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223: Throw the Fork Away

 

00:00:00   Out of curiosity, and you can choose not to answer this, what did we conclude with regard

00:00:03   to headgear for the live show?

00:00:05   Did we ever reach a conclusion?

00:00:06   You have to wear your retainer, Casey.

00:00:08   Yeah, I'm definitely wearing headphones.

00:00:10   I don't care how nerdy I look.

00:00:12   You guys are welcome to make that choice for yourselves.

00:00:15   You should have headphones available for us.

00:00:18   Put them on the table in front of us.

00:00:19   We can choose to put them on or not.

00:00:20   It really, for me, it depends on whether it's weird for me not to be able to hear myself

00:00:24   or whether just the in-room speakers will be enough and hear in the audience.

00:00:28   So I'll just I'm gonna make the call at the moment to see what it's like. I'm gonna try it without first

00:00:32   And if it's weird, I'll put them on

00:00:34   Okay

00:00:34   So what I'm hearing is I will bring a pair of scissors and hundreds of dollars to refund Marco for the headphone

00:00:41   The headphones that I break if John tries to put them on no, I thought myself not gonna put them on you

00:00:46   I know but it but if you put them on and Marco has them on what am I gonna be the lone cool kid?

00:00:51   No, you can totally you're your own person you I'm not the boss of you. You do what you want with your own head

00:00:57   Ian McDowell writes in, this is, he is not an Apple genius, but apparently heard from an Apple genius, if I understand this correctly,

00:01:05   that the key caps on the new scissor key keyboards are not removable,

00:01:11   dirt commonly gets under the keys, and they now have special tools in the stores to help fix them.

00:01:16   I would love to know what the special tools are. Is it like tiny nano machines that they send in through those little cracks between the keys,

00:01:23   and then they grab little pieces of dirt and come out?

00:01:26   - Actually, it's a magical school bus

00:01:29   that they drive through and use to clean things up.

00:01:32   Speaking of the keyboard and cleaning it,

00:01:35   there is actually, did Stephen Hackett send this to us?

00:01:39   Somebody sent this to us.

00:01:41   There is actually a Knowledge Base article,

00:01:42   so I'll just assume it was Stephen,

00:01:44   that's entitled Clean the Keyboard of Your MacBook

00:01:46   Retina 12-inch 2015 and Later.

00:01:49   And it describes holding your MacBook

00:01:52   at exactly a 75-degree angle.

00:01:54   - Exactly, this is very important.

00:01:55   hold it at 80 this does not work. Forget 90, forget it, what are you even doing? 75.

00:02:00   Obviously I'm joking, but it really does show a 75 degree angle and with a little

00:02:05   diagram of what that looks like. I mean it's kind of... I don't know if that's really 75.

00:02:09   Someone get out your protractor. But anyway, they're very insistent about the

00:02:12   degree. Yeah, and so then you use compressed air to spray the keyboard or

00:02:15   just the effective keys in a left-to-right motion. Very important. Then

00:02:20   rotate your MacBook to its right side and spray the keyboard again from left

00:02:24   to right and they have a little diagram.

00:02:25   - You rotate it to your left side, this will not work.

00:02:27   Warranty voided.

00:02:29   - Right, exactly.

00:02:30   (laughing)

00:02:31   So anyway, so yeah, they have this whole process

00:02:33   that apparently amounts to blow crap out

00:02:35   from under the key caps.

00:02:37   And that is an actual knowledge base article.

00:02:39   - So in the time since our last show,

00:02:42   I have my whole rant about the heat and the keys, right?

00:02:46   That was last--

00:02:47   - Yeah, the expanding, like when it gets warmer weather,

00:02:49   you thought maybe the keys are expanding

00:02:51   and filling the openings more and getting stuck.

00:02:53   - So I've actually, so I went on a little Twitter rant

00:02:56   about this almost a week ago, and I heard from a lot

00:03:01   of people who have computers with the new keyboards,

00:03:05   and it actually seems like this might not be as much

00:03:07   of an issue on the MacBook One's keyboard,

00:03:10   the first generation of this on the 12 inch,

00:03:12   but it seems like this is a major issue for a lot of people,

00:03:16   and you know, and when I say a lot of people,

00:03:18   I'm saying like I've heard from a lot of people on Twitter.

00:03:20   That doesn't mean that like a large percentage

00:03:23   of customers have this problem, only Apple knows that.

00:03:26   But it certainly seems like this is a noteworthy problem

00:03:29   that keys get stuck or feel different or get stuck down

00:03:34   or repeat or somehow don't work properly.

00:03:39   On a pretty regular basis with a lot of these keyboards,

00:03:41   a lot of people have to get them replaced.

00:03:43   And also, it seems to be related to heat.

00:03:47   That when they are warm, either when the computer

00:03:50   is working really hard, so it's getting warm,

00:03:52   or if you're just in a hot environment,

00:03:55   like I was when I was having this problem,

00:03:56   I was outside on a hot day.

00:03:58   And the keys tend to stick a lot more then.

00:04:01   And so I don't know enough about the way these are built

00:04:04   to know why that is.

00:04:06   Some of the Twitter people were speculating

00:04:07   that maybe the tolerances are so tight

00:04:09   that maybe a little bit of thermal expansion

00:04:11   is enough to make it not work properly, I don't know.

00:04:14   But it does seem like that's kind of a problem,

00:04:17   if that's true.

00:04:18   That seems like a big problem.

00:04:19   So I don't really know what the answer here is.

00:04:24   I hope that Apple is doing so many replacements

00:04:28   of these keyboards under warranty

00:04:29   that it motivates them to change things if they can.

00:04:32   The only question is can they?

00:04:35   Or are they gonna have to wait until the next major revision

00:04:37   of the keyboard in new laptops entirely?

00:04:41   And everyone who owns this generation

00:04:43   might just be out of luck and just might have to

00:04:45   get frequent keyboard replacements.

00:04:47   And I hope that's not the answer

00:04:48   because that's not a good answer.

00:04:50   And as an owner of one of these,

00:04:51   I'm really not happy with this.

00:04:54   The idea that I'm gonna have to bring it to Apple

00:04:59   at least once and go without it for like a week

00:05:02   at least once to get this keyboard fixed

00:05:04   if I want it to work reliably,

00:05:06   that is not very appealing to me

00:05:08   'cause I buy a laptop because I need a laptop.

00:05:11   And going without it for a week

00:05:12   is usually not very convenient.

00:05:14   Not to mention having to get an appointment with Apple

00:05:17   or call them and wait on the phone

00:05:18   and do mail order or whatever else,

00:05:21   like none of these are good options.

00:05:22   None of these are great solutions

00:05:24   to what should be a pretty basic thing,

00:05:26   which is I expect the keyboard

00:05:27   and my laptops to work reliably.

00:05:30   And this is all like feeling aside,

00:05:32   like we've talked at length about how much we like

00:05:36   or dislike, mostly dislike, the new shallow keyboards,

00:05:41   and I've heard from people who defend them,

00:05:44   who like the feel, and that's fine.

00:05:45   It's a personal preference.

00:05:47   the feel of the keyboard doesn't bother me

00:05:48   as much as it used to, now that I've used it for a while.

00:05:51   But what does bother me is reliability being bad.

00:05:54   And I think regardless of what you think

00:05:57   of the feel of the keyboard,

00:05:59   I think we can probably all agree

00:06:01   that an unreliable keyboard in a laptop,

00:06:04   especially such a young laptop, is really worrying.

00:06:09   If it was just me, then that's fine.

00:06:12   And you can disregard it, I would disregard it,

00:06:14   as well, I got a bad keyboard, you know,

00:06:15   to get it fixed.

00:06:17   But from what I keep hearing from people

00:06:19   over and over and over again when I bring this up,

00:06:22   a lot of people have had to get multiple replacements

00:06:25   and the replacements have the same problem.

00:06:28   And so it just seems like it's a design flaw.

00:06:30   And that's a pretty big design flaw.

00:06:31   I hope that this is smaller than it seems.

00:06:36   I hope that I can just get it replaced once

00:06:39   and then have a reliable laptop keyboard

00:06:41   for the next one to four years that I use this laptop,

00:06:44   whatever it ends up being.

00:06:47   I hope that's it, but so far what I have heard

00:06:50   is discouraging in that area.

00:06:51   It sounds like this might just be a problem

00:06:53   with this entire generation of keyboards

00:06:55   that's in the 2016 MacBook Pro.

00:06:58   - I think this is solvable if Apple figures out

00:07:01   what the problem is.

00:07:02   Like they diagnose this and they figure it out

00:07:05   and say aha, if we change the design in this way,

00:07:08   change a different material, make little bits of the key

00:07:12   differently shaped or larger or smaller or whatever it takes to make the keycaps themselves

00:07:16   slightly smaller.

00:07:17   This all seems like something that could be solved by, kind of like they did with the

00:07:20   screen image retention, where it's like, "Oh, we sold you a bunch of Retina MacBook Pros,

00:07:26   and if you got the LG screen or the Samsung screen" — I can't even remember which one

00:07:29   was the bad one — "you might have image retention problems."

00:07:31   They don't fix it by giving you another one of the same screen than in image retention

00:07:35   problems.

00:07:36   They give you a different, better screen that still fulfills the same purpose, has the same

00:07:40   resolution and the same characteristics, but doesn't have burning, but it's like a different

00:07:43   part.

00:07:44   Either a new part from the same maker or a part from a different manufacturer.

00:07:46   So if they figure this out with a keyboard, they will make a new keyboard that fits these

00:07:50   things and when you come in for a repair, they'll replace it with the new version.

00:07:54   It's just a question of how long it takes them to figure out what the heck the problem

00:07:58   is, assuming it even is a problem according to their numbers.

00:08:01   Well first of all, to save you a bunch of email, Image Retention 15" 2012 Retina Mapbook

00:08:07   Pro screens, they didn't guarantee that you got a better one.

00:08:10   Like, the LG was the problem, the Samsung was the good one.

00:08:12   When you got it replaced, you could get either one.

00:08:15   It was just kind of dumb luck which one you got.

00:08:16   And you just hope that you got the Samsung panel.

00:08:18   - Well, but they could do that.

00:08:20   Like, if they know one's good and one's bad,

00:08:22   assuming that's even true.

00:08:23   Like, that's our conventional wisdom of like,

00:08:25   oh, if you got this one, you're okay,

00:08:26   and if you got this one, you're not.

00:08:28   But assuming they know one is better,

00:08:30   they have the option, what I'm saying is,

00:08:31   they have the option of getting one.

00:08:32   They don't have to redesign the thing,

00:08:33   you don't have to wait for the next model.

00:08:35   If Apple knows, replace this part with this other part that is different and it will fix

00:08:39   the problem, they have the ability to do that.

00:08:42   You're not out of luck, is what I'm saying with this thing.

00:08:44   You don't have to wait until you buy the next computer.

00:08:46   You don't have to return this one and get a different one.

00:08:48   You just need Apple to A, make an improved thing and B, actually give it to you when

00:08:52   they replace it.

00:08:55   When it comes to moving along with Apple, moving along with the newest technologies

00:08:59   and getting the newest stuff and keeping up with Apple, you have to swallow some things.

00:09:04   You have to, okay, yeah, I guess I'll get rid

00:09:06   of my headphone jack.

00:09:08   I guess I can get rid of all my ports

00:09:10   and my SD card reader and everything else.

00:09:12   And a lot of these things are easier or harder to swallow.

00:09:15   Having a keyboard not be reliable is a massive problem.

00:09:22   I don't care what you think of this keyboard.

00:09:24   Having it not be reliable for almost everyone who buys one,

00:09:29   that is unacceptable.

00:09:30   That is not a trade-off,

00:09:32   that is not moving towards the future,

00:09:33   that is not, like, there's no excuse for that.

00:09:36   That is a design flaw, and that needs to be fixed.

00:09:40   - Yeah, I really wanna tell you that you,

00:09:43   or especially early on, that you were being a big baby

00:09:45   about the keyboard and how you didn't like it,

00:09:47   blah, blah, blah, but you know,

00:09:48   you're allowed your opinion, that's fine.

00:09:50   However, I could not agree with you more,

00:09:52   that if these reliability problems are as widespread

00:09:55   as they anecdotally seem to be,

00:09:58   then this is definitely a step backwards

00:10:00   and needs to be addressed.

00:10:02   All right, moving on.

00:10:03   If you do have a problem with your keycaps,

00:10:06   there are some people that apparently do remove them

00:10:10   without breaking them according to a somewhat shady

00:10:14   YouTube video. - Asterisk, asterisk

00:10:16   at the end of that. - Yeah, exactly.

00:10:17   - Without breaking them, because, well,

00:10:18   we'll continue to the next volume, but anyway,

00:10:20   this is a video of someone showing how he can pry his

00:10:22   keycap off with a guitar pick, and kinda how they work

00:10:25   under the covers, so you can kind of visualize

00:10:27   what it is that you're doing when you pry this thing up.

00:10:31   So, some people are doing it.

00:10:33   It's a thing, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

00:10:35   That was sent in by Kuba B.

00:10:38   Additionally, Michael M. writes in regarding the fragility

00:10:43   of the new keyboard types and how they differ

00:10:45   from the days of old.

00:10:47   Here are some photos of the damaged key caps so far

00:10:49   that I've replaced, and we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:10:52   There are four pictures here of what appears to be

00:10:55   four different or three different key caps

00:10:57   and a scissor switch that have been an issue.

00:11:00   Note the clips at the top.

00:11:01   Each top corner should have two fingers to clip around a pin on the butterfly and the hooks at the bottom.

00:11:06   To remove these keys must be pried up at the top and then removed by moving the cap toward the top of the keyboard.

00:11:11   Anything else would break the fragile clips, as will any misalignment on reassembly.

00:11:15   I only broke the pins off two butterflies while I damaged at least seven keycaps.

00:11:18   I have the first generation MacBook One, I've had it since shortly after release.

00:11:22   My F and key worked properly, but didn't return to its full height correctly from new.

00:11:25   I ignored the issue. Turns out that keycap had been broken for years.

00:11:28   the bigger and more concerning issue,

00:11:30   which is why I've not yet made a second or third round

00:11:33   of keycap and butterfly replacement part purchases,

00:11:35   is that a couple of keys I'm having difficulty with

00:11:37   do not have any apparent physical damage

00:11:39   to the keycap or the butterfly,

00:11:41   and they do not have any bits stuck under them

00:11:43   that can be seen upon very close inspection.

00:11:45   So I still dearly regret taking these keycaps off.

