And you know what, even when I say

01:37:52   I've never used the HDMI port, that's probably wrong.

01:37:55   I've probably used it like once or twice.

01:37:58   And during those once or twice times,

01:38:00   I bet I was really glad I had it.

01:38:02   And a line-in jack for audio,

01:38:05   like this is one of those things where it's like,

01:38:07   it isn't that hard to add.

01:38:09   They already have the entire like USB audio codec chip

01:38:13   in these computers anyway.

01:38:15   Like it would cost them almost nothing additional.

01:38:18   And while most people don't usually use it,

01:38:22   sometimes people use it.

01:38:24   And during those times, it's really nice to have it.

01:38:27   And I would say the same thing about so many other features.

01:38:29   Like I never use the front facing camera

01:38:31   on any of my things.

01:38:33   But a lot of people do, so it's fine.

01:38:36   I never use many of the capabilities.

01:38:38   Most people don't use all of the capabilities

01:38:41   of the computers and the computer devices they have.

01:38:44   That does not mean that the correct design decision

01:38:47   is to get rid of everything.

01:38:49   Like there's this obsession with getting rid of things,

01:38:52   minimizing things, deleting things, erasing things.

01:38:56   The reality is, these are general purpose devices

01:39:00   and the more they can do,

01:39:01   the more useful they're gonna be to people,

01:39:03   the more they're gonna help people,

01:39:04   the more often they're gonna be able to do

01:39:05   what people need them to do,

01:39:06   with the equipment they already have,

01:39:08   without buying a bunch of dongles

01:39:10   and having them with you all the time.

01:39:12   I wish that Apple would have the courage,

01:39:17   and I'm using this word deliberately here,

01:39:19   have the courage to say yes sometimes.

01:39:22   And to have the courage to say, you know what,

01:39:24   even though most people don't use, say, the SD card slot,

01:39:29   for the people that do, that's incredibly useful,

01:39:33   and it's not really being a problem for us

01:39:36   to keep it there, so let's keep it there.

01:39:39   Or how about maybe if we're going to have a whole new line

01:39:43   of computers that is reducing the number of ports it has

01:39:46   down to almost nothing, how about we give people

01:39:49   the most of that port that we possibly can?

01:39:53   And maybe they are now, I don't know.

01:39:54   I don't know the details about Thunderbolt bandwidth

01:39:55   and stuff, but I feel like Apple needs to step back

01:40:00   a little bit from the obsession with removing things.

01:40:04   Because it really does overall make these things

01:40:07   less useful in times and people don't expect that

01:40:10   or don't welcome that or we have to patch over

01:40:14   these wonderful beautiful objects with things like

01:40:17   dongle bags in our bags that now we have to carry

01:40:19   these additional things and spend the 80 plus dollars

01:40:23   on all these additional adapters that we didn't need before.

01:40:27   With the computers that we bought a few years ago,

01:40:30   we didn't need a dongle to do this common thing

01:40:32   and now we do.

01:40:34   And so have we really made progress?

01:40:36   like that sounds worse to me.

01:40:38   There's nothing wrong with a computer having a capability

01:40:43   that most of its customers don't use.

01:40:45   If it's not costing you a lot to have it there,

01:40:48   if it's not causing some kind of big problem,

01:40:50   what's the big deal with having it there

01:40:52   for the time when someone does need it

01:40:55   and then they can be happily delighted that,

01:40:57   oh, my computer can do this new thing

01:40:59   that I need to do suddenly right now

01:41:01   that I didn't predict or plan for

01:41:03   or buy a dongle for ahead of time.

01:41:05   What's so bad about that?

01:41:08   I think the answer is it's--

01:41:12   to get rid of them simplifies things.

01:41:14   To get rid of them makes things smaller and thinner.

01:41:17   And as much as I am 100% behind you on thinness being a bad

01:41:24   thing for phones--

01:41:25   like, we could stand to have our phones get a little

01:41:27   thicker, and you've been saying that for a long time,

01:41:30   and I agree with you.

