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207: Selling Hot Dogs on a Stick

 

00:00:00   I just for the first time in a while picked up my iPhone 5s.

00:00:03   I had it out for overcast testing.

00:00:06   - Mistake.

00:00:07   - It's waffle time.

00:00:09   (beeping)

00:00:10   - It's so good.

00:00:12   (laughing)

00:00:13   - See, but try accomplishing anything on it.

00:00:16   - You are like someone who we're trying not to mention

00:00:18   and whatever the last thing that you've done

00:00:21   is like that has the most impression on you.

00:00:23   (laughing)

00:00:24   Oh God, oh God.

00:00:26   No, I mean, it's the kind of thing,

00:00:28   Like I saw, I was doing some testing a few days ago

00:00:30   and that's why I just picked it up,

00:00:32   now I'm moving it out of the way so we can do the show.

00:00:34   It just feels so good when I pick it up

00:00:36   and I'm like, man, it looks so good.

00:00:38   I wish phones could still look that good

00:00:39   and would still feel good in my hand.

00:00:42   But then when I actually use it to do my tests,

00:00:44   I'm just like, man, this is such a toy.

00:00:47   This is so small.

00:00:49   This is so, I've actually, I've honestly been thinking like,

00:00:52   okay, so my phone is continuing to not be able

00:00:56   to make phone calls reliably.

00:00:57   Since day one, both mine and TIFF's iPhone 7s

00:01:02   have been very frequently exhibiting the exact same problem

00:01:06   of the microphone cuts out during phone calls

00:01:09   so that the other person can't hear us

00:01:10   for like 10 seconds or 15 seconds at a time,

00:01:13   often resulting in them saying hello, hello, hello

00:01:15   until they hang up, and we're screaming,

00:01:16   we're here, we're here, we're here,

00:01:18   and they just hang up after a while

00:01:19   'cause usually it doesn't recover.

00:01:22   And it's, you know, you say you might think

00:01:25   you're never on the phone.

00:01:27   "Oh, I never take phone calls.

00:01:29   "I use apps on my phone all the time."

00:01:31   You'd be surprised how many times

00:01:33   a phone call becomes something important,

00:01:36   even in a lifestyle like this.

00:01:38   (laughing)

00:01:40   Simple things like when your credit card gets flagged

00:01:42   for fraud and you have to call them and explain it,

00:01:45   and they hang up on you in the middle

00:01:46   'cause they say, "I'm sorry, it seems like

00:01:48   "no one's here anymore, we have to hang up."

00:01:50   Anyway, so I've been thinking about maybe

00:01:54   trying a plus while I get this phone fixed.

00:01:58   - Oh, boo.

00:02:00   - But I don't know.

00:02:01   I just keep waffling 'cause the camera on it is so good,

00:02:04   even though it's not that great in low light,

00:02:06   but I don't know.

00:02:08   'Cause I use my phone so much,

00:02:10   and so often I wish the screen was bigger,

00:02:13   but when I do have the plus for a week here or there,

00:02:16   I'm just like, oh, this is so unwieldy in my hand.

00:02:19   I hate holding it.

00:02:19   I hate it so it's-- - Yep.

00:02:22   - I don't know.

00:02:22   Anyway, that's the current waffle,

00:02:24   but it's not a very serious waffle yet.

00:02:25   Maybe Mike will work on it for another couple of weeks

00:02:27   and we'll see, but probably not.

00:02:28   I'll probably just wait till the next one.

00:02:30   - Can we not put this in the show?

00:02:31   'Cause I don't wanna hear Mike's lip

00:02:32   after it's inevitably released

00:02:34   and then he starts celebrating on you waffling again.

00:02:37   Also, I take issue with something you said a minute ago.

00:02:40   The 5S unquestionably feels amazing in the hand.

00:02:45   Oh my God, it feels so good in the hand.

00:02:47   But I actually stand by my earlier assessment

00:02:51   that this iPhone 7 matte black that I have in my hands,

00:02:56   while unquestionably slippier than the most slippy soap

00:03:01   that you've ever held,

00:03:02   it is aesthetically my favorite iPhone I've ever used,

00:03:05   which is unfortunate because it is like holding a bar of soap

00:03:08   but God, I think this thing is beautiful.

00:03:10   And that doesn't mean you have to agree,

00:03:11   but this is my favorite phone

00:03:13   of all the iPhones I've owned purely visually.

00:03:16   - On the phone size thing,

00:03:19   the AirPods are giving me a little bit of relief from the excessive size of the 6, which

00:03:27   is the only size of iPhone I've had, but it's obviously bigger than the Plus, or not the

00:03:31   Plus, the iPod Touches I used to use. Remember I said when I first got the AirPods that the

00:03:36   clicker thing on my wired headphones was beating them in the kitchen? Well, the AirPods have

00:03:41   made a comeback because they allow me to put my phone down someplace else and not have

00:03:47   it in my pocket, which you wouldn't think would make a difference when I'm going around

00:03:49   the kitchen and cooking.

00:03:51   But when you're cooking in the kitchen, occasionally you have to bend down to get like a pot out

00:03:54   of a low thing or whatever.

00:03:56   And no matter which pocket I put my phone in, it's just big enough to be uncomfortable

00:04:01   when I bend down that I feel like I'm either bending my phone or it's just, you know, I

00:04:04   don't know, it's just nice not to have it there.

00:04:07   It's just, anyway, I feel better when I put my phone down, you know, on a side table in

00:04:14   the other room and then just walk around the kitchen with my AirPods.

00:04:16   The AirPods are back in the house now.

00:04:18   And it just goes to show that I would never trade down this for the smaller size, no matter

00:04:23   how good it feels in the hand because, like Marco said, you don't just hold the thing.

00:04:28   It's not a worry stone that you just rub in your hand.

00:04:30   You actually look at it and touch the screen.

00:04:32   And for looking and touching the screen, I want a bigger screen, so I have one.

00:04:35   But I do like that the AirPods are letting me keep my phone away from myself while listening

00:04:40   to audio.

00:04:41   I'm just, I'm so torn because whenever I am using it,

00:04:45   I want a bigger screen, but whenever I'm holding it,

00:04:47   I want a smaller phone.

00:04:49   - You're talking about the 5S?

00:04:50   - No, I'm talking about the middle one,

00:04:51   the 4.7 inch size.

00:04:53   - Oh, oh, oh, oh.

00:04:54   - I'm never happy with this size,

00:04:57   but I'm also not happy with any of the other ones.

00:05:00   So I picked the one in the middle

00:05:01   that's kind of mediocre at everything,

00:05:03   and I'm, I guess, least unhappy with it,

00:05:07   but I don't know, this is why I'm hoping so much

00:05:10   that the next industrial design of the phone

00:05:12   puts a larger screen in smaller bodies.

00:05:14   I would love so much to have the size screen

00:05:19   the Plus has, but in something that isn't quite

00:05:21   as much bigger than the Plus.

00:05:23   Any reduction in size would probably be enough

00:05:27   to push me over the edge, even if it's a small reduction,

00:05:30   just like fine.

00:05:31   And I'm not talking about thickness.

00:05:33   As you know from ever listening to me complain

00:05:36   about anything ever, I don't care that much about thickness.

00:05:39   In the iPhone's case, it's more about the footprint,

00:05:42   the dimensions, 'cause that's what makes it awkward

00:05:44   in the hand and awkward in my pocket.

00:05:47   The thickness itself is not that important to me.

00:05:50   So I'm really, really hoping the next one

00:05:53   does something like that, but I don't know.

00:05:55   They keep selling so many of these,

00:05:56   I don't know if they're ever gonna change it.

00:05:58   Speaking of topical things.

00:06:00   - So I have a question.

00:06:02   If the next iPhone, let's just assume

00:06:06   it's called an iPhone 8.

00:06:07   I'm not saying that's what I expect.

00:06:08   Let's just assume for this conversation that the next iPhone is the iPhone 8.

00:06:12   And let's assume for the sake of conversation that it is approximately the same size as

00:06:17   an iPhone 7, physically speaking, but the screen, because of smaller bezels or John

00:06:22   Bezels, however, is now roughly the size of a 7 Plus.

00:06:28   I don't even care if that's like possible physically, just for the sake of discussion.

00:06:33   Is Mike right if we all get these iPhone 8s that are physically the size that we've always

00:06:40   used, but the screen size is the size of a Plus?

00:06:44   Is Mike right?

00:06:45   Yes or no?

00:06:46   Is it like the TARDIS where it's bigger on the inside?

00:06:48   The math doesn't work out on that.

00:06:50   Just go with it.

00:06:51   No, I mean, just go with it.

00:06:52   It's like, what if you could have a bus, but it was the size of a Matchbox car, but it

00:06:56   fit your whole family.

00:06:57   Precisely.

00:06:58   You get it, John.

00:06:59   You get it.

00:07:00   For reference, so I have all three phones that we're talking about right here on my

00:07:02   I've been doing this testing,

00:07:03   and if you place the iPhone 7 on top of a Plus phone,

00:07:08   you can still see the size of the Plus phone screen

00:07:12   sticking out of the left and right.

00:07:14   (laughing)

00:07:15   - I don't think Casey knows how big a Plus is.

00:07:17   It's way bigger.

00:07:17   - Yeah, it's a lot bigger.

00:07:18   (laughing)

00:07:20   So yeah, it's not possible to shove the massive screen

00:07:23   into the mid-sized body.

00:07:24   It is possible to put the massive screen

00:07:27   into a phone that is less massive.

00:07:29   It would still be a very large phone,

00:07:32   but it would be possible.

00:07:34   It would be more pleasant in the hand.

00:07:36   It would be a little bit smaller.

00:07:38   And honestly, I mean, none of the three of us

00:07:41   have ever, to the best of my knowledge,

00:07:42   correct me if I'm wrong, spent any time

00:07:44   with one of these Android curved screen edge phones.

00:07:47   But you can look at other phones on the market

00:07:51   and they have creative ways to shove large screens

00:07:56   into at least narrower phones and maybe also shorter,

00:07:59   but narrower is usually the more important one.

00:08:02   And I think I would agree with that in the hand,

00:08:04   narrower is kind of more important

00:08:05   for whether you can reach things with your hand

00:08:07   and how it fits, how you hold it.

00:08:09   But man, I just, again, any, like,

00:08:12   the very slightest improvement in size of the big one,

00:08:17   I'm getting it.

00:08:18   - You won't be swayed by what they're probably gonna do,

00:08:21   which is keep the seven form factor

00:08:24   but pulling the margins on that.

00:08:26   Like, so same size screen as the seven,

00:08:28   but smaller surround.

00:08:29   So basically it's making it in your hand feel closer

00:08:32   to the five size.

00:08:34   You'd still go for the big giant phone

00:08:36   with its margins pulled in as opposed to the middle phone

00:08:39   with the margins pulled in.

00:08:40   - So you're probably right that that is probably

00:08:43   the kind of thing they would do.

00:08:44   Like if they do one, they would probably do both

00:08:46   with the same kind of treatment.

00:08:48   So the phone you just described,

00:08:51   which is basically like the iPhone 8 minus,

00:08:54   it would be really, really great feeling in my hand.

00:08:57   However, I would have the same problems I have

00:09:00   with the current six, which is, or seven, this design,

00:09:03   which is that I just keep wanting more screen space

00:09:06   and all the biggest battery and the biggest camera.

00:09:10   Although honestly, truth be told,

00:09:12   I have been totally fine with the battery on the seven.

00:09:15   - Yeah, agreed.

00:09:16   - And part of that's 'cause I'm doing

00:09:17   a lot of iOS development,

00:09:18   so it's plugged in a lot during the day.

00:09:21   (laughs)

00:09:22   But overall, the battery life on the seven

00:09:24   is noticeably better than it was in the 6S for me

00:09:28   in my real world use.

00:09:29   It is a substantial difference.

00:09:31   And it's to the point now where,

00:09:33   like Tiff and I, a few years ago,

00:09:36   I ran a lightning cable between two segments of our couch

00:09:40   so that we would just always be able to pull,

00:09:42   between two of the cushions,

00:09:43   we would just be able to pull up a cable

00:09:45   and plug our phone in.

00:09:46   Called a charger couch, it's a great idea.

00:09:48   And we recently had to replace the couch

00:09:50   and I haven't even set up the new one yet

00:09:52   with the charger cable,

00:09:53   'cause I realized we never really use it anymore.

00:09:56   'Cause Tiff's phone always has

00:09:57   the giant battery backpack on it,

00:09:58   and mine is always plugged into my computer all day,

00:10:01   and when I'm actually using it throughout their outside world

00:10:04   the battery is actually better enough in the 7,

00:10:07   the regular size 7.

00:10:08   So that is good for them.

00:10:10   I'm really happy about that in practice.

00:10:13   And that's one of the reasons why overall

00:10:16   I am happier than I thought I would be with the 7.

00:10:19   That being said, I still want the bigger screen

00:10:21   and whatever the best camera is.

00:10:23   Hopefully in the next one they can fit

00:10:24   two image stabilized cameras,

00:10:26   and hopefully the zoomed in one is both stabilized

00:10:29   and not a meaningfully smaller aperture.

00:10:32   So that would be nice, but I still do want

00:10:35   the best, best, best of all that stuff,

00:10:37   because I use my phone so heavily

00:10:39   for so many things throughout the day.

00:10:41   - Sorry, Apple doesn't make best, best, best

00:10:43   of anything anymore.

00:10:44   - I know, that's kind of the problem, right?

00:10:46   Yeah, you gotta decide what asterisks

00:10:49   you're willing to tolerate.

00:10:51   But anyway, so to answer your question, Jon,

00:10:53   I should probably just go ahead and get the big one

00:10:56   next time, assuming it is a little bit smaller.

00:10:58   But the whole time I would have it,

00:11:00   I would be waffling in the other direction.

00:11:02   So you'll hear about it, just wait about,

00:11:04   what, about nine months, and you'll start hearing me--

00:11:06   - I'm gonna say this is like, you will buy the bigger one,

00:11:09   you will receive it, you will use it for a week,

00:11:11   and then you will keep it for testing purposes

00:11:13   but buy a smaller one and use it as your phone.

00:11:15   (laughing)

00:11:16   - Maybe.

00:11:17   No, I just want my wonderful seven

00:11:19   that I'm unreasonably happy with in other ways,

00:11:22   I just want it to be able to make phone calls.

00:11:25   It's kind of important.

00:11:26   - Do you think that's related to the Intel,

00:11:28   do you have the Intel chip instead of the Qualcomm one,

00:11:30   the radio?

00:11:31   - I do, that's another thing.

00:11:33   So I do have, every, I think AT&T sold phone.

00:11:38   I think all of them except, in the US,

00:11:41   I think all of them except the Verizon one

00:11:43   have the Intel one. - Except my phone, yeah.

00:11:44   That I never make phone calls from.

00:11:46   - Right, exactly.

00:11:47   So that was also one of my theories is,

00:11:50   if I send this in to get fixed

00:11:51   and I buy a new phone in the meantime,

00:11:53   I would buy a Verizon unlocked one.

00:11:54   And then just maybe, you know,

00:11:56   if I get the old one back, then sell it or something,

00:12:00   I don't know, I just don't wanna deal with it.

00:12:02   This is why I haven't gotten it fixed yet.

00:12:03   It hasn't been able to make phone calls reliably

00:12:04   since day one.

00:12:05   But I just, like, I need my phone all the time.

00:12:08   And so there hasn't been a time where I've wanted to like,

00:12:12   you know, ship it back and be without it

00:12:13   for probably at least a few days

00:12:15   while Apple does whatever to it.

00:12:17   and then it comes back and maybe isn't fixed.

00:12:19   - Mine has been completely fine,

00:12:21   and Aaron's to the best of my knowledge

00:12:23   have both been completely fine since we've gotten them.

00:12:24   We're both on AT&T, both on iPhone 7s,

00:12:27   and they've both been no problem at all.

00:12:30   Which, I'm not to say that you're wrong or anything,

00:12:33   obviously your experience is your experience,

00:12:35   but it's not a systemic issue

00:12:38   with all the Intel chips it would seem.

00:12:40   - Yeah, that's what I was wondering

00:12:41   if it was like an OS bug or something.