00:11:48   This isn't a keyboard to be worked on by an expert,

00:11:50   it's a keyboard to be worked on by a trained expert

00:11:53   with a spare parts stash.

00:11:56   That's the lesson of all portable devices.

00:11:59   Like everything that, you know,

00:12:01   Apple increasingly the things that are assembled with glue

00:12:04   or the sort of the one way assembly where it goes together,

00:12:08   but it does not come apart and go back together

00:12:10   the same way it was.

00:12:11   Maybe you can take it apart

00:12:13   and maybe you can put it back together,

00:12:14   but it will never be the same.

00:12:16   And so the idea of like, oh, I'm a do it yourself

00:12:18   or I can pry these key caps off.

00:12:20   I can see how they work.

00:12:21   You look at these pictures and look at the size,

00:12:23   the sort of the feature size in, you know,

00:12:26   silicon chip parlance,

00:12:27   how small the little clippy things are

00:12:30   on the bottom of this.

00:12:30   And the tiny little pins on the butterfly switch

00:12:33   that they grip, very, very small, very delicate, right?

00:12:38   And so if you are thinking about prying these things off,

00:12:42   the possibility that you're going to break off or bend

00:12:44   or otherwise screw up one of those clips

00:12:46   or one of those pins seems very high,

00:12:49   which is probably why Apple doesn't like repair

00:12:50   these keyboards, they give you a whole new one.

00:12:52   Wasn't that on the last show someone said

00:12:53   It's not as if they're gonna fix one key for you,

00:12:55   they're gonna replace the whole keyboard.

00:12:56   - As far as I know, that's true.

00:12:58   - Yeah, this doesn't seem like a repairable thing.

00:13:01   Now, in Apple's knowledge base article,

00:13:04   they tell you how to blow compressed air on it

00:13:07   to maybe get the grit out,

00:13:08   'cause it's not gonna shake out on its own

00:13:10   because all the gaps are so small,

00:13:11   and that might solve your little grit type problem.

00:13:14   But the other interesting thing about Michael's story here

00:13:17   is that he had a key

00:13:19   that had one of the little clippy things underneath it

00:13:21   broken from the, I'm not sure how he knows this

00:13:23   'cause maybe he broke it when he took it off or whatever,

00:13:25   but that it hadn't been working

00:13:28   and he had just been ignoring it

00:13:30   and it had been broken for a really long time.

00:13:32   If these little clippy things are broken

00:13:35   under one of your key caps, you can't know that.

00:13:37   It's not like you have x-ray vision.

00:13:38   Maybe that could explain why it's not working

00:13:40   'cause the little clippy things help the key rise and fall

00:13:43   in sequence with the butterfly switch

00:13:44   and stay stable and everything.

00:13:46   And if it's not connected to one of the little clippy things

00:13:47   It's kind of like independent suspension when you want a really live rear axle and strong

00:13:55   anti-roll bars.

00:13:56   This is a car analogy.

00:13:59   I think this one actually works, but it only works for people who know what those things

00:14:02   are.

00:14:04   So I can imagine if you have a bad clip and one corner of your key is not being pushed

00:14:08   upwards and pulled downward with the whole rest of your key no matter where you hit it,

00:14:13   it is basically like an anti-roll bar under the cover.

00:14:16   one corner of the key goes up or down, you want the whole rest of the key to go with

00:14:19   it, that can make the key tilt in a way that it doesn't expect and get stuck and do all

00:14:24   sorts of other things.

00:14:26   Just looking at the pictures of these keyboards make me start freaking out a little bit about

00:14:31   how delicate these little bits are and how easy it is for something to go wrong.

00:14:36   If you open up a scissor key keyboard like the one I use every day, it's also extremely

00:14:41   delicate and tiny inside there.

00:14:42   I don't know if the features of the keycaps and mechanisms are actually all that different.

00:14:46   It could just be a matter of butterfly versus scissor and travel distance and maybe the

00:14:51   switching mechanism underneath it.

00:14:52   But I do not like keyboards.

00:14:56   I don't like thinking about these keyboards.

00:14:59   It almost makes me long for a non-moving iPhone 7 home button style keyboard where nothing

00:15:04   actually moves.

00:15:05   No, don't say that.

00:15:06   They'll do it.

00:15:07   No, I don't like thinking about keyboards either.

00:15:10   That's why this annoys me so much because I've had every other laptop I've ever had

00:15:14   from Apple, I have never had to think about the keyboard.

00:15:18   It just worked and it was fine.

00:15:20   That's why this bothers me so much.

00:15:22   I feel like we're moving backwards in technology if the basics become unreliable.

00:15:28   Hector Ramos wrote in to tell us that he worked at a big company's tech conference at the

00:15:32   Montgomery Convention Center last month, which I don't even know, but I'm assuming that's

00:15:36   the one that we're going to be in for WWDC.

00:15:40   "When heading Ben to WWDC," says Hector, "I think it's fair to say that the box lunches in the San Jose Montgomery were worse."

00:15:46   Sad trombone.

00:15:47   "So don't get your hopes up. The box lunches were all cold sandwiches with either soggy bread or hard and impossible to eat bread, along with mystery dessert.

00:15:55   They also had salad-only options that were passable. However, the real news here, which is terrible, there was no Odwalla. Sorry, Casey."

00:16:07   I'm so sorry, man. Are you gonna be okay?

00:16:09   Well, I'm hopeful that it's just that this particular event may not have sprung for the

00:16:17   Odwala option, but I'm nervous. And also, a real-time follow-up from friend of the show,

00:16:22   Jason Snell, it's McEnery, not McEmery. So that's M-C-E-N-E-R-Y before I get all the

00:16:29   San Jose residents writing me.

00:16:31   If you're William Hector, he wrote it with M's.

00:16:32   Yep, so in any case, yeah, so no Odwalla for this particular tech conference, and reading

00:16:40   between the lines, it was not the sort of tech conference where they needed to worry

00:16:44   about money.

00:16:45   This was a spared no expense kind of experience.

00:16:48   So I'm nervous, but hopefully, hopefully Apple will spring for the Odwalla just for me.

00:16:54   I know that there's discussion somewhere in Cupertino.

00:16:59   You know, Casey made it this year.

00:17:00   He won the lottery this year, and we don't want to hear him whining and moaning for a

00:17:03   year if there's no Odd Wallace.

00:17:04   We might as well just pony it up.

00:17:06   My favorite thing about this is that we have become the podcast of conference box lunches.

00:17:13   So true.

00:17:14   So anyway, we'll see what happens.

00:17:15   But that is sad times, tentatively.

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00:19:06   News broke earlier today as we record this. Denise Young-Smith, who used to be the vice

00:19:10   president of World Wide HR, has now been named the vice president of inclusion and diversity.

00:19:17   Which is cool. I think that's pretty awesome. We don't really know much about it yet, so

00:19:22   you know, obviously we don't want to celebrate it too much quite yet, but this is absolutely

00:19:25   stop in the right direction, and she's not a white dude, because that seems to be the

00:19:29   classical thing to do, which is to put a white dude in charge of diversity and inclusion.

00:19:34   And so at least Apple wasn't so tone deaf that they made that faux pas.

00:19:39   So this, in theory, seems like a great thing.

00:19:42   This is a newly created position.

00:19:44   This position didn't exist as a new vice president level position that they've created.

00:19:48   I don't know how this is going to work out, because so much corporate stuff is opaque.

00:19:54   When I see stuff like this in companies other than Apple,

00:19:56   I think Apple is an exception in many, many ways,

00:20:00   but when a big company makes a new role

00:20:05   for a vice president or someone who's going to address

00:20:09   some problem that they think they have,

00:20:10   I always fear that that person is being set up for failure

00:20:14   because how is it that they're going to pursue their agenda

00:20:19   in a company that didn't even have this position previously

00:20:24   and to pursue the agenda requires, you know, massive company shifting policy changes.

00:20:31   So that's my usual fear with these type of things, that, you know, what can they even do?

00:20:36   Is it just symbolic? Will the rest of the company listen to them? And, you know,

00:20:40   will they be empowered to make change? The thing that encourages me about this,

00:20:43   for Apple specifically, is that it seems like Apple has done this to pretty good effect in

00:20:49   the past. One example is, who's it, Lisa Jackson, who was on the talk show,

00:20:52   the, uh, it does like environment or whatever. I'm assuming that position was newly created at

00:20:57   some point in the past too. Like, you know, Apple, Apple 20 years ago, probably didn't have a,

00:21:01   you know, environment czar or whatever her title is. Um, and she's got results. Like she does

00:21:09   things that change the way Apple makes its products. Right. And so she wasn't just put

00:21:14   in the split and say, Oh yeah, no, we have someone worrying about the environment. That's a whole

00:21:17   vice-president role. And then they just continue to do what they did and, you know, put out press

00:21:21   press releases or like, you know, it becomes like a PR type position.

00:21:25   From the interview, which you should definitely listen to, like, Apple is changing what it

00:21:30   does across its entire business because of initiatives spearheaded by this person and

00:21:34   what in any other company would be like a symbolic position.

00:21:37   So let's hope that this newly created position is, you know, just successful.

00:21:41   That's a good sign.

00:21:43   And, you know, Apple's been reasonably good about publicly sharing their diversity report

00:21:49   I think at the end of the year? I forget exactly when it is. But at some point during the year, they share it.

00:21:54   And so, in theory, we can judge them on what their results are after this move over the coming years.

00:22:02   Obviously, they massage that report to be as complementary as they possibly can while still being truthful,

00:22:07   hopefully anyway. But certainly, this is a good sign, and I'm hopeful, and I think we should celebrate it.

00:22:15   All right, Jon, tell us about Thunderbolt 3 and what's going on with Intel.

00:22:19   Every time we talk about Apple not using Intel chips,

00:22:24   someone will write us--

00:22:26   many someones will write us and say, oh,

00:22:27   but that's not going to happen because if you don't use

00:22:30   Intel chips, you can't have Thunderbolt.

00:22:31   And Apple needs to have Thunderbolt because of reasons.

00:22:35   Therefore, don't worry about it.

00:22:37   And I think the last time we discussed this,

00:22:38   what I tried to emphasize was--

00:22:40   I think it was when we were talking about like Ryzen,

00:22:41   AMD's Ryzen, and making reasonably competitive chips

00:22:44   in certain market segments again.

00:22:46   And they're sort of their comeback bid.

00:22:49   that if Apple decided to go to AMD for whatever reason,

00:22:54   you know, AMD, Apple, Intel are all companies,

00:22:56   things can be worked out.

00:22:58   Money can change hands, deals can be made.

00:23:00   I feel like it's a type of thing

00:23:04   that all three parties would be able to work out

00:23:06   that none of them would be so adamant

00:23:08   that they would say there is literally no amount of money

00:23:10   that you can give us Apple that would allow,

00:23:13   that would let us, you know,

00:23:14   that would make us license Thunderbolt 3 to AMD.

00:23:17   Like there's no kind of grudge like that going on there.

00:23:19   So I'm like, set that aside.

00:23:21   Yes, it's an issue.

00:23:22   It would have to be worked out by the people involved.

00:23:24   But if Apple thought it was to their advantage

00:23:25   to start going to AMD for certain chips or certain things,

00:23:28   like it has the advantage

00:23:29   that it wouldn't be an architectural change.

00:23:31   And having two vendors is a thing that Apple loves to do

00:23:34   for every part and all of its things.

00:23:35   And at a certain point, it's kind of against Apple's

00:23:39   instincts and general policy to have a single vendor

00:23:41   for like an extremely important component,

00:23:44   you know, a single non-Apple vendor, I suppose.

00:23:46   Like they always want to have multiple people,

00:23:47   multiple people fabbing their chips,

00:23:49   buying their chips from multiple vendors

00:23:51   if they can help it, putting them against each other,

00:23:53   like, you know, just typical business.

00:23:55   So today's announcement from,

00:23:57   I think it's today from Intel,

00:23:59   adds an interesting twist to this.

00:24:02   First is that Intel is adding Thunderbolt to their CPUs,

00:24:06   so you don't have to buy a separate chipset,

00:24:08   which apparently has been a barrier to, you know,

00:24:12   PC manufacturers, you know,

00:24:13   aren't willing to spend the money to, you know,

00:24:15   license or buy the Alpine Ridge or whatever the latest

00:24:19   chipset is for Thunderbolt support.

00:24:20   It's like, "Nah, we'll just take the CPUs.

00:24:22   They have support for like USB, blah, blah, blah,

00:24:24   and PCI express like on the chips.

00:24:26   I don't care about Thunderbolt.

00:24:27   I'm not buying another chip.

00:24:28   It's pointless, right?"

00:24:30   So now they're putting it on the CPUs

00:24:31   with so many other things

00:24:32   and that will make it cheaper for people to use.

00:24:34   And you basically can't not get it

00:24:36   if you buy a part that has it built in.

00:24:38   I mean, maybe they'll still sell parts

00:24:39   that don't have it built in.

00:24:40   And I assume it's better for packaging,

00:24:43   probably also better for power.

00:24:45   And it's a move that will make Apple computers better

00:24:47   because Apple likes to put Thunderbolt 3

00:24:48   on its high-end computers.

00:24:51   And if Apple can get that built into the CPU,

00:24:54   they'd love it because they'd love to make everything small

00:24:56   and lower power.

00:24:58   And if it's cheaper on top of that, all the better, right?

00:25:02   And the second part of this story is,

00:25:05   Intel is going to license Thunderbolt 3 for free

00:25:08   to anybody who wants it.

00:25:10   And that would obviously include AMD.

00:25:13   So that barrier to Apple using AMD CPUs,

00:25:17   assuming it ever was a barrier,

00:25:18   because I'm not entirely convinced

00:25:20   that Apple is so wedded to Thunderbolt 3

00:25:21   that they wouldn't consider a CPU,

00:25:23   consider building a Mac without it, 'cause they do.

00:25:26   That barrier is gone.

00:25:29   Thunderbolt 3, and from Intel's perspective,

00:25:31   it's not like they're doing this

00:25:32   to let Apple take AMD CPUs.

00:25:33   They're doing this because they want Thunderbolt

00:25:35   to spread more widely, and a barrier to adoption

00:25:37   is you gotta buy this extra chipset,

00:25:40   and you can only get it from us,

00:25:41   and you can't make your own thing.

00:25:43   So Intel's like, no, no,

00:25:44   we wanna see Thunderbolt 3 everywhere.

00:25:45   It's really important for us to the standard to spread.

00:25:47   Guess what?

00:25:48   It's free for everybody.

00:25:49   And it's cheaper when you buy Intel CPUs.