01:41:31   In this case, though, I have to concede that this thing

01:41:35   being as thin and light as it is, it's pretty nice.

01:41:39   That's exactly why I bought it.

01:41:42   - Well yeah, and there's differences here.

01:41:44   I'm not saying that the one super thin,

01:41:47   super light computer in the lineup

01:41:49   has to have a million ports on it,

01:41:51   'cause obviously that actually doesn't have the room for it.

01:41:53   But I'm talking about, okay,

01:41:55   I got over them removing Ethernet a while ago

01:41:58   because well, Ethernet's really big, so that makes sense.

01:42:00   But SD cards and audio jacks and stuff are pretty small.

01:42:04   and you can fit those in thin bodies,

01:42:07   it isn't a problem.

01:42:09   A lot of these things seem to have been removed

01:42:12   just because they thought people didn't use them enough

01:42:16   anymore or they were tired of shipping them or something.

01:42:19   Okay, but I really,

01:42:23   it's hard to tell whether some of these things were removed

01:42:28   for good reasons that benefit the customers

01:42:31   or for reasons that only benefit Apple.

01:42:34   For the benefit nobody.

01:42:35   We all know they just need to add a second USB port to the adorable, and then you add

01:42:38   an SD card reader to the big giant expensive 15-inch, and then maybe put four ports on

01:42:44   the Escape, and we're all happy.

01:42:45   Like, we're not asking for the moon here, you know?

01:42:47   Again, you're not going to put an Ethernet port on these things, but if you had four

01:42:50   USB-C on the Escape, you'd be able to get over a lot of the weird USB-C ecosystems.

01:42:54   You'd be like, "Well, whatever, I'll get four dongles and plug them all in and have power,"

01:42:58   right?

01:42:59   And on the Escape, you know, it is super thin.

01:43:01   You don't have room for much of anything, but, you know, how about a second port?

01:43:05   You know, maybe a third of you could fit in there, that's fine.

01:43:07   And on the big giant 15-inch that has everything in it, SD card plus 5 USB-C, who's gonna complain

01:43:12   about that?

01:43:13   You can probably still complain about the audio end being missing, although I think

01:43:16   any analog input at this point is crazy, so it would have to be the optical one with the

01:43:19   little, you know, little light at the end of the thing.

01:43:21   They got rid of optical too in all the new MacBook Pros.

01:43:23   They used to be the hybrid jack that has the optical out.

01:43:26   They have also the iMacs getting rid of them too, which is unfortunate because I use mine,

01:43:30   But oh well.

01:43:31   I only pick certain battles.

01:43:33   Yeah, I think they're saying that the digital audio through USB is the way to go.

01:43:39   Like I said, I'm all on board with the USB-C as they are tiny.

01:43:43   Please give us more of them.

01:43:44   Or I suppose Apple can come up with some kind of reliable hub.

01:43:48   Because I suggest the Thunderbolt hub as a solution to your problem, but it's not the

01:43:53   type of thing you'd want to order a week before going to WWDC and cross your fingers

01:43:56   that thing doesn't flake out because as we all know hubs are notoriously flaky and

01:44:00   Exactly, it would be nice if every nice of Apple

01:44:04   Didn't leave this as a third-party opportunity for those things

01:44:08   So, you know, they're close like I think the lines are close on

01:44:12   You know their laptop lines are close on the things they're including and again, like I said a couple shows ago

01:44:16   I'm glad they put USB a on the iMac because it's not like there's not room for it back there plenty room and boy

01:44:21   Isn't it convenient to not have even more dongles hanging off the back of your fancy new iMac?

01:44:26   Mac.

01:44:28   And I'm still pinning my hopes on those statements that whoever was said during the Mac roundtable

01:44:33   about the Mac Pro that they're thinking about Macbook Pros that address some of the customer's

01:44:38   needs.

01:44:39   The easy answer is, guess what, you already saw those.

01:44:42   They announced them at WWDC.

01:44:43   How do you like them?