00:12:43   By the way, speaking of like how often we use our phones,

00:12:45   I have my phone right here and I can pull up

00:12:47   How often I...

00:12:49   Does all calls do sent and received or just sent? I'm going on the recent call section in the all tab.

00:12:55   That's everything right? I would think so. So this is 2017 phone calls for me.

00:12:59   One on the fifth

00:13:02   from my house

00:13:04   Spam call on the 12th, spam call on the 18th,

00:13:07   one on Thursday, spam call on Thursday, and then one today.

00:13:13   So that's everything in 20 one two three spam calls and three legit calls in 2017 so far

00:13:19   It's February don't use my phone a lot. I have 52 calls in 2017

00:13:25   Yeah, so you're you're feeling the pain of a weird microphone a lot more than I am yes

00:13:30   32 33

00:13:32   8 for screens

00:13:34   Yeah, it's it's somewhere between 40 and 50 and and I'm using that no more robo thing to like I don't it's I mean it

00:13:41   I'm using it and I like the fact that it has caught some but I don't like that if you still get through

00:13:47   Yeah, so iPhone 7 overall thumbs up, but for God's sake I want to make phone calls reliably and Noma Robo also thumbs up

00:13:55   Big big supporter of that now. I tried a lot of the call blocking things Noma Robo was the best

00:14:01   I think it's like two bucks a month some kind of subscription price, but it's worth it

00:14:05   Do it. Oh, yeah. Well, I would I would pay more if it worked better

00:14:09   Although I still have Haya on here,

00:14:11   which was the one I was using before,

00:14:12   which as you pointed out Marco doesn't work

00:14:13   and is annoying and is slightly evil.

00:14:15   Because Haya lets you look up numbers,

00:14:17   so when one of them gets through and I don't answer it,

00:14:21   'cause why would I, I wanna know is this a spam caller?

00:14:24   And I can just go to Haya and paste in the number

00:14:26   and it says oh, nine out of 10 people

00:14:28   reported this as spam and I know.

00:14:30   - Yeah, I mean I've had Nomorobo miss spam calls

00:14:35   a couple of times in the last few days,

00:14:37   but overall it's been very solid.

00:14:39   'Cause when I'm not running a blocker of some sort,

00:14:42   I get roughly one a day maybe.

00:14:46   - Really?

00:14:46   - Yeah, for the last couple years I've gotten

00:14:48   almost one a day.

00:14:49   Maybe it's more like four or five a week,

00:14:51   so it's not quite one a day, but in that ballpark.

00:14:54   And I had a high block zero of them ever.

00:14:57   I ran it for two months.

00:14:58   And then I've had no more robo now for a couple of weeks

00:15:01   and I have gotten I think one or two in two weeks or so.

00:15:06   weeks or so.

00:15:07   We'll put a link to Marco's article about this in the show notes because it's hard

00:15:11   to understand the name of these things.

00:15:13   We're saying "Hiya" as in the word "Hi" and then "Yuh" is short for "You".

00:15:18   H-I-Y-A.

00:15:19   And then "No-Mo-Robo" is "No more robo calls" but it's N-O-M-O-R-O-B-O all one

00:15:24   word.

00:15:25   Yeah.

00:15:26   Anyway, we'll link to the blog post.

00:15:27   All this stuff is linked.

00:15:28   It just sounds like we're saying made up words but these are real apps.

00:15:31   Welcome to the app naming.

00:15:33   It's like, you know, Web 2.0 site naming where you had to like spell everything because it's

00:15:37   like, "Oh, well, it's like Flickr without the 'e'."

00:15:41   I don't know who else would name sites like that.

00:15:44   Yeah, who would that be?

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00:17:52   (upbeat music)

00:17:56   All right, so let's start with some follow-up,

00:17:58   if you can claim starting this late.

00:18:00   Most important piece of follow-up that I think we have,

00:18:04   which is not in the list, which makes Jon oh so happy

00:18:07   when I go off schedule like this,

00:18:09   I have heard a lot of feedback about my shower habits,

00:18:12   and I have heard one or two pieces of feedback

00:18:16   that has disagreed with me and said,

00:18:19   I am a barbarian for showering at night.

00:18:21   And overwhelming amounts of feedback,

00:18:24   probably because we've been hiding in the shadows for all these years, ashamed at our

00:18:29   peculiar ways.

00:18:30   David Eagleman Dozens of us.

00:18:31   Dozens.

00:18:32   Steven McLaughlin Dozens of us, I tell you.

00:18:34   An overwhelming amount of feedback, including many people making that same reference, have

00:18:38   said it is absolutely the only way to go.

00:18:41   You must shower at night.

00:18:42   It is disgusting to shower during the morning time.

00:18:47   And many people wrote in to say, I want to—I should have kept notes, but I believe it was

00:18:52   Japan.

00:18:53   culturally the way they do it is to shower at night. Forgive me. It was like every country

00:18:58   outside of the United States. Like, Howard characterized the feedback was, well, first of all,

00:19:03   still the vast majority of the entire United States is against Casey, and they didn't write

00:19:06   in because they have a silent majority. That's probably true. But basically every other person

00:19:10   wrote in and said, "In insert country that's not the United States, everybody either showers at

00:19:16   night or showers twice a day." Nobody wrote in from other countries and said, "Oh, we all shower in

00:19:19   in the morning because maybe there's some majority too but lots of people from many

00:19:23   different countries in Europe, South America, Asia, everywhere they're all like oh we totally

00:19:27   shower at night but United States nothing from them because we all know Casey's crazy

00:19:31   and so they just let him be.

00:19:33   Michael Scott There also were clear trends where hotter countries

00:19:37   would more often do it and also it seemed more prevalent in Asia than other places.

00:19:41   Michael Scott Yeah and some people point out the farther

00:19:43   you get from Europe the more showers people take.

00:19:48   who lived in South America, but yeah. Although I didn't pick this up because I didn't

00:19:53   think there was anything to follow up on. I thought we covered all the bases. But since

00:19:56   Casey insists on bringing it back up, one point that nobody brought up the last time

00:20:01   is like what I think is the obvious reason, which again wasn't stated because we all

00:20:05   know Casey's the outlier here, that people shower in the morning gets back to the Dilbert

00:20:10   comic strip with after you shower you're the cleanest object in your house, right?

00:20:13   So after you shower, that's the cleanest you're going to get and you're just going

00:20:15   to get sweatier during the day. If you shower in the morning, your interactions with other

00:20:20   people for your day, for your nine to five day, present you at the cleanest because you

00:20:24   go from maximal cleanness slowly degrading until five o'clock, right? Those are the best

00:20:28   hours you give or the hours you're with, you know, you're at work and with other people.

00:20:32   If you shower at night, you've got a good solid eight hours of sweating in your bed

00:20:36   before you meet the first person the next day for work. So that's the obvious morning

00:20:39   shower thing. And I'm assuming that's why everybody in America showers in the morning.

00:20:42   I know, Jon, there's these magical devices. They're called air conditioners.

00:20:47   And you can turn them on, and it conditions the air.

00:20:51   Because no one sweats at night if the room is the right temperature.

00:20:54   Something like that.

00:20:55   I have some bad news for you, slash your wife, as you age about night sweats.

00:21:01   [laughs]

00:21:04   Oh, Jon, I love having the old man on the show to keep us in check.

00:21:08   I love how like this week like everyone else is talking about Apple earnings and we're talking about showers again

00:21:14   We'll get there. This is just follow up and Casey added this. I didn't have it in the notes

00:21:19   Casey wanted to bring it up. He's digging his own grave. John loves it when I just throw something in at the last second

00:21:24   It's his favorite

00:21:26   Also, I'm gonna rearrange the show notes aspartame is the artificial sweetener and diet coke not sucralose. I don't personally care

00:21:33   Whatever it is. It's freaking delicious. It was it was Marco who got it wrong. I got complaining about our first sweeteners

00:21:38   I knew that already, but it doesn't really matter. It's like the concept of an artificial

00:21:44   sweetener, I made some reference to it causing cancer, and of course we heard from everybody

00:21:49   about how it does or doesn't cause cancer, which chemical does or doesn't.

00:21:53   It doesn't, but you were making a joke. I took it as a joke, but other people took it

00:21:56   seriously which is worth pointing out.

00:21:57   I was making a joke, yes.

00:21:59   That's not a real thing, don't be afraid. You should be afraid perhaps of weight gain

00:22:05   and some relation to diabetes from drinking diet soda.

00:22:08   But there's lots of studies in that of like,

00:22:09   how could diet soda cause you to gain weight?

00:22:11   It's zero calories and how does it have anything

00:22:13   to do with diabetes?

00:22:14   But there's lots of studies around that

00:22:15   that do indicate there might be something

00:22:17   to be concerned about, but cancer not so much.

00:22:19   - I mean, in general, training yourself and your palate

00:22:23   to not need all of your drinks to be sweetened

00:22:26   is always a good thing.

00:22:28   Because like, basically, for purposes of like calorie

00:22:32   and sugar control, the stupidest thing you could possibly do

00:22:35   is drink a lot of calories.

00:22:37   Like, it's just, it works so much against you.

00:22:39   It is so incredibly bad for you.

00:22:40   So like, anything that conditions you

00:22:42   to still want all your drinks to be sweet

00:22:44   probably works against you in that way,

00:22:47   even if one of the things you drink

00:22:49   has a zero calorie sweetener.

00:22:51   - Yeah, I don't know.

00:22:52   It still tastes delicious and I'm good with that.

00:22:54   Remco Vandenbosch writes in to say,

00:22:57   "Once iOS 10.3 comes out,

00:23:00   "do you think it will be worth restoring my iPhone

00:23:02   from scratch to get more APFS benefits.

00:23:06   And then he or she, they, talk for a little while about the HFS to APFS conversion.

00:23:14   Is that good?

00:23:15   Is that bad?

00:23:16   John, as our resident file system expert, what do you think?

00:23:20   So what he's asking about, I think, is if you leave all the data where it is and just

00:23:24   write all the metadata to new places, maybe you have files that are fragmented and other

00:23:28   stuff like that.

00:23:29   if by the way, HFS+ on iOS does the auto-defragmenting stuff that they added to HFS+ years ago, like

00:23:36   where it will find files below a certain size that are overly fragmented in its spare time,

00:23:40   defragment them and stuff.

00:23:43   But so, basically it's asking like, would it be better, ideally speaking, to wipe your

00:23:48   whole phone, reformat it as APFS and refill it with your data so that you'd have fewer

00:23:54   fragmented files?

00:23:56   And in theory, I think you could potentially get a nicer, less fragmented layout, but I

00:24:08   don't think it would be anything that you would notice and I think it would actually

00:24:11   even be hard to measure.

00:24:13   Because Flash is not a spinning disk and Random Access is faster on Flash than it is on spinning

00:24:19   disks and fragmentation, even if they don't have the auto-defragment stuff that's part

00:24:25   of HFS Plus. It's probably not that big of a concern. So I don't, I think you would get

00:24:32   some benefit that maybe if you took great pains to measure it and had a really thrashed

00:24:36   phone and compared it with a fresh one you would see, but it's definitely not worth people

00:24:40   doing. So just let it convert in place and it'll be fine. So that's my advice.

00:24:46   Cool.

00:24:47   Oh, and there's also a question about whether APFS will be open source, like HFS Plus is

00:24:52   is kinda, sorta.

00:24:53   And what Apple has said about that is they're going to document the, what did they say,

00:25:02   the volume format?

00:25:03   Yeah, the volume specification.

00:25:05   So they're gonna put a document out for that.

00:25:07   But that's not the source code, but that's just like telling you, "Hey, here's how the

00:25:09   bits are on disk."

00:25:10   And all they say is, "An open source implementation is not available at this time."

00:25:15   Doesn't say anything about the future, but who knows?

00:25:17   So basically somebody else could theoretically make a third-party tool or driver to at least

00:25:24   read APFS volumes and probably also write them, but you probably wouldn't want to rely

00:25:29   on it.

00:25:30   Kind of like the whole Mac on Windows and NTFS on Mac kind of things, right?

00:25:33   Yeah, and you can see the HFS Plus code, which was very helpful for all my OS X reviews.

00:25:39   It's all in the Darwin source repository.

00:25:42   But APFS, I'm not sure there's a big benefit to them open sourcing it because it's not

00:25:46   like, unlike Swift, I don't think they want APFS to take over the world. Instead, I think

00:25:49   they want it to be a custom tailored operating system just for their devices that they're

00:25:53   free to change in any way they want, and I bet they will. And I don't know if anybody

00:25:58   else has the exact needs that Apple has. Like, if you look at the features of APFS, they

00:26:02   are excluding the ones that are, you know, fancy new features. All the other features,

00:26:08   like having like per file encryption keys and foregoing a lot of these ZFS data integrity

00:26:13   features and stuff are so tailored to Apple's specific needs because it needs that encryption

00:26:17   stuff for what it already does on iOS outside the file system now and it can't have the

00:26:21   heavyweight stuff because it has to run on a watch and like I don't know if anyone else

00:26:25   has those exact needs so it's not really a general purpose PC or server file system.

00:26:30   It is a specific purpose Apple file system as its name awkwardly implies.

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00:28:03   So just, was it yesterday as we record?

00:28:06   Apple announced their first quarter earnings, if I get this right.

00:28:11   I believe that's right.

00:28:13   So things are going well, as it turns out.

00:28:17   We'll link to a summary by Jason Snell at Six Colors.

00:28:22   And as long as you don't like the iPad, things are mostly okay.

00:28:29   I don't know.

00:28:30   I don't really have a lot to add on this.

00:28:31   I've been really busy so I haven't dug into this deeply.

00:28:34   Marco, any thoughts on this?

00:28:36   - I mean, I think it's probably best

00:28:38   that we leave most of the discussion of this

00:28:40   to other podcasts with people who do this kind of like

00:28:43   businessy type of reporting more often.

00:28:45   But for the most part, it is useful to just see

00:28:50   general trends of how things are going for Apple,

00:28:53   even if we aren't directly investing in it ourselves

00:28:56   or care about the stock price.

00:28:58   And I used to have Apple stock a couple years ago at least,

00:29:02   if not more, but I have since stopped buying

00:29:06   and selling any individual stocks

00:29:07   and I sold off all the ones I had.

00:29:09   And now I just invest through like mutual funds

00:29:11   and things like that that might have it,

00:29:12   but I'm not directly investing,

00:29:14   so that's a disclosure there.

00:29:15   And honestly I think, just friend to friend here,

00:29:18   this is not investment advice, whatever, whatever.

00:29:20   However, I think investing in individual stocks

00:29:22   with a substantial portion of your money is a fool's game.

00:29:25   Anyway, I think looking at it as general trends for Apple

00:29:30   and as Apple watchers and Apple fans,

00:29:32   it is useful to see these kind of numbers

00:29:35   are what Tim Cook is graded on by the board

00:29:38   and by investors.

00:29:39   And so optimizing for these numbers

00:29:42   is a large part of Cook's goals.

00:29:45   Whether he has other goals for product quality

00:29:50   and new initiatives and things like that,

00:29:52   That's all vague and unknowable as to the balance there.

00:29:56   However, we do know for sure that it is very important

00:29:59   that Tim Cook keeps these numbers looking healthy

00:30:01   for the board and for investors.

00:30:03   And that does drive product decisions on some level.

00:30:06   Again, whether it's a high priority in his mind,

00:30:09   we can't know, that's up to him.

00:30:11   But it is useful to pay attention to what's going on here,

00:30:15   to see trends in what's working for Apple

00:30:19   and what's not working for Apple

00:30:21   and where they need growth, and that can help inform

00:30:26   our predictions and our opinions

00:30:28   and our interpretations of what Apple does.

00:30:31   So in these earnings, the iPhone's doing great.

00:30:35   It seems like it has kind of recovered

00:30:37   from the weird boost and then slight dip

00:30:40   that it had with the seemingly related

00:30:44   to the massive success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

00:30:47   It seems like it's kind of back on a regular track now

00:30:49   of steady growth, so that's good for the iPhone.

00:30:52   The iPhone seems like it's fine, so that's good for it.