00:25:51   And I'm hoping that all the other manufacturers of PCs

00:25:55   and parts and so on and so forth

00:25:57   will take the ball and run with it.

00:25:58   I'm hoping the reason they were staying away from Thunderbolt

00:26:01   was that it was too expensive.

00:26:03   I'm assuming Intel and, you know, Intel and Apple

00:26:07   or, you know, the people who created this standard

00:26:09   still have the most influence of it.

00:26:11   So maybe people were staying away

00:26:12   because they feel like it's not like an industry standard,

00:26:14   it's more like an Intel or Intel Apple standard.

00:26:17   But either way, I'm happy to see moves

00:26:19   that have a chance of keeping Thunderbolt

00:26:23   from FireWire's fate.

00:26:24   FireWire just never got the wide adoption

00:26:27   that would have helped it to stick around longer

00:26:30   and be a viable technology.

00:26:32   It was only used by Apple and video and a few other things,

00:26:36   and USB, meanwhile, went literally everywhere.

00:26:39   So this seems like yet more of the USB-ification

00:26:43   of Thunderbolt.

00:26:44   They already stole their connector and their port,

00:26:47   confusing the world with a port that is 17 different things

00:26:49   in one, but I think that's really cool tech-wise.

00:26:52   And now it's free for everybody, so go forth and Thunderbolt.

00:26:55   - Do you think that Thunderbolt has already been firewired?

00:27:00   'Cause I see a lot of the same signs of it.

00:27:02   Like, you know, Thunderbolt, and the earlier versions of it

00:27:06   I think had a more severe problem of this,

00:27:09   where just very few peripherals were ever really made

00:27:12   for Thunderbolt.

00:27:13   And what was made for Thunderbolt

00:27:15   was always much more expensive than the USB 2 or 3

00:27:20   version of the same thing.

00:27:22   And for things like hard drive enclosures or SSD enclosures,

00:27:26   there's almost no reason for anybody

00:27:27   to go with Thunderbolt when USB 3 is an option,

00:27:30   unless you have really, really high end parts

00:27:32   and you need maximum bandwidth and you

00:27:35   don't care about the price.

00:27:36   For most people, one of those things is not true.

00:27:40   So I don't think Thunderbolt really has taken off very far.

00:27:44   I would say Thunderbolt is exactly where FireWire was,

00:27:48   both 400 and 800 of like, it is this standard in quotes,

00:27:53   but in practice, it is only used by some Apple stuff

00:27:59   and some high-end peripherals and storage enclosures.

00:28:02   But almost everything that most people use

00:28:05   uses USB 2 or 3.

00:28:07   Apple did a really smart, or Apple Intel, did a really smart thing here

00:28:10   because when they changed the connector. Because you're right that

00:28:13   there are many people who don't need Thunderbolt, they just need USB.

00:28:17   It's the same little hole in the side of your computer,

00:28:21   right? And so if Thunderbolt gets confined to be

00:28:25   "Oh, it's just this weird thing that Apple does," like

00:28:28   Intel may not be happy with that because maybe Intel wants it to be used more broadly for

00:28:31   whatever strategic reasons, but

00:28:32   It's not like Apple has to change anything about its strategy.

00:28:36   As long as Thunderbolt continues to be made, or like basically the little plugs

00:28:42   on the side of the computer already have a situation where you can get, don't some

00:28:45   of the, doesn't the low end like MacBook not have a Thunderbolt 3 port,

00:28:48   but instead just has the USB C and power thing?

00:28:50   Am I wrong about that?

00:28:51   That's correct.

00:28:52   The 12 inch MacBook does not have you, it does not have Thunderbolt.

00:28:55   It only has USB 3 over that port.

00:28:57   But it's the same old little connector.

00:28:59   And similarly, the Thunderbolt ports can just run USB off of them.

00:29:02   The main place, sadly, or maybe not sadly,

00:29:07   depends on how you look at it,

00:29:08   the main functionality that Thunderbolt 3

00:29:10   brings to Apple's products is they can put a small set

00:29:15   of very small, uniform ports

00:29:18   on the side of their portable computers,

00:29:20   and people can connect stuff to them,

00:29:22   they give them all the other ports,

00:29:24   all the other things you can imagine,

00:29:25   all those different breakout boxes.

00:29:27   That's the magic of Thunderbolt, right?

00:29:29   Do you need Thunderbolt 3 for that or whatever?

00:29:30   And I guess I suppose, you know,

00:29:31   high-end monitor support depending on how they want to implement that, whether they

00:29:34   want to do it with multiple DisplayPort streams or tunneling things over Thunderbolt and external

00:29:38   GPUs and all the other fancy stuff you can get.

00:29:41   But if you don't take advantage of that fancy stuff, it still just looks like you're plugging

00:29:45   a little USB Type-C connector into the side of your computer.

00:29:48   And if you do take advantage of it, you buy the fancy Apple computer and the same little

00:29:51   port, you can plug in all that other stuff, but also you can plug in these other things

00:29:54   to get these cool breakout boxes.

00:29:56   I think Apple would be perfectly fine with that.

00:29:58   They're not faced with a firewall-like situation where they have to say, "Oh, all those peripherals

00:30:01   you bought are useless, as long as Thunderbolt continues to be an ongoing concern in some

00:30:06   fashion, Apple can continue to ship all of its peripherals, all of its Mac stuff, all

00:30:10   of its dongles and adapters with that one little hole on them.

00:30:14   So I think they're better off, but the reason I brought it far is exactly the reason you

00:30:18   said, that it seems like Thunderbolt is being confined because USB 3 is so fast and so good

00:30:24   and so cheap and so ubiquitous.

00:30:27   But in some respects, the other angle on this,

00:30:30   USB type C is kind of,

00:30:32   I'm gonna say it's the same as FireWire,

00:30:34   but I get a little bit of a whiff of that FireWire on it

00:30:36   in the general reluctance of the rest of the industry

00:30:39   to follow Apple along with this,

00:30:40   even like Microsoft not putting USB-C

00:30:42   on all of its new service stuff,

00:30:44   and then making excuses about like,

00:30:45   well, when we think the world is ready for USB-C,

00:30:47   we'll change it, but in the meantime,

00:30:48   you can get a dongle that lets you connect USB-C stuff,

00:30:51   which is a pretty good snark there.

00:30:57   It seems to me, when I look around and see laptops,

00:31:02   the only ones I ever see with USB-C ports are Apple ones.

00:31:04   So maybe they're just ahead of everyone else

00:31:06   and people will convert over,

00:31:07   but that stupid USB type A connector

00:31:10   may be very difficult to dislodge.

00:31:12   And it could be that like FireWire,

00:31:15   the only hardware you ever see with these weird USB-C things

00:31:18   are probably cell phones,

00:31:19   'cause size is gonna make those people turn over

00:31:21   and mini USB sucks, and then Macs.

00:31:24   but every other portable PC or tablet or Surface thing

00:31:28   or whatever will have just a bunch of USB type A connectors

00:31:30   on the side of it, I don't know.

00:31:32   - I'll tell you one thing,

00:31:33   now that I'm in the USB-C ecosystem with my new laptop

00:31:36   and I've been looking at USB-C peripherals

00:31:39   and looking for adapters and dongles

00:31:42   and various peripherals that use it, there are not many.

00:31:46   I thought that with the 12-inch MacBook

00:31:49   being now two years old, I figured there's gotta be

00:31:53   tons of them now. And there are a small number of things that can plug into that port natively,

00:31:59   but it seems like almost all of them are like cheap crap from no-name brands on Amazon for

00:32:05   40 bucks that is all unreliable and badly built and all probably using the same chipset

00:32:11   inside and it seems like it's a very, still a very immature market and I hope that, I

00:32:16   hope it matures soon, now that all the MacBook Pros use only these ports. That should be

00:32:21   enough of motivation for peripheral makers, but we'll see. It's not where I thought

00:32:26   it would be by now.

00:32:27   Yeah, I don't know what the resistance is to USB-C, because, man, it's just USB still.

00:32:31   I mean, it's a different spec, and the cables are different, and maybe they're more expensive,

00:32:35   and the connectors are more expensive than they used to be. But it seems like I fully

00:32:39   expect just a complete turnover eventually to USB-C, because it's not a FireWire situation

00:32:44   in that, oh, it's so much more expensive, and you have to put these way more expensive

00:32:46   chips into things, and the chips have to be on both ends, or Thunderbolt with the weird

00:32:51   chips in the wires for the high-speed connection and all sorts of stuff like that.

00:32:54   Like that's not, it's just a different physical connector for USB plus a different, you know,

00:32:59   chip set.

00:33:00   And USB 3, I think, is rolling out pretty well.

00:33:02   3.1 maybe?

00:33:03   I don't know what the, I don't know what the holdup is.

00:33:06   People in the chat room are saying that Windows, there are Windows laptops that have USB-C,

00:33:08   of course.

00:33:09   There's Windows laptops that have everything on it.

00:33:10   It's just that I don't, I don't see the, it's not like, remember when USB 2 came along?

00:33:17   USB 1.1 did not last long in the face of USB 2.

00:33:20   USB 2 just rolled out across the whole industry and you would have USB 2 ports everywhere

00:33:25   except for your keyboard and mouse which would be 1.1 for a while.

00:33:29   But USB-C has not rolled out like that.

00:33:31   Well, for a long time almost every PC you would buy would have like two blue ports and

00:33:38   then six black ports.

00:33:39   Yeah, but the point is it had the blue ones.

00:33:43   Keep the old ones around the same reason they kept parallel port and the PS/2 port around

00:33:46   because they're PC makers, they'll always do that.

00:33:48   But you had the new ones.

00:33:50   To buy a PC without USB 2 anywhere on it in the USB 2 age was unheard of.

00:33:54   But like I said, Microsoft, with these very expensive high-end fancy Surface tablet laptop

00:34:00   convertible whatever thingies, seems proudly to be shipping them without any USB C ports

00:34:05   and defending their decision by saying, "Oh, you can get an adapter.

00:34:08   It's USB 3.1.

00:34:09   It's totally the same thing.

00:34:10   We just don't like that connector," which is weird.

00:34:15   now had my first—well, what I consider to be my first USB-C device, which is the Switch.

00:34:21   Yes, I have an Apple TV, and yes, it's USB-C, but that doesn't really count. The idea of

00:34:27   a theoretical future where I have a MacBook that has been updated, which in and of itself

00:34:36   is a very theoretical future. I have a MacBook that's been updated that is powered by USB-C.

00:34:41   I have a switch that is powered by USB-C.

00:34:44   The thought of a phone being powered by USB-C

00:34:48   for convenience alone sounds pretty awesome.

00:34:51   - Doesn't it? - Now, I don't really love

00:34:54   the USB-C connector as much as I like the Lightning

00:34:57   connector, no small part because the Lightning connector

00:34:59   is smaller and also because I have 11 D billion

00:35:02   Lightning cables strewn throughout my entire life.

00:35:04   But having one port, one connector that can really

00:35:09   be all things to all people is pretty neat and does sound appealing. So as much as I

00:35:17   don't actually begrudge the Lightning connector because I think it's really, really good,

00:35:23   especially in ways that the dock connector wasn't, I still think a USB-C future might

00:35:28   be pretty cool. Hell, it would make the phones get thicker too, right? So that's a win as

00:35:33   well. Bigger battery.

00:35:34   Yeah, that means more battery.

00:35:35   (laughs)

00:35:36   - Exactly.

00:35:36   I don't know, we'll see.

00:35:39   But I mean, it certainly does sound appealing.

00:35:41   In that sense, I am a little bit envious

00:35:43   of the Android folks with their USB-C lives.

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00:37:44   - All right, so Apple has maybe started working on,

00:37:52   I mean, presumably started working on

00:37:54   a Siri thing with a screen.

00:37:56   And obviously this is all rumors.

00:37:59   There's been a lot of rumors that this might happen

00:38:02   in a couple of weeks at WWDC.

00:38:04   There's TechCrunch article, "Get Ready for a New iPad

00:38:06   "and a Mysterious Siri Speaker at WWDC."

00:38:11   As we've talked about numerous times, I currently, anyway,

00:38:14   don't really care about ladies in a tube,

00:38:16   so Marco or Jon, do you wanna kinda take this one over?

00:38:20   - I mean, our timing on this is terrible, because--

00:38:23   - Oh, this is an old story

00:38:24   and there's no rumors about it now?

00:38:26   - Well, no, just because it's rumored

00:38:27   to be announced in two weeks.

00:38:29   So it's probably not a great time

00:38:32   to speculate too much on it.

00:38:34   I would simply say that if you're in the market

00:38:39   for one of these home speakers,

00:38:41   like the Amazon Echo or Google Home or whatever else,

00:38:45   I would say it's probably worth waiting

00:38:47   for this announcement just to see what it is,

00:38:48   see what you're dealing with.

00:38:51   But I also am concerned because this is the kind of product

00:38:56   that Apple historically has not done well,

00:39:00   something that has to be cheap and integrates well

00:39:03   with everything else people have and based on

00:39:06   a really reliable, really advanced voice assistant.

00:39:09   Maybe they've become a different company.

00:39:12   Maybe they have really ramped up the API.

00:39:14   I mean, I do expect W3C to have a lot of

00:39:17   Siri kit advancements, the Siri API for third party apps.

00:39:21   I would love to have some kind of like

00:39:24   audio library functionality so that Overcast

00:39:26   could actually use the Siri API,

00:39:27   'cause right now there's nothing for it to use,

00:39:29   but that would be nice if there was some way to say,

00:39:32   hey thing, play this podcast in Overcast

00:39:35   or something like that.

00:39:36   That would be awesome.

00:39:36   - You can't do that now?

00:39:38   You can't say, hey, play episode number 17

00:39:41   of my favorite podcast?

00:39:42   - Nope, can't do it.

00:39:43   - Oh, that's right, 'cause I forget,

00:39:45   we talked about this after last WDC,

00:39:46   but it was like a really limited domain

00:39:48   of things you can do.

00:39:49   It's not so much the playing of the audio,

00:39:51   it's the idea that this is a voice command

00:39:53   that you can issue that causes something to happen,

00:39:55   that they had abstracted it away from the level of the app to just be like, this is

00:40:00   a desire for a thing to happen that is not app specific that your app can deal with.

00:40:04   It's all coming back to me now.

00:40:06   It'll come back to me more at WWC sessions, but that's a killer feature that you just

00:40:09   described right there.

00:40:11   Just like it is a killer feature of many of these TV-attached pucks where you can say,

00:40:14   you know, play episode five, season two of Seinfeld, and it does that.