01:44:44   But I'm still holding out hope like, "No, they meant they're going to add SD card to

01:44:48   the 15-inch, right?

01:44:49   Right, Phil?

01:44:50   Tell me."

01:44:51   I wouldn't count on that.

01:44:52   Oh, it could happen.

01:44:54   - Yeah, we, ugh.

01:44:56   There's so much room for it there.

01:44:57   - Also, one thing I wanna argue about

01:44:59   your Thunderbolt hub thing for a second here.

01:45:01   So, people in the chat pasted this link to,

01:45:05   apparently Belkin did make a Thunderbolt 3 hub.

01:45:08   So, first of all, it's $350.

01:45:11   And this is not just the one time,

01:45:13   like almost every Thunderbolt hub that has ever existed

01:45:16   that actually is Thunderbolt based and not just USB,

01:45:19   they're almost all like $300 range, like in that ballpark.

01:45:23   So the reason this is not a solution,

01:45:27   number one, is that it's very expensive.

01:45:30   Number two is that it adds all ports that aren't USB-C ports.

01:45:36   It adds USB-A ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort,

01:45:41   and then two Thunderbolt 2 ports.

01:45:44   Well, who needs that?

01:45:45   If you're moving to this new ecosystem,

01:45:47   you want Thunderbolt 3 devices that use USB-C.

01:45:52   And on top of that, it needs its own giant power supply.

01:45:55   And let me tell you, just as like a geek wisdom thing,

01:46:00   one of the biggest reasons why many peripherals,

01:46:05   or things like peripherals, why they often fail or suck,

01:46:09   is crappy or unreliable AC/DC power supplies.

01:46:14   Like, basically, if your thing is not bus-powered,

01:46:17   if it is powered by its own external power brick,

01:46:20   Not only does that make your desk and stuff messier,

01:46:23   but also it is way more likely to suck or fail

01:46:27   because those power bricks are crap.

01:46:29   They're always crap and the one thing you do not want

01:46:33   is to rely on one of those power bricks

01:46:34   or to introduce them into your setup

01:46:36   and cause possible noise or interference.

01:46:38   They always suck.

01:46:39   They're always cheap pieces of crap

01:46:41   and so anything you can do to avoid needing external power

01:46:45   into a peripheral, you will be better off for it.

01:46:48   But then that also means that USB hubs

01:46:50   are often either unpowered, which sucks,

01:46:53   then you plug in devices and not enough power,

01:46:56   or they need these things,

01:46:58   or they only have like two ports.

01:47:00   So it's like any of these hub solutions almost always suck.

01:47:04   The way to make the USB-C ecosystem not suck

01:47:08   is to A, have, just have as many of these ports

01:47:12   on the computers as you can fit,

01:47:14   and as the chipset can power and drive.

01:47:15   Like step one, try to avoid the need for hubs at all.

01:47:19   Because what, the correct answer,

01:47:22   if you're arguing for the USBC future slash,

01:47:25   now it's really the present,

01:47:27   if you're arguing for the USBC world,

01:47:29   you should be totally accommodating

01:47:33   and it should be awesome for people who are willing

01:47:37   to go out and buy USBC everything.

01:47:39   Like look, like Casey, you bought a new laptop,

01:47:42   I bought my laptop, like I went out

01:47:45   and I bought a USB-C ethernet adapter

01:47:46   and a USB-C SD card reader and USB-C lightning cables.

01:47:51   'Cause I'm like, you know, if I'm gonna do this,

01:47:53   I'm gonna go all in, I'm gonna get all USB-C stuff.

01:47:57   But if you do that now, it still sucks

01:47:59   because there's still no USB-C port multiplier hubs

01:48:02   out there, as we said earlier.

01:48:04   So you still have to live in this weird, mixed world

01:48:07   and you're dealing with all these unreliable hubs

01:48:09   with crappy Amazon reviews that are made

01:48:10   by no-name companies.