00:30:56   The Mac division is probably the least interesting.

00:30:59   It's up a little bit, but it's within normal realm,

00:31:02   so Mac seems like steady, healthy,

00:31:04   not setting the road on fire, and that's to be expected

00:31:07   after a year of having very few Mac releases.

00:31:09   Then in this quarter is when the new MacBook Pros

00:31:12   became available, so that helped boost those for sure.

00:31:14   You can see that in the graphs,

00:31:15   and things like average selling price and everything.

00:31:18   You can see average selling price for the Mac

00:31:20   took a big hike upwards.

00:31:22   That's not a coincidence in the quarter

00:31:24   in which they release a whole bunch

00:31:25   of more expensive laptops that were significantly

00:31:28   more expensive than what they replaced.

00:31:30   That is probably one of the reasons why

00:31:32   to make that boost up a little bit.

00:31:34   Services are doing really well.

00:31:37   Their services revenue is up by a good amount.

00:31:40   That's interesting 'cause like,

00:31:41   it seems like that is a major part of their future growth

00:31:47   that they're gonna want to boost up.

00:31:48   So that might include things like, you know,

00:31:51   maybe we're not gonna see a whole bunch

00:31:53   of cheaper iCloud storage this coming fall

00:31:56   or summer or whatever else.

00:31:57   Maybe we are gonna see more ways

00:31:59   that we can give Apple money every month,

00:32:00   more services, more premium tiers, things like that.

00:32:04   This plays into things like what Apple Music is doing

00:32:06   and their possible video efforts that they're hinting at

00:32:09   or saying very little about, things like that.

00:32:12   So expect to see Apple, because services

00:32:14   is a line that's going up and is now a decent number,

00:32:17   expect to see Apple putting more into services

00:32:21   and trying to make more from us from services.

00:32:25   So, you know, Tim Cook is really good at this.

00:32:26   He's really good at taking an existing market

00:32:29   that's doing pretty well and turning the screws

00:32:31   so that they make more from each person.

00:32:33   That's why the iPhones now have two sizes

00:32:35   and one of them costs 100 bucks more than the other one

00:32:37   and all the base storage has sucked for so long

00:32:40   because Tim Cook is really good

00:32:41   at pushing those average selling prices up, up, up

00:32:44   to try to make more money from each new person.

00:32:46   That's why things like iPad cases are so much more expensive

00:32:50   than they were in the other two parts and all this stuff.

00:32:52   You have the $100 battery backpack for the iPhone now

00:32:55   and all these different things.

00:32:56   This is why, this is not an accident.

00:33:00   And this is definitely why the new MacBook Pros

00:33:02   cost so much more than the old ones.

00:33:04   Anyway, so expect to see tightening of the screws

00:33:07   and boosts in the services area.

00:33:09   So we're probably gonna see again,

00:33:11   more ways we can spend money on Apple every month

00:33:14   coming this fall or summer, whatever else.

00:33:16   And then the other thing is the iPad.

00:33:19   And the iPad is down again,

00:33:23   and not by a small amount either.

00:33:25   It's still going significantly down.

00:33:28   It's kinda hard to explain.

00:33:31   Everyone has their own theories.

00:33:33   Everyone has, you know, some people say

00:33:35   Apple is not telling the right story, whatever that means.

00:33:38   I honestly don't really get that argument, to be fair.

00:33:42   Some people say that iPads just last so long,

00:33:46   and therefore people don't replace them very often.

00:33:50   Some people think that the iPad is a flop in some way,

00:33:54   and that nobody likes tablets anymore.

00:33:56   I think the truth is probably a combination

00:33:59   of all of these things.

00:34:00   And I guess we're probably gonna talk more about that

00:34:03   for the rest of the show,

00:34:04   so I will move on from that for now.

00:34:06   And then the watch is kind of buried somewhere in other,

00:34:10   And we don't have any numbers about the watch,

00:34:12   except Tim Cook says it was the best quarter ever

00:34:14   for the watch, so good.

00:34:16   On a Bezos chart, that is now the highest bar

00:34:20   on an axis that has no label.

00:34:22   So good for the Apple Watch.

00:34:24   Their quote, other revenue that the Apple Watch

00:34:27   is buried in didn't take a huge jump,

00:34:30   so it doesn't seem like it's moving the needle much

00:34:32   on revenue for the company, but oh well.

00:34:34   We are an analyst, maybe I'm missing something there.

00:34:36   But you know, it's probably doing fine.

00:34:38   What do you guys think?

00:34:40   So the services thing, I saw some doom and gloom about like,

00:34:42   oh, look there, services are growing,

00:34:44   therefore Apple's not gonna lower prices on iCloud storage.

00:34:46   I don't make that connection at all.

00:34:48   Like services is all about getting more people to pay Apple

00:34:50   on a recurring basis for something, anything.

00:34:53   One way to do that is to lower the price,

00:34:55   because if you can lower the price by half

00:34:57   but get more than double the number of people

00:34:58   to sign up for it, then it works out.

00:35:00   And there's a lot of things buried in services.

00:35:03   It's not just, you know, when you say services,

00:35:04   a lot of people think you just mean iCloud

00:35:06   or like the app store is in there,

00:35:07   which is one of the reasons everything is going up.

00:35:09   And Apple Music, which has been backfilling for the iTunes Music store downloads that

00:35:17   sort of disappeared many years ago and now Apple's finally getting to streaming.

00:35:20   And the idea that Apple has all these customers, surely there's some way Apple can monetize

00:35:25   them by making them pay some small amount for each one of these little things.

00:35:31   And trying to—it's kind of like the original video content they're doing.

00:35:34   By attaching the original video content to Apple Music, they're basically just trying

00:35:38   to get more people to sign up for Apple Music. Why? Because I think once they get you on

00:35:41   the Apple Music thing, you're just used to having all the music available to you, you'll

00:35:44   just keep paying this month after month. And I think to entice more people to like, you

00:35:50   know, how many people pay for iCloud storage, whatever the percentage is now, if it's not

00:35:54   really, really high, like in a 90%, Apple must be thinking, we can get more people to

00:35:58   pay for iCloud storage. Let me look at what the numbers are. Actually, we've been overcharging

00:36:02   by a ridiculous amount, as everybody knows when compared to other cloud vendors. Why

00:36:06   don't we just bump that or lower the price or both and then we'll get more people on

00:36:10   board. And by the way, let's attach some original video content to iCloud storage.

00:36:14   And you know, like that, the things they're willing to do to get to entice people to sign

00:36:19   up for in a Roderick on the Line parlance, another eel are boundless and seemingly don't

00:36:25   have to be that well related because the idea of offering exclusive, like essentially television

00:36:31   video content to get people to sign up for Apple music doesn't make any sense except

00:36:36   that, hey, if there's something you want and the only way to get it is to do this, you'll

00:36:40   do it. Like it's the whole reason people sign up for Amazon Prime so they can watch Ben

00:36:44   in the High Castle. What does Man in the High Castle have to do with getting free shipping

00:36:47   from Amazon.com for rolls of toilet paper? Nothing. But you'll do what it takes to get

00:36:52   the content, right? And this is a weird deal, but people have shown that it works. If you

00:36:57   give them something they want, they will sign up for something they don't want just to get

00:37:00   the thing they want. Hell, I did it. I signed up for YouTube Red just so I could, or I signed

00:37:03   for Google Play Music just so I could get YouTube read on a family plan. I don't use

00:37:07   Google Play Music. It's sitting on my phone, but I never actually launch it. It's just

00:37:11   so I don't have to see ads on YouTube. It's a tried and true technique, which is not ideal

00:37:15   from a consumer's perspective, but people love recurring revenue.

00:37:19   [laughter]

00:37:20   Yeah, I mean, I'm slightly surprised—well, I guess I'll stick with it. I'm slightly

00:37:27   surprised that things are going overall as well as they are. I mean, obviously on this show we've

00:37:35   talked a lot about how we feel like things are not the way they once were, and I think the three

00:37:42   of us have varying degrees of how dire everything may be, but I mean this was their best quarter

00:37:49   ever. I mean, I'm looking at the very first chart on Jason Snell's post, and the most recent quarter

00:37:57   was 78.4 billion and the nearest one was the prior holiday quarter or first quarter I guess

00:38:05   which is over the holidays which was 75.9 billion. So I mean that's what two and a half billion

00:38:11   dollars difference something like that I mean that's a big difference and things are

00:38:14   clear. But percentage wise like look at the slopes on this graph like Apple's growth is still slowed

00:38:18   especially if you look at the year over year change in revenue like the reason this is a big

00:38:21   deal is because they're coming out of three consecutive negative year over year revenue

00:38:25   growth quarters. It's like, "Hey, we're back in the black. We're back positive. We made

00:38:29   more money in this quarter this year than we did last year." But you can kind of see

00:38:33   if you look at those, if you look at like especially the big holiday quarters, 46, 54,

00:38:37   57, the slope of that line versus 74, 75, 78, right?

00:38:40   Yeah, that's true. Growth is still slowing at Apple, right? And

00:38:45   that's something they have to deal with. But I mean, I think this is in line with everything

00:38:48   that we said on the show. We've just been disproportionately focused on our dissatisfaction

00:38:52   with the Mac, but when we all were asked to pick what is your favorite Apple product this

00:38:56   year, didn't we all pick the iPhone 7?

00:38:59   I think so.

00:39:01   Although now I would say AirPods, but at the time when like...

00:39:04   Or maybe you did say AirPods, I don't know, but I think Marco and I at the very least

00:39:07   with the iPhone 7.

00:39:08   iPhone 7 is a great phone and it doesn't surprise me that it sold well.

00:39:12   You know, headphone jack, whatever, it is a good phone.

00:39:15   It is a tried and true thing.

00:39:16   It's their third attempt at the same form factor.

00:39:18   It has better battery life.

00:39:20   They worked out all these shoes they could possibly work out.

00:39:23   The weird home button and the waterproofing and the whole--

00:39:26   like everything comes-- it is a good phone.

00:39:28   And I've always said that they're doing very well

00:39:31   in the phone space.

00:39:32   And because if you look at the giant Pac-Man chart

00:39:34   and you see the little Pac-Man-shaped wedge that

00:39:36   is the iPhone eating the rest of Apple's products,

00:39:39   if the phone does well, Apple does well.

00:39:42   And that totally dwarfs any--

00:39:43   whatever, iPad, some sort of problems there.

00:39:46   That's lost in the noise.

00:39:47   Service revenue keeps going up.

00:39:49   and the Mac continues doing what it does.

00:39:51   And the little hike in the graph,

00:39:52   like Mac ASP is going up

00:39:54   because they cranked up the price of their Macs.

00:39:56   It's like, it's the old Mac,

00:39:57   for the past few years it's been like,

00:40:00   produce pent up demand by not releasing any new computers,

00:40:03   and then whatever the hell you release, people will buy,

00:40:05   and if what you release is 500 bucks more

00:40:08   than it used to be, your ASPs will go up.

00:40:10   So it's not, I don't think that's a healthy situation,

00:40:12   but that's what happened.

00:40:13   - Yeah, yeah.

00:40:15   I don't know, like Marco said,

00:40:16   I don't know how much more analysis

00:40:17   we should really be doing on this,

00:40:18   But I'm sad about the iPad.

00:40:20   It's funny, I don't know if we've talked about this

00:40:23   on the show, I don't think so,

00:40:25   but I've been flirting with the idea

00:40:28   of getting a MacBook adorable

00:40:32   whenever the presumably pending refresh happens,

00:40:35   although with the way Apple is these days,

00:40:37   I guess I should never assume a refresh is coming.

00:40:39   But I don't know, I really love my iPad Mini,

00:40:44   and I have the most modern one,

00:40:47   which was brand new or nearly brand new,

00:40:50   not this past Christmas, but the Christmas prior.

00:40:52   I really love my iPad mini.

00:40:55   I really like that form factor.

00:40:56   I know a lot of people don't, that's fine.

00:40:59   But I can't help personally,

00:41:03   but feel like anytime I wanna do anything,

00:41:06   but like look at Twitter,

00:41:07   and I don't wanna get into like the consumption

00:41:09   versus creation debate,

00:41:10   but anytime I wanna do anything other than like glance

00:41:12   at Twitter or RSS or something like that,

00:41:14   I feel like I'm fighting the device.

00:41:16   I feel like I'm fighting iOS.

00:41:18   And so I've really been debating, you know,

00:41:21   maybe a MacBook Adorable would be a better fix

00:41:25   for this problem, because it would also be very portable.

00:41:29   Not as portable, but very portable.

00:41:31   And it would do everything a Mac could do.

00:41:36   Maybe not as fast as other Macs,

00:41:38   but that's why I have a 5K that I'm speaking on right now.

00:41:41   And it would probably be a really good compromise.

00:41:45   And somebody tweeted, I think earlier today, and I don't recall who it was, but, or somebody

00:41:49   had said earlier today anyway, that, you know, if you think about it, the Macs are getting

00:41:54   more and more and more portable.

00:41:57   And the iPads aren't that different than they were a few years ago.

00:42:04   The software's a lot better, multitasking is a lot better, even my iPad mini can do

00:42:07   the multitasking.

00:42:10   But I feel like the change in portability of the most portable Macs is dramatically

00:42:17   better as compared to the change in ability of iOS on an iPad.

00:42:22   And so that's led me to wonder, you know, maybe I should just get a MacBook Adorable

00:42:27   as a super portable travel machine, because that might fit my needs even better.

00:42:32   And so I use this all, and the reason I bring this up is because it's a case study of why

00:42:37   maybe the iPad isn't doing that great. And as Marco alluded to, there's probably a billion other reasons.

00:42:42   But any immediate thoughts on that before we get too far down the rabbit hole?

00:42:47   I don't think a Mac could replace my iPad usage for me, and I think that's probably true of most people.

00:42:52   Maybe you're using an iPad because no Mac was portable enough,

00:42:57   but for people who are using iPads for iPad type purposes, like, there is no Mac.

00:43:01   Even if there was a Mac exactly the same size and weight as my iPad,

00:43:04   I still wouldn't use it because I don't want to use a trackpad. I want to touch a screen

00:43:09   I don't want to deal with the keyboard like I want an iPad for what for when I do iPad stuff

00:43:13   which is you know browsing the web or

00:43:15   Reading Twitter or watching video. I want an iPad right so there's no substitute for

00:43:20   the Mac for that

00:43:22   the iPad sales stuff like

00:43:24   You know that we shouldn't just rattle off the reasons that we've talked about all the other things

00:43:29   things. Marco talked about them in his post about the iPad. One of the most

00:43:34   compelling ones aside from iPads lasting forever is if people just use the iPads

00:43:39   to watch video you don't have to spend $800 to watch video on a little square

00:43:43   that's a screen, right? That's a loser market. Apple can't stake out the

00:43:47   high end of square screens that play video because there is no high end of it.

00:43:51   That is doomed to a low end thing. All you need is some basic Wi-Fi

00:43:55   a reasonable CPU with some video decoding hardware,

00:43:59   and the ability to run the Amazon Prime and Netflix apps.

00:44:03   They're Amazon tablets for that,

00:44:04   they're Android tablets that you do not need an iPad

00:44:06   to watch Netflix, I promise you, right?

00:44:09   And so if that's what you're doing with your iPad,

00:44:11   I think people like tablets for that purpose,

00:44:13   but you don't need an iPad for that.

00:44:15   And the other thrust of,

00:44:18   what was the title of your article, Marco?

00:44:20   - The Future of Computing.

00:44:22   - Oh yeah, so we've gone over this on the show before,

00:44:24   We've gone over this on the show before and I must remind Marco once again because apparently

00:44:28   I wasn't there to remind him before he wrote this post.

00:44:31   But every time we discuss that, I take great pains to emphasize the idea that the iPad

00:44:36   as a specific product as made by Apple as it exists now may not necessarily be the product

00:44:42   that sweeps across the market and becomes the most important thing.

00:44:45   But when I specifically talk about the future of a computer with a capital F, capital C,

00:44:49   What I'm talking about is post PC computing, which means computing without as many of the

00:44:56   concerns that have necessarily come with PCs, which includes dealing with Windows menus,

00:45:01   pointers, file systems, like all that stuff.