00:40:20   And even if you don't have the world's worst television remote, aka the Apple remote, it's

00:40:24   It's a pain to use any remote to do that.

00:40:27   The sentence I just said,

00:40:28   you will be watching that episode so much faster

00:40:31   than if you have to navigate, find Seinfeld.

00:40:33   So in my recent shows, oh, seasons, season two,

00:40:37   scroll, scroll, scroll, episode five.

00:40:39   It's so much better.

00:40:41   So being able to do that,

00:40:42   especially on Overcast feature suggestions,

00:40:45   especially if it doesn't expect you

00:40:48   to all have that already downloaded.

00:40:49   Like if Overcast understood,

00:40:50   you don't even have to be subscribed to the podcast.

00:40:53   I will go to Overcast's directory,

00:40:54   find the podcast that I think is the best match for that,

00:40:57   download the episode number that you asked for

00:40:58   and start playing it, like all in one thing.

00:41:00   Again, doing that by hand.

00:41:01   You could do it by hand in Overcast right now,

00:41:03   but being able to say that sentence into your phone

00:41:05   and have it do that, that would be like magic.

00:41:08   - Right, and that is, I assume,

00:41:10   if and when they do any kind of music or audio

00:41:15   type integration with Siri, with SiriKit, I mean,

00:41:18   I assume that's the kind of thing that they will do

00:41:20   because most other services that would use this,

00:41:22   think of like a music streaming service.

00:41:25   They're not gonna have the entire index of all songs

00:41:28   that are available on the service stored locally in the app.

00:41:31   They're gonna have to make a network request.

00:41:32   They're gonna have to have some way for Apple

00:41:35   to index their libraries.

00:41:37   That way, like the Siri logic, probably server side,

00:41:42   could then figure out what you're actually asking about

00:41:45   and send like an ID to the app.

00:41:47   And I think this is probably why they didn't have it

00:41:49   last year because all the existing intents, they call them,

00:41:54   for SiriKit, like all the different ways

00:41:55   you can do SiriKit, you know, it's stuff like

00:41:57   booking a ride or sending a payment or things like that,

00:42:00   and those are things that have like a limited

00:42:03   command dictionary that you could pretty much

00:42:04   deal with locally without having to custom index content

00:42:08   from Uber or whatever else, or Lyft, you know,

00:42:10   and or, you know, any of the other things they can do.

00:42:14   Whereas if you say like integrate with Overcast

00:42:16   or Spotify or things like that,

00:42:19   Siri has to have some way to index these services

00:42:22   just to see what are the possible things

00:42:24   people can be asking for.

00:42:26   And then have some way to interpret

00:42:30   what people are asking to be those things,

00:42:33   and then tell the app, this person just asked for

00:42:35   the artist with this ID and the track with this ID,

00:42:38   or whatever else.

00:42:40   And that's a lot more to build.

00:42:41   So that's why I assume that it wasn't there last year.

00:42:44   And I don't even know if it's gonna be there

00:42:45   this year or ever, but if they give

00:42:48   the option for Siri to integrate with audio services,

00:42:52   to do it right is gonna involve all that stuff,

00:42:53   and that's a lot of work, and that's a lot of stuff

00:42:55   for us to implement on our side as well,

00:42:57   but it could be awesome.

00:42:58   - The one advantage I feel like they have on this,

00:43:01   is the, you know, this happens every time

00:43:03   we talk about the thing, is if you're in the audience,

00:43:06   and they're announcing whatever their Siri thing is

00:43:08   that you talk to, right, and you don't already have

00:43:13   one of the existing things that you talk to,

00:43:16   almost anything they demo will look amazing if you've never seen it done before. So assume,

00:43:22   speaking of the audio thing, assume they say, even if it's just integrated with Apple Music,

00:43:25   it's not third party, you can't do it, but Apple Music has it. And they go up there and

00:43:29   demo something, and they rattle off some sentence that's like, "What's that song that goes

00:43:34   blah, blah, blah?" And maybe they hum a tune or do the lyrics or some kind of vague, touchy-feely

00:43:41   thing that you might ask a person.

00:43:42   They definitely want to do that.

00:43:44   And it finds it because like, you know, all the, you know,

00:43:46   Amazon and Google both have the say an arbitrary lyric

00:43:50   from a song and it will find it.

00:43:52   I don't know if either one of them has a do, you know,

00:43:56   hum the tune and it will find it.

00:43:57   I mean, I guess people aren't in tune enough to do that.

00:43:59   - The Echo has lyric search at least.

00:44:01   I don't know if it has like, like melody search.

00:44:03   - Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

00:44:04   Like Google Home has it too.

00:44:05   If you say, we say literally any lyric from a song,

00:44:08   if you get it close to right,

00:44:09   it will find that song and play it.

00:44:11   And it works amazingly well, right?

00:44:12   So it's almost as if Apple doesn't demo that.

00:44:15   They're just showing that they're behind two people who know.

00:44:17   But if you don't have an Echo and don't have a Google Home,

00:44:19   that demo is incredibly powerful.

00:44:21   And because it's Apple,

00:44:23   this is one of those places where it's true.

00:44:24   They're like, oh, Apple just announced something

00:44:26   that everyone else has had for years

00:44:27   and they just get press 'cause they're Apple.

00:44:28   That effect exists, right?

00:44:30   Because they're good showmans

00:44:32   and the showmanship that they have

00:44:34   and the way they're able to give a compelling demo

00:44:39   in ways that like the Amazon Echo commercial

00:44:42   or the Google Home things are not able to.

00:44:44   And because there's so many eyes on Apple

00:44:46   and yada, yada, yada, it is an opportunity for them

00:44:49   to really sell features that other people have had for years

00:44:53   that Apple is probably gonna do worse

00:44:55   and come out looking like, wow,

00:44:56   Apple is amazing and innovative.

00:44:58   And the only stories that will be, hey,

00:45:00   Apple's playing catch up are gonna be

00:45:01   in the nerdy tech press that we read.

00:45:04   - Well, I mean, I think Apple is going to own privacy,

00:45:08   looks, probably the UI on the screen,

00:45:11   And then maybe sound quality,

00:45:14   'cause the Echo's sound quality is not that great.

00:45:16   I don't know about the Google Home, but who cares.

00:45:18   And, sorry Sean.

00:45:19   - It's not great.

00:45:21   I mean, you've seen it.

00:45:22   It's not very big.

00:45:23   It's one little dinky speaker-y thing in there.

00:45:24   - Right, right.

00:45:25   So Apple's probably gonna own those things,

00:45:28   but the usefulness of these products is based so heavily

00:45:33   on the incredible speed and reliability

00:45:38   of the voice service.

00:45:40   that's where I have concerns about Apple.

00:45:42   Because Siri, for all of its smarts,

00:45:44   for all of its wonderful international support,

00:45:47   for all of the different, you know,

00:45:48   the more advanced API that it has compared to the Echo,

00:45:53   'cause what I was saying earlier about Siri having to parse

00:45:55   the way that people say things and kinda just

00:45:57   pass off to the application, like,

00:45:58   "All right, the user requested this artist ID,

00:46:00   "this track ID," the way that the Echo does it is

00:46:04   it has a very limited vocabulary of what you can specify,

00:46:07   and then it just can tell you the exact words somebody said,

00:46:10   but then it's up to the application to figure out

00:46:12   how do I parse that, which is easier to implement,

00:46:16   it enables a lot more things from day one

00:46:19   to be possible in that API,

00:46:20   'cause you don't have to wait around for them

00:46:22   to design your specific use case,

00:46:25   but it's way harder to actually use

00:46:28   for anything non-trivial.

00:46:30   Where Apple's gonna come in from is,

00:46:32   they're gonna come in with SiriKit support only,

00:46:34   I would imagine.

00:46:35   it's gonna be really great for these like 12 app types

00:46:39   to integrate with this, but nobody else can.

00:46:41   Or nobody else can do anything useful with this.

00:46:44   So that's gonna be problem number one.

00:46:45   And problem number two is just like,

00:46:47   again, the reliability of Siri

00:46:48   and the advancement of Siri,

00:46:51   I don't think they have kept up.

00:46:53   And this is always an argument,

00:46:55   everyone always thinks like, oh well,

00:46:57   I asked the Amazon device about this thing

00:46:59   and it gave me this kind of weird answer

00:47:01   and then I asked Siri and it gave me a better answer.

00:47:03   or the Google and Amazon devices don't support my language

00:47:06   or my country and Siri does.

00:47:09   And that's all valid, everyone can have their own opinions,

00:47:10   but I think overall, it's fairly clear that Siri has been,

00:47:14   for most people, less reliable and less smart

00:47:18   on the whole than the other services.

00:47:21   And this is the kind of device where,

00:47:24   like you know, on your phone it's kind of a secondary thing,

00:47:26   you know, some people use it heavily,

00:47:27   but for the most part, like everywhere else

00:47:29   the Siri exists is kind of a secondary input type.

00:47:31   With this kind of device, it is the primary input method.

00:47:35   And it has to be fast, and it has to be reliable,

00:47:38   and it has to get it right almost every single time.

00:47:41   And that's what makes the Amazon products,

00:47:44   which I have the most experience with,

00:47:45   that's what makes them so compelling

00:47:47   when you're used to the Apple ecosystem,

00:47:49   when you're used to Siri, when you first see an Echo,

00:47:52   you're like, "Oh my God, that was fast."

00:47:53   And then as you start using it more and more,

00:47:55   you're like, "This works every time."

00:47:59   And that has just never been

00:48:00   a lot of people's experience with Siri.

00:48:02   So for this product to succeed,

00:48:05   I think Siri has to be way better than it is now.

00:48:09   And maybe it is, maybe they're about to unveil

00:48:11   a brand new version of Siri to everybody to see

00:48:13   that is way better and way more reliable.

00:48:15   I just don't think it's very likely

00:48:16   based on their past performance.

00:48:18   - Yeah, those are all things they can hide in the demo,

00:48:20   though, from the PR perspective.

00:48:21   Of course it's gonna work amazingly in the demo

00:48:23   because they rehearse and it's all set up to work perfectly.

00:48:26   We won't know whether they've actually done a good job

00:48:28   with it until we get things in our hands,

00:48:30   So it's why they could get, I think, a bunch of positive reactions from the audience that's

00:48:34   there, because most people don't, you know, won't have any experience with the existing

00:48:38   devices like this, so everything they see is new and amazing.

00:48:40   And the performance will be awesome on the stage, because they're good at making a demo

00:48:43   and everything like that.

00:48:44   And they've got good press out of it from everybody except the tech press who knows

00:48:47   they're playing catch-up.

00:48:48   And this is assuming they don't even have some big wow feature.

00:48:50   I bet they probably will have at least one headlining feature that Echo and Home don't

00:48:56   have.

00:48:57   Whatever it may be, something that plays to Apple's strength.

00:48:59   - It'll be privacy.

00:49:00   (laughing)

00:49:01   - Well, there's the privacy angle too,

00:49:03   but also especially if there's a one with the screen,

00:49:05   I bet they can put better stuff,

00:49:07   more impressive things on that screen

00:49:09   than Amazon can on their Amazon show

00:49:11   or whatever their terrible name is for their thing.

00:49:13   - Like, and I pre-order the Amazon thing,

00:49:15   but Amazon is so bad at user interface design,

00:49:18   I expect that to be clunky.

00:49:20   - And it'll be underpowered so they can't do like,

00:49:22   whatever crazy GPU is gonna be in the Apple one

00:49:24   to have cool effects and you know,

00:49:26   like just the same kind of functionality,

00:49:27   but even if it's just nice screensavers of your family

00:49:31   that it pulls from your photo library,

00:49:32   this is another angle by the way of like,

00:49:34   A, it's why Casey will get one of these

00:49:36   no matter what everybody says now,

00:49:38   and B, it's why I'm much interested in it.

00:49:40   It's 'cause the Google Home one I got

00:49:42   because I have lots of my life,

00:49:44   I use the Google ecosystem,

00:49:46   it's got my email, my calendar, and one copy of my photos,

00:49:49   but the real copy of my photos are in Apple's photo library

00:49:52   and Google Photos is just my sort of redundant backup

00:49:54   that I use for search and other things like that.

00:49:56   I'm interested in this one because the other half of my life

00:50:00   is not in the Amazon ecosystem,

00:50:02   it's in the Apple ecosystem.

00:50:03   So I would like one of these in my house

00:50:04   so that I'll have something that I can talk to

00:50:06   that has access to the other half of my stuff

00:50:09   and hopefully can do something interesting with it.

00:50:12   - The other problem it's gonna have

00:50:13   is that the support for home automation devices

00:50:17   is gonna be limited to HomeKit.

00:50:19   And the Echo and the other things,

00:50:23   Echo supports way more than just HomeKit.

00:50:25   And HomeKit is still like, every new smart home device

00:50:30   is still not shipping with HomeKit today.

00:50:32   Many of them are, but there's still a lot out there,

00:50:35   and especially most of the cheap ones

00:50:37   that most people are probably actually buying.

00:50:40   A lot of them are not HomeKit compatible.

00:50:42   - They could play that up with the privacy angle, right?

00:50:44   Like I think you're right about that,

00:50:46   but the way they can spin that

00:50:48   is as part of their pitch to you about privacy.

00:50:51   Like I think that's one of the strengths HomeKit has

00:50:53   and the stringent requirements.

00:50:54   The more stringent security requirements for devices that comply with it, they won't

00:50:59   come right out and say, "Yeah, there's not as much HomeKit stuff out there, and

00:51:03   the best stuff is not HomeKit compatible, but the stuff you do buy that is actually

00:51:07   HomeKit certified will have a slightly less chance of letting people own your entire house."

00:51:11   That's true, yeah.

00:51:13   So again, it's going to be the kind of thing where the main selling points to this

00:51:17   are going to be things that most people aren't really going to think to ask about or care

00:51:24   about and the main downsides of it are probably going to be cost and support of devices out

00:51:31   there and the reliability and intelligence of its voice assistant. Those are pretty big

00:51:36   things. That's why I'm worried about this product. I don't think that it's going

00:51:41   to go very far in the market unless there's, I mean, we haven't seen it or know anything

00:51:47   about it yet. We don't even know technically that it's real. So this could all change

00:51:51   when we see it, but I am very skeptical of this product

00:51:54   just because it seems like it requires strength

00:51:57   that Apple doesn't have.

00:51:58   - You know what would be a good test for this?

00:52:01   Because this device is in many ways like Apple TV,

00:52:04   like it's a, especially the one with no screen,

00:52:08   a kind of a faceless device that's cheap, small,

00:52:11   it's not a Mac, it's not an iOS device, strictly speaking,

00:52:14   even though it's running iOS under the covers.