01:48:11   And even the ones from good companies like Anchor

01:48:14   have terrible reviews and it's like,

01:48:16   it just seems like this whole world of like,

01:48:18   of USB-C relies currently today on this ecosystem

01:48:23   of crappy hubs that kinda ruin the whole thing,

01:48:26   like once you go beyond the ports in your computer.

01:48:30   And so what we need is for the computers

01:48:32   to need fewer hubs, A, by having more ports,

01:48:35   and B, we need good hubs.

01:48:38   And I know this is like, this is not an exciting topic,

01:48:40   but like, think about how long it took

01:48:43   to find good USB 3 hubs, like just with USB-A ports on them.

01:48:47   I mean, I don't know if you guys have good ones,

01:48:49   it took me like two years to find a good USB 3 hub

01:48:51   that didn't flake out and like disconnect drives randomly

01:48:54   that were plugged into it and stuff like that.

01:48:56   Still today, USB 3, which is now comparably ancient,

01:49:00   very few hubs are good, but there are a few that exist.

01:49:03   We need good USB-C hubs now, and we, as far as I can tell

01:49:07   from the world out there, I don't think we have any

01:49:10   that actually give you more USB-C ports,

01:49:12   let alone good ones, and the ones that give you

01:49:14   different ports, again, as I mentioned,

01:49:16   they don't seem to be consistently good.

01:49:20   And so if this world is going to happen,

01:49:22   if this is going to actually take off,

01:49:23   we need those two things.

01:49:24   We need more ports on the laptops,

01:49:25   and we need great hubs.

01:49:27   And until that happens, it's gonna be really a pain

01:49:31   to have USB-C devices.

01:49:34   And that's why I kinda feel like,

01:49:36   would it kill Apple to make a good hub?

01:49:37   Like, I know it's the most boring Apple product

01:49:40   in the world, but they make boring stuff sometimes,

01:49:42   like all their little adapters and cables,

01:49:43   like they make other boring stuff,

01:49:45   that would enable this, like if Apple just made

01:49:47   like a decent like, you know, one to four USB-C hub,

01:49:51   that would be great, like, 'cause I think we have seen

01:49:56   the entire rest of the electronics world,

01:49:59   they have shown us over the last like decade,

01:50:01   they can't do this, like they cannot do this reliably.

01:50:05   The entire consumer electronics industry

01:50:08   is not capable of putting out reliable USB hubs.

01:50:11   Like we're lucky if we can find one model of one sometimes that works for a while.

01:50:16   For god's sake Apple just give us a USB hub.

01:50:18   That's all we need.

01:50:20   ATP tipster, you're our only hope.

01:50:22   Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.

01:50:25   Squarespace, Away, and Hover.

01:50:27   And we will see you next week.

01:50:29   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin.

01:50:36   Cause it was accidental.

01:50:38   Oh it was accidental.

01:50:40   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:50:46   Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

01:50:51   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:50:56   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:51:01   Follow them @CASEYLISS

01:51:07   So that's KZ List, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:51:11   Anti Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C

01:51:16   U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:51:19   It's accidental

01:51:22   They didn't mean to

01:51:24   Accidental

01:51:27   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:51:30   - So we didn't actually complete follow-up yet.

01:51:35   (laughing)

01:51:36   - Of course we didn't.

01:51:37   - We have one--

01:51:38   - Will we ever complete follow-up?

01:51:40   Is it even a possible thing?

01:51:42   - If Jon has his way, the only way we complete follow-up

01:51:44   is by ceasing to record the show anymore.

01:51:47   In any case, we have one piece of follow-up

01:51:50   that we did not cover, but is very important,

01:51:52   and it is WWDC Breakfast.

01:51:56   So Rich has written in and said,

01:51:59   "I had donuts at WWDC Breakfast

01:52:01   "three out of five days this year.

01:52:03   "Maybe they were gone when you arrived, Jon."

01:52:06   - That shows that they're insufficient donuts.

01:52:09   'Cause if they're gone, I arrive like I was coming

01:52:11   at the same time as I show up every year.