00:45:04   And as compared to iOS, which swept all that stuff off the table and abstracted and hid

00:45:10   so much of it.

00:45:11   That is the future of computing because people can't handle PCs in general and dealing with

00:45:16   file systems and their files and Windows.

00:45:19   It's too much, the iOS or smartphone or whatever interface where they take away almost all

00:45:23   that complexity and massively simplify it and protect you from yourself, that is the

00:45:27   future of computing.

00:45:29   Unquestionably, the question is, okay, how does that manifest?

00:45:32   Does it manifest by Mac OS slowly removing all that functionality?

00:45:36   Does it manifest by Windows becoming this mutant hybrid thing?

00:45:38   Does it manifest by Android taking over the world?

00:45:41   Or does it manifest by Apple introducing the iPad?

00:45:43   It's incumbent upon each one of those products to figure out how they get there.

00:45:47   But it's like saying, "Well, the Mac isn't successful, so let's all go back to DOS."

00:45:53   Nope, that's not the answer at all.

00:45:56   You can see with the future is because we've all lived our entire lives of seeing how badly

00:46:02   humans are at dealing with PCs with all the stuff they come with.

00:46:05   And then iOS showed us a way to get a computing platform with almost all that stuff gone.

00:46:11   And now we're just figuring out, "Yeah, but what about the stuff you can't do?"

00:46:14   the iPad thus far has been doing, as Marco points out,

00:46:17   not a great job of showing you how you're gonna get

00:46:19   that same stuff done without the complications.

00:46:21   But it's very clear that without the complications,

00:46:23   it is so much more accessible

00:46:24   because everybody has smartphones

00:46:26   and nobody deals with any of that weird PC crap

00:46:28   on their smartphones.

00:46:29   Like everything is just so much simpler and easier

00:46:32   and easy to use, which is why smartphones

00:46:34   have raced across the entire world.

00:46:35   And a tablet is just basically a bigger smartphone

00:46:38   in terms of how hard it is to use at this point.

00:46:40   That has to change if you ever want

00:46:43   the capital F, capital C, future of computing

00:46:45   to actually marginalize the PC,

00:46:48   to push it down to the specific realms

00:46:50   where it will have to remain, right?

00:46:52   But that hasn't happened yet.

00:46:54   Microsoft's trying to do it with Surface Studio,

00:46:56   Apple's sort of trying to do it with the iPad Pro,

00:46:58   but halfheartedly, is Android doing anything in this space?

00:47:01   I don't know.

00:47:02   I mean, maybe you can count Chromebooks

00:47:03   as an attempt to get away from some of the dangers of PCs,

00:47:08   but I don't think they're doing a very good job.

00:47:10   But anyway, that's the future of computing.

00:47:13   we all believe in and what we should be grading an apple on is like you're blowing it.

00:47:19   You are not achieving that.

00:47:20   You want to have your cake but you don't want to eat it.

00:47:23   That's a terrible one.

00:47:24   Anyway, they want to say, "Look, it's the iPad and it's simple like your phone."

00:47:29   It's like, "Yes, it is."

00:47:30   And you use it to replace your PC.

00:47:31   It's like, "Well, can we?"

00:47:35   And Apple has to show us how to do that because there are things we need to do and we need

00:47:40   to be able to do them and they need to be pleasant, just like web browsing.

00:47:44   Previously, we were not able to do web browsing on our phones or it was incredibly unpleasant.

00:47:48   And Apple said, "No, actually you can do web browsing on a tablet and on a phone."

00:47:52   And I think we would all agree that browsing the web on a tablet is super pleasant.

00:47:56   In many, many ways nicer than doing it on a PC, if only because you can be sitting on

00:48:00   the couch and leaning back and using your finger and it's more like flipping through

00:48:03   a magazine.

00:48:04   Web browsing, you've nailed it, iPad, but as Marco would point out, a million other

00:48:08   things like whether it be from editing a podcast or using Photoshop or dealing with complicated

00:48:15   projects that span lots of different applications and share data, you know, of the typical PC

00:48:19   site stuff, it hasn't yet been demonstrated that we're able to do all those things in

00:48:25   the same way. So everyone else is a contender. The Mac is still a contender for the future

00:48:29   of computing, provided Apple was willing to remove all the functionality that we know

00:48:33   and love about the Mac, which I hope they never do. But that's one way you could try

00:48:37   to get there. You could try to get there like Microsoft by weirdly morphing your desktop

00:48:41   OS into a hybrid OS that does both things at once. And who knows how we could get there,

00:48:47   but iOS is such a stake in the ground to say it's obvious that in the future no one wants

00:48:52   to deal with the crap that we deal with on Macs and PCs today. That is not the future

00:48:56   of computing. We have to leave that behind. But so far, the iPad has not been a compelling

00:49:03   argument for that.

00:49:04   And there was one other graph that's not in Jason Snell's page that we're looking at here

00:49:09   on sixcolors.com, which we'll put in the show notes that has tons and tons of pretty graphs.

00:49:13   One page that I think maybe Horace tweeted or something.

00:49:17   It's showing graphs of days of the week, like average days of the week usage time for, what

00:49:25   was it, for smartphones and PCs.

00:49:27   And the smartphone line is like this little lumpy thing that goes along, right?

00:49:30   You don't see any particularly large trends there.

00:49:33   And the PC thing goes Monday through Friday, huge dip Saturday and Sunday.

00:49:39   And back up from Monday through Friday, huge dip Saturday and Sunday.

00:49:41   We're just saying that people don't use PCs on the weekends.

00:49:44   And what are they not on the weekends?

00:49:46   They're not at work.

00:49:47   So maybe they're using PCs at work, or maybe they only consider PC as a work-like thing,

00:49:50   but the phones they use all the time.

00:49:52   I feel like if the iPad curve was shown, it would look more like the phone curve and less

00:49:57   like the PC curve.

00:49:58   Because people aren't, for the most part, doing work on their iPad.

00:50:02   The iPad curve would just be like,

00:50:03   ah, use it the same amount pretty much every day.

00:50:05   It wouldn't be like, oh, the weekend's here,

00:50:06   I'm not gonna be on my iPad because he used my iPad

00:50:08   for work.

00:50:09   You'll know that the iPad or any other PC replacement device

00:50:13   or post-PC device is finally useful

00:50:15   for all the same things PCs are

00:50:16   when it starts to get the same curve,

00:50:18   because everyone's gotta do some work,

00:50:19   and a lot of people do work involving some kind of task

00:50:22   with computing.

00:50:24   And if they're still doing that

00:50:26   on personal computer type devices,

00:50:27   I mean, it could be a lagging indicator,

00:50:29   so maybe we have to wait a few more years.

00:50:30   But right now, think of the number of people you know

00:50:33   who every day go to work and just use a tablet of any kind

00:50:37   as opposed to a PC.

00:50:38   I know way more PC users,

00:50:39   maybe it's because all my friends are old,

00:50:41   but we'll keep an eye on that.

00:50:44   - I mean, I think what we're seeing,

00:50:47   I think the right way to interpret the iPad

00:50:50   and the future of computing and everything else

00:50:53   is probably something between the crazy blog post I made

00:50:57   and the argument that Jon is making

00:50:59   and the argument that Jason Snell made

00:51:01   on upgrade this week.

00:51:03   You know, the future of computing is not going to be

00:51:06   just one of these types of things.

00:51:08   It's not gonna be just tablets,

00:51:09   and it's not gonna be just computers.

00:51:12   My argument is not that the iPad is failing as a thing,

00:51:15   or that it's going away, or that it's useless to everybody.

00:51:19   My argument is simply that when people say

00:51:21   this is the future of computing,

00:51:23   what they usually mean by that is going to replace

00:51:25   the PC style computer.

00:51:27   Again, I mean PCs and Macs in that.

00:51:30   I basically mean, for the most part, I mean laptops

00:51:33   and other desktops and things that run Windows or Mac OS

00:51:38   or Linux even, like PC style OSs.

00:51:41   And I think the most likely outcome here is that,

00:51:46   as the tablets of all sorts are not going to replace PCs,

00:51:51   they are going to do what they've been doing,

00:51:53   which is add to them, augment them.

00:51:55   There are going to be some people who only primarily like tablets, and there's going

00:51:59   to be some people that only primarily like PCs.

00:52:02   They're not going to actually replace each other in either direction.

00:52:05   Well, the only way that'll happen, I don't think you can do that.

00:52:08   I don't think you can have them not replace them unless PCs essentially adopt all the

00:52:15   attributes that I was just discussing of iOS-style computing.

00:52:19   Like in other words, PCs would have to abandon all the weird-ass crap that regular people

00:52:24   don't like and can't handle about PCs.

00:52:26   Like, because they can't stay in their current state of like,

00:52:31   with all the legacy stuff that PCOSs have to deal with.

00:52:33   It's an untenable situation because people can't use them and people can use phones.

00:52:38   And so something is going to marginalize current style PCs,

00:52:43   whether it's the PCs themselves changing, because it totally could be.

00:52:46   Like you could take any of those PC style operating systems you listed and slowly,

00:52:51   basically iOS-ify them while leaving enough of the functionality still there, you know,

00:52:56   showing through so you can get more stuff done than you can on an iPad, for example.

00:52:59   But you just can't leave it there. It's again, it's like going back to DOS, like saying, "Well,

00:53:03   I can't do everything on this Mac that I can do on my PC with DOS, therefore it's a dead end and

00:53:08   people just keep using DOS forever." They won't. Like, the capabilities of the GUI will eventually

00:53:12   expand to do enough of the things, you know. So I don't think there is any situation where the PC

00:53:19   as it exists today with all of its legacy concerns does not become marginalized in the

00:53:24   future. It's just a question of what will marginalize it. Like not disappear, but marginalized.

00:53:28   Like in the same way that, you know, people use in the command line. Still tons of people

00:53:32   use in the command line today. I use it every day, but it's marginalized.

00:53:35   I'm not entirely sure that your premises are sound here. So premise number one is that

00:53:41   you said people can't figure out how to use PCs, but they can use their phones. Do we

00:53:45   Do we actually know that?

00:53:46   Is that actually a thing?

00:53:47   Like are PCs really as hard as we think they are to use

00:53:52   and then are phones as easy as we think they are to use?

00:53:54   Or is that cap actually smaller than what we might think?

00:53:57   - Oh, it's big.

00:53:59   Go find someone who has a PC,

00:54:01   whether at work or at home even, and just look at it.

00:54:03   That's all I ask, just look at it.

00:54:05   Watch them use it and see what's on it

00:54:07   and see what state it's in

00:54:08   and ask them to use it to do something.

00:54:10   And yes, people have trouble with phones too.

00:54:12   It's a relative thing,

00:54:13   one is so much easier than the other.

00:54:15   One is not infinitely easy and one is not infinitely hard,

00:54:18   and yes, you can learn to use anything,

00:54:20   but you have to get rid of those things

00:54:23   that people don't like to be concerned about.

00:54:25   It's the reason people love the phone so much.

00:54:27   They took away so many things

00:54:28   that they have to worry about.

00:54:30   Maybe less so on Android.

00:54:32   - I don't know about this at all, Jon.

00:54:34   - I think the bigger reason is that it's always

00:54:35   in your pocket and it has these awesome cameras

00:54:38   and sensors and always data connections.

00:54:41   There's a lot about phones to love

00:54:42   that don't have to do with the usability paradigm of their software.

00:54:46   But people can do things with their phones that PCs could also do, but they never did

00:54:51   with the PCs because it was too much of a pain. Even just down to like installing software.

00:54:55   So easy on phones, hard enough on personal computers and so fraught on personal computers

00:55:00   because of lack of the App Store and viruses and all sorts of stuff like that, that people

00:55:03   didn't attempt it or accidentally attempted it by accidentally clicking on things that

00:55:07   install browser toolbars and crap like that. All the crap of the PC world makes it so people,

00:55:12   Even if they were equally easy to use,

00:55:14   it would say, well, this feels safer.

00:55:15   Suddenly, I'm installing software.

00:55:17   Oh, there's a cool new app, I'm gonna try it.

00:55:19   No one, regular people were not discussing cool new apps

00:55:22   for their PCs, only nerds were.

00:55:24   That alone is such a huge--

00:55:26   - I think you're describing Android.

00:55:28   - Maybe less so on Android, but even Android,

00:55:31   I feel like the disposability of phone is like,

00:55:33   well, if my phone is hosed, I'll like,

00:55:35   the fact that it normalized backups into thing,

00:55:37   and the thing that nobody, essentially nobody did

00:55:39   to their personal computers, but because of cloud backups

00:55:41   with phone stuff built in, more people have a shot

00:55:44   at having some kind of backup of something somewhere

00:55:48   on their phones, whereas PCs, it was like forget it.

00:55:51   Backups might as well not exist as far

00:55:52   as the non-nerd world is concerned.

00:55:54   - Well, and so I think there's this continuum here.

00:55:58   You know, like you mentioned, like, you know,

00:55:59   command line all the way up to like, GUI and phone.

00:56:02   When you're in the more command line side of it,

00:56:04   the more difficult side of it, getting like productivity

00:56:09   and power user type tasks done is possibly easier

00:56:14   than on the easy devices, but casual use is harder.

00:56:18   And then on the devices like phones and iPads,

00:56:21   getting productivity and power use type things done

00:56:24   is actually harder to figure out,

00:56:26   but casual use is easier.

00:56:28   Somewhere in the middle there is the PC style OS.

00:56:31   PC style OSs are, they kind of try to be everything.

00:56:36   I think we are generally much better at using them

00:56:39   for productivity type things and power user type things

00:56:41   and that's partially because most productivity

00:56:44   and power user people have grown up with computers

00:56:46   to some degree or have a certain number of years using them

00:56:49   so there's already a lot of what people are used to,

00:56:51   people are already trained on how to use computers

00:56:53   for the most part.

00:56:54   But also part of that is just the design of them

00:56:56   is with these kind of file centric paradigms

00:57:00   of the desktops and everything and all this drag and drop,

00:57:02   multiple windows kind of stuff,

00:57:04   it's just a lot easier to do a lot of tasks,

00:57:07   a lot of productivity and power user-type tasks

00:57:09   on a PC-style OS.

00:57:11   That's not to say that iPads and stuff

00:57:13   can't get some of those features,

00:57:16   but also you can't say that PCs can't get

00:57:21   some of the better ease of use and security features

00:57:23   that iPads and phones have.

00:57:25   - Well, that's all I'm saying.

00:57:27   If you do do that to the PC-style operating system,

00:57:30   if you start hiding the file system

00:57:32   on PC-style operating systems, it's the same argument.

00:57:35   It's just like, it's the question of venue.

00:57:37   Where is that going to happen?

00:57:38   It's going to happen because people don't like the old way

00:57:40   and they like the new way better.

00:57:42   - Do they?

00:57:43   I'm pretty sure that sales curve

00:57:44   is showing you something else.

00:57:45   - Yes, they're proving it by what they wanna buy.

00:57:49   I mean, so here's the thing, with the complexity of tasks,

00:57:53   it's about marginalizing the users.

00:57:54   It's about chasing them farther into the corner.

00:57:56   So people who use the command line

00:57:59   and who do sophisticated things for their computers

00:58:01   will still need PCs, but all those people

00:58:03   who just do email, word processing, calendaring,

00:58:06   web browsing, they don't need PCs now.

00:58:09   They have them because basically it's the only way

00:58:12   to get Outlook and to be able to see PDFs

00:58:14   and to do all the other stuff.

00:58:15   But increasingly, if your company uses Google Docs

00:58:19   and Slack and so on, there's no reason

00:58:22   those people need a full-fledged PC.

00:58:25   Not because they're not doing command line stuff,

00:58:27   but they're not even doing anything complicated enough

00:58:29   to require them to use the non-command line

00:58:33   portions of a GUI.

00:58:34   They don't have multiple files that they're assembling

00:58:36   into a large project, they're not doing, development is also kind of a command line

00:58:43   thing, but it's a matter of slowly making the people who need PCs a smaller and smaller

00:58:49   subset of people, in the same way that people who need command lines have become a smaller

00:58:52   and smaller subset of people.

00:58:53   It stops at some point.