00:52:16   And Apple TV is like, well, look how badly

00:52:20   they've done with that device. They've made so many revisions of it. It used to be this

00:52:23   giant Mac running, you know, Tiger that did some weird stuff with iTunes and it morphed

00:52:28   into this puck which was better but then it didn't get much better. This Siri in a puck,

00:52:34   in a tube, in a whatever thing is a great test to say, "Is the Apple TV not great because

00:52:40   Apple's not good at making this kind of device or is the Apple TV not great because they

00:52:44   were never able to do the content deals or is it some combination?" Because it could

00:52:48   be that the Apple TV, the biggest thing hobbling it is all their grand visions for how this is going

00:52:53   to change the way you watch TV have been thwarted by the fact that they can't get their deals done.

00:52:57   They cannot produce a compelling offering that lets people actually do all the things they want

00:53:01   to do. And the poor kind of orphaned ghost town TV app on the Apple TV is, you know, there's no

00:53:10   better example of the Apple's failure to bring it all together on the TV front. Most people don't

00:53:15   don't have complaints about the hardware again,

00:53:17   other than the terrible remote,

00:53:18   which hopefully will not be an issue on this tube thing.

00:53:21   So it could be that Apple is really good

00:53:22   at making embedded devices that efficiently listen

00:53:25   to audio and play music and make it,

00:53:28   maybe they're really good at that.

00:53:29   And in this case, they don't need any content deals

00:53:31   'cause it's just a speaker and a microphones in a tube.

00:53:35   But on the other hand, if they roll this out

00:53:36   and it looks to us two years later,

00:53:38   like, oh, it's one of those things that Apple makes

00:53:41   like the Apple TV that is kind of mediocre,

00:53:43   more expensive than the competition and not as good.

00:53:45   And then we just sit there and wait year after year

00:53:47   for it to be updated in some way

00:53:49   while Apple refuses to acknowledge its shortcomings.

00:53:52   - Yeah, I take small issue with what you said.

00:53:53   I really love my Apple TV.

00:53:55   Now, to be fair, I use it for a very particular set of tasks

00:54:00   and it is very well suited to basically

00:54:03   what it boils down to is playing Plex or playing Netflix.

00:54:06   And that's basically all it ever does.

00:54:08   But for those things, it's actually quite good.

00:54:10   And I'm not saying the remote is perfect by any stretch,

00:54:13   but it's fine.

00:54:15   It's not great, but it's fine.

00:54:17   It works.

00:54:18   I don't know.

00:54:19   I wish it wasn't so symmetrical, but.

00:54:21   - But compare it to the competition,

00:54:23   the other pucks that have 4K support

00:54:25   that cost less money, that play Netflix just as well

00:54:27   that the remotes are better on.

00:54:29   Like that's why people say Apple TV is not bad.

00:54:31   The remote is bad, but Apple TV itself is not bad.

00:54:33   I use it all the time too, right?

00:54:34   But if you are in the market for a puck

00:54:37   and you don't have a bunch of movies

00:54:38   that you bought on iTunes,

00:54:40   Apple's puck costs more, does less,

00:54:42   and is worse in pretty much every way

00:54:45   than the competition, and that's why people say

00:54:47   it's not the best puck offering.

00:54:51   - Yeah, that's fair.

00:54:52   I don't know, we'll see.

00:54:53   I mean, we're only a couple weeks away,

00:54:54   so we'll see what happens.

00:54:55   - Yeah, oh, and on the other puck front is like,

00:54:57   when the various versions were introduced,

00:54:59   sometimes they were pretty darn good, right?

00:55:01   But Apple just is not interested

00:55:04   in keeping up with the Joneses.

00:55:05   So everyone else gets 4K support,

00:55:07   or does 24 frames per second output for the film nerds,

00:55:10   or whatever, and Apple's like,

00:55:11   "Eh, the one we got is fine.

00:55:12   "We'll let it stay there for a few other few years."

00:55:15   Don't worry about it.

00:55:16   Maybe we'll update it, maybe we won't.

00:55:18   Who needs 4K, is that a thing?

00:55:20   - That can't be a thing.

00:55:21   No way that's a thing.

00:55:22   That's not a thing.

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00:57:27   (upbeat music)

00:57:30   - We're gonna take a really weird turn now.

00:57:33   We're gonna talk about Google I/O,

00:57:35   'cause that's a thing,

00:57:36   and it was somewhat interesting, believe it or not.

00:57:38   - It's so timely, right?

00:57:39   - And it's so timely, given that it happened

00:57:41   like two weeks ago.

00:57:42   Indeed.

00:57:44   So Google I/O happened May 17th through 19th,

00:57:47   we're recording this on the 24th,

00:57:49   and the only bit of I/O that I watched was the keynote,

00:57:54   but I did watch the keynote, and it was very, well,

00:57:56   given it was not an Apple keynote, it was very good.

00:57:59   And if there's anything that we can all agree

00:58:02   that Apple is very good at,

00:58:03   it's doing a keynote presentation.

00:58:05   And so I watched the keynote, and by and large, I didn't

00:58:10   think that there was that much to discuss, for us to

00:58:14   discuss.

00:58:15   There were a couple things, though.

00:58:16   One was the updates to Google Photos, which I am a devout

00:58:20   fan of. Yes, I understand that I'm giving Google my data.

00:58:23   Yes, I understand that that can be creepy.

00:58:26   Yes, I understand that there are penalties for doing so.

00:58:29   Yes, I understand I am paying them, and yet they're still

00:58:32   scanning all my data, despite the fact that I'm paying them.

00:58:34   However, I made the choice that to me the benefits are worth it in the case of Google Photos.

00:58:40   And so that's just my choice. It may not be right for you, but it's right for me.

00:58:44   So what they've done is they've done a lot with sharing with Google Photos. So it's much easier to share

00:58:52   kind of your photos with your spouse or with those that are at like an event like a party or something like that.

00:58:59   And that looks really cool. It's trying to be more proactive about, you know,

00:59:03   "Hey, it looks like Marco and John are in all these pictures.

00:59:05   Do you want to share this with them?"

00:59:07   Make an album and automatically share it with them.

00:59:10   And that sort of stuff is really cool and I'm looking forward to it, although I think

00:59:14   it'll be more useful if I knew more people that were devout Google Photos users like

00:59:19   myself.

00:59:20   But we'll see.

00:59:21   But I thought the Photos improvements looked neat.

00:59:24   So I tried to merge this in the notes with an old question that we had many, many months

00:59:29   ago from Mark Wadham who was asking about family iCloud photo libraries.

00:59:34   This is a general question I think it was like we talked about a long time but what

00:59:38   the heck do we mean and it's suddenly more relevant because like Casey said this was

00:59:41   a headlining feature of their Google I/O presentation of the Google Photos portion of it like hey

00:59:46   look at this neat way to do a thing that they think is common like you know you and your

00:59:52   partner and your spouse whatever just want to share all of your pictures with each other

00:59:57   not like on a case-by-case basis like Casey was talking about,

01:00:00   which is another feature of like, oh,

01:00:01   let's suggest sharing these or whatever,

01:00:02   we just say, look, everything that I take,

01:00:04   also show it to this person.

01:00:06   And the way they implemented it is they get to see that stuff,

01:00:09   and then they can look at them and save them

01:00:11   into their own library if they like them.

01:00:13   Right?

01:00:13   Oh, I like that one.

01:00:14   I want to keep that one.

01:00:15   I want to keep that one.

01:00:16   So it's not-- it's more like automatic by default offering

01:00:20   of your photos to someone else, but it's still

01:00:23   two separate libraries.

01:00:24   And the broader question about from way back in the hypercritical and no iLife is an island

01:00:30   is the very difficult problem that Apple has not yet tackled, but that they're slowly building

01:00:35   up the infrastructure to tackle, I feel like, and I hope they address it soon, is the way

01:00:41   my family at least uses photos and the way I think a lot of families would use photos

01:00:46   if given the option, which is if you have two parents and children, both parents take

01:00:53   pictures of their children, depending on maybe at the same time at the same event, or if

01:00:57   one parent is with one child, one parent is with another, they take pictures on their

01:01:00   phone, they take pictures with their cameras, however they take them.

01:01:03   Each parent is an adult and has their own Apple ID, or whatever, Google account, or

01:01:08   whether they have their own accounts, which means in the Apple and Google worlds, they

01:01:12   have their own photo libraries, and you know, it's kind of this siloed arrangement.

01:01:16   And yet, in a family situation, usually you want all the pictures, at least all the pictures

01:01:23   of the kids, probably all the pictures, period, to be together in one big library and not

01:01:27   have to deal with, you know, two different people's libraries and sharing between them.

01:01:32   It's inefficient.

01:01:33   It's hard to keep track of like the one master library of family photos.

01:01:37   Very often the solution is, oh, just designate one parent to be the official holder of their

01:01:42   Apple ID has the library, right?

01:01:45   That's what we do at our house.

01:01:46   My wife's Apple ID, she is the owner of the photos library.

01:01:49   So on her iOS devices, she has access to all of our pictures.

01:01:54   On my iOS devices and on my Mac, I have access to only the pictures I've taken with my iPhone

01:02:00   because all the other pictures go into the big library and periodically I have to manually

01:02:06   export unmodified original, you know, to make sure I get all the stuff.

01:02:10   You know, I can't bother editing them on my phone or anything.

01:02:12   I have to just let them stream into my Mac, export all the unmodified originals and import

01:02:17   them into the "real" photo library that is hers.

01:02:22   This used to be mine, and now it's hers, and we've gone back and forth with it, but this

01:02:25   is not what I want, and this is not what any family wants.

01:02:28   And I think a lot of families do get by by having the designated person who owns the

01:02:31   photo library, but it's terrible because we take so many pictures on our phones.

01:02:35   I don't want to be signed into my wife's Apple ID on my phone, right?

01:02:39   It's bad enough that we all have to do that from the old days of buying things through

01:02:43   the app store, and Apple does let you be signed into the app store as your spouse, but signed

01:02:47   everything else is you, like they let you do that for sharing of apps.

01:02:50   That's what we do. You know, Aaron is me for the App Store, but she is her in every other way.

01:02:57   Yeah, and Apple added the capability to do that because it is a common arrangement, but it's not great.

01:03:01   So Apple eventually added, a couple years ago now, the concept of a family, where you can make a family

01:03:08   in Apple's interface and say, "Here are the people who are members of the family, here are the adults, here are the children."

01:03:12   and family sharing allows you to share applications that allow this.

01:03:17   I think the default is to allow, but Marco wouldn't know.

01:03:19   I think you could configure your app to say it's not shareable,

01:03:22   like I don't want you to be able to share this,

01:03:23   but in my experience, pretty much all apps are like this.

01:03:26   If I buy an app, my children's iOS devices have access to that app

01:03:32   just because I bought it.

01:03:33   It's a little bit weirder with in-app purchases,

01:03:35   and since so many things are free with in-app purchases now,

01:03:38   it's still a little bit weird, but it is, you know,

01:03:40   The key thing is Apple allows the concept of a family to exist and membership and that family to exist.

01:03:47   And that membership brings certain sharing privileges that only exist within the family,

01:03:51   including from things of like my kids try to buy stuff on their iOS device and it sends me a notification

01:03:55   that I have to approve or deny. They're leveraging that functionality to do that.

01:03:58   So they're creeping up on it. Before it just used to be a bunch of Apple IDs that you'd be shared in weird ways.

01:04:04   Now you can construct a family unit and specify everything about it.

01:04:09   You can give kids Apple IDs, which you didn't used to be able to do, and now you can.

01:04:12   They just need to take the next step, which is stop siloing libraries of photos.

01:04:18   And it's a really difficult problem because you might think, well,

01:04:21   I don't want all the photos from two people to be shared forever into one giant library.

01:04:25   Like how would that even work in terms of billing and how do I keep some photos private

01:04:30   if I'm taking a million pictures with my phone of like, you know, a bunch of, you know,

01:04:35   things in the hardware store for some repair I'm doing

01:04:37   and my wife doesn't want them appearing on her phone because,

01:04:39   you know, that's just relevant to me.

01:04:41   Like, it is a hard problem.

01:04:42   Don't get me wrong.

01:04:43   It is not like they should just snap their fingers

01:04:45   and do this.

01:04:46   They just need to make incremental progress towards it,

01:04:48   and eventually they need to get there.

01:04:50   And even Google, with their thing of like, oh,

01:04:53   you can just see all my pictures and pick the ones

01:04:54   that you want, that is still incremental progress.

01:04:56   Because it is still two entirely different libraries.

01:04:58   It's just easing the friction of how you get from one thing

01:05:02   to the other.

01:05:02   But I wouldn't like that solution

01:05:03   either because I'd constantly be thinking, oh,

01:05:05   did you pull in all the photos yesterday or did you forget some or where did you leave

01:05:10   off? I just want them all to be in one big pool. I just want them to be our photos, like

01:05:14   the way it is now. And so I really hope Apple is slowly but surely working towards this.

01:05:19   And I hope Google is too, because I think that is a better way for families to manage

01:05:24   their photos than any of the current systems.

01:05:27   I agree with you.

01:05:29   Who has the photo libraries in your houses?

01:05:32   - I do.

01:05:34   - We have two different ones with lots of duplication

01:05:37   and lots of wasted effort and lots of wasted iCloud space

01:05:42   and hard drive space and we are our own people

01:05:45   and we have our own ways of doing things.

01:05:48   We have some of our own pictures,

01:05:50   we have a bunch of family pictures.

01:05:52   It would be nice to have both,

01:05:53   but usually what actually happens is

01:05:56   whenever one of us wants a picture that the other one took,

01:05:58   we ask across the office,

01:06:00   "Hey, can you send me that picture of whatever, whatever?"

01:06:02   and then we either airdrop it to each other

01:06:04   or we go browse our hard drives on our network share

01:06:07   and do it that way.

01:06:08   - Do you get freaked out about whether you're actually

01:06:10   getting original quality when you share them with each other

01:06:12   'cause almost all the sharing interfaces

01:06:14   do not give you original quality.

01:06:16   - Yeah, we don't do any of the sharing with like,

01:06:18   you know, inside the Photos app,

01:06:20   like the shared albums, like that will do with like

01:06:22   sharing photos with friends or, you know,

01:06:24   for an event, but those are not full quality.

01:06:26   As Jason Snell pointed out,

01:06:27   I think I upgraded this past week,

01:06:29   those are only like three megapixels or something,

01:06:30   they're very, very small.