01:52:13   And it's not the very first person in line,

01:52:16   but I'm not super late either.

01:52:18   You need to have enough donuts for everybody.

01:52:19   I know that means it's a lot of donuts,

01:52:21   but you gotta do what you gotta do.

01:52:23   - Fair enough.

01:52:25   I would also like to thank our listeners.

01:52:27   I have gotten a surprisingly small amount of flack

01:52:31   about my completely embarrassing

01:52:33   Philadelphia cream cheese incident,

01:52:34   and I appreciate you guys taking pity on me, so thank you.

01:52:38   - Yeah, it is summer break though for a lot of people.

01:52:39   I bet a lot of people haven't gotten to the episode yet.

01:52:41   - That's possible.

01:52:42   - Give them time.

01:52:43   - And speaking of getting flack, we had,

01:52:46   one of us, one of the three of us,

01:52:48   was very bitter a couple of days ago.

01:52:52   And one of the three of us had committed the ultimate ATP sin, which is not getting title

01:53:01   case correct.

01:53:02   Because I tell you, the audio could be totally garbage in an episode, and that would be less

01:53:08   offensive to one of my co-hosts than the title case being incorrect.

01:53:12   That is not the case at all.

01:53:14   I can care about more than one thing at once.

01:53:15   I like good audio quality.

01:53:16   I also like correct title case.

01:53:18   Those two things.

01:53:19   It was particularly frustrating because we discussed on the show. Hey, don't forget to use title case

01:53:25   Which letter should be capital just use the website and then Marco decided you know what?

01:53:29   I don't like what the website said

01:53:31   I have different opinions about what title case should be and he changed the title and I see it in my feed with the capital

01:53:36   F and 4 and it just stabs my eyes like daggers

01:53:39   So anyway, I'm blaming Marco for this if you look at the title of our show and said boy

01:53:45   It's just don't know how you use title case. No, just Marco

01:53:48   - Yep, I take full responsibility.

01:53:51   I looked at the way it was capitalized

01:53:53   and I thought that does not look right.

01:53:55   - That's exactly how grammar works, you're right, you did it.

01:53:58   (laughing)

01:54:00   This word doesn't look like it's spelled right.

01:54:02   I'm gonna change it.

01:54:03   - First of all, spelling and stylistic capitalization

01:54:06   are very different things.

01:54:08   Secondly, there are many rules of both grammar

01:54:13   and for things like style manuals for publications.

01:54:17   many rules that, like with permission,

01:54:22   you sometimes can break.

01:54:24   Like if you know what you're doing,

01:54:26   and you know you're breaking the rule,

01:54:28   but you decide like the rule is wrong here,

01:54:31   you can break them.

01:54:32   - Oh, you've drifted from, all right,

01:54:35   stylistic breaks and know what you're doing

01:54:36   to just deciding that the rule is wrong.

01:54:38   And those are two different things I feel like.

01:54:40   One is like, there's competing belief systems

01:54:44   that you understand the nuances of

01:54:45   and you choose among them.

01:54:46   and the other is, I don't know too much about this,

01:54:48   but that seems wrong to me.

01:54:50   - It's, so, for listeners who are not aware

01:54:54   or looking at the list of episodes,

01:54:56   basically the last, the title of the last episode was,

01:54:59   what was for suckers, something was for suckers?

01:55:02   - Scrolling is for suckers. - Smooth scrolling

01:55:03   is for suckers.

01:55:04   And titlecase.com, the website that we've used

01:55:07   that we agreed upon is our Title Case

01:55:09   Capitalization Authority.

01:55:11   It capitalizes, in the phrase title case,

01:55:14   or smooth scrolling is for suckers,

01:55:17   it capitalizes the is and not the for.

01:55:20   Because for, I guess, it probably just has a rule

01:55:23   not to capitalize prepositions,

01:55:25   but to always capitalize verbs.

01:55:26   That's my guess, right?

01:55:28   So is is the verb, so you capitalize that,

01:55:31   but then the for you don't.