00:58:54   It's not as if, if the command line, marginalizing the command line has really stalled out, because

00:58:59   so many people do software development or do stuff involving servers and so on, where

00:59:05   command line is important and is not going away anytime soon, right? So it's

00:59:08   not like you chase command lines away until there's only three people in the

00:59:11   world using it, but it shrinks way down from where it was the DOS thing. Like, to

00:59:15   do your regular business stuff you don't need a command line. You can get that all

00:59:20   done with a GUI, which was an argument at one point. It's like, well, if I want to get

00:59:23   real work done I need DOS, but if I want to do this one silly thing like draw a

00:59:25   silly digital painting maybe I can use a GUI. Eventually you can do everything

00:59:30   from GUI. You can do your fancy business spreadsheets, you can write your word

00:59:32   processing things. Email hadn't been invented, but you could do that too. You can do all

00:59:36   that stuff from the GUI. It's just a question of marginalizing that stuff. And if that stuff

00:59:41   gets marginalized by old-style PC operating system and new-style one that hides all that

00:59:47   crap or modes within one, it really depends on the particular company that ends up figuring

00:59:52   this out, whether it be Apple with its whole different OS/iPad approach or Microsoft with

00:59:56   its hybrid approach or Android with its Phone OS Everywhere/Chrome OS whatever hybrid-esque

01:00:01   thing or even just with the web stuff like can you get everything done with the web browser

01:00:04   and use a Chromebook for regular people so you have nothing locally and it's just everything

01:00:08   is on the web. Maybe you can do that. In that case you definitely don't need a PC style

01:00:12   operating system to do that you just need something that can run all the web apps and

01:00:16   that's not so far fetched especially if like there's a slack client and stuff like that.

01:00:20   So you know I don't I wouldn't focus on one single product I wouldn't even focus on what

01:00:26   we call PCs because it's possible for them to be the future of computing as well.

01:00:31   Just have to look for where and how the people who really do continue to need a GUI end up

01:00:37   getting...

01:00:38   Where do they get chased?

01:00:40   What corner do they get chased into?

01:00:41   And they'll be hanging out there with the command line people because the command line

01:00:43   people are not going anywhere and very often they're the same people.

01:00:47   And soon eventually they'll be joined by the people who need to use full PC operating systems.

01:00:51   and then everyone else will be trying to book rooms in Outlook, futilely, on their future

01:00:59   of computing devices. Because that's what they do all day, is send people emails and

01:01:03   mess with calendars and waste time in Slack.

01:01:06   So I don't disagree with much of what you said. I think we're kind of arguing two different

01:01:12   points here. Basically my theory is that the PC style operating system and the iPad style

01:01:22   operating system have this kind of common ground between the two that they're both kind

01:01:28   of aiming for or should be aiming for to solve their problems. But I'm not sure that either

01:01:35   product can get to the other one's common ground. If they actually meet in the middle

01:01:40   successfully, I'm not sure that would be a good product

01:01:43   for either of them.

01:01:44   But I do think-- - They're not gonna meet

01:01:45   in the middle from the same company,

01:01:46   because the same company would be foolish

01:01:48   to make their two products meet in the middle.

01:01:51   But they could be like the iPad meets Windows 10

01:01:53   in the middle, you know what I mean?

01:01:54   - Right.

01:01:55   - Windows 10 goes tablet-y, and the iPad goes PC,

01:01:59   but the Mac would still be hanging out there

01:02:00   in full-fledged PC area.

01:02:02   - Right, however, I do think though that we are judging this

01:02:06   for the most part from what Apple's doing,

01:02:09   'cause Microsoft does crazy things,

01:02:10   they're kind of on drugs, sometimes they work,

01:02:13   sometimes they don't, who knows what they're doing

01:02:14   over there, sometimes they're pretty cool.

01:02:16   Microsoft is showing that there is still a lot

01:02:20   that can maybe be done in PC style OS's,

01:02:23   and also there is a possibility of making

01:02:27   more productivity focused tablets.

01:02:29   Like, Microsoft is doing a bunch of stuff in that area,

01:02:32   and it's all wacky, and some of it is cool,

01:02:34   most of it is weird, and sometimes it works,

01:02:36   sometimes it does it okay.

01:02:37   but they actually are moving,

01:02:38   and they're actually seeing some progress there,

01:02:40   and some success with their server stuff,

01:02:43   and various Windows 10 stuff and everything.

01:02:45   We make fun of it,

01:02:46   but it actually is starting to actually succeed.

01:02:48   Anyway, we are looking at Apple for this,

01:02:51   because we know Apple, if they put their mind to it,

01:02:54   would do a better job at both sides of this.

01:02:57   However, I think it's very clear from recent years

01:03:02   that Apple's not really stepping on the gas too hard

01:03:05   on either side of this.

01:03:07   they're devoting their resources elsewhere.

01:03:09   They're focusing on things like the iPhone and services

01:03:12   and the watch and maybe occasionally the TV

01:03:14   and pouring God knows how much effort into this car thing.

01:03:18   They're not really stepping on the gas

01:03:22   on trying to improve Mac OS,

01:03:23   which seems like it's almost in maintenance mode.

01:03:26   And iPad OS/iOS seem like in these productivity style

01:03:33   or power user style ways, it jumps forward

01:03:38   like every two years in some interesting way.

01:03:41   Like they have multitasking or split screen

01:03:43   or extensions or whatever else.

01:03:44   But then that kind of just sits there for a while.

01:03:46   They're not really driving quickly

01:03:49   towards either of these goals.

01:03:51   And it's kind of unclear as to whether they even intend to.

01:03:54   So I think it's kind of a bad example.

01:03:57   Like we are trying to argue whether these things

01:03:59   are possible or whether convergence is possible

01:04:01   or which one of these is like quote the right

01:04:03   or the inevitable or the future approach.

01:04:05   But we're basing that on only what Apple's doing here.

01:04:08   And I think that's kind of blinding us

01:04:10   to what might be possible.

01:04:12   Because if a company was,

01:04:15   if a company had these platforms

01:04:16   that really cared a lot about these particular things,

01:04:19   enough to prioritize them higher than what Apple does,

01:04:22   I think we might see more answers more quickly.

01:04:25   And I think we might see ideas tried

01:04:27   that we wouldn't have considered.

01:04:28   And Microsoft is almost doing that.

01:04:30   Like, again, they're doing a lot of crazy stuff.

01:04:33   They're just not doing it very well most of the time

01:04:34   because they're not that great at it.

01:04:36   But we are seeing, it is possible if you invest heavily

01:04:41   in these areas and you really step on the gas

01:04:43   in these areas, it is possible to both have interesting

01:04:47   tablets that could be easy to use and also run

01:04:50   productivity software pretty well, and it's also possible

01:04:54   to do interesting new things with desktops to bring them

01:04:57   closer to the tablet world in ways that make

01:05:00   the tablet world good.

01:05:01   I think it's only a matter of, for Apple specifically,

01:05:05   do they care enough about macOS to make major changes

01:05:09   to the OS and to the way it works?

01:05:11   And we just saw the touch bar and everything,

01:05:13   and that's cool, that's not a major change

01:05:15   to the interaction model or the application model of the OS.

01:05:19   That's a hardware feature that sells new hardware

01:05:21   and has some software integration,

01:05:23   and it's really cool the way it integrates

01:05:24   with the hardware and everything,

01:05:25   but that's not fundamentally changing macOS

01:05:27   in any meaningful way.

01:05:29   So it doesn't-- - Yeah, today.

01:05:31   - Well, okay, fair.

01:05:32   - It's not, it's additive.

01:05:34   I think Mark is right, it's purely additive.

01:05:36   It's not taking away any complexity from the Mac,

01:05:38   put it that way.

01:05:39   Any of the weird stuff on the Mac,

01:05:40   like the touch bar doesn't alter that at all.

01:05:42   It's just an additive, cool thing, right?

01:05:44   But it does not allow you to avoid or otherwise hide

01:05:47   or make moot any of the complexity involved

01:05:50   in all the things that iOS does better than the Mac.

01:05:52   - Exactly, and then on the other side,

01:05:54   iOS on the phone, the phone is making great strides,

01:05:58   of course, 'cause that's where Apple focuses a lot,

01:05:59   because that's good, they should,

01:06:00   That's where all the action is, that makes sense.

01:06:03   But on the iPad, what we see,

01:06:05   we've seen the same pattern from them over and over again,

01:06:08   which is they give the iPad a little bit of attention,

01:06:11   and then they kinda just let it sit for a year or two,

01:06:13   and then they give it a little bit more attention,

01:06:15   and let it sit for a year or two.

01:06:16   But ultimately, the iPad always is playing

01:06:19   second fiddle to the iPhone,

01:06:21   and that's true of both Apple's attention

01:06:23   and also just the design of the OS.

01:06:26   In so many ways, the iPad is just a blown up iPhone,

01:06:30   and it seems like that's mostly okay with everybody.

01:06:33   And that's fine, there are a lot of advantages

01:06:35   to doing it that way, but if you keep doing it that way,

01:06:38   I don't see how it ever replaces more PCs meaningfully

01:06:42   than what it's replacing now.

01:06:44   - You just go to the screen thing,

01:06:45   which is the thing I always bring up.

01:06:46   People don't use PCs with 12-inch screens on their desk

01:06:49   if they can help it.

01:06:51   Maybe in laptops, but even then,

01:06:52   if they wanna work all day,

01:06:53   they'd hook it up to a bigger screen.

01:06:55   There's a reason for that.

01:06:56   Bigger screen lets you see more stuff,

01:06:58   it makes you more productive.

01:06:59   Remember back in the 80s, all the studies about how worker productivity increases when

01:07:04   you have bigger CRT on your desk and employees would use that as an excuse to demand a massive

01:07:09   21-inch CRT, which actually they were massive.

01:07:12   They're really huge and heavy and people don't understand exactly how big those things were.

01:07:16   But yeah, both the iPad and on the Mac, one of the things that I always attribute to the

01:07:24   fictional person of Apple Computer, which is not a person but a collection of people,

01:07:28   you know, sort of turning it into a person.

01:07:30   Like, Apple is hoping that people don't have to do

01:07:35   such complicated things.

01:07:37   Can't you do all of your stuff with the iPad apps

01:07:39   that we give you?

01:07:40   Look how simple they are.

01:07:41   You just need these simple functions.

01:07:42   You just need to be able to crop your images in this way.

01:07:45   No, you don't need to be able to crop

01:07:47   with fixed proportions, but also in landscape and portrait.

01:07:50   You only need to do that on Mac.

01:07:51   On the iPhone, do you really need to do that?

01:07:53   When you edit video, do you really need that fine control

01:07:56   of how the audio comes in?

01:07:57   or can you just drag the slider

01:07:58   and we'll pick the curve for you?

01:08:00   Like, do you really need that much?

01:08:01   All right, how about the precision editor?

01:08:04   Is that precise enough?

01:08:05   Couldn't you get your work done just with these simple,

01:08:07   'cause it's so much easier with the simple,

01:08:08   'cause we don't have dialogues

01:08:09   with all these numbers in them,

01:08:11   we don't have all these palettes that you have to rearrange

01:08:13   and there's so many palettes,

01:08:14   you can't even have them all on the screen at the same time,

01:08:16   you have to pick which ones you want.

01:08:17   That's just too much.

01:08:18   Look how much simple it is.

01:08:19   Guys, right, can't you get your work done?

01:08:20   And people say, sometimes, but other times, no.

01:08:26   And Apple really doesn't want to give you either.

01:08:28   Like for the Mac, it's like,

01:08:29   can't you get your work done with one CPU?

01:08:31   Most of the time, yeah, but maybe I want,

01:08:34   if I had two of them and they both had 12 cores,

01:08:36   I could cut this portion of my work down in half

01:08:39   and it would make me more productive.

01:08:41   But can't you get, isn't this okay?

01:08:43   We just buy this one.

01:08:44   It's like wishful thinking that the massive simplification

01:08:48   that is so good for everybody, doesn't that fit,

01:08:51   they seem to be thinking that it'll fit more people into it

01:08:53   than it does.

01:08:54   And as Mark was always with,

01:08:55   because people are just getting shaved off the top.

01:08:57   And Apple has shown that they're essentially

01:09:00   a captive audience.

01:09:00   When you come up with the new laptops,

01:09:01   and they're $500 more expensive,

01:09:03   and they don't have all the ports and features

01:09:05   that you may have wanted, you're gonna buy them anyway.

01:09:07   What choice do you have?

01:09:08   What are you gonna do?

01:09:10   Vote for a third party candidate?

01:09:11   Go ahead, throw your vote away.

01:09:14   - I finally get the reference.

01:09:16   - Yay.

01:09:16   So yeah, that I feel like is where Apple

01:09:21   is dropping the ball.

01:09:22   And they have been too optimistic, too hopeful

01:09:27   that every new thing they make,

01:09:29   whether it's like the new version of iMovie

01:09:30   where they had to keep the old one around

01:09:32   or that really old kerfuffle from many, many years ago,

01:09:35   all the way up to the hopes

01:09:39   that the iOS versions of their apps,

01:09:41   like the iOS versions of photo editing

01:09:43   and so on and so forth, would be enough for anybody,

01:09:46   so much so that we can even just port them to the Mac

01:09:48   and there'd be enough for everybody there too.

01:09:50   Like, that is probably a good strategy

01:09:52   for trying to simplify this for most people,

01:09:54   but it is slowly like torturing the people

01:09:58   who really do have demanding needs.

01:10:00   And Apple doesn't wanna complexify the software,

01:10:04   and Apple doesn't seem to want to make it

01:10:06   so that other people can make similarly complicated software

01:10:09   if only because they refuse to make an iPad

01:10:10   with a bigger screen,

01:10:12   'cause you can't fit all of Lightroom's palettes in there.

01:10:14   Marco was playing with Lightroom on a 28-inch Surface Studio.

01:10:17   That gives you enough room

01:10:18   for all of Lightroom's crazy palettes.

01:10:19   oh, do you really need all those controls in Lightroom?

01:10:21   Can't you get away with just the controls

01:10:22   that are in like an okay iOS app?

01:10:24   No, you actually can't.

01:10:26   For a certain section of the market, you can't.

01:10:28   And if Apple doesn't care about them,

01:10:30   they are seeding that entire market,

01:10:32   both on the PC and on the Mac to other people.

01:10:34   Now, to bring Microsoft into it,

01:10:36   the thing about Microsoft,

01:10:37   they're kind of in the Apple position,

01:10:38   and I kind of feel bad for them,

01:10:39   but kind of not because, you know, history.

01:10:41   Where even if Microsoft has the right product,

01:10:46   and even if their product is awesome,

01:10:48   Sometimes you're just not in the right market position

01:10:50   or you have the wrong reputation.

01:10:52   Forces independent of the quality of your product

01:10:55   can cause your thing to fail.

01:10:57   Look at Apple in the 90s.

01:10:59   The best operating system, the best GUI,

01:11:01   but it was too late.

01:11:03   Microsoft had already won.

01:11:04   - Wait, hang on.

01:11:05   You're saying OS, like classic OS,

01:11:07   was the best operating system in the 90s?

01:11:10   - Yeah.

01:11:11   - I'll give you the 80s and maybe the first part

01:11:13   of the 90s, first few years maybe, but like--

01:11:15   - Yeah.

01:11:17   - Until Windows 2000.

01:11:19   When Windows 2000 was what, '99-ish?

01:11:20   - Yeah, '99.

01:11:22   - Yeah, trust me.

01:11:24   - Maybe.

01:11:25   - I mean, certainly on the GUI,

01:11:26   and then on the tech things, it's borderline.

01:11:29   But anyway, certainly back when it was like

01:11:32   the Macintosh versus DOS, and Windows 1.0,

01:11:35   but anyway, not to rehash that,

01:11:37   sometimes you don't win with the best product, right?

01:11:39   And so even if Microsoft gets it right,

01:11:41   or gets it righter than Apple,

01:11:44   We are at the whim of the companies that exist and their entrenched legacies and their customer

01:11:49   bases and where they make them like, it's not a perfect system where once someone comes up with

01:11:54   the right answer, it will just, you know, we are stuck with the companies that we have or the new

01:11:59   companies that will have to grow to replace them. And that is a ugly, messy, slow process.