01:06:32   When I'm doing the transfer between Tiff and I,

01:06:34   we either do AirDrop or direct file transfer

01:06:38   over the network.

01:06:39   - AirDrop from the photos thing on iOS?

01:06:42   - Sometimes.

01:06:43   - Is that full quality?

01:06:45   Like do you get the RAW, if she shot it in RAW,

01:06:47   do you get a RAW coming over the wire or do you get a JPEG?

01:06:50   - For transfers of RAWs, that's when we'll usually involve

01:06:53   just the network shares where I will just open up

01:06:55   her hard drive on my computer over the network

01:06:58   and pull the file over ethernet,

01:06:59   because ethernet's awesome.

01:07:01   AirDrop is usually when the photo has originated

01:07:04   on an iPhone, when it was taken by an iPhone,

01:07:06   then we will air drop it.

01:07:07   I'm pretty sure that is the original file then,

01:07:10   in that case.

01:07:11   - Yeah, the other terrible thing about separate libraries

01:07:14   and sharing photos is it either discourages you,

01:07:18   the individual people, from doing edits,

01:07:19   or it makes you feel bad about it.

01:07:20   Because say you both have your own photos

01:07:22   and your own things, and you've done your own edits

01:07:24   and cropped things and made them look nice.

01:07:27   You would like it, and what I would want to happen is,

01:07:30   look, say you are both using photos,

01:07:32   I don't know if you are,

01:07:33   but if you are both using Apple's Photos app,

01:07:35   why can't I get all of that?

01:07:37   Give me the unmodified original,

01:07:39   give me your modifications,

01:07:40   it keeps them all losslessly,

01:07:42   it has all that information.

01:07:44   Your only choices instead are what I do,

01:07:46   which is export unmodified original,

01:07:48   which I really hope does what it says,

01:07:49   'cause I'm trusting it.

01:07:50   (laughing)

01:07:51   But you are losing all of the edits at that point,

01:07:54   'cause you're saying, forget about the edits,

01:07:55   and it's like, oh, why did I even bother doing,

01:07:57   It happens when we go on vacation a lot,

01:07:58   'cause a lot of times I go on vacation

01:08:00   and I'll be putting the photos into my photos library

01:08:02   and my Apple ID and picking favorites and doing edits.

01:08:06   And then I have to do this laborious manual sync process.

01:08:08   It reminds me of the old days when I would get a new Mac

01:08:10   and manually do what Migration Assistant does today,

01:08:13   which was fun the first five or 600 times,

01:08:16   so eventually it gets old.

01:08:18   I will do all this picking and editing and cropping

01:08:21   and all this other stuff.

01:08:22   And then when I come back to the home computer,

01:08:24   I have to make a bunch of smart albums

01:08:26   to pull all the favorites and export on modified originals

01:08:30   for those and then redo my edits to make them look

01:08:33   like I did over there, cribbing off of them

01:08:35   to see how I decided to crop it and stuff.

01:08:37   It is not good at all.

01:08:40   And the other choice is to just be like,

01:08:41   okay, well I'm gonna import them into my library

01:08:45   because I have the device with me

01:08:46   and then when I get home to the real library,

01:08:49   I'll just dump them 'cause I haven't done

01:08:51   any modifications to them.

01:08:53   Or I'll be logged in as my wife the whole vacation

01:08:55   and use her account on this thing.

01:08:57   It's just a bunch of bad options.

01:08:59   - Yeah, we solved that problem again by duplication.

01:09:03   There's lots of duplication.

01:09:04   The only thing that helps here is that Tiff and I

01:09:07   both have very different editing styles.

01:09:09   She's way better at it, but I will often take my own pass

01:09:13   at things before her or if I don't think she's gonna care

01:09:16   about that photo or if it's something I took.

01:09:19   And so usually anything edited in my library

01:09:22   was edited by me and she takes her version

01:09:25   and it makes a way better version later.

01:09:26   But that's, again, we solved this problem

01:09:30   just by duplication, more and more duplication.

01:09:32   And it's a terrible solution,

01:09:34   but it does avoid a lot of the problems

01:09:37   that any kind of shared library would add.

01:09:39   It's just really inefficient.

01:09:41   - Another feature request I have for photos

01:09:42   and a thing that I do a lot is that I don't have two people

01:09:45   with conflicting editing styles,

01:09:46   I have just me who has different ideas

01:09:48   about how to edit things.

01:09:49   And a very frequent operation for me

01:09:50   is to duplicate a photo so I can do a different edit on it,

01:09:52   because you can't have more than one edit per photo.

01:09:55   So with a shared library, family photo library,

01:09:59   one of the features they should have

01:10:00   is the ability to do multiple edits of a single photo.

01:10:02   So then you could have the TIFF edit and the Marko edit

01:10:05   with one unmodified original beneath them

01:10:08   and have an interface to that.

01:10:10   That would be great.

01:10:10   Instead of me duplicating the thing

01:10:13   and getting image one, two, three, four,

01:10:15   copy.jpg and then doing modifications there.

01:10:18   Again, it's a thing I think people do,

01:10:21   multiple possible edits,

01:10:22   even if it's just two different crops.

01:10:24   one crop that you're gonna use for sharing with the family

01:10:26   'cause you know they're gonna be looking at it on a phone,

01:10:28   and then a different crop and edit

01:10:30   for the one that you're gonna print on a fracture

01:10:32   or something and then throw up on the wall

01:10:34   because it'll be much bigger.

01:10:35   Lots of low-hanging fruit in the photo world

01:10:40   for features like this, but then the family sharing

01:10:42   is not low-hanging fruit.

01:10:43   It is a really difficult problem,

01:10:44   and I do see Apple making progress towards it.

01:10:46   I just can't wait for them to just finally do it.

01:10:51   I think in general, like kind of broadening this a little bit, one of my biggest wishlist

01:10:55   items for the Mac specifically, and I know this is probably involved iOS also just because

01:11:02   of the way this big sync setup works, but I just want the Photos app to just get more,

01:11:08   just get better and get more added to it. You know, like first on the realm of get better,

01:11:13   I really hope they finally sync the recognition data between images so that each new device

01:11:21   doesn't have to run its CPU hot for three days just to figure it all out itself.

01:11:25   Do you still use that feature?

01:11:27   I've kind of given up on it already.

01:11:28   I don't think you can turn it off.

01:11:30   I know, but in terms of, I'm thinking mostly of the faces.

01:11:33   I know you're talking about like, find me a picture of a boat, right, that whole thing,

01:11:37   which I think works OK.

01:11:38   Yeah, it works OK.

01:11:39   The Google Photos one is better.

01:11:40   But the face one is the one that I have the most hope for and that makes me the most disappointed.

01:11:44   I continue to manually keyword label the faces that I care about, which is incredibly tedious

01:11:50   And the Photos app fights you every step of the way.

01:11:53   Like when they remove the keywords from underneath, you can't display them anymore.

01:11:56   It's so hard to figure out which ones have keywords on them or not.

01:12:00   And I was like, "Well, why do you need to do that?

01:12:01   Just let the face recognition figure it out."

01:12:03   And I tried to train it, and I tried to convince it.

01:12:06   And it's close, but it's still just, you know, guess what?

01:12:10   People who are genetically related to each other tend to look similar.

01:12:16   And it's a hard problem.

01:12:17   I don't blame them.

01:12:18   Google doesn't get it perfectly either,

01:12:20   but I just wish I could just say,

01:12:22   I don't have to worry about that.

01:12:23   If I wanna find pictures of my son,

01:12:25   I can just type in his name

01:12:26   and it will find all the pictures of my son.

01:12:27   Reality in photos, it will find 15% of the photos of my son.

01:12:31   - Yeah, so photos, there is so much area

01:12:35   for improvement with photos.

01:12:37   Not only in the intelligence of what you were just talking

01:12:39   about, like the intelligence of the recognition

01:12:41   and the faces and everything, and the syncing of that data,

01:12:43   which is always my complaint, that like,

01:12:44   why does each device have to do this over and over again

01:12:46   and burn through its battery for the first few

01:12:48   days or weeks that you own it.

01:12:50   And then just the entire Photos app,

01:12:53   on iOS it's fine, I wouldn't say it's great, but it's fine.

01:12:57   The Mac Photos app really needs a lot of help.

01:13:01   It is seemingly designed by people who don't use Photos apps

01:13:06   and who have never used it to edit more than one photo

01:13:10   or to browse a library that had more than 10 photos.

01:13:13   It really does seem like it was rushed out once

01:13:18   three years ago whenever it came out,

01:13:20   and then not touched since in any meaningful way.

01:13:22   And I really hope that changes

01:13:24   because there's so much promise.

01:13:26   Because the syncing system they've built

01:13:27   for iCloud Photo Library has been rock solid for me

01:13:31   and for everyone else I've talked to who uses it.

01:13:33   It has been rock solid.

01:13:35   It's a great sync system.

01:13:37   It's integrated into everything.

01:13:39   It gets everything off your phone automatically.

01:13:41   The sharing is decent.

01:13:42   You know, it's not amazing, but it's decent, good enough.

01:13:45   I just wish the app on the Mac was better.

01:13:47   it is still not as good or not as responsive

01:13:51   or not as easy to work through more than four photos

01:13:55   as even iPhoto, let alone Aperture or Lightroom.

01:13:59   Like, there's so much room for improvement

01:14:01   and just the basics of navigating it,

01:14:04   picking through photos, rating photos,

01:14:06   deleting the ones you don't wanna keep,

01:14:08   editing the ones with performing minor edits.

01:14:10   It seems like it's designed right now for maximum friction

01:14:14   and to be as error-prone as possible.

01:14:16   and I just really, really wish,

01:14:19   and I know this is a long shot,

01:14:20   I wish they would like, I don't know,

01:14:22   put a different team on it,

01:14:23   put a different designer on it, something.

01:14:25   Get some new blood in there

01:14:26   to make the Photos app on the Mac great.

01:14:30   Or even just good.

01:14:32   I'm not asking for a lot here,

01:14:34   but like make it usable for people to actually go through

01:14:38   and sort through the thousands of pictures

01:14:42   that we can now take with these amazing devices

01:14:44   in our pockets all the time.

01:14:45   make that better, make it easier.

01:14:47   Don't show me 60 different animations

01:14:50   to go all these different levels deep

01:14:51   in this weird hierarchy, just do it.

01:14:54   Just respond to my keystrokes quickly.

01:14:56   When you're deleting photos out of a big list,

01:14:58   move it to the next one instead of,

01:15:01   just do what every other photo app has ever done before.

01:15:04   (laughs)

01:15:05   And this one doesn't do it.

01:15:07   So I really, really hope they got better.

01:15:09   - Imagine if they added features too.

01:15:11   Imagine that, like they actually added features.

01:15:14   next year there would be more features in it? Imagine.

01:15:17   That would be great. I'm not even, see, I'm not asking for much.

01:15:20   I'm kind of asking for features at this point. I feel like it's been long enough. But what

01:15:24   you said about the, I think I listed photos, Apple's Photos is one of my favorite applications

01:15:29   one year and we did like a favorites list. And it's for the reason you just said, it's

01:15:32   for the syncing. And I know people have horror stories about like, all my images were black

01:15:36   thumbnails and I lost all my data and blah, blah, blah. But like you, Marco, for me, it

01:15:40   It has been solid and I just have my fingers crossed that I'm not just lucky, right?

01:15:44   And that it really is, I think it really is reasonably reliable.

01:15:49   And so that's why I love it because it solved that problem for me, or not for me, for my

01:15:53   wife because it's on her phone.

01:15:54   But anyway, it solved the problem for one of us.

01:15:56   By the way, that's one of the things I use Google Photos for because we have this thing

01:15:59   where her Apple ID is the family photo library and it's on her phone and her iPad, but then

01:16:05   Then I have Google Photos running on her account, on her Mac, uploading to my Google account.

01:16:11   So if I want to pull one of our family photos, I launch Google Photos on my phone, because

01:16:14   it's the only way on my phone that I can get to our family's photos.

01:16:18   And so yes, I pay for one terabyte of storage in Google, and also the maximum amount you

01:16:23   can buy in Apple, so it is not particularly monetarily efficient.

01:16:26   This is the system I have.

01:16:27   But I've just now remembered that we're talking about Google I/O.

01:16:30   Yeah.

01:16:31   Yep.

01:16:32   This is a song about Alice.

01:16:33   Well, I mean, the photos was the thing they talk about.

01:16:36   And like credit where credit is due to Google,

01:16:38   they are very smart for giving me that ability.

01:16:40   The fact that I can run a client a thing, a terrible thing,

01:16:43   on my Mac that somehow sucks all of the photos out of my Apple photos library

01:16:49   and uploads them to Google, by the way,

01:16:51   I'm going to give a two-second rant on this little thing.

01:16:53   It's like it's a little menu bar icon and it does what I want it to do,

01:16:56   which is like, I'll find, I don't know how I'll do it,

01:16:59   but I'll dig through your Apple crap and I will find your photos,

01:17:02   probably in a way that Apple doesn't want us to do, but they do it and it works,

01:17:05   and I will push them up to the Google account of your choosing.

01:17:08   And so, from my wife's account, I can push up to mine.

01:17:12   But this little menu bar thing has this feature in terrible scare quotes,

01:17:17   where it will say, it will tell you how many uploads failed,

01:17:22   and sometimes it will give you a notification, say,

01:17:25   "I tried to upload these pictures to Google Photos and they failed.

01:17:28   Click here to learn more."

01:17:29   and you click and it gives you this terrible little tiny dialogue that lists these very long

01:17:34   file paths that you can't see the right hand side of unless you scroll. Right? And it says,

01:17:38   "These are all the ones that failed." And there's a button on it or other, you know, other, it's a

01:17:43   button or menu item, whatever, that lets you through this thing say, "Please retry them."

01:17:46   And it's like, "Don't wait for me to tell you. Just keep trying, little Google thing." And maybe,

01:17:53   here's the thing, maybe it does automatically retry. Maybe it's going to retry no matter what

01:17:57   anyway but the fact that the UI has a way for you to see what failed and click

01:18:01   the retry button compels me to every time I'm on her computer do that and

01:18:06   because their file names are all obscure I can't tell is it trying to re-upload

01:18:09   these seven raws over and over again can it just not upload raws at all and every

01:18:12   time it fails to upload them it tells me about it or is it if I never touched it

01:18:16   would it merely retry constantly and eventually succeed no way to tell one of

01:18:21   the worst like sort of like nerd baiting interfaces because once you give me an

01:18:25   an interface to see the things that failed

01:18:27   and you give me a button to tell it to retry,

01:18:29   it's cruel, it is a cruel interface

01:18:31   and if someone at Google is listening to this,

01:18:34   A, either make your thing, never tell me about this

01:18:36   and just upload them all, or B, make it so that

01:18:40   I have some explanation for the failures

01:18:42   and like, or some kind of progress indication

01:18:44   or something that will, like if you're gonna give me

01:18:46   information, give me actionable information.