01:55:33   And I thought having every single word capitalized in that

01:55:36   and not the for looked wrong.

01:55:39   Like having the is capitalized and not the for.

01:55:41   And I tried making both of them lowercase,

01:55:44   but that didn't look right either.

01:55:46   Animated both of them capital,

01:55:48   and that looked the least wrong

01:55:50   of all the things that we had.

01:55:51   - So obviously, the thing with style guides is

01:55:54   you have agreed upon set of rules that you use,

01:55:56   and you can change the style guide,

01:55:58   but you can't say, for this instance,

01:55:59   I'm gonna ignore the style guide,

01:56:00   because why even have the style guide then, right?

01:56:02   So, you know, it's like consistency.

01:56:05   And TitleCase.com, I do not hold up as,

01:56:07   like, it's not how I would capitalize it either.

01:56:09   Like, I would do it differently if I was title,

01:56:11   you know, but this was just the tiebreaker.

01:56:13   It's like, to make Casey's life easy,

01:56:14   so he doesn't have to guess,

01:56:15   so we don't have to discuss it,

01:56:16   just go to this website.

01:56:17   And the website's gonna do stuff that we don't agree with,

01:56:20   but it's just consistent.

01:56:22   - Are you not able to deviate from the thing

01:56:24   that you've decided is consistent if you think it's wrong?

01:56:27   - But I think it's wrong too.

01:56:28   I would do lowercase i and lowercase f.

01:56:30   That's what I would've done,

01:56:31   but I deferred to the website.

01:56:33   - And I would've settled for that.

01:56:34   All I decided was that capital I lowercase f looked wrong,

01:56:39   and either they should both be lowercase

01:56:41   or they should both be capital.

01:56:43   - Anyway, I just wanted to assign blame, that's all.

01:56:45   - Oh yeah, it's totally my fault.

01:56:46   I overrode it and I knew you would be mad

01:56:50   and I made a calculated risk like--

01:56:52   - You think I wouldn't notice, which is--

01:56:54   - No, no, no, I knew you would notice.

01:56:56   There was no chance you were not gonna notice.

01:56:59   But it was a calculated risk based on like,

01:57:02   I think John is relatively happy with me,

01:57:04   as much as he can be these days.

01:57:06   I think I can probably get away with doing this

01:57:08   maybe once a year and this seems like a good time to do it

01:57:11   because the way that titlecase.com did this

01:57:14   looks so bad to me.

01:57:15   So I decided to spend--

01:57:16   - You just spend the rest of the year

01:57:17   making your peace with titlecase.com, as I have.

01:57:20   'Cause again, it's not the way I would capitalize you.

01:57:21   You just have to make your peace with it.

01:57:23   And Casey can spend the rest of the year

01:57:24   working on his comma usage.

01:57:25   - I wonder if I could buy it and just change it.

01:57:27   - Oh yeah, where was there an aggressive amount of commas?

01:57:32   And what did you have to repair?

01:57:34   - I didn't repair anything, I just left it as is.

01:57:36   But like, all right, so what do we got here

01:57:38   for commas? - An aggressive amount of commas.

01:57:40   You mean in the show notes?

01:57:42   Yeah, in some sense.

01:57:44   So Casey usually writes all or almost all of the show notes.

01:57:48   John's ancient comma slow comma Mac Pro.

01:57:52   Oh, yeah, it shouldn't be after slow.

01:57:53   That should be gone.

01:57:54   That's right.

01:57:55   I don't know.

01:57:56   I'm not going to argue that.

01:57:58   I stand by it still looks right to me sitting here today.

01:58:02   No, you're ruining my argument.

01:58:04   This is the new rule for English written languages.

01:58:06   Does it look right to Marco or Casey?

01:58:08   No, this is a rule number.

01:58:10   That is just wrong.

01:58:11   It's all right.

01:58:12   No one reads the show notes anyway, it's fine.

01:58:14   But a lot of people do read the title, so.

01:58:15   [beeping]

01:58:17   (beep)

01:58:19   [ Silence ]