01:12:03   And so it's really hard to tell if Microsoft actually has the right answer. Like for example,

01:12:07   if Apple had done what Microsoft's doing with its OS strategy, they would probably be farther along,

01:12:12   because Apple has been in a stronger position

01:12:14   because of a little thing called the iPhone,

01:12:16   and they could have made a lot of headway there,

01:12:18   whereas Microsoft was coming away from behind,

01:12:21   having really gotten, you know,

01:12:22   really missed the boat on the mobile thing,

01:12:24   and having all sorts of problems

01:12:25   with their traditional sources of revenue,

01:12:27   switching around and trying to change

01:12:29   into a services company, like,

01:12:31   so it's really hard to tell

01:12:32   if they've got the right answer either, but.

01:12:34   - I love that Microsoft has the luxury

01:12:36   of having a completely failed smartphone effort

01:12:38   so they have no legacy in smartphones to worry about.

01:12:41   - Well, it's tough like now that iOS and Android

01:12:45   have like sort of run the table,

01:12:46   what room is there for like Tizen

01:12:49   or whatever the hell that thing is called

01:12:50   or you know, Windows Phone, right?

01:12:53   And it's tough, like it again,

01:12:55   even if Microsoft had the best smartphone operating system,

01:12:58   technically, aesthetically, user-friendliness or whatever,

01:13:01   it's so hard to go up against entrenched interests.

01:13:03   But again, we always talk about Apple

01:13:05   'cause we know more about it.

01:13:06   And I feel like Apple's mistake is actually one of

01:13:10   naive optimism or wishful thinking.

01:13:12   And they keep plugging away at it.

01:13:14   Like they plugged away at you don't need access

01:13:15   to the file system for how many years

01:13:17   before they did iCloud Drive?

01:13:18   Like that's all just wasted time.

01:13:19   Like if they were gonna come up with a better answer,

01:13:21   that's fine.

01:13:22   If you can't come up with a better answer,

01:13:23   not really good to wait six years

01:13:25   or whatever the hell it was before iCloud Drive comes out.

01:13:28   Because by that point, everybody's already using Dropbox

01:13:31   or OneDrive or whatever the heck they're using.

01:13:33   And you know, iCloud Drive because it's entrenched

01:13:35   and it's from the platform vendor, it's gonna do okay.

01:13:38   Same thing with Apple Music streaming.

01:13:40   Like there is an advantage to being the platform owner, but that's not a strong move to take

01:13:48   away the file system and all the functionality it provides while hiding the complexity and

01:13:52   then not come up with the suitable replacement and then just bail a couple years later and

01:13:56   say, "Okay, here's Dropbox."

01:13:57   - This is always the struggle of the iPad and iOS in general also, but I think more

01:14:05   for the iPad that in order to enable these power uses,

01:14:09   you have to give a little on the simplicity.

01:14:13   And there's always the question of whether you're actually

01:14:15   just slowly re-implementing the Mac poorly,

01:14:20   like the whole Lisp joke.

01:14:22   And I don't think that the industry has shown yet

01:14:26   that anybody has a really good idea

01:14:28   of how to balance those things between power usability

01:14:31   and multitasking and file access and things like that,

01:14:35   and simplicity of tablet use.

01:14:37   I think almost everybody just kind of punts

01:14:39   the answer to that question of,

01:14:40   oh well, Apple will figure it out, they're smart,

01:14:44   or some answer like that that's really not an answer,

01:14:46   and it's like, usually Apple doesn't figure things out

01:14:50   that we can't figure out a solution to ourselves.

01:14:53   'Cause usually Apple's made up for the same kind of people

01:14:55   as outside of Apple, and if we can't figure out

01:14:59   whether a solution to a problem can even exist,

01:15:02   they usually can't either.

01:15:03   They usually just punt and say,

01:15:04   well, yep, this is a problem, deal with it, and we do.

01:15:07   And it's fine.

01:15:09   Like when the iPad was first being rumored,

01:15:12   we were all like, well, what are they gonna do

01:15:14   for text input?

01:15:15   Because on-screen keyboards are pretty limited,

01:15:19   but you can't have like a physical keyboard on a tablet,

01:15:22   that doesn't work either.

01:15:23   What are they gonna do?

01:15:25   And they punted.

01:15:26   They said, all right, well, here's an on-screen keyboard,

01:15:28   it's limited but deal with it and we'll sell you

01:15:30   this external one that was really bizarre.

01:15:33   Sometimes these are just kind of unsolvable design problems

01:15:40   that you just have to pick one or the other

01:15:42   and neither are great.

01:15:43   And I think the balance between the file system access

01:15:47   and windowing and multitasking and everything like that

01:15:50   and the simplicity of what iOS offers today,

01:15:55   I just don't think there is a good balance

01:15:57   between those two.

01:15:58   There might be ways to do it better

01:16:00   than what the Mac and what Windows do,

01:16:04   but I still think that if you add that power,

01:16:08   you are going to ruin the simplicity,

01:16:09   you're going to add complexity.

01:16:11   It is just gonna be one of those design punts.

01:16:14   And I'm not sure that this is necessarily avoidable,

01:16:19   but I do think it might be an unsolvable problem,

01:16:23   because tablets have been around for a while now,

01:16:26   and we still haven't figured out a solution to this problem.

01:16:28   - You know, I keep coming back to,

01:16:31   as I'm listening to you guys,

01:16:32   I think about what Chris Latner had said

01:16:35   a couple episodes ago.

01:16:36   God, it's cool that we can say that.

01:16:37   Anyway, what he had said about Swift having,

01:16:41   and I forget the term he used,

01:16:43   maybe one of you remembers, but like--

01:16:44   - Progressive disclosure. - Progressive disclosure.

01:16:46   Yep, exactly, you knew where I was going with this.

01:16:48   Where I think, by and large, Marco,

01:16:50   I actually agree with you in that

01:16:52   I personally don't see a way to square this circle.

01:16:55   And in order to make an iPad more usable for more people in a professional capacity, I

01:17:04   think it would have to take away a lot of the things that make the iPad so great today.

01:17:09   But progressive disclosure is the thing that's already happening.

01:17:13   Like if you don't do a swipe from the right side of the screen toward the center of the

01:17:16   screen, would you ever really know about multitasking?

01:17:20   If you don't hit that little...

01:17:22   I know about it when I accidentally do it playing a game all the time.

01:17:25   And that's fair. But you know what I'm driving at. You know what I'm driving at.

01:17:28   Actually, I think that's actually relevant. Like, it sounds like a side thing. Like, "Oh, you accidentally do gesture, so what?"

01:17:33   That's one of the things that is more troublesome on touch devices and less on PCs,

01:17:39   where like progressive disclosure is easier on a desktop operating system because you're less likely to accidentally trigger something because the input is more precise, right?

01:17:48   And there's more mechanisms, right? You have an entire keyboard and then you have all the hotkeys and you have a pointing device and two

01:17:53   buttons on you can have like alternate clicks and modifier and they're not afraid to put

01:17:58   Preferences in like hey if you want to disable dashboard and disable all hot corners

01:18:01   You can iOS has you know disabled multitasking gestures and stuff

01:18:04   But some things you just can't turn off on iOS because they're always there like actually control center

01:18:08   I think you can there's a preference for that too. But

01:18:10   Yeah, that type of that type of thing of like how do you do progressive disclosure disclosure?

01:18:14   well on a device where you've already used up like every possible Morse code click combination

01:18:19   on the home button and 50 million gestures and there's no keyboard.

01:18:23   Like, they're kind of already painted themselves into a corner in their ability, in their eagerness

01:18:28   to gild the lily of iOS touch interface.

01:18:32   It's not leaving a lot of room for them to wedge in the more complicated stuff in a nice

01:18:35   progressive disclosure way.

01:18:37   Yeah.

01:18:38   And I agree with you.

01:18:39   I just can't help but wonder, is there something that I'm not seeing today that would lend

01:18:46   itself to having the iPad feel like a more—I'm going to use the word professional, but I

01:18:51   can't think of a better word for it—but a more professional device?

01:18:54   And I think about, if you had told me during the iOS 6 or 7 days, "Oh, there's going to

01:19:01   come a time that you can have this floating window that plays video that you can shimmy

01:19:04   around the screen and enlarge and shrink and swipe off to the side to kind of hide it for

01:19:09   for a minute, I would have thought you were bonkers.

01:19:11   And I would have wondered, how do you activate that?

01:19:13   Well, how do you make it go away?

01:19:14   What do you do with this thing?

01:19:16   And as it turns out, picture-in-picture

01:19:17   on the iPad is awesome.

01:19:19   And similarly, multitasking is pretty awesome.

01:19:22   It's pretty crappy switching between apps

01:19:24   in the little multitasking app switcher,

01:19:26   but by and large, it's pretty awesome.

01:19:28   And I don't know that I would have seen a way to do that

01:19:31   prior to having actually seen the way it was implemented.

01:19:34   So I do agree with the both of you,

01:19:37   but I can't help but wonder,

01:19:39   what is it that we are not thinking of

01:19:41   that would make something in the spirit

01:19:43   of progressive disclosure possible?

01:19:46   And I don't know, I have no specifics,

01:19:47   but it makes me wonder what's coming.

01:19:50   You know, what's coming in June?

01:19:51   - You're not thinking of it,

01:19:52   but I totally am thinking of it.

01:19:54   Like, that's what I was getting at with Apple being wishful

01:19:57   in hoping that the simple applications

01:19:59   and the limited form factors and interface venues

01:20:02   that they have provided on the iPad

01:20:03   and increasingly on the Mac

01:20:05   will be sufficient for everybody's needs.

01:20:08   They are intentionally not doing a bunch of obvious things.

01:20:11   For a long time, they intentionally didn't do

01:20:13   the obvious thing of giving you a pencil,

01:20:16   basically, the Apple Pencil.

01:20:17   For a long time, they avoided that,

01:20:18   because it's like, that's an additional complication,

01:20:21   and most people don't need it.

01:20:23   Maybe people can get along without it.

01:20:24   And we had to endure many, many years

01:20:27   of people selling hot dogs on a stick

01:20:29   that you used to draw on your iPad,

01:20:32   this big, stubby, artificial finger thing.

01:20:34   and it took so long for them to get through their skulls.

01:20:36   People wanna draw on these things.

01:20:38   They're buying these terrible devices to do it,

01:20:40   for God's sake, make a pencil.

01:20:41   And they did, finally.

01:20:42   There's so many obvious things they can do.

01:20:44   They can make a much bigger form factor.

01:20:46   If you wanna see, Microsoft's already gone

01:20:48   and done a whole product that you can rip off ideas from

01:20:50   or get inspired from.

01:20:52   You can do more things with multitasking

01:20:54   than simply splitting the screen.

01:20:56   You can do more things with hotkeys

01:20:58   and with the little floating windows.

01:21:00   There's tons of obvious things they can do.

01:21:03   And the thing that Marco was talking about,

01:21:05   something I talk about in the first OS X reviews

01:21:08   that I did just after iOS came out,

01:21:10   I think it was maybe the very first one

01:21:11   after it was clear there was some crossover between them.

01:21:13   It was like, is it easier to make the Mac more like iOS

01:21:17   or to make iOS more like the Mac?

01:21:19   Like, is it easier to simplify Mac OS

01:21:22   or bring those capabilities of the Mac to iOS?

01:21:25   And I think it said then, and I think now,

01:21:27   it is much easier to add the capabilities of the Mac to iOS

01:21:31   without messing it up than it is due to the reverse.

01:21:33   Because as soon as you start trying to make the Mac

01:21:36   to be like iOS, you totally destroy its usefulness

01:21:39   for the people who want to use it for the current use cases.

01:21:41   And there's no replacement for that.

01:21:43   If on the other hand, you take iOS,

01:21:44   which is a cleaner slate,

01:21:45   and was much cleaner back then than it is now,

01:21:47   but a cleaner slate,

01:21:48   and try to let people do the more complicated stuff

01:21:52   with, like Casey said, progressive disclosures,

01:21:55   it is a much easier thing to do.

01:21:57   And you get a chance to do it in a different way over there.

01:21:59   And while you're doing that,

01:22:00   You're not screwing up professionals who presumably can still use your Macs.

01:22:03   And if you're doing a good job on iOS, you're also not screwing up people who never use

01:22:06   that functionality.

01:22:07   And arguably, that's what Apple has been doing by making the iPad Pro, by making the 12-point

01:22:12   whatever-inch iPad, by making the pencil, by adding multitasking.

01:22:15   But boy, did it take them a long time.

01:22:17   And they're still stubborn about, you know, about going all the way.

01:22:22   Like I don't know what they're holding out for.

01:22:25   I don't know what they're waiting for.

01:22:26   I don't know.

01:22:27   Maybe they're waiting for people to die and habits to change.

01:22:28   I agree with Marco in that the use cases aren't going to change. People would like to do them

01:22:33   with less complications, but if they can't do them with less complications, they just want to do them,

01:22:36   period. They have to do them because it is part of their job. And if you don't give them a simpler

01:22:41   way to do it, they will limp along with the more complicated way until and unless somebody,

01:22:45   could be Microsoft, could be anybody else, gives them a way to literally do the same really

01:22:50   complicated jobs with less concerns, with less fighting with the machine. And Apple still seems

01:22:57   like like like marcus said like give them a little bit does this move the needle is the ipad really

01:23:02   a pro device now because we made a slightly bigger one and gave you a pencil it helps it doesn't hurt

01:23:07   right but microsoft service studio is like what are you even doing you know what was the uh the

01:23:12   meme you're like a little baby in the 28-inch microsoft service studio that's how apple apple

01:23:19   should feel but uh am i the impression i get from the personification of apple is they still really

01:23:24   I really wish people didn't have to do such complicated things with computers.

01:23:27   It's like they're almost put out by people's actual needs.

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01:25:10   you very much to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show. I think you are

01:25:17   right that it is easier to advance the iPad probably than to lock down or dumb down the

01:25:26   Mac. And that is, you know, your argument about like, you know, leaving Mac people behind,

01:25:30   you know, how bad that would be versus bringing along iPad people, that makes a lot of sense.

01:25:34   I still think it's going to be hard--we still don't really know if the iPad can do these

01:25:38   things well and we still don't see massive efforts from Apple in the software department.

01:25:46   we see interesting efforts in the hardware department.

01:25:48   Like I mentioned in past shows,

01:25:52   the iPad Pro 9.7 is amazing.

01:25:55   And the 12.9 is also amazing for people

01:25:57   who like even bigger ones.

01:25:58   But the 9.7 being the average mainstream iPad,

01:26:02   it is amazing hardware.

01:26:04   The hardware is better than ever, as is usually the case.

01:26:08   (laughs)

01:26:09   The hardware is better than ever.

01:26:11   They're doing fine on the hardware.

01:26:13   But the software is harder to do

01:26:15   because it's a more significant

01:26:17   and trickier design challenge

01:26:20   and it takes a lot of investment

01:26:22   to massively move software around.

01:26:25   And there's also, there's two more issues

01:26:27   I wanna mention here that are, I think,

01:26:30   problems, big problems for the iPad.

01:26:32   One is the application ecosystem.

01:26:36   Apps that are used by professionals or content creation,

01:26:40   or even just a lot of productivity apps,

01:26:42   are just really, really mature and stable

01:26:45   and usually much more financially healthy on the Mac.

01:26:49   And when these applications have tried to move to iPad,

01:26:52   they've had pretty mixed success.

01:26:53   Some of them work, many of them don't.

01:26:56   Many of them work like UI-wise to some degree

01:27:00   with a lot of work, but then fail business-wise.

01:27:02   They don't sell enough, they don't bring in enough money,

01:27:04   and so the companies aren't interested

01:27:06   in investing in them further or can't afford

01:27:08   to bring over more of their apps or whatever else.

01:27:10   That's a huge problem with the App Store

01:27:13   and with customer expectations for pricing for these things.

01:27:17   And that significantly hurts the iPad.

01:27:20   And there's no end in sight to that, really.