01:18:48   But otherwise, I would prefer it if you just

01:18:50   did your best and kept trying without any input from me

01:18:54   and it drives me nuts.

01:18:56   I've lost my train of thought

01:18:56   and I wasn't too busy being angry about that thing.

01:18:58   - Google IO.

01:18:59   - No, I know exactly what you're thinking of

01:19:02   and it's so bad, you're absolutely right.

01:19:04   - Do you use that thing as well, Casey?

01:19:06   - Yeah, yeah, the uploader that's on the map.

01:19:07   - And do you get suckered into going into the failed dialogue?

01:19:10   Failed uploads dialogue?

01:19:11   - Oh yes I do.

01:19:12   And it seems like there's about 10 files, mostly raw.

01:19:16   Now I have a ton of raw files, don't get me wrong,

01:19:18   so it uploads raw as a general point of fact,

01:19:21   But there are like 10 files that it just seems to forever be confused about.

01:19:26   And you can sort of figure out what they are, but yes, the everything you described, an

01:19:30   emphatic thumbs up to, well, really thumbs down to the uploader, but thumbs up to what

01:19:33   you were saying, because I completely agree.

01:19:35   Have you gotten to the point where you wrote down the file paths so that the next time

01:19:39   a dialogue comes up, you compare or screenshot it or otherwise try to record it?

01:19:44   I'm coming close to that because, you know, you can't remember what they're all like nonsense

01:19:47   names or whatever.

01:19:49   Like, is it the same three files that it's been telling me about every day for the past,

01:19:53   you know, year and a half?

01:19:54   And I don't know.

01:19:55   It's different amounts, I can tell you that.

01:19:57   Sometimes it's five, sometimes it's 100, sometimes it's 35, sometimes it's 50, like it tells

01:20:00   you the counts on them.

01:20:02   Anyway, this is a very long trip around for me to emphatically agreeing with Marco's other

01:20:06   complaint that using Apple's photos feels like walking through like waist-deep molasses,

01:20:10   right?

01:20:11   And this is an esoteric thing that I think only, that I'm particularly sensitive to,

01:20:17   And I think not everybody has the same hang-ups that I do about responsiveness, right?

01:20:20   But I have big, deep, deep hang-ups about responsiveness.

01:20:25   And everything I do in photos, because in photos you do a lot of repetitive operations.

01:20:29   Go to the next thing, crop, move, resize, adjust, star, favorite keyword, go to the

01:20:35   next thing, delete, go to the next thing.

01:20:38   Like that cycle, that thing I do when I do photos, when I go through my photos, every

01:20:44   Every single operation takes just a little bit longer than I think is reasonable.

01:20:49   Everything has this lag, has this, "Okay, eventually I'll do that.

01:20:53   Oh, did you want to crop?

01:20:55   Oh, you want to exit full screen?

01:20:57   Oh, you want to enter full screen.

01:20:59   Oh, you want to edit this photo?

01:21:01   Wait a second.

01:21:02   Wait, wait.

01:21:03   Okay, now I'm drawing the edit thing.

01:21:04   I want this to be so fast that before the key comes up off the keyboard, have it activated

01:21:10   on key down for cry.

01:21:12   I want it to be so incredibly fast because, I mean, at the time we bought this 5K iMac,

01:21:17   it was the fastest iMac you could buy.

01:21:20   And the fastest Mac you could buy, period, in single-threaded performance.

01:21:23   I don't know what the holdup is.

01:21:25   I do have a massive library.

01:21:27   I admit that my library is not small.

01:21:30   Maybe if I literally did have 100 photos, it would be fine.

01:21:32   I have, I think I'm up to 80,000, 90,000, I forget, I don't know if I've broken 100K

01:21:36   yet.

01:21:37   I have a lot of photos.

01:21:38   I understand it's a difficult problem case,

01:21:40   but this is what I want out of it.

01:21:44   And my perception of it is that it is slower now

01:21:47   than it was with iPhoto.

01:21:48   Now that's not fair because when I was using iPhoto,

01:21:51   especially older versions of iPhotos,

01:21:52   I had way fewer photos, right?

01:21:54   But on the other hand, I also had a slower Mac

01:21:56   and there was no SSD.

01:21:58   And like, I don't know, either way,

01:21:59   that's what I personally want out of this program.

01:22:01   And aside from the features,

01:22:03   I want it to just be so, so much faster.

01:22:07   make every single operation that I do,

01:22:10   like have as little lag as possible.

01:22:13   No transition, no redrawing things.

01:22:18   And again, it's not just a transition.

01:22:20   Very, very often I will hit a key combo

01:22:23   to like zoom to full screen

01:22:25   and either it will ignore the fact that I hit space bar,

01:22:28   it'll be like, that never happened.

01:22:30   I'm never gonna do that.

01:22:31   Or it will start at the animation to go into editing mode

01:22:35   and I double click the thing or click into edit mode,

01:22:37   it will start it perceptibly after I am completely done

01:22:41   with the input.

01:22:42   I have clicked or double clicked or done whatever.

01:22:45   Nothing happens on the screen for fractions of a second

01:22:48   that seem like an eternity, and then the animation begins

01:22:51   and I just wanna strangle somebody.

01:22:53   - All right, let's bring this back around.

01:22:54   Remember we were talking about Google I/O

01:22:56   like three hours ago?

01:22:57   (laughing)

01:22:59   - Related to that, and getting back to Google Photos,

01:23:01   getting back to Google Photos,

01:23:02   there was a comment I saw from somebody,

01:23:04   maybe it was Gruber, maybe it was just retweeting somebody.

01:23:06   Somebody's saying that using Google Photos

01:23:08   in your web browser is more responsive

01:23:11   than using the native Apple Photos app.

01:23:13   I wouldn't quite go that far because I don't do

01:23:18   the sort of going through photos, picking and editing

01:23:20   and tagging and stuff in Google Photos,

01:23:22   but I do use Google Photos in the web interface frequently,

01:23:25   basically to find a picture that I'm looking for.

01:23:27   I go into it, I use a search, which I think is pretty neat.

01:23:30   I try to use its facial recognition,

01:23:31   which is not really that much better than Apple's,

01:23:33   but it's what I've got or whatever.

01:23:35   And my perception of scrolling through,

01:23:38   especially like scrolling through photos by date

01:23:39   or filtering or searching,

01:23:40   those operations do actually feel faster

01:23:43   in Google Photos in Chrome than using the native app.

01:23:47   But for the picking and zooming and everything,

01:23:49   I imagine you'd end up with like download speed

01:23:51   being an issue because you gotta,

01:23:52   if I wanna see the full res photo to edit

01:23:54   and I wanna go to the next full res photo,

01:23:56   that's gonna happen way faster on my 5K iMac

01:23:58   with everything coming off the SSD

01:23:59   than it is gonna be pulling that stuff over the network.

01:24:01   So I'm not gonna go as far as whoever that person was

01:24:04   who said that the web version felt better than the native,

01:24:06   but the fact that there are any operations

01:24:08   in which it's a contest shows that Apple Photos

01:24:10   is a long way to go.

01:24:11   And kudos to Google for making essentially a webpage

01:24:14   that you can go to that I can scroll through

01:24:16   literally 90,000 photos and find what I want.

01:24:18   It's pretty amazing.

01:24:19   - Yeah, because this isn't like a web versus native

01:24:21   argument, this is just the Photos app on the Mac

01:24:24   is just not very good at all.

01:24:26   Like it really is quite poor.

01:24:28   And especially when you get into any kind of operation

01:24:31   where you're trying to go through a batch of photos

01:24:33   and pick through and delete and maybe star

01:24:37   or do minor edits on even.

01:24:39   It's again, it's just like it fights you at every turn.

01:24:41   Like it seems like it wants to show you its animations

01:24:43   more than it wants you to get your work done.

01:24:46   You're just, you're always waiting for it to do its thing,

01:24:49   to transition itself, to animate something.

01:24:52   It's also, I don't know, what do you guys think

01:24:54   of the incredibly deep like modal hierarchy

01:24:59   that it has in the various editing controls.

01:25:01   Like, you know, typically, like in a lot of image editors,

01:25:06   you have like a browsing mode,

01:25:08   and then you enter editing mode.

01:25:10   And in editing mode, pretty much all the controls

01:25:12   are visible, or at least very,

01:25:14   or at least can be collapsed out really quickly

01:25:16   with like a triangle dropdown thing.

01:25:18   But with photos, both on iOS and on the Mac,

01:25:21   it has these like, this like second tier,

01:25:24   so everything is like two or three levels in

01:25:26   where like, you go into editing mode,

01:25:28   You don't just have a crop control.

01:25:29   You have the controls box, and you open up the controls box,

01:25:34   and then you can crop from in there.

01:25:37   And everything is two or three levels deep.

01:25:40   And I find that quite cumbersome in real use.

01:25:44   And I know it's kind of a challenge on mobile

01:25:46   'cause there's not a lot of space for controls,

01:25:48   but on the Mac that's not true,

01:25:50   but it seems like on the Mac they have copied over

01:25:52   the iPhone style anyway unnecessarily,

01:25:55   I guess for consistency or because they didn't have

01:25:57   any better ideas, I don't know.

01:25:59   But there are a lot of powerful controls

01:26:02   that Photos on the Mac has, but they're buried

01:26:05   under so many different levels and modes

01:26:06   and you have to toggle them on every single time

01:26:08   and all these different things that I find it

01:26:10   just incredibly cumbersome.

01:26:12   Is it just me?

01:26:13   - No, that was, I remember the last time I complained

01:26:16   about it was about the crop aspect original,

01:26:18   crop aspect original, crop aspect original.

01:26:20   Because it wouldn't remember, and also as you point out,

01:26:22   because why do I have to go three levels deep

01:26:24   to get to this anyway?

01:26:25   Like, on my 5K iMac screen, it's comical

01:26:28   that I have to click the thing to go to the screen

01:26:31   where I can get my crop options,

01:26:32   then click the thing that brings up the crop options,

01:26:34   then click, like, there is so much room

01:26:36   on the side of that screen.

01:26:37   You could put literally every edit control.

01:26:39   I mean, it is a big screen, there's a lot of resolution.

01:26:43   There's not that many controls here.

01:26:46   Like, you know, that's why applications, you know,

01:26:49   from Adobe and some of it have

01:26:51   a bunch of configurable palettes.

01:26:52   Now, I'm not saying photos needs configurable palettes.

01:26:55   That is a pro feature that regular people,

01:26:57   you don't want to throw a bunch of pallets in their face.

01:26:58   It's too much.

01:26:59   But the old version, iPhoto before photos,

01:27:03   had a more Mac-like interface where they said,

01:27:05   well, we got all this screen real estate.

01:27:07   Let's put as many of the commonly used editing functions

01:27:10   on the screen at the same time.

01:27:12   It's visible interface in the same way

01:27:14   that Apple used to be all into the toolbars and stuff.

01:27:16   Don't hide everything away.

01:27:18   If you can make the controls visible to somebody,

01:27:22   it's easier than going hunting for them.

01:27:24   And the multi-layer certainly is elegant and clean,

01:27:26   but it has insults to injury on the timing thing,

01:27:28   because even setting aside the mysterious lag

01:27:30   before anything happens,

01:27:31   all those transitions have some kind of animation,

01:27:34   and they add up, and it doesn't remember your preferences.

01:27:36   And if you do the same thing over and over again,

01:27:38   you just feel like you're,

01:27:39   it's like you're eating dinner,

01:27:40   but every time you wanted to take a bite of your dinner,

01:27:42   you had to go to the kitchen,

01:27:43   take a fork out of the silverware drawer,

01:27:45   close the silverware drawer, come back down,

01:27:46   take a bite of your dinner,

01:27:49   and then throw that fork away into the garbage.

01:27:51   The next time you wanted to take a bite,

01:27:52   you gotta get it from your seat, go to the chicken,

01:27:53   Go to the kitchen, go to the silverware door,

01:27:55   take out your fork, close the door,

01:27:56   come back, sit down, take a bite with it,

01:27:57   throw the fork away.

01:27:58   That's what using photos feels like.

01:27:59   (laughing)

01:28:01   - My word.

01:28:02   - I could not have put it better.

01:28:03   That's perfect, that's exactly how it feels.

01:28:06   - So Kotlin's a thing.

01:28:08   Remember, we're talking about IO, kids.

01:28:11   (laughing)

01:28:13   So Google announced first party support

01:28:17   or official blessing, if nothing else, for Kotlin.

01:28:19   Now Kotlin is a language by JetBrains.

01:28:23   JetBrains is a third-party entity.

01:28:26   If you're a .NET developer or were once a .NET developer,

01:28:29   like myself, ReSharper is a JetBrains thing,

01:28:33   if I'm not mistaken.

01:28:34   - You're a recovering .NET developer.

01:28:35   - A recovering .NET developer.

01:28:37   And so JetBrains knows development tools pretty darn well.

01:28:42   And they decided to come up with Kotlin,

01:28:44   which my vague understanding is runs on the JVM.

01:28:48   It is compatible with the Android libraries.

01:28:53   What is it? Android Studio, I believe it is?

01:28:56   Shoot, I probably have that wrong, I apologize.

01:28:57   But anyway, the thing, the IDE that is the official

01:29:00   blessed IDE, I believe started as a JetBrains IDE.

01:29:04   This is for all of Android development, not just Kotlin.

01:29:07   And so yeah, now Google has said,

01:29:10   "Hey, we understand that Kotlin's a thing, we embrace it.

01:29:13   If you wanna make your apps in Kotlin, then feel free."

01:29:18   And what's really fascinating about Kotlin is

01:29:21   It's really eerily similar to Swift.

01:29:24   Now at this point, anyone with a neck beard

01:29:28   is probably saying, well, actually,

01:29:30   it's not exactly like Swift at all and blah, blah, blah.

01:29:32   But the point is, at a glance,

01:29:34   it looks really, really, really similar to Swift.