01:27:23   There's been a couple of things Apple has tried

01:27:26   to maybe help move Needle on that a little bit,

01:27:28   like, oh, now you can do subscriptions.

01:27:29   And that's cool, but it doesn't seem

01:27:31   like that's really helping a lot.

01:27:33   - They could totally tie up the entire market

01:27:36   for pro users who routinely spend their day

01:27:38   using a 12.5 inch screen.

01:27:39   Like those people are like, "Great, I can now switch my work to the iPad and get it

01:27:43   all..."

01:27:44   Nobody does that.

01:27:45   Nobody sits at a desk doing any complicated app on a 12.5-inch screen.

01:27:48   Like the screen size alone, I feel like, is a disqualification.

01:27:51   Even if you can get Lightroom, like exactly Lightroom, exactly how it is, like it's, you

01:27:55   know, OS X on your iPad, would you choose to use it on a 12.5-inch screen when you could

01:27:59   use it on a 5K?

01:28:00   I'm like, "Nobody would."

01:28:01   It doesn't...

01:28:02   No, I disagree.

01:28:03   I disagree.

01:28:04   Unless you had to be portable, obviously, like the whole use case is portability.

01:28:06   Like, "Oh, I have to use it on the go," or whatever.

01:28:08   Like yes, portability is a thing, but portability is only a concern for people who are not currently

01:28:14   sitting in a dark room at a desk, plugging away at their computers.

01:28:18   Working as Pixar or working on Photoshop all day or even if you're just doing big CAD drawings

01:28:24   or just assembling a big presentation.

01:28:27   Some people need to be on the go and portability is important, yada, yada, yada.

01:28:31   But everything Marco's talking about, all these applications with strong financial foundations

01:28:35   and they charge a lot of money and people routinely upgrade and stuff.

01:28:40   I feel like the only company that is straddling that line is maybe Microsoft with its Office

01:28:43   applications, which I have a feeling is still subsidized by the other businesses, and Omni,

01:28:47   which is still selling expensive Mac apps and still making partner apps that also work

01:28:52   on iOS for when you want to do the same stuff but portably.

01:28:56   But almost everybody else is like, "How are you going to get that guy off the desk when

01:29:00   you're only offering them a 12.5-inch screen?"

01:29:03   There's so many remaining hardware barriers

01:29:05   to success in this area that Apple,

01:29:07   just like Margo said, he doesn't see an end in sight

01:29:08   'cause he's like, I don't see Apple coming out

01:29:10   with a 28-inch iPad, it doesn't even make any sense,

01:29:12   it's not an iPad anymore.

01:29:13   You're right, it's not, it's something else,

01:29:14   but you're never gonna get those people off their desks

01:29:17   if you force them to use a portable form factor

01:29:19   all the time.

01:29:20   - And there's also a lot to be said

01:29:22   for using the same application from a 12-inch laptop

01:29:26   all the way up to a 30-inch display on a desktop.

01:29:29   You can use the same app, you can write one app

01:29:33   for the PC operating system, you can have it show up for all those screen sizes, and

01:29:37   you can have people both portably and at their desks using this one app. So it's easier to

01:29:42   develop that app, it's easier to sell it, people who only have to buy one copy of it.

01:29:47   Like, that's a huge advantage.

01:29:49   Steven: That's true, but I think you guys are overemphasizing your own needs and not

01:29:56   considering the needs of other kinds of users. And there is a distinct advantage to being

01:30:02   a single machine person, and that machine could be a 13-inch iPad.

01:30:07   There is a distinct advantage to never having to rearrange your windows every time you plug

01:30:12   in an external.

01:30:14   There's a distinct advantage to having a simpler experience.

01:30:19   Just because CAD doesn't work on a 12-inch screen, which I bet it could, but it certainly

01:30:24   wouldn't be as easy as a 40-inch screen, just because CAD doesn't doesn't mean everything

01:30:29   doesn't.

01:30:30   A lot of people value having one machine that they can carry anywhere.

01:30:34   I mean, look at me.

01:30:36   I, generally speaking, for most of my life have had a single laptop that was my everything

01:30:43   computer.

01:30:44   And yes, there were compromises for sure, but I preferred having one machine that always

01:30:50   had all of my stuff.

01:30:53   Always.

01:30:54   Because that was better to me, and that was a trade-off I was willing to make.

01:30:58   And just because a CAD operator or designer or what have you doesn't necessarily want

01:31:03   to make that trade, that doesn't mean that everyone doesn't want to make that trade.

01:31:08   And I mean, look at all the people that have MacBook Airs that may or may not plug them

01:31:12   into external monitors all the time.

01:31:14   Like those are small displays, they aren't even a retina.

01:31:16   They may or may not be dry.

01:31:18   They may or may not be dry too, you never know.

01:31:21   Keep your liquids away from your computer's kids.

01:31:23   So I'm not trying to say that you're wrong, John or Marco, but I think that there is a spectrum here that you're not really giving credit.

01:31:34   Marco's context was specifically about pro applications that are expensive, that have a foundation on the Mac, that sell to people who use them for work.

01:31:43   And those are the people who you can't pry away from their desks with a 12.5 inch screen.

01:31:48   Obviously, there's tons of people who are, again, like I said, they're just messing around

01:31:52   with Outlook and sending emails and doing web browsing and writing stuff up and talking

01:31:56   with other people in chat applications.

01:31:57   By all means, it's just a question of whether you want a laptop or a hardware keyboard,

01:32:01   all sorts of stuff like that.

01:32:02   Even within the realm of your single machine being an iPad with a 2TB flash drive in it,

01:32:07   you can sit down at your desk and connect it up to a massive 28-inch touchscreen and

01:32:10   have Server Studio when you're sitting and when you pick it up on an iPad.

01:32:13   That gets back to what Marco was saying, the ability to sell one app that scales to different

01:32:17   screen sizes like you can if you buy Lightroom on a PC and you have a 5k iMac or a 5k external

01:32:23   screen assuming your Wi-Fi router isn't nearby.

01:32:25   And you connect it to your laptop, right?

01:32:30   But again, that is an experience that the iPad does not offer at all.

01:32:34   You've got a 12.5 inch screen and that's what you're stuck with whether you're at a desk

01:32:37   or not.

01:32:38   You can't sell one version of your application that you can use on all those different screens.

01:32:42   No matter how you want to do it, whether you want to do single machine, multiple machine

01:32:44   or whatever, the iPad does not address that at all

01:32:47   for hardware reasons.

01:32:48   And that's all we're saying.

01:32:51   Specifically talking about this high-end people,

01:32:53   you will never dislodge them until the AR/VR realm comes

01:32:58   and things are being projected

01:32:58   under their retinas or something,

01:32:59   and then we don't care how big screens are,

01:33:01   and this is all a moot point.

01:33:02   But for now, anyway, the hardware limitations

01:33:06   of the iPad and the software and the application ecosystems

01:33:10   that Apple has chosen for itself

01:33:12   are necessarily limiting that.

01:33:13   Microsoft has made different choices, but they have so many other challenges that are

01:33:17   unrelated to the quality or potential of their products.

01:33:20   So we're still just sitting here patiently waiting for Apple to make its next progression

01:33:25   of the iPad, but it just seems like Apple needs to be dragged kicking and screaming

01:33:29   into the future.

01:33:31   And in the meantime, they've been chopping out the legs from underneath the Mac and hoping

01:33:34   people can get all their work done in even simpler situations on the Mac, and if they

01:33:38   can't, have fun dealing with a third-party monitor.

01:33:40   (laughing)

01:33:41   - Well, and then the other problem,

01:33:43   so I mentioned the applications issue,

01:33:46   which is what got us on this big tangent,

01:33:48   but the other problem, Casey,

01:33:49   is what we were just talking about.

01:33:51   It is really nice to have one machine for lots of reasons.

01:33:55   Lots of people have one machine for price concerns alone.

01:33:59   That's a huge concern,

01:34:00   because a decent spec'd iPad is not cheap.

01:34:04   Like, if you buy an iPad that's any good,

01:34:07   you're lucky to be out of there for less than 600 bucks,

01:34:09   And that's without any accessories.

01:34:10   If you actually want like a keyboard or a cover

01:34:12   or anything, it's so easy to spend like eight, $900

01:34:16   and just to get what you consider like a mid-range iPad

01:34:19   with a couple of accessories that kind of are required

01:34:23   to make it very useful to you.

01:34:25   A lot of people just cannot justify 500 to $1,000

01:34:30   on this in-between device when they already have a phone

01:34:34   which covers most of their ultra mobile

01:34:36   and ultra simple needs and they already might have

01:34:39   a computer, a laptop.

01:34:40   And so people who want only one device,

01:34:45   that one device so often,

01:34:47   I'm not even gonna say most of the time,

01:34:51   I'm not even gonna say sometimes,

01:34:52   but that one device often can't be an iPad

01:34:56   because that one, I mean, assuming the phone

01:34:58   is always gonna be there, 'cause that doesn't even count,

01:35:00   I'm talking one device between iPad or computer.

01:35:03   So often that can't be an iPad because of things like,

01:35:06   we were just complaining about hardware limitations

01:35:08   they just don't make it in this size,

01:35:10   you can't plug in an external screen or whatever else.

01:35:13   There are so many limitations with iPads

01:35:15   that if you need to do something outside of

01:35:19   what is considered and optimized for by Apple,

01:35:23   you hit a brick wall and you just can't.

01:35:26   It's just like, well, the answer to that

01:35:27   is you just can't do that.

01:35:29   Or you hit what appears to be a brick wall

01:35:31   and there might be some kind of power user app

01:35:34   to work around that, but you might not know that

01:35:36   as a typical iPad user, or you might not have that app,

01:35:39   or you might not want to spend the money for that app,

01:35:41   or whatever else, so there are so many hard brick walls

01:35:45   that you hit when trying to do any kind of edge case thing,

01:35:49   or even some pretty common things on iPads and iOS.

01:35:53   And if your one device is a computer,

01:35:57   it might be less fun, or harder, or more complicated to use,

01:36:02   but there are far fewer of those brick walls.

01:36:05   The computer is like, it's just partly from legacy,

01:36:09   partly from architecture, partly from hardware ecosystem.

01:36:12   The computer is the everything device.

01:36:15   It can do so, so much, especially when combined

01:36:19   with a phone, because then the phone covers

01:36:21   your like, ultra mobile, your camera,

01:36:23   and then the computer covers like everything else.

01:36:25   For so many people, if they can only have,

01:36:28   or if they only want, or they can only justify paying

01:36:31   for one device besides their phone,

01:36:34   the idea that it would be a tablet is not high on their list

01:36:39   because they need to do something

01:36:42   or they want to do something

01:36:43   or they prefer the way something is done

01:36:45   that can only be done on a computer

01:36:46   and that trying to do it on iOS is either impossible

01:36:49   or really it just fights you the whole time.

01:36:51   And that's what you were saying earlier

01:36:53   about wanting to maybe get a small laptop

01:36:55   instead of your Retina Pad Mini.

01:36:58   Sorry, Steven, again.

01:36:59   There are these walls that you hit

01:37:01   trying to do things with iOS

01:37:03   that while many people can do great work on iOS

01:37:07   and love doing it, I think they are a minority.

01:37:11   Everyone can always point to power users like Vitici,

01:37:15   who use the iPad for everything,

01:37:17   and you can point to everyone has a relative

01:37:21   or a friend who's a novice at using computers

01:37:24   and the iPad is their only computer,

01:37:26   but there's a lot of people in between.

01:37:29   And for so many of those people in between,

01:37:32   a PC style operating system and PC style hardware

01:37:36   is the only way they can get their needs solved

01:37:38   in one device.

01:37:39   - Today.

01:37:40   - Well, that's true.

01:37:41   And again, this could change in the future.

01:37:44   But I think changing that would require

01:37:46   so many changes and expansions to both iOS and iPad hardware

01:37:51   that just seem very unlikely that Apple would ever do.

01:37:56   And that's why I think it's fairly unlikely

01:37:59   that we're gonna get to that point.

01:38:00   I think it's much more likely

01:38:01   that we're gonna keep going where we are for a while,

01:38:04   which is Apple's strategy is basically

01:38:06   we're gonna keep selling you these devices

01:38:09   that are kind of in this big Venn diagram

01:38:11   where all the circles overlap like a third of the way

01:38:14   with other circles, and we just want to,

01:38:17   Apple's a hardware company.

01:38:18   They wanna sell you more hardware.

01:38:20   So Apple is perfectly fine to have the strategy be,

01:38:23   oh, for you, you like parts of this device

01:38:25   and parts of this device, you should buy both.

01:38:27   You know? (laughs)

01:38:29   I have a feeling that's gonna be their strategy

01:38:31   for a long time, but as long as it is their strategy,

01:38:33   the iPad is never going to replace the Mac,

01:38:36   and at least it shouldn't.

01:38:38   If there's a future for any kind of mainstream

01:38:40   and power computing on Apple devices,

01:38:43   the iPad better not replace the Mac

01:38:44   unless it has significant changes.

01:38:46   But again, I don't see, it just seems very unlikely

01:38:50   that the Apple that we know today

01:38:53   would do the kind of changes to both iPad OS and hardware

01:38:57   that would enable it to fully replace the Mac.

01:39:01   It must be tough, and imagine how stinky it is to have to worry about charging your computer

01:39:07   every day.

01:39:08   And, God, imagine how crummy it would be to have to carry a brick that you need to charge

01:39:14   it that's big and heavy.

01:39:17   For me, I can just charge wherever I have a USB port.

01:39:20   Imagine how crummy it would be if any time I wanted to get on the internet, I had to

01:39:24   have Wi-Fi.

01:39:25   Okay, yes, I have a phone in my pocket, but I can just flip on my little cellular switch

01:39:30   and suddenly I have Wi-Fi in the device I'm using.

01:39:33   Imagine how crummy it would be to not be able to tear your keyboard off the device

01:39:37   because you just really don't need it and you know you're not going to need it for a while.

01:39:40   Imagine how crummy it would be to feel like you can't always bring your one device everywhere you're going

01:39:47   because it's this big computer and yeah, okay, they're smaller than they used to be

01:39:50   and they're certainly more portable than they used to be.

01:39:53   But, man, it would stink if I felt like I had to have this big, like, laptop bag.

01:39:59   How barbaric is that?

01:40:01   What kind of pants are you putting an iPad into, out of curiosity?

01:40:04   Actually, I can fit a Mini in several of my jackets.

01:40:07   Not my pants, but my jackets.

01:40:08   Underscore has got laptops in every pocket of all clothes you wear every day.

01:40:12   I know.

01:40:13   But imagine how boring it would be to have to use a Mac every day

01:40:17   when you can just touch and swipe your way through getting work done.

01:40:22   I'm being silly.

01:40:23   And I started the show by saying, I don't really know if there's an iPad--

01:40:27   if there's a place in my life for an iPad anymore. But I absolutely understand how it would be

01:40:35   possible to prefer an iPad for all the reasons I don't like it. And I think that the three of us

01:40:42   are too preoccupied with our own needs and our own desires and our own wants. And I think there

01:40:48   are plenty of people that would prefer an iPad Pro, be that a 10-inch or a 12-inch or a 9.7 or

01:40:55   or what have you, that would prefer for all those things.

01:40:58   And Vitici is an example of this, and yes, I acknowledge that he is, like, way on the

01:41:03   other side of the spectrum.

01:41:04   But I don't think a lot of his desires are that unusual.

01:41:08   To have an LTE-equipped device, to have only one device to have to manage—again, like

01:41:14   you, Marco, I agree that the phone is just a given—to have something where the software

01:41:19   is always the software he has, it always looks the same, regardless of what—you know, it's

01:41:23   because the device is always the same size. I feel like there's so many advantages to

01:41:30   living an iPad-only life that are disadvantages to me. They're disadvantages to you too. But

01:41:37   they are advantages to some people. And I think all three of us are discounting that

01:41:45   there's plenty of real work that can be done. Maybe not CAD. Maybe not development. Maybe

01:41:51   video editing, maybe not. Maybe podcast editing, maybe not. But there's a lot of

01:41:56   real work that can be done on an iPad today and all the rumblings I've heard

01:42:01   is that things are gonna get a lot more interesting in the next few months. So

01:42:04   imagine what will be possible tomorrow. I don't think any of us are just counting

01:42:09   that at all. I think you haven't been listening to us. We've been talking

01:42:11   specifically about the high end. We totally concede that the vast

01:42:14   majority, we were only talking about the high end. That's all we're talking about.

01:42:17   Yeah, but my point is that your high end, when you say high end, it implies, I'm trying

01:42:26   to think of how to describe this, I feel like you feel like the high end is the Empire State

01:42:30   Building and to me the high end is the Mighty Black Stomp.

01:42:33   And that there are people that can, this analogy is falling apart already, but I think that

01:42:41   you guys are treating this mythical high end as this unattainable thing.

01:42:44   It's not a myth, it's a real thing.

01:42:46   "Okay, you're treating this high-end as this thing

01:42:48   "that could never be accomplished by a single touch device."

01:42:51   I don't think that's the case.

01:42:52   - No, I'm not treating that at all.

01:42:53   I'm saying the opposite.

01:42:54   I'm saying the iPad could totally do all this stuff.

01:42:56   Apple has been reluctant to extend it to do so.

01:42:59   - Yeah, I mean, 'cause like the hardware power is there.

01:43:02   The will of people to want to carry an iPad

01:43:06   into these things on it is there.

01:43:09   It's really just a very strong problem of the iPad OS

01:43:14   really not being advanced enough

01:43:18   and being too high friction

01:43:20   for the way a lot of people want to work

01:43:23   and the way some people need to work.

01:43:25   - And the app store and upgrades

01:43:27   and the hardware flexibility and again,

01:43:31   Apple has been making steps in that direction.

01:43:32   Remember they weren't making any steps in that direction

01:43:34   for a long time and that was frustrating

01:43:35   'cause it was static.

01:43:37   But they have been making moves

01:43:39   and as Marco characterized it, they're sporadic moves

01:43:42   and they move a little bit each time

01:43:43   and they hang out in between.

01:43:46   And if they move faster, it would be more dramatic.

01:43:49   But I don't really-- if they have

01:43:51   to choose whether to put the resources behind the next iPhone

01:43:53   or the next iPad, the iPhone is where you have to do it.

01:43:57   Yeah, that's not a choice.

01:43:58   Right.

01:43:59   So who knows?

01:43:59   Maybe they will accelerate or whatever.

01:44:01   But I am heartened by any kind of progress,

01:44:04   because it's as if they came out with a Mac Pro that

01:44:08   was a weird trash can, and they waited a year.

01:44:11   And then they let you have two CPUs and one GPU.

01:44:14   And they waited a year.

01:44:15   And then they upgraded the GPU to be not really old.

01:44:18   And they waited a year.

01:44:19   That's not great.

01:44:20   This sounds amazing.

01:44:21   It's better than what we got.

01:44:22   It's better than what we got.

01:44:23   So on the iPad, where it's like, oh,

01:44:25   finally I'll have multitasking.

01:44:27   And then wait a year.

01:44:28   Oh, here's a pencil too.

01:44:29   And then wait a year.

01:44:30   This is good.

01:44:31   This is-- it's not as good as it could be.

01:44:32   But it's better than the high end of the Mac where they're

01:44:35   like, nope, that's not a thing anymore.

01:44:37   Just buy what we sell.

01:44:40   Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, HelloFresh, Audible, and Away.

01:44:44   We will see you next week.

01:44:46   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:44:53   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:44:58   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:45:03   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:45:09   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:45:14   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:45:23   So that's Kasey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:45:27   Anti Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C

01:45:32   U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A

01:45:35   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:45:38   They didn't mean to (accidental, accidental)

01:45:43   ♪ We've got no tech broadcast in so long ♪

01:45:48   - So today, Scoop Gherman has written a post

01:45:53   saying that Apple, well, let me just read the headline.

01:45:57   "Apple is said to work on Mac chip

01:45:59   that would lessen Intel role."

01:46:01   And I think that actually has changed.

01:46:02   I think it was a different headline earlier,

01:46:04   but in any case-

01:46:04   - Read the slug for the original headline.

01:46:07   - "Apple developing new Mac chip

01:46:08   in test of Intel independence,"

01:46:10   which is certainly a little more aggressive.

01:46:12   is not true and an inaccurate headline, so that's why they changed it, but they never

01:46:15   change the slugs because people make terrible CMSs that don't let you change a slug. Or

01:46:18   if they do let you, no one ever changes them. Like, do they think people don't see URLs?

01:46:22   I know Safari hides them by default, but come on, people.

01:46:25   Anyway, so there's a delightful autoplay video that's going on here, which is the most frustrating

01:46:30   thing in the entire world. But anyway, the article in short seems to say, "Hey, there's

01:46:36   There's this T1 chip that was done to power the touch bar, that's ARM-based.

01:46:42   What if for like Power Nap, for example, there's this new chip that apparently has been codenamed

01:46:47   T310, because that matters.

01:46:50   But anyway, this mythical T310 chip could handle Power Nap and wake up and do those

01:46:56   sorts of things and then go back to sleep.

01:46:58   And because ARM just sips power, that would be flawless and perfect.

01:47:02   So that's the way forward, is we can slowly encroach on Intel's territory by making an

01:47:08   ARM chip that's used when convenient, and then use the Intel chip for all the other

01:47:13   time.

01:47:14   So it's an interesting premise.

01:47:17   It's certainly not something that I had really considered, but I like the idea of it.

01:47:22   I don't know if I really buy that it would be flexible enough, short of like virtualization,

01:47:26   which would be a terrible idea and ruin most of the power savings, that it would be flexible

01:47:30   enough to just do anything on this mythical ARM processor.

01:47:36   But maybe like via the extension framework, and I saw somebody else talking about this

01:47:40   earlier, the extensions maybe could have an extension that's compiled for ARM and the

01:47:45   rest of the app is compiled for Intel.

01:47:47   I don't know.

01:47:48   But it's certainly a fascinating idea, and every sign that I can see, all of the tea

01:47:53   leaves are pointing to Apple at least exploring getting rid of Intel and using their own chips,

01:48:00   if it's not anytime soon. So John, what do you think? It's a weird story because like the chip

01:48:05   that powers the touch bar like it's it's sense it only makes sense that there will be a successor

01:48:12   to that chip that powers the touch bar on the next generation things and maybe it'll be a little

01:48:15   better in a bunch of ways like sure granted and whatever that chip's code name is fine and we

01:48:19   already know it's a little ARM CPU and running some little mini thing of iOS and you could use

01:48:25   it to do smart things when the Intel CPU is asleep, right? Where this story gets fuzzy is like,

01:48:33   "All right, so the power nap stuff?" First of all, I'm not sure that stuff your computer does when

01:48:41   it's essentially asleep and you're not using it is a really big source of power draw. Like,

01:48:45   idle power. People don't even list this anymore in laptop reviews. How long can I leave this laptop

01:48:51   asleep before the battery drains.

01:48:53   Like that's not a very common use case.

01:48:55   Like, oh, I need to be able to leave it at my house

01:48:56   for a week in sleep mode and come back

01:48:58   and have it have 100% battery.

01:48:59   Well, it's not gonna happen.

01:49:00   Nobody even tests that and it's not a common use case.

01:49:03   - No, it does happen.

01:49:04   It's like, now it's like a month

01:49:06   'cause what they do is after I think like eight hours

01:49:08   or whatever of idle time and I believe you can tweak

01:49:10   that timeout with some kind of, you know,

01:49:12   NV RAM command, it goes into full hybridate mode.

01:49:15   Like hybridate to disk.

01:49:16   - So even in full hybridate, batteries drain.

01:49:18   That's why you don't bring your Tesla to Fire Island

01:49:19   because you're afraid of that.

01:49:20   - But that's why I'm pretty sure that the idle time

01:49:23   has been about a month since the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro.

01:49:27   - Right, but that's not a use case they care about.

01:49:28   So putting a lot of investment into making that use case

01:49:31   even better, like now it's two months.

01:49:33   Like who cares?

01:49:34   That's not a selling point, it's not a big thing.

01:49:36   And the second, the idea that this thing would be able

01:49:40   to do the stuff that happens during Power Nap.

01:49:42   Power Nap, the computer's basically asleep,

01:49:46   but it wakes up the real live CPU periodically to do stuff

01:49:49   in a lower clock, lower power type way.

01:49:52   It doesn't turn on the screen

01:49:53   and doesn't even turn on the fan

01:49:55   in the cases of modern computers with fans, I think, right?

01:49:58   But it's still running the real software

01:50:00   in a limited capacity.

01:50:02   And it has to be running something

01:50:04   that has the ability to do IO to the disk,

01:50:07   or, you know, to the SSD, essentially,

01:50:08   because you can't receive your email

01:50:10   or do time machine backups if you can't do IO to the disk.

01:50:13   I have a hard time believing

01:50:16   that there would be an ARM CPU in there

01:50:19   that could not wake up the Intel CPU at all,

01:50:21   which is still the main CPU to the system,

01:50:23   but wake up and somehow run code for your mail application

01:50:26   to fetch mail and do IO to your disk

01:50:28   while the Intel CPU is asleep?

01:50:30   Even if you were compiling extensions with ARM binaries

01:50:33   and shipping them off to the little ARM CPU to run

01:50:36   and that little CPU is gonna have access to IO

01:50:39   and it's such a weird situation.

01:50:41   It's like, what are you even optimizing for?

01:50:43   So it makes me look at the story and think,

01:50:45   there's totally a successor to this T1.

01:50:47   It is better and more capable

01:50:48   and we'll do more things like perhaps listening for

01:50:50   (indistinct)

01:50:51   on my Mac so I can finally use Siri in a sane way.

01:50:54   But will it do everything?

01:50:55   Will it do all that power nap stuff

01:50:57   and let third party applications run arbitrary code

01:50:59   in the background without waking the Intel CPU?

01:51:02   I mean, it could,

01:51:03   I'm not saying this is technically impossible,

01:51:04   but it seems like that is not a use case

01:51:06   that Apple would be investing money in.

01:51:09   Whereas I think they would invest money in,

01:51:11   you know, making Siri better

01:51:12   or have it only listening, always listening for stuff

01:51:15   or have it be able to do more sophisticated things,

01:51:18   having to do with the management of the system,

01:51:19   but once it starts shading into actual applications,

01:51:23   running code, whether they be first party or third party,

01:51:25   without waking up the Intel CPU,

01:51:28   it just doesn't seem like it's worth the hardware, OS,

01:51:31   and software investment to make that work,

01:51:34   because the benefit is not something that you would sell

01:51:36   and not things that people would notice.

01:51:38   - Yeah, I think this is yet another case

01:51:41   where a rumor article that has good sourcing

01:51:46   gets probably the gist of the facts correct,

01:51:50   but the story wrong.

01:51:52   It seems like this is not like Apple trying to reduce

01:51:56   their dependence on Intel as a chip supplier.

01:51:59   It seems much more likely that it's like,

01:52:01   well, we are putting this chip in these machines

01:52:04   for the touch bar anyway.

01:52:06   So we have this whole little embedded ARM computer

01:52:09   in these machines that uses almost no power.

01:52:11   Like, we're including this hardware anyway,

01:52:14   So can we have it do anything else?

01:52:16   Can we have it be more useful than what it's doing now

01:52:19   while the computer is not needing it for anything else?

01:52:22   Because it's convenient,

01:52:23   we have all this great stuff in here,

01:52:25   let's figure out if it can help us out any other way.

01:52:28   I think it's probably gonna,

01:52:30   the facts here are plausible,

01:52:31   it is probably truly there to do very low power tasks.

01:52:36   What those low power tasks include is another story.

01:52:39   And I don't think this is at all indicative

01:52:43   that Apple is slowly gonna cut Intel out and make ARM Macs.

01:52:48   They might be doing that in the future, who knows?

01:52:51   But I don't think this is related to that.

01:52:53   It seems like a totally separate project or task here

01:52:58   because it seems like what they're doing here

01:52:59   is more effectively utilizing the resources

01:53:02   they already have in these computers

01:53:04   and are already building in any way.

01:53:07   And it would be such a technical challenge

01:53:10   and such a hurdle and so much complexity

01:53:13   to have this chip meaningfully take over lots

01:53:15   of what the Intel CPU is doing,

01:53:17   any kind of major application level thing.

01:53:20   I think you mentioned that it would be probably an extension

01:53:25   and that would be an ARM extension,

01:53:27   if it's accessible to third parties at all,

01:53:30   or even just the way Apple's apps implement it.

01:53:32   It is probably a little extension kind of thing

01:53:34   that is native ARM code that can run here.

01:53:37   John, I share your concern about,

01:53:39   well, does this have access to the disk somehow?

01:53:41   how does that work, how does it interact with--

01:53:46   - All the buses and Wi-Fi and network operations,

01:53:49   it's like a dual CPU system

01:53:50   with two different CPU instruction sets,

01:53:52   which again, you could do it,

01:53:53   like this is all technically possible,

01:53:55   but that's hell of an investment

01:53:56   and I just don't see the benefit.

01:53:58   - Right, exactly, so that's why I think it's more likely

01:54:01   that this is a real story, but that the tasks it's going

01:54:04   to do are going to be very, very limited.

01:54:07   And it's not a big deal, it doesn't mean anything

01:54:10   about Apple's relationship with Intel

01:54:12   or the future of possible ARM MacBooks

01:54:15   that is all totally separate discussions.

01:54:17   And it seems much more likely

01:54:19   that this is mostly a non-issue,

01:54:21   something that they might mention in a keynote

01:54:23   for two seconds that we would immediately forget about.

01:54:26   - It could be a headlining feature if they use it right.

01:54:28   So one example is you could do

01:54:30   a Windows 10-style face recognition thing,

01:54:32   not to let you in because that's terrible

01:54:34   because people just print out a picture of your face

01:54:35   and get access to your computer.

01:54:36   But even just something as simple as,

01:54:38   hey, it's always listening for you,

01:54:40   and there's proximity detectors to see when you're close by,

01:54:43   and when you sit down in front of your sleeping computer,

01:54:45   it does face recognition with the camera

01:54:47   to realize who you are to bring you your login prompt.

01:54:50   Like even if it was on a different user,

01:54:52   so you don't have to like pick the user or do the thing,

01:54:54   like that would be a good use of a fairly capable,

01:54:59   low power CPU that has access to some things,

01:55:02   has access to the camera,

01:55:02   has access to its own proximity detectors,

01:55:04   has access to touch ID and the secure enclave,

01:55:06   and can do stuff with the touch bar.

01:55:08   It doesn't involve, oh hey, I'm taking over Power Nap.

01:55:10   Not to mention, the reason it works,

01:55:13   and it works even better now,

01:55:14   is 'cause you can make these Intel CPUs

01:55:15   run in a super underclocked rate,

01:55:17   turning off most of the cores.

01:55:19   They're pretty efficient.

01:55:20   Like a Skylake in super duper low power mode

01:55:23   with half of the chip disabled is actually pretty good.

01:55:26   You can let, most of the power is gonna be

01:55:28   from your Wi-Fi radio trying to do your time machine backup

01:55:32   and all your SSD access.

01:55:33   The CPU is not the problem there.

01:55:35   So either if you're gonna let power nap happen at all, you're not worried. Oh, I can't have this Intel CPU running it

01:55:40   It's 600 megahertz with one core enabled doing my thing

01:55:44   It's because the SSD and the Wi-Fi are gonna overwhelm that anyway

01:55:47   But but anyway back to the little arm chip if the feature I just described like face recognition proximity detection touch ID blah blah

01:55:54   That's that's a keynote

01:55:56   Keynote demo ball feature right there. And yeah, it's not a big deal technically speaking and they already had the hardware there

01:56:00   It's an easy win. It's a cool thing

01:56:02   It's something that Microsoft has sort of already done an app can pretend they don't know that and just pretend they invented it and we'll

01:56:07   All ooh and ah and just like we like sitting down to use touch ID to unlock our computers

01:56:11   We'd like sitting down in a shared environment and having it know that it's us and awake from sleep and show us our password prompt

01:56:16   Even if someone else was logged in

01:56:18   Is that it think so ship it?

01:56:21   [BEEPING]