01:29:37   And that's a huge improvement,

01:29:39   because if you've ever seen how absolutely bananas

01:29:44   closures are in Java,

01:29:46   or at least up until modern versions of Java,

01:29:48   which I don't think Android supports,

01:29:50   maybe has just recently supported, closures are comically awful. And so Kotlin is a new-ish

01:29:59   language. It was started around the same time as Swift and looks really, really similar

01:30:04   to Swift. There's a website that's going around. We'll put a link in the show notes. It is

01:30:08   not a flawless comparison of Swift and Kotlin, but it gives you a basic idea of what the

01:30:13   two of them look like side by side. We'll put that in the show notes, like I said. This

01:30:16   This is super cool.

01:30:18   The team at work had been kind of looking at Kotlin and debating whether or not they

01:30:24   wanted to dive in with it, but it kind of pushed or pumped the brakes because it wasn't

01:30:28   officially blessed.

01:30:29   Well, now it's officially blessed, and so now we're going to start using it as far--well,

01:30:34   really, the Android team's going to start using it as far as I'm aware.

01:30:37   So this is all really cool stuff, and I'm really excited about it.

01:30:40   And I'm interested to see if server-side Swift and server-side Kotlin, if either of those

01:30:46   really becomes a thing, and if so, do both of them become a real thing, or is it just

01:30:51   Swift or just Kotlin? And, you know, are there, like, cross-compatibility libraries between

01:30:56   the two? I'm just curious to see where all this goes, but I think this is a super positive

01:30:59   move by Google, because, man, the versions of Java that our team is using, oh, they're

01:31:04   ugly. Man, are they ugly.

01:31:06   So this website that compares Swift and Kotlin, I mean, it's a useful thing to have, and,

01:31:12   you know, one of the things people are most interested about when they hear a new language

01:31:15   is like what does it look like?

01:31:16   And so this website is kind of saying at the top level, here's how they look similar.

01:31:22   And they do look very similar.

01:31:23   Like, what is the syntax?

01:31:24   What are they used for defining these common constructs and everything?

01:31:28   As you scroll down this page, you eventually get to the things that I'm more interested

01:31:32   in, which is, all right, well, so for the easy stuff, like how do you define a function

01:31:35   in a variable and how do you iterate over things and stuff like that, yeah, yeah, every

01:31:39   language has those.

01:31:41   But you get to the things that define the language that have nothing to do with the

01:31:45   syntax.

01:31:46   Like the way Swift leans on protocols and how it uses them to implement its standard

01:31:50   library and how you're expected to use them in your functions versus using inheritance

01:31:53   and stuff like that and the struct versus class thing.

01:31:56   Those are the things that make Swift Swift more, you know, practically speaking, more

01:32:01   than the syntax.

01:32:02   Because the syntax is the thing people care about.

01:32:05   It's kind of like that's the cover of the book.

01:32:06   But what's in the book is what really makes it different.

01:32:09   And if you scroll down this thing, you see that Kotlin is actually, at least superficially,

01:32:14   similar to Swift in that it supports a lot of the same constructs.

01:32:17   It's tuple return values, it does have protocols.

01:32:21   It's difficult for me to tell without knowing anything about Kotlin other than reading a

01:32:24   couple of web pages about it, how deep the similarity goes in terms of the things I just

01:32:28   said of like, you know, how does it use protocols in, you know, how does the language expect

01:32:33   you sort of culturally and as expressed through its own standard library to use protocols

01:32:38   versus inheritance, does it have the struct versus class distinction with the same trade-offs

01:32:43   that Swift has, or does it not have that at all? That's kind of the interesting question to me,

01:32:48   is how language looks is kind of good in that you'll be like, "Okay, I'm not scared of this.

01:32:55   It doesn't look like Erlang or Haskell. It looks like something I'm familiar with,

01:32:59   so I feel comfortable diving right in." But then, what does this language bring in terms of

01:33:07   new constructs and new ways of programming.

01:33:10   And to that end, one of the other things

01:33:11   I've heard about Kotlin,

01:33:12   maybe Casey can correct me if I'm wrong,

01:33:13   is that it has some things in its tool chest

01:33:17   or standard library or whatever that Swift doesn't yet

01:33:19   in terms of concurrency, is that the case?

01:33:22   - I don't know if Kotlin has it,

01:33:24   but I can assure you that Swift does not really yet.

01:33:27   I mean, Swift has Grand Central Dispatch,

01:33:28   but it's not entirely the sort of thing

01:33:31   that most people want.

01:33:32   Like, what most people want is more along the lines

01:33:34   of .NET's async/await,

01:33:36   and that certainly does not exist in Swift.

01:33:38   I honestly don't know if it exists in Kotlin.

01:33:41   - Yeah, but that's what I had heard,

01:33:42   that it had either some kind of async stuff,

01:33:44   that Kotlin has some kind of async stuff,

01:33:46   or maybe also coroutines like Go,

01:33:48   or that it was ahead of Swift in the area of concurrency,

01:33:50   because they had chosen a solution for that,

01:33:53   and had undertaken it, and Swift is still,

01:33:55   like it's still in Swift knows

01:33:56   that it needs to add it eventually,

01:33:57   and they don't have their big solution for that,

01:34:00   and like you said at the meantime,

01:34:00   it's like use Grand Central Dispatch.

01:34:02   Obviously, Kotlin is not an option for Apple,

01:34:06   because Kotlin does not prioritize Objective-C interop, which is kind of important for Apple.

01:34:11   So yeah, there's that.

01:34:14   And for Google, this is kind of weird that this is coming from a company that's outside

01:34:20   Google.

01:34:21   Like, is the move for Google to buy them now?

01:34:23   Because the reason this can happen is it's a JVM-based language, and they have this,

01:34:26   you know, you don't have to use Java.

01:34:28   There's lots of other languages that are on top of the JVM, and here's one of them.

01:34:31   And Kotlin is reportedly really, really good about Java compatibility, because that's their

01:34:36   equivalent of Objective-C interop.

01:34:38   You know, you totally can use this with your Java code, and even the weird nitty-gritty

01:34:42   corner case details will make that interop perfect, because that's this thing's whole

01:34:47   purpose in life.

01:34:48   So it could be that Kotlin ends up being Google Swift, or they just buy this company or whatever,

01:34:52   or an Open Standard just adopted a whole hog and say, "You know what?

01:34:56   Stop."

01:34:57   Like Apple has said, "Stop using the other language.

01:34:59   Use this one instead.

01:35:00   now on all of our examples, all of our libraries, all of everything will be in this Kotlin world.

01:35:06   I mean, two main barriers there. One, this company is not owned by Google yet, and two,

01:35:10   the name is terrible. Kotlin.

01:35:12   Fair enough. K-O-T-L-I-N. Big thumbs down. I apologize if that's someone's last name,

01:35:20   but when you're naming a computer language, marketing counts and Swift is a better name.

01:35:25   It's an island off Russia, I believe, or something like that.

01:35:29   There is a thing or place that it is named after, and I don't remember what it is.

01:35:34   And I mean, it's okay.

01:35:35   On the plus side, it's a little easier to search for because there are a few things

01:35:40   other than this island or whatever that are named Kotlin, whereas there's a gazillion

01:35:43   things that are named Swift or that have the word Swift in them, not the least of which

01:35:48   is Taylor Swift.

01:35:50   But I don't think it really rolls off the tongue either.

01:35:54   So I don't know, win some, lose some.

01:35:56   - It's like Apple with the place names for Mac OS.

01:35:58   Like it's good for you just this year's OS

01:36:00   is named after this place in California.

01:36:01   You can get away with kind of vanity place name,

01:36:03   sort of regional things like that with yearly releases,

01:36:07   but if you're gonna name a language,

01:36:09   probably not the best idea to name it

01:36:11   after some obscure place that's like

01:36:13   near the people who made it.

01:36:14   But what can you do?

01:36:15   It's their thing, they name it right up

01:36:16   until Google buys it and re-brands it.

01:36:19   (laughing)

01:36:21   - Indeed, but no, I'm really excited about this.

01:36:22   I think this is really awesome.

01:36:24   Again, I mean, look at, I forget what version of Java

01:36:27   that our team is using,

01:36:30   but it's at least a generation or two old.

01:36:32   And when you look at how they use closures

01:36:35   and what they, I think what they have to do is

01:36:37   they have to make like an anonymous class

01:36:39   and like implement a function on that class

01:36:42   or something along those lines.

01:36:43   So particular details aren't really that important.

01:36:46   Just the point is that to make a closure,

01:36:48   it is just comically just weird

01:36:52   and clunky and ridiculous.

01:36:55   And so even just getting a language

01:36:58   that supports closures better, I think, is a huge win.

01:37:01   Yes, I know that more modern versions of Java

01:37:03   do support this sort of thing,

01:37:05   but again, based off of what I see day to day,

01:37:09   it isn't a thing in our world,

01:37:12   in whatever version of Java we're running on,

01:37:14   and this is already a huge improvement.

01:37:17   - I thought Java programmers liked tons of complexity

01:37:20   and making tons of classes.

01:37:21   Isn't that the whole point of programming in Java?

01:37:23   - They like it when their IDE does that for them.

01:37:24   They just type two or three characters

01:37:26   and just auto-complete it all.

01:37:28   - Thanks for our three sponsors this week,

01:37:29   Squarespace, MailRoute, and Fracture.

01:37:31   And we will see you next week.

01:37:33   (upbeat music)

01:37:36   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:37:38   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:37:41   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:37:43   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:37:44   ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:37:45   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:37:47   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:37:49   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:37:51   'Cause it was accidental

01:37:54   It was accidental

01:37:57   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:38:02   And if you're into Twitter

01:38:05   You can follow them

01:38:07   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:38:11   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:38:16   ♪ Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:38:21   ♪ U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A ♪

01:38:23   ♪ It's accidental, accidental ♪

01:38:26   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:38:29   ♪ Accidental, accidental ♪

01:38:31   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:38:35   - You know, I really hope that the new MacBook

01:38:39   actually comes out soon.

01:38:40   And people are saying it might come out next week,

01:38:43   or two weeks from at WBC, I really hope that it does,

01:38:48   'cause I cannot wait to hear what you think of it

01:38:51   after you've used it for like a month.

01:38:54   I really am curious to hear this,

01:38:55   because you tend to have relatively similar needs as I do.

01:39:00   - Yeah.

01:39:00   - And most people who I know who have had

01:39:04   the 12-inch MacBook, who have enjoyed it,

01:39:07   have had much lighter needs.

01:39:09   It's people who are writers,

01:39:10   or who are doing basic productivity tasks,

01:39:12   like email and stuff on it mostly.

01:39:14   I don't know a lot of programmers who use them.

01:39:18   And so I would love to hear your opinion of it

01:39:21   when you get it.

01:39:23   And I can't say I'm rooting for you to hate it,

01:39:26   but that might be interesting if you did.

01:39:29   I don't know.

01:39:30   I just, I really want to hear your opinion of it.

01:39:32   And that's assuming that they don't make

01:39:35   like massive upgrades to it in this next version,

01:39:38   which I doubt they, I'm expecting the same thing

01:39:41   with Kaby Lake? Well to be fair, I don't think I would be doing very much development on it.

01:39:45   You know, if I did, it would just be for personal things. Like, it's unlikely that I would do any

01:39:50   real work, and by that I mean work for my job work on it. I would certainly write for my blog,

01:39:57   and that's just Visual Studio Code, which is Electron-based, but unlike Slack is actually

01:40:01   well done. And so I would do a little development, sort of, kind of, in that regard. But the

01:40:10   The likelihood of me running Xcode for more than a few minutes to do a quick fix or something

01:40:15   like that is not terribly likely.

01:40:18   So I understand what you're saying, and by and large I agree with you and I am also interested

01:40:23   in it, but I don't think it's a perfect apples-to-apples comparison because I will probably not be doing

01:40:29   much "real work" on it.

01:40:32   So eventually, assuming my work ever buys a new line of Apple's laptops and doesn't

01:40:38   continue to buy the 2015s, all three of us will have daily access to a Mac with the new

01:40:46   low profile keyboard.

01:40:47   And that will be an interesting test case.

01:40:49   One, I guess for reliability.

01:40:50   Well, speaking of reliability, I just learned that the 2015 MacBook Pro I have at work has

01:40:58   the screen delamination problem.

01:40:59   Oh, delightful.

01:41:00   At first I thought it was like someone had rubbed off the anti-glare surface, but now

01:41:04   seeing Gruber post pictures of his issue and hearing other people talk about it, that it's

01:41:09   a delamination thing, which in theory I could just go get replaced, but I'm not going to

01:41:12   because it's not my computer and I don't want to be without it at work.

01:41:16   But then all three of us having the keyboard, we'll see where we all end up with in terms

01:41:20   of liking or disliking the feel of the keyboard.

01:41:23   We have heard a lot of reports from people saying that they really love it and that the

01:41:26   old keyboards feel like junk now, and I feel like that could definitely be a thing.

01:41:29   But then also reliability.

01:41:30   If all three of us get it, and within a couple months, all three of us have keyboard problems

01:41:34   that cause them to be repaired, again, perhaps not statistically significant, even though

01:41:38   that phrase means nothing, and none of us know anything about statistics.

01:41:41   But anyway, it is something versus if it's just Marco that has the problem and our keys

01:41:46   work fine for year after year.

01:41:47   Yeah, I mean, if that ends up being the case and if yours are perfect, then I will gladly

01:41:52   go in and get mine serviced and not complain about it anymore after, well, for—

01:41:56   I'll go play one more time.

01:41:57   Well, one of those things is true.

01:41:58   - They also use ours outdoors where it's hot.

01:42:00   I mean, Casey can do that down there in the south,

01:42:02   but if you're gonna take yours to the beach and stuff,

01:42:03   but I'm just using mine in an air-conditioned office,

01:42:05   I'm never gonna run into whatever heat expansion thing

01:42:07   you're running into, you know?

01:42:08   - It was like in the '70s, it wasn't even that hot.

01:42:11   - Yeah, I don't know.

01:42:12   - But what happened, when I first had the problem,

01:42:14   just the O key was stuck down,

01:42:17   and then I eventually dislodged it

01:42:19   and it kinda stuck back up.

01:42:21   What I realized it was a bigger problem

01:42:23   was when I was sitting in this 75-degree environment

01:42:27   typing away, all of a sudden lots of keys started misbehaving and feeling weird, sounding

01:42:33   different and clicking weirdly and being less reliable. And that's when I realized this

01:42:39   is not just one speck of dust under one key, this is like many keys suddenly misbehaving

01:42:45   and then since that day it hasn't happened again. So this is not just a dust thing, this

01:42:51   is an actual flaw in the way these things react to something that seems like it might

01:42:56   be heat. But I don't know. It's really... I hope this is a temporary thing that I can

01:43:03   just get it fixed once. But I just... I don't have high hopes.

01:43:06   [BEEPING]